Tag: history

Vikings: Life and Legend (British Museum Exhibition)

The current big exhibition at the British Museum is Vikings: Life and Legend. It only just opened and runs through till 22 June. We’ve actually visited twice – first time on opening day when it was shutting early so we ended up not having enough time to see things properly, so we went back a week later. This is the first exhibition they’ve had in their new exhibition space, so it was interesting to see what the new room was like. Of course the way it’s laid out this time will be totally different for another exhibition, but the final space with the whole ship in it was striking for its sense of wide open space. Otherwise my impressions were that, really, it’s a big rectangular room but that’s not a bad thing – it gives them a lot more flexibility with layout than the circular space they were using before.

The overall theme of the exhibition is to show the Vikings as being more than just marauding warriors. The emphasis was on their trading and settling activities rather than just raiding, and on the cultural exchange between the Vikings and the various places they visited. I was a little disappointed with the first couple of areas of the exhibition, not helped by the huge number of people when we visited the second time. The exhibition opened with a small collection of illustrative objects found in the Viking homelands, then looked at Viking influenced objects from a variety of the areas they interacted with. Most of the objects were quite small (and spaced out) and the labels weren’t visible till you got right up near them – this meant there was a lot of time queueing to see things. And I didn’t think they’d made enough use of the wall space in that area – there were some pictures (and a rather good video) and a handful of quotes but more to look at while you waited to get a chance to see the objects would’ve been nice. There also wasn’t quite enough context in the labels for some of these objects – like the jewellery, where it would’ve been nice to have some pictures showing how it would be worn.

However, criticisms about the layout and labelling aside, they did have a lot of interesting things (and later sections of the exhibition were much better). One thing I particularly liked in the first area was a video screen that was showing the various trade & raiding routes of the Vikings. The sheer scale of the area that the network covered was astonishing, and particularly so when you remember the sorts of ships they were sailing in. The first room and a half had objects of Viking origin or with Viking influenced design that had been found across their trading network. As well as a selection of things from the British Isles and north western Europe there were also items from a variety of Slavic countries where the Vikings settled fairly early on. And from as far away as the Byzantine Empire and the Islamic Caliphate. Many of the quotes round the walls throughout the exhibition were from Islamic writers, talking about the barbaric habits of the Rus (the name they gave the Vikings). In many ways that told us as much about how the Islamic intellectual elite of the time wanted to see themselves as it did about the Vikings, but it was interesting to see someone else’s mythology of the Vikings and how it was and wasn’t like ours.

The next section of the exhibition looked at the sorts of goods that the Vikings took on their trading runs, and the sorts of things they got back. This included a couple of large hoards of silver – one found in England, one in Sweden. These included whole pieces of jewellery, jewellery that had been hacked up (to use as currency) and coins. Some of these coins were Islamic dirhams from the Middle East, showing again the widespread nature of Viking contacts. The English hoard had been buried in the north of the country just around the time that Æthelstan (Anglo-Saxon King, grandson of Alfred the Great) united the whole of England under his rule. Presumably left behind by one of the defeated Vikings. This section of the exhibition also included samples of amber and fur of the sort that the Vikings would’ve taken to trade in Byzantium or the Middle East. And examples of the shackles that they kept their slaves in as they took them to the same markets – many of these slaves were picked up on raids on places like Ireland. Some were taken to Viking settlements (genetic analysis of people in Iceland shows a lot of Irish influence) and others were sold on in the Middle East. They had a quote from an Islamic writer talking about how impressively well the Vikings looked after their slaves, after all they were valuable trade goods.

After this there was an area devoted to the way that the Vikings displayed wealth and status. As well as some ornately decorated swords there were several very large pieces of gold jewellery. This included a cloak pin for a man to wear which was huge and must’ve been really quite cumbersome when in use. There was also a gold necklace that looked big enough to be a belt, and must’ve weighed far too much to wear regularly. And there were several objects associated with feasting – I was particularly struck by the decoration to go round the top of a drinking horn.

And then after walking through a couple of fairly narrow corridors you come out onto a balcony overlooking the centre piece of the exhibition – the longest Viking ship ever found. It’s really quite impressive to see. About 20% of the actual wood was found, mostly at the base of the ship – including the whole of the keel (I think that’s the right word, the piece of wood at the centre of the base that goes from end to end). Because they have that particular piece they can recreate the size and shape of the ship (knowing how Viking ships are designed) and they’ve created a metal frame to fill in the gaps that gives you a real sense of scale. While it’s the longest ship ever found, they don’t think it was the biggest in existence because sagas refer to ships with more pairs of oars than this one would take. But it’s still one of the biggest, and was a great display of status for the man who had it built. It’s thought that this was either Cnut (the one that ruled England for a while in the early 11th Century) or a rival of his in Norway. On the one hand it looks incredibly large as you stand there looking at it (37m long), but on the other hand when you think about how far the Vikings went in ships like these it seems awfully small for such long voyages. There were also some other pieces of other ships (like a shield that had hung over a burial ship’s side, and a steering oar). And a fascinating little audio snippet of an interview with a man from Shetland (interviewed in the 60s I think) talking about the names of pieces of ships – which are apparently very similar in old Shetland dialect to Viking names for the same things. Partly this was fascinating because for most of the way round the room till I got to it I could half hear it and it sounded like a foreign language not English. But when I sat down for a moment to listen it was suddenly understandable, even if heavily accented and full of “foreign” words.

Around the ship there are several collections of objects that give much more of a sense of the Vikings as people than the previous rooms had done. These started with a look at the warrior culture of Vikings, and included many swords and pieces of armour. There was also a jawbone from a warrior that showed how they filed their teeth. I’d known they did this, but somehow I’d though that meant filed to points – that’s not the case though, what they did was to etch horizontal grooves in the front teeth. These would be filled with blue pigment, and were an extension of the decoration of their tatoos – intended to make them look fierce and intimidating on the battlefield. And also to demonstrate their ability to handle pain. In this section they also had evidence that the Vikings weren’t as unbeatable as their reputation at the time and in the modern day might suggest. A mass grave somewhere in England with the bodies of several Viking warriors, all of whom had been decapitated – this was clearly an execution of people captured in battle, not a sign of victorious Vikings.

The last section looked at the move from warriors to soldiers, and the concurrent move from their older pagan beliefs to Christianity. By the end of the 11th Century the Viking era was over – often the endpoint chosen is the defeat of the Norwegians by Harald Godwinson the day before William the Conqueror defeated Harald in his turn. What remained were countries that were just like other European countries of the time (the Normans are a good example of this). In this section they had a replica of the stone erected by Harald Bluetooth with a very Viking looking piece of Christian imagery on it – Christ on a cross but surrounded by a snake motif. The replica was coloured as the original would’ve been when it was set up and was very striking.

Despite finding the first couple of rooms disappointing I’m pleased we went to see the exhibition. It might not be one of their best but it’s still good and worth seeing 🙂 And the ship is awesome!

