History in Books

[Zorral]

A new book, with new take on the Battle of Crécy

Vol. 44 No. 17 · 8 September 2022
Under the Arrow Storm
Tom Shippey
Crécy: Battle of Five Kings 
by Michael Livingston.
Osprey, 303 pp., £20, June, 978 1 4728 4705 8

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.... In his new book, Michael Livingston argues that we have got nearly everything about Crécy wrong.  ...

...  It’s archers that win battles, not knights. Plumes and shining armour are just for show. You can’t expect much sense from hereditary monarchies, especially French ones. Of course, Philippe and his cavaliers were fools. As for a weapons system, that just means weapons. Doesn’t it?

Livingston disagrees. He points to two underexamined sources: a poem written in 1346 by Colins de Beaumont, though not published until nearly five centuries later; and a ledger kept by one of Edward’s household clerks, William Retford, which lists the king’s kitchen receipts. Who now troubles to read old poems (fanciful) or lists of receipts (boring)? But fanciful or not, Colins was there, as a herald, and his job was to identify the French dead; and Retford, in his quartermasterly way, always knew exactly where Edward was.

Livingston rejects the idea that Edward knew what he was doing, and Philippe didn’t. It’s far too easy, with historical hindsight, to describe something that turned out badly as pure stupidity. But though decisions may transpire to have been incorrect, ‘in the moment they must have seemed correct’ – and that applies to both kings. Edward was not following a plan: he was running for his life, quite sensibly, being outnumbered and out of food, and Philippe was catching him, because (this is one of Livingston’s maxims) he knew how to ‘follow the roads’. Shifting a medieval army, with its wagons and its pack animals and its herds of livestock, was a logistical nightmare, and knowledge of the few available roads was key.

Livingston’s second departure from the historical record has to do with the site of the battle. It’s not where the modern memorials are – and where, unlike the hundreds of arrowheads found on the field of Towton, no battle debris has been recovered – but more than three miles to the south. The French army wasn’t advancing on Edward from the east; it had overtaken him on his chosen road out, and was coming down from the north. (Now we have an alternative site for the battle, battlefield archaeology, with metal detectors, may confirm the result.) ....

 

 

[SeanF]

48 minutes ago, Zorral said:

A new book, with new take on the Battle of Crécy

Vol. 44 No. 17 · 8 September 2022
Under the Arrow Storm
Tom Shippey
Crécy: Battle of Five Kings 
by Michael Livingston.
Osprey, 303 pp., £20, June, 978 1 4728 4705 8

 

OTOH, Jonathan Sumption, who has been studying and writing on this for years, described French leadership at the battle as “almost pathetically incompetent.”

It was not *just* archers who won it.  It was archers working in combination with spearmen, knights and men at arms.  And it was an English cavalry charge that finished the French army.

[Zorral]

That isn't the subject matter of the book, though, is it?

[Zorral]

Has anyone encountered the historical fiction author  David Donachie, who also writes as Tom Connery and Jack Ludlow as well as, from 2019, "Jack Cole".

I have begun Hawkwood, one of the Jack Ludlow series.  Yup, that Hawkwood.  He and his archers (along with those in many other companies) have just been let go by Edward III and the commander who hired them in France, and has declined to give them any lands or even a passage back to England.  So he's joining up with a larger and more variedly equipped company, to turn "free company".  We all know what that means for the poor people of France, as Hawkwood begins his career in earnest.

This is a long way from nautical warfare, which is what Donachie does.

Anyway, there are a lot of historical novels of different military breeds by this author.

 

[maarsen]

On 9/14/2022 at 5:09 PM, Zorral said:

Has anyone encountered the historical fiction author  David Donachie, who also writes as Tom Connery and Jack Ludlow as well as, from 2019, "Jack Cole".

I have begun Hawkwood, one of the Jack Ludlow series.  Yup, that Hawkwood.  He and his archers (along with those in many other companies) have just been let go by Edward III and the commander who hired them in France, and has declined to give them any lands or even a passage back to England.  So he's joining up with a larger and more variedly equipped company, to turn "free company".  We all know what that means for the poor people of France, as Hawkwood begins his career in earnest.

