The Burning Questions of Lecturing Life

"I did no work this term and it's your
fault because your teaching is
rubbish!"

Why is there always one?  Why is there always one wee shite who decides to muck up your feedback returns?  I take my teaching seriously and I take my feedback seriously too.  If the forms all said 'Grumpy is a useless sack of shit who can't teach his way out of a paper bag' I'd be enduring some long dark nights of the soul (well, even more than I do anyway), I can tell you.  Even if they mostly said only marginally nicer things - 'it wasn't bad I suppose but it could have been much better', that sort of thing - I'd be asking myself some pretty searching questions, and our Johnny's gratuitous trolling wouldn't seem so out of place.  Feedback's essential for pointing out (or confirming what you suspected were) things you can be doing better or experiments which didn't go so well, for next time, and that's fine.  I'm all in favour of feedback (within certain limits) to the extent that for some years now (ahead of the rest of my dept) I've carried out interim feedback exercises mid-way through courses to see if there are things I can improve.

As it happens, I just finished teaching a new second-year course.  As my regular reader knows, I've been away for three years on a research fellowship so the students who signed up for this had signed up 'blind'.  Students in my experience are wary about courses with lecturers they don't know, so it wasn't as heavily subscribed as the other courses of the same type and many who were enrolled had not listed it as a first choice (as became clear in feedback, albeit via rather nice comments along the lines of 'this wasn't my first choice but I really enjoyed it').  Additionally I was trying to do something different, to stretch the students a bit, something that upped the intellectual stakes, rather than just being entertaining.  If you just want an amusing 'ho ho, welcome to the crayyy-zee world of late antiquity' lecturing clown to lure first-years away from the Tudors and Hitler and into medieval history, I'm your man but to be honest that's become too easy; it's still fun and I enjoy it lots but it's not a challenge any more.  Trying to develop a second-year lecture course (quite a new phenomenon in the Stuff wot Happened department at Poppleton University) that did something different and required more of the students was a challenge.  Furthermore, before I went off on my fellowship, some of our students (not many but a significant and vocal minority) had shown themselves capable of being pretty strident about hating anything theoretical, anything that wasn't all kings and wars ('proper history') and especially anything that they thought might be 'Marxist' (and I'd told 'em, straight up, in the briefing that I was not a Marxist but that I was a socialist)...  This had also led me to think that 'students today' were all result-obsessed and uninterested in being challenged intellectually.  But I had decided to go full speed ahead and damn the feedback forms.  For all those reasons I was expecting some, shall we say, 'mixed' responses.

So I am chuffed that the responses were overwhelmingly positive.  At 85-89% it may not (if you care about such things) have been numerically the highest score I've ever had (normally I hit the 90s) but, as noted, I wasn't expecting the students necessarily to enjoy the course.  Moreover, the free text comments were generally very favourable.  The most important - and cheeriest - thing to report is that I had been quite wrong in my prognosis of 'students today'.  Given the nature of recruitment (see above) and given that they'd had (in no particular order) Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, Lacan, Gramsci, Žižek, Bourdieu, Giddens and even an off-the-cuff (and possibly wrong) allusion to Heidegger rained on them for ten weeks without warning, the number that reacted positively to mixing history and philosophy, to intellectual stimulation, to being made to get their heads round difficult concepts, and to being challenged, was probably the best Christmas present of all.  Thanks for that!

It wasn't all positive, of course.  Apart from the inevitable stuff that needs tightening up for next time, there was one student who rated the course 2 out of 4 but said the teaching was very good, which I assume means that they didn't much enjoy the subject matter but that it was well-taught.  Fair enough.  To be honest, I'd rather that than a response that said they'd loved the course but that it had been an utter shambles.  I don't think it's clear, to us or the students, whether the overall 'rate this course out of 4' part of the form means 'how much did you enjoy this course?' or 'how well taught was this course?' - and they are quite different questions.  But I digress.

So we come to the inevitable Johnny Troll.  There's always one, the one student who said the lectures were poor, that the philosophy 'detracted from the subject of the course' (ahem, that sort of was the subject of the course), that the VLE* was poor, that the group work was pointless, etc.  Really, what is this about?  When the obvious translation is 'I didn't want to do this course so I have sulked for the past ten weeks; I came to a couple of lectures and didn't understand them; they weren't just telling me what was what, like 1st-year lectures; I expected the VLE to be a list of just what I needed to read; I couldn't be bothered to take part in any group work and let my fellow students down too.'  When it's so out on a limb, so out of step with the rest of the feedback (about lectures, VLE, etc), what is he (and I'd bet a  month's salary, pre-tax, that it was a he) thinking?  OK maybe he's a Billy No-Mates (I kind of hope so, what with me being vindictive and all) and doesn't have any awareness of what his class-mates think.  Maybe he thinks his opinion outweighs all theirs (I wouldn't rule that out either)?  Maybe he thinks my head of department, when he comes to review the feedback, is going to push all the positive forms to one side and say 'Grumpy, this just won't do!  You're fired!'  Maybe he thinks my Head of department will summon a public parade of the University and in a sort of academic re-enactment of the Dreyfus Affair, symbolically smash a chair in front of me and my colleagues and throw the pieces on the ground in front of me, tear up my letter of appointment and throw it on the ground, rip my doctoral gown off my shoulders...  You get the picture.

