Years of political turmoil and culture wars have left people asking, what is England and where do we all go from here? Too often, the answers offered are rooted not in real lives, but in myths that have been inflated out of all proportion. Some talk of restoring an English birth-right of liberty or the global confidence to rule the waves. Others yearn for the old-fashioned morality with which, they claim, England once civilised a savage world. Still more look inwards to a story of an enchanted island that can stand alone against a hostile world. Tom Baldwin and Marc Stears unravel seven myths that have distorted ideas of this country. They travel from muddy fields in the Home Counties to the ports of Plymouth and Hull.