Review : Unruly (I)

David Mitchell's Unruly : A History of England's Kings and Queens has been on my "I'd quite like to read that" list for some time. Finally, mission accomplished. As the popular comedian I most strongly identify with, this one was an obvious choice.

Incidentally, should you prefer to hear from the man himself without reading the whole book, he gave a nice interview about in on History Hit, which is now available on the rest of YouTube. You can skip this post entirely and just watch that if you want, I don't mind.

Anyway, the book is very good. It's clear that Mitchell has read most of the same books that I have, so I can't say I learned too much about history from this. As an overview of the thousand years c.500 – 1500 AD though, it's excellent. It's extremely readable, obviously very funny, and surprisingly analytical. There was a lot more big-picture thinking going on than I expected, rather than just being a potted hilarious historical romp going king by king. I mean, it does have that as well. But Mitchell tries to identify what medieval rulers needed to do more generally to make a success of things, and he goes well beyond merely regurgitating the popular histories. You get genuinely new analysis here, not just Dan Jones doing stand-up.

By and large, the balance of jokes/anecdotes/history is darn good. Only in the case of Cnut, where Mitchell can't help but making cunt jokes instead of describing anything terribly serious, does this become a bit irritating. I get the temptation, and I don't mind the cunt jokes, it's just that the balance is off. He also doesn't really give much of a sense of how much time has passed per monarch, but this is really quibbling. As a book, I'm giving it 8/10.

Quite honestly... and this may be a crime to say... I thought it was a lot better than professional comic historian Terry Deary's latest effort. Sorry Terry !

I'd certainly like a sequel, but this isn't likely to happen. He ends with Liz I, after which the monarch's power was significantly diminished and their history becomes more soap opera and less high politics. Mitchell doesn't really want to go any further because this would be a different challenge, and as we'll see, he views medieval monarchs as something entertaining but not the figures of history he's actually most keen on. Maybe we can look forward to a different history book from him at some point though.

I don't think I feel the need to go into a detailed review of this. I'd rather just get on with – unusually for me – a listicle of David Mitchell's Top Tips For How To Be A Successful King. But there are a few things that don't fit into this sort of categorisation that I really think I should get out of the way first. If I don't, I might explode or something. 

Listicle 1 / 2 : The Things Which Aren't About Being King Which I Found Quite Interesting

It's Good To Be the King ?

Michell has an understandable love–hate relationship with his subjects (can kings be subjects ?), who were indeed a bunch of thugs. Still, it feels a bit harsh to say that Henry II and Edward III never really achieved anything comparable to Nelson Mandela or whatnot... I mean, they didn't, but they were also living in a totally different age, so they also simply couldn't. It's also a bit mean to call Matilda a twat for waging a pointless war but not William I for doing exactly the same thing, or for that matter Harold. May as well say that Harold should have just given up and handed William the keys to the kingdom.

The odd thing is that Mitchell by and large totally gets this, refusing to judge the past by the standards of the present. Quite right, too ! But it then seems a tad unfair to say that they weren't as important as, say, Shakespeare, and somewhat nihilistic to say that "it's all pointless in the end" because the achievements of one were often undone by the next. Mitchell is caught between genuinely admiring them by their own standards and hating them from his own. Which does at least lead to some hilarious outbursts*, but seems to miss the quite valuable points he makes about how leadership works. As we'll see next time, I think plenty of these remain more relevant today than they we might want them to.

* Norman propoganda against Harold being unsuccessful, Mitchells suggests that "they should have just said he was a paedo". The conquest ? "A moderately major thing but it would have been nicer if it hadn't happened". "Allowing good men to do nothing is the purpose of civilisation", and on controversial views more generally, "I am passionately committed to whatever it is you already think". Sensible bloke, David Mitchell.

He also notes that the actual desire to be in charge was weird, and I'm fully on board with this. As he says, if you're in charge, you get the blame. Far better to take the approach of modern political leaders : be the person who appoints people to make the decisions and then blame them when they get it wrong. Absolutely ! In fact I'd go further. I cannot for the life of me understand people who want to be in charge at all; I, for one, would like to avoid having other people telling me what to do, but this is totally orthogonal to any impetus to instead be the one bossing people about myself.