Nah.  It's none of the above, in my opinion.  In my view, the reason is that he knows what the other burning feedback-related question of lecturing life is.  And it's a big question too, one that applies to every other history lecturer that I've ever spoken to about this.  It is this: why is it this piece of feedback, rather than the 30-odd that went out of their way to say nice things (sometimes wildly, probably equally unjustifiably nice things) about my course - why is it this one response - that has stayed on my mind for the rest of the day?

---
*Virtual Learning Environment: the intranet on which course materials etc are posted.  In my university it is called 'Yorkshare' - see what they did there?

It's the thought that counts

T-Shirt given to me by my MA students this week (front and back).

As my partner put it, 'So they bought you a T-Shirt with a critique of your life's work on it?'

A few more thoughts on contact hours

[Here's another extract from my 2nd-year briefing, which I present for prospective (and indeed current) university students and their parents.  It's a sort of attempt to make a kind of contract between me and my 2nd-years.  So far - though they're a tough crowd - they seem to be working very well in class, so maybe some of it went in, with some of them!  But it follows on from what I've said before about contact hours and how to understand the issue.]

[What I expect of my students]

No, Mr Bond, I expect you to give me
 your take on Book II of Gregory
of Tours' Histories

It’s easy enough for me to say what I expect of you.  In the inverse of what Auric Goldfinger said to James Bond, I don’t expect you to die; I expect you to talk.  In other words to take a full part in the discussion groups.  And I expect you to do the work.  I expect you to engage critically with what I say, not to parrot it or slavishly agree (which would go against everything I’ve just said), but not just to stick your fingers in your ears and say ‘la la la I can’t hear you’ either.  You don’t need to agree with me to get good marks – the highest marks I’ve ever given have been for essays that disagree with me.  I don’t have to be convinced; I just have to think you’ve made a good, solidly-based argument that shows you’ve thought critically about what I’ve said, within the parameters of what can be expected of a second-year undergraduate.  And those are the parameters you’re judged against; not some abstract historical ideal but what you can be expected to know and do in (or after) a one term 2^nd-year undergraduate course).

 

[What my students can expect of me]

That’s what I expect.  What can you expect?  Now as I see it there are certain demands on the part of students which come up again and again.  One is the issue of contact hours; the other is a concern to be taught by the senior, permanent members of staff, the currently-recognised established historians.  I understand both of these concerns, and to some extent I share them.  To take the second one first, I will say – sincerely – that being taught by the established staff-member doesn’t necessarily mean getting the best tuition.  The young grad student might very well have more enthusiasm and newer and better ideas for teaching.  But what we are going to do nevertheless on the course is swap over half way through, so that the two groups taught by [my TA] in the first half of the term will be taught by me in the second half, and vice versa.  Whether you want to see that as ensuring that you all get a turn with the big hot-shot professor or as making sure you aren’t stuck with the old lag for the whole term but get a chance with the sparky young historian too, is entirely up to you!

Now: contact hours.  Like I said, I share your concerns about this, up to a point.  What’s more I share your concerns about value, especially now you have to pay fees – which is an obscenity in my view but then it would be.  But numbers of hours are a crude measure.  You shouldn’t just think in terms of quantity but quality.  You should work to ensure that you get the most out of the small-group contact-hours you get, by being fully prepared, by having done the reading, by being willing to talk in class.  Contact hours can’t just be pushed up and up because we expect you, especially in years two and three, to prepare properly for them, so for each extra hour you get, you’d have to do more preparation.  That’s the bottom line.  The point is not for me to stand up here and tell you what to write, what to think, what you need to say to pass the exam.  I don’t think it’s what you want either, whatever you might think superficially.  If that was all that happened in a History degree, then a BA History wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s written on; in just the same way as people’s attitudes to A-Levels have changed since it became possible just to coach people to the high grades.  There’d be even greater qualification-inflation and even more expense to get them.  So think on.

What’s more if you just wanted to be told what’s what, that would contradict your concerns to be taught by the most renowned and established members of staff.  …  There’s no point in having a top-flight, internationally-respected historian just telling you what to write to pass an exam, for the simple reason that if it were that simple, a first-year PhD student could do that every bit as well.  Come to think of it, a top third-year undergraduate could tell you.  It’d be like having a Ferrari but only using it to drive down to the shops at the end of the street.  It’d be like buying Lionel Messi and using him as a ball boy.  So, if you want your money’s worth then you have to make the most of me lecturing to you on stuff that I know and am actively engaged in, or talking about it with you in class.

