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Quote of the Day–On Learning History
William the Conqeror
WILLIAM THE FIRST was the first of our kings,
Not counting Ethelreds, Egberts and things,
And he had himself crowned and anointed and blest
In Ten-Sixty-I-Needn’t Tell-You-The-RestBut being a Norman, King William the First
By the Saxons he conquered was hated and cursed,
And they planned and they plotted far into the night
Which William could tell by the candles alight.Then William decided these rebels to quell
By ringing the Curfew, a sort of a bell,
And if any Saxon was found out of bed
After eight o’clock sharp, it was Off With His Head!–Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon
The rest of this little poem goes through each strike of the bell, one through eight, at the end of which all the Saxons are tucked up in bed, “in a deuce of a state.” I know it by heart. It’s the first poem in a marvelous little book, Kings and Queens, by Eleanor and Herbert Farjeon (early twentieth-century British siblings with a knack for churning out reliably popular children’s stories, poems, and songs). Eleanor is best known outside the UK for the hymn “Morning has Broken,” which put Yusuf Islam (AKA Cat Stevens) on the map in 1972. Oh well. It’s a pretty song. The rest of Kings and Queens covers every monarch since William with an equally historically accurate and easy-to-memorize little poem. “John, John, bad King John, Shamed the throne that he sat on,” and so on. It was a very early, and a favorite, book of my childhood.
For reasons I can’t quite recall (they say that short-term memory is the first thing to go), I signed up for this “Quote of Day” gig (it’s a thing we do on Ricochet) on the spur of the moment, just a couple of days ago. And as I was mooching around looking for inspiration and something to write about, I found it, and when I did the above poem thrust itself unbidden into my consciousness, although I don’t think I’ve thought about it for more than half-a-century. (I’ll tell you why it “apparated,” as Harry Potter might say, in a minute.)
But before I get there, I’m going tell you a bit about how I began to learn history.
It certainly wasn’t in the classroom. I didn’t wait till I was six or seven or eight. (Do they even teach history at those ages these days?) My elementary school education was spotty, took place on three different continents, and went completely missing for a year, during which I was the reluctant and ill-tempered beneficiary of my mother’s rare and half-hearted attempts at home-schooling, the benefits of which I have no memory at all. But I survived, and by the time I started Junior High School, the family had settled, for keeps, in the United States, and I’d picked up and scavenged enough facts and knowledge to fake it until I could finally make it, which I eventually did.
I began to learn history from books, at first from books which were read to me, and later, from ones I read and treasured myself. From poems, like the one I recited above, or others by Kipling, Browning, and Longfellow. Some from antiquity, some anonymous. From stories and novels by Scott, Kipling, Sutcliffe. (Later, when I became interested in the genre I call the ‘tasteful bodice ripper,’ from Heyer, Seton, DuMaurier.) Everywhere I looked, there were books.
And I learned history from family: from Dad, from my grandparents, and from my great-grandmother. I learned about a time in the world I couldn’t remember, but they could (some such recollections, related to me by a relation or family retainer who lived through them, go back as far back as about 1875, almost 150 years ago–before there were telephones, when Queen Victoria still had decades to go on the throne, the Franco-Prussian War had just ended, and William Ewart Gladstone was Prime Minister, sandwiched as he was in between the two terms of Benjamin Disraeli.
And I learned bits of history from songs, sad ones, funny ones, songs about the first World War, about the Civil War (both of them, mine and yours) folk songs about the days of Robin Hood, or about the Four Marys or the six wives of Henry VIII (“With her head tucked underneath her arm, She walked the bloody tower . . .”). And I’m a walking encyclopedia of popular songs of World War II–“We’re going to hang out our washing on the Siegfried Line” (“Daddy, what’s the “Siegfried Line?”–There were two, one in each World War.) Hard to stump me on songs of the Second World War.
