Tag: history

Treasures of Ancient Egypt (Ep 1); The Art of the Vikings

There’s a new series just started called Treasures of Ancient Egypt, so of course we’re watching it not long after it airs (the day after, actually, but because of the way I’ve scheduled my blog posts this post has gone live 8 days after). The series is presented by Alastair Sooke, and is similar in format to the Treasures of Ancient Rome series that he did a while ago (post). It is a chronological survey of the art of Ancient Egypt from the early pre-dynastic through to Cleopatra, each episode will have 10 “treasures” and this first episode covered the period up till the end of the Old Kingdom.

I’m not going to name check each piece of art, but he covered quite a wide range of types and styles. Some were well known iconic pieces (like the Great Pyramid or the Narmer palette), and some were less well known. Although having said that, I think we thought we’d seen most (but not all) of the items in the flesh – we have seen rather more than the average number of Egyptian museum collections tho! He started with petroglyphs out in the Sahara dating from before the Sahara was a desert, which pre-dates the association of the people who will later become the Egyptians with the Nile. But he was able to point out features in this carvings that anticipate the later art style we expect (like figures with front facing torsos but legs in profile). Because he was looking at each piece as a piece of art rather than in terms of what it tells us about the historical context there were things I’d not thought of before. For instance he used the Meidum geese (a personal favourite of mine) to illustrate how the Egyptian artists used small variations in their strict symmetry to stop it looking sterile and boring – so with the geese there are differences in tail position etc that keep it interesting. There were also a handful of segments with modern Egyptian artists working in the same mediums as the ancient artists, which to be honest I found less interesting.

The next episode will cover the Middle Kingdom & the New Kingdom – so I imagine we’ll have Akhenaten-era stuff and something of Tutankhamun’s as our well known items.

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Amongst the other programmes we watched over the week was a one-off programme presented by Janina Ramirez about Viking art, called The Art of the Vikings (part of the Secret Knowledge series, which are all one-off half hour programmes, I only recorded this one). Ramirez was showing us the Viking items from an exhibition in Edinburgh, and giving us some context for them – demonstrating that the Vikings weren’t solely the destroyers of popular culture. There wasn’t particularly any new information (to me), but it was nice to see the objects. Especially fine was a large silver brooch (for holding a cloak shut), and I also liked the bead necklaces.

But I mostly mention this programme because it was somewhat startlingly amateur. Ramirez was a good presenter as she generally is, and the filming was also good – but the sound was very variable, with some bits sounding like Ramirez was recorded in a bathroom. And the onscreen titles were dreadful – the chosen font/layout had really weird spacing between the letters, with every “i” seemingly suspended in space making words like “Ramirez” read more like “Ram i rez”.

Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 & 2 of Strange Days: Cold War Britain – series about Britain and British culture during the Cold War, presented by Dominic Sandbrook.

Episode 2 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Australia.

Episode 5 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

Episode 1 of Sacred Wonders of Britain – Neil Oliver visits several sacred sites in Britain dating from prehistoric times through to the Reformation.

The Truth About Immigration – one-off programme presented by Nick Robinson about immigration into the UK. He talked to immigrants, Brits, employers & politicians, and got across how complicated the subject is and how little it’s actually debated in an informed fashion.

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities; Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History

Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities was a series about the history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore that we watched in December last year finishing just before Christmas. Montefiore seems to be specialising in serieses about holy cities – his previous ones have been about Jerusalem (which we watched before I started writing blog posts) and Rome (post).

Byzantium started out life as a strategically well placed Greek town at the eastern periphery of the Greek (and later the Roman) world. It rose to greater prominence as the centre of gravity of the Roman Empire shifted towards the east, and Constantine moved his capital there at the same time as establishing Christianity as the official religion of the Empire. The Greek pagan past was swept very much under the carpet as the newly renamed Constantinople was positioned as the Christian centre of a Christian Empire which it remained until 1453AD. Something easy to forget from the way the subject was taught to me as a child is that the Roman Empire continued in the East long after the fall of Rome – seamlessly becoming what we now call the Byzantine Empire. Montefiore talked about how Constantinople came to be regarded as associated with and under the protection of the Virgin Mary, one-upping in their minds the association of Rome with St. Peter. And he finished up the first episode with a discussion of the rising tensions between the Western Church and the Orthodox of Constantinople, culminating in the excommunication of the Patriarch by the Pope and the Great Schism.

The second episode covered the period between the Great Schism in 1054AD, and the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453AD. This is a period characterised by decline from former glories, punctuated brutally by the 4th Crusade. The Crusades started off because of the worries of the Byzantine Empire over the rise of Islam and how this new faith had conquered vast swathes of territory, including the Holy Land, and were now eyeing up Byzantine lands. They invited the Western Christians to lend their military might to hold off the Muslims, but this was an uneasy alliance. With the added political differences between Constantinople and Venice (supplier of ships for the 4th Crusade) the unease spilt over into outright violence and Constantinople was sacked by the Crusaders. Montefiore had a bit of an air here of an outsider handing out the popcorn while he was discussing the lead up to this disaster, but he sobered up for the discussion of the atrocities afterwards. The programme ended with the final fall of a weakened Constantinople to the Ottomans, after they’d taken over all the surrounding territory.

The third episode covered the whole of the Ottoman Empire’s time in the sun. This was a second golden age for the city, now known as Istanbul – once again the centre of a large secular Empire it also became the centre of another religion. The Ottoman Sultans moved the seat of the Caliphate to Istanbul, and discovered (or moved in some cases) relics of the Prophet Muhammed and those close to him in the city. Montefiore dwelt on different aspects of the Ottomans to the series we watched earlier in the year (post). He didn’t gloss over the institutionalised fratricide of the Sultans as much, and he told us about some of the less successful holders of the title whose incompetance or brutality also shaped the city. He also spent a bit of time telling us about how the Jews were welcomed into the Ottoman Empire after their expulsion from Western Europe. This episode ended with a discussion of Attaturk and the new secular Turkey after the end of the Ottoman Empire.

