All posts tagged Norman Conquest

Murder in the Mews by Agatha Christie (1937)

‘Charles wouldn’t kill anybody. He’s a very careful man.’
‘All the same, Mademoiselle, it is the careful men who commit the cleverest murders.’
(Murder in the Mews, chapter 6)

‘You are hopeful of success, M. Poirot?’ Lord Mayfield sounded a trifle incredulous.
The little man shrugged his shoulders. ‘Why not? One has only to reason – to reflect.’
(Poirot emphasising the importance of thinking, reflecting and pondering, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘This affair,’ he said, ‘is more complicated than it appears.’
(The classic statement which someone makes about the murder mystery in every Christie story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Leave it to Hercule Poirot. The lies I invent are always most delicate and most convincing.’
(Poirot’s immense self confidence, The Incredible Theft, chapter 4)

‘Good-morning, mademoiselle. Yes, it is as you say. You now behold a detective – a great detective, I may say – in the act of detecting!’
(Poirot gently mocking himself in Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 11)

‘Oh la la!’ cried Poirot. ‘I have been a fool, but a fool!’ The other stared at him.
‘I beg your pardon, M. Poirot?’
‘It is that a portion of the puzzle has become clear to me. Something I did not see before. But it all fits in. Yes, it fits in with beautiful precision.’
(The Eureka moment that occurs in every Poirot story, The Incredible Theft, chapter 5)

‘After breakfast,’ he said, ‘I will explain. I should like everyone to assemble in Sir Gervase’s study at ten o’clock.’
(The classic ‘you’re probably all wondering why I called you all together here this evening…’ moment, Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 12)

‘Murder in the Mews’ is a volume of four long short stories, some of them worked up from short stories previously published in magazines into 80-page novellas, long enough to require chapters.

  1. Murder in the Mews
  2. The Incredible Theft
  3. Dead Man’s Mirror
  4. Triangle at Rhodes

Murder in the Mews

It is Fireworks Night as Poirot and Inspector Japp are walking back to Poirot’s house. They take a short cut through a mews (Bardsley Garden Mews) and Japp jokes that it’s a good night for a murder because nobody would hear a shot.

Not to the reader’s complete surprise, next morning Poirot receives a phone call telling him that, guess what, there was a shot in that very same mews the night before, only it appears to have been a suicide.

So Poirot meets Japp at the murder scene and they start their investigation. 14 Bardsley Garden mews was shared by two young women, a Miss Jane Plenderleith and a youngish widow, Mrs Allen. Miss Plenderleith got home after being out of town for a few days (weekend with the Bentincks in Essex), knocked at her housemate’s door, discovered it was locked, called the police who came round, broke down the door and discovered Mrs Allen’s body on the floor, with a fatal gunshot wound to the head and the gun in her hand.

Except that the gun wasn’t really gripped, it had more the appearance of being placed in her hand. And, more tellingly, the shot is to her left temple whereas the gun was placed in her right hand. I.e. it’s an anatomically impossibility.

So Poirot and Japp set out to work in tandem but with their different approaches, interviewing the flatmate, Mrs Allen’s MP fiancé, various neighbours in other houses along the mews etc. The story is by way of being a nice comparison of the styles of the two men (something we have, of course, seen in quite a few of the novels) and so contains a number of familiar tropes e.g. Japp thinking Poirot is going soft / too old, when he dwells on apparent trivia.

‘Eh bien,’ said Poirot. ‘I shall complete my search for the unimportant. There is still the dustbin.’ He skipped nimbly out of the room. Japp looked after him with an air of disgust.
‘Potty,’ he said. ‘Absolutely potty.’
Inspector Jameson preserved a respectful silence. His face said with British superiority: ‘Foreigners!’
Aloud he said: ‘So that’s Mr Hercule Poirot! I’ve heard of him.’
‘Old friend of mine,’ explained Japp. ‘Not half as balmy as he looks, mind you. All the same, he’s getting on now.’
‘Gone a bit gaga as they say, sir,’ suggested Inspector Jameson. ‘Ah well, age will tell…’ (Chapter 4)

Poirot’s foreignness

Note how Japp’s slur on Poirot’s age is combined with Jameson’s smug contempt for Poirot’s foreignness, his outsiderness. But this ‘foreignness’ is very flexible; it has multiple purposes.

Poirot mocks the British A foreignness which comes into play a bit later when Christie has Poirot gently mock the English class system, as he does in quite a few of the novels, especially round ideas of being pukka or playing cricket, the right sort etc. Here’s Poirot interviewing Miss Plenderleith, who tells him that:

‘Charles has got a very good nose for anybody who isn’t well, quite – quite – ‘
‘And Major Eustace was not what you call quite – quite – ?’ asked Poirot.
The girl said dryly: ‘No, he wasn’t. Bit hairy at the heel. Definitely not out of the top drawer.’
‘Alas, I do not know those two expressions. You mean to say he was not the pukka sahib?’
A fleeting smile passed across Jane Plenderleith’s face, but she replied gravely, ‘No.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot deploys his foreignness strategically, playing it up when he sees that it might be a way of getting round an interviewee, buttering them up or making them lower their defences. Here is Japp introducing Poirot to the MP:

‘By the way, let me introduce M. Hercule Poirot. You may have heard of him.’
Mr Laverton-West fastened himself interestedly on the little Belgian.
‘Yes-yes-I have heard the name.’
‘Monsieur,’ said Poirot, his manner suddenly very foreign. ‘Believe me, my heart bleeds for you. Such a loss ! Such agony as you must be enduring! Ah, but I will say no more. How magnificently the English hide their emotions.’ He whipped out his cigarette case. ‘Permit me – Ah, it is empty, Japp?’ (Chapter 7)

The point of this little bit of play-acting is to lull Laverton-West into tendering one of his cigarettes because the brand of cigarette stubs found in the murdered woman’s bedroom turn out to be an important clue.

Xenophobes hate Poirot’s foreignness And in moments of anger, Brits can use his foreignness against Poirot, as when their interviewing makes Major Eustace lose his temper.

‘Who are you, I’d like to know?’ Eustace turned and spat the words at him. ‘Some kind of damned dago! What are you butting in for?’ (Chapter 8)

Plot

It’s a sort of chamber piece because all the clues are at the scene, in the bedroom where the body was found, and the solution is relatively straightfoward, concerning a troublesome man, Major Eustace, who had been calling to see Mrs Allen over the past year or so…

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • George – Poirot’s immaculate man-servant
  • Inspector Japp
  • Inspector Jameson – assisting Japp
  • Dr Brett – police doctor, time of death etc
  • Miss Jane Plenderleith – a dark, efficient-looking young woman of twenty-seven or eight’; drives an Austin Seven; plays golf
  • Mrs Barbara Allen – the dead woman, married young (17) in India; husband, then baby daughter both died; came to England; years later was engaged to be married to…
  • Charles Laverton-West MP – ‘a man of medium height with a very definite personality. He was clean-shaven, with the mobile mouth of an actor, and the slightly prominent eyes that so often go with the gift of oratory. He was good-looking in a quiet, well-bred way’
  • Mrs Hogg – ‘I’m not one to gossip’ style working class neighbour
  • Fred Hogg – small boy and eye witness to a late-night visitor to the house
  • Major Eustace – someone Mrs Allen met in India, ‘ a man of forty-five, military bearing, toothbrush moustache, smartly dressed and driving a Standard Swallow saloon car’; ‘ a tall man, good-looking in a somewhat coarse fashion. There was a puffiness round the eyes small, crafty eyes that belied the good-humoured geniality of his manner’

Poirot’s obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD)

Poirot explains why he makes such efforts to solve the mystery of the missing attaché case:

‘My friend, an affair must be rounded off properly. Everything must be explained.’

The police just need enough evidence to secure a conviction; Poirot, driven by his OCD / personal predilections, needs to understand every ramification of a case, and tie off every lose end, as Japp mocks:

‘Though what this attaché-case business has to do with the crime I can’t imagine. I can’t see that it’s got anything at all to do with it.’
‘Precisely, my friend, I agree with you – it has nothing to do with it.’
‘Then why… No, don’t tell me! Order and method and everything nicely rounded off! Oh, well, it’s a fine day.’ (Chapter 9)

Bookish references

‘How long has she been dead?’
‘She was killed at eleven thirty-three yesterday evening,’ said Brett promptly. Then he grinned as he saw Japp’s surprised face.
‘Sorry, old boy,’ he said. ‘Had to do the super doctor of fiction!’ (Chapter 2)

Sherlock Holmes reference

As I’ve pointed out in my reviews of all the novels, Christie felt compelled to make at least one jokey reference to Sherlock Holmes in every one of her stories. Here there are two:

‘Damnation!’ Japp said. ‘I knew there was something. But what the devil is it? I searched that case pretty thoroughly.’
‘My poor Japp – but it is – how do you say, obvious, my dear Watson‘?’ (Chapter 9)

At the climax:

‘It was odd, very odd, that the room should smell – as it did, perfectly fresh.’
‘So that’s what you were getting at!’ Japp sighed. ‘Always have to get at things in such a tortuous way.’
‘Your Sherlock Holmes did the same. He drew attention, remember, to the curious incident of the dog in the night-time – and the answer to that was there was no curious incident. The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ (Chapter 10)

Cars

Major Eustace drives a Standard Swallow saloon car, Miss Plenderleith drives a Baby Austin Seven.

Baba and sirrop and chocolate

Poirot’s favourite dessert is a Baba au Rhum i.e. rum baba.

His favourite drink is the non-alcoholic sirop de cassis, ‘syrup of the blackcurrants’ or blackcurrant cordial, not unlike the English cordial, ‘Ribena’.

Poirot always drank chocolate for breakfast – a revolting habit.
(Captain Hastings telling us in ‘Dumb Witness’)

Payoff

‘Not murder disguised as suicide, but suicide made to look like murder!’
‘Yes, and very cleverly done, too. Nothing over-emphasised.’

2. The Incredible Theft

We are among the posh, the ‘top drawer’ of society, at a dinner party given by Lord Mayfield with half a dozen posh guests. The dinner has two purposes. In attendance is Air Marshal Sir George Carrington and he has come to discuss with Lord M ‘a discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’ which was, of course, of burning importance in the troubled mid-1930s as the shades of war deepened. That’s how it’s described initially, but then this morphs into repeated references to ‘the new bomber’, its design and specification.

The second aspect of the evening is the presence of Mrs Vanderlyn. She is a very attractive mature lady who has had no fewer than three husbands, rather comically one each from each of Britain’s possible enemies, Italy, Germany and Russia, is reputed to have ‘contacts’ in each of those countries, and lives a luxury life far beyond her apparent income. In other words, as Lord Mayfield explains to Sir George, she is probably a spy. The thing is no-one’s been able to pin anything on her. And so this dinner is not only the pretext for a chat about the new bomber between the two chaps, but by way of being bait to persuade Mrs V to take a risk, to come out into the open, and to be caught. At which point she can be arrested, interrogated and neutralised.

But all this is hidden behind the gentle manners of a posh dinner party and so, after dinner, the ladies retire, the chaps drink port and smoke cigars, then reconvene in the drawing room to play some hands of bridge. By then it’s late and most of the party retire to bed, while Sir George and Lord M go for a stroll on the terrace outside his office (which has french windows opening onto it).

It’s while during this stroll that they see a shadowy figure nip out of his study and into the night. Moments later they re-enter the study where Lord M’s secretary, Mr Carlile has gathered the technical specifications of the new bomber for the men to discuss.

Except it isn’t there! When Lord M leafs through the papers, he asks where the spec has gone, Carlile insists he just put it there but then himself can’t find it. When quizzed, he says 5 minutes earlier he heard a woman’s scream, and ran into the hall to find Mrs Vanderlyn’s maid standing on the stairs claiming she’d seen a ghost. It took a few minutes to calm here down and send her backstairs to bed, at which point Carlile returned to the study and Lord M and Sir George entered it.

It must have been during those few minutes of his absence that someone darted into the study, stole the specifications, and this was the figure the old chaps saw nipping off into the darkness. Someone has stolen the ‘discovery that will probably revolutionise the whole problem of air defence’!!

So guess who Sir George advises Lord Mayfield to call in to solve the mystery and get the plans back? Clue: his name begins with P and ends in oirot.

Cast

  • Lord Mayfield – ‘a big man, square-shouldered, with thick silvery hair, a big straight nose and a slightly prominent chin. It was a face that lent itself easily to caricature’
  • Lady Julia Carrington – ‘a woman of forty, tall, dark and vivacious. She was very thin, but still beautiful. Her hands and feet in particular were exquisite. Her manner was abrupt and restless, that of a woman who lived on her nerves’
  • Air Marshal Sir George Carrington – Lady Julia’s husband, ‘still retained the bluff breeziness of the ex-Naval man’
  • Mrs Vanderlyn – ‘an extremely good-looking blonde. Her voice held a soupçon of American accent, just enough to be pleasant without undue exaggeration’
  • Mrs Macatta MP – ‘a great authority on Housing and Infant Welfare. She barked out short sentences rather than spoke them, and was generally of somewhat alarming aspect’; a feminist
  • Reggie Carrington – 21 and completely uninterested in Housing, Infant Welfare and indeed any political subject – ‘ the weak mouth camouflaged by the rather charming smile, the indecisive chin, the eyes set far apart, the rather narrow head’
  • Mr Carlile – Lord Mayfield’s private secretary, ‘a pale young man with pince-nez and an air of intelligent reserve’, been with his lordship for nine years
  • Mademoiselle Leonie – Mrs Vanderlyn’s attractive young French maid

Foreignness

Once again Poirot’s foreignness is brought up:

Lord Mayfield said slowly: ‘Why drag in a wretched foreigner we know nothing about?’
But I happen to know a lot about him. The man’s a marvel.’

And:

‘By the Lord, George, I thought you were too much of an old John Bull to put your trust in a Frenchman, however clever.’
‘He’s not even a Frenchman, he’s a Belgian,’ said Sir George in a rather shamefaced manner. (Chapter 3)

And:

‘To send for a queer foreigner like this seems very odd to me,’ said Reggie. ‘What has been taken, Father?’

Christie’s comic feminists

The book before this, ‘Cards on the Table’, is notable for the advent of a kind of avatar of Christie, an alter ego, the fictional female author of detective stories Mrs Ariadne Oliver who also happens to be a passionate and outspoken feminist. Well, there’s an echo of her here in the character Mrs Macatta, who is an MP, an ardent advocate of social reform, and a feminist. At least she’s quick to criticise men:

‘Lord Mayfield has brains,’ allowed Mrs Macatta. ‘And he has carved his career out entirely for himself. He owes nothing to hereditary influence. He has a certain lack of vision, perhaps. In that I find all men sadly alike. They lack the breadth of a woman’s imagination. Woman, M. Poirot, is going to be the great force in government in ten years’ time.’ (Chapter 6)

Nearly as critical of men as she is of women who don’t agree with her:

Poirot invited Mrs Macatta’s opinion of Mrs Vanderlyn – and got it.
‘One of those absolutely useless women, M. Poirot. Women that make one despair of one’s own sex! A parasite, first and last a parasite.’
‘Men admired her?’
‘Men!’ Mrs Macatta spoke the word with contempt. ‘Men are always taken in by those very obvious good looks.’

So she despises all men, and all women who don’t share her beliefs, and it all leads up to a call for the entire nation to be subjected to sweeping moral reform:

‘The evils of gambling, M. Poirot, are only slightly less than the evils caused by drink. If I had my way this country should be purified.’
Poirot was forced to listen to a somewhat lengthy discussion on the purification of England’s morals.

Tempting to say that feminists haven’t changed that much in the past 90 years, still the same unquestioning self-confidence, the dismissal of anyone who disagrees as morally deficient, still the same ambition to bring about a sweeping moral transformation, ban porn, overthrow the patriarchy, abolish the male gaze, end domestic abuse – no doubt all eminently worthy aims, and just as achievable as Mrs Macatta’s goals of ending drunkenness and immorality.

That’s my contentious view. What isn’t contentious is that Christie deliberately made her feminist characters figures of fun. She found full-on feminist views good material for humour.

Interviews

For sure there are physical clues to be found and assessed but the core of the stories is Poirot’s lengthy interviews with the other characters / suspects. There’s a deep connection between the way he interrogates the characters and the art of the author herself. In a non-genre novel we get to understand the characters via their interactions in different settings. Whereas the Christie-style detective story, the characters are lined up as in a queue, sometimes literally in a queue, waiting to go one by one into the room where they will be interviewed by the moderator figure. This happens in Murder on the Orient Express, Death in the Clouds and again, here, where, the day after the robbery, Poirot makes his base in the study and then interviews each of the other characters one by one. This, not their interactions with each other, is how we find out about them.

It is very schematic, isn’t it? It’s almost like a diagram of a novel rather than a full, proper novel. In works like this and ‘Orient’ you see the narrative process reduced to its bare bones:

  • mysterious event (murder or theft) occurs
  • all the suspects are interviewed one by one at length
  • the solution and explanation are revealed

Maybe it’s because the essence of the narrative is so samey that Christie was able to knock out such an impressive number of stories. Obviously the settings, characters and details change in every one. And yet, on the deepest level, they’re all the same.

