A Box of Electoral Reform Tricks

Watching the BBC’s coverage of the General Election, it was interesting to note that the two most eloquent commentators – Vernon Bogdanor and Peter Hennessy – were both historians. It looks like we may be on the verge of major reform of the UK voting system, currently, according to Hennessy, a ‘rigged market in an era of economic deregulation’. It is not so much that a reformed system would introduce fairness, but that it would mirror an increasingly fractured and fractious society. It would certainly not offer a promise of stability as it would be likely to open still further the fissures between the nations.

Bear in mind that the BNP got almost 70,000 more votes than the SNP (who now have six MPs) and that UKIP garnered almost one million votes, over twice that of the SNP and five times that of the Democratic Unionist Party (who now have eight MPs). The Greens, for whom this was supposedly a ‘breakthrough’ election, got their first MP, though they were backed nationally by less than 300,000 voters. If reform goes ahead, there will be many more ‘breakthroughs’ next time, though considerably less of the UK’s much-lauded political stability. Are we about to open a Pandora’s box?

The Long Constitutional View

The upsetting of the political apple cart that followed the first of the televised General Election debates of the party leaders (the second is screened live tonight on Sky1), has left political commentators floundering. Though it is possible we may be entering a period of profound political change, it is noticeable how few historians have been called upon to comment on the potential ramifications.

That’s one reason why Ben Wilson’s excellent volume What Price Liberty: How Freedom Was Won and Is Being Lost (Faber) is such an important and timely read. Apart from being a riveting and elegant survey of Britain’s constitutional changes over the centuries, it also reminds us of what the historian brings to the political party; a mindset fixed on the long view rather than the fripperies of the immediate.

‘We learn about liberty by experience,’ he writes, ‘and it gets its value and force from the experience and stories of people living in the past, contending with real issues. I do not mean history here as a static thing which hands us down precious artefacts that we must not sully, or indeed as desiccated morality tales. I mean it as a radical and dynamic force which we can draw upon to formulate and give expression to our own desires and grievances.’

There is certainly plenty of the latter around, but not a lot of consideration of our past political conflicts. One lesson of history is that we should be cautious about the British people’s apparent desire for change. Even Margaret Thatcher, the most radical of modern British premiers, thought them ‘a difficult people to move’.

Ben Wilson will be writing on the 18th-century constitution for the June edition of History Today, by which time the political settlement may be more apparent. Until then, read his book.

The State of the Tory Nation

Age has neither withered nor mellowed Norman Stone, described as ‘Lady Thatcher’s favourite historian’ in the headline to his piece in yesterday’s Evening Standard. The former Oxford Professor has spent the last 13 years at Bilkent University in the Turkish capital Ankara, writing a brilliantly concise and idiosyncratic history of the First World War and a newly published and very personal history of the Cold War. But he occasionally emerges to comment upon British politics and never fails to entertain.

He argues that the ‘Dianified’ Conservative Party of David Cameron is unworthy of holding office and should ‘let a new Lib-lab coalition take the responsibility’ for cleaning up Britain’s economic and social travails. Prof Stone’s Tory vision is rather at odds with the Notting Hill modernisers: ‘A real Conservative Party would just promise to put an end to the stupid vexations we have to put up with,’ he writes.

‘ Does anyone really want to live in a country where the government has the power to stop people from smoking in private clubs? Or where the perishable rubbish is collected every two weeks (in Istanbul they collect rubbish twice a day, because otherwise the cats scratch open the bags; and since we are on the subject, if an able-bodied young man started begging, he would be honour-killed and quite right, too; the begging slot is reserved for old women who deserve it).’

Hard to see Norm’s policies being much of a basis for negotiations with the Lib Dems should a hung Parliament arise, but a Conservative Party led by the Grand Vizier Boris Johnson may be interested in the lessons of Turkish social policy.