Inside the Animal Mind; Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure; Royal Cousins at War; The Great British Year

Inside the Animal Mind is a three part series presented by Chris Packham that looks at what we know about how animals think and what that tells us about our own thinking. The first episode covered animal senses, the second looked at how intelligent animals are and the third investigated the effects of being social on animal intelligence. In each episode Packham showed us the sorts of experiments currently being done to extend our knowledge of animal minds. For instance one of the questions he looked at in the first episode is how do dogs seem to know when their owners are due home from work? It’s not like they can tell the time after all. It turns out that this may have something to do with scent levels in the house – if you bring into the house something smelling of the owner earlier in the day, which increases the scent levels, then the dog doesn’t react at the normal time.

The first episode was mostly setting the scene for the meat of the series – making sure we knew a bit about how information gets into the animal brain. The next two episodes were mostly concerned with the overall question of how unique are humans. What, if anything, sets us apart from the other animals. So the second episode concentrated on some of the most intelligent animals – primarily a variety of crow species. These birds solve can solve complex puzzles, use tools and even plan for the future. That last was illustrated by an experiment where a couple of crows were kept in a large cage that could be partitioned into three – overnight they were kept in one end or the other, during the day they had free range of the whole cage (and were given plenty of food). They weren’t given a choice about which end of the cage they spent the night. If it was one end they would get breakfast in the morning before the partitions were removed, if it was the other they wouldn’t. So after that pattern had been established they were given places to hide food (little sandtrays) in each end of the cage. During the day they’d hide some of the food they were given, and they’d hide a significantly higher proportion in the “no breakfast” end – knowing that if that was where they ended up then they’d want more food in the morning than if they ended up in the breakfast room.

The last episode concentrated mostly on dolphins (tho also other intelligent social animals, like chimps). The idea is that being social helps to drive the development of intelligence and in particular intelligence to do with communication and recognition of others (and oneself) as individuals. Things we think of as human traits, and some of these traits take a while to develop in young children too – a child won’t recognise his or herself in the mirror until the age of 2, and the ability to realise that other people have other perspectives takes longer than that. Dolphins are one of the few animals to recognise themselves in a mirror – they had footage of a dolphin very clearly admiring himself in a mirror in the water. They also had some footage of how this was first observed – the biologists were observing dolphin mating via a one-way mirror, and when the dolphins realised there was a mirror there they oriented themselves so they could watch themselves while they were mating.

The series didn’t try to provide an answer to what sets us apart from animals – just pointing out that many of the things we think make us special have been found in at least one other species. And yet, there must still be something that means we are the ones with civilisation and advanced technology not the others, but we don’t yet know what that is.

I’d been expecting something a lot more shallow, so this series was a rather nice surprise. Worth watching.

We’ve started watching some of the World War I related programmes that the BBC are broadcasting at the moment. The first three that we’ve watched were sort of prequels to the war. The first was a biography of Edward VII (Edward VII: Prince of Pleasure), and the others were a two part series about the descendants of Queen Victoria who were ruling England, Germany and Russia by the outbreak of the war (Royal Cousins at War). I’m lumping these together to talk about because they had clearly been made by the same team, and had the same format and aesthetic. Each one had a (faceless) narrator, as well as a selection of experts on the subject, and they were very focussed on the biography of the individuals and how that intersected with the politics. At times that did make us feel they overstated the importance of (for instance) the English King in the politics of the day but mostly it stayed on the right side of the line.

The mission of all three programmes seemed to be to humanise the people they were talking about, and one of the tricks they used to do this was by colourising black and white photographs of them which suddenly makes them seem more real. In the two Royal Cousins at War programmes they also had video footage taken by the royals on their holidays – so all messing about a bit and hamming it up for the camera. And of course there’s a soap opera quality to the dysfunctionalness of Queen Victoria’s family. The Edward VII programme spent a lot of time looking at the way the relationship between Victoria and Edward was a vicious circle – she felt he was useless and shouldn’t be trusted with responsibility. So he frittered away his time on women and parties, and whenever he did get given something to do he’d end up doing daft stuff like showing official documents round to his friends to get opinions. Which then meant Victoria had proof he was useless. So that meant by the time he came to the throne no-one, not even himself, thought he was going to be any good at being King. As it turned out, he was good at the job – he was charismatic and much better than his mother at the public performance side of royal duties.

This is also the last hurrah of powerful monarchs in Europe. While Edward VII and his son George V didn’t have much overt power, as constitutional monarchs, they had even less after WWI was over. Their role was still important in terms of diplomacy, however. Edward’s ability to get on with people helped to sweeten relationships with countries such as France – a visit from Edward helped get public opinion onside before the “real diplomats” sat down at the negotiating table to discuss what became the Entente Cordiale. And George’s lifelong friendship with his cousin Tsar Nicholas helped shape the alliance between Russia and England.

At the other end of the spectrum Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas were still autocratic rulers and so their personal qualities and opinions did have a large part to play in politics and foreign policy. They weren’t entirely free to do what they wished – public opinion and the opinions of their politicians did matter, but they had more genuine power than the British monarchy. And sadly neither were particularly competent. Tsar Nicholas seems to’ve epitomised “nice but dim” and combined this with a strong sense of his duty to preserve the authority of his throne. Which doesn’t end well.

The story of Wilhelm is the sort of thing that if you wrote it as fiction people wouldn’t believe it. He was the son of Victoria’s eldest daughter and she had been married off to the Kaiser Wilhelm I’s eldest son with a mission to liberalise Germany. Her husband (heir to the throne) is more liberal than his father and than Wilhelm II would turn out to be – so if only he’d lived to rule longer than a few months then history might’ve gone very differently. Wilhelm II had a very troubled relationship with his mother – he had had a difficult birth, and his left arm was damaged in the process. His mother couldn’t bear the fact that she had a crippled child, and Wilhelm himself felt inadequate – which only got worse as he got older and bought into the militaristic culture of Germany at the time. As future Kaiser he should be the epitome of perfection, and yet he was physically crippled. This sense of humiliation isn’t helped along by relations with his extended family. Edward VII was married to a Danish princess, whose sister was married to Tsar Alexander. Prussia had invaded Denmark, and defeated the Danes, in the 1860s and the Danish royal family had never forgiven them. So the two sisters would organise jolly family holidays … to which Wilhelm was not invited. He seemed to go through most of his life overcompensating for his disability and for his perceived lack of friends. He also seems to’ve been a rather nasty piece of work, too – so even tho some of it was out of his control, he did make his own problems worse.

These programmes were an interestingly different perspective on the run-up to World War I, and I realised how little I know about Germany of that era & Kaiser Wilhelm in particular.

We also finished off watching The Great British Year. This was a nature series, about the wildlife of Britain across the year. I don’t really have much to say about it – the point was very much the visuals, and they did have some spectacular footage 🙂 And there were red squirrels, but not enough of them for J’s tastes 😉

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Unnatural Histories – series about human influence on areas of the world that we traditionally think of as “untamed nature”.

