History and its Audiences

Thus history has many manifestations and as many audiences. For the Franks an understanding of the past worked at several levels and was manifested to them in a number of different textual contexts. A sense of the past could express a much more general cultural affiliation and identity within which a sense of time and chronology may or may not have played a role. As we have seen in this lecture, the Franks' sense of the past was a composite one. Alternatively one might need to think in terms of different overlapping sequences: of different local and institutional senses of identity expressed in terms of their own community's foundations, property, associations, dead members and others remembered with some association with a particular place, and of benefactors; of the chronological progression of Jewish and Christian history; of being heirs of both imperial and Christian Rome; of their own sense of achievement as Franks, expanding ever eastwards and imposing their own composite culture on others. A sense of the past was deeply integrated into the sense of identity of the audiences for history in early medieval Europe, but it still needs a lot of unravelling to understand it properly.

The audiences for medieval history in the twenty-first century

So for us too a sense of the past is an essential part of our identity. I should like to spend the last portion of this lecture in considering why the middle ages, in the widest possible understanding of that much abused term, remains an essential part of the construction of our past in twenty-first century Europe.

Many of the views on the subject of study of the middle ages in the twentieth century expressed by my seven eminent predecessors in this Chair (of whom I knew as colleagues, was taught by, or have met no fewer than five) remain as valid as when they voiced them at their inaugural lectures. I take this opportunity both to acknowledge my amazement at having now stepped into their shoes and to refer you to the inaugural lecture given in 1988 by my immediate predecessor Barrie Dobson, whom I am delighted to see here today, and who so forthrightly summarized what they had had to say.¹

It is clear from the millennium hysteria, the spate of books published in 1999 on the year 1000, ITV's 'soap opera' 'Dark Ages',² and the ostensibly more sober television documentaries such as London Weekend Television's '2000 Years',³ that the modern audiences for the middle ages are every bit as varied, to say the least, as they have been in the past. Journalists have been particularly keen to air their views on medieval history. Some of it makes good sense, though most of what appears in the British Press does not look beyond the cliffs of Dover.

John Walsh in The Independent on Sunday and with tongue in cheek, for example, defined the middle ages as follows: 'so-called because they are located in the middle of history between the ancient Romans and Greeks and the modern era of civil wars, revolutions and e-mail. In fact they lasted just over 1,000 years'. The period from '410 to the battle of Hastings', he continues, is called the Dark Ages 'because England was overrun by barbarians, craftmaking packed up, and trade collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons worshipped pagan deities such as Thor and Freya, and fought over their kingdoms. History has so little to say about the period that King Arthur and Camelot were made up to fill the gap'.⁴

Yet there is a difference between poking fun at something you know well, as Sellars and Yeatman did in their immortal 1066 and all that and belittling and ridiculing the middle ages out of superficial knowledge or sheer ignorance. Even distinguished scholars can purvey what is an unfortunate expression of a more widely-held view, such as the opening piece in The Times Higher Education Supplement's Millenium Magazine which began thus:

The 10th century, the last of the old Millennium, was, from an intellectual point of view, the darkest in the history of western Christendom. ... But, in the centures after the Roman Empire turned Christian, much that the pagan world had learnt was forgotten, preserved only in unconsulted manuscripts in remote monastic libraries. At the beginning of the second millennium the inhabitants of Europe knew much less about the world than their predecessors had known ten centuries previously.⁵

If history is indeed as, Robert Phillips claims, 'no longer just professional, but also public and political property' ⁶ (has history in fact ever not been public and political property?) then medieval historians have an urgent obligation to see, firstly, that the middle ages, however defined, are not misrepresented, or, worse, dismissed as an unfortunate and embarrassing faux pas, lasting for 1000 years, that is best forgotten. Secondly, it is up to medieval historians to ensure that collective identities are not formed nor political power wielded by means of historical myths and distortions, as in, to cite just one instance, the right-wing appropriation in 1996 of the celebration of the 1500th anniversary of the Frankish King Clovis's baptism in 496.⁷ A consideration of the construction of our past needs also to be seen in the context of the audience for history in the schools of this country and the potential impact on the wider public's historical understanding. When announced last summer (1999), the new OCR A-level History syllabus in England excluded all English history before 1042, all Continental European history before 1073 and substantial parts of later medieval English and Continental history. Further, there was little provision, under the new proposals, for the study of England or Continental Europe in the eighteenth century, that is, a period of major British expansion overseas and of the Enlightenment,⁸ or for 'British' history before 1846. As for what we in the History Faculty call 'extra-European' history, there is only a small space for a little modern American history. The 'market' orientation and lack of pedagogic or intellectual rationale in these proposals was striking. Publicity was pleasingly adverse, with many letters to The Times and other newspapers.⁹

