Automation

As I guess you’ll know if you’ve read much of this blog, I teach history, and I’ve taught a fair number of lessons dealing with automation. It’s difficult to do any kind of survey course without touching on the Industrial Revolution, and therefore getting into the question of mechanical labour replacing human labour.

I usually present it as a kind of two-sided development, because on the one hand the new industrial processes enabled far more of basically any kind of product to be produced for lower costs, so it became possible for people to buy a much greater range of things than would have been the case beforehand. The consumer economy was more or less born.

The other side is that workers who had their labour replaced – for example, a weaver who saw themselves replaced with a power loom – essentially saw a skilled vocation disappear, and for many, their standard of living fell through the floor at the same time as others were becoming wealthy. The gap between rich and poor in the new industrial cities was bigger than it had ever been.

Obviously automation is still something we are wrestling with today; I found a great article a few years ago written by a truck driver, contemplating the advent of a supply chain running on driverless vehicles and automated warehouses, which would probably speed transportation, reduce hazards on the roads, and of course reduce costs. He also estimated that it would or will put about 3 million people out of work in the U.S. The writer of the piece concedes that this is probably inevitable, because the dollars will win.

It’s not an accident that I’m writing about this tonight. Last night I read a thing about how a company owned by Elon Musk (I mean, of course it’s Elon Musk) is working on an AI that can take a given set of prompts and write a fan fiction story based on them. It doesn’t work yet, but as someone who writes stories and who would kind of like it if people bought them, that’s a sobering thing to contemplate on approach. It’s not hard to imagine a company like Disney being delighted with the idea of an AI that can endlessly churn out, say, Star Wars novels, and it’s also not hard to think of the chilling effect that tech will also have on what is already a difficult field to make your bread and cheese in.

And of course writers are perhaps not facing the immediate threat that visual artists are, as art-creating AI becomes less and less of a curiosity and more and more something accessible and useable by ordinary people. Even beyond the question of replacing human labour with computer labour, in this case, are the ethics of these AIs often being trained on the work of human artists who did not consent to their art being used for this purpose and who received no compensation.

So we live in a time when the automation question is arriving for the artistic community, and perhaps because I’m in a bleak mood, I’m pretty sure I know how this is going to go too. I’ve seen people who I otherwise consider friends of the artistic community for whom the lure of ‘cool art cheap’ is going to be more than they can resist, and corporate interests for whom ‘how much does it cost us’ is and always will be the only consideration are already starting to produce art for commercial applications using AI. That was someone’s job a couple years ago.

As I say, I don’t think this is a change that can be prevented. The dollars will win as they always do and humans doing art will become even more of the preserve of the well-to-do in society than it currently is. But right now, in this moment, we can at least express that it’s not what we want as individuals, and that we value the brilliance, ability, and labour of human artists.

Personally I will not give any of my money or other support to any project that uses AI art, unless at absolute minimum they are able to demonstrate that their program uses only the work of artists who all gave explicit consent for their work to be used for the purpose and who were compensated. The burden of proof is on them. And then I’ll think about it.

I don’t want to get overly maudlin about this, but there are many people I love in this world who are artists. Whatever the future is going to be, now is the moment where we can show them that. Please support your local humans, even if the bot can make something pretty.

Thanks for reading.

Important Work

I had another thing I was going to write about this week, about the casting for the Sandman series and how it made particular people lose their minds and what I think that reveals about them, and I don’t know, maybe it would have been a decent blog entry.

But then the bodies of 215 children were discovered on the site of a former residential school in B.C., and it doesn’t seem worth writing about the Sandman cast any more.

Canada’s genocide against First Nations and Inuit people is the ongoing shame of our nation. It is a crime that continues to affect people up to the very moment that I am writing this, and it has many facets and tendrils, but the residential school system must be among the most horrific. It was designed by the Canadian government (no, we can’t blame the British for this one) specifically to eliminate First Nations people and enable the continuing expropriation of their land and resources. It was implemented largely by religious institutions, but (conscience-salving though it might be) we can’t shift all the blame onto them either because, again, the objectives were set by the government. Quite explicitly.

Some people still feel it important to try and defend these things, add qualifiers, ‘yes but’s. I don’t understand those people.

I remember when some of the first court cases brought by survivors started to happen in the 80s and 90s. I remember my first reaction was thinking ‘well, that can’t be right’ because of course that wasn’t the sort of thing that happened in Canada, that Canadians did. I had learned, very much, the comforting national tale of Canada the good and kind. When my history classes had touched on First Nations people (which was not all that often), we learned the version of the story where Indigenous people preferred dealing with the British to the Americans because they got better treatment. There are few things more Canadian than seizing the opportunity to dunk on the United States.

