Since the death of my father, I haven’t posted here much although there has been a lot going on in my life worthy of comment. There was the funeral, the probate, a holiday near Scotland, a visit to an old friend near Cambridge, our son going to the States and moving out. I’ve even worked on a post about Satan. However, none of it has yet persuaded me to set digits to keys until now.
The quote is, slightly paraphrased, “anyone’s death diminishes me”. I’ll start with my father’s and get on to the Queen’s later, as the two are, for me, psychologically related. My father was radically unlike me in many ways. He was a lifelong Tory, an atheist and quite aggressive, and also very good at making money. He worked in nine-to-five jobs for more than forty years until his early retirement at the age of sixty. By contrast, I am very left wing, with the proviso that I think it would be nice if a catholic economy was feasible but I don’t think it is, very peaceable and a depressive and anxious person, strongly theistic and religious and appalling at making money. Ironically, I’m the one with my own business and he was the one who worked for an employer. So there is a clash of values, beliefs and a vastly different skill set. All that said, we did have a few things in common, such as our apparent neurodiversity and interest in science and maths. He was also notable as being one of the two non-deaf people I’ve ever encountered with absolutely no interest in music, which places him apart from almost everyone in the hearing world.
Even so, his death is a loss to me. In many ways other children’s loss of a father is bound to have openly upset them far more than this seems to have affected me, but it’s not true to say it hasn’t done that at all. That man who read all those hundreds of books in the bookcases downstairs, derived a big enough income to buy a large house in rural southeast England with his largely mental labour, gained a degree from the Open University, published academic chemistry papers, was the metrication officer for his workplace and sat on International Standards Organisation boards for drawing instruments, is now reduced to a pile of ashes in a casket and a large amount of water and carbon dioxide in the water cycle and biosphere. This is a surreal and major landmark in my life, not least because, as I’m sure you can relate to, the death of any person is a memento mori.
The Queen’s death is also a reminder of one’s own mortality, as is anyone’s. Like my father, the Queen had little in common with me. She was a billionaire for a start. In particular, it has to be noted that I’m republican. I don’t believe in the monarchy as a political system, constitutional or otherwise. However, I am only quite weakly republican, mainly because I don’t think the existence or otherwise of the monarchy has much bearing on British politics. A situation where we had a figurehead president, like Ireland’s for example, wouldn’t really be that different to the situation we have now. It doesn’t really matter to me if laws are assented by a president or a monarch. Nor do I consider the monarchy to be particularly expensive compared to other things the government spends its money on. I also think it would be difficult to end the monarchy, because even if it officially ceased to exist, the people involved would still be in the minds of the public and be thought of as holding the positions they currently do in law, unless there were a major groundswell against them. However, I would prefer a republic. I just don’t think it’s really worth our energy to achieve one. I also say this in full knowledge of the plausible claim that the monarchy secretly has a hand in drafting our laws. I’ve discussed the actual issue of the monarchy in political terms elsewhere on this blog.
None of this has any bearing on the emotional import of the situation. Just as my father was largely opposite to me in values, beliefs and character, and I have much to resent him for, so was the Queen in many ways the polar opposite to what I think is best for the country.
I’d like to illustrate what I mean with reference to bloodsports.
I used to go hunt sabbing every Saturday and sometimes on Boxing Day. I strongly object to foxhunting, and of course the Royal Family has been heavily involved in it. I expended a lot of energy in doing what I could to disrupt foxhunts non-violently. Many friends of mine were passionately involved in this action. At the same time, there was an animal rights stall in town on Saturdays. After a few years, it occurred to me that if a single carnist individual, say in her early twenties, was persuaded to go vegan by the actions of the animal rights people by the Clock Tower in Leicester, that single success would be likely to save the lives of more vertebrates than a whole lifetime of hunt sabbing. That is a very low bar to clear. Imagine five hundred days on that stall and one person being persuaded in all that time. In the meantime, five hundred days of freakishly successful hunt sabbing would save fewer than a thousand animals. In other words, it isn’t primarily about the animals or animal rights, but class struggle. Appalling though foxhunting is, the motivation of many hunt sabbers seems to be to ruin the enjoyment of the sadists who pursue the uneatable, and notably the thousands of anglers who go down to the canal on a regular basis and cause immense suffering to large numbers of fish generally, but not always, carry on unchallenged, because they’re not upper class, and somehow this is supposed to make it better? I think hunt sabbing is a worthwhile thing to do, but I can’t get on board with the class envy aspect of it. The common juxtaposition of a rough sleeper kipping down next to a lavish portrait commemorating the Queen’s death speaks volumes, but do you really think if we were a republic that guy wouldn’t be there? Not if it wasn’t socialist.
British socialist groups on Reddit are unsurprisingly anti-monarchist, and of course I’m also anti-monarchist. However, a lot of the posts are particularly focussed on the monarchy rather than other things about which socialists might be expected to care, and I find it a distraction. It’s similar to the focus, either from a supportive or oppositional stance, on trans issues: what are we not discussing or campaigning on while we’re talking about those? Yes I’m against the monarchy, but really, does a country like the US or France really seem more socially just than this one? How much difference would it really make to most people if we were a republic? It seems to me that the animosity expressed towards the ultra-rich bloodsportspeople who are nominally running this country is not really about achieving a better world.
There’s a rather disconcerting prelude to Owl City’s song ‘Galaxies’, which is about the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster in the form of a sound clip from Ronald Reagan’s speech on the matter. The associations many left wingers of a certain generation have with that despicable individual make this seem quite distasteful, but when it comes down to it, all he was doing was acting as the Head of State and speaking for the nation about a tragedy, and since he was a Hollywood actor, he was actually quite good at it. The associations, I presume, do not exist for Adam Young, since he was only two when Reagan left office. It could have been Walter Mondale speaking for the nation and the situation would’ve been the same, because the president, overtly politicised though the rôle is, also speaks on behalf of the country in a non-politicised way. Our own head of state is covertly politicised but can do the same thing.
I have recently lost a parent, my father. Those two words refer to an office which to some extent transcends the characters of the people involved, and it’s the same with the monarch, because a monarch is often the Head of State. The Queen’s head is on our notes, coins and stamps. Her initials are on the post boxes and the throne. In France, Marianne used to have the same function and in the US there’s the eagle and the Statue of Liberty. Our symbols of nationhood are oddly mixed. One of them happens to be a real person, but there’s also a unicorn, Scotland’s national animal, and a Turkish-Greek bloke killing a dragon. People are unlikely to get worked up about the unicorn but they have been known to take exception to a supposèdly animal-loving country having the slaughter of as magnificent a beast as a dragon as one of our symbols. That’s probably fictional (I suspect it’s based on a watering hole with a crocodile living in it, but that’s another story), but it’s still a figure representing the country, which is also what the Queen was. Unlike George or the unicorn, she could actually speak and interact with the people.
‘Out Of Africa’ is a film which annoys me because I get weepy about the death of Denys Finch Hatton, an upper-class big game hunter, at the end. The reason that happens, apart from the clever emotional manipulation of the people involved in making the film, is that we are all human and we cannot help but be moved by such things. That’s rather specific for me, but it will probably be someone else for you, another fictional character. This is the same kind of phenomenon as I experienced the other day when Sarada came home and I said I should do an emergency big shop just in case the Queen died, and found myself, to my amazement, choking up slightly inside. It does annoy me that I’m more influenced directly by the Queen’s death than my father’s in this way, and is cause for concern, but in fact I wasn’t just crying for the Queen but for all my losses, and the losses others have recently experienced, and I haven’t had that many, and for the very general experience of bereavement as part of life for us all. I felt the same thing more recently when I heard people sing “God save the King”. And I am absolutely not a monarchist. It isn’t about that. It isn’t even about specific respect for the Queen and King, except insofar as they are human and therefore worthy of respect, a respect moreover I wouldn’t confine to humans.
Diana comes to mind here. To us at the time, the reaction to her death seemed quite fake and excessive, but we had friends who had been more affected by the AIDS crisis than I was, and really, I was affected quite enough by it thank you, who were authentically touched because of her challenge to the stigma. Right now, although I’m getting on with my life, I do actually feel quite affected by it, so I’m on the other side of the situation this time. This is probably because of recent bereavements experienced at first and second hand.
