A few weeks ago I posted a story about archaeologists searching for the grave of Richard III. Yesterday they held this news conference about remains they had found under a council car park in Leicester. As the report states, “the remains had spinal abnormalities and a “cleaved-in skull” that suggest it could be Richard III.”
It will be very interesting to see how the find changes our understanding of a man who has been unquestionably attacked by 109 years of Tudor propaganda.
Mr Kydd.
In designing our A Level course we were very keen to add the Elizabethan unit for a number of reasons. Above all, it is an excellent topic, but it also allowed you explore issues of gender, historiography and to understand that History existed before the Congress of Vienna in 1815.
This wordpress site has been recommended to me by an ex-student, and it is well worth a look. It is indeed a A Venerable Read and the focus on the so called Dark Ages could again make you think about what History is. Consider for example this review of Alfred The Great by Justin Pollard;
If you only read one book on the Dark Ages, make it this one.
“Splendid this rampart is, though fate destroyed it.
The city buildings fell apart, the works of giants crumble….
Until a hundred generations now
Of people have passed by. Often this wall
Stained red and gray with lichen has stood by
Surviving storms while Kingdoms rose and fell.”
Out of all the vivid description of life in the eighth century in this book, none stands out more than the comment on the reaction of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims to seeing the Coliseum of Rome in an era when there was not a standing stone building in all of northern Europe. The world we are introduced to is alien, fragmented, distant and almost post-apocalyptic in feel, but unlike the anonymous writers of the Ruin (quoted above), there is no lost nostalgia or sense of longing for the civilisations that came before the Dark Ages.
Mr Kydd.
Everything about Richard III is just interesting. He is famed as the last English king of England (remember the Tudors were Welsh and the Stuarts were Scottish) and the last King to die in battle (at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485). He is also said to be the target of very unfair propaganda attacking his physical appearance (hump and all) and his actions (many now question if it was he who ordered the murder of the princes in the Tower).
Whilst there is doubt over whether his body was stripped naked (see Harry other Royals have got there before you) and thrown in the river, it does seem that Richard met an undignified end.
Now there is an excellent piece of archaeology from the University of Leicester seeking to identify his final resting place. This work (the Greyfriars project) stems in part from the recent work that relocated the site of the Battle of Bosworth (you may like to refer to the earlier post discussing this revision of the location of the battle site). This article from the Daily Telegraph discusses what the project is trying to achieve.
Mr Kydd.
As students move into and beyond A Level history they should be aware of how the discipline becomes more specialised. Military history has never really been my thing but I have always had great admiration for two British historians of this genre – both of whom did not just write about generals, but also were able to write about was it was actually like to fight in a war.
Last April the great Richard Holmes died. There is a good obituary for him here. My favourite book by him is Tommy – a typically detailed account of what made the fighting man “tick” in the First World War. Nick Rennison writes of it “Tommy is Richard Holmes’s tribute to the ghosts of the millions of ordinary soldiers who fought in the First World War. The book also reflects the dissatisfaction he feels at the way we still remember it. Too often we approach World War I through the literature it inspired. The poems of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others have their own truths to offer, but Holmes would dispute the assumption that they represent the experiences of the majority of those who endured the trench warfare of the Western Front.”
Sir John Keegan died on 2nd August, and his obituary from the Telegraph can be found here. Keegan also wrote about the harsh realities of fighting in a battle in his seminal text The Face of Battle – the Amazon review describes it as follows. Keegan looks “at the direct experience of individuals at ‘the point of maximum danger’. It examines the physical conditions of fighting, the particular emotions and behaviour generated by battle, as well as the motives that impel soldiers to stand and fight rather than run away. And in his scrupulous reassessment of three battles, John Keegan vividly conveys their reality for the participants, whether facing the arrow cloud of Agincourt, the levelled muskets of Waterloo or the steel rain of the Somme.’ In this book, which is so creative, so original, one learns as much about the nature of man as of battle.”
If military history interests you you could not do much better than starting by reading either Holmes or Keegan. Perhaps it might be best to leave the last words to Sir John Keegan. These are his opening line in “The Face of Battle” – they perhaps reflect the wider challenge faced by all who would write history.
“I have not been in a battle; not near one, nor heard one, nor heard one from afar, nor seen the aftermath. I have questioned people who have been in battle; have walked over battlefields … I have read about battles, of course, have talked about battles, have been lectured about battles and, in the last four or five years, have watched battles in progress, or apparently in progress, on the television screen … But I have never been in a battle. And I grow increasingly convinced that I have very little idea of what a battle can be like …”
Mr Kydd.
