The Key to Learning by Lynne Benton

When I was at school I hated History.  For four long years in my teens I had an extremely boring History teacher, who made everything seem really dull.  My main memory of her lessons is of her writing on the blackboard lists of dates and Acts of Parliament and telling us to copy them and learn them.  I don’t remember her telling us anything interesting: about the people, how they lived, how they thought, or why the Acts of Parliament were important. And in those days there was no internet, and we had no television either, so although I enjoyed visiting castles and museums, these seemed to bear no relation to what I was supposed to be learning at school. I wasn't inspired.  I’m sure I wasn’t the best pupil, but Miss P. wasn’t the best teacher either.

Fast forward 25 years, when my daughter was the same age as I’d been then.  At the time there was a series on television called “Robin of Sherwood”, on which she and her friends were all hooked – especially the hero, Robin Hood, played by Michael Praed.  (Seen here with Judi Trott, who played Maid Marian)

 They all had posters of him on their bedroom walls and never missed an episode.  That term at school (an all-girls school) they had a new History teacher, Mr. Pritchard, and he began their first lesson by saying, “Right, girls, Robin of Sherwood!”  Instantly he had the entire class in the palm of his hand, and they lapped up everything he could teach them about life in mediaeval times.  This has sparked a lifelong interest in mediaeval history in my daughter at least, and maybe in others too.  History teaching had certainly improved since my day, so well done Mr Pritchard!

In fact I did come to love history later, after I’d given it up at school, when a friend recommended historical novels by the likes of Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton etc. 

     

     
I was soon hooked, and read all the ones I could find.  It was fascinating to learn about life in different periods in history, and importantly how the behaviour and beliefs of those who ruled the country affected ordinary people.  I was inspired to find out more about the eras I was reading about, and realised what I’d missed through such uninspired teaching.

This is why I love writing for children, especially writing historical novels.  I hope to make history exciting for children, so they will enjoy it more than I did.  Now I don’t have to learn lists of dates I love doing all the research required, to make sure I’ve got the facts right.  And when my first book was published ("Raiders!", about the Viking invasion of Britain) it filled me with great satisfaction to imagine how Miss P. would have scoffed at the idea of me writing a historical novel!

Christmas Past - Celia Rees

Christmas is a time of nostalgia, of looking back. It triggers memories of childhood, of the past, both recent and distant.  I was a child in the 1950s. It is odd to think that my own childhood is now history. 

I was talking to a friend recently about our shared passion for Rupert the Bear. Every year I would receive a Rupert Annual as part of my stocking (well, pillowcase to be accurate). It was just as much a stocking fixture as the tangerine wrapped in silver paper, the variety pack and the Compendium of Games with requisite number tiddlywinks and dice (last year's having become somewhat depleted). I loved Rupert and Christmas would not have been Christmas without him. It wasn't until I was much older that I thought about how very strange it was for a bear and his animal chums to be dressed in children's clothes from some undefined era and for them to wear shoes and have human hands (apart from Edward Trunk who has feet for hands and wears shoes - how did he tie his laces?). I knew that Rupert didn't live now, the clothes told me that much. He seemed to live in a lost rural idyll where it always snowed at Christmas and in the summer the beach was littered with star fish and there were dragons  and pagodas and all kinds of wonderful things, if you climbed high enough.

Rupert and his friends had the most exciting adventures and met the most exotic of creatures and I envied him. Even though I knew he wasn't real, part of me hoped he was and that, one day, I might meet elves and fairies and the beings that lived in his world. Rupert would now be regarded as fearfully unPC. There are golliwogs and natives with bones through their noses. What was unexceptional in a world that still clung to the remnants of Empire and unthinking assumptions of white superiority would be unacceptable now. Such things offer insights into time and place; insights into history.

As a child of the fifties, I was much freer to have adventures than children are now. I was talking to another friend (I told you that Christmas was a time for looking back) about the kinds of games we played and it was interesting to note how many were informed by history. I grew up in Warwickshire. We used to play out in the woods and fields, so we would play Robin Hood, Children of the New Forest, Ivanhoe, carrying home made swords and bows and arrows.  She lived by the sea, so her games involved playing pirates on old beached hulks and exploring caves and tunnels to discover evidence of smugglers. Reflecting on this, I realised how much my child's imagination was fired by history mediated through books, films and T.V.