There will be tough stuff to grasp on this course.  It will make your head hurt at times.  It makes mine hurt sometimes.  But – and this is the most important thing – I’m here to help you with all that.  Again, if you want your money’s worth – and why wouldn’t you? – you have to make use of what’s available to you.  I’ll be available in my office hours ... and you should come and talk to me; you can e-mail me and ask questions; you can arrange an appointment at another time.  You can just bang on my door.

I’m paid to teach you.  That does not mean lowering the bar and making it all so easy that you can coast through; it means helping you to raise your game so you can get over a higher bar more easily.  Let’s be clear about that.  I’m sure you’ve had this analogy before, but think of University as like an expensive intellectual gym.  If you joined a gym with a world-class athlete as a personal trainer, you’d be mad not to make use of him or her.  But you wouldn’t expect him or her to do the exercises for you, to get fit on your behalf or lose weight for you.  The trainer’s there to help you get fit but you won’t get fit or lose weight without doing the exercises yourself and feeling the pain.  I’m the trainer.

I spent the first 11 years of my career teaching mature students so I’m used to treating my students as adults.  I expect you to behave as responsible adults and therefore to work to make sure you get the best value for money and the best education and to ensure that you get the results you want.  What you can expect of me is, as I just said, to do whatever I can to help you get intellectually into shape to make sure you do yourselves justice.  I hope we have a deal.  If we do, we’ll learn a lot, expand our minds, be able to think better about the world and – I hope – have a bit of a laugh too along the way.  If we don’t you’ll just make me angry and – believe me – you won’t like me when I’m angry.

Professor Grumpy's Historical Manifesto

[This is an edited bit of my introductory 'briefing' lecture to my new second-years yesterday.  I didn't get the feeling it went very well - I think they were expecting a 15 mins 'here's the course book and my office hours are...' rather than a full-on manifesto.  But still, I got some decent feedback later on...  A Facebook friend asked how we justify medieval history not long ago, so here's my answer.  This section came after a section about why late antiquity had attracted my interest, personally, about all the big changes that took place around 600, and about why they might be important.  That concluded, though, by asking why it mattered to know any of that.  Now read on...]

 

Why does any History matter?

Think of the ways in which people – maybe you – justify the study of history. I expect two themes come up: relevance and ‘how we got where we are’. I’d say, though, that no history is relevant … or alternatively that all history is equally relevant.

What do people mean when they say that history is relevant?

It’s, let’s face it, usually a justification for modern history. To understand the modern world, the argument runs, we have to understand its history. So, to understand the problems, say, of Iraq, Afghanistan, or Ireland, or the Balkans, we need to know the history of those regions. Sounds reasonable, but actually we don’t. It’s no more use to study the modern history of those regions than it is to study the end of the Roman world.

Why? Well, let’s look at the problem more closely. Let’s take, for example, a modern Ulster Unionist or Irish Republican, or a Serbian nationalist (or a nationalist from any other area – including Scotland). 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 (such as there’s a lot of at the moment), to know that in the 1830s 80% of Athens spoke Albanian? That the only reason that (allegedly) Socrates could still read a Greek newspaper if he came back to life is 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’s as close as Italian is to Latin)? No. It might get you punched in the face but it won’t help you understand why.

Knowing 'what really happened in history' is Chronicling not history.  And it isn't much practical use outside pub quizzes*. 1: It reduces history to simple fact-finding; and simple factual recounting isn’t history. 2: It assumes that the simple course of events explains them, and thus that the course of events naturally, inevitably, led to particular outcomes (where we are today). 3: Our modern nationalists aren’t operating under compulsion from the Past. The past has no power; it’s dead and gone. It can’t make you do anything. These people are choosing events from their understanding of the past to justify what they are doing or what they want to do in the present. 
*Though it does provide a useful basis for undermining the claims of Nationalists and others, and that is important, it's not (and this is really my point) really history.

There’s another justification. If we’d only known more about Iraqi or Afghan history in the 20th century – so runs the argument in e.g. John Tosh’s Why History Matters – we’d have thought twice about invading because we’d have seen what would happen. What – because these people always act the same way in response to certain stimuli, according to some kind of timeless national characteristics? Isn’t that just a mite – well – racist? There are some general similarities for sure between Iraq in the 1920s and in the first decade of the 21st century but to assume that the latter state of affairs was predictable from the former is essentialist at best.