As always with Montefiore’s serieses I I liked the cinematography as well as being interested in the subject matter. There’s a visual style to the programmes that I like, though I’d be hard pushed to describe it or distinguish it from other things – but that’s me lacking the vocab and knowledge, I think 😉

The other series we finished off over the last few weeks was Sam Willis’s series about Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History. This was a three part series that looked at shipwrecks around the British coast or involving British ships since Tudor times, with the main focus being on the 18th and 19th Centuries. The format was part telling the stories of individual disasters, and part drawing out what effects these disasters have had on British culture and British history. Willis did a good job of making the shipwrecks sound every bit as hideously dreadful as they must’ve been, whilst not overdoing it. And there were lots of interesting tidbits of history – like in the last episode he told us about the first weather forecasting system, the first life jackets, the fight Plimsoll had to undertake to get overloading of merchant ships regulated and several more. An interesting series, worth watching.

Other TV watched over the last couple of weeks:

Calf’s Head and Coffee: The Golden Age of English Food. Disappointing programme about Restoration era English food that couldn’t work out if it was about the history or about the food, and ended up falling short with both aspects.

Planet Ant: Life Inside the Colony – a bit like the series The Burrowers that we watched a while ago (post) but about leafcutter ants not cute fluffy bunnies etc. An ants nest was reconstructed in a lab and science is being done on it (and we got told how the nest worked and about the ants biology etc).

BBC 4 Sessions: The Christmas Session – recorded for Christmas 2011 I think, this featured various folk artists including the Unthanks and was a lot of fun. We watched it on Christmas Day.

Egypt’s Golden Empire – a three part series on one of the Sky documentary channels that we watched at J’s parents’ house. I confess I wasn’t always paying that much attention, but what I did watch seemed like a rather good and thorough overview of the New Kingdom period of Ancient Egypt.

Charlie Brooker’s 2013 Wipe – round up of the big events of 2013 presented by Charlie Brooker (and segments from others, which I felt worked less well).

Jool’s Annual Hootenanny – music and chat from Jools Holland and his guests (and audience). It’s our tradition for welcoming in the New Year when we’re at home – Jools on the telly and whisky to drink. Not the best one there’s ever been, but we still had fun heckling.

2013: Moments in Time – another roundup of 2013, this time of the main news stories of the year shown through the photos that illustrated them. And some discussion of the changing nature of these photos (and the rise of social media’s importance in news).

Episode 1 of Rise of the Continents – series about the geology of the continents and how that’s shaped them and their wildlife (and us) presented by Iain Stewart. This episode was about Africa.

Episode 4 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

A Tudor Feast

One of the programmes we watched this week was something originally from 2007, but repeated this summer – A Tudor Feast. It was a one hour standalone programme, and the main presenters have gone on since to do several serieses about farming in various historic programmes (including Wartime Farm which we watched last year (post) and Tudor Monastery Farm which we’re watching at the moment but I haven’t yet written about). In fact it was slightly odd watching this, because we’re watching something 6 years newer so both Ruth Goodman & Peter Ginn looked jarringly younger than in the other programmes!

The premise of the show was to cook a Tudor feast using only authentic recipes and ingredients, and only the techniques the Tudor cooks would’ve had available to them. So it was (like the $TIME Farm serieses) a mixture of pseudo-re-enactment and documentary. For instance all the people involved were dressed up in Tudor clothes, as well as explaining how to do things Tudor style. The programme was filmed in Haddon Hall, which still has Tudor era kitchens (I think they said those hadn’t been used in 400 years, presumably new kitchens have been built at various points over the years). And they picked a specific period where they have some records of the occupants of the house at the time – the 1590s. So as well as the modern recreation we got shown a list of the food used for a feast during that time.

One of the things this programme made clear was why this food was luxury food and only for the nobility. Some things were conventionally expensive – like cinnamon, because it came from far away, or gold because it’s rare. But much of it was expensive because it required a lot of labour to make. For instance one of the centrepiece items they put together was a marchpane dessert. This was basically marzipan, that was then gilded and decorated. Which sounds quite simple, but the recipe started with sugar (already conventionally expensive) that had to be ground into powder by hand. Then grind your almonds. Then finally make the marchpane with these two and rosewater. That’s hours of work, probably carried out by the mistress of the house or trusted servants under close supervision. And you haven’t carefully iced or gilded it yet, let alone constructed the decoration.

Another of their centrepiece items was a peacock pie – not a bird one eats nowadays. The programme was concentrating on the food prep – the “downstairs” side of the feast – but they did discuss the taste of things a bit. In particular Goodman mentioned that peacock is often said not to be a good eating bird, but she’s liked it when she’s tried it. This pie looked like a conventional pie until the very end stage – and then (having taken great care to select a good looking peacock and to take his skin off in one go) they put the peacock skin over the pie, with a support structure (not sure quite what, twigs? wire?), to look like a peacock once more. When that was served up they put something burning in its mouth, following a period suggestion, so it looked very spectacular when carried to the table.

They also showed us how the table was set and discussed proper manners (“courtesy”, the word etiquette wasn’t in use yet). Where you sat was determined by social status, and top table got the most impressive dishes – the centrepieces I talked about above (and others like a boar head with an apple in its mouth), the better meat, the better cutlery and tableware etc. People were given napkins, which I didn’t realise were a thing that went back that far. But instead of putting it on one’s lap or tucking it into one’s neck it was to go on the left shoulder. There it was conveniently placed to wipe your hands (most food was cut up with the knife then eaten with the fingers) and to clean your lips. Food was served not in courses like we would today, but in what were called “removes”. Instead of everyone getting their own portion of the current dish, a variety of dishes would be set out on the table and you’d help yourself to what you fancied that was near you. There’d probably be 2 or 3 removes – this feast they did two, one of primarily savoury things and one of sweeter things. Choice was part of the conspicuous display of wealth that was the point of a feast – poorer people didn’t tend to get a choice in what they ate.

I enjoyed this programme (like I do everything I’ve watched from this team). Lots of little bits & pieces I didn’t know before, and sometimes you don’t really realise what things were like till you see them done even if you’ve read about them. I’m now curious what peacock tastes like … and I rather like the idea of a centrepiece at the dinner table of a fire breathing bird containing a pie! Not quite enough to buy a turkey with its skin on for Christmas dinner, however 😉

Other TV watched this week:

Episodes 1 and 2 of Byzantium: A Tale of Three Cities – history of Byzantium aka Constantinople aka Istanbul presented by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

The Bridges that Built London with Dan Cruickshank – one off programme telling the history of London’s bridges across the Thames. Interesting, but got a bit woo-woo at times towards the end.

