A Moreish Utopia

And now back to one of the default topics of this blog : philosophy ! Social philosophy, at any rate.

Anyone interested in social progress and ideal societies surely needs to read Thomas More's offering that gave the name to the whole concept. To be honest I was expecting something ludicrously and brazenly Christian, the whole project rendered null and void by More's devout belief that scripture would be the answer to everything. Maybe he'd have had everyone sitting around washing poor people's feet and massaging lepers all day, or something. 

Fortunately, it's nothing of the sort. It definitely has those overtones to it, occasionally loudly, but in some respects it's actually progressive even by modern liberal standards. Often I had to remind myself of a point that deserves to be specially highlighted : 

This man burned heretics. 

We'll see why that's so jarring with some of his proposals later on.

It's interesting to read the (contemporary) supplementary material that came provided with More's essay, which was hyperbolically promotional to the extent of absurdity. For example, the claim that More had surpassed even Plato in his mighty intellectual achievement is clearly bollocks; at best, Utopia is a sort of re-imagining of Republic with a few other ideas thrown in. In any case, having covered both Republic and Laws in some detail, I don't feel the need to do a great dissection of this one, as it would honestly just be a lot of repetition., Further, err, more...* More just has nothing fundamentally new to offer, no new philosophy or social insight beyond what Plato already came up with, despite the intervening ~1800 year gap and profoundly different social norms. 

* Very possibly the worst joke I've ever made. I'll see myself out.

If More did have any underlying strategy behind his reasoning, I suppose I would have to pick... pragmatism. Want a better educated populace ? Teach them more things. Want them to be better fighters ? Give them more military training. There's a little bit of Sun Tzu about the whole thing, with everything being treated with extreme prudence and common sense.

More's biggest downside is that he falls for the same trap as Plato. He often seems to think that there's really only one correct, ideal way to live, namely pontificating on philosophy and intellectual pursuits. At his worst, there's a sort of well-meaning bigotry to the project, the idea that the populace will be content to farm and read books all day, eating their food in stoic silence, and won't want to do anything too radical like play unintellectual games such as backgammon and tennis (which are listed in the same sentence as brothels) – let alone want any cosmetics or jewellery or fine clothes. 

But at his best, and he's often at his best, he's tolerant, warm, highly intelligent, egalitarian, even playful and silly. The translator notes it can often be difficult to tell when More was joking*, though the capital being the Invisible City on the Lackwater River on the Island of Nowhere would seem to be a pretty obvious example.

* One of the accompanying letters by Erasmus hints at the darker aspect of Moore's character. He fooled his first wife into thinking that bits of coloured glass were fine jewels to save on expenses, and married his second wife a month after her death.

Right then, what does More's vision of paradise look like ?

1) Work

More very much endorses one of the maxims of Henry V : flee idleness. The overall mood is best captured in modern terms as "human flourishing", the idea that people should have lives which are happy, meaningful, and productive all at once. Work, for More, is a major part of this. Anyone who is genuinely incapable of working should be supported by the community, but everyone else will need to be cajoled or forced into it. In Utopia there won't even be any real holidays, and though people might get permission to visit other places for the sake of it (though everywhere on the island is pretty much the same), even then they'd still be expected to do at least some work each day.

These negative aspects are, however, heavily offset. 

The authorities don't force citizens to engage in unneeded labour, since the Utopian social system has one overriding aim : so far as public needs allow, every citizen should be released for as long as possible from physical drudgery and should have the time available instead for the free exercise and improvement of mind and spirit.

Work in Utopia is therefore generally limited to about six hours a day. By "work" he generally means farming and other physical efforts. Of course there are councillors and administrators and academics (and a few religious devotees who do charitable activities), but their numbers are extremely limited, with these few being exempted from "work". Which is a bit weird coming from an academic like More, apparently convinced that intellectual accomplishment wasn't particularly useful. Simplicity and stability are preferred to progress and reform.

No kind of class system exists whatever. Whosever can meet the entrance requirements can become an academic (numbers permitting), and failing academics are sent back out to the farms. Utopia, like Republic, is a strict meritocracy, surely the only sensible sort of qualification system*. Furthermore, "bullshit jobs" are a big no-no. On the lack of work in his own world :

* Of course I looked into this pretty heavily a few years ago, and it's still baffling to me to see people objecting to meritocracies even in papers like the Guardian. Sure, they don't by themselves solve wealth inequality. But what's the alternative to letting the most qualified person do the job ? Nothing, that's what.

Then there are the priests and members of the religious orders (so-called) – so many and so idle ! Add in all the rich, especially the great landowners, popularly termed "gentry" or "nobles", plus their retinues, dregs of worthless soldiery.

All work in Utopia is to be directly productive. I sympathise heavily with More and Graeber that some jobs are indeed pointless; I doubt we can strip things back anywhere near as More would like, but I do think a lot could be automated out of existence or just avoided entirely. In some ways I'd go further than More and suggest we could and should automate a lot of manual labour too. 

Still, More's keen work ethic is very much tempered by giving everything a strict purpose, the furtherance of mental advancement being something like an end goal of the whole project. And though the Utopian workload is high, it ensures full employment and prosperity for all. More tries heavily to avoid short-term thinking, coming close to the Sam Vimes "boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness : Utopians can afford to spend heavily on infrastructure maintenance and repair because the recognise the long-term costs of doing only the bare minimum will outweigh the short-term savings.

2) Greed

Where I think More strays into purely wishful thinking is in economics. In Utopia everything is free because there's no money, but there are no luxuries available anyway. People take only what they need from "shops"; the superabundance of basic goods means taking more than this is pointless. The constant demand to work means that Utopia has a huge surplus of wealth for emergencies, which they spend without worry when the need arises. Strict social policies and education keep anyone from getting any capitalist ideas about accruing more wealth than absolutely necessary, with greed eliminated almost entirely (amusingly, one method of this is to give gold and fine trinkets only to children, explicitly treating them as childish things and shaming people who try and persist with them into adulthood*).

