Historians From England

"The workings of the mysterious influence of heredity present few greater puzzles than the characters of the English kings. It is indeed strange that Edward I should have been the son of the pious but incapable Henry III and father of the equally incapable Edward II."

"In the first place it must be borne in mind that before the extinction of its independence Wales was a geographical expression rather than a nation."

"That it was the king’s intention to govern the parts of Wales that were now under his control with justice and gain the goodwill of the inhabitants cannot be doubted. There is also reason to believe that he was in some considerable measure successful so far as the common people were concerned, but the chieftains and petty lords were too long accustomed to that form of license which they called liberty to accept the restraints of English law even if administered with strict impartiality, and from what we know of contemporary English officials in their own country we may feel fairly sure that cases of maladministration and oppression were not lacking."

"Eleanor of Castile is the most attractive personality in the long list of English queens, her only rival being Philippa of Hainault."

"Although he must have seen that the position was serious it was impossible for him to realise the disastrous effect that the death of the Maid of Norway was to have upon the history of England. The discussion of hypothetical history is not very profitable, but it may be pointed out that if the marriage planned between Maid of Norway and Edward had been consummated the union of England and Scotland might have been anticipated by several centuries, the wearisome and disastrous wars between those two kingdoms would at least have been avoided, and also the Hundred Years’ War with France, arising out of Edward’s actual marriage with Isabel of France. Had Maid of Norway lived Bannockburn, Crécy and Agincourt would never have been fought."

"So far as the popes were concerned it was Edward I’s habitual practice to become enthusiastic over crusading propositions whenever he was in want of money and thereby to obtain grants of clerical subsidies, which he promptly applied to other purposes."

"Eleanor of Provence was a kindly, narrow and commonplace woman, devout to a degree which to modern ideas would seem bigoted but was admirable in the eyes of her contemporaries, affectionate, and even devoted, to her husband, children and relations."

"The most famous and popular of all English saints, St. Thomas of Canterbury, could not be ignored but Edward does not seem to have shown any great affection for him and one cannot help feeling that he was too conscious of the parallel between Becket and his own troublesome archbishops to display any great devotion towards the martyr."

"Though he always professed to aim at setting forth truth unadorned and regardless of consequences, his partisan tone and apparent prejudice gave offence to many. Those who knew him best, however, testified to his singleness of purpose and genuine piety."

"Even the canny invader William the Conqueror can be thought to have contributed to the total of our plant list. When he came to build what we now know as the s, he preferred use material with which he was already acquainted rather than stone from unknown English quarries, so the walls of castles like and were built from stone imported from the . Incidental to its main purpose, the stone itself carried the seeds of a double invasion — seeds of two plants we think of as being most quintessentially English. The first was the , and the second was . Both were seen blooming on the stone walls of in France, so the pretty little delicate pink which is used in the breeding of nearly all of our border pinks is the result of ."

"Trees can be record breakers: they can be one of the oldest living s in the world: Californian specimens of ', the Wellingonia or Big Tree, are believed to be at least 4,000 years old. They can also be the largest form of life: a which grows in in Mexico — and which, incidentally, is about 2,000 years old — has a circumference measuring 54 s (178) and is 40 metres (130ft) high. Its weight is estimated to be about 500 s."

"Evelyn ... wrote the first (and only) bestseller on : was published in 1664 and addressed and the shortage of . ... "We had better be without gold than without timber," Evelyn wrote, because without trees there would be no iron and glass industry, no fires to warm houses in winter, nor a navy to protect the shores of England. Timber was, as Maggie Campbell-Culver points out, the oil of the 17th century, and the shortage of it created similar anxieties about fuel, manufacturing and transport as threats to oil production do today. Sylva was a response to these fears, encouraging the reader to plant trees as an act of patriotic duty. ... A Passion for Trees is beautifully illustrated with paintings and sumptuous botanical drawings. But the use of explanatory extensive "text boxes" (some are four pages long) interrupts the narrative. As with her first book The Origin of Plants, Campbell-Culver is at her strongest and most convincing when she delves into the lives of the trees, although both Evelyn himself and the age in which he lived remain elusive throughout the book."

"As long as the West upholds an image of the free human being within an integrated vision of God, heaven, and earth, esotericism will undoubtedly remain a feature of its intellectual and religious landscape."

"RACE IS THE lodestone of the Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism, the guiding principle of their historical and political worldview. American neo-Nazism, represented by George Lincoln Rockwell and his successors, adopted the Nazi view of the Jews as the ferment of liberal society, variously promoting communism, civil rights and race mixing."