Poirot’s symmetry OCD

Poirot went back to the fireplace and carefully rearranged the ornaments on the mantelpiece. (Chapter 7)

3. Dead Man’s Mirror

This is the longest of the three stories at 108 pages. On the face of it another murder mystery, it is also an extended satire on the foibles and eccentricities of the poshest of the English aristocracy.

Eccentric old Gervase Chevenix-Gore, last male descendant of a family which dates back to the Norman Conquest. The setup is simple. At his flat in London Poirot receives a letter from Gervase asking him to come and see him at the grand family home, as he suspects he is the victim of a fraud but must manage the matter with discretion. But when Poirot (having taken the train from London) arrives at the house, arriving just as the gong for dinner has been sounded to the dozen or so members of family and house guests all assembled there – Gervase doesn’t show up and when they break down the locked door of his study, they find him slumped at his desk, gun in hand, shot through the head, an obvious case of suicide. His desk faced a mirror and the bullet had gone through his skull and shattered this mirror.

However, only Poirot (and the reader) know that Gervase sent the letter inviting him down and so had no reason to commit suicide; the opposite, we would have expected him to be waiting to engage Poirot and explain what he wanted him to do.

So, in the time-honoured style, Poirot and Major Riddle set about interviewing all the family and guests, an entertaining assemblage of florid characters. Who had a motive? Who had the opportunity etc? As you would expect, the more the pair dig, the more cross-currents and motivations they discover, not least in the terms of the dead man’s will, often the first place to start in the murder of a rich old man. As Poirot puts it:

‘Do you not agree, my friend, that the more we learn, the less and less motive we find for suicide? But for murder, we begin to have a surprising collection of motives.’ (Chapter 8)

Surprising to Poirot maybe. Not to anyone who’s read an Agatha Christie story.

The mirror as metaphor

There’s generally very little symbolism in a Christie story. So I was struck when the mirror is used as a metaphor for the complexity of the situation which Poirot and Riddle (inevitably) uncover:

‘What the devil –’ began Major Riddle, and ended rather hopelessly: ‘It gets more and more difficult to keep track of this business.’
Poirot nodded. He had picked up the little piece of earth that had fallen from Ruth’s shoe and was holding it thoughtfully in his hand.
‘It is like the mirror smashed on the wall,’ he said. ‘The dead man’s mirror. Every new fact we come across shows us some different angle of the dead man. He is reflected from every conceivable point of view. We shall have soon a complete picture…’ (Chapter 10)

Cast

Preliminary

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Mr Satterthwaite – expert on the aristocracy, who we’ve met in ‘Three Act Tragedy’

At the house

  • Gervase Chevenix-Gore
  • Vanda Chevenix Gore – his wife, ‘an Arbuthnot, very handsome girl. She’s still quite a handsome
    woman. Frightfully vague, though. Devoted to Gervase. She’s got a leaning towards the occult, I believe. Wears amulets and scarabs and gives out that she’s the reincarnation of an Egyptian Queen’ – thinks she’s a reincarnation of Hatshepsut and before that, was a priestess in Atlantis’
  • Ruth Chevenix-Gore – adopted daughter: ‘they’ve no children of their own. Very attractive girl in the modern style’ – ‘a well-chiselled nose, slightly aquiline, and a clear, sharp line of jaw. Her black hair swept back from her face into a mass of little tight curls. Her colouring was of carnation clearness and brilliance, and owed little to make-up. She was, so Hercule Poirot thought, one of the loveliest girls he had seen’ – ‘a devilishly attractive girl. Has played havoc with most of the young fellows round here’
  • Hugo Trent – Gervase’s nephew – ‘Pamela Chevenix-Gore married Reggie Trent and Hugo was their only child’ – in ‘the Blues’ i.e. The Royal Regiment of Horse Guards – ‘ a moustache and an air of modest arrogance’
  • Susan Cardwell – house guest, ‘rather a good-looking girl with red hair’
  • Colonel Bury – an old friend of the family’, ‘almost a tame cat about the house. Kind of A.D.C. to Lady Chevenix-Gore’, ‘follows her about like a dog’
  • Mr Forbes – an old friend and the family lawyer, both devoted to Vanda back in the day – very proper and formal, ‘I never guess’ – wears a pince-nez
  • Godfrey Burrows – Gervase’s secretary, ‘ good-looking, and knows it. Not quite out of the top drawer’ – turns out he thinks Gervase’s attitude was feudal and ridiculous
  • Miss Lingard – ‘little, middle-aged prim woman’, research assistant for the history of his family which Gervase has been writing for the last six months
  • Captain Lake – Sir Gervase’s agent for the estate, ‘a tall, fair-haired man in a lounge suit’
  • Snell – the butler

The investigation

  • Major Riddle – Chief Constable of the fictional county of Westshire, ‘a tall, spruce-looking man’
  • the police surgeon – ‘a lank elderly man with grizzled hair’
  • police inspector – ‘a tall impassive-faced man in plain clothes’
  • Mr Forbes – family lawyer

Bookish references

‘It’s all very well, Poirot. But the evidence is clear enough. Door locked, key in his own pocket. Window closed and fastened. I know these things happen in books – but I’ve never come across them in real life.’ (Chief Constable Riddle, Chapter 5)

Or the movies:

‘You’re getting a bit too sensational, I think, Poirot.’
‘You think what I suggest is too like the pictures? But life, Major Riddle, is often amazingly like the pictures.’ (Chapter 8)

The tribulations of being rich

Christie’s stories testify, now and then, to the impact of the 1930s Depression, pointing out that all wealthy people have taken a hit. The Chevenix-Gore family lawyer in this story, says the family fortune has been impacted. More impactful, though, was some bad investment advice given him by his friend Colonel Bury. When they interview him, Bury justifies himself against his friend’s reproaches:

‘Didn’t seem to realise that the whole world was going through a period of crisis. All stocks and shares bound to be affected.’ (Chapter 8)

While the lawyer draws a general, and amusing, conclusion:

Mr Forbes sighed. ‘Retired soldiers are the worst sufferers when they engage in financial operations. I have found that their credulity far exceeds that of widows and that is saying a good deal.’ (Chapter 6)

Poirot is old

We (well I) are hoodwinked into thinking Poirot is a reasonably agile, late-middle-aged man by the image of sprightly dapper David Suchet in the extensive ITV adaptations. And yet the texts themselves often tell a different story, emphasising that Poirot is, quite simply, ‘a small, elderly man’.

The revelation

You can’t help smiling when, at the conclusion of his investigations, Poirot asks the household to convene in the study for his big explanation which he kicks off with the classic phrase:

‘I have asked you all to come here so that you may hear the true facts of Sir Gervase’s suicide.’ (Chapter 12)

It’s as enjoyably, reassuringly formulaic as panto.

4. Triangle at Rhodes

‘Human nature is simply fascinating. Don’t you think so, M. Poirot?’
(posh Miss Lyall accidentally puts her finger on Poirot’s central axiom, Chapter 1)

Improbably, Poirot is on holiday on the Greek island. He is of the old school which believes in completely covering your body in the sun. Beside him sits:

Miss Pamela Lyall, who sat beside him and talked ceaselessly, represented the modern school of thought in that she was wearing the barest minimum of clothing on her sun-browned person.

There’s another nugget of social history, when one of the characters laments that Rhodes is such a long way to travel from England. Yes but just imagine, says, Miss Sarah Blake, if it was easier to get to:

‘Yes, but then it would be awful. Rows and rows of people laid out like fish on a slab. Bodies everywhere!’ (Chapter 1)

Which is exactly what started to happen in the 1970s with the advent of package holidays and has been happening ever since. Fifty years of over-tourism.

Anyway, this Miss Lyall thinks that people watching is the most fascinating hobby. Surprisingly, maybe, Poirot observes that people in the end fall into very obvious types or categories and rarely act out of character. In a downbeat way, he says it becomes, in the end, quite boring. The sea is more varied and interesting.

So Poirot was advised to come to Rhodes in October, out of season, when the hotels would be empty. Instead he is distressed to discover seven or eight English guests and among them two squabbling couples.

Valentine Chantry has been a world famous model for 16 years or so, with a succession of flashy husbands and now proceeds to drive the latest one, a brutish naval commander, Tony, wild with jealousy, by flirting outrageously with gullible young Douglas Gold, much to the disgust of Gold’s wife, Marjorie.

So the two men fancy the same honeypot woman (Valentine) making up one of the oldest relationship stereotypes in the world, the Eternal triangle.

Poirot unhappily observes all this happening but it delights another hotel guest, the catty, humorous Miss Pamela Lyell, the one with no attachments who loves watching people. In conversation with Poirot, she even humorously teases out of him that he fears there might be a murder!

So then the murder actually takes place. The male characters are sitting round. Gold has bought the first round of drinks, including a pink gin for the commander. In come the women who have been off on an outing. Tony Chantry chivalrously offers to buy drinks. When his wife asks for a pink gin, he pushes the one in front of him over to her and goes up to the bar. She drains the glass to the dregs then comes over funny, turns blue and dies. As she cries out the commander comes running back and shouts at Douglas that that drink was intended for him, Tony. When the police are called they indeed find the rest of the poison (‘A form of stropanthin. A heart poison’) in Gold’s jacket pocket.

So it looks like an open and shut case. Gold, twisted any way she wanted him by Valentine, wanted to poison Tony Chantry to get him out of the way so he could marry Valentine, but his plan went disastrously wrong when Tony unexpectedly handed over his (poisoned) drink to Valentine.

Except that that’s not what happened at all. And in the short seven-page final chapter, Poirot explains to an amazed Miss Lyall a completely different and true explanation of what really happened and why.

Cast

  • Hercule Poirot
  • Miss Pamela Lyall – ‘whose principal interests in life were the observation of people round her and the sound of her own voice’
  • Miss Sarah Blake – her friend
  • Valentine Chantry – now 39, famous model since she was 16, staggeringly beautiful, had 5 husbands etc
  • Commander Tony Chantry – ‘a commander in the navy… silent, dark, with a pugnacious jaw and a sullen manner. A touch of the primeval ape about him’
  • Mr Douglas Gold – 31, ‘extremely good-looking, in an almost theatrical manner. Very fair, crisply curling hair, blue eyes, broad shoulders, narrow hips. He looked more like a young man on the stage than a young man in real life, but the moment he opened his mouth that impression faded. He was quite natural and unaffected, even, perhaps, a little stupid’
  • Mrs Marjorie Gold – 35, ‘ a small woman-rather like a mouse. She was not bad-looking, indeed her features were regular and her complexion good, but she had a certain air of diffidence and dowdiness that made her liable to be overlooked’
  • old General Barnes – ‘a veteran who was usually in the company of the young’

Bookishness

The General chuckled. ‘She’s finding him a little bit difficult! One of the strong, silent men you hear about in books.’ (Chapter 2)

Poirot’s egotism and modesty

And though Hercule Poirot was a conceited little man where his profession was concerned, he was quite modest in his estimate of his personal attractions. (Chapter 2)

‘Every woman adores a fascist’

[Mr Gold] said to Poirot, ‘That man’s a brute!’ And he nodded his head in the direction of the retreating figure of Commander Chantry.
‘It is possible,’ said Poirot. ‘Yes, it is quite possible. But les femmes, they like brutes, remember that!’
Douglas muttered: ‘I shouldn’t be surprised if he ill-treats her!’
‘She probably likes that too.’ (Chapter 2)

5. Language

Poirotisms

I’ve mentioned how Poirot’s foreignness is raised a number of times. It can also be used for pure comic purposes, as when Christie has Poirot mangle an English proverb or common phrase, as he does at least once in every story:

‘For the same reason, when she sets out the following day to get rid of the golf clubs, she continues to use the attaché-case as a – what is it – kippered herring?’
‘Red herring,’ Japp said.
(Murder in the Mews, Chapter 10)

Poirot held up a hand. ‘I do what you call explore all the avenues.’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘Ah, yes, it is what you call the old gasp – no, pardon, the old wheeze, that – to come back for a book. It is often useful!’
(The Incredible Theft, Chapter 4)

‘One has, sometimes, a feeling. Faintly, I seem to smell the fish.’
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 1)

1930s slang

  • bad hat – bad man
  • gasper – basic cheap make of cigarette
  • old cock! – Japp’s Cockney / vulgar term of affection, cruder version of ‘old chap’
  • pukka sahib – literally ‘genuine master’, metaphorically ‘good chap’, approved by the British upper middle-class value system
  • legal wallah – wallah is a Hindi term meaning ‘in charge’ so in British India came to be used in association with a profession or action e.g. ‘rickshaw-wallah’; Major Riddle is asserting his membership of the ruling class of the Empire by consciously using imperial slang, in this case referring to the family lawyer, Mr Forbes

Posh diction

According to Christie, posh people like Lord Maybury use contemporary slang but emphasise their superiority to it by using quotation marks:

  • ‘She’s an American subject. I know that she’s had three husbands, one Italian, one German and one Russian, and that in consequence she has made useful what I think are called “contacts”.’
  • ‘I know,’ Lord Mayfield continued, ‘that in addition to having a seductive type of beauty, Mrs Vanderlyn is also a very good listener, and that she can display a fascinating interest in what we call “shop”.’
  • ‘You see, George, to use the language of the movies, we’ve nothing actually “on” the woman. And we want something!’

Related is:

‘Do you yourself approve of Mr Burrows?’ The colonel delivered himself of the opinion that Godfrey Burrows was slightly hairy at the heel, a pronouncement which baffled Poirot completely, but made Major Riddle smile into his moustache.
(Dead Man’s Mirror, Chapter 8)

The same phrase as was used in ‘Murder in the Mews’. Maybe Christie had heard it somewhere and it amused her enough to slip it into the speech of several posh chaps.

Changing definitions of age

In ‘Cards on the Table’ Mrs Lorrimer is considered an old woman at 63.

‘But I am 56, my boy. In another four years I shall probably be a nasty old man continually haunting the society of unwilling debutantes.’
(Lord Mayfield in The Incredible Theft)

Charity

There are lots of reasons for Christie’s runaway bestselling status:

  • the narratives are written with beautiful clarity and zip along at speed
  • the large casts of posh characters appeal to the same audiences who love Downton Abbey and other early 20th century costume dramas i.e. a kind of vicarious snobbery
  • the books (much more than the often clumsy TV and movie adaptations) are always beamingly good humoured, and sometimes very funny
  • although one or two people are ‘murdered’, these alleged murders are totally unlike the sickening, disgusting murders of real life – they are accepted by one and all as ‘tokens’ in an entertainment, conventionalised events designed to deliver all the other psychological / reading pleasures I’ve listed – only very rarely does a murder really upset the story’s characters and cut through to the reader, the most obvious example being the teagirl, Betty Barnard, killed in The ABC  Murders which devastates her poor family

Lastly, there is an air of charity and forgiveness about them. There are lots of other things about it but, in the end, the most notable thing about ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ is that Poirot, understanding their motives, lets all the murderers off, lying to the police so that they can get away.

Same in ‘Dead Man’s Mirror’. When the murderer is revealed, so is her sad story and the nobility of her motivation. When she piteously begs Poirot not to reveal the truth of her identity, he charitably agrees.

Despite the ostensible subject matter of murder, the tone of the narratives, and the attitude of most of the characters and, above all, of the master character, Poirot, is one of understanding, compassion and forgiveness. I think it’s this quality which makes them somehow such comforting and reassuring reads.

Credit

‘Murder in the Mews’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1937 by the Collins Crime Club.

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Posted by Simon on August 13, 2025

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Design for Living: A Comedy in Three Acts by Noel Coward (1932)

LEO: It should be easy, you know. The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now!

GILDA: Ernest, if you only realized what was going on inside you, you’d be bitterly offended!

‘Design for Living’ is a comedy play written by Noël Coward in 1932. It concerns a trio of artistic characters, Gilda, Otto and Leo, and their complicated three-way relationship. Originally written to star Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt and Coward, it was premiered on Broadway, partly because its risqué subject matter was thought unacceptable to the official censor in London. It was not until 1939 that a London production was presented.

‘Design for Living’ was a success on Broadway in 1933, but it has been revived less often than Coward’s other major comedies. Coward said:

‘It was liked and disliked, and hated and admired, but never, I think, sufficiently loved by any but its three leading actors.’

The play was adapted into a film in 1933, directed by Ernst Lubitsch, with a screenplay by Ben Hecht, and starring Fredric March, Gary Cooper, and Miriam Hopkins.

Background

In the second half the 1920s Coward became one of the world’s most famous playwrights, with a succession of popular hits ranging from the operetta Bitter Sweet (1929) and the extravaganza Cavalcade (1931), to the intimate comedies Hay Fever (1924) and Private Lives (1930). Back when he was penniless Coward had met Lunt and Fontanne Lunt on his first trip to new York and had promised he’d write a play to showcase them as an ensemble. By the early 1930s the time was right for Coward to write their star vehicle.

