Remembering The Battle of Bosworth by Catherine Hokin

The first of these Welsh kings was Henry who defeated all the other kings at the Battle of Boswell and took away all their roses. After the battle the crown was found hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill. This is memorable as being the only occasion on which the crown has been found after a battle hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill.

With thanks to 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman



As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That - probably still my favourite historical book of all time which may explain a lot - History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. One of the things many people are pretty certain they can remember is the Wars of the Roses, which ended (or didn't but we'll get to that) 533 years ago today on the 22nd August 1485 with the Battle of Bosworth. History buffs or not, ask a sample of your friends about this time period and I guarantee they'll all have some sense of it. Whether it's the lost princes in the Tower, the ill-fittingly romantic name, Richard and his hunch-back, or his car-park discovery, the Wars of the Roses and its characters still resonate. They also inspire great passion. My father was a member of the Ricardian Society and a war-gamer whose sand-table battles (ask your parents) re-enacted every twist of that August day. As I said many times when my novel about Margaret of Anjou came out, he was so obsessed with the conflict that, as a child, I was fairly certain that it was still going on. And who can forget the Channel 4 documentary after the discovery of Richard III's body and Philippa Langley's face when she looked at that re-created head.

 Bosworth Memorial

Perhaps one of the reasons the Battle of Bosworth still attracts such attention (apart from the fact that a king died) is that it still courts controversy. We have no eye-witness accounts - all our knowledge of the day's events is derived from documents written after the fact and under a regime with a need to remember history in its own particular way if it was going to have any kind of a future. Some sources in fact come even later - for example there was no real attempt to analyse the use, type and position of troops  for nearly another 200 years. The site itself has long been a matter of dispute - the stone marking the spot of Richard's death is at Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. In 2010, after a major archaeological project, the actual site of the battle was announced as being 3km away from the memorial. Part of the evidence which relocated the battle site were 22 pieces of lead shot, ranging from gunshot to grapefruit-sized canonballs. Not only did this discovery change the location, it also dispelled a myth that the armies fought each other with bows and arrows rather than firepower.

 Stanley Coat of Arms

Controversies over the site are one thing but the issue of treachery - and that of Lord Stanley in particular - is quite another blood-boiler. Listen to my father and William Stanley made Attila the Hun sound like Winnie the Pooh. The version he subscribes to has the hitherto loyal Stanley turning his coat at the last minute, swooping his troops down the hill behind Richard in a shock move that ensured the king was butchered. That Stanley declared for Henry at the last minute is as certain as anything in this battle can be but the idea of the attack having no deeper roots than a self-serving decision on the day as been re-examined by historians such as David Hipshon. He cites Stanley's failure to support Richard not as a sudden change in loyalty but as coming out of a 20 year power-struggle in Lancashire; a personal score being settled in a bigger political arena. And I can already hear the cry - "tomaytoes/tomatoes: it's still treachery!"

Reconstructed head of Richard III

The site, the type of weapons used, who turned coat and who didn't: it all disappears into the mist when we get to what happened to Richard himself. Oh the ire it used to raise. The stories of his removal from the battlefield are told in a number of the chronicles which later reported the battle. According to Vergil, the body was ‘nakyd of all clothing, and layd uppon an horse bake with the armes and legges hanginge downe on both sides’, a scene the Crowland Chronicle described as a ‘miserable spectacle in good sooth’. His body was then taken back to Leicester, his head supposedly hitting the stones of Bow Bridge as it was carried across. Most accounts agree that the body was put on public display for two days at Greyfriars church. Some then have the corpse interred in a plain unmarked tomb inside the church, others talk about an alabaster tomb, with an effigy of Richard on top, being erected at a later date on the orders of Henry VII. If that ever existed it was lost, as was the King with the most commonly believed story having him tipped unceremoniously into the River Soar.

