Philosophy

Biskieboo – I’m fascinated by how you immersed the personal in the more historical.

This is roughly at the upper limit (timewise) of what I study, but my knowledge of the Anglo-Saxons is v v poor. Was interested to read about the Viking problem and more about Alfred’s own translation projects (this was a v important thing back then).

The things which I found particularly interesting related to ‘relating to Alfred’; discerning ‘greatness’ in history; and the genealogy.

You describe a very real affinity with or even affection for Alfred. It seems to me that we do draw on historical figures, places etc to ground ourselves, to locate ourselves. At a more intimate level, I can’t imagine anyone who isn’t in some way fascinated by their own family history (and I mean this going beyond the recent BBC-inspired vogue – ‘vogue’s a bit harsh). But even at the level of figures like Alfred, we place ourselves – not absurdly, I add – in relation to them. I always smile whenever I walk past one of those blue plaques set upon London houses, to tell me that so-and-so lived there (and I smile even when, as happens, I haven’t a clue who the person is). I used to live – and still work shopwise – close to an area of London which has a curious mix (Hampstead) of such places. There is a road on which you’ll find Freud’s house (and the small Freud Museum). Just up at the end of the road, there is a Jesuit house and an Opus Dei house, each with their own particular little histories! I used to love walking – slightly poncily – up to the pubs in Hampstead. There’s one there which is supposed to be where a whole bunch of thesps (like Olivier) hung out in the 60s. If you’re willing to walk, there’s another (The Spaniards’ Inn) which is, supposedly, the old haunt of older writers (I’ve heard Marlowe’s name mentioned, though I am still sceptical).

On the translations, I’m interested to note which texts you mentioned: Boethius, Gregory the Great and a Psalter. Obviously liturgical texts were v important at this time. The text which caught my eye, however, was Gregory the Great’s Pastoral Care. It’s a big work (can’t say I’ve read all of it, let alone translated) but interesting. THe third(?) section has each chapter structured on the differences between ‘pastorally caring for’ contrasting groups of people. The example I know (3.27) pertains to those who are and are not married (a most interesting text, which complicates – I didn’t say breaks – conventional notions of what an early medieval Christian view of marriage, sex etc looks like). The other reason it’s interesting pertains to Gregory’s ‘the Great’. You touched on the way Alfred came to be seen as ‘great’: I am not sure precisely how Gregory came to be seen as such, but it is difficult to overestimate just how respected and authoritative a figure he was from the 7th century on. This was a very quick authority he gained after his death (604), and is interesting if we bear in mind differences in communication etc. He’s also important in all sorts of other ways: e.g. the first pope from a monastic background. In many ways, he’s one of the figures from my period for whom I have the most affection (though I dare not say that in seminars: Gregory the Great’s great etc).

The genealogy business is also interesting. (What’s your son’s name?). It relates partly to what I was saying about grounding, rooting yourself. Genealogies are damn important in a way: it connects us to the past, to these people on whom, in a sense we are dependent for our very being, and yet whom we can never know exactly. Obviously, there was a trend for quite fanciful genealogies throughout this period (and in others). Generally, they seemed to relate either to Christian history, or to Greco-Roman myths. (There were others, of course: what is interesting, though, is that in being written up – in Latin, of course – they inevitably have a Roman/Christian pressure on them). The Franks (in what’s now France/Germany) had their own myth that they were descended from the Trojans, while the Visigoths said they were from ‘Scandza’ (Scandinavia). People have taken these quite seriously as the remnants of historical memory. (I should add that they also had political utility at the time at which they were, either, written, or disseminated). At times, I feel quite blase about this. But I then consider, were someone to say to my grandfather (lives in India, is a Parsi – an Indian Zoroastrian – descendent of Persians [hence 'Parsi'] migrating a long time back) were told that actually his descendents did not go back, ultimately, to what is now Iran, he would be hurt to the core. (As it happens, his belief that they do is quite reasonable). Hurt not because he thinks of himself as Persian or, anachronistically, Iranian (he’s a proud Indian), but because this story of migration, of a separate (but quite happily ‘integrated’ to use the modern word) community in India is so important and central to his identity. (In this he is symptomatic of most Parsis).