This is a long way from nautical warfare, which is what Donachie does.

Anyway, there are a lot of historical novels of different military breeds by this author.

 

Dammit Zorral, my reading list is too long to begin with! 

[Zorral]

47 minutes ago, maarsen said:

my reading list is too long to begin with!

I can't help myself!  No self-restraint! No self-control!  I apologize!    

[Zorral]

Textbooks teaching white supremacy  -- if this isn't history in books, lordessa, nothing is!

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/how-nations-schools-taught-white-supremacism/

 

[Zorral]

The death of this British woman is sad.

Hilary Mantel has died, age 70, of a stroke, so says the NY Times obit that just went up.

Too soon.

She'd suffered, literally, nearly life long illness and pain from endometriosis and the associated maladies.  As all those who suffer chronic severe pain know, the pain itself is exhausting and debilitating.

https://variety.com/2022/tv/global/hilary-mantel-dies-dead-wolf-hall-1235381500/

https://www.vogue.com/article/hilary-mantel-obituary

 

Edited September 23, 2022 by Zorral

[LongRider]

I have been reading the not so ancient history of Watergate.  Started out with the dvd of the film, All The President's Men (1976), thought it was OK then read the book, All The President's Men by Woodard and Bernstein.  I liked the book and what impressed me was how the story of the conspiracies and crimes just kept on and on, like peeling an onion.

After that book I wanted more and picked The Nixon Defense (2014) by John Dean.  For this book Dean listened to the tapes Nixon had made in his various offices and phones.  Because of this, the book follows the story from the break-in to Nixon's resigning the Presidency, August 8, 1974.  

Nixon was in on the cover up from the first, lied and lied to many people, including Dean.  Months later, when Dean realized how much trouble Nixon was in, and he was in, he went to the president and discussed this with him.  Dean thought the prez didn't know how bad it was, but of course he knew, though Dean didn't realize this. Later Nixon tried to use this conversation for his defense; he didn't know what was going on until Dean told him.

The cast of characters is large in this story and captured many insights about the central and peripheral actors in this drama.  Nixon resigned in August 1974, which happened to be two months after I graduated from high school, so Watergate was not unknown to me.  Spending time with Woodard and Bernstein, as well as Dean, really fleshed out the story for me for as a teenager I didn't spend that much time on it.

While reading some of Nixon's actions seemed so familiar to me: his constant instance for loyalty from his staff.  At one point he told his Attorney General that his job was to defend the president (sorry, the book is back at the library, and I can't remember the name).  Firing of staff that he felt was disloyal or a legal liability, and trying to delay and deny, and corruption, holy cow was the man corrupt.  In the Dean book the source for Woodard, "Deep Throat" was known, and boy did Nixon and hate him!  Very interesting.

I would recommend both books, All The President's Men had good insights about the press in the '70s, and The Nixon Defense, because it is based on the tapes gives a fuller, more fleshed out story.

 

And now for a Nixon joke from just before all hell broke loose.  The film 'Deep Throat' premiered a few days before the WG break-in June 1972.

Hey, did you hear Nixon went and saw Deep Throat three times?   What?  Three times, why?   He wanted to get it down Pat.

bada-bing  bada-boom 

[Wilbur]

2 minutes ago, LongRider said:

...While reading some of Nixon's actions seemed so familiar to me: his constant instance for loyalty from his staff.  At one point he told his Attorney General that his job was to defend the president (sorry, the book is back at the library, and I can't remember the name).  Firing of staff that he felt was disloyal or a legal liability, and trying to delay and deny, and corruption, holy cow was the man corrupt...

Watergate was the first news story that I was aware of, and my grandfather used to comment during breaks in the coverage that, "Nixon hasn't changed a bit - he did this same sort of thing with Ike."

As an adult, reading about the first Eisenhower campaign and the September 1952 funding issues that culminated in the Checkers speech, it really came home to me how much of a political scoundrel without personal integrity Nixon was, long before Watergate.

[LongRider]

11 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

Watergate was the first news story that I was aware of, and my grandfather used to comment during breaks in the coverage that, "Nixon hasn't changed a bit - he did this same sort of thing with Ike."