 Leicester Council Sign

Except, of course, he wasn't. In 2012, an archaeological excavation discovered a battle-damaged skeleton in a Leicester City Council car park, believed to be the site once occupied by Greyfriars Priory Church. The body showed that the skeleton had 10 wounds, eight of them to the head, inflicted in battle and suggesting the soldier had lost his helmet. A blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. In 2013 DNA testing identified ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the remains as those of Richard. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of Richard’s eldest sister, Anne of York. So we had Richard but we didn't have an end to the arguing with both York and Leicester campaigning to host his remains - a battle Leicester's tourism department won.

Was 1485 the end of the Wars of the Roses? Not for Henry VII who lived under the shadow of pretenders and resurrected dead princes throughout his reign and probably never sat that comfortably on his throne. And, beyond a categorisation date of the here ends/here starts type, not for historians who still have so much of the battle left to pick over. And don't forget there's another controversy to come: the lost princes, one of history's ultimate cold cases. There's bones, they've never been tested and Philippa Langley is on the case...

It Ain't Necessarily So - by Katherine Langrish

While Government education ministers moan about the history curriculum in English schools, I shake my head.  There is no way, no way at all, to fit the whole of British history into two or three lessons a week over the course of a few brief school years, so obviously stuff has to be left out, and the question: what? is highly political.

In my own youth it used to be the case that ‘school history’ ignored the Roman conquest, skipped the Dark Ages and the early English kings, even Alfred, and began with the Norman conquest in 1066. This was presented as ‘the last time a foreign army ever conquered England’ but also as the event which created ‘the language of Shakespeare’ and therefore, as Messrs. Sellar and Yeatman would say, A Good Thing.

Our history lessons then hopped several centuries to the Wars of the Roses in the late 1400’s, dwelt adoringly on the Tudors (especially Elizabeth the First, and the failure of the Spanish Armada: another Good Thing); did a little swift footwork over the Stuarts and the Civil War (leaving us with the impression that the Stuarts were a bit flaky but after all they were really only Scottish/French, weren’t they, and practically foreigners?), hurdled the next couple of centuries (we knew nothing of Queen Anne, for instance) to arrive breathless and panting at the Napoleonic Wars (Waterloo, Trafalgar: Britain in her habitual role of Holding the Tyrant at Bay). 

After this, apparently nothing of much note occurred before the Industrial Revolution (a Good Thing because it made Britain Richest Nation and Top World Power): the downside of which in terms of human suffering was redeemed by heroic reformers like Fry, Wilberforce and Shaftesbury (English People with Moral Principles who Improved Lives). Our history lessons finally drew to a close in the mud of Flanders: the First World War was too close and terrible to be airbrushed in any way; my generation all had granddads who had survived it or died in it. And the Second World War wasn’t history at all, but something which belonged to your mother’s childhood, and she could tell you stories about it – dashing down to the air raid shelter with the cat – shivering to the explosion of the bomb that missed – listening to Churchill on the radio.

And so, albeit with several lacunae, schoolchildren of my era did get a general sense of the progression of British history – a sense of the order into which the different portions fell.

This is useful.  But it is not the only important, nor even the most important thing. For every version of history written by the victors, a different version is remembered by the victims; and when – as often happens – victors and victims switch places, their historical narratives switcharoo, till a single set of historical events may yield two opposing storylines that snake across each other’s paths like sine and cosine waves, intersecting at a few bare points of reference.

Henry VIII

Hence the Catholic view of the English Reformation goes like this: Because monstrous Henry VIII wanted to divorce his wife he broke with Rome, dissolved the monasteries, turned nuns and monks into beggars and led England away from the true path.  Queen Mary I briefly restored the Catholic faith, till England reverted to Protestantism under Elizabeth I. The Catholic persecution was renewed and continued for centuries (not until this year, 2013, was the constitution amended to allow the monarch to marry a Catholic). Over 300 English Catholics were martyred (hanged, drawn and quartered) between 1534 to 1680.

But the Protestant view of the Reformation goes this way: Henry VIII merely hurried the English Reformation along: it was inevitable, ever since Martin Luther and the unforgettably named Diet of Worms.  It’s a bit embarrassing Henry was such a monster, but the Reformation was still a good thing.  Of course you shouldn’t be encouraged to pay money to the Church to buy God’s forgiveness!  Of course people should have access to the Bible in English!  Under Bloody Mary (Queen Mary I) over 300 English Protestants were martyred (burned at the stake) between 1554 and 1558. And what about Catholic plots against Elizabeth I?