Episode 1 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

In Our Time: Pocahontas

Pocahontas only lived for around 22 years, but her short life became an integral part of America’s national mythology. A lot of the things we “all know” about her are wrong, or misleading. Even the name we know her by wasn’t her real name – more of a nickname, meaning “naughty child” or something of that sort. The three experts who discussed what we actually know about her life on In Our Time were Susan Castillo (King’s College London), Tim Lockley (University of Warwick) and Jacqueline Fear-Segal (University of East Anglia).

Pocahontas first appears in the historical record around 1608, when she’s described as a girl of about 10. Although that age is just a guess by a contemporary given the rest of what is said at the time she’s certainly pre-pubescent (not acting nor dressed like an adult woman), and the experts agreed that a birth date of around 1595 seems plausible. She was the daughter of Powhatan, who was the primary leader of the Native American tribes living in the Tidewater area of Virginia. There were several sub-chiefs below him in status, and he was expanding his empire/area of influence. The society she grew up in was matrilineal, but the chief was always a man. So although she was daughter of the chief she wouldn’t convey the right to leadership herself or inherit any power. She was, however, Powhatan’s favourite child.

In 1607 the English made another attempt to establish a colony in North America. This was a government encouraged effort, but the English government weren’t particularly involved in funding any of the colonisation preferring instead to rely on private investors. North America had been pretty much ignored by the Spanish colonial forces because it didn’t have as readily available gold as South America. But the English were beginning to want their own overseas empire (to play with the big boys) and this was available real estate that might be able to be be made profitable. Roanoke, the first colony, had failed and Jamestown (this new effort) also ran into significant trouble. The experts on the programme were pretty scathing about this – they said that too many of the colonists were gentlemen who didn’t know what they were doing. So it wasn’t just the challenge of farming in an unfamiliar land, it was also the challenge of getting people who’d never farmed before to learn and work hard enough and do it quickly enough to feed the colony. The colonists had to be bailed out more than once by the local Native Americans (led by Powhatan) who provided food that got at least some of them through the harsh winters. In 1610 the remaining few colonists (about 60 out of the original 1000) were in the process of leaving to go home to England when 900 new colonists arrived and forced the original colonists to return to Jamestown to carry on.

Pocahontas is first mentioned by John Smith, who is one of the English colonists. In 1608 he has some sort of meeting with Powhatan (which results in help for the colony and relatively good relations between the peoples). In a letter about that event he mentions Pocahontas. And around that time (afterwards?) she and other children of the Native Americans would come to the English colony to play with the children there (hence the descriptions of her that suggest she’s pre-pubescent at the time). She is also the person who comes to bring the gifts of food from Powhatan (as someone who has status but isn’t threatening in any way, conveying the peaceful intentions of Powhatan at that time). Writing much later (in fact after Pocahontas’s death) Smith elaborates his story and this is where the legend of Pocahontas saving the life of an English colonist comes from. His later account says that he was going to be executed by Powhatan, but Pocahontas put herself between him and her father and persuaded Powhatan to let him go free. The experts were clear that this is most likely to be a later fabrication on Smith’s part because Pocahontas is already becoming mythologised. However if it is accurate, then it’s actually most likely that Smith misinterpreted a staged ritual scene as a reality and that possibly this was some sort of adoption ceremony. Nowhere in Smith’s accounts of his meeting(s) with Pocahontas does he suggest any sort of romantic relationship. At the time of their interaction she was still a child around 10-12 and he was 30 years old, so it seems pretty unlikely. This is a much later addition to the myth – to make it “a better story”.

Pocahontas then vanishes from the record again for a few years. On the programme* the experts said that she is thought to’ve married during this time – to a member of a nearby chiefdom mostly under her father’s control. On a visit to her husband’s people (in 1613 says wikipedia, I don’t remember if they said the date on the programme) Pocahontas was tricked into getting on an English boat at which point she was captured and brought back to Jamestown. During her time in captivity she was converted to Christianity. This is important because one of the rationales given by the English for why it was morally good to colonise North America was that they would then convert the natives to Protestant Christianity rather than let the Spanish convert everyone to Catholicism. This was a goal more talked about than done, unlike the Spanish empire there weren’t mass efforts to convert by the English, however Pocahontas was held up as an example of the “good” that could be done here. So that contributed to both her celebrity status when she visited England, and her later mythologisation.

*Wikipedia disagrees and thinks this first husband is likely apocryphal. I’m inclined to go with the experts on In Our Time over wikipedia but as I looked something up on wikipedia for this paragraph I noticed and thought I’d mention it.

Relations between Powhatan and Jamestown fairly obviously deteriorated into fighting after Pocahontas was captured. However peace was restored but Pocahontas didn’t return to her people, instead she remained in Jamestown where she married an Englishman named John Rolfe in 1614. Rolfe had been shipwrecked in the Bahamas on his way to Virginia, and his wife and child had died there. When he eventually made his way to Jamestown he brought with him a Bahaman strain of tobacco – which was easier to grow, and more to European tastes, than the native Virginian tobacco. So he played a prime role in the future profitability of the colony. In private letters he talks of his love for Pocahontas, but in more public letters he stresses that he is not overcome by lust instead he’s doing this for the good of the colony etc. On the programme they talked about him being a bit of a conflicted man – he was prone to overthinking things. However they agreed that he probably did love Pocahontas, just that in the very racist society of the England of the time (including the colony in Jamestown) it was an almost perverse thing to do to marry a Native American woman. Not just a heathen, but not even white. Bragg notes in his blog post on the Radio 4 blog that there were only three interracial marriages in Virginia in the 17th Century of which this was the first.

Relations between Powhatan and Jamestown definitely improved after this marriage. There’s some indication that Powhatan was trying to bring them into his empire as a sub-chiefdom like the others (and this started back with John Smith in 1608). They talked a bit on the programme about how one of the problems with relations between the two peoples was differing views on landownership – not just who owned it but completely different systems. This blew up again (after Pocahontas death) as the English colony expanded. The Native American view was that the land you were using was your land, but all of the towns they had were only semi-permanent. The normal process was that the tribe would settle somewhere and the women would farm and the men hunt in the surrounding forest – once the farmland was exhausted and needed to be left fallow the whole community would up sticks and move. But the English came along and started clearing forests or settling on land that wasn’t currently in use because they saw it was “empty” and “unowned” but the Native Americans saw it as not currently in use by anyone but that it would be in future. So the English were reducing the amount of land available for everyone, and later in the century began pushing the Native Americans off even the land they were using as relations between the peoples deteriorated further.