On the subject of the crisis in the Conservative Party as it approaches the General Election on May 6th, I picked up a book titled Is Conservatism Dead?, published in 1997 and co-authored by the Tory MP David ‘two brains’ Willetts (who thinks it isn’t, of course) and the political philosopher, former Thatcherite and all-round pessimist John Gray (who thinks it is). Gray blames the Conservative Party’s embrace of neo-liberalism for the demise of the Western world’s most successful political party:

‘The hegemony of the Conservative Party, exercised in British politics for more than a century and a half, depended on its skill in renewing a particular kind of social order. Generations of Tory statecraft bound the Conservative Party by unnumbered threads to institutions and interests central in the life of the nation. Its dominance in national politics reflected its success in building and protecting networks that linked it with centres of power in the country at large. The hegemony of the Conservative Party stood on its successful construction of a Tory Britain. The effect of nearly 20 years of New Right policies, in conjunction with vast changes in the global economy, has been to blow over that construction.’

Margaret Thatcher was anything but a Conservative, having much more in common with the old Manchester Liberals. We won’t know until May 7th, but how ironic if the modern incarnation of the Liberal Party was to be the greatest beneficiary of her legacy?

The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

As the General Election campaigns fires up and the electorate garners unfeasible promises from its aspiring masters, a fascinating article from Diana Spearman published in History Today in 1955 which warns us of the perils of short-termism.

Diana Spearman explains the deep complexities of the pre-Victorian political landscape and electoral system in The Pre-Reform Constitution in Britain

A Silver Lining Amongst the Gloom

Gloom has descended upon university history departments throughout Britain. Cambridge’s history faculty has followed that of Oxford in freezing all new appointments, perhaps for years to come. One senior historian has described the position outside Oxbridge as ‘near catastrophic’. Much publicity has been given to the University of Sussex’s decision to drop research and research-led teaching in early modern history in what appears to be yet another step towards the dominance of modern history at the expense of earlier periods. King’s College London is to lose its chair in palaeography, an obscure discipline certainly, but one crucial to the production of scholarly editions of, for example, Anglo- Saxon literature. Mark Goldie, reader in British intellectual history at Cambridge, is surely right when he says that a ‘decent history syllabus cannot be so present-centred’.

Yet there may be some benefits to all of this in the long run, a concentration of minds. Clearly, given current economic conditions and the loss of £950 million from higher education budgets over the next three years, historians and their departments, like other academics, will be compelled to go in search of private endowments, as has been common in the United States for decades (with remarkable success) and to forge closer links with the public (something too many historians are still reluctant to do).

Commentators such as Simon Jenkins have even suggested that some universities should seize the opportunity to privatise and charge the market rate for their courses, enabling them to provide scholarships to those unable to afford the full fees. But would government be willing to cede control of educational institutions?

The options for university departments will become more apparent when Lord Browne of Madingley’s report on the funding of higher education is published later this year. Whatever the conclusions reached, it will be wise to recall the words of the Oxford historian and President of the Board of Education H.A.L. Fisher, written in 1919, but still relevant to the teaching of history, not least because they are so utterly at odds with the current mania for ‘relevance’ and ‘utility’:

‘The business of a university is not to equip students for professional posts, but to train them in disinterested intellectual habits, to give them a vision of what real learning is, to refine taste, to form judgement, to enlarge curiosity and to substitute for a low and material outlook on life a lofty view of its resources and demands.’

Where are the Political Roots?

Mark Mazower, the British-born professor of history at Columbia University in New York, writes an interesting review of Richard Evans’s recent book Cosmopolitan Islanders: British Historians and the European Continent (Cambridge University Press). In the New Republic piece, Mazower makes the point that many British historians have been moved to study other countries’ past because they ‘find the stability of modern political life in Britain less noteworthy than the radical instability of the world of fascism and totalitarianism. Why bother with Oswald Mosley—a study in failure—when the Nazis give you the real thing?’