Now of course this was at best partly true, and certainly not the whole or most significant part of the story, and we certainly never got to the part where Sir John A. MacDonald asked for a way to get rid of Indigenous people. I don’t really blame my history teachers, because my guess is they didn’t know much about it either. A lot of the ugly parts of Canada’s history have been very carefully camouflaged under the ‘aw shucks’ national myth.

But the schools were there, and we’ve known a lot of the horrifying details about them for a while now, about the physical and sexual abuse, about the unpaid forced labour, about the poor conditions, and about the deaths of so many of the children. How many? Well that was hard to say, because no-one thought it was important, or maybe not prudent, to actually keep proper track.

So you have things like the bodies of 215 children waiting to be re-discovered.

I’m not the right person to say what can or should be done to try to heal the wounds of all the people hurt and traumatized by everything that Canada has done to Indigenous people. I really don’t know how you can ever reach a point where things are ok, or anything like ok. I believe it must be a long and probably endless process of trying to recognize the truth of what has happened, to listen to what Indigenous people need, and then giving it.

I believe that a minimum starting point is to – as my friend Jay Odjick puts it – treat the site of every residential school like a crime scene, right now, and examine them all to find all the remaining evidence of what happened there. Of course it will cost money, probably a lot of money, but the thing is there always turns out to be money for the things we think are really important. This is really important.

There’s so much work that is really important that urgently needs to be done. I have tried to do what little I can by teaching about these things when I have the chance. I have a lot to learn, but it’s really important to try.

I also take a lot of heart from the fact that – unlike me at that age – many of my students are already aware of all this, and already angry about it. It gives me hope that a really different future is coming.

Why I Do This

We’re getting to the end of another college semester here (hello, pile of marking) and as I often end up doing around now (only in part because I’m procrastinating) I have been thinking a bit about why I teach history. To a degree this is probably something everyone does – why do I do this?? – but it strikes me especially because I teach at least one history course every year that all the students in our program are required to take, and it won’t be the only time in their education where someone will make them take history, even if they’re not after a degree in it.

Add to that that the interest level in history among the students – interest level going beyond ‘10 unbelievable facts about the ancient Greeks! – is middling, and I periodically question why we do this. Perhaps obviously, I think everyone should study history because history is the best and everyone should love it. I can go on about that at length but again I suspect most people can be equally passionate about their chosen fields, and they’re not all compulsory.

So why is history?

People wore yellow Stars of David that said ‘No COVID certificate’ to a protest in the UK last week. I trust I can skip the step of explaining why this is unbelievably offensive, cruel, and dangerous, to suggest a parallel between an industrialized genocide and being asked to get vaccinated against a disease. But perhaps I shouldn’t, because people wore yellow Stars of David to a protest, and people defended them.

I wonder whether part of the reason they felt emboldened to do so is the increasing gap of time between the Holocaust and the present day, and the decreasing number of people for whom it is living memory. We should also factor in that far-right ideologies (with which me must surely associate anything that denigrates or minimizes the Holocaust) and conspiracy theories (which we must categorize anything attaching sinister motives to public vaccination as) have a louder voice today than in even relatively recent years past.

But I think on some level the answer is that these people simply weren’t taught history very well, and simply don’t understand what they are talking about, or the comparison they were making. Perhaps it explains that louder voice for the hateful and the dangerously foolish, as well.

There was a fuss, recently, about the things being ‘Anglo-Saxon’. It sounds a neutral enough term, and I will say that I think many people who use it do so intending nothing more than a harmless shorthand for a time in English or British history that is ‘after the Romans, but before the Normans’ while also including ‘not the Vikings’. In my PhD studies, I read a great deal of what was termed ‘Anglo-Saxon’ studies and read about ‘Anglo-Saxon Britain’ and a great many other ‘Anglo-Saxon’ things. At the time I gave it no more thought than other periodization shorthands like ‘Angevin’, ‘post-Plague’, or ‘Tudor’.

But there are problems. One is that it is a kind of useless term. Except for a literal handful of examples, we find neither people referring to themselves as Anglo-Saxon nor monarchs who claim to rule such people. Alfred of Wessex (despite the whole ‘West Saxons’ thing) envisioned the title ‘King of the English’ (Rex Anglorum) which his son would later claim and this is generally what we find throughout the period. Various titles, but not ‘Anglo-Saxon’.

So it’s a created anachronism that basically no people ever used to describe themselves or their own culture, applied later by historians who (it must be said) like a handy label. It creates the illusion of unity and homogeneity when it probably didn’t exist and one that would probably not have been recognized by people at the time.

That’s problematic, but we might stick with the handy label, except that at least some of the time (and perhaps a lot of the time) it gets used, it has a wholly different meaning, often unspoken: ‘the right sort of white people’. It’s used by racists and xenophobes to weave their fiction of a ‘pure’ ‘white race’ into which all the right sort of people can be said to belong, and bring along with it the idea that the values of this made-up common culture are under threat and need defending.

