VISITING CASTLES

We have spent a lot of weekends camping this summer - late night Friday drives down to the coast, two glorious days by, and in, the sea and Sunday night back to Oxford ready for work on Monday morning.  

We have camped quite a lot beneath the magnificent ruins of Corfe castle, which I've already written a little about here.  I've been preparing for teaching a paper this term on the British Isles between 1042 and 1330. Visiting Corfe, a Norman castle which was added to over the years before being reduced to picturesque ruins during the civil war, really added something to my sense of what this period is about.  But working out what precisely this is, is harder.

The romance of such ruins is clear - the rugged and mighty walls reaching at gravity defying angles skywards, and whispers from the past covered now in weeds and lichen.  But, whilst this tells me a lot about my own cultural background and expectations, it tells me little about the eleventh century.

But it certainly is valuable to visit the sites which we study.  First, because it's the setting within the landscape which made castles like Corfe function: when you're standing there, you get a very dramatic sense of the superb strategic positioning of the castle, perched atop a steep hill, and commanding magnificent views in all directions; you get a much more meaningful understanding of the ways in which roads and communications inland could be controlled; and, of course, the nearness of the sea and its role in the precarious ties between England and the continent is particularly striking.  And then, there's the sheer scale of the thing: standing beneath the towering keep is awe-inspiring, and gives one a sense of the spectacle of power.  Most interestingly, a place like Corfe, where the ruined state allows you to see the different types of stone-work and the numerous additions, emphasises how history involves processes of layering; of re-use and adaptation; of re-invention of symbols and architecture in shifting political contexts.  It's a building as palimpsest in a sense: the successive regimes, antagonisms and shows of power peel off one by one as the ruins crumble.  And it's excellent for playing hide-and-seek as my son discovered.

Putting all this together, I think that visiting historical sites gives us added insights into the study of particular periods or phenomena, but also helps us to reflect on the practice of history more generally. We tend to be very focused on texts, and to assume that they, in some way, represent what happened. With buildings and historical sites, it is much more obvious that they are what happened.  A building like Corfe castle is very obviously a many-layered part of history, a historical agent in its own right. Thinking back to the texts that historians like myself usually work with, this helps to remind us that texts too were not just produced to tell us things, but also to show and to be.  They were necessarily just representing stuff that had happened, they were designed to make an impact on people, to demonstrate power, they were contested, ripped, sometimes destroyed: they were historical agents too.

SWIMMING

One of the lovely treats on this visit to Germany was spending time at the outdoor swimming pool.  My son loved it, and the view down the wooded valleys was wild and inviting.

Swimming is such a natural sort of pleasure that it's pleasing to find examples of people enjoying it in the Middle Ages.  One of my favourite images is from the early C14th Vie de Saint Denis: this is a richly illuminated manuscript telling the story of the life of the C3rd saintly bishop of Paris, but underneath each illumination of this very serious tale is a more light-hearted scene of everyday life from contemporary fourteenth-century Paris.  Here you can see some students playing in the Seine: they seem to be English students, as it was thought that the English had tails (how many people actually believed this, goodness knows).

Vie de Saint Denis, fol. 20, scanned from Egbert, On the Bridges of Medieval Paris

However, the idea of leisure in the Middle Ages does subvert several stereotypes.  Many of the popular images of the period, and even much historiography seems to assume a terribly serious, and certainly very brutal world, where few had the time or inclination for frivolity.  In the same way, it is often supposed that medieval people had no concrete notion of childhood (this was the argument of a famous book by Philippe Aries).  Much subsequent work has demonstrated that, on the contrary, medieval people had very variegated and affectionate ideas of childhood as a distinct life-phase.

I think this is important not just for its own sake, but because there are many today from whom childhood and leisure are effectively taken away.  Everyone is shocked by the idea of child labour (see here), but many continue to buy products of dubious origins.  Why do we all tolerate this?  I think it's mainly because it's convenient, but I think that there's also deep-down a kind of insidious sense that, in developing countries and different cultures, childhood and leisure just aren't so valued.  So my point is a very simple one - and one that one image of students swimming hardly proves (!) - that leisure and childhood are actually pretty universal.  They are ideas which humans as social beings all yearn for - and to which all should have a right.

Sorry for the long gap...  I've been away in Germany, some holiday and some research - I have a few thoughts waiting to be posted from the trip, and will put them up later this week.  In the meantime, I've written a post on law and anthropology for Oxford Scholarship Online today - do go and have a look.  Comments and discussion always welcome...