Tag Archives: fougou

Writing people out of history, in real time

Posted on by
20

You’ve heard complaints that some group of people have been written out of history, and maybe you thought, Okay, they haven’t been mentioned, but the process couldn’t have possibly been so deliberate, could it? These things just happen.

It’s true (and I, of course, am in a position to sort the true from the untrue) that once a group’s been erased, it doesn’t take much effort to keep them invisible. Inertia takes over. But at the start? As it happens, we have a ringside seat just now, and we can watch the process play out in real time. And guess what: those first steps look pretty deliberate. 

The story we’re following is happening in the Netherlands, at the American Cemetery in Margraten, the burial ground of some 8,000 US soldiers who died fighting the Nazis. Of those, 174 are African-American. Unless they were African-American. I can’t figure out if a person’s ethnicity dies with them and slips into the past tense or if it outlives them. 

The cemetery also memorializes another 1,700 soldiers who were listed as missing. That’s probably irrelevant and as far as I know they have no ethnicity. It got lost too.

Irrelevant photo: a fougou–a Cornish, Iron Age tunnel, open at both ends, with dry stone walls. No idea what the purpose was and the explanations I’ve read–to store things or to use as a refuge–make no sense at all, given that they’re open at both ends. All I know is that they took one hell of a lot of work.

 

The disappearance

The site’s run by a US government agency, the American Battle Monuments Commission, and its visitor center recently took down two panels commemorating African-American soldiers. One memorialized George H. Pruitt, a 23-year-old telephone engineer who died trying to rescue a fellow soldier. The second was about the US military’s policy of segregation, which continued until 1948–and for anyone who’s young enough that the 20th century all looks the same, that was several hands of poker after the war ended. 

You’re welcome.

What happened to the panels? Pruitt’s, the commission says, is “currently off display, though not out of rotation.” In other words, it might come back. No promises as to which century it’ll be when that happens. And the other one? It’s on the naughty step until it apologizes to President Trump, stops insisting on all the diversity and inclusion nonsense, and proves that it took the approved position on releasing the Epstein files, whichever that is this week.

The commission says 4 of its 15 panels “currently feature African American service members buried at the cemetery,” but a journalist who visited the site couldn’t find them. 

 

Local involvement

Generations of local people have adopted individual graves in the cemetery, tending them, leaving flowers, telling their adopted soldier’s story, saying a prayer if they’re the praying sort, building a relationship with the soldier’s surviving family. It’s been a way to keep alive the history of the Nazi occupation and to express gratitude to the country’s liberators. And those people aren’t happy with the way their history’s being edited just now. Local politicians, historians, and plain old people are calling for the panels to be put back. The mayor’s written the commission, asking it to “reconsider the removal of the displays” and give the stories of Black American soldiers “permanent attention in the visitor center.”

Last I heard (and of course I’d be the first person they’d tell), there’s been no response. 

To be fair, the commission hasn’t started selling Nazi-flavored bubble gum and probably won’t, but shoving an ethnic group out of the public sphere has a slight flavor of the Nazis’ early moves against the Jews. If you chew on it for a while, it leaves a nasty aftertaste.

 

Does it matter?

Well, for starters, segregation within the military is woven into a central strand of US history that reaches from slavery through the Abolitionist movement, the Civil War, segregation, the Civil Rights movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement, with pieces left out along the way for the sake of brevity. 

But more than that, Black soldiers aren’t being disappeared because they played such a small part that they had no effect. The act of disappearing them speaks to how much they matter: they get in the way of history being all white, just as the disappearance of women’s history and the accomplishments of individual women speak to how much they interfere with history being all male. They mess with a comfortable narrative. Take them away and you make the human story less complex, less contradictory, less honest, and more comfortable for people who used to complain that all this diversity and equality stuff took away their freedom to shut other people up and push them off the world stage.

This is about who’s going to be allowed into the picture.

At the back of my head, I hear someone reminding me that I was all for taking down the statues of slave traders and Confederate generals. How, that voice asks, is this different? 

It’s different because those were monuments honoring deeply dishonorable people.  Want to put up a panel discussing their legacy? As long as it’s honest, I have no problem with it. But I’m not much for monuments anyway, even the ones that honor people who did honorable things. The process of turning them into heroes falsifies them and asks us to accept a lie. Leave it up to me and I’ll skip the statues altogether.

 

Hang on, though: isn’t this blog supposed to be about England?

It is, but sometimes I cheat. Last week’s blog was about the Black British soldiers who fought in the Napoleonic Wars, people who’d been invisible and are only recently being reclaimed for history, so the process of writing people out of history is on my mind. And I’m American, at least originally. I’ve lived in Britain for almost 20 years, but the U.S. formed my thinking, my assumptions, my accent, and you may have noticed, my spelling. And since the US has invested heavily in the business of erasing history lately– Yeah, I can’t pass up a chance to write about this. It’ll piss off all the right people in the unlikely event that they happen to read it. 