In 1616 John Rolfe and Pocahontas visited England. They didn’t talk much about Pocahontas’s personality on the programme (because we don’t know much) but they did stress that she is thought to’ve been a curious and intelligent woman. So this trip to England was in part because of her desire to know more about the world her husband came from. However it was also something of a diplomatic mission – she was treated as a foreign princess by the English, and her brother (who was involved in Powhatan’s administration) and his wife also accompanied them on the trip. So there was some degree of diplomacy going on and some degree of espionage. There’s an anecdote (possibly apocryphal) of her brother bringing a counting stick to count how many of these English there are … but before they even get to London he’s already thrown the stick away as there are too many to count. I think they said that all the people Powhatan ruled over totalled about 15,000 at the time so that’s quite a big difference between the two countries. Pocahontas and her husband were presented to King James at court as a part of their trip – Rolfe himself was too low status for this sort of treatment so it’s definitely her status that’s driving this. It’s interesting to wonder what would’ve happened if she’d lived – this feels like it’s shaping up to be an alliance of sorts between Powhatan and the English. If Pocahontas had lived long enough to mediate diplomatically between the two would it have lasted longer? But then again probably not, too much entrenched entitlement on the part of the English colonists I suspect.

Pocahontas and Rolfe were actually on their way home to Jamestown when Pocahontas fell ill. On March 10th 1617 there’s a record of a meeting between some English officials and Pocahontas where she’s not mentioned as being in ill health. But on the ship from England she becomes ill and the ship returns to Gravesend where she dies and is buried on March 21st. The experts on the programme preferred the theory that she caught something like dysentery – there’s no indication of a long decline so some sort of catastrophic illness seems most plausible. Later theories (particularly from modern descendants of Powhatan’s people) also include the idea that she was poisoned. But there doesn’t seem to be evidence that the English wanted her out of the way, and that seems to be as much a part of the myth as the romantic relationship with John Smith.

“Figurines in Ancient China: From Prehistory to the First Emperor” Sascha Priewe

Last Thursday we went to the British Museum to go to a talk about Chinese figurines (and we’d hoped to go to another talk later the same day but it was sold out). In this talk Sascha Priewe (a curator at the British Museum) was talking about traditions of figurine making in ancient China and how this did (or didn’t) lead to the First Emperor’s terracotta army. He started by talking briefly about the Ice Age Art exhibition that had been in the British Museum last year (post). This had several examples of small figurines made in Europe more than 10,000 years ago, and you can trace the development and traditions of these figures (again in Europe and also in the Middle East) through the intervening time. This tradition eventually leads to things like Greek statues. However in China it seems (at least from a Western perspective) that the terracotta army buried with the First Emperor appears almost from nowhere in the 200s BC. So his talk was exploring whether or not this was actually the case, and what evidence there is for figurines before these notable (and large and numerous) examples.

The bulk of his talk was an overview of Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology in China, looking at sites where 3D figures have been found. There is a tradition of female figurines found in the northern part of the country during the Neolithic – that may be reminiscent of the earlier European female figurines. But he stressed that this could be an artifact of it being the same people discussing them rather than inherent to the figures. Also during the Neolithic there is a tradition of making phallus models, this is in a different geographical area – the Yellow River valley, if I remember correctly. There’s no indication that these are parts of whole body representations – instead they appear to’ve been created as just a phallus. A little later in (I think) the same area of the country you also find what look like pot lids with a modelled human head on them. Again there isn’t any indication that these are broken off a bigger statue – they appear to be complete as they are. Priewe then talked a bit about the Bronze Age artifacts. There are some developments of art in the round – like the bronze funerary vessels – but in many ways these seem to be 2D art wrapped around a 3D object rather than inherently 3D. While there are some representations of animals during this period (in some places) there are still not large numbers of human figurines.

So the First Emperor’s terracotta army does actually appear to’ve been the start of this tradition in Chinese art. Priewe next turned his attention to where it might’ve come from if not growing out of previous traditions. One suggestion, although he didn’t seem to think it was terribly plausible for the sole reason, was that the First Emperor and/or his immediate predecessors in the Qin culture had learnt of Greek statuary via trade routes across to the area of modern Afghanistan (which would put them in contact with Alexander the Great’s Hellenic empire). His preferred explanation is that the terracotta figures were reflecting a growing shift in funerary beliefs. In the Qin culture immediately before the First Emperor there are indications of human sacrifices buried with leaders. Priewe said that he thinks the terracotta army are a shift from burying your servants to take them with you (which was a recentish development), to burying symbolic figures of your army and your servants. A more cost effective way of ensuring you had the proper entourage in the afterlife than killing a whole lot of trained soldiers etc.

Priewe finished the talk by moving forward in time from the First Emperor showing how this tradition of providing for the afterlife via symbolic figurines and models continued and even extends to the modern day. So he showed us some of the Han dynasty tomb goods (that were on display in Cambridge a while ago (post)) including the toilet for the use of the deceased … He also talked about the Tang Dynasty figurines a bit. And he finished up by noting that in modern Chinese funerals people will burn model houses and money, and even viagra, so that the deceased can take these things with them into the afterlife.

At the beginning of the talk I was a bit worried that it was either going to be too academic or too disorganised to follow easily. But once he got going it was an interesting talk 🙂

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History; Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England

Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History was a two part series on Channel 5 – I found out about it because it’s presented by Suzannah Lipscomb who was one of the talking heads on the programme about The Last Days of Anne Boleyn that I liked so much last year (post). The first part covered the successful part of Henry VIII & Anne’s relationship and the second part looked at the unravelling of that relationship. It had been billed as “part re-enacted” but actually there wasn’t much more than you often see in documentaries. They had a couple of actors to do Henry and Anne, and some extras, and several snippets of action (like a court scene, Henry fencing, Anne being dressed or praying). They also had the actors repeat lines that one or the other had written – quotes from letters, or other such things. But all too often that felt like filler, because Lipscomb herself would also read out the quote.

As well as the start of Henry & Anne’s relationship the first programme also talked a bit about the earlier lives of the two. In particular Lipscomb visited the house Anne grew up in (Hever Castle) and one of the palaces of the French court where Anne spent several years as a lady in waiting to the Queen of France. One of the main themes of this early part of the programme is how the legend that has grown up around Henry and Anne is both accurate and not. Although later it’s true that Henry was something of a cruel tyrant, at the beginning of his reign (and even by the time Anne and he begin to interact) he’s a charming, charismatic athlete and playboy. Anne’s sometimes talked of as “a commoner” but that’s like Kate Middleton being “a normal middle class girl” … true, but not particularly accurate (both come from significantly wealthier or higher status families than the phrase conjures up). Also Anne’s time at the French court is later held up as where she learnt “the arts of love” but actually the Queen’s court was known for being virtuous and chaste.

