Tag: 18th Century

Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century

There seems to be something of a tendency for historical documentaries (about Britain) to announce that some aspect of the era under discussion is “the foundation of the modern world”. In Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief and Morals in the 18th Century Suzy Klein’s thesis was that the musical world of 18th Century Britain was the start of the music and entertainment business as we know it today. Even after watching the series I felt that was perhaps a bit of a grandiose claim, in that I suspect an in depth look at the musical world of the 17th or 19th Centuries would be able to make similar claims about those centuries. However, scepticism about this era as sole origin story aside, they were good programmes.

The three programmes dealt, roughly speaking, with the three words in the subtitle in order. In Episode 1 Klein introduced us to the musical styles of the era – Handel of course featured prominently throughout the series. Music in the 18th Century was part and parcel of forming the new British identity. Songs like the real (God Save the King) and unofficial (Rule Britannia!) national anthems come from the 18th Century, and were originally much more politically nuanced than their current status as “general patriotic songs”. God Save the King is a song that says you’re on the Hanoverian side in the Jacobite rebellions; Rule Britannia! makes you a part of Frederick Prince of Wales’s side of his political (and personal) disputes with his father George II.

Episode 2 (thus Mischief) was about music’s place in the growing pleasure-seeking culture of 18th Century Britain. Times were good, the money was rolling in from the Empire, people were getting richer and traditionally upper-class entertainments – like musical performances – were becoming accessible to lower down the social scale as well. This is an era of the commercialisation of music and musical performance: concerts were even put on for paying audiences! And it was an era of the super-star performer and composer. Handel and Mozart being only two of the big name composers who worked in London during the 18th Century. Individual opera singers could become famous as much for their extravagance and their behaviour as for their singing voices (and there’s definitely shades of modern celebrity culture in that!).

Episode 3 then took us back to the other side of music – its spiritual power. Klein talked about the Methodists and their invention (re-invention?) of British hymn singing, so many tunes or words for hymns come straight from Charles Wesley. The power of songs and singing to in effect remake the world into a better one wasn’t confined to the church. Songs were important in the abolition movement. I’d also not realised that the song Amazing Grace dates back to this era.

I enjoyed this series, I thought the music of the era was an interesting lens to use to look at the history and the social changes that happened during the 18th Century.

Due to being away & also Diablo III arriving this last week we only watched one other programme:

Episode 3 of Tropic of Capricorn – Simon Reeve travels round the world following the Tropic of Capricorn.

Travels with Vasari; Melvyn Bragg’s Radical Lives

Travels with Vasari is a two-part documentary we’ve had on the PVR for the last 4 years or thereabouts. It’s presented by Andrew Graham Dixon and is about Vasari, and Renaissance Italy. Vasari was an artist in Italy in the 16th Century but nowadays he is much more famous for the book he wrote called “Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”. Dixon explained that this is the first work of art criticism and art history as we know those subjects today, and that Vasari can be credited with inventing them. The two programmes had a little bit of Dixon talking about Vasari himself (his life, some of his art) but mostly it was a tour round Italy looking at examples of the works that Vasari wrote about. The book was organised as a sort of progression throughout the Renaissance towards what Vasari thought was its crowning glory – the paintings of Michaelangelo. As his subject was the lives of the artists he obviously provided some biographical details for each one as well as discussing their art – but in many cases he stretched the truth or invented things out of whole cloth (for instance casting one artist as a murderer, yet investigative work in the 20th Century showed that said artist died 4 years before his putative victim …).

A good series, I’m not sure why we left it so long before watching it. It also reminded me that somewhere I have a book covering the broad sweep of the history of art via a series of example paintings, and while at one point I was going through it at a rate of a painting a day, I don’t think I ever finished. Must dig that back out again.

Melvyn Bragg’s Radical Lives was two biographical programmes about two of the great British radicals. Bragg started the first programme by reminding us that while Britain has never had a successful revolution, and it’s flirtation with being a republic ended by inviting the monarch back, nonetheless there have been some notable radical thinkers born in our country. The first programme looked at the life of John Ball – a name that isn’t necessarily familiar to everyone, but I think most people will’ve heard the phrase “When Adam delved and Eve span, who then was the gentleman?” which is one of Ball’s. John Ball lived during the 14th Century and was instrumental in leading what is now known as the Peasants Revolt. The subject of the second programme was Thomas Paine, an 18th Century radical who was born in England but participated in the American War of Independence (on the American side) and the French Revolution. He wrote several influential pamphlets – like “Common Sense” which was influential in the decision of the fledgling US to declare independence, and “Rights of Man” which was in part a defence of the French Revolution.

Bragg told the stories of these two men as separate tales, but linked them together and to William Tyndale (who he’s previously made a programme about) by the way that their great influence was derived from their use of English to communicate their ideas. And not just English (which was radical enough in Ball’s time all on its own) but plain English that was understandable by everyone rather than just some intellectual elite.

