But What Does an Historian Do?

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Medieval Europe, The St Scholastica's Day Riot

I’ve been traveling for the past two weeks and haven’t had a chance to finish my review of 1776. One of the reasons I’ve been traveling is to do some research, and as I was doing it, it occurred to me that it might be worth posting about the work I was doing, because I think most people have only a vague idea of what it is that historians actually do. So in this post, I’m not going to talk about movies at all. I promise the next post will get back to my regular lamentations about historical films.

 

The Project as a Whole

My research focuses on violence at medieval universities, and I’m currently in the middle of writing a book about the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot, the most famous incident of town/gown violence in the history of universities. On February 10^th, the feast day of St. Scholastica, two students from Oxford University got into a quarrel with a local tavern-keeper and dumped a pot of wine on his head. The incident spiraled out of control into a three-day battle between the students of the university on the one hand, and the townsmen and local peasants of the region around Oxford on the other. By the time the violence calmed down, about 40 people were dead; at least 20 buildings had been set on fire; one of the town’s gates had been battered down; the students, having lost the fight, had fled the town; and the townsmen had looted student housing. Why the quarrel at the tavern got so out of hand, what happened in those three days, and what the consequences of the riot were are the subject of my book.

 

The Immediate Research Issue

One of the documents that survives for this shocking event is the records of the subsequent trial in which more than 150 townsmen were found guilty of either felony or trespass or both. 14th century English trial records aren’t like modern trial records; they don’t contain transcripts. Most of the document is actually just a long list of names of the men (and one woman) convicted, sorted into conviction for felony or trespass. (The distinction between those two categories is that trespasses were crimes minor enough that a fine was an acceptable punishment, whereas felonies were major crimes whose punishment was, in theory, death.)

Last year, I was able to secure a digital copy of the trial record to transcribe. But the document is quite faded and discolored, and so I was only able to get about half the names off of it. So last week, I went to inspect the original document at Britain’s National Archives in London.

The National Archives in London

 

Getting Into the Archives

Professional historians spend a fair amount of time looking at original documents from the periods we study to learn whatever those documents can tell us. Many documents have been edited and published somewhere and so are easy for us to access, but the vast majority of all documents have never been transcribed, edited, and published, and therefore remain available only in their original form, which means that they have to be studied wherever the document happens to be.

That means we have to get access to whatever library, archive, private collection, or government office houses the original. These collections vary considerably in how easy they are to get into. My experience at the National Archives is a good example of how complex the process can be.

Unlike some collections, the National Archive is open to anyone who wishes to conduct research, so I didn’t need to submit a letter of recommendation from a fellow scholar. I just had to go online and register with them. I could have done that the day I showed up, but I did it ahead of time. As part of the process I had to watch a short video about how to handle various types of old documents to avoid damaging them.

Wednesday morning, I went to the National Archives, which are conveniently located at the same London Tube stop as Kew Gardens, which gave my ex-horticulturalist husband something to do while I worked. First, I had to go get my Reader’s Ticket, which is basically the National Archives’ version of a library card; I couldn’t get access to the collection without it. To get the Ticket, I had to show two forms of ID and get my picture taken. That was pretty routine. (At the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I had to swear a 400-year-old oath that I wouldn’t burn the building down.)

My ‘library card’ to the National Archives

Then I had to check my bag because I was only allowed to take a few things into the collection with me. Among the things I could take in were my laptop, my cell phone, my wallet, a pencil and some paper, and (fortunately) a portable battery to recharge my cell phone. Among the things I wasn’t allowed to take in were pens (so I couldn’t write on the original documents), my pocketknife (thieves occasionally cut pages out of old manuscripts to sell on the black market), my water bottle (don’t want to spill water on old documents), or my lip balm (actually I was just assuming they wouldn’t allow that in). Everything I was going to take in had to be put in a clear plastic bag.

Then I had to go to a computer to order the document. In most archives, scholars aren’t allowed into the actual storage stacks where the documents are kept. Instead, I had to request that document be brought up to the reading room from the stacks. So I had to wait about 45 minutes before I could get into the reading room and collect my document.

As part of that process, I was assigned a seat number, which confusingly isn’t actually a seat. In the reading room I was allowed to use any available desk I wanted. The seat number is really more of an ID number. But I needed that seat number to get the document I ordered.

So after 45 minutes, I was allowed to go in to the reading room. I had to swipe my Reader’s Ticket through a scanner, and then let the attendant go through my clear plastic bag to make sure I wasn’t trying to bring anything inappropriate in. I needed to bring in my Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations, which wasn’t on the list of approved items, so I had to get a special form filled out giving me permission to bring in the book to help me with my work. (When I left for the day, they searched everything again, to make sure I wasn’t trying to steal any documents. So I had open my laptop and let them page through my dictionary to make sure there wasn’t anything hidden in them.)

Once through all that, I found a desk, and then went to the room where the requested documents are held to claim my document, which came in a very large heavy cardboard box that turned out to contain about a dozen parchment documents, one of which was my target, PRO KB 9/98B, the records of the trial of the St. Scholastica’s Day Riot. Finally, I was ready to actually look at my document.

The first page of PRO KB 9/98B

The second page of PRO KB 9/98B

 

Working with PRO KB 9/98B

My document was two long strips of parchment bound together between two modern cloth covers to protect it. But as I noted, it’s very faded and discolored. So simply seeing what the author wrote is a challenge. The author in this case was an anonymous scribe attending the court and making a record of who was convicted.

To read the document, I had to lay it flat with the help of a weighted cord. Then I used a sheet of paper to cover the part of the document I was working on; as I worked, I slid the paper down slightly to expose a new line of text. In addition to helping keep my place in the document, the sheet of paper helped me not touch the document directly, which is generally a big no-no when working with old and fragile documents. (When I was a graduate student and doing some work at the ‘Secret Vatican Archives’, I made the mistake of touching the manuscript too often. I get yelled at in Italian, which I don’t speak, so I was terrified they were threatening to drag me away and torture me or something.)

As I exposed a new line of text, I’d check my transcription from the digital copy to see what I had initially thought the line said. Then I’d look at the document with my eyes to see if I could read it. If I couldn’t, which was the case more often than not, I’d use my cell phone’s magnifier app and study the line on the highest magnification to see what I could see. If I still couldn’t read it, I’d turn on the magnifier light to see if that helped, which it often did. On the second day, I got talked to by a very polite attendant (“we don’t use the flashlights on our phones, sir,” which seemed a very British way to yell at someone), so I had to stop doing that, even though several other researchers were doing exactly the same thing.

And if I still couldn’t read the line, which was frequently the case, I had to resort to using a hand-held UV light, which can be remarkably useful in making black ink stand out. Frequently text that was simply too faded to read popped out plainly when exposed to UV light, and sometimes I’d discover the line was longer than I thought because there was text that is now completely invisible to the eye but which UV brings out easily.

That white rectangular box is the UV light

Of course, UV lights are the same thing used in tanning salons, so I had to be really carefully how I used it, because I didn’t want to give myself a sunburn or screw up my eyes. So normally I’d turn the light on, read the line as best I could, and then turn it off. Then I’d transcribe whatever part of the line I had figured out, and then go back with the UV light and do it again. It was long, tedious work, going line by line. It took me about 8 hours over the course of two days to work my way through both parts of the trial record. And even with all that, there were still parts of the text too damaged for me to be able to recover.

Other scholars working at the National Archives

 

But Wait! There’s More!

The challenges of working with the document don’t end with the physical challenge of making out what’s written on the page. 14^th century English court documents weren’t written in English. They’re written in Latin (mostly). As a medievalist, I’ve had to learn to read Latin simply so I can read the documents from the period.

But the real challenge is not the language that the document is written in, but the script. The simplest way to explain the concept of a script is that it is to handwriting what a font is to typing on a computer. Historically, the Latin alphabet itself has not changed too much over time (other than the addition of the letters ‘J’ and ‘W’), but the way the letters of the alphabet have been written has varied enormously. The most obvious example in modern English is the difference in letter forms between cursive and printed letters, which are technically separate scripts. The difference between lower case and upper case letters is another example. Some scripts are easier to read than others, and while the script used by the scribe in this document is not the most challenging I’ve ever encountered, it does present some difficulties.

The most basic stroke in Latin calligraphy is a simple vertical line, technically called a minim. The letters ‘I’, ‘M’, ‘N’ and ‘U’ are all comprised of minims: ‘I’ is a single minim (usually undotted, as it is in this script), ‘N’ and ‘U’ are two minims, and ‘M’ is three. ‘M’ and ‘N’ are theoretically minims joined at the top, while ‘U’ is joined at the bottom, but a scribe writing in a hurry is often careless about this. So picture a word like minimum. It’s composed of 15 minims that may or may not be clearly joined at top or bottom, and it’s up to the reader to figure out which minims belong together as letters. Is it ‘minimum’? ‘iminimum’? ‘imnuniim’? ‘unumum’? Are they all one word, or two words run together? Fortunately, only one of these is a Latin word, but you get the idea. And minims aren’t the only challenge. ‘L’, ‘S’, ‘T’ and ‘H’ can all look quite similar, being made with long strokes. So simply transcribing the correct letters is a challenge.

Additionally, because this scribe, like many others, was essentially taking dictation, he had to write as quickly as possible. So the scribe resorted to a variety of strategies to allow him to write faster. He employs ligatures, a device in which two letters are run together. A modern example of this is the ampersand (you know, the ‘&’ symbol); that’s a ligature for ‘E’ and “T’, or ‘et’, which is the Latin word for ‘and’. The scribe also abbreviates a lot, particularly with first names. For example, instead of writing ‘Robertus’ he writes ‘Robtus’ and makes a quick mark indicating that he’s dropped a few letters.

The one that I really struggled with an abbreviation I hadn’t send before, and which isn’t included in my Dictionary of Latin Abbreviations. It is a man’s first name, and occurred about a dozen times over the two pages. Here’s a picture of it. It’s the first word in the third line. (Ignore the thing that looks like a funky ‘A’; it’s a ligatured “IT’, short for ‘item’, meaning a new entry on the list.)

I initially read it as ‘Piais’. But I quickly realized that the first letter was an ‘R’; note that in the previous two lines, he makes the ‘R’ in ‘Robertus’ this way. But Riais wasn’t much better. Notice the line drawn over it; that’s a contraction mark, so he’s dropped a few letters (the Robtus also has a contraction line, running through the ‘B’). I knew it wasn’t ‘Robert’. What about ‘Richardus’? Well that almost works, but there’s only one ‘I’ in ‘Richardus’ and it would be a weird abbreviation that dropped all the consonants. So I was stumped. Finally, a fellow scholar pointed out what should have been glaringly obvious to me. That third letter probably isn’t an ‘A’, because the scribe usually (not always) adds a second chamber to his ‘A’ by extending the last stroke of the letter upward and curving it to the left. Instead, this scholar suggested it was a ligatured ‘CU”, meaning it was ‘RICUS’. I had subconsciously been reading as “AI” because it looks like a modern lower-case cursive ‘A’. ‘RICUS’ is a pretty obvious abbreviation for ‘Richardus’. So the man’s name is Richard Dyere.

 

Where Did the Rioters Come From?

The fun doesn’t end now that I’ve transcribed more of the document. Some of the lines were still too faded for me to read, even with UV light. I’ve gotten more of the document, but not all of it, and I’ll just have to be content with that. But one challenge I have to finish is identifying all of the place names, because I’d like to know where these men came from and often the document tells me. Some of them are pretty easy to work out. ‘Oxon’ is ‘Oxoniensis’, or ‘Oxford’. It makes sense that many of the rioters were from Oxford. However many of them are identified as coming from other communities, and it would be good to map that out. But trying to identify modern places from medieval spellings of medieval places gets a bit tricky, because medieval place names didn’t always have standardized spellings, especially not when they were small villages.

The scribe identifies several men as coming from a town he variously spells as ‘Hengey’, ‘Hengesteye’, and ‘Henyate’, all of which seem to be the modern Hinksey, a small village just outside Oxford. Clearly, without a standard Latin form, he was unsure how to write the town’s name and made a different choice each time the name came up. Three men are identified as coming from ‘Cornewalle’, which I initially read as ‘Cornwall’. That’s a long way from Oxford, but maybe they were there on business. But after looking at a map, I realized that they were much more likely to be from the small manor of Cornwell, which is only about 40 miles from Oxford, still a considerable distance, but not as far as Cornwall. Since Oxford is the nearest major town to Cornwell, it would make sense that these men might have gone there to sell goods or produce or buy something.

But what about the two men identified as coming from ‘Salesbury’? I can’t find any community with a name like that in Oxfordshire. Is it Salisbury, the cathedral town in Wiltshire? Salisbury is about 50 miles from Oxford as the crow flies, but closer to 70 miles by modern roads. It’s not inconceivable that two men from Salisbury might have had business in Oxford, but it’s more of a stretch. But perhaps these two men were originally from Salisbury but moved to Oxford a long time ago. Demonyms (“of Cornwell”) were a common way to identify people in the Middle Ages, especially in the period before surnames became standard. But they could indicate current place of resident, place of birth, or sometimes even just a former residence. So Richard of Salesbury might have been born there and left decades before, or he might currently reside there or maybe even just have some important connection to that place. And the same is true of the men from Cornwell. Just because they came from somewhere near Oxford doesn’t mean they had just made the journey.

What’s clear, however, is that the rioters weren’t all from Oxford proper. Some of the accounts of the riot mention that peasants from the countryside got involved in the riot, and the trial records allow me to confirm that.

 

Who Were The Rioters?

One of the most valuable details from the trial records is that it often, though not always, identifies the rioters by occupation. Sometimes it uses Latin, for example when it identifies someone as a sutor (a shoemaker) or a pastor (a shepherd). Sometimes it uses English; almost a dozen men are identifies as a “bocher” (butcher) and several others as a fullere (fuller, a type of cloth-worker); one is a shether, which I take to mean a sheath-maker. But what do I do with several men identified as cister? The ‘er’ ending suggests it’s an English word, but cista is the Latin word for a box or basket; is the scribe saying these men are box-makers or basket-weavers?

Several men are listed as being a serviens, which can mean a servant or a serf; since they are always listed as being the serviens of another man, I’ve concluded that they are probably domestic servants rather than peasants, but that’s an assumption I can’t prove. A number of men are listed as being a famulus. The term can mean an apprentice or just a laborer employed by someone. And one man is listed in the trespass list as a serviens and in the felony list as being a famulus, which suggests that the scribe was using the two Latin words interchangeably in their general sense as someone who is subordinate to an employer. However, I can’t eliminate the possibility that there was a technical difference between the two.