What her time at the French court does do for Anne is make her appear sophisticated and a bit exotic. Combined with her wit & intelligence, that’s what eventually catches the King’s eye. But Lipscomb was keen to point out that this wasn’t at once – actually the King takes Mary Boleyn as a mistress when the Boleyns come to court, not Anne. Once Henry & Anne’s relationship begins Lipscomb paints it as a passionate love affair, and says that she believes that the reason they wait and start to look for a way out of his marriage for Henry is that they want to “do things properly”. Obviously Henry must’ve already begun to worry about a lack of heir, and to think about how to change that as his first wife grew older. But Lipscomb doesn’t believe Anne played hard to get in order to hold out for marriage, instead she thinks the two fell head over heels in love and wanted to marry from the beginning – this was not just another mistress for Henry. I’m not entirely sure I agree (although obviously Lipscomb knows far more about the subject than I do!). One notable absence from Lipscomb’s narrative was any of the other men Anne may’ve had relationships with. In particular Anne had been bethrothed to Henry Percy, and that had to be formally declared as a celibate relationship (it was broken off because his father did not approve). If it hadn’t been a celibate relationship then they would’ve counted as married before Henry and Anne became a couple – so this was important, but Lipscomb didn’t mention any of this is the programme.

The second programme looked at Anne’s fall from grace, which really began shortly after the highpoint of their marriage. Through no fault of her own she failed at the primary duty of Henry’s Queen. Elizabeth was born, and was not a son. Another pregnancy came to nothing (Lipscomb noted there’s no record of a miscarriage either, so perhaps this was a phantom pregnancy). And then not long after Katherine’s death Anne miscarried a child that was far enough along development to be obviously a boy. Things were beginning to unravel. Around this time Henry also suffered a fall during a tournament that knocked him out for a couple of hours, and re-opened an old leg wound that would never completely heal again. Lipscomb speculated that this fall might actually have caused a personality change in Henry – and certainly afterwards he was the tyrant we later remember him as. However personally I’m not sure we need to speculate about frontal lobe damage from the fall, and subsequent personality changes, to explain this. Henry’s behavioural changes could also be explained by an increased sense of mortality, and the effects of chronic pain. He almost died without an heir, his nightmare scenario. And the ulcer in his old leg wound was now being treated with hot pokers on a regular basis, not something to settle anyone’s temperament.

Then we’re up to the final fall of Anne – accused of adultery, imprisoned and tried then executed. Lipscomb is firmly on the side of Anne being innocent of the charges, swayed in part by Anne’s swearing of oaths to God that she hadn’t done these things even once she was condemned to die. Anne was, after all, a pious woman. So Lipscomb’s theory (and I’m inclined to agree here) is that Anne’s “fault” was to not be submissive enough to the King – she didn’t make adultery unbelievable – and to flirt and be witty in the company of the court. The very things that had drawn her and Henry together in the first place were her downfall in the end.

A good series, even if I didn’t entirely agree with Lipscomb’s theories at all times.

As well as that recent series about the Tudors we’ve also been watching a series we recorded last year – The Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England. The conceit here is Ian Mortimer presenting a sort of handbook to what you’d need to know to blend into Elizabethan England if you were able to go and visit. The emphasis was on the differences to the modern day, and the potential hazards you might run into. I really liked the visual style of this series. Parts of it had Mortimer talking to us in a room that looked like an alchemist’s den – lots of bottles and curiosities and old books. In parts he was walking through a computer generated space with old pictures illustrating what he was talking about hanging in boxes in the space. And about half was filmed in real life locations which were then enhanced with white line drawings of the people and objects you’d expect to see there in Elizabethan times.

The three programmes of the series covered different levels of Elizabethan society. We started with the poor – I think because that’s what in general one knows least about, and because it would have the most shocking changes. Life really was nasty, brutish & short if you were a peasant – he covered things like the poor living conditions, the diseases, the food, the sorts of work you could do and how much (little) you’d be paid. And also the problems with travelling while poor – people could get in trouble for sheltering the homeless, so unless you could find work you wouldn’t find much shelter. The second programme looked at high society. They had many more comforts in life (and probably live a lot longer too), but disease was still an issue. And watching what you said and who you said it to would still be very important if you were visiting – informants and paranoia were not just for the lower classes. The last programme looked at the rising middle classes, and at the growing amount of innovation, exploration and culture coming from this class. Shakespeare is an obvious example, Francis Drake is another. Throughout all three programmes Mortimer also noted how social mores have changed – what we’d find particularly noticeable would be the difference in how women were treated. He talked about how wives were obliged to do what they were told, and could be beaten without that reflecting poorly on the husband. And about the way that it was almost assumed that a female servant would be coerced into sleeping with her master. Of course, if she became pregnant that was then her problem.

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this series, but I really liked it. Might pick up the book it was based on at some point.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Episode 1 of Inside the Animal Mind – Chris Packham looks at how animals think and perceive the world around them.

Mad Dog: Gaddafi’s Secret World – a 90 minute documentary about the rise and fall of Gaddafi, using interviews with people who were a part of his regime in one way or another. Very much had a message, and sometimes you could see just how they were using spin to make him seem as bad as possible (even tho I agreed with the premise it felt heavy handed). Part of the Storyville series.

Captain Cook: The Man Behind the Legend – Timewatch episode from 2008/09 about Captain Cook & his voyages of exploration. I knew surprisingly little about the man in advance (beyond that he existed).

In Our Time: The Physiocrats

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monday Link Salad

This week I start my next Future Learn course – Shakespeare and His World.

I’m starting to quite look forward to Evolve (the new game from the guys who did the original L4D) … hopefully it doesn’t disappoint when it finally gets here 🙂

The Writ of Years is a delightfully creepy fairytale-esque short story.

I’m catching up (slowly, slowly) with reading at tor.com – Jo Walton’s post on if there’s a right age to read particular books caught my eye. I’m in agreement with Walton, I think. Even though I re-read less these days than I did as a kid, it’s odd to think that reading a book “too early” would do anything but mean you missed a bunch of stuff that you’d notice on a future read through (or fail to comprehend it entirely but understand it later).

More book stuff: I’ve set myself up an account on WWEnd which curates a list of authors & books who’ve won SFF awards or been on “must read” type lists. You can set what you’ve read and it gives you stats (like I’ve read 47% of all Hugo award winning books), they also encourage people to rate & review books. I’m about halfway through their list of authors marking what I’ve read that I remember (although only rating stuff I’ve read recently). (I was going to link to my account, but I can’t seem to find a way to directly link to it, oh well.)

Mass groups of whale fossils found in Chile – probably the result of at least four different mass strandings caused by a group of whales eating toxic algae then their dead bodies being washed up on shore.

10 Facts about Ichneumonidae describes these parasitic wasps near the start of the article as “think chestburster from Alien, but for insects.”.

Less creepily here’s 37 photos from history ranging from the moving to the “wtf?” (particularly the baby cage for ensuring your infant offspring get sufficient sunlight and fresh air if you live in an apartment block). Thanks to J for that link 🙂

I think I’ve seen this before, but it’s pretty striking – due to different streetlight lightbulbs you can still see the East/West divide in Berlin.

