“The Dervish House” Ian McDonald

Ian McDonald’s book “The Dervish House” is set in Istanbul, in the middle of the 21st Century. It opens with suicide bombing of a tram, that doesn’t kill anyone but the bomber herself. One of the witnesses, Necdet, lives at an old dervish house and starts seeing djinn in the aftermath. Another resident of that house (Can, a young boy with a weak heart who wears earplugs to prevent being startled by loud noises) is also a witness, via his toy robot. The other point of view characters (another 4 of them) are also residents or connected with the dervish house. There is Leyla, a young woman from outside Istanbul but part of a large extended family in the city just starting out in marketing. Georgios is an old man, one of the few Greek Christians left in the city, who was once both an economist and a political activist. Ayşe owns a high class antiques & art gallery in the dervish house, and her husband Adnan is a trader (in the stocks & shares sense) with a foolproof scheme/scam to get rich.

The plot follows the six characters over the five days starting with the suicide bombing on a Monday. At first each story seems separate, even Ayşe and Adnan are only linked by their relationship not by what’s going on in their story. Necdet sees djinn and tries to find out why. Can sets out to be a Boy Detective and find out about the suicide bombing. Leyla starts work trying to secure funding and promote a startup nanotech business belonging to one of her cousins. Georgios hears his girlfriend from his student days is back in town, and is also invited to a government thinktank to “think outside the box” about threats to the city. Ayşe accepts a commission to hunt for a legendary Mellified Man despite some misgivings. And Adnan has a scheme to sell cheap (and illegal) oil from Iran to make a huge profit. In the end, all these disparate stories come together – some links are visible early on, but others stay separate till nearly the end.

For all that the plot is mostly about the aftermath of a bombing, and about potential terrorist activity, I didn’t really find it terribly urgent. I wasn’t particularly worried that anyone would die even when they were in danger. Instead the charm of the book was in its snapshot of the life of a city. The characters cover a range of sorts of people – those with money, those without, men, women, single, married, young, old, Christian, Muslim, secular. They all felt distinct, and like their stories and actions grew out of who they were. For all I’ve just said there was no urgency to the plot, I still wanted to know what these people would do and how their stories linked up. Just it’s not driven by the action.

I’ve never been to Istanbul, and I don’t claim any particular knowledge of Turkey, so I can’t say if McDonald gets it right enough for someone who does. However it feels like a plausible near future Turkey to me. There are differences most notably that there’s new tech, like ubiquituous nanotech to do things like help people concentrate or other mental alterations. But these haven’t changed the world into something unrecognisable, in the same way that ubiquituous mobile phones have changed our world but the world is still full of people being people. I guess it’s an anti-singularity novel – McDonald doesn’t seem to think that technological change will at some point accelerate to the point where there’s a discontinuity and afterward the world will be unrecognisable and “post-human”. Instead technology will change, the details of our lives will change, but the old men will sit in cafes in Istanbul gossiping about their neighbours etc.

I enjoyed this book. It’s not necessarily one I’d rush out to recommend to everyone nor is it a particular favourite, but I’m glad I read it.

Monday Link Salad

Today (by the time this is published) I start the next of the MOOCs I’ve signed up for on Future Learn. This one is about the Roman port Portus (at Rome) and I think about archaeology in general as well. And despite saying I wasn’t going to overlap courses I’ve also signed up for one starting on 2 June about literature of the English country house – the two courses together are supposed to take about as much time per week as the Shakespeare MOOC I just finished, so hopefully that should be OK. I can always abandon one if not 🙂

J found a phone app that’s just a little like magic – Word Lens Translator translates 6 different languages to & from English on the fly, using the phone camera. So you hold your phone up to a menu or a sign and see an English translation. All languages are free at the moment.

TV I’m recording this week:

Heart vs Mind: What Makes Us Human?; The First World War; How to Get Ahead; Precision: The Measure of All Things

We finished three different series over the last week so I wasn’t going to write about any of the one-off programmes as well, but Heart vs Mind: What Makes Us Human? irritated me sufficiently that I wanted to say why! The premise of this film was that the presenter, David Malone, had always thought of himself as a wholly rational person but then his life had become derailed – his wife had started to suffer from severe depression and it was as if the person she had been no longer existed. In the wake of that, and his responses to it, he started to think emotions were more important to what makes us human than he’d previously thought. So far, so good – I mean I might quibble about how it’s a known thing that no-one’s really totally rational and we know that the mind affects the body & vice versa; and I might wonder what his wife thinks about being talked about as if she might as well be dead. But those are not why I found this programme irritating.

I found it irritating because the argument he was putting forward had the coherency and strength of wet tissue paper. He took the metaphorical language of “brain == reason; heart == emotion” and then looked for evidence that the physical heart is the actual source of emotions. There was some rather nice science shown in the programme – but whenever a scientist explained what was going on Malone would jump in afterwards and twist what was said into “support” for his idea.