I didn't write as a child. My creative imagination was developed and nurtured through playing games which could be very elaborate and go on for weeks, even months. I remember spending almost a year obsessed by Robin Hood. The games we played were porous. Robin Hood and his Merry Men could easily morph into Wyatt Earp or Jesse James but that didn't seem to matter. We didn't worry about strict factual accuracy. We were attracted to myth and romance. The West was just as much history as the Crusades. In an odd way they seemed to go together.

My lifelong interest in the past began with and was fostered by play and the child's imagination which, in turn, was fuelled by the stuff of a fifties childhood, including the rich mix of English Pastoral, folklore and fairytale that is Rupert.

The Historical Character I Just Don't Get: Richard Coeur-de-Lion

In this month of July, the History Girls have been celebrating their first year as joint Bloggers by writing about their favourite Historical Characters. Katherine Langrish has already praised Harold Godwinson. But we also have an occasional series of 'Characters I just don't get', and here is hers:


Picture it. The closing scene of ‘Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves’. Kevin Costner’s Robin, fetchingly garbed in outlaw chic, and Marion, robed in white with a harvest crown of wheat upon her head (to symbolise an ungreenwoodly but earth-goddess-like fertility, no doubt) are about to be joined in matrimony by Friar Tuck - when hoofbeats are heard, and from between the trees emerges a stately but familiar figure clothed in mail.

‘Richard!’ Marion cries, her face lighting up.

And lo, it’s Sean Connery as Richard Coeur-de-Lion - Richard the First - Richard of England! Here to add his benison to the union of the happy couple, reinstate Robin in his lands, and set right all the evils which have befallen Sherwood under the iron fist of Alan Rickman’s splendidly black-hearted Sheriff of Nottingham and - one presumes - the faulty and self-serving regency of Prince John.

Jack shall have Jill, nought shall go ill,
The man shall have his mare again and all shall be well.

This is the satisfactory denouement of pretty much every one of the Robin Hood films and most of the books, including Rosemary Sutcliff’s early work ‘The Chronicles of Robin Hood’ and Robin McKinley’s ‘The Outlaws of Sherwood’. Here’s Sutcliff’s Richard, casting off his disguise as an abbot:

As the long sable folds parted, the astonished outlaws beheld the golden leopards of England blazing on his scarlet surcoat. He thrust back the cowl from his head and stood before them - the king! For a second there was an utter silence. Then Robin dropped on one knee at the king’s feet.

Illustration by C. Walter Hodges of Rosemary Sutcliff's Chronicles of Robin Hood

Merrie Englande indeed! And it’s notable that these fictional King Richards all speak English, and can sympathise with outlaws and peasants in a quite incredible manner. It’s as if Coeur-de-lion has been melded with King Arthur so that Richard’s return to England is the mythical Return of the King - the True King, whose coming will bring peace and justice to the land. It taps into an almost religious longing.

In fact, until the 16th century the king of the Robin Hood tales, if named at all, wasn’t Richard at all but ‘Edward’, not specifying whether I, II or III. So Richard I owes his modern fame to a fictitious connection with legendary Robin Hood. But I doubt he would thank us for this image of a king who identified with the poor and oppressed - with Saxon or even Celtic peasantry against Norman overlords. To begin with, he was an aristocrat to the bone, with no empathy whatever for the lower estates. Next, he couldn’t even have talked with them. Like most of the Angevin nobility Richard spoke no English. His native tongue was French - both langue d’oïl and langue d’oc - in which languages he composed poems and songs.

Richard I by Matthew Paris

I know one shouldn’t judge historical personages by modern standards, though it’s hard not to, but even in the context of his times, Richard was by no means universally admired. The chronicler Giraud le Cambien tells how Richard loved to boast descent from a countess of Anjou who was in fact the fairy Melusine, so that therefore his family ‘came from the devil and would return to the devil’. And this is a pretty good clue to the quality of his family life. In 1170 his father King Henry II made the disastrous, Lear-like decision to divide his territories in England and France between his three eldest sons, Henry, Richard and Geoffrey, with the intention of remaining their over-lord. Aged 14, Richard set off with his tempestuous mother Queen Eleanor to become Duke of Aquitaine, and was soon busy supporting his elder brother Henry “The Young King” in a rebellion against their father. It didn’t work. Henry put down the revolt and made peace with his sons (blood is thicker than water), dispatching Richard back to Aquitaine to punish those very barons who had fought for him. Ever the pragmatist, Richard obeyed with gusto, razing their castles: it was during this campaign that he earned the soubriquet ‘the Lion-hearted’.

