The game now appears to be getting hotter, with protesters and roadworkers facing off at what he believes is the site of the battle. You can read about it on his blog The Secrets of the Norman Invasion Blog. It has gone from historical detective work to political activism. Nick has produced a mass of material to read on the subject, should you want to get up to speed with it before joining the blockade.
It leads me to a little philosophical rumination about what is history and what is mythology, and how the mythology is developed from history to serve various purposes. If William the Conqueror built the abbey that he had promised on a different site to that of the battle, despite his stated intention, he must have done it for a reason, but one that is lost to history. It could have involved suitability of terrain, or some political machinations involving landholding, of which there were many in the middle ages, or some shenanigans involving relations with the church, of which ditto. However, once a site of pilgrimage is established, and this is a kind of secular pilgrimage site, there are many interests in preserving the mythology. I mean, if Nick is right, the producers of commemorative crockery and teaspoons in Battle may suffer a severe economic downturn.
To look at some other examples, Did the abbots of Cluny really believe that the remains of St James were miraculously transported to a remote spot in Spain called Compostella, or did they just think they were on to a good thing in setting up a lucrative network of pilgrimage routes? Perhaps the fact that the general pilgrimaging public fell for this ruse was considered a miracle in its own right.
One of my favourite bits of historical mythology involves the Strasbourg Oath, as sworn by the grandsons of Charlemagne and their respective armies. It is solemnly represented as the earliest written evidence for the proto-French and Proto-German languages, based on having been written down in a Latin chronicle, the only extant copy of which is from several hundred years after the event. So how accurate is the transcription of these bits of proto-language, and how did the original chronicler acquire them? If he was there, how accurately did he hear them? If he was given an official transcript, how accurate was it given that these were non-literate languages? How accurately was it transcribed over the centuries? It all reminds you of the Sermon on the Mount scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Nevertheless, it is supposed to be a foundation charter for French and German linguistic identity.
If you think it is important to separate historical fact from historical mythology, perhaps you need to be sitting down there on a roadworks site in Sussex. Right or wrong, if it is all dug up and tarmacked, we will never know. Mythology will win again.
1 comment:
I remember the Strasbourg Oaths from my studies many years ago. No-one would represent the oaths as literature, but there are various interesting things about them.
The texts one sees tend to have all the abbreviations expanded, which is misleading if your interest, like mine, is linguistic. So a picture of the text is a great improvement. (I have found a better quality picture at http://video.boutiqueufc.ca/uploads/antidote/Windows/Image Dossier Antidote/Donnees/Grammaire/images/serments.jpg)
The “very peculiar word spacing” in the German text makes it more, not less, reliable as linguistic evidence: it implies that Nithard (or perhaps the copyist) did not understand what he was listening to, and so was more likely to have written what he actually heard than what he thought he should have heard.
The oaths in different languages show that the Franks in France, like Nithard, had already gone native, and no longer spoke Frankish.
This history reminds me how much the greatness of Charles the Great depended on his brother Carloman dying two years after their father: Charlemagne was thus able to spend his reign fighting foreigners instead of other Franks. He then ensured the unity of the empire for another generation by being succeeded by only one son, Louis the Pious. One son more or fewer and we might not have had the Carolingian renaissance.
The Sermon on the Mount scene from the Life of Brian explains two mysteries. The crowd heard “peacemakers” as “cheesemakers” because the Valley of Cheesemakers is next to the Mount of Olives where they were standing — thus we identify the location and see that the true language of the New Testament was English.
Alan Bernard Hughes
Post a Comment