The Sensational Case Of Lydia Harvey | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How much money could people [sex workers] make?’
‘Yeah, I'm really reluctant to kind of give really strong statistics, because this is, you know, there's enormous dark figures at work, here, because the, the amount that women were making wasn't, wasn't being recorded. Not least because moral reformers and people who were campaigning for the criminalization of prostitution had no desire for anyone to find out how much money could be made within that industry. And sex work then just like today was was incredibly diverse. So some women were what you could call professional sex workers. And many of these women made incredible amounts of money for what you might guess was way less than 68 hours of work a week. So you know, by rough calculations that I've done, many were making, you know, the equivalent of professional salaries. So the same amount that a barrister, for instance, would be making, potentially even more. Even a sex worker who was kind of working an average amount, who wasn't necessarily having, you know, charging a lot and getting a lot of high end clients. Even those women would be making far more than the police who were arresting them... it could be anything, you know, from the modern equivalent of 1000s a week to the modern equivalent of just a handful of pounds a week...
‘The ones in the train stations who were working for what was called the National Vigilance Association, tended to have a very conservative approach to the problem of exploitive prostitution. They were overwhelmingly dedicated to the eradication of prostitution and trafficking, and truly believed that making the buying and selling of sex illegal and using the carceral state that is police, fines, prison, corporal punishment could achieve that aim. So they were actively campaigning for more criminalization, for more police involvement, for more prison time, even for corporal punishment. And they, one of their kind of branches of activity was to monitor rail stations, and ports. And what they were looking for was women in, who were traveling alone, who they perceived were vulnerable, or men and women who looked as though they may be pimps or procurers or traffickers. And so it was a surveillance network in a way that supplemented the nation immigration system. And while it was ostensibly put in place to help women and protect them from trafficking, it was overwhelmingly also a way to monitor their movement, and oftentimes to offer help and rescue when neither help nor rescue was needed or desired. And so I found it so ironic that Lydia Harvey's walking through these stations as this, you know, if there was anybody who was a kind of ideal victim in the eyes of these moral reformers, it was Lydia Harvey. And they didn't, they didn't help her, they didn't find her. And then in the next breath, I see them finding, for instance, French women who are coming to London to sell sex, telling them you're, you've been a victim of trafficking, even though the French women say I haven't, I've just come here of my own accord. And the National Vigilance Association workers are deporting them or helping to deport them. And so it's this really complicated situation where they are claiming to help, claiming to have the best interests of vulnerable young women in their hearts. But ultimately, the most action that they take on these issues is to deport women, who don't conform to their idea of what a victim looks and acts like. And I think I have to concede that even, even the most morally conservative of moral reformers believed that they were helping young women so I don't mean to suggest that their aims were overtly sinister, although many of them were openly xenophobic. But these men and women who worked for moral reform organizations also saw working class girls as subjects to be protected, surveilled and controlled, and not as individual young women with dreams and desires, including sexual desires, and a right to autonomy. So they really saw them as, as creatures to help and reform. And their attempts to rescue these women from the sex industry were also, in essence, seen as rescuing the young women from themselves. Showing them what's really best for them was to go into those traditional roles of domestic servant, wife, mother. And so they ran reform homes. They talked about retraining and rehabilitation, which was almost always funneling these young women back into the domestic service roles that they had left. And they actively participated in what they called repatriation, but which I've just mentioned is actually deportation. And so the kind of rescue that these moral reformers were offering young women like Lydia Harvey looked mostly like punishment. And it's no wonder then that Lydia Harvey, when, when she is in London, you know, has just been abandoned by Chalice and and is penniless on the streets, she continues to sell sex, because she knows that if she goes to a kind of one of these rescue workers, as they were sometimes called or moral reform organizations, that she's going to end up right back where she started, which is working 80 hours a week for next to nothing...
French women at this time, were also racialized as kind of suspect aliens in Britain. And tended to be stereotyped as kind of some of the key players in the sex industry in London’"
The anti-sex work crowd hasn't changed
Weird that French women were racialised. I thought race was invented during the colonial era to justify slavery
The Maya: Everything You Wanted To Know | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How did the Maya become the most powerful empire of their time in America? So as you've already said, they weren't an empire. But, I guess there's a deeper question about how did the Maya become such a successful civilization?’
