england – Page 6 – It's More Fun to Be Jack of All Trades than Master of One

A Short Trip to the V&A

While at the V&A for the Treasures of the Royal Court exhibition (post) I also managed to have a look at a couple of other galleries before & after the exhibition. Sadly train times meant I didn’t get long there overall (otherwise I’d’ve had to pay the peak time fare) but I did get some photos!

The photos are up on flickr (here), with some highlights in this post.

I started out in the Medieval & Renaissance Europe galleries, and the first couple of rooms I went into had a strong religious theme. The first room actually reminded me a bit of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin (which I still haven’t written up a post about) because it was dominated by a piece of monumental architecture nicked from another country:

In this case the Choir Screen from ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands. This room was mostly pieces of sculpture, and the next one I went into was full of altarpieces. These were all spectacularly ornate, like one from France (the Troyes Altarpiece) which had not just the main subject in each carved scene but smaller incidental details behind.

Moving on to more secular art (and I think forward in time) one of the pieces that particularly stuck out to me was a tapestry showing scenes from the Trojan War. One of these was the Amazon Queen Penthesilea kneeling before King Priam of Troy – when I went to the museum we’d only just listened to the In Our Time episode about the Amazons (post), so they were particularly in my mind. Also in this section they had one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks, which I somehow found unexpected.

Tapestry, Part of a Set Showing the Trojan War

After I’d been to the exhibition I went and looked at the British galleries – starting from the Tudors and moving on the Stuarts. I didn’t have long before I had to leave (only an hour or thereabouts) so I was quite brisk, just looking at & photographing things that caught my eye rather than everything they had. This included the Great Bed of Ware, mentioned by Shakespeare in one of his plays – and probably constructed to be a talking point for the inn in question to drum up trade. I also took several photos of the clothing they had on display (and tried to get some of the panelled rooms, but sadly those mostly failed to come out right).

Definitely going back for a longer visit sometime, with the big camera too 🙂

Treasures of the Royal Courts: Tudors, Stuarts & the Russian Tsars (Exhibition at the V&A Museum, London)

Back in July I went on a daytrip to London to visit the V&A and to see their exhibition called “Treasures of the Royal Courts” before it closed on 14th July. I must’ve been to the V&A before, but it’s been a long time – I didn’t have much time on this visit because of train times, but I did manage to have a little look at a couple of galleries as well as the exhibition which I’ll talk about in another post. Sadly no photos for this post because photography wasn’t allowed in the exhibition.

The subtitle for this exhibition had struck me as somewhat strange, in advance – Tudors, Stuarts and Russian Tsars? One of these things is not like the others! However all became clear – the centre piece of the exhibition was a collection of silverware that had been gifted to the Russian Court by the English. Most of the silverware of this period that remained in England was destroyed, either to make more fashionable pieces in a later time or after the Civil War when the Monarchy was abolished. So these pieces from Russia are the best surviving examples of English silverware from this period. With this as the focal point of the exhibition the rest of the items explored what the Tudor & Stuart courts were like (materially speaking) and how & why these gifts were made to Russia.

The first part of the exhibition gave a picture of the splendour & symbolism of the English Court during this time period. It started with arms, armour & heraldry – including some of Henry VIII’s armour. I particularly liked the four Dacre Beasts – painted wooden standard bearers in the shape of four beasts that symbolised Lord Dacre’s ancestry & allegiances. Which included a dolphin, I hadn’t realised that was a heraldic beast back in the 1520s! As well as the pageantry of the military world there were a lot of items from the civilian side of court life. These included minatures, jewellery, clothes and larger portraits of monarchs and members of the court (with a particular emphasis on people who’d been envoys to Russia).

Diplomatic relations between Russia & England had started accidentally in 1553. A small flotilla of English ships was trying to find a route to China via the north, caught in bad weather the surviving ship landed on the coast of Russia and the crew were escorted to Moscow to meet the Tsar. This was an auspicious time for both nations to start direct diplomatic relations. Europe at the time was divided between Protestant & Catholic countries, and this both limited options for trade and disrupted the safe passage of merchants & diplomats by land. Russia was outside this conflict, as the form of Christianity in the country was Orthodox. Russia was also relatively new as a country – the Duchy of Muscovy had only recently “upgraded” itself to being the rulers of Russia. So they were looking for trading partners & diplomatic contacts to set themselves up as part of the “civilised” world.

Symbolism, pageantry & protocol were important in both courts, so despite the cultural differences there were similarities in their styles of diplomacy. But it wasn’t all plain sailing. Diplomacy broke down completely during the Commonwealth (between the two Charleses, when Oliver Cromwell was in charge). This was because the Tsars did not approve of the overthrow of a monarchy. There were also problems that arose from the diplomats being as much (or more) merchants as courtiers, which some of the Tsars felt was an insult. England was also little inclined to get involved in the wars Russia fought, in particular Tsar Ivan (the Terrible) had hopes of much more involvement from Elizabeth I’s England in his wars than he ever got.

This info (and more, I’m summarising from memory so I’m sure I’ve missed stuff) was illustrated in the exhibition with not only the silverware but also portraits from the Russian Court, other gifts between the courts, and even paintings of the diplomatic events. I was particularly struck by a portrait of Prince P. I. Potemkin, who as part of his diplomatic career was an ambassador to England in the time of Charles II. (It’s currently used as the picture of him on his wikipedia page.) I think he looks both completely different to the English court of the time, but also part of that same sort of world of showing off your status by what you wear. In terms of the other gifts the standout one was a coach presented to the Tsar. They had a model in the exhibition, and a video about it (which is on the exhibition website. It was taken across to Russia by boat in pieces then reassembled in Moscow before presentation.

As I said, the silverware was the main focus of the exhibition, and was laid out in the centre of one of the rooms so you could see all round it. These weren’t just some dishes to eat your dinner off, they were display pieces to be laid out on a cupboard or buffet at the side of the room. Or perhaps put on the table as a centrepiece. As such they were large and heavily decorated pieces. I particularly liked the ewer in the shape of a leopard – posed much like the standard bearing Dacre Beasts from the start of the exhibition, with a shield rather than a standard. I also liked a water pot with both handle & spout shaped like toothy grinning snakes. The decoration was obviously full of symbolism & meaning and then for the Tsars it had the added meaning of demonstrating international trade & diplomatic connections.

It was a good exhibition, and I’ve got the book to read at some point 🙂

She Wolves: England’s Early Queens; Caligula with Mary Beard; Royal Institution Christmas Lectures: Meet Your Brain

The last episode of She Wolves: England’s Early Queens covered the three Tudor Queens. Castor started by giving us a bit of context – when Henry VIII died his son Edward succeeded him, at the age of 9. Edward took ill & died at the age of only 15, before he’d had a chance to produce an heir. Which was a problem, as that meant there were no legitimate male heirs and England would have to be ruled by a Queen. Castor didn’t dwell on it, but I thought it was interesting that no man tried to seize power at this point – perhaps it wouldn’t be legitimate, but it’s not like Henry VII had a terribly good claim to the throne. Times had changed a bit from the more “might makes right” of previous centuries.

Henry VIII’s will had provided instruction for who was to succeed Edward VI if he died without heirs – first Mary, Henry’s eldest daughter, then Elizabeth. But for the staunchly Protestant Edward & his equally Protestant regency council this was a problem – Mary was very much a Catholic, and they felt that this Would Not Do. So even before he became ill Edward set about drafting a new order of succession if he was to die without heirs. He used the fact that Henry had declared both Mary & Elizabeth illegitimate to say that the next legitimate claimants were the descendants of Henry’s sister Mary. He skipped over his cousin Frances in favour of her three daughters, and his initial draft excluded women from ruling directly and was to leave the throne to the heirs male of the Grey sisters (in order, by age). However when it became clear he was dying the Grey girls were still too young to’ve had children (although Jane was married by this stage), so he altered this to leave the throne to “Jane Grey and her heirs male”. Castor pointed out that Edward’s council were also probably heavily involved in this – Jane’s father-in-law (the Duke of Northumberland) just happened to be the head of the council.

So Edward dies & Jane is summoned to meet her father-in-law & the rest of the council … much to her surprise she’s offered the throne. Castor said Jane tried to refuse it, because she believed Mary was the rightful heir, but she was “persuaded” to accept. After that Edward’s death & Jane’s ascension to the throne was announced to the country – met, Castor said, by somewhat confused silence by the general population who thought Mary was next in line. Jane moved to the tower to prepare for her coronation, but alas that was not to be – only 9 days later Mary had succeeded in rallying her allies and installing herself on the throne as the rightful Queen. Northumberland died a traitor’s death, but Jane was spared at first and remained in the tower as a prisoner. Even if Northumberland had succeeded in keeping Mary from the throne it seems unlikely that Jane would’ve been the obedient & docile pawn he’d’ve hoped for. Even in the 9 days she was Queen she’d started to show her Tudor heritage of strength of will & intelligence. Northumberland had assumed that his son would be crowned King when Jane was crowned Queen, but Jane was quite clear that she would make her husband a Duke but he would not be King.

Mary’s most pressing concern after actually taking the throne was to have an heir – a proper Catholic one. So she needed to marry, and soon, because she was in her late 30s by this stage. She too had the problem that if she was Queen then was any husband of hers to be King, and she too was adamant that this would not be the case. Her solution (a bit to the dismay of her council) was to marry Philip of Spain – he was the son of her biggest ally (the Holy Roman Emperor) and was already ruler of Spain. She drew a distinction between herself as a woman (who was subordinate to her husband) and herself as a Queen (who ruled England) and marrying a foreigner of the same status as herself meant that she wasn’t subordinating herself to someone she also ruled. And there was a lot of diplomacy involved in making sure she did rule England, rather than Philip doing so, and to ensure that in the event of her death Philip had no claim on the throne.