Sorry, have been going on way too long. Thanks for the write up.

Thanks Chooch.
Gregory does sound great. I might read up on him next.
The genealogy in Asser from the beginning is:
Adam, Seth, Enos, Cainan, Mahalaheel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, Noah, Seth, Bedwig, Hwala, Hathra, Itermon, Heremod, Sceldwa, Beaw, Taetwa, Geat, Godwulf, Finn, Frithuwulf, Frealaf, Frithuwald, Woden, Baeldaeg, Brand, Gewis, Elesa, Cerdic, Creoda, Cynric, Ceawlin, Cuthwine, Cutha, Ceolwold, Cenred, Ingild, Eoppa, Eafa, Ealhmund, Egbert, Aethelwulf, Alfred.

I think my son got off quite lightly with Finn. I thought it was an Irish name when I chose it (to go with his Irish surname – which is not the same as mine). I had rarely heard the name before he was born but it is fairly popular now.

It does explain in the notes of the book that the genealogy is to be understood as a product of royal ideology. Alfred’s list of ancestors contains West Saxon heroes and the pagan god Woden before ultimately gaining Christian respectability!

BB

Is your interest in history recent? I say this because so many people I know are devouring history in a way I have never seen. Why do you think this is? It might be trite to ascribe it to dislocation but I actually think its therapeutic in many ways in that it does not make demands like philosophy or science – at least not for me since my head was not made for such thoughts. I did history as an undergrad and if I have to be honest I have not gone back before 1919 since. I have a lot of catching up to do. The problem is where to begin By the way your powers of editing are astounding.

Re: genealogy I think they still went in for that kind of thing in renaissance epics like Orlando Furioso by way of praising the patron.
I’m quite sure I come from a long line of nameless illiterate peasants, though there is something grounding when you go to the village cemetery and see so many grave stones with your surname on them. No Norfolk inbreeding jokes please, you needed a dispensation form the Bishop to do such things.

Choo Choo

You just took me back 15 years to Southwell House, is it still there????????????? I went on a retreat there back in the day (apparently one of the suspected Jack the Rippers lived there!). I remember having to go to Soho and see the work being done with the homeless and people with drug problems. Walking through Lincoln’s Inn Fields just now shows me how little has changed. I had no idea there was an Opus Dei house near there. Do they have pitch battles between Arrupe boys and the Escrivva crew? I will confess my prejudices. I owe so much to the SJ and despite the doubts and confusions of my mind they still inform my better decisions. Added to that I know quite a few Basques and their anti Castillian influence has been great. Well AMDG as we used to say.

Simon

I used to take Year 11 kids to Southwell House in the nineties. Fantastic place. Despite coming from all sorts of backgrounds Jain, Buddhist, Catholic, Evangelical, Nothing-in-particular they all really loved it.

PS Did you know about Antony Gormley’s initials?

Biskie:

Many thanks.

I think I mentioned that Anglo-Saxon history was an interest of mine many years ago but almost all your info I had either forgotten or never knew.

I hadn’t realised that he did not attain his ‘Greatness’ until the 16thC. I knew that he had the reputation of being a ‘Good’ king and that he was a scholar but I wasn’t sure how much of that was later hagiography. Contemporary sources seem to attest pretty strongly that his reputation was fully deserved.

ChooChoo:

Talking of pubs in Hampstead, I was an occasional visitor to a Young’s house in (I think) Flask Walk. I lived in Ealing in those days and Young’s Ordinary and Fuller’s London Pride were my tipples of choice.

‘G’ and Gordy/Gerry – Southwell House is indeed still there. (I guess it’s not quite up the road from the Freud Museum – that leads you to the back).

“Do they have pitch battles between Arrupe boys and the Escrivva crew?”

Oh how amazing it would be. I dream of organising one of those old-fashioned, pre-codification of the rules days football matches which pitched whole communities against one another, the Workaholics on one side, the Jesus creepers on the other.