For instance, take heartbeat regulation. It is known that there are two nerves that run from the brain down to the heart and they regulate the speed of the heartbeat. There is a physiologist in Oxford (I didn’t catch his name) who is looking at how that regulation works. It turns out there is a cluster of neurones attached to the heart which do the actual routine “make the heart beat” management. The messages coming from the brain tell the heart neurone cluster “speed up” or “slow down” rather than tell the heart muscle to “beat now; and now; and now”. Interesting, but not that astonishing – I think there are other examples of bits of routine tasks being outsourced to neurones closer to the action than the brain is (like the gut, if I remember correctly). Malone took this as proof that the heart had its own mini-brain so it would be possible for it to generate emotions. And so it’s “like a marriage between heart and brain with the brain asking the heart to beat rather than enslaving it and forcing it to beat.”

There were other examples of his failure to separate metaphor from reality – indeed his failure to realise that there were two things there to separate. Take, for instance, the metaphor of the heart as a pump. Malone hated this metaphor, so industrial and mechanical and soulless. Practically the root of everything wrong with modern society! (I exaggerate a tad, but not much.) However, the heart undeniably does pump blood round the body. So he looked at visualisations of blood flowing through his heart (another awesome bit of science) and talked about how beautiful this was – as the blood is pumped around the shape of the heart chambers encourages vortices to form in the flow which swirl in the right way to shut the valves after themselves on the way out. Which is, indeed, beautiful and rather neat – and I learnt something new there. However Malone then carried on about how we shouldn’t keep saying the heart is a pump because the complexity of the heart’s pumping mechanics are too beautiful to be reduced to what the word pump makes him imagine. Er, what? Saying you can only imagine pumps as simple metal cylinders with pistons says more about paucity of your imagination than the pumpness of the heart.

I think part of my problem with this was that I’m not actually that much in disagreement with him so it was irritating to watch such a poor argument for something reasonable. I too believe Descartes was wrong – you can’t separate mind from body. The mind is an emergent property of the body. And there is feedback – our mental state, our emotions and beliefs, affect the body and its functions. Our physical health and physical state affects our minds. It’s not surprising to me that it’s possible to die of a broken heart (ie mental anguish can affect the physical system including disrupting heartbeat potentially fatally in someone whose heart is already weak). But this is not because the metaphor of the heart as the seat of emotions is a physical reality. It’s because mind and body are one single system.

None of us are rational creatures. Emotions are a central part of what makes us human. And metaphors do not need to be based in a physical truth to be both useful and true.

(I also get grumpy about people who think that explaining something necessarily robs it of beauty but that’s a whole other argument. As is the one where I complain about the common equation of industry with ugliness.)


Moving on to what I intended to talk about this week: we’ve just finished watching the BBC’s recent 10 part series about The First World War. This was based on a book by Hew Strachan, and used a combination of modern footage of the key places, contemporary film footage, photographs and letters to tell the story of the whole war from beginning to end. Although obviously the letters were chosen to reflect the points the author wanted to make, using so many quotes from people who were there helped to make the series feel grounded in reality. It was very sobering to watch, and the sort of programmes where we frequently paused it to talk about what we’d just seen or heard. It wasn’t a linear narrative – the first couple of episodes were the start of the war, and the last couple were the end, but in between the various strands were organised geographically or thematically. An episode on the Middle East for instance, or on the naval war, or on the brewing civil unrest in a variety of the participating countries.

I shan’t remotely attempt a recap of a 10 episode series, instead I’ll try and put down a few of the things that struck me while watching it. The first of those was that there is so much I didn’t know about the First World War. This wasn’t a surprise, to be honest, I’ve not really read or watched much about it and didn’t spend much time on it at school (having given up history pre-GCSE). But I’d picked up a sort of narrative by osmosis – the Great War is when Our Men went Over There and Died in a Brutal Waste of Life. And that’s true as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go anywhere near far enough. Even for the Western Front – the British narrative is all about it being “over there” but (obviously!) for the French and the Belgians this was happening in their country and in their homes. One of the sources used for this part of the war was a diary of a French boy – 10 years old at the start, 14 by the end – which really brought that home. And (again obviously) the Western Front and the French+British and German troops weren’t the only participants nor the only areas of conflict. I thought separating it out geographically & thematically was well done to help make that point.

It was odd to note how much the world has changed in the last century. Because there was film footage of these people – dressed a bit too formally, but looking like ordinary people – the casual anti-Semitism and racism in their letters and official communications was more startling than it would’ve been from more distant seeming people. Things like referring to Chinese or African troops as “monkeys” in relatively official documents. I’m not saying that racism or anti-Semitism have vanished in the modern world, but there’s been a definite change in what’s acceptable from politicians and so on.

Throughout the whole series the shadow of the Second World War loomed. Obviously no-one knew at the time how things would turn out (tho it seems one of the French generals did make some rather prescient remarks about only getting 20 years of peace at the end of the First World War). But it’s rather hard to look at it now without the knowledge that hindsight gives us. Which ties in with my remark about anti-Semitism above, because one of the things that changed cultural ideas of “what you can say about Jews” is the Holocaust. And other hindsight spectres included the situation in the modern Middle East as set up in large part by the First World War, and of course the Balkans too.

Interesting, thought provoking, and I’m glad I watched it.


Very brief notes about the other two series we finished:

How to Get Ahead was Stephen Smith examining three different historical courts and looking at both the foibles of the monarch and the ways a courtier at that court would need to behave & dress in order to succeed. He picked out a selection of very despotic rulers – Richard II of England, Cosimo Medici of Florence and Louis XIV “the Sun King” of France. I wasn’t entirely convinced about Smith as a presenter, a few more jokes in his script than he quite managed to pull off, I think. But good snapshots of the lives of the elite in these three eras/areas.

