Australian Bushrangers: Folk Heroes Or Common Criminals? | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Most people see Bushrangers as national heroes. And there's actually popular government support for that as well. There's a, there's a government webpage about Bushrangers. A lot of Australians self identity with the bushranging mythology, with the kind of mystique, the idea of the underdog, the fighting against adversity, the idea that you're somehow making the world a better place through bringing about a more kind of rough but also a very real form of justice. That mythology is so pervasive that there are many studies of the sociology of bushranging in Australia today. So there are even studies about people with Ned Kelly tattoos are apparently more likely to die violent deaths than the regular population... My research tries to really challenge and destabilize our understanding of bushranging as a white male phenomenon. Because it categorically wasn't. Even if you look at the numbers and say, well, there were more white men committing bushranging than these other racial or gendered groups, when you look back through the records, the very tangible, visceral fear that people felt about these other bushrangers. And the extent to which they really did have influence, discussions about these figures changed legislation, led to intense Parliamentary Debate, changed the whole composition of certain communities, and had enduring legacies that remain till the present day'"
The Cold War Battle For Berlin | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘How bad a state was the city and its population in at the end of the war?’
‘Well, you've got to remember that Berlin is a city in total ruins, you know, the the RAF, the Americans, they've been bombing it from the air for, you know, for several years, intensely. And then you had the Red Army has come in and just you know, mortared and shelled the city. So it's a city in ruins. There's no city administration, no functioning government, there's no water, there's no gas, there's no electricity, and there's almost no food. So, and all the hospitals have been destroyed completely. So it's a city, and people are living in, in ruins, in their basements, in the cellars. It's an absolute, you know, humanitarian disaster in the waiting. And so the, when the both the Soviets move into their sector of the city and the Western Allies into their sector sectors, they they've got an absolute disaster to deal with. They've got in the western sectors alone, they've got two and a half million Berliners who are starving, and they've got to bring food in and they've got to bring it in pretty quickly… The Soviet Army, the Red Army, has captured Berlin and got there two months before the Western Allies. So the Soviets already control the whole city. And by the time they deign to allow the Western Allies into their sectors, the Soviets had done what they can, and they've done quite a good job at repairing water supplies and some electricity supplies in their sector of the city. But they have declined to do to do anything in the western sectors, except of course, loot those those sectors and take away whatever they can. So when the, when the Americans and the British arrive in their sectors, not only is the no water, no electricity, no gas supplies, as I've said, but also they find that all the great industrial factories, many of which are in the British, British sector, have been totally looted. The the Soviets have simply carted off off everything, as they see it for reparations for all the damage that the German army has, you know, has done to Soviet Russia, of course. So they, it's, you know that they walk into an absolute disaster...
‘Stalin's vow, was that Adolf Hitler was still alive. I think he might have said possibly in British held territory, when all the while Stalin had confirmation that the German leader was in fact dead. And he was so so determined to sort of spin this story that Hitler was still alive that he had the person who confirmed Hitler's dead locked up in a gulag so the truth couldn't leak home. Why was Stalin so hell bent on misleading the allies on this point?’
‘Yeah, this is absolutely extraordinary. And you read what happened is the Soviets found the the grisly charred corpse of Hitler. And most importantly, they found the jaw, his jaw bone, and the head his teeth. So they they went to they found his the dental nurse that looked after Hitler's teeth. And she was able to find the radiographs of his teeth and prove without a shadow of a doubt that this was Hitler's corpse. And this was told to Stalin who immediately saw this as a potential way of, you know, getting one over on the allies but on the Western Allies. So yeah, he had it absolutely hushed up, the fact that Hitler was indeed, had committed suicide, his body has been burnt. And he started to insinuate that the British were holding a still alive Hitler in their, in their zone of occupied Germany. It's an extraordinary accusation to make against, against your supposed ally, you know, and this will be repeated time and again, and it just made the British look really, really bad, because they couldn't offer any proof really. So this this story, run and run and Stalin was very happy to let it run and run...