The most startling thing in the trial records, however, is this entry:

It reads “John de Bedeford mayor ville”. That’s right, the mayor of Oxford was convicted of trespass in the riot. And he wasn’t the only member of the town government to be convicted. Both of the town’s bailiffs (who were basically the mayor’s assistants) were also convicted, as were several other men who had served in town government or who had represented the town as a member of Parliament. In fact, nearly everyone who had played an official role in Oxford’s political life in the past decade was convicted in the riot, sometimes right along with their servants.

(But there is a mistake in this entry. The scribe confused John de Bedeford, a former mayor of Oxford who was convicted of both felony and trespass, with John de Bereford, the current mayor, who was convicted only of trespass. That wasn’t the only time that mistake was made; several months later, the Crown issued an order to release Bedeford from prison, but some official seems to have accidentally released Bereford, because he was later recorded as being absent from the prison without permission.)

Before I looked at the trial records, it was already clear that the Edward III blamed the Oxford government for the riot. But the trial records seem to suggest that the town leadership did not just permit the violence but actively participated in it. The mayor, the bailiffs, the former mayor, and other leading citizens in the riot were personally involved in attacking students, looting their property, or other related crimes.

Even though most of the people mentioned here are just names on parchment, looking at the social make-up of the rioters, we see a wide cross-section of the townspeople and nearby peasantry engaging in violence of the most extreme sort against the university. That’s why this document is important and why I needed to study it so closely. It reveals the scope of the violence and raises intriguing questions about how the town and university related to each other. Whatever grievances drove this riot, they were clearly ones felt by most segments of the town population. So as I finish my book, I’m going to have think a lot about what factors might have united such a wide range of men in violent opposition to the institution that made the town famous.

Hopefully this very close look at one small research project (or piece of a project, really) will give my non-historian readers some insight into exactly what it is that historians do and some of the various challenges that the work involves.

 

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The White Princess: Whackadoodle-doo!

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Elizabeth of York, Henry VII, Kings and Queens, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Starz, Tudor England

 The 2017 Starz series The White Princess (based on the Philippa Gregory novels of the same name) is a sequel to The White Queen series, although not completely. None of the earlier series cast returns (with the exception of one supporting character), and a key detail of The White Princess is incompatible with the first series.

The show also feels cheaper than its predecessor. Instead of finding appropriate period locations for domestic scenes, in the earlier episodes they filmed a lot of scenes in churches and just tried to cover up problematic details like tombs behind large banners on free-standing mounts. Henry wears a lot of black leatherette pants and one of his cloaks is just a big sheet of leather with clasps held on with fibulae. It must be a great cloak, because he has it for years. Frock Flicks really hates the costuming. Henry spends a great deal of time just walking around with a crown on for no real reason. But the show did spend more money on its battle scenes (although tactically they make no sense.)

First, Some Background

Henry VII seized control of England in 1485 by defeating and killing the now-infamous Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth Field. Henry VII had a very weak claim to the throne. He came from the lower nobility, his father (who died before Henry’s birth) having been the 1^stEarl of Richmond and the son of Henry V’s widow Catherine of Valois. His mother Margaret Beaufort was a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, third son of Edward III via his mistress-turned-wife Katherine Swynford. Since the Beauforts were related to the Lancastrian kings of England whose line had been stamped out by Edward IV, Henry represented one of the last remaining heirs to the Lancastrian claim to the throne. But his claim was a weak one, because in 1407, when the Lancastrian king Henry IV had legitimized the Beauforts, he had specifically excluded them from the line of succession. Additionally, Henry’s family was not particularly wealthy by the standards of the day, and Henry had spent much of his life outside the British Isles, so he didn’t have deep political connections either. His claim was successful partly due to residual loyalty to the Lancastrians and partly due to hostility to Richard III.

The Lancastrians had been displaced by the Yorkist line, in the person of Edward IV, duke of York. The Yorkists arguably had a superior claim to the throne in a legal sense, because they were descended from both Edward III’s second son Lionel and his fourth son Edmund (directly from Edmund and through Lionel’s daughter Philippa). When Henry IV usurped the throne from Richard II in 1399, he not only violated Richard’s right to the throne, he also passed over Lionel’s claims. As long as Henry and his son Henry V were successful, their questionable legal claims were ignored, but Henry VI proved woefully incompetent as well as mentally ill, which opened the door to Edward of York seizing the throne in 1461.

To simplify a complex story (as told in The White Queen), Edward ruled fairly successfully, with the exception of a disruption in 1470 when Henry VI briefly retook the throne. He married Elizabeth Woodville, a women of the lower nobility, which provoked a great deal of political trouble from the more established English nobles, who resented Edward’s efforts to promote the Woodvilles ‘above their station’. Edward and Elizabeth produced a whole passel of children: seven girls and three boys (one of whom died around 2 years old).

When Edward died in 1483, his older son Edward was 13 and the younger, Richard of Shrewsbury, was 10. But Edward IV’s younger brother Duke Richard of Gloucester feared that the Woodvilles, who were his political opponents, would use the young king to strike at him, so he quickly usurped the throne. Richard III took charge of Young Edward and Richard, who were placed into the Tower of London and never seen again. There has been debate about what happened to them ever since, but there is no real scholarly doubt that Richard either ordered their deaths or made it clear that he would accept someone doing the deed proactively. Given how vitally important they were during Richard’s reign, it’s simply inconceivable that they were killed against his will.

When Richard took the throne, Elizabeth Woodville began negotiating with Henry Tudor, who was one of the few credible opponents of her brother-in-law. In 1483, they agreed that Henry would marry Elizabeth of York, the oldest child of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Henry went so far as to swear a public oath to that effect. The effect of this marriage would be to join Henry’s rather weak claim to the throne with Elizabeth of York’s rather strong claim. Assuming her two brothers were already dead, Elizabeth was the heir to Edward IV’s claim, meaning that her claim was much stronger than Richard’s, at least legally.

Henry VII

Richard III had only one child with his wife Anne, a boy Edward who died a year after his father took the throne. (He also had two illegitimate children fathered when he was a teenager.) Anne died in March of 1485, leaving Richard in desperate need of a wife and heir. So he immediately began negotiating with King John II of Portugal for the hand of John’s sister Joanna, a nun who was rather disinterested in marrying anyone. To sweeten the deal, Richard also proposed marrying his niece Elizabeth of York to John’s kinsman (and future king) Manuel I.

This was a sound move on Richard’s part. First, it would have helped secure him an ally, had the marriages gone through. Second, it would have weakened Henry’s political position and claim to the throne, thus undercutting his ability to threaten Richard. Third, the Croyland Chronicle claims that there were rumors that Richard had an inappropriate desire for his niece. Given that Richard’s position was already shaky, he may have decided that he didn’t need rumors of incest circulating about him, so he sent her away from court almost immediately after Anne’s death; her marriage would have completely removed any scurrilous gossip about a supposed relationship.

However, it’s unclear how reliable the Croyland Chronicle’s claim is. The author of this part of the Chronicle is anonymous, and historians disagree about who he was, although he clearly had access to the Yorkist court. This section was written around 1486, after Henry had become king, so it’s quite likely that the author was a former Yorkist hoping to curry favor with Henry by making Richard look as bad as possible. So the Chronicle’s claim that there were rumors about Richard’s incestuous interest in his niece cannot be assumed to be true, although it can’t actually be totally discounted either. But it’s worth noting that the claim is that Richard was attracted to Elizabeth, nothing more. There’s no evidence that he actually wanted to marry her, which would have been wildly unacceptable, or ever tried to do anything with her.

Elizabeth of York

Henry defeated Richard on August 22, 1485. He retroactively dated his accession to August 21^st, meaning that anyone who fought in support of Richard was by that fact guilty of treason against Henry. He had himself crowned king in October of the same year, pointedly not marrying Elizabeth of York until January 18^thof 1486, which means that he was king of England not because of his wife’s legal claim but by his own right of conquest. He even made a point of claiming the throne by right of conquest in some of his proclamations. His first son, Prince Arthur, was born on the 19^thor 20^thof September of that year. Elizabeth was crowned queen in November of 1487.

The White Princess           

At the start of the series, Elizabeth of York (Jodie Cromer) is in love with Richard and has had sex with him. Consequently, she passionately hates Henry (Jacob Collins-Levy) as the man who killed her lover. Her relationship with Richard seems to be widely known, because both Henry and his mother Margaret (Michelle Fairley, striving mightily to bring some semblance of plausibility to a religious maniac) refer to her as a whore and Richard’s lover.

I cannot emphasize enough how totally whackadoodle this is. Not only does it depend on the thinnest of evidence, it goes far beyond the claims of the Croyland Chronicle. The idea that a royal princess would have been openly having premarital sex is ludicrous, because it would have severely undermined her value as marriage partner. Elite women of this era were essentially required to be virgins on their wedding day. It also completely ignores the fact that uncle-niece incest was as unacceptable then as it is today, arguably more so, given the very complex rules about consanguinity that medieval society dealt with. No one at any point bothers to comment on the fact that not only is Elizabeth having premarital sex, she’s breaking one of the biggest taboos of all. Since Elizabeth of York is the audience identification character, it’s clear that the show wants to avoid making viewers queasy by reminding them that her first great love is her uncle.

And despite all this, Henry insists on putting blood on the bedsheets the night they are married. The whole point of doing that is offer evidence that the bride is a virgin, but if everyone knows she’s not a virgin, it’s pointless.

In the show, Elizabeth and Henry hate each other from the moment they meet. Henry doesn’t like the idea of marrying his enemy’s lover and she doesn’t like the idea of marrying her lover’s enemy. He openly suggests marrying someone else, including Elizabeth’s jealous younger sister Cecily (Suki Waterhouse), but his council includes former Yorkists who insist that he keep his promise to marry Elizabeth.

It’s a little-known fact that Margaret Beaufort could spit venom up to six feet when threatened

So Henry decides that he can’t marry her until he knows for certain that she’s fertile. So he essentially rapes her to see if he can knock her up quickly. When it becomes clear that she has gotten pregnant, he marries her. There’s no virtually no evidence to support this. They did reside in the same household before their marriage, so it’s possible they could have had sex before their marriage, but the only reason to think they did so is that Prince Arthur was born 8 months and 1-2 days after their marriage. So either he was conceived in late December or he was born a month premature. But there was no practice of ‘testing’ a woman’s fertility with premarital sex, and given that Henry needed to build his claim to the throne, it would have been risky for his heir to be an obvious product of premarital sex, because it would have opened the door to claims that Arthur was a bastard, the last thing Henry would have wanted. (This is another reason why the idea of Elizabeth having an affair with Richard is so crazy. If Elizabeth were known to have not been a virgin on her wedding day, the legitimacy of all her children would have been suspect.)

Also, as an aside, can I just point out that the trajectory of the show has Elizabeth fall in love with Henry gradually, after he’s raped her? There’s something really fucked up about Philippa Gregory here.

Finally, the show’s timeline presumes that not only did Elizabeth get pregnant from that first, very quick, act of intercourse but also that it was clear to her that she was pregnant just a couple weeks later and that a very hurried marriage could be arranged without anyone noticing the rush. Remember, for Arthur to be born after nine months, there’s only room for a month between his conception and his parents’ wedding. While it’s possible that Elizabeth might have realized she was pregnant just a week or two after conceiving, it’s more likely for a woman to take 5-6 weeks to realize she’s pregnant. Elizabeth lived in an age when women were discouraged from having a clear understanding of such matters and even physicians and midwives weren’t always clear on the relationship between a missed period and conception. Would Elizabeth have understood what a single missed or very late period meant? It’s hard to know, but the show is relying on much more recent ideas about pregnancy than were common in the 15^thcentury.

Henry’s coat here comes from the Late Biker Age

In general, the show wants us to see Elizabeth as a sincere yet politically-engaged woman who often fought with her mother-in-law. She frequently participates in the royal council and writes letters to rally support for Henry against Perkin Warbeck. She successfully rallies English troops that don’t want to fight for Henry. In one remarkably absurd scene, she conducts a marriage negotiation with Isabella of Castile because Elizabeth speaks Spanish and Henry does not, and then lies to Henry about the fact that Isabella has refused the marriage, as if there is no one else in the room who understands both English and Spanish and could tell Henry what was actually being said. (In fact, although Elizabeth was a very well-educated woman by the standards of her day, she never learned a second language beyond some not very good French. Also, the marriage was proposed by the Spanish, not the English. And the idea that Henry would have personally gone to Spain and taken his wife with him as his translator at a time when he was fearful of a rebellion against him in support of Perkin Warbeck is rather silly.)

There’s no real evidence that Elizabeth was very involved in the politics of her day. Her mother-in-law was far more influential at court and Henry appears to have made it very clear that Elizabeth was the mother of his children and not one of his key counselors. Although it is possible that she influenced him during their private (and therefore unrecorded) conversations, there’s no particular evidence that he trusted her except in matters of marriage, where it was traditional for the queen to play an important role. She focused her life on her children and charitable works, which he gave her a substantial income to pursue.

More Whackadoodle

One continuity between The White Queen and The White Princess is that Elizabeth Woodville (Essie Davis) is a witch. And by that, I mean she actually has magic powers. Over the course of the show, she sends a nightmare to trouble Margaret Beaufort, ensures that a stable boy finds a message she has thrown out a window, kills Mary of Burgundy by breaking a statue of the Virgin Mary, keeps Perkin Warbeck from being captured by Henry, and generally miraculously knows things like that Warbeck is landing in England.

As I’ve discussed in a previous post, this is nonsense. There’s literally no evidence at all that Elizabeth Woodville knew or attempted to practice magic of any sort. And one wonders why, if Elizabeth actually could work magic, she didn’t bother to, oh say, kill Henry. Why didn’t she send nightmares against Henry or otherwise curse him? Why didn’t she kill Prince Arthur? Gregory wrote her novel to give Elizabeth power to cause a variety of things that actually happened historically, but the fact that Elizabeth wasn’t able to do the sort of things that would actually have benefitted her cause in a material way shows how silly this idea is.

And as we’ll see in the next post, there’s a lot more whackadoodle stuff around Perkin Warbeck’s rebellion against Edward.

Want to Know More?

The White Princess  is available on Amazon, as is the novel it’s based on. But if you’re looking for something historically reliable about Henry and Elizabeth, skip Philippa Gregory. For Henry VII, take a look at Sean Cunningham’s Henry VII or Thomas Penn’s Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England. For Elizabeth of York, try Arlene Okerlund’s Elizabeth of York: Queenship and Power.  

The Last Kingdom: Testudos!

Tags

Alexander Draymon, BBC, Bernard Cornwell, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Military Stuff, The Last Kingdom, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, Vikings

I’ve finally found time to do my last post on The Last Kingdom, after wading through weeks’ worth of term papers and exams. Sorry this post is overdue. I knew I was going to have to re-watch several episodes to formulate my thoughts on the show’s depiction of 9^th century warfare, and it took me a while to find the time.

