From the Archives: Road Trip Through History – The Battle of Hastings
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from November 2012:
Image courtesy of Antonio Borillo
On October 13, thousands of history enthusiasts from around the world arrived at the British town of Battle to re-enact the Battle of Hastings. (You know, William the Conqueror, 1066, and all that.)
My Own True Love and I weren’t there.* Just as well. The weather was cold and wet. The battlefield conditions were so muddy that the organizers called off the second day of the battle because the ground was too muddy for vehicles to get in and out. (I suspect any number of Anglo-Saxon and Norman soldiers at the original battle would have been pleased if someone had called off the second day of the real battle.)
When we arrived, a week later, the battlefield was still a muddy mess. We happily went through the excellent introductory exhibit, learning about Anglo-Saxon England, the Duchy of Normandy, and why William the Bastard of Normandy** thought he had a claim to the English crown.***
Then we headed to the battlefield, audio tours in hand. Before we got to the first point on the tour, we were slipping in the mud on the path. My Own True Love’s shoes sprang a leak. Defeated by the mud, we retreated to the café, where we drank coffee, listened to our audio tours, and envied the rubber boots worn by the squadrons of British school children trooping past.
You can get a detailed account of the battle here. These are the elements that struck me:
- Both sides were descendents of Viking conquerors. The rulers of England were the descendents of King Canute of Denmark. The Normans were Norwegian Vikings with a French accent.
- The battle was a classic stand off between infantry and armed horseman: immovable object vs. irresistible force.. The English army, on foot, depended on the strength of its shield wall. The Normans enjoyed the mobility of cavalry. William stumbled on a tactic that the Mongols (armed horsemen par excellence) would later use to confound Western armies. When his men panicked and retreated, exultant English troops broke out of formation to pursue them. William saw what was happening and ordered his flank to cut the English off. The pursuers were surrounded and slaughtered.. The first time was an accident. William learned; apparently the English didn’t. When William ordered a feigned retreat to replicate his success, the English pursued again and were slaughtered again.
- The Battle of Hastings changed history, but it wasn’t the only time France invaded England. Who knew?
Next stop, Brighton.
* We missed several special history nerd events as we drove along Britain’s southeast coast–always a week too late or a week too early. We did, however, manage to arrive in Bath on the day of a major rugby match.
** The name was a legal description, not a character assessment.
*** William was a shirttail relative to Edward the Confessor, whose death in 1066 was the catalyst for the invasion. William’s great grandfather was Edward’s maternal grandfather.
From the Archives: Kepler’s Mother (A Scary Story for Halloween)
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from October, 2017:
The seventeenth century was a period of scientific revolution. Astronomers, like Galileo, worked out the motions of the planets and stars in the sky, and overturned the concept that the earth stood at the center of the cosmos.* Galileo, Newton and others created a new science of mechanics that applied the laws of mathematics to motion. Physicians explored the structure of the human body. The development of scientific instruments allowed students to see new worlds in a drop of water and scan the skies with a clarity not possible with the naked eye. Natural philosophers (the name used by scientists at the time) began to perform experiments in a way that could be verified by others.**
The seventeenth century was also the height of the European witch trials. Black magic, maleficum, was a capital crime, clearly defined by law. Between 1570 and 1680, roughly 110,000 people were tried for witchcraft in Europe and between 40,000 and 60,000 were executed. Most of the accused were women. One of the women accused was Katharina Kepler, the 68-year-old mother of German astronomer Johannes Kepler.
The charges against Katharina will sound familiar to anyone who has read accounts of the Salem witch trials. (And probably to anyone who has read accounts of European witch trials as well.) A woman who suffered from a chronic illness accused Katharina of poisoning her. The local schoolmaster reported that the illiterate Katharina constantly pestered him to read letters from or write letters to her famous son, and that on one occasion she entered his house though the doors were locked. A local matron reported, second-hand, that a young seamstress told her that Katherina had roamed the house late at night*** and offered to teach her (the seamstress) witchcraft. She was accused of killing various local animals by magic and of turning herself into a cat. Katherina vehemently denied the charges. The only charges she couldn’t plausible deny were 1) being old and 2)being difficult.**** Obviously prime witch material.