Castor next ran through the sad story of Mary’s two phantom pregnancies, and the increasing crackdown on Protestants in the country. Castor presented the two things as sort of linked, in that as Mary became more convinced she wouldn’t have a Catholic heir she also became more keen to stamp out Protestantism so that Elizabeth couldn’t bring it back. It’s for her fanaticism that Mary is most remembered (as Bloody Mary), but Castor tried to spin that as being hyped up because Mary was a woman and this was unwomanly behaviour. It wasn’t an entirely convincing take on the reputation, although I do agree that Mary probably got worse things said about her than a King might’ve done for the same behaviour – just that condemnation for burning people at the stake seems perfectly fair to me.

After Mary’s death Elizabeth was next in line for the throne, and this transition went relatively smoothly. There was again the assumption that Elizabeth would marry promptly, and that her choice of husband would indicate the direction her rule would take the kingdom. But Elizabeth had other ideas – her solution to the “who is in charge” problem for a married Queen was not to marry. Castor pointed out that Elizabeth’s method of dealing with this – with prevarication & putting off decisions to a later time – was the method she used throughout her life to keep from being railroaded into decisions by her councillors. She also “failed” to choose either fanatical Protestantism or fanatical Catholicism, famously saying that she would “not make windows into men’s souls” – as far as she was concerned if you had the outward appearance of conformity to the Church of England then that was sufficient. (And she returned the Church of England to a not quite Protestant, not quite Catholic state after the pendulum swings of the previous two reigns).

Elizabeth was the last of the Queens that Castor was discussing so the end of the programme was wrapping up – a combination of “look how far we’ve come” and “look how little has changed”. While I’d agree with Castor that the political power in our country is still disproportionately held by men, I think I’m more optimistic about how far we’ve come than she is. I was also surprised that she drew a distinction between these Queens she talked about & later ones as the earlier ones ruled, and the later ones just reigned. And she postulated that’s why our current Queen, for instance, was accepted as Queen without any worries about her gender. My surprise was because I thought the myth of Good Queen Bess was also instrumental in changing attitudes – finally a precedent of the country not falling to pieces when a woman ruled.

Overall an interesting series, particularly as it told us about the history of some key players in England’s past that aren’t often given a lot of screen time. However, I’m not sure the evidence Castor presented always supported her thesis (that these women have bad reputations because of misogyny & they’d be better remembered if they’d been men doing the same things). But that could partly be due to streamlining the story for television, I should read the book and see what I think of that.

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Caligula is one of the most notorious Roman Emperors – remembered for levels of debauchery & tyranny that were shocking even by the standards of the Romans. Mary Beard presented this programme about what we actually know about the man behind the myth. The answer is “surprisingly little” when it comes to his actions once he was Emperor.

Caligula was born Gaius Caesar Germanicus (sometimes he was refered to as Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus & I wasn’t entirely sure if that was him adding to his name once he was Emperor or if it was just a variant version of his name). He was the son of Germanicus, a popular Roman General who was the nephew of the Emperor Tiberius, and was thought likely to become Emperor. Caligula’s mother was Agrippina, the granddaughter of the Emperor Augustus. So on both sides he’s descended from the rulers of Rome. He was brought up mostly in army camps in the north of the Empire, in modern Germany. He was a sort of military mascot – his mother dressed him up in a miniature legionary’s uniform. This is where he got his nickname from – “Caligula” is a diminutive which refers to the caligae, the boots, that a legionary wore. Beard said it was a bit like calling the boy “Bootikins”. Unsurprisingly the adult Caligula became did not like being called that – and would’ve been furious if he’d known that was how he would be remembered in the future.

When Caligula is still relatively young his father dies – probably poisoned, certainly that’s what Germanicus said with his dying breath. There was a trial in Rome, but the accused man conveniently committed suicide early on in the proceedings so the trial became more of a public inquiry. Beard showed us one of the proclamations that were put up in all major cities afterwards – which basically say “the accused was acting on his own, nothing to do with Tiberius, no sir not at all”. After his father’s death Caligula lived with the Emperor Tiberius, Beard said it isn’t clear quite why – was he a hostage? did Tiberius like him? did Tiberius see him as heir & so want to make sure he was kept an eye on? However while he was living there most of his other relatives died – bumped off by Tiberius’s agents.

Succession to the position of Emperor wasn’t well defined – Beard laid this partly at the door of the Emperor Augustus. While Augustus had children, and Augustus’s wife Livia also had a children, they didn’t have any children with each other and so there wasn’t an obvious “legitimate” heir. So the succession tended to involve the removal either before or afterward of other potential candidates. And assassination of the ruling Emperor by the next-in-line was also common. It’s thought that Caligula smothered Tiberius, or instructed someone to smother Tiberius.

When Caligula became Emperor he was only 24, and in many ways he was trading on his boyhood status as military mascot to keep the army onside. He only reigned for a little under 4 years, and in the end he was to be assassinated by the army – Beard pointed out that’s a problem a lot of tyrants & despots face even today. If you use the army to gain power, the army can tear you back down again – the army has the real power.

A lot of the information we have about Caligula’s time as Emperor comes from Suetonius, and he wrote later and his biographies of the Emperors are full of salacious gossip. Tho even he couldn’t quite bring himself to say that Caligula did have an incestuous relationship with his favourite sister, just that “some men say that …”. There is some contemporary evidence for Caligula’s personality & actions as Emperor, though – Beard told us about an eye-witness account of a delegation from the Jews of Alexandria who went to meet Caligula. Instead of getting to business at their appointment, instead they had to trail round after Caligula as he decided how he was going to renovate a part of his palace. And then when he deigned to notice them he was more interested in why they didn’t eat pork rather than the business they wanted to discuss with him. As Beard pointed out this was a power display – they weren’t worth his time or attention, and he could humiliate them on a whim.

Beard also made the point that many of the tales of debauchery may also be tales about Caligula showing his power – stories of Caligula eyeing up the wives of important Romans at dinners, and then choosing one to take off & have sex with, only to return and make some remark about her not being much good in bed. That’s a display of power, and a humiliation for his target. Beard also talked about the story of Caligula making his horse a Consul, which is a later story she thought was likely to’ve derived from some petty humiliation by Caligula. That he was saying something like “you lot are all useless, my horse could do a better job than you, I should make him a Consul”. (She also said, imagine it as if the Queen has called one of her corgis “Prime Minister” – we’d all know what that would mean about the Queen’s opinion of her government.) And later writers turned that into a done deed, not a petty remark.

Caligula lived in a paranoid world where assassination could be just around any corner, and in the end it was. He only ruled for a little under 4 years, which surprised me to learn – I’d assumed he was in power for longer to’ve built up quite such a reputation. After his assassination there was some brief attempt to return to the Republic as a mode of government, but Claudius (Caligula’s uncle) was soon Emperor.

An interesting programme 🙂

The second lecture of the 2011 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures was called “Who’s In Charge Anyway?”. It felt a little more disjointed than the first one, with a bit less information & a bit more entertainment. It covered memory, learning & how the sum total of your memories shapes who you are. And also the frontal lobes & their role in personality & decision making. Again, not a lot I didn’t already know but still fun to watch. Things that particularly stuck in my mind were the demonstration of how poor eyewitness testimony can be (they had someone run off with a cuddly toy, then a later line-up of possible people & the audience mostly got it wrong). And also the “did you see that gorilla?” thing, which demonstrates how you can just not notice even quite strange things when you’re concentrating on something else.

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She Wolves: England’s Early Queens; Secrets of the Arabian Nights; The Secrets of Stonehenge: A Time Team Special

The second episode of Helen Castor’s She Wolves: England’s Early Queens was about Isabella of France & Margaret of Anjou. Neither of these women ruled England in their own right, but both ruled in the name of a man (son & husband respectively) and neither have been remembered kindly by history. Rather unfairly, I think (although Isabella brought it on herself to some degree).

Isabella was the daughter of the King of France & was married to Edward II when she was only 12 years old. The marriage didn’t get off to an auspicious start when Edward sat his favourite, Piers Gaveston, closer to Edward at the feast than Isabella was and they ignored her to concentrate on each other. Even at this young age Isabella was very aware of the respect due to herself as a daughter of a King and a Queen herself. However, despite the fact that Edward was besotted with his favourite, Isabella set out to behave like the perfect Queen & wife.

Gaveston’s behaviour and indulgence by the King wasn’t just annoying & insulting to Isabella, it also wasn’t going down well with the nobles at court. Eventually the situation deteriorated to the point where the barons took up arms against Edward & his favourite, and they had to flee – with Isabella in tow. The situation was only resolved with the capture & execution of Gaveston. Relations between Isabella & Edward must’ve got better after this – if nothing else they started having children including the future Edward III. Isabella had therefore performed one of the critical duties of a Queen in ensuring the succession, she also played the Queenly role of peacemaker in mediating between Edward & the rebel barons.

However she was to play a critical role in the re-emergence of hostilities. She was travelling with her household when they were caught in a storm, and sought shelter at Leeds Castle (in Kent). The Lord of the castle had been one of the rebels but he was away, and his wife refused Isabella entry. Isabella was furious and ordered her men to force their way in, at which point the soldiers in Leeds Castle fought back (as you would) and six of Isabella’s men died. Edward called this insult to his Queen treason & used it as an excuse to beseige the castle, eventually capturing it & imprisoning the lady & her children. The lady’s husband was executed. I’ve got chronology muddled a bit here (I don’t think Castor did tho) and by this stage Edward II had already taken up with his next poor idea for a favourite – Hugh Despenser. Castor characterised Despenser as a political predator (and we got nice visuals of a raptor of some sort flying about and tearing at some sort of prey). She also said that she believes that relationship to’ve been platonic, unlike the one with Gaveston.

So now relations between Edward & the country are deteriorating & so are those between Edward & Isabella. Tensions are rising between England & France, too. Isabella seizes her chance when her brother (now King of France) wants to negotiate a peace – she volunteers to go to France to negotiate on England’s behalf. Once in Paris she organises for her son Edward to join her, and instead of returning to England as a dutiful wife she returns at the head of an army, fighting to depose Edward II & set Edward III in his place. She’s practically welcomed in, Edward II’s reign had become tyrannical and unpopular. Once Edward II was captured Edward III was crowned & Isabella ruled as his regent. Edward II subsequently died, almost certainly at Isabella’s orders (but not via the red hot poker of later myth). Isabella was widely regarded as the saviour of England at the time.