And while Mitchell is dead right that sometimes raw humanity speaks to us across the centuries, it's hard to see anything of basic human warmth in the "love" between Edward II and Piers Gaviscon... sorry, Gaveston, that's Mitchell's fault. No, they were both abusive cunts and it's hard to see anything remotely heartwarming or romantic about it. But then this is classic Mitchell, saying stuff that makes a lot of sense only to suddenly throw out something where my only response is "Say what now ?".

Lastly, an interesting parallel for British contemporary politics. Everyone was sick to the back teeth of the unbearable Richard II. The problem was that the usurper Henry IV over-promised on how he'd do a better job, but far worse was that the populace now demanded not just improvement but perfection. The result was pointless rebellions at the drop of a hat which only made the job all the more difficult; had they just accepted the change, things would probably have been alright. They went from a total loser to someone half-decent, but they ended up buggering any improvements they might have gotten.

In short, it's good to be the king, but only when circumstances align really quite precisely. The rest of the time it's a pretty thankless and shitty job. Better than being a peasant, to be sure, but that's a very low bar.

Terminology Problems

Refreshingly, Mitchell doesn't give a shit about historians silly quibbles over the Dark Ages or the Anarchy or the Plantagenets, saying that they were dark and it was anarchy (but they weren't actually flowers, so that one doesn't work as well). It doesn't matter that they didn't call them this at the time :  that's what we call them now, so let's get on with it. Admittedly, this is somewhat weakened when he points out that some of the earliest Dark Age poetry is sophisticated and melancholy, hardly the writing of a barbarian. But even so, a label's a label, like how quibbling over "slaves" versus "enslaved" seems to me to be really a waste of breath fighting a truly pointless culture war*.

* Also the word "moron" has some rather unsavoury origins in eugenics, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop using it.

A tangentially-related issue is that he's unafraid to pick a side, saying, "I reckon I've got the right to enjoy history in whatever way I like". Indeed ! And as he says, historians pretending not to have picked a side "are more misleading in an insidious way, because they definitely will have done, even if they don't know it". That's been my view for ages : better to just declare where you stand than pretend you're not standing anywhere. Or if you really are sitting on the fence, you can tell us that too, but that's not the same as being truly objective. That's just knowing that you can't decide who your favourite is, not that you're completely dispassionate. 

Religion : Don't Blame God

Mitchell doesn't think religion was the cause of much or any of the Dark Age violence, because this was happening anyway. At the same time, while there were a lot of devout believers as well as cynics and hypocrites, religion totally failed to stop the violence. Wacky ideas that kings were divinely-appointed bullies wasn't what made them become bullies, but it had exactly no impact in their bullying. Even when they started to really believe it, the Christian stuff about being nice to each other rarely actually overruled human nature. If a king wanted to chop someone's head off, then "thou shalt not kill" was hardly going to stop them from some impromptu anatomy lessons.

He also describes early religious belief, rather nicely, as about not merely words on a page or going to Church every Sunday, but "the underlying truth of existence". And this, I think, does encapsulate something important. There are a lot of caveats to this, not least because the variations are extreme (this is definitely not a complete definition of religion !), but it has a tantalising explanatory power. It helps tremendously in explaining why people got so very cross about seemingly trivial details of procedural theology.

That is, as someone who isn't a complete moron, it's hard not to get angry at anti-vaxxers or Flat Earth conspiracy nutcases. The latter shouldn't really matter, as it doesn't actually impact my own life in any way. But when you study for years and years and someone simply says, based on absolutely nothing, "you're literally wrong about everything", it's hard not to get pretty pissed off about that. That's what a Flat Earther does just by professing their idiotic beliefs, even if they're not trying to convince anyone, even if they don't literally say "you're wrong" so directly.