Precision: The Measure of All Things was Marcus du Sautoy looking at the various ways we measure the world around us. For each sort of measurement (like length, or time) he looked at how it had evolved throughout history, and at how greater precision drives on technology which in turn can generate a need for even greater precision. I think I found this more interesting than J, because I think it’s kinda neat to know why seemingly arbitrary units were decided on when they could’ve picked anything. I mean the actual definition settled on for a meter is arbitrary (the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second) but there’s a rationale for why we decided on that particular arbitrary thing (the definition before the definition before the current one was that it was 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the north pole to the equator).


Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

Krakatoa Revealed – somewhat chilling documentary about the 19th Century eruption of Krakatoa and what we’re learning about the certainty of future eruptions of Krakatoa.

24 Hours on Earth – nature documentary looking at the effects of the diurnal cycle on animals and plants. Lots of neat footage and a voiceover with somewhat clunky and distracting metaphors (“Soon the sun’s rays will flip the switch and it will be light” !?)

Episode 1 of David Attenborough’s First Life – series about the origins of life and the evolution of animals.

Tyndale Society Study Day (10 May 2014)

Last Saturday was clearly the best day to hold a study day – there were three different ones on that date that J & I between us found interesting. The one I chose to go to was organised by the Tyndale Society who are a group whose primary interest is in the life and works of William Tyndale (who translated the Bible into English in the early 16th Century). I’m not a member of the Society myself, I just spotted a poster advertising the study day a few weeks ago & signed up for it. The subject of the day was Ipswich as a late medieval port of the type whose trade & shipping links helped the spread of Reformation books, and three men with Ipswich links who played a significant role in the Reformation. It was held in St Peter’s by the Waterfront which was for a brief moment in its history the chapel for Cardinal Wolsey’s school in Ipswich. As well as the four talks there were a couple of (very short) walks to see relevant places in Ipswich – the weather was good for just long enough at just the right times for those! One of which included our lunch in the cafe attached to Dance East (nice soup & sandwiches, if a little basic). There were also a selection of books for sale (I picked up “Late Medieval Ipswich: Trade and Industry” by the third speaker, Nicholas Amor). And a rather fine (and jaunty) model of a medieval Cog:

Model Cog
Model CogModel Cog

(All photos are links to flickr, the whole album is here.)

“Thomas Wolsey as Educationalist” John Blatchly

The first talk was given by John Blatchly who is a local historian, former Head of Ipswich School and currently chairman of the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust (which includes St Peter’s by the Waterfront in the churches it looks after). After a preamble about himself and the Ipswich Historic Churches Trust he talked to us about Cardinal Wolsey, concentrating on his links with education and with Ipswich. Wolsey was born in Ipswich, the son of Robert Wolsey & his wife Joan (née Daundy). I’m sure Blatchly said he was born and lived at the Black Horse Inn – but there’s a plaque on the wall near Curzon House that suggests he was born in that part of Ipswich instead. He was born in 1470 or 1471 – this is known because on Maundy Thursday of 1530 he washed the feet of 59 old men, one for each year of his life so far.

Wolsey was first educated in Ipswich, and went to Magdalen College, Oxford at around the age of 15. A biographer of Wolsey’s writing not long after his death said that his early education was good, through the encouragement of his parents and masters. Blatchly explained that this was unlikely to be Robert Wolsey’s influence. Robert Wolsey was an innkeeper and butcher (at the Black Horse) and there are records of him appearing in court rather a lot. He was fined for several misdemeanours like letting pigs roam freely and so on. Thomas Wolsey’s mother was rather better born than her husband. Her brother was patron of St Lawrence Church, and was likely the person who encouraged the young Thomas Wolsey and got him his good education.

Blatchly mostly skipped over Wolsey’s career in the church and his involvement in Henry VIII’s government. He did, however, give us a flavour of the man with a digression on his attitude to heraldry. Obviously as the son of a butcher & innkeeper Wolsey had no coat of arms himself – and so he made one up with symbols that he felt suitable. Wolsey’s mistress, and mother of his children, was the daughter of a Thetford innkeeper which sounds a bit like Wolsey seeking out someone of a similar background to his own – but Blatchly felt her being the sister of the archdeacon who was Wolsey’s confessor was far more signficant. Their son was called Thomas Winter (discretely not using Wolsey’s name, nor his mother’s name). It would’ve been rather indiscreet for Thomas Winter to do the canonical thing of using his father’s coat of arms with an indicator of bastardy, so Wolsey made him a new one too. Blatchly said there’s some evidence that Winter was a spendthrift, so one of the symbols on his coat of arms is coins which are perhaps a nod to this tendency.

Wolsey was not on the side of Reformation as a theological/political movement, but he wasn’t against the idea of dissolving a few priories when he could “make better use” of the money. He dissolved several (I think Blatchly said generally in Norfolk and Suffolk, and no longer vibrant communities) to pay for his great educational foundations. These were Christchurch College in Oxford (taken over by Henry VIII so it still exists) and Cardinal College of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Ipswich. One of the dissolved priories was what has become St Peter’s by the Waterfront. This included the church and sat on a site of around 6 acres. So what Wolsey did was to dissolve the priory and convert the church into a chapel for his college. The rest of the site was then used for the college. After Wolsey’s fall from grace the College was abandoned – the church became a parish church, the institution of the college became the ancestor of Ipswich School and the fabric of the college mostly went to London to build Whitehall.