These arguments are usually deployed to bolster a claim that modern history is somehow more useful or relevant but, as I’ve just shown, they’re all a bit weak theoretically, relying on a pretty poor conception of history: history as only a collection of fact. Further they provide no justification for any sort of cut-off point in how far back we go. By their own logic, there’s no reason why, to ‘understand’ Afghanistan today you shouldn’t go all the way back to Mahmud of Ghazni in the tenth century, or to Sikhander himself, Alexander the Great, or further. For if the events of say the 1990s can only be understood by studying the events of 1900-1990, then the explanation is incomplete, because surely the events of 1900 can only be understood in terms of those of 1800-99, and the events of 1800 by those of 1700-99, and so on back to the earth cooling. A modern ‘relevance’ cut-off point is purely arbitrary and contingent and doesn’t at all follow from the logic of the argument.

So: let’s unpack the historical project and see what the really important – and relevant – elements of the analysis are. In looking at our modern nationalist and his/her relationship with the past, what are we, essentially, doing? First of all we’re showing an interest in understanding the world view of another human being – I’ll come back to that. Second, though, we’re adopting a critical stance to his or her thought or world view. Thus we’re recognising similarity in the sense of a shared humanity, but simultaneously acknowledging difference. We’re not taking the nationalist’s account as gospel truth; we’re questioning it, examining it critically. And that goes for all the voices from or about the past, or from the past about the past. History is about never believing what you’re told – taking a stance of radical scepticism. Put another way, slightly flippantly, the question we are always asking is not ‘is this bastard lying to me, but why is this lying bastard lying to me?’ (an adapted quote from a famous journalist.)

And that’s exactly it, because what we’re doing after that analysis of the evidence is trying to understand why people are acting like that. Why are they making that cock-eyed use of the past? These are questions that require not data but theoretical models, an analytical tool-kit if you like – and you can get that tool-kit from the study of any history. Thus all history is equally valid, equally relevant – or equally invalid and irrelevant if you prefer!

The true point of history, as I see it is as a basis for engaging with, and action in, the world, not a simple exercise of sitting in a library finding out stuff about the Emperor Maurice or Stalin or Philip V. That exercise of critical engagement with what you’re told is a key to that. But there are other key elements at stake.

Another key point concerns the idea that history had to be like that, that it had to have particular outcomes, that the world we know was the natural outcome of all that. But nothing is ‘just like that’. It doesn’t have to be that way. To understand change you have to see all the other possibilities that were open and that could have come about. It’s about ‘keeping faith with the impossible’. Many of the things we think of as natural ways of classifying the world aren’t natural at all: like race and sexuality. If studying late antiquity does have an advantage it is in making that very clear. Late antique people didn’t see colour as the basis for their way of organising the peoples of the world; they didn’t have concepts of homosexuality or heterosexuality. Their ideas of sexuality were quite different.

Which brings us back to understanding the other: seeing these people as humans, like us, and yet somehow different; listening carefully to their stories but critically examining them. Paying attention to alternatives and different ways of doing things isn’t about wishy-washy relativism; it’s not saying that all things are equally valid – it is about trying to understand them.

All that gives us enormously important skills in dealing with, and acting within, our world in the present. When the papers tell us that this or that category of people are doing this, or are like that, or are to blame for something else, historical analysis gives us the skills of source criticism; it also accustoms us to think twice before accepting a judgement; it allows us to try and see other possibilities, the other side of the story. If we make a judgement it will almost certainly be a more sophisticated and less extreme one, but wherever we end up it will be a more responsible and informed choice of opinion and action, and if we spread that, we do good.

There’s a humanity that permeates the entire process of historical enquiry; the critical questions we ask, the desire to understand, which we must bring from history to our everyday lives. They make it impossible in my view to cast human lives off to the demands of the market, or the nation, or the class struggle. That’s why I always say there’s a huge ethical demand involved in history. Huge. Unbearable in fact. But a good historian doesn’t switch off her critical faculties when moving from the seventh century to the twenty-first. There is a demand for commitment there. So I hope you see why I think my politics are the politics of history; they’ve after all grown out of twenty-odd years of being an historian, and I think being a pretty good one at that.

Now – all this, I am sure is making some of you a bit uncomfortable. Good. History is meant to make you uncomfortable. Clio, the muse of history, is like Jesus: she brings not peace but a sword. She will make you rethink everything you think you know; everything you think you hold dear; she will make you question everything. Everything you were brought up with; everything you thought natural. She’s not here to wrap you in cotton wool and say ‘there, there’ everything is just how it’s supposed to be. She’s not there to bring succour to your view of your country, or smooth over the bad stuff that it did, or to soothe your conscience about the massacres perpetuated in the name of your religion, or the slaughter committed by people who at least claimed to share your political beliefs. She’s there to make you uneasy. She’s there to stop you from falling victim to her evil twin, Myth. In a sense I want to free you from feeling like the past controls us; that we have to base our identities in the present upon myths. That means we don’t have to feel guilty or apologise, either – just to be aware; to understand.