In fact, the people on the other side this time are responding to her death just as much as most other people as a symbol. For them, she and her heir represent everything that’s wrong with this country, and that’s a fair take, but for me that is inauthentic. I don’t generally believe individuals are politically influential as such, but simply end up in the positions they are and have their behaviour determined by economics. The monarch before her didn’t even get to decide when to die: he was, it’s said, in a sense killed by his doctor so that the news could make the papers the next day. I don’t think there’s a much clearer demonstration of how little freedom he had, and the freedom of a monarch is if anything more restricted than that of the average well-off middle class person. I can’t generate the degree of animosity some other people seem to feel towards the over-privileged, and to pretend I felt that would be dishonest even if I talked myself into thinking that’s really how I felt about her death or her as a symbol. I just don’t.
When it was common practice to write cheques, many people had the experience of accidentally putting the wrong year all through January and having to cross it out. Even though that year was Anno Domini, now often referred to as “Christian Era”, writing that year, or getting it wrong on the cheque, didn’t imply they were Christian. It’s just the dating system we use here in the West, with a few exceptions such as on Jewish tombstones, for the Islamic calendar and Julian dates. This, for almost all of us, is what the Queen’s death is like. It means we’ll soon have the King’s face on notes, coins and stamps, “C iii R” on any new post boxes, QCs will become KCs and people will be singing “Send him victorious”. All of this is odd and disconcerting, and will take some getting used to, not least because most of us weren’t even born the last time it changed. But for my mother, this is her fifth monarch. A person born on 11th April 1471 who lived to be eighty-eight would have seen ten monarchs, for instance Thomas Carn of London, who lived to be 107. We are relatively exceptional in British history not to have seen multiple kings and more rarely queens even in our fairly long lifetimes. This alone makes it exceptional and historic, and just as it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian or not when you cross out the wrong year on a cheque, nor does it matter if you’re monarchist or republican, or for that matter anarchist, if you recognise this as a disconcerting historical event. I would of course acknowledge fully that this is a great time to bury bad news, but there’s more to it than that.
There are also specific sadnesses resulting from the fact that we had a Queen. Although it’s a birthright rather than a position one could work to reach, I don’t believe it was any bad thing that generations of girls grew up with the knowledge that the Head Of State was a woman. We also had a situation where a young woman in her twenties became Sovereign in contrast to all the relatively old male presidents and dictators around the world, and eventually became older than them all as well, so there were two lengthy periods in her life where she was demographically exceptional in two ways at once. She has now been replaced by the rather less exceptional, and this is not to malign him for characteristics he can’t do much about, man in his seventies. We’ve ended up, just now, with a much less remarkable figurehead in that respect, and this will probably be the case next century too. Next Christian century.
It’s said that the most common dream people have in this country has been the Queen coming to tea. A third of the British population has had this dream, including me. This happens without respect to the political beliefs of the people concerned: you can be a red-blooded Communist and have this dream just as easily as a true blue Tory. The details also tend to be similar. It’s all the more remarkable that I’ve had it because I never drink tea, so for me the beverage is just something I make for someone else and I don’t partake of our national identity by either being a monarchist or having a nice cup of tea and a sit down. But there it is, because in this dream both the Queen and the tea are symbols of national identity which exist even in the minds of non-nationalistic republican coffee-drinkers. Also, for a long time as a child, and I don’t think I’m unusual in this respect either, I associated the Queen with my mother. I used to think they looked similar, for example. Given this perhaps comforting significance, it makes sense that people might wish to deny the less palatable aspects and allegations made against the Royals, regardless of their veracity.
I never met the Queen although I strongly suspect I once met her son, now King. Other than the fact that she’s head of the Church and I am C of E, I don’t feel the need to pay obeisance to her or the King in a visceral or profound way. However, if I met the King under different circumstances than I actually seem to have met him in (everyone needs a break sometimes), I would follow the usual etiquette as I understand it simply because it would be embarrassing not to, it would probably make him feel awkward or angry as a person one to one with me, and there’s not really any need to do that.
All that said, yes, Scotland and England should both be republics, but this has got nothing to do with current historical events, and 2022 will go down for me as the year my father and the Queen both died.
Well, it was either that or a portrait of the Queen wasn’t it?
You probably know, because I’ve said it on here before, that I’m kind of technically republican but really don’t feel that strongly about it. I’ve read and watched lots of pro-republican propaganda and to be honest the emphasis on the monarchy being expensive calls to mind a lot of other things which are a much bigger waste, and I find it hard to motivate myself to care. I’ve said before that arguing about whether these nations should have an elected head of state or a hereditary one is like arguing about what colour the handle of the executioner’s axe should be. Having said that, there are many reasons for abolishing the monarchy. For instance, right now it means the monarch is almost certainly going to be White and until recent changes in the law probably also male, and if they aren’t heterosexual they’re probably going to have to be in the closet because of the succession, and none of those things are good. Looking further into the millennium, assuming a persistent monarchy, we’ll probably have three kings, assuming regnal names are the same as birth names: Charles III, William V and George VII, and there probably won’t be another queen until at least the 22nd Christian century. But one excellent reason for abolishing the monarchy is for the sake of the people subjected to it, the Royals themselves, because psychologically it takes its toll on them. George VI’s health seems to have been quite seriously damaged by his being king for example. Knowing that you will only ever have one job in the long term and are unable to do various things with your life must feel like a gilded cage to them, and it probably feels like much of what you do before you become monarch is just dabbling with life in full knowledge that it actually doesn’t amount to much. I can see the value of the likes of the Prince’s Trust and the Duke of Edinburgh Award, and yes, I’m talking about the family rather than the men born to be King here, but still, they must have to work very hard to infuse their lives with meaning.
Having said all that, there are other aspects to the Queen’s life and rôles. As well as being monarch, she’s head of state, not only of this country but also many others, such as Canada, and in a way it’s just like having a president, in that she fulfils a similar position. As a child, I noticed that foreign banknotes often had an ornamental frame on them which appeared to be blank, and being from a monarchy I thought these windows, which are in fact there to display the watermark clearly, were supposed to symbolise the fact that the country issuing them was a republic. People from republics disabused me of this notion and said they didn’t generally think of their countries as lacking a monarch or feel the need to indicate their absence. Now we have windows on our own banknotes of course, but not because we’re a republic.
The Queen has a long list of rôles, including head of the armed forces, and also head of the Church of England. Some would see these two as contradictory. However, having been an active member of the Anglican church in the past, I did genuinely feel that whatever else might be true, and whatever other political views I might had, the Queen was the head of my denomination, and this was significant. She seems to live her life in a Christian way and her faith seems to be important to her. Although it’s important not to fall into the trap of thinking they’re just like us in some ways, although of course we all share humanity, it does create a connection between us in the sense that she had this rôle thrust upon her, probably in a way which she perceives to be the hand of God, and has constantly been labouring under the responsibility since 1952, with the help of her Maker. And I can relate to that! I don’t feel she is merely in an unearned position of privilege or has a cushy life. In a theoretical situation where we became a republic, it’s still possible that she would’ve retained her position as head of a church, and being female, a woman who took on that function four decades before there were any women priests. That’s not insignificant.
If you do the calculations, it looks like the Queen and Charles will die in the same year. If she lives as long as her mother, she’s likely to die in 2027 at the age of 101. Her four predecessors, Charles’s male ancestors, died at the ages of 68, 70, 78 and 56. Her heir, born 1948, would die in 2026 if he lives to the same age as the former Edward VIII, and to be honest that particular “king” may have lived longer because he was able to go off and do what he wanted rather than stay as head of state. That said, life expectancy is longer in this country than it used to be, and there are alleged to be connections between tobacco smoking and each of these men’s deaths. Charles gave up smoking when he was eleven. Consequently, just on these bare stats, which fail to take much into consideration, it very much looks like he will never be King.
There’s a pattern in the way monarchs go in England. Long reigns are often followed by a flurry of short ones due to the fact that successors tend to be older by the time they get there. Also, unsurprisingly there are many more kings than queens, but proportionately the average length of a queen’s reign is longer than that of a king. Since William the Conqueror there have been three dozen kings and eight queens, if Lady Jane Grey and Matilda are included. The average length of queen’s reigns is bumped up by the two outliers, Victoria and Elizabeth II Of England. Monarchs who have managed not to reign without being executed, namely George III and Edward VIII, tend to live longer. I think we should bear this in mind because it shows the strain being monarch puts on people. It really isn’t a bed of roses.