Interesting programmes about two men I didn’t actually know much about beyond their names.

Other TV we watched last week:

Episode 2 of Rule Britannia! Music, Mischief & Morals in the 18th Century – Suzy Klein talking about 18th Century British music and how it impacted and was impacted by the history of the time.

Episode 2 of Tropic of Capricorn – Simon Reeve travels round the world following the Tropic of Capricorn.

Episode 2 of Lost Land of the Tiger – three part series about looking for tigers in Bhutan.

Episode 1 of Britain’s Great War – Jeremy Paxman looking at what happened in Britain during WWI.

The Search for Life: The Drake Equation – one off programme about the possibility that there is life on other planets, looking at each of the factors of the Drake equation in turn to see what we now know about the probabilities. I didn’t always agree with what was being said (for instance I’m not particularly convinced the photosynthesis is as dead certain to develop as they were saying, it’s only evolved once on earth after all). It was also marred somewhat by the visual style which was clearly done by someone who thought the subject of the programme was dull so needed to be jazzed up with shaky cams. Overall, good but not as good as it could’ve been.

Do We Really Need the Moon? – a delightful programme presented by Maggie Aderin-Pocock about the moon. She talked about the origin of the moon, what it was like in the past, what it will be like in the future. And a lot about how it has shaped the earth and life on earth. Possibly she credited the moon with a bit too much influence sometimes, but her enthusiasm carried the programme along.

Literature of the English Country House (Course on Future Learn)

I’d not intended to overlap courses on Future Learn, because I thought it might end up feeling like it was taking up too much of my time. I was right, but I’m still glad I took the Literature of the English Country House course even tho it has overlapped with two courses that I’d already signed up for. And to be honest it was part of why I found the Portus archaeology course so disappointing in the end (post), because this one was much more to my tastes!

This course was an 8 week course run by Sheffield University about, as you might expect, English literature that deals with or takes place in country houses. All the videos were filmed in country houses so that we could see the sorts of places the texts were talking about. The first seven weeks each looked at a particular aspect of country house literature, roughly moving forwards in time as we went. And then the last week was a review of the previous weeks, and a test to see if you’d got the right idea.

The first week also introduced us to the concept of close reading – it was a course pitched as being for everyone, so this made sure we were all aware of the technique. Whilst it wasn’t something I’d ever been formally taught I’ve been reading a few in depth analyses of books and book series online over the last few years so the concept was familiar to me. The general point is not just to read for the surface meaning, but once you’ve done that to go back and read more closely paying attention to word choice and the broader context of the piece. This doesn’t just show you how the author built up your impression of a scene, but might also give you greater insight into what they are saying (intentionally or unintentionally).

The texts we read were mostly excerpts from longer works tailored to demonstrate the points the course was making. In week one, as well as the skill of close reading (illustrated using a scene or two from Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night), we also looked at modern misconceptions about country houses and country house literature – namely that they were only places of harmony between the elite and the rest of the countryside, and that women didn’t write literature in the 17th Century. These were illustrated by a poem by Ben Johnson (To Penshurst) which by praising one place (and family) for its harmonious perfection also lets one know what normality really was. And we also read an excerpt from a work by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle.

Week two focussed on entertainment in 17th Century country houses – both the amateur (illustrated by a poem written by a servant to celebrate a child’s 2nd birthday) and the professional (illustrated by the scenes from Hamlet where the travelling players visit Elsinore). In week three we looked at politeness in the 18th Century – which they explained was a bit of a broader concept than it is now. It wasn’t just about whether you said “please” and “thank you” in the right places, but also the way you spoke, the clothes you wore and whole sum of your public behaviour & presentation. Personally, I think we might still stretch politeness as a term to cover all of that sort of thing, but perhaps I’m not understanding the nuances here. This week was illustrated first with an excerpt from the Spectator, a humorous piece about the differences between country & town manners. And also by an excerpt from a novel by Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire featuring a husband who was polite in the mode of the town but very much not nice.

Week 4 was devoted to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice. The passages we read were about Elizabeth Bennet’s visit to Darcy’s house – which is thought to be modelled on Chatsworth. And these passages were used to illustrate a narrative technique which Austen used that was revolutionary at the time. This is “free indirect discourse” where the boundaries between the narrator and the thoughts of the character are blurred. In week 5 we turned to the darker side of country house literature – the country house as a sort of malevolent presence or with a weird or reclusive owner. This was illustrated with a gothic novel by Ann Radcliffe (Mysteries of Udolpho) and also by Dickens’s Great Expectations. The latter was also used to look at points of view within the story – because the story is told by Pip when he’s much older so you get a mingling of the young boy’s reaction to Miss Haversham and the older man’s more considered view.

