History is bunk (1)

As Henry T Ford once said ’History is bunk’. Like Voltaire that’s not what he actually said, what he actually said was ‘History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition and we don’t want tradition’.

I really am beginning to tire of the inaccuracies and false reporting but I’m not sorry I checked up on the quotation itself because it led me to discover others on the subject of ‘History is bunk’ and four in particular that sum up my current feelings if not towards history then historians and authors of historical fiction.

But first let’s start with Henry who added to his comment with a somewhat plaintive cri de coeur ‘As a young man I was very interested in people’s lives, how they got from place to place, light their homes and cooked their meals. So I went to the history books. I could find out all about kings and presidents but nothing of their everyday lives. So I decided that history is bunk’. He’d be a happy man now with so many TV programmes and books galore devoted to social history but not so some historians who complain that the pendulum has swung too much the other way.

It would seem HTF had a point about tradition; tradition or traditional tales can be dangerous if we believe them to be the truth. One of the great heroes of the UK is Robin Hood, about whom there has been films and TV programmes a-plenty and his heroic fight against the rich and powerful but very little evidence to prove that he actually existed. Try telling that to the people of Nottingham. Or Yorkshire where many claim our Robin were a Yorkshire lad. And no doubt as one philosopher might have said. ‘ If he didn’t exist, we’d have had to invent him’.

Whichever version one chooses it’s a good rollicking yarn about the put-upon young man determined to bring justice to those in a time – according to the tale – when even Magna Carta did not exist. ‘Feared by the bad, loved by the good’ as one TV series had it. Robin the good guy. Robin the people’s hero. Robin the guy who stands up to the bad guys, the oppressor, the foreign invader. Every country it seems has its own Robin Hood or variant thereof, the folk hero; such people can be found even in religious or semi-religious texts like the Bible or the Ramayana.

And yet all is not as it seems. Real medieval outlaws were seldom the good guys either and they could hardly be described as ‘merry men’ either having to live on their wits and life a hard battle for survival; being merciful was not an option. The earliest records speaking of ‘Robin Hood’ or ‘Robert Hood’ are in fact Court records and the earliest tales were oral which change or adapt or get added to or embellished as they pass down the generations. At the moment there’s not much danger with the tradition of Robin but what it if were to be hijacked as the ‘causa belli’ (the reason for war) in order to settle a grievance?