Time Travel To The Time Of Good Old King Henry : Auld England Was Green! (Land Of Greensleeves) by A.N.Muggins

    And Auld England was still truly green in those days of Olde. Outlaws of Robin Hood’s ilk probably still roamed the woods and evaded the justice of the King, when they were obliged, and put wrongs to right wherever they could, and the surviving elves and fairies still frolicked in the woods, which echoed with their laughter.

    The trees and grasses were greener, somehow fresher, the Kingdom somehow less tarnished than in Alfred’s own future time, where the nouveaux riche tarmacked their front gardens in increasing numbers, merely so they could park their cars on them, and hedgerows of privet, or whatever, were torn down and replaced with fences, and householders tried to make easy money by building ever more houses on their gardens, so they could ‘cash in’ on the misery of an overcrowded populace who wanted houses, but could barely afford them. And they weren’t Palaces, these houses! Boxlike houses, ever smaller with non existent gardens, were being built across the Kingdom, and not just in England and Wales.

     In Henry’s day there were still wide open spaces, and forests, which stretched for miles and miles. There were plentiful fish in the sea and in the rivers. The country was still better populated than the towns and cities.

    In Alfred’s future time every corner of every city or town became crowded as refugees from distant lands, failed economies, and distant wars made themselves a home in England (or Britain!) encouraged by our generous Health Service and our kindly governments, and by the international reluctance to intervene in certain countries sovereign civil wars, which were often allowed to rumble on without intervention by the states who purported to promote peace and order.

     Even Father Christmas had been called the Greene King in those days of Henry (remembered largely as a food serving Public House chain in the latter days of Alfred’s time!)

     Somehow the air was so much fresher and more wholesome in Henry’s Time, and global warming had not so much as even begun yet. (Indeed weren’t they in the middle of or just starting a mini ice age at that time? For many years, in the couple of centuries to follow, didn’t the Thames used to freeze up and everyone went skating across it in winter? He would have to look that one up further sometime to remind himself of the facts!)