Tag: history

How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears

How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears was a three part series that looked at how the geography of North America affected the westward movement of the USA. Mears was concentrating on the 19th Century, which is when most of the westward expansion took place. Each episode looked at a different aspect of the landscape. We started with mountains, both the eastern Appalachians and the two great western ranges (the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada). All of these provided resources for the USA during the 19th Century – including wood from the Appalachians, fur from the Rockies and gold from the Sierra Nevada. But in the west this terrain was also a death trap – to get to the west as a settler you could only cross the mountains when the weather was good enough for the passes to be open. One of the places he visited was where the Donner Party were forced to spend the winter when they were caught by bad weather in the mountains on the way to California.

The second episode was about the Great Plains – which used to be the home of the buffalo before the settlers came and killed them all. That episode looked both at how difficult it was for the people who settled in the plains, and at how difficult it was to cross as you made your way west in your wagon. This is also the landscape of the cowboy – driving vast herds of cattle for days across the plains to be sold. And the third episode was about the deserts in the south west of the USA. Even today 2000 people a year die trying to cross the Sonoran desert in Arizona (mostly trying to cross from Mexico into the USA), these are not forgiving regions. Some of the things Mears talked about in this programme were the difficulties the army faced trying to set up outposts in the south west USA, and also the lawless towns that grew up during the gold rush.

As well as talking about the difficulties and opportunities that the new settlers faced on the westward journey Mears also spent quite a lot of each episode talking to the Native American people whose ancestors had lived in those landscapes for generations before the Europeans turned up. He talked to them about the various traditions and skills they had which were suited to whichever environment they lived in. And he also made sure to cover the various atrocities committed during the westward push of the USA including the displacement by force of the native peoples.

It was an interesting series which focused on the two things that always strike me when watching programmes about the history of the USA – how much bigger the landscape is than what we have in Britain and how recent all the history is!

Other TV watched over the last two weeks:

Episodes 1 and 2 of The First Georgians: The German Kings Who Made Britain – Lucy Worsley talking about the Georgian Kings.

Episodes 2 and 3 of Secrets of Bones – series about bones, their biology & evolution.

Episodes 1 and 2 of Tigers About the House – series following 2 Sumatran tiger cubs being brought up at a zoo keeper’s house in Australia for the first few months of their lives.

Voyager: To the Final Frontier – one off programme about the Voyager missions, the space probes that were launched in the 1970s and flew past the outer planets of the solar system before heading out into deep space. Interesting both for the data they sent back of the planets, and also just for the fact that 1970s tech was capable of building and launching them.

Archaeology of Portus: Exploring the Lost Harbour of Ancient Rome (Course on Future Learn)

The third course I’ve done on Future Learn was about archaeology & the Roman port Portus. And sadly I found it a bit disappointing. The course was run by Southampton University, whose archaeology department are one of the partners in the excavation of the site at Portus. Portus is in Italy, near Rome & to the west of it. From the 1st Century AD it was the main port serving the city of Rome, remaining in use until the 7th Century. Since then the coastline of Italy has changed and the whole site is now inland. Portus was one of the sites that featured in Rome’s Lost Empire which we watched over a year ago (post) and that’s part of what drew me to this course.

Over the first 5 of the 6 weeks that the course ran they had three strands of information. One of these was following the development of Portus from its foundation by Claudius in the 1st Century AD through to its use by the Ostrogothic rulers of Rome after the Western Roman Empire had fallen. The second strand was putting the port in context with the wider Roman (and post-Roman) world – looking not only at things like what sorts of goods & from where passed through the port but also at what was going on in historical terms at the time. The third strand was about archaeological methods – ranging from really basic stuff covered on any archaeology documentary, through to descriptions of cutting edge techniques. The final week was intended to pull the whole thing together and to get us involved with actual work going on right then at the site. It had a section where you could ask them to photograph things on site or answer questions about particular things. And the assignment was to look at some actual data & try and draw some conclusions.

As I said at the beginning I was rather disappointed, and in fact I never finished the final week. In part this was because it didn’t feel like it was pitched at people like me. I found the way the material was presented somewhat patronising on more than one occasion, and over all I felt they were interacting with us as pupils rather than as fellow adults (if that makes sense). This is in contrast to the other Future Learn courses I’ve done (or am doing) – the two Shakespeare ones and the English literature one I’m currently doing have managed to present technical terminology and explain details of their subject without resorting to phrases like “Well, I seem to be using a lot of big words in this one!”. I’d hesitate to say that to a primary school child for fear of offending them, let alone to a large group of adults.