"The risks of racist religiosity are great. By projecting grievances, fears and anxieties onto the "shadow" figures of other races, religious transcendence is stunted and perverted into the dynamics of exclusion and hatred. Instead of genuine spirituality, there is partiality, separation, restriction. A rigid self-righteousness leads down into the spiritual basement of a primitive dualism, where pseudo-salvation depends on the elimination of the Other. The political projection of religious Manichaeism onto human differences inevitably leads to strife and violence. Whenever human groups are interpreted as absolute categories of good and evil, light and darkness, both the human community and humanity itself are diminished. Such degraded religion never leads to light but only into darkness."

"Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism posit powerful mythologies to negate the decline of white power in the world. The cultural pessimism of Julius Evola, Savitri Devi and Miguel Serrano all express the fear of (Aryan) white submergence in a degenerate age dominated by social and racial inferiors. Their adoption of Hindu chronology is intended to plot the curve of that decline into the Kali Yuga with the millennial promise of regeneration through a new golden age in the cycle of the ages. Francis Parker Yockey likewise articulates a mythic philosophy of history, whereby the European races are (temporarily) disabled by alien Jewish influences and prevented from fulfilling their destiny in a powerful new Imperium or world empire."

"Powerful ideas of anti-Semitism as a form of world-rejecting gnosis, Aryan paganism as a global religion of white supremacism, and Hitler as a divine being within a cosmic order together compose an unholy theology of the Aryan myth. Seen in this light, neo-Nazism has all the characteristics of an international sect with a religious cult. There are devotional practices, initiates and martyrs, prophecies and millennial expectations, and even relics."

"We cannot know what the future holds for Western multicultural societies, but the experiment did not fare well in Austria-Hungary, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The multiracial challenges in liberal Western states are much greater, and it is evident that affirmative action and multiculturalism are even leading to a more diffuse hostility toward liberalism. From the retrospective viewpoint of a potential authoritarian future in 2020 or 2030, these Aryan cults and esoteric Nazism may be documented as early symptoms of major divisive changes in our present-day Western democracies."

"All nature has intrinsic worth and equality, and whatever science that remains should be nondominating."

"For historians trained exclusively in the evaluation of concrete events, causes, and rational purposes, this netherworld of fantasy may seem delusive. They would argue that politics and historical change are driven only by real material interests. However, fantasies can achieve a causal status once they have been institutionalized in beliefs, values, and social groups. Fantasies are also an important symptom of impending cultural changes and political action."

"What is esotericism? From the Enlightenment until the middle of the last century, magic, astrology, and occultism, to take a few of the subjects now considered under the rubric of esotericism, were generally perceived as survivals of superstition and irrationalism. The intellectual status of such topics was denigrated, and they were kept in epistemological quarantine lest they cause a relapse from progressive rationalism. Just as the established churches had once excluded heterodox doctrine as heresy, the modern post-Enlightenment world rejected magic and occultism as a violation of reason, its dominant criterion of acceptable discourse."

"The Nazi dreams did not come true. The Great Hall of Berlin with its enormous dome was not completed in 1950; the Wewelsburg was not reconstructed as a gigantic SS vatican by the 1960s; the giant motorways and broad gauge railways as far as the Caucasus and the Urals were never laid; Western Russia was not transformed into a huge colonial territory for German soldier-peasants; nor did the SS libensborn stud-farms produce 150 million pure-blooded Germans for the New Order. The glorious One Thousand Year Reich actually ended a mere twelve years after its proclamation with the military defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But even if these grandiose plans and megalomaniac visions had not gone beyond the stage of maps, memoranda and miniature models, the Third Reich had accomplished sufficient demolition of the old order in Europe for it to remain an outrage which still haunts literature, films, and the memory of survivors."

"It is a tragic paradox that the colourful variety of peoples in the Habsburg empire, a direct legacy of its dynastic supra-national past, should have nurtured the germination of genocidal racist doctrines in a new age of nationalism and social change."

"The cybernetic encirclement of man and his complete divorce from nature could well foster a more fundamental alienation. In a congested and automated world, Savitri Devi's sentimental love of animals and hatred of the masses may find new followers. The pessimism of the Kali Yuga and her vision of a pristine new Aryan order possess a perennial appeal in times of uncertainty and change."

"Outside a purely secular frame of reference, Nazism was felt to be the embodiment of evil in a modern twentieth-century regime, a monstrous pagan relapse in the Christian community of Europe."

"Both the trappings and the myths of American Nazism reflect the behavior of a persecuted religious sect that prepares for militant action against a fallen world."

"THE RELIGIOUS AND MYTHIC elements of German National Socialism often made the Third Reich resemble a cult in power."

"Most contemporaries would have argued that it was a king’s job to put in peril his soul for the good of his Church and of his people. But Henry was too self-obsessed to do that, too determined to live a life of a confessor saint and thereby join the mystical body of Christ in heaven and so be revered by the faithful in this world. In an age when the cult of royal saints was in the ascendancy, Henry’s ambition is understandable, but it was hardly justifiable and it was certainly not heroic."

