1
00:00:18,015 --> 00:00:19,805
Hello, my topic for you today is:

2
00:00:19,805 --> 00:00:22,151
Is the past a foreign country?

3
00:00:22,151 --> 00:00:26,037
That is of course the first line
of L.P. Hartley's book "The Go-Between":

4
00:00:26,037 --> 00:00:29,360
"The past is a foreign country,
they do things differently there."

5
00:00:29,360 --> 00:00:32,534
My question for you today is: "Is it?"

6
00:00:32,694 --> 00:00:36,253
If it is, why does popular culture
always present the past

7
00:00:36,253 --> 00:00:40,498
to something so cosy
and actually not alien at all?

8
00:00:40,508 --> 00:00:43,710
If it is, finally, do can we go there?

9
00:00:43,710 --> 00:00:44,965
Do we have a visa?

10
00:00:44,965 --> 00:00:47,935
Do we have the passport that we need?

11
00:00:47,935 --> 00:00:51,233
Historians might actually go further,
say that it's a foreign country,

12
00:00:51,233 --> 00:00:55,586
that it's actually an imaginary country,
that is more Narnia than France,

13
00:00:55,586 --> 00:00:59,105
because of course the extraordinary thing
about the past is, that it was,

14
00:00:59,949 --> 00:01:01,205
and it is not.

15
00:01:01,205 --> 00:01:04,809
History is the study
of something that doesn't exist,

16
00:01:04,809 --> 00:01:08,020
and sometimes it feels like
the veil between us and the past

17
00:01:08,020 --> 00:01:10,150
is therefore great.

18
00:01:10,150 --> 00:01:13,058
Thankfully there are footprints
in the snow for us to follow,

19
00:01:13,058 --> 00:01:14,797
should we choose to go.

20
00:01:15,658 --> 00:01:18,625
History in the popular media
tends to be something

21
00:01:18,625 --> 00:01:22,178
that stresses the similarities
between us and them,

22
00:01:22,178 --> 00:01:27,054
so that they were people who ate,
people who slept, people who fell in love,

23
00:01:27,054 --> 00:01:32,385
who, you know, needed to wash,
who hoped, believed, dreamed and died,

24
00:01:32,385 --> 00:01:34,025
just as we would do.

25
00:01:34,025 --> 00:01:35,930
In fact, G.M. Trevelyan said:

26
00:01:35,930 --> 00:01:39,197
"The poetry of history
is the quasi-miraculous fact,

27
00:01:40,066 --> 00:01:43,647
that once on this earth,
on this familiar spot of ground,

28
00:01:43,647 --> 00:01:46,319
walked other people,
other men and women,

29
00:01:46,319 --> 00:01:48,709
as actual as we are today,

30
00:01:48,709 --> 00:01:51,980
thinking their own thoughts,
swayed by their own passions,

31
00:01:51,980 --> 00:01:54,240
but now all gone,

32
00:01:54,240 --> 00:01:56,764
one generation vanishing after another,

33
00:01:56,764 --> 00:01:59,646
gone as utterly as we ourselves
are shortly be gone,

34
00:01:59,646 --> 00:02:01,800
like ghost at cock-crow."

35
00:02:02,625 --> 00:02:05,957
When you get to come across history
in the popular media,

36
00:02:05,957 --> 00:02:09,434
you tend to come across stories
that tell you things that you know.

37
00:02:09,434 --> 00:02:13,447
The great disaster of Titanic
is portrayed as a love story.

38
00:02:13,457 --> 00:02:18,077
The Other Boleyn Girl which has Eric Bana,
Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman,

39
00:02:18,077 --> 00:02:22,328
re-immagines Tudor History
as chick-lit sibling rivalry.

40
00:02:22,991 --> 00:02:28,750
Fahrd takes arguably a treasonous criminal
and makes him into a freedom fighter.

41
00:02:28,750 --> 00:02:32,897
A film like The Duchess, which is
the story of an 18th century aristocrat,

42
00:02:32,907 --> 00:02:34,117
had the strap line:

43
00:02:34,117 --> 00:02:36,179
"There were three in their marriage."

44
00:02:36,179 --> 00:02:39,972
It came out just a year
after the death of Princess Diana.

45
00:02:39,972 --> 00:02:43,605
Often actually what we hear about
is a story of shared emotions

46
00:02:43,605 --> 00:02:44,665
with the past.