I was brought up on the Protestant narrative, the Official Version in state education and in my own home.  I went to a perfectly ordinary rural grammar school where there were few Catholics, fewer Jews, and absolutely no Muslims.  I was therefore astonished at age eighteen, in the course of a conversation with a new friend who happened to be a Roman Catholic nun, when she quietly remarked, “The Reformation was the worst thing that ever happened to England.”

I was utterly taken aback. Not once in my life had it occurred to me that anyone might question the view expressed in every history book (fictional or non-fictional) I’d ever read, that the Reformation was not only A Good Thing, but A Very Good Thing. It paved the way for Elizabeth the First, didn’t it – Gloriana herself?  And dim recollections of simony and the selling of indulgences, mixed up with memories of carousing friars and false prelates from stories about Robin Hood, had led me to take for granted that the late medieval Catholic Church had been sadly lacking in moral fibre.

Many years on, I still wouldn’t actually agree that the Reformation was the worst thing ever to happen to England, but my views on it are more nuanced, and at least I know it’s possible to have the argument.  Much more important, however, was my belated realisation that what you read in a history book ain’t necessarily so.

Robert Bellah, in his interesting book  "Religion in Human Evolution" (Harvard 2011) writes:

Families, nations, religions (but also corporations, universities, departments of sociology) know who they are by the stories they tell. The modern discipline of history is closely related to the emergence of the nation-state. Families and religions have seldom been concerned with 'scientific accuracy' in the stories they tell. Modern nations have required national histories that will be, in a claimed objective sense, true. ...But the narrative shape of national history is not more scientific (or less mythical) than the narrative shape of other identity tellings, something that it does not take debunkers to notice. Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities recounts both the widespread establishment of chairs of history within a generation of the French Revolution and its unleashing of nationalist fervour, and of the strange mix of memory and forgetting that that history produced (not so strange to those familiar with other forms of self-telling). [My italics]

Ignatius Sancho

The narrative of British history taught to me in school was concerned with aggrandisement of Britain as a nation and the British as a race - with a fairly narrow definition of race. It's good to feel good about yourself, but not if it encourages blindness, ignorance and prejudice about your neighbours, local and international. For example, there have been black inhabitants of these islands since at least Roman times, but we were never told anything about that in my schooldays. They were invisible. Including them in the history curriculum was a step not merely towards a new and better national narrative, but also towards a more accurate one. It's got to make it harder to view black British people as foreigners, newcomers and interlopers if you've been taught about black Elizabethans like the trumpet player John Blanke, black Georgians and Victorians like the writer Ignatius Sancho and the composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor, black First World War soldiers... No wonder there was an outcry when Michael Gove tried to remove Mary Seacole from our children's history lessons.

In my daughters’ time in school, during the last decade, I’ve been pleased that the history they have learned was very differently taught from the rather odd mixture of rote learning and essays which constituted my history lessons (the battle plans and dates of Napoleon's campaigns have long faded from my memory: but I enjoyed writing short imaginative essays about how it might feel to be sent down a mine at age seven.)  They've been constantly asked to pay attention to the sources. They’ve been shown the difference between primary and secondary sources and asked to evaluate the trustworthiness of each.  They’ve been taught to think carefully, not just about what was said to have happened, but also about who was saying it, and why, and whether this person might be in any way biased.  Suppose Henry VIII had written a personal account of his break from Rome. It would be an important primary source: but you wouldn’t take it at face value, would you?  

Rote learning of facts and dates is far less important than the skills my daughters learned in history, skills which will serve them well in life.  Especially in an age when you can look up facts and dates on the internet (which may not be accurate), it’s good to think for yourself.  It’s good to have an enquiring mind.  It’s good to retain a healthy suspicion of people with axes to grind. Above all, it’s good to know that you shouldn’t believe everything you read.  Just because it’s in a book – or available online – doesn’t make it true.