4,000-Year-Old Cold Case: The Body in the Bog. One off programme about the discovery and investigation of a body in an Irish bog. This particular one was dated to 4,000 years ago, most across north-west Europe are from about 1,500 years later. They tried to present a theory for how & why these people were killed & buried – got a bit Discovery Channel (they Solved The Mystery and Proved The Theory), and a bit unclear how general their idea was but nonetheless interesting.

Episode 1 of Shipwrecks: Britain’s Sunken History – Sam Willis talking about shipwrecks around Britain or involving British ships, their impact on history and our culture.

Episode 3 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 5)

The next chapter of the history of Plantagenet England returns to the chronological discussion of the politics of the era, and Prestwich starts by reminding us that Edward I had presided over a 20 year span of peace and prosperity. This had now come to an end in part because Edward’s main advisers during that period had died, as had his first wife. The next couple of decades covering the end of Edward I’s reign and the start of Edward II’s were to be characterised by war and political crises.

Orientation Dates:

  • The Yuan dynasty ruled China from 1279 to 1378 (post).
  • Philip IV (the Fair) ruled France from 1285 to 1314.
  • Edward I died in 1307.
  • Edward II reigned from 1307 to 1327.
  • Edward III born 1312.

Political Crises, 1294-1311

The political problems at the end of Edward I’s reign stemmed from war – the financing thereof, and the rationale for them. Edward I had wanted to lead a Crusade, but this turned out to be infeasible – in part because of the breakout of wars nearer home. In the first four years of this period there were several conflicts: 1294 war broke out with France (meaning that Gascony needed defending), there was a significant Welsh rebellion in 1294/5, there was a campaign against the Scottish in 1296 and finally Edward lead troops to Flanders in 1297. Prestwich says that in total this cost £750,000 (in the money of the time), which is an astonishing large sum – for reference the total value of the Church’s wealth in England at this time had been assessed at £200,000.

So during these years the Crown was trying to raise money any way it could. Direct taxation (via grants of taxation by Parliament) were the least controversial of the measures taken. The Church was also taxed heavily, until this was forbidden by the Pope in 1297 (and even then it continued because the King threatened to remove royal protection from any cleric who didn’t pay a fine which matched the amount they would’ve been taxed). The Crown also did things like seize all coin held by churches to “check for clipped and counterfeit coin” – most of this didn’t make it back to the churches concerned. Twice attempts were made to seize all the wool in the country, and for the Crown to then sell this itself – cutting out the merchants and keeping all the profits for themselves. The first time this was abandoned and instead customs duties payable on wool were raised significantly (generating £110,000 over the 3 years till 1297). The second wasn’t officially abandoned, but wasn’t particularly well carried out and relatively few sacks of wool were actually seized.

In previous years Edward had also relied on an Italian banking family, the Ricciardi, for loans but they were bankrupted in 1294. In part this was because they were caught in the middle when the Anglo-French war broke out, with neither King happy with them – and Italian depositors started to worry and withdraw their funds, so the Ricciardi’s bank collapsed. This left Edward I with no co-operative bank to help fund his wars on the promise of future payment.

Taxes and Crown expenditure weren’t the only issues bubbling to the surface by 1297. There was also the issue of military service – the feudal lords were not feeling co-operative with the King, and were starting to refuse feudal summonses. In some cases they were bullied into providing troops (for instance to go to Gascony) by threats to call in their debts, in other cases there wasn’t anything to provide leverage. The subject of whether the King should be pursuing these wars was also controversial – the wars in France and Flanders were unpopular, because the Scottish were causing trouble in the north and the barons felt this was where military effort should be focused.

So in 1297 matters came to a head. Whilst those who lead the opposition among the nobility and the clergy had personal grievances as well they were almost entirely acting in what they believed the country’s interests to be rather than their own interests. The key difference between this crisis and that of 1258 (discussed a couple of chapters ago, post) was that the conflict was based not on deep seated grievances with the way the country was being run but was instead almost entirely about the current wars. The terms King and nobility (and King and Church) agreed to in the end were not radical, and didn’t inhibit the King from ruling the country himself (unlike in 1258). The grievances that were not related to the wars were related to the King’s enforcement of Forest Law – at times in places where it was not traditional – so one of the things he promised was to carry out an inquiry into this. Another promise was a reiteration that taxation should only be imposed by assent, and that in addition it should be for the common profit (rather than the King’s gain). The documents didn’t really go into details of how this was to be ensured.

The aftermath of this crisis wasn’t peace and tranquillity. Conflict rumbled on until 1301, with Edward trying to wriggle out of the promises he’d made about Forest Law and the nobility refusing (although not always successfully) to grant taxes till this was done. From 1301 to the end of Edward I’s reign in 1307 things calmed down. In part this was due to the opposition leaders dying, or marrying into the royal family, or in the case of the leading churchman (Winchelsey) being summoned by the new Pope (an ally of Edward’s) to answer charges against him. The Scottish war also provided political peace in England – it was a popular war being in defence of the realm rather than a foreign adventure. So taxation for this war was less objectionable than for the Flanders campaign in 1297.

Edward I’s personality was also an important factor in both the relative small size of the 1297 crisis and the increasing stability after 1301. He was a formidable man, and Prestwich recounts a couple of stories of the time of men dropping down dead when confronting the King or the like. He wasn’t loved by his subjects, and common criticisms were about his stubbornness and his wilfulness. Prestwich says that in Edward’s youth he had been compared to a leopard – fierce and brave like the lion (leo) and unreliable and deceitful like the pard. But he was a feared and respected monarch, and this held the country together.

Edward II was to be a very different sort of King. Prestwich very quickly dismisses the speculative idea that better training might’ve made Edward II a better King with the point that Edward II had been given opportunities (like the 1301 Scottish campaign) to prove himself and learn to be King. But he hadn’t demonstrated any capability (or desire to do more). Prestwich says the most politically significant facet of Edward II’s life before taking the throne was his developing friendship with Piers Gaveston. Edward I disapproved, probably because Edward II was asking for too many favours for Gaveston, and had sent Gaveston into exile in early 1307. One of Edward II’s first acts on taking the throne was to reverse this.

