One of the most evil books I ever read was a quite short Penguin paperback that I inherited from my father. It was written not long after World War 2, when the pre-war trickle of honest reporting about the horrors of Stalin’s USSR was becomimg a post-war, Cold War, gush. But the author of that Penguin paperback argued that, since very few of these reports were first-hand and in writing, they could be dismissed as merely malicious gossip. Beautiful. The Soviet Government shifts heaven and earth to obliterate all first-hand, written reports of its crimes. It then, echoed by persons like the evil writer of that evil paperback, declares that, in the absence of the very written reportage which it has laboured so hard to suppress, these crimes are imaginary, invented by malevolent enemies of the inevitable and noble tide of history. After I had read that evil paperback, I understood far better Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s obsession about getting the Gulag story, with its wealth of first hand accounts, into print in such voluminous detail.
I cannot now locate that evil paperback, although I believe I still own it. Such is the disorder that is my library that if I do still own it, the book is hidden from view. Contrary to the argument made in it, this does not mean that it does not exist or that its author never said what he said, or that him having said it is of no significance. On the other hand, neither does him having said what he said automatically make what he said true, for in fact what this particular writer said was evil lies.
It may seem odd to be starting a piece about medieval history with this uncertain recollection of a book which I have not recently set eyes on, concerning the recent and recently collapsed USSR. But not long ago I stumbled upon a debate about how to write medieval history which reminded me of the claim made in that evil book.
My recent interest in medieval history was provoked by the purchase of a book about a man called Mortimer, by a man called Mortimer. The overlap is potentially confusing, but surely not surprising. Had a man called Micklethwait been the ruler of England between, say, 1327 and 1330, I would have been more than casually interested. Well, Roger Mortimer did rule England between those two dates. No wonder historian Ian Mortimer got interested, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that this interest was what turned him into a historian in the first place.
I hugely enjoyed that book about Roger Mortimer. All previous attempts by me to put flesh on the bare bones of my schoolboy knowledge of those times, mostly consisting of a few history dates, had been engulfed in tedium. Yet now, I was suddenly engrossed in the fourteenth century. Partly, it must have been because I was at last ready to be fascinated by it. My historical knowledge had finally, tediously, arrived at the state where a bit of medieval detail finally had a bulky enough structure to get attached to. But there was something else going on in Ian Mortimer’s book about his namesake besides my mere readiness to take it it. I found the book to be, as they say, a page turner, something I had never experienced before with a book about medieval history. When I learned that Ian Mortimer had written a follow-up volume to his Roger Mortimer book, about the king who toppled Roger Mortimer, Edward III, about whom (not least because neither Marlowe nor Shakespeare had written any plays about him) I knew pretty much nothing apart from his presumed involvement in a couple of those schoolboy history dates (Battle of Crecy 1346 and Black Death 1349), I bought that, and immediately became engrossed in that book also. A further book by Ian Mortimer about Henry IV wasn’t quite the thrill that its two predecessors had been, if only because Henry IV did marginally less exciting and surprising things than Roger Mortimer and Edward III, but that too was pretty good, and contained many fascinating titbits. (For instance, did you know that when Henry IV ascended the throne of England, he was the first English monarch to proclaim his newly monarchical status in a document written in English? Well perhaps you did know this, but I didn’t.) And now, I am looking forward to reading this, which will flesh out another big history date. And after that one, there will be yet more. To get a sense of what Ian Mortimer is all about without buying any books, try reading one of these. (Some of these pieces I like, others not so much.)
