The Myth of Relevance (Part 2)

[Here is the next installment of the chapter.  As last time, it was mostly written a year ago.  It is very much a draft and most if not all of the 'facts' mentioned still need to be double checked!]

There are other arguments presented for limiting the time and place of relevant history.  These can be illustrated by a series of different examples.  Some of these are taken from John Tosh’s interesting and valuable Why History Matters.  I disagree quite seriously with the line that Tosh takes but I am profoundly sympathetic to his overall project and certainly find myself in the same general part of the political spectrum.  In other words, I think he is firmly ‘on the side of the angels’.  My disagreement concerns the argument he has chosen to make in defence of the discipline and its value, which I think is mistaken in that I hope to demonstrate, that there are better, stronger arguments available to serve his purpose.

One argument for the relevance of history in the present is that it helps us understand current situations in the world.  The middle east, Iraq or Afghanistan furnish potential examples but so too do the ‘troubles’ in Northern Ireland or the conflicts in the Balkans after the fragmentation of Tito’s Yugoslavia.  Here the argument goes that if one knows about the historical ‘chain of events’ in the area under discussion, then one will gain a better understanding of the problems in the present.  The situation in the Balkans – the tension between different ethnic groups – is to be understood as the product of a particular series of events. Again, though, this argument for relevance presents numerous problems in its implications about the nature and purpose of historical enquiry.  The problems should by now be familiar.  The current state of affairs is assumed to be the automatic, logical outcome of preceding events.  That, in turn, implies some problematic assumptions about the objectivity of historical narrative and about causation, which we have already discussed.  The narratives used to explain or justify current political action are no less chosen, no less artificial, than the ones employed to explain ‘who we are and how we got here’.  Those alluded to by politicians in modern conflicts are  often no more constructed – even if they frequently are less empirically accurate.  Our modern nationalists are not operating under compulsion from the Past. As I have already argued, the Past has no power; it’s dead and gone.  It cannot even be properly conceived of without the deliberate construction of narrative, and all the problems that that entails.  It cannot make you do anything.  These modern politicians and their followers are, like the people involved in the Northumbrian Feud or the hypothetical diarist of Chapter 2, choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present.

Here the argument for ‘relevance’ shifts ground to claim that historical study enables us to challenge the ‘abuse’ of history for political ends.  We can stop to think more closely about the underlying implications of this argument.  Obviously it should be stated at the outset that this argument is motivated by the best of intentions.  The problems occur in the nature of history that is assumed.  The   implication is, firstly, that history is first and foremost about the collection of empirical facts.  This  happened like this; that did not happen, or did not happen like that.  That is, as I have been at pains to argue, not only a pretty low level of intellectual expectation for an academic discipline; it is fundamentally not what history is about, as opposed to chronicling and antiquarianism.  The second point follows from this and is that this argument for ‘relevance’ assumes that there is a single, univocal object history that is capable of being abused.  The only level of abuse that can reasonably be encompassed within the argument is the telling or presentation of falsehoods.  A questionable, if factually reliable, reading of history, based upon the available data, cannot easily be called an abuse without implying that there is a finite array of acceptable, non-abusive interpretations.  The argument may then move to discuss the motivation for such presentations of history, claiming that using history for political purposes is abusive.  It assumes, therefore, that history is capable of being written without some element of the political, broadly defined, entering into the process.  Or it supposes that there is a range of acceptable non-abusive motivations for historical writing: the simple neutral disinterested furtherance of knowledge for example.  Even if this were possible it could only function  at fundamentally non-historical levels of antiquarianism and chronicling.  Then we might reasonably ask what this deployment of erudite, accurate, factual history (itself non-political? non-abusive?) might practically achieve.  What, for example, might be attained by pointing out the factual flaws in nationalist historical narratives?

Let’s look at the problem more closely. We can again draw some examples from modern trouble-spots where nationalism rears its invariably ugly head.  Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area). Does a knowledge of the history of Serbia or Ireland help us understand his actions (let’s assume it’s a he)? No it doesn’t. For one thing, we’ll soon discover that the ‘history’ that he uses to justify his case or actions is cock-eyed and wrong.  Does it help just to know the events he makes reference to, that he keeps harping on about – the Battle of Kosovo Pole or the Battle of Boyne, say? Does it help to know that in reality King Billy’s army was paid for by the Pope, or alternatively that Cromwell’s troops killed rather more English soldiers than Irish civilians at the sacks of Drogheda and Wexford? Does it help to know that for most of their history Serbs and Croats and Bosnians rubbed along together in their communities just fine (think about it; if they hadn’t, ‘ethnic cleansing’ wouldn’t have been ‘necessary’)? Does it help, when confronted by Greek nationalism (as represented by the neo-Nazis of ‘Golden Dawn’ for instance), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is not the allegedly millennia-long continuity of Hellenic culture and language but that Greek was reinvented on more classical lines, and purged of Slavic and Turkish words in the late 19th century (as was Romanian, which is the only reason why it is as close as Italian is to Latin)? Would it avail you much to point out to a Scottish nationalist that the Declaration of Arbroath was copied from an earlier Irish letter and that (contrary to the impression one would get from visiting the battlefield memorial) it post-dated the Battle of Bannockburn?  No.  All of these things might get you punched in the face, or worse, but would not help you to understand why.

Obviously, a simple and entirely valid advantage is conferred by the collection of accurate historical information and that is the ability to see through the truth claims of others when these are based around an appeal to history.  The counter-arguments provided might be ‘true’, in that they are based upon empirically-demonstrable historical ‘facts’.  Yet, they carry little practical weight.  Although such factual correction might influence third parties and, with luck, cut the ground from beneath some propaganda, it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind.  Frequently the result will simply be to entrench the idea further that some vague power is controlling and distorting ‘the truth’ in order to further their oppression.  As Slavoj Žižek has repeatedly argued, using the psychoanalytical concepts of Jacques Lacan, empirical arguments rarely cut any ice in such discussions because the root of the problem does not lie in the register of the Symbolic (crudely, the factual; that which can straightforwardly be represented in language) but rather in that of the Imaginary (the ideal/idealised).[This last bit needs re-doing.]

A more positive impact might be to make political parties eschew any reference at all to the past.  This, one must admit, need not be a bad thing.  It might, especially, be no bad thing if it ended cheap demagogic appeals to a supposed national historical heritage (see above).  One might see an example of the cutting away of the grounds for such an appeal in the cross-party response to the British National Party’s employment of a picture of a Spitfire in its 2008 election leaflets.  It was rapidly pointed out that, such was the party leadership’s ignorance, they had picked a photograph of a Spitfire flown by a Free Polish pilot.  Indeed one could say that, rather than (as intended) symbolising the Battle of Britain as a fight against encroachment by foreigners, their picture actually illustrated the historical benefits of immigrant eastern European asylum-seekers taking ‘British’ jobs!  Had the ‘historical’ argument been developed, it might have undermined all future use of Churchill, the Battle of Britain and the Second World War by the xenophobic right – if the point had been made more forcefully that most of the Conservative Party in 1940 was in favour of a negotiated peace with Hitler, that Churchill’s biggest supporters in the ‘dark days’ of 1940 were members of the Labour Party and that certainly by the end of 1940 the war had ceased to be a national conflict and taken on some features of a ‘crusade’ for the liberation of Europe from Nazi tyranny – in other words for an engagement and involvement with Europe, not isolation from it.  None of this would have been without value.

Within this line of argument, it is clear, modern history does indeed normally have a prior claim to ‘relevance’; arguments against xenophobic nationalism that are based on the English ‘nation’s’ formation through the migration into Britain of Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans are, though not without use, easily enough dismissed as referring to something that happened ‘a long time ago’ or that was somehow ‘different’.  The longer ago that something happened, the less use one can make of it in discussing modern politics.  This is usually the case, but not always; the end of the Roman Empire, allegedly at the hands of invading foreign immigrants or because of supposed moral degeneracy is frequently deployed by right-wing commentators as a ‘lesson from the past’.