* One strange exception is the priesthood, seen as the elite of society, who uniquely are allowed ornamental clothing while everyone else gets something very plain and functional (almost to the point of being a national uniform). Why this exception should be made is unclear, and seems contradictory to the whole notion that wealth and status inevitably cause corruption.

And More really, really hates greed. He views it as one of the chief evils of society, singularly responsible for most of the problems of the world. A few short quotes will suffice :

I really think that, wherever there's private property and everyone uses money as the measure of everything, you'll almost nowhere find a society that's justly or successfully governed. 

And why, above all, are people so damnably insane as to revere a rich man almost like a god when they owe him neither money nor anything else ? Yet they know the rich chap to be so unscrupulous and grasping that, for surer than sure, they'll never see a single penny from all the money he's amassed for as long as he lives.

These landowners live lives of idleness and luxury. They're of no public benefit...they're actually a public menace. It takes just one man of insatiable greed – deadly blight on the nation ! – to decide to join up his fields... then his smallholders are evicted... they wander around as beggars, but even then they get thrown into prison as vagrants...

So Utopians live in common properties, each family living in a house which they're randomly assigned every ten years (presumably to prevent anyone having any chance of aggrandising "their" property out of vanity, leading to social stratification). It's all quite reminiscent of Bregman's awful "Human Kind", but at least More's vision isn't meant to be a serious claim that everyone would be happier living in a war-ravaged jungle.

More's approach to work may be fundamentally naïve but it's clearly well-intentioned and the basic sentiment of reducing work is a good one. He's dead right about greed. But his economic "solution"... well, even if we grant that it would actually work, at best it comes with a hidden cost which is extraordinarily high, as we'll see shortly.

3) Civil rights 

First a few words on daily life. Everyone in Utopia gets the same high standard of education, including women. Both genders are educated in warfare and wives are encouraged but not compelled to accompany their husbands on campaign*. While there is some level of compulsory military service for all, no-one can be forced to serve abroad against their wishes. More claims that the Utopians detest war, but even a casual reading reveals they have a distinctly imperial streak that reflects a strongly paternal, patriarchal view on More's part : Utopia is clearly the best, so other countries should be positively grateful to be brought within their sphere of influence.

* More doesn't view his Utopians as supermen. They have a technological edge over their neighbours but not an overwhelming advantage. They aren't invincible and can be routed in battle, but where they really shine is logistics : Utopia has enough wealth and organisational skill to eventually overcome any setback, and enough defences to make invasion of their own territory essentially hopeless.

Women get treated in a similar way. There's little in the way of actual cruelty or misogyny, but plenty in the way of male dominance. Brothels are, unsurprisingly, banned, as are all forms of prostitution : women are to be good, loyal housewives but men are similarly expected to have the utmost fidelity. Adultery and extramarital sex are punished severely. Divorce and remarriage are possible, but only with mutual consent and council approval. Divorce on grounds of a disfigurement is banned on grounds of needing to support your partner at a time of distress, which sounds again well-meaning but far from fully thought-out.

Perhaps the biggest difference from Plato is that there's absolutely no sense that people should only ever learn one job and stick to it. Quite the opposite : everyone, men and women alike, get the same basic education, but they're also free to attend higher lectures throughout their lives. These happen before dawn, apparently this being normal in More's day* ! More has a similarly elitist view of Plato of those suitable for ruling and research being few indeed in number, but he expects everyone to hunger for education and self-improvement. Not everyone can be a full-time academic, but everyone can be educated, and everyone is free to learn as many skills as they want. There aren't really even any standard "professions" in Utopia at all. There are jobs that need doing and people get them done.

* Though if I were More I would had made any lectures before 9 am strictly illegal. Look, man, you're designing a fantasy, and you want this to include 5 am lectures ???

One might wonder whether this encouragement of education might not lead to Utopians getting dangerous ideas. Here More is remarkably tolerant, at least religiously. Utopians are free to worship more-or-less however they like, provided they believe in some kind of deity. Even atheism is grudgingly permitted.

So the Utopians show no respect for someone so minded, nor do they entrust any civic office to them or put them in charge of any public service. People like this are looked down upon everywhere as inherently supine and useless. They're not subjected to any corporal punishment, though, as the Utopians are convinced that no-one can change what they think by an act of will. Equally, they don't use threats to make these people hide their views; nor do they countenance deception or lies, which they utterly detest as close to criminality. They stop people of this kind debating their views in front of ordinary folk, that's all. They permit, and actually encourage, such discussions in private with priests and men of intellect, in the conviction that their folly will yield to rational argument.

This sort of permission may be a particularly condescending variety of paternalism, but from a man who actually put heretics to death... it feels incredibly progressive.

While More can be something of a fuddy-duddy in banning backgammon, tennis, and prostitution all in the same breath, he doesn't share the Puritan belief that work should be the sum total of existence. Life should be enjoyable, it's just that his view of what's enjoyable is hardly liberal. At his most racy, prospective partners get to view each other naked before marriage, sex being a perfectly acceptable pleasure provided it's all above board; quite why marriage is so essential for recreational sex is nowhere stated. 

But even outside of the bedroom, More views those seeking hard work and suffering for its own sake as "totally insane". You're allowed to rest – Utopians get eight hours a night plus daytime naps – and do purely recreational games, it's just that these must be of the approved sort. Utopians, for example, love jesters, mistrusting anyone who doesn't like a bit of silliness.

So Utopia is a world where the inhabitants work hard but only for a purpose, and actively seek to minimise physical toil. In keeping with this, when suffering becomes unavoidable and unendurable, More is at his most astonishingly progressive :

When an illness is not only incurable but brings continuous distress and agony, a patient is seen as unequal to all life's activities, a trouble to others, an burden to themselves and outliving their own death. Then the priests and public officials encourage any sufferer to resolved not to harbour the disease or affliction any longer and, life now being a torment, not to put off dying; they have a good hope to bear them up, so let them leave this life that's become a prison and a bed of nails and either take themselves off or give others permission to hasten their departure... Those who are persuaded either end their lives by fasting of their own free will or are given release unconsciously while asleep. Those who are unwilling are not removed against their wishes nor do they suffer diminution of care.