But what was it about Ian Mortimer’s writing that so fascinated me, when so many other writings about the same historical era had failed to strike any sort of spark? I found a clue in the introduction to the third book, the one about Henry IV. Apparently debate has long raged among professional historians about the very possibility of writing satisfactory biographies of medieval personalities, a debate which Ian Mortimer describes thus (pp. 9-10 of my paperback):
There was for many years a general perception that biography was too populist a medium for serious consideration. ‘It is despised by the hard and practised by the soft in one discipline after another’, wrote a correspondent in the Times Higher Educational Supplement in 1987. Sixty years earlier K. B. McFarlane had declared that ‘the historian cannot honestly write biographical history; his province is rather the growth of social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas’. One could talk about a king’s reign, or the interaction between a king and his people, but biography itself was seen in a negative light on account of its sympathetic (as opposed to objective) approach, or, as other critics have said, because biographical authors ‘opt for narrative rather than analysis’. Thus, for most of the twentieth century, academic historians tended to write history books about individuals, not biographies, and justified this on the grounds of the intellectual superiority of the objective, analytical approach. At the same time, there was a widespread belief in literary circles that a ‘proper’ biography could not be written for a character living before 1500, as personal letters do not normally survive to attest to what the subject thought or felt. This view was seized on by the anti-biographical academics and used as a justification for why it was essential to avoid the biographical medium when writing about medieval political figures: the whole exercise was impossible, they said, ‘for the sources to permit such a study have not survived’. For decades no one exposed the weaknesses of this view.
That struck a chord, both in terms of what it said about how medieval history should be written, and how it shouldn’t. What it should be, these anti-biographical academics had been saying, was tedious analysis of the development of “social organisations, of civilisation, of ideas”. And what it should not be was like the stuff Ian Mortimer writes, and which I had been so greatly enjoying.
I also possess other Penguin paperbacks, this time ones which I can lay my hands on, with titles like English Society in the Early Middle Ages, these being the books about medieval history that I had, over the decades since my school history lessons, tried and failed to read. I do not say that the growth of the manorial system, say, or the rise of trade and the weakening of feudal ties, were social processes and civilisational developments which did not happen or were of no significance. But such things do not explain why particular events occurred. The Battle of Crecy, for instance, did not happen merely because of certain social processes – even though plenty of interesting and important social processes are illustrated by that battle, notably the rise to prominence of the unmounted, unwealthy footsoldier as a military force to be reckoned with (see also Peasants Revolt 1381). Crecy happened because two kings – two individual persons – decided that it should happen. One king, Edward III of England, was in France with an army, spoiling for a fight. The other, the King of France, felt he had no choice but to oblige, what with all the spoiling that would otherwise have continued, on his land, had he decided not to fight. So, to understand what happened and why, you need, in particular, to understand the individual attitude of Edward III, the man who set all this in motion. Why did Edward III think it a proper, even noble, use of his time and resources to invade France? Ian Mortimer’s writing, to put it bluntly, makes sense of the times and events he is describing. Certain powerful individuals made decisions with big consequences for the lives of others, and with the available facts Ian Mortimer gets as far as he can inside the heads of such persons, to explain why they thought of themselves as they did, and why they decided to do what they decided to do. The most pertinent historical analysis of events, medieval or otherwise, is, again and again, biographical analysis. X did Y because of the kind of person X was and because of how X thought of himself. As Ian Mortimer says of his namesake (p. 10):
For example, in order to understand Roger Mortimer’s actions against Edward II in 1322-6, it is necessary to understand his earlier loyalties, disappointments, military experiences and political awareness from his own point of view.