Nonetheless, as mentioned the key drawback with these arguments is its reduction of historical activity to simple chronicling; historical ‘truth’ means factual accuracy.  Wherever a claim cannot be refuted on straightforward factual grounds, as the element of interpretation involved becomes greater the value of historical argument to modern politics incrementally lessens.  When academic opinion is divided (no matter how unevenly matched the sides in the debate), politicians have repeatedly been able to bat away objections produced by professional expertise with a sort of relativist line that it represents ‘only one opinion’ (as for example even with the reality of climate change).  One could claim, and legitimately enough (see chapter 1), that a formal historical education – or at least the existence of a class of historical professionals – is unnecessary for the furnishing of this level of historical argument.  Non-academic writers about the past could fulfil the need for factual data every bit as well as ‘professionals’. 

Another weakness of the traditional line about the value of historical knowledge is that it is frequently somewhat essentialist.  Specific types of people placed in a particular context are likely to behave in the same (or similar) ways to those observable in the past.  Thus the key flaw in John Tosh’s argument that historical awareness might have led to an avoidance of the (at best ill-advised) invasion of Iraq in 2003.  A knowledge of the problems and parallels that could be extracted, interestingly enough, from the study of the British occupation of Mesopotamia in the 1920s not only represents, at the level of historical endeavour, the simple accumulation of facts (chronicling, again), as just discussed.  It also – if, to take a hypothetical counter-factual situation, wherein historians are called in to advise the leaders of Britain and the USA in spring 2003, deployed as a warning  – makes the implicit assumption that the inhabitants of the region would behave in just the same way as they had done eighty years previously.  It is not difficult to see how easily such arguments could have been refuted, logically and indeed reasonably, by a president and a prime minister already bent on launching the invasion.  The argument that things ‘were different’ after the First World War is reasonable enough; so would be an accusation of a form of essentialist orientalism on the part of the historical advisers.  So?  These things happened in the past.  If one moved on – as the true historian (as opposed to the chronicler) must surely move on – from the cataloguing of verifiable events to their explanation, one would soon find oneself in the midst of discussions of the precise context for the events following the First World War and the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.  Discussion of this context would rapidly differentiate the recorded events of the 1920s from the likely consequences of actions in the 2000s, unless, that is, one did assume a set of timeless Arab attitudes, grounded in a view of the Muslim culture or tribal structures of the area as fixed and unchanging.  Such a view, it would correctly be pointed out, would deny the people of Iraq any capacity to act as independent historical agents or to make their own choices.  Once these assumptions were (rightly) exposed and questioned, the ‘relevance’ of the historical knowledge to the present would be seriously compromised.  These arguments against the war could furthermore be deflected in slightly different, if all-too-familiar, less confrontational fashion by thanking the historian-advisors for their input and suggesting that the historical knowledge they had provided would help avoid the repetition of similar mistakes…

The Myth of Relevance (Part 1)

[I have, you might have noticed, been rather creatively 'blocked' for the past few months.  I am trying to get myself back into writing, especially my book Why History Doesn't Matter, of which I have posted draft elements in the past.  To try and help in the process here is part of a chapter I have just recommenced working on (chapter 4), with the same title as this post.  This section was largely written about a year ago.  As ever, all (constructive and polite!) comments, criticisms and suggestions are welcome.]

Thus far my argument has been composed of elements which are quite familiar within discussions of historical practice.  Yet, it is has also become clear that these apparent commonplaces have had little effect either upon how history continues to be written or upon how historical study is justified.  Indeed, it would seem that the implications of the points made have either not been followed up carefully or have been ignored as inconvenient.  This chapter pursues the exploration of this crucial disjunction.

We have seen in chapter 1 that history us more than the simple chronicling or description of past events or facts.  Chapter 2 demonstrated that the narratives of the past are artificial constructions that were rarely if ever experienced in the way recounted.  Chapter 3 developed this point to argue that, therefore, the story of the past does not tell us who we are and how we got here.  All this cannot but have a serious and detrimental effect upon the usual arguments for the relevance (or otherwise) of history.  Obviously, this matters.  People ignorant of the subject often claim that History is irrelevant.  Their claim is far from justifiable but the usual defences of the relevance of historical study are, on the whole, equally weak.  That weakness means that those who wish to deny the importance of an historical education can easily bypass them.  The form that such defences take is profoundly damaging to the discipline of history itself.     

What kinds of history, in what periods or places in history, are relevant and to whom?  And why?  The usually-deployed arguments for historical relevance have a tendency to valorise some forms of history (usually modern, often very modern; sometimes specific regions or historical themes) over others (ancient and medieval, or unfashionable thematic areas like diplomatic history).  The problem is that, especially when combined with the academic politics to which I will return, this can lead to an ever-increasing concentration on ever narrower themes and time-spans.  One might say that this need not matter; that, although breadth of knowledge or awareness never did any historian any harm, the simple knowledge of a wide range of things that happened in the past is in itself fundamentally unimportant to the value of historical study.  That argument has some logical force.  However, range and diversity in historical endeavour need defending on different grounds from those usually employed.  If it is properly carried out, all historical study is of equal value and relevance (albeit in different ways from those usually proposed), whether one studies Hitler or the Hittites.  No period or topic has a greater claim to being more relevant than any other.  According to the criteria by which historical relevance is normally accorded, though, nohistory is actually relevant at all.  Judging history according to the usually-assumed criteria of relevance is a mistake; it perpetuates a myth.

Part of the problem with traditional justifications for history originates in the acceptance, castigated in the previous chapters, of the idea that each episode in a historical narrative finds its necessary and sufficient cause in those that precede it.  Using the metaphor of the snooker balls [A crib from Bertrand Russell, IIRC [actually Hume and billiard balls - with thanks to a Mr Danny Chaplin]: you can observe a sequence of events but not causation itself or whether the results are determined by intention: I hadn't actually written this bit up when I wrote this about a year ago and I stll haven't! So I can't remember quite what I had in mind!] we saw that this is a very poor way of envisaging historical cause and effect.  If this argument is accepted, then a critical weakness is exposed in the claim that, to understand how things are here and now we need to comprehend things that happened, here, immediately beforehand.  But, even if this critique is not accepted, one is left with the problem of how far back ‘relevant’ history goes.  If the events of 1945-2015 can only be understood in by reference to those since, say, 1939-45 then surely the events of 1939-45 can themselves only be comprehended by reference to those of 1914-39, which in turn can only be  grasped via study of the period 1870-1914, and those events make sense solely in the light of history between 1815 and 1870.  And so on, back to the earth cooling.

The only means of escaping this bind come through the simple exercise of academic power.  Most historians are specialists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and so have a vested interest in staffing their departments with ever more specialists in ever narrower and more specialised areas of modern history.  Once a critical mass is attained, the dynamics of university departmental politics make it increasingly difficult to change this situation.  As more members of staff offer increasing numbers of modern options then, logically inevitably, more students take modern history.  This fact is then read après coup to argue that modern history is what most students want.  When a particular era dominates school curricula and when the burden of fees and debt understandably reduces an undergraduate intake’s confidence in trying out new periods and places of history, the two points merge and a sort of cock-eyed market principle comes into play to underline departmental politics.  We must give our student-customers what they want.  As pre-modern history becomes more marginal, specialist staff are called upon to teach ever longer and broader stretches of history, usually well beyond their detailed knowledge.  This in turn underlines the idea among students and specialists in later eras that nothing much of importance changed or happened across these millennia and thus that a single lecturer can reasonably be charged with covering the entire period between the fall of Rome (or, in the States, ancient Sumer) and the Italian Renaissance.  And so the log-rolling continues apace.