So the Red Army comes in first. So the the Russians are there for two months with no, no Americans and no Brits in the city. Berliners are desperate for the West, Western allies to arrive because, of course, the Soviets, I mentioned they've been looting. But also they've been raping. I mean, the accounts of rapes are, they're pretty grim to read, it has to be said. Some 90,000, Berlin, women had to have medical treatment for rapes at the hand of the Red Army. But that number, the number of rapes is known to be infinitely higher than that’"
The tankies will have some convenient excuses for Stalin's perfidy. Presumably lying about Hitler was justified in the name of anti-fascism. And maybe they will say the women in Berlin had to be comfort women for the brave Red Army soldiers
Contraception, consent & erotic connection: sex through history - HistoryExtra - "'Instead of this kind of period of intense, horrific persecution, and horror and kind of destruction or removal of gay men, the 19th century, the Victorian period is actually very different. We start out with the removal of the death penalty for sodomy, we start out with camp, huge campaigns, really kind of incredible things that are done by magistrates, and by the people who are in charge to sort of say, we should not be giving the death penalty for this anymore, you know, you know, this is, it's wrong, and we get a period, really from the 1830s through to the 1890s. Every time I found a consensual case, now that's not someone who has committed an act of like an assault on a child or an assault on another man, or, or abused an animal, which also falls, kind of under the sodomy laws, those those cases I don't count, when you find a consensual case, where it's clearly two men who are gay, who have been in a relationship together, who've had a sexual encounter, every every single time they come before the courts, pretty much, they are found not guilty. That was incredible to me, because it completely shifted my understanding of our legal system, it completely understanded my understanding of how society saw these men… you find that if two men who are clearly in a relationship together are brought before the court, the only thing they will ever be prosecuted for, prosecuted for is not the act. And often they've been caught in the act. But it's not the act, it's for getting caught in a in a park or a field in a public place. And, and so it's a very quick kind of slap on the wrist and off you go. In other cases, they're often found, if they are found guilty, their sentences are then commuted, you know they're, or they're pardoned. And if you have that kind of legal backdrop where the legal system itself is not prosecuting, not taking these convictions or not putting those people in jail, then you also start to unpick what the reality of sexual culture and gay culture was at this time. And that's when you find the real lives. The people like Edward Byrne Hodge, who really at the end of kind of the 19th century, becomes someone who is prosecuted for being a gay man in a very rare successful prosecution solely because he, he pleads guilty, which doesn't happen very often...
A lot of people will say to me… lesbians were banned because Victoria didn't, Queen Victoria didn't believe they existed. We've got no evidence... I have an abbess who was basically secretly abusing her entire nunnery by taking them to bed over an evening and sort of saying, this is God, God is telling me to do this to you...
Often the women who are involved in sex work are the ones who are the most free in terms of finding some form of independence, writing down their thoughts, their ideas and their attitudes and, making a name for themselves. And that's, that's tough for a lot of people who want us view sex work as purely victimhood. I think the, one of the worst things we do as historians is denying agency in the past just because it doesn't fit our view of what agency should be. Just because we feel that we disagree with someone's choices, somehow they aren't, that means they don't have agency, their own freedom. And this is where my love of the problematic comes from...
I think one of the things I love about the history of contraception is the moment someone says to you, sex was repressed in the past, they weren't talked about it, no one did it, you say, you know, there was a condom shop in like the 17th and 18th centuries in London. And you know, that, that we have first hand accounts of men who would take their, you know, their sheep skin condoms to be washed by the laundry women… all the agricultural almanacs, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, for housewives would include instructions for how to make your own sheep and goatskin condoms… contraception was something that was written about and discussed by men and women… as far as the Victorians and the 18th and 17th centuries, we're concerned, consent is the most fundamental part of any sexual encounter… it must not happen any other way. And that contraception was absolutely celebrated and known and acknowledged, whether that was the withdrawal method or condoms being safe. Making sure you're not transmitting an STD was as much an issue to someone in the 16th and 17th centuries, as it is to today… There's a wonderful pamphlet that I've I first saw in the Museum of London archive a long time ago, for that's printed in 1863. And it's on the art of the, getting handsome children… it's kind of ripped from a 16th, 16th century, 17th century physician’s Guide to Sex that has been constantly printed and constantly kind of shared and repeated across the globe for for centuries… It's important to, how to make your wife have an orgasm... you could not get pregnant if the woman didn't have an orgasm. This was the standard this was like the the like the first bit of sex education anyone learned in any century before us, was the importance and the power of the female orgasm. But because the female orgasm was so important, consent was equally important. Because if you're not comfortable, if you're not happy, if you're not relaxed, these are all the things that people felt, were key to making sure a woman was going to have an orgasm and therefore get pregnant. So I really do think, you know, when we look at the past and we look at consent, it was absolutely tied to joy and connection. They're kind of the wholehearted embracing of the physicality and animalistic joy of sex that happened in every century before our own. We really are, we've really lost out and we're really missing out on a thing.'"