Fratricidal strife soon broke out again. Henry’s sons never stopped quarrelling with him and each other. Richard’s ultimate attempt to seize the throne from his father ended with Henry’s ghastly death from illness in Chinon, 1189. As his elder brother had already died, Richard became King of England, Duke of Normandy and Count of Anjou. He returned briefly to London for his coronation, but was already preparing to leave on the Third Crusade, having ‘taken the cross’ a couple of years previously as Count of Poitou. His only known remarks about England are: ‘cold and always raining’, and that he would have ‘sold London if I could find a buyer’ to raise money for the Crusade - for which purpose he emptied the Treasury.

Yet here he is. perpetuated in bronze, outside the Houses of Parliament!  I just don't get it! 

Setting off for the Holy Land (and bickering constantly with his rival crusader lords), Richard’s military skill and courage brought victory in a number of sieges, notably Messina in Sicily (which he captured and burned when the common people protested the presence of all these foreign troops - so that showed them, then!) and Limasol in Cyprus, where the island’s unspeakably cruel despot made the mistake of imprisoning Richard’s fiancée, Berengaria of Navarre and Castile, who’d been shipwrecked there. Having overthrown the despot and chained him in silver chains, Richard married Berengaria… but in case you are thinking ‘how romantic’, I should point out that the poor girl was only wrecked in the first place because, having been betrothed to Richard in Pamplona, he set off to the Holy Land without her and left her to catch up.

Richard then joined in the siege of Acre, which fell after holding out against the Crusaders for two years. Here, negotiating with Saladin over an exchange of prisoners, Richard lost his patience and had at least 2,700 of his Muslim prisoners decapitated. The mind boggles at the bloodshed. Defeating Saladin at the Battle of Jaffa and hearing news that - in true family style - his brother John was about to usurp his English throne, Richard hastily prepared to leave for England, but not before being implicated in the assassination of the ‘King of Jerusalem’ Conrad of Montferrat, whose pregnant wife was immediately married off to Richard’s nephew.

Of course, on his way home (once again leaving Berengaria to find her own way back) he was captured by the Austrian Duke Leopold, Conrad’s cousin, who accused Richard of arranging the murder and locked him up in the castle of Dürnstein. (Stories of how he was found by the minstrel Blondel, strumming Richard’s own lute-songs outside the castle walls, are later fabrications.) Richard was handed over to the Holy Roman Emperor who demanded a colossal ransom of 65,000 pounds of silver, raised by heavy taxation on the English people. On its payment, Philip of France sent Prince John the famous message ‘Look to yourself: the devil is loose,’ and Richard made a last visit to England to accept his brother’s submission and - a political necessity - confirm him as his heir. In all, he is not thought to have spent more than six months in England as King. He never came back to England and is buried at Fontevraut Abbey in France.

Could anyone be further from the magnanimous, understanding, compassionate King Richard Lionheart who turns up at the end of Robin Hood?

Yes, he could be generous - kings must, if they are not to be universally hated. But mainly he was arrogant and quarrelsome, a blue-blooded aristocrat who most certainly believed what he told the Emperor: ‘I am born of a rank which recognises no superior but God’, and who coined the motto ‘Dieu et mon Droit’ - ‘God and my Right’, still the motto of the British Royals to this day.

Perhaps the main reason why Richard is still so popular is that there are so many good stories about him (even if many are inventions).  He clearly had courage, style, good looks and charisma, and it’s an unfortunate human failing that we find it easy to forgive faults in such people. ‘I’d have sold London if I could have found anyone to buy it.’ We forgive it - even find it amusing - because it sounds outrageous and daring, just like Richard himself.

But you know what? Don’t be fooled. He meant it.

He really meant it.



Picture credits: Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, 1991: Sean Connery as Richard I
Richard of England by Matthew Paris, Wikimedia Commons 
Richard I - bronze statue - Wikimedia Commons
Richard I's tomb at Fontevraut, France Wikimedia Commons