I have witnessed these dynamics in action with modern historians but the attitude is contingent; it is not intrinsic to modern history.  Historians of other times and places are equally capable, when in positions of dominance, of justifying their own prejudices with high-sounding principles and using them to entrench their current superiority.  I have also experienced much the same dynamics in other institutions among medievalists and have seen traces of it among classicists and early modernists too.  This is well attested in the US as well as the UK.  Nor is this sort of academic politicking confined to history.  It is visible across many other disciplines.  Witness changes in subject matter and coverage    in modern language departments, again frequently to the detriment of the earlier periods taught, or the witch-hunt against continental thought in British philosophy departments.  The point is that what is presented as logical, natural or automatic is usually the product of specific, local operations of power.  Indeed I will be arguing that teaching and learning this point is one of the most important purposes of history.  Thus the arbitrary cut-off points used to determine when history ceases to be relevant are part of a battery of tactical ruses within the petty departmental politics of the university, not something that would emerge from serious historiographical theory.

One can isolate similar contingent political principles used to justify the arguments in favour of the history of a specific region being more ‘relevant’ than that of another.  Here, the pressures usually – though sadly not always – come from outside academia.  Typically they originate with politicians of a conservative bent who wish to present a particular national narrative to the schoolchildren of their country.  This has been a much-debated issue in the United Kingdom for some time but it is by no means limited to, or especially extreme within, British politics.  French history has been subject to analogous pressures and the political demands made of US public schools by conservative state governments are often much more disturbing.  The idea that one particular narrative is natural or represents ‘the truth’ is highly questionable.  Such narratives, as we have seen, are artificial constructs designed to make a particular point.  A key issue is the arbitrary selection of the geographical zone in question.  In the British example, the determination of a particular off-shore archipelago might reasonably be seen as a solid enough justification for the geographical delineation of a long-term historical narrative.  Of course, it is never so simple.  It is a commonplace that ‘British history’ all too often means ‘English history’, with Scots, Welsh and Irish playing only walk-on parts or, as I once put it, walked-on parts.  What is England or Scotland or Wales in a long-term context?  All these are specific units of the earth’s surface with no natural connection and, perhaps as a result, no very long-term social or political unity.  England has existed, as currently defined geographically, for under 1000 years and yet is, by that definition, the oldest of the four British polities by some margin.  Even then, the precise delineation of the Anglo-Scottish border was only fixed in its western reaches after  the Union of the Crowns in 1603.  As far as Berwick upon Tweed is concerned, the issue has been debatable even longer.  Although Berwick is currently located administratively in England, Berwick Rangers play their football in Scotland.  Scotland only acquired the isles at various points in the later Middle Ages.    Wales never had a unitary existence before English conquest and administration except, conceptually and inversely, as that part of southern Great Britain which was not ruled by an English king or kings.  Ireland has never been politically unified, and certainly was not before the Anglo-Norman landing in 1166.  All these points render questionable the idea that the history of these regions should naturally or automatically be relevant to all those who currently live within them.  And that leaves aside the even thornier issue of whether all those people who currently occupy these zones constitute any kind of unitary ‘nation’ in any case.  The issue, obviously, is not limited to the British Isles.  Exactly the same points could be made, usually with even greater reason, in more or less any other country of the globe.  The issues of the relationship between history and modern identity will resurface later. [In a chapter entitled '"We are not "them"; "they" were never "us"']

The only way to combat these points would be to use the history of the regions to question the usual assumptions, to show the historical disparity of the people who come to occupy England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland today, to show the fortuitous, accidental un-natural means by which these portions of territory or space have been thrown together as political units.  This might, one could reasonably argue, have a relevance to the modern population of a particular country.  At the same time, though, a couple of other points would be implicit.  One would be that the usual presuppositions according to which a regional history would automatically be more relevant to its modern population than the history of another area would be undermined.  The assumptions according to which the inhabitants of a geographical area naturally constituted a nation with a shared history would be – in the correct sense of the word – deconstructed.  Crucially, the value of history would be displaced, from the transmission of narratives of ‘who we are and how we got here’ to the critical questioning of claims to be able to say either who ‘we’ are or how ‘we’ got here.  The lesson would be quite the opposite of that which is usually claimed as relevant.  History would rather be concerned with how ‘we’ could have got somewhere else and how what ‘we’ mean by ‘we’ (and thus, implicitly, ‘them’) changed constantly through time.  ‘We’ have not always existed.  The exercise would be one of critically thinking through how the past is presented and manipulated.

Getting the Point of Pointlessness

[I am off to Kalamazoo in a couple of weeks, or rather less (eek!) where I will be giving a paper in the Exemplaria session on 'New Critical Imperatives'.  Here is the abstract I sent them.  Some may note similarities with 'the Manifesto'.  The finished version may end up as the last chapter of Why History Doesn't Matter.  

Given my previous post, it now seems especially pertinent... (On that issue, btw, there is some talk of specifically local reasons for poor medieval take-up, about which it would be unprofessional for me to say more, and I am not 100% convinced in any case.)]

Academic history seems not to know what to do with itself since the linguistic turn.  The realisation that the Rankean ideal of objective history, telling it ‘wie es eigentlich gewesen’, was not (and never had been) possible appears to have led to a real – if largely unacknowledged – crisis of identity within the discipline, one result of which (in the UK and perhaps elsewhere) has been the removal of academic practitioners of history being increasingly sidelined from public discussions of the subject, its value, its place in education and so on, increasingly replaced by non-academic ‘media dons’ and ‘writers and historians’.  On one side there have been those who have adopted a position simply deriding the absolute possibility of history, a (usually ill-informed) nihilist position (Jenkins, Munslow, Ankersmit); on the other there have been more or less extreme or at least pragmatist defences of traditional empirical history (Evans) while most historians seem to continue in what Žižek might call an ideological fantasy, the ‘je sais bien mais quand même’: continuing to write empirical history judged by fundamentally Rankean empiricist standards as if it were still possible, even though they know it isn’t.

It seems to me that none of these stand-points is sustainable if the academic discipline is really to survive.  But how to avoid the pitfalls of epistemological nihilism when there is no possible transcendental ideal or goal for history, whether one sees that in empiricist terms of recreating or retelling a past just as it was or in more academic-political terms of creating a dominant paradigm/convincing everyone else?  I would like to draw on some work by Simon Critchley (Very Little … Almost Nothing) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communauté Désoeuvrée), possibly trying to marry it with some of the ideas of Emmanuel Levinas, to try and deconstruct pointlessness.  In other words I want to argue that the role (political/ethical) of historical study is fundamentally transient, consisting in conversation and dialogue, and that that element of discursive transience should be embraced.  What I am suggesting is a ‘talking about’ or an ‘engagement with’ the traces of the past to help us live in, make sense of, engage with the present.  This does not avoid the traditional epistemological standards or rules of ‘fit’ between data and argument, etc., but it – I propose – permits us to avoid either the perils of trying to argue about who is right and who is wrong, or paradigmatic dominance, on the one hand, or simply seeing academic historical practice as no more than a mask for academic careerism on the other.  Whether this is possible without introducing some other transcendent ideal remains to be seen.

For your Amusement (Twisting tails! - and Twisting Tales...)

Check out this blog for top-quality pseudo-historical Arthurian craziness, and a bit of an obsession with Worlds of Arthur, the point of which the blogger, a Mr Adam Ardrey, seems to miss entirely (as he similarly fails to understand any of the basic rules of how to construct a historical argument).  Mr Ardrey (who has established a reputation for pursuing academic historians of medieval Scotland with his 'interesting' ideas...) claims to have written a polite letter to me, but I have no recollection of receiving one.  I have kept all the e-mails and letters from crazies that I have received since WoA appeared because they are pretty entertaining so I don't know what happened here.