The 6th week was all about childhood and the literature devoted to it, which was rather fun. So we had some of Lear’s nonsense rhymes, and an excerpt from Alice in Wonderland. And the final week of reading brought us up to the end of the country house era – the 19th Century, and Oscar Wilde. The excerpts this week included a couple from The Canterville Ghost, which started out as a witty look at the trend of wealthy Americans buying up old British country houses from impoverished aristocrats. But by the end (our second excerpt) seemed to’ve turned into a rather saccharine piece of sentimental Victorian religiousness!

I enjoyed this course a lot. It’s a shame I had so many other things on at the time, I’m not sure I entirely did it justice while I was working through it – but the stuff is all still there to go back over again if I want to in the future 🙂

The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain; Tigers About the House; The Birth of Empire: The East India Company

The First Georgians: The Kings Who Made Britain was a series presented by Lucy Worsley which ties into an exhibition at Buckingham Palace this year to mark the 300th anniversary of George I taking the throne. The series (and presumably exhibition?) focussed on Georges I and II who are often overlooked a bit in the rush to get to George III and the madness and loss of the American colonies. As well as the two monarchs Worsley also looked at the other important members of the family during this time – starting with the Electress Sophia of Hanover, who was the originally designated heir to Queen Anne. Sophia didn’t live long enough to take the throne, so it was her eldest son George who did. Other members of the royal family discussed were the spouses of the two Georges: Sophia and Caroline; and Frederick Prince of Wales (son of George II and father of George III).

The Hanoverians were brought in as monarchs of the United Kingdom by an Act of Parliament designed to avoid the “disaster” of a Catholic monarch. This of course was fertile ground for conflict – which boiled over in 1715 and 1745 with the Jacobite rebellions. As well as being Protestant they had another advantage – they were a family, with more than one heir already lined up! It was hope this would usher in a period of a stable Protestant monarchy. And it did, in one sense, but they were a pretty dysfunctional family. George I’s wife spent the last 30 years of her life locked up after having an affair, George I and George II did not get on, neither did George II and his son, Frederick. As well as all their disastrous fallings out the family also had some problems with being accepted by the populace of their new country – they were seen as foreigners, and George III was the first of the dynasty to be born in England! Both George I and George II were seen as more interested in Hanover than they were in the UK, Frederick was the first to truly put the UK first – mostly as it would annoy his father.

This was a time of great change in British society, and Worsley’s thesis was that some of this was due the trickle down effect of the Georges’ on the society around them. For instance in George II’s reign the concept of “the opposition” in parliament began to rise. This is because Frederick provided a secondary focus for the politicians – a place in the political system where you could disagree with the King whilst still being loyal to your country.

A good series about a couple of Kings I often overlook at bit, and it has definitely made me want to see the exhibition.

Tigers About the House was something completely different 🙂 Giles Clark is a zookeeper who is in part of the team who look after the Sumatran tigers in a zoo in Australia, and for the first couple of months of the lives of a pair of cubs he was bringing them up at home. The tigers in the zoo aren’t ever going to be reintroduced to the wild, and are handled often by the keepers (and sometimes by the public) so this was a good way to familiarise the cubs with humans while they were young. But it wasn’t in any way domesticating them – it seemed more like the keepers ended up as friends of the tigers (whilst still respecting them). As well as the strand of “ooooh, cute tiger babies” the programme also had a message about conservation. One of the reasons this Australian zoo is so keen to have their tigers handleable, including by the public, is that this encourages people to contribute to conservation funds. Sumatran tigers are being hunted to extinction by poachers in the wild, because their bodies are used in traditional medicines and as luxury goods – there are only a few hundred tigers left in the wild, and they may become extinct in the wild in the next few decades.

A very cute series, which did its job at raising awareness of the tigers plight in the wild.

The Birth of Empire: The East India Company was a two part series presented by Dan Snow looking at the history of the East India Company, and how they accidentally established the British Empire. It was full, as you might expect, of British people behaving poorly towards the Indians. But different phases of the history had different sorts of poor behaviour. Snow split it into two halves for the two episodes – in the first part of the history the Company was wholly independent from the British Government, and wholly concerned with profit. Going to India as a member of the East India Company was a good way to become spectacularly rich – providing you survived the climate and the diseases that came with the climate. It also seemed to have less formalised racism – men who went to India with the Company frequently married or otherwise had relationships with local women, and could take on some of the local customs (including but not limited to polygamy). But profit was the main focus, and this lead to the spectacularly poor management of a famine in Bangladesh (including selling food out of the region in order to make a profit rather than feeding the people) that appalled the public in Britain. The Company was brought under the oversight of Government after this, and the second phase of its history began.

This phase was to see the rise of the civil service and also increasing education of the the Indians. But it also started to move from trade with India to ruling India. In part because the Government oversight was back in London and couldn’t really do much to restrain the ambitions of the men on the ground in India. This era also saw the rise of a much more racist attitude towards the Indians, regarding them as innately inferior. And it was this attitude that lead to increasing tensions between the Indians and the Company – and this boiled over in the Indian Mutiny (otherwise known as India’s First War of Independence) in 1857. There were atrocities on both sides, and public sentiment in Britain was that the Company had been at fault in letting it happen. This was the catalyst for the British Government taking over ruling India and the end of the East India Company.