All those, for me, relatively unexciting ruminations about the manorial system and suchlike embody a moral judgement of medieval times, to the effect that the experiences of ordinary people should not be written out of history, however insignificant these experiences may have been thought to be at the time. Quite so. But it is one thing to regret that ordinary people counted for so little in those times and to believe that they should have counted for more; it is quite another to suggest that no individual counted for as much then as individuals have in more recent times. On the contrary, one of the features of life in settled times and places such as my own is that I and my lucky contemporaries in countries governed as mine now is are not now at the mercy of cruel or incompetent individuals to anything like the same degree that most other people have been in the past, and that many people still are, and in the way that almost everyone was in medieval times. Oh, my finances get regularly mucked about because of the mistakes of powerful people. But these are mere pinpricks when compared with what it must have been like for a French peasant, perhaps already on the edge of starvation, who found himself and his dependents on the receiving end of some of that spoiling that Edward III did in order to provoke the battle of Crecy, or to be an Englishman of any kind during the latter stages of the disastrously cruel and incompetent reign of Edward III’s father, Edward II (the king deposed by Roger Mortimer). If you were a lowly farm worker, it mattered desperately whether the king who reigned over you was capable (like Edward III) or not (Edward II). The former, and war and its associated havoc and misery was a distant rumour in France. The latter, and the havoc was all too likely to happen all over you. So, to simply block out the individual decision making processes of individual people like Edward II or Edward III, to block out the fact that all those ideas and social processes had their greatest impact in shaping what such individual men decided to do, and how to do it, and where to do it, and who to do it to, is like trying to understand a car while ignoring the nature and impact of the petrol that powers its engine. And you also, let it be added, block out one of the most characteristic and distressing experiences endured by all those ordinary people in those times, which was what happened to an ordinary person when bad luck or bad judgment caused an ordinary person to get in the way of an extraordinary person, like a powerful or vengeful or angry king. Such history is The Godfather without Brando or Pacino, just a great crowd of extras labouring away in the fruit business. Which is interesting, if you are interested only in that kind of thing, but I want more. And it’s not only me. Ian Mortimer paperbacks are now to be found in all the history sections of the mainstream bookshops. He is now a successfully self-employed historian.
The written evidence of the lives of these extraordinary and powerful medieval individuals is indeed harder to come by than about powerful people of later times. But historians must do their best, and if Ian Mortimer’s work is an example, their best can be very good indeed. What is more, as Ian Mortimer says (p. 11):
This … leads us to ask why a biography based on a man’s actions should not be every bit as ‘biographical’ as a life based on his letters? Indeed, we delude ourselves if we think that letters prove a man’s feelings, or necessarily convey an accurate impression of his inner life. Men and women may misrepresent themselves and their feelings in their letters for any number of reasons, consciously and subconsciously, perhaps due to momentary depression or elation, or even due to their inability to express themselves. In a long summer of happiness, one may take a moment just to write down a single line of regret or bitterness, and what is left of that summer a hundred years later? But although men and women often deceive in what they write, it is rare that they deceive in what they do.
It would seem that Ian Mortimer’s attitude to medieval biography is now becoming more fashionable, for he introduces all these ruminations thus (p. 9):
In the summer of 2003 a whole string of leading medievalists attended a conference at the University of Exeter on ‘The Limits of Medieval Biography’. Almost all echoed the conclusion of the keynote speaker: that biography was not only one of the most important approaches to the past, it might actually be the most important, for ‘only through biography could one argue why this had happened, or that had not happened’.
Exactly so. And more public and less personal writings than letters and diaries must, as my opening paragraph in this posting illustrates, be treated with even more suspicion, as all honest historians have long known. In the matter of the USSR, the truth of the deeds presided over by that extraordinary individual, Stalin, speaks far louder than the torrent of lying words that Stalin’s governmental apparatus also unleashed.
And the extreme excitement and enjoyment that I got from reading Mortimer’s medieval trilogy (so far) of biographies was derived from the fact that I was finally not just reading about but understanding what was going on.
When I read what Ian Mortimer said about how “anti-biographical academics” had “seized upon” the difficulties of medieval biography to say that medieval biography simply could not be properly done, I believe that I also heard an echo of that vile writer who claimed that since the evidence of Stalin’s alleged atrocities was, allegedly, not available in writing, that too was a kind of knowledge which it did not make sense to pursue.
I do not want to suggest that all those medieval historians whom I found to be boring were also evil, although I am sure that some of them were. But I do at least speculate that, intellectually, some of their anti-individualist emphasis may have shared the same evil intellectual ancestry. Communists were definitely responsible, if not for creating, then at least for reinforcing the notion of history as the working out, in a succession of stages, of impersonal, abstract social and economic forces, in a way that made the mere decisions of individuals relentlessly less significant than they, or Ian Mortimer, or I, think that they actually were or are. In writing like this about the past, Communists were seeking to create a kind of historical momentum behind the idea that individualism of the sort that Ian Mortimer and I both regard as a permanent fact of history – the fact that what powerful individuals think about and decide to do matters – is really only a passing phase. Such individualism, they tried to suggest, counted for less in medieval times. Social forces and social systems and social institutions counted for more. Which makes it that much more credible that individual decision-making might, for equal and opposite reasons to the ones that caused it to rise, fall again. Were individuals making big decisions in medieval times? No. If they thought they were, they were deluding themselves. If we think they were, we are deluding ourselves. Do we now make a silly sentimental fuss about how other individuals fell foul of another very significant and powerful individual, Stalin? A silly and sentimental fuss is also all that that is. You can’t stand in the path of history, and you shouldn’t try to.
