THE ART OF HISTORY
18
pages
English
Documents
2012
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18
pages
English
Documents
2012
Le téléchargement nécessite un accès à la bibliothèque YouScribe Tout savoir sur nos offres
Publié par
Publié le
11 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures
561
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
61 Mo
How history is very important for all of us now, and in the future. A look at my childhood and how history influenced me and what it tells us about the world we live in today. There are lots of colour illustrations and photos that accompany this article.
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Publié par
Publié le
11 septembre 2012
Nombre de lectures
561
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
61 Mo
THE ART OF HISTORY
A picture paints a thousand words
BY JOHN TARTTELIN
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When I was eight years old, my grandmother used to buy a monthly magazine called
Treasure
for me and my brothers and sisters. It cost the princely sum of one shilling –
a lot of money in the Britain of 1963. At that time a bar of chocolate was only 6d –
sixpence, more commonly called a ‘tanner’ and a gallon of petrol was only about 4/6
or just over 22 pence in today’s money. It cost me 9d to go to the Saturday morning
pictures which filled my little head with even more fantastic and wonderful imagery.
In the cinema I swapped ‘fagcards’ with my friends – these were colourful small cards
found in cigarette packets or bought separately to make sets out of. Then there were
larger chewing gum cards from series like
The Man From UNCLE
, or topics like the
American Civil War – gory tableaus that appealed to a kid in short trousers. Back
then, we did not get our first pair of long pants until we were eleven and went to
secondary school.
I still have a few copies of
Treasure
, creased and dogeared, which I keep in a box. I
shall never part from them because those magazines and the picture books my father
got me from the library were what sparked my lifelong interest in history. Some of
the very first books I ever saw were about dinosaurs, Red Indians and wildlife, and I
am still very interested in all of those topics today. The child is indeed the father of
the man.
The image above from
Treasure
was far from historically accurate – there has never
been a Viking burial found with a horned helmet for example – but to a young boy
that did not matter. It fired my imagination and engendered within me a passion to
find out more about the misty times of long ago. Behind my house was a patch of
waste ground with a huge dead tree and weeds that would not have been out of place
in the Amazon jungle. To me it was a child’s paradise, there I fought monsters,
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discovered ‘new life and new civilizations’, fought angry wasps with Squeezy bottles
full of water, and cried when I killed a small bird with a thrown stick – I felt I had
committed murder.
I saw the first series of
Star Trek
in 1969, when Neil Armstrong walked on the
Moon and our species took its first tentative stride towards a future of space travel and
interstellar exploration. Later, when
Star Wars
came along, I realized that all the
‘aliens’ were based on people or periods from human history the Storm Troopers
being an obvious example. History colours our whole lives even if we are seldom
aware of it.
My first book of dinosaurs in the ’60s showed them up to their ears in water because
it was thought that they were far too heavy to have moved about on land without
support. Since then, thanks to the work of men like Bob Bakker and Jack Horner and
the films of Stephen Speilberg, we have a completely different understanding of what
dinosaurs were like and how varied and incredible many of their survival tactics were.
They were around for tens of millions of years and it was only chance that caused
their demise and enabled our minute and inconsequential ancestors to evolve into us.
Humans are not the product of special creation nor are they in any way the
fulfilment of some teleological quest for perfection. We are here by chance and a
whim of fate will see an end to our species as it has to 99% of all the animals that
have ever existed. But that is not to say that we haven’t had a remarkable history.
Below I include an eclectic mix of images that have stirred my imagination as man
and boy. It is a necessarily arbitrary choice, but one which may, I hope, give history, a
currently neglected subject, a place not only in the past but in our present – for it has
made us what we are today.
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Above is a second picture from
Treasure
, of William the Conqueror, Bastard by name
– and nature. Whether fortune favours the brave is a moot point, for Harold
Godwinson had been fighting an invading Norse army at Stamford Bridge when he
got the news of the Norman landing. The storming Normans began to cause havoc in
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the South around Hastings in order to entice an exhausted Saxon army to battle. Too
impetuous for his own good, Harold arrayed his troops on Senlac Hill – the place of
the lake of blood, before all his army had time to reach him.
The Waterloo of its day, the Battle of Hastings was a slogging match that lasted
over eight hours. For most of that time it was too close to call. Then, so it is said, by
feigning retreat, the Normans coaxed men from the thinning Saxon ranks, making it
easier for the cavalry to give the coup de grace to the men that remained atop the hill.