Who wrote that book or that blog?  And for what purpose?  Is the author telling the truth?

It ain’t necessarily so.

Credits:

Cover illustration by John Reynolds of '1066 And All That' by Sellar and Yeatman - published by Methuen http://www.methuen.co.uk/1066-and-all-that/b/3

Henry VIII, in the Royal Collection:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1491_Henry_VIII.jpg

Ignatius Sancho: portrait by Thomas Gainsborough:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IgnatiusSancho.jpg

: 'It Ain't Necessarily So' from George Gershwin's 'Porgy and Bess', Trevor Nunn, 2006 (Youtube)

OLIVER CROMWELL...a historical character I can't warm to. By Adèle Geras

It's not his fault, it's mine. It all began when I was very young indeed and my history education came from the wonderful '1066 and all that," In this version of our island story, the Roundheads were 'right but repulsive' and the Cavaliers were 'wrong but romantic' and I knew which ones I preferred, just from the way they dressed. I've always had a soft spot for snazzy dressers (see my previous post about Marie Antoinette) and Oliver Cromwell didn't stand a chance judged by such frivolous standards.

It's extraordinary how many historical periods one can simply miss out altogether, even with a very good history teacher (Miss Butcher, or DWU about whom I've written on this blog). Unless you're studying history for A level, vast tracts of time just don't get looked at, and you have to pick up what you can from books, other people, representations on television, movies etc.

So what, without recourse to Wikipedia or any scholarly tome, but just from my general knowledge, so to speak, do I know about Oliver Cromwell? He had warts. He told a painter to paint him 'warts and all' and that phrase has entered the language. He signed Charles I's death warrant. He sat in various parliaments as an MP for Huntingdon and later for Cambridge. He did a lot to make Parliament into what it is today. He put down rebellions in Ireland with spectacular cruelty. He persecuted Catholics. There was something about his head...

From looking at Wikipedia, I discover that he lived briefly in Ely and his house is now the Tourist Information office.

He is descended from Thomas Cromwell;s family through Thomas's sister, Katherine. Some years after his death and burial in Westminster Abbey,after his state funeral, there was a king on the throne of England again and he was disinterred and his body beheaded and treated appallingly and his remains now reside in Sydney Sussex College in Cambridge. There seems to be online controversy about his head, ..... There are, surprisingly,lots of representations of him in popular culture. He's depicted in a Howard Brenton play by Douglas Henshall. Dominic West played him in a series called The Devil's Whore on television. Antonia Fraser has written a book about him. I feel I ought to be more interested and engaged but somehow I am not. Of his distant relative, Thomas Cromwell, I can never read enough, but Oliver still remains for me, a closed book. If Hilary Mantel ever wrote about him, I might change my mind but for now, here he is, warts and all and not my favourite historical character by a mile.

The Historical Character I Love Best - by Katherine Langrish

Harold Godwinson, Bayeux Tapestry

Or perhaps it’s fairer to say, since he’s not an obviously lovable character, that Harold Godwinson – King Harold II of England – is the historical character who most intrigues me. Everyone knows the date of the Battle of Hastings, the last time England was successfully invaded: as Sellars and Yeatman point out in their classic comic history, ‘1066 and All That’, it’s one of the only two Memorable Dates in English history (the other being 55BC when Julius Caesar first arrived here): and thanks to the Bayeux Tapestry, everyone knows that Harold died at that battle after being shot in the eye by an arrow. (There’s been a lot of argument about this, but it looks to be substantially true.)

The Anglo-Saxon throne was not inherited, neither was it in the gift of the reigning monarch. When a king died, his council, including earls, thegns and clergy, would assemble to choose a successor. This was a sensible practice which meant a reigning king would always be a capable adult – and also helped limit his power.

When King Edward the Confessor died in early January 1066, the council’s choice fell, predictably, upon Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex. The Godwins were an ambitious and powerful family who had established control over much of England, and Harold and his brother Tostig, Earl of Northumbria, had been in joint charge of the English armies fighting the Welsh princes. In 1065 the brothers fell out, fatefully, when Tostig doubled the taxes on his Northumbrian thegns and they revolted. Harold refused to support his brother and replaced him with Earl Morcar, brother of Edwin of Mercia. Tostig was banished and took refuge with the Norwegian King Harald Hardrada (‘the Hard Ruler’). Shortly afterwards Edward the Confessor died, and Harold was crowned King on the same day as the Edward's burial in Westminster Abbey.