The tone is set - in a way - by the claim that

'The legendary Arthur is commonly presented as a Christian English King...' 

Hmmm... the one thing Arthur is *never* presented as is English.

But it gets much, much better:

"... in reality [says the author of this blog], he was an historical figure, a man of the old way of the druids, a Scot and a warlord. Merlin too lived in history: he was the preeminent druid of the 6th century."

There is - needless to say - absolutely no historically-acceptable evidence for any of that.  (See also, for especial amusement, the claim to know where Merlin's house was; the 'grave' of Merlin which Mr Ardrey claims to have found in fact has been excavated; it was Bronze Age...)  Elsewhere he claims to have identified and dated all twelve of Arthur's battles.  Anyone can have a guess at where Arthur's battles are, but no one will ever know.  That's why so many mutually incompatible locations have been suggested.  It's fun.  It's not history.  The one thing we can say with at least a small amount of certainty is that, with the exception of the battle of the Caledonian Forest, the author of the HB, who after all is the only early medieval person to mention 'Arthur's battles', and who may, for all we know, have made them all up anyway, thought (rightly or wrongly, if he didn't invent them, that is) that the battles were fought in the southern half of Great Britain.  Badon is the only battle in the HB's list of 'Arthur's Battles' that is definitely historical and recorded by a near-contemporary author (Gildas).  On the basis of Gildas' account it cannot be reasonably located other than in southern Britain.  Where in southern Britain, we'll never know.  I have my ideas but I'd never sell them to anyone as 'proven' or even as 'more plausible than anyone else's ideas.

But there's more: read on...

"For 1,500 years the Christian Church and its temporal partners-in-power deleted historical evidence and fabricated a legend that, literally, suited their book."

But if the evidence was deleted... ...  Maybe they got rid of his letter to me too.  This is precisely the sort of thing I had in mind when I wrote Worlds and in particular the opening page, which says of pseudo-historians:

"Each author fanatically believes his version (and the author is usually a he) to be the true story, hushed up by horrid academics or by political conspiracies (usually by the English) or sometimes his rivals."

Which is possibly why the author of Finding Arthur seems to have developed such an unhealthy obsession with me (he likes to refer to me as 'Guy', though we've never met) - five of his last twelve blog posts being concerned with me.  Check out the section of the home page called 'Arthuriana and the Jesuit touch'.  Says it all.  You might reasonably suppose I was paying people to write these things to illustrate my point!  But I'm not.

Anyway, there has been a glut of attempts to 'prove' that Arthur was Scottish, of late.  Here is another, which argues (again, without a shred of evidence):

 "Arthur was born in the latter half of the 5th century. He became the commander of a rapid reaction force of British cavalry, originally created by the Romans but which had continued after their withdrawal."Arthur's career started in Strathclyde, where struggles between rival rulers had allowed the Southern Picts to occupy the Lennox. Arthur seems to have settled the succession, taken back the lost territory and probably then advanced to overrun the Pictish forward positions, forcing a peace."This was something the Romans had never achieved and it was a feat which made his reputation."He fought as a crusader and in his wake followed Christian missionaries bringing moral authority to hold the peace."

And here is a third, which also conjures up a conspiracy.

"Arthur led the Britons to the brink of victory but was cut down by treachery and betrayal. Arthurian legends have since been corrupted, leading to popular but false assumptions about the king and the belief that his grave could never be found. Drawing on a vast range of sources and new translations of early British and Gaelic poetry, Arthur explodes these myths and exposes the shocking truth. In this, the first full biography of Arthur, Simon Andrew Stirling provides a range of proofs that Artuir mac Aedain was the original King Arthur; he identifies the original Camelot, the site of Arthur's last battle and his precise burial location. For the first time ever, the role played by the early Church in Arthur's downfall and the fall of North Britain is also revealed. This includes the Church's contribution to fabricated Arthurian history, the unusual circumstances of his burial and the extraordinary history of the sacred isle on which he was buried."

All of which leads me to quote what I say in Worlds of Arthur (pp.152-3) under the sub-heading "King Arthur was Scottish":

There certainly was a historical, Scottish Arthur. He was Artuir, son of King Áedán mac Gabráin of Dalriada. We know nothing about him beyond what Adomnán’s Life of Saint Columba tells us, written almost a hundred years after Artuir’s death. The information could, however, come from an earlier Life written by Adomnán’s predecessor in the 630s or 640s, of which Adomnán includes an excerpt. Artuir, says Adomnán, was killed, alongside his brother Eochaid Find, in a battle won by his father against the Miathi. The Miathi are presumably the Maetae recorded in early Roman geographies and thus another of the groups subsumed within the Pictish confederacies reasserting their identity in the post-imperial centuries (see Chapter 11). Artuir’s death must have occurred before Áedán’s in c.608 because Columba’s prediction was that he would not succeed his father as king. Thus he was never a king in his own right, though that need not matter, given the HB’s description of Arthur. Artuir mac Áedáin might be the historical figure behind Arthurian legend but, even if he was, there is nothing else we can say about him. Attempts to do so involve joining the dots from all sorts of snippets, inconsistently cherry-picked from later (second-millennium) sources, whether later Celtic hagiography and folklore or Arthurian romance (French or otherwise), mostly with no relationship to each other, and breaking just about every rule in the book of sound historical methodology. 

As to the pagan Arthur, this (from p.153) seems relevant:

These aren’t the druids you’re looking for: the pagan King Arthur

That King Arthur was a pagan is commonly stated in novels, pseudohistory, and other New Age Arthurian material. There is no reason to suppose that any historical fifth- or sixth-century Arthur was anything other than a Christian. Two of the three first-millennium sources that mention Arthur explicitly describe him as Christian. The other, Y Gododdin, contains precious little by way of religious elements of any sort. Its Christian elements, according to Koch, are later additions. Some of Koch’s argument turns on how you understand an ambiguous phrase that might refer to communion, though. Whichever way you read it, as ‘communion’ or ‘a victor’s share’, the argument easily becomes circular. In any case, Koch rightly states that this has no necessary bearing on the poet’s religion or that of his subjects. The western Roman Empire, including Britain, had been heavily Christianized (see Chapter 11) and Gildas did not see paganism, unlike heresy, as a problem with the British rulers of his day. Even Artuir mac Áedáin is mentioned in a Christian context, being part of an army prayed for by St Columba and his monks.

That really is all that a careful historian (an actual historian, you might say) can say on those subjects.  Pottering about with Chrétien de Troyes (as if that were a reliable source in any case) and cherry-picking and relocating to Scotland everything that he says about the legendary Arthur (ignoring everywhere when he locates Arthur somewhere else) is doubtless a great laugh.  History it isn't.  Caveat emptor.  Were people not likely to lose good, hard-earned money on the misleading claims of Messrs Ardrey, Crichton and Stirling, we could see it all as harmless fun.  This was largely why I wrote Worlds of Arthur and I am delighted that the likes of Ardrey, Edwin Pace and Dan Hunt see it as a threat.  I'm even glad that Amazon is offering Worlds... as part of a 'buy them together' offer with Crichton's book!

Dominique Venner: Not a historian

The suicide of Dominique Venner in Notre Dame, shortly after writing a blog post calling for resistance against the law allowing gay marriage in France and leaving a note on the altar, presumably setting out his political justifications, has been reported as the suicide of a 'far right historian' (here).  Let's be clear.  Venner was not an historian.  At least as far as I have been able to ascertain he had no formal academic qualification or accreditation in the discipline.  He was a far right extremist with an interest in weaponry who wrote some populist books about history, to - shall we say - mixed reception.  