Blatchly also talked about Wolsey’s retirement plans – he was intending to live in Curzon House next to his new Ipswich College. This was inhabited by the Curzon family at the time, but they agreed to move somewhere else (although never had to, because Wolsey fell from grace). The house itself no longer exists (there’s a rather ugly modern building in its place) but Curzon Lodge, where visitors were put up, still does. Blatchly also explained about the statue of Wolsey as an educationalist which sits outside the modern Curzon House, and after his talk he took us all on a short walk to see the statue and the Lodge (and another 15th Century merchant’s house which is now the Thomas Wolsey pub).

15th Century Merchant's HouseJohn Blatchy talking about the Wolsey Statue
Curson Lodge

“John Bale” Oliver Wort

The second talk of the day was given by Oliver Wort, about John Bale who wrote many books and was a Protestant Reformer. The Ipswich connection is that Bale was born in Suffolk, and spent 30 years as a Carmelite friar first in Norwich and later as the prior of the Carmelite house in Ipswich. He then converted to Protestantism, and spent 30 years as a Protestant writer. Bale wrote extensively in both his incarnations but most modern scholarship concentrates on the later Bale and ignores his earlier writing. Wort feels this is foolish – whilst the later Bale is important, his formative years were as a friar and this did have an influence on his later thinking.

One of the reasons for concentrating on his later life comes from Bale himself – as a convert he was very keen to disavow his Carmelite past and repeatedly got irritated by people who referred to him as Friar Bale. Bale published one of the first autobiographies in English, which was the fourth iteration of his own account of his life over a 20 year period (the first three were as essays at the back of books he wrote). Wort made the point that it’s necessary to take Bale’s words with a large pinch of salt. In Wort’s preamble to this talk he gave us a flavour of John Bale the man – he had somewhat of an ego. In books that he wrote he wasn’t just content to put his name on the title page and perhaps at the end. Instead he made sure his name was repeated throughout, and constantly in the text referenced the fact that these were the opinions of John Bale. In one of his books there was even a puzzle to do with the capitals at the start of each chapter, which when solved spelt out “BY ME JOHAN BALE”. This occasionally backfired – in his autobiography (which has his name on each page as part of the title) his name is at least once spelt “BAAL” instead of “BALE”. Particularly amusing as this was one way that ardent Protestants referred to the Pope.

So the autobiography is in all its incarnations the work of a man who is keen on presenting an image of himself to the world. Wort suggested that this is probably not just ego, Bale may also have been trying to overwhelm the reader with his new convert status and hoped they’d forget the earlier conformist Friar Bale. Taking it with a pinch of salt the autobiography gives us what is likely to be a historical overview of Bale’s life. He was born in 1495, and became a monk in Norwich at the age of 12 (in 1507). He was educated at Cambridge, starting in 1514, and graduated as a Bachelor of Divinity. After this he rose swiftly through the Carmelite ranks, becoming Prior in Ipswich. In 1536 he left the Carmelites to become a priest. And after his conversion to Protestantism (1537ish? I haven’t got a note of what Wort said) he wrote plays at court for a few years (writing the first English history play). He fled into exile after Cromwell’s fall, and only returned when Edward VII took the throne. He also spent the years of Mary’s reign in exile abroad, returning when Elizabeth became Queen.

Wort explained that the four different versions of the autobiography can tell us something about Bale’s changing sense of himself and the ways that religious conversion was seen in England at the time. The details change depending on the political climate of the time that it was written, in particular the details of the moment of his conversion (which become more elaborate and specific). His marriage is positioned in the later versions as the capstone sealing his conversion but closer to the event he doesn’t refer to his wife at all – perhaps he was keeping her secret because it was illegal for him as a priest to marry, perhaps he didn’t actually marry her till later when it became legal! The autobiography might also be better referred to as an autohagiography. For instance Bale repeatedly compares himself to the apostle Paul, giving a whole host of (rather tenuous) correspondences between their lives. At the time this attracted rather heated disagreement from other writers about the ego involved in appropriating an apostle’s life for one’s own self-aggrandisement.

“Ipswich, a Late Medieval Port” Nicholas Amor

The third talk was after lunch, and started with a walk along the Waterfront to Isaacs where we looked at the (outside) of the oldest part of the building, which is a 15th Century merchant’s house and would’ve existed during the time period that Nicholas Amor was talking to us about.

Nicholas Amor talking about the Medieval Waterfront15th Century Merchant's House

Ipswich has been a port since Anglo-Saxon times, and one thing Amor told us on the walk was that when the new university buildings were built there was an opportunity for archaeologists to dig there. The Waterfront area is where the medieval port was – the river ran past there at the time (nowadays the course of the river has changed and the Waterfront is on a canal that forms the Wet Dock). Amor’s specialisation is the late medieval period, particularly the 15th Century when Ipswich was an important port. During this century Ipswich had trading links as far afield as Spain, Iceland and the Baltic – but no trans-atlantic links and no Mediterranean trade either. The bulk of the trade, however, was with the Low Countries. Amor has compared the trade through Ipswich in the 1390s, the 1460s and the 1490s to get a picture of how it changed throughout the 15th Century. This is a period with a lot of unrest in England and wars with France, and you can think of the 1390s as a sort of golden age. Trade goes significantly downhill across the whole country by the 1460s – Ipswich actually does rather better than other places because of a high concentration of German merchants operating in the town. By the 1490s trade has improved but not back to the levels of the late 14th Century.

