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| Eve Edwards |
Have you ever come across something thatoverturned all your preconceived notions about a subject? I do frequently – partly thanks to a teenage son whois a firm fan of QI, but also because I have been researching historical periodsthat I thought I knew well – then discovered I didn’t. Here are some that have come to me recently;perhaps you can add your own?
1. Napoleon was short. That made him angry and decide to take overEurope.
In fact, he wasa respectable 5’ 7”. I suspect it wasthe cartoonists that gave us the idea he was tiny. Bang goes the Napoleonic complex.
2. Richard the Lionheart was thegood king, John the bad one.
Sorry Disney andKevin Costner, Richard was pretty horrible, only good if not setting foot muchin England is counted as good. He hasthe usual sins of a Medieval king to his name (high taxes to pay for his armiespursuing interests that had nothing to do with England, war crimes duringcampaigning) and certainly was no hero. I’ll never cheer at the end of a RobinHood film again. John wasn’t great, buthe neither was he so much worse than his brother. He made the mistake of staying in Englandperhaps?
3. The Bayeux Tapestry is atapestry.
No, it is an embroidery.
4. The Great Plague ended with theFire of London.
The part of London destroyedwas not the hotbed of the plague and it is not know why the disease faded awayeventually.
5. Vikings wore horns on theirhelmets.
Apparently we think theydid because some horned helmets were dug up in Scandinavia by Victorianarchaeologists. They assumed aconnection to the Vikings when in fact they were much older (Bronze Age) andpossibly ceremonial. Now I stop andthink about it, horns are not a great idea, are they, in a fight? Why give the enemy something with which toyank your helmet off? And what about thepoor guy sitting next to you in the boat when you are pulling on the oars?
6. Pirates made enemies walk theplank.
A real life example wasfound in 1829 but this is not the era of the pirate of our imagination. I think this is one of those things that should be true.
7. Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare.
Yes, you’ve readit too (and the idea is being revisited in the film Anonymous as I write), but the best and simplest proof that Shakespeare was the Stratford manI’ve read is in John Bate’s Soul of theAge. He takes a close look at thelocal references cross-checked with parish records and finds bags of proof thatwe are reading the work of a man from Warwickshire. Of course there’s also the argument that hiscontemporaries who knew him, including Ben Jonson, all agreed it was him. Unless the conspiracy was huge (and for whatpurpose?) there seems little point arguing against them.
8. Bronze age tools were bronze.
Actually, the majority werestone.
9. Cornish wreckers regularlylured ships on to the rocks with false lights.
Only in novels. There is no known case of the tricklighthouse as in Jamaica Inn. Wreckers salvaged stuff washed up on theshore, which was regarded as theft, possibly failed to save sailors trying toget ashore, but not quite the mass murder of the literary imagination.
10. Julius Caesar declared ‘Veni Vidi Vici’ on stepping ashore inBritain.
This announcement refers tohis victory in the quite different Battle of Zela 47 B.C. He didn’t do anything very memorable inBritain but visit a couple of times and give it up as a bad idea. He probablytook one look at the cold, soggy coast of England and decided he was too earlyfor tea so might as well go home.
(with thanks to Wikipedia for images that are not author's own)
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