Put another way, the historian is the ‘Internal Affairs guy’. This is a well-known figure in popular TV ‘cop shows’ and rarely a ‘good guy’. He or she is there to suppose that the hero has lied or done something wrong and that the villains might have been wronged or be telling the truth. The character rarely turns out to be as unsettling as that but it works as an analogy. For me, the historian is not there to provide comforting truths but to question them. The historian must always be prepared to wonder whether the ‘heroes’ of history are not, in fact, the villains,

If you believe anything at all, if you want your belief to be solid, in other words, it has to be on the basis of taking it apart and putting it back together on the basis of radical scepticism.

Politicians of all sorts – left and right - always want to control the teaching of history. History is a real political football, and in the light of what I’ve just been saying you can see why. It’s about not believing what you’re told without close scrutiny; it’s about trying to understand the other; it’s about trying to see and evaluate another point of view. That makes history potentially VERY dangerous. What a history degree should be is three years of thinking dangerously. And the sixth and seventh centuries are as good a thing to think dangerously with as any other era.

So, voilà. That’s my historical manifesto. You can read my views on this sort of thing at various stages of development on my blog. The main thing is that that’s what I want this course to do – to bring out this sort of critical ethical tool-kit through the study of an interesting, and important period of change.

'Bournville Tech' IAA Closure: Latest

At the institution that we at Historian on the Edge like, for legal reasons, to refer to as 'Bournville Tech' ("Bastards: We got 'em") someone has put key documents on the web relating to the closure of its Institute of Archaeology and Antiquity.  It's revealing stuff and all too emblematic of the climate of UKHE.  Read about it and find the links here, and do what you can do to help, not least by bringing pressure on the pretty loathsome senior management team of VC 'Harry Callaghan' and dean 'Maurikios Copronymos'.

The Decline and Fall of the Ancient Triumph

[Next week I'm off to a conference in Berlin on the triumph in the classical world - with brilliant timing I'll get back the day before term starts and I am reintroduced to normal actual work after 3 years of Leverhulme-funded thinking-luxury.  My paper has a very dull title so I have substituted a better one that I didn't think of at the time.  My argument is that although victory remained absolutely central to royal ideals and imagery, there was a crucial change between the late Roman and the early medieval western worlds.  Although key features remained (processions etc.) there was a decisive shift of emphasis towards Christian celebration prsided over by the church, towards thanksgiving rather than praise and towards Old Testament imagery.  You won't be surprised that I think that this shift took place after the Justinianic wars of the mid-sixth century! I then attempt to explain this in terms of the shift in ideological bases caused by the Justinianic wars and the end of the Roman Empire, a more Christian mode of thought in which credit for victory was not appropriately given to mortal warriors, however skilful, to a change in the 'geo-political' nature of the west and perhaps t a difference in the type of warfare being waged.  It's preliminary and doubtless needs refinement and development, but see what you think of this first sketch.
N.b.: There are typos, stylistic infelicities and dates that are wrong, all of which I haven't been bothered to correct, so don't rely on it in detail!]

Introduction

In agreeing to give this paper, I must say that I feel that I accepted something of a poisoned chalice. I placed myself in the unenviable position of trying to find something to say about, or a position to take on, post-imperial triumphal rulership that added in some way to Michael McCormick’s excellent treatment of the subject from twenty-six years ago. It is not an easy task to try and build on a book that has deservedly held the field for almost three decades. Nonetheless I will try! I will, of necessity, have to open with a brief recapitulation of some of the main points made by McCormick, but then I will suggest two slightly different avenues down which analysis might be pursued, and then – and this is related to my current principal research project – suggest that a key moment of changed in the West occurred in the generations either side of AD 600.

The Persistence of Victorious Rulership

The Agilulf plaque from Val di Nievole

One thing that certainly persisted from the classical world through late antiquity and into the early medieval period was the importance of military success to the notion of good kingship. McCormick demonstrated that very clearly. McCormick was able to assemble plentiful and impressive evidence of the continuation of kings being styled as triumphator or given other ostentatiously victorious epithets and titles; kings were addressed and praised in poetic and other works as victorious leaders; they continued to hold victorious parades, some of which still bore some trappings of imperial Roman triumphal ritual; other public rituals celebrated victories and humiliated the defeated; they were depicted visually in ways that echoed earlier Roman ideas of the victorious king. An example given is the well-known Valdinievole plate showing the Lombard king Agilulf receiving the submission of barbarous enemies and flanked by winged victories. Alas, research by Cristina La Rocca and Stefano Gasparri casts some reasonable doubt on the authenticity of this piece. But the general point stands. From the late Roman period through to the Carolingian Empire, the centrality of military success to the concept of good rulership remained a constant.

