England's Hours of Not Quite Greatest Need

[bunn]

When thinking about England*'s Hour of Greatest Need, I started considering previous Hours of Apparently Insufficient Need.  It must be admitted though, that my knowledge of anything that happened during the period between about 1485 and 1900 is pretty appalling, so I thought I'd ask for suggestions.

I thought of :
- The Viking Invasions
- The Norman Conquest
- Stephen v Matilda
-  The Wars of the Roses
- The Spanish Armada (but then dismissed that as a scary thing that basically just got blown away)
- The English Civil War
- 1916 (although if you argued that this is a lot more than England's, Britain's, or even the UK's Hour, I'd have to concede the point)
- Dunkirk

Then it occurred to me that we actually have a gadget that is supposed to specifically indicate Hours of Need just down the road at Buckland Abbey, so I looked up Drake's Drum to see what times of national emergency it had seen fit to signal.  But it seems to be a most erratic indicator, drumming for things like Lord Nelson being given the Freedom of  Plymouth, which doesn't really seem like an emergency, even in Plymouth.

Incidentally, there's an excellent list on Wikipedia of Sleeping Kings** In Mountains.   I knew there were quite a few of them, but I hadn't previously realised quite what a superb range of sleeping heroes was available in the event of emergency.

* I'm not being too picky about national definitions here, although I think 'Albion's Hour of Greatest Need' definitely has more of a ring to it than 'United Kingdom Maximum Necessity Moment' or similar.

**Although not all of them are kings.

Comments

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I'm not being too picky about national definitions here

It suddenly occurs to me that maybe we should be picky about national definitions. Maybe that's why nobody's woken up yet. "I will return when this land is in danger!" they say, but new waves of invaders come along, and national boundaries change, and country names evolve, and "this land" as he knew it ceases to exist, so the magic is void.

It's like asking a genie for a wish: you have to be super-careful with the wording, or the whole thing falls apart.
Has any Sleeping Hero actually said, "I will return when this land, or the spiritual successor of this land, or a land whose inhabitants (or at least quite a lot of them) have DNA that shows them to be descended from my people, or an entirely new country that includes all or most of this land, is in danger?" If they did, they might have been waking up in droves for centuries.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

But how does this affect Heroes like Glyndwr and Boabdil, who were really rather unsuccessful Heroes, and wandered off going 'Back in a tick!' leaving the Land behind?

I think Wales is Wales is Cymru, but if Glyn Dwr didn't manage to evict the English in 1406, he really can't argue he hasn't had ample opportunity to try again...

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

Perhaps these aren't true Sleeping Heroes, merely unsuccessful heroes who co-opted the whole Sleeping Hero mythos to excuse their failures. "I haven't really failed! I... er, am just popping out for a moment, and I'll return soon to bring you victory!" they say, before sloping off with the firm intention of never ever coming back again.