"In the September Parliament, Henry made the announcement that the lands of Simon and his supporters were forfeit, and that the main beneficiaries were to be members of the royal family. In this act we are once again reminded that many thirteenth-century men and women had a tenuous grasp of the ethics of rulership, despite their repeated public pronouncements to the contrary: the kingdom was put there by God in order that they might predate on it."

"Henry might not be King Louis’s equal in matters of war, but he would be in matters of style (the confusion of style with substance is a recurring theme in Henry’s life)."

"We might like to think of Henry III as a gentle and pious king (an image he wanted us to see), but many of those who suffered under the rule of his local officials had a different perspective on their monarch."

"In thirteenth-century Europe, battles were rare, in part because they occurred only when both sides felt certain that they had the decisive advantage (it was relatively straightforward to avoid battle when necessary) and in part because the quickest way to win a battle was to kill or capture the opposition commander; unlike their modern counterparts, medieval war leaders led from the front and, as a result, were subject to more than their fair share of attention. A leader had to be certain of success if he were to engage the enemy in a battle."

"Henry’s major problem was that the local communities of England rather liked the idea that the ruler needed their consent if he were to rule legitimately. It was no longer enough that Henry was God’s anointed; the reforms that had followed in the wake of the Provisions of Oxford had created a widespread expectation that consent could and should be a political force in national politics. Simon and his baronial colleagues had not acted alone in their reforms, but had tapped into the grievances of the county communities of thirteenth-century England. Indeed, it was these local grievances that gave the reformers their political weight."

"We cannot know what impact the loss of his mother may have had on the young Henry. Modern historians have been critical of her actions, seeing them in terms of ‘abandonment’, but the medieval mindset was not the same as ours, and it is unwise to ascribe modern sensibilities to our medieval forebears, especially when it was perfectly normal for them to be brought up outside the nuclear family and within a broader familial network, which might include cousins and aunts and uncles living in far-flung places."

"The greatest problem that Henry faced was that, after a long minority, his subjects had become used to a king who did not rule."

"A difficulty for Hill is that many of the she celebrates will be no more than names to most readers. But she combats this by selecting details that bring them to life. , for example, co-founder of the , lived in picturesque squalor in an abandoned convent with an alcoholic wife and children who ran wild among the ruins. He eked out a living as a commercial artist and taught drawing to, among others, Gustave Flaubert, whose portrait he drew. ... Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources. Her great strength, as she showed in her witty book on Stonehenge, is that she is not inclined just to laugh at what seem ludicrous beliefs. Rather, she carefully unpicks them, showing what made them attractive to their cultures. Time’s Witness is a book to change the way you think about history."

"The first detailed depiction of Stonehenge to survive is a , now in the , by . De Heere was a artist who lived in London from 1567 to 1577 and seems to have made another, less distinguished, contribution to the subject by carving his name on sarsen 53. Meanwhile, despite doubts about its reliability, , remained popular and its account of Stonehenge was repeated by other authors. Only with the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship and the dawn of the , did it begin to fall out favour, for the nature of history writing itself was changing."

"gave Britain's capital cities two of their greatest landmarks, the , generally, if inaccurately, known as ,1 and, in Edinburgh, the . He built the first since 's and he r. But his influence depended not only, not even primarily, on his buildings, it was both wide and more elusive. He gave the nineteenth century a new idea about what architecture could be and mean. He saw it as moral force in society and as a romantic art. (p. 1) 1. It is in fact the bell that is called Big Ben. (p. 536)"

"The ix. of July, at sixe of the clocke at night, in the Isle of Thanet besides Ramesgate in the Parish of Saint Peter under the Clift, a monstrous fish or Whale of the Sea did shoote himselfe on shore, where for want of water, beating himselfe on the sands, he dyed about sixe of the clocke in the next morning, before which time he roared, and was heard more than a mile on the land. The length of this Fish was two and twenty yards, the nether jaw twelve foote the opening, one of his eyes being taken out of his head, was more than sixe horse in a cart could draw, a man stoode upright in the place from whence the eye was taken, the thicknesse from the backe whereon he lay, to the toppe of his bellie (which was upward) was fourtéene foote, his tayle of the same breadth, betwéene his eyes twelve foote, thrée mē[n] stood upright in his mouth, some of the ribbes were xvi. foote lō[n]g, his tong was xv. foote long, his liver two cart loade, into his nostrels any man might have crept: the oyle being boyled out of the head was Parmasitie, the oile of his body was whitishe, and swéete of taste."

"Never, perhaps, was any Object in itself, abstractedly considered, less valuable, nor less worthy of public Attention, than the Falkland Islands: yet, the Manner in which Spain acted on the Occasion, displayed so much Arrogance, as to compromise the Honor of the British Crown, and to demand a Reparation no less public than the Affront."