At this point, provided Sumerian king lists are not taken seriously, nobody has been a monarch anywhere in the world or at any time in history longer than the current Queen. Although she is a figurehead, she probably also acts as a source of wisdom and experience for governments and would be able to do this to a greater extent than anyone else in history. She’s seen fourteen British prime ministers for example, and is not entirely hands-off in her rôle, but of course we don’t really know what’s going on with her. Eventually one may get to don the mantle of respectability simply by virtue of one’s age and length of time in office, but presumably she has reflected on the nature of successive governments. I do wonder how seriously some of her prime ministers have taken her though.
Another aspect of this is the nature of anniversary naming. On the whole the sequence could be expected to be something like: iron, bronze, silver, gold, platinum, with other interspersed “substances” in between. Sarada and I have had our silver wedding anniversary already, which makes me feel old. There are two diamonds, one at five dozen and one at seventy-five, so Queen Victoria was able to have a diamond jubilee but that was that. They have latterly been modernised, and are mainly seen to apply to marriages so they tend to have things like “electrical appliances” in them. The original is the golden jubilee, which was instituted in the Bible, consisting of seven times seven years plus one, due to the ancient Hebrews having no concept of zero. The Golden Jubilee was honoured more in the breach than the observance, but it’s a brilliant idea.All debts were forgiven and slaves and prisoners freed. I think there was also redistribution of land, in order to prevent the concentration of land ownership in the hands of the wealthy few. We could definitely do with something like that.
That’s it really. The official anniversary of the accession is today, but the celebrations will be in June.
H2G2 casts a long shadow. Any radio science fiction comedy is bound to draw comparisons with it, and even more so if it’s on Radio 4. To some extent, the same problem exists on BBC television, where SF comedy is likely to be compared to ‘Red Dwarf’. This happened with the rather obscure ‘Hyperdrive’ with Miranda Hart, Nick Frost and Kevin Eldon, which ran for only two series. It wasn’t wonderful to be sure, but it was absolutely not a rip-off of ‘Red Dwarf’. It was ‘The Navy Lark’ in space. That series, of which I was never a fan but you know, it was okay, was probably unknown or forgotten by 2005 but is so much more similar to ‘Hyperdrive’ than ‘Red Dwarf’, and if people had known about that and resisted the urge to draw comparisons with the most prominent space comedy, I’m sure it would’ve been perceived much more positively.
There have been quite a few Radio 4 SF comedies since 1980, and H2G2 is rather like the Beatles in that it defined a genre and cannot be successfully imitated without being seen as derivative. What, then, do you do if you want to write a series of this kind? It has to be completely different from Douglas Adams’s work, and probably use a different kind of humour, and this is very restrictive. However, restriction is a wonderful spur to creativity and originality if you can dislodge your focus sufficiently on what you’re trying not to write. I would say Tony Bagley’s ‘Married’ has successfully escaped from Mr Different Adams’s fierce gravitational pull and managed to write something pretty fresh. I mean, he did it over twenty years ago now but it’s still good.
The premise of ‘Married’ (SPOILERS) is that steadfastly single and misanthropist architect Robin Lightfoot wakes up one morning to find himself in a parallel universe where he’s married with children and works at a greetings card company, and absolutely hates his new life. Meanwhile, his counterpart in the parallel universe has entered this one and proceeds to trash his life, since he too is misanthropic but considerably more actively antisocial and abusive. The series becomes increasingly surreal and science-fictiony as it proceeds until the existence of the entire Multiverse is threatened and the fabric of reality breaks down. Robin finds a solution in the final episode, but it isn’t clear if the Multiverse is saved.
Robin is played by Hugh Bonneville, cast somewhat against type. Arthur Smith is another central character, who plays himself, and Julian Clary makes a guest appearance. Many people who exist in this universe also exist in the other, but often have different life histories. It gently breaks the fourth wall a number of times. The only person with an initial grasp on the situation is his son, who reads a lot of graphic novels and is therefore savvy about parallel universes. In a sublime piece of technobabble, he explains to Robin that there are two types of parallel universe, Inverted Gravimetric and Temporal Neomorphic. It’s never at all clear what these are but they sound marvellous.
Although the drama centres, initially at least, on the interaction between the characters, the background is also intriguing. Much of it is based on the humour of rôle reversal. Tony Blair is leader of the Conservative Party. Environmentalists are campaigning for the legalisation of genetically-modified organisms and the use of organophosphate pesticides. Most people believe Francis Bacon wrote the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare. Jimmi Hendrix is a middle-of-the-road radio disc jockey. ‘The Guardian’ is a tabloid and has a porn page but ‘The Sun’ is a quality newspaper. There were eighteen years of Labour rule up to 1997, when the Liberal Democrats achieved power, led by Richard Branson, who is now Prime Minister. Alcohol is a Class A drug but you can buy Cannabis over the counter in Boots. There is no Sunday trading. Surrey is a deprived area but the northeast of England is affluent.
The humour is not confined to reversals. Fashion is how it was in the early 1970s, with kipper ties and flares. Richard Whiteley did something nebulous but awesome in the “Fuel Crisis of ’89” which has made him a universally-loved national hero and there are statues in his honour. Margaret Thatcher died in 1978. The death penalty is not only still in place but fast-tracked without appeal to avoid causing prolonged suffering to the perpetrator. Edward VIII didn’t abdicate and was replaced by Richard IV and then John II, who leaves his wife and comes out as gay, marrying his lover Adrian. He is of course played by Julian Clary. Janis Joplin is still alive. There’s no Marks & Spencers but instead there’s a Marks, Bruce & Willis. There’s a Channel 6. Radio 4 is called Radio 1 and there’s also a Radio 4 Live. The Today programme doesn’t exist. Nicholas Parsons presents a radio panel game called ‘The Transport Quiz’, which seems to be a reference to Mornington Crescent and ‘Just A Minute’. Kingsley and then Martin Amis read the Shipping Forecast. The Titanic wasn’t hit by an iceberg but was torpedoed in 1940. There are numerous other examples, all mainly for the sake of humour. They don’t particularly feel like they go that deep but they are fun.
I’m stuck with my usual quandary here of not knowing how well-known this is. I first came across it when its final episode was broadcast some time in the ‘noughties, and remarkably, if you know the ending, I seem to remember being in the bath at the time. This makes me wonder about false memories. I didn’t catch up with the whole series until about 2007.
Most of all, I wonder about the model of the Multiverse being used in the series. The real answer is “whatever makes the listeners laugh” of course, but those two terms, “inverted gravimetric” and “temporal neomorphic” have a real ring to them. Swapping the first words of each gets you “temporal gravimetric” and “inverted neomorphic”. The former is a real phrase, often used to refer to the measurement of subterranean water and its fluctuation. Temporal gravimetry is the measure of mass changes through time, so it is an actual thing but nothing to do with parallel universes. Inverted gravimetry is no closer. Neomorphism is to do with metamorphic change in rocks and is also a variety of gene mutation where a newly formed gene becomes manifest immediately rather than being masked or inactive.
These parallel universes are more like the “mirror Universe” of ‘Star Trek’ than the bog-standard “choose a pivotal point in history and change it” approach of alternate timelines. Like the Mirror Universe, the same people tend to exist in various universes, so they can’t be based on events which prevent people from existing or cause people to come into existence. They’re interdependent. Ultimately this becomes apparent in other ways, and it raises the question of whether the only kind of parallel universe is one which deviates in connection with events occurring within it. David Lewis’s idea of modal realism is easily confused with the idea of alternate timelines and quantum-related universe variations, but could in fact be an entirely different beast. We talk as if things could be other than they are. We say “if I were you, I wouldn’t do that” for example, but in fact that isn’t true because someone cannot be someone else and they just would act in that way. There is also the issue of paradoxes of material implication. Material implication is usually understood to mean “if P then Q”, but in fact it means “not both P and not-Q”, which lacks the kind of “direction” implication normally implies, and it means that there are peculiar situations where, to quote Wikipedia, it would be true to say that if the Nazis had won the Second World War, everyone would be happy, because if something is false, it being true can imply everything, and if sonething is true, anything can imply it. The idea behind material implication is to make it impossible to move from true premises to false conclusions, meaning that truth implying falsehood is always false.