‘Yeah, I like, I like the questions. Where, as you say, I suppose it's a bit rude. But we can say the phrasing is wrong. But the, but I like those because the point about that phrasing is it's telling you something about the ideas that have circulated and so on. So the idea that the Maya were an empire, it's, there's nothing wrong with anybody saying that, because if you go into a library, and pick up older books, written by, you know, well established scholars of previous generations, there's talk of the Maya Empire, there is talk of such a thing as an old Maya Empire and a new Maya Empire. So this all dates back to a time when scholars were not able to read Maya hieroglyphs. When you can't read the writing the Maya is left to us, it's difficult to figure out what the relationship was between city states. So so the answer to this question is, there was no Maya Empire. How do we know that now? Because now we can read their writing. And therefore, why do we get the impression that they were so important? What is, if they weren't an empire, how are these ideas still circulating of their significance? And I think it comes back to that same thing, their writing system...
I have a real problem with that phrase, human sacrifice. This is where I will get into big arguments with other historians and anthropologists and archaeologists who don't see a problem with it. I think when people in early modern Britain or Spain were burned alive at the stake, for political and religious reasons, we don't talk about that as human sacrifice. Right, we only talk about ritual, political, and religious executions, by other people as being human sacrifice, so we place it in this kind of other exotic category. The fact is, is that the Maya, were no more violent than any other civilizational culture, nor were they any less violent. That they did not practice so called human sacrifice on any kind of a, of a massive scale. Were people ritually executed? Yes. Were offerings made to deities? Yes. But the vast majority of cases those offerings, not only were they not human, they weren't even, you know, animals. It was, it was plants and, and herbs and incense, and then beyond that, more likely would be animals like chickens, white chickens. Then there were self sacrificial rituals that people would engage in where you might cut yourself to let some blood, and the blood would go on a sacred piece of paper or something like that. The actual ritualized execution of a human being happened relatively rarely, and I would argue, probably less often than that kind of thing was happening during the same time period in, in in Europe’"
Dan Jones On 1,000 Years Of History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'Magna Carta [is] a commentary on the whole of Plantagenet government. So in the 12th century, as we've just been talking about the Plantagenets arrived with Henry II, there'd been major overhauls of lots of different parts of English, political and administrative rule. One of the, one of the major crisis points had come in the in the long running and dramatically settled argument between Henry II and his erstwhile First Minister turned Archbishop of Canterbury, turned bete noire Thomas Beckett, which ended with Beckett’s murders, just after Christmas in 1170, on the floor of Canterbury Cathedral. Now, that sort of thing doesn't go away and undeterred, festered. Really, this sense of not overmighty, but of sometimes dangerously out of control King, Plantagenet kingship. This had been a running theme since Henry II’s reign, but it really culminated in John’s reign. So Magna Carta 1215, as well as a short term reading of it, which is about John and his barons, you've also going to take a longer term reading of it, which is to do with what the Plantagenets have been doing to England in particular, since the 1150s, 1160s. And that really culminated in this this howl of anguish that is Magna Carta in 1215...
There are possibly, maybe even probably about 6 million people living in the British Isles, at the start of the 14th century. Now, a combination of great famine of the second decade of the 14th century, and terrible weather, you know, a major period of climate change, beginning, the Little Ice Age. And then the Black Death, which arrives in the late 1340s, and then recurs in waves throughout the 14th century, I mean, this has a long lasting and profoundly reshaping effect on British history. Not only does that population fall from possibly probably 6 million to possibly probably two to 3 million, not to recover until the start of the 18th century'...
‘Agincourt in 1415. So we have Henry V leading the charge there. What do we need to know?’
‘Yes, it's funny Agincourt, isn't it? We've talked already about Magna Carta in 1215, as this, this semi mythical, foundational kind of event in, in our history, and Agincourt almost exactly 200 years later, you know, October 1415. Agincourt occupies the same place. I've think I've yet in my life ever to watch an England versus France, football or rugby match in which someone has not mentioned in the pre match punditry, the Battle of Agincourt, it's, it's peculiar. And, and I think some of that is Shakespeare...
Agincourt is a poisoned chalice really in the in the longer sort of stretch of the 15th century, because it's the moment that leads to the conquest of Normandy, the occupation of Normandy, and then Henry V, brilliantly, but disastrously dies, as soon as he's achieved absolutely everything he wanted to achieve, leaving a nine month old successor in the form of Henry VI, and an awful problem, which is, how on earth are you going to hold together, an English crown, which also dominates Wales, and has delusions of dominating Scotland and Ireland, and actually has to rule most of Northern France, like how, how is this supposed to be possible. And they wrestle with it for, you know manfully, for about 30 years, before the whole thing goes very, very badly wrong. And in the seeds of the collapse of the English effort in the 100 Years War lie the origins of the Wars of the Roses... Henry V’s success in the 100 Years War springs out of what is effectively the French Wars of the Roses, the Burgundy and Armagnac conflict’"
Leonardo da Vinci’s private life - HistoryExtra - "‘What is known about Leonardo's private relationships?’