I’m not the right person to fully engage with this foundational aspect of white racism and why it is central to many of the scary ideas that we see people standing up to be counted with today. But it is, and that is why many historians get upset about the use of the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’. Historians may arguably have created the problem with a handy label, but it’s also an understanding of history that allows us to attack the scary ideas.

It’s somewhat bemusing to me to see the grab bag of historical stuff that bigots grab onto to drape themselves in – you will see ostensibly ‘Viking’ runes and symbols along with the arms of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. I trust we don’t approve of Charlemagne’s policy of conversion of pagans by force, but I also trust it’s clear that any attempt to suggest that these two symbols meaningfully belong together is based on absolute nonsense.

At some point, these people have simply never learned history.

This is getting long and I don’t want to go on at too much great length, but I will also say this – if they did know about the history of ancient Rome, or Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, or medieval England, if they knew what these places were really like, not as they are imagined in the fever dreams of racists, they would know that all of these cultures were multi-ethnic and what today we would call multi-racial. People who looked different, spoke different languages, ate different food and lived their lives differently were always there. Historians never fail to find them, when we are looking.

Again, the argument that there was ever a time when white people did not live in a racially mixed society? It only survives because people don’t know their history.

I don’t pretend that the couple of courses I teach to 17 year olds who are mostly thinking of other things is going to solve that problem. Except maybe it will, in one or two cases, perhaps. And that is enough, and at least part of why I teach history.

Thanks for reading.

Story of a Prayer

So I had a birthday recently, and I usually post something on my social media about the fact that I’m getting older, not because I’m worried about it, but because I want to acknowledge that it is happening. Life goes on, and changes happen. I am determined not to be one of those people stridently denying that they will ever grow old. Of course I will. It’s what happens. It’s neither good nor bad, it’s just life, playing itself out.

Anyway often I have used a song by B.B. King or Junior Kimbrough, but I wanted to do something different this year and (loving the Middle Ages as I do) I went out looking for a medieval person’s thoughts on getting older. I did not find that, but I came up with something else that I thought ticked the box I was after.

I found an article in the Journal of Gerontology and Geriatrics that cited a prayer, attributed to a 17^th century abbess, that had some clever turns of phrase and a kind of self-deprecating humour that I liked, and so I quoted it myself. I also looked up their citation, which led to a website that seems to be a stranded Geocities page (good lord above!) which also provides no source for the prayer aside from the assertion that it was written in the 17^th century.

Now, my academic spidey-senses were tingling at this point and if I had been engaged in anything serious I would either have had to investigate much further or regretfully abandon the prayer as a source, but I was just messing around on the internet so I didn’t worry too much about it. I posted it up, people liked it, and I enjoyed my birthday. However, a couple of people also asked for more information about the prayer and the person who wrote it, and so I did a little bit of digging.

I found a few writers pointing out that the language in the prayer doesn’t seem very 17^th century, but at this stage I wasn’t too concerned because if it had been translated into English from another language, very often the translators will modernize the phrasing and vocabulary, especially if they’re not doing it for academic purposes. So, I, er, noted the cautionary note and went on.

I also found that this prayer is exceedingly widespread, showing up not only all over the internet, but also being quoted in places like the Philippines Senate (in 1987) and as part of the ‘Hearings before the Committee on Banking and Currency’ in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1971. So it’s far from obscure, and (somewhat to my chagrin) appears to be a common touchstone when someone wants something clever to say about the subject of growing older, and has been for longer than I’ve been alive.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything about its origins.

At this point, though, I found a website attributing the prayer to a nun (rather than specifically an abbess), and declaring that it was ‘found in an English church’. Now my spidey-senses were really tingling, because first of all, if it was an English writer, then the translation excuse for the modern language doesn’t work (or at least not so well), but even worse: after Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in England in 1536, there were none again until 1791. So something is definitely up with at least part of the story of our ‘17^th century’ prayer, and it seems unlikely that the story of its origins hold much water, if it holds any at all.*

At this point I was relieved to discover that several journalists had done investigations much like the once I was engaged in, and happily vultured off their results. One attributed the prayer to a woman in 1950s America, and another pushed it back as far as an appearance in Reader’s Digest in 1922. There things seem to run into the sand, and (to be frank) I ran out of time to spend chasing down this particular rabbit hole.

So where are we? We can of course still imagine nearly any history we want for this prayer on aging and could insist that it really is the work of some anonymous 17^th century nun or abbess. However, on the balance of probability it seems to be much more recent than that, probably a 20^th century creation, but no less intriguing for that, although in different ways.

You would have to evaluate this thing as a successful piece of writing; it features in church decorations around the world as well as being plastered all over the internet, hanging on the wall in people’s houses, and being a part of government discussions. And yet, the author’s name has disappeared.

