Just north of the Somme

On twitter and elsewhere one might comes across postings by 'John Bull', @garius. He is expert on transport in London (see London Reconnections) and digs up recondite aspects of forgotten history (the Emu War is a gem).

Today he made a reasonable complaint:

That is because most producers — and I include Olivier and Branagh— haven't thought through the context and depth of the great soliloquy speeches in Henry V. Here was my effort, now fifteen years gone, part of a wider study of the play and of Henry's 'psychology':

The address before Agincourt

This is the crunch moment, up against impossible odds, when Henry had to rally some sparks of spirit. 

The English army trekked across northern France, an unnecessary journey which should have taken just over a week. It had had now extended into three, in foul weather, and worsening to constant autumnal rain. Just a short march from the English town of Calais, they were brought to battle by a larger (though not, as Shakespeare and some school histories have it, vastly overwhelming) French force. It is also not true, as Juliet Barker shows, that the French tactics were unco-ordinated.

That's the history: here's the theatre. This speech, too, is worthy of close analysis. It is something more than mere rabble-rousing:

If we are mark'd to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

Henry enters, having just overheard Westmoreland wishing for reinforcements. His opening merely recognises the inevitable: there are no additional resources. Instead he offers honour, an abstract, but one of the marks of chivalry.

Chivalry

This of itself needs a passing comment. Chivalry was the morality which controlled the man on the horse, who was the military equivalent of the modern tank (and, curiously, needed about the same size of support team).

Chaucer had described it:

A knyght ther was, and that a worthy man,
That fro the tyme that he first bigan
To riden out, he loved chivalrie,
Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie.

Those essentials of knighthood would translate into modern English as the code of the noble class:

• giving one's word and keeping it, no matter what;
• offering due respect and deserving respect from others;
• generosity of spirit and well as of pocket;
• the good manners of the Court. 

Henry picks up one those,  fredom, to continue:

By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires...

Then he reverts to his first theme: honour, that most prickly issue of the Medieval and post-Medieval period.

But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God's peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man's company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.

This has segued through stomach to fellowship. The stomach was the seat of anger, the opposite of self-control, according to the theory of the four humours. Apart from the shame of walking out on one's fellows, Henry manages therefore to lob in a belittling hint of pettiness. It is going to be the fellowship theme that will be developed further.

First, though, a touch of the domestic. At first it seems little more than a momentary reflection on the church holy-day back home:

This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'

There are, by the way, only a couple of Church of England dedications to Crispin.

Half way through that section, the appeal changed. It becomes an invitation to project into an imagined certain future, when faced by the uncertainty of an impending battle. It also invites the hearer to imagine a prosperity in which there is the wherewithall to provide the "feast". Within that is a hidden, cruder appeal: the promise of wealth from plunder or ransom, the substantial motive for going to war.

Then comes the moment of "lightening", a wry invitation to imagine reaching old age, and being able to "improve" on the personal history:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day, ... 

The speech before Harfleur had clearly distinguished between the orders of society. Now Henry deliberately blurs and overlaps them. This may be a perceptive recognition of the growing cameraderie that would inevitably have developed over months together. It might invite speculation that Shakespeare talks from experience, if he spent some of his "lost years" in a spell with the army in Flanders. It invites the common soldiery, drawn from the yeoman class, to identify with the highest nobility as their "best mates":

Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.

The slow, settling, sonorous long vowels of the personal names, the commonplace of "Harry"; then flowing cups, again the domestic and cheering tone, as he moves towards a peroration:

This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by, ...

It's the inheritance and posterity line again, the dream of establishing, or continuing a dynasty, that Henry used in the Harfleur speech. Then the rhythm increases: the vowels shorten, the language veers to simple monosyllables:

From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

Three soaring promises there: one of an eternal memory, a kind of heaven on earth, kinship with the king himself, and superiority over all those at home:

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:

Again the carrot of social advancement:

And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.

But not just that: "they're at home in bed: we're here doing the job of real men"; "you're not just country yokels, you're better than the landed gentry"; and the where, when, what and who of the final line. Notice, though, there is something deliberately missed out: at no point does Henry give a reason why the battle is necessary: the one question of all those the common soldiers had proposed to him the night before:

... if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle; for how can they charitably dispose of any thing, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the king that led them to it ...

Wrap up

It's the most commonplace that is frequently overlooked: the live Mills bomb we have used as a doorstop because Granny did the same. We employ the cliché to avoid thought, but the implication may indicate strange truths (witness the white South African who announced he felt "the Blacks needed a fair crack of the whip").