In the 1980s a mass burial pit from the 1340s Black Death was discovered at Spitalfields in London. This report was typical, stating “it contained two mass burial trenches and a mass burial pit, densely filled with several hundred articulated skeletons, as well as many individual graves…it was…one of two emergency burial grounds created to cope with the Black Death epidemic. It is currently the largest and most comprehensively excavated Black Death cemetery in England.”
Except that it now seems that it isn’t. This report from yesterday’s Observer suggests that recent research, “including radiocarbon dating of the bones and geological data from across the globe – shows for the first time that mass fatalities in the 13th century were caused by one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past 10,000 years“. As one monk put it at the time, “The north wind prevailed for several months… scarcely a small rare flower or shooting germ appeared, whence the hope of harvest was uncertain… Innumerable multitudes of poor people died, and their bodies were found lying all about swollen from want… Nor did those who had homes dare to harbour the sick and dying, for fear of infection… The pestilence was immense – insufferable; it attacked the poor particularly. In London alone 15,000 of the poor perished; in England and elsewhere thousands died.”
This is not a small reworking of the edge of an argument; rather it is a complete and fundamental reevaluation, made possible by advances in carbon dating. The message for us is clear, History, and historical interpretation has never been static, but now more than ever our assumptions are being challenged by science..
Mr Kydd.
The contents of which photograph do you consider to be more valuable ? These two images come from the two news stories below. In a material sense, the answer is of course clear cut -the coins have an estimated value in excess of £10 million. However, the iron slag pictured below perhaps tells the historian more.
In May it was announced that over 50,000 Roman coins in Jersey. This article from The Guardian is developed well by this BBC News report. Although less glamourous, this report suggesting that the Highlands were a centre of metal production in Iron Age might actually be more significant to us as historians. This is because it potentially could change our understanding of trade and society in Iron Age Europe. Perhaps the north of Scotland was part of an intergrated and specialised economy.
Worth comes in many forms…
Mr Kydd
Churchill is meant to have once said “History will be kind to me for I intend to write it”. Perhaps it is an obvious point to suggest that History tends to be written by the winners, but that does not stop it being a valid one as the example of Alexander the Great proves. Few men in the European subconscious have a better reputation. This BBC report starts off by stating the tradition view that “Alexander the Great, feted in Western culture as the conqueror of the Persian Empire and one of the great military geniuses of history.”
However Professor Ali Ansari (the Institute of Iranian Studies, St Andrews University) then goes on to explain that “the influence of Greek language and culture has helped establish a narrative in the West that Alexander’s invasion was the first of many Western crusades to bring civilisation and culture to the barbaric East. But in fact the Persian Empire was worth conquering not because it was in need of civilising but because it was the greatest empire the world had yet seen, extending from Central Asia to Libya.”
Have a read and see what you think. There is also a Radio 4 Series if you are interested.
Mr Kydd
As many of you will have the misfortune to know Tudor history is really my bag, and there certainly has been a lot of it in the news recently. As such, I thought it might be helpful if I posted the links here.
Here Clifton Davies argues that “research shows the term “Tudor” was barely ever used during the time of Tudor monarchs” continuing that “years of trawling through contemporary documents yielded almost no references – with only one poem on the accession of James I (James VI of Scotland) recognising the transition from Tudor to Stuart”.
Here Philippa Gregory and Dr Robert Hutchinson discuss on the Today programme why novelists are so fascinated with the Tudor period. “We’re interested now in historical realism… the grime of it, as well as the rare moments of glamour at the top.”
Here Dr Steven Gunn explains why “between 1558 and 1560, almost three-quarters of fatal accidents took place during the summer months.” This can be blamed on “cart crashes, dangerous harvesting techniques, horse accidents and windmill mangling were among the perils facing the Tudor farm worker.” It is of course a bit of fluff, but also perhaps a reminder that little of the renaissance reached the rural England where over 85% of people lived. This link goes on the strange and stupid deaths of many Tudors (if you accept that term !) – however, as the poster below shows, there were other surefire ways to die…
Mr Kydd
Those of you who can cast their minds back to the posts on last summer’s riots will remember that David Starkey is not an individual shy of a point of view. This week he compared the Alec Salmond, the Scottish First Minister to Adolf Hitler, stating that both shared a common ability to court popularity by “tapping into nationalism and the idea of a common enemy”. He said Mr Salmond thinks that “the English, like the Jews, are everywhere”, before arguing that Hitler was “more democratically elected”. This article from the Daily Telegraph goes into more detail.
It is of course possible to argue that David Starkey is seeking to be controvertial for his own (financial ?) ends. Indeed he seems to suggest he has done as much before in this BBC interview. Perhaps more interesting however is the Irish view, which can be read here .
As promised – please find attached a photo of our plan for the Unit Six problems, and how they link together. If you want some further reading on this then you could do a lot worse than the conclusion to C Haigh’s Profiles in Power on Elizabeth I.
Mr Kydd.