So much for the simplistic blaming of the British for anti-sodomy laws
Piano In Musical History | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘Something that I, I had never even really realized, of course, it's so obvious, until I read the book is that the piano was an instrument is designed for male hands.’
‘Yes, I'm glad you’ve, I'm glad you’ve picked up on that, because I, I put, put that in the introduction with a certain amount of trepidation because it's an, I actually have never seen it stated just quite as sort of boldly as I stated it that, that most piano music was written by men for their own hands for the ha-, or expecting that the music would be played by by other men with with with typical male hands. And there are women who have large hands. And just as there are men who have small hands, but generally speaking, the male hand is on a slightly larger scale than the female hand. And so for a lot of piano music, particularly of the Romantic era, where they're using wider intervals, and they require greater stretches between individual fingers, to get your hands on big chords, that is easier for men, it just, it just is. Because they can more easily stretch. For example, the Russian composer Rachmaninoff, end of the 19th century, had an enormous hand and he wrote music, which his own hand could play. So he could stretch something like an octave and a fifth, which is, you know, a stretch that I could never manage, I can stretch an octave. And if I'm given time to stretch my hand a little bit more, I can put my hands on an octave plus one note, that's all. So I could not possibly put down the chords that Rachmaninoff played all in one, all at one moment, I would have to go up bum bum bum bum. And that means that for me, a lot of romantic music, I have to say spread the chords, meaning to ripple from the bottom to the top, it just makes a different, a different effect.’"
Kate Morgan On The Legal History Of Murder | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra - "‘So in around the 10th and 11th centuries, there's this concept of Mordor that emerges into into the legal system. It comes across from from France, and also from Germany. And what that denotes is, is secret killing. So it's not just the fact that you've killed somebody that makes it a crime, it's the fact that you've done it in secret is what makes the law tak an interest in it effectively. And then over the next couple of 100 years, that got finessed a little bit, it got anglicised, and that then led into the crime of murder that has been part of the law… all murders are homicides, but not all homicides are our murders. And there's been an ongoing challenge for the law really to, to draw those demarcation lines between the kinds of killings, that it that it deems to be murder, and that's shifted almost continuously since since back in those Anglo Saxon days, really...
There was a lot of circumstances that it wasn't, a killing wasn't even treated as being unlawful. I mean, it was, I think we, you know, in the modern era, we kind of forget how dangerous daily life was back in those days and, and actually violent death at somebody else's hands wasn't necessarily that the shocking thing that we see as today because life expectancy was was so much lower. There were so many other threats to people's safety, that actually the the act of of murder wasn't really given the prominence that it is in our culture today. So at that point, it would only be those secret killings that were effectively treated as murder back in those days, and then it's it's as the law progresses probably over the next few hundred years. So by the sorts of 15th and 16th century, it's come to be attached with this concept of sort of premeditation and malice, of forethought that really defines murder from from the lesser homicides, like like manslaughter...
Certainly from like the Middle Ages onwards, it would be death for those killings that were found to be deliberate. Originally, before the, before the concept of Mordor entered the law. Very often, the killing was attoned for by by paying something known as bot, which was effectively financial compensation to the, to the victim of the person that had been killed. And that then was was the end of the matter really, as far as the law was concerned. So it didn't become a crime that was punishable by the state. Until this concept of Mordor and then murder emerged a couple of centuries later. And really ever since then, murder has been punishable by death in in almost all circumstances. What did change over the course of sort of more recent history is the fact that there were so many other crimes that were punishable by death as well. When you get into the, so in the 17th, and particularly the 18th centuries, there are almost 200 criminal offenses that were punishable by death. So murder really wasn't anything special, you know, you could be hung for stealing a loaf of bread, just in the same way that you could be hung for murdering someone. It's only in the middle of the Victorian era where the death penalty for crimes other than murder and treason is abolished. That murder sort of assumes this, this prominence within the criminal law, based largely on the fact that it is the only crime in effect punishable by death. And I think that gives it an extra layer of notoriety from that point onwards...