The 'oath' scene, Bayeux tapestry

But Edward, though he had no right to do so, had on one previous occasion somehow vaguely promised the throne to William of Normandy.  And in 1064 Harold himself had been shipwrecked in the Normandy coast, taken hostage by William, and had – according to Norman sources – sworn an oath on sacred relics to support William’s claim to the English throne.


William therefore prepared to invade, and Harold mustered his troops on the Isle of Wight, but the winds were unfavourable for seven months, and William’s invasion fleet of 700 ships stayed in port. On the 8th September 1066, Harald disbanded his own army, which was running short of food, and returned to London. On the very same day, Harald Hardada of Norway and Harold’s own brother Tostig invaded England from the north, landing his fleet of longships at Tynemouth.

From now on, things moved fast. The earls Edwin of Mercia and Morcar of Northumbria marched to meet Hardrada and Tostig, only to be defeated at the Battle of Fulford on 20th September. Meanwhile, news of the invasion reached London. Harold Godwinson acted with lighting speed. He collected an army, and marched them north, over 200 miles in only four days, arriving at Stamford Bridge near York on the 25th of September.

The Norse ‘Saga of Harald Hardrada’ has a long description of this battle. The Norwegians were not expecting to meet the King’s troops: they were expecting to be able to march unopposed into York.

“There was very good weather and the sun was hot. The men left their brynies [mailshirts] behind and went up with their shields, helmets and spears, and with swords girded; many had bows and arrows also, and they were very merry. But when they came near the town, a great army rode out against them; they saw the smoke from the horses, and fair shields, and white brynies. The king [Harald Hardrada] called Tosti the jarl [Earl Tostig] to him and asked what army that might be.”

Knight carrying raven pennon, Bayeux Tapestry

It was soon obvious. Harald Hardrada then set up his dreaded raven banner, the Land-Waster (said to bring victory to those who followed it but death to him who carried it, in this case a man called Fridrik) and prepared for battle. First, however, ‘twenty riders rode forth’ from the English lines with a message from King Harold Godwinson, offering Tostig his earldom back if he would change sides. Tostig asked what his brother would offer to Harald Hardrada, and was given the famous reply, “Seven feet of ground – as he’s taller than other men.” Tostig refused to betray Hardrada, and as the messengers rode back, Hardrada asked, “Who was that well-spoken man?” Tostig replied, “That was King Harald Godwinson.”

The story is sometimes doubted, but it’s the sort of thing that might well have happened in those days of personalised warfare: and a direct plea from brother to brother seems not unlikely to me. And the quip is the sort of dark humour which was highly appreciated by all sides. Tostig and Hardrada seem to have known there was little hope. The saga says that Hardrada made this verse:

Forth we go / In our lines
Without our brynies / Against blue edges
The helmets shine / I have no brynie
Our shrouds now lie / Down on those ships.

And so it proved. King Harold Godwinson won a decisive victory and both Tostig and Hardrada were killed, along with great numbers from both sides; the chronicler Ordericus Vitalis, writing some time around 1130, remarks that it’s easy to spot the site of the battlefield because ‘great heaps of bones of the slain lie there to this day’. But only two days later, William of Normandy landed 7000 men on the English coast at Pevensey, and Harold again had to force-march his victorious but surely exhausted army 240 miles south to face this new threat. On the 14th October, only 19 days after the Battle of Stamford Bridge, William and Harold’s armies met at Hastings, where, after nine hours of hard fighting, Harold was killed.

Death of Harold, Bayeux tapestry

Harold’s defeat poses one of the biggest ‘what-ifs’ in history. The Norman Conquest changed England for ever. The entire political structure was demolished and rebuilt, castles sprang up everywhere, the native population was repressed for over two centuries, and – not least – an enormous amount of French words entered the English language, which shed most of its inflections and evolved into the flexible language of Shakespeare, dependent on word order, rich in synonyms and near-synonyms, and with such bizarrely non-phonetic spelling that it should be an obvious lost cause to try to teach children to read by phonetics alone.