Was that a deliberate choice, on their part? Did they think their creation would get a better reception coming from a nun from a past century? Or was that a choice the audience made, misattributing the work as often seems to happen with quotations to who ‘should have said it’ or who it ‘sounds like’ rather than the actual speaker? At this point we are unlikely to know, or at least finding out would be a reasonably involved piece of research into what is no more than a curiosity, but I do find things like this interesting.

I usually talk to my history students about the fact that we make up things about the past all the time, or tell stories about the past that are not true, and we think some about the reasons why we might do this. We often cling to those objectively false narratives with great determination, usually because we want the message in them, what they communicate about where we came from or what kind of people we are or were, to be true.

I suppose in a way the ‘Nun’s Prayer’ is much the same kind of thing: it is a pretty cleverly written meditation on the aging process, and it seems like the sort of thing some wise old woman should have said or written. And so, at some point (it seems), someone decided that was what happened, and so it has gone on ever since. Because it makes the right kind of story.

We are great storytellers, we really are. We tell stories about ourselves constantly, some that are true and some that are not, but (as I try to tell my students) even the ones that aren’t true have truth in them, because they communicate something about what we want to believe in, and how we want things to be. And on this micro scale, I guess we want there to be a dryly humourous nun who can give us advice, across the centuries, about how to age with grace.

Thanks for reading.

* – I suppose it’s just about possible to argue that the prayer was written much earlier than the 17^th century and kept in an English church until its discovery, but it is usually described as a ‘17^th century prayer’, so that seems to be a fairly rickety argument about what is already the pretty rickety narrative surrounding this prayer.

Writing, and Writing

I have a couple things I want to touch on this week, which is a switch from those weeks when I was struggling to come up with a good topic at all. Blog topics come not single spies, but in battalions.

However that may be, here we go.

First, I wanted to note and mourn the passing of Michael Clanchy, surely one of the most influential of medieval historians. When he passed away a few days ago the internet was filled with tributes from scholars who said that his work had changed their way of thinking, and I include myself in that number. His foundational book, From Memory to Written Record, remains one of the most remarkable books that I have ever read, and it is not an exaggeration to say that I have thought about a lot of things differently ever since.

From Memory to Written Record is about the change from memorial culture (remembering things, essentially) to writing them down, in European society. Clanchy’s work is essential for understanding why medieval people kept the records that they did and why they kept them the way that they did, and in illuminating a great deal about the way medieval people thought in general. So, as a student of history who spent a great deal of time working on Things in Archives, Clanchy was foundational and I could not have done my work without it.

Even more than that, From Memory to Written Record challenged me to think differently about technology and its effects on society overall, through its discussion of a pre-literate society, and then the semi-literate one that followed it. We live in such a tremendously literate world now, where the ability to read and write is one of the skills that society assumes we have and demands of us, that it’s often very difficult to imagine a society where that not only isn’t the case, but where the difference was not seen as a deficiency.

Put another way, from our hyper-literate perspective, we often find it very difficult to imagine a society where most of the population could not read as anything other than dysfunctional, and that it must have been filled with people feeling terribly deprived. However, neither of these things was true, the status of reading and writing as a very specialist skill that you only learned for particular purposes was absolutely normal.

It’s that challenge to accept a different ‘normal’ than the one that we are used to, and to think about things from that perspective rather than our own, that is one of the most essential tasks of the historian, and Michael Clanchy had a huge part in allowing me to do so. I am therefore both tremendously grateful for his work, and saddened to hear of his passing.

—–

From one kind of writing to another. I have been watching the new season of The Expanse over the past weeks, and first of all there are probably some spoilers ahead so if you’re not caught up on The Expanse perhaps abort mission here for now.

You should get caught up though, because the new season has been quite good and very entertaining, even for someone like me for whom its ‘hard SF’ credentials are not a real selling point. I have also, though, been interested in some of the conversations I have seen around its writing, and my own experience with it.

The show’s writers have proudly stated that their show does not “do a lot of handholding” and indeed they routinely ask and expect the audience to make deductions and inferences about what is shown on the screen to understand elements of plot and character, without being told. I feel like sometimes this works, and sometimes it doesn’t.

In the episode before this most recent one, without getting too deep into the weeds on plot recap, Naomi was stranded aboard a mostly derelict ship that was also a trap for her friends. We saw extended scenes of her trying to perform … various technical tasks, obviously undergoing considerable physical and mental stress in order to do so, but none of what she was trying to do was explained. (It’s certainly possible that if you had a stronger technical background than I do, that it might have been possible to figure a lot of it out.)

I regret to report that I had no idea what was happening, and what was clearly meant to be a series of moving and harrowing scenes very quickly became boring. The eventual revelation of what Naomi had been working on was neat, but the reveal was also not enough to make me feel much better about those long, (to me) impenetrable scenes.

