veritas et rumusculus

November 19, 2008

I remember studying Henry V my sophomore year of college. It was part of a class using literature to examine war in history. We talked quite a bit about the Battle of Agincourt and the downfall of the mighty French, in spite of their heroic shining armor. Armor that could not move… that was so heavy they needed to be hoisted onto horses with a crane. Or so the professor told us (influenced no doubt by Larry Olivier's cinematic interpretation of that history play). A little less than a year later I found myself working at Higgins Armory, where I learned almost immediately that there were no such things as cranes to hoist knights up on horses while wearing armor. Armor had to allow for agility – especially on the battlefield, especially atop a horse. The problem the French had in 1415 was really… just… mud.

This clarification of history came to mind the other day while reading an article sent to me by a museum colleague. It was an amusing collection of vignettes about the misinformation distributed by guides on historic house tours. Some of the stories had an element of truth from which their yarns stemmed, but most were just the polar opposite of truth. I was amused – not just because I've encountered and no doubt told some of my own hyperbolic tales of the past – but because it goes along with my theory that history is just a bunch of antiquated gossip.

When I traveled around New England with Lady Erica and Lady Catherine, we used gossip as exposition to our armor demonstration. We filled the gaps between mail and combat armor with jabs at the greasy, non-toothed graybeard, the six fingered Anne Boleyn, or the audacious young women who dared to expose their legs. It certainly wasn't the most reverent dispensation of historic facts… but I'm sure the idea of Sir Monkeyface made the concept of ceremonial armor stick a lot better than an explanation of metallurgy.

But none of those two shows were ever the same – whether altered by a cast change or an audience change. The nuance of the history certainly varied each time… especially when there was a determination to suppress giggles from unintentional innuendo or there was a question from a spunky eleven year old determined to prove we were in fact not from the 16th century. So while I like to think I know a thing or two about the era of knights and feasts that served up a cockatrice, I'm not going to deny I would play the story to the audience to make it a little more interesting.

I was – and am on Eastern Point every summer – a history gossip.

The ends to justify the means, I tell myself. Because on the page history can be so dusty and moldy and dull. A little embellishment makes it more appealing and intriguing. Because… isn't it better to walk away intrigued enough to learn more than to walk away bored out of one's mind and never wanting to revisit that corner of the past? Besides, those people are dead and can't be hurt by the distortions of conjecture. I imagine the servants would probably hear one of my tours and laugh with a disapproving shake of their heads. What the hell do I know about Beauport? Really, what do I know? I just imagine myself there… and try to take the tangible objects and put myself in the shoes of the people who were actually able to touch them.

But I can't touch the objects, or the people. I can only imagine. So I fill in the gaps with a clever description or romantic guess about what happened between the walls. I make a disclaimer that some of what I say is a guess… but I know that the disclaimer won't linger so well as the good story. And the good story makes me the center of attention and earns the praise of a satisfied audience. No matter the omission of truth.

But … really… will we ever KNOW the truth of the past? It's hard enough to get it straight with what happened yesterday… never mind nearly six hundred years ago on a rainy battlefield in Northern France. For all I know students in a few decades may be learning that the French were just actually really hungover… and that's the reason they lost England that day.

Who knows? Not even Shakespeare was true to the truth... not even about himself.