Five hundred years later and we still haven't allowed those in terminal agony to end their suffering, citing as a concern that they will be encouraged to do so : a thing More views as actually a good thing.

4) Crime and punishment

The Utopian conceit that suffering is best avoided is not quite an absolute. There are some harsh punishments, most notably execution for those who repeatedly commit adultery (again, what exactly is supposed to be that bad about it is not stated). They take a very dim view of cruelty to animals but don't appear to have an outright ban; hunting is essential for food but they believe it stems from "an instinct for cruelty" which is "unworthy of free citizens". Burning heretics, I suppose, must have served a clear purpose for More, but this is still fascinatingly at odds with his professed ideals.

Laws in Utopia are few. Like Lord Shang, Utopians believe that complex laws won't be understood, but like Plato, they believe the best solution is the unfettered guidance of a ruling elite. Capital punishments are generally rare, reserved largely for re-offenders. Much depends on the individual civic officials. Such statutory punishments as do exist (for example bans on remarriage after adultery) can be forgiven by individual governors; other public crimes require ad hoc council judgement rather than following prescribed rules.

Now to give More his due, he recognises that crime is largely the result not of inherent, individual malevolence, but of systemic failings in society. He also recognises that, by direct consequence, harsh punishments simply won't work and aren't justified. When wealthy landowners evict their tenants, forcing them into homelessness and banditry :

Stop this expropriation by the rich, this virtual license for monopolistic exploitation. Fewer people should live without jobs... Unless you remedy these ills, you'll have no cause to boast of the way your justice system punishes thieving : it may sound good, but it's hardly either just or effective... all you're doing in punishing the thieves you've created yourselves !

Clearly prevention is better than cure. And Utopia has no prisons (or at any rate certainly none used as punishment devices). Instead, it has... slavery. Really, quite a lot of slavery – every family has a couple – with forced labour being the major punishment for pretty much everything. There's little sense of the sadistic about this : slaves aren't supposed to be "scared straight", and indeed it's possible to enlist as a slave as a foreign volunteer – and they're free to leave (so long as they leave Utopia) whenever they want, which is hardly a genuine form of slavery. Children of slaves are not automatically slaves, but in keeping with the imperialist tendencies, the Utopians do enslave prisoners they capture in battle.

This, then, is the dark side of paradise. There's much to admire in More's vision, even if in some respects it seems like a very dull sort of life. The price of that bland existence is forced slavery, justice dependent on the whims of an elite, a throttling of social and intellectual progress, and imperial colonialism.

---

Of course, only a fool would expect a complete social solution in manuscripts of the distant past; even Well's Utopia of barely a century ago has many aspects that now seem bafflingly strange. Perhaps that's a lesson for world-builders then, to concentrate more on the goal than the specific methods of implementation. All Utopias strive to solve the problems of their current day, and recognising what was problematic and the context of their solution may be more valuable than their actual suggested fixes.

Nevertheless, that still leaves much value in More. He proposes not to simply hope that people will become better if you punish them severely, but understands that they generally only fall to criminality due to necessity : prevention is understood to be the result of restricting the wealthy rather than tormenting the poor. Curtailing greed looks as necessary now as it did in More's day, if not more so... if wealth flows from the bottom, then crime flows from the top. More allows for a degree of liberalism and tolerance which is sometimes impressive even by today's standards (even if he can also be deeply conservative), allowing a right to die as a sacred as well as secular duty, and at least allowing religious freedoms if not exactly warmly embracing differing views. And he encourages free education for all and for its own sake, not in Plato's vision of simply trying to find the best rulers, but out of a genuine belief that education is an inherently good thing, that if we can't all be geniuses, we can at least reduce the number of stupid people. 

More's vision of paradise is hardly mine own. As well as its imperialist nature, Utopia is also built on slavery and stability in place of progress and justice. It's egalitarian to a fault and naïve in expecting everyone to buy in to its uniform vision of moral monotony. Nor does More's offering have anything to offer in relation to that other great social ill of our age : lies, deceit, and misinformation. Perhaps there's still scope for a Grand Duchy of Rhysyland after all.

Review : Henry V

Time for something a bit lighter.

Dan Jones being one of my favourite popular history writers, a signed copy of Henry V was an obvious "yes, actually I do know what I want for my birthday" item last year, which I've finally gotten around to reading. This isn't a book that needs a long discussion – if you want a detailed history of Henry V, you should bloody well read the dang book. My job, as I see it, is to extract the broader themes and tell you why they're interesting.

But first, the review bit.

Dan Jones is a master of blending the analytical with the page-turning narrative. And here he manages that rarest of things : a historical biography done right. While proceeding absolutely linearly and chronologically, he doesn't just set out what Henry did, but attempts an insight into why he did it. Foreknowledge of what happens next is never allowed to become a distraction, so the reader follows along with Henry (Jones here writes almost entirely in the present tense, a format which could easily be annoying but isn't) while being carefully guided towards Jones' conclusions. He sticks to this remit pretty strictly, not allowing it to become a wider discussion of the Hundred Years War but seeing things directly from Henry's perspective. Characters flit in and out as Henry himself encounters them : we don't get diverted onto tangents, and everything serves a narrative purpose.

Obviously, Henry's most famous achievement is the battle of Agincourt. Entire books have been written about this one incident. Personally I enjoyed Juliet Barker's book of the same name very much; her sequel Conquest is also a superb bit of military history. While Jones is the sort of person I can easily imagine running amok by gleefully describing military details of the campaigns, here he maintains a level of self-discipline worthy of Henry himself. His laser-like focus is absolutely fixed on Henry the man, not his war per se. We get plenty of detail on the tactics and logistics and battles themselves, but only when necessary, only with a purpose to providing an insight into Henry's character. The result is something absolutely gripping.