There are indeed few times and places in the earlier Middle Ages where kings were not expected to lead their armies in person and to win battles. In that sense the importance of victory might be said to have been even greater than it had been during the Empire. The penalties for failure were high. At the very end of the period that I studied in my 2003 book on warfare, the Emperor Charles III – the so-called Charles the Fat – can be argued to have lost his throne because of his perceived failures against the Vikings. It has been very cogently argued by Simon MacLean that, in the abstract, the actions that Charles took to defend his realm were no different from those pursued by previous members of his dynasty. Nonetheless, in the precise political circumstances of 888 the failure actively to defeat the Vikings in battle presented a golden opportunity to Charles’ enemies to portray him as a Bad King. Not least because the leader of his opponents, Count Odo, had been able to be presented as waging a heroic defence of Paris against the odds while Charles did nothing. Within the year Charles had been deposed and died. Over a hundred years previously, the Mercian king Æthelbald was killed at night by his own bodyguard, in an evidently shocking act of betrayal even by Mercian standards. It seems plausible to associate this with the battle, two years previously, at Burford, where Æthelbald was beaten by the West Saxons, over whom he had claimed overlordship. Again, the picture is not so simple; some evidence suggests that Æthelbald had restored his dominance over the south; nonetheless the talismanic value of battlefield success or failure remained high. If we continue our journey backwards through time towards the Roman era, we can see further examples. The defeat of the Austrasian army by the Thuringians in the 630s left Merovingian hegemony east of the Rhine in tatters, and nothing illustrates this better than Fredegar’s pathetic image of the young king Sigibert III sitting, weeping on his horse at the rout of his army by the rebellious Duke Radulf. Sixth-century Visigothic kings knew better than anyone the price of failure. At least two kings appear to have been killed or deposed as a result of military failure: Theudis was killed shortly after a defeat outside Ceuta; Agila faced a revolt and lost his crown after suffering a defeat at the hands of the citizens of Cordoba.

The principal exception seems to have been the Merovingian Frankish kings between the death of Chlothar I and perhaps that of Chlothar’s last surviving son Guntramn of Burgundy in 592. Although Chlothar’s sons had commanded armies in their father’s lifetime, they rarely led military forces when they were kings, usually delegating such a role to their dukes and patricians. Yet, to examine the poetry of Venantius Fortunatus is very quickly to discover that there was no evident lessening of the importance of war-leadership in the list of kingly virtues. Gregory of Tours seems, to judge from the Preface to Book V of the Histories, not necessarily to have had a problem with external warfare as a mark of good kingship; it was of civil war, within the regnum francorum, which he disapproved. Whether or not one believes it to be sincere (and I do not), the diatribe against Chilperic at Histories VI.46 makes a similar point. The diatribe takes the standard points of good kingship in turn and flips them into their negative. Rather than being a great war-leader, Chilperic was simply a ravager and desecrator of his own lands. It would seem, therefore, that such was the success of the Merovingians in establishing themselves securely on the Frankish throne that – like the Roman Emperors in some periods, they had no need to demonstrate their martial ability in person, but could garner the laurels from any victories won by their subordinates – while simultaneously evading the negative effects of defeat. This seems to have been a short-lived phase. By the later 590s, in a development probably not unrelated to the general crisis being experienced by the Frankish kingdoms at that point, the grandsons and great-grandsons of Chlothar I had returned to leading their armies in person. This may have remained the case throughout the rest of the Merovingian period, at least where kings had come of age.

Change in Victory Celebration

Yet, if we return to Spain, we may find some instances of changes to which I would assign more significance than did McCormick. Two texts can be placed alongside each other – McCormick cited both. First we can take Isidore of Seville’s discussion of the triumph. The point I want to make (McCormick made it too) is that it is entirely cast in the past tense. This is what the Romans did. There’s absolutely no sense that this sort of thing goes on any longer. McCormick rightly pointed out that, whatever the impression given by Isidore, victory processions certainly persisted through the seventh century. Indeed they did but there is, in my view, a crucial shift. McCormick makes a slight sleight of hand; the Visigoths had a liturgy for triumphant return from war but the liturgy for the profectio belli ceremony is not about triumph. It is a ceremony for divine blessing before the start of a war. It still demonstrates the importance of victory and warfare, for sure, and it has Roman connotations, if with contemporary Byzantium rather than with the late Empire, but a triumph it is not and in that sense it contradicts Isidore not at all. Even if McCormick is right, though, and the liturgy for victorious return looked much the same, there are crucial changes to be noted.

