Make history interesting again
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St Dunstan tweaks the devil’s nose with a pair of blacksmith’s tongs
Here’s something I’ve been chewing on for a while—a seemingly minor irritation that has a lot of real significance.
My point will require some context. The following comes from a book I recently read that has otherwise excellent standards of research, interpretation, and writing. I don’t want my thoughts to be a knock on the author, whose books I’ve both enjoyed and learned from, so I omit the title and the author’s name here. The passage below is the author’s paraphrase of a story in the medieval Vita S. Dunstani or Life of St Dunstan, a saint’s life ascribed to the otherwise nameless scribe “B.” The story concerns the relationship between Dunstan, a Benedictine monk, abbot, and royal adviser and Edmund, the newly ascended teenaged King of the English:
When [King] Æthelstan died in October 939, the crown passed to . . . Edmund, who was eighteen years old. The dowager queen, who was probably around forty, returned triumphantly to court, where she appears to have played a dominant role. It seems fairly certain that she was behind the decision to summon Dunstan to her side, intending that he should become one of her son’s principal advisers.
Edmund, alas, did not share his mother’s high estimation of his new monastic counsellor, and nor did his aristocratic companions. Some of the king’s thegns, says the Life of St Dunstan, admired the saint for his way of life, but many of them soon came to detest him, and eventually Edmund himself lost his temper. One day, when the royal household was at Cheddar, about twelve miles north of Glastonbury, the teenage king exploded in rage, and ordered Dunstan into exile. Distressed at this development, the holy man sought the protection of some foreign visitors who happened to be at court, and made ready to leave the kingdom.
Happily, God soon intervened to redress the situation. Cheddar, which lies on the edge of the Mendip Hills, was a royal hunting lodge, and, a day or so after banishing Dunstan, Edmund and his men rode out to amuse themselves in the surrounding forests. When they came across a group of stags they chased them in different directions, the king charging off in pursuit of one particular animal, accompanied only by his braying pack of hounds. Caught up in the thrill of the chase, he was oblivious to a hidden hazard, described in the Life of St Dunstan as a cleft in the hill that ‘drops to an astonishing depth’. This must have been the famous Cheddar Gorge, where the ground does indeed fall away vertically for over 400 feet. The frightened stag ran headlong into his ravine, plummeting to its death, as did the excited dogs running close behind it. Edmund, suddenly realizing the danger, tried to restrain his horse, but it stubbornly refused to slow. In what seemed to be his last few seconds, the king recalled his treatment of Dunstan, and vowed to make amends if his life was spared. ‘At these words,’ says the saint’s biographer, ‘the horse stopped on the very brink of the precipice, when its front feet were just about to plunge into the depths of the abyss’.
Having recapped and glossed B’s short version of the story from the Vita (you can read B’s entire account of the events above here), our author offers some commentary:
It is a good story, not least because it gives us an early glimpse of an English king engaged in a favorite royal pastime. Naturally, we do not have to believe that it is true in every respect, or that it reveals ‘some secret plan of God’s’ as Dunstan’s biographer insists was the case.
Fair enough, but does it really need to be said that we don’t have to accept every particular detail of a source’s story? There’s also a faintly dismissive, condescending tone here that rubs the wrong way. Some English historians never really get away from the baleful influence of Gibbon.
But here’s where we get to the specific subject of this post. Emphasis mine in the passage below:
A more likely explanation for Edmund’s change of heart would be an intervention on the part of his mother, or by another of Dunstan’s supporters at court: it is shortly after this episode that we learn the saint had an older brother, Wulfric, who witnesses royal charters as a king’s thegn. The essential point is that, whatever influences were brought to bear on him, divine or otherwise, the young king recalled Dunstan and proposed a new way of resolving their differences.
My concern is the “more likely” and what follows. Two things I’ve been mulling since first reading this (again, otherwise excellent) book during the summer:
First, to invert the perspective in that paragraph, what precisely is unlikely about this story? Teenaged boys, especially those with a degree of privilege and power and not a lot of experience using the two responsibly, are not known for their piety or patience, and they are known for irresponsibility, disrespect toward spiritual authorities, reckless behavior, inattention to danger, wild emotional highs and lows, and sudden and highly public religious experiences. In other words, for sudden changes of heart.* What happened to Edmund during his hunt makes plenty of sense—why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation?
Second, why bother searching for a “more likely” explanation that is so… boring? As I hope is clear, this backroom wheeling-and-dealing explanation is no more likely than the one B gives us, so what we’re looking at is not a matter of likelihood but of preference.
A certain kind of historian develops a kneejerk skepticism toward anything colorful—that is, anything human and interesting—they come across in their sources, especially if that color plays a role in causal explanations for events. That backroom string-pulling and calling in favors sounds “more likely” to the author than the fearful repentance of a teenaged boy in danger says more about the author and his or her ability to imagine other minds than it does about the likelihood of B’s story.**
Likelihood is in the eye of the beholder.*** So work hard to broaden your subjective sense of what is likely the same way a novelist works to develop his ear for dialogue. Otherwise, it would be wise not to argue over a story’s likelihood and reflexively second guess sources unless:
contradictory evidence demands it, and/or
one exercises one’s imagination outside the faculty lounge a little more often.
Footnotes:
*I had a friend in high school who destroyed his collection of rap CDs as penance after losing a big basketball game.
**See also: People who prefer the “realism” of Game of Thrones, which is really just a bland, incessant, enervating cynicism, to The Lord of the Rings.
***I wrote about likelihood as a matter of people’s subjective judgments of “realism” earlier this year.