So in that case, I needed just a little more handholding.

On the other hand, I’ve seen various people complain about the depiction of Earth after having been struck by giant asteroids and that we haven’t seen enough to have a sense of how bad things are. Again, the showrunners have said they have no interest in what they call ‘disaster porn’ and don’t want to depict huge piles of dead bodies in rubble or what have you.

What they did give us was a scene where Amos and Clarissa come upon an abandoned retirement/nursing home, outside of which are a small number of bodies loosely wrapped in tarps. Amos and Clarissa conclude that these are the resident who were unable to be evacuated, who were euthanised by the staff before they left.

Now, to me, if we’re in a state of affairs where no help has come to somewhere like a care facility, and the people there were faced with an absolutely brutal choice like that, I don’t need any further indicators that the situation on Earth is Extremely Bad indeed. So here, I was not in need of further handholding.

I don’t know if what made the difference for me was the difference between a technical scene and one that wasn’t, or what other reason there may have been – maybe it was the tiny bit of dialogue between Amos and Clarissa? The effect of that difference, though, is that one scene worked and was satisfying (if disturbing) and the others did not.

It’s an interesting challenge for writers, because there’s no question that as a reader (or watcher) it feels very satisfying when you put together the pieces and figure something out without being told directly. We do like to solve a puzzle. However, when we’re unable to put those pieces together, it can be deeply frustrating. Unsolvable puzzles are infuriating.

I don’t have ‘the answer’ for this balancing act. It’s something to think about when we’re creating stories, though, and another reason to be grateful for the people who take our stories for a test drive.

That’s what I have for you this week.

Thank you for reading.

2020

I have been (perhaps obviously, given no entry last week) been putting off doing this one because, if I’m going to write about 2020, there seems no way to not write about the pandemic, and I have been generally avoiding the pandemic as a topic here because it is already so pervasive in our worlds right now and it would be very easy for this to become a Pandemic Blog, which we do not need another one of. Moreover, I am not an epidemiologist or virologist or similar person who might have actual insights upon said pandemic beyond: euuuuuuch.

Intentions aside, I think it will forever be impossible to talk about 2020 without COVID-19 being at least part, and probably a major part, of the discussion, no matter the intended topic. For most of us, it became the overriding concern sometime in March and has stayed that way more or less ever since. Every other activity has, perforce, been at least somewhat refracted through that prism.

Again, I don’t feel like I’m the right person to write about all the various ways that has played out, and we may not entirely understand it yet anyway. I expect future historians to be busy indeed evaluating the way these past twelve (and continuing) months have affected us.

Of course as a current historian, people expect me to know things about the past, but as I am not a specialist in medical history or the history of epidemic diseases, I can really only add another log to the pile of people observing that when societies experience a pandemic, they come out different on the other side. There’s a lot of variance as to ‘different how’.

According to some classicists, the civilization of the ancient Romans never really recovered from the Antonine Plague that started in 165 CE (probably smallpox), although the seeds of decline it planted took a while to grow. It may have accelerated the Christianization of the Roman world. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius encouraged immigration to help repopulate areas ravaged by the disease, and reputedly died with orders to see that the poor (most affected by the pandemic) were looked after on his lips.

In another example, many medievalists also argue that the Black Death led to the end of serfdom in Western Europe and tipped the balance of wealth in favour of workers and merchants. According to some interpretations, it created the conditions for the Protestant Reformation to succeed. Conversely, the agricultural productivity, and therefore prosperity, and therefore influence, of Egypt may have been permanently damaged.

So, different differences, and many that would have been unimaginable to the people living through it, with connections that aren’t necessarily obvious. ‘Buckle up’ might be the advice to take from all this, for the years ahead.

What sort of change will result from the COVID pandemic? Certainly in North America (and Europe) it has highlighted some of the divisions that already existed in our society; whether we choose to do anything about them or not is a part of the story that we’ve yet to write. I’m no good at predictions, so I can’t say what changes are likely. I do think that changes are likely.

So, 2020 was the year of the pandemic, inescapably. 2021 and onward is the ‘after COVID’ time that we don’t understand yet, possibly in as profound a way as the ‘before/after the Plague’ division medieval historians make of their (our?) chosen period.

I honestly cannot say what I expect the consequences to be, but I would very much like to think it is an opportunity we can seize to address the shortcomings and inequities and failures in our societies that have the disease has given clarity to. Perhaps I’ll fall back on two figures from history I’ve mentioned in the blog before.

After the first day of the Battle of Shiloh (which did not go well for the Union), General William Sherman said to his friend and commander, Ulysses Grant: ‘Well, Grant, we’ve had the devil’s own day, haven’t we?’

‘Yes,’ Grant replied. ‘Lick ‘em tomorrow, though.’