One question he looked at was why was Ipswich important at the time. One of the reasons is changes in the wool trade in the 15th Century. Wool could only be shipped through ports designated as staples – where the wool was taxed. In the 14th Century staples were in a selection of English ports and Ipswich wasn’t one of them. In the 15th Century the staple was in Calais, so it didn’t matter which English port you shipped from so long as you went there. Ipswich is conveniently located close to London and the Stowbridge Fair (an important wool market near Cambridge). It was also a quick journey from there to Calais. Another factor that made Ipswich more important than other East Anglian ports was that its position relatively far upriver made it safer. For instance nearby Harwich was sacked by the French during the 1440s, but Ipswich never was. This meant that even though the Crown would’ve preferred to move trade to Great Yarmouth it wasn’t ever a successful move.

At first wool was the biggest export from Ipswich, later in the 15th Century its importance declined. Suffolk wool was actually quite low quality, Amor said this was because the sheep have too easy a life in East Anglia – not enough poor weather to make them grow dense wool. As wool was taxed by quantity rather than quality Suffolk wool wasn’t worth legitimately shipping to Calais, instead it was smuggled to Flanders cloth makers who wanted cheaper wool. East Midlands wool was better quality and so was the majority of the legitimate trade (and so is mentioned in the customs records that Amor has used in his work). During the 15th Century the importance of the (export) cloth trade grew and much less wool was exported to cloth manufacturers in the Low Countries. Suffolk became the industrial heartland of England at the time, manufacturing the bulk of the cloth a lot of which was then exported via Ipswich. Wine imports were also an important part of the trade through Ipswich until the loss of Gascony to France in 1453, after which significantly less wine was shipped. Beer imports were important at the beginning of the century, but by the end it was being exported back to the Continent.

The merchants involved in this trade changed over the century. At the beginning a lot of them were local, but towards the end of the century there were many more foreign merchants living in and trading through Ipswich. The big players traded with Gascony and Spain – the long haul destinations. Smaller merchants operated to & from the Low Countries. In the mid 15th Century trade was much less lucrative – the loss of Gascony was part of this, and the ongoing war closing off markets at random was another part of the reason.

Sadly Amor ran out of time before he could finish his talk – the walk had taken longer than originally planned which ate into the time.

“Thomas Bilney” Andrew Hope

The fourth and last talk was another biographical talk, this time about Thomas Bilney and given by Andrew Hope. Bilney was a Cambridge academic and one of the first such reformers to go out to preach and talk to the ordinary parishioners. The Ipswich connection is that in 1527 Bilney went on a preaching tour of East Anglia, including a visit to Ipswich in May of that year. The bulk of Hope’s talk was focussed on what we know about the sorts of topics that Bilney preached about, and what sort of reformer Bilney actually was. This last is a topic of some debate with no clear answers – even the authorities at the time weren’t sure. When he was arrested they drew up two different charge sheets while trying to figure out which heresy to charge him with – a Lutheran or a Lollard.

The two possibilities are quite different in terms of their social constructs. Lollards are a community, who meet face to face. It had existed as a movement for around a century at the time and generally Lollards became Lollards because they knew people (like their parents) who were already Lollards. At the time, however, Lutherans in England were primarily isolated academics who had read the pamphlets and books being brought through ports like Ipswich and had experienced a moment of intellectual conversion like John Bale. Bilney falls between the two groups – he is an academic, and is isolated rather than part of group, however from what we know of his preaching he agrees with some of the Lollard thinking. For instance Lutheran thinking says that pilgrimages don’t confer salvation or any sort of de facto spiritual merit. Bilney in his preaching goes beyond this in a very puritannical direction, in much the same way the Lollards do. But it’s not clear if he read some of the more radical Continentals, or if he came to these conclusions via conversations with Lollards that he preached to.

One topic of his preaching was against the use of miracles to imply that God approves of pilgrimages. This was the standard Catholic answer to people who doubted the worth of shrines and pilgrimage. But Bilney picked up on a biblical reference which says that Satan will be on the loose after the year 1000 AD, and used this to argue that this so-called miracles were the work of the devil (this also comes up in Bale’s writing). Bilney also preaches on salvation using terminology from both the Lutheran and Lollard schools of thought. For instance he uses the term “mediator” for Christ, which is really only used in Lutheran texts but he couples this with the Lollard imagery that praying to a saint is like putting the head at the feet. He also preaches against the Papacy, with a rather clever argument that it’s put itself in the position that conscience should take, and that conscience should be the temple of the Holy Ghost. This is clever because conscience as an idea wasn’t the same as it is now – one of the important questions of the era was how come there seems to a cross-humanity consensus on right and wrong (like, murder is bad, that sort of thing). So the medieval thinkers postulated that there is a conscience that is responsible for this, a sort of collective thing that some people were more in touch with than others. The official position of the Church was that when they put forward rules of behaviour this was them channelling this conscience and letting everyone know what it said – so if you were in doubt about the moral course, you just asked the Church. So Bilney was taking an existing concept (the Church is in some sense the conscience of society) and arguing that this was bad and that one’s own individual conscience was more important. There is evidence that his preaching on this topic is taken up by local Lollards who start using his terminology and ideas about conscience.