 

The English connection

I can connect this to England, though, by way of statues: 

In Glasgow, a statue of the Duke of Wellington (looking heroic, of course) traditionally wears a traffic cone on his head. In fact, if this particular link doesn’t just have a picture of the statue and the traffic cone but also one where he’s wearing two traffic cones and his horse has a couple of its own.  

The traffic cone isn’t traditional the way wearing a kilt is traditional, but traditional in the sense that since the 1980s members of the public have replaced the traffic cone every time some representative of sensible governance has it taken expensively down. Over the years, cones have worn a Covid mask, the European Union flag; and the Scottish flag, and so forth. The tradition calls to the creative spark in us all the way a school desk calls to a wad of used chewing gum. 

Now, the cone has been replaced by a statue of a pigeon wearing its own, smaller traffic cone. And reading a newspaper. It’s believed to be the work of Rebel Bear, a street artist known as the Scottish Banksy. He–assuming he is a he; I haven’t a clue but it’s what the newspaper said–posted a picture of the pigeon on social media, saying: 

“The dignified and undignified of beasts. Located: well, youse know where.”

I would dearly love to show you a photo but, you know, copyright and all that. Follow the link. 

That takes us to Scotland, though, which you may notice isn’t England, but with Wellington I can move us south of the border. He was born in Ireland–still not England but bear with me; I’ll get there–and he fought in the Napoleonic Wars, came home a hero, and most significantly of all had a boot named after him. His Wellington boots did touch Scottish soil, which is probably what justifies the Glasgow statute. More to the point, though, he became the Duke of Wellington, which gave him a connection to Somerset, England. 

You know I’d get there eventually, didn’t you?

The Brigantes: a bit of Roman-era British history

Posted on by
25

When the Romans invaded Britain, some of the British tribes weighed the odds of defeating them, didn’t like their chances, and cut deals with them. As far as I know, you won’t find statues to those tribes. They got their payoff at the time and to hell with posterity. 

By way of contrast, Boudicca–leader of the Iceni and scourge of the Romans–has a very nice statue in Westminster. Or if it’s not nice, it is at least big.  

Boudicca earned her statue by leading an uprising against Rome, burning what are now Colchester, St. Albans, and London. According to a Roman source, her troops killed 70,000 Romans and pro-Roman Britons and made mincemeat of the Ninth Legion. 

The word mincemeat isn’t in the original. It’s my translation and since I don’t know Latin you shouldn’t give it too much weight, but you might also want to substitute “a lot” for that 70,000. It’s from that impeccable source, the Britannica, which got it from a Roman writer, but at the time statistical reporting was no better than my Latin. 

I also question the number because Wikiwhatsia (sorry–handy for a shallow dive on a beside-the-point topic) estimates the late-second century population of what’s now the UK at somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million, which is close enough for a blog post. If we subtract all the people who lived outside of the area the Romans occupied, and then  eliminate children, old people, and people who had migraines when the battles took place or who were nine months pregnant (women fought–consider Boudicca–so we’re not eliminating them all), we’re left with–um, nowhere near as many people as we started out with. And we haven’t even eliminated all the people who weren’t pro-Roman.

What I’m saying is that if 70,000’s the right number, she would have killed off an unlikely proportion of the fighting population. I suggest we take it as a deceptively specific way of saying she did the Romans a lot of damage.

The Romans did eventually defeat Boudicca, but many centuries later she got her statue.

The tribes who collaborated with the Romans not only don’t get statues (as far as I know), they also don’t get much press, but I stubbed my toe on one of those tribes, the Brigantes, recently and I hate to let that pain go to waste, so let’s stop and learn a bit about them.

Okay, I’m pushing it here. This is a fougou–an elaborate prehistoric tunnel whose purpose no one’s sure of–at Carn Euny, in Cornwall. Wrong end of Britain for this story, but the village was in use until the fourth century CE. 

The Brigantes

The Brigantes were a confederation of tribes–the largest on the island at the time–occupying most of northern England. Or northern what’s-now-England. Or else they were one large honkin’ tribe, not a confederation. Take your pick. We’ll probably never know.

In 43 CE (that’s where we pick up the story), they were led by a queen, Cartimandua, who made an alliance with the Romans in order to avoid an invasion. 

Not invading, though, didn’t mean the Romans stayed out. It just meant they didn’t kill people on their way in. They came, they settled, and they rubbed their hands in glee at the minerals that were to be had. Above all, they made money. 

Unfortunately, the Brigantes left no written records, so we only get to see what happened from Roman sources and from archeology, and with all due respect to archeologists, they can never tell the full story of people’s lives. So we don’t know much about Cartimandua’s life and we don’t know the Brigantes’ experience of having the Romans move in. What we do know is that the Roman pattern was to create what an article on a Warwick University site calls “mutually beneficial relationships with the local elite.”

It would be a long time before the non-elite put their point of view on the record.