47
00:02:44,665 --> 00:02:46,966
I used to work at Hampton Court Palace,

48
00:02:46,966 --> 00:02:50,666
as part of an exhibition there
on Katherine of Aragon, Henry the Eighth

49
00:02:50,666 --> 00:02:51,900
and Cardinal Wolsey.

50
00:02:51,900 --> 00:02:52,955
There is a doorway

51
00:02:52,955 --> 00:02:58,955
which has inscriptions of all the children
who died soon after birth,

52
00:02:59,455 --> 00:03:03,651
or were still births, or miscarriages
of Katherine of Aragon.

53
00:03:03,651 --> 00:03:06,622
One academic we worked with
said he had always known that,

54
00:03:06,622 --> 00:03:08,932
but it was only when he saw it
on this doorway,

55
00:03:08,932 --> 00:03:10,792
which looks a little bit like a tomb,

56
00:03:10,792 --> 00:03:14,646
that he really felt it,
he felt that connection to the past.

57
00:03:14,646 --> 00:03:19,150
This is history as sympathy,
this is creating connections.

58
00:03:19,985 --> 00:03:21,235
Perhaps we stress this,

59
00:03:21,235 --> 00:03:23,999
because if we feel that we can
learn lessons from the past,

60
00:03:23,999 --> 00:03:28,034
we have to assume that there is
something meaningful in those lessons.

61
00:03:28,034 --> 00:03:32,343
There can only be something meaningful,
if we are essentially like them.

62
00:03:32,343 --> 00:03:36,709
"History doesn't repeat itself,
but it rhymes," said Mark Twain.

63
00:03:36,709 --> 00:03:41,891
Dan Snow came to talk to my students
at the New College of Humanities and said,

64
00:03:42,313 --> 00:03:46,472
"The past doesn't repeat itself,
but its the best guide we've got."

65
00:03:46,472 --> 00:03:50,615
Perhaps ask why we stress
the familiarity with the past.

66
00:03:50,615 --> 00:03:55,756
Our interest in the past is because
we are really interested in ourselves.

67
00:03:55,756 --> 00:03:57,217
I'm going to put it like this:

68
00:03:57,217 --> 00:04:00,303
History ought never to be
confused with nostalgia.

69
00:04:00,303 --> 00:04:02,623
It is written not to revere the dead,

70
00:04:02,623 --> 00:04:04,515
but to inspire the living.

71
00:04:04,515 --> 00:04:08,385
It's our cultural blood stream,
the secret of who we are.

72
00:04:08,385 --> 00:04:09,345
Perhaps that's why

73
00:04:09,345 --> 00:04:11,870
"Who do you think you are?"
is such a popular program.

74
00:04:11,870 --> 00:04:14,153
This is all about our story.

75
00:04:14,153 --> 00:04:16,613
If we do look
at the differences in the past,

76
00:04:16,613 --> 00:04:20,187
the differences we tend to look at
are external, superficial ones.

77
00:04:20,187 --> 00:04:24,609
So if you look at reality TV programs
you know, 1900's House, 1940's House,

78
00:04:24,609 --> 00:04:27,267
they point to things
like they don't have electricity,

79
00:04:27,267 --> 00:04:28,837
or they have different clothes,

80
00:04:28,837 --> 00:04:31,528
or they wash with lye
rather than shower gel.

81
00:04:31,528 --> 00:04:34,239
This is the past,
there's hardship and privation.

82
00:04:34,959 --> 00:04:38,480
This is history, it's something
that's dirty and messy and painful.

83
00:04:38,480 --> 00:04:42,267
They're people like us, but they
are just in harder circumstances.

84
00:04:42,267 --> 00:04:44,545
Again the question comes to us:

85
00:04:44,545 --> 00:04:47,615
"What would we do in such circumstances?"

86
00:04:47,615 --> 00:04:51,490
This is history as progress,
this is a weakish version of history.

87
00:04:51,490 --> 00:04:55,130
I think that explains partly
at least the fascination

88
00:04:55,130 --> 00:04:57,250
that we have with horrible histories.

89
00:04:57,250 --> 00:05:02,482
Terry Deary's Horrible Histories have
sold something like twenty million copies,

90
00:05:02,482 --> 00:05:06,577
since they launched in 1993,
have been translated into 31 languages.

91
00:05:06,577 --> 00:05:10,183
They market themselves
as "history with the nasty bits left in."

92
00:05:10,183 --> 00:05:14,078
Of course we are slightly
perversely fascinated by gore.