As an adult, reading about the first Eisenhower campaign and the September 1952 funding issues that culminated in the Checkers speech, it really came home to me how much of a political scoundrel without personal integrity Nixon was, long before Watergate.

He wasn't called Tricky Dick for nothing.  What surprised me though, is Dean, who had been working in DC for several years before becoming Nixon's legal counsel, seems so clueless to Nixon's mendacity in this book.  Since he wrote the book, he gets to portray himself in the best light I suppose.  Such a fascinating time. 

 

[SeanF]

On 9/21/2022 at 7:33 PM, Zorral said:

Textbooks teaching white supremacy  -- if this isn't history in books, lordessa, nothing is!

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/09/how-nations-schools-taught-white-supremacism/

 

I do remember seeing one that was used in Virginia, entitled “How the Negroes Lived Under Slavery.”

It depicts a jovial slaver in a top hat, greeting a well-dressed black family off the boat.  It read as if slavery was like a benign finishing school.

Edited October 4, 2022 by SeanF

[Zorral]

Ha! We knew about these guys from reading Xenophon, and Herodotus, who describes this battle.  

Paid to Fight, Even in Ancient Greece
DNA from a 2,500-year-old battlefield in Sicily reveals that mercenary soldiers were common, if not the Homeric ideal.

The photo at the top of a mass grave at the battlefield, including complete skeletons of humans and equines, is impressive, to say the least.  Caption to the photo says:

 "A mass grave of troops from the second Battle of Himera in Sicily in 409 B.C. One-fourth of the combatants are thought to have been mercenaries, compared to two-thirds in the first Battle of Himera seven decades earlier.Credit...Stefano Vassallo"

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/04/science/greece-sicily-himera-genetics.html

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Wherever there is an out-of-the-way war, there will be mercenaries — hired fighters whose only common bond may be a hunger for adventure. Some join foreign armies or rebel forces because they believe in the cause; others sign on because the price is right.

This was true in ancient Greece, although you wouldn’t know it from ancient Greek historians, for whom the polis, or independent Greek city-state, symbolized the demise of kingly oppression and the rise of citizen equality and civic pride. For instance, neither Herodotus nor Diodorus Siculus mentioned mercenaries in their reports of the first Battle of Himera, a fierce struggle in 480 B.C. in which the Greeks from various Sicilian cities united to beat back a Carthaginian invasion. Mercenaries were considered the antithesis of the Homeric hero.

“Being a wage earner had some negative connotations — avarice, corruption, shifting allegiance, the downfall of civilized society,” said Laurie Reitsema, an anthropologist at the University of Georgia. “In this light, it is unsurprising if ancient authors would choose to embellish the Greeks for Greeks aspect of the battles, rather than admitting they had to pay for it.”

But research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the ancestry of the troops defending Himera was not as strictly Greek as historical accounts of the time would have it. ....

 

 

Edited October 5, 2022 by Zorral

[Wilbur]

I have always thought that Xenephon's "professional" attitude to warfare / military adventures was a significant driver of his separation from Athens and exile in Sparta.

He doesn't seem to love everything he sees in Sparta, but the Spartans did share a worldview towards conflict, logistics, and pursuing military excellence with him that was at odds with the traditional Greek attitude of "military service as an amateur gentleman warrior for the polis and nothing else".

Xenephon's writing is a lot closer to a modern military approach than his contemporaries, so having his observations borne out by contemporary archeology is interesting.

[Zorral]

33 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

the Spartans did share a worldview towards conflict, logistics, and pursuing military excellence with him that was at odds with the traditional Greek attitude of "military service as an amateur gentleman warrior for the polis and nothing else".

That would be part of it, at the very least, when he himself became a merc.  

[SeanF]

20 minutes ago, Zorral said:

That would be part of it, at the very least, when he himself became a merc.  

For the Gods’ Sake, no gentleman was paid to fight!

A gentleman was *rewarded* by his commander, out of spoils taken from the enemy.

[Zorral]

Except, of course, all those gentlemen in the 10,000, who kept re-drawing 'contracts' and thus and so forth.  