The above is, I think, a fair summary of the intellectual atmosphere that has surrounded the Soviet-inclined brand of Communism during the twentieth century. And now that Stalin’s successors and what remain of their apologists elsewhere have found themselves on the receiving end of some more history of a sort that their Communist prejudices did not prepare them for, it makes sense to me that this Communist attitude should now be in retreat, and that a more realistic approach to the importance of medieval individuals should now be catching on amongst historians.
Such speculations about a possible link between anti-biographical medieval historians and the more recent sort of anti-individualists are reinforced by an Ian Mortimer endnote (note 18, p. 389), which reveals that the piece he quotes from the Times Higher Educational Supplement, published on October 9th 1987, was by a certain Eric Homberger. That is where Ian Mortimer got his K. B. McFarlane quote from. Both McFarlane and Homberger are new names to me, so I did some googling. I found very little about McFarlane, more about Homberger. Homberger is not remotely a slavish Stalinist, but he has written, I’m guessing not unsympathetically, about American Communists of yesteryear who were closer to that kind of foolishness, and his political inclinations are definitely towards the left. Might Homberger perhaps be the kind of leftist who regards Stalinism as an individualist deviation from the true faith, rather than the kind of thing that should have been expected in any time or place that took Communism seriously? Might he be someone who, noticing that that inevitable and noble tide of history, in which earlier leftists had invested such hopes, has not obliged, still believes that it should have, and that one day it still might? If Ian Mortimer himself has any such suspicions he keeps them to himself, perhaps wisely.
But now, I am entering “But what do I know?” territory, a land I often stray into when blogging, if only because commenters often know far more about whatever it is than I do. And since this posting of mine, although rather long, is still only a loose-ended blog posting rather than a properly topped and tailed essay, I would be particularly interested to read comments on the degree to which the anti-biographical arguments I have referred to really do overlap with concurrent Communist notions about more recent events. Was Homberger any sort of overt Communist sympathiser in his youth, and did other Communists and Communist sympathisers ever echo these anti-biographical sentiments? I’m guessing yes, but would dearly love to know chapter and verse.
Paul Marks, to name but one potential commenter on this, knows American Communism pretty well, and history, and well, everything. So, Paul?
I have nothing to contribute on the subject of the “anti-biographical” biases of professional historians, but since you’re interested in life in the 14th century I thought I’d recommend a biography I recently read on Thomas Malory (author of Le Morte d’Arthur). It, too, is essentially reconstructed from events and other odds and ends of source materials, since with the exception of his famous novel Malory seems to have written essentially nothing. But the book gives a fascinating glimpse into the life of the “lesser nobility” (I think that is the correct term) and knight errant in the time of Henry IV.
I know that Marxist historians do indeed think in terms of the inevitable forces of history. That does not necessarily make it wrong to say that history has a momentum. It also does not say that a powerful individual, in the right time and place can redirect that flow.
I like to think of it in terms of chaos theory. There are points when an entire complex system can be pushed into one state or another, or one of a large family of possible outcomes. Those pushes can come from individuals or groups who ‘carpe deim’. A particularly single minded and powerful individual can even kick the pins out from under the whole enterprise and send it roaring off in an entirely new direction. Take Alexander for example. He rather changed the whole of civilization of his time. It is difficult to imagine that he was just a tool of history. He was an outlier and history was his tool instead.