But she’d already sown the seeds of her downfall. Whilst in Paris she’d also taken up with a knight called Roger Mortimer (Castor made a lot of use of chess metaphors in this programme, in particular referring to the Queen making her move with her Knight & Pawn (Edward III)). So when she started to rule as regent she had her own favourite by her side, not quite what the nobles wanted to see. And she had always been very aware of her own majesty, and this only got worse when she was running the country – she and Mortimer enriched themselves at the Crown’s expense. So in the end Isabella was overthrown in her turn, by her son. Mortimer was executed, but Isabella was allowed to live on.

(Isabella is one of the viewpoint characters in “Iron King” by Maurice Druon that I read earlier this year, it’s set around the time of Edward III’s birth. Druon has her & Mortimer (very much pre any relationship) conspiring to catch her sisters in the act of adultery, oh the irony.)

The second half of the programme was devoted to Margaret of Anjou – the French bride of Henry VI. Henry had been King since he was 9 months old, when his father Henry V died. Unfortunately at the time Margaret of Anjou married him he still wasn’t showing much signs of capability to rule – he was 23 by then. And it got worse – Margaret became pregnant, but shortly before the baby was born Henry slipped into a catatonic state. The court was already divided into factions – one centred round the Duke of York (who had his own claim to the throne), one centred round the Duke of Somerset (who was pro-Henry). Castor was telling us that Margaret would’ve prefered that she was named regent – she felt she had the right as the King’s wife & that she was a more neutral choice than the other two. However it was the Duke of York who got the job. This is where the Wars of the Roses begin to properly kick off.

Henry did recover his wits (such as they ever had been), so the Duke of York was no longer regent. However relations between the Yorkist & Lancastrians had deteriorated to the point where civil war broke out. Margaret was firmly in the Lancastrian camp, keen to protect her husband & son’s right to the throne. Henry was fought over & captured/released and generally passed around like pass the parcel. Castor told us of the king sitting in the centre of St Albans, guarded by soldiers, while the fighting raged through the town – not participating, just bewildered as he was fought over. In the end York won, not to control the king but to rule in his own name. (By this stage it’s not the original Duke of York, it’s his son Edward who ruled as Edward IV.) Margaret & her son (and husband? I can’t remember where Castor said Henry was) fled the country. Whilst in France she worked tirelessly to drum up support for her husband’s cause, but not very successfully.

Eventually the chance she’d been waiting for arrived – one of the major Yorkists, the Earl of Warwick, became dissatisfied with the King he’d put on the throne. Warwick regarded himself as “Kingmaker” and felt that if this one wasn’t working out, why all he needed to do was put a new one on the throne. So he switched sides, and promised Margaret that he’d work to return her husband to his rightful throne. Margaret was quite canny about this, she accepted his aid and then waited with her son in France until Warwick had delivered on his promise. Only then did she set out for England.

Sadly for Margaret just as she and her son were landing in England the Yorkists re-grouped and retook the crown. Margaret & her forces were forced into a battle in which her son took part for the first time. He died and as he was Henry VI’s only heir, with him died the hopes of Margaret for keeping her husband’s line on the throne. Henry VI was a Yorkist captive again, and died shortly afterwards in the Tower of London. Margaret lived the rest of her life in France.

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Secrets of the Arabian Nights was a standalone programme presented by Richard E. Grant all about the stories of the Arabian Nights. He traced their origins in the Middle East & beyond, and how they got to the West. He also talked to several critics & others about the impact they still have in both East & West today. And we also got treated to some retellings of some of the stories.

The stories come from a thriving oral tradition originating with merchants travelling the Silk Road & other trade routes across Asia. The prominence of merchants in many of the stories is a legacy of that. These stories were subsequently fitted within the Scheherazade frame story, and written down as The 1000 Stories. They came to the West via a Frenchman called Antoine Galland in the 18th Century – he was fluent in Arabic & Persian & other Middle Eastern languages, and he translated an Arabic form of the stories into French & published it. The book was a great success – partly because it was exotic and new, with sorts of stories & magic that aren’t the common tropes of Western literature (flying carpets were an example Grant mentioned repeatedly). And partly because it was the right thing at the right time – there was already a fashion for fairytales, and these stories fitted into that niche. Due to the success of the stories Galland was pressured to provide more, and he did – he said he’d heard the stories from contacts in the Middle East, but Grant pointed out that this was pretty dubious. It’s more likely that Galland invented them or significantly embellished them. I knew already that what we have in the West isn’t quite the same as the original, but I hadn’t realised that Aladdin & Ali Baba were among the extras.

Galland’s book was translated into English where again it was a success and helped establish the craze for “oriental” fashions in Britain. It was also disapproved of by the more strait-laced – Grant quote one lord who felt that it was encouraging the “Desdemona complex” (which is every bit as racist as you might imagine). And then in Victorian times the Arabian Nights stories were significantly bowdlerised & re-purposed as children’s stories. Which is really the form that most of us English speakers run into them first today.

Grant spent some time talking to a variety of critics both European & not. They were mostly in agreement that one of the themes of the book as a whole (in the original) is female sexuality & desire. They also drew out a feminist theme to the collection of stories. The framing story of Scheherazade is about a king whose wife betrays him, so after killing her he goes on to marry & then execute a woman every night. As revenge. Scheherazade uses her wits & her storytelling abilities to not just save herself but to slowly change the King’s attitudes. They were saying at the beginning the stories she tells fit with the King’s misogynistic & vengeful ideas, but over the course of the stories she emphasises wisdom & reflection over vengeance, and seeing women as people.

In the Middle East today (well, 2011 or 2010 when this was filmed) the book is controversial. It’s regarded by some as immoral – too much drinking, too much sex, people aren’t rewarded for being good they’re rewarded for being lucky, and so on. Grant talked to an Egyptian author & publisher (Gamal al Ghitani) who has published a new edition of the stories – he has received death threats & there was pressure on the government to ban the book because it was indecent & not Islamic enough. Gamal al Ghitani was clear that he felt this was rubbish, that the extremely conservative Islamist groups weren’t right about the only way to be a Muslim. And that these stories are an important part of Arabic heritage & should be read & learnt about by modern people.

It was a good programme, interesting & the dramatic re-tellings of stories were fun 🙂

Secrets of Stonehenge was a Time Team special we’d recorded several years ago, about a team excavating at and near Stonehenge. It felt very padded, in what I think of as “Discovery channel style” – i.e. the sequence went: cliff-hanger, ad break, re-cap, small bit of something else, next cliff-hanger etc. And while it did belabour the point about theories only lasting so long as there’s evidence to support them, it also made a lot of use of “and now they’ve proved” language *rolls eyes*. However. It was fun to watch, as Time Team generally is. A particularly amusing moment was when Robinson said “to help the archaeologist Time Team has built a life size replica of the henge at Durrington” … well, no, I think you did it so you had something cool to show on the telly 🙂

The excavations were led by a chap called Mike Parker Pearson, and his pet theory (which evolved over the 6 years of excavations) was that Stonehenge fit into a ritual landscape involving a progression from life to death. The henge at Durrington, built of wood, was a place where people came to feast each midwinter. They then travelled down the river Avon and along the avenue to Stonehenge, which was the place of the dead. There they buried some of their ancestors (mostly adult males, who were relatively fit – Pearson speculated this was a royal line). Some of this left me hoping it was based on better evidence than they showed us (i.e. that the people would process along the river scattering ashes?), some of it was more compelling (i.e. evidence of feasting on pigs of a particular age at the Durrington site implies feasting at a particular time of year).

Another strand of the programme talked about the previous excavations at the site – it was a minor enough theme I wouldn’t’ve mentioned it except that I wanted to make a note of one rather appalling part. One of the modern excavators, back in the 50s, was a man called Richard Atkinson. Although he did a lot of work on the site none was recorded and none was published – so effectively he dug it up & disturbed it all for no gain. Not what you expect from the modern era! Wikipedia is somewhat kinder to the man citing overwork & illness, so perhaps that too was hammed up to make “good telly”.

Overall I’d say it was fun but not necessarily accurate (or nuanced).

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 1b)

This post covers the second half of the introductory section of the book. Having discussed the environment Prestwich moves on to an overview of the legal & political institutions of the country during the period.

The Crown and Kingship

Kings of England during this time weren’t just Kings of some isolated country, they were part of an international world. The King had titles to lands on the other side of the channel (more at some times than others …) and marriages (both their own & their family members) linked them to yet more. So they were part of a network of ruling families in Europe, not just in the contemporary time but in their history as well. They could trace their descent back through the Anglo-Saxon Kings of England (via marriages) as well as more fanciful genealogies (Edward I wanted to link himself to King Arthur, for instance).

Prestwich then divides Kingship into two facets – sacred & secular. Kingship of the time is sacred via the anointing of the King during the coronation ceremony. This endowed the King with spiritual authority, and the King could use this to bolster his authority if necessary. As well as special ceremonies (like Henry III’s transfer of Edward the Confessor’s bones to the new shrine in a rebuilt Westminster Abbey) there was a routine calendar of religious ceremonies in which the King played a significant part. For instance the giving of alms on a regular basis, and touching to cure the king’s evil which was a rite introduced by either Henry III or Edward I.

The King was also the secular & feudal lord of the country, which granted him specific rights over his nobles. For instance military service, or the paying of an aid on the occasion of the marriage of the King’s eldest daughter. This side of Kingship was emphasised particularly when getting support for war – the feudal right to soldiers & money being very important. Another secular aspect of the King’s rule derived from Roman law. Prestwich talks here about the concept of “necessity”, and how the King was entitled to taxes without his nobles having right of refusal if he could show there was a necessity (i.e. for a war he was fighting to defend the realm).

At first there wasn’t a distinction drawn between the King & the crown, but over this period the two concepts began to separate. Most notably in legal or land-ownership contexts – for instance the King might give lands to his heir with the caveat that they were not to be separated from the crown (i.e. he couldn’t give them to someone else, he should still have them on his ‘inevitable’ accession to the throne). It also played a role during & at the end of Edward II’s reign – at the end the person of the King had been deposed but the crown had not.