The reaction of the country at start of Edward II’s reign was guardedly optimistic – a generous tax was granted despite the failure of the invasion of Scotland (not quite started when Edward I died, and abandoned shortly after). But even in early 1308 there are signs of political argument taking place within the nobility. A group of magnates signed an agreement that “things” had been done that were contrary to the King’s honour and they should work to rectify them. It’s unclear now whether this is magnates loyal to Edward II protecting his interests from more radical magnates, or whether it’s a veiled attack on Gaveston and these are magnates loyal to the memory of the old King. But either way there was clearly some dissension within the nobility. Edward II married Isabella of France (the 12 year old daughter of the King of France) in January 1308, and was crowned in February of that year. There was some attempt to demand the delaying of the coronation until Gaveston was exiled again, but it didn’t succeed. However Edward II’s coronation oath added a clause to “maintain and preserve the laws and rightful customs which the community of the realm shall have chosen”. The precise meaning of this is debated by historians, Prestwich says it probably meant different things to different people at the time too. The clause was very shortly afterwards used to bully the King into exiling Gaveston again.

Prestwich spends a bit of time talking about the hostility towards Gaveston and the nature of the relationship between Edward & his favourite. He comes down on the side of this not being a homosexual relationship – although admits that no-one will ever know. On the “yes” side for this are some insinuations at the time about how Edward loved Gaveston more than his new Queen. But on the “no” side are that this wasn’t as widespread a rumour as it would surely have been if it were true. Prestwich also cites Edward’s children with (and early affection for) Isabella and an illegitimate son, and Gaveston’s own daughter, as evidence there was no sexual relationship between the two men – but I don’t see that that rules anything in or out. Edward did after all have an incentive to produce an heir which might overcome a distaste for sex with women, and he could also have been bisexual.

But modern desire to know what was really going on aside, the nobility of the time had other reasons to dislike Gaveston whether or not he was sleeping with the King. He was extravagant and arrogant, so he spent the King’s money and rubbed everyone else’s noses in the fact. He mocked the other members of the court, and was known for a waspish tongue. Gaveston caused no problems during his exile, but on his return in 1309 he was back to irritating the nobility at large.

Matters came to a head in 1310, and this crisis is more like that of 1258 than that of 1297. The King was deemed to’ve frittered away his treasure and was forced to agree to a council of Ordainers who had full power to reform the realm and the royal household. In exchange all the King got was a promise that this was not to form a precedent. The Ordinances mostly looked back to previous Articles and precedent from the earlier crises of Edward I’s reign (and his father’s before) – even back to the Magna Carta. However it wasn’t particularly radical, and didn’t try to impose the sorts of restrictions on royal power that were tried in the 1250s and 1260s. It was more a purge of corrupt advisers or officials and a drawing up of more explicit rules for how consent for taxation and other issues (like the King leaving the realm) should be obtained. One significant difference between the Ordinances and earlier documents about obtaining consent is that it moved this from being from “the community of the realm” to being more explicitly via representation in Parliament.

The publication of the Ordinances didn’t solve the crisis. Edward II saw the renewed demand for Gaveston’s exile and the restrictions on his ability to exercise royal patronage (to avoid future Gaveston-esque situations) as completely unacceptable. So this wasn’t the dawn of an age of peace & prosperity like the authors would’ve hoped, it just kicked off more trouble – which is the subject of the next chapter.

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The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination (Exhibition at SOAS)

The Brunei Gallery at SOAS housed an exhibition on Zoroastrianism for a couple of months this year (now finished) called The Everlasting Flame: Zoroastrianism in History and Imagination. We managed to fit in a trip at the end of November, a week or two after our visit to the mini-exhibition at the British Museum on a similar theme (post). Sadly no photography permitted but we went to the British Museum briefly afterwards, and I took couple photos of related objects (some of which had replicas in the exhibition) to illustrate this post.

The exhibition started by setting the scene of the various cultures present in the Middle East in the first millennium BC when Zoroastrianism got going. They didn’t just have objects from Iran, but also from other cultures across the region – including an example of the Luristan bronzes. I’d not particularly noticed these before (there are a selection in the British Museum, see below for a badly lit example), but they caught my eye this time. The exhibition was saying that these cultures were replaced by Indo-Aryans migrating from the steppes to the north, and Zoroastrianism was brought by these peoples or developed by them. I think this is based primarily on the language used to write the Zoroastrian scriptures. This is called Avestan and is only known from being written down many centuries later by Zoroastrians. The scriptures themselves are collectively called the Avesta.

Luristan Bronze

The next room of the exhibition was a circular space with verses from the Gathas, a key Zoroastrian text which is traditionally believed to be Zarathustra’s own words, on the walls in Avestan and translated into English. This was complemented by audio of these verses being read out. From there the exhibition moved to a very brief description of some of the key principles of Zoroastrianism, for instance the division of the world into 7 classes of things (like fire, water etc), and there were several Zoroastrian texts displayed. I read none of the scripts that these books were written in, let alone the languages, so this section felt rather heavy on texts with too little explanation. Some parts that stick in my mind, however, were firstly the way that the annotations for the rituals would be written in a different writing system to the main text – and upside down. Avestan is written right to left, and the Gujarati annotations are written left to right – so if they’re upside down then they run right to left just like the main text. Also written upside down wherever it occurred was the name of the evil principle, Ahriman. As well as the texts there were illustrations of the Zoroastrian funeral arrangements in this section – because the elements of the world are holy they should not be polluted by the dead body. This means that cremation and burial weren’t regarded as viable ways of dealing with the body (although these days they may be). Instead the bodies are exposed to vultures (sometimes in circular towers known as dhakma) – modern changes in tradition are in part due to a decline in vulture population.

The next section of the exhibition looked at the spread of Zoroastrianism along the Silk Road through Central Asia to China. The objects here consisted of more texts (some of them some of the earliest extant Zoroastrian texts dating from the 9th Century BC) and some ossuaries. The other side of this room showed representations of Zoroastrianism in the Christian world. Not just the Three Wise Men but also Zarathustra shows up in medieval texts as an ancient philosopher and magician – the very word “magic” derives from the Zoroastrian word for priest (Magus). A prime example of how things get garbled as they travel between cultures.

Downstairs the centre piece of the exhibition was a replica Fire Temple. Non-Zoroastrians aren’t permitted in real Fire Temples so this is really the only way to see what one is like. As well as an impression of the building they had a (fake) fire in a ritual cauldron and examples of many of the implements used during rituals. There was a video of a priest and his assistant carrying out the daily ritual of the temple – which involved not just the fire but also water and plants. These days a priest has just one assistant, but they had a book from pre-Islamic times which showed where the 9 different assistants should be positioned during this ritual, so clearly it was once much more elaborate. I think this room was my favourite part of the exhibition, and certainly the most striking.