The play was based on the Lunts’ own marriage. They were a devoted couple but had an open relationship with ‘triangular relationships in their private lives’. Coward wrote:

‘These glib, over-articulate and amoral creatures force their lives into fantastic shapes and problems because they cannot help themselves. Impelled chiefly by the impact of their personalities each upon the other, they are like moths in a pool of light, unable to tolerate the lonely outer darkness but equally unable to share the light without colliding constantly and bruising each other’s wings…. The ending of the play is equivocal. The three of them… are left together as the curtain falls, laughing…. Some saw it as the lascivious anticipation of a sort of a carnal frolic. Others with less ribald imaginations regarded it as a meaningless and slightly inept excuse to bring the curtain down. I as author, however, prefer to think that Gilda and Otto and Leo were laughing at themselves.’

‘Design for Living’ opened in New York on 24 January 1933, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on Broadway. It was such a success that Coward was persuaded to relax his usual rule against appearing in any production for more than three months, and he allowed the play to run for a total of five months. So great were the crowds of fans in the street that special police had to be called in during the last week of the run.

Ménage à trois

A ménage à trois is a domestic arrangement or committed relationship consisting of three people in polyamorous romantic or sexual relations with each other, and often dwelling together.

Cast

  • Gilda – ‘a good-looking woman of about thirty’, ‘a permanent spectator’
  • Ernest Friedman – ‘any age between forty and fifty, rather precise in manner’
  • Otto Sylvus – ‘tall and good-looking’
  • Leo Mercuré – ‘thin and nervous’
  • Miss Hodge
  • Photographer
  • Mr Birbeck
  • Grace Torrence
  • Helen Carver
  • Henry Carver
  • Matthew

Plot

Act 1. Otto’s studio in Paris, 1932

Gilda is an interior designer who lives with the painter Otto, who was previously attached to Leo, an author. Ernest Friedman arrives, an art dealer and friend of all three. He is excited about his newly acquired Matisse and wants to show it to Otto. Gilda says that Otto is in bed, ill, has had neuralgia and absolutely cannot be disturbed.

Their conversation consists of classily phrased arguments and insults. ‘Private Lives’ taught me that a good deal of Coward dialogue consists of bad-tempered arguing.

ERNEST: If, in my dotage, I become a bore to you, you won’t scruple to let me know, will you?
GILDA: Don’t be an idiot!

He wonders why she doesn’t marry Otto and she replies because he loves her too much. To be tied legally to him would kill the love. She tells him to mind his own business.

ERNEST: I cannot, for the life of me, imagine why I’m so fond of you. You have such abominable manners.

Ernest tells her that Leo is back in Paris after making a success in New York. They both find it hilarious that he’s staying at the Georges V hotel.

Gilda’s discourse is all on stilts, on a high register of shrill self-awareness occasionally tipping over into hysteria, so much so that Earnest confesses she scares him.

GILDA: I’m yelling! Can’t you hear me yelling like mad?
OTTO: What on earth are you talking about?
GILDA: A bad joke, and very difficult to explain.

For example, she delivers a little speech about how she hates her own femininity, hates being trapped in a woman’s body.

There’s nothing funny in the scenario and few comic lines or jokes. It’s just listening to a posh man being mildly abused by this wilful neurotic. Everything is overdramatised. When Ernest makes the slightest of comments on her claiming to be in love with both Otto and Leo at the same time, she flies into a wild dramatisation of the threesome.

GILDA: Look at the whole thing as a side show. People pay to see freaks. Walk up! Walk up and see the Fat Lady and the Monkey Man and the Living.

To the audience and Earnest’s surprise, Otto – not at all in bed and suffering from neuralgia as Gilda claimed – enters from the street carrying luggage. Gilda lied fluently as so many Coward characters do cf Elyot and Amanda in ‘Private Lives’. In fact Otto’s just returned from a trip to Bordeaux where he was doing a portrait for an unknown client who he insulted by telling her she was fat, and got thrown out.

When Ernest tells Otto that Leo’s back from America, Otto insists that they go and see him straightaway and Gild eggs them on so they both depart.

Then Leo stumbles in from the bedroom and we realise why Gilda lied to Ernest about Otto being in bed with neuralgia and he couldn’t go into the bedroom even to whisper hello. It’s because it wasn’t Otto in the bedroom it was Leo. When he says ‘What we did was inevitable. It’s been inevitable for years’ it makes it sound like they’ve had sex for the first time after fancying each other for years. In other words, that the ménage à trois I’ve read about in all the blurbs and summaries of the play isn’t as established as I thought.

Anyway, he’s racked with guilt about it and they spend some time discussing what it means to have betrayed their best friend etc. As usual with Coward this takes the form of an argument or a squabble. His character suffer from an over-articulacy, they are far too fluent and articulate for their own good – which almost guarantees that they pick up on stray words here and there and magnify them into huge arguments. This was Elyot and Amanda’s way in ‘Private Lives’ and the same here. Leo says something sweet and reassuring which Gilda takes to be an appalling cliché and explodes:

GILDA [viciously]: Let’s have some more! ‘Passion’s only transitory’, isn’t it? ‘Love is ever fleeting!’ ‘Time is a great healer’. Trot them all out, dear.
LEO: Don’t try to quarrel with me.
GILDA: Don’t be so wise and assured and knowing, then. It’s infuriating.

The key word here is ‘viciously’. All Coward characters flip from civilised banter to vicious recriminations and insults in a second, and then back again. It makes them all dislikeable. And it gives the plays a constant sense of walking on eggshells, anxiously waiting for the next character to explode. It’s more like living with a wife beater than attending a sophisticated ‘comedy’.

At the height of their discussion-squabble-argument, Otto walks in and discovers them. Ah. He and Ernest got to the Hotel Georges V only to discover Leo wasn’t staying there at all, so he’s come back to his apartment and found…

They come out and tell him that they slept together in his absence. With crushing inevitability they start arguing and finding articulate fluent ways to describe how miserable they are and to accuse each other. Posh people fighting in a Noel Coward play! Yes.

LEO: What right have you to be hurt and grieved, any more than Gilda and me? We’re having just as bad a time as you are, probably worse.

Much like the audience. Coward’s alleged ‘wit’ is only intermittently apparent. Much, much more present in all these plays is the bad-tempered arguing and insults.

OTTO: I’ve seen something in you that I’ve never seen before; in all these years I’ve never noticed it—I never realized that, deep down underneath your superficial charm and wit, you’re nothing but a cheap, second-rate little opportunist, ready to sacrifice anything, however sacred, to the excitement of the moment.

Not that funny. Otto is violently unpleasant and Gilda collapses in tears.

GILDA (collapsing at the table): Stop it! Stop it! How can you be so cruel! How can you say such vile things?

Otto makes clear his contempt and hatred for both of them, wishes they were dead and in hell, and storms out.

Act 2

Scene 1. Leo’s Flat in London, 18 months later

Most of Coward’s plays take place over a few days. A gap of 18 months is a big thing, more like a novel.

Leo and Gilda are now living together and he is writing plays which are being produced and are tremendously successful. The scene opens with Leo reading out the reviews of his latest play, ‘Change and Decay’, to Gilda,

A playwright nervous about his reviews writing a play about a playwright nervously reading his reviews – you could consider this delightfully meta and cleverly postmodern – or tiresomely self-obsessed and narcissistic, according to taste.

Coward does that thing which numerous modern-ish authors do, which is have a character in one of their novels or plays repeat the popular criticism of them: in this case he has Leo read out the Daily Mirror‘s criticism that his latest play is ‘thin’. This exasperates him and stings him to tell Gilda that in future he will write fat plays about fat characters. This is, of course, to ignore the substance of the criticism: Coward’s plays are thin. The basic scenarios are often quite winning, but the characterisation is generally shallow as a puddle and the dialogue is astonishingly lacking in the wit and humour I have for decades associated with Coward until I actually came to read and watch his plays, and be rather disappointed. Instead of genuine wit or comedy you have exchanges like this.

GILDA: Anyhow, you can’t expect a paper like the Times to be really interested in your petty little excursions in the theatre. After all, it is the organ of the nation.
LEO: That sounds vaguely pornographic to me.

Schoolboy humour. Here’s another example of Coward’s shimmering wit, Gilda pretending to be a brainless newspaper interviewer:

Gilda [conversationally]: Tell me, Mr Mercure, what do you think of the modern girl?
LEO: [politely]: A silly bitch.

Not scintillating repartee, is it?

A phone call from some aristocratic inviting them to dinner prompts Leo to say these social situations are awkward when they’re obviously a couple but not married. So he proposes to her but she sagely turns him down and even says it would be against her moral code.

Presumably this kind of suave, sophisticated exchange was designed to shock and outrage the older, Edwardian generation with their Victorian morals.

The phone rings incessantly, a symptom of the modern world. Leo calls their maid or servant, Miss Hodge, in and tells her to answer the phone for him. Next time the phone rings working class Miss Hodge answers the phone with comic ineptness. The working classes, eh, ha ha ha.

What’s obvious is how bored they are. Gilda is bored to death.

GILDA: Perhaps you’re wise about our marrying; perhaps it would be a good thing. I’m developing into one of those tedious unoccupied women, who batten on men and spoil everything for them. I’m spoiling the excitement of your success for you now by being tiresome and gloomy.

Watching posh bored people torment each other, throwing ‘cheap gibes’ at each other, that’s entertainment. ‘Tiresome’ – that’s the key word. And Leo is as irritated and frustrated.

LEO: This looks like a row but it hasn’t even the virtue of being a new row. We’ve had it before several times, and just lately more than ever.

A journalist, Mr Birbeck, and press photographer from the Evening Standard arrive to do a feature on him. After arguing with Gilda Leo is in a bad mood and gives sharp replies to all the questions. Here is an example of his authorly wit:

MR BIRBECK: Do you believe the talkies will kill the theatre?
LEO: No. I think they’ll kill the talkies.
MR BIRBECK (laughing): That’s very good, that is! It really is.

It isn’t though, is it? It’s not in the slightest bit funny. It’s flippant and cynical and sounds like it ought to be a joke, but it isn’t. Leo gives up answering questions and tells him he’s tired and doesn’t he find asking all these stupid questions ‘grotesque?’ and tells him to come back dome other time when he’s less… tired.

Nonetheless he lets the photographer take some snaps and the scene ends with Mr Birbeck tentatively asking whether Leo could, just maybe, possibly, give them a teeny weeny smile? This is one of the few things I’ve found funny so far, these poor professionals trying to do their job in the face of Leo’s self-important moodiness.

Scene 2. Leo’s London flat, a few days later

A few days later Leo is away. After some comic business with the working class character, the maid Miss Hodge (Gilda asks if she minds that she and Leo are not married; Miss Hodge says she doesn’t mind, having herself been twice married and not thinking much of the institution) departs and Otto turns up.

He too is now successful, as an artist. He’s just back from staging an exhibition in New York.

There’s a joke, a joke with a punchline, such a rarity in Coward it’s worth recording.

OTTO: This seems a very nice flat.
GILDA: It is. You can see right across to the other side of the square on a clear day.

Ooh, immediately followed by another one. Otto says he bumped into a woman just leaving. Gilda explains that that was the maid, Mrs Hodge.

GILDA: That was Miss Hodge. She’s had two husbands.
OTTO: I once met a woman who’d had four husbands.

And a little later, after Otto explains that he went away for a while, on a Norwegian freighter:

OTTO: I can say, ‘How do you do?’ in Norwegian.
GILDA: We must get to know some Norwegian people immediately, so that you can say ‘How do you do? to them.—

Noel’s on fire! Maybe you can see what I mean when I say that this kind of thing isn’t really funny in itself. These aren’t really jokes, or barely. What makes them funny (if it does) is how they exemplify the attitude of these posh, superior, self-absorbed arty types. It’s so exactly the kind of flippant throwaway remark that a posh character in a Coward play ought to say.

Anyway, she asks why he’s avoided them for so frightfully long and he says yes, it has been frightfully long, hasn’t it. Did you miss me, darling etc.

Remember I commented on a playwright having a character in his latest play commenting on newspaper reviews of the character’s previous plays which sound very like the reviews and criticism Coward got for his plays? Happens again here. Otto asks what Gilda thinks of Leo’s latest play, prompting quite a serious reply:

GILDA: Three scenes are first rate, especially the last act. The beginning of the second act drags a bit, and most of the first act’s too facile—you know what I mean—he flips along with easy swift dialogue, but doesn’t go deep enough. It’s all very well played.

‘Doesn’t go deep enough’. Well, there’s no point criticising Coward for what he isn’t. No Ibsen or Strindberg, he. He concocted effective and extremely popular entertainments over a career spanning decades. An awesome achievement.

Back in this play, Otto and Gilda have a picnic dinner together: cold ham, salad, cold rice pudding, and slowly revive their friendship turning back into love. Or whatever it is they have. Maybe just opportunity.

Otto jokes about what would happen if they ended up fighting over Gilda, reminiscent of the fight scene between Elyot and Victor which fizzles out in ‘Private Lives’.

The conversation is frequently difficult to distinguish from an argument or row.

OTTO: Shut up! Don’t talk like that…
GILDA [breaking down]: Don’t—don’t laugh at me.

Author’s message

Remember how I’ve pointed out that the fundamental dichotomy in Coward isn’t between the straight and the gay, it’s between what my son calls ‘the normies’ – the normal, everyday people with their conventional beliefs and lives and morality and behaviour – and the Coward characters who proclaim that they are special, different, exceptional, Well, the same sentiment is expressed here in a pat little speech by Otto. For when Gilda has a moment of ‘normality’ and says that their falling in love is sordid and gross, Otto suavely replies that this is only so if measured by other people’s standards. I might as well give the whole speech, as it amounts to a manifesto of sorts.

GILDA: Why should we flatter ourselves that we’re so tremendously different?
OTTO: Flattery doesn’t enter into it. We are different. Our lives are diametrically opposed to ordinary social conventions; and it’s no use grabbing at those conventions to hold us up when we find we’re in deep water. We’ve jilted them and eliminated them, and we’ve got to find our own solutions for our own peculiar moral problems.
GILDA: Very glib, very glib indeed, and very plausible.
OTTO: It’s true. There’s no sense in stamping about and saying how degrading it all is. Of course it’s degrading; according to a certain code, the whole situation’s degrading and always has been. The Methodists wouldn’t approve of us, and the Catholics wouldn’t either; and the Evangelists and the Episcopalians and the Anglicans and the Christian Scientists—I don’t suppose even the Polynesian Islanders would think very highly of us, but they wouldn’t mind quite so much, being so far away. They could all club together—the whole lot of them—and say with perfect truth, according to their lights, that we were loose-living, irreligious, unmoral degenerates, couldn’t they?
GILDA [meekly]: Yes, Otto, I expect so.
OTTO: But the whole point is, it’s none of their business. We’re not doing any harm to anyone else. We’re not peppering the world with illegitimate children. The only people we could possibly mess up are ourselves, and that’s our lookout. It’s no use you trying to decide which you love best, Leo or me, because you don’t know! At the moment, it’s me, because you’ve been living with Leo for a long time and I’ve been away. A gay, ironic chance threw the three of us together and tied our lives into a tight knot at the outset. To deny it would be ridiculous, and to unravel it impossible. Therefore, the only thing left is to enjoy it thoroughly, every rich moment of it, every thrilling second.

This is no different from the ancient trope of carpe diem, Latin for ‘seize the day’, which is a literary phrase for the pretty obvious idea that you should enjoy life while you can. (The original Latin phrase comes from Horace’s Odes, which I’ve reviewed for this blog.)

The banter goes on for page after page until they realise they need to go to bed together. They embrace passionately. So it’s partner swapping again, as in ‘Private Lives’.

Scene 3. The same, the next morning

10.30 the next morning. Otto is still asleep when Ernest calls on Gilda. He asks to see Leo but Gilda lies, saying he’s not very well and can’t be disturbed. In reality, as we know, Leo is away at a weekend house party and it’s Otto asleep in the next room. This is quite funny because it mirrors the situation in the first scene, where Ernest arrived wanting to see Otto and Gilda lied, saying he was in bed with neuralgia when it was, of course, Leo who she’d illicitly slept with, who was in the bedroom.

This explains why Gilda is, once again, as in the first scene, slightly hysterical. And in this hysteria liable to sound off and make sweeping statements. For a start she says humanity is a great disappointment, has barely risen above the primeval slime. But this leads onto a more revealing statement.

GILDA: The human race is a let-down, Ernest; a bad, bad let-down! I’m disgusted with it. It thinks it’s progressed but it hasn’t; it thinks it’s risen above the primeval slime but it hasn’t—it’s still wallowing in it! It’s still clinging to us, clinging to our hair and our eyes and our souls. We’ve invented a few small things that make noises, but we haven’t invented one big thing that creates quiet, endless peaceful quiet—something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—

Coward hated critical analysis of his plays, so I’m going to do something he would have loathed and subject this little speech to tuppeny-ha’penny analyses according to several classical schools of literary criticism.