An interesting series that reminded me (again) how little I know of the history of India – I need to add a book about the subject to my (huge) list of books to read 🙂

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve also watched:

Episode 4 and 5 of Secrets of Bones – series about bones, their biology & evolution.

Episode 1 and 2 of Tropic of Cancer – repeat of a series where Simon Reeve travels round the world visiting the countries that the Tropic of Cancer runs through.

The Secret Life of the Sun – one-off programme with Kate Humble and Helen Czerski looking at the sun and the solar cycle. Lots I didn’t know or only had a vague idea about (like how long it takes for photons to get out of the sun!).

ISIS – Terror in Iraq – Panorama episode about the disintegration of Iraq and the rise of the ISIS Islamic state. Thoroughly depressing, full of atrocities committed by ISIS – the conclusion seems to be that as they want to spread throughout the world the question isn’t if the West end up in conflict with them, but rather when.

Britain Underwater – Panorama episode that aired in February about the flooding in the Somerset Levels (and other areas of the UK). Depressing, and looked at how there are no long term answers that will keep everybody from being flooded.

In Our Time: The Bluestockings

I’d always thought that “bluestocking” was just a Victorian pejorative for a woman who preferred learning to socialising, and that the term derived from the perceived frumpiness of said women. But the In Our Time episode that we listened to this Sunday disabused me of that notion. The Bluestockings were an influential intellectual “club” in late 18th Century England, which bore some resemblance to the French salons of the same era, involving both men and women. Only later did the term become gendered and pejorative. The three experts who discussed it were Karen O’Brien (King’s College London), Elizabeth Eger (King’s College London) and Nicole Pohl (Oxford Brookes University).

The Bluestockings were not originally conceived of as a movement, instead it grew organically out of informal gatherings hosted primarily by three London society hostesses for the purpose of rational conversation. In the 18th Century the term “rational conversation” meant something along the lines of “improving conversation” – it was about learning and educating each other. And this is in some sense in opposition to the normal etiquette of the time which frowned upon talking about anything you knew more about than the person you were talking to – particularly if you were a woman. The meetings happened about once a month, and members also corresponded by letter and published essays. Very unusually for the time women were not just permitted to attended, they were also heavily involved in organising these meetings and over time came to dominate them. The name Bluestocking, however, was derived from the male attendees – as the gatherings were informal some of the men would wear their everyday blue stockings rather than their court silk stockings.

One of the important hostesses at the beginning of the movement was Elizabeth Montagu. She was born a member of the gentry, and married into the aristocracy. She was a very intelligent woman, who took over running her husband’s coal business when she married and made her family incredibly wealthy. The experts explained that she opted out of the court social circle of the time – as it was stultifyingly boring, particularly for ladies in waiting. Instead she hosted her own gathers – which became meetings of the Bluestockings. She wrote many many letters and also published essays, including an influential one about Shakespeare. This was in reply to an essay by Voltaire, and Montagu was writing to restore Shakespeare’s reputation as an important playwright. The experts pointed out that this is period when Shakespeare isn’t all that well regarded – classical authors and classical styles are still held up as being inherently better than anyone writing in English could be. Montagu’s essay is an important part of overturning this consensus.

Montagu’s gatherings might’ve been informal, but they were still organised – she arranged the chairs in her room in a semi-circle and so everyone was talking to everyone (I think). Another of the society hostesses involved in these was even more informal – she dotted the chairs around the room in little groups before the guests arrived, this meant there would be many clusters of conversations going on. The informality of the English Bluestockings was a contrast to the French salons of this same era – they had topics decided in advance and were more formalised with some degree of rules about who could speak. Another contrast between the French & English models was that the French salons were politically and religiously radical – the Bluestockings as they began were not.

As the first generation of Bluestockings gave way to the next the movement began to become more restricted to women, and to become tarred with the association of the French salons with radicalisation. This is during a period where the establishment was particularly concerned about any hints of political radicalisation, because the French Revolution was an example of where that sort of thing could lead. On the other side of the coin the Bluestockings were seen as too conservative by the new generation of female thinkers – women like Mary Wollstonecraft. So the movement began to fade away, however it had the legacy of having promoted the concept of women as the intellectual equals of men at a time when that was practically unthinkable.