Obviously, the ceremony is Christian, but Christian elements had intruded into Roman and post-imperial victory celebrations for some time before that. The concentration on church ritual is interesting. Certainly this looks qualitatively different from what we can detect of royal victory ritual in the later fifth and early sixth centuries, which were firmly within the late Roman tradition. Victorious kings – like Theudebert I of Austrasia when he took over the rule of Provence in the 530s – held celebrations in the circuses, like later Roman emperors. The triumphal entry into towns is referred to and, as we shall see in a moment, victorious titles of entirely Roman nature were used. McCormick was able to assemble an impressive body of evidence for these practices. As intimated, they are entirely in harmony with the victory celebrations of contemporary emperors and this is probably not coincidental. As stated, the focus on Church ceremony seems different, even if victorious kings and emperors attended church as part of earlier celebrations (as Clovis did in 507), and even if public procession remained an element of later victory ritual. What seems to me to have happened is an important shift in the relative importance of the elements. In this sense I propose that Isidore’s setting of the classical triumph in the past tense is not surprising or coincidental. The importance of victory to rulers remained; triumphal processions there still were too; but nothing that looked like a triumph. Even Clovis’ procession through Tours in 507, to which I will shortly return, which diverged considerably from the proper Roman way of doing things, will have looked, I suggest, more like a triumph than anything Isidore might have seen.

What interests me now is the particularly Old Testament emphasis. The liturgy draws upon the book of The Wisdom of Solomon as the king receives the banner and goes to war. This is interesting given the usual stress upon peace that was involved in early medieval Solomonic kingship, recently discussed at length by Paul Kershaw, but to me it seems emblematic of the shift towards the Old Testament in royal ideology that had occurred between the earlier and later sixth century. If one were to reprise the theme taken up by Daly in his important 1994 article on Clovis – ‘How pagan, how barbaric?’ – it’s interesting to compare Gregory’s treatment of the 507 campaign with what seems to be more contemporary data. Gregory describes Clovis’ triumphal return to Tours after Vouillé in terms that can be and have been assimilated into a straightforward late antique tradition. Indeed, as we shall see shortly, the procession, the distribution of coin, the acclamation, are wholly in keeping with other royal triumphal celebrations (let’s call them that) of the early sixth century. Gregory says that Clovis was thenceforth called consulus aut augustus, a phrase that most historians have been want to dismiss as a misunderstanding. I am less confident of that. In the context of the rather strange half-century between 476 and 526 it seems to me entirely possible that a Frankish king might have allowed himself to be acclaimed as augustus, just as his contemporary Theodoric of Italy allowed one of the Decii to erect an inscription describing him as gloriosissimus adque anclytus rex … victor et triumfator semper augustus. Whichever attitude one takes, one is left with the idea that this was most likely information from closer to Clovis’ own day.

On the other hand, when Gregory turns to describe a miracle that predicted the Frankish victory, Clovis’ messengers entered the Church of Saint Martin, Tours, just as the priest intoned Psalm 17:40-41 ‘you girt me with strength in war and you cast down beneath me those who had risen up against me and you gave me the backs of my enemies’ (cp 2 Sam. 22:41) – a prophecy fulfilled when the Goths turn their backs iuxta consuetudinem in battle. This Old Testament language seems to fit with Gregory’s very Old Testament Clovis. Indeed, the next miracle concerns a pillar of fire such as appeared before the Israelites (and seems to be taken from Venantius’ Miracles of Saint Hilary). ‘Giving me their backs’ seems not far removed from the reference to the calcatio colli (Deut. 33.29) in Visigothic liturgy and other seventh-century sources. It may be reasonable to assume that it comes from a source closer to Gregory’s own day (the 570s at that stage of the Histories). After the defeat of an Arian uprising in Spain in 588, the inhabitants of Mérida celebrated like the ancients (in this case meaning the Israelites, which is significant in itself) and celebrated in the open, singing the victory song of Moses. Gregory’s contemporary John of Biclar described a Gothic victory over the Franks in the same or next year in entirely Old Testament language. And so on.

Explaining the Change

What might explain this shift of emphasis? To me, this seems to fit with a range of other evidence that suggests that the traditional, Roman bases for royal (and other) ideologies had ceased to be viable after the Justinianic wars of the sixth-century. With an emperor proclaiming the West to have been ‘lost’ to barbarians, continued reference to Roman ideals and bases of authority were simply no longer as viable. New sources were sought and these were readily available in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament; long established virtues – wisdom, piety, justice, victory – could continue to be celebrated but in different language with different exemplars. In the 580s a Frankish prince was even named Samson, which might have been an attempt to recast the dynasty with its long hair in more Old Testament mode.