A Marxist interpretation

Most of Coward’s characters come from the parasite rentier class which doesn’t work for a living. Thus, lacking the purpose given to existence by the need to work, they are often bored to death, as Gilda is. In this particular play, the two male leads do in fact work for a living, after a fashion, as a playwright and an artist.

But the real point is that none of them are aligned with the forces of History, specifically the Proletariat which is, in late capitalism, the embodiment of the spirit of History and which must, as Marx proved with his scientific socialism, soon overthrow the exploitative capitalist system and its imperial extensions, and usher in the triumph of the working class.

So on the Marxist view of his day, it is only by throwing in their lot with people with a cause, committed to the liberation of humanity, that Coward’s characters can discover meaning and purpose to life and stop indulging in their squalid, petty bourgeois intrigues.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions—’ is the cry of the rootless, aimless, cosmopolitan bourgeoisie adrift from the unstoppable march of History, and for which there is only one cure or solution. Align with the class of the future, the proletariat. See the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre which dramatise just this issue.

A Freudian interpretation

Freud’s first, pre-war model of the mind, developed between about 1895 and 1918, attributed the central driving force of the unconscious to Sex, broadly speaking the Darwinian drive of the human organism to reproduce which, more narrowly, creates erotic drives which had to be channelled ‘correctly’ in order to be socially acceptable. Freud was among the first to discover how easily these drives get blocked and misdirected in childhood and adolescence to turn into the florid array of sexual ‘perversions’, or be stifled and emerge was a wide variety of neurotic and obsessive symptoms, which his patients described when they presented to him.

However, the colossal slaughter and destruction of the First World War persuaded him that his theory was inadequate. Nothing about sex could explain the hecatombs of corpses and entire empires brought to their knees.

Thus in the 1920s he developed his second model of the mind and this time posited that alongside the positive Life Force or Eros, of which reproduction and sex are merely subsets, an equal and opposite drive in all humans, indeed (he speculates) in all organisms, which he called the Death Drive or Thanatos: the widespread wish that the whole wretched business of life, all the anxieties and worries and responsibilities, not to mention illnesses and accidents, would all cease once and for all.

Thus Gilda’s wish for ‘something to pull over us like a gigantic eiderdown; something to deaden the sound of our emotional yellings and screechings and suffocate our psychological confusions’ is a textbook expression of the deep wish, a key component of all human minds – sometimes buried deep, sometimes (as here) freely acknowledged – for the whole stressful business just to end.

Anyway, this big speech is all preparatory to Gilda telling Ernest she is leaving. Leaving Leo and Otto. Running away. She feels stifled. She wants to be free. She wants to be her ‘unadulterated self’. She’s going to run away, stay in a hotel, go to Paris, no, Berlin. Explaining all this makes her feel very tender towards Ernest and she throws her arms round his neck. She leaves two letters on the desk and then leaves with Ernest.

The phone rings, Miss Hodge answers it and this prompts Otto to slouch out of his bedroom in his pyjamas and dressing gown. Miss Hodge lets him know she disapproves, and he tells her to go away and mind her own business.

Leo sneaks in through the front door, and for a moment mistakes the back of the head on the sofa and the cigarette smoke rising to be Gilda and shouts Hi honey, I’m home. So is appalled when it’s Otto who turns to greet him.

This turns into a row, with Leo telling him how vile he is, just as Otto told him how vile he was in the earlier scene. As with so much Coward, this is studiedly symmetrical and patterned.

OTTO: I said all that to you in Paris. Do you remember? I thought it was true then, just as you think it’s true now.

They have a long conversation about how they’re doomed to repeat the same situation (infidelity with Gilda). Leo says he needs to be tolerant which Otto, understandably, finds hard.

Then they notice the letters, reading them and concluding that Gilda has escaped. So, rather pathetically, they decide to get completely pissed on brandy and then sherry. Difficult for actors portraying steady descent into quite wild and then tearful drunkenness. Otto delivers a semi-drunken rant:

OTTO (with sudden fury): So many words! That’s what’s wrong with us! So many words—too many words, masses and masses of words, spewed about until we’re choked with them. We’ve argued and probed and dragged our entrails out in front of one another for years! We’ve explained away the sea and the stars and life and death and our own peace of mind! I’m sick of this endless game of three-handed, spiritual ping-pong—this battling of our little egos in one another’s faces! Sick to death of it! Gilda’s made a supreme gesture and got out. Good luck to her, I say!

Apart from the detail of it being a trio, the basic idea of being sick to death of choking themselves with words and dragging their entrails out, this could come from one of Elyot or Amanda’s rants in ‘Private Lives’.

Coward drags out this scene to inordinate length with Leo and Otto arguing at length, though it’s dressed up with fancy ideas, for example:

LEO: Science is our only hope, the only hope for humanity! We’ve wallowed in false mysticism for centuries; we’ve fought and suffered and died for foolish beliefs, which science has proved to be as ephemeral as smoke. Now is the moment to open our eyes fearlessly and look at the truth!

Which might mean something in a more serious play but, spoken by one of Coward’s superficial mannequins, comes over as flippant and inconsequential as everything else they say. For example, increasingly fanciful digressions, for example about the absurdity of the words ‘macaroni’ and ‘wimple’. Eventually they get so drunk that they embrace, sobbing helplessly.

So the act ends with two old friends having got hopelessly drunk and feeling hopelessly lonely and sad. Not immediately comic, in fact quite sad for us…

Act 3

Scene 1. Ernest’s apartment in New York, two years later

Like the gap of 18 months before Acts 1 and 2, two whole years is another long period of time to jump. So we find ourselves in Ernest’s New York apartment. Gilda has married Ernest and become a commercially successful designer. Ernest is away and, on this fine summer’s evening, Gilda is giving a reception for some important clients, namely: Henry and Helen Carver, ‘a comparatively young married couple, wealthy and well dressed’, and Grace Torrence, ‘slightly older, a typical Europeanized New York matron’.

Gilda has grown up. She is elaborately and beautifully gowned. Her manner has changed a good deal. She is much more still and sure than before. A certain amount of vitality has gone from her, but, in its place, there is an aloof poise quite in keeping with her dress and surroundings.

Gilda takes Grace off to show her something and Henry and Helen have an extended argument about the merit of interior decorators, Henry thinking it’s all a racket, Helen defending her. Couples fiercely arguing, it’s Coward’s basic situation.

Doorbell rings and Henry lets in… Otto and Leo, both in fine fantastical moods. They come over as very camp i.e. over self-consciously mocking everything everyone says.

OTTO: There’s something strangely and deeply moving about young love, Mr. and Mrs. Carver.
LEO: Youth at the helm.
OTTO: Guiding the little fragile barque of happiness down the river of life. Unthinking, unknowing, unaware of the perils that lie in wait for you, the sudden tempests, the sharp jagged rocks beneath the surface. Are you never afraid?
HENRY I don’t see anything to be afraid of.
LEO (fondly): Foolish headstrong boy.

This is deliberately aggressively offensive but cast in such suave politeness as to be hard to talk back to. Part of the purpose of camp which is a power play.

Otto and Leo’s fast-talking sophisticated banter startles and puzzles Henry and Helen. This is also a classic scenario – clever, fast-talking smartarses bewildering the normies. Which conceals, not very well, their anger. They are cattily, bitchily angry with Gilda and their anger quickly comes out, constantly teetering on the brink of… yet another argument, a fight, a flaring row. The basic Coward content.

Gilda responds to their aggressive flippancy with bitterness of their own and barely controlled fury. On a general point, lots of twentieth century drama seems to be about people behaving badly on stage. Drunken angry bitterness being the speciality of, for example, Tennessee Williams a generation later.

Their intense, recriminatory conversation drives Helen, Henry and Grace away. Grace recognises boorish behaviour when she sees it. Gilda insists Leo and Otto leave as well but secretly gives them a key and tells them to come back.

After they’ve all gone she compulsively finished one of the other’s drink, with tears in her eyes.

Scene 2. The same, the next morning

Ernest returns the next morning and is greeted by his Black servant who makes him a coffee, he puts down his luggage etc and then… Otto and Leo come down the stairs wearing his pyjamas and dressing gowns.

He is completely flabbergasted and triggers their ‘brazen impertinence’ i.e. more camp flippancy. They tell him they gatecrashed Gilda’s little party the night before, she gave them a key, but when they came back she had gone.

They call him ludicrous for claiming that Gilda is his wife, but they dismiss this as nonsense, claiming she belongs to them just as much as to him (Ernest).

Cue Gilda walking in and explaining that she spent the night at a hotel. Ernest explodes in anger but once again, as in the previous scene, it’s a case of the two tricksters, jokers, sparky and flippant and imaginative people, against the ‘normie’, Ernest, who can’t keep up with their smooth repartee. Just as straight-laced Victor couldn’t keep up with Elyot’s smart repartee in ‘Private Lives’. So:

ERNEST: I think your arrogance is insufferable. I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to do. I’m very, very angry.

Of course he doesn’t know what to do. He’s the normie in a play about tricksters.

Now it turns out that Gilda has realised she is bored with her life with Ernest and so she’s going to leave him. She reveals that being her wife has no value to her, it’s been very convenient and comfortable but now she realises she has to go back to the tricksters.

Ernest tries to argue that Gilda knows too much to be taken back by them but she denies it. He thinks she’s gone mad but she declares they are all of a piece, they all share the same ‘difference’ from normal society which I commented on earlier.

GILDA: It’s silly to go on saying to yourself that I’m different from Otto. and Leo just because you want to believe it. I’m not different from them. We’re all of a piece, the three of us. Those early years made us so. From now on we shall have to live and die our own way. No one else’s way is any good, we don’t fit.

‘We don’t fit’, cry of the alienated teenager for at least the last 70 years. And more manifesto:

ERNEST: Your values are false and distorted.
GILDA: Only from your point of view.
ERNEST: From the point of view of anyone who has the slightest sense of decency.
LEO: We have our own decencies. We have our own ethics. Our lives are a different shape from yours. Wave us good-bye, Little Ernest, we’re together again.

Ernest accuses them of wallowing in a ‘disgusting three-sided erotic hotch-potch’. But the more angry he gets – the more he invokes conventional morality – the more flippantly amused the naughty threesome become and, as Ernest stomps to the apartment door, leaves and slams it shut, the threesome collapse into hilarious laughter.

Thoughts

I’ve made my main comments: not many comic lines; thin characters; the whole effect achieved almost entirely by the posh self-centred self-satisfied smug superiority of the characters, which the audience is invited to alternately identify with and/or laugh at.

What impresses, maybe, is the professionalism with which the initial premise or scenario is worked through, with clever structural echoes and parallelism. But it gets pretty monotonous at moments, since the audience quickly develops a strong idea of what’s going to happen.

Is it even a real ménage à trois?

Short answer, no. It isn’t. Our three heroes do not live in a relaxed happy ménage, so they? The opposite. What really happens is Gilda sleeps around, betraying first Leo, then Otto and then, a year or so later, her husband Ernest. It is not a ménage at all but the story of a serial adulteress or promiscuous woman. The idea that the three of them can somehow happily co-exist only really comes at the end, in the Betraying Ernest scene.

But again, as with The Vortex, there’s little point judging the scenario by our own modern standards: in its day, the play’s timid hints at a genuine ménage were enough to cause shock and scandal among the bourgeois newspapers, critics and staid theatre goers.

Mocking the provinces

I wonder how long the English upper classes have been mocking the provinces. Maybe since the Norman Conquest. One of Coward’s other plays mocks Newcastle, and there’s a slight dig here.

GILDA: Have you been married much, then?
MISS HODGE: Twice, all told.
GILDA: Where are your husbands now?
MISS HODGE: One’s dead, and the other’s in Newcastle.
GILDA (smiling): Oh.

More sustained metropolitan snobbery is dispensed by Otto in Act 2.

OTTO [drawing up a chair]: What delicious-looking ham! Where did you get it?
GILDA: I have it specially sent from Scotland.
OTTO: Why Scotland?
GILDA: It lives there when it’s alive.
OTTO: A bonny country, Scotland, if all I’ve heard is correct, what with the banshees wailing and the four-leaved shamrock.
GILDA: That’s Ireland, dear.
OTTO: Never mind. The same wistful dampness distinguishes them both.

A post-colonial interpretation

Hilarious (that’s sarcasm). But if you were an Irish nationalist, an Indian nationalist, any educated inhabitant of one of Britain’s 57 colonies, dominions, territories, or protectorates, you might have read this kind of thing as precisely the kind of ignorant, self-centred, privileged, smug indifference that you had to shoot your way through in order to gain independence.

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Posted by Simon on June 2, 2025

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The Struggle For Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284 by David Carpenter (2003)

This is Volume Three of the Penguin History of Britain and I’m afraid to say it’s pretty boring. It opens logically enough with chapters on ‘The Peoples of Britain’ and then on ‘The Economies of Britain’, which no doubt synthesise the latest findings in archaeology and textual analysis, and do shed light if you’re really paying attention (I had to read them twice) and are already familiar with the key historical events of the period, but are still, well…boring.

A major challenge is the way that, in order to make his thematic points, Carpenter’s narrative jumps all over the chronology, so that we skip from 10th century Scotland to mid-1100s England, there’s an anecdote from 1175 and then he’s summarising changes made in the early 13th century or the mid-13th century or the late-13th century, all in one sentence. These swooping leaps around the period make it hard to follow a lot of the analysis.

The Norman Conquest

I was looking forward to getting to Chapter Three, on the Norman Conquest when, as Carpenter promises, a more traditional chronological narrative of events kicks in, but I was disappointed. Key players, key relationships like Harold’s with Morcar or Tostig – are introduced mid-way through the narrative, and then only fleetingly. In fact, when he is first introduced into the narrative Carpenter doesn’t make it clear enough that Harold of England was the son of the Earl Godwin, who had risen to be the most powerful man in the land and threatened the reign of King Edward the Confessor. It feels like you have to figure out a lot of the relationships and jostling for power by yourself: I kept having to reread paragraphs to understand what he’d just said.

Same for the complex background which explains why Harold Hardrada, King of Norway, and William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy, both felt they were entitled to the English throne after Edward the Confessor died – I felt these situations weren’t conveyed thoroughly or powerfully enough.

Reading the Norman Conquest chapter reminded me just how complicated a business it was: all the main players were related to each other by marriages stretching back several generations. In fact to tell the story properly you have to go back to the reign of Ethelred the Unready (978 to 1013) and get a sense of the deeply destabilising impact of the Danish invasion of Sweyn Forkbeard, whose campaigns in the early 1000s led up to the reign over England of his Danish son, Cnut the Great (1016 to 1035), then the brief rule of his son Harthacnut (1040 to 1042), before the throne reverted to an Englishman, Edward the Confessor, himself married to the daughter of the overbearing Earl Godwin.

During this period the female relatives of most of these players were married off into each other’s families or into families in France and Normandy, creating a very complex web of alliances and relationships. You really need to have a good sense of these dynastic matrices in order to understand the constraints and pressures all the players were operating under.

The best book I know on the subject is ‘The Norman Conquest 1066’ by Marc Morris, because it does indeed require an entire book to fully describe the sixty years or so of complex warfare, invasion, foreign rule and dynastic intermarriages which lay behind the successful Norman invasion. Carpenter’s book touches on all this, of course, but doesn’t go anywhere near conveying the depth and complexity and fraughtness of the political situation. He conveys the facts with a kind of deadening punctiliousness, with no sense of the threat or risk or excitement.

Social history

This is chiefly because Carpenter is much more interested in social and economic history than in kings and conquerors. The opening chapters set the tone with their wealth of information about the fundamental social and geographical realities of 11th century Britain, and how it slowly, slowly evolved under the Norman kings. There is an awful lot about the way the country was defined, laid out, administered, farmed and taxed – a lot about nucleated villages and carucates (the extent of land which could be ploughed in a year and a day), demesnes (the land attached to a manor), sokes (an area overseen by a local court), sokemen (the peasant inhabitant of a soke), wapentakes (the northern equivalent of the hundreds which southern counties were divided into) and so on. A typical sentence runs:

Tax records from the end of the thirteenth century show that at Aberffraw wheat was grown extensively, indeed the balance between wheat and oats was better than in some parts of Oxfordshire. (p.39)

There are hundreds of snippets like this. Are you supposed to remember them all? True, they form the basis for and lead up to more graspable general conclusions, but still…

Wales

Wales was economically and socially undeveloped compared to England. The Welsh had no coins and no mint; any coins circulating came from England. There was no one central ruler but hosts of petty kings and princes and dukes who fought among themselves (this was to a large extent determined by the geography of Wales, divided by highlands and steep river valleys). This fighting was rarely what we would call a ‘war’, but more a life of constant raiding and plundering. Thus ‘the law’ was difficult to enforce, and mostly took the form of revenge and vendettas. There was a lot of murdering and maiming. Even Welsh writers lamented the violence and instability of their own society and looked with envy at the strong centralised organisation of England, which benefited from the rule of one strong king, with one set of laws, with a sophisticated system of regional courts, with a strong agricultural economy and one centrally controlled currency.