That may not be the case for much longer. The forthcoming general election may herald a period of instability in British politics, the consequences of which may be troubling. In part, the current uncertainty surrounding British politics and public dissatisfaction with the major political parties stems – as the historian Jeremy Black claimed last night at the launch of his 98th (98th!!!) book The Politics of World War Two (SAU) – from their abandonment of a historical context, the desperate desire to seem modern and not to call upon their ideological roots. For this and other reasons, Mazower claims that Evans’ study will be read as ‘a paean to a time when history’s public role could be taken for granted. This is no longer true, at least in Britain. And perhaps this is another, sadder, reason why so many British historians find their warmest reception abroad, not least in the United States, where history still seems to matter’.

The Unholy Crusades?

The Daily Mail is a newspaper held in contempt by metropolitan bien-pensants, often for good reason. But it carries as much serious history within its bizarre mixture of celeb-baiting, hypochondria and ‘proper’ news as any other British newspaper. Our own Juliet Gardiner’s excellent new book The Thirties (Harper Press) is currently being serialised in the Mail. Peter Oborne is one of the most historically-informed of political commentators. And historians of the calibre of Max Hastings and Michael Burleigh are regular contributors.

But today’s edition contains a piece of A-grade historical tosh: William Napier, author of the Attila novels, says that ‘traditionally the Crusades have been painted as a noble mission’. By who exactly? Since when? Edward Gibbon, writing as far back as the 18th century, judged them to have been born of a ‘savage fanaticism’ and that they had ‘checked rather than forwarded the maturity of Europe’. Despite the efforts of Walter Scott and various 19th-century colonialists that’s pretty much the view today. For a serious consideration of the subject, may I point readers to Jonathan Phillips article Call of the Crusades published in our November 2009 issue. Bizarrely, Phillips is namechecked by Napier, though one wouldn’t think he had read his excellent book Holy Warriors: A Modern History of the Crusades (Bodley Head) very carefully.

The Mail carries a more considered article by the historian of decline Correlli Barnett on the need to cut Britain’s military cloth, but the argument is put more forcefully and originally by the Times’ Sam Kiley whose latest, superb book Desperate Glory: At War in Helmand with Britain’s 16 Air Assault Brigade is one of the best books I have ever read on the subject of men and war. According to Kiley:

subtle, fast and highly trained small, integrated units are the only way to fight the new form of war that is already upon us. There is now a very good case for copying the US Marine Corps and integrating the Army, Navy and Air Force into one’. Britain’s armed forces should become the ‘fast, lean, and cheap attack dogs of Nato. If we get the Strategic Defence Review right, we would have a big voice in Nato because we could deliver a powerful and quick punch on its behalf — and because we can box with brains. We can leave the big expensive stuff to the Americans.

Jonathan Phillips traces the 800-year history of ‘Crusade’ and its power as a concept, in The Call of the Crusades

Gillian Reynolds in the Telegraph

The Telegraph’s superb radio critic Gillian Reynolds echoes some of the concerns about Neil MacGregor’s current Radio 4 series that I express in the February issue of History Today. The radio series that’s really – and should be – a television series. What’s that saying about great minds?

A History of the World in 100 Objects (Radio 4, Mondays to Fridays) hits its third week (of an initial six, with more to come). There’s something wrong with this series, too. It’s overly busy, almost as much as Chris Evans’s breakfast show. Chris, however, has two and a half hours to fill daily. Neil MacGregor gets under 15 minutes to talk about each representative object – a tool, a carving, a pestle, a bowl – and fit it into his wider story of global evolution.

Yet, for instance, if food is the day’s focus we must hear Madhur Jaffrey and Bob Geldof on the subject too, not to mention fitting everything into an aural frame of music, title, opening montage, scripted description and bits of distracting location sound. It’s too much. MacGregor is a born communicator, a brilliant talker. Why not just allow him to do it? Here is radio made for television audiences. Listeners may occasionally like to talk back. When the story is this good we actually prefer to concentrate.

Starkey on Today

David Starkey is becoming something of a regular on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. On the edition edited by the thriller writer and all round good egg P.D. James he talked eloquently (and courteously, tamed by the grand dame) on English national identity, musing on whether the English now inhabited a ‘post-nation’. Today he mused on the Staffordshire Hoard and the continuing camoaign to raise funds for a permanent home for the collection in the West Midlands. He thought it important that it should remain in the old kingdom of Mercia, as it was a symbol of the origins of ‘Angle-land’, and threw light on issues of Englishness that needed to be considered and embraced. The English, after all, have as much right as anyone else to muse on the nature of their identity, reluctant though they seem to be to celebrate it too loudly. The significance of the Hoard is hard to overestimate.