The main selling point for Henry enthusiasts is that fully half the book is given to his upbringing. Jones uses an approach which ought to be common-sense for history writers but sadly isn't : where there are gaps in the knowledge (and there are plenty), tell us how things generally went in these situations without making it sound like a definitively factual account of anything unique to Henry himself. Jones does this perfectly. Confidence in what young Henry was doing comes through very clearly but implicitly in the language used, being speculative when necessary and assertive where possible. Thus the narrative flow is unbroken; uncertainties are openly acknowledged without ever bogging it all down.

If anything, I'd have liked a bit more about the mechanics of Agincourt. Obviously this debate has rumbled on for some time, but I'd have liked Jones' own take on it. As it is, what we get is implicit : it was the longbow what won it. This ought to be obvious, so perhaps Jones is deliberately trying to avoid re-opening that rather dubious argument*. The only other (really trivial) thing I can find fault with is Jones' very surprising and un-needed dig at the The Last Duel :

* I know of at least one documentary which did some fairly extensive testing and found that the longbow efficacy just wasn't up to the standards of legend. There were any number of problems with this which I won't go into here.

... which made the 1386 battle... a ponderous meditation on the politics and ethics of twenty-first century sexual abuse.

Readers will know I loved both the book and movie so I find this slight against them to be jarring and strange. But, ultimately, forgivable : I give Jones' book a commendable 8/10. It's a solid, compelling yarn, enormously readable and intelligent, but – and this is no fault of the author – a discussion about one man can only ever teach you so much. In brief, Jones' has done about as good a job as is realistically possible here.

Things that have particularly stuck with me include Jones' favourable assessment of Henry IV. Here was an extremely accomplished general and diplomat, enormously well-travelled, who was beset by circumstance. He was given an impossible choice to either stand by his capricious, tyrannical and ineffectual monarch (Richard II – though Jones is careful to give credit where credit is due, and stops well short of painting him as unintelligent or monstrous) or to commit to the heinous crime of overthrowing the established order. Henry IV chose the latter. The problem for the medieval mindset was that this was always going to be the wrong thing to do, and from that moment on, he inevitably faced continuous uncertainty : if one king can be overthrown through force, why not another ? He was a weak king – but only because he'd been forced into a situation where there were simply no good options.

Not so for his son. Interestingly, what comes across firstly implicitly and later explicitly, is that Henry V could seek legitimacy by simply waiting for his father to die. All Henry IV had to do was not get himself murdered and die of natural causes, and nobody would much doubt the anointed prince as successor. It's a strange mindset : you're dad's a usurper, but you'll be legitimate when he's dead. Nevertheless, that's how it went.

The other really interesting thing for me was Jones' take on the Glyndwr rebellion. Most books on this paint a vivid and inspiring picture of Welsh nationalism. Jones' description is quite different, partly for his emphasis on Henry V's role in the campaign – where he cut his teeth in warfare – and partly for his assessment of the rebellion itself. The latter is often viewed as an essentially inevitable reaction to a century of English oppression following Edward I's conquest; certainly opportune, but nevertheless a deliberately nationalistic, patriotic endeavour that summons up the blood in every Welshman. 

For Jones this is heavily tempered. Glyndwr's initial squabble was over a petty border dispute, only becoming a fully-blown attempt at restoring Welsh independence as the situation changed. It did, however, evolve into a really serious threat to the Crown as Henry IV's wider situation went from bad to worse. But what we don't get much of is anything in the way of detail of the initially disastrous royal incursions into Wales, or Glyndwr's reputed (but utterly failed) counter-invasion. This is quite understandable, though, because Jones is focused not on the king but the prince.

Now I've always though of Henry V as essentially just mopping up the last remnants of the rebellion after Henry IV died, by which point the rebels were already reduced to scarcely more than bandits. Not so, says Jones – fighting the rebels was Henry V's first taste (as a young prince) of military command. Here he learned logistics* and siegecraft the hard way, suffering a rather gruesome injury (a crossbow bolt to the head) from which he barely survived. He also made many mistakes and had no small squabbles with his father. But while he came perilously close, he never went too far to apologise and recover. He took all the right lessons from his failures : financial, diplomatic, logistical, military. He had a fairly close to ideal upbringing, fraught with danger and risk, but firmly grounded in both practical and scholarly pursuits. He often learned the hard way, but learn he did – and without the Welsh rebellion, Henry V would not have become a famed military leader, let alone known as the "star of England" of Shakespearean history.

* Especially money. Henry was frequently but calculatingly theatrical, making grand gestures whenever he could spin either failure or success to his advantage. Thus he could convey the appearance of appealing to spontaneous ideology and charisma but from a well-planned position. This was a man who could both give a stirring speech to rally the troops but also prepare the treasury to deal with the enormous expenses of said inspired troops. In taking military risks, here too we see calculation at work. Henry would risk both himself and his men but only when the cost of not doing so was, for his goals, unacceptably high.

It must be said that part of his education was in learning to be absolutely cruel and ruthless. He issued his first capital sentence at age 14 by burning a heretic alive. Famously he ordered the execution of prisoners at Agincourt, but much worse than this to me was refusing to let the non-combatants escape a town under siege in his later French campaign. Jones paints a truly dire picture of this with women giving birth and dying outside the walls, their babies hoisted back into the town only to starve to death. To me this is far less justifiable than killing prisoners, a potentially deadly threat, during battle. He could have simply let the women and children go and still taken the town.

Why didn't he ? Not out of malice, says Jones, not sadism but calculation. He needed to send a message to the French that they couldn't keep their own subjects safe. He needed to be seen as cruel and dangerous so that's the mantle he assumed, just as he would whenever he ordered executions. In this, says Jones, he did no more than what the standards of the day demanded; he made, as Jones says, the system of medieval kingship work by following procedures correctly, rather than trying to reform the model of ruling itself*. And so an ideal medieval king should be kind and generous to his subjects but merciless to his enemies, and – quite rightly in my view – judging such a person by our own standards is a pretty silly thing to do :

* This will either be extremely appealing or contemptible depending on your point of view; for my part, having naturally small-c conservative tendencies, the idea of making things work without resorting to reform (and Henry was certainly no reformer !) definitely has at least some level of merit. The argument over whether a good ruler is also a good reformer is possibly the most interesting aspect, albeit largely implicit, of the whole book.