Sculpture from the Palace of DariusCyrus Cylinder

The rest of the downstairs was divided into two sections – one was Zoroastrianism in Persia and one in India. The Persian side was dominated by a rather fine glass etched replica of the sculptures from the Palace of Darius in Persepolis – the photo above left is of the plaster cast replica in the British Museum. The centre text of that relief is a cuneiform inscription extolling the virtues of King Artaxerxes III who had this staircase added to the palace. It also calls for the Zoroastrian gods to protect him and his country. Other objects in this section included a replica of the Cyrus Cylinder (the photo above right is of another replica in the British Museum, the original is out on tour). This details Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon and again has Zoroastrian themes. One of the interesting bits of information in this section was that it was a Persian Zoroastrian priest who really pulled together the religion into a coherent whole, several centuries after it was originally founded. Prior to him the different cults in different places had their own flavours of Zoroastrianism, but he set down a proper way to do things and enforced it. The other half of the room was Zoroastrianism in India, sadly it seemed to me to lose focus and to devolve into a collection of portraits of notable Indians in (British) court dress – mostly from the Tata family. It is presumably no coincidence that one of the listed sponsors of the exhibition is TATA Enterprises …

Upstairs there were some more modern pictures of Zoroastrians around the world – there are now communities in many countries including Britain. And there was some art with Zoroastrian themes, most of which was not really my cup of tea.

Overall I think it was an interesting exhibition, and I’m glad I went. However, it did suffer from a lack of focus (not just in the Indian section, but that was the worst) and I wasn’t always sure why things were included. And sadly by the time we visited (only a little over a month after opening) the labelling on the cases was beginning to wear off – and particularly downstairs some of the cases were lit in such a way that the labels were pretty much unreadable. We did buy the book, so when I get a chance to read that hopefully the essays will elucidate some of the things I missed!

The Making of the Modern Arab World: Episode 1

The Making of the Modern Arab World is a new Radio 4 series about the causes and recent history of the current political situation in the Middle East. It’s presented by Tarek Osman, an Egyptian author, along with several interviews with historians or the descendents of notable figures – his focus is on Egypt and Syria in particular. The first episode looks at the development and decline of Arab liberalism. Osman started by talking about the parallels between the 2011 uprising in Egypt and the 1919 Egyptian uprising against the British colonial government, and about how during the early 20th Century there was a period that could be seen as a golden age of liberalism in the Arab world. He then began to trace the rise of this liberal ideology, and the flowering of the Nahda – the Arabic renaissance.

Osman traced this story back to the invasion of Egypt by Napoleon in 1798. This shook Arabic culture out of a sense of complacency about its place in the world. In this pre-European-colonial-empires time there weren’t the same tensions between “the West” and “the Middle East” that there are now. Scholars and intellectuals from Egypt and other parts of the Arab world visited European countries and investigated European philosophy & science, with an eye to taking what ideas they could and integrating them into their own Arab way of life & their Islamic religion. This lead to a period called the Nahda, often translated as the Arab renaissance. This wasn’t seen as Europeanising, but more as modernising and regaining the place in the world that they used to have (back when Europe was in the “Dark Ages” and the Islamic world was the centre of intellectual development).

However the drive to modernise came at a cost. The economies of the Egypt and other Arab countries weren’t set up to generate enough money to buy the new modern industrial infrastructure that they were putting in. So they got in debt to the European nations, in particular Britain and France. When economies collapsed, or there were popular uprisings against the governments, the British or French would step in and directly rule the country concerned. But the Nahda continued, and there was a growing elite with more liberal values than the traditional conservative society of these countries. This elite was encouraged by the colonial authorities via diplomacy during and after the First World War to consider themselves a potential stepping stone to self-rule for their countries.

As always comes up in the modern history of the Middle East the First World War is where Britain and France really sow the seeds of the current political conflicts both internally to the countries concerned and between the Arab world and Europe. To get the various past and current constituent countries of the Ottoman Empire on the side of Britain and France in the war they were all promised self-rule and lands of their own. And in addition the Jews were promised territory in Palestine. Several of these promises were contradictory, but that isn’t even the worst bit about the situation – after the war most of the promises weren’t kept at all. Britain and France divided up the former Ottoman Empire between themselves, and the Arab states didn’t get self-rule.

The sense of betrayal in Egypt, Syria and other Arab countries was profound. Osman discussed the uprisings in Egypt (in 1919) and Syria against the colonial governments. Some initial amount of success – limited self-rule in Egypt after 1919, and a backing off of the French authorities in Syria (after the initial brutal crackdown) – lead the liberal elite to believe they had begun to achieve their goals. But the lack of results with Britain and France still holding onto the powers they wanted damaged the creditability of this elite with the rest of the population. Osman finished the programme by talking briefly about the movements that grew out this disillusionment with the liberal Westernised elite. One of these is the Arab nationalist movement, in particular the Ba’ath party in Syria, and the other is Islamism, in particular the Muslim Brotherhood which was founded in Egypt. These movements are the subject of the next couple of episodes.

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Charlie Brooker: How Videogames Changed the World

How Videogames Changed the World was a two hour look through the history of computer games, presented by Charlie Brooker. We recorded it from Channel 4 on Saturday and it was very much made to be aired around the release dates of PS4 & Xbox One – and Sony had definitely bought a lot of the advertising spots in the breaks! I’d not actually had high hopes going into watching it – I mean, a mainstream programme about games might miss the mark. But it was clearly not just about games, but also by gamers – all the participants “got it”.

The format was a countdown of 25 significant games – although it was almost treated like it was supposed to be a chart it was really a chronological sequence. Most of the first hour of the show was a nostalgia filled trot through my childhood, and then the second half had a lot of games J or I have bought as adults. Very much the target audience for the programme 🙂 As well as Brooker there were lots of other contributors – some games industry figures (journalists or developers) and some relatively random celebrities (most of whom I didn’t know of). Well, they had a love of games & gaming, so not entirely random, but …

As someone who has spent a lot of her life playing computer games it was nice to find few things I’d quibble at. I think the biggest hole I’d pick in the list is that it’d be nice to’ve had something from the simulation/strategy/god game niche that wasn’t just The Sims. I mean, I can see they wanted to talk about The Sims (and had stuff to say specifically about it), but nothing about Civ or Populous or Sim City and not even name checking those felt like an oversight. In general tho I agreed with their choices – they were good or iconic, or in some cases neither but perfectly illustrated the point being made.