I found the material in the course itself felt somewhat repetitive, and thus a bit shallow. I think that was an artifact of the way it was presented rather than actually being the case. Most sections had both a short video and a short article, with a lot of overlap in the material but some unique pieces of information in each. So to get all the information you had to watch the video and read the article, hence the feeling of repetition. Some videos were better than others – the ones where one of the educators was talking to camera on their own were the best. The ones where a student was conducting a very staged feeling interview with the educator in question were the worst – it was a good idea, I just think they failed to pull it off.

On the positive side they did give a lot of links to further information in each section. I confess I rarely followed them, because I wasn’t feeling particularly engaged with the course. There were also extra “Advanced” sections where they explained some techniques in more detail, and some of those were the more interesting parts of the course.

Overall, a rather disappointing experience. I was too put off by the tone and the feeling of repetition to ever really get properly into the subject matter.

“Vikings: Life and Legend” Thomas Williams (Lecture at British Museum Members’ Open Evening, 16/6/2014)

The most recent British Museum Members’ Open Evening was in mid-June, just before the Vikings exhibition finished. As part of the evening they had a lecture from the Project Curator, Thomas Williams. As we’d already seen the exhibition twice (post) and seen the Vikings Live film they did (post) I was more expecting to get another perspective on the exhibition rather than anything completely new, and this was the case. So I’m just going to pick out a small handful of things that particularly struck me about his talk, rather than try & recap it.

Williams was a very entertaining speaker. He opened with a drawing of stereotypical (mythical) Vikings – men on a boat, complete with horns on helmets, double headed axes, and overly muscled blonde men wearing “barbarian” outfits (fur loin cloths & cloaks). He then spent a little while explaining how pretty much everything in that was wrong, except the fact they were on the sea (but even the shape of the boat was wrong)! So one of the jumping off points for the exhibition is that it was to present an overview of what we really know about the Vikings. This is a much harder task than it had been thirty-something years ago when the last British Museum exhibition about Vikings was held – scholarship has moved on a lot since then. One of the things Williams pointed out over & over during his talk was how recently many of the items on display had been discovered. The other jumping off point for the exhibition was Roskilde 6, the ship that was the centrepiece – another relatively recent discovery (in 1997). So the exhibition was centred around what the ships were used for – in particular the interactions of the Vikings with other surrounding cultures, as traders, as settlers and of course as raiders.

As well as pointing out the many new discoveries on show in the exhibition Williams also talked about how new work has lead to re-evaluation of older finds. One of the big changes is in the evaluation of the position & status of women in the Viking culture. One aspect of this that’s very revealing about previous archaeologists’ assumptions is that early excavations of Viking burials seemed to show a distinct gender imbalance with many more men than women. On later more detailed analysis of the bones it turns out there’s about a 50:50 split of men:women, the thing that confused the first excavators is that a not insignificant number of women were buried with swords. He said it isn’t certain if these women used the swords, or if the swords were in their graves as in indication of high status.

Women also played a role in the religious/magical life of the communities. High status female burials sometimes contain decorated iron rods, which are now identified with the iron staffs that female Viking shamans were said to carry. The evidence for what exactly these women did and what part they played in their communities is fragmentary but is similar to what is known of shamanic practices in the nomadic peoples who live(d) along the northern edge of Scandinavia & Russia etc. Williams also talked about how what we think we know about Norse mythology might not be the whole story. Most of what we know is what was written down post-conversion to Christianity, and there are all sorts of obvious ways that might be biased – both from people distancing themselves from the “old bad religion”, and from people trying to make their ancestors’ beliefs not look too “wrong” by the new standards. One thing Williams speculated about was whether the attitude to women in the medieval church (i.e. temptresses, sin starting with Eve & the apple) meant that some of the powers associated with women in Norse mythology got merged in with more “acceptable” male deities. The object that he used to illustrate this idea is a small statue of what might be Odin with his two ravens sitting on either side of his throne. But the figure is dressed in female clothes. Williams was suggesting, I think, that maybe it’s a feminised Odin to reflect the feminine nature of the shamanic powers (represented by the ravens), or not Odin at all but a female deity or shaman who was later merged in the written down mythology with Odin.

A very entertaining talk – glad we went to see it.