Listen to the Starkey segment of the programme by clicking here.

Ben Macintyre on the Rosetta Stone

Ben Macintyre comments today in the Times on the saga of the Rosetta Stone's disputed ownership:

Instead of debating ownership and trying to impose modern notions of political sovereignty on ancient cultural patrimony, the argument should be about how to bring the world’s cultural riches to the widest possible audience, regardless of where they physically reside.

Happy to observe we are in agreement over yesterday's post!

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.

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?

The BNP Sturm und Drang

There has been much Sturm und Drang over the performance of the British National Party’s ‘Nick’ Griffin on BBC’s Question Time last Thursday. Reluctant to spill forth more, let us leave the final word on why fascism and Englishness remain anathema to one another, to Daniel Defoe and his poem of 1703, the True Born Englishman. Impure, inauthentic and proud of it.

Thus from a mixture of all kinds began,
That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman:
In eager rapes, and furious lust begot,
Betwixt a painted Britain and a Scot.
Whose gend’ring off-spring quickly learn’d to bow,
And yoke their heifers to the Roman plough:
From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came,
With neither name, nor nation, speech nor fame.
In whose hot veins new mixtures quickly ran,
Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane.
While their rank daughters, to their parents just,
Receiv’d all nations with promiscuous lust.
This nauseous brood directly did contain
The well-extracted blood of Englishmen.

Which medly canton’d in a heptarchy,
A rhapsody of nations to supply,
Among themselves maintain’d eternal wars,
And still the ladies lov’d the conquerors.

The western Angles all the rest subdu’d;
A bloody nation, barbarous and rude:
Who by the tenure of the sword possest
One part of Britain, and subdu’d the rest
And as great things denominate the small,
The conqu’ring part gave title to the whole.
The Scot, Pict, Britain, Roman, Dane, submit,
And with the English-Saxon all unite:
And these the mixture have so close pursu’d,
The very name and memory’s subdu’d:
No Roman now, no Britain does remain;
Wales strove to separate, but strove in vain:
The silent nations undistinguish’d fall,
And Englishman’s the common name for all.
Fate jumbled them together, God knows how;
What e’er they were they’re true-born English now.

The wonder which remains is at our pride,
To value that which all wise men deride.
For Englishmen to boast of generation,
Cancels their knowledge, and lampoons the nation.
A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.
A banter made to be a test of fools,
Which those that use it justly ridicules.
A metaphor invented to express
A man a-kin to all the universe.

For as the Scots, as learned men ha’ said,
Throughout the world their wand’ring seed ha’ spread;
So open-handed England, ’tis believ’d,
Has all the gleanings of the world receiv’d.

Some think of England ’twas our Saviour meant,
The Gospel should to all the world be sent:
Since, when the blessed sound did hither reach,
They to all nations might be said to preach.

’Tis well that virtue gives nobility,
How shall we else the want of birth and blood supply?
Since scarce one family is left alive,
Which does not from some foreigner derive.

Even so, there is justified concern for Britain’s and especially England’s ‘white working class’, excluded from the benefits of globalisation and technological innovation. Places such as Dewsbury in West Yorkshire, Burnley in East Lancashire, parts of the West Midlands and the East End overspill of Barking and Thurrock have become the strongholds of the BNP. Social mobility has all but disappeared in these areas. The key to understanding why is the subject of Robert Skidelsky’s chapter in Heinemann’s superb new history of the British Isles, A World By Itself, edited by Jonathan Clark to be published in January. Here is a salient extract:

‘The abolition of the free grammar schools in the 1960s and 1970s stands out as a milestone in the failure to sustain a culture based on middle-class values. The grammar schools, being the main conduit of higher-order cultural values to the working class, offered Britain its best opportunity to build a high-quality culture divorced from class. The opportunity was lost because their meritocratic ideal ran counter to both middle-class exclusiveness and working-class egalitarianism. The disappearance of the grammar schools accentuated the cultural divide between the high brow and the low brow. As prosperity spread, the working class became middle class in income, but not in taste.’