The only new TV programme I’m setting to record this week is When Albums Ruled the World next Monday – but the BBC’s schedule page was a little broken this morning and I’ve not been able to look at what’s showing on Saturday & Sunday.

The Stuarts; Bible Hunters

For some odd reason the BBC had a new documentary series about The Stuarts and then only aired it in Scotland. I can see that it was intended to tie in with the upcoming vote on independence but it was straightforwardly a documentary rather than a piece of propaganda. So I’m not really sure why it was kept north of the border. We only spotted it because I’d recorded something else off BBC2 Scotland to avoid a clash, and there was a trailer for The Stuarts.

The presenter was Clare Jackson, who I don’t think I’ve seen anything by before, and her thesis was that the Stuarts were the defining royal dynasty of Great Britain – despite the actual creation of the United Kingdom only happening almost by accident at the end of the Stuart era. She took us through the whole 17th Century (and a smidge beyond) in chronological order. The first episode covered James VI & I, and the early years of Charles I. The accession of James to the English throne in 1603 after Elizabeth I’s death had been a time of optimism – for James and for his new country. James’s dream was to unite the two countries in the same way that the crowns were now united, however he wasn’t able (even with his high degree of political skill) to persuade the English in particular to do this. Jackson also covered the seeds of Charles I’s autocratic leanings – in particular she pointed at his visit to Spain, whilst he was trying (and failing) to negotiate a Spanish marriage for himself. At the court of the Hapsburgs he got a taste of how royalty “should” be treated.

The second episode covered the civil wars and the Restoration. In this episode Jackson was keen to stress how the way we’re taught British history today (particularly in England) simplifies and prettifies this collection of conflicts. We’re often presented with it as “democracy vs. autocracy”, and the parts of the war outside England are often ignored. She said it is better compared to modern conflicts like the violence & genocide in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. And she emphasised the Irish parts of the Civil Wars, which were not pretty in the slightest and still have repercussions today. Cromwell is a divisive figure – either a hero (from a Protestant point of view) or a villain (from the Catholic point of view). She also pointed out how Cromwell was by the end King in all but name (hardly the champion of democracy that English school history would like to portray him as) and after he died his power and title passed on to his son. Who was sufficiently bad at the job that Charles II was invited back to England.

The last episode could be thought of as the long decline of the Stuarts … we started with the disaster that was about to be James VII & II. Charles II had been fairly astutely focused on remaining King – he might’ve had Catholic leanings and a Catholic wife but he’d stayed a Protestant (until his deathbed, perhaps). His brother James, however, did convert to Catholicism and was fervent about it – he resigned public office rather than give up his Catholicism. Charles never managed to sire a legitimate heir, so James was next in line to the throne. Charles did his best to mitigate the problems with his having a Catholic heir – he had James’s daughters brought up Protestant and married them to good Protestants (like William of Orange, a diplomatic necessity as well as an internal political one). So when James did come to the throne it was seen as a brief blip before Mary & William took over – dealable with. When James’s new wife had a son this changed and it was time for more direct action, William was invited to invade (this is the Glorious Revolution) which he did and by chance he won bloodlessly. William and Mary, and then Mary’s sister Anne after them were childless so after Anne the next possible Stuart heirs were the Catholic descendants of James. And this is what finally brought about the creation of the United Kingdom that had been James VI & I’s dream. England wanted the Protestant Hanoverans to inherit after Anne died, Scotland would’ve preferred the Stuart heir – and so the crowns and thus the countries would part unless Parliament succeeded in passing the Act of Union.

A good series, I really don’t know why it was confined to the Scottish bit of BBC2.

Bible Hunters wasn’t a promising name for a series, but actually it turned out to be pretty good (with some flaws). Jeff Rose took us through the 19th and early 20th Century attempts to find or confirm the truth of the Bible. The first episode focussed on the New Testament, and the efforts of 19th Century scholars and explorers to find early copies of the Gospels. The idea was to show that the Gospels were indeed the inerrant word of God, and that the narrative of Jesus life and ministry was correct. Egypt was the target of these expeditions because of the early monastic tradition in the country dating back to much nearer the time of Jesus life than anything in Europe could do. Some monasteries (like that at Sinai) have been inhabited continuously since at least the 3rd Century AD. What was found shook the certainty that nothing had changed as the Bible was copied and translated over the centuries. In particular the ending of the Gospel of Mark (the oldest of the four Gospels, thought to’ve been written first) was different, and different in an important fashion. The modern end of that Gospel has Jesus seen after his resurrection, and the women who went to his tomb are instructed to go forth and tell people the good news. The 2nd Century version of the text ends with the women finding the empty tomb, being told by an angel that Jesus has risen, and being afraid and telling no-one. The programme built this up as being a cataclysmic blow to the faithful, and certainly it causes a lot of problems if your faith requires the words in the Bible to be literally the whole truth and literally unchanging.

The second episode looked more generally at what expeditions to Egypt showed about both the general truth of the biblical world view and the construction of the canonical texts of the Bible. As the history of Pharaonic Egypt began to be examined it cast doubt on the accuracy of the Biblical stories about the history & age of the Earth. For instance when the Dendera zodiac was found it was thought to be 12,000 years old (now known to be false, it’s Ptolemaic) and how did that square with Usher’s careful calculations about the Earth having been created in 4,004 BC? And other Gospels were found buried near old monasteries – which had been hidden after the official choice of the four we now know as being the canonical books. These included a Gospel according to Mary Magdalene, which gave a bigger role for women in the early church than in later times. And also Gnostic Gospels.

The format of the programme was Rose going to various places in Egypt, and also talking to various academics from a variety of institutions about the history of the people who found these things and the history of the ideas. And it was interesting to watch, but I kept running into things that made me stop and think “wait, is that really true?”. Which then casts doubt on the accuracy of other things that I didn’t already know something about. For example Bishop Usher’s calculation of the age of the Earth was mentioned, and Rose told us that “everyone believed that the Earth was only 6,000 years old” at that time. But as far as I was aware by the time Usher was doing his calculations there were a lot of people (if not most people) who thought the Earth was much older than that – Usher was more of a last-gasp of outdated thought rather than mainstream. I could be wrong, it’s not an area I know much about but things like that let the doubt in. Another example was that the EEF (forerunner of the modern EES) was presented as being solely about proving the truth of the Bible when it started – but when we visited the EES last September (post) we were told that although the biblical links were used to get more funding preservation of the ancient monuments as things in themselves not as “it’s in the bible” was also an important goal. The discrepancy could well be down to spin, but again this lets doubts creep in about the accuracy or spin on the rest of the programme.

I am glad I watched it, but I don’t know if I’d trust it on the details without cross-checking the facts.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of Henry & Anne: The Lovers that Changed History – two part series about Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, part dramatised documentary presented by Suzanne Lipscomb.