Queenship was a distinct thing, that had an important part to play in royal politics. The Queen could intercede for people, and then the King could show mercy or generosity without looking weak. There was an expectation that the Queen would act as a peacemaker. Obviously personal relationships play into how that actually played out, and Isabella of France shows that a Queen could influence politics beyond that under some circumstances.

Symbols & ceremonies were important for impressing the country with the power of the monarchy. The physical crown (of which there were several) and other royal regalia weren’t worn daily, but were worn at ceremonial occasions to enhance the grandeur of the monarchy. The throne, likewise, was possibly not used often but was an important symbol. Not many of the King’s subjects would’ve seen him in his regalia & sat on his throne, but most if not all would’ve seen an image of him. The English currency was unique at the time in having an image of the King’s head on all legal currency. Even private mints (of Bishops, say) had to use the same image on their coins. A better image of the King could be found on the royal seals that sealed all royal documents, and the incidental symbolism in these representations was important. For instance Edward III’s use of the French royal arms as well as the English after 1340 when he claimed the French throne. Prestwich discussed religious ceremonies in the section on sacred Kingship, here he turns to the secular ceremonies that promoted the King’s power. For instance feasts & tournaments.

The King’s possessions & clothes were used to enhance his authority – always made from the best & most splendid materials. And buildings were also used to promote the image of the King. Henry III had Westminster Abbey rebuilt in magnificent style, and it became used as the royal mausoleum in a further display of royal splendour. In this Henry & his heirs were trying to equal or better the Capetian Kings of France – Saint Louis IX had built Sainte-Chapelle at the start of this period which gives an example of the sort of magnificence the English Kings were trying to live up to. Very much keeping up with the Joneses on an epic scale. As well as religious buildings, secular buildings were important. There were several royal castles, and although many were poorly maintained others were refurbished & enhanced – like the Tower of London and Windsor Castle as examples of luxurious royal residences & Edward I’s castle at Caernarfon as an example of a fortress.

Prestwich finishes this chapter by talking about the King’s court and the King’s household. The two terms mean different but overlapping things, and weren’t always used consistently by contemporary sources (which Prestwich expresses some scholarly frustration with!). Roughly speaking the “court” was a broader term that could be used about everyone around the King, whereas the household was more concretely defined & was used about people retained in the King’s service.

A large part of the household’s role was domestic – the provision of food for the King & all these people, the stabling & care of the King’s horses, falcons, dogs and those of the rest of the household. Also the means of transporting the household were provided internally – carts & horses or boats, and people to drive them or crew them. The main department of the household that looked after these various sections was the wardrobe, and it also played a key role in government of the country. The keeper of the wardrobe & other clerical officials were some of the King’s most important ministers. Government is the subject of the next chapter, so Prestwich moves on to some examples of details of the court or household’s expenditure on food & clothing or on the sorts of entertainment that the court had.

There’s not much evidence for particular manners for court, no guides to etiquette or whatever, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t niceties to be observed. Certainly the King seems to’ve lead a pampered existence with bevies of servants to do everything for him – like one to supervise the meat he was given, one to carve it and a third to actually serve it to him. The court’s influence on the culture of the rest of the country is debatable – there is some hint of an influence in architecture & in patronage of painters. But definitely not literature.

Government

This chapter demonstrates that running the country via a large bureaucracy with lots of red tape is not a modern invention. Prestwich says scholarly opinion is divided between the idea that England of this period “enjoyed a remarkably sophisticated bureaucratic system” or was suffering from “a surfeit of government, with quite unnecessarily complex administrative procedures that achieved little”. At the end of this chapter he concludes that it’s a bit of both – it could’ve done to be more streamlined, but it actually worked most of the time.

Much of what we know about the bureaucracy of the time comes from the complication – multiple copies of records were kept, and writs could be issued in as many as three documents (under the king’s secret seal to be sent to the privy seal office, which would instruct the chancery, which would issue the final writ). So this could cause delays, although when the matter was urgent the machinery seems to’ve moved swiftly. The language of government documents was Latin, so the majority of the population wouldn’t understand it. A lot of the surviving rolls are in very good condition, testament to how few people had need to read them.

The structure of the government was already established by the early 13th Century. Top was the King & his council. Council was defined in various ways – it could be a great council with lots of the magnate present, or a more ordinary one with a smaller handful of magnates & some judges & clerical officials etc. Sometimes this council was imposed on the King by his nobles, some were chosen by the King. But generally it was a working body with a bias towards officials, that provided expert advice & assistance to the King. In some periods the chief financial body of the government was the wardrobe, the financial arm of the King’s household. The household also provided the privy seal, which was used to issue orders to the chancery & the exchequer and came into being as a separate government body (rather than part of the wardrobe) over this period. The chancery & the exchequer were the two main state departments, which gradually became more independent over this period. The exchequer looked after the financial side of government and in some periods had control over wardrobe expenditure & sometimes not. The chancery did the issuing of writs, and was the centre of the governmental machinery. Law courts were another important part of the government. The two central ones were the King’s Bench (which heard cases appealed from lower courts, and increasingly concerned itself with criminal cases) and the court of Common Pleas (which mostly heard property cases).

If that summary sounds a little confused, that’s because I’m not sure I completely followed that section – it had the feeling of a high level & technical summary of a complicated subject. And I just got the flavour from it.

Prestwich next moves to the sort of people that were senior officials in the government. Generally these were churchmen, although sometimes laymen held offices. But it was harder to reward laymen as you couldn’t just give them a juicy bishopric, so they had to be paid more by the King. Many notable figures rose to prominence due to their administrative skills & are given their bishoprics afterwards for service rather than for piety. But there are records of bishops who became high officials with no prior government experience (and subsequently did good jobs even, the Bishop of Exeter, Walter Stapledon, was one such man in the 1320s when he was made Treasurer). Most officials were trained in their posts, but they also endowed university colleges to train clerics – Merton College & Oriel College (both Oxford) are the examples that Prestwich gives. (Exeter College (founded by the Bishop of Exeter I mention above) was founded pre-government job so it doesn’t quite fit the theme).

Moving on to local government Prestwich notes that there isn’t a clear distinction between central & local government, drawing one is a convenience for the historian not a contemporary idea. The main unit of local government was the county, with a sheriff in charge with assorted officials under him. At the beginning of this period the sheriffs were appointed (by the King or other nobles), later they were elected although sometimes this was a technicality. The sheriffs had jurisdiction over some financial matters, and presided over the county court to settle legal matters. He also visited the hundred courts (hundreds are the sub-divisions of counties) in rotation. Not all of the country was actually under the central government – the state was still more feudal than not. For instance Durham was practically independent although the perspective of the crown was that as the Bishop held the liberty in the King’s name he was acting on behalf of the King when ruling it. And the Welsh marches were even more close to independence. There were also more minor liberties where the local ruler was more firmly subordinate to the King’s central government whilst still being technically separate.

And that was another section where it feels like there’s a whole book of complexity beneath the summary in this book and I don’t quite grasp it well enough to summarise well in my turn!

Prestwich next discusses the Church which was technically run by a separate & parallel system of government to the state. Many offices & functions are duplicated in this different sphere, with a broad emphasis on spiritual matters (like organisation & governance of monasteries). And of course the Church also had a need to collect money & manage its finances. As a lot of government high officials were given bishoprics there was a high degree of cross-fertilisation despite the separation. And there were areas of co-operation as well as competition between the two systems.

And the chapter finishes with a discussion of corruption in government. Prestwich stresses that the government was fundamentally sound – he says that it was less corrupt than the time of Henry I or than it would be in 16th & 17th Century England. However there was a level of corruption present. Officials were caught taking bribes, and some lords paid judges retainers so that court cases would be resolved in their favour. This was frowned upon, however, and punished when caught.

So now Prestwich has set us up for the meat of the book – next chapter starts the chronological examination of the politics of the period.

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“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 1a)

Plantagenet England 1225-1360 is one of the volumes of the New Oxford History of England. I have a vague plan to eventually buy & read the lot, but that’s a long way off (and anyway they’re not all published yet) – so far I’ve read England Under the Norman & Angevin Kings 1075-1225 (which was by Robert Bartlett) and now I’m starting this one. The break points between the volumes of the series are not at the ends of Kings reigns, nor at dynastic break points. So this volume starts part-way through Henry III’s reign, where he can be said to’ve taken control himself. And it ends with the ending of a phase of the Hundred Years War, even though that means that the full impact of the Black Death needs to be left till a later volume. This post is going to be about the first half of the introductory section* of the book, after that it goes through the politics of the time in chronological order followed by a thematic look through the society of the time.

*Originally it was going to be the whole of the introduction as I’ve finished reading it, but this post was getting very long so I’ve decided to split it up.

Orientation Dates

As it’s a more academic book the author assumes that the reader has a feel for the shape of the period – who reigned when, and how they were related, what the major political events were – the purpose of the book is to look at these things in detail. There is a chronology & genealogy at the end of the book as reference, but I’m going to pull out the Kings names & dates for orientation dates inside the subject of the book.

Henry III reigned 1216-1272, son of John I, married to Eleanor of Provence.
Edward I reigned 1272-1307, son of Henry III, married to Eleanor of Castile then Margaret of France.
Edward II reigned 1307-1327, son of Edward I & Eleanor, married to Isabella of France (who overthrew him & had him murdered).
Edward III reigned 1327-1377 initially under his mother’s regency, son of Edward II, married to Philippa of Hainault.

In my other Chapter by Chapter posts I’ve been using mostly English history to orient myself when thinking about a different country’s history, this time I’ll put a few reminders of things that happen elsewhere.

Saint Louis IX (builder of Sainte-Chapelle) ruled France 1226–1270.
Genghis Khan died in 1227.
Reconquista of Spain is well underway in this period, the last Muslim Emirate (Emirate of Granada) is founded in 1238 after the defeat of the Almohad Dynasty by the Christian Spanish Kingdoms and remains the only Muslim run region of the Spanish Peninsula from then until its defeat in 1492.
Seventh Crusade from 1248–1254.
Eighth Crusade in 1270.
Ninth Crusade from 1271–1272.
China re-unified under Kublai Khan (post) in 1279.
Philip VI of Valois reigned in France 1328–1350, starting the Valois dynasty.