Once again we see the phenomenon I have discussed before, where anyone with an interest in the past who manages to get a book published is allowed to style him/herself a historian.

Oh, and by the way, good riddance.

Ah, sod it. (In which I live up to my grumpy moniker)

So I'm not going to make myself look good - I'll probably make myself look worse.  My friend Steve says 'maintain a dignified silence' and he's right of course, but I don't really do dignified ... or silent.  I have to get this off my chest.  It'll look like the intellectual equivalent of the beefiest sixth-former picking on the weediest  first-year, and that ain't good, I admit.  But sometimes there are things (in Churchill's words) 'up with which one should not put' and Amazon haven't got back to me about the abuse of their reviewing T&Cs

Let's go through Edwin Pace's (Elafius') review of WoA, sentence by sentence.  Remember, Edwin Pace is the author of the pseudo-history Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain..

This book claims to be the definitive argument against any historical Arthur. 

No it doesn't.  It nowhere claims that.  On the second page of text (p.vii) I say that 'I also concede that it is impossible to prove for sure that he [Arthur] didn't exist'.

Halsall correctly notes that most Arthurian enthusiasts `cherry pick' data, while flouting inconvenient hard evidence. Indeed, many past arguments for Arthur ("Arthur used heavy cavalry", "Lucius Artorius Castus was `really' Arthur", "Ambrosius was `really' Arthur", etc.) are based on no evidence at all. He blames much of this on John Morris, who often took liberties with his evidence, and cherry-picked his data. 

That's fair enough.  I do (mostly) say that, although I think I rather said that all of that ilk do that.  The reason Edwin  Pace changes it to 'most' is that he wants to use the word 'correctly' and thus simultaneously claim that his own work (Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain) somehow differs from the other pseudo-histories (see p.vi of WoA for the fact that this is what all the pseudo-historians do).

Most significant, Halsall argues that all written sources, whether they mention Arthur or not, are useless as evidence for post-Roman Britain.

No I don't.  One example: 'Gildas tells us much about society, Church and rulership in the Britain in which he lived and wrote.' (p.57)  I also say there are things here and there to be learned from some other sources (cp. p.85).  What I do say is that they are useless for the construction of detailed political narrative.  That is not the same thing at all.

This book, however, is in no sense a simple guide on how to refute Arthurian enthusiasts. Halsall's very peculiar view of how Roman Britain became England and Wales requires him to invalidate every written source--as well as ignore pertinent archaeological data. 

Ok it might be peculiar - I say that it is a personal view on p.x of the book that not many people would agree with (unlike Edwin Pace, who falsely claims to be revealing the truth in Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain).  This does not 'require' me to invalidate every written source (see above); the theory is an attempt to propose some ideas in the light of the fact that over the past 30-40 years serious scholars have invalidated every written source as a sound basis for political narrative.  Nor do I ignore any pertinent archaeological data (see next comment).

We thus find that Saxon federates were serving in Britain in 383, a full two generations before the archaeology tells us they were (a `heavy-cavalry' assertion if there ever was one). 

I don't know what a 'heavy cavalry assertion' is, and nor, I expect, do you.  The archaeology does not tell us that Saxon federates were in Britain two generations after 383.  It tells us that people from northern Germany were making their presence visible in the archaeological record from about 430, in East Anglia.  It tells us (it can tell us) nothing about their politico-military status.  Besides which, I spend pp.185-7 explaining why the archaeological record cannot be read simply as passively showing the date of the arrival of migrants.  Pace is deliberately misrepresenting me; I do not 'ignore' this evidence.

More worrying, on the basis of a single `cherry picked' word in Gildas, `meanwhile' (interea), we find that the DEB is not talking about things in the fifth century, but the fourth. 

Edwin Pace doesn't understand the meaning of the word cherry-picked.  The word interea is crucial because it comes at the very beginning of the break in Gildas' narrative, where he turns from the north to the east (as Molly Miller pointed out 30-odd years ago) and, whether or not you accept my thesis, it is absolutely commonplace that it must mean a break (it technically means 'meanwhile' but its other meanings also mark a shift in the direction of the story). If I'd plucked it out of context from the middle of some paragraph in the middle of the account of the Saxons or the Picts, that would be cherry-picking (of the sort Edwin Pace does throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain, although given that he can't read Latin he normally does this from translations, compounding his error).  Nor is my thesis constructed only on this basis.  It is put forward - whether you agree or not - on the basis of an account of the structure of Gildas' work, of other phrases that come around the break in the narrative (e.g. sicut et nunc est), a comparative discussion of Gildas' account of Maximus and those of other fourth- and fifth-century authors, and so on.  That discussion takes seven pages (pp.187-94); even I, prolix as I am, would have difficulty spinning a single cherry-picked word into seven pages of exegesis.  You don't have to agree with the thesis, but it's not cherry-picked.

This allows Halsall to conclude that Vortigern was `really' the usurper Maximus, that the general Ambrosius Aurelianus was `really' St Ambrose, and that the general Vitalinus was `really'...the corpse of St Vitalis.

This is the most egregious of Edwin Pace's misrepresentations (or lies if you prefer).  Nowhere do I say that Vortigern was really Maximus.  I do argue that Gildas' unnamed tyrannus is Maximus, and I argue that by the eighth century traditions about Maximus had become fused with traditions about Vortigern (that fact is made concrete by the evidence of the Pillar of Eliseg, regardless of what else you think of my hypotheses).  Vortigern, I argue at some length, is a figure whose historicity is at least as dubious as (personally I think it is more so than) Arthur's.  That is nothing even close to the argument Edwin Pace accuses me of and yet it is the closest he comes to an accurate representation of the book in this passage.  I nowhere claim that the general Ambrosius Aurelianus 'was really St Ambrose', I nowhere claim that 'the general' (the general?  where does Pace get that from?) Vitalinus 'was really' the corpse of St Vitalis.  This is just scurrilous.  As throughout, Edwin Pace simply chooses to mock arguments he doesn't follow or understand.

Halsall then refutes the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's testimony with a reference to a single study by Barbara Yorke, which he fails to footnote. Indeed, unlike John Morris, he dispenses with all documentation.  

More untruths.  I do not refute the ASC's testimony 'with a reference to a single study by Barbara Yorke'.  The text itself name-checks at least two studies and the further reading essay refers to a further three.  Yorke's article is - technically - unfoot-noted but it is clearly cited on p.312 ('The studies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle referred to in the text are ... and Yorke (1990)'. It is entirely - and deliberately - misleading to say that I dispense with all documentation.  References to chapter and verse of primary sources used are given in the text itself; allusion to particular ideas is given in text by citing the name of the historian with whom they originate and the bibliographical essay and 19-page bibliography expand on this.  I did dispense with foot-notes for particular reasons (p.xi).  This may have been a mistake but it was done for particular reasons to enhance accessibility, as this isn't primarily a book aimed at academics, and not out of arrogance, laziness or hypocrisy as various reviewers have claimed.  I concede it might look that way.  I will explain further anon.

But his investigation of the Historia Brittonum is most puzzling.  
Here Edwin Pace starts to lose his already slender grip on reality and uses the opportunity to go off into his own world (or rather parallel universe) of Arthur (the one set out at length in Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain).

He correctly notes the grave weaknesses in David Dumville's `founding' sceptical article of 1972-4. It requires us to accept four unevidenced assumptions to explain a single 69-year interval in chapter 66 of the HB (i.e. `coming of the Saxons'--69 years--consul Valerius, 521). 

