Issue no 49, November 1999

LETTERS

History teaching

From Mr Thomas Braun

Sir: Your article about the neglect of historical teaching for the hapless young was splendid (`Cromwell vs King Alfred at Waterloo', September). Rather than give you grim examples from my own experience, however, let me give you an instance of the happy results of sound historical teaching among unassuming British subjects of more advanced years.

Not long ago I bought a new electric toaster at Boswell's in Broad Street, Oxford. I found I had run out of cash and asked if I could use my credit card. `Certainly,' said the motherly shop assistant. `Will you step over to our machine, please?'

`That's what they said to Marie Antoinette,' said I. The allusion was not lost on her. `But not so politely,' she replied.

Yours sincerely,
THOMAS BRAUN
Merton College, Oxford
20 September

From Mr David Whiteley

Sir: The widespread ignorance of historical dates is not a new phenomenon. As a child in the 1920s, I was well versed in the dates of events from 1066 onwards as my mother, who had been a teacher, played with me and my sister at a card game called `History of England'. This worked like `Happy Families' and you had to collect sets of cards of dated items belonging to the various monarchs. So we gradually remembered all the main events with their dates.

At secondary school we did learn more general history of the Middle Ages, but from age 14 all efforts were concentrated on the Tudors and Stuarts as they were the set period for the Cambridge School Certificate exam. I have always felt very ignorant of anything in our history after Queen Anne, except for what I may have picked up.

There should, I think, be more history teaching spread over a longer time base, going back to early Britain.

Yours sincerely,
DAVID WHITELEY
Harrogate
7 September

More bluestones

Sir: Recent letters have considered the possible sea-journey of bluestones from Preseli to Stonehenge (Letters, September). I have discussed the question in the local alehouse with inshore fishermen who have spent all their lives on this stretch of very difficult coastline, and they feel that such journeys in ancient times were little problem.

The village children to this day have small boats from the age of about nine, and regard the cliffs and rocks as a playground. As adults, like the local crabmen, they have a total knowledge of the stretch of coast regarded as `village', which is about five miles. All a Neolithic voyager had to do was to travel on ahead on land and recruit the local people over every stretch of journey, changing pilots every five miles or so.

One fisherman also thought that a long time ago the Tamar could have been navigable for a raft-type boat from the Bristol Channel to Plymouth, thus bypassing Cornwall altogether, just short overland portage being needed.

Yours sincerely,
R WALLINGTON
Polperro fish stall, Cornwall
10 September

From Mr Rodney Legg

Sir: As the Warden of Steep Holme, I organised a beach search in 1996 during one of the lowest tides of the century. We found several specimens of bluestonelooking rocks.

Because of sea-staining, it was difficult to be completely sure of their geology. Three samples were sent to Dr Robert Ixer at Birmingham University. I chose them because they showed differing characteristics and for the pragmatic reason that they fitted into a box that was to hand.

Although none turned out to be authentic, another fragment appeared on sectioning to be the correct shade of greyish-blue stained with white. It had flaked off a much larger block, embedded in the shingle spit that stretches east from the island's main beach, and has been confirmed as coming from an undressed Preseli boulder.

Its position could be used to argue for glacial drift but given that the location coincides with a navigation hazard in the middle of one of the strongest tide races in the world, a prehistoric shipwreck would seem much more likely. On getting into difficulties it would have been the obvious point at which to abandon raft and hope to be washed ashore.

Yours sincerely,
RODNEY LEGG
Wincanton, Somerset
9 September

Golden age

Sir: I must take issue on some central themes of Guy de la Bédoyère's article, `No decline before the fall of empire' (July), which advocates the idea of a `golden age' in late Roman Britain.

In the small print (as it were), de la Bédoyère admits two important things: there was decline in late Roman Britain, especially in towns; and the `golden age' was restricted to a tiny elite. But these qualifications receive short shrift, since `[the elite's] ostentatious display of wealth . . . defines their age for us' - in contrast to the timeless experience of everyone else, who `lived lives of thankless toil on the land'.

He uses the example of the pre-Civil War southern states, where 6,000 big plantation owners `defined their age'. If so, why did they fall in 1865? The answer, of course, is that they provided only part of the definition, not the whole. Equally of the age were the northern abolitionists, the fugitive slaves and `contrabands', and the 150,000 black soldiers in the Union army.

The Civil War was a sudden explosion, but there was half a century of tension behind it. Roman Britain was the same. The decline was real, the conflicts that produced it stretched deep into the countryside, and the collapse when it came was long-formed.

The decline of the towns in the 4th century is now generally accepted. The villas kept going for longer, but the general view that villas went up as towns went down is false. Jack Newman and I have analysed a random sample of 80 sites (all that we could find with well-dated excavation evidence). The peak for building work was c AD300, and for occupation c AD325 - and thereafter there was gradual decline. We found a similar pattern in a survey of low-status rural settlements.

So a more rounded picture of late Roman Britain is possible. A small class of super-rich, most linked with the imperial estate, occupied the shrunken towns and palatial villas. The lesser landowners, by contrast, were in decay, and the peasantry, burdened with rising taxes, corvees and requisitioning, became resentful and obstructive. The age looks `golden' to some because wealth was concentrated at the top. But this was a coin with two sides: as the elite became smaller and richer, Rome's popular support in Britain shrivelled. Without a protective screen of soldiers, the culture of its gilded elite vanished in a decade or so, unlamented by all but a few.

Yours sincerely,
NEIL FAULKNER
London SW2
6 July

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