Thinking about a New Nobility.

Part 2. History.

Hail and welcome,

This week I will give more thoughts on Mr Roberts article “A New Nobility” generously written and published here on Syre Byrd Word Emporium last August. I think it is great thing to take your time digesting an argument and case. I have been doing just that over the past six months with admittedly periods of intermissions to just read and write a host of other things in the course of life!

When I first read the Necessity for a New Nobility I conceived a three part response and discussion. This would of course be along my usual lines in the Word Emporium:  a personal reading and responses where I let my mind go where it wills. My thoughts are my own. My writing reflects the same. That is what (and why) I share writing here on this SubStack.

I too want to see how I develop, how I reflect, how I change, how my views are shaped and perhaps amend the kind of life I lead and the choices that I make. Hopefully readers can also benefit as you follow and observe and read this snapshot of an ordinary life. This Substack is in affect a mirror upon that process.

Thus Mr Roberts sparked firstly an interest in my mind regarding philosophers and philosophy; secondly something about the nature of history; thirdly and I felt deeply just as vital to this topic of a new nobility is the social communion taking place through shared hospitality. A hospitality that of itself would engender and facilitate discussion and debate about all the noblest aspects of our shared humanity at this time.

You already can read that first response. Today I am beginning to think through the history and hospitality aspects of my initial responses that I etched out at the time.

I love history. I am not entirely sure why. It may be something, as I have often reflected to myself, about my childhood. I was born in Eastbourne in 1967. According to my Birth Certificate, the midwife was one Constance Alice Sales. A most Edwardian name I have always thought (without any evidence). As if she was a venerable Matron dressed from head to toe in a dark navy nurse uniform with a white lace head covering who had never, in public, shown so much as an ankle. Yet was the undisputed lady midwife in Eastbourne!

Eastbourne is a South Eastern Seaside Town in England. My parents at that time where living in a (then) small community near the village of Stones Cross. It has one distinguishing feature: a windmill. In my childhood this was a rural area. It is now swallowed up in suburbia.

Yet at the coast there are a series, mostly still there, of Martello Towers. Built to defend, to repulse a most threatening invasion from the late 18th and early 19th Centuries: that of French Revolution and Napoleon. Peel the layers back still further and you find a story of the British Navy discovering this tower technology and finding a deep respect for its defensive capabilities. Thus the British take it for themselves and build them on their Southern Coasts opposite France in their own time of immanent threat and need.

Consider also my first school. Pevensey and Westham Church of England Primary and Junior School. It is next to Pevensey Castle. This castle was once on the coast itself. The Romans, who called it Anderida, could sail up to it and I assume had some seagate or entrance or dock at that time. It is now a mile or so from the coastline. A victim of geographical processes: silting river bed.

It’s story did not end with the Romans leaving their Province of Britannia sometime in the fifth century A.D. You can see the magnificent Roman Walls today. Yet on the inside of those Roman walls there is also a latter Norman Castle, with a moat. For the astute among you would have realised that Pevensey levels was where in 1066 AD. there was a indeed a successful (kind of French), invasion. William Duke of Normandy led the Normans in a conquest of England by landing at first, in that place.

The Bayeux Tapestry Pevensey scene.

The Battle of Hastings took place at Senlac Hill some 8 miles from that coast later that year of 1066 A.D. Arguably, it changed the history of England forever. Indeed at the site itself today, you will find an interpretation from the 1960s of that event written on a marble slab that has the following inscription,

Even closer to my School, however than Senlac Hill and the now interestingly but somewhat obviously named town of Battle,  is yet another structure, another Castle. Another place with a beautiful name, itself a reflection of events, a marriage, coming out of conflict. Herstmonceux.

A local Sussex person that has the local accent would by most people be heard phonetically calling this place Hurstmonzoo. As I indeed I do. The Castle is beautiful. It is indeed still used. It is a rare early brick built castle. It has been a University campus. Yet that is not the point I want you to know.

For in its grounds are the old Royal Observatory. As a child I could see the towers that held the telescopes. Looking at the stars has been a part of my imagination since that time. I also took my Irish Wife and toddlers there one summer. Toby and Joshua played in those grounds. Though they were so young, they wont remember. But I do.

So let me recap what this small autobiographical article has thus shown us.  History needs questions. It is an enquiry.  Who built those walls? When? Why? For what purpose?