[Zorral]

The Partisan Leader (1836) by  Beverly Tucker (male; 'Beverly' is a common male surname and first name in earlier decades among the Aristo class in VA, SC, etc., particularly those descended from pre-Independence VA ), under the pseudonym of Edward William Sidney.  He was a prof at William and Mary.  As one likely would expect, if not the first, one of the first sf novels -- the novel is set 13 years in the future from the year in which it was published -- would be written by a fellow who was all about slavery, about a successful Southern secession and confederation against the dastardly North.

https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/partisan-leader-the-1836/

https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/work?id=olbp84079

 

[Zorral]

. . . .  Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontë by Devoney Looser (2022).

Washington Post review here,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/10/25/porter-ister-novelists-devoney-looser-review/

which, upon reading the review, I immediately ordered the biography. These Porter sister novelists were the mothers of English historical fiction. I have often invoked Sir Walter Scott as the father of historical fiction (and Dumas as godfather), but as deep as my knowledge of English literary history is, I'd no idea these women had existed.  Can we guess why, one wonders . . . .

 Maria and Jane Porter published the first Brit historical fiction in novel form in several books in the first decade of the 19th century.  Maria Porter, in her 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw, created

Quote

 

... “the historical novel as we know it” in her 1803 tale of a Polish war hero who becomes a refugee in England. “What was new about ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ ” Looser explains, “was its mingling of climactic historical events with the conventions of biographies, romantic tales, and probable domestic novels.” Contemporary critics dubbed it “a work of genius,” and it was a sensational bestseller. ....

In 1810 Jane Porter published The Scottish Chiefs, telling the tale of William Wallace’s battle for Scottish independence from Britain, published quite prior to Scott’s first novel, Waverly, 1814, that told of of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion.

 

 

These two sisters’ novels were massive hits, best sellers, out of the box. Would that have had any influence on Scott’s literary choice of form and subject?  One commentator to the review observed,

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 "I find it interesting that of the twenty-six ‘Waverley novels’ written by Walter Scott not one was set during the time of William Wallace and King Robert I." 

Author Looser did address this -- how could she, how can we, not?

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... [Looser] is more cogent on the question of why these popular and influential authors are virtually unknown today. The root cause of the sisters’ decline in literary reputation and, eventually, sales, Looser writes, was the phenomenal success of Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in 1814 and the author’s failure to acknowledge that the methods he employed in his historical novels were very similar to the Porters’: “Critics would increasingly claim that the Waverley novels had elevated the genre of fiction — and especially historical fiction — bringing to it a superior new (masculine) excellence, while correcting supposed previous (feminine) faults.”

Are we surprised yet?

Quote

.... Jane in particular resented this and in 1827 wrote a pointed short story, “Nobody’s Address,” that implicitly accused Scott of reducing his literary precursors to nobodies. By the time she died in 1850, having survived Maria by 18 years, Jane had been reduced to living with a brother and receiving charitable grants from the government. Her achievements deserved better recognition, and although Looser’s thickly detailed biography could stand to be a little less detailed, it pays overdue tribute to pioneering siblings unjustly neglected by literary history. ....

 

[Wilbur]

I have a different view on Thaddeus of Warsaw, a really long book I read in college.  I haven't read any of her other works, so ToW will have to stand in for all of her work for my opinion.

My opinion is that, like Wilkie Collins, Porter wrote stuff that was popular to contemporaries but was less accessible to later generations.  I think that Collins outsold Charles "paid by the word" Dickens, his contemporary, but you have to work hard to find a high school class with Wilkie Collins on the syllabus, while Dickens is everywhere.  Collins wrote highly contemporary stuff, while Dickens wrote characters facing universal challenges that stood the test of time.

I really wanted to like ToW, as the professor who recommended it to me suggested that it contained a lot of ideas I thought were admirable.  But as a story, I found it slow and boring, and as a didactic work, I found it unchallenging.  Perhaps it was ground-breaking and presented new ideas to the public when it was written, but then society moved or progressed onward in such a way that the content no longer had much of an impact on readers.

Again, just my opinion based on a single read of a single book long ago.  I just checked, and even Librivox doesn't have a reading of ToW, so it shows how little-known Porter's writing is.

Edited October 30, 2022 by Wilbur
no audio book