But a different history may not be the only way in which a world can be different. An alternate universe might be just one which is located elsewhere but exists in the same way as this one does, with nothing else in common except what must be so for it to exist meaningfully as a universe. This could mean being observed in some way, or at least having its existence deducible from something observable. Maybe this kind of multiverse is like a cluster of mushrooms whose stalks sprout from their Big Bangs and become mature as caps, but multidimensionally.
Robin describes the multiverse as like a loo roll. Each universe is a single sheet of paper, separated from its neighbours but also coiled up tightly, so that you could enter another universe on either side by travelling a long way and finding a portal, which is the paper between the perforations limiting the sheets, or, much more easily, you could move towards and away from the centre and enter a neighbour much more easily, since the other universes in those directions are but a whisker away, as thin as a single sheet of toilet paper or even less. Just as accidents can occur where you accidentally poke your finger through the paper, or the roll gets wet and water wets adjacent sheets and their contents might bleed through (assume it’s monogrammed toilet paper) like ink soaking through successive sheets, so can there be bleeding through or accidental penetrations into other universes, but because they’re “rolled up”, it’s easier to enter a universe five universes away or a different number, than it is to enter any of the neighbours in other directions. Isaac Asimov explored this idea in his ‘Cosmic Corkscrew’, a completely lost and unpublished story written in 1931 where a man discovers it’s possible to move forward or backward in time by a set interval because time is like the coils of a slinky, and on travelling forward a single loop of the coil, say a week, he finds the world has ended, and is unable to convince anyone on returning to his present and ends up in a mental hospital. There is of course absolutely no scientific evidence for this but it isn’t ruled out. There’s just no reason for supposing it to be the case. It does work quite well as a model though – it’s coherent. It’s easy to imagine each universe consisting of time and space, and then there being extra dimensions which link them together in different ways, so there are not only portals to adjacent universes separated by gigaparsecs but also extra dimensions in which other universes it would otherwise take countless æons to reach are only a hairsbreadth away, if only we could find our multidimensional equivalent of an inconvenient finger poke or splash of water.
Maybe. But what does “maybe” mean here? Using possible world semantics, “maybe” means “true in some possible worlds”. In other words it’s a bold statement that there are universes where this has been done, that there are bridges between universes which have either arisen spontaneously, through accidents or have been made on purpose. It can become very difficult to talk clearly about parallel universes because language like “possibly”, “probably”, “perhaps” and so forth then become references to places where this is actually so. “Probably” means “true in most possible worlds” for example, but if there are an infinite number of them, how can the majority of worlds contain such a situation? The ones in which the state of affairs doesn’t hold could also be infinite, so how is that a majority?
There are two very implausible things which never seem to get ruled out in spite of the difficulty in accepting how they are reasonable things to expect. One of them is travel backwards in time, and the other is parallel universes. In spite of the “cat among the pigeons” effect them being true would have on science, it remains unfeasible to rule either of them out.
First of all, a confession. I don’t know a huge amount about history in the Dark Ages and most of what I do know is biassed towards what is now England. Moreover, much of what I do know is based on linguistics rather than straightforward history. Nonetheless I’m going to have a go at this.
Roman Britain had been one edge of the Empire, and it has that in common with very far-flung parts of Afro-Eurasia such as the northern Sahara, the Middle East and the Caucasus. There is still to some extent a cultural unity between the areas which used to be part of it and I have only ventured out of the former territory of the Empire to the north and west, namely Ireland and Scotland. The rest is unknown to me, and that emphasises, I think, how huge it really was. There have been bigger ones of course, notably the Mongols and the British had them, and the Songhai Empire in Afrika was twice the size, but this is more about the sheer size of this planet than celebrating their “achievement”, although there were positives.
There are of course many hypotheses about the Fall of Rome. I read Gibbon as a teen and am therefore aware of what he said about it, but I don’t know if it stands up to contemporary scrutiny. I do strongly suspect that Christianity had a rôle because it only lasted about a century after the Empire became Christian, so I would agree with some others in saying that because the Empire had adopted the Christian faith, they turned their backs on doing things in this life in the expectation that they would be in Paradise, from their perspective, soon after death. The offence of suicide was, I understand, created by the Church in order to stop people from rushing it and getting to the Hereafter more quickly at about that time too. I also disagree that this is a sensible interpretation of Christianity, although it is one which has plagued the world ever since and there’s a case for saying it helps people cope in dire personal situations. Other hypotheses include the idea that the army had recruited so many Germans (that’s “us” by the way, to a limited extent, but it would’ve included people the first speakers of our language would have easily understood and been able to have conversations with) that they effectively had an enemy army on their own soil, that the Empire had to feed Rome and was doing so by conquering ever more distant territories and having to bring stuff back over ever greater distances (that seems to be what Asimov thought), and even that the barbarian invention of the horseshoe enabled them to fight back against the Empire and invade it more successfully. I neither know what happened nor if there’s a consensus on this matter.
I’m going to start with the Caistor-by-Norwich astragalus. This is a bone from a roe deer dating from between 1175 and 1225 AUC – okay, I’ll explain that dating. AUC is ab urbis conditæ, “from the founding of the city”, the dating system used in the Empire, and numbers its years from 753 BCE, so those dates are in the fifth Christian century. Anyway, this bone has runes from the Elder Fuþark scratched on it, reading “ᚱᚨᛇᚺᚨᚾ”, “roe” or “RAIHAN”, and notably has only one bar on the H or Hagalaz (“hail”), meaning that it predates the appearance of English runes, which have two bars on it. It may have been imported from Scandinavia or be a sign of Germanic presence in Britain. There is also evidence that Germanic tribes were settling along eastern rivers from the mid-twelfth century AUC onward, so the transition may not simply have been belligerent or a dramatic conquest.
This next bit I remember learning at school, so I presume it’s practically common knowledge for any Sassenach. Some time around the turn of the thirteenth Roman century or about 450 CE, Britain made a final appeal to the Roman army for defence against the Picts and Scots, but Rome couldn’t spare any resources. It reads as follows:
Agitio ter consuli, gemitus britannorum. […] Repellunt barbari ad mare, repellit mare ad barbaros; inter haec duo genera funerum aut iugulamur aut mergimur.
To Agitius [or Aetius], thrice consul: the groans of the Britons. […] The barbarians drive us to the sea, the sea drives us to the barbarians; between these two means of death, we are either killed or drowned.
Vortigern, a Celtic chieftan, then invited Hengist and Horsa to this land to aid him in defeating the Romans. Hengest and Horsa may in fact have been the same person – this is all from Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, written around 731 CE (incidentally, Bede is also responsible for inventing the current calendar dating system from the birth of Jesus and got it out by about four years, so that year number is his fault and reflects his considerable influence on the human world). I’m not now going to rely on anything but my own memory. My understanding is that Hengist and Horsa came over with a number of German tribes, substantially from the area around Angeln, hence the name “England”, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, the last being inevitable but not mentioned in chronicles of the Dark Ages for some reason, fought alongside the Celts and then with them, after which they settled here and proceeded to have the audacity to call the Celts living here the “Welsh”, meaning “foreigners”. I think this may say a lot about the White English mindset, and it reminds me of the stereotype of our own emigrants going over to the Med and refusing to learn the language, and basically just enjoying the sunshine while feeling the place is infested with “furreners”. It’s a bit like Basil Fawlty’s opinion that his hotel would run just fine if it weren’t for all the guests.
Anyway, what they call Sub-Roman Britain would’ve been an interesting place. It would’ve included, for instance, Christians and also Black people, and people able to write in the Latin script as we do today. Britain had had a Black governor and the Empire a Black emperor by this stage, because racism was not based on skin tone or anything else like that in the Roman world. There are known to be Black people in Roman Britain because DNA tests on remains dating from that era demonstrate that this was so, and there are still families, in rural Yorkshire for example, which have no significant genetic input from outside the area for many centuries and yet could only have had ancient Black ancestry. Again using my fairly unreliable memory, I think people identify reliably as Black once at least a quarter of their genes are of Black Afrikan origins. The concept of ethnicity was different in any case back then, and there was certainly active racism – for instance, the word “barbarian” is racist and similar to “Hottentot” in that it mocks the sound of the language spoken by a particular group – but wasn’t centred around skin tone. Given the twenty-five percent genetic characteristic, a Black person born in Roman Britain in about the year 400 CE, assuming they conceived children with a White person, could have notably Black grandchildren born in around the year 460 CE who could have survived into the mid-sixth century. I mention this to emphasise that sub-Roman Britain would have been ethnically diverse to some extent in modern terms. Remains of a young Black girl have been found in a tenth century grave and Vikings are known to have brought Afrikan slaves back in the ninth, who were referred to as “blue men”. Black people have been here for longer than the Germanic tribes have.