Headlines in the national broadsheets, such as 'Don't give up on the Dark Ages',¹⁰ were matched by those asserting that all the History students in Sixth Forms knew about was the twentieth century.¹¹

Protests in the summer of 1999 resulted in the restoration, by Oxford and Cambridge examination board (OCR), of only the Anglo-Saxon period as an option.¹² For the rest, the fight is on. Yet as the History Today survey has established¹³ and as the History teachers at the Historical Association's Education Forum, held at the University of York in September 1999, confirmed, probably a majority of school pupils, if they continue with History after Key Stage 3 in the National Curriculum will study Hitler, Hitler and again Hitler. Sean Lang, the Head of History at Hills Road Sixth Form College in Cambridge, has coined the term, 'Hitlerisation of history' and asked: 'why do we [teachers of history] feel that the best way to sell our subject is violence and tyranny?'¹⁴ Well, the middle ages are not exactly short of tyranny and violence.

It is generally felt that undergraduates are arriving in their first year with no 'sense of span'¹⁵ and an increasingly narrow range of knowledge and of types of history. Studying earlier periods than the nineteenth century does not only add to one's sense of the past, of time in a longer perspective and of change. It also clarifies the interdependence of social, economic, cultural, religious and political history. It introduces students to very different categories of historical evidence, and to the problems of survival and interpretation. It is also obvious that studying different periods will also provide a wider range of historical methods and analysis, enrich comparisons and encourage interdisciplinarity. If teaching in school and at undergraduate level is to be as responsive to current trends in research as, say, physics or biology, then the history taught in schools and universities should bear some relation to the current dynamism of medieval history, not only in this country but all over the world. There are those, not in this room I am sure, who might persist is saying that only the most recent history is 'relevant', as if chronological proximity brings with it instant understanding and men and women in the past have to be like us to get a hearing. But, as Thomas Sutcliffe has recently remarked: 'The past has many other things to supply us besides a surprising prescience - among them the reminder that our own circumstances are not an incontestable state of nature but a transitory arrangement - which may be better or worse than what has gone before'.¹⁶ The past is in many respects 'a foreign country',¹⁷ but on the premise that travel broadens the mind, this is all the more reason to go there. The more we study the more distant past of the middle ages (and the ancient world for that matter) the more we can appreciate and assess the discontinuites of human experience as well as the continuities. On a methodological and comparative level, questions of evidence, audience and interpretation are as closely intertwined in the early middle ages as they are in any other period of history.If one thinks of contemporary histories of our own time, such as Peter Clarke's splendid book on twentieth-century Britain, Hope and Glory, ¹⁸ Peter Clarke in this book, like his Carolingian counterparts, had an agenda, structure and emphasis of the events and interpretations he offers. The audience of Hope and Glory supplies, for their part, their own private recollections and amplification, some of which is inevitably directly contradictory to the historian's version. But Peter Clarke has given shape to his and their memory in time; and in the future, his account might become all that is left as a record of Britain in the twentieth century. We saw a further instance of the difficulty of generalizing a mood or opinion in Richard Evans's inaugural lecture a fortnight ago.¹⁹ Then he presented us with opinions expressed in contemporary Britain about Germany still coloured by perceptions of the Second World War. On one level, these opinions might be taken as representative of the people of Britain as a whole. Yet Richard observed them as phenomena different from his own view and Richard's audience understood it as a curious manipulation of the past to serve a modern distorted understanding of the present that we did not share. If in one thousand years' time all that remains to establish British attitudes towards Germany in the late twentieth century is the selection of material Richard analysed, as distinct from his own analysis of it, the historians in the thirty-first century will present a very different picture from what our, or even the public's, understanding might be at present. An awareness of the problems of selective survival of evidence and its interpretation in the middle ages is obviously as germane to the interpretation and selection of evidence in modern and contemporary historical writing.

As an historian of Continental Europe in the early middle ages, I am engrossed with the process long known in Cambridge as 'The transformation of the Roman world'.²⁰ Early medievalists face Janus-like towards both antiquity and the eleventh century and beyond. Yet what we medievalists study is a shared past and the common cultural inheritance of the many peoples of Europe. How powerful this can be was illustrated by the extraordinary public interest in the magnificent celebratory exhibition at Paderborn in 1999 of the meeting there between Charlemagne and Pope Leo in 799, with material brought from all over the world and over three hundred thousand visitors.²¹ A common and sometimes distant past unites most modern polities. The narrative of historical events and the recording of memories, quite apart from historical myths at their inception and in later manifestations, use and abuse, need to be understood. Medieval historians have a duty to their audiences - each other, their students and the wider public - to counter the false use of the past to justify present action or attitudes. We need, in short, to keep the lines of communication with the past open, by every means in our power.