We’ve had the devil’s own year.

Lick ‘em in 2021.

Thanks for reading.

The Hippocras

Alright this is gonna be another odd one, I warn you in advance. I’ve been doing rather a lot of grading.

Despite that, last week I got one of my strange ‘cook foods of the past’ bees in my bonnet and made some lamb stew, following a medieval recipe. I made a curious gingered bread (most emphatically not gingerbread). And I made some hippocras.

Hippocras is usually made with wine, sweetened a bit, and then heated up, with spices (and perhaps fruit) added – cinnamon, ginger, and cloves all seems to have been common, with anise and rosemary showing up among others. You let it slowly warm and the flavours infuse through before you drink it.

(I made a non-alcoholic version)

It’s a very old beverage (apparently enjoyed by the ancient Romans) and obviously the antecedent of some things we drink today, perhaps including sangria, which obviously is not served warm any longer but is still dangerous to the unwary. The somewhat odd name comes from the step of straining it through cloth to remove the bits of spice (and perhaps fruit), the perfect device for which was reputedly invented by Hippocrates (yes, that Hippocrates) or he may have simply used his (reputedly) expansive sleeves.

Anyway, what you end up with is a rather tasty, sweet and warming beverage that, in well-to-do households, would have been served at the end of many meals. It was thought to aid in digestion (and who knows, it may well do) but was also probably just quite a nice way to wind down an evening.

But in more modest households, hippocras would have been a special treat. Wine was more expensive than ale, whatever was used to sweeten it would have been an expense, and the spices, even more so. So hippocras would have been an indulgence for special points in the year (like the one we are now approaching, as I am writing this).

I thought about that, as I was doing my cooking: having the hippocras warm by the fire through the day, to be shared with visitors at a special time of year. It’s an idea that appealed a lot, perhaps especially since we can’t do such things this year, or at least not literally. But what a lovely way of building and maintaining connections – and that we can still do.

So, in the days and weeks and months ahead, I hope we shall all find suitable means of emulating the hippocras for ourselves, however that ends up happening, in the hope and trust that in a year’s time, we shall be able to genuinely visit one another’s hearths again.

There, I said it was going to be a weird one.

Thank you for reading.

Grant and Sherman

As you will know if you have been reading this blog for any length of time at all, of course I am a lover of history and a sometimes historian, and there’s basically no part of it that I don’t find interesting on some level or other. Of course, there are certain subjects or themes and places and times that I especially love – medieval European history prominently among them – but I really do dig it all, to some extent at least.

And yet of course there are also topics that I’m not particularly jazzed about; one of those, by and large, is the U.S. Civil War, which I tend to find over romanticized and some of the valorization of the South disturbing, to say the least. Even so, it’s such a prominent part of North American historiana that you almost can’t avoid finding out at least certain things about it, and so I have found myself fascinated by two Union generals, Ulysses Grant and William Sherman, who were both remarkable characters, and seem to have had a really unique sort of friendship.

(This is brought to mind by the docudrama Grant that is currently airing on the History Channel, which seems quite well done to me and it is pretty rad to see Ta-Nehisi Coates, among others, involved)

I suppose I feel a certain kinship for Grant, apparently a fairly introverted sort who struggled with alcoholism, and at times just making his way in life. Similarly with Sherman, who struggled with his mental health to varying degrees throughout his life. Both were, through it all, quite successful military commanders, and were quite remarkable friends.

The quote that sticks with me is this, Sherman speaking in defence of his friend: “General Grant is a great general. I know him well. He stood by me when I was crazy, and I stood by him when he was drunk; and now, sir, we stand by each other always.”

First of all, it’s just a good line. Second, it speaks vividly to me of the shared trials and traumas that bonded these two undeniably strange men to each other.

It also kind of resonates with me now, as many of us are weathering different kinds of tough times, or perhaps worrying about tough times yet to come. Sometimes we do need that person who will stand by us, even when we’re not at our best. Sometimes that’s what gets us through. And sometimes, just standing by someone not only all you can do, but all they need to get through – knowing that they aren’t alone.

We’re perhaps especially blessed the bizarrely interconnected world we have built for ourselves that we are empowered to stand by a great many more people than would have been possible in the 1860s. We’re aware of a great deal more negativity, and that’s something that our society is going to have to grapple with, but I can also stand by a friend of mine on the West Coast, or in the UK, or people I haven’t even properly met, wherever they are. We can stand by each other, and in hard times, that’s not nothing.

Anyway, I think if you spend some time reading or watching history, you’ll rarely be disappointed for entertainment, and may find things in there that can genuinely teach you, in different ways.

And as we appear headed for even more difficulties, perhaps we can try hard to stand by one another, always.

Thanks for reading.