So it was with early theological debates. It wasn't about calculating the date of Easter correctly : it was about their entire world view. It may seem silly now, but then, that's the hindsight of 1500 years of advancements for you. At the time, the world's finest minds were as invested in this stuff as we are in Maxwell's equations or the theory of evolution.

Context is key

I've frequently mentioned the somewhat confusing network-versus-hierarchy analysis as to how the Vikings were so initially successful but then became vulnerable once they settled down. On the surface, it all seems a bit incoherent : a centralised hierarchy (like the Saxon kingdoms) is supposedly easier to conquer than a decentralised network, which itself should have a hard time coordinating the resources for an invasion. But the Vikings did assemble such forces and were fabulously successful at first, but then, when they moved into colonisation, they were eventually picked off by a resurgent, unified Wessex.

Part of this can be explained by the fragmented nature of the Vikings once they stopped conquering. They were, in effect, a false network, lacking a unifying purpose. But also, adds Mitchell, as purely raiders there was simply nothing for the Saxons to attack in response. As settlers, they had territory which could be occupied. Sure, you couldn't just kill one king and claim the whole Danelaw. But you could assemble enough forces to take a town and then just keep doing that over and over. Just because it was more difficult than having to kill a single leader doesn't mean it wasn't possible. In a sort of reverse Occam's Razor, sometimes the easiest solution isn't the right one.

And the Saxon defences, once Alfred got them all sorted out, were essentially decentralised. Each burg could act as an independent fortification that had to be taken and couldn't be ignored. The fact that Wessex was politically centralised doesn't mean its military had anything like the same structure.

To my mind that quite satisfyingly explains how centralised Wessex survived and was able to overthrow the decentralised Vikings. How did the Viking network manage to assemble and coordinate an invasion ? In Mitchell's words, sometimes things in history just happen, and like the Star Wars prequels, there's no point in trying to explain them.

Couple of other points on this though. Context matters in that fragmented Viking settlements were not the same as massed Viking raiders. Similarly, castles were tremendously good for the state when the state was well-managed, but they made warfare endemic when it faltered : now any lordling could raise a formidable obstacle and cause chaos. But if strength could become weakness, so too could weakness occasionally become strength. Whereas trying to buy off the Vikings had been disastrous for early Anglo-Saxon kings, for the much stronger William I, this had actually worked quite well. Any sort of rules about what's a good idea and what's best avoided, then, had jolly well better take account of the circumstances and not stand as absolutes.

Finally, Mitchell clearly believes in a meritocracy. Appointing the best people is self-evidently a good idea. But he also concedes that in the wrong circumstance, it can fail spectacularly. For a weak society, trying to appoint the best ruler would almost always end in chaos and disaster. It was far better to have a strict system for appointing the ruler even if this was manifestly unfair, because you could usually learn to cope with a bad leader but it's bloody difficult to cope with continuous warfare in a protracted power struggle. Regardless of whether you get a strongman or a hapless imbecile, a simple procedure to decide who's in charge has the appeal of clarity. When the alternative is unrestrained violence, that can be not just a feature that's nice to have, but actually sensible and even necessary. And a strongman, ironically by being militarily powerful, can be better for this, ensuring peace through superior firepower.

I like this a lot. It's long seemed to me that some of the more irrational features of functioning democracies aren't just weird holdovers from a stupider age, although some of them are, they're actually necessary to account for just how irrational people can really be. A totally logical system would likely fail almost instantly because people just don't always respond sensibly to perfectly sensible things.

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That's my assortment of "other interesting things David Mitchell has to say". Don't judge the past by the standards of today and don't get all bent out of shape for things that happened a long time ago. There's no point taking it too seriously : it's already happened, everyone involved is dead now, and getting morally invested in it won't help.

Which doesn't mean that there aren't interesting lessons to be learned though. The influence (or lack thereof) or religion is important, as is understanding how the same actions can have very different consequences in different circumstances. That means that anyone hoping for a sort of how-to leadership guide in the next post had better be aware that harrying the North is no longer such a surefire way to shore up your political capital.

With that in mind, how, then, should a medieval ruler aspire to lead his subjects ? Tune in for part two !