It wasn’t just a history of how games have changed, I thought the programme did a good job of showing how they fitted into the culture around them at the time and of illustrating how they’d affected the world. There are many positive ways that games have changed things – Minecraft was one major example used here, because it’s not just a game it can be used to teach things too. And just in general games are more interactive and less passive than, for instance, TV watching. I did have issues with the dismissal of books as less immersive than games, tho 😉

They also spent a bit of time on most of the big issues around gaming and gaming culture – not just the positive aspects of gaming. Obviously they covered the moral panic over video game violence, and equally obviously as a programme by gamers it was heavily on the side of how foolish this moral panic is. But even so space was given to examples that did cross lines – because the point is not that all games are OK for everyone, it’s that demonising all games because of a few is like saying every film ever made is pornographic because filmed porn exists. Another issue discussed was the way that gaming culture can be seen as a bit of a cesspit. The two strands of that that they discussed were again the obvious ones. The treatment of women gamers and particularly women gaming journalists can be abysmal, and CoD on Xbox Live in particular is notorious for foul mouthed teenagers. This is just a vocal minority, as they said on the programme, but it can seem relentless at times and probably more so from the outside.

The last “game” on the list was Twitter, which I felt was a bit of a cop-out and didn’t (to me) actually illustrate their point very well. The point Brooker & co were trying to make was that with the rise of social media and so on more of our day to day life has been gamified. I think there is a point there, but I’m not sure for most people Twitter is that thing. All the people speaking on the programme were in some ways celebrities – in the sense that people will follow them on Twitter because of what or who they are not because of a personal connection. So they were all discussing how things like follower counts are like game scores, and projecting a persona is like having a game avatar or playing an RPG, and you craft tweets for maximum impact. And, well, I’m not sure normal people do that? Maybe everyone else does, I do barely use Twitter myself, so I could be way off base here. What did strike me is how the public in that game of Twitter are the coupons that prove you’re winning (or not) – we’re like the gold coins that Mario collects. Which didn’t seem to be the point Brooker was making, but it’s an interesting one to me.

A good programme, I thoroughly enjoyed it as a look at a culture that’s one of my own 🙂

Other TV watched this week:

The Science of Doctor Who – a lecture by Brian Cox about the physics of space time, and the Fermi paradox.

Episode 1 of Tudor Monastery Farm – part re-enactment, part documentary about what life would be like living on and running a farm in 1500.

The last episode of David Starkey’s Music and Monarchy – which covered the 19th and 20th Century.

Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia (British Museum Exhibition)

One of the British Museum‘s current exhibitions is Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia which runs until March. We went to see it in the afternoon before the recent British Museum Members’ Open Evening (which I wrote about here and here). The jumping off point for the exhibition is the legend of El Dorado which lured Spanish adventurers into Colombia. The way the legend is most remembered now is as telling of a city paved with gold, but the original Spanish adventurers wrote of a man or king coated in gold. From this starting point the exhibition looked at what role gold played in the civilisations of pre-Hispanic Colombia, and more generally at the rituals of these societies.

There was a certain degree of overlap between the subject of the exhibition and a TV programme we watched earlier this year – the third episode of Lost Kingdoms of South America was about Colombia and the El Dorado myth (post). Not really a surprise as the presenter of that series was Jago Cooper, who is a curator at the British Museum, although not the curator for this exhibition (who is Elisenda Vila Llonch).

The exhibition contained objects from six different cultures from the Colombia region, but I’m afraid I didn’t end up remembering which object was which specific culture. Apart from at the very start the exhibition was focussing on a higher level – the equivalent of discussing early modern Europe as a whole rather than a country in particular. Near the beginning of the exhibition they had a timeline showing the periods that the six cultures had existed – as always I’m startled by how recent they are. In part because J’s interest in ancient Egypt has pushed my concept of “ancient” back a long way, and so anything in the last millenium is “practically modern”. I shouldn’t be surprised tho, these were all cultures in existence when the Spanish came to the Americas, so obviously they must have existed in the late 1500s.

Gold wasn’t valuable in Colombia in the same way that is valuable in our culture – it wasn’t currency instead it had spiritual and symbolic importance, which varied in its details between the cultures. After setting the scene by talking about how the various objects were made the exhibition moved on to talking about how they were used and what their significance was. One culture, the Muisca, had the most obviously different attitude to their gold objects – they weren’t even what we would consider “finished”, i.e. not polished. And then generally the objects were put in significant locations like in caves or lakes. Even as recently as the 20th Century there were Westerners scheming to do things like drain the most significant of the lakes so that all the gold could be retrieved, which is somewhat saddening (it didn’t happen tho).

The other cultures did use their gold objects in ways we’d recognise – as jewellery, as decorative containers etc. One room of the exhibition looked at the jewellery and showed how it was often a status indicator. This room also talked about other status indicators in these societies – like body paint, which can convey messages about who you are in your society and what society you’re from. Another status indicator is representation of people sitting on stools – this always indicates high status.

The jewellery is very elaborate & large, and it often has little moving parts which will move around when the person wearing it moves – and reflect the sun or firelight. This ties in when use of these ornaments in religious rituals, particularly involving lime & coca leaves. The next room of the exhibition talked about these rituals, and displayed some objects associated with them. Taken together lime & coca leaves are hallucinogenic, and the exhibition had several lime containers & dipping sticks – from more basic ones to elaborate and decorative ones. The rituals also involved music, and movement – the way the jewellery the participants were wearing shimmered & jingled would’ve added to the general ambience.

The motifs chosen to decorate the jewellery and other objects also had religious significance. The next room of the exhibition had several pieces that had representations of things from the natural world. Some of these were as straightforward as a necklace made of gold beads shaped to look like jaguar claws – effectively a more high status version of a necklace of jaguar claws. Others were more symbolic – like pectorals shaped like a half-bat half-man figure. Often the belief was that the shaman wearing an item representing a particular creature would take on the essential characteristics of that creature during his hallucinogenic trance – for instance fly across the landscape with the wings of the bird figure he was wearing.

