Huw Pryce and John Watts, editors
POWER AND IDENTITY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Essays in memory of Rees Davies
283pp. Oxford University Press. £55 (US $100).
978 0 19 928546 4
Alison Weir
KATHERINE SWYNFORD
The story of John of Gaunt and his scandalous duchess
366pp. Cape. £20.
978 0 224 06321 0
Ian Mortimer
THE FEARS OF HENRY IV
The life of England’s self-made king
480pp. Cape. £18.99.
978 0 224 07300 4
As anyone who has ever sat on a committee or conducted a confidential inquiry
can testify, historians are notorious gossips. From the vast dustheap of the
past, the historian scavenges for secrets to divulge, either personal or
societal. Ever since the nineteenth century, this peculiar, indeed
pathological variety of indiscretion has been dignified with the title
“historical research”, and since “research” is now the holy grail of British
academia, with the vast majority of university-based historians determined
to obtain “research funding” as a means of improving their chances in the
government’s absurd “research assessment exercise”, the rivalry between
historians to divulge other people’s secrets can exhibit all the dignity of
a gang of transvestites squabbling over a wig.
All three of the books under review here claim to broadcast new historical
“truths”. All three deal with roughly the same places and period:
later-medieval Britain, with a particular emphasis on the years 1250 to
1450. How justified are their claims to tell new truths about the past, and
what is distinctive in their various approaches?
There is no doubting the research credentials of the late Rees Davies. He
worked chiefly on the history of late-medieval Wales, and brought to this
field, by some considered a peripheral backwoods, both the broadest of
outlooks and the most precise eye for detail. In consequence, he not only
produced definitive histories of such aspects of Welsh history as the
Glendower rebellion, but entirely revolutionized the study of “British”
history, demonstrating the extent to which the history of the medieval
British Isles was a history of the Imperialist English drive for mastery.
Davies was also an elegant prose stylist and the most polite and modest of
men. Some, though not necessarily all of these qualities are shared by the
pupils and friends who contribute the seventeen essays assembled in his
honour, intended as a Festschrift, but transformed, by Davies’s untimely
death, into a liber memorialis. Obliged to paint in miniature, various of
the authors here display an ability both to write and to think.
Colin Richmond, for example, casts an almost Dickensian eye over the
fifteenth-century English gentry, pointing out the Ralph Nicklebys, the
Wackford Squeers, and even the Mrs Crummleses of the generation which
embarked on self-slaughter in the Wars of the Roses. Robert Bartlett writes
amusingly on the distinctions between what might be considered peripheral
and what essential in medieval Europe, and Wendy Davies supplies a superb
survey of recent trends in writing on medieval Spain. John Gillingham
reveals that it was that great Victorian optimist Samuel Smiles who first
popularized the idea of the conquest of Ireland in 1170 as a “Norman” rather
than an English phenomenon, while Philip Morgan explores various of the
myths that grew up around Chester’s status as an Anglo-Welsh frontier town.
At their best, as in these examples and several others, these are essays that
reveal significant truths about the past, often by drawing comparisons
between geographically or chronologically distinct bodies of evidence, or
else by their application of the insights of the social sciences to what
might otherwise be dismissed as simple-minded antiquarianism. As a memorial
to Rees Davies – perhaps the closest rival to Marc Bloch that Britain can
claim to have produced, both in terms of scholarly method and of humanity –
this book has the added advantage of a postscript from Davies himself,
reminiscing about his early failure to obtain a place at Oxford, where the
Master of his prospective college questioned him about his Welsh-speaking
ancestors and the fairy tales and myths of his home area with all the
condescension, Davies tells us, that an anthropologist might have displayed
confronted with “a member of the Dinka or the Nuer”. One senses here that
the wounds of the greatest historians go deep, and that from them flows much
that is best and most humane in their writing. This is historical
scholarship at its best.
Nonetheless, even the most spectacular of fireworks displays have their
occasional dud rocket, and in this instance there are essays that fail to
become airborne. Solipsism is perhaps the greatest potential failing of the
professional historian, and in this instance there are two essays
(politeness forbids one to name them) which exhibit all the coherence of a
madman in a telephone box, scoring rhetorical points off a listener who long
ago had the sense to replace the handset.
Where solipsism might be anticipated from those who teach in universities and
who as a result are overexposed to the sound of their own voices, it is not
a quality that one would expect to encounter among popular biographers.
Popular biographers have to keep bread on the table by persuading readers to
buy their books. Theirs, in theory, should be a world of page-turning
human-interest stories. Alison Weir has established quite a reputation for
herself as a bestselling biographer, bringing to a mass audience her
insights into the lives of past men and particularly of past women that the
academics have been too busy dissecting to portray as flesh and blood. And
yet in this, her study of Katherine Swynford – Flemish gentlewoman,
Lincolnshire widow, servant, mistress and finally wife to John of Gaunt –
there is solipsism in plenty. Weir makes great claims both for the
originality of her research and for the revelations that emerge from it. At
least to begin with, the reader might be forgiven for accepting these
claims. There are, after all, numerous historical details, a clear narrative
approach, none of the social-scientific jargon that clouds the work of
academic historians, and a steady stream of footnotes. The devil, however,
lies in the detail.