What is the English journalist or the grandiose prime minister saying, when he plunders this bit of Shakespeare? It is a desire to link with the "tradition", that strongest, most potent, and potentially most poisonous aspect of our culture. It is a piece of self-inflation.

We recall the bravado of Henry V, and likely do so with Olivier's curious pronunciation and emphases in our heads. Perhaps, though, the play is the thing, and we might usefully return to the whole text, and strip from it trite jingoism. For the text is an exercise in psychology: that of the eponymous Henry, but also of those, on stage and in the audience, seduced by his rhetorical expertise. 

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Our reading may be about to change ...

 This derives from two prompts:

1. The latest edition of The London Review of Books had a piece, Paper Cuts by Malin Hay.
2. I had, yesterday, an Amazon delivery.

Now I'm putting them together, in the hope of finding a conclusion.

Take those 'prompts' one at a time:

Malin Hay tells us more than we need to know about the production of the LRB, how it is:

printed on a matte lightweight coated paper. The specifications are exact: it needs to be heavier than newsprint, resistant to heat and the effects of ageing, and good at reproducing colour. It is called ‘improved newsprint’: the paper quality is slightly higher and the ink doesn’t come off on the reader’s hands.​

The paper originates in Finland, where the manufacturer is in a long-running dispute with its employees. Until COVID there was over-production of paper, until those factors reduced the supply. As soon as the economies re-opened, there was under-production, and paper manufacturers went for price hikes. All predictable. All wishing Marxian definitions of cyclical supply-and-demand. In particular, the strike at the UPM paper mills:

... has prevented the production of more than a million tonnes of coated graphical paper – about 25 per cent of the total European supply. At the end of January, the European federation for print and digital communication, Intergraf, estimated that 40 per cent of the paper that would be needed from mid-February onwards would be impossible to procure.​

Fascinating as the piece was, I assumed it was a fore-warning of a change in LRB production quality, or format, or subscription pricing, or all three.

​

On to the second prompt.

Early afternoon, Amazon delivered me Graham Robb's latest: France, an Adventure History.

Robb is not, primarily a historian, or — more correctly — not an orthodox historian. He is a literary critic of great distinction, and one of our experts on French literature and culture.

He started with The Discovery of France, back in 2007-8 (my copy is a 'slightly-foxed' paperback — after which I tended to invest in the hard-backs), and then continued with Parisians (a sequence of pastiches so good even the French awarded prizes). To which this latest completes something of a trilogy.

In between such efforts, he extended his range with the quite extra-ordinary attempt to rediscover Celtic western Europe, The Ancient Paths (flogged to the susceptible Americans as The Discovery of Middle Earth) —this is predicated to the Via Heraclea, a notion there is a 'ley-line', from the winter solstice sunset seen at Cabo de São Vicente to the summer solstice sunrise seen at Col de Montgenêvre. More recently he has retreated from his Oxonian dreaming spire to the Scottish border, and celebrated that with The Debatable Land, the Lost World between Scotland and England.

None of that is my immediate concern here.

What alerted me, and reminded me of that LRB piece, was the Amazon package I received yesterday. It was a solid box, not the usual book pouch. What came out was equally hefty. The latest Robb is 520-odd pages, more than Parisians (470-odd), same format but 540mm deep (versus 460mm). And weighs in (literally) at over 1280g (versus 840g). The difference is the quality of the paper. Although, for now, it looks clean-and-decent, it is a different weight and feel. Different type-setter; different printer.

I am not too happy about these changes.

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The glory that is Swift

 Round about 1959-60, starting Irish Leaving Cert, my brain-cells absorbed the dictum about:

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.

I see I blogged about it, nearly a decade ago. And rather well, too, if I'm allowed to say so:

... the slim-line version was courtesy of Augustus de Morgan, the twice-coined professor of mathematics at the newly-minted London University: a great man who was ineligible for Oxbridge tenure because of his atheism — though he went the same way as Willie Yeats, seduced into spiritualism by the love for a good woman. Correction there: since the Yeatsian seduction was via that Surrey minx, Edith Maud Gonne, and de Morgan married Sophia Frend, that should read “the love for a better woman”.

Nothing like getting one's vicious retaliation in first; but around then — and continuing to this day — I've always felt the Gonne MacBride (from father to wife to son to son-in-law) set up was to be treated with very long tongs. Dammit: the fascist tendencies were never far from the surface.