(Most of those I had to resort to wikipedia for, tsk tsk!)

Introductory

The Environment

The introductory section of the book is broken into three chapters & the first one is about how the lives of the people in this era were nasty, brutish & short! Prestwich starts with a discussion of the climate across this century & a half. From the various sources (both chronicles that note weather & records of harvests) it seems that the climate gradually got colder across this period, and more unsettled. He thinks that the gradual cooling was compensated for by farmers, but the increased volatility caused problems. Particularly notable bad weather occurs in the years 1258-1259 and 1315-16. He ties the first to a known volcanic eruption which has left evidence in Greenland ice cores, but there’s no known explanation for the latter.

Population grew during the beginning of this era – peaking around 1300 and remaining roughly stable till the collapse at the Black Death. At its highest the population was probably 5 million (for reference wikipedia says the 2011 population of the Greater London built up area was 9.8 million, the population of the Greater Manchester built up area was 2.6 million). Analysis of skeletal remains shows a lot of disease in the population & that’s just what one can see traces of in bones. 90% of the population died before the age of 45, average life expectancy was around 30. But if you made it to 20 you might expect to live another 20 or 30 years, and if you made it to 50 you’d probably live till old age. People were short, but not as short as in Victorian times – average of 5’7.25″ for men, 5’2.5″ for women. Contemporary sources record much death from accident, or violence, as well as famine & disease.

Prestwich also discusses the landscape the people lived in. This was stable across the period, and was mostly composed of farmland. The exact practices of farming varied from region to region (because of tradition as well as suitability of crops) and this shaped the landscape. Most land wasn’t wooded, but there were areas of woodland & parks as well as forests & chases. The latter were a legal distinction – in a forest common law didn’t hold, instead the area was under forest law which restricted what the people who lived there could do (in favour of keeping the area suitable for royal hunting). Chases were non-royal forests.

The animals of the countryside still included wolves in remoter areas, for instance there are records of the loss of farm animals to wolves in Lancashire in 1303-4 although the number wasn’t large. Rabbits were a recent introduction & carefully looked after in warrens – the first documentary evidence for them in England was in 1235. Given how important rats are as a vector of the Black Death it’s surprising there’s not much evidence for a large population of them either in documents or via archaeology. Domestic animals were mainly horses, cattle, sheep & pigs, and they were all smaller and yielded less meat/milk/wool than their modern counterparts. Sheep were the main animals kept, with some estates having flocks of several thousand. Dogs were kept for hunting & pets included cats. Prestwich mentions documentary evidence for several plagues amongst farm animals – in particular there is evidence for a lot of animal disease in the 1310s, which also had the worst weather & worst harvests.

The buildings of the era ranged from castles to wooden shacks. There were around 400-500 castles during this time period, the figure varies depending on how you define castle, and castles defined aristocratic lordship. Many of them had building work done on them during the period, but not many new castles were built. As you move down the social scale buildings are still used to demonstrate your social standing – gentry had manor houses or moated buildings. There were about 5,000 moated sites by the end of the period, and about 70% of these came into existence between 1200 & 1325. Abbeys and churches also loomed large in the landscape, but these didn’t change much over the period with no major new monastic foundations. Peasant housing is harder to find evidence for as it was mostly built from wood which doesn’t leave much trace particularly when there’s been much rebuilding on a site. Longhouses weren’t unknown, but often the house was separate from the barn. What little evidence there is for cost of peasant housing suggests it was cheap & not well made (unsurprisingly) – Prestwich mentions a report of a house collapse which killed the woman who lived there & the value of the timber in the house was put at only 18d.

Most of England lived in villages or towns, rather than isolated farms, with settlements in the north & west more dispersed than those in the rest of the country. The growth of population through the first half of this era saw a proliferation of towns. And even walled towns show signs of expanding outside their boundaries. Even large towns weren’t particularly big – London might’ve had a population of around 70,000 by 1300 and no other town was bigger than 20,000. For reference, wikipedia says that in 2011 there were ~179k people living in the Ipswich built up area, and even the 70th most populous built up area in England has ~100k people living there. The East Kilbride built up area in Scotland has about the same population in 2011 as London did in 1300. For contemporary reference Prestwich says 1300 era London was in a similar league to Paris or Florence – however my copy of The New Atlas of World History (by John Haywood) lists Paris as the 4th most populous city of the world in 1300 at 228k (beaten by Hangzhou & Dadu in China and Cairo, all at or just above 400k). Population figures for this era are sufficiently vague & a matter of interpretation that I doubt Prestwich & Haywood actually disagree significantly. Towns don’t sound terribly nice places to live – as well as the omnipresent threat of fire they were crowded, unhygenic & smelly. And not just in modern eyes – Prestwich gives a few quotes from contemporary sources about the unpleasantness of particularly towns.

Technologically speaking there were skilled craftsmen & slow improvements to techniques, but not many striking breakthroughs. Gunpowder is introduced in Edward I’s reign, but the primitive guns don’t have much effect on the period. Timekeeping does start to change, with the beginnings of the move from measuring time by the patterns of daylight or the monastic day to clocks measuring the passing of hours & minutes. Power was provided by wind, water & animals. Again there were some developments in windmill & watermill tech but nothing groundbreaking. Use of horses for transport or power was increasingly replacing use of oxen. Bulk transport however was still cheapest on ships & boats, and land transport was much slower. Prestwich says most people didn’t travel much, which was just as well as the transport network was inadequate – and still mostly reliant on the Roman roads. If you did travel it would probably take you a week to travel around 200 miles.

Prestwich concludes with some more cheering quotes & anecdotes. Although life was in many ways grim for most of the population, people were in general proud of being English and regarded their land as a good land & a good place to live. And there were diversions & distractions from the grimness.

Tangents to follow up on: A throw-away line about towns & the problems with counting them made me realise I’m not sure I’ve learnt what the technical distinctions between villages & towns & boroughs etc are.

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Time Team: The Hollow Way; Michael Wood on Beowulf

We decided to watch a couple of programmes that we’ve had on our PVR for 3 or 4 years and somehow never got round to actually watching before. First was an episode of Time Team about a medieval village that used to exist around a farmhouse at Ulnaby, County Durham. Obviously being Time Team they only had 3 days to do a fairly superficial excavation of a handful of areas around the site. But what they did manage to discover was that the peak of the occupation seemed to be around the 13th to 14th Centuries – finding pottery & house walls, and also references in documents. The original assumption had been that it had been deserted in the Black Death (1348) or as land use throughout the country was re-organised in the 15th Century with many villages evicted. However their digging found evidence of occupation up to the 17th Century (lots of tobacco pipes) and there was also documentary evidence for the village up till then as well (names of people pardoned for being involved in the Rising of the North in 1569 (by supporters of Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth I). So their conclusion was that it had petered out gradually around & after that time.

And not really much else to say about it – Time Team tends to be fairly superficial, but it’s normally fun to watch.

Another programme we’d had sitting around for a while was Michael Wood on Beowulf. This was partly a retelling of the Beowulf story and partly about the poem & the world the poem was written for. The retelling part of the programme featured Julian Glover reciting/acting a modern English translation of the poem to an audience of Anglo-Saxon re-enactors in Kent who were all dressed up in their reconstruction royal hall, and had just had a feast. So that was very much “as it would’ve been” (except cleaner, lighter, politer & less drunk, I expect! 😉 ).

For the parts of the programme about the world of the Anglo-Saxons & the origins of the poem Wood spent a lot of time in East Anglia, where the earliest Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in England were. As he said, the Anglo-Saxon presence here was an immigrant one, and the poem looks back to their ancestral homelands in Denmark & Sweden. He compared it to tales of “the Old Country” told by Irish-Americans or Italian-Americans these days. He visited Sutton Hoo (of course) and talked about how there are ship burials in the poem and that’s what was famously discovered at Sutton Hoo. The King who was buried there was probably Rædwald who was not just a local King but was overlord of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain. And he & his lineage (and subjects) were probably the target audience for the original incarnation of the poem. Wood told us that there are references to ancestors of Rædwald at various points in the poem, so it seems likely the original poet was well informed about Rædwald’s genealogy (and wanted to associate him with the heroes of old).

One of the things that is interesting about Beowulf in context is that the world it was composed for was a Christian world, but the world it was about was a pagan world. So the hero Beowulf & his companions are all presented as old pagan heroes, but there is some interestingly Christian imagery & crossover. For instance the monsters, Grendel & his mother, are referred to as the seed of Cain (so the descendants of Adam’s son Cain who kills his brother Abel). Wood visited Northumberland to talk about Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which is a very Christian & Anglo-Saxon history. And also to tell us about The Dream of the Rood, which is an Anglo-Saxon poem which is overtly Christian & about a dream about talking to Christ on the Cross. It has a certain amount of pagan imagery, in a sort of mirroring of the Christian imagery in Beowulf. Wood was explaining this sort of cross fertilisation between the pagan & Christian worldviews as being part of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity and of fitting the new religion into their history.

So the programme has visited areas near where we currently live and areas near where J grew up, and in discussing the relationship of the Anglo-Saxons to the history of the world around them Wood visited Weyland’s Smithy which is in Oxfordshire which completed the set (as it’s an area near where I grew up). What Wood was talking about here was that the Anglo-Saxons knew they lived in an old world – they saw the Bronze Age monuments & burial mounds in the landscape & peopled them with gods & heroes. And it is this old world that Beowulf fits into & explains.

The poem was written down around 1000AD, but was probably composed some time earlier & passed down orally. Despite being an East Anglian work (probably) the version that’s survived is written in a West Saxon dialect, as part of a compilation of “texts about monsters”. Wood visited the British Library to see the original manuscript, which was damaged in a fire in the 18th Century and is very fragile.

A good programme, I’m glad we kept it. I do have one quibble about the filming of it – all the exterior shots were very heavily processed & vignetted. Sometimes that worked (particularly on shots of bleak fenland while Wood was telling parts of the Beowulf story), but often it felt overdone.