‘Well, this is a really, really challenging subject because the actual detailed evidence we have for Leonardo, in terms of his lovers from his own lifetime is very, very scanty indeed. So we really have one document. This is from 1476. And it is an anonymous denunciation of Leonardo and four other men to the Florentine authorities on a charge of sodomy. So this anonymous individual writes a message, puts it in the anonymous denunciations box, pretty much and says that Leonardo, who at the time was just short his 24th birthday, along with a chap called Bartolomeo, he's a goldsmith. A chap called Baccino, he’s a tailor. And a guy called Leonardo Tornabuoni, who is from quite a wealthy and well known family in Florence, have been engaging with in sodomy with a 17 year old man Jacopo Saltarelli, who appears to be a sex worker, he is, has a previous offense on record, and Saltarelli is described as being a party to many wretched affairs and consents to please these persons who exact certain evil pleasures from him. So. Leonardo, there is accused of having sex with men, which is against the law. Erm, now this anonymous denunciation is not actually accepted by the authorities. Now, it used to be the case that people said, this wasn't accepted, because the Tornabuoni family had political influence, and so they got them off. But actually now, I think most historians think that the reason is simply because as an anonymous denunciation, it didn't fit the requirements. Although you were allowed to make these denunciations, secretly, without your name becoming public, you did have to sign them. And because this one wasn't signed, there was a bit of an investigation, it was ruled out of order. And the group were told, you're absolved of these allegations, provided you don't get reported again. So it's a little bit like being let off with a police caution. So, we know this is gonna stay on record. But we don't, we're not going to, you know, rule either way, whether or not you are guilty of it. We're just going to say, look, you know, don't, we don't want to hear from you again… what we do need to be a little bit careful about though is that in this period, we do not, well two things really. One, there are not very solid distinctions of identity between people who are gay and straight. Those are much, much more modern, really don't come in until the 20th century. And so, and so that's part of the story, that we shouldn't assume that because somebody is having sex with men, they would have an identity as gay or bisexual. That's something that people do rather than something that people think they are. And, and secondly, most men in Florence, were having sex with other men, at some point in their lives. This might be the extraordinary pieces of history about 15th century Florence, is that we know from the remarkable work in Michael Rocker’s book forbidden friendships, which came out now 25 years ago, that when you look at the police lists of this office of the night, which is a magistracy set up specifically to try and you know, deal with issues and vice, really, a little bit like a Florentine vice squad, runs over the 70 years, from 1432 to 1502. If you look at the records of the later part of the 15th century, more than half the men in Florence appear at some point in the lists. Now, does it mean that they are all necessarily did exactly the thing they were accused of doing. No. Does it mean that there was a general culture in Florence in which despite it being illegal, lots of people were having same sex affairs, same sex one night stands, same sex relationships. Yes. So this is very much an accepted part of Florentine male culture. And they the the, you know, the penalties are quite small. People don't go to jail until they're on a kind of fourth offence or so as you see the case of Leonardo, you, you get let you know there are, there are charges that aren't pursued’"
Katharine Parr: secrets of a Tudor survivor - HistoryExtra - "'She made this rapid marriage to Thomas Seymour, and for a time all seemed well but unknown to her. Well, not not for not for long, it was unknown to her. But Seymour started to make advances towards Elizabeth who was then 14 years old. And he would come into her bedchamber in the morning and tickle her and make, you know, leave her in the bed and slapped her on the bottom and her governess Kat Ashley, was quite horrified and eventually she told Katharine. And Katharine makes nothing of it. She joins Seymour on some of these occasions. On one occasion when they're in a garden. Elizabeth’s wearing a black morning dress of Henry the Eighth and Katharine, it's a romp, Katharine holds Elizabeth while Seymour takes shears and cuts this gown to ribbons while Elizabeth was wearing it. And Elizabeth rushes indoors in tears and her governess is absolutely scandalized by it and complains to the queen and nothing Katharine does can make Seymour stop this because he's adamant this is all good, harmless fun. And that is the way she affects to see it. Or we think she affects to see it, but maybe she was perturbed'"
The quest to find Alexander’s lost city - HistoryExtra - "‘The people who are writing about Alexander's lost cities, in London and Paris, Berlin, have never been to Afghanistan, have a clue what they're doing. They're trying to reconstruct the map of Afghanistan, where the most reliable source right, the most reliable source in the 19th century on the geography of Afghanistan was a history of Alexander the Great written in the first century AD by a Roman who had never set foot in Afghanistan'"
Who was Britain’s Greatest Prime Minister? Episode 5: Pitt the Younger - HistoryExtra - "‘I thought it'd be really good to choose somebody a bit older, and somebody who served in a time of crisis, because I think that's often the key to Prime Ministerial achievement. It's not about you know, oh, you built lots of hospitals, well done. I mean, any fool can do that if the economy is doing well, I think the test is how you respond to colossal challenges. And Pitt the Younger, who was Prime Minister at the end of the 18th century and into the Napoleonic Wars, he is somebody who faced, you know, arguably, one of the two or three greatest crises that Great Britain has faced since it was united at the beginning of the 18th century. So that's the French Revolution, and the emergence of Napoleon. And. You know, the one thing that people know about, William Pitt the Younger is that he's very young. So it actually is laughable to think that he was Prime Minister at the age of 24. You know, I mean, I don't even think people should be allowed to vote at the age of 24, let alone get into or enter politics...
