Physics Is Fun!

A brief update from the midst of the lurgy-ridden wastes of November, and it’s good news this week for the public perception of the Middle Ages. Researchers from the University of Durham were nominated for a Times Higher Education Award in the Research Project of the Year category, and although they were beaten to it by a team from Nottingham, the collaboration between historians and physicists was notable for its reference to the scientific writings of Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, who died in 1253.

A lecturer in theology at Oxford, Grosseteste was part of a network comprising the key English academic figures of the period – Adam Marsh, Thomas Wallensis and Alfred of Sareshel inter alia – and was teacher and possibly mentor to Roger Bacon, who praises the bishop’s multilingualism in his Opus Tertium. While his intellectual energies went in all directions, perhaps his most interesting writings are his commentaries on Aristotle and his treatises on astronomy and light.

Þu canst nat þe Maþþeletes iunen, yt is socciale selfe-slauȝte.

The popular notion of medieval ‘scientists’ as urine-drinking, augury-taking weirdos, deriving in no small measure from the efforts of Mark Twain and Monty Python, is given the lie by figures like Bacon and Grosseteste; and while men like my homeboy Alexander Neckam may ultimately have been answering to ideas of a divinely-ordered schema, their academic curiosity was none the worse for it. Mindful of Bernard of Chartres’s phrase, I sometimes have to remind my students that, simply by merit of living in a world where the concept of gravity is known, they are not automatically more intelligent than the intellectual giants who lived before. A paper published by the Durham research team goes to the heart of the matter:

[S]cience is never ‘complete’ — and perceiving modern scientific endeavour as part of a continuum keeps us honest. Admitting that we may be almost as far from a full understanding of colour as our thirteenth-century collaborators reminds us to doubt — and that, after all, is the only way to progress. [Hannah E. Smithson, Giles E.M. Gasper, Tom C.B. McLeish, ‘All the colours of the rainbow’, Nature Physics 10 (2014).]

While it’s always fun to explain to people why A Game of Thrones isn’t historically accurate (true story), it is my hope that an increased exposure, however small, to Grosseteste’s early work will show casual modern onlookers that rumours of the Dark Ages have been greatly exaggerated.

Rainbows and Smiles

Of the two major memorials taking place in Europe this week, both speak to the absolute necessity of reconciliation, of casting off old enmities to ensure peaceful futures. Since they concern twentieth-century events, there’s not much I intend to say about them – except that at times like this the increasingly blinkered separatism of sizeable swathes of the English population strikes an especially jarring chord.

A memorial that we won’t read about is the anniversary this Thursday of the St Brice’s Day Massacre of 1002. It’s hardly a famous occasion, and despite being marked vaguely at its millennium twelve years ago, holds little interest to those outside the field of Anglo-Saxon history. But it is a particularly dishonourable event in the years of skirmishes and strong-arming that preceded the Danish conquest of England, and a hideous aperçu into the ethnically-motivated violence and animosity of the period.

Scholars differ in their reactions to them, but these are the events as reported in the C-text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, now British Library MS Cotton Tiberius B.i:

In that year the king ordered all the Danish men who were in England to be slain. This was done on St Brice’s mass-day, because it was made known to the king that they would treacherously bereave him of his life, and afterwards all of his Witan, and after that have his kingdom without any gainsaying. (trans. J.A. Giles, 1914)

Thus the scribes of the Abingdon Chronicle attribute the massacre of the Danes in England to the vengeful edict of a paranoid king. This king, incidentally, was the hapless Æthelred the Unready.

Give peace a chance.

It is unclear as to how many died; it has been sensibly suggested that the victims all lived outside the Danelaw, in towns whose foreign populations indicate a size like to or larger than Oxford, where a mass grave was discovered in the last few years. Chillingly, the Danes of Oxford had sought refuge in the church of St Frideswide, which was then burned to the ground by the local population. As evidenced by a charter issued two years later, Æthelred’s primary concern was over the loss of the church’s books, and he even claimed that the Danes had burned down the church with themselves in it.

Reprisals throughout the country were bloody, not least because amongst the dead in the West Country had been a Danish royal hostage, Gunhild. Exeter was sacked, and within ten years the Danes had exacted over thirty thousand pounds of tribute payment, ransacked at least fifteen counties, and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury. While the massacre invoked by Æthelred may have seemed just at the time, and was taken up by the English people, the result was decades of tension, violence and political instability.

I usually object in the strongest terms to the use of the word ‘medieval’ as shorthand for backwardness and barbarism. But the violent character of the decades around the turn of the first millennium reinforces the idea that murder, rape and pillage were the only order of the medieval day. These sorts of events are now reported every day by the news media, and commentators are perhaps mostly correct to describe their perpetrators as medieval. Æthelred gives us few ideas as to how to remedy this violence. But following the example of his warrior ancestor Ælfred, via Tina Fey,

I wish I could bake a cake made of rainbows and smiles, and we could all eat it and be happy.