The Arrow in Harold’s Eye

I’ve always enjoyed reading history, but have never had the discipline it would take to be a professional historian; I would never be willing to spend the necessary thousands of hours poring over manuscripts in dusty libraries and the like. But increasingly over the years I have been unhappy simply reading the cut-and-dry accounts meant for a general readership or even for, say, undergraduate courses. So I’ve been delving at least a layer or two beneath that, seeking out more specialized books with thick bibliographies, tracking down papers in scholarly journals, getting to know the controversies, getting at least some sense of how history gets written.

Thus it happened that when a few days ago I stumbled upon Frank McLynn’s 1066: The Year of the Three Battles, in which the author boasts of demolishing the schoolboy version of Hastings, I had already read several articles in the Proceedings of the Battle Abbey Conference which touched on several of the precise sources he was dealing with, and could see that his version of events, while well written and plausible, represents after all just as much an oversimplification of the arguments as the schoolboy history – his reliance on the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, and his dismissal of the scene in the Bayeux tapestry traditionally taken to depict Harold grasping the arrow, are positions that have been argued both for and against with a lot more vigor and with citations of a lot more evidence than you would know from just reading McLynn.

Conservative Christians often accuse opponents of treating the Bible with greater skepticism than they do any other comparable book. Those who say this probably just don’t know how skeptical the scholarly-minded are towards all sources.

One more item for the Norman reading list

Emily Zach Taboutier, Transfers of Property in Eleventh Century Norman Law.

Argues against the view that most land in pre-Conquest Normandy was held by feudal tenure.

But if land was “owned” rather than “held,” how did it come to be owned in the first place? Alas, it seems ownership was originally acquired in pre-literate times, and when charters and other documents began to be drawn up they simply assumed a pre-existing title. Based on what? Oral tradition?

Terminological update

I looked up Morgan:

Apparently the “freemen” of a Company met 4 times a year in a Great and General Court, in the place specified by the Charter (usually London or Plymouth), and elected a Governor, Deputy Governor and 18 “Assistants” who were like a Board of Directors. The Assistants met monthly, with 7 required for a quorum, and 6 of them had to attend the Great and General Court; no other quorum requirement was specified. The Assistants had the absolute right to admit new persons to “freeman” status; generally, I imagine, this happened automatically with the selling of shares.

So Winthrop’s innovations were: 1) getting the Charter to allow the Court to meet in the New World; 2) bringing the actual Charter with him; 3) assembling a quorum of Assistants here; and last but not least, 4) admitting all church-going settlers to “freeman” status.

Instant democracy. The newly-redefined “freemen” were in effect citizens, with the power to elect a sovereign (indeed virtually omnipotent) government.

Citizenship

A reconsideration of the Dred Scott case at Harvard Law School, presided over by Justice Breyer, concluded that by law in effect at the time the case should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, making Taney’s inflammatory opinion totally unnecessary. You see there was no diversity of citizenship, because by Missouri law Scott was not a citizen there.

That would have simplified matters considerably. Without the ensuing aggravation of Northern opinion, the Republican party might never have triumphed, nor the South seceded – but then what? Would we still have slavery?

Speaking of citizenship, I’ve decided to go back and reread Edmund Morgan’s Puritan Dilemma. I recall something in it about how the Mass Bay Company charter originally failed to specify a meeting place for the directors, which in other such charters was generally London or some seaport; thus allowing them to meet in Boston, once the city was built and a quorum of directors was here, and then amend the charter as they saw fit. This may have been as important as the decision to bring the document with them, which Leo Collins emphasizes. Also – and this is the main thing – there was something about how some category of person with voting rights, originally meant to refer to shareholders or something similar, was reinterpreted to include the entire (churchgoing) population of the colony, making them in effect citizens of a self-governing territorial state; and I was wondering if maybe this actually created the concept of citizenship as we know it. For in England there were subjects, not citizens. The right to representation in parliament belonged to certain specific classes of person, not to the population at large. One was either heir to a patent of nobility, or a bishop of the Church, or a “knight of the shire” (which meant owning a certain amount of land), or a “burgess” in a municipal corporation (each of which had its own rules for membership)….

More stuff on government and property in Medieval Europe

Judith A. Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England, C’bdge ‘97,

has references to a number of other interesting things, including a remarkable book by I. J. Sanders, English baronies: a study of their origin and descent, 1086-1327, Oxford, ‘60, which purports to trace the descent of every attested barony in England from Domesday through the reign of Edward II, and even quite a few manors whose “baronial” status is uncertain.

And a contribution by George Garnett to the Holt Festschrift which he co-edited (Law and government in mediaeval England and Normandy : essays in honour of Sir James Holt / edited by George Garnett and John Hudson, Cbdge ‘94), namely ch. 4, p. 80, “‘Ducal’ succession in early Normandy.” This in turn leads to things like Eleanor Searle’s Predatory kinship and the creation of Norman power, 840-1066, Berkeley ‘88, Holt’s article “Feudal Society and the Family in Early Medieval England” in TRHS 5th Ser xxxiii ‘83 209, and several articles in EHR by D.C. Douglas including “The Earliest Norman Counts,” lxi ‘46 131.