The Lollards of the time must’ve felt like this was a new dawn. They had been living as a heretical community for over a hundred years, and suddenly academics and mainstream thinkers are putting forward viewpoints that are close to what the Lollards believe. There’s a general idea that areas with a strong Lollard presence become strong Protestant areas, and Ipswich is an example of this. But it’s important not to assume this is always the case.

Hope finished up his talk by telling us a bit about the end of Bilney’s life. Bilney was arrested as a heretic, as mentioned before, and examined – and eventually abjures his faith. It’s clear that he’d struggled with his identity before (Lutheran or Lollard) but after this he became unsettled and struggled with the tension between his belief and the fact that he’d saved his life by denying his beliefs. After 3 years of this he went to Norwich and practically baited the authorities into arresting him – he preached and handed out tracts written by William Tyndale. After being arrested he was sentenced to death by burning at the stake (the only sentence possible for this second offence). Even though Bilney sits in this odd position between the Lollard and the Lutheran traditions of reform his influence in Cambridge at this time was second to none, so he was an important part of the English Reformation.

Monday Link Salad

I rediscovered Khan Academy this week – I’ve had an account there for a few years but had faded out on using it. It does gamified maths tuition and the current way the site is set up has just the right hooks to keep me doing “just another set of questions” for hours. I think I lost 4 hours of Thursday to doing maths 🙂 Before I think you had to start with basic arithmetic and work your way up to the more complex stuff, and that got boring fairly fast. But now there’s a mode where it picks 6 random things to ask a question on, so you get a variety every time ranging from the basics through to things I’m not sure I ever learnt. You can always skip a question with “I haven’t learnt this yet” or get hints if you almost know what you’re doing but just can’t quite remember (or can’t figure out why you got it wrong). I think there’s also some degree of targetting the randomness so there’s a spread between stuff that’s doable and stuff that’s a bit of a stretch (as far as it can tell from your previous answers).

TV set to record this week:

  • The Story of Women and Art – 3 part series about female artists from the Renaissance onwards.
  • The Search for Life: The Drake Equation – one-off programme about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Actually going to record it next week, I think the showing next Sunday has sign language interpretation which I find distracting.

Ian Hislop’s Olden Days;

I’m not quite sure what I was expecting from Ian Hislop’s Olden Days but it wasn’t what we actually got! What we got was an interesting (and entertaining) look at how the British think about their history. The first episode of the series looked at two different Kingship myths – Arthur and Alfred. Obviously Alfred has the advantage of being real, but the best known story about him (burning the cakes) is about as truthful as the Arthur mythos. Ian Hislop spent that programme looking at the stories (and history where possible) of both Kings, and tracing their popularity over the centuries. Arthur is more popular during more romantically inclined eras – for instance in late Medieval times when chivalry was an important part of society. Alfred on the other hand is popular in more practically minded eras – particularly the Victorians. He brought laws and valued wisdom and learning, and this fits in well with the Industrial Revolution and the Victorian sense of bringing order and civilisation to The Whole World. Of course this isn’t ever an exclusive “one or the other” situation, and even in the eras I just mentioned both are an important part of the national idea of the perfect monarch.

The second episode concentrated on the paradoxes of the Victorian attitudes to the past. On the one hand this is an era of progress and practicality, bringing new technologies and ways of life to the world. on the other hand, and perhaps because of all the change, this is an era constantly looking back to a better and more perfect past. Not just for nostalgia, although there is plenty of that (like Sir Walter Scott’s Arthur and/or Scottish history themed novels). It’s also rather paradoxically being used to help drive the change. Hislop phrased it like this: The best way to get the British to do something new is to tell them it’s rooted in the old traditions of the country.

And the third and final episode looked at the place The Countryside has in the collective imagination of Britain. He started off by explaining that 1851 was a tipping point in Britain’s history – the census of that year recorded more people living in towns & cities than living in the rural areas, for the first time ever. And ever since the countryside has been idealised and mythologised into a timeless and unchanging rural idyll. So Hislop showed us sentimental Victorian watercolours of rose covered cottages and talked about Cecil Sharp’s great project to track down the True Folk Music of the People. This sort of theme also shows up in places like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings – it’s The Shire (an idealised version of the village Tolkein spent some of his childhood in) vs. Mordor (which Hislop noted must be Birmingham in that context 😉 ). And even though the Archers started out at a radio show designed to bring new ideas to farmers, it’s turned into another example of mostly urban people idealising the country life.

An interesting look at the British national mythos over history. And unsurprisingly given the presenter rather funny at times.


Other TV watched this week:

Episode 9 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 2 of How to Get Ahead – series about court life during a three different historical periods.

Episode 2 of Precision: The Measure of All Things – series about measurement and the history of measurement.

Don’t Panic – The Truth About Population – part of the This World series this is a lecture presented by statistician Hans Rosling. It’s a very entertaining yet informative look at population growth and poverty throughout the world. It’s the answer to fears about the booming population (we’ve actually reached peak child so growth is already slowing and will top out in the next few decades). And also a look at whether or not we can really pull the third world out of extreme poverty (it’s already happening). He also talked a bit about climate change but was less convincingly reassuring about that!