Henry's contemporaries saw in him a paragon of Christian, knightly virtue and the living embodiment of traditional kingship. They perceived – rightly – a ruler who made the systems of English government work as they were supposed to without resorting to novelty or swindling the system. They saw a defender of religious orthodoxy and a severe but consistent disciplinarian who seldom acted rashly or unpredictably and usually kept his word. They saw a master of war, who learned from his mistakes and proved, until his final illness, freakishly hard to kill.

Yet in the view of a more recent historian, Henry was 'a deeply flawed individual', a misogynist, a religious fundamentalist, a reckless spender of other people's money, and a second-rate military commander. In this view, Henry was 'one of the cruellest and most cold-hearted kings that England has had'... His golden reputation is based on nothing more than the inconvenient fact that people at the time seemed to like that sort of thing. 

There is, famously, no accounting for taste.

The final point I'll make is a disagreement of Jones with Barker's Conquest. She concluded that while Henry was indeed a great leader (you'd have to be properly crackers to disagree with that), his ambition to take the French crown was what ultimately doomed the campaign. It was unworkable and a goal set by, if not arrogant ambition, then at least a miscalculation. For Jones, it's unclear if it really was unworkable, or if Henry would really have persisted with his same goals and strategies when France eventually rallied. But more to the point, he didn't set this objective out of hubris. He did it partly because his diplomatic negotiations failed, with the French refusing to respond to his earlier, much more modest, demands. But also in part he went for the jugular because there was no better moment to do so : France was as weak as it would ever be, as his second, blazingly successful campaign attests to. 

Had he not died, or his son been older and less of a dullard when he did, it might just have worked. What we would have got, says Jones, is something more like an Empire : two distinct kingdoms with a shared king but not a shared parliament or culture. Interesting but surely unworkable; without a cultural sense of loyalty, it would surely be all too easy for one side to decide they wanted their own king, thankyouverymuch. 

Was it unworkable though ? Jones says that Henry had a habit of succeeding in what was considered improbable or impossible... the problem with kings, of course, is you don't know who you'll get next. Indeed, just as Henry gave way to weak successor, so the French king gave way to an altogether stronger ruler. Maybe Henry V could have made a double-kingdom work for a while, but I doubt it would have been much of a permanent solution. But, I guess we'll never know.

Review : Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic (II)

Welcome back to the concluding part of my review-summary of Chantry Westwell's Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic. Last time I looked at some of the themes that emerged from the stories contained in this highly illustrated selection of retellings. But being a hugely visual work, I think it's also important to look at at least some of the art on offer : that too can tell us something about the medieval mind. This being a mainly text-based blog, I've tried to link to the images (the same as I found in the book, wherever possible) rather than embedding them in the post.

2) The Images

Keith Thomas noted that the medieval conception of time shaped their art. Few technological developments had yet occurred that had caused any really radical societal changes, and thus the view of history was largely one of constancy. Hence they had no issue with depicting scenes of Troy as a medieval castle populated with knights in plate steel armour and princesses wearing wimples, or even (in at least one image) the city being bombarded with cannons. This idea is transformative for examining the images : immediately one realises that just because a painting looks like yet another a medieval battle, it might very well be depicting something entirely different.

I rather doubt if this explains all such images, however. There are occasional exceptions in which different times and (especially) places are depicted more realistically, and clearly scholars of the time had studied ancient literature in detail. It seems surprising that they wouldn't have been aware that architectural and clothing styles had changed over time... after all, you don't need to reshape your entire conception of reality to figure out that people sometimes like to wear different sorts of hats.

Another possibility is the intended audience. Written for the elite, both the stories chosen and the way they were illustrated almost always contained an agenda. There were radically different attitudes to cultural appropriation, with Henry VIII deliberately having himself depicted (rather ludicrously) as the Israelite King David*. I would guess also that making the images familiar to the audience would have made the stories more accessible : people could understand a castle well enough, but a Babylonian-style fortified city might have left them more confused than anything else.

* Perhaps not that radically different though, given the whole A.I. Trump-Pope fiasco... and I've seen a lot of incredibly cringe-worthy left-wing American art depicting Bernie Sanders et al. as improbable superheroes too. Insulting visual imagery of politicians is common enough in Britain but vainglorious promotional material like this would be shot down in flames.

Certainly the accuracy of the images was hardly the artist's main concern. To an extent this is understandable given the fantastic nature of the tales they preferred to illustrate, of which virtually all (in this book at least) are replete with magic and monsters. In fact I think there's not a single example in the book not having at least some supernatural or other-worldly aspects. I suppose if you really do believe that dragons and enchanted swords are real enough – and they routinely used magic in their own everyday lives – then omitting this from fiction wouldn't have made any sense. So the stories may seem fantastical and escapist to us today, but they wouldn't have been received in quite the same way by the original audience. Some of them were definitely written and understood purely as entertainment, but there seems to have been no bias whatever against monsters and magic as serious literary devices

Even so, the artistic style is usually just that : stylised, not naturalistic. As this nice little article points out, there are many reasons for this, and it doesn't necessarily imply the artists were unskilled... especially given that much of the art here is from marginalia rather than full-sized paintings. What's strange to modern eyes is that the level of detail varies tremendously. Often the decorative borders are bursting with intricate, immaculate, highly abstract patterns, whereas the main piece is simple and plain in comparison (when combined with the the delicate calligraphy, the overall effect is usually one of striking beauty even when the main image is very silly). These are often quite literally iconic, with their subjects immediately clear to the eye. Perspective is totally ignored in favour of making the content instantly clear and comprehendible in a brief glance. Function over form, I suppose.