I think what happened was in the Georgian era, there's a lot of focus on the law as being a means of protecting property and money and finance and somebody interfering with those those rights were seen, you know, as no better than a murderer. And that was reflected in the punishment of the, of the law. And I think, as society progresses, and the law gets a little bit more enlightened, that seems to seems to drop away, really. So that by, and certainly by the 1820s, 30s, that there's beginning to be the stirrings of an abolition movement for the death penalty in general anyway, so that sort of adds on the pressure for for the law to slim it down and really focus on which crimes should should be punishable by death, and that that progresses throughout the Victorian era. So it's very difficult to point to a sort of big bang theory, I think there's a, there's just a gradual realization that this is not a civilized way to, for a legal system to conduct itself...
There's some quite poignant testimony, certainly in some of the Victorian cases where people are pleading insanity where their lawyers are saying, look, you know, this is, this is not an easy way out you. Mental, mental health care at the time was such that actually being found to be insane and confined to an asylum to, for a lot of people would be a fate worse than death.’"
Lea Ypi On Living Through The Fall Of Communism | History Extra - "‘Now, one of the big themes in your book is freedom. And in, over the course of your life, you've lived through communism in Albania, then capitalism in Albania. And then obviously, you've spent many years living in the West. What have those different experiences taught you about freedom and the limits of it?’
‘In a way, the story that I tell the book is about sort of how different people interpret different ideas of freedom. And so what I do is to try and think about different characters that I have met in my life and how they had thought about freedom and the limitations of that outlook on freedom in both the decisions they make and in sort of their orientation. So I talk about my mother, for example, as someone who is committed to what might might call a very liberal idea of freedoms, you are free insofar as you're not told where to go, or what to wear, and what to do what to say, which were all the kinds of freedoms that were lacking in socialist Albania. You know, you couldn't travel, you couldn't wear what you wanted, you were always told to think in a certain way. And so these impediments were what she thought were freedom. And then my father had a different idea of freedom he had, he had a more what one might call the kind of positive idea of freedom. So you're free only insofar as you also have certain opportunities. Which is why, for him, it wasn't just the question of not being told to do certain things. But it was also a question of being given the means to do what you want to do, and to kind of have a life that is flourishing. And that's also why for him, it was very difficult to make those decisions, for example, at the port about sacking people, because he realized that if someone doesn't have a job, or if someone doesn't have money, yes, they are formally free to travel, but they can't go anywhere, because they don't have the money to buy a ticket to go anywhere. And so, and so that system, and that way of thinking about freedom, in some ways, is also deficient, it's not enough to just be given the sort of formal guarantees, to realize what you want to realize, if you don't also have a sense of opportunity. And if you don't have real opportunities, and if those opportunities are not distributed equally. So that was sort of a different understanding of freedom, which in his life, he could, he was committed to this, but he could also see the limitations of it. And it became very difficult for him when he was the person in charge of making those decisions, that he knew what actually obstruct other people's freedom in terms of, you know, telling them that they would not have this job from day, the next day. And, and then the other one, the other idea of freedom that I find very interesting, and that I felt like my grandmother embodied is this idea of freedom as moral agency. In other words, the idea that we always, we are free because we have a free will. And that free will shows itself even in circumstances that seem oppressive. And even when there are obstacles to realizing it. She, in her life, this book was sort of the message that she always passed on to me, was this idea that circumstances will always be stacked against you. And she was someone who in her life had experienced this because she came from this some elite family who had lived scattered in the Ottoman Empire for many generations and then came to Albania. She was an advisor to the Prime Minister, was the first woman to work in the Albanian administration, and then ended up being the wife of someone who went to prison and then was deported, had to work in the field. And so she had this very fundamental shifts in her life. And she always, what I found incredible was that throughout her life when I asked her about her life, and so on, she insisted that she had always been free. And I found this always completely bewildering, because I thought, well, how can someone who's gone through this level of oppression, whose