Episode 1 of Churches: How to Read Them – series looking at symbolism and so on in British churches.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 9)

The last two chapters of Part II (Politics and Wars) of this book are about the relationship between England and France during the period the book covers, focusing on the Hundred Years War which starts during Edward III’s reign. I’m lumping these two chapters together because the second one is specifically about the English army of the time, which is a subject that I acknowledge is important but am not that interested in personally.

England and France

Prestwich opens the chapter by noting that although with hindsight we see the Hundred Years War (kicking off in 1337) as a coherent thing that’s different in kind to preceding wars, this wasn’t the case at the time. Before King John (so before the scope of this book) the English Kings had control over vast lands in what is now France but after John’s loss of most of this to France all that was left on the continent for the English King was Gascony and even that was disputed by the French. Prestwich lays out how this duchy wasn’t worth much to the English crown in a monetary sense and it wasn’t terribly culturally similar to England. So its worth was mostly as a point of principle and as a base for re-expanding English control to their “ancestral lands”. There had been various campaigns in France in the early years of Henry III’s reign, with not much success. Then in 1259 the unstable domestic situation – which was building up to civil war (which was talked about in the first chapter of this part of the book) prompted the English to negotiate for a more lasting peace with the French. In return for being allowed to control Gascony Henry III gave up his claims to the rest of the lands, plus agreed to do homage for Gascony. Prestwich notes that given how arrogant Henry III was, this clearly wasn’t seen as humiliating for him at the time otherwise he wouldn’t’ve agreed to it even if it was sensible.

In hindsight, this treaty of 1259 can be seen as setting up the tensions that would result in the Hundred Years War. But in the medium term it was a stunning success and relations between England and France remained good for over 30 years after this treaty. In 1286 Edward I even did homage to the new French King as he was bound to do by the treaty terms. So far, so friendly. But tensions started rising not long after. Edward I reorganised the government of Gascony in a way that meant he was taking a more active role in it. And this was happening against a backdrop of the French crown being eager to assert their own royal rights wherever possible (for internal political reasons, I think, so again the fact it was Gascony was almost irrelevant).

War broke out in 1294 sparked by rivalries between sailors from English ports (in Gascony) and Breton sailors. Originally the English tried to keep a friendly relationship with France. Edward I’s brother Edmund and the Queen of France (and her mother-in-law) actually negotiated a treaty that Edward considered binding. It had a complicated series of events to follow, but after Edward did his part the French did not follow through with theirs so Edward felt duped. But Prestwich says it’s more likely that the French Queen just didn’t have as much authority and influence as she thought she did – so she was acting in good faith but wasn’t actually able to make a binding treaty.

Unlike Henry III, Edward I had an actual plan for his war with France. The main goal was to keep Gascony, but it was easier to actually campaign in Normandy. And Edward also masterminded a grand alliance pulling in various other European courts on his side – Flanders, Germany, Brabant, Holland, Guelders. But even having a plan didn’t guarantee success and the English were lucky that the French King was both cautious and fooled into thinking their army was larger than it really was. A truce was agreed in 1297, but peace treaty negotiations dragged on until 1303. In the end what was agreed was that everything should revert to the pre-war situation and friendly relations should be cemented by marriages between Edward I and the French King’s sister, and the future Edward II and the French King’s daughter.

However, you can’t realistically pretend that a war didn’t happen and tensions remained between the two countries. The legal status of Gascony meant that technically nobles there could appeal against the English King’s judgements to the French King, and they were encouraged to do so. Edward II also kept putting off the whole “paying homage” thing. So in 1324 war broke out again – a war that the English didn’t really want and the French weren’t terribly enthusiastic about. Peace was negotiated by Isabella, Edward II’s wife and sister of the current French King, mostly because she had personal reasons for wanting peace. Again the treaty was a restoration of the prior status quo, and Isabella’s son, the future Edward III, came to do homage on his father’s behalf for Gascony. And again this was more part of Isabella’s personal political manoeuvring than done on behalf of her husband – this is the jumping off point for the invasion of England by Isabella and Mortimer that results in the removal of Edward II from the throne.

For the first 10 years of Edward III’s reign there is an uneasy peace, and in 1329 when the first Valois King of France takes the throne Edward did homage to him for Gascony. Relations break down gradually over the early to mid 1330s. As well as the issue of Gascony the interference of France in Anglo-Scottish relations and of England in Franco-Flemish relations was important. There was also a failed crusade that Philip VI of France was going to lead – the Pope cancelled it because peace in Europe could not be guaranteed. Philip thought this was Edward’s fault. There was also the question of who was the rightful King of France. By French succession laws descent via the female line was invalid, so Edward III had no claim to France. By English succession laws he had a better claim (as the past King’s nephew) than Philip VI did. However by doing homage for Gascony he’d tacitly abandoned his claim. In 1337 he changed his mind and in 1340 he altered his coat of arms to include the French coat of arms. When writing to Continental rulers he started to call himself “Edward by grace of God King of France and England and lord of Ireland” (when referring to himself in English correspondence he put England first…). Prestwich suggests that this isn’t necessarily all because Edward wants the French throne – it’s more about getting the Flemish onside, if they can claim to be supporting the legitimate King of France then their position is much stronger than it is if they are rebelling. It’s also about asking for more than you necessarily want in the hopes when you negotiate it’s only down to your true position.