Concerning religion, although Roman Britain had been officially Christian, there were pagan temples in the West of Great Britain, and once the Germans had invaded it returned to paganism. There was also a firm division between urban and rural environments, in that the towns were more Roman and the countryside more Celtic. Hence Canterbury, Wroxeter, London and a few other places would still have had people in them speaking British Latin, of which there’s practically no trace. British Romance is one of several “submerged” Romance languages which have disappeared completely, leaving hardly any written or other record, the most important other one being in Africa and Libya, which seems to have been a little like Spanish. British Romance is likely to have been very radical compared to Classical Latin because it was so isolated from the rest of the Empire and also quite distant, so it may have had features in common with the ancestor of French, Gallo-Romance. The rest of the populace would have spoken a Celtic language similar to Welsh rather than Irish. It used to be thought that there were non-Indoeuropean tribes as well but that’s now been discredited.
The population of Britain at the end of Roman occupation was around 3.6 million, but suffered a sudden crash in numbers as Rome fell. 125 000 of those were Roman military and their families, so the Latin contribution to British culture might be thought considerable, but one of the differences between much of the continental Empire and Britain was that the former continued to be Christian and was therefore preserved to some extent by the social structure of the Church hierarchy, whereas in Britain this was destroyed by invasion. This also led to the rapid “Germanisation”, to coin a phrase, of the settlements as there were no longer any clergy. One reason for the population crash may have been a series of epidemics, including the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death and smallpox, which arrived from India at about that time.
There are a couple of linguistic quandaries about Britain stemming from this time. One is the question of why a Romance language didn’t develop here, but it’s fairly easy to explain that because of the general trashing of the Roman element. Harder to explain is the absence of a Celtic tongue spoken over the whole island today, because at the time, even after the Germanic tribes settled here, many people would’ve been speaking British. Celtic culture, such as it is, is reflected in the presence of Cambria, modern-day Cumbria, in the northwest of what is now England, and Yr Hen Ogledd into Strathclyde up to the Antonine Wall in what became Scotland. Cornwall and some of Devon also stayed Celtic. These regions were all P-Celtic rather than Q-Celtic, and spoke a language now referred to as Cumbric, traces of which survive in placenames and the counting rhymes used by shepherds in the North of England, from which it can be gleaned that it used a virgesimal system like other Celtic languages – base twenty.
Before the emergence of the Heptarchy, there were more than two dozen nations in Great Britain, although this is probably better understood as loose agglomerations of tribes. In the south and east of the island up into today’s Northumberland, they would’ve spoken various dialects of Anglo-Saxon, although they were heavily influenced by the fact that they had been different tribes already before they crossed over into Britain. They were aware that there had been a great fall from the Roman condition. The imperial level of technology was about the same as it would be just before the Industrial Revolution. For instance, there is even a third Christian century printed version of the Bible in Gothic, they were able to make concrete and there were rudimentary mechanical computers for navigation, automatic doors, vending machines and so forth. All this knowledge was lost, and this is expressed in the poem ‘The Ruin’, composed in the eighth century:
Wrætlic is þes wealstan, wyrde gebræcon; burgstede burston, brosnað enta geweorc. Hrofas sind gehrorene, hreorge torras, hrungeat berofen, hrim on lime, scearde scurbeorge scorene, gedrorene, ældo undereotone. Eorðgrap hafað waldend wyrhtan forweorone, geleorene, heardgripe hrusan, oþ hund cnea werþeoda gewitan. Oft þæs wag gebad ræghar ond readfah rice æfter oþrum, ofstonden under stormum; steap geap gedreas. Wunað giet se …num geheapen, fel on grimme gegrunden scan heo… …g orþonc ærsceaft …g lamrindum beag mod mo… …yne swiftne gebrægd hwætred in hringas, hygerof gebond weallwalan wirum wundrum togædre. Beorht wæron burgræced, burnsele monige, heah horngestreon, heresweg micel, meodoheall monig mondreama full, oþþæt þæt onwende wyrd seo swiþe. Crungon walo wide, cwoman woldagas, swylt eall fornom secgrofra wera; wurdon hyra wigsteal westen staþolas, brosnade burgsteall. Betend crungon hergas to hrusan. Forþon þas hofu dreorgiað, ond þæs teaforgeapa tigelum sceadeð hrostbeages hrof. Hryre wong gecrong gebrocen to beorgum, þær iu beorn monig glædmod ond goldbeorht gleoma gefrætwed, wlonc ond wingal wighyrstum scan; seah on sinc, on sylfor, on searogimmas, on ead, on æht, on eorcanstan, on þas beorhtan burg bradan rices. Stanhofu stodan, stream hate wearp widan wylme; weal eall befeng beorhtan bosme, þær þa baþu wæron, hat on hreþre. þæt wæs hyðelic. Leton þonne geotan ofer harne stan hate streamas un… …þþæt hringmere hate þær þa baþu wæron. þonne is …re; þæt is cynelic þing, huse …… burg….
This masonry is wondrous; fates broke it courtyard pavements were smashed; the work of giants is decaying. Roofs are fallen, ruinous towers, the frosty gate with frost on cement is ravaged, chipped roofs are torn, fallen, undermined by old age. The grasp of the earth possesses the mighty builders, perished and fallen, the hard grasp of earth, until a hundred generations of people have departed. Often this wall, lichen-grey and stained with red, experienced one reign after another, remained standing under storms; the high wide gate has collapsed. Still the masonry endures in winds cut down persisted on__________________ fiercely sharpened________ _________ ______________ she shone_________ _____________g skill ancient work_________ _____________g of crusts of mud turned away spirit mo________yne put together keen-counselled a quick design in rings, a most intelligent one bound the wall with wire brace wondrously together. Bright were the castle buildings, many the bathing-halls, high the abundance of gables, great the noise of the multitude, many a meadhall full of festivity, until Fate the mighty changed that. Far and wide the slain perished, days of pestilence came, death took all the brave men away; their places of war became deserted places, the city decayed. The rebuilders perished, the armies to earth. And so these buildings grow desolate, and this red-curved roof parts from its tiles of the ceiling-vault. The ruin has fallen to the ground broken into mounds, where at one time many a warrior, joyous and ornamented with gold-bright splendour, proud and flushed with wine shone in war-trappings; looked at treasure, at silver, at precious stones, at wealth, at prosperity, at jewellery, at this bright castle of a broad kingdom. The stone buildings stood, a stream threw up heat in wide surge; the wall enclosed all in its bright bosom, where the baths were, hot in the heart. That was convenient. Then they let pour_______________ hot streams over grey stone. un___________ _____________ until the ringed sea (circular pool?) hot _____________where the baths were. Then is_______________________ __________re, that is a noble thing, to the house__________ castle_______
This is widely believed to be a description of Bath or Chester. In other words they knew what was possible but they didn’t know how to do it. To me, this poem comes across as rather like ‘Ozymandias’, and it may be enlightening to remember that for a very long time everyone was expecting the world to end quite soon. Much has also been forgotten, or was at least unknown to the poet, as the description of mead-halls for example clearly indicates they are projecting quite an English image of what life must’ve been like back then. But this is still in the future of my narrative, and living memory of Roman Britain would have persisted until the late fifth Christian century at least. Judging by my own family history, the earliest heirlooms I’m aware of as a fifty-three year old in 2021 date from 1778, so that gets us to the mid-seventh century CE. By that time, the future England had become Christianised. It’s quite something to contemplate what it must’ve been like living in a time when one was fully aware of the heights from which civilisation had crashed in such a short interval. The scenario is almost post-apocalyptic.
