Download PDF | Lacey Baldwin Smith, This Realm of England, 1399 to 1688, D. C. Heath and Company, 1966, 7th ed., 1996.
410 Pages
Foreword
Carl Becker once complained that everybody knows the job of the historian is “to discover and set forth the ‘facts’ of history.” The facts, it is often said, speak for themselves. The businessperson talks about hard facts; the statistician refers to cold facts; the lawyer is eloquent about the facts of the case; and the historian, who deals with the incontrovertible facts of life and death, is called a very lucky fellow. Those who speak so confidently about the historian’s craft are generally not historians themselves; they are readers of textbooks that more often than not are mere recordings of vital information and listings of dull generalizations. It is not surprising, then, that historians’ reputations have suffered; they have become known as peddlers of facts and chroniclers who say, “This is what happened.”
The shorter the historical survey, the more textbook writers are likely to assume godlike detachment, spurning the minor tragedies and daily comedies of humanity and immortalizing the rise and fall of civilizations, the clash of economic and social forces, and the deeds of titans. Anglo-Saxon warriors were sick with fear when Viking “swift sea-kings” swept down on England to plunder, rape, and kill, but historians dispassionately note that the Norse invasions were a good thing; they allowed the kingdom of Wessex to unite and “liberate” the island in the name of Saxon and Christian defense against heathen marauders. The chronicler moves nimbly from the indisputable fact that Henry VIII annulled his marriage with Catherine of Aragon and wedded Anne Boleyn to the confident assertion that this helped produce the Reformation in England. The result is sublime but emasculated history. Her subjects wept when Good Queen Bess died, but historians merely comment that she had lived her allotted three score years and ten. British soldiers rotted by the thousands in the trenches of the First World War, but the terror and agony of that holocaust are lost in the dehumanized statistic that 765,399 British troops died in the four years of war.
In a brief history of even one “tight little island,” the chronology of events must of necessity predominate, but if these four volumes are in any way fresh and new, it is because their authors have tried by artistry to step beyond the usual confines of a textbook and to conjure up something of the drama of politics, of the wealth of personalities, and even the pettiness, as well as the greatness, of human motivation. The price paid will be obvious to anyone seeking total coverage. There is relatively little in these pages on literature, the fine arts, or philosophy, except as they throw light on the uniqueness of English history. On the other hand, the complexities, uncertainties, endless variations, and above all the accidents that bedevil the design of human events — these are the very stuff of which history is made and the “truths” that this series seeks to narrate and preserve. Moreover, the flavor of each volume varies according to the tastes of its author. Sometimes the emphasis is political, sometimes economic or social, but the presentation is always impressionistic — shading, underscoring, or highlighting to achieve an image that will be more than a bare outline and will recapture something of the smell and temper of the past.
Even though each book was conceived and executed as an entity capable of standing by itself, the four volumes were designed as a unit. They tell the story of how a small and insignificant outpost of the Roman Empire hesitantly, and not always heroically, evolved into the nation that has probably produced and disseminated more ideas and institutions, both good and bad, than any state since Athens. Our hope is that these volumes will appeal both individually, to those interested in a balanced portrait of particular segments of English history, and collectively, to those who seek the majestic sweep of the story of a people whose activities have been wonderfully rich, exciting, and varied. In this spirit this series was originally written and has now been revised for a sixth time, not only to keep pace with new scholarship but, equally important, to keep it fresh and thought-provoking to a world becoming both more nostalgic and more impatient of its past.
Lacey Baldwin Smith
Preface
History is not lived as it is told. It is experienced as a series of largely unexpected disastrous or advantageous personal encounters, the outcomes of which depend on luck, circumstance, and personality. But history is recorded collectively and given direction and focus through the advantage of hindsight, and all sorts of messages about the meaning and purpose of the historical process are imposed upon this collective experience.
The fundamental question is whether history belongs to the living or to the dead. Should historians, using their knowledge of how events actually turned out, direct their research and artistry at reconstructing history as it affects and interests the present? Or should they write about the past as if they were contemporary to it, blind to what will happen? Today, the neo-Whig interpretation — history written with the benefit of hindsight and evaluated through the eyes of the living — is branded by the so-called revisionist historians as false. Such scholars argue on the grounds that it is wrong to presume the existence in history of men and women possessed of providential knowledge who strove to achieve, or conversely to block, those ideals and institutions that would become important to the twentieth century. Far better, so the revisionists maintain, is to present history as it really was: the product not of heroes and villains obsessed with a sense of manifest destiny but of accident, misunderstanding, and the perversity of events. The gospel according to the revisionists insists that great events in history — wars, revolutions, and heresies — do not require great causes. In recent years the story of the English Civil War has been rewritten in that belief. Today, revisionism has seeped back into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Wars of the Roses are no longer seen as the result of some malfunction in society but as the product of the peevish personality and mistakes of Henry VI. The Protestant Reformation is now said to be more the work of political factions in the court of Henry VIII than a response to changing religious aspirations operating within a society transformed by economic forces and a mounting secular perspective.
In the fifth edition of This Realm of England, the chapters dealing with the early Stuarts and the coming of civil war were heavily modified to soften their Whiggish tone and to incorporate the revisionist school of history. In the sixth edition, the sections on the Lancastrian, Yorkist, and early Tudor reigns were similarly revised. This seventh edition has sought to resolve one of the basic dilemmas of textbook writing: how to incorporate social, intellectual, economic, family, and cultural history into the story of the past without losing the chronological thread. Many texts prefer to cluster together in a separate chapter those themes that do not fit neatly into a political time frame. This volume used to be no exception. Chapter 13, “Paternalism, Profiteers, and Pioneers,” was Fibber Magee’s closet that kept the rest of the story tidy. Its contents have now been woven into the text to give the story a stronger social and cultural flavor. Not even a volume that makes no apology for its political emphasis can afford to ignore the essential role played by the family, local government, education, and women in the building of English history between 1399 and 1689.
Two notes of caution are in order when reading a text that has been thirty years in the making and that tries to do justice to the past as well as the present. First; there are fashions in history as in other human activities. Ideology and determinism — both economic and sociopsychological — as driving forces in the affairs of men and women are out of style. Some evidence suggests, however, that the pendulum is beginning to swing. Second, the story of the past, especially when it is encapsulated into a survey that seeks to lead the anxious reader through a maze of events, must have direction and must highlight those developments that contributed to the making of today. Although it may be essential to remind ourselves of the importance of the irrational — pride, prejudice, and paranoia — and of the inescapable shapelessness of the past, it is equally important to realize that history is a continuum and by definition a prelude to the present. It had its winners and losers, and the historian’s job is to explain how and why certain people, institutions, and ideas triumphed or failed, and in doing so how they produced the world as we perceive it. The trick in writing a textbook is always to be faithful both to men and women long dead, who had little or no sense of the future, and to readers, who want to understand the present in terms of the past. In a sense, then, history belongs to neither the past nor the present but to the magician-historian who handles the lighting and stage-manages the effect. The novelist Samuel Butler sensed this paradox when he wrote:
It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence. — Erewhon
LB: S.
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