In the series, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons are equipped nearly identically in terms of their war gear, with one major exception. Vikings get round shields and Anglo-Saxons get rather pathetic small rectangular shields, clearly inferior in terms of how much of their body they cover and also in terms of manufacture (the Viking shields have metal rims, or actually if you look close, painted details designed to look like metal rims). The purpose of this difference is probably so that the viewer can distinguish the Viking troops from the Anglo-Saxons, which is a reasonable issue for the show to struggle with. But it’s wrong historically. Both Vikings and Anglo-Saxons had the same type of shields. Visually, there wouldn’t have been a whole lot to distinguish the two sides from each other.

In the first episode, three Northumbrian eldermen lead their troops against the invading Vikings. At the battlefield, the Vikings form a testudo and wait in position while the Anglo-Saxons charge across the field in an unruly mob, having apparently never seen a testudo before. (For those who are unclear on what a testudo is, I discuss the topic here.) The Anglo-Saxons are unable to penetrate the testudo, although they do force the Vikings to give a little ground and manage to kill a few. This leads to the Anglo-Saxon reinforcements charging in, thinking they are winning.

The foolish Anglo-Saxons charging the Viking testudo

But then a second Viking unit rushes the field and forms a second testudo behind the Anglo-Saxons. This effective pens the Anglo-Saxons in. The two testudos slowly advance, mercilessly crushing the Northumbrian troops like the garbage compactor scene in Star Wars, only with much bloodier results.

There are a few things wrong here, namely almost everything. First, there is zero evidence that the Norse understood the concept of the testudo, much less had the intensive group military training to pull the formation off. (That is, unless you consider The Vikings, season 1, evidence.) Testudos required a degree of unit cohesion and training that, so far as the evidence allows us to speak, neither the Norse nor the Anglo-Saxons possessed. There’s no reason to think either side would have known about this ancient Roman military technique, much less been able to execute it.

(Ok, a brief digression. There is actually one medieval source that describes Vikings using a testudo. Abbo of Saint-Germaine, a French monk who was present at the Viking Siege of Paris in 886, describes the Vikings as advancing in a testudo. However, in this passage he’s using Roman military terminology, certainly because he’s read some Roman authors and possibly because he wants to show off how well-read he is. The question that historians debate is whether or not Abbo actually understands what a testudo is. Many scholars think that he is using Roman technical vocabulary without really knowing what the vocubalary means. In other words, he’s seen the Vikings using a shield wall and has decided to call that shield wall a testudo, either because he thinks it will make him look more learned or because he thinks that a medieval shield wall is the same thing as a testudo. This is a common problem with medieval authors, not at all unique to Abbo.

And I agree. I think it is much more likely that Abbo is misusing the term testudo here than that the Vikings somehow knew what an ancient Roman military formation involved, because there’s no easy way to explain how the Norse would have had access to military ideas from a culture that died out several centuries before their time. The Norse never fought a classical Roman legion, did not speak Latin, and did not know how to read. So how would they have gotten this information? Occam’s Razor makes me think that Abbo is more likely to have misused the terminology than that the Norse are to have understood this technique. However, this well-educated amateur scholar disagrees with my assessment. So you can decide for yourself.)

Second, the testudo was not really a fighting formation. Its tactical purpose was to allow soldiers to maneuver on the battlefield while taking arrow fire. It essentially puts soldiers into a sort of defensive crouch with their shields locked together. It’s unlikely that soldiers could have fought effectively from that posture, and even more unlikely that they could have held that formation effectively when a large number of hostile soldiers were charging them and slamming into the shields. The idea that a testudo could function offensively to push men back and kill them while still functioning defensively is highly dubious.

Anglo-Saxons with their crappy little shields.

Third, if you watch carefully, you see two testudos slowly closing together, trapping the Anglo-Saxons within. But there’s a huge problem. The testudo is a straight line. So when two testudos close in on each other, there’s nothing to prevent the Northumbrians trapped within from simply running out at the top or the bottom of the formation. The camera shot is structured to keep the viewer from realizing that is a possibility, but it definitely is.

In reality, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons used a very similar tactic when they had open-field battles. They both employed a formation called a shield wall, which is similar to a testudo but actually possible. In a shield wall, soldiers stand in a long line, close enough together that their shields overlap. The front rank focuses its energies on defense, while the men in the rank behind them focus on attacking over the shoulders of the front rank. Their presence also helps brace the front line, and if a man in the front rank is injured or killed, the man behind him can step up and close the gap.

The shield wall was a very effective formation, probably the most effective formation of the early Middle Ages. Unlike a testudo, it didn’t require long hours of practice to pull off (although certainly some drilling was necessary). At the battle of Hastings in 1066, the Anglo-Saxon shield wall withstood repeated charges by the Norman cavalry, although keeping the men from breaking rank and counter-attacking whenever the Normans retreated was a problem.

The big tactical drawback of the shield wall is that it was a static formation. When it advanced, it ran the risk of losing cohesion, and without cohesion, it lost most of its value. As a result, the Anglo-Saxons tended to take up a shield wall position and then wait for the other side to charge, trusting in the strength of their defensive position. As a result, when two Anglo-Saxon armies confronted each other, they frequently both adopted the shield wall formation and then waited for the other side to charge. They would taunt each other, each side hoping the other would lose its self-control and charge, thereby surrendering the defensive advantage.

A Roman testudo. Note that it requires fairly tall shields, the sort of shields no one in the MIddle Ages used

So the scene as it’s depicted is sort of the opposite of what would probably have happened if the Vikings had taken up a testudo. The Anglo-Saxons would have done the same and tried to goad the Norse into breaking formation. They were unlike to have charged recklessly and without any structure to attack an unfamiliar formation. We could always assume that the eldermen were stupid, because military commanders did sometimes make shitty decisions, act rashly or with overconfidence, or lose control of their troops. But a plot that requires stupidity to work is a lousy plot.

In the third episode, we see Uhtred (Alexander Draymon) and Leofric (Adrian Bower) drilling a group of Anglo-Saxon men in a shield wall technique. The two sides line up and adopt a shield wall (or what would pass for a shield wall with those crappy little rectangular shields). But then Leofric’s side charges, losing all cohesion, and Uhtred’s side responds by quickly losing cohesion as well. In the second round, the two sides advance more cautiously, probably more the way an actual shield wall would, at least until Leofric’s side charges again and dissolves into disorder. Given that it’s a training sequence, we can forgive that.

Then Uhtred teaches the Anglo-Saxons how to do a testudo, a totally new and unfamiliar formation they’ve never seen before. But Uhtred forgets to make himself part of the shield wall and instead stands in front of it when Leofric’s line charges. It’s a slightly comical moment, but it undercuts the idea that Uhtred is really a great tactician. But overall, this training scene is probably the closest the show gets to showing us something real about how Anglo-Saxons fought.

Uhtred in front of his testudo. Never mind the boom mike.

The idea that the Norse understood the testudo seems to only go back to first seasons of The Vikings. It’s a good illustration of how an historical film or show can shift the way people think about the past for the worse.

If you need help picturing this battle, the always-amusing Lindybeige has a nice analysis of the first episode.

 

The Battle of Edington

The first season climaxes with the Battle of Edington. The Danes, led by the villainous Skorpa (Jonas Malmsjö) and the less villainous Guthrum (Thomas W Gabrielsson) and the Anglo-Saxons, basically led by Leofric and Uhtred, take up positions opposite each other on a field. Both sides form a testudo, with the Anglo-Saxons suddenly having both their usual crappy rectangular shields and kite shields. The kite shield (which I always think of as the Ice-Cream-Cone shield because in silhouette they look like sugar cones with a single scoop of ice cream on them) seems to have been developed in the 11^th century for use from horseback (because the narrow end of the shield can fit between the horse’s neck and the rider’s leg). The 9^th century Anglo-Saxons didn’t use kite shields because 1) they hadn’t been invented yet, 2) the Anglo-Saxons were quite resistant to fighting from horseback, and 3) kite shields are rather awkwardly shaped for use by foot soldiers (although foot soldiers can use them). But the production people on the show must have realized that the crappy rectangular shields simply wouldn’t work for a testudo and just threw in some kite shields hoping no one would notice. But I did. That’s why I get paid the big bucks to review shows like this.

Although both sides possess small cavalry units, they’re mostly using foot soldiers. This will become important later on.

The Vikings decide to charge, despite the fact that charging a shield wall is generally a losing tactic. Despite inflicting some casualties (including Leofric), the Vikings are unable to penetrate the Anglo-Saxon testudo, which begins to force the Vikings backward.

The Vikings (left) collide with the Anglo-Saxons (right). The shields in the middle are the two testudos pressed against each other.

At this point, Skorpa has an opportunity to shift the course of the battle by leading his cavalry to flank the Anglo-Saxon formation which is vulnerable on its sides and read. Instead, he succumbs to his villainy and attacks the Anglo-Saxon camp, killing Uhtred’s current woman and bringing her head back to taunt him with.

That turns out to be a bad idea. The enraged Uhtred breaks from the testudo, leaps over the Viking testudo, and starts slaughtering Vikings, who are unable to do anything in response to his righteous fury (which apparently acts like a power-up in a video game). He single-handedly opens a big gap in the Viking position, allowing the Anglo-Saxons to charge into the breach and slaughter the bad guys, whose eyeliner is no longer able to protect them. Skorpa gets speared in the chest, Guthrum has to surrender and accept conversion, and the Anglo-Saxons get to live happily every after until next season, except poor Uhtred, who gets lots of juicy manpain to chew on because the woman he’s loved for the last two episodes has died.

Some elements of this are plausible. If you substitute shield walls for testudos, you have a basically believable 9^th century battle, at least until Uhtred eats his spinach and starts clobbering the Vikings. Skorpa’s actions are more cartoon bad guy than ruthless military leader, but I suppose we could say he decided that a flanking maneuver wouldn’t work because he didn’t have a large cavalry unit and his maneuver might have been countered by the Anglo-Saxon cavalry. It seems unlikely that the Anglo-Saxons wouldn’t have posted any guards at their camp in case of just such villainy, and it’s not clear why the Anglo-Saxon cavalry doesn’t move to stop the raid on the camp. But this battle definitely makes a hell of a lot more sense than the one that opens the series.

11th century Normans with kite shields

In general, I dislike the show’s treatment of warfare. The show imagines that the Viking were able to beat the Anglo-Saxons because they had a superior battlefield tactic that the Anglo-Saxons didn’t understand, until Uhtred spilled the beans about how to perform the testudo. That’s just untrue. The Vikings did have a tactical advantage, but it was their longships, not their land tactics. The longship allowed the Vikings to get into a coastal or riverine area quickly, attack a surprised community when its defenses were down, and then get away before the local noble could raise a force to respond. However, during the late 9^th century, the Norse switched over to conquest rather than raiding. At that point, the advantage that they had was more about numbers than superior tactics, from what we can tell from surviving sources. The Great Army (as the Viking force was called) probably included several thousand men (although historians have debated the exact size because we have no particularly solid numbers with which to make a real estimate). It wasn’t an enormous force, but the typical Anglo-Saxon kingdom probably could only field a force of several hundred fully trained elite warriors, supplementing that force with much more poorly-trained local peasant levies. So the Great Army probably had the upper hand in terms of numbers and battle experience. The force that Guthrum invaded Wessex with was only half the Great Army, but Alfred’s forces were weakened by years of coastal raiding and a few key defeats. Edington might only have involved one or two thousand men in total, but Alfred was gambling a lot on that battle.

The show also has a tendency, like so many modern depictions of ancient and medieval warfare, to privilege the righteousness of the hero’s cause over all other considerations. Uhtred wins his fights not because he is a demonstrably better fighter or because he’s tactically smarter, but because he’s filled with righteous fury that the enemy ultimately cannot prevail against. It’s the sort of assumption that teenagers make about how combat works. In general, Uhtred acts like an indignant teenager and the show tends to reward him for it. I want to like this show, because I love the fact that it’s telling a story about a period of English history that rarely gets much attention, but Uhtred is just such an unlikable and petulant protagonist that I can’t sympathize with him. Sigh.

This review was paid for by a kind donation to my Paypal account by my faithful reader Lyn. Thanks, Lyn! I’ve got a couple more requested reviews to tackle (my apologies that I’ve been taking a while to get to them guys) but if you want me to review a show or film, please make a generous donation and tell me what you want me to cover, and I’ll get to it as soon as I can.

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

If you want to know more about Anglo-Saxon warfare, I would suggest the works of Richard Abels. His Lordship and Military Obligation in Anglo-Saxon England is excellent. And his Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England is very topical for this series.

The Last Kingdom: Runes

Tags

BBC, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Runes, The Last Kingdom

One of the things that people tend to know about the Norse/Vikings is that they used runes for magical purposes. The Last Kingdom employs this trope; Ubba has a sorcerer who uses them. There’s been a lot of misinformation around runes, so now that I’ve gotten through the massive pile of student papers I’ve been struggling with for the past three weeks, I figured I would do a quick post on the issue.

In the show, Ubba has a sorcerer (whose name I wasn’t able to catch, so I’m just going to call him the Sorcerer) who ‘casts runes’. He has a pouch of clay or stone tiles, each of which has a rune on it. He throws them on the ground and looks at them and makes a divination based on what they tell him. I’ve seen similar versions of this scene a number of times in other shows and films.

It’s total bullshit. There is precisely 0 evidence that the Norse ever employed runes in this fashion. As a divination method, it is inspired by the Chinese I Ching and perhaps by western Tarot cards, both of which use randomization as a mechanism for divining, as well as unclear references to Norse divination by lots. But the idea that Norsemen used runes in this particular way doesn’t go back much further than the late 1980s, when some occultists being using them this way. In the 1990s, someone began marketing a commercial set of runes that was sold at bookstores and Renaissance Faires. But rune tiles are completely ahistorical. There’s also no evidence that runes were used on pendants worn around the neck; that’s another contemporary use.

But that doesn’t mean that runes themselves are ahistorical. The Norse did genuinely use them, so we need to look into that a bit more.

Runes

Runes emerged in Germanic culture (of which Norse culture was one branch) somewhere in the period between 100-250 AD, as the Germanic peoples had increasing contacts with the Romans. In origin, runic scripts are attempts to replicate the Latin alphabet. Different Germanic peoples developed different runic scripts; we have surviving examples for the Norse, Goths, Anglo-Saxons, Frisians, and Franks. The oldest surviving runic inscription dates to around 300 AD, but it was certainly not the first of its kind. I’m going to focus primarily on Norse runes, just to keep this short.

A wooden staff carved with runes found in the early 9th-century Oseberg burial

Unlike the modern alphabet, runes were not designed to be written down, so there is no cursive form of them. Rather they are designed to be carved, originally on wood and later on stone, bone, walrus ivory, and metal. This origin explains several features of runic script. It is made up entirely of straight lines, because those are easier to carve and less likely to disappear into the writing surface; they are carved perpendicular to the grain of the wood, with no horizontal strokes, which would tend to disappear into the grain (and perhaps split the wood, if it was a thin surface).