It was an interesting exhibition – but I’m aware I was missing a lot of the nuances because I know so little about the region and the peoples who lived there. If we go to the museum again before the exhibition finishes I think I’ll go through again for a second look 🙂

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 4)

Wales

In this chapter Prestwich takes a digression from his chronological trot through the Plantagenet era to look at the situation in Wales during this period. It’s very much Wales from the perspective of its interactions with England, and fits in here because Edward I conquered Wales.

He begins by setting the scene in terms of the political situation in Wales during Henry III & Edward I’s reigns in England. A key difference between the two cultures is that in England inheritance is by primogeniture, but in Wales it is not that clear cut. Which means that when there were multiple heirs (as there were in Gwynedd in 1246, for instance) the territory might be shared out between the heirs, or they might fight amongst themselves for who got the inheritance. Obviously England isn’t immune to civil war or inheritance disputes – but in Wales the tendency is for lands to fragment and be reunited only to fragment again. The early 13th Century had seen Llywelyn ap Iowerth reunite Gwynedd into a strong principality, only for it to fragment again after his heir’s death. His great-grandsons fought amongst themselves, and eventually Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was effectively in charge – with one of his brothers imprisoned, one paid off and one still free and at times plotting against him.

Another important facet of Welsh politics at the time is the Marcher Lords. These are the descendents of Norman nobility who hold lands along the border between England and Wales. I’ve always thought of them as a part of England, but this chapter made it clear that’s far too simple a picture. From the perspective of the English crown the Marcher Lords were their vassals, albeit with greater traditional liberties than other English nobles. From the perspective of the Welsh the Marcher Lords were also seen as part of the English invaders, but nonetheless there was a degree of integration between the Marcher Lords and the Welsh. More in the south than in Gwynedd to the north, but even there Llywelyn ap Iowerth married his daughters into Marcher families. However from the perspective of the Marcher Lords themselves they weren’t as firmly English as all that. Prestwich says that they saw themselves as potentially independent – that at the moment their interests aligned with the English crown (useful backup against the Welsh…) but this wouldn’t necessarily always be the case.

Prestwich says that conquest wouldn’t’ve felt inevitable to the people of the 13th Century. It would’ve seemed more plausible that the Welsh and the Marcher Lords would continue to integrate, and the sense of Wales & the Welsh as a separate entity would attenuate over time. But what actually happened was a growing sense of Welsh nationhood, which lead to a desire for recognition as independent. There were often skirmishes between the Welsh and the Marcher Lords, and whenever the English crown was having difficulties (see the bulk of Henry III’s reign) the Welsh would take advantage of it. So from the English perspective it became ever more important to get the matter of English power over Wales settled.

During Henry III’s reign raids by the Welsh on the Marches were met with shows of power by the English. A substantial English army would move some way into Wales, and a castle would be built (or planned) where they had pushed forward to. These gains stopped well short of full conquest, but they did give the English the upper hand. In 1247 the Welsh princes (including Llywelyn ap Gruffudd) acknowledged Henry III’s dominance, and submitted to the jurisdiction of the English crown. This wasn’t a long lasting situation, though – as Henry’s political difficulties increased the Welsh situation also deteriorated. He had left Edward in charge, but this appears to’ve been a mistake. And Llywelyn ap Gruffudd took full advantage of the civil war that developed after 1258, starting to call himself Prince of Wales in this year. But the English civil war also caused Llywelyn difficulties – the uncertainties of the English political situation meant he couldn’t come to a final settlement with them. A settlement was arrived at in 1267, with Llywelyn acknowledge as Prince of Wales by the English, but owing fealty to Henry III – so pseudo-independent.

After Edward succeeded to the English throne Llywelyn should’ve come to pay homage to him – but he failed to do so. This provided a formal reason for the outbreak of war, but Prestwich says that Llywelyn’s marriage to Simon de Montfort’s daughter was also a factor. The prospect of a Welsh prince who was also a de Montfort was unthinkable to Edward. The first Welsh war of his reign followed the pattern of his father’s campaigns – march an army in as a show of force, build a castle. But Edward miscalculated – the show of force wasn’t impressive enough. And the subsequent political situation was mismanaged, to a degree that united the Welsh, even Llywelyn and his brothers. The rhetoric of the dispute was focussed on the law – the Welsh wanted their own traditional Welsh laws, not the ones harshly imposed by Edward I.

The last conflict started in 1282, kicked off by one of Llywelyn’s brothers. Prestwich suggests that Llywelyn would’ve preferred not to start anything at this point, but the choice he now had was to fight with the English against his brother (unthinkable) or fight alongside his brother. Neither side was interested in compromise. Edward wanted the Welsh to submit to his authority unconditionally, and Llywelyn wanted to be recognised as an independent Prince of Wales. The turning point of the war came in late 1282 when Llywelyn was lured out of Snowdonia, perhaps by false suggestions of an alliance with the Mortimers (or by betrayal by some of his own men). His force met the English in battle at the river Irfon, and Llywelyn was killed. His brother Dafydd, now Prince of Wales as Llyweln had no male children, continued the war but Edward pushed on and it was all over but the mopping up. In June 1283 Dafydd was captured and the conquest was over.

There were still rebellions after this, and in particular the rebellion of 1294-5 required significant effort by the English to put down. But what was notable after this was that not all the Welsh were against the English crown. The country didn’t fully integrate into England, and the Welsh retained their own culture. The law codes of the two countries remained different in some respects, but criminal law was brought into line with England and the shire system of England was extended into Wales.

Prestwich also looks at what happened to the English army during these campaigns. One of the reasons for Edward’s success was that he brought a lot of resources to bear on the problem. He recruited sufficient men – not just via the feudal system, but also paid soldiers. And he provisioned and armed them properly, allowing him to keep the army in the field for longer. But Prestwich is keen not to overstate the innovations that Edward brought to the army – he says that the changes were quantitative rather than qualitative, and there’s no particular indication of novel tactics or organisation. Rather it’s that Edward’s logistics were what made the difference – his army was well fed, and supported, even when deep in Welsh territory.

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In Our Time: The Corn Laws

In 1815 the British government passed a law fixing the price of grain at a higher than market price. This was the first of the Corn Laws, and it sparked rioting by those most affected – the urban poor. The laws were to last until the late 1840s, when they were finally repealed under pressure from manufacturers concerned about the effect on trade. The three experts who talked about these laws on In Our Time were Lawrence Goldman (Oxford University), Boyd Hilton (University of Cambridge) and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey (London School of Economics).