An interesting programme about something I knew nothing about before. I’d quite like to read a biography of Elizabeth Montagu, but a quick google suggests there’s no such thing. A shame, but the further reading list for the In Our Time episode lists several books about the Bluestockings so perhaps I’ll pick up one of them at some point 🙂

Border Country: The Story of Britain’s Lost Middleland; Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness

Border Country can be fairly characterised as unashamed propaganda for the No-to-Independence side of the upcoming referendum in Scotland. To be fair that fits my own bias* so I was predisposed to like the series. The narrative structure for the two programmes was a history of the border regions of England and Scotland from the time of the Romans through to James VI & I as ruler of both countries. It was presented by Rory Stewart, and his thesis is that the border between Scotland and England is not a natural cultural breakpoint, but more of an arbitrary line drawn across the region. And he believes that these sorts of line-on-the-map borders lead to more problems than they solve.

*One selfish reason: if Scotland isn’t part of Britain then as the English born child of Scottish parents I lose my sense of national identity (I’m British rather than Scottish or English). One more political reason: As someone who can’t vote in the referendum I’m not looking into it closely, but the rhetoric in favour of independence that I do see is heavy on the “of course the bad stuff stays with the UK but we’ll get to keep the good bits of the Union even once we’ve left”. And that feels naive and foolish to me – maybe everything will work out the way they want, but unless there are some signed agreements then making contingency plans on worst case scenarios and reassuring your public about them would seem sensible.

The intros from the BBC continuity announcer for both programmes were very pointed about this being Stewart’s personal opinions, and he says that himself several times through the series. Part of this is distancing it from his job – he’s the Conservative MP for the Penrith and the Border consituency in Cumbria. So important for him to point out repeatedly this is him speaking for himself and not the Tories in general. But this also came up several times when he was talking about the history of the region – he’d fairly often say something along the lines of “many historians believe X but I believe Y because …”.

The facts and stories that he told us were mostly the same as in many other programmes about British history. But there were two major differences in the way the narrative was framed that made this a series worth watching. The first of these was that it was strongly focused on the stretch of land between the river Humber and the river Forth, which he referred to throughout as the Middleland. He emphasised the continuity of culture across that region, both before and after the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall. The first programme covered the tribal culture of the people who lived in the region before the Romans, then the effect the Wall had on them. This was followed by the aftermath of the demilitarisation of that border when the Roman Empire shrank back away from Britain. And that programme ended on a high note with the golden age of Northumbria – the era of the Venerable Bede and St Cuthbert. A time when this region was a centre for religious thought and art across Europe – note that Northumbria at the time covered areas on both sides of the border. The second programme was full of death and destruction. He concentrated on the Vikings, then the Harrowing of the North by William the Conqueror and finally the Anglo-Scottish wars of the late medieval period and the clans of Reivers who terrorised the area during this period. The power of these clans, in Stewart’s narrative, was broken only when the border ceased to divide the countries. He said that the unification of Scotland and England into the United Kingdom meant that the Reivers weren’t useful to the military of one side or the other so it was easier to enforce the law in the region.

The other way in which the framing of this series was different to many other British history programmes is that Stewart frequently drew parallels between our history and areas of the world today. He was a deputy governor in Iraq for a while, he’s got a lot of involvement in charity work in Afghanistan and has walked through that country and written a book about it. As well as other places. So, for instance, he was comparing the tribal Celtic culture that existed before the Romans arrived to rural Afghanistan. He compared the golden age of Northumbria to modern day Tibet – because of the monkish religious cast to the culture. Never in a “it’s exactly the same” sort of way, but in a way that drew out the parallels and made you think about both the history of Britain and the current state of the world in a new way.

I don’t think I always agreed with him – I could see places where I thought he’d had to be careful to pick his facts to fit his story (like the Edward I trying to conquer Scotland bit didn’t quite sit right with me, for instance). And I think the implied “don’t vote for independence because it’ll all go up in smoke” is a bit too far-fetched. But equally, I do agree that the boundary between Scotland and England is a historical artifact – drawn by the Romans for their own imperial reasons. And it was thought provoking, and good to look at the history I know through a different lens.

Rococo: Travel Pleasure Madness was a three part series about the Rococo art movement presented by Waldemar Januszczak. It’s a sequel of sorts to the series he did last year about Baroque art that we watched in February (post). In the Baroque one he moved across the continent following the movement, this Rococo series was done in three themes instead. And his themes were picked to support his thesis that a lot of the modern world has its roots in the Rococo. First he looked at the period and the art in terms of travel – particular emphasis on Venice as a tourist destination, as well as the fondness for paintings of exotic animals and Chinoiserie. Next was pleasure, and there were two strands to this. One was the sort of decadent pleasure epitomised in Boucher’s Blonde Odalisque (a painting I’ll never look at in quite the same way after seeing Januszczak sprawl across a sofa in the same pose (with his clothes on, thankfully!)) and in Marie Antoinette pretending to be a milkmaid. The other strand talked about things like how “the pursuit of happiness” as a human right is a Rococo idea. The last of the themes was madness – a lot of the Rococo style is rather otherworldly and unreal, and this programme focussed on where that could lead and the darker side of the Rococo.