Like apparently, seems everybody who was a public figure in those days, he suffered from terrible gout, partly because he drank colossal amounts of ports. His doctors actually advised him to drink all this port they thought it was, you know, when they noticed that his health was bad. They said, well, you clearly need to drink more'"
Too bad he "trusted the science"
Marcus Aurelius: thinker or fighter? - HistoryExtra - "‘During this period, which is sort of known as the adoptive emperors, which started with the Emperor Nerva in 96, CE… starting with Nerva they were emperors who were adopted rather than succeeding because of, because they were the sons of the previous emperors. Erm, now it's it's tempting because of the way that sort of later historians have spoken about it, to see this as a kind of, you know, a judgment call, as something that the Emperor's saw the, you know, errors of previous dynasties and wanted to correct it. Actually, they just didn't have sons. And we see that with Marcus Aurelius. You know, clearly because when he does have a son who can take up the position of Emperor he does, you know, have his own son as his heir. And, and actually, the relationship between the previous Emperor Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius is a close one, so, Antoninus Pius is married to Marcus Aurelius’s aunt. And also, Marcus Aurelius is married to, Antoninus Pius, Pius’s daughter. So there is a family connection there. He's the previous emperor’s son in law, in other, in other words, so and and he's also adopted very early on by Antoninus Pius as well as his, his co emperor Lucius Verus, the person who will become his co emperor...
They also show a very loving relationship between Marcus Aurelius and Fronto in a way that you know, can sometimes surprise people so I have a an example of how, if you don't mind, how he signs off, not all of his letters, but one of his letters that I think is, is, you know, sums up perhaps, some of the excessive way in which he tries to show his love for his tutor. And so he says, at the end of the letter, ‘Farewell, most loving, most delightful and eloquent man, my sweetest master. When you see the unfermented wine seething in the cask, let it remind you that my longing for you is welling up in just the same way in my breast and overflowing and foaming. Fare ever well.’ So, you know, it’s quite, it's quite emotional. A lot of these letters are quite emotional in the way that he talks about Fronto, about about how much he loves him. about the relationship they have as tutor and pupil. And that remains even when Marcus Aurelius becomes Emperor.’"
Liberals will come in and claim that we are erasing gay history because they don't understand homosocial love. Clearly all close same-sex friendship in history is evidence of homosexuality. Just like all cross dressing is really evidence the cross dressers were trans
Napoleon the art thief - HistoryExtra - "‘Can you give us an idea of the scale of his appropriation of great artworks across Europe? I mean, how many master pieces did he plunder and, and over how many years?’