Now even the income has all but disappeared, what’s left? BNP or X-Factor. Hopefully, the latter. That’s a difficult sentence to write.

(Credit to Andrew Sullivan for Daniel Defoe extract)

Wolf Hall Wins the Booker

Hilary Mantel has won this year’s Man Booker Prize for her novel Wolf Hall, based on the life of Thomas Cromwell. Stella Tillyard reviews it in the current issue of History Today which also features an overview of the current state of the historical novel including comments from Mantel herself.

Kathryn Hadley, on our news blog, also recently asked what real value these types of books bring to the field of historical research?

Wolf Hall has met with considerable acclaim although David Starkey, one of our leading Tudor historians, described it as ‘historical tosh’.

Golden Days of the Second City

Richard Morrison wrote a celebratory piece about the Staffordshire Hoard yesterday, commenting upon the 10,00-strong horde who queued to get in to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery over the weekend to view the ‘stash of 1,300 Anglo-Saxon artefacts found in a field outside Walsall’.

Morrison goes on to claim that the exhibition is the most exciting thing to have happened to Brum since Aston Villa won the Inter-Toto Cup. But Morrison hugely underestimates the importance of the Hoard. It’s the most exciting thing to happen in the Second City since Aston Villa won the European Cup in 1982!

Hill's Handsome Coins

One can’t help thinking of Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet, in relation to the Staffordshire Hoard (despite him being a man of Worcestershire). Here’s a particularly resonant passage from his masterly Mercian Hymns:

'Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight.
Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers.
They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face.

Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed.
Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce.
Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres.

Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring.
It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger.
He reigned 40 years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil.'

More on the Staffordshire Hoard

The more information that emerges about the Staffordshire Hoard, the more remarkable it seems. Two years ago, the British Museum paid £125,000 for an Anglo-Saxon sword handle. There are 310 such parts in the new hoard! Leslie Webster, a former BM curator could, understandably, hardly control his excitement: ‘It will make everyone think again about rising and falling kingdoms, the transition from paganism to Christianity, the conduct of battle and the nature of fine metalwork.’ It appears that some of the objects in the hoard came from as a far away as Byzantium and modern-day Sri Lanka.

The identity of the person responsible for the discovery has been revealed. Terry Herbert, a 55-year-old former coffin maker from Walsall, found the vast hoard using his 14-year-old metal detector on farmland owned by a friend (who has since sold it), believed to be near Lichfield. Mr Herbert and his friend will soon be very wealthy men indeed; the coroner in nearby Cannock declared the find a treasure trove and a committee is currently evaluating its worth. The amount of gold is so large that there are fears it may have a depressive effect on the gold market. Mr Herbert though seems nonplussed, dealing with the media in the typically deadpan delivery of a true Black Countryman. Only once did romance get a hold of him, when he declared that the find was his destiny: ‘I have this phrase,’ he told the assembled throng of the world’s media,’ that I say sometimes, “Spirits of yesteryear take me where the coins appear”, but on that day I changed coins to gold.’ He has changed our understanding of Anglo-Saxon history too.

A sample of the hoard goes on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery today until October 13th. I thoroughly recommend their excellent Edwardian Tea Room.

Duncan Slarke of the Portable Antiquities Scheme was the first archaeologist to see the hoard. An interview is available on the Birmingham News Room website.

A new website devoted to the Staffordshire Hoard has also recently gone live providing images of some of the objects, a history and various interpretations of the find.

Visit our Anglo-Saxon focus page for further information on the period as a whole.