But there are some choices where you still just have to wonder why the hell they did that. Stylistic choices don't explain, for example, seven-headed dragons which very clearly have eight heads*, or supposed giants being depicted as normal-sized people. Or vice-versa, those cases where George's famous dragon is barely large enough to eat a pair of socks, much less devour a virgin (admittedly this is more forgivable when it comes to statues, as long as George himself is made to a respectable size). Or why Guy of Warwick has a noticeable but quite typical hunch, or why so many medieval faces are absolutely passive and expressionless – which is especially strange considering there are no small number of incredibly derpy-looking animals**.

* If the one on the tail doesn't count, then I'd like to know why.
** I note in that one the derpy stag but also that one of those horses is clearly planning something. 

To some extent this can only be pure silliness. My favourite example included here is the man with a rooster up his backside who's blowing a rabbit out of a trumpet; of course there are many more famous examples of knights fighting snails and the like. More subversively there's a case in which in the illuminated letter, monks are singing at a lectern, but the illustration below – in a direct and unmistakable comparison – has a rooster at a podium singing to a fox ! Once again any idea of the medieval world being one of perpetual religious triumphalism and seriousness is shown as false, presumably arising from the stricter sort of monks (history after all being written by, ultimately, the writers). And yes, there are also medieval dick picks, although these seem to be more designed to horrify or amuse rather than tantalise the ladies*.  

* I imagine no small number of female readers immediately sympathising with medieval writers.

Not everything can be silliness though. It seems unlikely that medieval authors would deliberately try and make the apocalypse look amusing*, leaving the extra-headed dragon something of a mystery (along with giant locusts that look like horses with human heads**). Some stylistic choices are easy enough to understand, like combining multiple parts of a story in a single image*** due to limited space – this also helps explain why they didn't care about perspective much. Even in more naturalistic images, colour was used to draw associations, such as in the case of George's red cross and the red of a damsel's dress. Clearly the artists generally knew what they were doing. Often, skin is depicted as unnaturally pale, including the Moors – even when they're understood to be, well, not Caucasian. 

* At the very least, I never heard of any humorous Crucifixion imagery, which would surely be the equivalent of Holocaust jokes today.
** This is not the same image in the book, so apparently this interpretation of locusts was common.
*** My favourite is the example of St Margaret shown in the lower-left corner of an image from the Huth Psalter. Here she emerges from the dragon's carcass and simultaneously punches his reincarnated demon-form, making her look ultra bad-ass.

So many strange-looking aspects are definitely not due to lack of skill; skill levels could vary, of course, but surely not to this extent. And artists certainly could do realistic horses and naturalistic lighting when they wanted to. Given that books and art were largely for the elite, presumably most of those tasked with illustration must have known what they were doing... although in the case of elephants and other exotic animals, certain misunderstandings are inevitable. Which leaves the routinely passive expressions, pale skin, strange poses, and bizarre proportions all the weirder. Sure, they're "stylistic choices", but what does that mean ? Why do things this way in particular ?

Quite honestly I've no idea. Depictions of giants as just large, well-dressed people (rather than loincloth-clad ogres) makes sense, and a sense of fun might partly explain devils with flamethrowers and a monstrous sea-going goose (sadly I could find neither of these images online). A deliberate sense of the weird – the humorously creepy – might fit for devils and giants with faces on the knees and groin... but again all this surely only gets us so far. I can only shrug and say "but that's what makes it interesting".

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This enormous diversity of styles and mixed messaging is part of the appeal of books like this. Some of it is as shallow as a puddle, some of it – both the visual art and the stories depicted – has dangerously hidden depths. Some aspects are timeless, some are lost to history : parts of European culture which now feel alien and strange. There are endless visual details I haven't covered and doubtless ones which I haven't even noticed.

After writing the first part of this post, I had my doubts about whether I really wanted to conclude that the medieval world was such a cosmopolitan melting-pot of diversity. Did I actually want to claim the existence of a sort of woke medievalism ? 

Not really. Certainly, again picking up a point from Keith Thomas, it would be easy to go too far with this. The era was hardly one a typical Guardian reader would approve of. A multitude of pagan imagery and mythological retellings certainly doesn't mean that every aspect of non-Christian teachings were widely approved of, or that medieval readers took away the same messages that we do. They did burn heretics, denounce witches, and wage religious war, after all.

Perhaps a better lesson is that it's important not to paint the era with too broad a brush. Yes, they had a distinctly Christian culture that was a very much more important aspect of their daily lives than it is now. But did not make most of them religious fanatics and it certainly didn't make them homogenous. Within their own societal norms they were every bit as diverse and human as we are. They could be cruel and crude, vain and vulgar, but also tolerant, playful, and extremely silly. They could dedicate enormous amounts of work to the tiniest and most irrelevant of details or make bold and unjustified sweeping statements at the drop of a hat.

To answer the classic question, "why does medieval art look like that ?", then, surely has to begin with acknowledging that there is no single "that". If art imitates life, then the array of styles and subjects of the medieval era surely show one which was both intriguingly similar to our own but also captivatingly different. Theirs was not the same world as ours, a realm of miracles and monsters, but also of a subtle complexity that's barely comprehensible today. The safest conclusion I can make is that if you're into medieval history, this book is a worthwhile treat for your collection.

Review : Dragons, Heroes, Myths and Magic (I)

I saw Chantry Westwell's Maidens or Monsters ? in a bookshop and immediately wanted it. But then I found she'd done a similar effort, replete with beautiful medieval illustrations on almost every page, on frickin' dragons and I immediately wanted that one more.

Dragons, Heroes, Myths & Magic : The Medieval Art of Storytelling is near-impossible to find in hardback. Fortunately the paperback edition is abundant and of such physical quality that I didn't feel I'd missed out on anything. From the British Library, this is a excellent coffee-table piece but one you can also read without feeling self-indulgent. You'll buy it for the pretty pictures, but stay for the description and analysis.