Additionally, because they have to be carved, they are not used for long texts, such as letters or histories. Instead they tend to be shorter texts, often just a statement of ownership or manufacture, such as ‘Thorstein carved this’. Longer texts exist, but texts of more than 25-30 words are fairly rare.

A third characteristic is that runic script is simple and economical. Most runes are simultaneously individual letters and specific words. For example, in the Norse runic alphabet, the letter T is also the rune for ‘sword’ (as well as the name of the god Tyr), while the rune for K means ‘ulcer’. So an individual rune in an inscription can be either a letter or a whole word. For the sake of brevity, double letters were written as a single rune. The earliest Norse alphabet, called the Futhark (from its first 6 letters) had 24 runes, but shortly before the Viking period started, this was simplified into the Younger Futhark alphabet, which had only 16 runes; the letter K did double duty as the letter G, and some sounds used in Proto-Norse fell out of use in later Old Norse. Runes could also be written in either direction. Since inscriptions often don’t have word separation, accurately interpreting these inscriptions can be challenging.

The Elder Futhark alphabet

Runes as Magic

19^th and early 20^th century scholars confidently maintained that runic script was a magical language, meaning that its original purpose was magical and that non-magical uses only emerged later on. There were several reasons for this. First the word ‘rune’ means ‘mystery, secret’. Second, a lot of early runic inscriptions seemed to be untranslatable gibberish, which was interpreted as being magical (sort of like ‘abracadabra’). The pagan Norse poem Havamal contains a reference to runes being used to temporarily bring a dead body back to life, and later Norse sagas show runes being used for a variety of magical purposes; for example, Egil’s Saga contains an incident when an improperly written charm makes a man ill, until Egil erases the mistake and re-carves it properly, curing the man. The T rune has been found on several swords; since labeling a sword ‘sword’ seems a bit redundant, it’s been suggested that this was some form of magical charm. Put together, these seemed to point to runes primarily having a magical function.

A typical, if elaborate, runestone

But more recently, historians have tended to move away from the ‘magical hypothesis’. It rests on an assumption that early Germanic society was so primitive that it had no practical use for a writing system, so that all writing had to have a magical function. The fact that some inscriptions are unintelligible does not automatically mean that they were magical words; we may simply not know enough vocabulary to translate them. It’s also been pointed out that the inscriptions most likely to survive were high-status inscriptions made on rocks and metal objects, whereas less important inscriptions (like the Norse equivalent of a shopping list) would have been made on more perishable media like wood; it’s likely that we have lost the majority of all runic inscriptions ever made and so our sample is skewed. And Norse sagas were all written centuries after the conversion of the Norse to Christianity. Icelanders clearly thought that their pagan ancestors had used runes for magical purposes, but that doesn’t mean that their ancestors actually had used runes only for that purpose.

None of this means that Norse sorcerers didn’t employ runes for magical purposes. Havamal is good evidence that runes did have a role to play in Norse magic, and the early medieval Sigurdrifumal mentions runes being used to protect against poison in ale, to facilitate child-birth, to protect ships, to improve one’s speaking ability, and as “gladness-runes”, among others. The aforementioned T rune inscribed on a sword is most reasonably explained as a magical charm. What it does mean is that Norse sorcerers wrote their magical texts using the same alphabet they wrote their grocery lists and love letters in. So runes were not inherently magical, but Norse magic probably employed writing on at least some occasions.

Very few surviving examples of runic inscriptions are obviously magical. The Glavendrup Stone in Denmark, like many runestones, is a simple memorial to a dead man by his family. But then it asks Thor to ‘hallow’ the runes. The text ends with a curse against anyone who damages or moves the stone, declaring him to be an outcast. But it’s not clear that the curse has power because it was written in runic script, or simply because the carved declared the curse. For that matter, it’s not clear that the curse is actually supposed to be supernatural rather than social in nature.

The Glavendrup Stone

A more clearly magical use of runes can be found on the pre-Viking Age Björketorp Stone in Sweden. Its inscription reads “I, master of the runes, conceal here runes of power. Incessantly [plagued by] maleficence, [doomed to] insidious death [is] he who breaks the monument. I prophecy destruction.” What’s not clear is why someone would carve this on a stone. What’s the point of writing “I curse the person who messes with this curse”? Scholars have offered various suggestions about missing gravesites, fertility rituals, and other options, but there’s no clear explanation for the stone yet. But it’s clear that the carver felt that the act of carving the runes was magically powerful in some way, either because the runes made concrete a spoken curse or because the act of carving them was inherently magical.

The Gummarp Stone in Sweden memorializes a man named Hathuwulf, and then repeats the F rune three times. Since the F rune is also the word for wealth, it’s been suggested that this was a magical charm for wealth, but who is supposed to receive this wealth is not clear. So while Norse literature has an idea of runes being used for magic, actually pinpointing examples of runes actually being used that way is harder, and understanding what the point of those examples are is harder still.

A 1^st century Roman source, Tacitus’ Germania, claims that the Germanic peoples performed divination with “signs” in groups of three cut from a “nut-bearing tree”. His description doesn’t make it clear how these signs were used for divination. But they are unlikely to be runes, because the runic script hadn’t been invented yet. And this predates the formation of the Norse culture by half a millennium. A highly unreliable 14th century saga claims that the Norse performed divination by means of sacrificial “chips” that were marked with the blood of a sacrifice and then thrown to the ground. But this reference makes no mention of runes. Another Christian source claims that the Norse drew lots for divinatory purposes. That’s the closest we get to a notion of rune tiles being used for divination, but the text makes no mention of runes on these lots. So there’s no actual evidence that runes themselves played a role in divination. That hasn’t stopped 20^th century occultists from making up an entire divinatory system from runes. But that’s an artifact of contemporary culture, not medieval Norse culture.

So the next time you see someone “casting runes” in a show or movie, loudly shout ‘bullshit!’ at the screen. If anyone complains, tell them to talk to me.

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

There are a metric shit-ton of books on Amazon that promise to teach you about runes, but of that shit-ton, approximately one is actually a scholarly book about runes, Sven B.F. Jansson’s Runes in Sweden. It’s a lovely guide to Swedish runestones, with great illustrations. R.I Price’s Runes is a nice little introductory books on the topic, but I couldn’t find it on Amazon, so it may be out of print.

If you want to know more about historical Norse magical practice (as opposed to modern invented practices), one really excellent book is Magic and Witchcraft in Europe, v.3: The Middle Ages, edited by Benkt Ankerloo and Stuart Clark. Only the second section deals with Norse magic, but it’s a very good essay about genuine Norse witchcraft, called seithr. Seithr did not, so far as we know, involve runes at all, so it’s a bit of a tangent from our topic, but a good read nonetheless.

The Last Kingdom: the Law, the Church, and Marriage

Tags

Alexander Draymon, Alfred the Great, Amy Wren, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, Religious Stuff, The Last Kingdom, Uhtred of Bebbanburg

Partway through the first season of The Last Kingdom, our hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg (Alexander Draymon) gets married to Mildreth (Amy Wren). This starts a plot thread dealing with a debt owed to the Church that I think is worth looking at, because, as usual whenever medieval law or religion is involved, things go wrong historically.

In the third episode, Uhtred presses Alfred (David Dawson) to give him land. Alfred counters by offering him a bride who has land, and he decides to take the offer. Episode 4 is where the marriage happens. Evidently there was a meeting not shown in the episode in which Uhtred negotiated the details of the marriage with her godfather, Odda. Her father is dead, but it seems a little odd that he would be negotiating with Odda instead of an actual kinsman of hers, since godparents did not have any legal rights over godchildren, but perhaps Odda is actually a kinsman as well as a godparent (which would be fairly irregular, since godparents were not typically relatives of the child) or perhaps her entire family is dead and it was decided that Odda as godparent was the only person around to be responsible for her.

Odda’s son, Odda Jr, (Brian Vernel) has the hots for Mildred and tries to bribe Uhtred to not marry her, presumably because he wants to marry her himself. Unfortunately for him, that would have been a no-no, because since his father is Mildrith’s god-father, he has a spiritual kinship with Mildreth that would render the marriage a form of incest. The show never explicitly says he wants to marry her, and he’s an all-around rotter anyway, so perhaps he just wants some semi-incestuous sexytime with her.

The unseen meeting is technically the engagement ceremony, the beweddung (the ‘wedding’), and it was normally the critical moment of the whole marriage as far as the law was concerned. Engagement was a legal contract, with witnesses, and was often accompanied by a feast to celebrate the establishing of new ties between the two men. Once the beweddung has taken place, groom and bride’s family are legally committed to the union, and if either of them tries to back out, they owe the other side a stiff fine. Socially this would have been an important moment as well, and Uhtred would probably have met Mildrith at that point. However, her presence was not legally required; what mattered was her father’s presence and Uhtred’s. The beweddung would eventually be followed by the gifta, the ‘giving’ of the bride at the nuptial ceremony. In the show, the gifta apparently happens a day or two after the beweddung, but the two ceremonies could actually be months or even years apart. The gifta was less important, but the show assumes it’s the more important one because for modern Westerners, the engagement has become a nominal practice and the nuptial ceremony has become the focus of all the attention as well as the legal heart of the arrangement.

The gifta

Uhtred pays a “bride price” of “33 pieces”, presumably of silver, that is, shillings. Technically this would have been the ‘handgeld’ or weotuma, paid by the groom to the family of the bride at the engagement ceremony. It compensated the family for the loss of their daughter and her labor and also demonstrated that the groom had the resources to support his wife. However, by Alfred’s time, the handgeld was given to the bride herself. In the show, Odda momentarily tries to keep the handgeld for himself, but it is finally presented to Mildrith by Odda Jr at the nuptials, although it turns out that he’s kept almost half of it without her knowing it. (Uhtred later correctly says that this money belongs to her legally, so Odda has cheated her.)

At the nuptials, Father Beocca (Ian Hart) blesses the wedding. Modern Americans would assume that this was necessary for the marriage to actually be a marriage, but as I’ve mentioned before, the participation of a priest was not a requirement for a marriage to be binding. It’s a social nicety and a religious blessing, but the beweddung was legally the key moment in the joining of the couple.

Then the couple rides to her estate, Lyscombe, which legally is his estate, since it would be the dowry from her family to him. Uhtred would have had control over the property. During the ride, Uhtred discovers there’s a complication involved in this deal, which we’ll get to later. When they get to Lyscombe, Mildrith proceeds to give away some or all of her handgeld to the peasants who have come to congratulate her on her marriage. From a financial standpoint, this is a very foolish thing to do, because that money was intended to help support her when she becomes a widow. It’s also a fairly extravagant gift, since a shilling was enough to purchase a couple acres of land. And, as we’ll see, she’s deeply in debt. However, generosity was an important Christian virtue and Mildrith later decides to become a nun, so perhaps she’s trying to emulate the extravagant disdain of wealth that saints were expected to demonstrate.

Then the newlyweds have sex. However, the show skips over another important moment. After sleeping with her, assuming she was a virgin, a new husband was obligated to pay his bride her morgengabe, or ‘morning gift’. The morgengabe was financial compensation to the bride for the loss of her virginity. The failure to pay this was a statement that the bride was not a virgin, and it was mattered legally. If he married her thinking her a virgin and then discovered that she wasn’t, he would have grounds to repudiate the marriage and sue her father for fraud. Like the handgeld, the morning gift was the bride’s personal property, outside her husband’s legal authority.

Amy Wren’s Mildrith

So there are three important moments in an Anglo-Saxon wedding: the beweddung, the gifta, and the payment of the morgengabe. The show has chosen to give us only one of them, the gifta, arguably the least critical of the three legally, out of the mistaken sense that it was the most important one. Modern audiences don’t care much about the legal niceties and assume that the blessing of the nuptials is the emotionally critical moment, but I’m far from convinced that an Anglo-Saxon would have seen it that way.

The Debt

On the ride to Lyscombe, Mildrith reveals that there’s a complication. As she explains it, her dead father made an arrangement with ‘the Church’. She says that to find favor with God he gave the Church 1/10^th of the yield of his estate, and ‘they’ demand this payment even when the crops fail or the Danes raid. The bishop sued her father. It’s not clear what court this was, but she says “the Church is the law, and the law decreed that my father owed them a huge sum.” He died right after that. Alfred, she says, could “remove the debt”, but he has chosen not to. Then she reveals that the amount owed is 2,000 shillings. There’s a lot wrong here, so let’s pick it apart.

In the Anglo-Saxon period, 1 librum (a ‘pound’) was worth 48 shillings, while 1 shilling was worth 4-6 pence (the exact exchange rate fluctuated over time, so let’s say it’s 5 pence to the shilling). 2,000 shillings is 10,000 pence or about 42 libra. Translating medieval currency into modern currency is quite difficult, since their economy was drastically different from ours. Instead of trying to declare an equivalent dollar amount, I’ll do what historians do and talk about prices in the Anglo-Saxon period so you can get a sense of the buying power of that money. One shilling was enough to purchase a ewe and lamb, so that sum would purchase a massive flock of sheep. A common house dog cost about 4 pence. A sword cost around 240 shillings. 1 librum could purchase around 120 acres of land, so that sum would purchase around 5,000 acres. In other words it’s a huge sum of money.

One of Alfred’s pence

Since that sum was accrued off of 1/10^th of Mildreth’s estates, either her father had a massive estate of which we don’t see much evidence (since her hall is a small house in need of repair), or else her father let that debt run up for a very long time. If her father controlled estates large enough to generate that sort of debt in a just a few years, why was her handgeld so low? If she’s that rich, why didn’t any other noble try to marry her? (She says there were other suitors but “none suitable”, perhaps a reference to her god-sibling Odda Jr.) In other words, these figures don’t make a lot of sense based on what little evidence we have to work with.

But honestly, the math is the least of the issues here. It’s not clear who her father made this deal with. Was it the local church attached to her father’s estates? A local monastery? One of the bishops of Wessex? It’s never explained. I doubt it’s the local “parish” church (in quotations because the actual parish system won’t develop for a few more centuries), because if it’s on his land, he would probably be the proprietor of the church and therefore he’d be making a deal with himself and could let himself out of it if need be. What would make the most sense historically is that he made this deal with a local monastery, since early medieval nobles frequently made donations to a monastery that had an association with their family, in exchange for being able to retire there late in life, but I suppose he could have done it with the bishop for some reason. The fact that the bishop is the one who sued him would suggest that it was a deal with the bishop, so that’s what I’m going to say.