As with the Baroque series it’s hard to find things to say, because it’s all about the visuals. One thing that does strike me is that Januszczak’s programmes have a distinctive style to them. I’m not sure I can articulate it, it’s more of a feeling than something I’ve got figured out – but I’m hard pushed to think of another presenter who spends so much time walking away from the camera with his back to the audience. Another quirk is that often he has people looking at the paintings he’s talking to – and they’re not just people around in the art gallery by chance, it’s always the same handful of people so it’s for deliberate effect. This series also had people dressed up and acting out silent vignettes completely ignoring him while he stood and explained what was going on.

I still think Rococo art is overall a bit too frilly and a bit too pink, but I do now know more about what’s there behind the pink frilliness!

When Albums Ruled the World – nostalgia for the heyday of the vinyl LP, the 60s & 70s.

Episode 3 of Pagans & Pilgrims – series about the sacred places of Britain, presented by Ifor ap Glyn.

Animals Overnight: Sleepover at the Zoo – programme about sleep and animal sleep patterns. They set up cameras around Bristol Zoo to record what various of the animals did overnight when no-one was around, and also visited various sleep scientists to talk about what we know and don’t know about sleep. Most surprising fact for me is that REM sleep appears to be the result of convergent evolution, even if we still don’t know what its purpose is.

Episode 1 of The Plantagenets – Robert Bartlett covers the history of the Plantagenet dynasty, who ruled England for nearly 300 years.

Episode 5 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

In Our Time: The Physiocrats

The Physiocrats were members of a French school of economic thought that flourished in the 18th Century, and can be thought of as some of the first modern economists. The three experts who talked about them on In Our Time were Richard Whatmore (University of Sussex), Joel Felix (University of Reading) and Helen Paul (University of Southampton). The programme not only looked at what their economic theory was, but also set it in the context of the politics of the age and looked at the influence it had in its turn on politics.

Someone trying to predict the future at the end of the 17th Century would’ve thought that France was the rising star and would go on to dominate politics across the world during the 18th Century. But this didn’t actually materialise – instead Britain began to rise in prominence. A lot of thought was put into the question of “what went wrong and how do we become great again?” during the mid-18th Century in France, and the Physiocrats were a part of this cultural soul searching.

The big idea of the Physiocrats was that all wealth was tied to agriculture. They divided the world into three classes – the producers (i.e. those who actually worked the farms), the sterile class (or commercial class) and the landowners. This was quite a change from the prior medieval division of people into aristocracy, clergy and “the rest”. It wasn’t, however, intended to change the social order – they still believed that the landowning class were entitled to the produce and labour of the producing class, as in the old feudal system. They saw the problem of France’s decline as being down to regulations messing up the divinely appointed natural economic system – basically if wheat and other agricultural produce was allowed to be freely traded within the country then they thought wealth would naturally increase.

There was a definite anti-British flavour to this theory as well. Relatives of British aristocrats might move into trade (rather than become clergy as was the “proper” idea) – and this was seen as something that detracted from a country’s wealth by the Physiocrats. I think the experts were suggesting that this belief was in part caused by not wanting to follow Britain’s lead in anything. Which was a shame for the Physiocrats long term aims – after all the British were about to kick start the Industrial Revolution and manufacturing was just about to take over the wealth creation role from agriculture.

One thing that set the Physiocrats’ ideas apart from previous ideas about economics was that they were a part of the Enlightenment mindset. They were approaching the problem of how to create and maintain wealth in a scientific fashion (although not entirely – as I mentioned above they saw their theory as divinely appointed). And they took inspiration from other sciences at the time – like seeing the circulation of the blood as akin to the circulation of wealth in the economy.

They were influential on later economic thought, in particular ideas about free trade – and Adam Smith was notably influenced by them. Another influence they had was probably even less to their tastes than influencing a British economist – the idea that the people who worked on the land were the actual producers of wealth fed into the French revolution.

When we started to listen to this programme I thought it was going to be awfully dull (economics isn’t a favourite subject of mine) but it turned out pretty interesting after all. The Physiocrats were a curious mix of trying to think about economics rationally, whilst being blinded by their political ideology.

This Week’s TV including Games, Antigua, Vikings, Ottomans, and Iron Age & 20th Century Britons

Games Britannia

This is a three part series about the history of games in Britain, presented by Benjamin Woolley – we only recorded the first one which was the earlier history. Just as well, I think as he got closer to the modern day I’d’ve got more irritated with him (a throwaway remark in his intro to the theme of the series about how “these days teenage boys play video games” put my hackles up …). Other infelicities included showing a picture from an Egyptian relief of a game of senet and talking about it as if it was an ancestor of chess (unlikely, I think it’s believed to be more like a race game than a war game). And an assumption that an Iron Age game board must’ve been for divination purposes and meant this burial was of a druid … which, er, why does everything “primitive people” do have to have deep religious significance? Can’t a game be a game?