Images: (Staffordshire Hoard website)

- Gold strip with a biblical inscription

- Gold helmet cheek piece

First Impressions: The Staffordshire Hoard

The Staffordshire Hoard, first discovered on private land in July 2009 and now revealed to the world, has gained widespread publicity, much to the delight of scholars of Anglo-Saxon England always keen to publicise their somewhat neglected field. The claim made at the press conference yesterday that it is a ‘treasure that will rewrite history’ appears to be considerably more than hyperbole. It is by far the largest find of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found: 5kg of gold, to be exact, as well as 1.3kg of silver. That’s five times the amount of gold found at Sutton Hoo. One strip of gold bears a Biblical inscription, from the Book of Numbers, in Latin: ‘Surge domine et dissipentur intimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua (Rise up, O Lord and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face). This particular object has already stirred up controversy, with some academics arguing that it dates from eighth or ninth centuries, others saying that the style of lettering suggests the seventh century, a period for which there is sparse material evidence.

Dr Kevin Leahy, the Portable Antiquities Scheme’s National Finds Adviser, has been responsible for cataloguing the find. ‘The two most striking features of the hoard,’ he claims, ‘are that it is unbalanced and it is of exceptionally high quality. Unbalanced because of what we don’t find. There is absolutely nothing feminine. There are no dress fittings, brooches or pendants. The vast majority of items in the hoard are martial.

‘The quantity of the gold is amazing but, more importantly, the craftsmanship is consummate. This was the very best that the Anglo-Saxon metalworkers could do and they were very good. Its origins are clearly the highest levels of Anglo-Saxon aristocracy or royalty.

‘It looks like a collection of trophies, but it is impossible to say if the hoard was the spoils from a single battle or a long and successful military career. We cannot say who the original or the final owners were, who took it from them, why they buried it or when. It will be debated for decades.’

Prof Helena Hamerow of the Institute of Archaeology at Oxford University, also foresees decades of debate about the nature of the hoard. It’s hard to envisage the context. It appears to date from the time of the Mercian supremacy around the time of Offa, the eighth century, though the objects range across several centuries. They’ve been stripped of their nice bits, which suggest that the metals may have been collected in order to recycle or to be used as bullion. What is really important about this find is that, hitherto, the material evidence of Anglo-Saxon England has never reflected the wealth of the society that is claimed in contemporary documents. Bede, for example, often refers to the magnificence of Anglo-Saxon England, but finds of this kind from that time have been far more common in southern Scandinavia or France. Now, all that has changed. We will now have a much better picture of a very exciting period, when England became part of European culture.

‘The interest in the find is good for Anglo-Saxon studies too,’ says Hamerow. ‘It’s been a long time since Sutton Hoo, and it’s nice to see your subject talked about.’

Even so, that didn’t stop one eminent archaeologist, whose name will remain secret, claim that he would swap the entire find for one Anglo-Saxon document. There’s no pleasing some people.

History in Britain's Schools

The debate on the teaching of History in Britain’s schools continues with the modern historian Dominic Sandbrook writing in today’s Daily Telegraph. The bestselling author of White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (Abacus) puts much of the blame on ‘progressive educationists’ who ‘did away with old-fashioned essay questions and replaced them with empathy exercises and multiple-choice quizzes that sacrificed any sense of intellectual depth or discipline’. He also points out that it was the last Conservative government who downgraded history from a compulsory to an optional subject at the age of 16; neither major party emerges with much credit on this matter.

Sandbrook concludes that the study of History,

‘ought to be the centrepiece of the education system, a long and thoughtful expedition, not a botched and half-hearted day-trip to which most children are no longer invited. And one day, I suspect, we will look back and judge that our Government’s ignorance and neglect of that wonderful, dazzling, irresistible country was among the greatest of its failures and the most unforgivable of its many betrayals.’

Who could disagree?

One further point. Following on from Tristram Hunt and Ann Whitelock’s endorsement of H.E. Marshall’s Our Island Story in our current edition (Terry Deary: History Made Horrible?, September 2009), Sandbrook makes the claim that this children’s history of England, published in 1905 (!), ‘still gives a more entertaining overall account of our national story than most modern textbooks’. Surely it is not beyond a publisher to create a modern version of this potentially huge bestseller. I'm off to talk with my agent.