Ireland

Ireland was even ‘worse’, a land of unbridled internecine conflict between umpteen ‘kings’ – mostly just local warlords – lacking writing and so written laws, without courts or taxation, coinage, even settled towns, apart from Viking-founded Dublin – lacking everything, in fact, which the Normans defined as ‘civilisation’ (p.15).

One aspect of this was the practice of war: the Normans brought a new war-winning technology from the continent – heavy warhorses, crossbows and ‘the castle’ (there wasn’t a single castle in England in 1066; by 1100 there were an estimated 500!) But they also brought rules and a certain amount of ‘chivalry’ to the business of war. Most obviously this meant the aim of battle was to capture rather than just slaughter opposing nobles, and then barter them for big ransoms or land (p.126).

(According to one online definition, ‘chivalrous’ means: ‘gracious and honourable toward an enemy, especially a defeated one’.)

By contrast, a contemporary chronicler laments that the Irish and Welsh practice in battle continued to be to kill, mutilate and behead captive nobles, and take non-noble prisoners into lifelong slavery.

The ransom played a key role in chivalrous continental warfare and was dependent on the existence of money and coinage: a captured lord could be ransomed if you could muster £1,000 in money; but if – as in Wales and Ireland – there was no money at all, then you could only offer his holders… what? Cows, horses, sheep? Giving these would undermine the ability of the people dependant on you to eat and survive. So…Let him die.

So it is a fascinating insight that chivalry depended on the institute of ransom which itself depended on the existence of cash.

Scotland

Scotland is the exception to the Celtic rule due to the sweeping changes wrought under King David I (1124 to 1153). David had been brought up in the court of King Henry I and witnessed the fluency and power of a continental-style monarchy. When he ascended to the Scottish throne, he invited Norman and Flemish settlers to come and settle the Lowlands; he introduced written records for tax purposes, along with continental-style tax and coinage, land-holding patterns. He took wide-ranging steps to generally ‘civilise’ – certainly to ‘continentalise’ – Scotland.

Hence, where Carpenter describes the rise of Anglo-Norman ‘racism’ in the 1100s against the Irish and Welsh (because they were perceived as being illiterate, having no central court or authority, no taxation, no coinage, no modern economy, and because of their inveterate habit of mutilating and slaughtering each other) he also reports the Anglo-Normans were forced, in the 1200s, to concede that Scotland was different. ‘Savages’ though the Highlanders might be, the Lowlanders had more in common with their Anglo-Norman neighbours than with the Celts.

Conclusion

This is a very long book which trawls through the reigns of kings William, William Rufus, Henry I, Stephen, Henry II, Richard, John, Henry II and the start of the reign of Edward I. A lot happens at the level of high politics – successions and civil wars and battles – which Carpenter dutifully reports, but he tends to get these bits out of the way so he can get back to what really interests him, which is the social and economic developments during the period, the changing patterns of trade and agricultural practice, reforms to tax laws or the ongoing reforms to church regulation and monastic rule.

Though this is mostly rather dull, it does throw up a steady trickle of useful insights. But for the thrill of high political intrigue, and a sense of how the pressure of tumultuous events limited and determined the actions of successive kings, I would look elsewhere.

Insights

English or Norman?

It seems there was 150 years during which different writers, kings and nobles called themselves English or Norman or French, depending on the context. In the 1120s chroniclers still complained about having been defeated by the Normans. But from the start, the Conqueror described himself as king of the English. Carpenter quotes lots of evidence before summarising, uncontroversially, that by the 13th century England, Scotland and Wales all had a greater sense of national identity than in 1066.

Revolt

Carpenter makes the subtle point that England was so far in advance of the Celtic countries, politically, that by 1200 not only did it have a strong centralised unified monarchy, but the nobles and aristocrats had a highly developed sense of their rights, and what the kingdom should expect from its king. This was the point of Magna Carta, to define and circumscribe the rights and role of the English king, and the political history of the 13th century – as I know from Dan Jones’s rip-roaring history of the Plantagenets and from Marc Morris’s thorough history of King Edward – was the conflict between errant kings (John, Henry III) and rebellious nobles who tried to curb their power and hold them to account against written standards of behaviour.

1204

1204 is referenced repeatedly as the key date in the Englishisation of the Normans because it was the year King John lost the Duchy of Normandy to the French king. John, his court and senior nobles all stopped being able to shuttle between their Norman estates and their English estates and were henceforth bottled up in Britain. Carpenter downplays the ongoing holdings in Gascony in south-west France to emphasise that the loss of Normandy set the kings of ‘England’ on the path towards mastering the rest of Britain i.e. the loss of Normandy leads to the conquest of Wales, the Norman colonisation of Ireland, the invasion of Scotland. Maybe. Quite a long lead time, though – from 1204 until King Edward’s campaigns in Wales the 1280s. Also, this downplays the simple geographical logic: strong powers tend to attack their neighbours sooner or later. The Anglo-Norman invasion of eastern Ireland began much earlier, in the 1170s.

As it happens, 1204 was the year of the Sack of Constantinople by members of the Fourth Crusade, which led to the imposition of Latin control over the Eastern Empire. So a key year to remember.

Slavery

As with Robert Bartlett’s book on the Making of Europe, I was shocked at the extent of slavery in pre-Conquest Anglo-Saxon Britain and by the fact that it continued on into this period of the High Middle Ages.

It is estimated that a the time of the conquest about 10% of the rural population of Britain were slaves; Domesday Book mentions 28,000 slaves. You could become a slave by being captured in an armed raid (generally by the Scots or Welsh) but also for simply being unable to pay a debt. Carpenter claims one of the few trades we know about in 11th century Wales was the export of slaves to Ireland.

The Conqueror banned slavery but it lingered on into the 11th century. It was regularly attacked by the Church (although the Church itself owned slaves) but the reason slavery declined and disappeared in the 12th century is that it was uneconomic in a more advanced economy. Slaves have no land and have to be fed. Norman lords realised it was more effective to give slaves land and then extract routine work or produce from them. Thus slaves were converted into ‘villeins’, the precise category of what is more loosely called ‘serfs’ – peasants who were attached to estates and manors, and could be sold on with them. But the key legal difference is that a slave could be punished, physically mutilated and killed by their owner with no comeback. Serfs, on the other hand, as the new stricter laws of the Anglo-Normans insisted, belonged to the king; an attack on their bodies was an attack on the king’s property.

Not war but slave hunts

I was particularly surprised to read about the behaviour of the Scottish during this period i.e. they engaged in routine, large-scale invasions of northern England, during which they lay the country waste, murdered, raped and dragged off the survivors into slavery. Repeatedly. For example, contemporary chroniclers were appalled by the behaviour of the Scots army led into Northumbria by King David and eventually brought to battle at the Battle of the Standard on 22 August 1138. Richard of Hexham described:

An execrable army, more atrocious than the pagans, neither fearing God nor regarding man, spread desolation over the whole province and slaughtered everywhere people of either sex, of every age and rank, destroying, pillaging and burning towns, churches and houses.

The Scots were perceived as going beyond normal Norman ‘harrying’ by systematically carrying off women and children as slaves. In the contemporary Celtic world this was regarded as a useful source of revenue, and not significantly more reprehensible than cattle-raiding.

Then (horrible to relate) they carried off, like so much booty, the noble matrons and chaste virgins, together with other women. These naked, fettered, herded together; by whips and thongs they drove before them, goading them with their spears and other weapons. This took place in other wars, but in this to a far greater extent.

This testimony supports the chroniclers’ tales of sexual abuse of the slaves and the casual slaughter of unsalable encumbrances:

For the sick on their couches, women pregnant and in childbed, infants in the womb, innocents at the breast, or on the mother’s knee, with the mothers themselves, decrepit old men and worn-out old women, and persons debilitated from whatever cause, wherever they met with them, they put to the edge of the sword, and transfixed with their spears.

So the Anglo-Normans’ description of the extremely violent, cruel, enslaving Scots, Welsh and Irish wasn’t just prejudice. This wasn’t war as continental chivalry; it was war as slave-hunt and butchery. These tales influenced English attitudes to their neighbours for generations.

Poverty

Carpenter lays out very clearly the techniques and the source materials used by modern demographers to try and work out the population of Britain in 1066 and then calculate how much it increased in the following two centuries (this lays bare just how much guesswork is involved and why the estimates vary so much). Best guess is the British population was 2 million in 1086 and doubled to over 4 million by 1300, possibly as many as 5 million.

But the more powerful aspect of his account of the British population is the grinding poverty of most of the population. An elite peasant might have a pig, a few cows, some chickens for eggs; a basic ‘cottager’ might have a cow; but the majority of peasants only ate what they could grow, and mostly lived on an unchanging diet of bread and pottage (porridge of oats and corn).

Life still remained miserable and short. Most of the population lived right on the borderline of survival. If there was a bad harvest large numbers starved to death. A bad harvest in 1257 led to large numbers of starving peasants roaming the countryside in 1258, commented on by chroniclers and prompting the government to slacken the law on burying the dead without a full identification, because corpses were piling up so fast. In the second half of the 13th century life expectancy was 24. 24! In 1300 60% of the peasantry were too poor to be taxed.

So the population doubled, new towns were founded along with hundreds of new markets and fairs, a small new merchant class began to crystallise – but the vast majority of the population increase was in the shape of chronically poor peasants tied to the land, who, at a dip in agricultural yields, starved to death.

In 1066 there were no towns north of York, in either England or Scotland, and no towns at all anywhere in Wales! Britain was an almost unrecognisably underdeveloped and empty land.

Credit

The Struggle For Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain 1066 to 1284 by David Carpenter was published by Penguin Books in 2003.

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by Simon on July 31, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on July 31, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/07/31/the-struggle-for-mastery-david-carpenter/

Virgil and the Christian World by T.S. Eliot (1951)

T.S. Eliot: a potted biography

The great Anglo-American poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) came from America to England just before the First World War, published a small number of sensuous, ‘modernist’ poems displaying a sensibility in debt to French Symbolism. Soon after the Great War ended he published the seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), but also established a reputation as a deeply insightful and intelligent critic of much earlier English literature, particularly the Jacobean playwrights and metaphysical poets of the early 1600s.

His reputation was enhanced and his influence steadily spread, especially among the younger generation of writers and critics, due to his editorship of a literary and philosophical magazine, The Criterion, which he edited from 1922 to 1939. Readers of The Criterion came to realise that, far from being a youthful revolutionary who was set on overturning literary values, and despite the radical format of The Waste Land (collage, fragments, quotes from multiple foreign languages), Eliot was, in fact, a profoundly conservative thinker.

This was made explicit when in 1928, in the foreword to a book of essays titled ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ (the Jacobean bishop and writer) Eliot ‘came out’, declaring himself ‘a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion,’ committing himself to hierarchy and order in all three fields.

He had already taken British citizenship. In the later 1930s he attempted to revive the verse drama of the Elizabethans which he had spent so much time analysing, on the modern stage, writing a series of plays in verse, starting with Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

During the Second World War Eliot worked as a reader for the publishers Faber & Faber during the day and a fire warden at night. The masterpiece of his maturity was the set of four longer poems collectively titled the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1936, then East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively).

After the war, Eliot settled into the position of Grand Old Man of Poetry, with a leading role at the leading publisher of poetry, Faber. He continued to write essays and make broadcasts on the radio. With his public conversion to Anglicanism he had achieved an ideological and psychological stability.

Having lived through two ruinous world wars, a lot of Eliot’s effort was now devoted towards helping to define and preserve the best of European civilisation. His early essays had been offshoots of a poet working through his own problems and interests; the later essays are a conscious effort to establish a canon of classic literature, trying to formulate universal categories to define and preserve it.

It is in this spirit that in 1951 he delivered a lecture on BBC radio titled ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, which was then printed in The Listener magazine and collected in the volume On Poetry and Poets.

Virgil and the Christian World

As befits radio this is not an address to a specialist audience of literary scholars but a more broad brush approach for a general audience. Eliot explains that he is not setting out to assert Virgil’s special value as a poet or moralist, but to pay attention to ‘those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind’.

Straight away he addresses the notorious issue of the Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. This, the fourth and final of Virgil’s set of lengthy poems about the countryside or ‘eclogues’, contains extravagant praise of the forthcoming birth of a special child, who, the poet claims, will bring a new golden age, the return of Saturn and the Virgin, the gift of divine life etc.

As early Christianity established itself, early Christian apologists ransacked all available texts, from old Jewish scriptures to the entire literature of the ancient world, looking for proofs and prophecies, any text anywhere which could be made to prefigure and predict the arrival of their messiah.

Thus the Fourth Eclogue was quickly adopted by these apologists and Virgil was made an honorary Christian before the fact because Christians claimed he had been gifted with spiritual prophecy to foresee the coming of the Christ. Throughout the entire Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance scholars and theologians genuinely believed that Virgil had predicted the coming of the Christ child.

Eliot makes clear right at the start that he in now way thinks that Virgil foresaw the birth of Christ (some 19 years after he himself died). Rather, Eliot thinks the Fourth Eclogue was written to a friend of his, Pollio, whose wife was expecting a baby.

[In fact, the notes to the OUP edition of the Eclogues which I recently read, suggest that this passage of the Fourth Eclogue was describing the hoped-for son of the recent marriage of Antony and Octavius’s sister, Octavia (in 40 BC), because contemporaries devoutly hoped that their union would usher in a final end to Rome’s endless civil wars.]

Eliot then ponders the meaning of the words prophet, prophecy and predict. He himself has no doubt that Virgil had no inkling of the coming of Christ. On the other hand, he suggests that if the word ‘inspiration’ means writing something the poet himself does not completely understand, and which he or she may themselves misinterpret once the ‘inspiration’ has passed, the maybe Virgil was ‘inspired’.

This is by way of preparing the way for some autobiography, for Eliot then paints an obvious portrait of himself and how his most famous poem, The Waste Land, which arose out of his purely private concerns, amazed him by going on to become the rallying cry for an entire generation of writers.

A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation.

A poet need not know what his poetry will come to mean for others just as a prophet need not understand the meaning of their prophetic utterance. Thus there may be any number of secular, historical explanations for the Fourth Eclogue; but he repeats his definition of ‘inspiration’ as tapping into a force which defies all historical research.

Anyway the point is that the existence of the Fourth Eclogue which so many Christians mistakenly thought was divinely inspired, gave Virgil and his writing a kind of free pass into the new Christian order, opening ‘the way for his influence in the Christian world’, something mostly denied to other explicitly ‘pagan’ authors. On the face of it this is a lucky accident but Eliot doesn’t believe it was an ‘accident’.

Eliot anticipates Jackson Knight’s view, expressed in his Penguin translation of the Aeneid from a few years later (1956), that Virgil was the poet of the gateway, looking both back to the pagan world and forwards to the Christian dispensation.

So after these preliminaries, Eliot gets to the meat of his essay: In what way did Virgil anticipate the Christian West? Eliot tells us that, to answer his question, he is going to rely on a book by a German scholar, Theodor Haecker, titled Virgil: The Father of the West.

Before he gets started though, Eliot rather surprisingly devotes a page to autobiography, telling us that as a boy learning the Classics he much preferred Greek to Latin (and still does). However he found himself immediately more drawn to Virgil than Homer. The main reason was that the gods in Homer are so capricious, selfish and immoral and all the so-called ‘heroes’ are in fact coarse ruffians. The only decent character in the entire book is Hector.

Nowadays, if forced to explain his preference, he’d say he prefers the world of Virgil to the world of Homer: it was ‘a more civilised world of dignity, reason and order’. Eliot goes on to compare the Greek and Roman worlds, saying the culture of Athens was much superior in the arts, philosophy and pure science. Virgil made of Roman culture something better than it was. Then he quietly makes a very big leap in the argument, claiming that Virgil’s ‘sensibility was more nearly Christian than any other Roman or Greek poet’. How so?

He says he is going to follow Haeckel’s procedure of examining key words in the poem and highlights labor, pietas and fatum. However, he immediately drops this plan and veers off into a consideration of the Georgics. What Virgil really intended the Georgics for remains a bit of a mystery: they’re not particularly useful as a handbook to farming, and they contain many digressions completely extraneous to their ostensible subject matter. After pondering Virgil’s motivation, Eliot concludes that Virgil intended to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour and the importance of the cultivation of the soil for the wellbeing of the state, both materially and spiritually.

The Greeks may have perfected the notion that the highest type of life is the contemplative life (Plato et al) but they tended to look down on manual labour. For Eliot the Georgics affirm the importance of manual labour on the land. Then he makes a leap to talk about the monastic movement which grew up within medieval Christendom and how the monastic orders combined both aspects, combining a life of contemplation with quite arduous labour, as both being essential for the life of the complete man.

It may be that the monks who read and copied Virgil’s manuscripts recognised their spirit in the Georgics.

Now onto the Aeneid. Eliot says this epic poem is:

concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule.

(quite unlike W.A. Camps with his silly claim that the Aeneid is not a work of propaganda.) But Eliot claims that Virgil’s ‘ideal of empire’ was founded on a devotion to the land, to the region, village, and family within the village. This brief explanation is his discussion of labor because Eliot now turns to the more important concept of pietas.