‘Well, this, this scale was vast. The scale of his plundering was vast. He starts in his very first campaign in Italy. And this is when he took the Veronese. He's only 26. And what's fascinating is, he races across northern Italy, conquering various Italian states, he was fighting the Austrians conquering state, Italian states that were either neutral, or allied with the Austrians. He forces these states that he defeats into putting works of art into the terms of their peace treaties. And then he would go on later, when he's the emperor of France or emperor of the French to plunder Germany and Austria and not so successfully Spain. And then he also, his, the, the head of the Louvre would go back to Italy, the very end of in 1811, and 1812, and 13. So it was vast, the plundering was vast in Italy and this ultimately, they would take some 500 works of art just from Italy. And only about half of them have gone back... Art plundering really dates has had a long, long history, dating back to ancient times with the Romans… But in the 18th century, this had become partly, because of the Enlightenment influence, this was no longer than norm’"
The Anarchy: everything you wanted to know - HistoryExtra - "‘The story goes that a boatman comes to Henry I and says, I've got this fantastic new shiny ship called the white ship. It's white, and it's really fast. And he also says, my father was one of the men who carried your father William the Conqueror across the channel for the Norman invasion in 1066. So it'd be my honor, if you would let me take you across the channel this time. And Henry I says, you know what, I've got my ship, I'm sorted, I'm fine. But how about you take my son and all his young mates you know, they can have the flash new Ferrari version of ships to get them back across to England. And so the the owner of the white ship thinks fantastic, makes all the preparations. William Adelin, 17 years old, all of his mates pile on board with more wine than there is people. The crew are getting involved, the crew are getting drunk as well. The young nobles are pushing the oarsmen out of the way and pretending to row the boat and they're all getting more and more raucous. The the monks come on board to bless the ship and the journey and they all jeer them away. And then in a drunken stupor. We get a story that several people then disembark and one of those is Stephen of Blois who you mentioned earlier. So this is kind of a really fortuitous moment that he gets off the ship and there's some suggestion that he might have had an upset stomach, but also that several people were growing really, really worried that this was a bad move. It was falling into evening, Henry I’s ship had already sailed. They were making plans to try and catch him up in this super fast new ship. Going into the dark and obviously a few people probably thought: this isn't a great idea and stepped off the ship. And then the ship eventually set sail, everybody's drunk. It doesn't even make it out of Harfleur harbor. It hits a rock that is a well known hazard on the way out of the harbor, tears the set side of the ship, and it sinks in the freezing cold water. There’s thought to have been around 300 people on board and this was the sons and daughters of some of the most important nobles in England at the time, there was some of Henry I’s illegitimate children on the ship as well. And obviously William Adelin, too, and there's only one person who survives he's a butcher called Berold from Rouen who was sailing across to try and get some of his bills paid. And that the irony is that his poor clothing of thick sheep skins and things like that saved him from the cold whereas all of those nobles dressed in their thin fine flimsy silks froze to death or drowned.’"
The Curious Tale Of The Cerne Abbas Giant | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘If you're talking about the hermit, why does he have this enormously prominent phallus? And I think first off, you'd want to mention that, in the medieval period, it was perhaps not quite as prominent. The penis was extended, possibly even as late as the early 20th century to incorporate a pre existing navel. It had a, the giant had a belly button that's now been sort of subsumed into the phallus. And, but more to the point of the argument I'm making, the nakedness of hermits was often seen as a sign of holiness. Contemporary rules for how they would conduct themselves or live their life, mentioned them going naked in imitation of Christ and the evangelists or living naked as a means of casting off worldly goods, or returning to kind of the blessed innocence of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden pre fall. And we have the Old English poem Daniel, in which spiritual penance in the wilderness is described as walking naked in misery. So we've got good evidence, I think for hermits and nudity being coupled in this way. And especially when I think we couple this with one other feature of the Cerne giant, which is he has exposed ribs, you can see his rib cage on his side, we might think of this combination of nudity and emaciation, as quite fitting for a stylized representation of a hermit, hermit suffering piously in the wilderness. But I think it's also just generally more important to note that even monks of this period weren't prudes. Nor was there a hard distinction between the erotic and the spiritual in a way that might be expected. So in the Exeter book, for instance, which is a compendium of Old English poems, written almost certainly in a monastic context, we find bawdy riddles with answers, such as, which are meant to be an onion or a key. But both both of which are absolutely full of innuendo to try and trick the reader into believing the solution in both cases is in fact, a penis. And these riddles existed alongside poetry dealing with enormously serious theological matters right up to and including the crucifixion of Christ, without any censor or comment. So I think views that monks of this period are prim or overly innocent when it comes to the representation of genitals or sex are slightly misguided, I think... … we're still dealing with the fallout of Victorian squeamishness about rather than any medieval sensibility, it's interesting to note that many Victorian depictions of the giant himself don't feature the phallus. It's a, it's removed from their illustrations because of moral sensibilities of the period. But this wasn't a concern for a medieval audience or a medieval artist, I don't think.’"
Who was Britain’s greatest prime minister? Episode 7: Lord Salisbury - HistoryExtra - "‘I think the tarnishing of his image really does come with the Boer War, not least of course, by the introduction of concentration camps, which were not in any way intended to be the kind of extermination camps that the Nazis had, in fact the exact opposite. They were attempting to protect the Boer women and children by taking them off the velt and away from the war. But nonetheless, needless to say, if your Premiership is in any way connected with something like concentration camps, that's going to be very easy for people, detractors to misinterpret what's going on... we had the two power standard whereby the Royal Navy had to be by law larger than the next two navies in the world combined, which is an extraordinary thing when one comes think of it, but something that the Victorians were able to pay for.’"