It seems highly unlikely that he signed this deal with the bishop personally. Most Anglo-Saxon bishops were monks, who were trained to think about money as being evil, so most bishops probably won’t have accepted such a deal personally, for fear that the gift might lead them into sin. Instead, Mildrith’s dad probably made the deal with the local cathedral as an ecclesiastical institution. So he probably made the contract with the dean or the treasurer of the cathedral chapter (as the staff of a cathedral was collectively known) and gave the gift to the cathedral for its support and maintenance, or perhaps to build a new chapel or something.

But whatever deal he struck was very odd. Normally, if a noble wanted to give a gift to an ecclesiastical institution he would make it in either movable goods (livestock perhaps, or much less commonly cash) or else he would give land free and clear. He would give an estate to the cathedral and the cathedral would take it over and manage it and it would become part of the permanent endowment of the cathedral. But that’s not what Mildrith’s father did. Instead, he gave the cathedral not the land, but rather some sort of usufructory rights on the land; he gave the cathedral the income from the land but not the land itself. And even more strangely, he didn’t give whatever produce or livestock the estate produced. He guaranteed the cathedral a set revenue from the estate regardless of how much the estate actually produced. That’s pretty bizarre, and it was an idiotic thing to do unless he was rolling in money and absolutely certain that he could afford to make up the difference between what the land actually produced and the revenue he had guaranteed to the cathedral. I’m not a specialist in medieval land law, but I’ve never run across a deal like that in my own research and it sounds suspiciously like it was made up to create a situation where poor Mildrith just happens to owe a vast sum of money she can’t pay. But perhaps some specialist in Anglo-Saxon land law can correct me on this.

An Anglo-Saxon charter

But wait! There’s more! The bishop “took [her father] to law”. In what court? His own episcopal court? Her statement that the Church “is the law” seems to mean it was the bishop’s court. That strikes me as suspicious, because that would make the bishop simultaneously judge and plaintiff, a highly irregular situation. Technically, the archdeacon might have been the one to bring the suit, since they handled most of the bishop’s financial matters; perhaps Mildrith is just using ‘the bishop’ as short-hand for the clerical officials under the bishop, but it still amounts to the bishop bringing suit in his own court. Since the gift was probably made to the cathedral rather than to the bishop, it might have been the cathedral treasurer who brought the suit, in which case it would have been the treasurer as representative of the building suing Mildrith’s father in the bishop’s court, in which case the bishop did not bring the suit at all but instead sat in judgment. That’s the most likely scenario, if we assume that Mildrith is wrong about who brought the suit.

But if the suit was brought in the bishop’s court, it was done under canon law, which would explain her statement that the Church is the law. But if this was an entirely canon law matter, why can King Alfred ‘remove’ the debt? Does she mean that Alfred has the legal power as king to simply void the contract? The only way that makes sense is if the suit was brought in the royal court, following secular law, with the bishop (or deacon or treasurer) as plaintiff, Mildreth’s father as defendant, and Alfred (or one of his officials) as the judge, and even then it naively assumes that the king can just make up the law as he goes. If it was a secular court case under royal law, her claim that the Church controlled the proceedings is nonsense, and if it was an episcopal suit under canon law, her statement that Alfred can waive the debt makes no sense. Perhaps she means that Alfred has the money to pay the bishop what is owed and simply refuses to do so. But if that’s the case, why would she assume the king would intervene to pay her father’s debts?

Now, on top of all that, the show assumes that because Uhtred is Mildrith’s husband, he is now locked into paying this debt. A conversation between Odda and Alfred confirms that this was part of Alfred’s intention. He wants to test whether Uhtred is reliable or not. But he’s forgotten one tiny detail. Anglo-Saxon law allows the groom to divorce his wife and sue her kin for fraud, which is pretty much what Alfred and Odda have just perpetrated. They’ve gotten Uhtred to marry on false pretenses, leading him to think that Mildrith is much wealthier than she actually is. Luckily for them, he’s as ignorant of Anglo-Saxon law as whoever dreamed up this scenario in the first place. He accepts that he’s on the line for the debt and it drives the next several episodes’ worth of action as he tries to find a way to pay the debt.

The Penance

However, that legal gibberish is a masterpiece of detailed historical research compared to what happens in the next episode.

Uhtred leads an attack against the Danes and scores a major victory. He’s warned to present himself to Alfred before anyone else can claim credit for the victory, but instead he goes to Lyscombe to meet his wife and newborn son. This somehow allows Odda Jr to claim all the credit for the victory, because apparently no other Saxon at the battle noticed that Uhtred had single-handedly engineered it and because Alfred is apparently a gullible fool.

When Uhtred learns about this, he rides back to Winchester and barges into the royal chapel, interrupting a church service that Alfred seems to be leading personally (but, to be fair, there’s someone dressed like a bishop standing next to Alfred, so let’s assume the show understands that kings don’t get to lead church services). Uhtred rages at Odda Jr and draws his sword. This understandably pisses off Alfred, who declares that Uhtred has broken the king’s peace, broken the peace of Christ, and brought weapons into a sacred place. He declares that he will punish Uhtred and sends him out to wait in the courtyard.

Alfred being scowly

Eventually Ealdorman Wulfhere shows up with Aethelwold (Harry McEntire) in tow, who has been caught drunk. Wulfhere tells Uhtred that the punishment for drawing a sword on the king is death. That’s doubtful, since Anglo-Saxon criminal law focused almost entirely on what injury has been done (no harm, no foul, basically), and injuries are either avenged with an equal injury or else handled by fine. Drawing a sword on the king might be an injury to his dignity or his peace, but it’s not the same thing as killing the king, so it would have been handled with a fine. But Alfred is being merciful. Instead of killing Uhtred, Alfred (via Wulfhere) sentences Uhtred to perform penance instead.

There is so much wrong here, I’d put my hands through the tv screen and strangle the scriptwriter if I could. Unfortunately I can’t. So I’m just going to have to explain what the hell penance is so that you too can see how idiotic this is.

Penance began in early Christianity as a way to make up for having committed a major sin, like sleeping with your wife’s sister or sacrificing to an idol. The original idea was that while minor sins could be readily forgiven, once a person was baptized, they were expected to avoid all egregious sin. But if they committed an egregious sin, they had one chance to make things right by confessing the sin and performing a penance to atone for the failing, such as prolonged periods of fasting (for example, fasting on every holy day for a year), prayer, alms-giving, and so on. For a grievous sin, this was a one-time ritual and having performed it rendered one to some extent a second-class congregant; for example those who had performed penance could not be ordained as priests and they could not receive the Eucharist until the bishop reconciled them to the congregation. In other words, this was a very severe religious punishment for a severe sin. It was not automatically a public matter, but penitents frequently made a public confession of their sin as part of the process.

By the 7^th century, however, under the influence of early medieval monasticism, a new system emerged that is technically called Tariffed Penance. Under this system, penance was no longer simply for severe sins, but potentially for all sins. It was no longer a one-time ritual, but was rather to be performed repeatedly, as often as a sinner had need of it. Penance was now tariffed, meaning that the penance was graded according to the severity of the sin. This gradually gave rise to the sacrament of confession and penance employed in modern Catholicism (“say 10 Hail Marys” for that sin), which is still essentially Tariffed Penance.

Penitents being scourged by a bishop

But in order for penance to have any value, the sinner in question has to confess his sin to a priest and repent. And before he can do that, he has to actually be a Christian in the first place.

So there are several problems here. 1) Uhtred doesn’t see himself as a Christian and the people around him don’t see him that way either, although Alfred, Beocca, and Mildrith are trying to push him in that direction. There’s no point in him doing penance because he’s a pagan and is going to Hell regardless. 2) Uhtred hasn’t confessed any sin to a priest. He clearly doesn’t repent of anything he does in that scene because he’s convinced he’s right. No repentance, no confession. No confession, no penance. 3) Alfred isn’t a priest and doesn’t have the authority to impose penance on anyone. 4) Penance isn’t a punishment for a secular crime, which is specifically the thing that Wulfhere says Alfred is punishing Uhtred for. (Alfred did accuse Uhtred to two religious offenses–disrupting a church service and drawing a weapon in church–but that’s not what he’s actually punishing Uhtred for doing.) Penance is a punishment for sin, not crime.

So this is like Donald Trump sentencing someone who tweeted at him to say 10 Hail Marys. Actually that’s a poor analogy, because we have free speech laws. This is like Donald Trump sentencing someone who pulled a gun on him to say 10 Hail Marys. That’s not a great analogy either, because 10 Hail Marys isn’t a very serious penance. This is like is a scriptwriter who doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about making up some bullshit because medieval people did penance and medieval people had kings, so clearly the two of those things must somehow intersect at some point.

As if all of that wasn’t dumb enough, the penance involves Uhtred and Aethelwold crawling through mud on their knees begging Alfred’s forgiveness while a crowd jeers and throws things at them. It’s true that some penances did have an element of public humiliation to them (condemned heretics sometimes had to participate in a barefoot public procession to a local church carrying a candle, for example), but while shame was a part of such procedures, it wasn’t meant to be a spectacle of ridicule like a public execution. Penance was intended to be a form of spiritual healing.

Uhtred and Aethelwold performing their penance

On this issue, The Last Kingdom is just another example of how people project nonsensical ideas about an all-powerful church back onto the medieval past while simultaneously making up whatever they want around law, because, hey, medieval law must not make any sense.

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

If you want to know more about Anglo-Saxon marriage, there are a number of good books on Anglo-Saxon women, but unfortunately they’re all out of print. Helen Jewell’s Women in Medieval England covers more than just the Anglo-Saxon period, but it’s a good introduction to the topic.

If you want to know more about penance, Robert Meens puts the ritual into its social context in Penance in Medieval Europe.

The Last Kingdom: The Plot

Tags

Alexander Draymon, Alfred the Great, BBC, David Dawson, Medieval England, Medieval Europe, St Edmund, The Last Kingdom

Ok, now that I’ve gotten some of the snarkiness out of my system, it’s time to discuss the actual plot of The Last Kingdom, based on Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories series. Unlike The Vikings, this show has the merit of following the broad outline of the actual events, although the main character, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, is fictitious, and so the show is obviously taking liberties by inserting him into what really happened.

The show’s protagonist is very loosely based on, or perhaps most reasonably ‘inspired by’ Uhtred the ealdorman of Derby, an Anglo-Saxon noble of the 10^th century who is often thought to have been a member of the Bernician royal family that ruled Bebbanburg (modern Bamburgh) in Northumbria. In the period from 930 to 959 AD, two nobles named Uhtred appear as witnesses to royal charters; little is know about either of these men, but the fact that they were witnesses to royal charters means they were significant nobles. But the Uhtred of Bernard Cornwell’s novels is at least half a century too early to be either of these men, since he was born sometime in the late 850s and would have literally had to survive to about 100 to be one of them.

In 866, his older brother is killed by Norse raiders, which results in him being rebaptized by Father Beocca (Ian Hart) from his original name of Osbert to Uhtred, his older brother’s name. I’m not quite sure what the point of including this is, since it doesn’t seem to make any difference in the story, and it would have been highly unusual. Certainly by the 12^th century, rebaptism was theologically unacceptable, but I’m not sure if that was the case in the 9^th century or not. Even if it were a violation of canon law in the 9^th century, we could probably forgive it by saying that Father Beocca was not trained in the details of theology.

Hart as Beocca

Soon afterward, though, Uhtred’s father leads an army against the invading Vikings and gets slaughtered. Uthred, who is about 9 at the time, has not had any training in fighting, but tries to fight, gets knocked out, and taken as a slave by Earl Ragnar (Peter Ganzler), along with the girl Brida. Ragnar is clearly part of Ivar the Boneless’ Great Army that invaded England in 865. Ragnar raises the two of them and essentially becomes their foster-father because he is impressed with their spirit. At one point, when a dispute breaks out between Uhtred and the boy Sven, he punishes Sven by putting out of his eyes.

About a decade later, a vengeful Sven attacks Ragnar’s stead and kills almost everyone, but the now-adult Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) and Brida (Emily Cox) escape. Initially, Uhtred tries to reclaim Bebbanburg, but his uncle (pretty reasonably, in my opinion) refuses to accept this total stranger’s claim.  When Uhtred learns that Sven has blamed the slaughter on him, Uhtred and Brida try to clear his name by going to the new Danish warlords, Ubba (Rune Temte) and Guthrum (Thomas W. Gabrielsson).

They catch up with the warlords just in time to witness them killing the East Anglian king Edmund, which places the events of the first episode or two in 869. That means that Uhtred and Brida have somehow aged about a decade in the space of 3 years. This sort of distortion of time is a serious problem with the first season, because they ride straight to Winchester in 871 and then manage to spend a year or so (long enough for Uhtred to get married and have a son who dies as an infant) serving King Alfred (David Dawson) in the lead-up to a battle that happens in 878.

Edmund’s death is roughly as it reportedly happened. Historically, Edmund was tied to a tree and used for archery practice and then beheaded. In the show, after Edmund explains the story of St Sebastian to Guthrum and Ubba, he’s tied to the pillar of a church and shot with arrows. Since the legend asserts that Ubba was one of the leaders who instigated this, the show is basically following the facts as they are commonly known.

The martyrdom of St Edmund

Uhtred and Brida go to Winchester, where they meet King Aethelred and his younger brother Alfred. The Anglo-Saxons are suspicious of Uhtred because he dresses more like a Dane than a Saxon (remember, the Danes wear mullets and too much eyeliner, while Saxons wear their hair short and have odd diagonally-buttoning tunics). But Uhtred proves his worth because he knows how the Danes think. Aetheled gets himself killed at the Battle of Ashdown, so Alfred becomes king, despite the fact that Aethelred has a son, Aethelwold (Henry McEntire).

 

Aethelwold

The plot around Aethelwold becomes incredibly grating, because the show refuses to understand how early Germanic kingship operated. Modern audiences imagine that kingship is always passed from father to oldest son (primogeniture), and so film-makers insist on imposing that model on monarchy everywhere, despite the fact that it was only invented in the 12^th century under specific conditions in Europe. The Anglo-Saxons had no concept of primogeniture at all

Instead, like most early medieval Germanic peoples, they used a system in which any man whose great-grandfather had previous been king might qualify to inherit the crown. In practice, this usually meant that the kingship stayed within a loose group of second cousins. When the king died, his successor was the man who had the best combination of several qualities: biological relationship to the previous king, skill in battle, political support, reputation for generosity, and (after the conversion to Christianity) support of the Church. The most vital characteristic is that the prospective king had to be an effective warrior, because the king’s primary duty was to be a war-leader. He had to be able to inspire loyalty and courage in battle and that required being a brave warrior himself. No candidate who lacked that quality was likely to become king until the late 10^th century, when Aethelraed Unraed became king at 12 years old as part of a political coup probably orchestrated by his mother.