9 miles in an hour

So a while back now I mentioned that I was going to start working on (another) new project, piecing together the life story of my grandfather and turning it into a story, whether just for my family to have or something else. Somewhat delayed by this year’s exceptional circumstances, I have gotten at it just a little bit through the summer; I visited my Mum’s hometown this summer and she and her family have let me borrow some of the documents that tell the story of his life. Another summer, when social distancing is less of a thing, I’ll record their parts of his story, too.

Since then, one of the things I have been doing is trying to knock the rust off my extremely nascent journalism training and consider what “the story” here actually is. Like, ok, I will collect a bunch of anecdotes and some facts and information about the past, but: what is the story.

I suppose I have long assumed that it will be somehow about the rather amazing things my grandfather did, especially his amateur athletics, for which he won quite a reputation and took home a variety of prizes. There’s good tales there, undoubtedly. But: is the story one of an athlete? I’m not certain.

He also went into the army during the Second World War, and especially in recent years, that’s very much the kind of story we like. Do we have a soldier’s story? Perhaps, and yet, my grandfather’s story there is not the heroic kind that gets made into movies or TV shows. He served in the 2^nd Canadian Mobile Laundry and Bath unit, providing clean uniforms and a chance to shower to soldiers in line units. Which, on a first impression: not very remarkable.

But even a little scratch below that surface and our story starts to change. First, it is more than a little remarkable for him to have done this to begin with. At this point, my grandfather had spend most of his life living in bush country, and there he was joining the military, travelling to another country and experiences that must have been entirely unlike anything he had ever yet seen. As it would have been for so many of those young people. Remarkable, all of them.

My grandfather would also tell his family how much it meant to soldiers to be able to get clean and have a change of clothing, and that he liked being able to do that for them. It isn’t the typical kind of heroism we tend to laud, but there’s much to admire in someone who took pleasure in bringing basic comforts to people who needed them. It also fits well with the character of a man who, though he was a fan of boxing, could never really take up the sport himself (and remember, he was a good athlete) because he didn’t like having to hurt his opponent. Not the typical protagonist of a story, perhaps, and yet – remarkable. Would we be better for praising this kind of heroism more frequently? I wonder if we might.

Then I opened up a little journal he kept while he was in the army. The first entry is from December 26^th, 1943. It reads: “Got up 0730. Very quiet day. Went for a run in evening, about nine miles (1 hour). Raining a little, dark night.” When I first read this out, my mother said, “Well that can’t be right.” But it’s written very clearly. It is right, and … it’s kind of amazing.

To put this in perspective a bit for non-runners, the distance I work on these days is 10k, which is a little over six miles. I figure I’m doing well when I have that time under an hour. My grandfather’s pace (assuming I’m doing the math right) would have been around a 4 minute 9 second kilometer. When I get under 5 minutes 30 I feel like I’m doing well.

This is not world-record stuff, or anything, but if you consider an amateur runner doing this for fun, at the end of a long day of work, it’s remarkable. I also don’t know what sort of gear my grandfather would have had, aside from the certainty that it would have been pretty basic compared to what I have at my disposal. Remarkable. Probably no-one other than my grandfather even knew it happened.

And I guess what I’ve decided the story is that my grandfather, at this point the young Sgt. J.W. Argo, is an example of the amazing, remarkable people that are around us all the time. Doing feats of athletics that many could never achieve, and most will never hear of. Providing simple kindnesses that society tends to forget. Simply doing things they might not have thought they were able to do. These are stories we tend not to hear, but are there when we look for them. Most of us will not run nine miles in an hour, but my guess is that everyone has an exceptional part to their story, that may go unwritten or unread, but is no less exceptional because of that.

What a world we would live in if we could keep that in mind a bit more often.

Thanks for reading.

Past Police

Some readers may know that in my day job I teach history, and that my background is in medieval history in particular. I deliberately don’t write about that much here in part because this is (supposed to be) a writing blog and in part because there are few things more tiresome than people who relentlessly drag every conversation back to their particular little area. And, when you do a PhD, you have a very particular little area.

However, with recent events, it seems to me that there may be a way that my particular little area is at least slightly relevant, so I’m dragging it out tonight. Because my PhD thesis, and most of the original research I have done, is on order and disorder in the medieval city. As I write this, there are a great many protests underway about racial injustices generally, but abuses of police authority and use of force by police in particular. There are many who are calling for an abolition of police forces as we know them, and many wondering how feasible this is or what alternatives we might have.

I’m sure I don’t have an answer to our modern questions, but what I looked at in the past may have some relevance. Very briefly, when I pursued medieval history for post-graduate studies, I knew I wanted to do research on medieval cities. I got interested in misbehaviour in the city during my MA (a friend suggest the title ‘Gosh those scamps’ for my thesis) and when I started my PhD research I didn’t know exactly where it was headed, the same broad field of order and disorder in the urban community was still very interesting to me. Skipping a great deal of angst: the question I eventually settled upon was, essentially: ‘how was order maintained in medieval London?’