Wolfson History Prize 2021 Special | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘During the time that I wrote the book, for example, we had the issue of of separated families in the United States, when Trump was president. And I had people constantly asking me, what's going to happen to be children, you know, what, these children are being taken away from their parents. And then often, in some cases, their parents could not be found for the children to be returned. And I thought, well, I don't know obviously, what will happen to these particular children. But if I look at the children in my book, I can tell you a lot about what happened to them in very similar situation. And it's not very happy story. So that actually felt very, very relevant and topical to me. And then we just had the broader issue of the fact that, you know, the book looks at this moment in, in in 1945, when you've got these survivor children on the move, they're on the move, they're kind of leaving the places they were in hiding, or they're leaving internment in concentration camps, or other sorts of camps, that they're on the move across Europe, and then out of Europe.’...
‘If you hitch your wagon, too closely to some contemporary agenda, or some contemporary issue, that sort of very, of great topical interest in the moment, you may find that actually, your book doesn't stand the test of time because the conversation moves on. So it's, it's really important, I think, to have something, I think, again, comes back to this point about having something to say having, you know, really compelling historical problem that you want to analyze that you want to get to the bottom of that you want to explain. And inevitably, almost inevitably, that will connect with something, you know, with with problems and challenges in the contemporary because, you know, these are human societies that we’re, that we're dealing with, you know, where history belongs to the humanities. We're interested in, you know, not to sound too, you know, precious, the human condition’...
‘One of the big dangers, particularly in my discipline of political science is that people are too obsessed with the present. And they just think we live in unique times, and we live in exceptional times, and there's nothing to be learned from the past. And that is just a silly view’"
Only the right is not allowed to make inappropriate Nazi analogies. Apparently illegal immigrants trying to enter the US are similar to World War II concentration camps inmates
Busting myths about the Anglo-Saxons - HistoryExtra - "‘There is this live debate about whether we should be talking about the Anglo Saxons, as a tool, a concept, which feeds into lots of things that are going on today, in terms of nationalism, and big debates, in that sense. You've chosen to call your book, the Anglo Saxons. So, you think it’s an appropriate term still?’
‘Well, I think it's an unavoidable term. I mean, as I say, when when these people call themselves Angles and Saxons, and from the, from the eighth century on the continent, you have a few instances of people calling that, using the phrase Anglo Saxon, but that's as a way of differentiating the Angles or rather the Saxons in, in what becomes England from the Saxons on the continent. So the English Saxons, if you like. But then in the ninth century, you have, you know, a king of Wessex, a very famous king of Wessex, Alfred the Great, who's begins his career as King of Wessex, Rex Saxonum. And about a decade into his reign, decides he's going to put a new hat on and starts calling himself a Rex Angul-Saxonum. And he's clearly not using that in the sense of English Saxons. He's using it as a way to reach out to the the Angles that he has recently annexed to his kingdom because Alfred famously, not only does he defeat the Vikings, who are threatening his kingdom, he increases the size of Wessex by annexing half of Mercia. And as a way of appealing to his new Anglian subjects in the West Midlands, he starts styling himself as a king of the Anglo Saxons, and that's you know, fairly consistently after about 880. His son does the same. Edward the Elder for another 25 years. And his grandson, so Edward the Elder’s son, Alfred's grandson Athelstan also begins his career styling himself as an Anglo Saxon king, king of the Anglo Saxons. So it is a contemporary term with contemporary warrant. And although they don't, although they increasingly start to talk about themselves as kings of the English after, say 927, they still periodically style themselves, occasionally style themselves as kings of the Anglo Saxons, right down to the end of the period. You know, you've got charters of Edward the Confessor’s, as late as 1061, styling himself, Rex Angul-Saxonum. So, you know, I totally understand the the, the desire to *sigh* combat racism within medieval studies. Of course, there's, you know, who could object to that, but I do worry about abandoning terms, which are of contemporary warrant. And I also think, I also think there's a, you know, that because there's such a long usage of it going back at least 400 years as a modern term, it's wishful thinking to imagine that you can cease talking about these people as Anglo Saxons, when that's the way that they occasionally describe themselves. It’s kind of a bit like, you know, when you know, the Artist formerly known as Prince, if you start talking about early medieval England, and people say, well, what do you mean, you say Anglo Saxon, you have to kind of invoke it to explain your circumlocutions. So and I don't think there is an adequate circumlocution. So. I continue to use it...