They started the programme by giving us a bit of context. Britain in 1815 was at the start of the process of industrialisation and just coming to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. So there was concern about how the economy was going to adjust to the new demands of peace and industry. There was also concern over political instability in Europe, and worries about the spread of revolution to Britain (it’s not that long after the French Revolution after all). And the industrialisation of Britain was also shifting population and the balance of power more towards the growing manufacturing cities of the north, which was generating pressure for reform of Parliament and extension of the franchise.

So against this backdrop the landowners, who were the major interest represented in the Parliament of the time (both in terms of who has the vote and in terms of how many MPs come from which areas of the country) vote through a law that protects their profits from grain growing. During the war it was harder to import grain, so to feed the country more & more marginal land was forced into cultivation. Now that peace has broken out the landowners are worried that grain imports will force down the price of grain and the profits they make & the rents they can get from their tenant farmers will be reduced. The law was openly protectionist in nature and the landowners who passed it felt it was their due for supporting the country during the war.

Right from the start didn’t go as well as they had hoped. Britain wasn’t actually able to be self-sufficient, but the hope was that for the 4 or 5 years out of 6 when the harvest was good enough then British grain would be enough. And for the other 1 or 2 years in this cycle when the harvest failed then grain could be bought in from the Eastern European farmers and prevent famine. But as one might predict (with the benefits of a cursory, but 21st Century, knowledge of economics) without the market always being there the farmers of East Europe turned to other crops or other ways of making their living, rather than growing surplus corn just in case they could sell it to Britain. So further laws were passed trying to sort this situation out whilst still protecting the interests of the British aristocracy.

Into this situation comes the Great Reform Act of 1832. This extended the franchise to men with less property (one now needed land or a house to the value of £10). And the boroughs were redrawn – the system had been kept the same for about 400 years previously, despite changes in population. Previously there were areas (“rotten boroughs”) where there was little population but they had an MP, and places such as Manchester (a new and growing town in this period) had no representation. This reform changed the balance of power, and the industrialists started to campaign against the Corn Laws. From what the experts on the programme were saying this didn’t have much to do with the plight of those poor who couldn’t afford to buy bread. Instead it was about trading the goods that the manufacturers were making. If Britain wasn’t importing grain then it was hard to get other countries to buy Britain’s exports, which hurt the profits of the industrialists and the country’s economy as a whole. And it was about how if food is expensive, then people buy less clothing or other goods, and again less profit for the boss and less economic activity in general.

The Anti-Corn Law League was formed in 1838, and attracted many supporters. They were working towards a plan for repealing the Corn Laws after the planned 1848 election – involving propagandising to the country in general and the electorate in particular, and getting their sympathisers elected. The Anti-Anti Corn Law League (real name the Central Agricultural Protection Society – CAPS) was formed in 1844 to campaign in support of the Corn Laws. Schonhardt-Bailey gave us some figures to demonstrate something of their reach – the Anti-Corn Laws League started off with about £5,000 worth of subscriptions, and grew by 1845 to ~£250,000 worth of subscriptions. The CAPS had about ~£2,000 worth of subscriptions at that point. The CAPS were handicapped in a couple of ways – firstly their senior figures (like the Duke of Richmond) were the sort of people that fit contemporary stereotypes about useless & wasteful aristocrats, whereas the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League were charismatic and good persuaders. And the CAPS membership and support base was drawn from people who felt it wasn’t appropriate to take politics “out of doors” – i.e. politics was something that happened primarily in Parliament and between the Members of Parliament. So they had an ideological opposition to drumming up support amongst the electorate & the population at large.

Robert Peel, eventually responsible for repeal, properly enters this clash of ideologies in 1841 when he becomes Prime Minister as the leader of the Conservative Party. The programme digressed a bit to talk about Peel’s background here, as he’s the man responsible in the end for driving through repeal. Peel’s father had been a self-made man, who then became a baronet. Peel himself had been educated at Eton & Oxford, so brought up with the members of the elite, and went into politics. He was ideologically a good fit for the Conservative party of the time, but didn’t feel at ease with them – because he wasn’t part of the old aristocracy he was an outsider in some ways. The Conservative Party was generally in favour of the Corn Laws – they represented the old landed interests. Peel himself voted against repeal several times in the early 1840s, although the experts suggested that he’d always been in favour of repealing them. This probably wasn’t for the same sorts of reasons as the industrialists wanted to repeal them. The suggestion is that Peel saw the Corn Laws as protecting the short term interests of the landed aristocracy at the expense of their long term protection. Effectively he was spooked by the rioting and opposition of the general public to these laws, and believed that as long as these laws existed they kept inflamed the possibility of revolt like in France only half a century earlier. You might have hefty bank balances from your grain profits, but will that help you if the mob burn your house down?

The experts were saying that Peel started by introducing legislation to weaken the effects of the Corn Laws – they believed this was an attempt to avoid looking like he was betraying his party. The plan seemed to be to reduce the laws, and then win the 1848 election on the back of these partial repeals which would then give him the mandate to repeal the Corn Laws fully. But this isn’t how it played out, instead in 1846 Peel brought repeal to the table at Parliament, and managed to persuade sufficient of his party to support him to bring it about. The experts were suggesting perhaps he came to believe his party wouldn’t win the planned 1848 election, so wanted to get this done when the Conservatives would reap the political benefits. Apparently the language used around the issue at the time was fairly religious and overblown (with talk of martyrdom and so on), so perhaps Peel was also swept along by a feeling that it would be the right thing to do to politically die for his faith in repeal.

After the Corn Laws were repealed and a Free Trade approach to the economy was now employed. The experts said that the next couple of decades were very prosperous for Britain – with ample harvests, and plenty of growth in the economy. They also said that this didn’t have much to do with the Corn Laws or Free Trade – it was mostly a result of climatic conditions favourable to agriculture. But because of the presumed cause & effect – repeal of the Corn Laws –> prosperous Britain – this shaped the future of Britain. Free Trade was now seen in many circles as proven to lead to a booming economy.

The programme ended quite abruptly, as Bragg realised they were running out of time – one of the problems with this being a live show I guess. I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. I’m not surprised it happened to this one, it was one of those subjects I thought might be a bit dull in advance but turned out to be fascinating once it got going.