I don’t think a serious historian can afford to ignore either element. The complex interplay of trends, culture, technology, beliefs and individuals are what make thinking about tomorrow so fascinating and reading about yesterday so absorbing.
Brian: I am as implacably opposed to moral relativism as most of the posters and commenters here but I must take issue with the confidence with which you label the author of that Penguin history of Soviet Russia evil. For all that I know it may be a true description. I think though that the question of what motivated the historian in question is somewhat relevant here. Did he secretly believe that lots of people had indeed been killed but didn’t consider that fact important? Did he seek to airbrush Stalin’s terrible crimes out of the historical picture because of his sympathy for his ‘larger goals’ ? If the answer is yes then I will agree that the author is indeed evil.
If he was merely a deluded incompetent, one of Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ then I really think its the wrong adjective to describe the author. His failing is an intellectual rather than a moral one.
I actually consider this distinction a very important one. The adhominem is the favorite tactic of the left. They use it to circumscribe the terms of political debate, by labelling those who refuse to accept their starting assumptions morally defective. I really don’t want us to go down that road.
If holding absurd historical opinions constitutes evil then a whole lot of otherwise very pleasant agreeable people will have to wear that label.
Is every dumb college kid in a Che Guevara T-Shirt evil? What about the vast numbers who believe in absurdities like 911 conspiracy theories? What about all those people who voted for the labour party at the last election?
In each instance I consider them profoundly misguided and find the reasoning that leads them to their conclusions incomprehensible.
But if we are going to admit all of them into the club the ranks of evil people will become very large indeed.
In my own life I am sure I have been profoundly wrong on many issues and I will undoubtedly be so again at some point in the future. I hope that doesn’t make me a de facto bad person.
In discussions of history and politics there is already far too much ‘you disagree with me therefore you are a bad person’ type posturing
Jay, given the enormity of what happened in the former Soviet Union, the word “evil” to describe persons who chose to suppress or shrug off such horrors is entirely justified. That old US journalist fraud, Duranty, being a case in point; ditto, those Fabian idiots, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Curses on them.
A well expressed view and I completely disagree. I actually do [I]not[/I] consider this distinction a very important one because what you describe as an intellectual failing is wilful blindness.
To use an analogy, I do not care if a soldier fighting to preserve tyranny is doing so out of ideological sympathy for tyranny or some sense of misplaced patriotism, I am quite happy to blow his brains out regardless as both motivations make him a willing accomplices of that tyranny. Bang.
Yes Brian – I can remember such books (and films) as well.
Indeed the two representatives Britain sent to help draft the world “human rights” declaration in the 1940’s were both vile abologists for the Marxists. E.H. Carr and Harold Laski (of course E.H.C. had also been an apologist for Hitler) – both of whom denied the Marxist socialists had murdered the tens of millions of people they had murdered.
This was in spite of the fact that the information on what was happening in Russia had been available for decades – for example my father (Harry Marks) an “uneducated” East End boy knew that the Soviets had murdered many millions of people and so resigned from the Young Communist League. People who say “we did not know” are really saying “we did not want to know”.
As for the period of the Middle Ages you mention. It could be argued that the characters acted as they had to.
Edward II was a useless King and had to be removed. If a King would not go voluntarily (and go off to some remote monastery, best in some distant land) then he had to be removed by force. This was not a time when the House of Commons could rule using the King as a powerless figure head (as was done when George III went mad, centuries later)
Roger M., may have had base motives (or he may not have done), but if he had the most noble motives he would have acted as he did.
Having removed (and killed?) the King Roger M. had to rule – had he given up ruling he would have been put on trial for treason and executed. But has he killed the young boy (Edward III) as well, the Lords and Commons of England would have risen in savage revolt.
And Edward III had to revenge his father (even if Edward II was not really his father) and overthrow the rule of Roger M. – and that meant he has to have him executed (if he had been allowed to go overseas it would have been seen as a sign of weakness – later Richard II tried exiling powerful people, and that mercy killed him).
So the main players acted as they had to – like flies trapped in a spiders web of history.
Of course legally Edward III was in the right (and being in the right legally DID matter to him).