¹ R.B. Dobson, Preserving the perishable. Contrasting communities in medieval England (Cambirdge, 1990), referring to C.W. Previté-Orton, The Study of medieval history (Cambridge, 1937), Z.N. Brooke, The prospects of medieval history (Cambridge, 1944), D.Knowles, The Prospects of medieval studies (Cambridge, 1947), C. Cheney, The Records of medieval England (Cambridge, 1956), W. Ullmann, The Future of medieval history (Cambridge, 1972) and the work of his immediate predecessor J.C. Holt, Professor of Medieval History, 1978-1988.

² It was broadcast from Tuesday 11th January, 2000, billed as 'A new comedy series. A hysterically historical new comedy from the last millennium. The year is 999 A.D. England is gripped with millennium paranoia'.

³ Compèred by Melvyn Bragg, this series was prepared to a simplistic agenda with some curious and gratuitous sensationalism built in.

⁴ John Walsh, 'Black Death, burnt cake and pagans'. John Walsh's handy guide to the Middle Ages before they disappear off the historical map', The Independent on Sunday, 25th July 1999, p. 17.

⁵ A. Kenny, 'Towards a rebirth', in 1000 years of intellectual history: The Times Higher Education Supplement. Millennium Magazine, 24/31 December 1999, pp. 4-7 at p. 4.

⁶ Robert Phillips, 'An argument about our island story of more than historical interest', The Independent, The Friday Review, p. 4, 21st April, 2000,

⁷ In any case, the date is disputed! But see the volumes produced in association with the colloquium linked with this meeting, ed. M. Rouche, Clovis histoire et memoire. Clovis et son temps l'événement. Actes du colloque internationale de Reims (Paris, 1997). The middle ages is not the only victim: see K. Sengupta and G. John, 'Americans couldn't break out of Colditz but they've escaped with the screen rights', The Independent, Monday 1st May 2000, p. 3.

⁸ The eighteenth century has more or less disappeared from the A-level English literature syllabus as well.

⁹ The alarm was raised by Robin Nonhebel, Head of History at St Benedict's School, Ealing, London. Letters to The Times, 'Dropping Anglo-Saxons and ignoring Normans', July 19th,1999, p. 21 and J. Judd, 'Anglo-Saxon history fades from exams', The Independent, Wednesday 14th July 1999.

¹⁰ L. James, 'Don't give up on the Dark Ages', The Independent, 14th July, 1999, The Wednesday Review and D. McKie, 'Cnut is hard to crack', The Guardian, Thursday 19th August, 1999, p. 15.

¹¹ J.Judd, 'History students ignorant of past', The Independent, 20th July 1999.

¹² Reported by, among others, J. O'Leary, 'Saxons return at A-level', The Times 17th August 1999.

¹³ D. Bates, 'Undergraduate history 1999', History Today 49 (8) (1999), pp. 54-60.

¹⁴ At York, Historical Association Conference, Education Forum, York, September 10th, 1999 and his article, 'A-level history', History Today 50(2) (2000), pp. 16-17. See also P. Furtado, 'Is there history beyond Hitler?', History Today 49(9) (1999), pp. 5-6.

¹⁵ A phrase used in the letter written to the OCR in 3rd August 1999 by members of the Oxford University Faculty of History. I am grateful to Professor Rees Davies for kindly sending me a copy of this letter.

¹⁶ T. Sutcliffe, 'Why relevance is irrelevant', The Independent. April 19th, 2000. I am grateful to Thomas Sutcliffe for allowing me to quote him and to Christine Carpenter for bringing this article to my attention.

¹⁷ L.P. Hartley, The Go-between (London, 1958), p. 1 and see D. Lowenthal, The Past is a foreign country (Cambridge, 1985).

¹⁸ P. Clarke, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-1990 (Harmondsworth, 1999).

¹⁹ R. Evans, Professor of Modern History, The Myth of the Second World War, Inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History, Wednesday 3rd May 2000.

²⁰ It has been the title of a Specified Paper in Part II of the Historical Tripos in the University of Cambridge since 1974. It was also the title given the project of the recently-completed European Science Foundation Project: see I.N. Wood, 'Report: The European Science Foundation's Programme on the Transformation of the Roman world and emergence of early medieval Europe', Early Medieval Europe 6 (1997), pp. 215-227.

²¹ The exact figure was 311,287 visitors. See the magnificent two volume catalogue and accompanying volume of essays: C. Stiegemann and M. Wemhoff (eds), 799. Kunst und Kultur der Karolingerzeit. Karl der Große und Papst Leo III. in Paderborn (Paderborn, 1999). 11,848 copies of the 2-volume catalogue and 9,776 copies of the essay volume were sold during the exhibition. I am grateful to Dr Christoph Stiegemann and Dr Petra Koch of the Diözesanmuseum, Paderborn, for supplying these figures.