We also don’t know whether Cartimandua was one of the eleven British “kings” who surrendered to Emperor Claudius and who were mentioned–not by name–on his triumphal arch, but she might’ve been. It might’ve made more sense to the Romans to call a woman a king than to acknowledge a woman as a ruler.

 

Resistance to Rome

While Cartimandua was cutting her deal, some of the tribes to the south surrendered to the Romans and others fought the. The Catuvellauni tribe fought and lost, and Caratacus, the son of their king, fled to Wales–or what’s now Wales–where with one of the local tribes he kept the fight going for nine years. 

When he was finally defeated, he fled into the territory of the Brigantes, hoping for sanctuary. That makes it sound like he hadn’t been reading the newspapers–the Brigantes; deal with the Romans; should’ve been front-page stuff–but that can happen when you’re fighting an asymmetrical war. You’re too busy to send a kid running to the newsstand. Or you send the kid but then you don’t have time to unfold the damn paper, never mind read it. You’re too busy dodging spears and mending your shield and wondering how you’re going to feed your warriors. 

It’s also possible that he knew Cartimandua had cut a deal with the Romans but he didn’t have any other cards in his hand so he played the one he had.

Either way, Cartimandua handed him over to Rome.

It’s not the sort of move that fills her descendants with pride, but if you narrow history down to feel-good stories about heroes, it’s no longer history, it’s propaganda. Which is of course not a comment on what’s been happening to school books and museum exhibits in the US lately. 

Caratacus’s defeat pretty much settled the question of who controlled Britain: Rome did. He and his family were shipped off to Rome and paraded through the streets. The humiliation of enemies brought glory to Rome. So I’m about to tell you he was executed, right?

Wrong. He gave an impassioned speech asking for clemency and Claudius–the emperor–pardoned him. He and his family lived out the rest of their lives in Rome, quietly.

If life was a movie, it wouldn’t make a good ending.

 

Cartimandua, Venutius, Vollocatus, and a soap opera plot

Cartimandua did well out of handing him over. Or out of her deal with the Romans. Either way, archeologists have unearthed luxuries–glass; rare tableware; amphorae for wine and olive oil–from what may have been her capital. 

Remember that business of the Romans cutting deals with the local elite? 

But we have to backtrack here, because Cartimandua had a husband, Venutius. He seems to have been the lesser power in the relationship and–speculation alert here–may have been the leader of another tribe and their marriage a political alliance. Who knows? They’re both dead and we can’t ask. 

Somewhere around 57 CE, they split up, and Cartimandua not only married his armor-bearer, Vellocatus, but shared power with him. Or so Tacitus, a Roman historian, tells us. Again, who knows? It’s as close to the story as we’re going to get. Let’s pretend to believe it. 

Theirs doesn’t sound like the kind of divorce where the couple gets together every Friday night to eat popcorn and watch TV with the kids, because at some point Cartimandua captured some of Venutius’s relatives, which (life advice warning here) is never a good move if you’re looking to keep peace in the not-quite-family.

Venutius attacked her, but when I say her what I probably mean is her territory. Her tribe. 

It’s possible–or better yet, probable–that this wasn’t all about who shared a bed but about politics. Handing over Caratacus might not’ve been a popular move. Becoming an accessory to a new ruling elite–the Romans–slotting themselves into place over the Brigantes might’ve made Cartimandua unpopular. 

A lot of things are possible. What’s known is that the Romans sent soldiers to defend Cartamandua and Venutius lost but lived and tried again ten years later, when Nero’s death left Rome in turmoil. He attacked, the Romans had only auxiliary troops to send, and Venutius won. 

What happened to Cartamandua? Dunno. She might’ve survived. She might not have.  After that, we’re out of possibilities. Vellocatus drops out of sight. Venutius, though, ruled the Brigantes only until the Romans booted him out and ruled directly. To hell with these client queens and kings; they’re too much trouble. What might’ve been Cartimandua’s capital–it’s now Stanwick–fell out of use and the center of power moved to what’s now Aldborough, which became a Roman administrative center. Where Stanwick seems to have been a place for gatherings rather than a town or stronghold, Aldborough followed the Roman pattern and became a town. A Roman legion was stationed nearby, in what’s now York, so let’s assume that all was not peaceful. Or at least that it was an uneasy peace.

 

What does it all mean?

Cartimandua’s come down to us–I keep saying this, don’t I?–only from Roman sources, and the Romans didn’t take well to the idea of women rulers. As they told her story, it was about a woman’s lust and lack of wisdom and the corrective violence of a tribe that couldn’t accept a woman’s rule. But with her and Boudicca as evidence, we can pretty safely say the tribes had no problem with women rulers. Or leaders, if that’s a better fit. The two queens sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum–fight the Romans; cut a deal with the Romans–but both held power and didn’t have to hide behind a man to wield it.

Cartimandua ruled for more than twenty years, which is more than most politicians can claim. Still, though, no statue.

Why am I so sure of that? Because when I asked Lord Google to help me find one, he led me either to Boudicca’s statue or to statues of people with heavy beards who I’m reasonably sure aren’t Cartimandua.