A History Maker (18 page)

Page 119.

The bright old day now dawns again
etc.
This is the last verse of a ballad which Charles Dickens contributed to
The Examiner
in August 1841. It parodies a right-wing popular song. Here is the full text.

THE FINE OLD ENGLISH GENTLEMAN

(New Version, to be said or sung at all
Conservative Dinners)

Page 126.

powsoudie
= sheep's head broth.

drummock
= raw oatmeal with milk.

kebbuck
= home-made cheese.

farle
= a three-cornered scone or bannock.

Page 136.

The stove was called the Aga.

Aga was the trade name of the cast-iron stove manufactured in the twentieth-century period. It burned household waste besides coal, wood or peat and was a thrifty source of heat for household uses.

We should all be gangrels.

Kittock's faith in the superiority of possession-less
people may seem the sort of romantic perversion sung in the ballads of
Johnny Faa
and
The Raggle Taggle Gipsies
. It was also entertained by Greeks, Jews, early Christians, Mohammedans, Buddhists, Hindus, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, George Borrow and many others who found natural justice incompatible with state-enforced laws, the earth which supports us at variance with owners who evict natives from it, often murderously.

Page 138.

wheen
= several; a few; a number which is sufficient when used approvingly, deficient when used disparagingly.

Page 142.

The men exchanged tobacco pouches.

This custom started in the seventeenth century when tobacco was imported to Europe in so many states that almost every smoker had his favourite blend, but thought it friendly and interesting to offer and taste other blends.

[The men] discussed whether the ten
thousand years of civilization should be
called The Dark Ages because of their greed
and cruelty, or The Middle Ages because they
had achieved some splendid things
. Breaking the past into easily labelled sections is a habit as ancient as thought. Ways of doing so is a brief account of mankind.

PREHISTORIC folk split time into two: the dream time or days of the gods when earth, sky, creatures and the first people were made; the human time which flowed from then. They believed that the earlier time was eternal, that gods in the sky, the neighbourhood and underground still helped the sun and seasons and human generations return. Before civilization destroyed such people their past seemed a continually renewed present extending forever through their children.

EGYPT AND CHINA were the longest-lasting nations of the historical era and both existed because farmers on fertile plains had combined to share large irrigation systems. Both systems got armies to defend them from marauding gangrels, a class of civil servants (priests or mandarins) to run them, one big landlord (Pharaoh or Son of Heaven) to unite the whole. In both nations the civil servants invented pictographic writing and by keeping no record of earlier times mythologized their state by teaching that the one landlord, his surveyors and tax collectors were incarnations and agents of gods who had made the universe. This meant that everbody else must serve them forever. The past was divided into periods named after the presiding Pharaoh or Son of Heaven.

GREEKS AND HINDUS split the past into four:

1 – The Golden Age when people were content to gather food without cultivating it and had weather which let them live without clothes and houses.

2 – The Silver Age, a colder time when they began living in caves and thick bushes, cultivating the soil and domesticating animals.

3 – The Bronze Age, when they formed settlements which sometimes raided each other.

4 – The Iron Age, when cities, navies, trading, warfare and every social evil were perpetrated on a vast scale. Since the Iron Age was modern and the Greeks were in it they saw history as a deterioration. The Greeks did not know how it would end. The Hindus thought the four ages amounted to a single Great Age which would be repeated eternally, each iron age collapsing into chaos before a new golden age arose.

ROMANS also split time into four: the time of gods and heroes who founded Rome, the Roman kingdom, the Roman republic, the Roman empire. After the kingdom many prosperous Romans thought each of these states an improvement on the last, so viewed their history as a continual social improvement. Augustus, the first emperor, was especially fond
of the notion and got poets to advertise it. This progressive view of history was later adopted by the officer class of empires too recent to claim that they had always existed.

JEWS had a recorded history too intricate to be simplified, for they dated it from the creation of the world. It told how their ancestors lost a happy garden where they lived naked without toil, became nomads and shepherds, and then guestworkers, slaves, immigrants, invaders, conquerors, farmers and civic exploiters who were again enslaved, colonized, dispersed by the Babylonian, Greek and Roman empires. To make this unending story bearable the rabbis explained it as a harsh middle age between the good garden where humanity was once happy and the happy Jewish city which God was preparing in the future. Sometime in A.D. 30 the Rabbi Jesus said the good future city was for everyone who loved God, even if they died first. This view of history became popular with slaves, women, labourers and other Roman subjects who did not view the empire as a continual improvement. Roman governors persecuted Christians as malcontents until the empire started cracking under its own weight.

OFFICIAL CHRISTIANITY. In the fourth
century after Christ the Emperor Constantine saw the political usefulness of a history which promised mankind a happy future if it left the management of the present time to landlords like himself. He made Christianity the Roman imperial religion, officially splitting time into four again:

1 – The prehistoric happy godly garden where life started well but went wrong.

2 – History without hope before Christ.

3 – History with hope after Christ.

4 – The posthistoric happy godly city where hopes come true (if you love God as the rulers and priests tell you).

This Christian division of time lasted over two thousand years, though when famine and administrative collapse made the present unbearable the majority revolted against their priests and landlords and demanded some heaven at once.

THE RENAISSANCE. Around A.D. 1400 some Italian republics and dukedoms so prospered by trade between Asia and Europe that they recovered the Roman sense that people could use intelligence to improve their community. Historians called this recovery the Renaissance and redivided time as follows:

1 – The Ancient World — All time before
Christianity became the Roman imperial religion.

2 – The Middle Ages — everything between the Ancient World and the Renaissance; a better time than the Ancient World, because it made Europe Christian.

3 – The Modern World — everything after the Middle Ages but better than these, because with Christian faith in the future modern Europeans were scientists continually enlarging the wisdom of the present, artists continually adding to the world's stock of beautiful things, traders bringing back rare goods from every continent in the world. Some historians felt so pleased with their part of Europe that they thought history had reached a lasting state of perfection. Bishop Bossuet felt this about Catholic France in the seventeenth century, the French revolutionaries about equalitarian France in the eighteenth, Professor Hegel about Protestant Prussia in the nineteenth.