93
00:05:14,078 --> 00:05:17,993
But it's also about history
being to congratulate ourselves,

94
00:05:17,993 --> 00:05:21,061
to suggest that we are very humane:

95
00:05:21,061 --> 00:05:24,563
"How civilized we are,
we don't do these things to people."

96
00:05:25,448 --> 00:05:30,045
What we look for in films,
and we call it authenticity,

97
00:05:30,045 --> 00:05:33,125
that those external details
often is quite superficial.

98
00:05:33,125 --> 00:05:35,509
It might, for example,
come down to making sure

99
00:05:35,509 --> 00:05:37,888
they've got the right clothes on,

100
00:05:37,888 --> 00:05:39,553
although quite often we change that

101
00:05:39,553 --> 00:05:43,416
so it fits to present day
standards of attractiveness as well.

102
00:05:43,416 --> 00:05:46,286
Tom Hanks was the producer
on Band of Brothers and he said,

103
00:05:46,286 --> 00:05:48,220
"There are two types of authenticity,

104
00:05:48,220 --> 00:05:50,695
the one that says that you got
all the buttons right,

105
00:05:50,695 --> 00:05:52,391
that the ammunition is correct, 


106
00:05:52,391 --> 00:05:54,869
that the buildings look
as they looked in the photo."

107
00:05:54,869 --> 00:05:57,477
That is relatively easy to achieve.

108
00:05:57,477 --> 00:06:00,124
But then there's a thing
that is much harder.

109
00:06:00,124 --> 00:06:01,976
There's literally the motivations,

110
00:06:01,976 --> 00:06:04,816
and the nature of the interplay
between the characters,

111
00:06:04,816 --> 00:06:05,800
because he says,

112
00:06:05,800 --> 00:06:08,670
"If we can't be absolutely truthful
to what they said and did

113
00:06:08,670 --> 00:06:10,120
at any given time,

114
00:06:10,120 --> 00:06:12,994
we can at least be
as authentic as possible,

115
00:06:12,994 --> 00:06:18,137
so that it still adheres to the framework
of the reality of being there and then."

116
00:06:18,147 --> 00:06:20,818
I would suggest there's
a third type of authenticity,

117
00:06:20,818 --> 00:06:23,177
the one that we don't go near.

118
00:06:23,177 --> 00:06:28,096
This is the one that says the past
is so very different from our own,

119
00:06:28,096 --> 00:06:33,809
that we fail to understand it,
because we only understand our own time.

120
00:06:34,309 --> 00:06:35,356
That is because

121
00:06:35,356 --> 00:06:39,816
people in the past had different
mental and imaginative worlds to us.

122
00:06:40,186 --> 00:06:43,020
The annals historians
have called this mentalité,

123
00:06:43,770 --> 00:06:45,870
the mentalities of these people.

124
00:06:45,870 --> 00:06:49,820
Perhaps this is the difference between
popular history and academic history.

125
00:06:50,010 --> 00:06:52,699
Is popular history
more interested in the similarities,

126
00:06:52,699 --> 00:06:54,769
rather than the differences?

127
00:06:54,769 --> 00:06:59,596
You can particularly notice, when you look
at attitudes towards sex and religion.

128
00:06:59,596 --> 00:07:02,856
If you read a historical novel,
or you see a film,

129
00:07:02,856 --> 00:07:05,211
for example, Phillipa Gregory's books,

130
00:07:05,211 --> 00:07:08,517
wonderful historical novels,
that transport you back to the past.

131
00:07:08,517 --> 00:07:13,249
But quite often the women in them
tend to be essentially proto-feminists

132
00:07:13,249 --> 00:07:15,646
and their attitudes
towards sex tend to be:

133
00:07:15,646 --> 00:07:17,845
'It's quite a good thing,
lets get on with it,'

134
00:07:17,845 --> 00:07:19,980
which before the age of the Pill,

135
00:07:19,980 --> 00:07:22,410
before there was any reliable conception,

136
00:07:22,410 --> 00:07:24,775
isn't congruent with the age of the past.

137
00:07:24,775 --> 00:07:26,497
How about religion?

138
00:07:26,969 --> 00:07:29,639
Rochefoucauld in the 17th century said,

139
00:07:29,639 --> 00:07:32,680
"There's always something ridiculous
about the emotions of people

140
00:07:32,680 --> 00:07:35,010
that one has ceased to love".

