Hoard Loot

The Staffordshire Hoard, a small selection of which is currently on display in the British Museum, has been valued by the Treasure Valuation Committee at £3.285 million. The money will be shared between Terry Herbert, the metal detectorist who discovered the hoard, and Fred Johnson on whose land it was found. Should be a pleasant Christmas ahead for the pair of them, whose services to the study of Anglo-Saxon England are incalculable.

Baghdad to Baldock

By the standards of the north Hertfordshire commuter belt, Baldock is a pleasant little settlement. Situated where the Great North Road and the Icknield Way meet, it became one of the great staging centres of early modern England, hence the large number of drinking establishments found on its wide streets, and the long list of famous folk who have passed through, including Charlies Stuart and Dickens, as well as ‘Mad’ King Ludwig of Bavaria, subject of films by Visconti and Syberberg and patron of Wagner. But the strangest thing about Baldock is that it was named after Baghdad by its founders, the Knights Templars, who established the settlement in the 12th century, a time when they had their sights on the then glorious, now benighted city on the Tigris. Are there any other unlikely places with grand names?

A History of the World

The launch of a new collaboration between the British Museum and the BBC, the ambitiously titled, A History of the World took place, appropriately, in the Enlightenment Room of the BM this morning. It’s actually a History of the World ‘in 100 objects’ and the daily, 15-minute programmes will be broadcast on Radio 4 from January 18th 2010. Each one focuses on a particular object from the museum’s collection and the series will cover a wide chronological and geographical period.

Neil MacGregor, the BM’s director talked of moving away from history centred on the Mediterranean – once, literally, the ‘middle of the earth’ – to create a genuinely global history, beginning with an ancient chopper from the Olduvai Gorge in modern-day Tanzania, that tells us much about the ideas of early man. Some of the objects are especially beautiful: the colossal statue of Rameses II, for example; others, less so, but huge in their importance. Three rather ugly stubs of metal turn out to be remnants of the first transatlantic cable, created as one single 4,000-mile long object created in east Birmingham, transported to Bristol in a remarkable feat of logistics, and then laid along the bed of the ocean to join the Old World with the New for the first time. The series will be supported by an impressive interactive website with high resolution images and a children’s TV series, Relic: Guardians of the Museum.

What is especially encouraging about this series from a historical point of view is that it reaches wide and far. I have bemoaned before (and will do so again) about the elision of history with current affairs, a trend of which BBC television (and not radio) has been especially guilty. But this is a wholly admirable adventure, real history despite the inevitable roping in of ‘celebrities’: though a definition of celebrity capacious enough to include Seamus Heaney reading his translation of Beowulf, Wole Soyinka and Madhur Jaffrey is one I can live with.

One caveat was raised at the press conference. After all the talk of outreach and accessibility, why is A History of the World not being broadcast on BBC1 television, easily the BBC channel with the largest audience? Mark Damazer, controller of Radio 4, a station on a roll at the moment, talked of budgetary limitations. But the truth is, the BBC and the BM know their audience – one reason why they are so good at what they do – and it is predominantly made up of the ‘interested’ middle classes. With a third of schools failing officially to provide a decent standard of education, that’s not going to change anytime soon.

Talking of education, in the Times today, History Today contributor Andrew Roberts provides a crash course in history books for Baroness Ashton, the EU’s new foreign affairs supremo. Any list that contains Chris Wickham’s magisterial study The Inheritance of Rome (Penguin) and A World by Itself (Heinemann), the forthcoming history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark (which he discusses in the January edition of History Today) gets my thumbs up.

A World by Itself

The British Museum Press has rushed out a small illustrated book on The Staffordshire Hoard. Written by Kevin Leahy, a National Finds Adviser for the Portable Antiquities Scheme, and Roger Bland, Head of the BM’s Department of Portable Antiquities and Treasure, it’s a brief, authoritative account of the story so far. It costs just £4.99, a pound of which goes to the appeal fund set up to raise money for a permanent home for the hoard. Go to the British Museum's website for further details.

Anglo-Saxon Britain has been much in my thoughts after reading the opening section of A World by Itself, the new history of the British Isles edited by Jonathan Clark to be published by Heinemann in the New Year. The section written by James Campbell is as good an introduction to the period from the Roman invasion to the Conquest as I have read and bodes well for the rest of the volume. History Today staff will be naming their favourite books, TV and radio programmes, films and exhibitions of 2009 starting next week. A World by Itself may well be mentioned in the 2010 dispatches. Jonathan Clark will be sharing his thoughts on national history in the January 2010 edition of History Today.