fortunes have changed so much, who had all these things and then didn't have them, how could they say that you, you’re still free, and she said to me, well, because look, freedom is something that is inside us. And it's to be, to have the will to sort of assert yourself even against the circumstances. And we remain free for as long as we retain that dignity and retain that free will. And it doesn't matter, you know, how the world is behaving itself around you, if you have that moral capacity, then you, no one can take away your freedom, they can take away this sort of other things. But these are all in some ways, obstacles that enable you to assert that you are free by sort of rising yourself above them. And by showing that you're still able to behave morally and to do the right thing. And so she kept saying to me, for example, you know, you have to keep studying and keep doing things, even if it doesn't look like you will be rewarded in the end because we don't do the right thing expecting rewards, we do just because it's the right thing to do. And this was actually something an idea of freedom that I had sort of grown up with my grandmother asserting it and then I became really invested in philosophically afterwards when I started to study and to yeah, to, to read philosophy and to look at different theories of freedom and different conceptions and different understandings of freedom. I found this one really powerful because I felt that it gives you a really good understanding of I think, what is fundamentally a human being, and also what kind of society you can create with that conception of the human being at its core, and I found that was a very powerful notion of freedom, which is also sort of thrown in there in the mix in the book and discussed through characters and through dialogues and through the stories that each of them tells.'"
Cricket as a colonial weapon | History Extra - "‘Why was this game as opposed to say football, or boxing, regarded as a symbol of English integrity?’...
‘Cricket started in England almost seven centuries ago, back in the 13th century. It was mostly associated with gambling, rustic people, all sorts of violence, it was often banned by different monarchs in the 15th, 17th centuries, and on Sundays, when most people would go out to play cricket, sometimes the local parish or the vicar would put a ban on cricket because that was distracting people from church service. Everything suddenly changed in the middle of the 19th century, when suddenly there was a huge upsurge of enthusiasm among the British elit [sic] regarding cricket. Why cricket and not in any other sport, we don't really have a very clear answer to it. But somehow cricket become the sport that they would all favor, as that pursuit of excellence as citizen, as patriot, as the ideal person to uphold the virtues of the nation, and also the Empire. To prepare people for administrative and military functions of the Empire so that the Empire can be further glorified. It can be strengthened, and all its bulwarks can be reinforced... It also had a very distinct military function because after the Crimean War, there was suddenly a big question put around the military functions of the British Army and also after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, there were question marks around the efficiency of the British military. These kind of questions were further strengthened by the debacle of the Boer War when England faced like severe casualties. So these were the processes which influenced the British people to think that we need to make our bodies more martial, we need more sport, and cricket became the kind of paradigm of discipline, teamwork, sacrificing oneself in the face of adversity or for the nation. So these were the virtues which were instilled in cricket actively in this period of 50 years. So cricket served a huge and significant ideological function around this period. And these virtues generally become so entrenched in British psyche that we can't even think about Victorian England without cricket...
Some of the writers on cricket… would conjure up this bucolic, this image of the bucolic pasts of England, the rusticity which were at the core of Englishness. So this was started in the late 19th century, when writers would usually ascribe good qualities into being back to nature. The connection with nature was extolled in most of these writings of this period. And also people were getting disaffected with industrial modernity. So they were saying that industrial Britain was making huge profits, but it was actually getting people away from what England really meant. So there was this mythologisation, and romanticisation of rustic rural England. And since the portraits of cricket photographs were not really very popular at the time that came much later, we always see most of the portraits of cricket, the game being played in on the village green by people who were like mostly amateurish, and not really professionals. So they would just play cricket for fun. So these kind of images, gradually became very strong reminders of what was English about England. And these also serve to differentiate England from its other parts of the United Kingdom like Scotland, or Wales. So cricket was something that differentiated England from Britain and also other parts of the British Empire.’"