History needs sources. These sources can be compared and contrasted. Categorised and compiled. They take many forms. Like a text with Constance Alice Sales upon it.  A Roman Wall of Anderida above a topographically changed map. Our exploration of the Stars with telescopes and the technologies used to produce the lenses used at the heart of those telescopes: a fruitful history enquiry with potential to link across epochs and civilisations.

History uses chronology. Be that tied to the reign of an ancient King of Egypt and the particular season an event happened. Or a mythological founding of a city. Or the movement of the Moon. Or the pilgrimage of a prophet or perhaps the birth of a sage. Historians like to uncover the systems of time that we humans have used to help make sense of our World. Thus above you can see such a system in use. My cultural one that takes as it starting point the Birth of Christ as a demarkation point for the concepts of before, and after.

Historians have sought to give frameworks to chronology. This is, it seems to me,  perfectly reasonable. They have sought to uncover and make explicit the links of knowledge, practices, beliefs, resource use or lack thereof, migration patterns even, between a chronological series. Thus we have inherited from them here in Europe phrases of time such as the Bronze Age, Classical period, the Medieval period, The Renaissance and the Enlightenment. In music history phrases like Classical and Baroque and Romantic. The same process in other realms of Art and Sciences as we seek to understand their past movements and discoveries and practices and add context and richness to our understanding.

Here Mr Roberts makes a point in his article about the Enlightenment. He is right to question it. It is a term that has the seeming linguistic ability to show in relief the Enlightenment:  made even bolder and sharper by a weak, superstitious medieval and religious Millenia preceding it. I too question this phrase whilst not neglecting this European movement. I too like Mr Roberts question the outcomes and consequences of the “Enlightenment’’. I too feel it is time to re-evaluate our historical desire to categorise this era. It is time to re-evaluate as historians how we use these hitherto accepted frameworks of time in Europe.

Time to re-evaluate the Enlightenment in the light of the social and economic and political upheavals it nurtured and fed into. From the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution for example. The impact upon the rapidly expanding industrialisation and ideas appertaining to work and the use profits. Implications for health, education and the role of the State.

Asking questions. Mounting an enquiry. Collating sources. Seeking for evidences. Not to throw out the reasoning of the time: but to seek to understand it, evaluate it, perhaps see how that age has been challenged and superseded by subsequent ages. Why those reasonings and approaches did or did not work.

It is interesting to me that Leopold Von Ranke is considered by many to be the father of modern history. He is writing and lecturing just after the Enlightenment. He is seeking to put history studies themselves, onto a more secure and scientific footing. History is a process of seeking to determine the nature and characteristics of events. You go to sources as evidence. You construct a narrative based upon those evidences.

Encyclopaedia Brittanica succinctly sums up his work by stating,

‘He contributed greatly to the progress of historiography: it became more self-assured in its method and proved itself capable of transforming the widely felt need for a historical understanding of the world (“historicism”) into an interpretation of the past based on scientific research.’

It is not the job to justify those events. For that would necessarily involve a different set of tools (beyond a historians remit and purposes) I think Von Ranke would intimate. Perhaps Hegel and I think certainly Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels would beg to differ and certainly went beyond Von Ranke's vision.

Which neatly brings me to ideology. Now I have been actually the recipient of good quality history works that have an ideological view as a starting point to evaluate the past. A man of my age and nation would be talking about the late great Professor Eric Hobsbawm. A Communist since the 1930s when he watched the rise of the Nazi party in Europe, as he was born there in Austria. In a Jewish family that left quickly.

His history work is not the slavish work of someone following the diktats of the party line via Stalin or anyone else. He was his own man: who could use his insights to illuminate the preceding centuries to the 20th century. Ultimately we as readers are free to evaluate his work, for ourselves. Job done.

My point being this: it is possible for us to own our own prejudices and backgrounds and social conditioning and still work with integrity in history. Yet many are just too lazy to do the work, and prefer ideological driven narratives above the donkey work of Von Ranke's ‘scientific research’. Or they cut and paste. Or simply plagiarise. These are hollow historical works.

The book I have just finished on Hypatia was illuminating. Useful. Thoughtful. I particularly enjoyed the latter chapter where the author showed how Hypatia has been used in history by all sort of people with their own agenda.

It is a symptom of the 21st Century that history is now so disputed, it has lost its meaning. Humanities are discredited. A consequence of the Enlightenment or something more modern?

That is for us to open an enquiry, collate and collect sources, weigh the evidence………..

Have a Blessed week everyone.

Please feel free to comment. That is the point.