But, of course, in one of those odd scenarios the Catholic church does pretty well (there are some more lovable eccentricities), they probably don’t speak to one another, let alone kick one another’s shins.

Boltonian – I think the pub is now called The Flask (still on Flask Walk). (It is quite strange: there is a bar, with a divider, a wooden wall on the punters’ side (but not on the other), resulting in two ‘rooms’, each with its own entrance onto the street. Did you ever go to the Holly Bush just up the road? It’s occasionally a tad poncy (I once overheard someone younger than me wearing a necktie and beret, smoking a clove cigarette – back in the day – with a cigarette holder say: ‘Yes, but Hamlet’s basically about gay automatons’, with the nods of purported comprehension among his companions a bizarre and innappropriate response to his absurdity) and also a tad crowded. But when near empty, it’s a lovely watering hole.

Biskie – apologies for raising all this Hampstead stuff. Back to Alfred. Thanks for the genealogy. And, also, I must echo Simon Boccanegra: “By the way your powers of editing are astounding.” It would take me about three weeks to come up with a long-winded summary three times as long. Let me know if Gregory is as nice to you as he has been to me so far.

Gerry,
I had no idea what you were talking about re: Anthony Gormly until I looked in wikipedia informed me what you were on about; and he went to Ampleforth. Well I never, with six siblings he must be from some ancient recusant family. I better stop this Papist talk less Boltonian thinks this blog has turned into the Brompton Oratory Newsletter.

This is a broad church. :-}

Thanks for this, Biskie.

By any reckoning Alfred was a remarkable figure and, insofar as it is possible to judge at this distance in time, he does come across as a very appealing character: a successful leader and man of action who was also reflective and intellectually curious. Stenton calls him ‘…the most effective ruler who had appeared in western europe since the death of Charlemagne’. It could be argued that his success in driving the Danes from Wessex and maintaining it as a largely Viking-free zone may have saved a distinctively English culture and learning from complete obliteration, and it also led to his recognition as a national leader of the English, which was the first step towards national unity.

The Danes may have continued to cause trouble, but he seems to have made an impression on at least one of their kings, Guthrum. He stood godfather at Guthrum’s baptism, and negotiated a treaty with him which acknowledged equal status for the English in areas ruled by the Danes.

His translations of Latin texts into the vernacular and their dissemination is, as ChooChoo says, of immense importance – it marks the beginning of English prose literature – and was by no means a straightforward task, precisely because it was the first time the English language had been used in this way (rather than for poetry, charters and laws, which in any case stemmed from an oral tradition). Ths was a time when book-learning was largely the province of latin-speaking monks and clerics; Alfred’s view that it was also the business of any man who aimed to be worthy of respect was little short of revolutionary in ninth century England.

It was news to me that he may have suffered from kidney stones, If so, I can empathise (when I was in my teens I suffered repeated bouts of renal colic).

The reference to the statue in Winchester brought on a bout of nostalgia. I know it well from the years I spent working on the excavation of the Saxon Old Minster there. This church was founded in the seventh century by Cenwalh, king of Wessex, and became, in a sense, the royal chapel, so Alfred would almost certainly have worshipped there. The original church, which was fairly small, formed the nucleus of a much larger and more elaborate structure in the tenth century, but the Normans pulled the whole lot down when they built the present cathedral (the outline of the Saxon building is marked out in the grass on the north side of the nave). The Normans presumably thought that they could do better, but their original structure seems to have been pretty shoddy. The first tower collapsed (allegedly because God disapproved of the burial of William Rufus beneath it), and if you go into the north transept you will see that there is scarcely a line or measurement which is true, and the arches of the triforium arcade are all shapes and sizes (we used to joke that it was the revenge of the Saxon masons).