She Wolves: England’s Early Queens; A Night at the Rijksmuseum; Horizon: Little Cat Diaries

She Wolves: England’s Early Queens is a series we’ve had sitting on the PVR for a while now – it’s presented by Helen Castor who has written a book with the same title & premise. She’s looking at the history of seven Queens of England, in medieval & Tudor times. Some of these Queens ruled in their own right, some were wives of Kings but all of them exercised power. The second episode will be about the woman who was actually referred to as a she wolf, none of them were entirely popular with their subjects. Castor’s thesis is that this is all down to the people of that time regarding power as male, so these women were slandered & put down for behaviours that would’ve been regarded as normal for a King. In this series she’s very much presenting the stories from the women’s point of view – J wasn’t so keen on this in the one we watched the other night. He thought she was too partisan, tho I think she was just obvious with her partisanship, everyone’s got biases after all.

The first two-thirds or so of the first episode covered the Empress Matilda who was never crowned, but was very nearly the first woman to rule England in her own right. Her story starts off fairly normally for a woman of the time, she is the daughter of Henry I (and granddaughter of William the Conqueror) born in 1102AD and at the age of 8 she’s married off to Henry V King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor. She lives in Germany from then until her husband’s death nearly 16 years later when she’s 23. She wasn’t heir to the English throne at first because she had a brother, William. However he died when the ship he was travelling in from Normandy to England ran aground just outside the harbour – Castor told us that everyone on the ship was drunk when they left (it was the Prince & his entourage most of whom were teenagers) and so not paying enough attention. In the cold November water there was no way rescue could get there before they died. With the death of her brother Matilda was now the only legitimate child of Henry I, and as yet she had no children of her own. Once her husband died Henry I married her off again quickly, to try to get grandsons soon enough that they could inherit when he died.

Matilda’s second marriage was to Geoffrey, Count of Anjou. This marriage didn’t go down well with her – it was her father’s choice, both for strategic reasons (the County of Anjou bordered Normandy so was a useful ally to have) and dynastic reasons. But Geoffrey was much younger than Matilda, and very much lower status (she was an Empress after all, he was merely a Count). The couple were estranged quite quickly, but Henry I subsequently enforced a reconciliation that appears to’ve worked out – the couple had two healthy children, and even better both of them were boys.

More than once before his death Henry I had had his nobles swear allegiance to Matilda as his heir. Castor told us that there was no precedent for whether or not a woman could rule the country, as the Norman invasion had effectively reset the clock. If Henry I had managed to live long enough for one of his grandsons to grow up he would probably have named him heir, but he died long before this could happen. When her father died Matilda was in Anjou (and not on good terms with her father) so couldn’t get to England quickly. She did actually set out, but on arrival at one of the castles in Normandy she delayed her journey – this might’ve been due to complications of pregnancy as she was pregnant with her third child at this point. Castor said that a contemporary chronicler just says she remained there “for certain reasons” which is maddeningly opaque.

The delay in Matilda reaching London gave her cousin Stephen of Blois time to seize power. This is where J thought Castor’s biases were most apparent – she presented it as “and of course this worked because Matilda was a woman”, however as J points out if a male heir had delayed that long then someone else might’ve seized power. Power vacuums tend to be filled, after all. It’s just that as Matilda was a woman it was easier for Stephen to rally support to his side.

What followed was 20 years or so of civil war, a period that is called The Anarchy (we listened to an In Our Time episode about it a while ago). Stephen was the anointed King, by virtue of his coronation ceremony, but Matilda was the legitimate heir, by virtue of blood and the oaths sworn to her father. At one point, in 1141, Matilda had the upper hand and had even captured Stephen. She was preparing for her coronation in London, having got the Church and several of the powerful nobles on side. But the chronicler (who was very much on Stephen’s side) writes that she became too arrogant and unwomanly, and so the people of London rose up and chased her out of the city. Again Castor was quite sure that Matilda was only regarded as arrogant because she was a woman, and that the same behaviour in a man would’ve been perfectly fine. It’s hard to tell, tho, as all the chronicles that still exist are on Stephen’s side. Stephen was also freed not long after this, so it was back to square one. In the end Matilda had to give up her ambition to rule in her own right, but she secured the crown for her son Henry as Stephen had no heir.

The last third of the programme was about Matilda’s daughter-in-law, Eleanor of Aquitaine, who never ruled England in her own right but did do the actual ruling of the country for a while as well as have a powerful influence on the politics of the realm at other times. Eleanor was born & brought up in Poitiers, the daughter of the Duke of Aquitaine, and she inherited the Duchy on her father’s death. She was married first to Louis VII, King of France, and this was not a happy marriage. Eleanor pronounced Louis “more monk than man”, but the couple did eventually have two daughters (which wasn’t good enough, as girls definitely couldn’t inherit the Kingdom of France). Louis & Eleanor went on Crusade to the Holy Land as part of the Second Crusade, and during this expedition their marriage broke down almost completely (this is between daughters 1 & 2).

Eleanor’s close friendship with her uncle (the ruler in Antioch) caused scandal, and then to make matters worse when Louis prepared to leave Antioch & move on with the Crusade Eleanor refused to accompany him. She tried to get a divorce from him at this point, citing their relationship to each other (which was within the prohibited seven degrees) – Castor pointed out this was Eleanor trying to use the same sorts of laws that powerful men used to get rid of no longer convenient wives. But unfortunately for Eleanor she didn’t have the same sort of power as a man would and her husband’s desire to remain married trumped her desire for an annulment. The couple were reconciled, at least to a degree that meant that after their return to France they had a second daughter. Not long after this tho they were estranged again, and this time Louis was willing to divorce. 8 weeks later, Eleanor married Henry, son of the Empress Matilda & Geoffrey of Anjou (not yet King Henry II of England). Castor said that Eleanor & Henry must surely have met when Henry visited the French court not long before Eleanor divorced, but there’s no record of this.

So now Eleanor is married to the King of England, and this marriage was initially much more successful. The couple had 8 children over 15 years, with three sons surviving to adulthood. Between his own inheritance & Eleanor’s own lands Henry ruled over a pretty big empire stretching from the Pennines to the Pyrénées. After Henry’s mother’s death (Matilda definitely exercised power via her son after he took the throne) Eleanor became more important in the politics of Henry’s realm. By this time she’s 43, and she lived in Poitiers again ruling the Duchy of Aquitaine in Henry’s name. Unlike her mother-in-law who never got to rule, because Eleanor was ruling in a man’s name she didn’t have the same problems of being regarded as un-womanly. (And possibly she was better at acting in a suitably “feminine” fashion while exercising power.) Castor noted that the sorts of stories that surround Eleanor during this time focus on tales of courtly romance (this is the time & the place for the troubadors), which are suitably feminine subjects even tho there’s no evidence that any of the stories actually happened.

Once Henry II & Eleanor’s sons were teenagers they began to want to share power with their father, but he made promises and never actually delegated any power. It struck us while we were watching this that Henry II probably couldn’t win here – either he delegated power to them, and then they got too powerful & weakened his own rule, or he didn’t and then they got annoyed & rebelled which is what they did. This wasn’t unusual in itself – sons taking up arms against their father – but what was unusual was that Eleanor sided with her sons against her husband. Castor read excerpts from a letter written to Eleanor by a bishop that said she was going to bring about the ruin of all of society due to these actions! The rebellion ultimately ended in victory for Henry II – it seems Eleanor was the brains of the operation and after Henry managed to capture her the rebellion soon ended with the sons begging for mercy.

Henry II was merciful to his sons, but Eleanor lived in captivity for the next 16 years until Henry’s death. One of the first things Richard the Lionheart did when he inherited the throne was send word that his mother should be freed. She’s now about 65, and freeing her wasn’t just an act of filial affection it was a necessity. Richard needed someone to rule the country in his name while he was off on Crusade, and Eleanor was just the person for the job. She ended up holding the reigns of power for longer than anyone anticipated because Richard was captured on his way home from Crusade. She also outlived Richard, and when his younger brother John inherited she was instrumental in smoothing his way to power. She eventually died at the age of around 80, and was buried next to her husband despite their differences in life.

The next programme in the series is going to be about the wives of Edward II (Isabella of France) and Henry VI (Margaret of Anjou) who played pivotal roles in their husbands’ reigns.

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The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has been shut for 10 years while being refurbished. A Night at the Rijksmuseum was Andrew Graham-Dixon acting a bit like a child in a sweetshop while being allowed to go behind the scenes just before the re-opening of the museum earlier this year. The programme was part about the renovation & the history of the museum, and part about what the contents of the museum are & how they’re organised. So mostly “look at the pretty things” which is always hard to write about.

The original building was built in the 19th Century, designed by a Catholic architect and it reminded me a bit of the V&A Museum in style and a bit of a cathedral. Graham-Dixon said that when it was originally built the resemblance to Catholic religious architecture was a bone of contention for many of the staunchly Protestant Dutch. The new additions have kept a similar sensibility, but with a more modern style (and the architect this time was Spanish which seems about as historically inappropriate as a Catholic amongst Protestants!). The interior of the original building has also been refurbished and restored to its former glory – including parts that were whitewashed over by a particularly modernist director in the 1950s.

The refurbishment was “only” supposed to take a few years, 2 or 3. Apparently the obstacle that caused the biggest slippage in the project time was the bike tunnel. Prior to the museum being shut there was a bike route that ran through a tunnel through the building, and the original plans for the refurbishment altered this route. However people objected, petitions were organised etc etc – but somehow this wasn’t discovered to be a problem till after the plans were finalised and work had begun. So the architect had to re-design that part of the building and that cost significant amounts of time & money.

While it was shut the curators not only had the chance to completely overhaul their vision of how the collection should be displayed, but also to do conservation & research on the paintings & other objects. In a particularly overenthusiastic segment of the programme Graham-Dixon was shown the work they are & have done on X-raying & 3D-imaging of the paintings in the collection. It was kinda neat, but I didn’t really understand the levels of excitement over being able to see the brush strokes more clearly. That was the 3D-imaging, the X-ray stuff was more obviously exciting to this non-artist because you could see how the composition of a painting had changed while it was being worked on.