By the late Middle Ages, London had a population of 50 or 60,000, making it a small town by today’s standards, but easily the biggest city in England at the time and a middling-sized city in Europe. It was not a ‘capital’ in the modern sense of the word, but it was England’s wealthiest and most important city, politically powerful, and under its charter with the crown, London largely ran its own affairs within the city limits. It did not have, by modern expectations, police.

The city did have its ‘scavengers’, responsible for maintaining the streets and taking precautions against fire, ‘rakers’ responsible for clearing garbage from the streets and obstructions from the water conduits, and beadles who reported public nuisances and disturbances to wardmote courts for the attention of an alderman. There were aleconners to verify that ale being sold in the city was of a suitable standard, and various other ward officers whose job it was to see that city regulations were being followed.

None of this relates directly to crime, however, and in terms of what a modern person would think of as ‘policing’, London had but two sheriffs who were responsible for arresting criminals, executing royal writs, and seeing to the execution of traitors, heretics, and felons, as well as presiding over one of several court systems found in the city. Assisting in them in their duties, they had only a few undersheriffs and ward constables. There was a coroner, whose duty it was to investigate the cause of deaths within the city, but there was nothing like a standing police force to detect crime and seize criminals. We find some mention of ‘watches’ being maintained by each ward (usually when the cost of doing so became relevant) but it seems clear that these were largely groups to keep the streets clear of nightwalkers after dusk and (in theory) defend the city should it be attacked. They were not police on patrol, alas for the ‘guards’ who inevitably appear in every city in every fantasy game ever created.

It can often sound to us as though that must have meant medieval London, and other medieval cities, were lawless and chaotic places where crimes went unpunished, but the men (and it was uniformly men) who ran the city would have been bitterly offended to hear such a judgment and indeed the evidence we have suggests that it would indeed be unfair. There would be a great many things that would seem strange to us in medieval London, but there was, basically, order.

So how was this done, without police? I won’t attempt to summarize the full argument of my thesis here (you’re welcome) but a big part of the answer is that order was primarily kept by the community. When crimes did occur, it was the responsibility of every citizen to help raise ‘the hue and cry’ – the (public, loud) identification of the crime and the criminal, and to aid in their pursuit and capture.

On a less dramatic and more day-to-day misbehaviour (of many many kinds) was kept in check by, basically, peer pressure. Neighbours could very easily become aware of any misdeeds a Londoner might commit, and they were encouraged to report these to various authorities including guilds, aldermen, and priests for correction. (People’s reasons for doing so were complex, but collective reputation, whether of a guild of artisans, neighbourhood, or city was a significantly important consideration)

More than that, though, and preventing many misbehaviours from ever happening: one’s individual reputation was a vital resource in medieval communities. No-one would enter into a business deal with someone of ill-repute, few people would hire them or rent property to them, few people would marry them. We think most transactions in the medieval city were exchanges of credit (rather than coin), and it would have been basically impossible to get credit if people thought you were a shifty rogue up to no good. If you did become involved in a court case, no-one would testify on your behalf, virtually guaranteeing the verdict would go against you. For people of poor reputation, survival in the city very quickly became at best difficult, at worst impossible, and to avoid that kind of desperation the evidence is that most people basically behaved as they were expected to by the community.

This is not to say that there was no crime – there certainly was – but very often the criminals were identified, and if they were not captured for punishment they would at least be forced to flee the jurisdiction, which from a London perspective was good enough. There are other obvious flaws that will probably quickly occur to anyone who thinks about this method of maintaining order in the community.

None of this is to suggest that we should try to go back to a medieval model, or that things were ‘better’ then. The point is that things were different, and that they worked that way for several hundred years, longer than our current system of policing has been in place. So, one thing we know is that alternatives are possible.

Sometimes that can be hard to see, when we’re immersed in our present. Things have been that way from what medieval people would have called ‘time out of mind’, and so it’s perhaps an easy step to go further and consider that they must always be that way, and that there is no alternative. Perhaps that we’ve found the best answer, or the only possible answer.

Someone in London, in 1525, would probably not have been able to imagine our current system of policing, or politics, or a great many things about our current society. They would not have been able to easily imagine things changing to be as they are. Of course now it’s obvious to us that the alternatives existed, and to us the changes had to happen, because they got us to where we are today.

The point is that we are not the end of the story. Change is possible, almost certainly inevitable. There are alternatives to all sorts of things that we take as givens in our society right now. People are suggesting these as we speak. Perhaps especially in our present moment more than any other, it behooves us to listen, consider the alternatives.

It’s clear we need to do better. Let’s embrace the opportunity.

Thanks for reading.