Writing persisted in a limited form as runes and oghams, carved on stone, wood, bone and ivory. Oghams were in use in the west, particularly in Pembrokeshire, and there are said to be Druidic alphabets, but these are probably invented in modern times. Anglo-Saxon developed its own runes from the Elder Fuþark, a script in which I’m as adept as Latin due to an intense interest in my adolescence. Each letter has a name referring to a concept in the Rune Poem, which was Christianised after the arrival of Augustine in 597 CE, and they were for a time used as ideograms in English Latin script writing, after the manner of the ampersand and Tyronian “et”.
The Frisians are obscure and forgotten, but show up in analyses of our DNA. They had problems with the Franks and their land tended to get flooded, so they colonised the Kent coast, but their genes mainly show up in the English Midlands. They are in fact genetically indistinguishable from most of the White population of the Midlands. A different issue affects the Jutes. This folk was from Jutland, which is the modern Danish peninsula also including Schleswig-Holstein. The name is cognate with “Goth” and also the “Geats” of Beowulf. The Jutes also settled in Kent and the Isle of Wight and Solent, but seem to have suffered some kind of genocide after being invaded in the seventh century CE. The Kingdom of Kent was originally Jutish. The “Maid Of Kent” and “Kentish Maid” division, much eroded nowadays by the growth of Greater London into the county, is thought by some to be derived from the Jutish presence in the east of the kingdom and this is also said to have been reflected in dialect differences through the county, although nowadays this is not very strong. I think there probably was a genocide practiced by the West Saxons on the central South Coast and I suspect it was to do with their reluctance to convert to Christianity.
At this point I’m acutely conscious of my ignorance of British history beyond what has become England. I’m aware of a trans-insular kingdom called Dal Riata in the north between Ireland and Scotland, but I can’t presume to know much more than that. In the future England the Heptarchy arose. This consisted of seven kingdoms: Wessex, Mercia, Kent, Essex, Northumbria, Sussex and East Anglia. One thing I don’t understand about this is where Middlesex came from, because it sounds like it ought to have been a kingdom on a par with Essex and Sussex (Wessex was much bigger) but apparently it was a province of Essex, which was ruled over by two kings at a time, so possibly Middlesex was the western king’s territory. It’s also notable that there’s a concentration of small kingdoms in the Southeast and the others are much larger, which I’d put down to differences in climate and terrain along with proximity to the mainland. The idea that there was a four-century period of seven easily identifiable kingdoms is an imposition made in the later Middle Ages, as is perhaps evidenced by my confusion over Middlesex. There were smaller kingdoms such as the Middle Angles, Magonsæte and Hæstingas, in Leicestershire, Worcestershire and Sussex respectively. It’s said that it would still be possible to consider the kingdoms separate into the tenth century. But there is another process to be considered in English history at this time: the Christianisation of this island.
Augustine arrived in Kent in 597 CE, becoming the first Archbishop of Canterbury, famously because of a pope’s pun about the Angles looking like “angels” and then discovering that they weren’t Christian, or so it’s said. At the same time, Irish missionaries were converting people in the northwest. There had also been a Pelagian civil war in late Roman times in Britain. The Pelagians were a heterodox religious movement which rejected the notion of original sin and believed in salvation by works, and therefore had a more positive view of human nature, believing, for example, that unbaptised babies didn’t go to Hell. This was long gone by the time Augustine got here. It’s worth bearing in mind that less than two centuries passed between the fall of Rome and his arrival. He is also said to have founded the King’s School in Canterbury, which is therefore the first place since Roman times that Latin script was taught.
Due to invasions by the Norsemen from the late eighth century, the English people found it necessary to unite against a common enemy, although both Wessex and Mercia had become very strong by that time. Most written English from this period was in the West Saxon dialect, which is not the direct ancestor of Modern English, which is Mercian. Moreover, insofar as there was a capital, it was for some time near Winchester rather than in London. The Danes invaded and succeeded in settling in the modern Midlands, establishing five boroughs known as the Danelaw. These were Leicester, Lincoln, Stamford, Nottingham and Derby, and can be identified by the use of the “-by” suffix in many of the place names in this area. Due to the facts that the Danes settled here and that English as spoken today is descended from this dialect, which incidentally is not now considered standard, present-day English contains many Danish words and constructions, and it’s even been argued that English is not West Germanic at all but Scandinavian.
One fairly common way of marking the start of English history is by considering the accession of Egbert to the throne of Wessex in 802, because he ended the dominance of Mercia and Northumbria, then united all of England under Wessex, which persisted for the next two centuries. The famous Offa of Mercia’s son in law Beorhtric had exiled him to France, where he may have married one of Charlemagne’s relatives. Most people of European descent today are descended from Charlemagne. This wife then poisoned Beorhtric and Egbert returned to Britain and claimed the crown of Wessex. In 825, he defeated the King of Mercia at the Battle of Ellendune in present-day Wiltshire, claimed Essex, Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and then East Anglia. Having taken control of the mint in London, he was able to issue coins in his name as the king of Mercia, and Northumbria accepted his lordship. Then in 830, Wiglaf took control of Mercia and wrested some of the power back from Egbert, but by that time the Danes were becoming a greater threat and Egbert fought several battles with them. He conquered Cornwall in 838. Once he’d done that, he summoned a meeting called the Council of Kingston where he gave lands to the sees of Canterbury and Winchester in return for the Church’s recognition of his son Æþelwulf. At the time, the Church was responsible for writing the wills of kings and determining their heirs. That, then, is how England began, although at this point a great deal of it was under Viking rule.
Æþelwulf became king on Egbert’s death in 839 and gave Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Essex to his son Æþelstan. He defeated the Danes in Surrey in 851, then married his daughter Æþelswiþ off to the Mercian King Burgred, thereby uniting the Mercian and West Saxon monarchies. While he was on the mainland marrying Iudiþ his daughter to Charles the Bald and sending his youngest son Alfred to Rome, Æþelstan died and was replaced by Æþelbald, his brother, who forced him to abdicate, who then married his sixteen year old stepmother Iudiþ. I have to admit I find this bit very confusing and disturbing although that marriage was later annulled. Æþelbald died in 860 and was succeeded by his brother Æþelberht. The word “æþel”, by the way, means “high-born”, and is often written as “ethel” in these names. The next brother to become king was Æþelred I in 865, not to be confused with the later Æþelred the Unready who came a century later. It’s notable here that the succession preceded “horizontally” rather than “vertically”, which I’m guessing is due to deaths in battle and perhaps other causes. When he died in 871, which didn’t seem to be in battle so maybe I’m wrong, he left two sons who, had they lived to adulthood, would probably have become kings, but instead Alfred became king – Alfred The Great.
By Alfred’s rule, the Mercians had bought the Vikings off by ceding them the Danelaw. Alfred’s English is to me and probably most people the standard dialect of Old English although it is now long since dominated by Mercian English. Some of its features survive in the Yeovil area, though even that style of the language cannot really be said to derive directly from it. Nonetheless it had its day in the Sun. Alfred is well-known for being educated and scholarly, and this still shows, but because the kingdom was under attack he didn’t end up getting to do much with it. He’s also known for accidentally letting some cakes burn a woman had asked him to take care of who didn’t realise he was king because he was distracted by the fact that he was in the middle of waging a war. She took umbrage at him and was then mortified when she found out who he was, but he said he was the one who should apologise. He’s also the only king in English history to whom the epithet “The Great” has ever been applied. He idolised Charlemagne and tried to model himself after him.
I’m aware that the bloke was probably a typical patriarchal tyrant, but I have a soft spot for Alfred because I’ve read a lot of his words. He translated various works into English, including Bede’s. This may have been because the Viking raids were perceived as divine punishment and he wanted to rekindle reverence through learning. It’s an odd juxtaposition to today’s sensibilities. He also supervised ‘The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’, which was copied and circulated, and continued to be updated until 1154 in Peterborough, and advocated for education in English. He even translated parts of the Bible.
Anglo-Saxon handwriting and calligraphy is much clearer than some later hands. It isn’t cursive and resembles printed matter in some ways. Alfred’s English has a kind of rustic sound to it which would be absent from Mercian or Northumbrian of the time. Y and I were still distinct, unlike later in the millennium when they began to be used as if they were the same letter. The Latin alphabet as written by him borrowed “Þ” and “Ƿ” from runes, as opposed to some other versions of English which used “UU” for what is now written as “W”.