Some of the books I've read recently on the Vikings have persuaded me that, you know, whilst you can say yes, you know, there are things that the, in many respects in which the Vikings, you know, they weren't sort of ogres or monsters, that the scale of the devastation was very considerable. And I think that's, that's kind of like the, I think it's just me reacting to that. That view, I mean, if you go somewhere like the Jorvik Centre in York, you know, you can come away from that with the impression that, oh, well, the Vikings wore trousers, you know, the Vikings had coins, the Vikings went to the toilet, you know, you see them doing these day to day things. Because this is a street excavated in mid 10th century, York, which of course, shows them engaged in commercial activities, and it shows them engaged in domestic activities. And you can come over the impression that, you know, that this is all, you know, pretty benign. But there's a great difference between you know, that I think, I think I'm right in saying that actually, the the stuff in the Jorvik Cenre actually dates from a period after they're under English rule. I think it dates from after 954, the excavations, although it's sold very heavily as kind of like Viking York, it's actually under the rule of the kings of England by that point... you can still, you know, be merchants, be traders. You know, wear trousers, go to the toilet and you know, have fantastic beads, etc, and broaches. And at the same time you or your ancestors can engage in kind of nefarious acts of violence. And you know, I think the, one of the things that kind of, for me establishes the scale of all the, the the, the extent of Viking destruction is is what's lost to us and the fact that we know, almost zippity doo da about the Kingdom of East Anglia, you know, which should be, what would have been one of the richest areas of England in the seventh, eighth, early ninth centuries. You know, the fact that we know almost nothing about Northumbria in the ninth century because, and Northumbria of course, had had this incredibly rich culture we know from Bede and from things like the Lindisfarne Gospels. The fact that we're so badly informed about it in the era immediately in the centuries between Bede and the Viking raids shows just how destructive those raids were. I mean monasticism, and for that matter, the organized church as a whole is wiped out in the areas that the the Danes settle in the first instance... there is no monasticism after the Vikings come along… They're just all devastated and wiped out. Same with the bishoprics as well, the bishoprics of East Anglia and and Eastern Mercia disappear… monasticism really is not reintroduced into those areas until after the Norman conquest. So for two centuries, you know, organized Christianity in those areas is wiped out and that's, you know… consequence of Viking destructiveness’"
Won't stop liberals trying to rewrite history for their political ends
Painting the Tudors: Hans Holbein the Younger - HistoryExtra - "‘Holbein’s paintings today, if you can get to see some of them, and there are some in the National Gallery for example, if you can get to have a look face to face with Holbein’s paintings, I guarantee you, a tingle will go down your spine, because it's not that his painting was lifelike in comparison to most of the art of the time. His painting in the whole history of art is some of the most lifelike we we have ever enjoyed. He is, you know, one of the greatest artists in that respect. But I think the other thing that people need to think, is to try and cast themselves back in time into what painting was like back in the 16th century. I mean, for a start, today we're so used to being able to go to galleries, we see everything in reproduction. We're surrounded by television and magazine and books and, paintings feel very accessible. But then they were rare. People would see them in church, they would see them in public buildings, and if people were wealthy, they would be able to commission paintings. So they were much more like sort of precious jewelry. They would have been considered an event. Quite often they were concealed in cabinets or books and you’d open shutters or draw back a curtain to look at them. And so, if you think of that. If you think of the rarity of seeing a painting, and then a curtain is drawn back and you see something that is really lifelike, that would have been a real novelty. A real event, real shock to the system for Holbein’s original clientele’"
Knights, dragons and beasts: the strange world of medieval romances - HistoryExtra - "‘A number of popular romances took their inspiration from classical tales, such as the Trojan wars, or older legends like say, the tales of King Arthur, why were medieval authors so keen to mine these older sources?’