In Our Time's Free Archive

In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg’s radio 4 programme, is one the jewels of BBC broadcasting. Each Thursday the ageless Lord Bragg sits down with three distinguished panelists to discuss subjects ranging from the Anabaptists to Newton, Babylon to Dante. Today it was announced that the full 11-year archive of programmes is to be archived online, free to listeners. It’s a valuable, compelling and entertaining resource for anyone interested in history in all its remarkable diversity.

The British public: a public ill served?

The number of literary festivals in Britain, many with a substantial historical input, continues to grow. The London History Festival, which finished last week, saw large numbers attending Kensington Central Library to listen to historians of the calibre of Simon Sebag Montefiore, John Adamson, Saul David and Alison Weir. Such events are now staples of middle-class British life, taking place in all regions, urban and rural.

What is the reason for their success? Could it be that television no longer caters to the ‘interested’ middle class, as Richard North calls them? That’s not to say that good television isn’t still made; it is. Witness Diarmuid MacCulloch’s History of Christianity, currently being broadcast on BBC 4. But primetime, real time terrestrial TV is by and large a motley, often degrading circus of celebrity and clamour, whose prime purpose seems to be the annulment of all thought.

So, the educated prefer to head somewhere local to listen to a Starkey, a Sebag or an Antonia Fraser. The same phenomena expresses itself in the increased audience for BBC Radios 3 and 4 (where Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time performs a similar function for listeners interested in history) and in the rise in sales of box sets of challenging US dramas such as The Wire (a Greek tragedy made modern) and Mad Men. There are plenty of discerning, curious people around. But they are very ill served by Britain’s television programme makers.

On the subject of a public ill served, Simon Heffer, writing on today’s Queen’s Speech, claims that the current Parliament is the most despised since Cromwell threw out the Rump in 1653. Can that really be the case, and what are the other contenders?

Some Exciting Histories in the Pipeline

Continuum are one of the more enterprising of our small publishing houses. Their most recent innovation is a series called – wait for it - Continuum Histories. These are small format reprints of selections from classic historical narratives introduced by a leading modern authority. The first three are already out and highly recommended: Lord Macaulay’s History of England, introduced by John Burrow; William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, introduced by John Elliott; and J.A. Froude’s The Reign of Mary Tudor introduced by Eamon Duffy.

They make excellent introductions to anyone concerned with the shifting sands of historiography or serve as handy reminders to those who engaged with the ‘history of history’ at university. Burrow, author of one of the best general introductions to historiography, A History of Histories (Penguin, 20007), is especially good on the great Whig historian who, whatever his faults – most notably a deluded faith in progress – wrote in magnificent prose to an enormous audience. There really is no serious historian of such popular appeal today. Future titles in the Continuum Histories include Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution introduced by Ruth Scurr; and, one I am really looking forward to reading, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire introduced by the excellent Tom Holland.

The London History Festival

History Today contributor Tristram Hunt writes today in the Guardian on the Staffordshire Hoard and the importance of it being sited permanently in what was once Mercia (ie the West Midlands and Staffordshire). He appeals to the wealthy burghers of the regions (yes, they do still exist, despite recession and the collapse of manufacturing in the region) to put their hands deep in the pockets and give the Hoard a home worthy of its historic importance:

‘ Those Black Country industrialists, Staffordshire landowners, Sutton Coldfield professionals and Birmingham business people need to find their inner Anglo-Saxon. For what the hoard reveals is that their seventh-century forebears, those righteous conquerors and wealthy warlords, were determined to use their prosperity to support art, crafts and design. These treasures, with their eagle miniatures, biblical inscriptions and thousands of inlaid garnets, show a kingdom replete with affluence and cultural confidence. The West Midlands wealthy have an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that future generations have ready access to this incredible insight into their identity and heritage.'

Tonight, the BBC’s foreign correspondent David Loyn, who writes on Afghanistan in the forthcoming issue of History Today, is in conversation with Stephen Robinson, Stephen Grey and Colin Freeman, Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Telegraph (who was freed from the clutches of Somali pirates earlier this year) at Kensington Central Library. The distinguished panel will discuss the history of war reporting. It’s part of the first and very successful London History Festival which concludes on Thursday when I talk to Simon Scarrow, Patrick Mercer MP and Saul David about their recent forays into historical fiction.