Sulking is Aethelwold’s only real talent

When the historical Aethelraed died in 871, the reason his son Aethelwold did not become king is that Aethelwold was a very young boy at the time (his exact birthdate is unknown, but he was probably about two or three). In the series, Aethelwold is an adult, but even if we leave aside that issue, McEntire’s Aethelwold would never have become king because he lacks all the other qualities of a king; he’s a coward who has never fought in a battle, a drunkard, a craven opportunist, has no political support whatsoever, and spends most of his time idiotically complaining to everyone that he is the real king (thereby demonstrating a total lack of political understanding). No one in his right mind would follow this jackass into battle or support him as a ruler.

In contrast, the historical Alfred was an adult, a warrior with a reputation for bravery and tactical knowledge, and a man of considerable learning, because he had been slated to become a priest. He was, in fact, the youngest of the five sons of King Aethelwulf of Wessex. All four of his older brothers had previously been kings of Wessex and had predeceased him. Additionally, according to one source, when Aethelraed was alive, Alfred enjoyed the position of secundarius, which seems to have designated the king’s successor. Even after Aethelwold’s birth, Alfred was his brother’s intended heir.

 

More Battles

As the season winds on, Uhtred works to undermine the Danes. The Danes seize the fortress of Wareham, which happened in 876, and he briefly winds up a hostage there. Immediately thereafter, when Ealdorman Odda gets trapped on a hill without water, Uhtred sneaks down to the Danish ships and burns them single-handedly, then kills Ubba in single combat. This enables Odda to win the battle of Cynwit, which happened in 878, not just a few days after the situation at Wareham. Then the Danes attack Winchester and drive Alfred and a few supporters to flee into the Somerset Marshes.

In reality, the Danes attacked Reading (not Winchester) and forced Alfred into the Marshes in 877. Alfred led resistance to the Danes over the winter (something the series completely omits) and then in 878 defeated the Danes at the battle of Edington near Ecgbert’s Stone (not Edward’s Stone, as the show has it).

Alfred before Edington

So all the major political and military events of the series beginning with Edmund’s death actually happened, and with the exception of Cynwit, they’re shown in the correct historical order, but the passage of time is off, compressing a decade’s worth of events into what appears to be perhaps 18 months total. As readers of this blog know, other shows and films have been guilty of far worse manipulation of events. The pace of the show is a bit too brisk for my preferences, but things happen in the right order and the basic facts are correct (once you factor out the non-existent protagonist). Edmund really was killed by being shot full of arrows by the Vikings, Aethelraed really was killed at Ashdown and Alfred really did succeed him, Odda really did win the battle of Cynwit and Ubba really did die there, Alfred really was forced into hiding in the Marshes and really did defeat the Danes at Edington, and Guthrum really did convert to Christianity as part of his peace treaty with Alfred. All of this puts the show light-years ahead of nonsense like Reign or Salem.

What Bugs Me

My big gripe with the show plot-wise, apart from the truly asinine character of Aethelwold, is that Uhtred repeatedly does really stupid shit and then gets upset when it works out badly for him. After he engineers the defeat of Ubba at Cynwit, he is explicitly told that he needs to go to Alfred and claim responsibility for the victory so that someone else won’t claim credit first. Instead, he goes off and spends time with his new wife, and when he gets to court he’s shocked to learn that Odda’s transparently villainous son Odda Jr, who is already gunning for him, has claimed victory for the battle.

Then a few episodes later, Uhtred decides he’s going to lead his Christian Saxon men on a raid into Cornwall against fellow Christians in order to get the wealth he needs to pay off his wife’s debts, even though Alfred has a peace treaty with the Cornish. So he has his men disguise themselves as Danes so that no one will know that Uhtred and his men are breaking the treaty. But after supposedly taking pains to disguise their identities, he repeatedly tells people his real name, doesn’t wear a helmet or in any other way disguise his face, and lets his men fraternize with the Cornish king’s men for a day before teaming up with a group of Danes to slaughter the king and his men in order to steal their hidden treasure. And then when he gets back to Winchester, he’s shocked to discover that a witness has gone to Alfred and reported that Uhtred of Bebbanburg has broken the truce, and then gets mad when one of the men who went with him and warned him not to do all this stuff admits it’s true.

Those are great disguises, guys. No one will ever recognize you as Uhtred and Aethelwold!

It would be one thing if the show made clear that Uhtred is immature and making dumb choices because he’s overconfident. If the show was clearly trying to depict Uhtred gradually learning a series of lessons about what it takes to be a great leader in 9^th century England, I’d think that was actually pretty smart of them. Instead, the show clearly expects the viewer to sympathize with Uhtred’s shitty choices and feel outraged when he can’t get away with them. It wants us to accept Uhtred as a natural-born leader and cunning tactician, all the while showing him doing incredibly dumb things.

But that’s my opinion as a viewer, not my opinion as an historian.

This review was paid for by a generous donation from my reader Lyn. Thanks, Lyn! If you’re interested in a review, please made a donation to my Paypal account and tell me what you’d like me to review.

 

Want to Know More?

The Last Kingdom is available on Amazon, as well as on Netflix. The first book of Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Stories is also called The Last Kingdom.

If you would like to know about the reign of Alfred the Great, Alfred P. Smyth’s Alfred the Great would be one place to start, although at 800 pages, it’s quite dense. Or you could read Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, which brings together many of the primary sources on Alfred into one fairly readable book.

An Open Letter to Donald Trump

Tags

19th Century America, Donald Trump, slavery, The American Civil War

Dear President Trump,

Normally this blog is about is the intersection of history with film and television, but occasionally I offer my thoughts about political comments about history. And recently you drew attention by saying “But why was there the Civil War? Why couldn’t that one have been worked out?” A lot of commentators have attacked you for asking the question and arguing that you ought to have known the answer. But as I tell my students occasionally, there is no shame in not knowing something about the past. The whole point of taking history courses is to learn things about the past that you didn’t know (and to learn a set of incredibly useful general skills that can be applied to almost any situation you’re in). So rather than shaming you, I’m going to answer the question for you.

As it happens, the answer to that question is both simple and complex at the same time. I’m not a specialist in American history but I do teach Modern Western Civilization pretty regularly, which requires me to discuss the issue, and here’s my take on the question. The Civil War couldn’t be “worked out” because 1) the Southern states were committed to the principle that black people were not truly humans but merely property that white people could own and use for labor, 2) the Constitution was written in such a way that, short of a massive change of heart across the South, there was no legislative solution to the dispute over slavery, and 3) Southern politicians were committed, not just to maintaining their “peculiar institution” (as they liked to refer to slavery) but also to expanding slavery into areas where it was not currently allowed. (By the way, if you need to practice your writing, that previous sentence is what’s called a “thesis statement.” It summarizes my main point in this essay. You sometimes have trouble expressing your arguments clearly, so you might try using a thesis statement.)

 

Southern Attitudes toward Slavery

My first point is that the Southern states were deeply committed to the principle of owning black people as property. You can see that in the statements the Southern states made when they were justifying their secession from the United States. For example, the Mississippi Declaration of Secession says in its second paragraph,

“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery – the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product, which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.”

Several of the ‘facts’ it cites are explicitly related to slavery and most of the remaining ones are indirect references to slavery or issues related to slavery.

South Carolina’s Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union takes somewhat longer to get to the point, but eventually explains that Northern states were refusing to live up to their Constitutional obligation to return fugitive slaves (as expressed in as the Fugitive Slave clause) and that the non-slaveholding states have sought to undermine the ownership of slaves as property.

Texas’ A Declaration of the Causes which Impel the State of Texas to Secede from the Federal Union says in its third paragraph “[Texas] was received as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery – the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits – a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.” It goes on to say a few paragraphs later that many of the Northern states have violated the Fugitive Slave clause of the Constitution, and that these states have formed a ‘sectional party’

“…based upon an unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of equality of all men, irrespective of race or color – a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States.”

Notice how explicit the Texas statement is about the moral value of slavery. It calls it a “beneficent and patriarchal system” supported by “the plainest revelations of Divine Law.” That sort of language is surprisingly common among Southern politicians in the decade before the Civil War. Albert Gallatin Brown, a prominent politician from Mississippi who served in the House of Representatives and the Senate and two terms as governor of Mississippi declared in his 1858 Speech at Hazelhurst, “I think slavery is a good thing per se; I believe it to be a great moral, social, and political blessing—a blessing to the master and a blessing to the slave, and I believe, moreover, that it is of Divine origin.” In the face of pressure from abolitionists, Southerners had developed a justification of slavery that argued that it was not just useful, but actually one of the greatest moral goods in human history. While shockingly racist by modern standards, these sentiments were quite common in the Old South.

Albert G Brown

The Confederate Constitution, which is largely modeled on the United States Constitution,   generally makes explicit references to slavery where the US Constitution was more discreet about the issue. It forbids the important of “negroes of the African race”. It declares that “No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.” (The italicized text is new.) Should the new Confederacy acquire new territory, “In all such territory, the institution of negro slavery as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected by Congress, and by the territorial government: and the inhabitants of the several Confederate States and Territories, shall have the right to take to such territory any slaves lawfully held by them in any of the states or territories of the Confederate states.” Clearly, the Confederate states wanted to ensure that slavery was guaranteed permanetly in their government.

 

Slavery in the Constitution

The American Constitution is in many ways a wonderful document. You should read it some time; my students are always surprised by the rules it establishes for how we can run our political system. But one of the places where it fails to live up to its promise is in its acceptance of slavery. The Constitution was very much a compromise document, seeking to balance the interest of large states against small states and of Northern non-slaveholding states against Southern slaveholding states. Without that compromise, it wouldn’t have been accepted by different states. It enshrines political compromise as a basic principle in our system. If the House and the Senate can’t agree on a law, that law can’t get passed, and if the President can’t agree with Congress, that law is probably not going to get enacted. One of the places where the authors of the Constitution compromised was by allowing slavery. In fact, slavery is written into the Constitution so deeply that achieving a legislative solution to the dispute over slavery was essentially impossible.

You might be surprised to hear that slavery is entrenched in the Constitution. The words ‘slave’ and ‘slavery’ never occur in the document. But that doesn’t mean it’s not in there. The men who wrote the Constitution (James Madison in particular) were aware that Northern states were hostile to slavery, so they sought to disguise the presence of slavery in the document by referring to it obliquely. By my count, the Constitution discusses slavery 3 times, mostly with an eye to protecting it.

James Madison

For example, Article 1, Section 2, Clause 3 says “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.” Did you catch that reference to slaves? They’re the “all other Persons” who aren’t “free Persons” or “Indians not taxed.” This is the famous 3/5^th Compromise, which declared that slaves were to be counted as 3/5 of a person for purposes of apportioning representation in the House.

Maybe you knew about the 3/5 Compromise, but you probably didn’t stop to think about what the practical effect of it is. By treating slaves as a form of property that still counts toward political representation, this clause over-represents the Southern states relative to the Northern states (which didn’t allow slavery). That guaranteed that even if there were an equal number of slaveholding and non-slaveholding states, the slaveholding states would always have a larger voice in the House, thereby ensuring that no law hostile to the interests of slave owners would be able to pass.

Article 1, Section 9, Clause 1 states “The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.” That sounds innocuous until you realize that the “importation of such persons” is a reference to importing blacks as property. The purpose of this clause is to forbid Congress from forbidding the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade until 1808 and forbidding Congress from trying to stop the trade by imposing steep tariffs on imported slaves.

Then there’s Article 4, Section 1, Clause 3, the aforementioned Fugitive Slave clause. “No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due.” In other words, no runaway slave can escape his slavery by fleeing to a non-slaveholding state. Slave owners could legal require that the authorities in non-slaveholding states had to turn over escaped slaves. One could also argue that Article 4, Section 1, Clause 1, the Full Faith and Credit clause, deals with slavery as well, since it requires non-slaveholding states to acknowledge the purchase and sale of slaves in other states.

But that’s not the end of the ways the Constitution protects slavery. Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 says that all bills dealing with taxation must begin in the House. That means that Congress would not be able to tax slavery out of existence, because slaveholding states were over-represented in the House. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 5 specifies that “No Tax or Duty shall be laid on Articles exported from any State.” Slaveholding states were perhaps the major exporters in the United States because slaves were primarily used to run plantations that produced export crops like cotton and indigo, so it would not be possible to abolish slavery by taxing the exports that made slave owners wealthy.

The 3/5 Compromise also affected the election of presidents, since the number of electors that a state received was based on the number of Representatives it had plus the number of Senators it had. So the over-representation of slaveholding states skewed the presidency toward slaveholding states. It’s no wonder that 10 of the first 16 presidents were slave owners, although two of them, Van Buren and W.H. Harrison inherited their slaves. (Despite being a Northerner, Harrison was a supporter of slavery.)

George Washington, slave owner

Eventually, the higher population growth of the Northern states began to enable the free states to overcome the artificial bonus that slaveholding states had, but at that point, the fact that all states got an equal number of senators began to work in the South’s favor by preventing anti-slavery laws from passing in that chamber. Since ties are broken by the Vice-President and a majority of the Vice-Presidents were supporters of slavery, slavery remained protected.

The cumulative effect of this entrenchment of slavery in the Constitution was that a peaceful, legislative solution to the dispute over slavery was nearly impossible to achieve, because slaveholding states and politicians had a decisive upper hand in the Federal Government. That meant that the only way slavery could be abolished was through violent conflict.

 

The Expansion of Slavery

Post-Civil War propaganda in the South has sought to depict the Civil War as a “War of Northern Aggression”, but the reality is that it was Southerners who wanted to expand slavery. Southern states insisted on the enactment of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, which was designed to overturn Northern states laws intended to make the return of escaped slaves harder by fining government officials who did not arrest alleged slaves; the law provided that government officials had to accept a slave-owners sworn testimony that a particular black man was a runaway slave. This made it quite easy for Southerners to essentially kidnap free blacks into slavery. The 1857 Dred Scot decision declared that blacks could not be citizens and therefore could not easily bring lawsuits alleging that they were free. It also declared that the Federal government had no power to regulate slavery in federal territories acquired after the American Revolution. By suing to force the return of slaves from free states, Southern slave-owners were often seeking to overturn free state laws, thereby undermining the ability of free states to remain free states.

(My own state, Wisconsin, I am proud to say, openly defied the Supreme Court on this issue and refused to hand over the escaped slave Joshua Glover. A mob broke him out of his prison at what is today Cathedral Square in Milwaukee.)

There was also a vehement quarrel over the admission of new states to the Union. Abolitionists hoped that by admitting more free states, they might eventually be able to overcome the lock the slaveholding states had on the Federal government. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 maintained the balance of power by admitting Maine as a free state and Missouri as a slave state.

Southern states, in contrast, wanted to export slavery wherever they could. In Albert Gallatin Brown’s speech, he declares the importance of exporting slavery.