In English someone is called ‘pious’ if they make a great show of their religious faith. Eliot says that pietas for Virgil had much wider associations: it implies a respectful attitude to the individual, the family, the region, and towards ‘the imperial destiny of Rome’. Aeneas is also ‘pious’ in his respect towards the gods and punctilious observance of rites and offerings.

Eliot delves further into the meanings of the word. Piety to a father can, for example, mean not only affection for an individual but acceptance of a bond which one has not chosen. Piety towards the father is also an acceptance of the correct order of things, and so, obliquely, respect of the gods. After some shilly-shallying Eliot gets to the point he wants to make: all these forms of piety involve some form of humility and humility is a professedly Christian virtue. Aeneas is, in this respect, the polar opposite of Achilles or Odysseus, who have not a shred of humility about them.

[Interestingly, given the date of the essay, written soon after the end of the Second World War, Eliot describes Aeneas as the original Displaced Person, a fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society.]

Odysseus endures ten years of exile but eventually returns to his home hearth, to a loyal wife, a dutiful son, his slaves and faithful dog. Whereas Aeneas can’t go home: he is a man on a mission and accomplishing that mission, the poem makes repeatedly clear, is only the very beginning of the long history of Roman origins and rise. Odysseus’s story ends when he gets home (and kills the suitors); Aeneas’s entire journey is itself only an episode in the much larger history of Rome.

Therefore, Eliot asserts (with a bit of a stretch, in my view) Aeneas is ‘the prototype of a Chistian hero’. He accepts the duty laid on him by the gods regardless of the price to himself. He subjugates his own will and desires to his god-given task.

This brings Eliot to fatum (so, OK, we are proceeding via the key word process). There is an excess of words to cover this concept. Eliot says maybe the best translation is ‘destiny’ but then makes the polemical point that you cannot have ‘destiny’ in a purely mechanical universe.

Eliot then tries to give a Christian interpretation to Aeneas’s ‘destiny’. It is a burden and a responsibility rather than a reason for self glorification. It happens to some men and not others because some have the gifts and the responsibility but they did not make these; something external made these and the humble man accepts the gifts and the responsibility. Who made them? Not the anthropomorphised pagan gods who behave so selfishly and vulgarly in the poem. Some power much deeper.

He zeroes in on the entire Dido episode (book 4) in particular Aeneas’s shame at abandoning Dido, shame which is revived when he meets her shade in the underworld in book 6 and she refuses to look at him or speak. This, for Eliot, more than personal shame, symbolises how much Aeneas suffered to carry out his god-given destiny. Making his point completely explicit, he says: ‘it is a very heavy cross to bear.’

Eliot can think of no other pagan poet who could have created this situation with its emotional, psychological and philosophical subtlety.

What does this ‘destiny’ mean? For Virgil’s conscious mind, and his contemporary readers, not least the all-powerful Augustus, there’s no doubt it means the imperium romanum. But Eliot then makes some dubious and sweeping generalisations. He claims that Virgil proposed for his contemporaries a noble ideal of empire – personally, I don’t see that in the poem. There are Anchises’ lines reminding Romans they must rule well and there’s praise of Augustus for bringing peace and order, but that’s about it. Eliot stretches it by claiming that Virgil’s work proposed ‘the highest ideal’ for any secular empire. Personally, I just don’t see that. In my view what the Aeneid praises is military conquest, might and power. There might be a strong thread of regret and sadness running through it, but that is the poem’s overt message.

Eliot proceeds to claim that ‘we are all, so far as we inherit the civilisation of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’. Is that true? I can see strong points on either side of the argument.

But he then goes on to claim that the Roman Empire Virgil imagined was ‘greater’ than the actual one of generals and proconsuls and businessmen. Eliot claims that Virgil invented this ideal and ‘passed [it] on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.’ I disagree on a number of levels.

First, I find the actual process of creating empire, as described in the Aeneid, to be hyper-violent and destructive, flagrantly contrary all Christian morality.

Second, part of the ideal which Eliot is describing must include the idealisation of the first Roman emperor Augustus. I can see why Virgil a) pinned his hopes for peace on b) sucked up to, the most powerful man in Rome, but in the end the entire poem amounts to the propagandistic adulation of a mass murderer, a man who achieved supreme power by liquidating all his enemies and then ensuring nobody could threaten his unique rule for the next 40 years. The Aeneid defends a military dictator.

So I just don’t agree when Eliot claims that it passed onto its Christian heirs any kind of noble model for how to run a spiritual empire. The exact opposite.

Eliot reiterates his claim that we are all still citizens the Roman Empire. Well, there are arguments both ways but ultimately I think he is incorrect. The state we inhabit in England in 2022 owes more to the non-Roman traditions of the pagan Danes and Anglo-Saxons and feudal Normans who each conquered this country, than to the Roman civilisation which they eclipsed. Our democracy owes nothing to Rome; it developed out of medieval feudalism, itself an import from Normandy, itself a colony of Vikings.

I think Eliot’s vision of a total European civilisation is erroneous and that his claim that this civilisation was in part inspired by Virgil is wrong.

Moreover, there is a blindingly obvious problem here, which is that Eliot is defending empire as an ideal form of government. Obviously this was considerably easier to do in 1951 than it would be nowadays. Millions of inhabitants of the former British Empire have immigrated to Britain and their children, in politics, in culture and in academia, have enthusiastically set about damning the British Empire, rubbishing any claim that it ever had anything positive about it. So just the sound of Eliot defending empire as a ‘noble ideal’ sounds badly in our time.

As to whether Virgil’s ideal of a suprahuman noble empire actually did inspire church authorities in the Middle Ages, I think you’d need a book examining the impact of the Virgilian ‘ideal’ on theologians, political thinkers, churchmen and statesmen throughout the Middle Ages and that would be a vast undertaking. I bet one exists, though. I’d love to read it.

This was, after all, only a half-hour radio lecture. Eliot’s sensitivity and insight and intellect bring out all kinds of aspects of Virgil’s achievement. And his thesis – that Virgil’s achievement of creating the notion of an ideal empire was to haunt the European imagination – is one of those ideas which is itself so big and vague that you can’t really prove or disprove it. But it’s an interesting perspective to add to the hundreds of other perspectives with which we can view Virgil’s epic poem.

Eliot concludes his essay with a page about a word which is missing from Virgil which is ‘love’. Amor does crop up, especially in the story of Dido and Aeneas. But it has nowhere near the force and central importance that it has for a Christian poet like Dante. It never has:

the same significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe that pietas is given.

Thus Eliot agrees (no surprise) with Dante’s positioning of Virgil in the Divine Comedy as an inspired teacher and guide right up to the barrier of belief, which he is not allowed to cross. In Eliot’s view Virgil mapped out a universe which in many ways anticipated the Christian universe, and handed many of its values onto later generations of Christian thinkers (and poets). But there is a line and Virgil doesn’t cross over into being a Christian. He can’t.

Instead, Virgil was limited by his position in history: the highest value he can conceive of, the value which underpins so much of the character and action of the Aeneid, was pietas, respect for father, family and fatherland.

But the highest value for the Christian poet Dante was love, the love which has created the entire universe and moves the sun and the stars and which we can all aspire to. Next to the gorgeous rose of Dante’s universe of love, Virgil’s pietas is a hard, iron sword, the colour of Roman imperialism.

Other Eliot reviews

Roman reviews

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by Simon on September 21, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/21/virgil-and-the-christian-world-t-s-eliot/

Content warnings at Tate

Warning: This blog post contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including depictions of slavery, violence and suffering.

Baroque Britain

When I visited the Baroque Britain exhibition at Tate Britain I was surprised that there was a Content Warning at the entrance to the second room. This warned us that some of the images were disturbing and might upset visitors. Specifically, a massive painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger which shows black people in collars and chains. Slaves, in other words.

Portrait of Hortense Mancini, Duchess of Mazarin by Benedetto Gennari the Younger (1674)

A handful of other paintings show rich people – men and women – being served or accompanied by black servants, but this is the only one where the black people (all boys, I think) are wearing very obvious metal slave collars round their throats.

William Blake

This is the second warning notice I’m aware of Tate putting up. The William Blake exhibition last year also warned visitors, in these words:

The art of William Blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering.

That’s putting it mildly, seeing as Blake illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy with its extensive descriptions of thousands of sinners being subjected to all sorts of tortures and torments in Hell, and Milton’s Paradise Lost which opens with Satan and the fallen angels languishing in agony in a lake of fire. Presumably it was these images of fire and brimstone which the warning was talking about.

Satan, Sin and Death: Satan Comes to the Gates of Hell by William Blake (1807)

Although when you actually look at Blake’s images, they are pretty inoffensive, aren’t they? Is an image like the above really thought to be so scary that visitors to an art gallery need a warning about it?

I wonder if the curators have ever seen a Hollywood film? Or even an average episode of Eastenders? Chock full of threat and violence. I can think of plenty of other Tate exhibitions which were full of much more genuinely upsetting images.

Notes and queries

Maybe visitors do need to be warned that art galleries and exhibitions contain images of slavery or violence or threat, but this new trend obviously raises a few questions:

Slavery 1 – black slavery

There must be thousands of images of black slavery scattered around the art world. Will every single one of them eventually require a Warning? For example, the huge memorial sculpture to slavery by Kara Walker currently on display in the atrium of Tate Modern. I don’t recall there being a warning for visitors about to encounter this. Should there be one?

Much more appalling and upsetting than any painting is actual period photographs of black slaves, which survive by the tens of thousands. I suppose if there’s an exhibition about slavery, or about these kinds of photographs it will be self-evident but, presumably if they’re included in exhibitions focused on other subjects – like the American Civil War or American history – presumably any photos of slavery will require a warning, as well.

Slavery 2 – white slavery

Most pre-modern societies had some form of slavery: ancient Rome and ancient Greece were based on slavery, and the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings traded in slaves (it’s estimated that at the time of the Norman Conquest of 1066, 1 in 10 of the British population were slaves).

The Mayans and Aztecs kept slaves in the Americas, as did the Sumerians and Babylonians in the Near East. The Egyptians employed huge numbers of slaves, including Israelites, Europeans and Ethiopians. Slave armies were kept by the Ottomans and Egyptians.

In Imperial Russia, in the first half of the 19th century, one third of the population were serfs who, like the slaves in the Americas, had the status of chattels and could be bought and sold.

In fact the English word ‘slave’ is derived from Slav, the white ethnic underclass of Eastern Europe that provided the bulk of medieval-and-later slaves, not only to Europe but to the Turks, Arabs and Tatars.

SLAVE – late 13the century, ‘person who is the chattel or property of another’, from the Old French esclave (13c.), from Medieval Latin Sclavus ‘slave’ (source also of Italian schiavo, French esclave, Spanish esclavo), originally ‘Slav’; used in this secondary sense because of the many Slavs sold into slavery by conquering peoples. (Etymological dictionary)

Will any gallery displaying any images of slaves from any of these historical cultures, from any period of history, from anywhere around the world, require there to be warning messages for visitors?

‘Trade negotiations in the country of Eastern Slavs by Sergei Vasilyevich Ivanov (1909)

If not, why not?

Violence 1 – secular

Human history is more or less the ceaseless history of wars and empires, human history is saturated with conflict and violence. Will notices warning of ‘strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering’ have to be placed outside every gallery which includes any images of conflict and war?

The first VC of the Great War won by Capt Francis Grenfell of the 9th Lancers at Audregnies, Belgium on 24th August, 1914 by Richard Caton Woodville

Violence 2 – religious

Christianity is saturated with violence. Its central image is of a man being tortured to death, and is closely accompanied by the stories and images of countless thousands of other Christian martyrs, most of whom died blood-curdling deaths.

Will all of these images require a warning notice? They would have to be put up in every gallery which includes images of the Passion of Christ or of the saints and, if we follow this logic through, outside every Roman Catholic church in the world.

Crucifix at the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament in Hanceville, Alabama, USA

Why now?

Why now? The painting by Benedetto Gennari the Younger has existed for 340 years and been sporadically on public display throughout that period, the Blake images for over 200 years during which they have featured in numerous books and exhibitions.

Why are these warning notices making their appearance now?

It’s not as if we are suddenly more opposed to slavery – the Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade got going during the 1780s, 240 years ago, and used as many images of atrocities against slaves as it could find. Anti-Slavery International, the world’s oldest international human rights organisation, was founded in London in 1839 and is still very active. I.e. graphic images of slavery have been in the public domain for over 200 years.

As to images of threat or violence, my God what have most movies for the past 100 years been about, plenty of plays and countless hundreds of thousands of art works not to mention millions of photographs taken of every war since the Crimea or the Indian Mutiny.

What is it in contemporary society which suggests that art lovers, old and young, native and foreign, have, for the last 300 years or so, been able to confront and process images like this without any kind of warning… but now they can’t.

Re. the slavery images, is it because the black population of the UK has reached a kind of tipping point where images like this are no longer acceptable, even in an obviously academic and historical context?

Have changes in social attitudes across the British population suddenly made images of black people in chains unacceptable?

But what about the warning about Blake’s pretty harmless cartoons? That doesn’t make any sense at all.

Or is it not British society, is it the attitudes of art curators which have changed?

Is it not the British public that the curators are concerned about? Is it the art curating profession which has been swept by progressive views, and whose modern woke training has told them that images like this are objectionable.

When they envision visitors being offended, is it really themselves and their progressive cohorts who they are envisioning?

Conclusion

So I’m not belittling the impact that images of black slavery might well have on black, or any other, visitors to an exhibition like this, or the emotional impact of images of threat or violence might have on gallery goers more broadly.

But up until a year or so ago, curators of pretty much every gallery and museum in the world were happy to assume that gallery visitors were grown-up enough, adult enough, to take images like this in their stride. To be shocked, maybe, maybe even to have an emotional response, but to be able to cope with it.

I’m genuinely curious to know 1. what has changed and 2. where this new trend will go.

And 3. am I going to have to put warnings at the top of every one of my blog posts which is about war or slavery or violence or conflict or threat? Because that’s most of them…

Reviews of other Tate exhibitions

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by Simon on March 3, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 3, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/03/content-warnings-at-tate/

King John by Marc Morris (2015)

I loved Marc Morris’s ‘History of the Norman Conquest’ because it gave such a thorough explanation of the background, build-up, events and consequences of the most famous moment in English history, so I was looking forward to reading this book and it is certainly good – but not as good as the Conquest one, and I spent some time, as I read it, trying to figure out why.

1. The long historical build-up to John’s reign

I think the main reason is that the central feature of King John’s reign (1199 to 1216) is the complete collapse of the huge and elaborate ’empire’ created by his predecessors – Henry I (his grandfather), the great Henry II (his father) and King Richard, his swashbuckling brother.

The pressures John faced trying to hang on to the south (Aquitaine), the middle (Anjou) and the north (Normandy) of France, along with the large and fractious realm of England, as well as managing relations with Scotland, Wales and Ireland – all these only make sense if you have a good grasp of how this patchwork ’empire’ had been slowly and effortfully acquired by his father and brother in the first place.

So anyone describing John’s reign would have to give a fair amount of space to this ‘back story’. Thus Morris has to start his story with the advent of Henry I (1100) and explain how his son and heir, William Aetheling, was lost in a disastrous shipwreck (1120) which – since Henry had no other sons – led him to the desperate expedient of trying to impose his daughter, Matilda, as his heir on his reluctant nobles. When Henry I died in 1135 Matilda’s claim was immediately contested by her cousin, Stephen of Blois, who managed to secure the throne of England and ruled as King Stephen (1135 to 1154) but under constant assault from the forces loyal to Queen Matilda in the west and north of England leading to 20 years of exhausting civil war.

Eventually, in the event-packed last few years of his reign, Stephen’s own son and heir, Eustace, died young (in 1153) and Stephen was forced to accept the son of Matilda and her husband, Geoffrey Count of Anjou, Touraine and Maine, Henry, as his heir. Geoffrey enjoyed the sportive nickname of Plantagenet, and so this name was also given to his son, Henry.

The very next year Stephen himself died (1154) and young Henry Plantagenet assumed control over a complex web of territories – England from Stephen, Normandy via his grandfather the Conqueror, Anjou, Touraine and Maine from his father and, via his shrewd marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine in 1152, possession of Aquitaine, a huge slab of south-west France, maybe a third the land area of the present-day France.

Because Henry’s central inheritance (from his father, Geoffrey) was of the Duchy of Anjou, the ’empire’ is often referred to as the Angevin Empire, Angevin being the adjectival form of Anjou (as Poitevin is the adjectival version of the neighbouring region of Poitou).