Anglo-Saxon literature is mainly verse. It includes a number of extremely bawdy riddles which use a lot of double entendres, which seems to be the start of the long kind of “smutty” tradition which we know from the Carry On films, and whereas they’re nothing to be celebrated they are at least the last gasp of a tradition leading up to them which began over a millennium previously. There’s also the very obvious epic ‘Beowulf’, which has always puzzled me because it seems to portray the Danes in a really positive light, and I can’t imagine that going down well with anyone. English used a lot of kennings at the time, like the Icelandic Eddas, where “hron-rad” – “whale-road” – and many other coinages means “sea” and “heofen-candel” – “heaven candle” – for “Sun”. There’s also a poem called ‘The Wanderer’ which puzzles me as it refers to a retainer’s woe that his lord and companions were killed in battle and he is now alone, because there’s a very strong sense of passionate love and longing in it which is refreshingly divorced from a sexual or romantic context but seems to me to be a kind of idealised view of how someone might view their better. It makes me wonder whether our way of looking at such relations between nobility and serfs, and the like, far from being romanticised, actually fail to capture the genuine feeling of care and love which the poor may have had for the rich, which is a very foreign idea to a twenty-first century mind.
Alfred the Great died in 899 and was, for once, followed by his son Edward, whose name is interesting as it’s the first time a regnal name is familiar to us from lists of monarchs post-Conquest. He recaptured first Mercia and then Northumbria. His son and successor Æþelstan became king in 924 and fought the Battle of Brunanburh, where he defeated an alliance of Olaf Guþfriþson of Dublin, Constantine II of Scotland and Owen, King of Strathclyde. This didn’t unite the island of Great Britain but did ensure the integrity of England. I’m aware of two things here. One is that it’s a shame that we only ever seem to hear about battles. The other is that I like to hear the other side on this. I don’t expect the other kings to have been particularly magnanimous to their own subjects, and this is probably about people fighting over land while the majority of the country continues in penury and misery, and again that calls the oddity of ‘The Wanderer’ to mind.
Æþelstan was succeeded by his half-brother Eadmund in 939, known today as Edmund I, as opposed to the later Edmund Ironside. During his rule, Olaf Guþfriþson conquered Northumbria and invaded Mercia, but was confronted at Leicester and a peace was brokered by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. He took the territory back after Olaf’s death. Then, in 945, he captured Strathclyde and handed it over to Malcolm I of Scotland, establishing a peaceful relationship between the two nations which kept the border relatively stable for a while. I don’t know much about history but it sounds like this ended up being honoured in the breach more than the observance. Then, in 946, a convicted robber and outlaw called Leofa attacked Eadmund’s seneschal and as the king defended his servant, he got stabbed to death in the ensuing fight. However, this is disputed and it’s also claimed he was assassinated.
His brother Eadred then came to the throne and two years later Erik Bloodaxe, who had killed two of his brothers to get Norway and was ejected by a third brother, seized Northumbria. Eadred forced him out but the Northumbrians then sided with Amlaíb mac Sitric, a Norse-Gael who was king of Denmark and Ireland, then deposed him in 952 and invited Erik Bloodaxe back in. In 954, they pushed him out again and he died in battle soon after, leaving Eadred with the nation once again. Eadred then came down with a chronic gastrointestinal complaint that forced him to survive by sucking the juices out of his food and died at the age of thirty-two.
Since he had been unmarried and had no children, his nephew Eadwig took the throne. At his coronation, Eadwig left the ensuing banquet with a female relative and her daughter Ælgifu, apparently to engage in a threesome and when Archbishop Oda the Severe remonstrated with him about disgracing himself at his coronation, he sent both him and St Dunstan into exile. He then married Ælgifu but Oda annulled the marriage on account of them being too closely related. He then purloined the other royals of their possessions, gave away ninety pieces of land and plundered the Treasury. He only ruled for four years but by the time he died at the age of nineteen, the kingdom only extended as far as the Thames.
Edgar, his younger brother, was already king of Northumbria and Mercia when he took over, thus reuniting England. He was also very young, becoming king of England at the age of sixteen. He brought Dunstan back and founded forty monasteries, so it sounds to me like he was trying to make up for what his brother had done. His time was free of Viking raids but he plundered Thanet and may have killed a romantic rival by “accidentally” impaling him with a javelin. He also humiliated six kings of Scotland, Man and Wales by having them row across the Dee and introduced press-ganging for the navy. Although he presented an image of piety to the public, he married his sixteen year old stepsister Eþelfleda Eneda and got a nun, Wilfrida, pregnant. After that, Dunstan suggested he do penance by not wearing his crown for seven years, with which he complied. The nun’s daughter and his, Eadgyþ of Wilton, herself became a nun and was famed for her beauty, sanctity and learning. Dunstan had a premonition that she would die in three weeks and she did so, after which she was said to appear in a vision to her mother, and both of them were made saints. Edgar was known as “The Peaceable” by comparison with his predecessors.
After Edgar’s death in 975, his son Edward was king for three years until he was apparently murdered by his stepmother Eþelfleda at Corfe Castle in Dorset. His kingship was disputed despite him being Edgar’s eldest, with some wanting his legitimate half-brother Æþelred to be king, but he was supported by Dunstan and Oswald, the archbishops of Canterbury and York. He was only sixteen when he was murdered, later became a saint, and was followed by the much better known Æþelræd The Unready, who was ten at the time.
Æþelræd’s name is a pun. “Æþelræd” itself means “nobly advised”. “Unræd”, on the other hand, means “badly advised” because the “un-” prefix could be used not only to negate but also to judge negatively, so it’s kind of pejorative. The reason he was “unready” was that he left his brother unburied for three years and didn’t punish his brother’s murderer, which made him very unpopular. It was rumoured that he might have been involved in the murder. He was also afraid of candles because his mother used to beat him with them. The public disquiet at his becoming king allowed the Vikings to take advantage of the poorly-defended country and Æþelræd sought to pay them off to leave it alone. This only encouraged them to continue to invade and he was forced to flee the country to Normandy. Sweyn Forkbeard successfully took over England in 1013 but died after a fall from his horse on 3rd February 1014, enabling Æþelræd to return as king. He then died during a series of battles with Cnut (Canute), enabling Cnut to become king of England.
Cnut is of course famous for his publicity stunt of attempting to prove that God was sovereign over all by pretending to order back the tide, which may not have happened. He was then said to have hung his crown on a crucifix and never wore it again. A less elaborate version of the tale says that he just did the last bit. Although he was Danish, he became considerably Anglicised during his time, and filled his court with English nobility. He also agreed to “rule according to the law of Edgar”. It all sounds a bit like the Georgian Era to me. Unlike any of the Georges though, he tried to conquer Norway but was opposed by a Swedish-Norwegian coalition, although he did succeed in a way. He then got fealty from Scotland, meaning that at one point he was King of Britain and all of continental Scandinavia.
Cnut died in 1035 and was replaced by Harold I, also known as Harold Harefoot. This is not Harold who was killed by William the Conqueror. Cnut’s son Ælfred Æþeling made his way from Normandy, where he had been born to his mother Emma of Normandy, to claim the throne but was captured and brought to Harold, who had his eyes taken out and he died in the process. Hardicanute, another of Cnut’s and Emma’s sons, took over when Harold died in 1040 and was buried at Westminster, the first monarch to be interred there. Hardicanute, however, had him dug up and thrown into a bog. Hardicanute was unpopular. He imposed heavy taxes to pay for his ships and when two tax collectors in Worcester were killed, he gave orders that all men in the county be killed and had Worcester burned to the ground. He was not generally healthy and in 1042, he died of alcoholic poisoning owing to overindulgence at a wedding reception. By that time, he had sent for his brother, Edward, later known as “The Confessor” from Normandy to take over the kingdom. As Edward had been brought up in Normandy, he had a lot of Normans in his court, which annoyed the royal houses of England. The Earl of Wessex, Godwine, married his daughter to Edward in an attempt to get the English houses in with the King again, but in 1051, with Leofric or Mercia’s help, Edward had the earl exiled and the couple separated. The year after, Godwine returned to England with supporters and forced Edward to compromise, allowing Harold II, yes, that Harold, to be the successor. Edward the Confessor was made a saint because he was the first monarch to touch for the King’s Evil, a practice which continued until James II of England. William III of William And Mary, who I mention here, refused to do it, but it was practiced for over six centuries.