In the melee that followed Harold, already wounded, was hacked to death by several
Norman knights who, in their bloodlust, struck off his genitals. On the Bayeaux
Tapesty this is shown as a sword stroke to the ‘thigh’. His body was so badly
mutilated that only his lover Edith Swan could recognize his corpse with the aid of a
birthmark.
William ended the high glory of the Saxon kingdoms of Alfred the Great and his
grandson, Athelstan, who in 937AD had a magnificent victory against the Northern
Coalition of Scots, Norse Irish, Danes and Northumbrians. As the AngloSaxon
Chronicles put it, the defeated were left to raptors like eagles and red kites and to the
grey beast of the forest, the wolf. They did not just lose a battle in those days, their
remains were eaten.
In 1086 came the Doomsday Book, socalled because it reminded William’s subject
peoples of the Day of Judgment. Every plough, every acre of land was described and
valued. By then, nearly all the land had been divided up between a few dozen
powerful Norman lords, the Church, and William himself. In the Ravaging of the
North that had occurred in 1068, the Bastard sent vengeful troops into Yorkshire as
the populace had dared to rebel and his knights killed every man, woman, child, dog
and beast of burden they encountered. So complete was the destruction that many
villages were left in ruins and never settled again – the skeletons of hundreds of
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people were still bleaching unburied on the moors fifty years later. He was a bad man
to cross was William – the Bastard.
Castles were built throughout the land and the feudal system ensured that the
peasants were too busy to be revolting. Above is the magnificent keep at
Conisbrough, South Yorkshire, England. With commanding views all around, it
covered the river Don – which had once been subject to Viking raids, and the road
south to the larger castle at Tickhill, now a forgotten ruin. Most castles were so secure
that they were never even threatened, let alone taken by force of arms. The cost of
manning them was tremendous and many large castles only had a dozen men to guard
them. They were the nuclear equivalent of their day, the ultimate deterrent.
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Fourteen miles away from Conisbrough is this statue of a First World War soldier in
Mappin Park Sheffield. The officer has his pistol ready – to shoot his own men if they
refuse to advance. The lives of brave men were snuffed out like candles in a hurricane
in this bestial conflict – lions led by donkeys indeed. While the wealthy and wellto
do fretted back in Blighty, the ordinary soldiers ate mud and drank bitterness in
copious draughts. Many had joined up full of national ardour, along with their mates
in the Pals Battalions, fighting for King and country, a noble thought for an ignoble
war. They were butchered by machine gun fire and gutted by barbed wire. Falling into
muddy shell holes that sucked them back as they tried to escape, many collapsed
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exhausted and were eaten alive by rats. It was oh so very quiet at night for these men
on the Western Front as they died a horrible lingering death. In this first industrial
war, their bodies were nailed and hammered, crushed and discarded like slag and left
in a corner of a field that will be forever England.
Here, in Sheffield’s Victorian cemetery, forgotten lives snuggle beneath a carpet of
fallen leaves. There is something strangely comforting about a graveyard, especially
one neglected and forlorn. It serves to remind us, that nothing really matters. None of
us will outlast the seasons. We are all falling leaves.
The car in the foreground below belies the antiquity of Saint Peters Church in
Conisbrough. There has been a place of worship here since about 750 AD. Parts of the
original Saxon church can still be seen inside the later building. There is only one
structure older than this in the whole of Northern England, a church at
Monkwearmouth on Tyneside.
Inside, there are tangible reminders of our ancient past. Perhaps England’s earliest
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depiction of Saint George and the dragon is carved on a tomb. Or it could be a Norse
image of the Jormungander dragon, whose tail was shoved into its mouth by the god
Thor. When the tail came out it would be the dawn of the Ragnarok, the mythic end of
days battle between Odin, the gods and men from Middle Earth, and the evil god Loki
with his army of frost, fire and mountain giants, goblins and dark elves. Some of us
do know where Tolkien pinched his ideas from.
01
The picture below amazes me even to this day, the notice is selfexplanatory. Here
one can literally touch the past. What thoughts were going through the minds of those
who made their ‘mark’ on history?
One final picture of Saint Peters shows the raised burial ground. So many people
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have been buried here over a period of more than a thousand years that the graveyard
is much higher than the surrounding land. The church has been a mute witness to and
a resting place for Saxons, Danes, Normans, people from the Middle Ages,
Georgians, Victorians and right up to the present century. If one is asked what it