Everywhere I looked, there was history. And I never seemed to be at the center of it. As time went on, I began to see myself as a very small cog in a very big wheel that had been turning for thousands of years before I was born, and would continue doing so for thousands of years after I was gone. All in all, and even before I got to school, I think that sense gave me a wonderfully healthy perspective on my place as neither more, nor less, important than those who had gone before, than those who would come after, or than those who were present with me in the here and now. It’s an upbringing and a worldview that I think is largely missing among today’s young people, and that makes me sad. Because it was a lovely way to grow up, it’s a lovely, connected, relaxed feeling, and I wish they had it too.
Speaking of those who have gone (some considerable time) before me, but to whom I can feel the connection, October 14 is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. William the Bastard, natural son of Robert of Normandy and his mistress, Herleva, defeated Harold II (Godwinson) of England on October 14, 1066, had himself crowned William I of England on Christmas Day, founded the House of Normandy, and ruled until 1087 when he died, apparently as a result of an injury from the pommel of his saddle (ouch).
Accounts of the all-day battle differ, but many speculate that Harold’s army may have been victorious had the king not been killed, possibly by an arrow to the eye (that part may be apocryphal). What’s not apocryphal is that the fight went out of his troops when Harold fell, and William cruised to an easy victory.
And the course of British history was changed forever. On this day, nine-hundred fifty-two years ago.
The Bayeux Tapestry depicting the Battle of Hastings in 1066.
*An excellent bit of light reading history on William the Conqueror by one of the queens of the ‘tasteful bodice-ripper’ genre is The Conqueror, by Georgette Heyer. Probably too girly for some of you alpha-males, but a fun read. (I’m not ashamed to admit to reading Georgette Heyer, since her book, An Infamous Army, about the Battle of Waterloo, was required reading at Sandhurst for decades, just for its closely-researched description of the battle itself. Still may be, for all I know).
Published in History
Few know that this song was actually about William the Conqueror:
Well, that’s news to me. Lord, another blast from the past. The hair! The clothes! Sheesh.
I should hope so. I just made that “fact” up.
OK, Smarty-Pants. Was that some sort of test?
Here are several non-made up facts about the Bayeux Tapestry, which commemorates William’s victory at Hastings and which was embroidered on a piece of cloth about 70 yards long: 1) Pedant alert–it’s not technically a tapestry at all, 2) Geography alert–It was embroidered in England, not in Bayeux, France, 3) The last bit of it has been missing for hundreds of years.
Most interesting thing about the ‘tapestry’ from my standpoint arises, as many things do for me, via a connection with my Dad. One of his students in the African Institute, who was also a PhD candidate in the English Department, wrote his dissertation proposing that the little embroideries and scenes in the lower border were actually a coded commentary, sometimes subversive and from the English point-of-view (which is why it’s important to remember that the embroidery was actually done in England), and that the lower border functions as what we would today probably describe as the “deplorable” version of the story, put there by the Saxons, more-or-less out of spite.)
It’s still a controversial theory, and another guy claims ownership of the idea (typical and nasty academic mud-slinging ensued, because, after all, the stakes are so small), but it’s an interesting read–for a very small select group of people, anyway. cf. Richard D. Wissolik, The Saxon Statement Code in the Bayeux Tapestry.
I just listened to the song. Oh, that is funny.
Now that you have these running through [my] head I might as well share them:
As a youngster listening to my dad’s copy of Horton’s greatest [hits] album I always got a giggle out of this part:
And then there is this…”Hit the decks a-runnin’ boys and spin those guns around…”
It actually fits pretty well. It mentions his walking around like a king and that he won’t “go home.” Well, that would have been what the Anglo-Saxons thought, wouldn’t it?
Meaning my grandson was born on the 950th anniversary of Hastings. I hope he learns history and the love you have for it.
I did not know the second one, but the Battle of NO was a big hit on a 78-record, on our wind-up gramophone when I was a kid. Likewise, The Ballad of Davy Crockett, which I also remember one of the Colonial wags recasting as “Kwame, Kwame Nkrumah, king of the wide, wide, boys.” I’ve lost the cultural or political reference, perhaps it will bubble to the surface at some point.
Yes, I know my set of memories is odd.
What a sweet comment. Thank you. Congratulations on the birth of your grandson, and I hope so too!
You confessed to your degenerate mendacity just as I was about to look up the lyrics.