Episode 2 of Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – this was part of the BBC’s Tudor Season in 2013. It’s a series about life in Elizabethan times from the perspective of the differences between now and then, what you’d need to know if you could travel back there.

Robins of Eden and The Rabbits of Skomer – two rather retro-feeling mini nature documentaries, lasting just 10 minutes each.

The Joy of the Single – programme about singles, talking to various music industry people. Covered things like the history of the single as a phenomenon, the physical object of a 7″ vinyl single and the sort of emotional impact that various singles had on these people.

Episode 2 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Blink: A Horizon Guide to the Senses – programme presented by Kevin Fong about the senses. Not much new footage, instead it made use of the last 40 years of Horizon to pull out illustrative bits and pieces from the archives. Some neat things to see, but in other ways it felt a bit shallow.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 8)

This chapter of Plantagenet England is the last of the strictly chronological chapters. It covers the 30 years from Edward III taking full control of his kingdom in 1330 through to 1360, which is the cut-off point for this book – Edward reigns for another 17 years after that. The end point of the book was chosen based on the ending of a phase of the Hundred Years War, which is why it stops part way through Edward’s reign. This chapter is about England’s internal politics during this period, the next two chapters will look at Anglo-French relations (focussing on the Hundred Years War) and the English army of the time.

Orientation dates:

  • The Yuan dynasty ruled China from 1279 to 1378 (post).
  • Edward III born 1312, reaches his majority in 1330 and dies in 1377.
  • Philip VI “the Fortunate” rules France as the first king of the house of Valois from 1328 to 1350.
  • David II ruled Scotland from 1329 to 1372.
  • The start of the Hundred Years War is in 1337.
  • The Black Death reached England in 1348.
  • John II “the Good” rules France from 1350 to 1364.

England Under Edward III

When Edward III took power in 1330 the prestige of the English monarchy was in a bit of a state. The incompetence of Edward II and the avarice of Isabella & Mortimer (see the chapter before last) had significantly eroded royal authority. Prestwich says Edward III restored his authority in two main ways – firstly be being successful in war and secondly by using the established patronage system to build up support for his rule. Victory over Scotland in 1333 was key to the first part of this – even though it wasn’t an end to war against the Scots it was a victory which was a change after the defeats that both the previous regimes had suffered.

Edward III was in the fortunate position of having a lot of land to give away to supporters – when he’d taken the throne he confiscated the lands that Mortimer had built up during his time in power. Later he gained lands by seizing them from French priories. These sources of land weren’t part of the hereditary crown estates, so there were no restrictions on Edward’s ability to grant them to people he wished to reward. He used these opportunities wisely – not just rewarding those who had helped him to power, but also granting lands to a wide range of other members of the court and aristocracy who he wished to cultivate. By not confining his generosity to a narrow clique (as his predecessors had done) he managed to build up broad support for his kingship. He also managed to strike a good balance between rewarding people sufficiently and not depleting his own resources. Despite Edward’s skill as a politician his reign was not without its own political crisis. As with the 1297 crisis in his grandfather Edward I’s reign (discussed a few chapters ago) it was the demands of war that brought matters to a head but it was also complicated by other economic difficulties. There was inclement weather in 1338 & 1339 which led to a failure of the 1339 harvest and widespread famine.

The war with France started in 1337, and as Edward III hadn’t built up financial resources in advance of it this required heavy taxation and the imposition of duties on wool exports. Wool was also taken by the government to be sold to raise money (another time honoured way of generating funds). Overall between 1337 to 1341 the demands of the crown (by all the various means) came to £665,000 which was a huge sum at the time. The army had to be supplied as well as paid, and corruption of officials led to its own problems there. Instead of the previous method of requesting each sheriff to provide specified amounts of foodstuffs the new system was to commission individuals to gather the foodstuffs from a wide area. In 1338 Thomas Dunstable was one of these individuals, and was subsequently removed from his position later that year and accused of many offences – including taking foodstuffs for himself, taking bribes to exempt places and falsely accusing men of refusing until they paid him fines. The country felt the taxes etc were a heavy burden, and on the other side the king was exasperated with how hard it was to finance his war. He had to resort to borrowing money, at first from Italian merchants and later from English merchants. The amount of debt he was taking on was also a concern for Parliament.

The crisis came to a head in 1340-41. The King was mostly abroad in France pursuing his war. His government was split between the household officials with the King in Flanders and the administration left behind in England under the nominal regency of Edward III’s 9 year old son Edward (later the Black Prince) and the practical control of Archbishop Stratford. By late 1340 the King was convinced that the administration England was actively working against his interests, so Edward III unexpectedly returned to London and undertook a thorough purge of the administration (including Archbishop Stratford). The dispute between Edward III and Stratford rumbled on for about 6 months, but it was conducted in the realms of propaganda rather than via violence. Stratford wrote a treatise setting out his position in French and circulated it widely, the King had his own position set out in a Latin treatise (circulated less widely). Stratford undertook a point by point rebuttal of the King’s accusations. And so on. It was settled (after some argument) when Parliament met in April 1341 – Stratford humbled himself to the King and was restored to some degree of favour. And in return the King accepted many of Parliament’s demands, although he refused to sack the ministers he trusted. Despite the apparent capitulation of the King he actually restored his position of authority pretty quickly, and didn’t follow through on many of the promises he made.

In combination with the crisis in England was another similar one in Ireland – in 1341 revenues from Ireland were significantly down and Edward III sacked most of his minister there. He even went so far as to revoke all land grants since 1307, but backed off on that after there were many protests. However the Ireland crisis was pretty much dealt with by that stage.

The aftermath in England took longer to resolve, even though Edward III regained his power and authority quickly. One change in the immediate aftermath was that Edward had lost confidence in clerical ministers particularly in the post of Chancellor, and for the next 5 years new appointments as chancellor were all laymen. However this didn’t last long, in part because the normal reward for ministers was a church living, which obviously couldn’t be granted to laymen. Another change of circumstances that helped the situation settle down was that the strategies employed in the French war changed from 1342 to ones that required less of a financial burden on the country. Taxation was still required to finance the war, but even tho there were arguments about the levels required there was no threat of crisis. Prestwich attributes this in part to Edward’s skilful political strategy – promising what he needed to get what he wanted then only following through when necessary, accepting criticism even if he didn’t change.

During this time period (the 1340s & 1350s) the House of Commons (as it would later be known) continued to grow in importance. It was still in many ways an unpolitical body – people were not elected to it with the idea that they would put forward a particular point of view, and neither King nor Parliament tried to stack it with supporters when reforms were made to who attended. Even tho it was becoming more important the social status of the attendees didn’t rise, in fact in general it decreased. Men who were chosen to attend from the counties still tended to be notable in their area, but were less and less often knights. From 1340 Parliament was also effectively secular below the level of the peerage. Prestwich also notes that the election of lawyers was discouraged. In the 1350s instructions went out that those elected should “be not pleaders, nor maintainers of quarrels nor such as live by pursuits of this kind”. Somewhat different to today!