But, just now, I had to remind myself of Swift's original. He was getting at his Critics. Here's the whole thing:

Hobbes clearly proves that every creature 
Lives in a state of war by nature. 
The greater for the smallest watch, 
But meddle seldom with their match. 
A whale of moderate size will draw 
A shoal of herrings down his maw. 
A fox with geese his belly crams; 
A wolf destroys a thousand lambs. 
But search among the rhyming race, 
The brave are worried by the base. 
If on Parnassus' top you sit, 
You rarely bite, are always bit: 
Each poet of inferior size 
On you shall rail and criticize; 
And strive to tear you limb from limb, 
While others do as much for him. 
The vermin only tease and pinch 
Their foes superior by an inch. 
So, nat'ralists observe, a flea 
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey, 
And these have smaller fleas to bite 'em, 
And so proceed ad infinitum: 
Thus every poet in his kind 
Is bit by him that comes behind; 
Who, though too little to be seen, 
Can tease, and gall, and give the spleen; 
Call dunces, fools and sons of whores, 
Lay Grubstreet at each others' doors: 
Extol the Greek and Roman masters, 
And curse our modern poetasters. 
Complain, as many an ancient bard did, 
How genius is no more rewarded; 
How wrong a taste prevails among us; 
How much our ancestors out-sung us: 
Can personate an awkward scorn 
For those who are not poets born: 
And all their brother dunces lash, 
Who crowd the press with hourly trash.

I'm fairly sure I've seen that printed as quatrains, and the punctuation suggests the same.

Why is it coming to mind just now?

Well, here's a tweet by the egregious @OwenJones84:

Labour needs to stop waging war on its own party and fight the Tories instead.

On @lbc shortly arguing just that...

Boosterism personified. Ah well, a young feller has to make it where he can, even if that means felling every fruitful tree in sight.

But who is 'waging war' on whom? Where I'm sitting, the far left are making life as hard as they can for anyone not of their little persuasion (meretricious* Steve Walker's Sqwawkbox, anyone?) and crowd the press with hourly trash.

* Now there's a good word.

It's the Anglicising (by Francis Bacon, no less) of the Latin meretricius, the adjective formed from meretrix. And meretrix is a prostitute. Related, then, to Swift's sons of whores. 

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From generation unto generation

There's something eerie in finding one's children, without prompting, have same books on their shelves. Except, in this case, I assume there was prompting from a university course.

21. Ronald Blythe: The Age of Illusion

That comes with the informative sub-title: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940. The first chapter is A Great Day for Westminster Abbey. That Great Day was 11 November 1920, and the interment of the Unknown Warrior. The final chapter is The Destruction of Neville Chamberlain, and deals with the few dramatic days from 7 May 1940.

In between most of the chapters hang hats on various characters of the period:

• Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks and his use of the Defence of the Realm Act to crack down on London night-life;
• John Reith and the birth of the British Broadcasting Company (sic);
• T.E. Lawrence;
• Amy Johnson;
• Harold Davidson, the infamous, much-maligned, and much-mocked Rector of Stiffkey;
• Wallis Simpson and the Abdication (and let's not forget the canoodlings of Edward Windsor and his Baltimore floozy did more to create the modern republic of Ireland than any of the blood-sacrifices of 1916);
• George Lansbury's pacifism and the Labour Party. That involved a swift canter through Lansbury's strengths and weaknessses, notably his use of the minor Cabinet post as Commissioner of Works — in which he tore down the railings of royal parks and opened the Serpentine to mixed bathing.

Those are then divided by the passing 'crises' of the age:

• the attractions of arty-farty bourgeois Communism;
• the horrors of the Depression;
• Britain's distraction with sensational murders, while the Nazis seized power in Germany;
• Spain.

When the New York Times came to review the book it pointed out that (on publication in 1964) it was as remote from the events it describes which are already as much history as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. That is perversely true in psychological distance: the interim involved several wars (one World, one Cold) and a couple of nuclear bombs. I feel that review's attempt at a punch-line is mistaken:

the large and variegated cast are assembled, put on their costumes and their makeup, speak their lines. But what of the play? What is the point of this so foolish, expensive, bloody and destructive spectacle? If point there be, it has eluded Mr. Blythe.

The use of the word spectacle is appropriate; but the lesson it tries to draw is not. Britain between the Wars was living a myth: the days of imperial grandeur had died none too far from Sarajevo, but the reality hadn't struck home. Despite the loss of Empire and Britain's diminished status, it still properly hasn't — and won't as long as Boris Johnson stirs the ashes. Dean Acheson's pungent remark was two years old when the NY Times came up with that review:

Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a rôle.

The Age of Illusion, indeed. 

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A load of old Bull

Once upon a time Norfolk was dominated by two Norwich brewers: Steward & Patteson (which had over six hundred tied pubs) and Bullards (which had more than five hundred).