The first part does fit, doesn’t it,
Since I confessed so readily, I don’t consider it too degenerate. I mean, I could have played it up and left people believing it. My brother Steve would have done that. But I’m an honest man…mostly.
None of it fits. All it does is remind me, in rather disturbing ways, of the Morris Dancers Mr. She and I witnessed on Boxing Day one year, outside the Abbey Hotel in the Malvern Hills (there was a Green Man there as well). Very pagan and elemental. One of the chants, indelibly impressed on my mind, had to do with “willy,” but not in this context. Although perhaps, or maybe not. Don’t know. Sheltered life.
Can’t repeat it here.
Well, Willie didn’t go, did he? ;I could only recall the first few lines of the lyrics; that is why I was going to look them up.)
It’s not worth it. Trust me. Thought-provoking and witty songwriting, it’s not.
True, but it is a great earworm.
I had a dream last night that I was back on the project where I worked the phrase “the degenerate mendacity of our erstwhile vendor” into a status report. I made coffee come out of the nose of our program damager. She was a sight.
And that did about the same to me.
You “watch your phraseology,” young man!
I’ve experienced much the same thing, only the reality-TV version (suspect you have too, actually). My phraseology wasn’t nearly so inventive, though, tending more towards the Anglo-Saxon in my own status reports. Yes, indeed.
We’re still great friends. Really.
She said that my eye rolls were more eloquent than some peoples’ prepared statements.
She, great post!
Your rich language experiences growing up reminded me of the following passage in a book I wrote.
“In a black mood, I once wrote an essay called Why Nothing Works. Its message was simple but comfortless: When children grow up in a rich language environment — their bookshelves filled with Billy Goats Gruff and Nancy Drew, their home scattered with novels and magazines and dictionaries and maps — they gradually come to understand what Winston Churchill said he learned at Harrow: ‘the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence’
“But when children miss out on those early language experiences, they have a devil of a time filling in the gaps. That’s when learning to write becomes difficult.”
It’s no wonder you turned out so well.
She,
I think that those who must struggle to attain certain goods are in a better position to really appreciate them than those who have them served to them on a silver platter with little effort. Here is a piece of Shakespeare that mocks hyper-detailed history but at the same time recognizes that one must historically “touch the base” if one wants to maintain a unified coalition.
Tennis Balls.
Regards,
Jim
The following short (~28 minute) video does a good job of explaining why the battle occurred north of Hastings.
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Thanks, I have my moments, in every direction, trust me. Yes, whoever it was who said “Give me the child until he is seven years old and I will give you the man,” was right, I think.
From the “history” and “connectedness” standpoint, I think there is something really therapeutic about understanding that one is just a little blip in the pantheon. That there was history, life, laughter, tears, happiness, sadness, love, hate, good and evil before one was born, and that there will be all of those things after one dies.
I sometimes think those we call “snowflakes” because of their inability to see beyond the ends of their noses, their assertions that “[they] are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (heard that somewhere), as though nothing that’s gone before matters a whit, and their determination to take personally anything and everything that they could possibly view as a personal slight, must actually suffer under a tremendous, if unnecessary and imaginary, burden. After all, when you believe that you’re “chosen” to save the world, and that every pronouncement that drips from your lips is a pearl of wisdom that others ignore at their peril (I’m looking at you, David Hogg), no wonder they crack and lose their minds to the extent that we sometimes see them doing.
Hey Ricochet wheels: We need a way to format poetry and long quotations.
It looks like WtC is wearing ironic hipster glasses in that drawing .
Um, yeah. He looks like a rather hopeless, but very bright, guy I once befriended, who one day told me that he’d decided not to be “Dave” any more, but was going to be “Susan” from now on (names changed). I’m a bit worried about him. (William, not Dave/Susan. S/He’s fine. Odd, but fine).
I’ve complained about the Samurai sword, too. Like no Norman sword I’ve ever seen. Note that was not my original illustration for this post, which was this one, from York Minster:
My choice must not have been “edgy” enough for the Big Time.
There are ways, Kent. What are you having issues with?