“Plantagenet England 1225-1360” Michael Prestwich (Part 10)

The last section of the book I’m reading about Plantagenet England is about the society and people of the era. Prestwich starts the first chapter in this section by noting that whilst society was very stratified in this period the boundaries weren’t rigid and well defined (or least not in ways that historians can be sure of now). However, you can divide the society at this time into four rough groups – the great lords (both lay & church), the knights, the peasants and the merchants. This chapter deals with the first of those groups.

The Great Lords

The great lords were the higher nobility and there are a variety of phrases used in official documents of the time that can define them to one extent or another. The “prelates, earls and barons” is one, the “magnates and nobles” is another, or “earls, barons and magnates”. Also “magnates” can be used on its own. It’s easy to work out who the earls and the bishops are from the surviving documents, and they are well defined – it’s a specific title generally relating to a place.

The earls were the elite of the nobility. There were 30 titles during this period (1225-1360) not all of which were in existence for the whole time, and some individuals could hold multiple earldoms. This means there were very few earls at any one time – for instance in 1300 there were 9. The title itself was mostly honourific – they had few special duties and not much extra income from earldom related sources. Because of their status they had to attend the king when required, and were always summoned to parliament whenever it met. Some earldoms came with ceremonial duties (like carrying a particular sword during the coronation), some had military ranks attached (i.e. the earls of Norfolk and Hereford held the office of Marshal and of Constable during this period). So being an earl was mostly about status – one of the things that so annoyed the earls about Gaveston was his habit of giving rude nicknames to (other) earls. So rather than talking about (the earl of) Lincoln he would refer to “Burstbelly”.

Earls were wealthy – newly created earls were generally granted lands worth around 1,000 marks/year, which gives a feel for the minimum appropriate wealth (1 mark is 2/3 of a £). The title of an earl (which he was referred to by) related to a specific county, but that wasn’t necessarily where the earl held most lands. They also had symbolic swords, granted along with the title. During the 14th Century they started to wear coronets, and they were permitted the most costly clothing (like cloth of gold trimmed in ermine). Generally they also made much of their heraldic symbols, and used them to decorate their possessions and clothing.

During this period there wasn’t much continuity in the various titles. If there was no direct male heir, the family name died out and the lands (and titles) would be divided amongst the female heirs. That wrinkle in how inheritance worked was something I’d not learnt before – primogeniture for sons, but divided for daughters. Prestwich looks at the statistics for earldoms being extinguished (no valid heirs) and comes to the conclusion that whilst there seems to be an unusually high number of sonless and childless families, that’s probably just by chance as it’s such a small sample group rather than due to any underlying cause. Prestwich also spends a couple of pages considering the royal attitude towards extinguishing and granting earldoms. Events in Henry III’s reign encouraged Edward I to be very conservative about creating new earldoms, and to be keen to control the power of those that existed. Edward II and Edward III had more need to create new earldoms, because they had family to provide for. It was also important for the King to have enough earls – being accompanied by several earls enhanced the prestige of the King’s court, particularly important on foreign trips. And there was a general policy of granting earldoms to those related by blood to the royal family, in the hope this would keep them loyal.

There’s not much in the sources about the countesses, but what there is tends to indicate that these high status & wealth women had some influence on the events of the day. Which is not surprising, but frustrating that we don’t know more about them. Prestwich talks about several notable women. Most of what is known about them revolves around their marriages, as you’d expect in chronicles from this era. But widows (of men with no heirs) could live out their lives as the landowner & head of their estates – and their power in this area was as much as any man’s, just they had much less power in politics.

Next down the social tree from earls were barons. Being a baron didn’t confer any rights or powers, rather it imposed some requirements on you (like paying a particular tax) so it wasn’t necessarily something people wanted. Barons did have a voice in parliament, which was formally recognised. For instance in the Ordinances of 1311 many matters were set down as requiring “the consent of the baronage”. Inconveniently for the later historian not all barons were summoned individually to parliament, so there aren’t complete lists surviving. The numbers who did get individual summons varied between a low point of around 30 to a high point of around 80. Generally Baron wasn’t used as a title, those who were barons tended to go by “Lord” and can be hard to distinguish from knights. As a result it’s difficult for the modern historian to be sure how many there were, or who exactly they were. Prestwich notes that one thorough survey (by a historian who published it in 1927) came up with 135 baronies, plus another 72 probables. So this is still a relatively small elite. Again the inheritance was by primogeniture for sons, but divided if there were only daughters – so sometimes baronies fractured into smaller pieces which may’ve all had the same baronial status. There was a reasonable amount of social mobility into the baronial class, with knights who distinguished themselves in battle or supported the right earl during a domestic conflict standing a chance of being granted lands that would confer that status.

Adjacent to the secular hierarchy was the clerical one. In the category of great lords we have the archbishops, the bishops and the greater abbots. Archbishops and bishops are well defined, but as with the barons the “greater abbots” are less clear. Not all of these men were of aristocratic birth, it was definitely possible to rise through the ranks as a clergyman. Bishoprics were often handed out as rewards to men who had held government posts. Some bishops were exceedingly wealthy, on a par with earls, others less so. The greater abbots were summoned to parliament, but otherwise their political role was relatively unimportant. Again they were often wealthy. The sources of the time judge abbots on their ability as manager of their monastic estates.

These great lords did not have a fixed address – the great lived in households which moved around between their various houses and court. The household comprised all the furnishing and so on that the lord moved with him, as well as his staff. Even a relatively low status member of the elite might have 25 staff in his household, spread throughout the various departments. This number doesn’t include any knights or men-at-arms who were retained, nor people like huntsmen or carters. A large household plus other employees for an important magnate might run to 200 or more. As well as the size of the household depending on the status of the lord, over the time period that this book covers there was a general increase in the size of the magnates’ households. Staff were generally provided with robes, and with food whilst at the household. They would also get wages, which might be paid by giving them the right to the rents from a particular estate.

Prestwich discusses in detail how this era had a mix of traditional feudalism and what’s known as “bastard feudalism”. In the first, the retainer holds lands from his lord and owes him service for them. In the latter, the retainer is rewarded for his service by cash (which may be rent from an estate). The two systems existed side by side during this period, and Prestwich is quite clear that he doesn’t see it as a transition from one system to another.

The castles and manor houses that these great lords built & lived in were overt expressions of their power. Although there weren’t any explicit restrictions on who could build a castle, it took wealth to do so. Generally the great lords built new fashionable residences when they could, but it wasn’t seen as necessary – more something to do when one could afford it. During this period residences were becoming more comfortable and less defensive, although it’s the military aspects that survive to the present day (being built from stone instead of wood).

The ceremonies surrounding death were another way for a magnate’s family to indicate their status. Elaborate funerals were important, as were ostentatious memorials (such as gravestones and monuments). Families tended to be buried in the same church for generations, although this could lead to arguments particularly in the case of women who had married more than once. Prestwich gives the example of Isabella (daughter of William Marshal) who married three times, and ended up with her body buried in Beaulieu, her heart in Tewkesbury and her entrails in Missenden. Other people worried about the anticipated bodily resurrection at the Last Judgement – sometimes a person was buried in multiple places, then later their body would be gathered back up by a relative to be reburied in one place. Also important for religious reasons was to provide money for services to be held after death, to ensure a short stay in Purgatory.

Prestwich ends the chapter by being a little scathing about anyone either contemporary or modern who tries to draw conclusions about “all the great lords”, because there’s too much variance between the individuals. The stereotype is of boneheaded brawlers, and some do fit this characterisation. Others don’t, in a variety of ways.

< Interlude | Next Chapter >

Mud Sweat and Tractors; Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures; The Crusades

Mud Sweat and Tractors is a four part series about the changes in farming in Britain over the last century or so. It split it up into four areas – milk, horticulture, wheat and beef – and treated each as a separate story, so each episode seemed quite self-contained. Each time there were two or three farming families chosen who had photographs and video footage stretching back to the 1930s. So they made good case studies and could talk about why they or their Dad or Grandad had made particular decisions at particular points. And the old videos were good for showing what the actual changes were. As well as this there were several social historians or experts in other parts of the farming/food production process who could talk about the wider trends that the individual farmers & their decisions fitted into.

Separating it out like that worked for telling the individual stories, but I think I might’ve like a bit more explicit drawing together of the themes that affected all the areas of farming. I could work some of them out, it just would’ve been nice to see more discussion of it in the actual programmes. Some of the commonalities were that the Second World War, and the aftermath of it, were a turning point – farming had been in decline before that, but during the war food imports were cut off and so increased production was important. After the war there was concern that Britain shouldn’t return to the pre-war situation, so farmers were given financial incentives to stay farming and to increase food production. And a lot of effort put into scientifically improving the breeds and technology used in farming. And the common theme after that is of food production getting too high – too much that wasn’t being eaten – so the subsidies go and it gets much harder for farmers economically. In addition some of the previous good ideas become seen as not such a good thing – things like the increase in chemicals used in horticulture in the post-war era (like DDT). Or things like breeding beef cattle for larger size & less fatty meat, but then it turns out that doesn’t taste so good so you have to compensate and fatten them up a bit.

It was interesting watching this with J. I grew up in a town so it was just history for me, and someone else’s history if that makes sense. But J grew up in a very rural area, right near farms. For a while his family rented a house on a farm, most of the rest of the time they lived in a 10 house village with working farms around them. So a lot of the 70s and 80s footage included things he remembered seeing as a child. I think we watched one bit of it three or four times in the last episode, because it included a hay baler that was exactly the sort he’d been fascinated by as a little boy. It had a robot arm, and somehow hay went in, was moved around by the arm then came out as square bales. Which was kinda fascinating to watch 🙂

In Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures Richard Fortey visited 3 particularly important and rich fossil beds, and talked about what they’d taught us about the evolution of life. One commonality of the three is that they have fossils with the soft body parts preserved, which means we know so much more about the animals than is generally possible from fossils.

First (and most obvious to me) was the Burgess Shale – a section of the Rockies where early multicellular organisms are well preserved. We’d just seen that on the David Attenborough programme we watched recently (post) so this wasn’t new ground for us. Still nice to see tho, particularly as I remember reading about it when I was a teenager. The second episode took us to China and to some new fossil beds there which are re-writing our ideas of how birds evolved and what the differences between dinosaurs and birds actually are. This is because these recently discovered fossils include several feathered dinosaurs. And the last of the three fossil beds was in Germany, with many fossils from early in the explosion of mammalian diversity after the dinosaurs died out. These well preserved fossils include lots of bats (already looking very sophisticated), early horses, and the earliest known primate fossils.

This was an interesting series 🙂 I’m sure I’ve said before that I wanted to be a palaeontologist when I was in my early teens – until I worked out that it would mean lots of being outside grubbing about in the dirt & rocks! So I particularly like seeing these sorts of programmes, and all the cool stuff that’s been discovered since I was reading so much about it.

We also finished watching a series about The Crusades this week. It was presented by Thomas Asbridge, and I’m pretty sure we’ve seen it before – but not during a period when I was blogging about the TV we watch so I can’t be 100% sure (this is one incentive to keep writing up the programmes we see!). Sadly the reason we’re pretty sure we’ve seen it is because the irritations seemed familiar. Some of that was the style – whenever there was a static image (like a painting from a manuscript) they’d tilt it or pan around on it in a particular irritating fashion. And there was a lot of over dramaticness to the script and the way Asbridge presented it. And for all it was billed as “groundbreaking” I didn’t really have any “wow I didn’t know that/remember that” moments (and I don’t think that’s just because I think I’ve seen it before).

It covered the Crusades in three chunks. First the start, and the initial successes (and their attendant brutalities). Next was Richard the Lionheart vs. Saladin. The final episode looked at the Muslim success in driving out the Christians, and at how it was actually the need to fight the encroaching Mongol Empire that drove this and the effects on the Christian Crusader Kingdoms were more of a side-effect.

Overall it was interesting enough to keep watching, but not as interesting as I’d hoped.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 1 of How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears – a look at how the geography of the USA affected the colonisation and history of the Wild West.

Episode 1 of Secrets of Bones – series about bones, their biology & evolution.

In Our Time: Robert Boyle

I know of Robert Boyle because of Boyle’s Law (which I must’ve learnt in GCSE physics about 25 years ago although I couldn’t give you the details now), but as In Our Time explained his part in developing the scientific method is probably the more important part of his legacy. And in his own time his piety and religious writings were also important. The three experts who discussed it were Simon Schaffer (University of Cambridge), Michael Hunter (Birkbeck College, University of London) and Anna Marie Roos (University of Lincoln).

Robert Boyle was born in 1627 as the 14th child and 7th son of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork. The Boyles were fabulously wealthy. Not all of the children survived to adulthood, of those that did the daughters were married off advantageously (although not always happily) and the sons inherited their father’s land. Robert Boyle as the youngest son probably had the least lands and income, but this still inclued lands in County Limerick and a manor in Dorset. And an income of around £3,000/year (if I remember right) which made him ludicrously wealthy at the time. An anecdote the experts used to illustrate this was that Boyle funded Hooke’s telescope for the Royal Society, which was almost not built because it was too expensive and Hooke couldn’t secure funds – Boyle stepped in and paid, and the programme gave the impression that this wasn’t a stretch for him.

Boyle was educated at Eton for a few years starting when he was 8 years old, just after his mother died. Then in his mid-teens he went abroad, with a tutor, and spent several years in Continental Europe including France and Italy on a sort of Grand Tour. During that time he began to develop an interest in science, but more important to him he had the opportunity to debate religion with various scholars of the day. At some point in these years abroad he had a type of religious conversion experience during a thunderstorm in which he thought he might die. On his return to Ireland (and then England) in the 1640s he began to write essays about his understanding of religion, seeing this as his life’s work. One of the experts, Hunter I think, said that if this was all Boyle had done then we probably wouldn’t remember him – his style and his thinking weren’t particularly novel or readable.

Boyle’s practice of religion was a fairly practical matter. He was part of a school of thought that felt the best way to live a godly Christian life was to carefully examine your past to determine if you’d taken the actions most pleasing to God (and then presumably you have a pattern for the future). It’s an ongoing process and would require meticulous attention to detail and thinking about other alternative things you could’ve done and so on. His scientific interests were also an outgrowth of his piety – a belief that the best way to learn about God was to learn about his creation. Bragg asked a few times if there had been a “scientific conversion” moment to match Boyle’s religious turning point, but either Hunter or Schaffer pointed out that our division between religion and science as separate things with different spheres of relevance is anachronistic when thinking about the 17th Century.

During the 1650s and later Boyle became involved with a group of men who met regularly in Wadham College, Oxford and who would later form the nucleus of the Royal Society. They were mostly university educated, and so Boyle was a bit of an outlier (although I think not the only one) with his lack of formal education past his schooling at Eton. Whilst here he formed a close working partnership with Robert Hooke, who was particularly gifted at building apparatus and the practical side of chemistry & physics experimentation. The work Boyle is remembered for on air and gases was done in collaboration with Hooke. Boyle also corresponded with one of his sisters, Lady Ranelagh, about his work – and in later life he moved to London and lived in her household (which didn’t include her husband, her marriage hadn’t been a happy one).

Boyle was meticulous about writing down his experiments, and also wrote about how one should both carry out and record scientific experiments. Roos pointed out that modern day Materials and Methods sections in scientific papers are the direct descendants of Boyle’s ideas about the scientific method. He said that one should write down exactly what had been done, so that another person could do the same experiment again. He also said that the experimenter should come to the experiment with an open mind, instead of already already decided what they expected to happen. Hunter finished up the discussion by saying that this initial development of the scientific method is Boyle’s greatest legacy.

Boyle turns out to’ve been a much more interesting man than I’d expected from my half memory of his law about the relationship between gas volume & pressure!

The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots; Churches: How to Read Them

The title of the Channel 5 documentary The Spy Who Brought Down Mary Queen of Scots was a little misleading – it wasn’t about Francis Walsingham (the titular spy) per se, instead it was about the Babington Plot in 1586, Walsingham’s role in that and the consequences for Mary Queen of Scots. That relatively narrow focus also meant that they elided a lot of the background for why Mary Queen of Scots was under house arrest in England in the first place and just opened with her having been so for 18 years. Whilst I’m quibbling about their narrative choices, I shall also note that I didn’t much care for all their stylistic choices for imagery. In particular whenever there was “spy stuff” going on they used very modern imagery (CCTV cameras, racks of networked servers etc) which juxtaposed extremely oddly with their actors dressed up in Elizabethan costume quoting actual letters from the era!

Having said all that, I actually thought it was a rather good programme. First they explained the situation leading up to the Babington Plot – Mary Queen of Scots under house arrest in England, and as a Catholic and a relative of Elizabeth I’s she was a potential focus for rebellion or invasion. There had been previous unsuccessful attempts to assassinate Elizabeth I. Francis Walsingham (as Elizabeth’s spy master) was obviously concerned about communications to & from Mary Queen of Scots, and about the potential for trouble being stirred up by her or on behalf of her. The Babington Plot was the latest in a series of attempts to free Mary Queen of Scots – it began as a conspiracy between a group of disaffected Catholic noblemen, lead by a young man called Anthony Babington. Communications with Mary were routinely intercepted and monitored, so the conspirators recruited an English Catholic priest called Gilbert Gifford who had fled to France. Gifford returned to England and made his way to the brewers who supplied Mary’s household with beer – he devised a method of smuggling messages to her inside the bungs of the beer barrels and so communication was established. In this bit of the programme they also explained how difficult it was to be a Catholic priest in England at the time and showed us several priest holes in a country house of the era.

Mary was at first very cautious about how she responded to the messages – not just using a cipher and being circumspect with her words, but also being very non-committal about proposed schemes. Gradually, however, she began to trust and to believe that just possibly this time it was going to work and she would not only be freed but also put on the English throne. Finally in a letter she said something that could be taken as endorsement of the plot, and unknown to her this is where it all started to fall apart for her. Walsingham hadn’t been sitting by in ignorance of this plot – instead he’d had a hand in it from almost the start. He’d had his eye on Babington & the other conspirators, and when Gifford had been sent back to England with his first message Walsingham had him seized. He was turned into a double agent, and it was Walsingham who designed the method of getting messages to Mary Queen of Scots. All the letters sent this way were copied by Walsingham’s people and the cipher used in them was broken. When the damning message was sent by Mary Queen of Scots, Walsingham knew he had his evidence to convict Mary of treason – but just to be sure he had his codebreaker & forger add a postscript to the letter to make it more explicit before forwarding it on to Babington.

Walsingham then swooped in and arrested the conspirators. He also lured Mary Queen of Scots into behaving as if she expected a rescue, then arresting her. All were tried and convicted of treason. The men were hung, drawn and quartered but Elizabeth did not sign Mary’s death warrant for some time. Eventually she reluctantly signed, and then tried to countermand it but the warrant had been whisked off to where Mary was being held and Mary was executed within hours. The programme was very much on the side of this being Elizabeth genuinely changing her mind and regretting signing. But from what (little) I’ve read, I’d always picked up the impression of her wanting to have her cake and eat it too – putting on a good show of remorse after the fact but only when the deed was irrevocable.

Overall a good programme, my quibbles aside 🙂

Churches: How to Read Them was a 6 part series of half hour programmes about British church architecture and decoration that we’d recorded ages ago. It was presented by Richard Taylor and covered the history of churches from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. I wanted to like this more than I ended up doing. Not that I disliked it as such, more that it seemed a bit shallow at times but I can’t really articulate what I would’ve preferred. However it did show a nice selection of surviving examples of the various sorts of architecture & decorations that he was talking about in each episode.

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 3 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Episode 2 of The Crusades – series presented by Thomas Asbridge about the Crusades.

Episode 2 of Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – Richard Fortey looking at three fossil sites that changed our idea of the past.

In Our Time: The Bluestockings

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley

A Very British Murder with Lucy Worsley was a three part series about the peculiar relationship of Victorian & Edwardian Britain with murder. It was half about the real life crimes that shocked (and enthralled) the nation during the era – including such notable villains as Jack the Ripper and Dr Crippen as well as others I’d not heard of before. This strand of the programme also looked at the changing face of crime detection and reporting during this era – the very idea of police detectives was come up with in Victorian times. The British fascination with murders also got a boost from cheapening newspapers and rising literacy.

Worsley was also talking about fictional murders – and the blurry line between dramatised stories of real life crimes and purely fictional crimes. Particularly in Victorian times an especially juicy story might get turned into the plot of a melodrama or for a travelling puppet theatre show. People would also write in to New Scotland Yard with their own ideas for how to solve high profile unsolved murders – and Worsley tied this to the beginning of the detective novel.

Purely fictional murder sensational novels and detective stories rose in popularity through Victorian and Edwardian times, reaching their highpoint with the Golden Age of detective fiction between the two world wars. This is the time of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers etc and in their fiction murder has become very sanitised, and detection a parlour game. Figuring out “whodunnit” before you got to the reveal at the end of the book had much the same appeal as doing a crossword, and those were also rising in popularity at the time.

This was a TV series with a sense of fun – Worsley dressed up in period costume, and acted out snippets of melodramas and so on as they fitted into the story she was telling us. Including a bit of the transformation scene from the stage production of Jekyll & Hyde!

Other TV watched this week:

Episode 2 of Mud, Sweat and Tractors – series about the history of farming in 20th Century Britain.

Episode 1 of The Crusades – series presented by Thomas Asbridge about the Crusades.