I also got up close and personal with the Vikings at Repton. The great army wintered there in 873/874, sacking and taking over a monastery and fortifying the site as their camp, with the church as a kind of gatehouse. Before they left they demolished a semi-subterranean building (probably an oratory) to ground level and used the below-ground part as a burial chamber for somone of importance – possibly even Ivar the Boneless, who disappears from the record around this time. The burial, which was surrounded by the stacked bones of about 200 other individuals, predominantly well built, muscular males, was at the eastern end of the building; the floor of the western part was covered by a greasy mess full of food debris, splashes of lead (presumably melted down from the roofs), and fragments of ivory filigree and glass beads etc from smashed up book bindings and reliquaries. Nearby there was a shallow pit containing the crouched bodies of four adolescents – possibly slaves sacrificed as part of the burial ritual. and the old ground surface around the building was littered with remnants of their loot – silver and silver gilt dress pins, brooches and such. Not nice people.

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Genealogy and the role it plays in rooting us to the past is another fascinating issue. A good deal of oral and anecdotal information has been handed down on my mother’s side of the family, going back to the beginning of the 19th century, and for several years now I have been assisting some of my cousins in family history research which has fleshed it out and to a large extent confirmed what we knew, though inevitably some of it had become a bit garbled in the transmission. The fascination for me lies not so much in the names and dates and who begat who, which does not, after all, convey very much, but in what can be learned about people’s lives from censuses (from 1841 onwards) and from incidental information in wills and probate inventories. Before the 1830s most were yeoman farmers, although my maternal grandfather was descended from a dynasty of millers on the Cheshire/Shropshire border. In the process we have made contact with several far-flung cousins, including some in Australia and the USA, all engaged in the same pursuit, and a couple of years ago a group of us, descended from the same line, met up in a pub in Ashton in Makerfield which had at one time been the family farmhouse.

Simon – I usually find it really difficult to get into books about history. I find it more difficult than scientific subjects. Unless I can relate to it in some way my focus goes wandering off very quickly. Very self-centred but true. A lot of history books are very dry which doesn’t help.

The last history book I tried to read was about Nelson and Napoleon. I didn’t finish it. I just didn’t care enough. Now, if it had been made into a swashbuckling film with some great actors and lots of action, then I would probably have really enjoyed it. That’s how I want my history – big screen action style.

Seriously though, there have been excellent films made about historical figures. I was taken to see “Ghandi” which had a powerful effect on me, and I have seen “Schindler’s List”, “The Pianist” and “Downfall” which are all excellent.

If anyone can recommend some more films of that quality to help with my history education I would be very grateful.

Elephantschild – glad to stir some memories. I will look out for the outline on the grass when I am next there.

Do you know why the Vikings were so horrid? Did their religion have no rules or ethics?

Biskie:

Not films but some historical novels that are factually very accurate.

Anything by the late Mary Renault, particularly the Alexander trilogy. All 20 of (the equally late) Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey/Maturin novels starting with Master and Commander – they must be read in order. If we lived nearer you could borrow mine. BTW the film, ‘Master and Commander, the Far Side of the World,’ is a travesty of the novels. Some Robert Graves.

Biskie.

The problem with films about historical people and events is that they are not, as a rule, reliable sources of information, and can sometimes be downright misleading. Which is not to say that they cannot be enjoyed on their own terms.

As for novels, I would recommend Steven Saylor’s Roma sub rosa series, which need to be read in order, starting with ‘Roman Blood’. They are basically mystery stories, set against the background of the last days of the Roman Republic, from 80 BCE onwards. They are well researched and give, I think, a good idea of how the major events of that period might have appeared to a contemporary Roman citizen.

Why were the Vikings so horrid? In fact they were probably no more brutal than their contemporaries, or any war band in the field and living off the land, but the Viking raids along the North Sea, Irish Sea and Channel coasts were very disruptive, after a period of relative peace and stability, and the fact that they targetted undefended monasteries meant that they got a particularly bad press (because it was the monks who wrote the records).

Those who made up the raiding parties and ‘armies’ were in search of wealth as a source of status and as a means to acquire land either in their homelands or (given population pressures in Scandinavia ) abroad and, once settled, they ceased to be so much of a threat. Some were also enterprising merchants, and the colonies they established at Dublin, York and Kiev, for example, became major centres of trade.