Just holding on to control of these far-flung territories needed every drop of this remarkable man’s confidence, aggression, cunning and ruthlessness. But it is only by understanding how the ’empire’ came about, almost by accident, that we can understand the context of problems which he and his sons – first Richard (1189 to 1199) and then John (1199 to 1216) -–would inherit:

  • How to maintain the disparate French possessions in the face of continual uprisings by local counts and lords?
  • How to fight off the continual attacks and threats of successive French kings – Louis VII and Philip II?
  • How to keep the aggressive Scottish kings bottled up in Scotland?
  • How to secure more land in Wales?
  • How and when to interfere in the troublesome island of Ireland?
  • How to manage relations with the pope, especially when you seem to be at loggerheads with one or other of your archbishops? (England has two archbishops – of Canterbury and of York)
  • How to pay for it all by raising the maximum amount of taxes but not alienating the fractious competing nobles of England?
  • And, above all, how to manage all this while coping with all the adult members of your family politicking and conspiring against you?

This context, this historical backdrop, the events of the 60 or 70 years prior to John’s accession (in 1199) are key to understanding John’s predicament.

2. Use of flashbacks

Rather than deal with this long historical run-up in a straightforward chronological account, Morris takes the risky decision to start his narrative in the middle of John’s reign, starting with a detailed account (along with pictures and two maps) of the French King Philip II’s siege of the Plantagenet castle of Château Gaillard, on the River Seine, 20 miles south-east of Rouen in 1204.

Having painted this scene, in chapter two Morris jumps all the way back to the birth of the family empire in the early 1100s (as outlined above). Chapter three returns us to the Château Gaillard siege (which turned out to be one of the longest and most gruelling in medieval history). Chapter four jumps back again, to 1189, when Henry II died and his son Richard succeeded.

This chapter takes us through the first half of Richard’s ten-year reign – his adventures on the Third Crusade (1189 to 1192), his capture on his return through Europe, his imprisonment by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI and his final release after his regents in England had raised an enormous ransom for him in 1194 – then abruptly stops.

The next chapter picks up the thread of John’s reign in 1205 after the end of the Château Gaillard siege and the humiliating failure of his English nobles to join an armed flotilla designed to attack King Philip of France, then follows events of the ‘campaigning season’ of the following year, 1206.

We are just getting our head round this context when the next chapter whisks us away from all that, to pick up the second half of King Richard’s reign from 1194 and carry it on through to the first years of John’s reign, 1202.

And so on. For well over half its length the book flicks back and forward between a ‘present’ narrative and historical flashbacks. I think I can see why: he didn’t want to start his book with 60 or 70 pages of solid exposition before he gets to John’s coronation. But, for me, it doesn’t work.

Comparison with Dan Jones

It just so happens that I read Morris’s book in parallel with Dan Jones’s jaunty, boys-own-adventure account of the entire Plantagenet dynasty. This tells the story outlined above but in a traditional chronological order and a direct comparison between the two suggests that, although Morris’s book is more scholarly and nuanced, Jones’s narrative is not only easier to read but gives you a much better cumulative sense of the issues at stake for all these rulers:

  • how the Angevin empire was originally created
  • the tremendously complex shifting alliances it required to keep it together
  • the history of the other major players involved, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, like Henry II’s rebellious children, like the pesky kings of France
  • as well as the litany of difficulties Henry, Richard and John all encountered while trying to tax the bolshy nobles of England
  • and the challenges of keeping the bloody church and interfering pope onside

To put yourself in the place of these (horrible) rulers you have to understand the constant pressure they were under from all sides (and the constant pressure they themselves exerted in the never-ending conflict which was medieval high politics). And the only hope you have of understanding why William of Scotland or Llewylyn of Wales or Louis of France attacked when and how they did, is to have a sense of the cumulative relationships between them and Henry or Richard or John, and the accumulated grudges or alliances or betrayals which feed into their behaviour.

It is hard enough to follow when presented clearly and simply so, for me, Morris’s approach made it hopelessly confusing. I quite quickly decided to read the chapters of his book out of the textual order he’s placed them in (reading chapters 2, 4, 6, 8, then 1, 3, 5, 7).

Detail

Dan Jones is shrewd to start his 600-page account of the Plantagenets with the sinking of the White Ship in 1120, which really seems to be the mainspring of the whole Plantagenet story. But his chronological approach also allows him to give events a properly detailed treatment as they occur – logically enough, there is a set of chapters devoted to Henry II and Richard I, before we get to the birth and youth of John.

Morris, by contrast, often skips over these earlier events in order to get to the ostensible subject of his book the quicker. He has to tell us something about the events of earlier reigns because John grew up under them and spent most of, for example Richard’s reign (1189 to 1199) politicking and conspiring against his brother – but he tends to skimp on details of Richard’s activities.

Thus he tells us simply that, en route to the Holy Land in 1191, Richard conquered Cyprus, in one sentence (p.72). Jones goes into much more detail, giving us a full description of Richard’s two-pronged assault on Cyprus (pages 118 to 119) and giving a typical snapshot that, once he’d conquered, Richard forced all Cypriot men to shave their beards off!

Similarly, Morris skips very briskly over Richard’s time in Palestine to focus on John’s scheming back in England. But we need to understand the detail of Richard’s activities in Palestine in order to understand how and why he managed to alienate so many of his Christian allies with such parlous consequences: we need to know that he scorned Philip of France so much that Philip eventually packed up and returned to Paris. And when the vital city of Acre was finally taken from the Muslims after a prolonged siege in which many Christian knights died of fighting or sickness (1191), Richard managed to infuriate Leopold Duke of Austria. Leopold had been involved in the siege for a year before Richard arrived and had demanded an equal place at the front of the victorious Crusader army as it rode into the fallen city along with Richard – but Richard rejected this request and added insult to injury by having Leopold’s flag torn down from the ramparts of Acre.

These details are vital because both Philip and Leopold returned to Europe before Richard and spread the blackest possible rumours about Richard’s treachery, lack of chivalry and so on, to anyone who would listen. When Richard finally decided to abandon the Crusade and return to England (prompted by news of the ruinous feud which had grown up between his chancellor William Longchamps and his enemies supported by John) Richard discovered that he was now a wanted man across most of Western Europe. So that when his ships were blown ashore in north Italy and he tried to make his way in disguise through Austrian lands, Richard was soon recognised, arrested and taken to the court of the very same Leopold who he had so fatefully insulted in Palestine – who promptly threw him into prison.

For sure Richard’s imprisonment, and the vast ransom demanded for his release, are all dealt with by Morris because they all impinge on the state of England and on John’s scheming (John was in his late 20s during the ransom crisis) – but the story makes much more sense, acquires a fuller depth of meaning, if you’ve been given a really good account of Richard’s activities in Palestine, and this Jones does better than Morris.

King John

King John

Notable aspects of John’s reign

It is in the second half of Morris’s book (chapters 9 to 14) – once he drops the flashback structure – that it becomes measurably more detailed and immersive than the Jones account. Having had a run-up of 150 pages or so you begin to have a feel for certain key players in the story – the ill-fated William de Brouze who John hounded into exile, imprisoning and starving to death his wife and son – or the remarkable William Marshall, 1st Earl of Pembroke, whose career spanned five monarchs, and who managed to survive accusations and punishments from the erratic John and went on to become guardian and regent for John’s young son, Henry III, when he succeeded in 1216.

And you get a feel for the relentless turnover of events: every year sees all the players on the board – the Scots, the Welsh, the numerous Irish and Anglo-Irish, the King of France, the nobles of Normandy, Brittany, Anjou, Main, Poitou, Angouleme, Gascony and so on, all girding their loins and setting off to fight each other, in a bewildering blizzard of alliances which shift and change at the drop of a hat. This second half of Morris’s book becomes really gripping, providing much more detail than Jones’s limited space can, and judiciously weighing evidence, balancing the accounts of the different contemporary chroniclers, as he gives a week by week account of John’s difficult confusing reign.

Some highlights

His reign lasted 17 years (1199 to 1216).

John Lackland

 While a boy under King Henry II John acquired the nickname ‘Lackland’ because his older brothers were all given substantial provinces to rule except for John, who was too young. Towards the end of his reign, the nickname was ironically revived to describe the way he had lost most of the Angevin Empire.

The loss of Brittany Arthur, Duke of Brittany

From the very start of John’s reign there was an alternative ruler, Arthur, son of John’s elder son Geoffrey (who himself had died in 1186). Arthur was born in 1187 and so was 12 when King Richard died in 1199.

Arthur inherited from his father the title of Duke of Brittany, and his Breton nobles proved remarkably loyal to him, while Arthur himself sought help and advice from French King Philip II. The situation was worsened by the fact that back in 1190 Richard had officially declared the infant Arthur his legal heir (during his peace negotiations with Tancred of Sicily, p.67). On his death-bed Richard changed his mind and proclaimed John his heir, fearing Arthur was too young for the job – but the Bretons, and everyone opposed to John, took Arthur as a figurehead for their cause.

The to and fro of successive alliances and peace treaties whereby Arthur allied with Philip, then John, then Philip again, came to an end when, in one of the rare military successes of his rule, John captured Arthur, who was leading a force besieging his grand-mother, Eleanor, at the Château de Mirebeau in Anjou.

John sent his nephew to a series of castle prisons. The contemporary chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall reports the story that John sent two knights with orders to mutilate the duke but that his gaoler, Hubert de Burgh, refused to let them – a legend which quickly spread and later provided the central plotline of Shakespeare’s play, King John, as well as heaps of wonderfully sentimental Victorian illustrations, like this one.

Prince Arthur and Hubert de Burgh by William Frederick Yeames (1882)

Prince Arthur and Hubert de Burgh by William Frederick Yeames (1882)

Young Arthur was moved to Rouen prison in 1203 and never heard of again. Quickly the rumour got about that John had had Arthur murdered, though whether getting others to do it or, in one version, murdering his nephew himself in a drunken rage, has never been confirmed. The rumour was enough for many people, nobles and commoners alike, throughout his realm, and John became known as the nephew-killer. In response the nobles of Brittany rebelled against John and he never regained their trust.

The loss of Normandy

Meanwhile in 1204, to the East, King Philip II of France began a major offensive against Normandy, bypassing the stronghold of Rouen and picking off smaller towns – Falaise, Cherbourg. Rouen begged John (in England) for reinforcements and John tried to mount an armed expedition to help them, but was stymied by the reluctance of his own nobles, who showed up late or not at all. When it became clear that no help was coming from England, Rouen surrendered to King Philip and the remaining strongholds of Normandy followed suit. The 139-year union of England and Normandy, created by William the Bastard in 1066, came to an end in 1204.

The loss of Aquitaine

In April 1204 Eleanor of Aquitaine died, old and full of years (a little over 80). With her died the loyalty of most of the dukes and counts of the massive region to the Plantagenet regime in the form of the unattractive John. They rose up, seized whatever strongholds remained loyal to John and, within months, the largest part of the Angevin Empire was lost.

Tough taxes

With the loss of most of the Empire, John’s sphere of activity was vastly reduced and now confined to the British Isles. Here he became famous for instituting ferocious new taxes. At that time many simple activities of the nobility traditionally required permission and a nominal fee to be paid to the king, for example for the smooth succession of an heir or the arrangement of a new marriage. John pushed these customary dues much deeper into every aspect of noble life and hugely increased the fees, by up to 1,000%. Anyone who questioned his right to do so was arrested or forced into exile and their lands confiscated. There was a ‘forest tax’ for anyone found breaching the rules of the Forest. John hiked these and extended the definition of ‘forest’ to include agricultural land and even towns. There was a tax known as ‘scutage’, which knights could pay if they didn’t want to answer the king’s call to join an army: John hugely increased this and applied it for new purposes. He applied another tax known as the Thirteenth, and in 2008 another tax, known as the tallage (p.182). He relentlessly mulcted everyone and everything throughout his reign.

The failed 1205 invasion

In 1205 John used this money to organise a massive invasion of Normandy, recruiting thousands of knights and soldiers and building (or hijacking) enough ships to create a war fleet of 1,500 vessels. But – at the last minute his leading nobles and knights backed out – afraid of chaos in the realm if John were killed (he had no heir), afraid they would find no support in the French realms which had so solidly gone over to King Philip, afraid of losing their lives and remaining goods.

And so John was left to gnash his teeth and weep tears of frustration. In fact John did mount several expeditions to France later in his reign, in one of them landing in Bordeau and marching inland to seize castles in his traditional heartland of Anjou. But always he had to retreat before the superior forces of King Philip II, or the Bretons or Normans or the Gascon nobles, sometimes reinforced by armies from over the border in Spain.

Two wives

King John had two wives, both named Isabella. In 1189 Henry married John off to Isabella, Countess of Gloucester, when he was 23 and she was 16. In fact they were half-second cousins as great-grandchildren of Henry I, and thus within the prohibited degrees of consanguinity, and on this basis John had their marriage annulled by the Church in 1199, just before he acceded to the throne. He then married Isabella of Angoulême in 1200, when she was just 12 years old. The marriage gave him possession of lands in the centre of Aquitaine but also, unfortunately, led to the enduring enmity of Hugh IX le Brun, Count of Lusignan, to whom she had been betrothed and who John was widely seen as stealing her from. The enmity of the de Lusignan family and their allies was a contributory factor to the loss of Aquitaine in 1204 when Eleanor died.

The Papal Interdict

Archbishop Hubert of Canterbury died in 1205 and the monks secretly elected one of their own as his successor. King John and the English bishops refused to accept their choice and appointed John’s favorite, John de Gray, in his place. Pope Innocent III (1198 to 1216) refused to accept either candidate and instead arranged the election of his friend Stephen Langton, in 1207. Furious, John expelled the monks of Canterbury who fled to France. The pope responded by placing England under Interdict in 1208. The interdict suspended Christian services and the administration of sacraments (except baptism, confession, and last rites). Even the dead were denied Christian burial. Ordinary people would have experienced an eerie phenomenon – for the first time in their lives church bells – which rang at numerous times of day for various services – fell silent and remained silent. John in fact turned the situation to his advantage, imposing lucrative fines and threatening imprisonment to bully the clergy. Innocent III retaliated by excommunicating John and eventually declared John ‘deposed’ in 1212, absolving his subjects of their allegiance to him.

In fact John, at a low point in his fortunes in 1213, made the shrewd move of completely and totally humbling himself to the papal legate, declaring England as the pope’s belonging and himself only a humble vassal. Innocent II was delighted and from that point onwards (for the last three years of his life) treated John with notable indulgence and favouritism. The interdict was lifted and after five long years, the church bells of England were allowed to ring again.

The Jews

There were probably only a few thousand Jews in all of Britain, but they were in a vulnerable position. They were allowed to carry on the business of lending money – forbidden to Christians – but only on the king’s sufferance. The crusading fervour at the very end of Henry’s rule led to violent anti-Jewish pogroms on the day of Richard’s coronation and for weeks afterwards, leading to the horrible climax of the entire Jewish community of York being hounded into York castle and preferring mass suicide to facing the baying mob outside. In 1210 John imposed a massive tax or ‘tallage’ in 1210, extracting some £44,000 from the community. At first he wanted only a percentage of their loans but this escalated to become a percentage of all their possessions. Roger of Wendover tells the gruesome story of a Jew of Bristol who was imprisoned and had one tooth knocked out every day until he gave in and handed over all his wealth to the king. Leading Jews were hanged as an example. And then, in John’s last full year of 1215, there were further attacks on the Jews, extracting money under torture. It took the Jewish community a generation to recover population and belongings after this onslaught.

Scotland

When he came to power John turned down King William the Lion of Scotland’s demand to have the province of Northumbria returned to him. The two remained on reasonable terms until in 1209 John heard rumours that William planned to ally with King Philip of France. John invaded Scotland and forced William to sign the Treaty of Norham, which gave John control of William’s daughters and required a payment of £10,000.

Ireland

John was made ‘Lord of Ireland’ by his father as long back as 1177, when he was just 11. When just 19 he was sent there by his father but, along with his youthful courtiers, created a very bad impression, making fun of the local nobles’ long beards. During his reign there was conflict not only between the caste of Anglo-Irish rulers who had settled in Ireland since the Conquest, and the native lords, but also among the natives themselves. John played all sides off against the other, and in 1210 led a major expedition to Ireland to crush a rebellion by the Anglo-Irish lords and impose English laws and customs.

Wales

Wales was divided into roughly three parts, the border or ‘marcher’ regions with England, ruled over by a handful of powerful Anglo-Norman lords, south Wales/Pembrokeshire owned by the king directly, and wilder North Wales. The leading figure was Llywelyn the Great, to whom John married off one of his illegitimate daughters, Joan, in 1204. In 1210 and 11 Llywelyn launched raids into England. John retaliated by supporting a range of Llywelyn’s enemies in the south and in 2011 launched a massive raid into North Wales. However Llywelyn’s forces retreated and John’s army was reduced to near starvation in the barren lands around Snowdonia. But the next year he came back on a better planned attack, ravaging Llywelyn’s heartlands, burning villages, towns and cities, until Llywelyn sent his wife, John’s daughter, as emissary to beg for peace. Peace was signed at, of course, a steep price, then John sent his mercenary warlords into South Wales to secure the territory and build defensive castles.