Episode 1 of Fossil Wonderlands: Nature’s Hidden Treasures – Richard Fortey looking at three fossil sites that changed our idea of the past.

Martin Amis’ England – a one-off programme featuring Martin Amis talking about what he thinks it is to be English and about modern society. The BBC blurb for it sounds a lot more negative than I thought it actually was.

Hidden Histories: WW1’s Forgotten Photographs – one-off programme about the photographs taken by ordinary soldiers during WWI. Particularly featuring two photographers, one German and one British, whose descendants met up as part of the programme.

In Our Time: The Talmud

The Talmud is one of the most significant texts in Judaism, second in importance only to the Torah. It is in part a commentary on the Torah, and in part an ongoing discussion (or argument) between various Rabbis & sages about Judaism, the Law and how to interpret the Law. The three experts who discussed the Talmud on In Our Time were Philip Alexander (University of Manchester), Rabbi Norman Solomon (Oxford Centre for Jewish and Hebrew Studies) and Laliv Clenman (Leo Baeck College and King’s College London).

The Talmud began to be written down sometime around the 2nd Century AD, and grew out of an oral tradition which purports to have begun with Moses. There are actually two different Talmuds, one which began to be compiled in or near Jerusalem, and one which was compiled in Babylon. The Jerusalem Talmud is much briefer than the Babylonian one – it might contain a story in a sentence where the Babylonian Talmud takes a page to say the same thing. The Jerusalem Talmud stopped being worked on around the 5th Century AD, whereas the Babylonian Talmud continued to be edited for at least another couple of centuries. Over the time since then the Jerusalem Talmud has decreased in importance, until nowadays if you say “The Talmud” you’re assumed to be referring to the Babylonian one. The experts suggested this was in part historical accident, due possibly to the ease of spread of the text within the Islamic world during the 8th and 9th Centuries – Jews living anywhere from Iraq to Spain were connected, and from Spain it could spread through European Jewish communities too. Whereas the trading and travelling links from Israel were more limited.

The Talmud is composed of two sorts of texts. The first is the Mishnah which is a compilation of the laws, taken both from the Torah and from the oral tradition. This is organised by type into 6 categories, thus making it much easier to refer to than needing to find the right place in the Torah where the subject comes up. These tend to be brief, and require interpretation – which is the purpose of the rest of the Talmud, called the Gemara. The Gemara isn’t just a straightforward linear commentary on the Mishnah, it can go off on tangents and explain contexts around an interpretation. It also contains stories about the Rabbis who taught and argued about the interpretations. These are generally, I think, matchable to historical personages (either living during the centuries the text was being compiled or before when it was an oral tradition) but the historicity of any individual story is a matter of speculation.

Once the Talmud had been compiled and edited it was not frozen in place as a definitive version. Over the subsequent centuries many people have written commentaries, and expanded and re-interpreted what is in the Talmud in the light of their own circumstances and of new technology and so on. The most famous of these, that is printed in many versions of the Talmud was written in the Middle Ages by a French Rabbi known as Rashi. A modern (relatively speaking) version of the Talmud is generally laid out with the Mishnah in the centre of the page, surrounded by the relevant passages from the Gemara. In one of the margins is Rashi’s commentary on this section, and other commentaries or glosses are in other margins.

All three experts were keen to say that the Talmud is not a book, not in the same way that Christian religious texts are. Instead it is an argument or a conversation. You aren’t expected to read the Talmud and take it as the final word, you are expected to read it and engage with it, to argue about the things you disagree with and put forward your own interpretations. This begins even when the Talmud is being taught in Jewish schools – the pupils sit in pairs reading the text and arguing about, even taking positions they don’t agree with to test each others ideas. The Talmud is supposed to evolve with the generations.

However that’s pretty unwieldy if you’re a Jew who wants to know how to follow the law in a particular circumstance – you’d pretty much have to go and consult with a Rabbi for every ruling. So there have also arisen lists of brief statements of what the law is in several common circumstances. These aren’t just distillations of what is said in the Talmud, they also reflect the compiler’s biases and interpretations – so they can be thought of as a part of the Talmud tradition in that sense. However the three experts didn’t seem very keen on them as a concept, even if they are useful – because they freeze the ongoing conversation into a bullet pointed list.

This felt like a programme that barely scratched the surface of what they were talking about. For instance they didn’t have any time to talk about specific examples, which might’ve helped elucidate what sorts of changes had taken place across the centuries since it was originally written down.