The first phase of the Hundred Years War runs from 1337 to 1340. This was fought much like Edward I’s war in the 1290s, expensively and with the help of allies. The English are a bit more successful however, in particular winning a naval battle at Sluys that did a lot to secure the English coast from French raids. The treaty of Esplechin in September 1340 was the end of this phase, with both sides promising a 9 month truce in all arenas including Scotland and Gascony.

The next phase of the war runs from 1341 through to 1355. War restarted using a succession crisis in Brittany as an excuse with the French and English backing different candidates. This was important as it gained Edward III more allies in French territory and access to more landing sites on the French coast. In 1346 Edward III himself undertook an extraordinarily successful campaign starting near Barfleur in Normandy and marching via Caen to the Seine (indeed nearly to Paris itself) and then north to the Somme eventually meeting the French in battle at Crécy. Pitched battles were actually rare, although Edward did have some reason to court them as winning a battle would be regarded as proof that God was on his side. The success of this campaign was very important, but wasn’t followed up – in part because of the crisis of the Black Death in 1348. However the English definitely had the upperhand in the bits & pieces of fighting that followed over the next several years even if there weren’t many more set piece victories.

In 1353 there was some attempt to negotiate a peace but both sides felt they still had more to gain if they kept on fighting, so nothing was worked out. The next phase of the war started in 1355, and Prestwich titles this “The Black Prince’s War” – Edward III’s son & heir lead the most succesful campaigns of this five year period, mostly raiding expeditions through southern France from Gascony. The major victory of this period was in 1357 at Poitiers when the French King was captured. For 2 years after this there were attempts to negotiate peace and ransom of the French King which didn’t really go anywhere. A final campaign by Edward III in 1359-60 ended this phase of the war. The English desire to continue was damaged by a disasterous storm that devasted the campaigning army, which meant they entered negotiations in a more concessionary mood than previously. Peace was negotiated in May 1360 at Brétigny – Edward III got Gascony, Poitou and several surrounding areas in full sovereignty in return for giving up his claim to the throne of France.

1360 is the end of the scope of this book, so to finish up the chapter Prestwich just notes that the peace lasted only 9 years. And mostly foundered on the actual implementation of the treaty.

The Armies of Edward III’s French War

The most surprising thing about this first section of the Hundred Years War both from a contemporary perspective and with hindsight is how competent the English army was, even compared to the start of Edward III’s reign. In part this is down to experience – the Scottish wars during the 1330s meant that there were men who knew how to command, knew how to organise logistics etc. And also had learnt lessons about which tactics had worked and which hadn’t.

Prestwich goes into a lot of detail about recruitment for the war. It was a worry for the crown initially, so the offered pay was higher than in previous wars. The bureaucracy was simplified too with explicit contracts between crown and commanders that set out how many men they were to bring of what sorts in return for how much in fees. Pay wasn’t the only motivator – the chance of capturing a noble Frenchman who you could then ransom was another form of motivation. And general looting, pillaging and “living off the land” was encouraged on these campaigns. This last also reduced the burden on the English domestically as there wasn’t as great a need to supply the army with food etc as there had been on the Welsh & Scottish campaigns.

When considering the tactics used by the English Prestwich starts off by discussing contemporary explanations for the successes achieved. The English mostly put it down to divine approval, which Prestwich notes is marginally more believable than the French thinking that their failure is down to wearing short-cut clothes … There isn’t much if any written evidence of English introspection about their tactics, but clearly it must have happened as lessons learnt in the Scottish wars are successfully implemented (often by the same commanders) in the French campaigns. However experienced troops and high morale were perhaps as important as the specific tactics used.

Chivalry was important in the 14th Century, and this may account for much of the enthusiasm for the French wars of Edward III. It’s not clear if Edward III was deliberately encouraging the culture of chivalry for this sort of purpose, or if he actually just liked it himself. Prestwich also notes that our association of the 14th Century with a golden age of chivalry is partly just because of what texts etc have survived. For instance the Order of the Garter was founded in 1348 and survives to this day, but it was one of several such things and it’s not clear how notable it actually was at the time. And as always the reality doesn’t live up to the ideals – wars of this era weren’t notably more chivalric in practice than any other era. Looting, pillaging and so on still happened, brutality still happened, and the practice of high ransoms for nobles doesn’t seem to square with the honour & glory rhetoric either.

Prestwich devotes the last two pages of this chapter to the economic effects of the war between 1337 and 1360. There is no clear consensus on whether the war was profitable or detrimental to the English economy. Prestwich concludes that the costs of the war were high in terms of the increased taxation needed to pay for it, and were probably not entirely counterbalanced by income from plundering and ransom high though that was.

Monday Link Salad

The tomb of Alexander the Great might’ve been found – if that turns out to be true, that’s kinda cool 🙂

New game on the way from the guy who was lead developer for Civ IV, RTS and economics based rather than units/war based. Rock Paper Shotgun has part one of an interview up, they mention boardgames in it although not specific ones so that’s probably why the resource trading is making me think of Settlers of Catan.

TV I set recording this week: