One in the Eye for Harold E-Book

Phil Mason

• Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 400

Beschreibung

The problem with history is that much of what you learn in school simply isn't true! For instance, King Harold was NOT shot in the eye with an arrow at the Battle of Hastings, Neanderthals were not as dumb as you'd think, Britain had an Indian curry restaurant years before it had fish-and-chip shops and the American 'Wild West' really wasn't that wild. In many ways the history we casually accept as truth is full of mistakes. One in the Eye for Harold is a riotous romp through the centuries with revelations about the untruth of large swathes of history. It shows us how fictions have coloured our views of religion, politics, war and society - and shows us how some of our most solidly held beliefs are entirely false. In One in the Eye for Harold Phil Mason - author of Napoleon's Haemorrhoids - catalogues how myth and error have shaped our view of the past, and how the history our teachers handed down is often far from the mark. It is full of remarkable insights that entertain gloriously as they challenge the conventional view of history.

Leseprobe

One in the Eye for Harold

Why everything you thought you knew about history is wrong

Phil Mason

Contents

Title Page

Introduction

1.What Every Schoolchild KnowsNeanderthals – Philistines – Vikings – The English – The Irish – The Scots – The French – Our Ancestors – Hastings – The Forgotten Battle of Hastings – Magna Carta – The Black Death – Columbus and the flat Earth – New England Puritans – Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot – The Victoria Cross – Hadrian’s Wall – Lady Godiva – Henry VIII: Defender of the Faith – Britain’s first passenger railway

2.Gospel TruthNativity – Crucifixion – Exodus – Ten Plagues – Jericho – Herod – Judas – Jesus – Adam and Eve – Manna from Heaven – Noah’s Ark – Divorce – Commandments – Satan – ‘Biblical’ wisdom – St Peter and the Papacy

3.Political SpinsGreek origins of democracy – The Greek legacy: Plato’s Republic – American War of Independence – Myths of the American Foundation Story – George Washington – French Revolution – Russian Revolution – Nazi Germany – Cuban Missile Crisis

4.Battling for TruthCrusades – English Civil War – The first ‘First World War’ – Culloden – Charge of the Light Brigade – American Civil War – First World War: Myth of the ‘Lost Generation’ – Armistice –Myths of the Second World War – The Blitz – D-Day Deception – Enigma – Trial of Lord Haw Haw – Trial of Mata Hari – Falklands mythology – Planning for Nuclear War

5.Creative ShocksThe myth of the Renaissance – The ancient Greeks: inventions before their time – Mis-credited modern discoveries: Diesel engine, vaccination, circulation of the blood, steam engine, movable type printing, Morse code and telegraph – Artistic achievements with an unexpected twist: Michelangelo’s finger of God – The Seven Wonders of the World – Shakespeare

6.We Remember It Well (?)The ‘fall’ of the Roman Empire – British origins of Jewish persecution – Myths of the Industrial Revolution – Myths of the British Empire – The mythical Victorians – The Roaring Twenties – The Great Depression – Roosevelt’s New Deal – The Fifties – The Eleven Plus – Drugs

7.Popular DeceptionsChristmas myths – The true origins of St Valentine’s – The real reason why the Thames no longer freezes – Scottish ‘traditions’ – The placid ‘Wild West’ – Mrs Beeton – The little known history of HMS Victory – Titanic myths – Unexpected origins – They never said it

Also by Phil Mason

Copyright

Introduction

The problem with understanding the past is not what we don’t know; it’s what we ‘know’ that isn’t actually so.

Most of us don’t think about it, but we live our daily lives through our past. The past shapes the environment that we, the current edition of humanity, temporarily occupy. It does so through historic buildings, statues of great heroes, places sanctified with historical significance. The past is all around us. It frames our view wherever we look. But the past also colours the way we think about ourselves, about our fellow countryfolk, and about other countries’ folk. The past gives structure to our minds.

How often do we find society collectively defining the ‘us’ living in the here and now in terms of a commonly held stereotype of the past? We self-satisfyingly declare how progressive we are, being more liberated than those prudish Victorians. We express secret and silent gratitude at not having been born at the time of the First World War, and not to have been one of that ‘lost generation’ who evaporated in the mud of Flanders before they could fulfil themselves. We piously please ourselves that we today do not need to gain our wealth by the callous exploitation that our predecessors resorted to when they created the British Empire.

But what if all these perceptions of the past are wrong? How secure would we feel about ourselves if much of what we have been led to believe about our past is actually not true?

Each of the above views of the past is wrong.

And there are more. Lots more. In fact, swathes of commonly held views of our past turn out to be wrong.

What you are about to read will turn the foundations of the history you know upside down.

One in the Eye for Harold shows just how much of the history that generations have absorbed from their history books, teachers and the power of collective belief, is actually wrong. Some of the most familiar tales that we have grown up with from childhood are in fact myths.

So for starters: the Victorians were not, in fact, prudes (nor, for that matter, were they unduly pious, or crime-ridden, attributes they are also often saddled with). The First World War did not create a ‘lost generation’ in Britain – in fact 86 per cent of military-aged men returned (and most soldiers were at the front for only four days in every month: their strongest memories were of boredom, not fighting). And the Empire, long pilloried for being a mercenary operation of grand plunder, did not, in fact, generate as much wealth and prosperity for Britain as the modern, politically correct, guilt trip makes out (indeed, one line of argument suggests it may even have hindered Britain’s development).

Many of the long-cherished building blocks of our culture, encoded into our core beliefs from our schooldays, turn out to be false:

Harold was not shot in the eye by an arrow at the Battle of Hastings.Our traditional view of the origins of the British – Angles, Saxons and Jutes invading from Europe and pushing the ancient Britons to the hills to become Scots and Welsh – is now shown by DNA evidence to be wrong. We all turn out to be from the same genetic stock. The Great Depression of the 1930s was not a period of overall economic decline as commonly presented: living standards in Britain actually rose.The much-touted Normandy invasion deception scheme did not trick the Germans into thinking the Allies would land somewhere else on D-Day.Magna Carta is not the great bedrock of Britain’s political rights we assume it to be. The vast majority of the sixty-two clauses actually dealt with barons settling individual scores with the King, not setting a grand new political order.

Some mistakes in the reading of history come from ignorance (the story of the arrow in the eye turns out to be more a coded message to contemporaries than a recording of historical fact for posterity).

Sometimes the falsity comes from folklore stories passing down from the mists of time which only modern methods can unpick (only through DNA sampling have the true origins of the British races emerged).

Others derive from perspectives formed in the moment becoming fixed and simply too ‘sticky’ to shift even when later evidence suggests an alternative picture (the image of the 1930s as poverty-wracked is iconic, conveniently straightforward and easy to understand).

Some myths become part of the national memory for more questionable reasons, because they make us feel proud, clever or superior, especially in times of stress (the D-Day legend of tricking the Germans is one of the core success stories of the Second World War) or because there is a deep-down collective desire to believe that the myth is true because doing so serves a valuable function in the present (Magna Carta lies at the heart of the British consciousness of the longevity of its legal and constitutional traditions, and thus reinforces a public belief in the depth and solidity of the nation’s values.)

One of the best examples of how mythologising about the past helps the present is the American foundation story. The commonly accepted view of the rebellion of the American colonies from Britain in the 1770s is that the Americans wanted to form their own new nation. That belief creates a shared story that binds the Americans together even today. But it is wrong.

The American War of Independence is now cherished in US folklore as the story of a concerted struggle of oppressed colonials to form their own union. But it was not, in fact, fought with the intention of creating a new unified country. The War was neither a mass popular uprising – only a third at most wanted independence – nor was the preconceived aim to form a united state. A portion of the colonials may have wanted to throw out British rule, but that did not mean they necessarily wanted to join together in a new combined community which we casually assume today was the motivation, and which any modern American would have us believe, because they sincerely believe it too. The journey from the Thirteen Colonies to the United States of America was a rocky, tortured one, and took a generation.

To hear it told today, one would believe it was a tale of a people acting in unison with a clear vision of the objective and achieving their goal with arrow-straight application of purpose. The truth lies far from that, but it is how history tends to remember it, and it remains a powerful narrative that helps hold a heterogeneous collection of people together. The story of the formation of the USA is far from this simple one we have all come to believe, and which American patriotic theology drums into its citizens.

Neither was the other great event in American history – the Civil War – as clear cut as popularly assumed. Surely, it was a war to end slavery? Not so. Abraham Lincoln, revered by history as the friend of the slave, the Great Emancipator, actually never freed the slaves despite his Proclamation which purported to do just that. Nor was Lincoln primarily concerned about slavery. Of greater importance was the Union. The Civil War was fought to preserve the Union, not eradicate slavery. If the battle against slavery got in the way, Lincoln would sacrifice it, and he did.

Sometimes, it seems, we just want to believe a viewpoint even though the facts tell a different story, so we tend to bury the inconvenient facts. The American Civil War is a good example of how one interpretation – some would argue a higher and more moral explanation of the war – has triumphed over the other, rather more practical motivation.

Another is one of the most colourful ‘facts’ about the most colourful British politician of the 20th century – that Winston Churchill was one sixteenth Iroquois Indian.1 The story has persevered over the years and has been trotted out in popular histories, even thought the facts were well known a long time ago.

The lineage was said to come through his American mother, Jennie Jerome, whose great-great-grandmother – New Englander Anna Baker – was, the family genealogies asserted, a native Indian. As late as 1999, Churchill’s politician grandson, also Winston, was visiting the United States attempting to substantiate the longstanding claim. ‘She’s got Red Indian written all over her face,’ he told reporters covering the trip.2 He need not have bothered, and should have known better, according to American genealogists.

The story of Churchill’s Red Indian ancestry, which supposedly kept its legs because there was a complete absence of information on the Baker family, had, in fact, been known to have no foundation since the 1950s. According to Gary Roberts, senior scholar at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, two researchers there uncovered the family tree of the Baker family in 1951.3 This showed her full ancestry, revealing that she had been born of English-descended parents – Rhode Islander Joseph Baker and Experience Martin, a Massachusetts woman.4 ‘I am afraid it is one of those false traditions that somehow grow up in families, but it is simply not the case,’ said Roberts. ‘There is not a trace of Indian blood.’ But history did not want to give up believing so easily.

One in the Eye for Harold is the story of how history gets misused and misremembered, for all sorts of reasons. This is not a book about historical controversies, of which history remains full. It is about the history that we assume to be settled, agreed upon, known and accepted by all – but in fact isn’t as we believe.

The phenomenon of ‘Bad History’ is far more dangerous and pernicious to understanding than plain ignorance. We delve into those ‘truths’ we commonly ‘know’ to show how far from the real truth they actually are.

As much of what follows is likely to run counter to what is usually believed, we have taken care to provide the sources for the different view of history presented here. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the material is how old many of the references are that show the errors of our beliefs. Many of the falsehoods have been known for decades. It has not been that the knowledge is not there. It is that it is buried, often wilfully and consciously, in favour of comfortable stories that explain our past more simply. We hang on to treasured myths with great tenacity. Despite the truth being out there, we prefer the conspiracy of Bad History.

We range across the spectrum of history’s themes – war, politics, social history, religion, science, popular culture. We span the globally significant …

There is no contemporary evidence that St Peter was the original Pope, or Bishop of Rome. He only appears in the Papal records 300 years after the founding of the Church of Rome.

… to what some would see as trivial:

The kilt is not an ancient Scottish dress, but invented by an Englishman only in 1727.

We find facts that will overturn long-held perceptions …

Manna from Heaven was a punishment from God, not a relief.More Scots fought on the English side at Culloden than with the Scottish army.Far from being the cradle of democracy, the political system suggested by the leading thinker of the ancient Greeks was for a eugenics-based dictatorship.Far from being a ruthlessly disciplined and organised outfit, the success of the Nazi regime was actually built on chaos and deliberate confusion.

… to those that suggest that much of our vision of the past is of modern manufacture:

The American Wild West was not actually very wild at all. The most deadly year in Dodge City saw just five violent deaths. Almost all our notions of the Wild West are inventions of Hollywood.‘Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité’ was not the motto of the French Revolution. It was only adopted when the revolution was almost over … and Bastille Day has been celebrated as the French national day only since 1880, 91 years after the event.

We guarantee that you will uncover a truth you did not know in the pages that follow. Many are likely to challenge the deepest certainties you thought you had about history.

If you thought the virtue of the past was that, because it was in the past it was fixed and unchanging, think again. Prepare to be surprised. Prepare to have your faith in the ‘historical record’ shattered.

Phil Mason

References

1 See for example, genealogy in K. Halle, The Irrepressible Churchill, Robson, 1985; R Churchill, Winston Churchill 1874–1900, Heinemann, 1966

2 Report, The Times, London, 13 October 1999

3 Report, Daily Telegraph, 15 October 1999

4 See www.winstonchurchill.org

1

What Every Schoolchild Knows

Some facts are so well ‘known’ that from our earliest ages at school they formed the ground floor of the scaffolding that built our learning about the past. In this chapter, we look at some of the most firmly entrenched views of the past – that are wrong.

A much maligned race (1) – the Neanderthals

(humorous and derogatory). Primitive, uncivilised, loutish. (Oxford English Dictionary)

The Neanderthals have had a bad press. Their place in the evolutionary road map has long been as the slow-witted, unadapting, cul-de-sac of the early human family tree that flourished across Europe around 300,000 years ago – the archetypal caveman – only to be pushed to extinction by the more advanced version of Homo sapiens, our direct ancestors, arriving from Africa some 200,000 years later. Neanderthals disappeared completely from the archaeological record 28,000 years ago, and are portrayed as the dead-end branch, swept aside by their more intelligent African cousins. The term ‘Neanderthal’ has come to personify characteristics that are uncultured, backward, ignorant.

While modern DNA techniques have indeed confirmed the ‘dead-end’ theory in regard to where modern mankind hails from, the common image of the Neanderthal’s primitivism has lodged fixedly in our minds. Only recently has a very different picture emerged from that which was created when the bones of a distinctly human form were discovered by workmen in the Neander Valley near Dusseldorf in 1856.

The timing of the discovery, according to famed paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey, could not have been worse for the fortunes of the Neanderthal.1 The interpretation of the find, which was long before the conceptual map of early human development had been pieced together, came at the height of the controversy raging across intellectual circles as to whether Man was descended from the apes (Darwin would publish his theory of evolution just three years later) and when the tide of opinion was forcefully against thinking such thoughts.

As more and more remains turned up across Europe in the decades that followed, the conclusion was inescapable that they represented an ancient race, but the temper of the times encouraged a disparaging approach to reconstructing their existence – both metaphorically and physically. Their fate in our modern minds rests a lot on the attitude taken by the man responsible for putting together the first complete skeleton of a Neanderthal from remains that were found in the Dordogne in southern France in 1908.

Marcellin Boule, a palaeontologist working for the French National Museum of History, had the task of giving shape to the collection of bones discovered. According to Leakey, he followed the preconceptions of the time:

to emphasise everything that was primitive, brutish and ape-like about the skeleton. He even failed to take account of the fact that in this particular specimen the old man clearly had suffered from severe arthritis. Marcellin Boule’s reconstruction stooped, with rounded shoulders and dangling arms. He walked on the outer part of his feet and with his knees bent. His big toes diverged from the rest of his toes, as in the apes, and his head was thrust forward in a cretinous and improbable manner. Despite the fact that the skull had room for a brain bigger than a modern human’s, Boule deduced from the long, low shape of the skull that the old man had been dimwitted.2

When he published his conclusions between 1911 and 1913, the image of the Neanderthal was set, the sub-text being to distance this specimen from humanity as far as possible. ‘Brutish’, ‘clumsy’, ‘bestial’ were some of the terms Boule used to characterise the being. They stuck. The common perception of Neanderthal Man was of a race that was inarticulate, unable to fashion adequate tools (hence their eventual eclipse by more advanced species) and more like an ape than a human.

The reality, it now seems, is quite different. Although the popular image has been incredibly hard to shift, Neanderthals’ place in the chain of human development has been improving in the arcane technical journals. As early as 1957 a reappraisal of Boule’s work by two anatomists, William Straus and AJE Cave, discovered the arthritis bias and demonstrated that, in fact, the body of Neanderthals were pretty much like modern humans. As they famously put it,

If he could be reincarnated and placed in a New York subway – provided he were bathed, shaved and dressed in modern clothing – it is doubtful whether he would attract any more attention than some of its other denizens.3

Neanderthals turn out to have been one of the most successful species – as any would need to be that managed to survive for a quarter of a million years. Modern evidence shows they used and developed stone tools and weapons, had a clan structure for social organisation and – a practice acknowledged to be symbolic of emerging humanity – buried their dead. Findings published in 2010 by the University of York suggest they even had a conscientious side. Analysis of remains showed that one Neanderthal who had acute disabilities including a withered arm, deformed feet and blindness in one eye, nevertheless lived for up to two decades, implying that he was being looked after by others in his group.4

They innovated in making tools, something only later species are traditionally thought to have been capable of. Findings published in 2008 suggested that their tools were just as technologically advanced as the Homo sapiens who would out-live them, destroying the accepted explanation that Neanderthals lost out because their rivals surpassed them with better devices.5 And far from stunted intelligence, their brains were actually slightly larger than modern humans (1,400 cubic centimetres compared to our 1,360)6

Research by a team from Duke University, North Carolina, in 1998, suggested that Neanderthals may even have been some of the first humans capable of speech, pushing back the accepted moment for verbal communication from 40,000 years ago to 350,000. They discovered that Neanderthals possessed hypoglossal canals – perforations at the bottom of the skull where the spinal cord connects to the brain – of the same size as modern humans. This implied that they had a nerve structure leading to the tongue identical to modern man, and could in theory be capable of speech. By contrast, most other remains known to scientists had canals equivalent to those of chimpanzees, suggesting they were incapable of articulating sounds.7 Spanish archaeologists endorsed this view in 2004 after studying Neanderthal ear bone remains in northern Spain which showed that they were attuned to picking up the same frequency as that used in modern speech, and distinctly different from that of monkeys.8

The mystery of their eventual demise remains, but it is clear now it was not simply due to them being backward and dimwitted. As Metin Eren, from Exeter University, commented in 2008, ‘It is time for archaeologists to start searching for other reasons why Neanderthals became extinct while our ancestors survived.’9

A much maligned race (2) – the Philistines

Another put-upon body of people whose reputation has been sullied for three thousand years are the Philistines. Turning once more to the Oxford English Dictionary, we find a familiar litany of negativity:

uneducated, unenlightened; indifferent or hostile to culture; aesthetically unsophisticated.

Their fate perhaps illustrates better than any other the reality that history’s winners get to cast history’s losers in whatever light they choose. As Churchill famously once quipped to an opponent who threatened that history would prove the war leader wrong: ‘History will prove me right – because I will write it’. And he did.

The Philistines, who occupied the strategic coastal strip that extended roughly between modern Ashdod and Gaza, had the bad luck to come up against some of the Bible’s most stunning Israelite heroes – Samson, Saul, Samuel and, above all, King David – whose memorialists had the advantage of holding history’s pen as the Bible set down for posterity a version of what occurred. The Philistines – believed to have been illiterate and leaving no written record – came off distinctly worse for wear.

According to the Old Testament, they were pagan and devil worshippers, constant invaders of Israelite land and accused of stealing the Ark of the Covenant, the sacred container of the Ten Commandments. They famously bribed Delilah to cut off Samson’s hair, the supposed source of his strength, and their champion, the giant Goliath, took up arms against David.

If that was not enough, history has been doubly harsh on them because it appears their modern status as the icon for uncouth barbarianism stems not directly from the Bible references but from the practice of 17th century German students in the university city of Jena of distinguishing between themselves (‘the gown’) and ‘the town’ (that is, ordinary everyday folk) by referring to the uncivilised remainder of the community as philisters, thought to derive from an allusion to ‘tall men’ (from Goliath), assumed to be a reference to the town guards with whom the students had frequent run-ins. According to tradition, after a particularly vicious confrontation which had caused the death of a student, the university rector used the Biblical quotation from Judges 16:9, ‘The Philistine be upon thee, Samson’ in his funeral sermon. It quickly extended to all townsfolk, and it was this usage that the likes of social critic Matthew Arnold and essayist Thomas Carlyle picked up on when they popularised the term in English as a moniker for uncultured attitudes in mid-Victorian times. It has stuck rigidly in our minds ever since.10

But the real truth of the Philistines has only recently been emerging, set off in the early 1990s by a team from Harvard University excavating a site near Ashkelon on Israel’s coast. They discovered signs of a high culture unseen in the region at the time and streets ahead of contemporary Israel. The imagery of an uncouth, backward people appears now to be far off the truth. Advanced building styles, exquisitely decorated palaces and altars were uncovered. Elegantly decorated pottery, painted with pictures of fish, birds and complex geometric patterns, was unearthed, richly contrasting with that in use by Israelis of the time who were still making do with crude, unpainted ware. The archaeologists proved that they had not simply been imported from other Mediterranean civilisations by testing their composition. They were shown to be cast from local clay. Even a wine press was found. Scenic wall paintings depicting stories from ancient Greek literature showed that the Philistines were a cosmopolitan race. The discovery of imported Greek loom weights proved not only that they engaged in weaving, but that they were also sophisticated international traders.

All a far cry from the vision that has been handed down to us. As one commentary on the revelations remarked, ‘History is the official record of the winners. … The moral of the reputation of the Philistines is not to believe everything you read. And for future reputation, get the scribes on your side.’11

The Vikings – more savaged than savaging

The only image we have of the Vikings is of bloodthirsty, horn-helmeted invaders who raped and pillaged their way across Britain in the 8th and 9th centuries.

It is now coming to be accepted by archaeologists that the Vikings did not wear horns or wings on their helmets. These seem to have appeared as distinctly Viking accoutrements only in the 19th century. The usually cited culprit is Swedish illustrator Gustav Malmström who used the motif in an edition of Frithiof’s Saga (1820–25). He is thought to have taken the idea from headgear used in Norse religious rites. None of the many helmets that have been unearthed from Viking archaeological sites have ever been found to have horns.12

It was the English translation of Malmström’s edition of the Saga that introduced the term ‘Viking’ into English. (With the exception of three references in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, where the reference is to ‘robbers’ rather than to a race of people, the term is not recorded in English until 1807.)13 Sir Walter Scott is credited with having popularised it by his 1828 novel The Pirate. It was not to become a recognised term for the people or the period until Victorian times, and the concept of the ‘Age of the Vikings’ seems to have first been invented in Scandinavia to label items in the National Museum in Copenhagen in the 1840s.14

Some historians have even doubted the Vikings’ famed reputation for violence. An investigation by the BBC Timewatch series in 1995 poured cold water on the image of the Viking as a deranged pillager. Professor Janet Nelson, a medieval historian at King’s College, London, confessed that it was difficult to find evidence of specific raids in contemporary accounts. ‘In fact, there isn’t a single case of rape,’ she told the programme. He was more likely, to be ‘a decent, respectable migrant’ who was ‘a little dull’. They were eventually to settle amidst the English for three hundred years, living side by side in relative harmony.

The history of the Viking experience in Britain, in fact, carries a very odd twist. In contradiction to our normally held memory of the Vikings, it is possible that the greatest episode of violence in the long history of the two races’ relations was inflicted on the Danes by the British. It is one of the darkest days of the country’s history, but one that is largely forgotten by the modern Briton: the gruesome St Brice’s Day massacre on 13 November 1002. Tens of thousands of Danes who had settled in the country were massacred in a single outburst of pent-up fury.

It was the brainstorm of King Ethelred – famously the Unready (meaning ‘ill-advised’) – who decided he had had enough of the extortionary Danegeld, the annual protection money paid to the Danish kingdom to dissuade them from military invasion. Paid for by a universally unpopular poll tax, it stumped up sums of up to 24,000 pounds of silver a year to buy peace. (No calculation can give an accurate estimate of what proportion of national wealth this represented. Churchill estimates it may have represented up to two to three years’ worth of national income.)15

It had had the (to Ethelred) unexpected but not illogical effect of encouraging the Danes to keep pushing up the price of peace. By 1002, his patience exhausted, he suddenly snapped and gave orders for every Dane in the country to be slaughtered.

Among the bizarre atrocities of the day was the flaying alive of captured Danes and the subsequent nailing of their skins to the doors of churches which the Danes were said to have desecrated. The remnants of skins remained exposed to view at many sites at least into the middle of the 19th century. Tradition asserts that the gates to Minster Abbey in Kent were so decorated for centuries. The great doors of Rochester Cathedral were also still so adorned well into the 17th century. No less an authority than Samuel Pepys’ diary records a visit he made to the town in April 1661 and his viewing of the Danish skins.16

In the long run, it was a blunder of stupendous proportions. One of the victims was the Danish King’s sister and the massacre merely prompted ever greater retribution over the next dozen years which culminated in Ethelred fleeing the throne, leaving the way open for the Danish King’s son, Canute, to become King of England in 1016. Three hundred years after first contact, the Danish conquest was complete.

The origins of the English

The English derive their name from the Angles, the ancient Germanic tribe which, according to conventional history, migrated, along with the Saxons and the Jutes, from the continent to the British Isles in the five hundred years following the departure of the Romans at the beginning of the 5th century. From AD 450 they supposedly pushed the ancient Britons, of Celtic origin, to the fringes of the isles, into Wales, Cornwall and Scotland and across to Ireland. It supposedly led to the atavistic differences that persist to this day between the English and their border brethren.

According to modern DNA research, however, all that may be entirely wrong. Two separate projects undertaken in 1997 and 1998 by scientists at Oxford and Sheffield Universities came to the same conclusions using different investigations. At Oxford, investigators compared the DNA of modern Britons with that of Stone Age skeletons and found that 99 per cent of modern Britons can trace their origins back to a common DNA pool that dates to 10,000 years ago. This suggests that the popular image of waves of foreign invaders settling and pushing out the original inhabitants – the core of the British island story – looks likely to be a myth. At best, it suggests that any migrations were smaller than usually presented and had an insignificant impact on the nation’s gene pool.

These conclusions lent strong support to those of the Sheffield project which had reported in 1997 the discovery of a distinctive genetic variant that is prevalent amongst people in Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, the areas from which the Angles and Saxons supposedly came. Had they swamped the British as history currently has it, remnants of the variant would be showing up in modern Britons’ DNA. And there is no sign of it.17

The findings seemed to be confirmed in 2001 by another study at University College, London. This found that between 50 and 75 per cent of people DNA-tested in southern England shared the same genetic origins as ancient Britons or Celts, rather than Anglo-Saxons.18 ‘Perhaps the most surprising conclusion,’ the report said, ‘is the limited continental input in southern England, which appears to be predominantly indigenous and, by some analyses, no more influenced by the continental invaders than is mainland Scotland’.

The stark conclusion is that the English are, at root then, no different genetically from the Welsh or the Scots. All the island ‘races’ are in fact common. ‘The genetic evidence does not support the hypothesis of the widespread destruction or displacement of the native population by invaders from what is now northern Germany,’ said Dr Martin Evison, head of the Sheffield project in 1997.

The ‘True-Born’ Englishman

For some reason, the English have a fixation for parading their lineage as a symbol of national purity. To be ‘true-born English’, or ‘English through and through’ conveys a deep-down belief in a single, undiluted identity. As long ago as 1701, Daniel Defoe penned a mocking rebuttal of this eccentric Anglocentrism. This is only a small part:

The Romans first with Julius Caesar came,

Including all the nations of that name;

Gauls, Greeks, and Lombards; and by computation,

Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation.

With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came,

In search of pounder, not in search of fame.

Scots, Picts, and Irish from t’Hibernian shore:

And Conquering William brought the Normans o’re.

All these their barb’rous offspring left behind,

The dregs of armies, they of all mankind;

…

From this amphibious ill-born mob began

That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.

…

And lest by length of time it be pretended,

The climate may this modern breed ha’mended,

Wise Providence, to keep us where we are,

Mixes us daily with exceeding care:

We have been Europe’s sink, the jakes where she

Voids all her offal out-cast progeny.

From our fifth Henry’s time, the strolling bands

Of banished fugitives from neighb’ring lands,

Have here a certain sanctuary found.

…

Thick as the locusts which in Egypt swarmed,

With pride and hungry hopes completely armed:

With native truth, diseases, and no money,

Plundered our Canaan of the milk and honey.

Here they grew quickly Lords and Gentlemen,

And all their race are True-Born Englishmen.

…

French cooks, Scotch pedlars, and Italian whores,

Were all made Lords, or Lords’ progenitors.

Beggars and bastards by this new creation,

Much multiplied the peerage of the nation;

…

Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;

What’er they were, they’re True-Born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,

To value that which all wise men deride.

…

A True-Born Englishman’s a contradiction,

In speech an irony; in fact a fiction.

A banter made to be a test of fools,

Which those that use it justly ridicules.

A metaphor invented to express

A man akin to all the universe.19

The origins of the Irish …

Continuing the unraveling of the British racial myths, the Irish suffered their own knock in 1999 when researchers into the Irish DNA stock confirmed that even the Irish appeared to be all part of the common British gene pool. Far from being a distinctive Celtic strain, Irish DNA was found to be part and parcel of the same genetic makeup as the English, and drawing its origins from the same ancestry of 10,000 years ago, millennia before the supposed Celtic migrations of the 5th or 6th centuries BC. ‘The image of the Irish as a genetically Celtic people, in fact the whole idea of a Celtic ethnicity … is a load of complete cock and bull,’ said Richard Warner, archaeologist at the Ulster Museum. ‘The average Irish person probably has more English genes than Celtic.’20

… the Scots

Hadrian’s Wall started it. Francis Lockier, 18th century Dean of Peterborough, seemed to confirm it:

In all my travels I never met with any one Scotchman but what was a man of sense: I believe every body of that country that has any, leaves it as fast as they can.21

And Byron reinforced it:

A land of meanness, sophistry and mist.

Each breeze from foggy mount and marshy plain

Dilutes with drivel every drizzly brain.22

The image of the wilds of Scotland being filled with ignorance and barbarism has been a consistent motif down the centuries. Not so. Archaeological finds in the 1990s have begun to paint a different picture, one of culture and finesse. A team from the National Museums of Scotland reported their conclusions in 1996 that far from the standard view of the island communities being rough and uncivilised, the Lords of the Isles developed between the 13th and 15th centuries a highly cultivated way of life. A six-year dig on the island of Islay had revealed much stronger evidence of a taste for music and the arts than had ever been thought. Previous assumptions, drawn from lowland chroniclers, that they lived a primitive existence in thatched wooden and mud huts were overturned with evidence of stone buildings with slate roofs. The Lord’s castle even had a timber sprung floor. techniques that were the most advanced anywhere in Scotland, along with tuning keys for harps which suggested a far more developed interest in music than they have been given credit for.

‘We are uncovering a society with a tremendous tradition of learning,’ said the team leader, David Caldwell. As to why they should have been so misrepresented in the past, he put it down to jealousy from those living in less harsh parts of the country. ‘It is almost a lowland prejudice about these people.’23 The emerging picture seemed to show that far from the Isles being tamed by the creep of civilization from the south, it was the relatively uncultured lowlanders who eradicated the more sophisticated lifestyle of their more advanced northern neighbours.

… not to mention the French

In 2002, Gallic pride was also dented when one of France’s most respected academics published his contention that the French identity is based on a litany of myths and false history. Christian Goudineau, Professor of History at the respected Collège de France, shocked his countrymen by asserting that the Gallic people never existed in the past as a collective community. The famed warrior nation that formed the supposed roots of what became France was all a combination of administrative casualness and someone else’s self-serving propaganda.

It was all the doing of Julius Caesar, who first coined the term Gaul for the people he came across as he extended the Roman Empire’s reach northwards between 58 and 51 BC. He conquered vast swathes of what is now France, Germany and the Low Countries, and for ease of future administration simply drew an arbitrary dividing line between the Germanic tribes to the east and those of the west, which he termed Gaul. According to Goudineau, the occupants of ‘Gaul’ were not a cohesive society but a disparate array of peoples. By branding them all as a single entity, Caesar manufactured a community that in fact had little in common. He also played up their martial qualities, largely, according to Goudineau, to create a glowing impression of his feat for those back home in having overcome them. In practice, the record showed that many of the tribes had done deals with the invaders and actually hardly put up a fight.24

Such was the foundation stone of the Gallic myth – the culture that would set itself apart for its fierce patriotism, proud contempt of outside influence and confidence in its own superiority. And to make matters worse, it was a foundation that was barely built upon until the most recent of times.

Surprisingly to us who have been brought up thinking – albeit mainly by the French themselves – that they are an ancient nation, the concept of ‘France’ is a very modern concept indeed. While it received an undoubted boost during the Revolution that launched itself on the world in 1789, for the centuries leading up to it, and, in reality, for much of the time that followed, the country was more an agglomeration of self-sufficient – and self-identifying – communities, not a nation. Before the Revolution, to say ‘France’ meant the small area around Paris, no more.25 There was no common language even, only a mere fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of local vernaculars.

If no one heard the country as a whole, neither did anyone view it as a whole. The first complete map of France was not produced until 1815, and it had taken seventy years to put it together.26 It was, in fact, only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that France finally knitted itself together, through roads, railways and telegraph, into a truly national entity. Until then, it was known as the ‘land of the thousand pays’, this being the strictly local area that extended only so far as the sound of the church bells reached. Not until August 1914 did a piece of news – the declaration of the outbreak of the First World War – reach the entire country on the same day.27

This, then, is the France that, in modern times, professes on the world stage the most ancient of lineages, steeped in a common bondage of national fraternity. In historical terms, it is, in truth, a creation of almost contemporary manufacture.

Why we don’t live longer than our ancestors

It emerged in 1999 that the commonly accepted view of our ancestors living much shorter lives than modern humans is a myth and has been based all along on a statistical error in the standard method of bone-dating. Scientists from Bradford University published their findings in New Scientist, suggesting that the error has led to under-estimating the lengths of our forebears’ lives by up to thirty years.

Professor Mark Pollard reported that the traditional approach used by archaeologists to date human remains – taking a large sample of bones of known ages and plotting how the tell-tale signs of wear on joints changes with different ages – and the statistical method used, has led to results that understate the real age of the subjects.

The researchers were led to investigate the technique after datings from sites frequently came up with lifespan estimates which did not accord with other documentary evidence available that suggested people had to be living longer.

One celebrated instance cited by the research was the case of the 7th century Mayan king Hanab Pakal whose bones were examined in the 1950s by the accepted method and assessed as dying in his forties. When the inscription on his tomb was finally deciphered decades later, it recorded that he had died aged nearer eighty.28

The orthodox view, for example, of how long Britons lived at the time of the Norman invasion in the 11th century had settled on an estimate of no more than fifty-five years. For years, we have been brought up to see our ancestors living lives that were nasty, brutish and short, and ourselves, by comparison, smugly enjoying the benefits of a more civilised life. By correcting for the error the researchers thought they had found, however, they concluded that the estimated age was between seventy and eighty – the same as modern humans. The entire supposed difference in lifespans had disappeared.

So for all the developments of the last thousand years in civilising living conditions and for all our modern creature comforts, it was perhaps not a little disconcerting to discover that so far as enjoying a longer life, they have counted for absolutely nothing.

Harold, Hastings and the arrow – another one in the eye for history

As Sellar and Yeatman wrote in their landmark comic history 1066 And All That,29 other than 55 BC when Caesar invaded (‘the first date in English history’), the only ‘memorable date’ in the country’s past is 1066. Every schoolchild learns of the momentous significance of the year, of the battle of Hastings that changed the course of our island history, and the most famous death of an English King – Harold killed by an arrow in the eye.

Unfortunately for tradition, the tale of the arrow appears to have been an invention created more than a decade after the battle. According to research published in 1998,30 contemporary Latin accounts written immediately after the battle make no mention of the arrow incident. Indeed, the accounts of those present, such as the one written by William of Poitiers, clearly record Harold being killed by four of William the Conqueror’s knights. He even names them: Eustace of Boulogne, William of Gifford, Guy of Amiens and the son of Guy of Ponthieu. They captured Harold in the melee, beheading and disembowelling him on the battlefield. One cut off his ‘leg’ – a Norman euphemism for penis – and carried it away as a souvenir.31

The story of the arrow in the eye does not appear until fifteen years later, and seems to have been introduced to carry a symbolic message about Harold’s death, to be depicted for all time through the Bayeux Tapestry: an arrow in the eye was the existing punishment for perjury. The suggestion is that the Norman invaders regarded Harold as a perjurer for breaking his promise to William to back his claim to the throne when Edward the Confessor died in the first week of 1066, sparking off the dynastic struggle. The Tapestry was intended to blackguard Harold’s reputation and be a lesson to anyone else contemplating treachery against the new regime.

The other chief historical remnant of Hastings – the Bayeux Tapestry – also holds a secret that contradicts conventional belief. It was long held to be a Norman French creation, produced by the ladies at the court of William’s wife, Queen Mathilde, to celebrate the victory over the English. It had always been assumed that it was made in France as once the conquest had been settled, William chose to spend little time in England. (After 1072, of the 170 months left of his life, he spent 130 in France.32)

Restoration work carried out in 1984, involving the unstitching of the Tapestry’s lining, revealed to experts ‘incontestable proof’ that it could only have been woven in England. One told press reporters that the complexity of the handiwork made it clear that ‘England alone possessed the skilled workers … able to carry out such a masterpiece’.33 Even the Tapestry museum in Bayeux now acknowledges that it was most probably embroidered, by monks, in the south of England.34

Hastings 2 – the forgotten battle

There is a postscript to the Norman success at Hastings that has resurfaced only in the last twenty years to change the accepted view of that momentous year. Archaeologists from the Museum of London discovered in 1996 evidence of a final battle, right in the heart of London, that was fought before William could finally claim the conquest of England. This ‘forgotten’ battle was, the theory goes, expunged from the traditional accounts because the Normans wanted to portray their King as a powerful victor who overwhelmed the nation in a single contest. That the reality was rather different has been successfully buried in the standard accounts.

The most cited sources for the autumn of 1066 are the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the account mentioned earlier by the faithful Norman, William of Poitiers. The Chronicle records the arrival of the Norman forces into London and the receiving of the surrender of Edgar the Aetheling, the thirteen-year-old who had been elected the new English king, at Berkhamsted to the north west of the capital. And then no more is said. William of Poitiers’ account is similarly