French lawyers just made up the thing (“Salic Law”) about a claim to the throne could not be made via the female line – this had never been mentioned before the English claim (oddly enough Edward III is the first Norman King who can really be called “English” as he is the first who we know spoke English in his court – we know this because he paid English language poets).
Also at this time no one suggested giving up the Royal lands in what is now France – and so they had to be defended from claims of French overlordship.
Either by defence alone (which would have meant leaving the south coast of England open to French raids) or by the radical step of trying to become the main power in France itself.
We snear at the efforts of Edward III and Henry V – but they came near to success. Indeed had Henry V just lived a few years more (and not left the young Henry VI a child King – under terrible pressure) the aim of uniting England and France would have worked (for good or ill – for France, being the larger population, would have dominated Enland culturally).
We must also remember that the French had tried it first – before Edward III was even born.
After the death of King John, the French tried to overthrow the boy King Henry III and unite England and France under French rule – and came very close to winning.
Brian:
Although, I have not read the history that you are talking about, I can relate to what you are arguing about the “Penguin book.” It is hard for us to fathom how a historian could dismiss the atrocities of the Soviet government during World War II. However, we cannot, as Jay states it is hard to generalize about his intentions.
As for why you enjoyed reading Mortimer’s book, I will hazard a guess that it was probably written as a narrative history. Since most medieval historical facts and documents have not survived the time, a lot of these types of histories have to tied together with the historian’s ‘best educated guess.’ Sometimes the historian is able to weave their ideas and documented facts into a good story.
If you are looking for other good (but not exactly medieval histories) check out The Return of Martin Guerre by Natalie Zemon Davis and The Cheese and the Worms by Carlo Ginzburg.
“Although, I have not read the history that you are talking about, I can relate to what you are arguing about the “Penguin book.” It is hard for us to fathom how a historian could dismiss the atrocities of the Soviet government during World War II.”
We do not need to go as far back as the 1940s for this kind of sloppy history. The section on Stalin in Mark Arnold-Forster’s “The World At War” (Pimlico 2001, pp 7-9 (orig publ by Thames TV 1973)) is as perfect an example of the kind of euphemistic language that Orwell discussed in “Politics and the English Language” as you could wish for.
“The World at War” was, of course, TV at its very, very best, but this accompanying book was woefully inadequate – poorly written, and poorly edited.
When I showed the Stalin passage to a Russian friend (who’d grown up in Soviet times) he asked, “Where did you dig out this astonishing specimen of stupidity?”
However, the very best book on the general subject of historians – and other intellectuals – glossing over Soviet atrocities is David Caute’s “The Fellow Travellers”; and with reference to an earlier commenter, I’m pleased to say that he reserves a special venom for the loathsome Webbs.
Lion Feuchtwanger’s historical novels were very much of the biographical kind to which you refer, Brian, and his books were almost impossible to find in the SU. When they occasionally printed a very limited number of copies, the lines in bookstores were similar to those for nylon shirts. They still printed his books for the obvious reason that he himself was a Stalinist apologist. Some irony there, I think.
Marxism has a very detailed and well articulated approach to history: it’s called “the materialistic interpretation of history”. It’s a fundamental part of Marxist dogma.
It says that the exclusive force that moves history is people’s desire to improve their physical well being, and the struggle of the masses against the ruling classes that exploit them economically.
Beliefs, ideologies and religions are inconsequential (except the one true ideology). Individuals don’t matter either, except Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. All other prominent historical figures were just pawns in the inevitable, materialistically driven, flow of history. Spiritual things, such as religion, are irrelevant, they are just veneers behind which the true, materialistic motives, hide.
As far as I remember, there is only one historic figure they lionize: Spartacus, the leader of a slave revolt in ancient Rome. Many sport clubs were called “Spartak” after him.
The idea of the materialistic interpretation of history is very strong, and accepted or unconsciously believed by many, who are not Marxists at all, and don’t even know the origin of this concept.
“I actually consider this distinction a very important one.”
When, and with regard to whom?