How do you 'evidence' an argument, when the argument is an attempt to make sense of a sentence that no one has understood by positing four entirely reasonable scribal errors.  Put another way, how do you evidence absence? This point is absurd.  And hypocritical since Edwin Pace's own Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain is one long a catalogue of unevidenced assumptions.  Most bizarrely, he takes Dumville's argument and then adds extra (in this case entirely unevidenced) hypotheses to it before then working backwards from an end point based upon the hypothesis he's just rejected...

But Halsall's alternative is that the consuls mentioned as the end-points of the said interval...are actually the two earlier pagan emperors Valerian and Decius, whom some nameless British scribe thought were coming back as the Anti-Christ--arguably in the form of the pantomime horse of the Apocalypse.
This is another point where Pace uses his strategy of mocking things he doesn't follow.  He misrepresents the argument in any case.  Nowhere do I say that a British scribe thought this.

Halsall then dismisses the other passages in chapter 66 as scribal errors, although, unlike Dumville, he gives no evidence for this. 

Not true.  There is a long, ten-page discussion of the HB's computations, citing them all in detail and showing - with full explanation and in-text referencing - how it is demonstrable that the HB frequently got its numbers and systems confused.  Nowhere do I describe any of the dates in chapter 66 as 'scribal errors' other than the figure of 400 years between the incarnation and the coming of the Saxons which is clearly - by the HB's own other calculations - a mistake.  An error, yes.  An error by a scribe, I suppose, but a scribal error means something else (I suspect Edwin Pace doesn't know this), and that is NOT what I claim it is.

This in turn proves that the HB is not a British annal. In this at least he is correct. The full HB Prologue states that it is using `Irish and Saxon annals'.

Here we get to the nub of the issue as this graphically illustrates Edwin Pace's own deficiencies.  What he calls 'the full HB prologue' (misleading; its textual status as part of the original is at best insecure) says nothing of the sort - even in translation.  It says it used 'the writings' of the Scots [Irish] and Saxons, which it clearly did in any case, since it includes a version of a Life of St Patrick and an Irish chronology, and the works of Bede.

Moreover, if one subtracts 69 from the end-point Dumville gives (Valerius' consulship of 521), it is in perfect accord with the date for the coming of the Saxons given in both Bede and a `Saxon annal'--the ASC (521 - 69 = 452). Moreover, Halsall's use of AP dates fully explains the HB citation that the Romans `came and went' for 348 years (Ch. 30). The result is within a year of 418 AD, the ASC's date for the Roman withdrawal (43 + 348 = 391 AP, 391 + 28 = 419 AD; 43 being the Claudian conquest). 

Well, what to say?  This is a brilliant illustration of Edwin Pace's "scholarship" as found throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain.  Having dismissed Dumville, he then subtracts 69 from the date Dumville used to get a date 'in perfect accord' with a date given by Bede and the ASC ... except that Bede doesn't give that date, he gives a 6-year bracket which, since Patrick Sims-Williams work in the early '80s, we've been able to see as Bede's own best guess, and nor does the ASC (which gives 449).  That, by Pace's standards of scholarship, is 'perfect accord'.  Now think of another number...  This is Edwin Pace's historical version of Numberwang.

The next section, if anything, is even better.  If you take an AD date (43: the date of Claudius invasion - remember that this is not a date in the HB or its available sources, which didn't use AD dates), right, and add 348 you get 391.  [Actually you don't.  By the way the HB counted - illustrated with references in WoA, p.198, n.3 - it is 390, but let that pass.]  Now - and this is where things get crazy - you add, for no good reason - 28 to 391, to arrive at 418 as an AP date.  [Actually 417 by antique counting; cumulatively we're in fact at 416...] Now - get this - 418 is the year the ASC gives for the departure of the Romans.  So it's all true!  That's the truth, ladies and gentlemen.  The TRUTH!  Except that the ASC's date (unreliable in any case)  is an AD date, not an AP date.  By AD dates and Edwin Pace's strange pseudo-methodology we've only got to 391...  For the two to harmonise we'd have to have started at the AP date for Claudius' invasion and ended at the AP equivalent of 418 (AP 445).  Also, in any case, 348 isn't the amount of time of the Roman occupation, as we would know it (43 to, let's say, 410 is 367 years, 368 by late antique counting; the HB's 348 could be a scribal error for 368 but let's not go there) so why do we give the figure any credence as a measure of accuracy?  Even if (as they don't) all the sources converged on this figure they'd still be wrong.  And finally, why focus on 418 as the date of Roman withdrawal, a date attested only in a demonstrably artificial ninth-century Anglo-Saxon chronology and referred to nowhere in any surviving contemporary sources (fifth- or even, for the sake of argument, sixth-century) from the Mainland?  This is how Edwin Pace works throughout Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain.  By any even vaguely scholarly standards, it's absolute gibberish and any decent second-year undergraduate could pull it apart.  

Overall, the HB and the ASC share seven such dates.
Wow.  So, by taking two equally, demonstrably, late and unreliable chronologies and messing about with them, according to what you decided in advance you wanted to prove and according to no sound historical methodology, seven whole dates can be hammered into converging to within a decade. Astonishing.  

Ronald Hutton argued a few years back that this discipline's main problem is that both Arthur enthusiasts and Arthur sceptics are equally guilty of using the same bad methodologies. 

Untrue again.  The closest Hutton came to saying that was where he said that Arthur-sceptics were refusing to try and explain why someone who never existed had come, within 300 years of his supposed existence, to be the national hero of an entire nation, and thus that they too weren't facing up to certain facts.  Hutton's is a very good piece but (and to be fair remember he's a 17th-century specialist) he overstates the case.  One of the aspects of WoA that I am proudest of is that I point out (though I'm hardly the first to do so) that there is no evidence at all that the legend of Arthur was even remotely well-known before the mid-eleventh century, even in Wales.  The issue is not how historical stories about Arthur could have been transmitted over centuries but why there are only five mentions of him in three sources from before 1000, out of the dozens of sources we have; why after the three Arthurs alive c.600 there is not one (of the hundreds of other people known to us in Britain) person called Arthur (and no Arthur place-names in any of the hundreds of charters); why, in the obvious place to deploy 'the national hero of an entire people' there is no allusion (even) to Arthur in the Armes Prydein.  And so on.  It doesn't prove Arthur didn't exist.  It is a pretty serious argument that, if he did, his story wasn't well known.

It is thus no surprise that the present volume replicates all the sins Halsall attributes to Arthurian enthusiasts.
That - as I hope I have shown - is nonsense.

And in rejecting Dumville's 1972-4 solution, Halsall inadvertently demolishes the very foundations of his own scepticism.

And so obviously is that.  Indeed it makes no sense at all.  The argument - if you can call it that - seems to be that if Dumville's piece on the HB was the foundational text of Arthur-scepticism, and you don't necessarily buy one minor element of Dumville's argument therein (and Dumville must have been only a PhD student or junior post-doc when he wrote that, which is salutary!), then you have somehow demolished all the grounds for rejecting the testimony of late and dubious sources.  This is rubbish.

In fairness, many of Halsall's past insights are of great interest. It is therefore doubly sad when he brands anyone who argues for Arthur's historicity as `dishonest'. Is this open scholarly debate?
Once again (and I know this is getting tedious) I do not say this.  I do not brand anyone who argues for Arthur's historicity as dishonest (see, e.g., my reference to Christopher Gidlow on WoA p.310).  What I do say is this (p.307):

'The old quest for King Arthur is fruitless.  The documentary evidence cannot respond to those sorts of questions.  More seriously, to pretend to have provided the answers sought by that romantic quest from the surviving written sources is downright dishonest.' [emphasis added]

That is a rather different claim, and it is one I stand by absolutely.  There are words for people who try to make money out of people by selling them books (like Arthur and the Fall of Roman Britain) that claim to have revealed 'the truth' when they do not, for people who describe things as true which have been established as anything but true, for people who describe other people as doing and writing things that they don't, for people who pretend disinterest, who disguise their identities, and then tell untruths (in reviews and comments on other reviews) in order to defend their own financial interests in partisan fashion.  Dishonest is about the most polite word I can think of for such people.