Giving birth in the 17th century | History Extra - "‘I always think that people in early modern England had a lot more knowledge about labor and childbirth, than probably we do. Now. If you think about going as a first time Mum to antenatal classes, and you've not probably ever been to a labor, you've not heard anybody in labor, you've probably never even in some cases touched a newborn or held a newborn. Whereas in the early modern period, because everybody gave birth at home or almost everybody, birth was part of life. And so you wouldn't escape the sights and sounds of birth in this period, when you were growing up, childhood, adolescence, you wouldn't be in the birthing chamber, necessarily, but you would hear sounds, you'd see people coming and going, you, you’d be holding babies. So I think that people in general had much more of an idea about childbirth than we do nowadays, certainly...
Almost two thirds of children made it past 15 into adulthood’"
Tsiang Tingfu: Why He Deserves To Be Remembered | HistoryExtra - "Many of his analyses of the crisis of China in the mid-20th century, you know, agricultural crisis, the ability to create a stable government, which he looked at actually as a historian and a clear-eyed historian, have stood up to time very well in certain ways. I've read many of his essays and in some ways you can look at the debates that he goes through the 1930s about, will strong man dictatorships overcome democracies and should they? Well, goodness me, we've having these debates today. In today's debates, China is usually on the other side, on the strong man side, rather than the democracy side, but people like Tsiang Tingfu show that any idea, any careless idea that there is no basis for liberal and democratic thought in China is completely wrong. Figures like Tsiang were very important in theorising exactly how that could be maintained in a culture that was distinctly Chinese but also distinctively liberal. That's a very important intellectual contribution and even if Tsiang Tingfu's contributions are now less well remembered than they might well be, I would say they deserve to be looked at again... He's well remembered amongst specialists but I don't think he's a name that has a huge amount of popular recognition in either Taiwan or China... His condition and his ideas and his situation do provide an insight into that now somewhat forgotten but actually at the time very important world in which China was going to be a major actor. It was probably, if anything, going to be relatively oriented towards the West, but it also wanted to maintain its own governmental and constitutional settlement which might not look either like a Western democracy nor indeed like the old Chinese empire but as a sort of distinctive republic that was going to shape its own destiny. That particular republic was pretty much cut off in 1949 with the communist victory, but Tsiang Tingfu is looked at, even in the mainland... even though he was an official of the anti-Communist nationalist government. Because it seemed that he sits in that wider continuity of one of the big questions, which is still being answered today, which is what does modernity mean in China? And Tsiang Tingfu is a very good lens into exactly that question"
Malintzin | The Indigenous Nahua Woman Who Translated for Cortés | HistoryExtra - "She is seen as sort of the mother of the Mestizo nation. The mixed Mexican nation, and that's a story that's been told about her throughout history at various times when people are trying to promote the idea of Mexico as a mixed nation. But she also became seen very much as a traitor to the indigenous peoples. The word malinchista means betrayer or traitor in Mexico, in particular people who betray their culture or their nation and the difficulty with that idea is that there is no one indigenous culture in Mexico at the time the Spanish arrive. She was enslaved by the Maya, having been a Nahua person. Does she be loyal to the Maya, who she's enslaved by, or to the Nahua who sell her into slavery potentially? Who is she supposed to be loyal to? Is she loyal to the Tlaxcala who are allied with the Spanish? There are so many complexities here that the idea of her, this young girl as a betrayer of the nation is very very problematic. But of course she does ally with the Spanish and make the best of her situation. But she's become a figure of complexity... She's actually just a young woman who has remarkable skills... and it's difficult to disentangle that from the narratives about her"
Kleisthenes | Athenian Founder Of Democracy | HistoryExtra - "When that word democracy gets picked up and coined and starts being used as a label, they're so proud of it and they're so convinced it's a good thing, that by the 460s BCE, they're actually naming their male children, Demokritos. That was a popular boys' name in Ancient Athens in the 460s, to call your kid "Democracy""
How the Persians were written out of history | HistoryExtra - "Herodotus has got a very clear agenda, that is he’s writing an inquiry into the wars, for an Athenian audience. That's, that's, that's his base. And so what he tries to do in the histories is, of course, is to create a mythology, a series of legends in a way in which Athens itself take takes pride in place the, it's the major player, and of course, has to set itself up as a kind of mirror image against the despicable, despotic Persians. What's incredible is the the legacy that that historical approach has had on Western historians ever since. So, in the 19th century, John Stuart Mill was able to write for instance, and this is really incredible, he once said, as an episode in British history, the Battle of Marathon is more important than the Battle of Hastings"