141
00:07:35,010 --> 00:07:39,846
If in modern Britain many people
have fallen out of love with God,

142
00:07:39,846 --> 00:07:41,210
we shouldn't underestimate

143
00:07:41,210 --> 00:07:45,080
quite how intoxicating a power
he had in centuries past.

144
00:07:45,440 --> 00:07:50,389
Make sure the things you read have
that sense of reality about world views.

145
00:07:50,389 --> 00:07:55,380
This is perhaps why Hillary Mantel's books
have been so popular and so prize-winning.

146
00:07:55,390 --> 00:07:57,816
Because although she creates characters,

147
00:07:57,816 --> 00:08:00,226
historical characters
like Chromewell, for example,

148
00:08:00,226 --> 00:08:03,629
from her own imagination,
as is the novelist's prerogative,

149
00:08:03,629 --> 00:08:07,691
she does actually immerse herself
into the world of the past.

150
00:08:07,691 --> 00:08:10,335
I remember being delighted,
when I read "Wolf Hall",

151
00:08:10,335 --> 00:08:12,912
realizing that she had identified

152
00:08:12,912 --> 00:08:18,288
that to call something new
in the 16th century was not a compliment.

153
00:08:19,108 --> 00:08:21,619
We have faint echoes of these ideas now.

154
00:08:21,619 --> 00:08:25,998
The word novelty carries
something of the hostility and suspicion

155
00:08:25,998 --> 00:08:29,003
that the new had in an age,

156
00:08:29,003 --> 00:08:34,533
when the traditional and the ancient
were very powerful things,

157
00:08:34,533 --> 00:08:37,250
and had a powerful hold on the Tudor mind.

158
00:08:37,949 --> 00:08:42,840
It's only when we begin to grasp
how different the past was,

159
00:08:42,840 --> 00:08:45,085
how differently people thought in the past

160
00:08:45,085 --> 00:08:46,730
that we can begin to comprehend

161
00:08:46,730 --> 00:08:50,490
some of the more bizarre behaviours
and beliefs of the past.

162
00:08:50,490 --> 00:08:53,837
Let me give you a few examples
from the period I work on.

163
00:08:53,837 --> 00:08:57,210
In the end of the 16th century,
the beginning of the 17th century,

164
00:08:57,210 --> 00:09:02,229
across Europe 40,000 to 50,000
people, mostly old women,

165
00:09:02,229 --> 00:09:04,631
where executed as witches.

166
00:09:06,170 --> 00:09:11,046
In the 16th century in England,
beggars where whipped.

167
00:09:11,687 --> 00:09:16,219
In 1547 it was ordered
that vagabonds, the homeless,

168
00:09:16,219 --> 00:09:20,446
should be branded on the chest
with a V made with a hot iron.

169
00:09:20,446 --> 00:09:24,390
In 1572 a new statute suggested
that they should be grievously whipped

170
00:09:24,390 --> 00:09:26,769
and they should be branded
through the ear hole

171
00:09:26,769 --> 00:09:29,137
with a hot iron, an inch in diameter.

172
00:09:30,769 --> 00:09:34,520
In 17th century Vienna, a common practice,
when a criminal was beheaded,

173
00:09:34,520 --> 00:09:37,930
was for someone suffering from what
was known as the falling sickness

174
00:09:37,930 --> 00:09:39,970
to rush in with a jug,

175
00:09:40,509 --> 00:09:45,859
scoop up the hot spurting blood
down it in one, and then sprint off.

176
00:09:45,869 --> 00:09:48,332
This was thought to cure epilepsy.

177
00:09:49,568 --> 00:09:52,930
In London around the same time,
1665, during The Great Plague,

178
00:09:52,930 --> 00:09:58,316
the chamberlain of the city ordered
200,000 cats and 40,000 dogs to be culled,

179
00:09:58,316 --> 00:10:01,321
because it was thought
they spread the plague.

180
00:10:02,505 --> 00:10:04,887
Women, perhaps this
is the most bizarre one of all,

181
00:10:04,887 --> 00:10:08,296
since the time of Aristotle
through till about the 18th century,

182
00:10:08,296 --> 00:10:11,056
where thought to be deformed men.

183
00:10:11,756 --> 00:10:14,846
Their uterus were inverted penises.

184
00:10:14,846 --> 00:10:18,084
They just hadn't had enough heat
to push them out of their body

185
00:10:18,084 --> 00:10:21,156
and of course this produced
a great anxiety.