By the way, dear readers, feel free to post a link to this under his 'review'.  This will stay up as long as the scurrilous review remains on Amazon.

History Never Happened

[This is the next rough draft instalment of my work in progress, Why History Doesn't Matter, which (currently) follows on from the second part of 'The Siege' (here).  Essentially the argument in this section (which is hardly novel or original, I admit) is that history - as opposed to The Past - doesn't exist until we shape 'the past' into 'history' in the present and that there are some key issues involved in history-writing that differentiate it from chronicling or description of the past.  This will lead (in subsequent sections) to a dissection of common justifications for history and an exploration of the ethical and political demands that inhere in history-writing.  The issue of remembrance and mourning, or a confrontation with what might seem to be the implication of the argument in this section, which is a trivialisation of events like The Holocaust, will be dealt with later.

I've no idea why the font changes part-way through and then changes back again.  It's something to do with importing the file from my computer, but there you go.]

Thurbrand and Uhtred

To illustrate the difference between serious conceptions of history and popular presentations of the past, I offer a deliberately provocative-sounding epigram: history never happened. Actually, although it sounds provocative, closer inspection will reveal that it is pretty uncontroversial, even banal.  To illustrate this, I will employ a tale written in twelfth-century northern England.[1]  It goes like this:  Once upon a time there was a powerful and energetic earl called Uhtred who saved Durham from the Scots.  Uhtred was married three times.  His second marriage was to the daughter of one Styr Ulfsson and was contracted on condition that Uhtred would kill Styr’s enemy, Thurbrand.  Alas, when Uhtred came to swear allegiance to King Cnut, his new ruler (and old enemy), in around 1018-20, Thurbrand and the king’s soldiers ambushed him and forty other chief men and killed them all.  Uhtred’s brother Eadwulf succeeded him in the earldom but when he died Ealdred, Uhtred’s son by his first wife, became earl and killed Thurbrand.  Thurbrand’s son, Carl, then campaigned against Ealdred until the two were prevailed upon to become sworn brothers and go on pilgrimage together to Rome.  Unfortunately, the ship upon which they were to sail was delayed by bad weather so whilst they waited, Carl entertained Ealdred at his home in Holderness in the East Riding of Yorkshire.  One day, whilst showing Ealdred around his estate Carl killed Ealdred in (to quote the source)

a wood called Risewood and still today the place of his murder is marked by a small stone cross.  Some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, who was the son of his daughter, sent a large band of young men and avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.  For when the sons of Carl were feasting together at their elder brother’s house at Settrington, not far from York, the men who had been sent caught them unawares and savagely killed them together, except for Cnut whose life they spared because of his innate goodness.  Sumerled, who was not there, survives to this day.  Having massacred the sons and grandsons of Carl, they returned home bringing with them much booty of various kinds.

This is a fascinating story but what makes it relevant to my argument is the way that historians have read this story as the tale of a ‘feud’: a vendetta with each murder justified by the last and justifying the next.  In other words, they have seen the characters in this tale as impelled to act by the past events that weighed upon their shoulders.  In this way of seeing, individuals were bound to act in particular ways because of the demand of the ‘blood-feud’.  They had no choice; such was the burden of expectations about honour and duty weighing upon them.  They are prisoners of their history.  For these reasons, what we can call the Northumbrian ‘feud’ can stand as a useful illustration of common conceptions of the individual’s relationship to history.  A person is constructed by the events of the past; her identity is forged and defined by those events; membership of a group is determined by shared memories; actions are largely explained as brought about by specific historical inheritance, or heritage.  But let us look at this story more closely.

It illustrates beautifully the fact that history is only constructed after the event.  It is written as a story; English is perhaps the only western European language where the word for ‘history’ is not commonly also used as the word for ‘a story’.[2]  The account also shows that how we choose to tell that story is crucial.  This point is often associated with the ‘post-modern’ turn in historiography but it has actually been made since the very earliest days of what we might think of as modern history-writing.  People like the author of this story (known to scholars as ‘the Durham Anonymous’) select episodes from the past and link them together to make a single strand of narrative.  In this case it was the story of a feud.  But did it really happen like that or were the events simply written up in that way? 

As related by the anonymous author, the episodes in the story of the Northumbrian ‘feud’ sound unproblematic, linked by a straightforward chain of cause and effect unfolding through time.  They fit the model of early medieval man, caught within a web of relationships and demands, not of his own making but inherited from the past.  In fact, though, long gaps separated the acts of violence.  It took ten years for any violence to erupt as a result of Styr’s alleged injunction to Uhtred to kill Thurbrand.  Styr’s daughter had died and Uhtred had remarried in the interim, surely freeing him from Styr’s demand.  Furthermore, it was actually Thurbrand who did the only recorded attacking.  A further seven years or more must have elapsed before Ealdred exacted his revenge on Thurbrand.  The episode after that is interesting.  Thurbrand’s son Carl is not described as trying to find an occasion to carry out hisvengeance killing.  Instead, he and Ealdred tried to do away with each other.  This period was another long one.  Carl’s killing of Ealdred dates to 1038, twenty-three years after his father had killed Ealdred’s father (the first event in the ‘feud’), and at least ten after Thurbrand’s murder (the second event).  The anonymous narrator proceeds from Ealdred’s death to say simply that ‘some time later, the grandson of Earl Ealdred, Earl Waltheof, … avenged the killing of his grandfather with the utmost slaughter.’  Some time later …  In fact, the Settrington massacre, the fourth and final episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’, took place in 1073/4, thirty-six years after Ealdred’s murder.  Carl killed Ealdred four years before Waltheof was even born. 

These four acts of murderous violence were thus spread over fifty-eight or fifty-nine years.  Most were separated by at least a decade.  A fairly long list of other lethal episodes can be compiled for Northumbrian history in this period – several are mentioned by our source.  They involve some of the men and families involved in the story of the ‘feud’, largely because these were prominent families competing for political authority, but as far as we know they did not result in vendettas.  This casts doubt on the idea that eleventh-century people really were governed by the demands of blood-feud.  Furthermore, if blood-feud compelled individuals to act to defend family honour, as we are often given to believe, the Northumbrian events make even less sense; some of the people involved were almost as closely related to the people they were killing as to the people they were (allegedly) avenging.

A lot of selection is going on here, from a background of violence and killing, in order to create this story, this long, unilinear saga of murder and revenge.  Like all historians, the ‘Durham Anonymous’ chose which story to tell and how to tell it.  The history of eleventh-century Northumbria has thus come to be that of the ‘feud’ between the families of Uhtred and Thurbrand.  However, the events were not experienced like that that as they occurred, as the complex mass of events unfolded.  The hi/story of the Northumbrian feud was made after the event; it never actually happened.

When Waltheof slew Carl’s sons it is very likely that he said he was avenging his maternal grandfather, appealing to the notions of vengeance that existed at the time.  Similarly, when Carl killed Ealdred it is likely that he justified this in terms of avenging his father, Thurbrand’s, death at Ealdred’s hands.  Yet, each episode of the Northumbrian ‘feud’ can be explained according to the precise political circumstances that pertained when it took place.  Uhtred’s and Thurbrand’s families were important Northumbrian kindreds, members of which occasionally found themselves in competition for authority.  This region was distant from the power-centres of the eleventh-century kingdom of England so such rivalry was frequently resolved violently.  The principal aim of each act was to remove a rival, not to avenge the murder of a long-dead kinsman.  The deed was then justified by appeal to such a past wrong.  Put another way, the actors in the story played for very specific stakes grounded in the politics of the presentbut legitimised and explained their actions by selecting an event from the past.  This, they claimed (rather than the desire to own more land in Teesdale, for example), compelled them to do what they did.  The past, in their view, absolved them of responsibility for wrong-doing in the present.  They depicted their deeds as having been motivated by a higher principle. 