Lots of stuff to digest.

Update: and add to all that Normandy before 1066, by David Bates.

Another book

M.T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307.
1979, 2nd ed. 1993.

In the preface to the 2nd ed. he explains that he hasn’t done comparisons between England and other countries because the evidence simply isn’t available yet:  thousands of charters and other documents all over the map are awaiting edition and study. But he points to the bibliography for samples of recent work in the field of medieval literacy.

Also: he says in the first edition he emphasized bureaucracy as the key to lay literacy; since then he has come to appreciate also the role of liturgy, the number of books of hours and the like being placed in the hands of well-born ladies…

My present re-read

David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066-1284.

As I think I wrote once in my earlier attempt to get this thing going, I started looking into medieval history again – England first, then France and Germany – after reading Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution, about the Civil War and Commonwealth. The idea being to track down just how/when Parliament got to have both the power and the self-confidence to actually try to take over the government of the country – in Britain and practically nowhere else. Which got me into all sorts of questions like what “feudalism” really was and how it developed.  back to the immediate post-Conquest generations, I found Carpenter a useful narrative of the immediate post-Conquest generations when I first read it, working my way back through the Late Middle Ages (with Maurice Keen as a guide); and now having found it in a second-hand paperback I am going through it again more slowly and carefully.

What did it mean to be a King, a noble, a royal official? How did government work? What was the relationship between political power and land-ownership? And what were the differences between countries, and between Western Europe and other parts of the world?

What role did the Church play?

All great stuff. I’m up to Henry II now, the murder of Becket, the situation with Malcolm IV in the north; soon we conquer Ireland.

My latest must-read

(seen in the HUP display room)

Karel van der Toorn, Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible

- goes into some questions we don’t normally think about: what was a “book” in the pre-modern world? How was writing used, how did things come to be written? And what does this tell us about the meaning of what did get written? What can we infer about the Bible from what is known about the uses of writing in other, contemporary cultures, especially Mesopotamian?

He says, the “book” as we know it, a thing to be taken home (or at least sat down with) and read, was a creation of the Hellenistic period. Before that time writing was always connected to performance, i.e. recitation.  The Bible thus should be seen as a part of the “flow of tradition.”

A definite must-read. As soon as I’ve got two or three other things out of the way.

The Middle Ages and me

Why do I read so much about the Middle Ages? Why am I so interested that I’m seriously thinking of checking out the Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg in three languages?
Ok, there are several aspects to this. For one thing I’m interested in all kinds and periods of history, always have been. The less well known the better. Not less knowable though. I like finding out things that are in fact known, in the sense that the information is out there, but which relatively few people actually know. This is why – well, one of the reasons why – I am not a scholar. That is, not an academic research type. I can’t get excited about going in search of completely new knowledge when there is so much knowledge already out there that I don’t know yet.
But why specifically the Western (and Central) European Middle Ages?
Well, once back in the last millennium I was struck by a remark I encountered in a book by MI Finley. A short book mostly on Rome I think, bringing together 6 papers or lectures of his – somehow I couldn’t identify the book just now when I did an author search on Hollis.
Anyway, there were two remarks he made that have stayed with me. The first was a complaint about how the bibliographies of books on Classical history tend to group together all writings from the Classical period, in Greek or in Latin, as “Primary Sources” even when they were written hundreds of years after the events they deal with. I.e., Livy on the early years of the Republic – he’s as much a “Primary Source” as David Hackett Fischer is on the American Revolution!
The other is that we have this totally unwarranted feeling that we know the Classical World, that we are so much more at home there than in the Middle Ages, when in fact – taking his primary field of interest, economic history – we have more detailed information about the management of a single monastery in the Middle Ages than we have for all of Ancient Greece and Rome combined.
That got me thinking.
More recently – a couple of years ago I bought and read and loved Austin Woolrych’s Britain in Revolution, and wanted to read more about the background, especially the business about the King and Parliament; and a little snuffling around led me to the conclusion that I had to go back to the first three Edwards at least to get a sense of where it all came from. So I read Maurice Keen a couple of times, and a few other things on England; I’d already gotten and looked at a few things on France from that period, and then I reread Reuter a couple of times… Then within the past month I tried rerereading Wedgwood’s Thirty Years’ War and found myself again fascinated by her account, right at the beginning, of the disfunctional constitution of the Holy Roman Empire – I am always amused by her remark that it was possible for as much as half the Empire to be totally engaged in civil or foreign war before anyone had the duty to so much as inform the Emperor!
And this time I decided to do what I did after Woolrych – go back to see what I could find about how the Empire got that way. I’d always had a sense that historians tended to blame the Investiture Controversy…. Anyway I’ve rerereread the relevant parts of Reuter, also his edition of papers on the Medieval Nobility, (and checked out Karl Ferdinand Werner’s Naissance de la noblesse,) and now I’m tempted to go back to Reuter’s primary sources…