If Harold had won at Hastings – and he nearly did – all this might never have happened. We could still be speaking something akin to Danish or German. Our monarchs might be bicycle-riding populists, elected, possibly, by the people.

Harold was clearly a highly intelligent man and an excellent soldier and strategist. His grasp of politics was pragmatic rather than clannish: he averted a civil war by refusing to support his brother Tostig over the Northumbria rebellion; it was the right thing to do. Sadly for Harald, it was also ultimately the wrong thing, because dealing with his brother and the Norwegians placed him almost 250 miles away when William’s ships first beached on the English south coast.

History is written by the victors. The Anglo-French Orderic Vitalis wrote of Harold:

“This Englishman was very tall and handsome, remarkable for his physical strength, his courage and eloquence, his ready jests and valour. But what were these gifts to him without honour, which is the root of all good?”

But his epitaph may be better found in the Norse history, which quotes this verse attributed to one Thorkel Skallason of the English army:

True is it that man-slaying in England
Will be a long time ending.
Doughty and swift was my lord.
Braver prince does not live.

IN PRAISE OF ALL THAT by H.M. Castor

History is a serious business. The number of woman-hours that the History Girls, as a group, spend on meticulous research into their different chosen time-periods, the hours spent searching for the right detail, combing through drafts to spot anachronisms, reading around and behind, above, below and every-which-way through a subject in order to get a feel for it must be prodigious. Certainly, a good number of posts on this blog have been concerned with research. Research – fascinating, absorbing and so often surprising – is, after all, one of the great joys of writing historical fiction.

However, along with the delight comes, often, a large dollop of worry (have I got it right?). And so, as something of an antidote, I wanted to write today about history books that joyously fling such concerns out of the window. I wanted to write in praise of silliness about history.

My favourite silly book about history has to be 1066 And All That by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman. First published in book form in 1930 (having previously appeared in Punch magazine), it bears the marvellous subtitle:

A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates

It’s a parody of the style in which history was taught in schools at that time, in particular of the popular history book Our Island Story by H.E. Marshall (1905). I was going to say I hope that, despite this, it can still be appreciated now but, rummaging around on the internet, I find that Our Island Story was reprinted in 2005 with the aim of sending a copy to every UK primary school (did that happen, does anyone know?), and was named by David Cameron as his favourite childhood book… In that case, 1066 And All That must surely be finding a whole new generation of fans.

(And by the way, for anyone who doesn’t know the book, it does not criticize this kind of history teaching – just makes it wonderfully hilarious.)

The premise of the book, stated in the

COMPULSORY PREFACE (This Means You)

is as follows:

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember.

This, of course, is a great comfort to all children/students faced with the terror (as I so often was) of history exams. More comfort is to be found in the delectable sprinkling of Test Papers throughout the book…

7. King John had no redeeming features. (Illustrate.)

…

10. How would you dispose of:

(a) A Papal Bull?

(b) Your nephews?

(c) Your mother? (Be brutal.)

…which often come with additional bits of advice:

N.B. – Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.

Cheering only that which is Memorable, 1066’s confusions, of course, become eminently Memorable themselves. I am for evermore unable to read anything about Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck (pretenders to the throne during Henry VII’s reign) without thinking of them as Lamkin and Warmneck, as they are called (amongst other variations) in the book. Any mention of the opposing sides in the English Civil War (about which I know pitifully little) causes a popping-into-my-head of the surely indisputable assertion that the Cavaliers were ‘Wrong but Wromantic’, while the Roundheads were ‘Right and Repulsive’. Meanwhile, let me only approach 1689 ever so vaguely and I remember instantly that there existed a curious monarch named Williamanmary (who was, of course, an Orange).