Otherwise it was an interesting survey of games from Iron Age Britain to late Victorian times. The earlier periods are represented by a small handful of games we don’t really know the rules for any more, except Nine Men’s Morris – which you find boards for scratched into the stonework in cathedral cloisters & so on, and it’s a game that is found in some variant form or another right across the world. The games we’d recognise today start to come in after contact with the east – some brought back by crusaders etc and later from India. I didn’t know that Snakes & Ladders derived from a Hindu game that was more of a teaching tool about the Hindu religion that a game per se. Odd to note that this game was altered to remove the message behind it during the same time period that teaching games were being churned out by Victorian moralists – lots of games where the point was to race to the end and there’d be various moral snares along the way (“You landed in a tavern, miss two goes”).

Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-hole: An Eighteenth Century Navy Graveyard Uncovered

A hurricane in 2010 uncovered 18th Century bones on a beach in Antigua – a place that Horatio Nelson once referred to as a “vile place” and a “dreadful hole”. In this programme Sam Willis followed the (fairly short) archaeological excavation that followed the discovery & told us a bit about the history of Antigua and why it was such an appalling place in the 18th Century. Antigua was important to the British Empire – both strategically and because it, in common with the other Caribbean islands, was where sugar was produced. The beach where the bones were found is in a place now called English Harbour – a natural harbour surrounded by hills where ships could shelter from the hurricanes. An obvious place to make your main base for the area – a couple of forts near the entrance & you can make the whole thing a safe place for your fleet. But the lack of wind & currents causes other problems – anything flung in the water just stays there. Parts of the seabed in the harbour today are feet thick in rubbish, industrial waste from the dockyards went in, any waste from the ships moored there including sewage. So instead of the pretty & clean beach of today the harbour would’ve been a stinking miasma of polluted water & air. Then you add in all the tropical diseases the sailors were exposed to, and the high mortality rate starts to seem reasonable. But then Willis talked to several archaeologists who have an additional theory about what was killing the sailors – lead poisoning from rum. Part of the sugar cane harvest was made into rum, and this was a staple drink for the sailors – they’d have a pint a day as part of their rations. But the rum was made in lead piping and lead distillation tanks, and the people Willis spoke to said the rum would’ve been contaminated. Perhaps not a problem if you had a bit now & again, but for the sailors it would’ve built up quickly.

The archaeological side of the programme was well covered, but was made at an early stage of the investigation – they had a few days of excavation but obviously hadn’t done any further analysis by the time the programme was made. But in that 5 days or so they got half a dozen skeletons from one small trench in the beach – the thought is that if a sailor died on board a ship in the harbour then he’d be hurriedly buried on the beach.

The Viking Sagas

This programme about the Viking Sagas wasn’t one of Janina Ramirez’s better programmes – somewhat padded out with lots of gushing about how wonderful the sagas were (rather than more discussion of the things themselves) at the start and some odd choices for imagery. It did get better as the programme went on, however, as we moved from generic “ooh this is wonderful” to a discussion of one saga in particular. The saga she chose was the Laxdæla saga, a story of lust, love & revenge. The point Ramirez was drawing out was that the Viking sagas were much more realistic than contemporary European literature which was heavy on tales of courtly love, and virtue being rewarded. The sagas are based on real events (in real places) with only a thin veneer of Christian moralising added at a later stage (like Guðrún, one of the protagonists, withdrawing to a nunnery at the end of her life in repentance). Ramirez also made a point of how British people were among those who settled Iceland (mostly women brought as concubines, i.e. sex slaves). And the sagas also influenced more modern British writers – Blake and Tolkein were the examples used.

Worth watching for the scenery & to hear bits of the saga read aloud (in Icelandic, with subtitles) in said scenery. But the In Our Time we listened to earlier in the year on the same subject was more informative (post).

The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors

In the second episode of this series about the Ottoman Empire, Rageh Omaar covers the second half of the empire from Suleiman the Magnificent (or Suleiman the Lawgiver) in the 16th Century through to Abdul Hamid II and the “Sick Old Man of Europe” (nickname for the empire) in the 19th Century. Omaar continues to be more of an apologist for the Ottoman Empire than I’d like (lots of “it was a tolerant place” while glossing over second class citizenship for non-Muslims & children of non-Muslims being taken to be slaves). It was during Suleiman’s time that the Mamluk Empire was conquered – bringing the heartlands of Islam under Ottoman control. Prior to this the Ottomans were only really nominally Muslim, and ruled over a predominantly Christian territory, afterwards they moved more towards embracing their Islamic faith as a mark of their legitimacy as rulers. The Sultan was now also the Caliph, and they imposed a hierarchy on the Islamic clergy where there was previously no such thing. Under Suleiman and his immediate successors the Ottoman Empire pushed its expansion westward – ending up at the gates of Vienna, where they were only defeated by all of Christendom coming together (in effect) to drive them back. The Turks were feared across Europe & from the perspective of Europeans it was very much a Holy War (but not so from the Ottoman perspective, that was about territory). Omaar pointed out that this historical legacy influences the way the more eastern countries of Europe see the prospect of Turkey joining the European Union to this day.