The so-called Northumbrian feud neatly illustrates how people relate to the past and how they connect their conception of the past to their actions in the present.  The past is used today not very differently, if at all.  The past is dead and gone and is (beyond the ‘aesthetic moment’ discussed in chapter 1) incapable of exerting any force or pressure on anyone.  That – perhaps rather obvious – point is the cornerstone of this book’s argument.  When we say we are defined by the past, let alone prisoners of the past, we are in fact saying that we choose to define ourselves, or to constrain our own actions, according to our conception of what happened in the past.  The past includes everything that happened between the Big Bang and a second ago: innumerable doings, sayings, thoughts.  The past is incapable even of being comprehended as such, except in the most abstract temporal sense of ‘stuff that has happened’.  Before it can properly be envisaged, it must be converted into a narrative, a hi/story.  So, in an important sense, history comes before the past!  To be comprehended, the past must be given a plot with a beginning a middle and an end (even if that end is not really an end but simply the present – a deferred ending). 

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

A simple thought experiment may serve as a further illustration.  At any given time we can conceive of yesterday in general abstract terms as ‘the day before today’ but before we can have any real grasp of it, for example in writing up a diary, we have to decide upon what things happened that give shape to that general concept, in other words, the things that turn it into a narrative.  It may be that one simply selects the main structuring events of the day: got up; had breakfast; went to work; came home; watched TV; went to bed.  It might be that, as here, these things have no especially marked ‘plot’ to them; they are just the things that happened: a sort of bare chronicle (we will return to the issue of chronicling).  But even here the meaning of the events takes shape not just from their naming (‘breakfast’, ‘work’) but from their sequence.  ‘Came home, went to bed, had breakfast’ would not usually make much sense (unless of course one worked the night shift and had breakfast in bed). That record gives shape and meaning to the abstract twenty-four hours of ‘yesterday’ and turns it into the narrative of an ordinary day.  There has still been selection.  This is hardly a record, even a chronicle, of the whole day.  A selection of what, at the time, we thought mattered has been made.  All the conversations at work and at home, the details of the trip to and from work, what was on the telly, what was eaten for breakfast (and lunch and dinner have even been omitted) and many other things have been left out.

Now suppose that, having written our diary, we have breakfast, go to work and are summoned to see the boss.  We are then told that we’ve been made redundant.  Now yesterday goes from being a dull day, its hours frittered and wasted in an off-hand way, to being ‘my last day in the job’.  From being just another day those twenty-four hours now acquire an added, perhaps even a certain tragic, quality.  The diary could be amended accordingly.  Certainly, how our diarist saw that day would change importantly.  Let us continue the experiment.  Suppose that the person who asked you the time at the bus stop yesterday, and with whom you had a brief exchange of pleasantries, began to be a regular at the bus stop, someone you got to know, and who in time became your husband/wife/partner.  Something that didn’t even seem worth recording on the day it happened and possibly for some time afterwards becomes a major shaping event of your life.  The dull day has become ‘the day I met my partner’, possibly one of the most important days of your life – one would like to think so.  Yet, at the time that that event happened, at the time that that ‘history’ was made, you didn’t even notice it.  Only later does it become part of a history that ‘made you who you are’.  Any number of variations on this basic scenario are possible, turning a bland unit of time into a key structuring element of the history of a life. 

Note, though, that the events, the elements themselves, do not change; it is how one characterises them, how one selects them and positions them within the narrative, and how one casts that narrative.  Events rarely carry an inherent meaning– those that do are the really traumatic ones.   If we return to the diarist, losing her job that day may have been the beginning of a long period of years of unemployment and of being treated, in spite of one’s best efforts, as an idle scrounger by tabloid editors, journalists and their readers and by populist Conservative (and Labour) governments.  Every moment of that conversation with the boss, every vain attempt to keep the job, to talk the boss out of her decision might become etched on the memory; the last day at work becomes a poignant twenty-four hours.  Alternatively, though, the diarist might have gone home and applied for another job, been successful, risen to the top of the company, met her partner and lived a very happy period of her life.  In that case, one doubts that any especial elements of the redundancy conversation are remembered and the event itself becomes something of a happy moment of transition to something better.  And didn’t I show her in the end?  That ‘last day at work’ remains a boring, unremembered twenty-four hours.  But it happened just the same, in just the same way.  The historical Real, the un- (or pre-) symbolised mass of ‘things that happened’, is always in its place.

Another variant future allows us to see the issue of how histories are made more clearly.  Suppose that, after a month or so on the dole the diarist gets a new job, similar to the last, and her life continues roughly as before.  How, and even whether, she remembers losing her old job is entirely a personal issue.  The act of being made redundant can be seen as a great personal affront or with equanimity as a hard decision that had to be made; the boss might become viewed as a personal enemy, even (or perhaps especially) if thought of in a friendly light earlier, or her standing in the eyes of the diarist might not change.  The diarist might still blame herself for not working harder, even though in fact she was a model employee, or retrospectively build herself up into a perfect company worker despite in reality having been a feckless slacker who was always likely to be first in line if job-losses had to be made.  And of course none of these histories is even capable of knowing the actual personal motivations of the boss herself, or the details of the company finances, etc.

These scenarios, at a micro level, illustrate the relationship between time, experience, record and the creation of history.  Such meaning that events have depends upon their place in a retrospectively constructed narrative.  The occurrences that matter have been chosen and placed in order (sometimes, of course, they are moved out of chronological sequence, whether deliberately or otherwise); their meaning depends on their juxtaposition with the other events selected within the type of narrative told; and that type of narrative depends entirely upon the contingent attitude of the narrator/rememberer.  However they are seen later on, though, at the time the events in the story were experienced in exactly the same way.  This is exactly how histories are made and written.  In the tale of Thurbrand and Uhtred, the ‘Northumbrian feud’, the exact same procedures were followed.  A selection was made (whether by the anonymous writer or his informants) from a vast number of different events and this was then arranged in a sequence to form the story of a feud, culminating in the tale of how Earl Waltheof avenged his grandfather.  Had the author or his sources been more inclined to support Carl’s family, one imagines that it would have been constructed in a very different way, probably from a different selection of past happenings.

The past, as the unity of all time, thought and action up until this very moment, here, now, happened and cannot be changed.  But, as I have just shown, it is absolutely meaningless in and of itself.  It only takes on meaning through the way its contents are selected and arranged in the present.  That historyis something that can be and is changed.  Regularly.

None of the foregoing represents a startling new departure in ways of thinking about the past and history, although it still makes some people uncomfortable.  After all, a removal of responsibility for present actions through placing the blame upon an inherited history is fairly comforting.  What the discussion shows is that the past in itself has no weight.  Being dead and gone it is as light as air.  What weighs upon us is our own creation of a past, our own choices of how to see the past; our own decision to see ourselves and our actions as made by the past.  The purpose of this book is to show how we should liberate ourselves from these notions as a means towards a freer future.  This means rethinking why we do (or should do) history: ‘why history matters’. 

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[1]The story comes from an anonymous source called the De Obsessio Dunelmi – Concerning the Siege of Durham (a misleading title as the siege of Durham hardly features in this short but interesting tract).

[2]Compare Geschichte, histoire, historía, storia, etc.