As part of these changes may have come a change in the ways in which people thought about victory. In 2003 I opened my book about warfare with a discussion of the fact that, for a society in which warfare played such a prominent role, there was a puzzling lack of attention to any sort of military detail in contemporary accounts of battles. This contrasted sharply with classical Greece, for example, where tactics were analogous and battle waged at similarly brutally close-quarters. At the end of a somewhat inconclusive treatment, the best that I could do by way of conclusion was to suggest that – as several early medieval writers said – whatever tactical skill one had, ultimately battle was such a lottery that the outcome could only reasonably be placed in the hands of God. This in itself suggests why there appears to have been a significant shift towards religious, ritual investment in the stages before battle compared with those afterwards, and why there appears to have been a shift from celebrating the military victor towards giving thanks to God for the judgement He made in awarding your side victory. Thus, during battles divine signs are often given – particularly to holy men – that one side has been victorious, underlining the Almighty’s role in determining victory. In the late seventh century, the Anglo-Saxon holy man Cuthbert, for example received a vision that the Northumbrian king Ecgfrith had been defeated and killed by the Picts at the precise moment of his death. In this context it seems not unexpected that it would be hubris in the extreme to publically glorify a king or commander for winning a battle when credit for the victory came from God. This was a point that Gregory of Tours made many times in the course of the Histories. Perhaps the most obvious illustration was the fate of Sigibert of Austrasia in late 575. Having defeated his brother Chilperic and hemmed him into the town of Tournai, Sigibert ignored the advice of Saint Germanus of Paris and proceeded to attend the siege and finish his brother off. While there he allowed himself to be hailed as king by the Neustrian Franks and elevated on a shield. And that was precisely the moment that he was slain by assassins sent by Chilperic.

Another possible explanation for the decline and fall of the Triumph might be sought more squarely in Roman ideas. Ammianus Marcellinus, in his well-known account of Constantius II’s triumph in Rome, expresses the view that celebrating a triumph over Romans was regarded as bad form. One feature that emerged as a result of fifth-century politics, and was underlined by the middle of the sixth century, was that no western ruler had decisively acquired the mantle of Rome in such a way that he could celebrate his wars as victories over barbarians. It’s interesting that Theoderic of Italy seems to have done this after his troops conquered Provence in 508. In the early medieval West, warfare tended to be endemic and small-scale. When major victories were won, they were celebrated, but rarely if ever did they involve the utter conquest of a people, with their king dragged in irons through the streets. The shaming of beaten rebels has Roman roots (and biblical reference points too) but it does not seem to me to be quite the same thing. In that sense, the sort of warfare that was represented by the triumph just does not seem to have existed in the early medieval period.

Whichever way one looks at it, whether ideologically or militarily, Isidore’s view is symptomatic. While victory remained of central importance to kingship, there was no longer any place for anything as antiquated as a triumph.

... And there's more

Here and especially here.  That latter link I think should be shared as widely as possible.

The headline news is that if you're off to NCHumz to study history, what you'll get for your £18k is a course directed by someone - a senior lecturer indeed - less than three years out of her PhD and with medieval history taught by an 'expert' less than a year out of his.  Plus some piece-rate hired hands I shouldn't wonder.  Not forgetting the occasional walk-on part by someone you've seen on the TV or heard on the radio (but who, strictly entre nous, isn't actually regarded as that good, except in their own estimation).  Their most (allegedly) stellar appointment has a publications list of a book and a half dozen articles.  For half that price you could go any number of places (not least the University of Poppleton) and be taught by a whole string of people considerably more established and more internationally renowned (and probably, well, just better) than any of this gaggle.  But, fair's fair, they do do a lot of broadcasting, so when you're back home at the old ancestral pile, after 'Hilary Term' (or whatthefuckever) you will be able to point them out on the telly to mater and pater.  

You'll see on the NCHumz history site, by the way, a lot of references to how their brilliant young stars 'took' double firsts at St Fithfroths.  Now, if like me you're a jolly old oik, you might not know what that means.  Sounds good though, no?  Actually it just means they got a first in their 2nd-year exams as well as their finals.  It's just that the rest of us who do that aren't allowed to call their degree a double first (any more than we're allowed to pay a fiver and have our BAs 'promoted' to MAs).  I got a first in my second-year exams and I took a joint honours (archaeology-history) degree so, if we were, I guess that'd be a quadruple first, right?

Ah but alas and alack.  The senior lecturer and course-convenor (aet.?30/31) has taken to the Twittersphere to accuse me and Voley of being bigots.  Apparently we're morons too, who don't know about real research.  Oh well, that's the professional way, I guess.

So in the meantime let me leave the last word to the Vole, who puts things better than I:

So to be clear: The New College of the Humanities is a reactionary, outdated, private-equity funded bastion of snobbery and washed-up academic approaches with TV stars on the banners and underpaid toilers in the class rooms. It is a finishing school for rich people who want their world-views reinforced rather than challenged. It deliberately excludes the knowledge-hungry poor and its imminent failure is going to be very satisfying indeed.

Oh - and it's considerably less than straight about its financial basis too.