Within a very few pages, it is apparent that what Weir lacks above all else is
precisely that discrimination in the use of evidence that sets the
professional apart from the amateur historian. Unpublished manuscripts from
the Public Record Office are cited alongside unregulated websites, the Shell
Guides and even dear old Arthur Mee, as if all of these sources were of more
or less equal value, with the historian serving as some sort of celebrity
master chef, stirring this unappetizing brew into the most savoury of
bouillabaisses. Weir tells us, for example, that Hugh of Swynford,
Katherine’s first husband, was “a shrewd and terrifying fighter”, citing
John of Gaunt’s Register as the source for this phrase. Readers might be
justifiably perplexed to discover that the fourteenth-century Register of
John of Gaunt includes not a single indexed reference to Hugh, and that the
phrase “he was a shrewd and terrifying fighter” appears to be borrowed from
an amateur genealogical blog (worldconnect.rootsweb.com, posted June 2006),
which itself cites merely unspecified “registers” as its source. The effect
of this, after a hundred pages or so, is a sort of tinnitus of error and
confusion ringing in the reader’s ear, drowning out whatever good qualities
Weir’s history might otherwise claim to possess. Those who like their
history richer in adjectives than analysis, and above all those already in
love with Katherine Swynford thanks to Anya Seton’s 1954 novel, Katherine,
will derive great pleasure from Weir’s book. University librarians
should not allow it within a hundred miles of an undergraduate readership.
Superficially, Ian Mortimer might be judged to inhabit the same world as
Alison Weir. The Fears of Henry IV promises revelations and a popular
approach far removed from the desiccated pedantry of academia. His title is
deliberately mysterious, and he is not afraid of imaginative reconstructions
of what “might” have happened in the past. Above all, like Weir, he opts for
a simple narrative approach, assuming that his readers wish to be told the
facts in chronological order and only then to be introduced to an analysis
of underlying causes. In all other respects, however, Mortimer and Weir are
as poles apart as Rees Davies and Anya Seton. Mortimer, unlike Weir, can
actually read the original sources in Latin and Norman-French and hence can
burrow deep into archives that have previously been ignored. The result is
that he brings to light new truths about Henry’s reign, from the exact date
of his birth to the proper meaning of the “s” symbols employed in
Lancastrian heraldry. This is real detective work, not the bungling and
self-aggrandizement of a latter-day Inspector Clouseau. Mortimer is perhaps
too anxious to present the case for the defence of Henry; too keen to allow
for Henry’s problems, and unwilling to admit that Henry was, for all his
qualities, a usurper, steeped in blood. Like Henry IV himself, Mortimer’s
story more or less grinds to a halt after the failed rebellion and execution
of Archbishop Scrope, so that the second half of the reign, in which the
King declined into majestic invalidity, is run through in very short order.
There is also a reluctance, as in much good narrative history, to interrupt
the story in order that any deeper truths or analyses can emerge.
Nonetheless, Ian Mortimer achieves the enviable feat of maintaining scholarly
standards while writing for the most general of publics. To this extent, the
truths that Rees Davies and his pupils have scavenged are here shown to
serve a purpose beyond the mere spreading of gossip or the promotion of
academic self-regard. In the hands of those still able to communicate with
the general public, these are truths that, once stated, are self-evident,
essential for our understanding of the rich complexity of the past, and at
the same time, in these days of postmodernism and craven relativism, an
important vindication of the historian’s role as a professional teller of
stories that are true.
Nicholas Vincent is the co-editor of Henry II: New interpretations,
published last year. His books include The Holy Blood, 2001, and Peter des
Roches: An alien in English politics, 1205–1238, 1996.
I think in any historical analysis it would be sobering to recall what E.H. Carr said about historical facts in his classic What Is History? Carr says that “the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always refracted through the mind of the recorder. It follows that when we take up a work of history, our first concern should be not with the facts it contains but the historian who wrote it.†And hence Carr supplements his first principle in the study of history that one should “study the historian†as a preliminary, by asking “Before you study the historian, study his historical and social environment.†(p.44) As put by Carr in a subtly ingenuous manner : “No document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought-what he thought had happened, what he thought ought to happen or would happen, or perhaps only what he wanted others to think he thought, or even only what he himself thought he thought.†(p.16)
Bal Patil, Mumbai, India
Why is everyone saying that the academic works are of course dull and difficult? I think the fault lies in the reader, who doesn't want to be made to think, doesn't want to work for understanding, and would rather be fed pablum from a plastic spoon. I'm tired of thing being 'dumbed down' to the lowest common denominator.
Laura Minnick, Portland , Oregon
so pleased to read professor vincent's review here:)
i suppose people should clearly realise when they buy a book that whether the author is a professional historian or just popular writer who's mainly interested in historical stories. a lot of readers choose the latter because most professional books are regarded as unappetizing and full of jargons. but still, they will get very annoyed when they find out that the easy reading cost their right to know about the truth.
GarboFour, Beijing, China