The objects used to be organised by type, but the new layout organises them by date. There are 8 main galleries which each cover a hundred years of Dutch history. So you have the paintings and the objects all mixed in together. It being Holland there’s a lot of maritime related stuff – paintings of ships, models of ships, cannon from ships … even the English Royal Coat of Arms from the prow of a ship the Dutch captured from us in Charles II’s time. And there’s also another wing of the museum with Asian related objects – the Dutch have traded with the Far East for several centuries, in particular they were the only Western nation allowed to trade in Japan during the Sakoku Period.

This was a fun programme to watch, but it did feel awfully like a piece of advertising for the Rijksmuseum. Kinda did the trick, I’d quite like to go to it some day, but a bit odd as a BBC programme.

Little Cat Diaries was a half-hour follow up to the previous Horizon programme The Secret Life of the Cat (post). It went into a little bit more depth about 4 of the cats that were in the first programme. As it was only half an hour this still wasn’t terribly much depth on each! There was a bit about the cat that was the best hunter (the family don’t really feed him much cat food because he eats so much of the wildlife), there was a bit about the cat that roamed furthest (his family said it was a bit like being at a parent/teacher evening & being told your child did well). And a bit about a stray cat who was spotted in people’s houses when they were filming their own cats (and he was subsequently captured & re-homed with one of the households he was visiting).

The bit that was most interesting for me was the short segment on whether one’s cat returns one’s affection. They set this up by talking to the previous & current owners of a cat that had run away – the previous owner said something along the lines of “as she got older the cat seemed to get less keen on the children, but when I got the dog it was the last straw. The cat walked in, saw the dog, the dog started to go for her and she left and never came back!”. I was left thinking that there are ways to integrate pets into a household, and that was Not It 😉 However the interesting bit was that there is research being done on whether cats are attached to their owners. This is based on a 70s experiment that shows that babies are attached to their mothers – if the mother leaves the room while a baby is being distracted by a stranger the baby is concerned, and obviously pleased to see the mother return. If you do the same experiment with a dog & its owner, the same is true. Cats however don’t get nearly as bothered by either absence or return of their owner. Of course that doesn’t actually test if a cat loves its owner, just that a cat doesn’t associate their owner with security in the way a dog does (or a baby does its mother). But still, interesting 🙂

Henry VII: The Winter King

Gradually catching up with the Tudor Court Season programmes that were recently on the BBC. This weekend we watched the one about Henry VII, which was presented by Thomas Penn. The programme was based on the book Penn has published with the same title – I got it for Christmas 2011 (and read it while I don’t seem to’ve been writing up books).

The programme opened with a brief description of 1485. It’s the tail end of the period now known as the Wars of the Roses & the Yorkist Richard III was on the throne but he’d come to power in a way that had split the York faction. This created an opportunity that the exiled Lancastrian Henry Tudor took advantage of. Henry’s claim to the throne is best described as tenuous – his mother, Margaret Beaufort, was the person through whom his best claim came. She was a direct descendent of Edward III via his son John of Gaunt. However her line wasn’t orginally legitimate – and when John of Gaunt’s children by his mistress were legitimised after he married her it was on the condition that they had no claim to the throne. So that’s not exactly a great claim for Henry Tudor. His father was the son of a man called Owen Tudor and his wife Catherine of Valois (who was the widow of Henry V). Not very useful for claiming the throne either.

But with the Yorkists split and no legitimate Lancastrian candidates for the throne Henry took his chance. He landed at Milton Bay in Pembrokeshire (which is near Milford Haven, so I’ve possibly been near there while on holiday). Penn half-acted out, half-told us about Henry landing his troops and wading ashore then sinking to his knees to pray that God would favour his cause. He didn’t have that many troops with him, and was out numbered by Richard III’s army – his “secret weapon” was his mother’s in-laws (she’d re-married a couple of times since his father died). The Stanleys were powerful and had a relatively large army, but they didn’t completely commit themselves to Henry’s cause at first. When the Battle of Bosworth Field started they held themselves apart from the fight to see which side they wanted to join – eventually they joined in on Henry’s side, tipping the battle to him.

Henry’s reign as Henry VII and the start of the Tudor Dynasty had now begun, but Penn stressed that the way it began was to shape the whole of Henry’s time on the throne. He had usurped the throne on a fairly flimsy pretext, and was therefore paranoid about this happening to him in his turn. The battle had also been turned by nobles choosing which side to join at the very last minute – not an incentive for Henry to trust them or others. Penn highlighted one of Henry’s early official acts, which gives a feel for the sort of man he was and how he intended to rule. After taking the throne Henry proclaimed the start date of his reign as the day before the Battle of Bosworth. This meant that he was declaring that anyone who had fought for Richard III had been committing treason – which he could then forgive them for (or not) and so have a hold over the nobles.

Henry solidified his descendants claim to the throne by marrying Elizabeth of York – the eldest daughter of Edward IV (and niece of Richard III). They very soon had children – an heir (Arthur), a spare (Henry) and a couple of daughters too (Margaret & Mary). The future of the dynasty was secure, and Henry’s main task was to ensure the stability of his own reign so that Arthur would inherit a peaceful & prosperous kingdom (and importantly that he would do so once he was an adult, after Henry had reigned for a long time).

Henry made good use of symbols as propaganda to enhance his reputation. His mother’s symbol, the portcullis of the Beaufort family was used in the decoration of many buildings built during Henry’s reign – a reminder of his claim to royal blood. The familiar Tudor rose was introduced by Henry to combine the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster in his new family emblem, a clear statement of “the civil war is over, my family are the true rulers”. He also had gold sovereigns made, the first time these coins had been minted. They were decorated with a stylised picture of Henry on his throne on one side
and a Tudor rose on the other. They weren’t coins that were used in general circulation (too much money) but made a potent symbol of power for Henry to give as gifts to foreign dignitaries & others.

The programme glossed quickly over the several rebellions & internal threats to the stability of Henry’s rule during the first 15 or so years of his reign – I remember the book went into more detail. One that was mentioned was a rebellion Henry put down where a young man named Perkin Warbeck was groomed to impersonate one of the Princes in the Tower (Edward IV’s sons, who were deposed by Richard III and subsequently vanished). The people involved in this conspiracy included William Stanley, who was now Lord Chamberlain & thus a trusted part of Henry’s government. The discovery of such a close advisor’s involvement didn’t help Henry trust his nobles, and the King became more even suspicious of his court.

As Arthur grew towards adulthood Henry managed to negotiate a very advantageous marriage for him – he was married to Catherine of Aragon, an important Spanish princess. After they were married in 1502, the couple went to set up their own household but disaster soon struck. Arthur contracted a virulent illness called the sweating sickness & quickly died. Henry was devastated by this loss, but more was to follow. Elizabeth comforted him with the thought that they were not yet to old to have more children, and soon became pregnant. The baby was born early, and soon died – and Elizabeth herself died shortly afterwards on her 37th birthday in 1503. Henry was incapacitated to the point of illness by this double loss of both heir & wife within a year. He was confined to his bed for 6 weeks, but then recovered and returned to the business of ruling.

However things had changed, and what had already been a paranoid court became full on tyranny. Henry felt that if he wasn’t to be loved by his people, then he would make them fear him. He created a council, called The Council Learned in the Law, who used obscure laws or invented charges against people to levy fines on them. Everyone owed the King money, or had paid to be pardoned of some crime – and the threat was always there that if you displeased the King your payment would no longer be enough. Penn told the story of one family, merchants in London, who were accused of killing a baby and fined an enormous sum of money (£500, which was a lot then). The Council Learned in the Law had no need of proof, and did not try their accused victims in a court of law, so it was pay up or be flung in jail. The man most associated with the abuses of power by this Council was a man called Edmund Dudley, who’d been a commoner who rose to power because Henry promoted him – so he was resented by the nobility even before he was coercing them into paying the King large sums of money.

By the time Henry died in 1509 his regime had become feared & hated, and Henry VIII was looked forward to as the ruler who would put things right. The younger Henry was everything his father wasn’t – good at the outward show of courtly behaviour (like jousting and other knightly activities) and charismatic. He was hailed as the Spring Prince – which is where Penn’s title of “The Winter King” comes from for Henry VII.

A slightly odd experience watching this – I think it’s the first time I’ve watched the programme based on a book after reading the book itself. So I was frequently reminded that the book went into more detail about this or that, but it did convey the central ideas of the book well. Henry VII’s reign is often overlooked when you talk about the Tudors – with both Henry VIII and Elizabeth I being so iconic there’s not often the space in the story for a miserly, paranoid King whose biggest achievement seems to be in not having another succession war at the end of his reign. So it’s interesting to learn more about him and have him held up not just as “Henry VIII’s father” but as a person & ruler with his own significance.

Fit to Rule; The Road to El Alamein: Churchill’s Desert Campaign; Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here

The last episode of Fit to Rule backed up a bit from the end of the second episode (post) to a time when George III was still on the throne and the future of the Hanoverian dynasty looked secure. His granddaughter, Princess Charlotte (daughter of the future George IV), had married and was expecting her first child. Worsley told us that in a departure from previous royal matches Charlotte was marrying for love, she was also looking forward to a life of familial bliss. She was a tremendously popular Princess, and all seemed bright for the future. Sadly, this wasn’t the case. Worsley showed us the detailed notes taken by the celebrated male midwife who was overseeing the delivery of the royal baby. After 24 hours of labour there had not been much progress, and then there began to be signs that not all was well with the baby. Finally after 50 hours the Princess was delivered of a stillborn boy. Disaster, but not yet catastrophe – that was to come during the night after when the Princess herself went from seeming fine immediately after the birth to dead. The midwife never recovered from the guilt he felt at presiding over the deaths of 2 generations of the royal family and killed himself a few months later. The nation was in mourning for Charlotte – Worsley showed us the commemorative teapots made as morbid souvenirs. The comparisons with Princess Diana are obvious, and Worsley told us that Charlotte had even been referred to as the English Rose just as Diana later would be.