“I want Cuba, and I know that sooner or later we must have it. If the worm-eaten throne of Spain is willing to give it for a fair equivalent, well—if not, we must take it. I want Tamaulipas, Potosi, and one or two other Mexican States; and I want them all for the same reason—for the planting and spreading of slavery… I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth, and rebellious and wicked as the Yankees have been, I would even extend it to them. I would not force it upon them, as I would not force religion upon them, but I would preach it to them, as I would preach the gospel.”

Apologists for the Confederacy have often claimed that the Civil War was caused by the issue of ‘state’s rights’. But in fact, when you read the various Declarations of Secession, you find the seceding states complaining that the Federal government wasn’t enforcing the Constitution on the Northern states. So they were actually opposing the idea of state’s rights.

Obviously the causes of the Civil War are complex. I’m not a specialist in American history, and I’m sure a good Civil War historian could greatly elaborate on (and perhaps in a few spots correct) my argument. But that’s the basic reason why the problem of slavery couldn’t be “worked out.” All avenues for resolving the dispute peacefully had essentially been foreclosed by the way the Constitution was written and by the insistence of Southerners that their system was inherently good and needed to be expanded.

Most of the confusion about the Civil War’s causes has been due to Confederate apologists seeking to justify their failed secession after the Civil War and by 20^th century racists who began to glorify the Confederacy during the Civil Rights era (for example by insisting on raised the so-called Confederate Flag at state-houses in the South). But that’s an issue that can be addressed with more emphasis on history education. I’d encourage you to do some reading about the subject or talk with an historian of the Civil War. Ignorance of the past is nothing to be ashamed of, but committing to ignorance of the past is.

 

Want to Know More?

One simple place to start is David Waldstreicher’s Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification. It does a good job of showing how slavery was enshrined in the Constitution.

Quills: Doing the Nasty

Tags

18th Century Europe, 18th Century France, Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard, Charenton Asylum, Early Modern Europe, Geoffrey Rush, Joaquin Phoenix, Justine, Kate Winslet, Marquis de Sade, Medical Stuff, Michael Caine, Quills, Stephen Moyer, The Enlightenment, The French Revolution

When Quills (2000, dir. Philip Kaufman, based on the play of the same name by Doug Wright) came out, it was received quite well by critics, who praised Geoffrey Rush’s performance as the Marquis de Sade, and it earned Rush his second Academy Award nomination. But it wasn’t so popular with historians, who pointed out its many historical inaccuracies. In particular, Neil Schaeffer, author of The Marquis de Sade: A Life, published a scathing critique of the film as being both inaccurate and simplistic in its depiction of the notorious pornographer. So the movie, like De Sade himself, was quite controversial. Sounds like fun!

 

De Sade’s Life

Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, was a minor French noble born in the mid-18^th century and the poster boy for everything wrong with the 18^th century aristocracy. By the time he was 23, he had begun sexually assaulting prostitutes and employees of both sexes egregiously enough that the police began paying serious attention to him, no small accomplishment at a time when the aristocracy enjoyed substantial legal prerogatives. When he was 28, he hired a woman to be his housekeeper, but then tied her up, and repeatedly tortured her with knives and hot wax. Four years later, in 1772, he and his man-servant were convicted of sodomy and poisoning and fled to Italy to avoid a death sentence.

During all this, his mother-in-law had obtained a lettre de cachet, essentially an extra-judicial order of imprisonment. In 1777, he was lured back to Paris and arrested under the lettre and imprisoned, although he managed to get the death sentence overturned.

The Marquis de Sade

By 1789, when the French Revolution was brewing, he was being incarcerated in the notorious Bastille prison, and nearly triggered the Storming of the Bastille two weeks early when he shouted out a window that the prisoners were being murdered. Just days before the Storming liberated the inmates of the Bastille, de Sade was transferred to the Charenton asylum. But a year later, he was released when the National Assembly invalidated all lettres de cachet. At this point his long-suffering wife divorced him.

He managed to get himself elected to the National Convention and spent several years as a politician before getting on Maximilien Robespierre’s bad side and being arrested. But before he could be executed, Robespierre fell from power and he was released.

He had already begun producing the pornographic works he is famous for during his first imprisonment. In 1801, Napoleon ordered the arrest of the author of the anonymous paired pornographic novels, Justine and Juliette, and eventually the works were traced to de Sade and he was arrested and imprisoned once again. In 1803, his family arranged for him to be declared insane, and he was sent back to the Charenton Asylum, where he remained until his death from natural causes in 1814.

 

The director of Charenton was the Abbé de Coulmier, a Catholic priest known for his liberal attitudes toward the inmates in his charge. Coulmier rejected many of the harsh treatments that were popular at the time, such as the physical restraint of patients and the practice of dunking patients head-first in water. Instead, Coulmier favored therapies such as self-expression, diets, and purges. In particular, he believed that allowing patients to express themselves in writing, theater, and music was helpful.

Because of this, Coulmier allowed de Sade to stage popular French plays, using the inmates as actors, for the viewing pleasure of the Parisian public. But in 1809, police orders required de Sade to be put in solitary confinement and forbidden to write. This confinement turns out to have been not so solitary after all, because in 1810, he began a relationship with Madeleine LeClerc, the 14-year-old daughter of an employee at Charenton. He died in his sleep 4 years later.

The chapel at Charenten

 

De Sade’s Writings

Although de Sade is today mostly remembered as a pornographer and as the man who gave his name to ‘sadism’, he was more complex than that. Not all of his work was obscene; he wrote both political treatises and conventional plays, and he deserves to be ranked as a figure of the Enlightenment. And even his pornographic work is highly intellectual. His paired novels Justine, or The Misfortunes of Virtue and Juliette, or The Rewards of Vice tell the stories of two sisters raised in a convent. But whereas Justine strives to remain virtuous, Juliette comes to believe that morality, virtue, and religion are meaningless. Justine experiences a series of personal disasters, including becoming the unwilling sex-slave of a group of monks. Every good deed she does results in a further sexual assault, humiliation, or other catastrophe, and finally she is struck by lightning and dies, after which her corpse is sexually assaulted. But Juliette willingly engages in the most perverse behaviors possible, indulging in orgies and repeatedly murdering people. Her various accomplices commit rape, murder, incest, and cannibalism. She is ultimately rewarded with an audience with the pope, and the novel ends with another long orgy.

Despite the repulsive content, de Sade has a point to make. Several in fact. Like many 18^th century intellectuals, he rejects conventional religion, and aggressively satirizes it; the clergy in his stories are often the most debauched characters. Given that the clergy enjoyed legal prerogatives as extensive as the nobility’s at this time, including immunity from taxation and most law courts and a strangle-hold on public religious life and education, de Sade’s attacks are remarkably bold and in favor of the separation of Church and State. Some have seen de Sade as challenging God to prove His existence by punishing de Sade’s blasphemies.

 

These two novels demonstrate the idea that virtue and vice are not neatly rewarded and condemned in real life, and the novels represent an effort to build an essentially atheistic moral paradigm celebrating the pursuit of pleasure as the only meaning in life. Nature consistently triumphs over the forces of civilization and restraint. (At least, that’s all assuming you read them seriously, and not as satire, as some scholars do.)

And de Sade’s slow corruption of Juliette, who gradually moves from simple sexual pleasures to full-blown sexual sadism of the most extreme sort, can be read as a challenge to the reader. How far are you willing to take your sexual fantasies? Will you at some point put the book down because you feel it is no longer titillating but rather disgusting, or will you allow the novel to corrupt you as it corrupts Juliette? These books may be deeply disturbing, but they’re also far more thought-provoking than most modern porn.

Nor was de Sade the only author in this period to intermingle pornography with philosophical musings. As the great intellectual historian Robert Darnton has pointed out, philosophical pornography was an extremely popular (if illegal) genre in 18^th century France. Quite a few authors used obscene stories as a way to attack the French clergy and the French political system. De Sade’s novels are the most extreme, but he’s by no means the only author of the day to tell stories of priests fornicating in the confessional and monks debauching nuns during the Eucharist. He’s just the one we still remember.

 

So What Does Quills Make of All This?

The movie opens in 1794 with de Sade apparently writing a story about a woman who is guillotined during the French Revolution and then jumps to ‘years later’ with de Sade in the Charenton asylum. Instead of being sent there for having written Justine, he has written the novel and had it smuggled out of prison by Madeleine (Kate Winslet). Napoleon orders a stop to his publishing, and dispatches Dr. Royer-Collard (Michael Caine) to Charenton to force Coulmier (Joaquin Phoenix) to crack down on de Sade’s privileges. Whereas Coulmier is gentle and believes in art therapy, Royer-Collard is old school and favors water-boarding patients. He also has a child bride Simone (Amelia Warner), whom he rather sadistically has sex with on their wedding night.

Geoffrey Rush as de Sade

 

Antoine-Athenaise Royer-Collard is a real person. In 1806, he was appointed chief physician at Charenton, where he became convinced that de Sade was sane and ought to be in a conventional prison. But his function here is to be the catalyst for everything going wrong at the asylum. Prior to his arrival, de Sade and Coulmier are friends, with de Sade seeking to express his disturbed thoughts on paper.

But Royer-Collard’s attempts to restrain de Sade trigger a contest of wills between the two men, with Coulmier caught in the middle. Royer-Collard’s harsh treatment of his young wife becomes gossip that reaches de Sade’s ears, so de Sade stages a play that is a thinly-veiled sex farce of the marriage. Simone, who sees the first part of the play, becomes interested in de Sade’s writings and secretly tracks down a copy of Justine. Corrupted by it, she runs off with a young architect, played by Stephen Moyer.

Furious at this, Royer-Collard leans on Coulmier, forcing him to gradually restrict de Sade’s privileges. When he takes away de Sade’s writing implements, de Sade figures out how to write with red wine on his bed sheets. When the bed is taken away, he writes in blood on his own clothes. Coulmier states the whole point of the film when he says to de Sade, “The more I forbid, the more you’re provoked.” De Sade points out that Coulmier finds it arousing to have so much power over him.

Joaquin Phoenix as Coulmier

 

Finally, naked and with nothing in his cell, he arranges to dictate a story to Madeleine through a chain of inmates, like an obscene game of Telephone. But one of the aroused inmates intentionally lights a fire, and in the confusion, another inmate rapes and murders Madeleine. Coulmier, who has fallen deeply in lust with the woman thanks to de Sade’s corrosive influence, apparently has sex with her corpse, and then has de Sade’s tongue cut out after water-boarding him. Chained in a cell, de Sade continues writing, using his own feces as ink. He dies in Coulmier’s arms, rejecting the crucifix the priest offers him.

The movie ends with Coulmier now imprisoned in de Sade’s old room, begging a visitor for paper and quill so he can write. He finally understands de Sade’s compulsion to write.

Hopefully from this summary, it should be clear that the film starts off somewhat shaky on the facts, since de Sade didn’t write Justine in prison, because that’s what he was imprisoned for. But it rattles along in the right general historical direction until, in the last hour, the train jumps the track and goes veering off into Crazyland at full speed, bearing its passengers to a world of hurt none of them bought a ticket for.

De Sade is somewhere between a full-blown lunatic with a sexual fixation and a martyr for the cause of free speech. The film can’t quite decide what’s really motivating him. On the one hand, his erotic writing appears to be a symptom of some mental illness; he is literally incapable of not writing, despite the increasing misery it’s causing him. And by the end of the film, he’s infected both Coulmier and arguably Madeleine with his madness.

Coulmier, about to do the literal nasty with Madeleine’s corpse

 

But on the other hand, he’s engaging in a willful defiance of Royer-Collard’s efforts to silence him. The two men fall into a chess match; each action by Royer-Collard to stop de Sade from writing elicits a response from de Sade in which he seeks to demonstrate the doctor’s ultimate impotence to control him. It is Royer-Collard’s efforts to still de Sade’s pen that triggers the next round of outrageous writing, and the marquis’ writings that trigger the next crack-down.

De Sade’s ideas corrupt everyone around him, driving them to lust, in the case of Coulmier, Simone, and the architect, or madness, in the case of the inmates who participate in his telephone game of dictation. Madeleine craves more stories from de Sade and is ultimately killed by the process of dictation, as is de Sade himself. The only character not corrupted by de Sade is Royer-Collard, who is already more of a sadist than de Sade. Perhaps it’s not such a good idea if your martyr for freedom of the press is a man whose writings literally corrupt and destroy those who read them.

Michael Caine as Royer-Collard

 

From a historical standpoint, the problem with Quills is that it too readily accepts the idea of de Sade as a charming madman and barely entertains the possibility that perhaps de Sade was actually trying to actually say something. And it soft-pedals the more literally sadistic elements of his writings. From the snippets of his stories that we hear, de Sade likes to talk about penises and vaginas a lot, and he readily mocks Christianity, but there’s only faint hints that he was also writing about rape, murder, incest, pedophilia, necrophilia, and a host of other disturbing things.

So for me at least, Quills doesn’t really work. It fails to grapple effectively with what the historical de Sade was trying to say, and it fails to offer a coherent message about who this man was and why he wrote such outrageous things. In a way, watching the movie feels a bit like reading Justine; instead of sympathizing with any of the characters or being turned on by its decadence, I just wanted to take a shower and put the whole experience behind me.

 

Want to Know More?

Quills is available on Amazon.

If you’d like to learn more about the Marquis de Sade, start with Neil Shaeffer’s The Marquis de Sade: A Life. If you want to sample de Sade’s writings, both Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue (Oxford World’s Classics)
and Juliette are readily available. But be warned: they are pretty much as hard-core as pornography gets, and they’re not for the easily offended or disgusted.

Dracula Untold: Don’t Go See This Movie

Tags

Anita Sarkesian, Dracula, Dracula Untold, Luke Evans, Medieval Europe, Mehmet II, Ottoman Empire, Sarah Gadon, Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler

There have been lots of Dracula movies over the years, and with the current fad for vampire stuff, it was only a question of time until some studio went back to that particular well. Dracula Untold (2014, dir. Gary Shore) is a mediocre example of a vampire flick. It’s neither especially good nor especially bad. It has a lot of the same problems that recent vampire films like Underworld: Rise of the Lycans have: medieval characters wearing improbably silly armor, sunlight and clouds that come and go largely on the whims of the plot, medieval architecture that makes little sense, and people who spend lots of time running around at night because that makes them vulnerable to vampires (who knew that the Turkish army mostly traveled at night, and—I kid not–blindfolded?). It’s basically a fantasy action film. But it sticks its toe in the waters of history (and generally decides that these waters are too chilly for it), so I felt like I ought to review it here.

Spoiler Alert: I discuss a couple fairly major plot points, so if you want to see this movie, you shouldn’t read further. However, for reasons I’ll explain later, I don’t think you should go see this movie. So I’d encourage you to just keep reading.

The Film’s Vlad Dracula

The film deals with the life of Vlad Dracula (Luke Evans). Vlad was given as tribute to the Ottoman Sultan as a boy. He was trained to fight as a Janissary and served the Sultan so ruthlessly he became known as ‘the Impaler’. Eventually he was made prince of Transylvania, although it’s not clear (at least to me) whether he inherited the position or was given it by the Sultan.