In 1963 Watney Mann acquired the whole lot. In a single stroke much of East Anglia was reduced to a single, monopoly supplier. Red Barrel became the universal fizzy concoction, the prototype for keg beers, flogged out at 3.9% alcohol. I have to admit it always seemed to me to have a metallic fore-taste and after-taste of onions. Red Barrel was widely and quite properly mocked:

"Why is Red Barrel like making love in a canoe?"

"Because it's fucking close to water."

One might think the British brewing industry couldn't fall lower. It could. Watneys was in turn taken over by Grand Metropolitan, a vertically-structured leisure, hospitality and property goliath, which in its turn was merged with Guinness to arrive at the Diagio empire.

All of which left me a trifle amused to find Bullards is not only still in business, but still producing 'the Spirit of Norwich' — or, at least, flavoured gins.

There's a faint whiff of pseudery in The Bullards Story Presumably the Bullard family, quite reasonably, retained the name through the Watney take-over.  Then decided to exploit it.

But what grates is the design of those gin bottles. My memory is: you went into even the better Bullards houses, and the young miss with whom one was accompanied (as if!) had advanced from expensive perries to someone 'harder' — a G&T perhaps (ha-ha! we're in luck with this one!). What was on offer was Gordon's. Or at a pinch, Gilbey's.

Since when we have had a tsunami of gins. Well, I mean, it's a raw spirit diluted to non-toxic levels, with added colouring and flavourings. And, unlike whiskey, it can be marketed without being natured in barrels. What's not for the marketing-manager and accountants to like?

So Bullards sell a gin.

Look closer.

Two small matters show up.

• The claim to be 'Est 1837' would be valid only if we ignore the 1963 sell-out. Oh, and various changes of business name through the nineteenth century. Still, if the Bullard family secured the name from Watneys, fair enough. Any link, though, has to be purely financial, as a 'family share-holder'.
• Then the trade-mark of the Anchor Brewery. That opened in 1867 at St Mile's Bridge. It closed in 1968, and the landmark chimney came down in 1982. If one pokes around the Coslany Street area one will find 'Anchor Quay' — but that's about it. Bullards distillery is now the other end of town, in Cattle Market Street, between an architect and a take-away.

So why am I griping?

It's yesterday's EDP, of course:

Famous Norwich firm locked in legal battle with Red Bull 

Despite being 150 years older, Bullards has been accused by Red Bull of "creating a conflict of interest" due to an apparent clash with the naming of the companies.

Basically, Red Bull which has existed for just three decades, believes a centuries-old company should ditch its famous name.

Major mistake, then, to feature a photograph of a very living Russell Evans, left, founder of Bullards Spirit.

Good luck with that one.

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Missed opportunities

Yesterday was a busy one. 

It meant I missed out on acknowledging a story from ecclesiastical history, a story more complex than most fictive plots.

16 September was when we might wish to celebrate the curious life of Louis Aleman (c. 1390 - 1450, and rather imaginative image as right).

All went well for Louis at the start of his career in the church. It always helps to have a benevolent and archiepiscopal relative in the trade. 

By his late twenties he was a Bishop of Maguelone — which is far more important than seems from beach that still carries the name — very popular with nude bathers and gay men — down the one-way track from Palavas-les-Flots.

Maguelone — that big blister in the middle of the map — was one lf the 'seven cities' (Septimania) of what once had been the Roman province of Gallia Narbonensis, and was absorbed as a buffer zone for Theodoric II's Visigothic kingdom.

The diocese is now based in Montpellier.

Anyhoo, Louis Aleman quickly received preferment, and within five years in 1423 was Archbishop of Arles, and soon after Pope Martin V Colonna dispatched his cardinal's hat.

Martin V Colonna was re-constructing western Christianity after the tumultuous and schismatic fourteenth century. After 1410 one had a choice of three popes: Gregory XII Correr, Benedict XIII in Avignon, and John XXIII Cossa. The 'middle management' of the Church had, it seems, had enough of this popology, held Councils at Pisa and Constance (where Jan His was immolated). Finally John XXIII and Benedict XIII were dethroned, Gregory XII was bought off and abdicated — and Cardinal Oddone Colonna was installed as Martin V, the first Renaissance pope, to rebuild Roma and the Vatican.

Louis Aleman had been in the midst of all this kerfuffle (fifteenth century Italian politics and church politics perfectly fitted that Russian's description of 'absolutism moderated by assassination'. In 1424 he had been Papal Legate and governor in Bologna (turbulent stuff!) in succession to Gabriele Condulmer (watch this space). The novelist manqué in me would make that the source of a continued feud.