Charlotte hadn’t just been the first legitimate grandchild of George III, she was the only legitimate one. So now the race was on for an heir – all the other sons of George III married (most just had mistress at this point …) and tried to be first to produce a child. Worsley quoted us a satirical poem of the day, which I’ve unfortunately forgotten. Prince Edward & his wife Victoria won the prize with the birth of the future Queen Victoria in 1819. Edward didn’t live long after that, so Victoria was brought up by her mother & her private secretary Sir John Conroy. In some ways bits of their regime made sense – Victoria was trotted around the country & shown to the public in carefully controlled publicity events. This was to give her a base of popularity for when she took the throne, an important thing to have given the unpopularity of her uncles who reigned before her and her family in general (saving only the dead Princess Charlotte). However that was the only good bit – the rest of it, the isolation of Victoria from her father’s family & from any children and the way they tried to control her every thought & deed, was not good. They tried to ensure her future obedience for after she became Queen, but in doing so over-reached themselves and meant that she shook off their influence as soon as she could.

The unhappy childhood of Victoria shaped her personality – she was imperiously keen to get her own way and prone to temper tantrums when she didn’t. (I guess because she never wanted to be controlled again, Worsley didn’t spell it out.) She was industrious in the performance of her royal duties at first, tho after her marriage this began to take a backseat to her pursuit of a happy family life. She, like Charlotte before her, had married for love. And she & Prince Albert had a brood of children, who they brought up in a “private house” on the Isle of Wight – the dynasty was secure and the Queen was mostly popular, much better than the last few decades would’ve suggested. However their eldest son, Bertie, gave them concern – he seemed slow & lazy. Victoria & Albert turned to the pseudo-science of phrenology to try & figure out what was “wrong” with him. Phrenologists believed they could tell a person’s character & capabilities by examining the bumps on his or her skull. Worsley said that the practitioner they turned to thought that Bertie had inheritied his lack of intellectual capability from his mother … but was too polite (and sensible) to tell Victoria & Albert this.

Bertie finished his education at Cambridge University, and also indulged himself in a life of luxury there. He slept with an actress, and when his parents discovered this they were horrified – Albert went off to Cambridge to have a word. Albert & Bertie made up in the course of a long walk, but soon after Albert’s health went downhill. When he died Victoria blamed the stress of dealing with Bertie’s bad behaviour for his illness. She went into deep mourning, which she never came out of – and for several years she did pretty much none of the duties of the monarch, having her doctors write medical reports saying she wasn’t capable. This came close to finishing the monarchy, after all if the Queen could just ignore her duties & government could continue without her what use was she? Worsley said that actually if Albert had remained alive it probably wouldn’t’ve helped avoid a crisis, but in that case it would’ve been because Albert was becoming more & more powerful (he did most of the work of the monarch, not Victoria).

Victoria did show herself from time to time, but never recovered from the depression she entered after Albert’s death. Her court was small & very concerned with morals, while Bertie continued to live it up. When Bertie ascended the throne it was thought that he wouldn’t make a good king, but as Edward VII he actually did a good job in restoring the public image of the monarchy. He might not’ve had as much power as his predecessors but he could put on a show and provide pomp and ceremony. He didn’t reign for long, and was succeeded by his son George V. Who even changed his name during the First World War, as a PR exercise really – no longer the German surname of Saxe-Coburg, now he was George Windsor.

Skipping over George V as being healthy, presumably, Worsley moved on to his son Edward the future Edward VIII who abdicated. From the outside Edward looked like he was going to be a splendid King. He was sent on tours of the Empire and other places for PR purposes, and brought a fresh informal style to various events. But inside he was not having fun At All. He hated all the meet & greets, and the media interest. He hated being away from whichever married lady was his mistress of the time. Worsley read bits from his letters back to his mistress that were particularly angsty & full of baby talk, he seemed somewhat emotionally fragile. This all came to a head when he became King – he had become involved with Wallis Simpson, who was married and now divorced. Somehow he hadn’t really thought that this affair would hit the press, and when it did it caused a constitutional crisis ending in his abdication. And this is where the series finished – obviously one can’t dissect the Queen’s medical history yet, and her father is clearly also a bit too recent!

An interestingly different way to look at the various monarchs of the last 500 years, with Worsley concentrating on different people and different events to the normal story we’re told. However I was uncomfortable that the sexuality of the monarchs was part of the narrative – particularly given the subtitle was “How Royal Illness Changed History”. I think I can see why they did this, because it’s part of the lives of the monarchs that was usually kept private & out of the official history and because it could affect the succession. But it’s still wrong to lump it in with “illness”.

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The Road to El Alamein: Churchill’s Desert Campaign (which was presented & written by Jonathan Dimbleby) was exactly what you’d expect: a programme about the events leading up to the pivotal Second World War battle at El Alamein in late 1942. This is the event about which Churchill said “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” Before it the Allies had been doing badly, afterwards they went on to win.

Whilst Egypt was technically independent by the time of the Second World War, it still had a very large British colonial presence and was strategically important to the British Empire. The ports on the Mediterranean coast (like Alexandria) were important for control of the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal was vital for maintaining contact between Britain & territories such as India. The initial attacks were made by Italian troops from Libya in early 1940 – Dimbleby said this was Mussolini’s attempt to prove he was one of the big boys, to make sure he’d get a sufficiently large slice of the pie in the peace treaty. At the time it seemed that Germany was poised to conquer Britain so Mussolini had to act fast. Libya was ruled from Italy at the time, and was the obvious base for the operation but the army that crossed the border into Egypt was poorly trained & far too cautious – they were easily pushed back deep into Libya by the British forces (under the command of Wavel at this point).

This caused consternation in Germany because Italy was supposed to be securing Germany’s southern border, so if they collapsed & were defeated then Germany was at risk. So Hitler sent Rommel with some German Army divisions to help out the Italians. Rommel acted decisively taking the British forces by surprise and pushed them back to the border with Egypt. There’s now some back & forth over the next couple of years but in general Rommel wins more battles than the British do.

When things are going poorly Churchill blames the generals for not doing their job. He sacks Wavel, installing Auchinleck in his place. Later (after the first battle of El Alamein in early 1942) Auchinleck is also sacked, and Montgomery is put in command. The difficulties between Wavel & Churchill were partly a personality clash – Wavel was a taciturn man who was suspicious of politicians, Churchill was bombastic and suspicious of generals. Never going to work out well. But in both cases the fundamental difficulty was that Churchill would send orders that attack must be pressed, why weren’t the army doing something?? And the generals would feel that the troops they had available weren’t adequately trained nor ready to actually win the battle. So they would delay, and ignore Churchill’s orders, because to’ve blindly followed them would mean certain defeat (and they were running into enough defeats as it was).

There were also other theatres in the Mediterranean and until late 1942 the British forces were losing in those too. There was an ill-fated attempt to invade Greece, which pulled troops away from the front in Egypt at around the time that Rommel was really starting to press forward. And they were defeated in Greece too, it was “another Dunkirk” with the British army forced into a humiliating retreat. Malta was another key place in the Mediterranean – it was under British control and played a vital part in restricting the flow of supplies to Rommel’s troops. It was captured by the German forces whilst the campaigns in Egypt and Libya were underway, and this contributed to the defeats of the British. Just before the second battle at El Alamein (the pivotal one) Malta was back under British control & so Rommel’s supply chain was once again disrupted.

Churchill was under a lot of pressure from politicians during this period – it seemed like he was presiding over a losing war, and motions of no confidence were called more than once in Parliament. This probably contributed to his pressure on the generals out in Egypt to act more decisively. He was firm in his belief that winning in North Africa was a prelude to winning the whole war, and kept pressing that in both domestic & international politics. In terms of international politics Churchill was fighting an up hill battle both to bring the US into the war despite a complete lack of public support for this in the US, and also to get them to fight in North Africa first. Eventually Pearl Harbour tipped the balance (and Dimbleby quoted from Churchill’s diary at the time where he’s quite gleeful about it, which I didn’t really think was appropriate when what he’s talking about is a lot of dead people even if it does mean he gets what he wants finally). Even after that the US wanted to fight in Europe first, but eventually Churchill wore them down and that pivotal battle at El Alamein was the prelude to the first Allied operation (which came at the Libyan based German & Italian divisions from both sides and defeated them).

I’ve missed out loads in this summary – things like the various battles for Tobruk, the anecdotes about how badly prepared the various armies were, the details of the political situation. All of it was also illustrated with quotes from soldiers as well as the generals & politicians involved. Dimbleby didn’t forget the human cost, either – talking about the horrific casualty figures & visiting the graveyards where the soldiers are buried.

The version of Why the Industrial Revolution Happened Here that we had recorded turned out to be a cut down version of the full thing (20 minutes instead of an hour). But it was still interesting, if rather brisk. Jeremy Black talked about both what it was about Britain that made it fertile ground for the Industrial Revolution to get started, and how it changed society.

The driving force for the start of the Industrial Revolution was coal. Before Britain had used wood for fuel, but this was beginning to become scarce. Coal was plentiful in Britain & easily accessible near the surface. It also turned out to be a better fuel than wood. As coal mines got deeper, they drove the need for machinery to keep them operational which started the process of mechanisation of various industries.

The political & social conditions in Britain at the time encouraged entrepreneurs & inventors. Black was saying that the Parliamentary Monarchy of Britain meant that there was more stability of government. Also important were the network of societies & coffeehouses where men could meet to discuss the scientific & engineering discoveries of the day. And not only educate themselves but contribute their own ideas. It was also possible to become rich by inventing new machinery – which is a great incentive to do so!

The programme then moved on to the ways that the Industrial Revolution changed Britain. Black talked a bit about Wedgewood, who isn’t just someone who made china dinner services but also in effect the inventor of modern marketing. The demands of new mass produced goods and factories for raw materials drove the creation of a better road network, and the creation of the canal system. (And presumably the railways, but that wasn’t covered – a bit too late perhaps? or maybe it is in the full programme.)

A shame I only found the 20 minute version when I recorded it, I’ll have to keep an eye out for the full thing.