At the start of the film, which is set in the 1440s, a messenger arrives from the Sultan Mehmed II (Dominic Cooper, playing a distinctly non-Turkish looking Turk), demanding tribute in silver and 1000 boys to be raised as Janissaries (the film incorrectly depicts this as a practice that was terminated prior to the 1440s, when in fact the Janissaries were an import element in the Turkish military down into the 18^th century, and weren’t disbanded until 1826). To save his son from this, Vlad tracks down a vampire and asks for help in defeating Mehmed. The vampire agrees to temporarily turn him into a vampire for three days, warning him that if he drinks human blood during that period, he will become a vampire forever. I think you can already guess where this is going.

Luke Evans as Vlad Dracula; note the silly plate armor

The film depicts Vlad as a good ruler, a man who deeply loves his wife and son and who is well-liked by his people. He also, inexplicably, has no army, which is why he needs to seek help from a vampire. He admits to having once impaled thousands of peasants while serving Mehmed, but he is nicer than that now. Later, he returns to his impaling ways after he slaughters a bunch of Turks. But basically he’s a loving family man even after he’s become an inhuman monster. At least he doesn’t sparkle.

The Real Vlad Dracula vs. The Cinematic Vlad Dracula

It’s hard to sort out fact from fiction with the historical Vlad the Impaler, because the best sources for his life were written after his death. There are a number of German pamphlets that describe him as a horrible person, and a number of Russian pamphlets that are pro-Vlad (although they still mention his unsavory habit of impaling people and torturing small animals). And there’s Romanian folk tales about him to add to the confusion; they both revile him for his cruelty and celebrate him from his supposed hostility to German merchants. So there aren’t a lot of good, reliable, unbiased sources out there about him. And I’ll readily admit that Eastern European history isn’t my strong suit. But there’s a fairly clear core of fact we can discuss. So here goes.

Vlad’s father, Vlad II, was the Voivode (Duke) of Wallachia. He was inducted by Emperor Sigismund of the Holy Roman Empire into the Order of the Dragon, a military order created specifically to oppose the Ottoman Empire, which was in the process of pushing up into the Balkans. Because of this Vlad II was known as Vlad Dracul (Romanian for “the dragon”). His son was therefore known as Dracula (“son of the Dragon”).

When he was 13, Vlad and his younger brother Radu were given to Sultan Murad II, not to be raised as Janissaries (since Janissaries were slaves) but rather to serve as hostages for their father’s good behavior. As a result he was raised with the future Mehmet II (this fact the film gets right). Vlad became jealous of the attention his better-looking brother received at court (Radu was nicknamed “the Handsome”).

Probably the most historical image of Vlad the Impaler

In 1448, with Turkish support, Vlad succeeded his father as Voivode of Wallachia. He was quickly ousted, but returned to power in 1456. But he soon defied a request for tribute and young boys to serve as Janissaries, probably because paying it would mean acknowledging that Wallachia was part of the Ottoman Empire. So instead, he had the turbans of the Turkish emissaries nailed to their heads. (In Vlad’s defense, he wasn’t the only Eastern European ruler to indulge this sartorial fancy.)

When the Turks invaded, Vlad ambushed a large group of cavalry and defeated them. He ordered them impaled on spikes, with the commander getting the highest spike. In 1462, when Mehmet showed up at Targoviste, he discovered 15-20,000 of his troops impaled on spikes; sickened, he retreated briefly. As a result of this the Turks called him ‘Lord Impaler’. His Romanian nickname Tepes (“the Impaler”) seems to have been bestowed on him in the mid-16^th century, and was not a term used at the time.

However, Dracula wasn’t just impaling his Turkish enemies. Vlad seems to have used impaling and other forms of cruelty as a tactic to dominate the boyars of Wallachia (the land-owning aristocracy) and to encourage obedience. The boyars had conspired against Vlad II, so when Dracula came to power, he invited many of them to a feast, impaled those responsible for his father’s death, and enslaved the rest for a construction project. He reportedly impaled the merchants and boyars of the city of Brasov on St. Bartholemew’s Day, 1459.

Vlad having a snack

Various stories circulate about his other cruelties, such as impaling adulterous women, unchaste widows, thieves, and dishonest merchants. Nor was he just into impaling; sometimes he reportedly indulged in other forms of unpleasantness, such as flaying people and cutting off women’s breasts. When his concubine claimed that she was pregnant, he reportedly cut her open to find out the truth. However, given the nature of the sources about Vlad, it’s hard to know how much truth there is behind these stories. It’s clear Vlad Dracula was a pretty nasty guy, but just how nasty is hard to say.

Ultimately though, Mehmet sent in Vlad’s brother Radu, backed with enough troops to exhaust Vlad’s forces. They captured Poenari Castle, his stronghold, which the film inaccurately calls ‘Castle Dracula’. In the film, it’s not surprising this castle gets captured; it’s built in the middle of a plain instead of on a mountain cliff. (In general, the architecture in this film makes little sense, and the first castle we see in the film, when the Turkish emissary comes demanding tribute, would have been a much stronger defensible position to take a stand at. But apparently that didn’t serve the needs of the action scenes very well.) Vlad’s wife reportedly leapt to her death rather than be captured, and Vlad was arrested by the king of Hungary, for reasons that are still unclear.

Some time later, however, the king patched things up with Vlad, let him out of prison, and let him marry his cousin Ilona (not ‘Mirena’ as this movie would have it). He returned to power in 1475, and died late the next year; stories about how he died vary—a Turkish ambush, betrayed by the boyars, or in an accident. He was buried, perhaps at Comana (not at Snagov, as 19th century tradition would have it, or in Naples, as recent crappy scholarship claims).

Also, as a minor note, Vlad Dracula did not kill Mehmet, who died in 1481 of natural causes. At the time of the movie, Mehmet II was in his mid-teens. He was a major figure in Turkish history, so killing him in the 1440s is sort of like killing Elizabeth I in the late 1550s not long after she has started her reign.

So the film is, to say the least, not particularly historical. But it’s a film about how a historical figure became a vampire, so you probably knew that already. It’s a bit perverse to make one of the most infamously cruel figures in history a romantic hero, as others have already pointed out. But I suppose in 600 years, we can look forward to seeing a rom-com about Pol Pot or Josef Stalin, in which our hero has a meet-cute with some dewy ingénue and then has to keep his genocidal schemes from her in order to win her love, with wacky consequences.

It’s also sad that the film decided to omit Vlad’s brother Radu. The two of them seem to have had a powerful rivalry, and making Radu one of the central bad guys would have given the plot more…um…bite. But I suppose we’ll just have to save that for a better movie.

So Why Shouldn’t I Go See It?

The film is not particularly good history, but it’s not historically offensive either, unlike, for example, Braveheart. My objection to it has little to do with my role as a historian. My objection to this film is entirely about my role as a decent human being who thinks women deserve to be treated better in film.

The movie is neither particularly feminist nor anti-feminist for the most part. Mirena (Sarah Gadon) is a generic cinematic wife. She gets one moment of being commanding, but is otherwise just there to give Dracula a motive to do anything to fight the Turks. She and his essentially pointless son are mostly just the triggers for all the manpain modern cinematic heroes are required to experience.

Sarah Gadon as Mirena

But then, as the film approaches its climax, it suddenly veers into one of the most horrifically misogynistic tropes developed by the video game industry. Mirena falls off a high balcony of a monastery (why did these monks build a pointless balcony over a high cliff and forget to include a railing?) and Dracula is unable to catch her in time. As she lies dying (having been tough enough to actually not die instantly from the long fall), she begs Dracula to kill her by drinking her blood, knowing that this will transform him permanently into a vampire and give him the power to defeat Mehmet. Dracula does as she asks and thereby gains vengeance on Mehmet.

As Anita Sarkesian has pointed out, the trope of the Damsel in Distress begging the hero to kill her has become a common story-telling device in video games. But the ‘Euthanized Damsel’, as she terms this sub-trope, is a deeply misogynistic idea, in which women beg their loved ones to kill them and then thank them for engaging in violence against them. As Sarkesian puts it, “These women are asking for it, quite literally.” Given that Dracula immediately runs off and starts making vampires of his other dying followers, the film never explains why he doesn’t just do the same to Mirena (we can hypothesize that he can’t make other vampires because he hasn’t yet drunk human blood and therefore doesn’t have that ability, but the film never clearly says this), so there is no objective reason why Mirena has to die, except that Vlad’s unhappiness is incomplete without him having to kill his beloved wife. In this particular example, all of Dracula’s immortal unending manpain is due to Mirena begging him to become an evil monster to avenge her and defeat the Turks. So Dracula is just a good guy who gets to suffer an eternity of torment because he loves his wife and kills her just like she asks him to. Some women are just never satisfied.

Here’s the video in which Sarkesian lays out her critique. Give it a watch; it’s disturbing to realize how widespread this trope is in video games. I enjoy video games, and I’ve played my share of them over the years. So I’m not hostile to video games or even video game violence. But I am hostile to the sort of misogyny that Sarkesian is calling out.

So why do I think you shouldn’t go see this film? Because you’d be giving money to a movie that has decided to embrace one of the most disturbingly misogynist tropes in modern storytelling, and in so doing, you’d be rewarding Hollywood for sinking to this level and encouraging the use of this device in more films. Hollywood obsessively reproduces whatever sells, and if this film sells well, it will encourage more Hollywood movies to delve into video game misogyny. There is, of course, already talk of a sequel; the studio seems to be hoping for a franchise. Avoiding this film would be a small gesture, but honestly, this movie isn’t good enough on its merits to justify your money anyway. Wait until it comes to Netflix, and then watch something else instead.

Want to Know More?

Don’t see this movie. Read the book instead; it’s much better. Here’s the Kindle edition of Dracula

Stefan Pascu has written a couple histories of Transylvania, so if you want to learn about the region, you might try his A History of Transylvania. However, I haven’t read it, so I can’t really vouch for it.

I

The Lion in Winter: Did Richard the Lionhearted Do It in the Butt?

Tags

Anthony Hopkins, Homosexuality, James Goldman, Medieval Europe, Philip II, Richard the Lion-Hearted, The Lion in Winter, Timothy Dalton

At the start of this blog, I discussed perhaps my favorite movie of all time, The Lion in Winter (1968, dir. Anthony Harvey). But there was one facet of the movie that I didn’t discuss in that post, namely the claim that the movie makes that Richard the Lionhearted was homosexual. So I want to look at that today.

In the film, Richard (Anthony Hopkins) meets with Philip II (Timothy Dalton) and reminds him of a night that happened several years earlier, during which they had been physically affectionate (the film doesn’t specify exactly what they did, but the implication is that they had sex). Richard clearly feels something for Philip, and is distressed when Philip cruelly tells him that he submitted to Richard’s advances purely to gain a weapon to use against Richard and his father. He viciously describes how disgusted he felt when he pretended to be attracted to Richard. Richard is deeply distressed by the revelation. Later, Philip shocks King Henry (Peter O’Toole) by describing the encounter to him, and then taunts him “What is the royal policy on boys who do with boys?”

Richard and Philip

When The Lion in Winter came out, it was still a year before the Stonewall Riots ignited the Gay Liberation movement. Homosexuality was a taboo issue, and Philip’s revelation would have been as shocking then as an admission of incest might be today. Because homosexuals were stereotypically depicted as effeminate, the notion that the great medieval soldier Richard the Lionhearted might be homosexual was startling. But was author James Goldman just making this detail up, or is there something to this claim?

In 1948, historian John Harvey, in his book The Plantagenets, put forward the argument that Richard was homosexual. Among the evidence for this claim is the fact that Richard married rather late to Spanish princess Berengaria of Navarre, and never had children with her, and that according to the very well-informed medieval chronicler Roger of Hoveden, Richard had been rebuked by a hermit for not sleeping with his wife and for indulging in ‘the sin of Sodom’. He twice confessed and performed penance, possibly for sodomy. Since Harvey put forward the idea, a number of other authors have explored it, adding one or two pieces of evidence. In particular, it has been pointed out that Hoveden also says that they shared a bed chamber, or perhaps a bed. If you want to see the passages in question, you can read them here.

John Gillingham, perhaps the most expert scholar on Richard, has argued against this claim and asserted Richard’s heterosexuality. Richard had at least one illegitimate son, Philip of Cognac, and he is noted in some accounts as raping women. The fact that he never had children with his wife might be partly due to the fact that soon after he married her, he was  separated from her by events around the 3rd Crusade, and on his return home, he was captured in Germany and held prisoner for more than a year. This would obviously have reduced his opportunity to sleep with his wife in the early years of his marriage. He does not seem to have had much affection for her; after his return to England, he did not spend time with Berengaria until Pope Celestine III ordered him to be faithful to her. Thereafter he attended worship with her on a weekly basis. Thus he may simply not have liked her as a person, since this was a political marriage. And, of course, it is possible that she was barren.

Berengaria of Navarre

Jean Flori, another expert on Richard, has come down in the middle, arguing that Richard was probably bi-sexual. (All of this assumes, of course, that medieval sexuality can be analyzed in terms of the modern notion of sexual orientation.)

The specific claim that Richard and Philip were lovers is based on a reference to them having once shared a bed or bed chamber (the Latin is ambiguous on this). While two adult men sleeping in the same bed would certainly be sexually suggestive nowadays, in the 12th century, this was a much less sexually-loaded practice. 12th century households had much less furniture than modern houses do, and the royal household carried its furniture with it as it traveled about from one estate to the next. Servants very commonly slept on the floor in their master’s bedroom. So even a king might not have spare beds in which to put up a royal guest, and inviting a visiting king to share one’s bed would have been much more about courtesy and hospitality than it would have been an opportunity to conduct a personal examination of the royal jewels. So even scholars who support the notion that Richard slept with men generally discount the claim that Richard and Philip were ever lovers.

However, at the time Goldman wrote his play, Harvey’s book was much closer to the cutting edge of scholarship than it is today, and his assertion that Richard and Philip had been lovers creates a good deal of interesting tension in the script. And certainly to audiences of the 60s, the revelation of the relationship would have seemed quite shocking, especially since Richard the Lion-hearted is one of the most celebrated warriors of the Middle Ages, whereas in America, the US military was still issuing dishonorable discharges for homosexual activity in 1967.

Want to Know More?

The Lion in Winter (1968) is available through Amazon. There’s also an, in my opinion, inferior 2004 remake starring Patrick Stewart and Glenn Close, The Lion in Winter. The performances are all good, but they simply can’t compete with the originals.

John Gillingham’s study of Richard I focuses heavily on the myths that have developed around this king. As I noted, Gillingham disagrees with the notion that Richard was homosexual. I’m not sure I entirely buy his argument, but it deserves serious consideration.