"A country of tradition"

As somebody remarked in class, Britain is often regarded as a place very attached to traditions and traditional ways of doing things. The division of the Houses of Parliament into a House of Lords (with lords and bishops) and a House of Commons (with commoners) directly descends from the division of medieval representative institutions into first, second and third "estates" (a distinction lost in most of Europe during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars). The United Kingdom has a Chancellor of the Exchequer instead of a Minister of Finance, and a Lord Chancellor instead of a Minister of Justice.

The decision of the French Revolutionaries that wheeled vehicles should pass one another on the right hand side of the road instead of on the left (as had been customary) has gradually been adopted throughout all of mainland Europe (in Sweden as recently as 1963) but has had no impact in Britain or Ireland.

Much else in British public life attests to continuities with a pre-Revolutionary period. An obvious example is the wearing of wigs by judges who administer the Common Law. Two hundred years ago no gentleman would attend a public function without a wig; after the fashion changed it remained the "correct" attire for both judges and barristers. The Common Law, with trial by jury and the practice of adversarial advocacy, is the basis of the legal system not only in Britain and Ireland, but also in the United States at federal and state level (with the exception of the State of Louisiana) and in many Commonwealth countries throughout the world.

In academic life, too, England has maintained two medieval universities, in Oxford and Cambridge, and Scotland three, in St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen, without the sort of disruption that Louvain, for instance, suffered in 1797-1834. This is perhaps one of the reasons why, throughout the English-speaking world, academic dress is a much more common sight on special occasions, such as graduation ceremonies, than it is at most Continental universities. At Oxford and Cambridge it is still a daily necessity.

England continues to enjoy an Established Church (the "Church of England", a historical compromise between Catholic practices and Reformed theology) with the Queen as its Supreme Governor. When John Major quoted George Orwell about "old maids bicycling to holy communion" being one typically British sight, the unspoken assumption is that the church being attended is "C of E".

There has been a marked reluctance to adopt the French metric system (with metres, grammes, and litres) that Napoleon imposed on the rest of Western Europe, in place of the pre-Revolutionary "imperial measures" available: the inch, foot, yard and mile, the ounce, pound, stone, hundredweight and ton, and the fluid ounce, pint and gallon (official metric equivalents established in the Units of Measurement Regulations 1995). Even in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (Part one, chapter 8), one of the characteristics of totalitarianism is the replacement of the pint by the half-litre. These days, with metrication in legal force as part of European harmonisation, few children can do calculations in the old measurements, but beer is still sold in pint glasses, and milk in cartons marked "568ml". For most of the period covered by the course (1945-1997), the imperial measurements were very much favoured.

The United Kingdom adopted a decimal currency (with 100 pennies to the pound) only in 1971, replacing a system of coinage with twelve pennies to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound which went back over 500 years in the case of shillings, and 1000 years for pounds and pence. Much like the changeover to the Euro, people would still ask years later, "What's that in old money?"

Apart from the visible continuities in political, legal, educational and religious institutions (often masking substantive change), and the long maintenance of idiosyncratic measurements and money, there are all sorts of popular, local, folkloristic and bizarre customs held in honour throughout the British Isles - but in much the same way that such customs are maintained in Binche or Echternach. For those interested, a good guide to such local traditions in England is the book England in Particular, or the associated website of the same name.