Books on history may have been (badly) written out of malice or stupidity, but in either case it is enough to say to other readers that such and such is wrong and to explain why.
But the distinction does matter in the case of say, a friend who is considering whether to switch from a job in the private sector to a job with Christian Aid. Is this because he is (a) evil, (b) daft as a brush (c) inadvertently ignorant, or (d) a willfully blind little Eichmann?
If the answer is (b) or (c) then it might be possible to persuade him otherwise, if it’s (a) or (d) then certainly not. Of course it may be another question altogether as to whether such persuasion is worth your effort in the first place.
Brian, it’s a shame you weren’t able to find much about Bruce McFarlane, especially in light of how Ian Mortimer chose to quote him. McFarlane wrote history as prosopography – that is, examining systems, social trends, etc. through the medium of specific individuals, often very minor historical figures, whose lives he researched in enormous detail. It is a shame that Mortimer presents him as a historian uninterested in the individual, as nothing could be further from the truth. You might in fact call McFarlane’s writings case studies – he shows how systems and practices affected the individuals and families about whom he writes, and he is able to bring such people to life in a way that many biographers, writing from an unsympathetic intellectual distance, fail to do.
But you needn’t take my word for it; this link should take you to a list of his publications.
Although in theory most land was “held” rather than “owned” in most Eurpean lands during the Middle Ages and later it was still a very big thing to take land.
Even a King who had proved treason would sometimes only take the traitors head, rather than the land as well – as taking the land might stir great trouble (as Richard II did by trying to take various estates – he would have caused far less trouble for himself had he executed his foes but left their estates alone). As for taking land without proving treason (in a biased court perhaps – but still a major act), this would have been considered an outrage.
In other civilizations (Islamic, Chinese and so on) taking property was much less troublesome. No more of a problem that it would be for a “modern” government now.
This is the essential difference between the West and other civilizations – and, due to their “modern” (i.e. statist) cast of mind, many modern historians find it hard to grasp. The minds of many historians are closer to the “reformist” postion of the “enlightened despots” who (from the 16th century onwards – and ending up with many of the rulers of the 18th century) tried to push the role of a European Prince closer to that of a Roman Emperor or an Ottoman Sultan or a Chinese Emperor (of course we have moved from the “divine right of Kings” to the “divine right of the 51%” with elected governments considered unlimited by any “feudal” concept of law).
However, these despots never fully succeeded – the difference between the civilizations still existed, but many modern historians (as I say above) simply do not grasp it.
This was brought home to me on hearing a group of historians discuss the Ottoman invasion of the Hapsburg lands in the late 17th century (ending in the Great Siege of Vienna).
To the historians there was no great difference between the Empire of the Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Empire – accept that the latter was more tolerant in religious matters.
The historians were far more learned people than I am – they spoke many languages and had read vast numbers of documents. But they did not have a clue – they were ignorant of the most basic factor, even though it was staring them in the face.
For all its faults the Empire of the Hapsburgs was still a land where the rulers were to an extent limited in their powers – they could not casually take the land and other property of anyone they felt like.
This was the same (to a greater or lesser extent) in the other Western lands – it is what makes them “Western”.
The depressing thing is that the mainstream historians would not even think to research such matters. The founding principle of their own civilization is alien to them.
The book, “The Idea of Decline in Western Civilization” is about the ideas of individuals over a historical predestined cycle of rise and fall.
For example– Imagine a world without a Martin Luther? Or what if George Washington decided to be a king?
History is the story of man and we control what happens next.
On a positive note, Marxist theory of history is falling out of fashion.
I once had the pleasure of an inpromptu tour of Sutton Hoo by the then site director – who in passing mentioned some of the challenges of interpretation of the site.
His basic story was – if I recall correctly – was that there had been various fashions – that everything should be seen as driven by power, or land, or environmental isuses, or whatever – until finally (coincidentally or not in the 80s) the view emerged that perhaps you should consider the people there as people and seek to understand what they might have been trying to do and why, given all these external factors.
I was astounded that that had apparently been a revolutionary concept in academic archeology.