The Vikings certainly had laws (the word itself has a Scandinavian root) and notions of good and evil, and these seem to be reflected in what we know of their religion, but the virtues they esteemed were those of fighting men: physical courage, loyalty to their fellows and their leaders, and the generosity of a chieftain to his followers. While they would probably have respected the same qualities in those who fought against them, they would not have understood Christian ethics or the concept of monastic life, and from their point of view monasteries and churches were simply places where there was plenty of loot to be found and the pickings were easy.

Biskie:

Another enjoyable author for historical novels is Conan Doyle, whose mediaeval romances are good fun: The White Company, Sir Nigel etc.

I don’t know, E, if you can vouch for their historical accuracy.

Supposedly, this is about the time my father’s family came to England from Gamla Uppsala, their name: Yyngglinglia (or something similar, equally difficult to spell; Ingle is the simplified version).

These were Swedish Vikings who attached themselves to the others, eventually fading into the landscape and becoming first sheepherders, then plasterers, in Manchester.

I’ve been to Gamla Uppsala, with its three mounds (one each for Odin, Freya, and Thor) — the vibes are dark and bloody; I didn’t like the place. Haring (? it’s been many years; this is a small place outside of Manchester where a great grandfather swapped land with the local Lord Haring) and York were more to my liking. So much for genealogy.

History is an area I find much more fascinating, partly owing to my beliefs that it is thoroughly alive, many versions of ourselves found within it, partly owing to an awareness that time itself can be penetrated, much as Toynbee experienced as a young man. An offshoot, somewhat related to Many Worlds/QM, is probable history, while future variations may concern themselves with other worlds, other dimensions, and the interchange between them and our world or system.

Then, too, there is the subject I refer to as controversial history. Often, the books I place in this category contain lots of useless speculation, but parts can be provocative. (Hancock, for example, is uneven, sometimes confusing rumor with archaeological fact or jumping to conclusions, but there are parts of some of his books that are truly intriguing; he does occasionally come up with a very good idea.)

Boltonian, Biskie.

I have never read Conan Doyle’s historical novels, so I regret that I cannot comment on their historical accuracy.

Another suggestion for reading (Romans again, I’m afraid) is Lindsey Davis’s Falco novels, set in the reign of the Emperor Vespasian. There are, to date, about 18 of them, which follow a chronological sequence starting with ‘The Silver Pigs’, so they, too, are best read in order, though it isn’t essential. They are an enjoyable read, full of humour and wit, and although the plots are sometimes a bit far-fetched, the background information on Roman life is pretty authentic. Also on the Roman theme, there are the novels of Robert Harris, ‘Pompeii’ and, most recently ‘Imperium” – the first volume of a fictional biography of Cicero.

Bill.

Interesting. For me, too, the past exists in the present, but in a very different way. It is present everywhere in the rural and urban landscapes of Britain, which can be read as a kind of palimpsest of human activity since the last retreat of the ice The ability to see and interpret this is to some extent a matter of training, but intuition does, I think, play a part, because not all archaeologists and architectural historians seem able to do it to the same degree.

Genealogy, for me, is a way of engaging with social history at a personal level. It is significant, though, that I was drawn into it, initially, through the activities of other members of my family on both sides, who were inspired by the anecdotes and oral traditions which had been handed down, and by the realisation that something of these was being lost with each successive generation.

The need to engage with the past as a means of establishing self-identity does seem to be felt by many people, perhaps the majority, although this need does not seem to be met by history as it is generally taught in schools. The point of my first, somewhat rambling and anecdotal comment (insofar as it had a point) was to illustrate some ways in which people can engage, whether through interest in a particular individual, such as Alfred, or through the physical remains of the past, or through identification with ones own ancestors.

E:

I agree with your idea of the past being part of the present. It has to be because the present is a summation of all that has gone before – that is if time is a continuum.

There is an old road that connects three ancient settlements hereabouts (Ilkley, Knaresborough and Boroughbridge) and it is still visible and used as a bridleway across the wild and largely uninhabited Blubberhouses moor. It doesn’t take much imagination to visualise the comings and goings of soldiers, traders and, in the middle ages, sheep and cattle drovers. Boroughbridge was a thriving port in those times and goods would have been shipped between there and York (and beyond).

Even now it is wide and easy walking excepts during very wet spells.