Suleiman’s Ottoman Empire was at its peak, after him & his immediate successors their technological advantage started to be outstripped by a Europe undergoing the Industrial Revolution and entering the Enlightenment era. When Napoleon took his army to Egypt the initial Ottoman reaction was an assumption they were clearly the superior civilisation so their rout by the French & the loss of Egypt was a complete shock. It’s all downhill from there – the Ottomans end up referred to as the Sick Old Man of Europe, and rising nationalist feelings start to tear apart the cohesion of the Empire. The Ottoman dynasty is also seen by parts of the Empire as not Muslim enough – a fundamentalist Muslim group rising in what’s now Saudi Arabia took control of Mecca & Medina for a while, and whilst their rebellion was put down by the Ottomans it was a sign of what was to come.

Which is presumably the subject of the next episode.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

Metal: How it Works

Metal: How it Works is the first of a three part series (all called X: How it Works) presented by Mark Miodownik which look at the materials our civilisation is based on. It was a combination of history, engineering & metallurgy, and while it could’ve been quite dry it was saved by the fact that Miodownik is engagingly enthusiastic about the subject. Miodownik took us through the history of metal-working from the early discovery of copper, and then bronze, through iron-working to steel and more modern metals. Along the way he talked about what it is about the atomic structure of metals that makes them behave the way they do (atoms in a crystal lattice, but one where the atoms can slide along and bunch up). As well as the enthusiastic bits about what metal working has let us do there were also a couple of segments about times when our ambition outreached our knowledge & skills. The first of these was about the railway bridge across the Tay, which collapsed under a train during a storm killing everyone on board. Which was the impetus for figuring out steel production – because it was the first indication for Victorian engineers that iron alone wasn’t necessarily the answer to all the world’s engineering problems. And the second was the first passenger planes, where tragically the stresses that repeated pressurisation & depressurisation put on the metal fuselages of planes was only worked out after several catastrophic mid-air failures.

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

Stories from the Dark Earth: Meet the Ancestors Revisited

The third episode of Stories from the Dark Earth was a very padded hour about two Iron Age burials. Very very padded. Bourton-on-the-Water is a village in the Cotswolds that I’ve been to several times as a child, and apparently underneath its primary school there is a fairly large Iron Age site. As the school has expanded they’ve had archaeologists come in and excavate before they put new buildings up, so much has been unearthed. The original burial (a girl in a rubbish pit) was thought to be singular and perhaps a sign of human sacrifice – so the updated info was first debunking that theory and then discussing the other burials they found in the area. All were of women or girls who were in some way diseased or disabled – they speculate that this may’ve been what set these women apart so that they were buried rather than excarnated (left to decompose before burying the bones). One of the bodies was of an older woman who had clearly been paralysed below the waist for several years (her leg bones were withered) but was otherwise in good health (as far as they could detect) which is an indication that these women were well looked after.

The other burial was a chariot burial found in Yorkshire in a village called Wetwang. Subsequent to the original excavation they’ve found evidence that the chariot was in use before death – ie it wasn’t just for burying the woman with, it was her vehicle in life. The woman in the grave was also disfigured, her skull was lopsided – probably pushed that way by a fairly large hemangioma on one of her cheeks. (Wikipedia says haemangiomas disappear over time mostly going by age 10, so perhaps I misremember what they said on the programme as they seemed to be saying it would still be visible in her later years.) She was buried with a mirror, which they’ve now discovered may’ve been kept in an otter fur bag – which may have symbolic status.

We’ll have a gap before we can watch the fourth episode, for some reason it didn’t record last time it aired so I need to wait till it airs again (soon, I think). In it, I suspect he’ll tell us several hundred times how it’s been “over N years since” the original excavations 😉

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >

A Hundred Years of Us

The third episode of A Hundred Years of Us was more of the same mixture as the other two. Phil Tufnell was irritating as a butler this time (but the butler teaching him was too polite to outright laugh). More interesting was the segment on motorways – brand shiny new in the 1950s and requiring informational films about how you shouldn’t do a U-turn if you missed your exit nor have a picnic on the hard shoulder. And they were empty! There was also an interview with a man who’d moved from Jamaica to England in the early 60s (not on the Windrush, his parents moved over on the Windrush). He talked about both the culture shock and the racism he faced – like how he’d corresponded with an agricultural college when he was still in Jamaica to organise becoming a student once he moved to England. But once he turned up (and turned out black) there was magically no space in any of the classes. He ended up having to get a job as a bus conductor in Birmingham. He was keen to stress how much England has changed for the better since he arrived (although this segment also covered how much it got worse before it got better).

< Previous Episode | Next Episode >