Harold II became King on 4th January 1066 and the rest is history. Unfortunately, Edward the Confessor had promised the crown to two different people. The population of England in 1066 was 2.5 million.
I want to turn my attention now to the wildlife of Great Britain during this period. The Romans had introduced the house mouse, which is why it has a Latin name in English, but there were no rabbits at this time, since they are Iberian. The only native lagomorph here is the mountain hare, although the Romans had also introduced the brown hare. British wolves were not affected by insular dwarfism and were therefore disproportionately large relative to the other animals. Either Æþelstan or Edgar imposed a fine of three hundred wolf skins a year on the Welsh king Hywel Da, although that was in Wales. Some criminals were expected to provide a certain number of wolf tongues per annum on pain of death. Wolves in Scotland probably died out in about 1400 although it is claimed that there was a wolf in Morayshire killed in 1743.
Brown bears have a rather complex history here. The Romans imported them for fighting but there may also have still been native bears at that time. There is evidence of bears in caves in Yorkshire around a century after the Roman Empire fell. They were rare in Scotland, Wales and the East Midlands of England but more common in Yorkshire, these being today’s divisions of the island. Bear claws have been found in Anglo-Saxon funeral urns and the arrival of the Romans caused the bear population to increase. After the Norman Conquest they were used for bear-baiting, but apparently not during the Anglo-Saxon period, and they were also kept for medical purposes.
Wild boar have a somewhat similar history to bears, with a native population waxing and waning but being replaced or topped up by escaping pigs. They seem to have died out in the seventeenth century, but have been back for a while since then. They were becoming rare by 1066, as William the Conqueror introduced a law forbidding the killing of wild boars.
Beavers, who have been reintroduced here recently, died out in about 1600. They were last referred to in 1526.
There are probably a lot of other aspects of the Dark Ages I haven’t covered, and I’m acutely aware that I haven’t talked much about Scotland or Wales, which is entirely because I know practically nothing about their history during this period. I also focussed rather heavily on royalty because that tends to be more clearly recorded. The term “Dark Ages” wasn’t invented until the fourteenth century, so unlike the Iron Age, people didn’t actually think they were living through it when it happened, although they did seem to be aware of a materially better standard of living before their own time. There’s also a Protestant bias in describing them as such, due to the Church being so dominant and mainly unchallenged. I have to say I’m pretty much fine with that idea. Later on, the main reason was the lack of written records. This seems to apply to Britain during the time runes and oghams were the main scripts in use here, and it is quite difficult to tell what was going on except through archæology. As I’ve mentioned though, the actual period during which there were apparently no continuous texts lasted less than two centuries and during that time oral history would’ve bridged the gap to some extent. It isn’t clear to me whether the situation was in fact more brutal than later in the European Middle Ages, but certainly the way royalty behaved in the tenth and eleventh centuries seems to have been pretty extreme.
Writing this has really revealed to me how little I know about this time. In particular, I would like to know more about the climate and ecology, and the lives of ordinary people. I’m aware, for instance, that the Danelaw was supposed to be less oppressive than the Anglo-Saxon system, but that could just be rumour. So for now I’ll leave it there, but there might be more.
Most arguments for the abolition of the monarchy centre on the common good and the best interests of the subjects/citizens, and I have considerable sympathy with these arguments, but I’m on record, presumably on this blog somewhere, as being fairly apathetic about the whole thing. It is true that insofar as I believe in the state at all, I’m republican, but it really doesn’t seem to be a very important issue to me compared to most other pressing concerns in the political sphere. It’s like arguing about the colour of the handle of the executioner’s axe. However, there is another way of looking at the question. What if the monarchy as it is today, or even historically, is bad for the mental health of the people involved in it? In that case, the issue becomes somewhat more pressing.
Last night’s interview with Megan & Harry, as we are encouraged to call them, brought up a number of issues in this respect. I can’t say that I’ve studied it that closely although I did pay attention to some of it, because it concerns me that a lot of what’s said about the royal family is a load of flim-flam used by the mass media, and sometimes the government, to distract the public from other concerns. This in itself might be a good argument for abolishing the monarchy, not only because it’s dangerous for the public to be unaware of other issues which are going on at the same time, but also because it’s that kind of attention which has led to the likes of the death of Diana and the extreme care with which the Windsors seem to have to manage their public appearance nowadays, although this has probably been true for centuries. The problem is, however, that it may not be possible simply to opt out of the attention, because even if the UK were to become a republic, many people would doubtless continue to regard the Royal family as special.
This need to micromanage one’s image is bound to be very stressful and have serious consequences for one’s well-being in the long term, but it’s notable also that before this was as big a problem as it is now, George III was Britain’s longest-living monarch up until that point, and Edward VIII ended up outliving his brother by two decades. George III, I suspect, owed his long life to the fact that he wasn’t actively king for very long although the way mental illness was treated back then wasn’t exactly a picnic either. It’s said that Edward VII and George V and VI all had their lives considerably shortened by tobacco smoking, which could of course be a response to stress, or on the other hand the result of having too much time on one’s hands, but probably the former. It is of course also true that in the first half of the last century, tobacco smoking was the norm and a scientific study would have to involve matching the kings with their peers, but it could be said to be a “smoking gun” in this respect, so to speak.
Even leaving this aside, the prospect of knowing that your life is mapped out in advance for you is likely to have some impact on your sense of fulfilment. What if you want to be a doctor or a farmer? You can perhaps play at that, like Marie Antoinette, but you know you’re never really going to be able to do that. Having said that, it is true that the Queen and Anne have both been involved in horses in one way or another, and the Queen has come up with a new breed of dog. However, there are always ceilings to their ambitions.
I tend to think of the monarchy as a good illustration of how nobody really has any control over their life. Power always seems to flee from a particular position in society the more it’s examined. It’s true to a certain extent that feudalism involved a lot less perceived freedom than today’s society in most of Britain, but the monarchy still seem to be trapped in that system because they are born into a predetermined series of roles which they can never really leave.
It’s also true that whereas poverty is probably the most important human problem in history, not being poor doesn’t make you happy or healthy. You can still be subject to various kinds of abuse from your family, to alcoholism and to all sorts of other problems in your gilded cage. Like anyone as rich as them, the royal family cannot have earned its wealth, no matter what they do, because there’s a clear limit to how much one can be fairly recompensed for anything, but this applies to all sorts of other people, some of whom did work tirelessly to get rich. The main reason I don’t hold their riches against them is that it’s insignificant compared to the whole UK economy or government spending, so to me it’s not very consequential that they’ve got lots of money. It can only really be of symbolic significance.
One very significant point about our monarchy is that our head of state will probably always have been a White person. If I recall correctly, the last arguably non-White person responsible for Britain would be Lucius Alfenus Senecio in the third Christian century, and since there have been monarchs in Great Britain, all of them have passed for White. They will of course ultimately have had Black ancestry but not so as you’d notice and that’s the key point. This is all the more significant given the talk about Megan’s baby’s skin tone within the Palace, although I’m not clear whether that was a member of the Royals or the “institution” as she put it. This is in particular a public interest argument for a republic.
Or two republics. Our monarchy is kind of Scottish although not really, and as a supporter of Scottish independence I also support Scottish and English republics. Hence the plural in the title.
For me as a habitually practicing Anglican, there’s a further issue I don’t really know what to do with. As well as being my head of state, which I can either take or leave as I see myself as more Northwest European than British, the Queen is the head of my Church. As far as I can tell from the image which seems to be successfully projected, the Queen does take her faith seriously and even if hers is very different from mine, it’s an article of the Christian faith that nobody is perfect. At the same time, the moral integrity of the Church could be compromised by it being established and of course there shouldn’t be bishops in the House of Lords. A country which does such markèdly non-Christian things really shouldn’t be proclaiming itself as such. Moreover, many non-Christians are born into membership of the Church, which neither Christians or non-Christians may have a clear conscience about.
Ultimately though, I feel no animosity towards the Royal family (I realise my capitalisation has been inconsistent) and ultimately it would probably be in their best interests for these countries to become republics.
There you go. You were going to get a post on radioactive porridge but that can wait until tomorrow.
A Box Of Chocolates 