Battlefield Britain
Last night I watched the first episode of a BBC2 program called BATTLEFIELD BRITAIN. At least, I watched the opening and closing parts. It is the sort of thing I might, I suppose, have gone for as a child: a series of eight "decisive battles" fought on British soil, from the suppression of Boudicca's revolt in 59AD to the Battle of Britain.
The opening was everything I feared from the crass title. Hosted by a famous TV journalist and his historian son, it presented a view of Roman Britain which was infuriatingly cocksure and never allowed the spectator to so much as imagine that there might be some problem with the sources. Time and time again, the presenters presented the most remote hypotheses as if they were certified by clear contemporary statements. Nor did their hypotheses shine for brilliance or understanding. The mere fact that they flatly translated the word "druid" as "priest", without trying to give any notion of the peculiar characteristics of this class of tribal sage (the name DRUID means nothing else than INTENSELY WISE), shows their inability to come to grips in any meaningful way with the period. This was simply the worst kind of elementary-textbook history, designed to leave in the viewer's mind a vague set of truisms, and aggravated by the fact that with textbooks you can go back and check the written sources. This program did not so much as name them: the presenters did all the narrating in their own persons, as though it was up to them, rather than to Tacitus, to know the events.
After about ten minutes of this sort of thing, I switched the TV off and went off to surf the net. Then, some twenty or thirty minutes later, I went back and turned it on again.
"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
It's not as though the quality of the program's mind had changed. We are still talking about assumptions, cocksureness, and a terrible tendency to treat the sources as raw material to be used and discarded. It is that it has moved into a territory that TV does supremely well, better than the best prose historian possibly could. They are now reconstructing the final battle between Boudicca's allied British tribes and Suetonius Paulinus' two Roman legions. The effect is simply overwhelming, and I have a strong feeling that many of the spectators will remember these scenes as long as they live. I am sure I will.
As I said, the minds of the makers have not improved. They are still making unproven and unprovable assumptions, and presenting them as facts. Only now it is not nearly as important. In the case of this battle, we know that it happened and that the Romans defeated a numerically enormously superior enemy - the sources speak of twenty against one. In this frame, it is not nearly so important that the presenters identify a aparticular field, with much more certainty than any historian would, as the battle place; or that they decide that the Romans had used a multiple wedge formation in their attack, which is the likeliest solution but not the only one; or that they use the un-Roman term "shieldwall" for the impact forward line of the charging legion, with shields locked together. All these things are secondary to the fact: the battle was fought: the Romans triumphed: the enemy suffered terrible losses. And I say that no historian, not if they had the literary genius of Trevor-Roper and the passion of Carlyle, could possibly render the impact of a charging Roman army, shields locked together, marching in step, grinding the enemy into the terrible funnels formed by the multiple wedge formation and trampling them underfoot with the weight of hundreds of marching men - no historian could possibly have made them as real, as terrifying, as those TV images did. Is it the exact truth of that particular battle? Does it matter? It does not; if it did not happen like that, it happened something very much like that - it must have, because we know that the Romans defeated a much larger force. And given that it happened, it takes only a certain amount of professional competence and a very moderate imagination to make them work. The story was broken up with cameos from a couple of actors dressed as Roman veterans and another couple dressed as the producer's idea of elderly Celtic tribesmen (although I do not think any upper-caste Celt would ever allow himself to look so scruffy). They all said the obvious thing; the "Romans", that they were there to civilize the natives, that they were right to suppress the revolt, that being in the front in a battle was scary, and that one got through it by discipline and trust in one's mates; the "Britons", that they remembered their elation on the morning of battle, the blood rushing through them, and then the terror of the Roman coming forward slowly and relentlessly, the day turning into nightmare,the slaughter of women and children. All this was simply obvious; it was what the situation dictated; and as the situation itself was immensely tragic and dramatic, and as the medium of TV lends itself ideally to rendering it, the effect was simply tremendous.
One last word. There might be a suspicion that this sort of thing might be too sensational, too popular, too meretricious, to count as the practice of history. I, for one, do not think so. Herodotus was not afraid of being popular. Macaulay was not afraid of being sensational. Battles, even decisive battles, do happen, they are part of history, and anything that serves to convey their reality effectively and without falsehoods is good history.