Go to www.londonhistoryfestival.com for full details.

Tristram Hunt describes how Friedrich Engels financed the research behind his friend Karl Marx’s epic critique of the free market, Das Kapital, in No Marx Without Engels

Simon Jenkins on the new Ashmolean Museum

Simon Jenkins, recipient of the History Today Trustees Award for 2008, today writes about Oxford’s revamped and extended Ashmolean Museum in his Guardian column. He describes the Ashmolean, which reopens to the public tomorrow, as ‘the most exciting museum anywhere in Britain’. Peter Furtado, my predecessor as History Today editor and an Oxford resident, will review the new Ashmolean Museum here on Monday.

Jenkins, though full of praise for the Ashmolean, has some reservations about the disjuncture in style between the early Victorian architecture of CR Cockerell and Rick Mather’s new hi-tech galleries, fashionably white. On a more elegiac note, Jenkins concludes:

‘The big museum project must surely be coming to an end, at least in the western
world. The public sector is financially exhausted and private money and fancy
architecture are turning elsewhere – in Boris Johnson's London, to the high-rise
luxury flat.
‘Fine arts will return to the Latin quarters, to local galleries
and private collectors. Britain may see a revulsion against the giant
accumulator museums such as the Ashmolean and the London megaliths, with their
miles of underground shelving stashed with works kept from public view.
Provincial galleries may start claiming some of the nation's loot of ages, and
may get it. Such cash as is available may go their way.
‘The more reason to
greet this last cry of the old regime, confident in both its display and its
argument. We may not see its like again.’

http://www.ashmolean.org/

The Grierson Awards

At the Grierson Awards last night, the annual jamboree for documentary film-makers, the History Today Award for Best Historical Documentary went to John Dower for Thriller in Manila, a look at the world heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and ‘Smokin’’ Joe Frazier. It was original in the fact that it is told from the point of view of Frazier, a bull of a man still plainly hurt by the caustic verbal assault Ali unleashed upon him in the build up to the fight, calling him, among many other things, ‘gorilla’ and ‘Uncle Tom’.

I was part of the judging process, which included historians such as Diarmaid MacCulloch (author of an interesting recent article on the Papal appeal to disgruntled Anglicans) and Anna Whitelock, as well as a host of documentary filmmakers. For me, the process raised a number of points.

Almost certainly for reasons of archive, the 20th century dominates history documentaries. It was really quite striking how few documentaries are made about the Middle Ages, the early modern period and the Classical world, eras which are hugely popular among those who consume their history in print. Only a few major historians, most notably David Starkey, get to present serious television histories set in the distant past, and even then it’s the Tudors. Is television unable to convey the realities of life previous to the 20th century, or are film-makers simply unwilling to tackle serious history?

By the way, the host of last night’s awards, Andrew Marr, a former winner himself, is currently in the midst of an entertaining spat with the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore over the ‘left-wing’ bias of his new BBC history of (stifle the yawn) 20th-century Britain. Oh for a big-budget history series on the Civil Wars, the Glorious Revolution or the Anglo-Saxons.

Peter Furtado introduces the remarkable work of award-winning historical documentary film-maker Norma Percy, in Can TV Make History?

Where Will the Hoard Call Home?

A small but exquisite selection of objects from the Staffordshire Hoard go on temporary public display today in Gallery 37 of the British Museum today.

It coincides with the launch of the Portable Antiquities and Treasure Annual Report 2007, the scheme, unique in Europe, which made possible the acquisition, examination and evaluation of the hoard. The display also includes a number of objects whose discovery was recorded in 2007 including a Roman copper-alloy figure of Cautopates, one of the attendants of the god Mithras, who was popular with Roman soldiers stationed in Britain; selections from the 10th-century Viking Hoard unearthed in the Vale of York, including Carolingian, Islamic and Anglo-Saxon coins; and a medieval silver piedfort – possibly a reckoning counter for officials - from the mid-1350s and struck in the name of Edward III as Duke of Aquitaine.

At the press conference, it was confirmed that the Staffordshire Hoard will find a permanent home in the West Midlands, though such is its size, the British Museum is always likely to have a selection on display. Staff from Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG) and the Potteries Museum in Stoke on Trent are working on those long-term proposals now. For curators, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, as Rita McLean, Head of Birmingham Museums and Heritage, was eager to stress.