Cathedrals: from bishops' seats to tourist hotspots | HistoryExtra - "‘The cathedrals in their cities become the kind of embodiment of the Protestant British state. When you get to Victorian times, there are huge changes made to British institutions and British life. And in the 1820s and 30s, many things get reformed parliament, local government, the judicial system, and cathedrals as well, cathedrals can no longer expect to be representing the whole of the population or the whole of the governing order, because Catholics and nonconformists can now become members of Members of Parliament and, and so on. So, they then have to acquire some kind of new purpose in life, which I suppose goes back to being more religious again. And in modern times it’s become more cultural, I think. That is something that actually you can trace back to the beginning of the 18th century. In the 1710s, the three cathedrals of Gloucester, Worcester, and Hereford began to hold an alternating festival, the Three Choirs Festival, which happens in one of these cathedrals every year, a music festival. You then see other music festivals starting up later in the 18th century, but particularly taking off in the 19th. And cathedrals become, in Victorian England, what they've never been before, which is concert halls. You start by staging something that's very definitely religious, like Messiah by Handel. But you gradually, you file out from that, but it's very slow to happen. And there's a famous occasion when Beethoven's Mass was done in a cathedral. They didn't dare call it a mass. They called it Beethoven’s service, I think. But when people realized they were actually listening to a setting of the Latin Mass, people walked out. So it took quite some time for the this novel idea that you could go to a cultural event in a cathedral to take hold... Cathedrals are very much a record of our history… when I go to one of the ancient ones, but you've got all periods of English history represented. The building itself comes through from Saxon or Norman or later times, you've then got a whole series of monuments… you've got the traces of the Reformation in cathedrals if you go to Gloucester or Worcester or Canterbury, as soon as you get out of the cathedral itself, you will be in the remains of the monastic buildings, the cloisters and the ancillary buildings, they may be ruined, in part in Canterbury still got most of them, in fact, so you've got the mark of the Reformation there. You've got the mark of the 18th century, I think in these these tablet tombs that you get, you get in, in cathedrals, or these wall tablets, to clergy, merchants, Gentry, laying out all their virtues, how benevolent they were, how caring for the poor, how hospitable they were free of all traces of enthusiasm… there are tremendous traces of the 19th century because some cathedrals are 19th century like say Birmingham's Catholic Cathedral and and Westminster Cathedral and Truro and Liverpool and the cathedral will have been extensively restored in the 19th century because one of the things that the Victorians did was to rescue cathedrals from comparative neglect that they had fallen into and embark on big programs of restoration... restoring meant to Victorians very often putting new things in instead of the old... The putting in of, of chairs, or pews, where everybody gets exactly the same sort of seat, you wouldn't have had that back in in the further past. Privileged people had privileged seats, either they had bigger ones, or they were up the front. The idea of a cathedral that is completely uniform in its seating is a reflection of the growth of democracy in the 20th century. And then another aspect of what you might call democracy is the wish to bring religion closer to ordinary people. If you imagine a Victorian service and certainly in previous areas, the laity who go are very much an audience. And the service is done by clergy, often at a considerable distance from the congregation...
The Vikings were not particularly hostile to cathedrals or even to Christianity. I think they were not above grabbing treasures. And churches had treasures. But the interesting thing about vikings is that you know, they sacked the cathedral at Lindisfarne, famously in the second 90s, the first Viking attack on England. But actually the cathedral didn't leave Lindisfarne for many years. When it eventually left, it didn't move to the most remote area from the Vikings, it actually moved into the Viking area. And there was clearly a much more of a symbiosis between cathedrals and Vikings than you might think... The next challenge is the Reformation… the king could have seized the property, he could have made himself even richer than he was. But there was a problem that cathedrals alone could solve. There were an awful lot of clergy who were younger sons of noble men and gentlemen, who wanted a kind of easy position in life. And cathedral canonries were the obvious thing for them. You see if they went into a parish, they'd be stuck out in the sticks somewhere ministering to people far below them in social route. If they had a canonry, it was quite well paid, had almost no duties because there was always a sec, a secondary dogsbody [sp?] who would do your duties for you. You would live in the cathedral city, in a reasonably civilized society with similar people.’"