By 1212 John had lost almost the entire continental empire, but solidly secured the grip of the English crown over the neighbouring British countries. But all mention of peace is deceptive, even inappropriate in the context of the Middle Ages. The very next year John had to go to the aid of William of Scotland who faced pressing danger from a usurper and had barely finished doing this before Llywelyn led a concerted attack to reclaim his lost territory in north Wales, along with uprisings by lords in central Wales.

Basically, every year there was conflict – and in more than one theatre of war – with players shifting alliances from year to year based on short-term strategy. This is what makes medieval history so difficult to follow in any detail.

The Battle of Bouvines

I’d never heard of this battle, but both Jones and Morris says it has a similar talismanic importance in the history of France as the Battle of Hastings has for England. It was the climax of the series of incursions John made into French territory in the previous few years. John had amassed a force of English nobles and foreign mercenaries (all paid for by his brutal taxation) and was campaigning in central France, while his allies – a force of German, English and Flemish soldiers – was being led by Otto IV, Holy Roman Emperor, in the north. John’s plan was for his forces to draw King Philip II south while his German allies took Paris, leading to the decisive crushing of King Philip, for him to regain all his lost French land and the Emperor Otto to seize the Low Country.

In fact John had already suffered a defeat when he was forced to abandon the siege of La Roche-au-Moine due to the reluctance of his Poitevin allies to engage in a pitched battle against King Philip’s son, Louis. In the retreat his infantry were badly mauled and he only just made it back to La Rochelle, losing all the gains of the campaign to the French.

So everything now depended on the northern army of the Emperor. This caught up with Philip’s main army on 27 July 1214, and rapidly attacked. The battle turned into confused mayhem but slowly the cavalry charges of the French began to tell. By the end of the day the Emperor had fled, his army was defeated, and a collection of rebel nobles had fallen into Philip’s hands.

From the French point of view, their strongest enemies had created their strongest possible alliance and thrown everything against the French – and failed. A chapel was built, Masses were sung everywhere, the students of Paris danced in the streets for a week, according to one chronicler. The Battle of Bouvines confirmed the French crown’s sovereignty over the Angevin lands of Brittany and Normandy, and lost them forever to the English crown. It was the climax of John’s decade of brutal taxation and war plans: and it was a complete failure.

A few hours of bloody mayhem at Bouvines had confirmed that [John]’s loss of Normandy, Brittany and Anjou would be permanent. (p.235)

Magna Carta

The barons’ rebellion

The failure of this campaign tipped many of England’s nobles over into open rebellion. Morris says there were about 160 barons in England and now most of them openly denounced and defied John. For several years there had been calls to return to the good old days of Henry II or even before, embodied in calls to restore the charter Henry II issued on his accession. Numerous hands – probably involving the archbishop – were involved in creating a draft document which started with traditional calls for good rule but then went on to address specific issues of John’s reign. The climax of the Barons’ Rebellion came when one of their forces – a self-proclaimed ‘army of God’ – seized London ahead of John’s representatives in May 2015. Now they had access to all his treasure and the taxation rolls of the Exchequer.

John camped with his forces at Windsor and representatives of both sides met half way, in the meadows at Runnymede. Here the document we call Magna Carta took shape and was swiftly stamped and agreed by John.

The key thing about Magna Carta is that it was a peace treaty between the two armed sides; and that it failed. Within weeks open conflict broke out again and John took his foreign mercenaries on a rampage through East Anglia, killing and raping all the supporters of the rebel barons, destroying crops in the fields, burning everything. It was on this last final orgy of destruction that he decided to take a short cut across the Wash into Lincolnshire but was caught by the tide and lost his entire baggage train, including all his jewellery and treasure, the crown of England and his priceless collection of Holy Relics. And he got dysentery. It was a blessing for everyone when he died on 19 October 1216.

There is no doubting John was a wicked, evil man, a coward who screwed his country and tortured countless victims in order to extract a vast fortune from his subjects which he then squandered on mismanaged military campaigns. He lost almost the entire Angevin Empire which he’d inherited, and he left his country in a state of bitter civil war.

Morris’s book includes at the end a full translation of the Magna Carta into English but that is all. Obviously his preceding historical account gives a blow-by-blow description of the events leading up to it, and to the issues raised by John’s misrule, which the charter seeks to address and limit. And briefly describes how the charter – a failure in its own day – was reissued under later kings, widely distributed, and became a set of standards to which medieval kings could be held to account. But somehow just stopping with the translation and nothing more felt a bit… abrupt.

Plantagenet trivia

  • King Henry I carried out a brutal recoinage of the realm’s money in 1125 in which he ordered the mutilation of all his moneyers – the people who had official permission to mint coins, namely the removal of their right hands and genitals
  • Right at the end of his life Henry II took the Cross with a view to going on Crusade and recapturing Jerusalem. In 1188 he instituted ‘the Saladin Tithe‘, a levy of 10% on all revenues and movable properties across England. In the end it raised some 100,000 marks, though Henry died before he could go on Crusade. The administrative machinery created to claim the tithe was used four years later to raise the enormous ransom required to free Richard I from his imprisonment by the Holy Roman Emperor.
  • King Richard founded Portsmouth Royal Naval dockyard.
  • Richard in his usual impetuous way, finding himself in negotiation with Tancred ruler of Sicily, promised to betrothe Arthur (then aged 4) to one of Tancred’s daughters (aged 2), though the wedding never took place.
  • In his passion to go on crusade, Richard weakened the Crown by selling off or mortgaging a huge number of Crown lands and goods. He is said to have quipped, ‘I would have sold London if I could find a buyer.’
  • King John founded Liverpool in 1207.
  • the word Exchequer derives from the large chequered cloth laid out a table on which debts were counted out using a device like an abacus (p.167).

Glossary

  • amercement – a financial penalty in English law, common during the Middle Ages, imposed either by the court or by peers
  • castellan – the governor or captain of a castellany and its castle
  • distrain – seize (someone’s property) in order to obtain payment of rent or other money owed
  • interdict – in the Roman Catholic church a punishment by which the faithful, while remaining in communion with the church, are forbidden certain sacraments and prohibited from participation in certain sacred acts
  • forest eyre – the main court of the Forest Law in the medieval period was the Forest Eyre, which was held at irregular intervals by itinerant justices
  • Forest Law – laws separate from English Common Law designed to protect game animals and their forest habitats from destruction. Forest Law offenses were divided into two categories: trespass against the vert (the vegetation of the forest) and the venison (the game).
  • justiciar – a regent and deputy presiding over the court of a Norman or early Plantagenet king of England
  • moneyer – any private individual who is officially permitted to mint money
  • scutage – also called shield money (from the Latin scutum meaning ‘shield’) in feudal law payment made by a knight to commute the military service that he owed his lord
  • tallage – a form of arbitrary taxation levied by kings on the towns and lands of the Crown

Other medieval reviews

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by Simon on March 29, 2017  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on March 29, 2017

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2017/03/29/king-john-marc-morris/

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin (2012)

Empire – as the assertion of mastery (by influence or rule) by one ethnic group, or its rulers, over a number of others – has been the political rule of the road over much of the world and over most of world history: the default mode of state organisation.
(‘Unfinished Empire’, page 7)

This is a much more sober, earnest and thoughtful account of the British Empire than Niall Ferguson’s popular blockbuster, Empire. Whereas Ferguson references popular myths and preconceptions in order to puncture them in the manner of a swashbuckling columnist, Darwin is the cautious scholar, thoughtfully engaging with the voluminous literature of other historians on the subject – which makes his book a much denser, more challenging, but hugely more rewarding read.

The medieval origins

Ferguson’s account starts with the Elizabethans establishing plantations in Ireland and America at the same time as they set up their own offshoot of the Atlantic slave trade (roughly the 1590s). Darwin takes the more interesting and, characteristically more thorough, approach of going back much further, to the Norman Conquest, to trace the origins of the attempts by the conquering Normans to take an ‘imperial’ approach to the British Islands.

Among the hundreds of rewarding points Darwin makes is that the entire left-wing critique of the British Empire tends to treat it as if it was a historical freak, a one-off, as if only this empire ever existed and was uniquely evil, racist and sexist.

In fact, as Darwin calmly points out, empire has been the normal form of rule for most of the world for most of history.

Thus, just looking at Britain, we were part of the Roman Empire for 400 years; we were invaded and conquered by sea-borne tribes from northern Germany and Denmark who set up their own settler states from the 5th to the 9th century; we were then invaded and part-colonised by the Vikings (800 to 950), before becoming part of Canute’s Danish Empire from 1014 to 1042. Were then invaded and colonised by the Normans (1066), brutal subjugaters who imposed their economic system, language and laws on their subjects, as well as confiscating vast swathes of their land, and massacred any resisters (the Harrying of the North).

Darwin picks up the story with the Plantagenet kings (1154 to 1485), who ran an essentially French Empire which included a large chunk of western France (wine-producing Gascony). The Plantagenets tried to extend their control of England into Wales (it was the Plantagenet Edward I who built all those Welsh castles in the late 1200s), and tried with varying success to push into Scotland and Ireland.

In the 14th century England hung on to her possessions in south-west France in the face of growing power of the centralised French state, but eventually lost them in 1453. In fact the steady consolidation of the European kingdoms of France and Spain effectively locked Britain out of Continental Europe and forced us to look elsewhere for growth. In other words, Britain’s efforts to find gold and wealth abroad were bound to be maritime, not continental. Locked out of Europe, Britain had to look further across the seas for conquest and colonies.

Before we even get to Ferguson’s start point of Elizabeth’s reign, England had already been part of five or six different empires, depending how you define them.

Protestant paranoia

Darwin adds to Ferguson’s account of the Elizabethan period, the importance of Protestant paranoia. It’s worth remembering that, after Henry VIII’s declaration of independence from the Roman Catholic church in the 1530s, English monarchs lived in fear of being invaded and conquered by the military superpower of the day for the next 250 years, first Spain, then France.

The campaigns to pacify Wales and Scotland were wars of conquest designed to protect the English monarchy’s exposed flanks. Scotland remained an entry point for invasions long after the Scottish Reformation partly calmed English fears. Even after the semi-forced Act of Union of 1707 created a country called ‘Great Britain’, there were still threatening Scottish insurrections – the last one, armed and supported by the Catholic French, as late as 1745, and only defeated after the Catholic army had got as far as Derby, just 130 miles from London.

Unrepentently Catholic Ireland, though, remained an enduring problem for England’s Protestant monarchs, from the first attempts to assert authority over it in the 1100s right up to the present day (today I read a news story saying the Irish Taoiseach, Enda Kenny, warned David Cameron that a Brexit from the EU might jeopardise the Good Friday Agreement).

Rivalry with other empires

My recent visit to the British Museum reminded me of the long list of empires which battled for supremacy throughout  history: just in the Middle East, the so-called ‘cradle of civilisation’, we have the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, the Babylonians and so on – while successive emperors ruled the vast area known as China, and waves of imperial invaders conquered and tried to bind together enormous India, leading up the Mughal emperors that the British had to deal with in the 18th century. When Cortes and Pizarro arrived in Mexico they didn’t discover vegan environmentalists but well-organised, centralised empires – Aztec and Inca – which had been vying for supremacy for centuries, supported by their blood-thirsty religions.

What we think of as the Tudor period, when Henry and his successors tried to conquer and bind together the people on these British islands, was also the era when the kings of Spain and France were doing the same in their realms, fighting to create strong centralised states. In this as in so many other ways, England was just one among many European nations doing the same thing at the same time.

And so, whenever we consider the complex, byzantine history of all the enterprises and entities which eventually coalesced into something we call ‘the British Empire’, we shouldn’t forget that:

a) it was always in rivalry and competition with the other, often more powerful and better-established, European empires
b) in many places it came up against existing ‘native’ empires, for example the Mughal empire in India or the Zulu empire in South Africa

Complexity

From the first pages Darwin emphasises the complexity of the imperial story, that there were a myriad stories of negotiation, business deals, trades, coercion, attack, rebuff, invasion and so on. And they jostled against each other. The imperialists and colonisers, the traders and soldiers, the central government and the men on the ground, not to mention the Christian missionaries, often had wildly different aims and strategies.

Throughout his book Darwin defines different ‘types’ of empire – which immediately make you realise that what later history too glibly thinks of as the ‘rulers’ of ‘the Empire’ always had conflicting aims, which often led to confusion, sometimes disaster.

And even a cursory reading of the history soon makes you aware of the arguments, often bitter angry arguments, between the so-called ‘ruling classes’ back home.

The most obvious example is the fierce arguments surrounding the anti-slavery movement which overcame the angry resistance of the plantation owners and slave traders to eventually ban the institution of slavery, then ban the slave trade, so that, from the 1830s onwards, Britain become the world’s leading agent against slavery. The ruling classes were anything but monolithic – they were at daggers drawn.

Similarly, a strong anti-imperial party always existed in British society, arguing from morality, from Christian principle or just for pragmatic reasons, that ruling an empire was immoral, it distorted the economy and made it too reliant on cheap external commodities or foreign trade, and so on.

I studied the later Victorian period for A-Level and had drummed into me the level of personal and political dislike between Disraeli, the slippery impresario of Empire, and Gladstone, its pompous opponent who carried on vigorously arguing against it into the 1890s.

By the late 19th century you have organised socialist parties giving coherent economic and social reasons against Empire, a set of arguments encapsulated in the classic text, Imperialism: A Study (1902) by the British political scientist John Hobson, which argued that imperialism is an immoral and unnecessary extension of capitalism.

There was always opposition in Britain to ‘Empire’, and imperial rule itself was bedevilled by the frequent changes of government and sudden changes of strategy caused by the pesky democratic system. A central strand of Rudyard Kipling‘s work is his real anger and hatred of idiot politicians, especially Liberal politicians, who were constantly meddling with things they didn’t understand and making the lives of the men on the spot, the men trying to run things, difficult and often dangerous.

So these are just some of the ways in which the Empire was always ‘unfinished’ – giving the book its title.

The British Empire never achieved stasis; it was always too big, too complex, too unstable, and in a permanent state of crisis, dealing with local wars or rebellions, the threats of rival European empires, economic woes like depressions or agricultural blights, the disruptive impact of new technologies like electricity or the wireless.

Darwin quotes the historian John Gallagher who wrote: ‘Once the British Empire became world-wide the sun never set on its crises.’

Each generation of rulers felt it had been handed a vast can of worms to try and make sense of, organise, maintain and keep secure. It was like the game show challenge of keeping all those plates spinning on the top of the poles, and it is amazing how such a small country managed to keep so many plates spinning for so long until, during the Second World War, they all began crashing to the ground.

Types of empire

  • Entrepôt empire: from the 1690s to 1790s British merchants thrived on the Atlantic trade, moving around slaves and sugar to make profits
  • Free trade empire: from the 1790s onwards, diversifying into the spices, calico and other stuffs supplied from Asia
  • Conquest empire: military conquest to make existing territories secure, to overthrow troublesome ‘native’ rulers
  • The English Atlantic empire: based on a series of early, coastal bridgeheads around the Atlantic
  • The Trading empire in India: run by the East India Company and dependent on the goodwill of local rulers

And amid this diversity of empire, Darwin also defines a whole variety of types of colony. There were at least five large categories:

  • Company Rule
  • Colonies
  • Protectorates
  • Dominions
  • Mandates

However many you count, the point is that they were diverse: from tiny Hong Kong to vast Canada, from almost empty land settled by convicts (Australia) to countries teeming with well-established populations, cultures and rulers (India) – each colony required different handling, legal and trade arrangements.

Strength in diversity

This is a brilliant book which quietly, calmly, confidently dispenses with left-wing rhetoric about the British Empire and shows, again and again, what a weird, peculiar hodge-podge of disparate entities ‘it’ really was.

Darwin refers to Edward Said and his ground-breaking work, Orientalism, as the source of the theory that the European empires, and the British Empire above all, were ruled by a monolithic ideology which drummed home the repressive messages of racism, white supremacy, gender stereotyping, masculine violence and so on, via a set of channels – the press, magazines, music hall, literature, art and so on – which were completely controlled by a unified Imperialist ruling class.

According to this view, all our modern ills – racism, sexism, inequality etc – directly stem from a unified imperial ideology which oppressed the British population as much as the foreign peoples it was used to control.

Darwin says the reality was more or less the opposite. It was precisely the extremely diverse nature of British society, with a strong central spine of monarchy and a settled parliamentary and legal framework providing the base for a huge diversity of religious belief, cultural practice and even languages among the populations of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, which meant that Britain was uniquely well-placed to ‘engage’ with the lands its settlers, merchants and missionaries discovered, in a kaleidoscopic variety of ways.

It was the diversity of Britain which helped it cope with, engage with, conquer, negotiate with and manage the extraordinary diversity of peoples, races, cultures, civilisations and traditions which it found itself fighting, conquering and ruling.

*********

All these ideas are conveyed in just the first 50 pages of this brilliantly insightful, calm, measured and fascinating book, which is too crowded and packed with insights to do proper justice to in a summary. Do your mind a favour and read it.

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by Simon on November 13, 2016  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 13, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/11/13/unfinished-empire-john-darwin/