‘It's, it's an interesting thing that they do that. Partly because I think nowadays, we think that medieval people largely forgot about the classical past. I think the old narrative used to be that people rediscovered these texts in the Renaissance. And then before then people had sat around for 1000 years just kind of ignoring the classical past. Romances show us that this is not true. There is very much a continuation. So yeah, stories around Troy in particular, they were fascinated with. And this is partly a political move and a move of status. So there is that kind of longing among kind of all the inheritors of kind of Greece and Rome, these cultures in Europe that they want to sort of associate with the great past and the kind of great classical heroes. There's a stake in that. And this is also where the language issue of romance meaning originally something written in French rather than Latin comes in. Because there is a move, French is a rather young language at that stage in terms of their literary history. So to borrow from these classical Latin texts is also to borrow some of that prestige’"
A Decade In The Life Of DH Lawrence | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘That was the first kind of cancellation of Lawrence, if you like… he left the country. He took himself into exile, after the war and lived in Italy and, and eventually, America, and the Americans kind of accepted him as their own. He reinvented himself as an American writer. But then he was, he was cancelled again in 1970… He died in 1930. He kind of rose again, as a kind of, as a prophet of the sexual revolution, and he was hero worshiped in the 60s after the Lady Chatterley trial in 1960. But then, in 1970, a young PhD student called Kate Millett, wrote an incendiary book it was her PhD thesis, one of the most successful PhD theses I could think of called sexual politics, in which she, she was very much speaking for second wave feminism, in which she described Lawrence as Phallocentric. And you know, what she meant by Phallocentric was that he, you know, he, he he worshiped the phallus and he saw men as having kind of mystical power over women. And there was a lot of silliness in Lawrence, a lot of silliness in late Lawrence. And whilst her arguments absolutely hold up, because Lawrence was contradictory, and she didn't understand this contradiction, she couldn't see that he also worshiped female sexuality. She took just one strand of Lawrence, took it completely out of context. But Lawrence was destroyed as, as a figure'"
Feminists strike again!
What The Stasi Did After The Fall Of The Berlin Wall | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "'The Stasi, were the secret police organization and ministry for state security for East Germany. They had their roots at the very beginning of the Cold War, after the Soviets left Germany and they needed an Internal Security Service of their own. So they were formed basically with the model of the Cheka, which was the predecessor for the Soviet KGB. As a matter of fact, the Stasi or the Ministry for State Security shield was fashioned by the Minister of State Security to be similar to that of the Cheka. And so they that was their, what they took their beginnings from. And they built on it, and actually quickly exceeded the capabilities of the Soviet services'...
‘And despite the suffering that the Stasi inflicted on so many 10s of 1000s, hundreds of 1000s of people, am I right to say that virtually none of them were ever prosecuted.’
‘I tried to determine how many of the Stasi officers were actually served jail. There were many, many investigations opened after Germany was reunified. So some people had reason for hope. There were very few prosecutions actually filed. And there are even fewer convictions for a Stasi officer doing something as part of his employment. Of those convictions. I found only one case of a Stasi officer who served jail time because of something that he did as a Stasi officer. Even the head of the Stasi, Erich Mielke. He was convicted not of anything to do with his creation of the Stasi, in his, his 40 years of ruling as what the Germans knew him as a master of fear. He was convicted of a murder of two police officers that occurred in the 1930s in which he was involved, that was before the Stasi was even created. So I think that most Germans don't know those statistics, because they're not easy to find. And they're not discussed and when they are discussed, there's embarrassment...
They still do maintain a very proud, you know, attitude towards their career. You know, in 2018, they were preparing for the next anniversary celebration of the formation of the Stasi. And they have celebrations. So I mean, it's, it's interesting because they didn't just go separate ways. And they didn't just fade away. Now, to be sure, many of the Stasi are receiving pensions. As of 2017, over 65,000, former Stasi officers were being paid attention by a unified Germany. And they're living all over the world, approximately 350 million euros per year… It was surprising to me how much they're still fighting to revise history. And it's, it's surprising to me how little pushback there is in Germany now...
Initially, there were a number of victims groups in the 90s. Still exist, they've been consolidated. But as the victims age, two things have happening. One is the system in Germany is there's a disincentive for them to speak up. Because they can be sued, they can be fined for making some claim that they know to be true, because they were there, but maybe they don't have a piece of paper. And the other thing is that after the the privacy laws became, in the last five years or so even more onerous because of Facebook and things like that, that if they post something about their experience, on their own Facebook page, which I mentioned a cut, some people in the book that done that, there's a government bureaucracy that that will entertain a complaint by a Stasi officer. And it's very onerous, when you've been victimized, you've been trying to recover for being victimized your whole life. And then when you wanna speak up, you get victimized again. So, you know, those privacy laws have been far better at protecting the privacy of the former Stasi officers, and the politicians of the SCD, the East German Communist Party, than protecting any victims...
I
think it bears all of us to focus on where tyranny could come from, and where it could spread. And it could spread faster than we may think. Even in some parts of Europe today, it's considered cool to have been a Stasi officer, and you never hear that reference a Nazi officer.’"