Her trial lasted six years.
In 1620, five years after Katharina’s ordeal began (!), at the height of his career, Johannes Kepler packed up his family, moved to the city where his mother was on trail, and took over her defense. He dissected the charges in a powerful, and groundbreaking, legal document. He attacked the reliability of many of the witnesses. He pointed out the fact that many of the accused acts–like entering someone’s house uninvited–could not necessarily be attributed to witchcraft. And that to do so would make any difficult old woman vulnerable to attack.***** He discussed the differences between natural and unnatural illness in scientific detail, with the authority of one of the great scientists of his age. He pointed out inconsistencies in the testimony. It took almost a year, but he ultimately succeeded in getting his mother acquitted.
Katharina died six months after her acquittal, no doubt worn down by her ordeal
At base, Kepler wasn’t that different than the men who tried his mother.**** He believed in magic. The division between magic, religion and science was not clear. Sir Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy and interpreting biblical prophecies as he did on the scientific theorems for which he is famous. William Harvey, who discovered how blood circulates in the body, dissected a witch’s toad familiar, looking for the source of its supernatural power. Most witchhunters and demonologists were scholars and rationalists who believed in the importance of direct observation and were concerned with the question of what constituted reliable evidence . The investigation of witchcraft, magic and miracles was a much a part of the scientific revolution as the study of gravity and electricity.
Small comfort for cranky old ladies who liked cats and annoyed their neighbors.
*Or at least shoved it off balance. It takes a while for new ideas about the nature of reality to work their way through society. Consider the existence of the Flat Earth Society.
**It is only fair to point out that many of these breakthroughs had been anticipated by Islamic scientists during the Golden Age of Islam, most notably Alhazen, whose work laid the foundation for the scientific method.
***There is a reason they call them the witching hours.
****In her trial Johannes himself admitted that she “disturbs the whole of her town, and is the author of her own lamentable misfortune.”
*****As indeed they were.
******Except for that small detail of being a scientific genius.
From the Archives: Before Rosie the Riveter
Sometimes life makes it impossible to write blog posts on a dependable basis. This is one of the those times. For the next little while, I’m going to run pieces from years past. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.
Next up, a post from October, 2018:
A generation before Rosie the Riveter, munitionettes “wo-manned” Britain’s factories and mines, replacing the men who volunteered for General Kitchener’s New Army in 1914 and 1915.
Women were initially greeted in the work force with hostility. Male trade unionists argued that the employment of women, who earned roughly half the salary of the men they replaced, would force down men’s wages.** Some argued that women did not have the strength or the technical skills to do the work.
When universal male conscription was passed in 1916, need out-weighed social resistance. By the 1918, 950,00 women worked in Britain’s munitions industry, outnumbering men by as much as three to one in some factories.
The hours were long and the work was dangerous. Munitionettes were popularly known as “canary girls” because prolonged exposure to toxic sulfuric acid tinged their skin yellow. Deadly explosions were common.
Munitionettes were not the only women to enter Britain’s work force in World War I. Another 250,000 joined the work force in jobs that ranged from dockworkers and firefighters*** to government clerks, nurses, and ambulance drivers. The number of women in the transport industry alone increased 555% during the war.
At the end of the war, most of the munitionettes and their fellow war workers were replaced by returning soldiers. Many of them were probably glad to go. But the definition of “women’s work” had been permanently changed. The thin edge of the wedge had been inserted.
* Evidently the simple solution of negotiating for women to be paid an equal wage for equal work did not occur to male-dominated unions. As a consequence, women’s trade unions saw an enormous increase in membership during the war.
** Imagine fighting a fire in a long skirt and petticoats.