Westwell writes in almost entirely neutral tones with the utmost clarity. Her text largely serves to explain the story behind the chosen pictures, both the original (often mythological) tales and how they were variously interpreted by the medieval audience. This she does superbly well. The only thing I felt was lacking was much in the way of the practicalities of how the art was generated and an analysis of the visual style : the classic question, "why does medieval art look like that ?" being hard to avoid. To be fair, the book is relatively hefty for its 360-odd pages even in paperback, so adding in even more is probably asking too much. Still, a note about the size of the images known – just to convey the sense of detail that bit better – would have been nice.

There are a couple of minor points which made me just a little bit skeptical, however. Westwell claims that the story of Beddgelert was Irish but set in Wales. This is a story I've known since childhood, but never have I heard of an Irish origin and nor can I unearth any other references to such a thing – despite extensive searching with both Google, ChatGPT and DeepSeek (they don't even hallucinate such a notion). Similarly, the claim that the first recorded elephant in Britain was in the medieval era omits the rather famous story of the Emperor Claudius riding one to impress (or oppress) the hapless locals. 

But these are two minor niggles in a 360 page book. I could try and give it a rating, but somehow that feels inappropriate. Westwell aims for breadth rather than depth, but taken as a whole this gives quite the insight into the medieval mind. She lets this come through implicitly in the stories and images, rather than being an overtly analytical work. The final result is something captivating, and if you're looking for a glimpse behind the curtain, this is a book for you. At last something that explains what so many of those fantastic, bizarre, hideous, beautiful medieval illustrations actually meant ! Huge kudos to the author for that, and I've got Maidens ready to read in due course.

Why does this work so well ? As with all examination of past fiction, stories matter. Stories are an insight into people's hopes, their dreams and their fears. They show how they thought the world worked, how they thought it should be, and what they were desperate to avoid... sometimes all at once. Both the differences and similarities to our own perspective are fascinating. There are moments of uncanny similarity and aspects which are unintelligibly alien. Coupled with the visual imagery the effect is only enhanced : the graphic depictions can clarify or confuse in equal measure. To try and understand, even if only to a small degree, the world views of the people who lived in an age of dragons and death, fire and fountains, is a thoroughly rewarding experience that goes far beyond the political or military histories of the era.

Summarising this one is difficult. The stories (and Westwell's commentary) are interesting in themselves, but so too, independently, are the artistic choices of the images. I've gone for a two-part approach, first looking exclusively at the stories and then next time attempting to offer some artistic commentary on the images.

1) The Stories

One thing that comes across almost immediately is how many of these are from the Greek or Roman era, with a smattering of tales from other times and regions beyond medieval Europe itself. This is very far from the popular image of medieval fundamentalists; as Erasmus pointed out, it would be absurd to reject wisdom just because of its pagan origin. Of course there were zealots aplenty, then as now, but most ordinary people had no problem enjoying the earlier stories – or even inventing new ones set in similar pagan worlds of gods and monsters.

For example, the "nine worthies", the great and the good according to the medieval scholars, included three Christians, three Jews, and three pagans. Compared to the popular image of every medieval person being a witch-burning fanatic, this all looks really rather inclusive, even progressive. Or consider the romances of Alexander the Great, a sort of Alexandrian Expanded Universe about what would have happened had he not turned his army around and kept on exploring/conquering, to the very limits of the sea and the sky... or even to northern Europe, where he helped sort out the chaos of early Britain. One of his attendees goes on to create a semi-Utopian realm which admittedly becomes monotheistic, but magical, distinctly pagan deities abound beyond its borders.

The point is, the medieval mindset had no problem whatever with incorporating pagan thinking into its fiction (and indeed into everyday life). Monotheistic Church doctrine as an all-consuming way of life... well, it just didn't happen.

Which is not to say that Christianity had no influence at all. For example, whereas the Amazons of ancient Greek legends were subversive renegades that went against the established social order, Westwell says that the medieval authors preferred them to be chaste and virtuous images of womanly perfection. Such an attitude was found elsewhere too. The unicorn might have been seen as a symbol of purity and strength, but the Holy Grail – which can only be obtained by those of a truly noble heart – shared more than a little of its character*, but with a distinctly Christian bent.

* Interestingly, the grail story of Percival begins in an almost identical way to that of notorious Welsh git Peredur. But whereas Peredur encounters a castle in which dinner is served alongside a bloody lance and a decapitated head (much to everyone's dismay), in the Percival story the grail is also present and the symbolism made obvious. No such explanations are forthcoming in the Mabinogion; I suspect I should re-read that but in an edition with plenty of expert commentary.

Other cultural influences are also evident. You'd be hard pressed to read the Trojans as abject villains in the Iliad, but you'd also find it tough to see the Greeks as being depicted in a bad light either. For medieval writers the situation had changed. Many myths had grown up around the Trojan survivors fleeing to found both Rome and Britain, so, despite the reverence for ancient Greek thinkers, now some of their greatest heroes were viewed with much more skepticism (especially, for some reason, the long-suffering Odysseus, who it seems didn't even get a break in his literary afterlife).

Moreover, thinking was far from homogenous. Alexander may have been one of the Nine Worthies, but that didn't stop Dante from depicting him deep in hell in a boiling river of blood for his warmongering crimes, or from others from declaring him a tyrant for imprisoning Darius' family (which seems a hell of a stretch given the standards of the time*). Then there are things like the Roman de la Rose, a bizarrely childish story that ends in blatant misogyny and overtly sexual allegory**; contrast that with Christine de Pizan's City of Ladies, chock-full full of advocacy for greater rights for women. Likewise the infamous story of Lancelot and Guinevere, containing its tantalising mixture of a knight par excellence who sinks to treachery out of love. Different writers chose to highlight different aspects of the story at different times, with the Mabinogion omitting the tediously boring (or at least hugely overdone) adultery bits altogether. 

* It also seems strange to me for Dante to put Caesar's murders in hell, given that the man was far more a tyrant than Alexander ever was.
** But also with a philosophical bent, musing on man's place in the natural world and discussing issues like predestination. Andrew Tate, take note.