"He...was highly favoured by nature, and his address exceeded even his figure. At every period of his life queens, duchesses, and countesses have showered on him their regard. The Duke of Dorset, recently sent ambassador to France, being an intimate friend of Mr. Whitworth, made him known to the queen, who not only distinguished him by flattering marks of her attention, but interested herself in promoting his fortune, which then stood greatly in need of such patronage."

"Eloquence, transcendent eloquence, formed the foundation and the key-stone of Pitt's Ministerial greatness. Every other quality in him was accessory."

"Votive Offerings is the general name given to those things vowed or dedicated to God, or a saint, and in consequence looked upon as set apart by this act of consecration. The idea is very old, for it springs from man's instinctive attitude towards the higher powers."

"On the 1170, the morrow of the , that is to say, Tuesday, 29 December, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, of the whole of England and of the , was murdered in his cathedral church by four noble knights from the household of his lord and former patron and friend, King Henry II. He had just celebrated what was thought to be his fiftieth birthday. The horror which the killing inspired and the miraculous cures performed at his tomb transfigured the victim into one of the most popular saints in the late-medieval calendar and made one of the greatest pilgrim shrines in the West. The modern , although doubtless better organized, gives some idea of medieval Canterbury with its phials of water tinctured, if faintly, with the blood of the martyr, and its highly charged atmosphere, a combination of the pathetic hopes of the sick and the jollity of the holiday-makers. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales kept the saint's memory green after the Reformation, and the drama has attracted distinguished modern playwrights."

"William Rufus had a remarkable career, even for the late eleventh century, when opportunities for the adventurous and talented were plentiful. Born into the middle ranks of the French aristocracy, and only a younger son, he rose first through the achievements of his father, William 'the Conqueror', duke of Normandy, and then through the misfortunes of his elder brothers. Still a landless when his father died in 1087, he took whatever chances came his way, and by the time of his own premature death thirteen years later had become a king of great renown. He was acclaimed by soldiers for his chivalry and magnanimity; and the flaws of his character proved to be no hindrance to success."

"Barlow's intellectual and scholarly qualities are arguably most evident in his editions of complex and technically difficult Latin texts, whose meaning he would elucidate with an almost unrivalled brilliance, and in the writing of biography, a genre about which he thought very deeply, as befitted someone who had contemplated a career as a novelist in his youth. Edward the Confessor (1970), William Rufus (1983) and Thomas Becket (1986) are all very important, and demonstrate a profoundly insightful and carefully reasoned determination to penetrate the religious attitudes of the historians of the 11th and 12th centuries in order to reveal the secular world beneath."

"The lantern which William of Malmesbury used to guide his steps when he was writing his ' ... was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, annals written in ; and it remains the surest guide. It is particularly valuable, because the first draft, at least, of that part of the Chronicle which covers most of 's reign was put together before the king's death, ... a circumstance which ensured that the events recorded were not chosen so as to explain either the or ."

"The reader must not expect in this work merely the private uninteresting history of a single town. He may expect whatever curious particulars can with any propriety be connected with it. [...] Nor must the general disquisitions and the general narratives of the prefent work be ever confidered as actually digressionary in their natures, and as merely useful in their notices. They are all united with the rest, and form proper parts of the whole. They have fome of them a necessary connexion with the history of Manchester. They have many of them an intimate relation, they have all of them a natural affinity, to it. And the author has endeavoured, by a judicious distribution of them through the work, to prevent that difgusting uniformity, and to take off that uninteresting locality, which must necessarily result from the merely barren and private annals of a town. He has thus in some measure adopted the elegant principles of modern gardening. He has thrown down the close hedges and the high walls that have hitherto confined the antiquarians of our towns in their views. He has called in the scenes of the neighbouring country to his aid, and has happily combined them into his own plan. He has drawn off the attention to the history of Manchester before it became languid and exhausted, by fetching in some objects from the county at large, or by presenting some view of the national history. But he has been cautious of multiplying objects in the wantonness of refinement, and of distracting the attention with a confused variety. He has always considered the history of Manchester as the great fixed point, as the enlivening center, of all his excursions. Every opening is therefore made to carry an actual reference, either mediate or immediate, to the reregular history of Manerester. And every visto is employed only for the useful purpose of breaking the stiff straight lines, of lighting up the dark, of heightening the little, and colouring over the lifeless, in the regular history of Manchester."

"To say that there was, and that there always remained, a great gulf between the ecclesiastical ideal of Christian knighthood and the militant reality, is merely to say that chivalry was a medieval institution. For nothing more striking distinguishes the Middle Age both from the Classical Antiquity which preceded it, and the Modern Commercialism which supplanted it, than the enormous discrepancies that displayed themselves between its theories and its practices."

"The backward condition of Portugal is largely attributable to its lack of instruction, and in view of the want of interest shown by the Government in non-political questions, private societies are endeavoring to apply the remedy."