The Bologna billet didn't last long: anyone claiming to have a full grasp of Italian politics in that era is too far ahead of me (though see here). In 1428 Louis Aleman was evicted from Bologna by the Condulmer faction. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold — and Martin V pegged out in 1430: Condulmer got the nod and the white smoke as Eugenius IV.

The comparative stability of Martin V's pontificate was already failing. Eugenius IV was under real pressure, and Martin V had convened the Council of Basle. There were two basic questions: relations with the near-terminal Eastern Church in Constantinople, and the far more acute matter of governance of western Christianity (that latter came down to a monarchical papacy versus something more collegiate and oligarchic). The presiding authority at Basle, as nominated by Martin V, was meant to be Louis Aleman. Eugenius V squelched that with a Bull of 1437, transferring the sittings from Basle to Ferrara (i.e. somewhere nearer his control).

That was not entirely a wise move. The Council in Basle went schismatic, and deposed Eugenius, nominating instead Count Amadeus VIII of Savoy as Felix V (his anti-papacy and the Council would limp on in shadow form over a decade, but would fail because the Germans wouldn't give him support).

Eugenius was having none of that: he stripped Louis Aleman of his titles, cardinalate, and excommunicated him. Eugenius was on something of a high: he had cobbled a form of conciliation with the Byzantines; he had seen off the Council in Basel; and now seemingly disgraced his main opponent. Then Eugenius inconveniently died.

The next pope was Nicholas V Parentucelli, who may have risen rapidly as a protegé of Eugenics, but shows as someone far more subtle, more diplomatic, and more cultured. In short order he bri=ought about the resignation of anti-pope Felix V, lanced the boil of Bologna by conceding a form of near-independence from the papal states, and re-instating Louis Aleman.

Louis himself survived barely another year; but would be beatified by Clement VII de' Medici.

All this is more than a bit of a niche interest. Even so, were I looking for an outline plot for a historical fiction, Louis Aleman might be its centre.

in 1432Uachtarán na hÉireann

Uachtarán na hÉireann

Uachtarán na hÉireann

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Rudery and prudery

 20. Strumpshaw, Tincleton and Giggleswick's Marvellous Map of Great British Place Names.

It was an item in the Eastern Daily Press that reminded me:

A post about tranquil Cockshoot Dyke was removed by Facebook because it goes against community standards and constitutes "hate speech".

Steve Burgess, a businessman and administrator on the Facebook page Love the Norfolk Broads said the issue arose when a member posted she had moored along the popular stretch, the old entrance to Cockshoot Broad.

Her reference combing the words cock, shoot, and dyke was promptly removed by automatic filters, a notification citing both violence and sexual content as the reason.

Most keyboard warriors have had similar experiences. Way back when PC (in every sense) machines were becoming available to teachers, I was edifying examination classes studying Romeo and Juliet. The institution had a super-Bowdler blocker. It meant a text-search of the the text of the play hit a block, and recorded an alarm to Higher Authority, were one to scroll to Mercutio's Queen Mab speech. Since that comes as early as Act I, scene iv, it really put the mockers on cut-and-paste text extracts.

Since my days in Norfolk, it has become generally accepted that the Broads are flooded mediæval peat excavations. There's a passing mention in Michael Pye's Antwerp that the Netherlanders borrowed the process.

Cockshoot Broad is off the River Bure, and near to ... ahem! ... Horning. It isn't just Facebook that has a down on Cockshoot Broad — as a place-name it gets omitted from many another map. Even on the Ordnance Survey, one has to come down to finer definitions:

Cockshoot Broad and Cockshoot Dyke seem to miss out on Marvellous Maps of Great Britain:

Some of those seem eccentric selections, anyway. What's funny or peculiar about Stiffkey (apart from one past rector)? Especially since, nearby is Muckledyke, Cockthorpe, Cocklestrand Drive and others? Why is Great Snoring (even with its Duckstown End) more amusing than Little Snoring? And Binham used to have Lousybush Lane.

The EDP conclude that story with even better snorklers:

A scan around the county reveals Facebook could have a field day if it were feeling particularly easily offended.

From Balls Lane in Fakenham to Booty Road in Norwich, Norfolk has its fair share of rude street names.

Notable mentions go to Three Holes, a hamlet on the Norfolk and Cambridgeshire border and Two Mile Bottom campsite near Thetford and Stiffkey.

But top honours have to go to Slutshole Lane, Besthorpe, Cock Street and Hooker Road in Norwich, Dick's Mount in Beccles, and Trumpery Lane in Norwich.

 

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