While a good chunk of the stories here are Greco-Roman in origin, some are overtly Christian, including Bible stories. And I have to say that the stories as told here are far, far more interesting than the boring moralising sermons they taught us in school. Take David and Goliath, for instance. In school all we get is a poor little shepherd who kills a giant and that's it. We aren't told that he's previously killed lions with his bare hands. We certainly aren't told about he pervs his sexy future wife in the bath and has her husband killed ! Nor did we get anything of Judith, who dressed like a slut in order to slay the invading Assyrian king. All we ever got were figures of unblemished moral perfection, simple tales for simple people... here are stories altogether more complex and more interesting. No wonder Christianity had more appeal in the medieval age : they actually made it fun.

The other much more interesting bit of the Bible that they omitted from school completely was Armageddon, a crime for which I will never forgive them*. Missing this out from school assemblies is a bit like watching True Blood and skipping the sex scenes, or indeed the movie Armageddon but skipping all the action sequences... Anyway, it's full of multi-headed dragons, locusts the size of horses, demons that spawn frogs as evil spirits from their mouths and weird creatures galore. There is, of course, a heavy Christian dressing to all of this, with (bizarrely) Christ himself playing a crucial role in bringing it all about. But there are also many similarities to Norse myth, especially the series of escalating battles preceded by plagues – all followed by the descent of a New Jerusalem. At the very least, this battle between gods – emphasis on the plural, for this does all seem like very half-hearted monotheism – and monsters must have made converting the Norse relatively easy. The obvious difference is that in Armageddon the existing gods win (though you have to wonder why on earth a benevolent, omnipotent deity would allow such a thing to happen at all) whereas in Norse culture the outcome was at best less clear**. Nor has Armageddon usually been such a central part of Christian myth in the way that Ragnarok was to the Norse beliefs, though of course the earlier Christians probably got much more of all these crazy monsters than 20th century British schoolchildren did.

* Although obviously if you were unfortunate enough to have this taught by someone who actually believes in this nonsense as literal truth, you have my sympathies.
** In the previous Norse books I've looked at, the commentators and authors have added that the regeneration after Ragnarok might have been a post-Christian addition. I wonder if it isn't more the other way around, with Revelation drawing on earlier pagan ideas instead.

There are much lighter stories too, of course. One that deserves to be much more widely known, I think, is Guy of Warwick : a sort of middle-England Hercules whose multitudinous exploits include killing the huge Dun Cow, ten yards long and six yards wide, but also adventuring far and wide to win the woman of his heart's desire only to abandon her after a few months. Like Celtic stories, the motivations are often hard to follow, and his ending (variously bittersweet or outright tragic) doesn't fit much with modern-day storytelling techniques, which only serves to add to the fascination. Or the voyage of St Brendan, a wonderful story which is a sort of cross between Dante's Inferno and Homer's Odyssey; as with Guy of Warwick, motivations are largely overlooked and even the purpose of the journey is nowhere clearly stated.

Some of the tales are simply weird and wonderful. There's a story that Richard the Lionheart, for example, earned his epithet not simply by being as brave as a lion, but by plunging his hand down a lion's throat and tearing out its heart. Elsewhere lions are used in strange allegorical pseudo-natural histories : the lion's tail, says one, hides his tracks as Christ hid his divinity; lion's cubs, claimed another, were born dead but resurrected by Christ.

About the titular dragons there are not so many as I would like, but then I'd be happy if the whole book was nothing but dragons. What there is is interesting enough though. Besides the many-headed dragons of the apocalypse, there are various others (in minor roles) littered throughout the book. Westwell notes that the dragon underwent a critical evolution throughout the medieval period, beginning as enormous worms and serpents that fought with elephants, and ending as the fire-breathing winged reptiles that dominate modern depictions. Sizes varied considerably, from crocodile-sized (or even smaller, maybe only the size of a large dog) to horse or elephant-sized beasts.

The story of Saint George obviously gets a more detailed look-in. I noted when reviewing Penguin's Book of Dragons that George's threat not to kill the dragon unless the townspeople converted to Christianity as being distinctly... un-Christian in its messaging. Westwell's retelling contains this detail but she doesn't dwell on it. Instead, oddly in my opinion, she focuses instead on the king's offer to sacrifice himself in place of his daughter as being somehow surprising : "we are not told why he, and indeed the other parents, do not give their own lives and allow their children to live". I don't see why that wouldn't be a simple sense of self-preservation, and in the case of the king it would seem grossly irresponsible for him to throw his life away. The important thing is the anguish and regret; that people in such a situation would say they'd rather die but not actually choose to do so is, I think, a hugely realistic and compelling detail.

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What do we learn from all this ? The playful inventiveness of the medieval mind, the enormous creative power and tolerance towards other beliefs all come forth in abundance. These people were no bunch of god-bothering fanatics : they were silly, explorative, funny, thoughtful, ordinary people living in what to them were ordinary times. They were far from a monolithic block but had diverse beliefs and disagreed sometimes on the most serious issues. Sometimes they killed each other in huge numbers for petty and stupid reasons; at other times they could be forgiving, welcoming, and liked nothing more than a silly joke and a big drink. Centuries later, perhaps not that much has changed.

That concludes this little review of the stories Westwell selected. As before, this reinforces my growing belief that Christianity's professed monotheism is essentially a sham – but shifts me away from the view of it being a wholly bland, goody-two-shoes bunch of happy praying people saying nothing of any real interest. Here are stories which are much more interesting than that, full of sex, violence and monsters, sometimes all at once. Here also is a religion wrestling with uncertainty about the future. It does, of course, have a distinctive flavour; it is not quite another pagan cult with unusual trappings : the moralising aspect of the stories is still front and centre in a way not found in most pagan stories at all. But strip that away, allow the stories to break free of their intended moral pronouncements, and what emerges is something far more complex and interesting.

Next time, in what will hopefully be a much shorter post, I'll try a different approach altogether and look at the imagery on offer, from the intricately beautiful abstract details to the bizarre nudity and derpy animals lurking in the background.