The Bewilderness

A test of memory

Euractiv has an article on the proposed commemorations of the Great War within Europe. Noting that a shared history is one of the foundations for a demos, the European Commission's unwillingness to participate in these events proves a notable failure for the Project. However, it is politically astute.

The British commemorations will focus on memory and loss, the defining themes of the war for thirty years as the last of the few have passed away. If there is an ebbing tide of the 'just war' and the 'right thing to do', this will not ne questioned deeply under the current coalition. Euractive misdescribes this as a focus on victory. The French reaction is similar. For both countries, the conflict is bound up with notions of cultural identity and how communities were tested or split asunder.

For Germany, Austria and Italy, the war is almost forgotten. Some view the emphasis on the conflict in the West as a form of victors' justice. Others cannot focus on the start of their tragedy since the prologue proved a miserable commencement to greater disasters. And in Russia, the centenary is viewed as a path for resurrection and a chance to draw upon Tsarist, not Communist, antecedents:

Vladimir Putin's Russia, meanwhile, has seized on the chance to fan national pride, reviving the memory of a war it says was unjustly forgotten under the Soviet regime -- which today's Russian rulers accuse of bowing shamefully to Germany in 1917.

How we recall the war depends upon national experience and the final disposition of the war. Those countries that lost and suffered revolutionary upheaval displaced their grieving and forgot their dead. But where losses were borne by stable democracies and without political change, there was a groundswell of remembrance and the names of the dead can still be discerned in lichened village sculpture under cross or sword. 

For the only lesson from the Great War that we still observe for our citizen soldiers is recited in the Ode of Remembrance:  "We shall remember them!" "Lest we forget!" 

Hail Gloriana

We see a long tradition of places named after monarchs. Often they are states in republics, where the Carolinas and Georgia remain by inertia; historical neutrality trumpeting any politician who was deemed 'historical' by his contemporaries. Would not the USA be improved with a state called Victoria (perhaps renaming Puerto Rico?)

So I welcome Queen Elizabeth Land, a snowbound Antarctic desert, where one final monarch can be named on her Diamond Jubilee for all that we now hold dear: the wonders of scientific knowledge and the breathtaking beauty of a desolate, impenetrable and inhumane landscape. A fitting tribute as the second Elizabethan Age draws to a close!

Brooke after Gallipoli

Finishing the memoir of Rupert Brooke today on the train to Petersfield, I was struck by a counterfactual. For three months, Brooke languidly took his artistic temperature in the cafes of Munich in 1911, adjudging the German character and drawing sketches of his fellow English as Forster wannabes. It was a poet with a view to exporting the Brookes club, sole membership: one.

The counterfactual would have been triggered by Brooke crossing paths with Adolf Hitler. But the times do not match as Hitler did not emigrate to Munich till 1913. It was motivated by the question of how Brooke may have matured if he had seen action and survived the war.

The question of patriotic poetry and his gauche early work are clear. The themes of satirical focus and sketches of what he saw and experienced would probably have replaced this naif hunger for action (in which he merely articulated the attitudes of his public school generation). Would he have even written about the sense of loss and bereavement for that 'lost generation', of which, in reality, he became a part? 

If Brooke had survived, it is difficult to plot his further career. Positioned between conservative patriotism and the socialism of his cohort, can we foresee Brooke as a reformed pacifist during the interwar period: the primary force in the 1945 Brooke government? His charisma certainly favoured a political role.  Or is he remembered as a minor academic at Sydney University, retreading old steps to the South Seas and tired of a country that held no further happiness for him? Or would he retire like Siegfried Sassoon: perhaps becoming a housemaster again at his beloved Rugby, some special plaque commemorating "Chips" Brooke and his influence over generations of schoolboys.

None of this happened and Brooke was buried on an Aegean isle, as the voice of that lost generation, his best unwritten poetry still before him. 

A Merrier England?

After McFarlane's work in the 1970s on "The Origins of English Indvidualism", some further work has come out to undermine the peasant theories that lead to misunderstandings of the Middle Ages. Work undertaken at the University of Warwick corroborates suspicions that England (and other European countries) were wealthier than realised.

"By the late Middle Ages, the English people were in a position to afford a varied diet including meat, dairy produce and ale, as well as the less highly processed grain products that comprised the bulk of the bare bones subsistence diet," he added.

Less convincing is the comparisons with modern day developing countries using per capita comparisons. Mediaeval England was not a subsistence society and did not face the sheer existential risks that modern day subsistence farmers face. In this instance, they had a better diet, but indicators such as life expectancy and infant mortality were far worse given the level of medical knowledge and the risks of dying a violent death.

Further details can be found in the work here (large pdf file).

Distort the past to mirror the present

There is a message so wrong in this starting statement that one should sack the journalist. It concerns the discovery of a Roman elite skeleton: female, of mixed race origin, living in York.

Archaeologists have discovered that wealthy black Africans lived in Roman Britain in one of the country’s earliest examples of multiculturalism.

It was one of the country's earliest examples of imperialism. A small, impoverished territory was invaded by the continental great power and subjugated. Their culture was imported by violence and enforced on the backs of the local population. Some of the invaders happened to be black:

Her sarcophagus, which was made of stone, a sign of immense wealth in Roman Britain, was discovered in 1901 in Bootham, York. The city was then a legionary fortress and civilian settlement called Eboracum, founded by the Romans in AD71....

Hella Eckardt, who carried out the study, said: “Multicultural Britain is not just a phenomenon of more modern times.

She added that inscriptions from that period showed that African people were most often members of the imperialist power’s army. But the latest research on a series of skeletons showed that African men had immigrated to Britain, invariably with the Roman Army, and had brought their wives and children.

Another good example of how ideological leavings of the present can distort our view of the past and the Roman Empire. Better to have a multicultural and multiracial society enforced by violence than leave the British to their own devices. And if they belonged to the Roman Army, they were likely to be of one culture: Roman.

How richborough came by its name

Excavations at the Roman fort in Richborough, the site of the first invasion of Britain, has finally resolved the mystery of how they landed. Now located two miles inland, the fort originally sat within a lagoon, so that the sea actually penetrated to Richborough. Looking at the wall, the archaeological team found a Roman foreshore and the signs of a harbour. The article notes that the harbour remained in existence till the fourteenth century, though it was probably rebuilt during Saxon times. This is contentious as it was assumed that the harbour silted up long before:

A recently uncovered Roman structure at Richborough , England, which has been estimated to be a dock dating back to the 14th century, has turned history on its head, by proving that at the height of medieval Sandwich's power and wealth as a port, boats were still mooring at Richborough.

According to a report in The Guardian, this discovery is unique because according to the conventional history of the site, Richborough had been completely filled with silt 800 years earlier, the once magnificent Roman fort and large town left abandoned and desolate.

The medieval dock was neatly constructed by joining up double-decker-bus-sized lumps of Roman walls which tumbled and slid down from the ramparts of the fort further up the slope.

It is built on the shingled Roman shore, one of the key sites in the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD, and can be securely dated to the 14th century, since the construction technique is identical to the medieval town walls of nearby Sandwich.

The little dock, still filling with water seeping from under the railway line, proves that at the height of medieval Sandwich’’s power and wealth as a port (the town is now as landlocked as the fort), boats were still mooring at Richborough.

This now leaves us with a question: if Richborough existed as a harbour in the Middle Ages and in Britannia, is there evidence of use during the so-called dark ages, a use that has been dismissed by the erroneous assumption that all fell into desuetude after 410: a view that is slowly but surely disappearing through detailed exploration of sub-Roman Britain. Perhaps that was why this place was called Richborough, wealthy in trade and history.