The opening was everything I feared from the crass title. Hosted by a famous TV journalist and his historian son, it presented a view of Roman Britain which was infuriatingly cocksure and never allowed the spectator to so much as imagine that there might be some problem with the sources. Time and time again, the presenters presented the most remote hypotheses as if they were certified by clear contemporary statements. Nor did their hypotheses shine for brilliance or understanding. The mere fact that they flatly translated the word "druid" as "priest", without trying to give any notion of the peculiar characteristics of this class of tribal sage (the name DRUID means nothing else than INTENSELY WISE), shows their inability to come to grips in any meaningful way with the period. This was simply the worst kind of elementary-textbook history, designed to leave in the viewer's mind a vague set of truisms, and aggravated by the fact that with textbooks you can go back and check the written sources. This program did not so much as name them: the presenters did all the narrating in their own persons, as though it was up to them, rather than to Tacitus, to know the events.
After about ten minutes of this sort of thing, I switched the TV off and went off to surf the net. Then, some twenty or thirty minutes later, I went back and turned it on again.
"All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
It's not as though the quality of the program's mind had changed. We are still talking about assumptions, cocksureness, and a terrible tendency to treat the sources as raw material to be used and discarded. It is that it has moved into a territory that TV does supremely well, better than the best prose historian possibly could. They are now reconstructing the final battle between Boudicca's allied British tribes and Suetonius Paulinus' two Roman legions. The effect is simply overwhelming, and I have a strong feeling that many of the spectators will remember these scenes as long as they live. I am sure I will.
As I said, the minds of the makers have not improved. They are still making unproven and unprovable assumptions, and presenting them as facts. Only now it is not nearly as important. In the case of this battle, we know that it happened and that the Romans defeated a numerically enormously superior enemy - the sources speak of twenty against one. In this frame, it is not nearly so important that the presenters identify a aparticular field, with much more certainty than any historian would, as the battle place; or that they decide that the Romans had used a multiple wedge formation in their attack, which is the likeliest solution but not the only one; or that they use the un-Roman term "shieldwall" for the impact forward line of the charging legion, with shields locked together. All these things are secondary to the fact: the battle was fought: the Romans triumphed: the enemy suffered terrible losses. And I say that no historian, not if they had the literary genius of Trevor-Roper and the passion of Carlyle, could possibly render the impact of a charging Roman army, shields locked together, marching in step, grinding the enemy into the terrible funnels formed by the multiple wedge formation and trampling them underfoot with the weight of hundreds of marching men - no historian could possibly have made them as real, as terrifying, as those TV images did. Is it the exact truth of that particular battle? Does it matter? It does not; if it did not happen like that, it happened something very much like that - it must have, because we know that the Romans defeated a much larger force. And given that it happened, it takes only a certain amount of professional competence and a very moderate imagination to make them work. The story was broken up with cameos from a couple of actors dressed as Roman veterans and another couple dressed as the producer's idea of elderly Celtic tribesmen (although I do not think any upper-caste Celt would ever allow himself to look so scruffy). They all said the obvious thing; the "Romans", that they were there to civilize the natives, that they were right to suppress the revolt, that being in the front in a battle was scary, and that one got through it by discipline and trust in one's mates; the "Britons", that they remembered their elation on the morning of battle, the blood rushing through them, and then the terror of the Roman coming forward slowly and relentlessly, the day turning into nightmare,the slaughter of women and children. All this was simply obvious; it was what the situation dictated; and as the situation itself was immensely tragic and dramatic, and as the medium of TV lends itself ideally to rendering it, the effect was simply tremendous.
One last word. There might be a suspicion that this sort of thing might be too sensational, too popular, too meretricious, to count as the practice of history. I, for one, do not think so. Herodotus was not afraid of being popular. Macaulay was not afraid of being sensational. Battles, even decisive battles, do happen, they are part of history, and anything that serves to convey their reality effectively and without falsehoods is good history.