There is even something serious to be said for the silliness. The concept that history is explained in terms of what is and is not a Good Thing, as in

The Roman Conquest was, however, a Good Thing, since the Britons were only natives at that time.

is one that is it always important to remember (i.e. what is the prejudice – personal or cultural – of the writer whose book/essay/film/documentary I am reading or watching?).

Also, the idea – which is a running joke in the book – that countries vie to be ‘Top Nation’ is eminently relevant: chillingly so in 1930, but also of course throughout the Cold War and no less so, I fear, today.

But I am not writing about seriousness. So let me leave 1066 And All That and show you, instead, this:

It is the notice at the front of Caryl Brahms and S.J. Simon’s No Bed for Bacon (first published 1941), and I cannot tell you how delicious I find it.

In a sense, it is nonsense. The book is packed with jokes and references which reveal the authors’ detailed knowledge of the life and plays of Shakespeare, and of Elizabethan England in general. But it is also, as Ernest Brennecke wrote (with approval) in a review in the Shakespeare Quarterly, “irresponsible, irreverent, impudent, anachronistic, [and] undocumented.” Bravo!

What is the story about? Here is Ned Sherrin’s summary in the introduction to the 1986 edition:

No Bed for Bacon, if it has a theme, imagines that Sir Francis Bacon wishes to acquire a bed that Queen Elizabeth has slept on to leave to his children’s children’s children as a gilt-edged investment. Lady Viola Compton, a young girl from the Queen’s Court, visits the theatre and is so infatuated by Shakespeare and his plays that she disguises herself as a boy player and inspires Twelfth Night and the playwright’s affection.

The story also features Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Francis Walsingham, Lord Burghley, Ben Jonson and Richard Burbage (among others), features every Elizabethan cliché you could want (potatoes, puddles and cloaks, plus the Armada) and is both unflaggingly energetic and gleefully silly.

One of the running jokes is that Shakespeare obsessively dithers over which spelling of his signature he prefers.

Another of the running jokes will ring bells with all Shakespeare scholars:

“Very well then,” [Bacon] said. “There is only one thing for me to do. I will take my suggestions to the Master of the Revels and you will be made to use them.”

Shakespeare sprang to his feet.

“Master Bacon,” he demanded passionately, “do I write my plays or do you?”

Bacon looked at him. He shrugged.

The book was written, astonishingly, in London at the time of the Blitz. I say astonishingly, because Brahms & Simon were both air-raid wardens, had a very tight publisher’s deadline and – due to the demands of their warden duties – sometimes only managed to meet for as little as an hour a day.

(But if, as a deadline-harassed writer, this achievement depresses you, let me lighten things by mentioning that they didn’t find it easy. In her diary, mid-way through the project, Brahms wrote: ‘Why did we ever start it? Why did we ever suppose we were the people to do it? Why didn’t our agent stop us?’ A feeling that I’d wager most writers have experienced, erm, once or twice.)

I could go on... There is the perennially delightful schoolboy Nigel Molesworth, of course, from the 1950s - the inspired creation of Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle - who gives us his view of History in Down With Skool! ('History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse') and writes, surely, the most entertaining essays one could want (Molesworth 2, by the way, is Nigel's little brother):

Meanwhile they discovered books and lots of people learned to read. This is nothing to boste about aktually as even molesworth 2 can read, but they thort it was wonderful and it all led to skools chiz chiz chiz.

It also led to KNOLEDGE.

A Serf: We are not hapy in our lot.

An Aprentice: Nor in our lot either.

This meant the Rise of the People and the People hav gone on rising ever since like yeast...

... but, in searching for a finale for this appreciation of all things historical and silly, I just want to bring things up to date. Due to the fact that I have two young children, I am more familiar than I might like with children’s TV. Reliable pleasure, however, is to be found in watching the award-winning Horrible Histories series. To those who don’t know it, I address a plea: do take a few minutes to watch the following two songs, which are (I think) wonderful. And, of course, very very silly.

First, a spoof boy band called ‘The 4 Georges’ sings ‘Born 2 Rule’ here.

And second, a Viking song called ‘Literally’ here.

H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII - is published by Templar in the UK, and by Penguin in Australia.

H.M. Castor's website is here.