By the time that the Black Death hit England (in 1348) a political consensus had evolved in the wake of the 1340-41 crisis. Surprisingly in the aftermath of the plague this consensus was not disrupted. Although it would lead to major social changes (as might be expected when up to half the population dies) the immediate effect on government was to bring the bits of what one might call “the establishment” together. The representatives in the Commons saw their interests as aligning with the magnates, and Parliament with the King – they all wanted to ensure that the previous status quo continued. Relations between secular and church authority continued to evolve through these decades. Notably the papal curia tried to flex its muscles in the appointment of clerics to bishoprics. By 1343 there was much discontent about this, and the representatives in Parliament complained that a lot of money was leaving the country via these foreign cardinals. The King was able to gain favour with the representatives by issuing statutes to attempt to curtail the papal right to appoint clerics, and to prevent too many cases being tried in the papal courts. Prestwich notes that this wasn’t so much a change in the relations between King & Pope, but more an indication of how he would respond to the demands of the representatives.

Prestwich concludes this chapter with a glowing character portrait of Edward III – I think he approves of him 😉 This 30 year period had been one of success and stability, and Prestwich puts much of the credit for that on the King. Although Edward III did get into irresponsible levels of debt at the start of the French war he was in general a hard-working man who took his responsibilities seriously. He didn’t indulge in favourites (very unlike his father) but instead was generous in his patronage to many different people. This combined with his pragmatic approach to politics (promise what you need to, then only follow through if necessary) meant that he had wide reaching support throughout the country. He somehow managed not to get a reputation for unreliability (unlike his grandfather), and he didn’t hold grudges (which made the aftermath of the 1340-41 crisis much less problematic). In terms of relationships with his family Edward III was markedly different to some of his predecessors. Prestwich compares him to Henry II here – despite having several sons Edward III managed to have a more harmonious family than Henry II, and to delegate authority to his eldest son keeping him onside. He allowed his children their own way in terms of marriages rather than just using them as pawns, even the girls. He was conventionally religious, but not overly mystical. Prestwich says the evidence suggests that Edward III enjoyed being King, and that his court enjoyed his company – whilst politics was taken seriously Edward III’s court also indulged in the more frivolous side of life with tournaments and so on.

Tangents to follow up on: a biography of Edward III, and more about his family too.

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Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s; Guilty Pleasures

Baroque! – From St Peter’s to St Paul’s was a three part series presented by Waldemar Januszczak about Baroque art and architecture. The three programmes moved in geography (covering Italy, Spain & the Netherlands, and Britain respectively) and forwards in time. He started off with the story of how baroque art has its roots in the Counter Reformation – basically intended to propagate the “right” Christian message via eye-catching art. In particular as a response to the more austere Protestant sensibility, a sort of “you say we have too much art? we’ll show you too much art!”. As the movement took off in Spain (via Naples – a Spanish colony) the religious subject matter became darker and more visceral. Baroque artists also became the court painters of the era. Januszczak was entertainingly dismissive of the Hapsburg rulers of Spain & the Spanish Netherlands (and to be fair, there’s a lot there to to be dismissive of) while extolling the virtues of their taste in art. The Spanish court paintings were one of the vectors that introduced baroque art & architecture to England – Charles I’s visit to Spain when he was hoping to marry a Spanish princess brought him into contact with the court culture and painting. This wasn’t to be the baroque movement’s first jump to a Protestant nation – that was the Netherlands. Once the baroque took a hold in England it was given extra space to grow because of the Great Fire of London – about half of the last episode of this series was about the various churches (including St Paul’s) which were rebuilt in a baroque style after that disaster.

I’ve found it hard to write about what was in the programmes, because a lot of the point was (unsurprisingly) the visuals – Januszczak showed us a lot of paintings and buildings both well known and not. The style of the programme was gloriously over the top, as befits the subject matter. Well worth watching 🙂

This week we also watched both parts of a series that we’ve had on the PVR for ages – Guilty Pleasures. This series was about how modern attitudes to luxury have been shaped by our cultural roots. It was presented by Michael Scott, who’s a classicist, so it’s no surprise that the first episode was about the influence of the Ancient Greeks; the second episode was about the influence of medieval Christianity. In Ancient Greece he followed three strands of Greek attitudes to luxury – the first of these was the Athenian democracy that spent time and legislation on trying to prevent ostentatious private luxuries by channeling the urge to consume into public luxuries. And tried to tie society together by having ritual communal luxuries – like sacrificing large numbers of cows which would then give every citizen some meat. The Spartans in some ways had their downfall through unsuccessfully navigating this tension between public & private luxury. As prominent Spartan citizens began to gather wealth to themselves rather than live in the spartan communal fashion their society began to decline. And the last society he touched on in that episode was the Macedonians who embrace luxury (for the ruler) much more than the Athenians or Spartans – they use their wealth as a propaganda tool and to enhance the division between the ruler and the ruled (unlike the more egalitarian principles of Athens or Sparta).

By the middle ages luxury has become a sin. Having contact with luxurious things is supposed to lead you into ever worse sin – fine foods, fine clothing is just a precursor to other indulgences. Scott also talked about how the Black Death actually led to increased luxury for the people who survived. People at the lower reaches of society in particular gained land and better pay because there was a lack of labour available. Which increased the feelings of guilt around luxury. Another factor was that the plague was seen as God’s punishment on people, and so at higher levels of society people took a second look at their lives and came to the conclusion that God was not pleased about their sinfulness (including their luxuries).

And Scott tied it together at the end by thinking a little about modern attitudes to luxury, in particular in the wake of the 2008 banking crisis. The Greek influences can been seen in how we generally react to conspicuous consumption as divisive, and the medieval influences are most obvious in the very idea of a “guilty pleasure”.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of The Stuarts – a series about the Stuart Kings of England & Scotland, presented by Clare Jackson, and about how they shaped the United Kingdom and how they were shaped by it. Broadcast on the Scottish version of BBC2 only.

Episode 1 of Bible Hunters – series about the search for early texts of the Bible in Egypt.

Episode 1 of Time Traveller’s Guide to Elizabethan England – this was part of the BBC’s Tudor Season in 2013. It’s a series about life in Elizabethan times from the perspective of the differences between now and then, what you’d need to know if you could travel back there.

New Secrets of the Terracotta Warriors – Channel 4 one-off programme about the terracotta army found buried near the Emperor Qin’s grave in China. Partly about the history of Qin era China (the first unification of the country in c.200BC, and partly about the techniques currently being used to learn more about the terracotta soldiers. A little shallow.

Episode 1 of The Great British Year – series about British wildlife and countryside over the whole year. Lots of gorgeous shots of animals, and timelapse sequences of landscapes.

Britain’s Most Fragile Treasure – Janina Ramirez programme about the East Window in York Cathedral. How it was made, who made it, how it’s being conserved, and what the various scenes and stories are.