186
00:10:21,156 --> 00:10:25,975
Occasionally, they had stories circulating
of a woman or a girl leaping over a fence

187
00:10:25,975 --> 00:10:30,758
and then gosh there she discovered
she was a man, her penis fell out.

188
00:10:30,758 --> 00:10:34,196
Of course, if it could be done like that,
it could be reversed as well.

189
00:10:34,196 --> 00:10:38,759
There was a certain anxiety
about being a man in early modern England.

190
00:10:38,759 --> 00:10:44,297
We have a tendency to look at the past
and think, they were just like us.

191
00:10:44,297 --> 00:10:49,180
What was going on inside their heads
was really, really different.

192
00:10:49,180 --> 00:10:52,464
If we are going to get any insight
from those TV reality shows at all,

193
00:10:52,464 --> 00:10:55,289
perhaps it comes when they fall down.

194
00:10:55,289 --> 00:10:58,635
In 1940's House,
the war committee as it were,

195
00:10:58,635 --> 00:11:02,098
gave them rabbits to eat
and the family refused to eat them,

196
00:11:02,098 --> 00:11:04,996
because of course they had
the mentality of today.

197
00:11:04,996 --> 00:11:06,754
In one called The Trench,

198
00:11:06,754 --> 00:11:09,430
where a group of young boys pretended

199
00:11:09,430 --> 00:11:14,702
to go to have an experience of being
on the front line in World War One,

200
00:11:14,702 --> 00:11:19,710
a Corporal brought along a grey coat
of one who had said to have fallen,

201
00:11:19,710 --> 00:11:23,430
there was something quite poignant
and completely ridiculous about the moment

202
00:11:23,430 --> 00:11:28,160
because of course, the chap hadn't fallen,
he hadn't died, he'd just left the show.

203
00:11:28,160 --> 00:11:31,133
The reality of that moment
of what it must have been like

204
00:11:31,133 --> 00:11:36,526
to lose a friend, a companion,
in World War One, was still missing.

205
00:11:37,206 --> 00:11:39,309
How we view the past matters,

206
00:11:39,309 --> 00:11:42,019
whether we see it as foreign or familiar,

207
00:11:42,019 --> 00:11:45,642
particularly, for example, it matters
in questions of moral judgement.

208
00:11:45,642 --> 00:11:47,797
Can we judge the past?

209
00:11:47,797 --> 00:11:49,687
Academic historians generally say no.

210
00:11:49,687 --> 00:11:51,485
We need to try and understand it.

211
00:11:51,485 --> 00:11:54,496
We need to give it
all the respect it's due.

212
00:11:55,275 --> 00:11:58,009
When you think
of the Holocaust and Hitler,

213
00:11:58,009 --> 00:12:02,220
when you think of slavery,
would it not be wrong to judge?

214
00:12:02,220 --> 00:12:03,943
The historian Collingwood said,

215
00:12:03,943 --> 00:12:08,510
"To pass moral judgement on the past,
is to fall into the fallacy of imagining

216
00:12:08,510 --> 00:12:13,060
that somewhere behind a veil,
the past is still happening,

217
00:12:13,060 --> 00:12:15,396
as if it's now being enacted
in the next room,

218
00:12:15,396 --> 00:12:18,006
and we ought to break in and stop it.

219
00:12:18,656 --> 00:12:24,210
These things have been, they are over,
there is nothing to be done about them."

220
00:12:26,569 --> 00:12:29,198
We need to seek to understand the past.

221
00:12:29,198 --> 00:12:32,512
But we need not to do
just historical clothing,

222
00:12:32,512 --> 00:12:36,014
that we always call costume,
for some reason I never understand.

223
00:12:36,014 --> 00:12:40,978
We need to don their mind-set,
we need to get out our guidebooks.

224
00:12:40,978 --> 00:12:43,638
Is the past a foreign country?

225
00:12:43,638 --> 00:12:45,453
Yes, very much so.

226
00:12:45,997 --> 00:12:50,702
But it's different in ways
that we haven't imagined.

227
00:12:51,413 --> 00:12:55,756
It's a bit like saying that France isn't
so different because they eat baguettes,

228
00:12:55,756 --> 00:12:57,672
but because they think nothing odd

229
00:12:57,672 --> 00:12:59,972
about having a mistress
and a wife at a funeral.

230
00:12:59,972 --> 00:13:02,541
They just have a different mentality.

231
00:13:03,508 --> 00:13:06,040
Why do we make the past so cosy?

232
00:13:06,040 --> 00:13:11,640
I would suggest it's because the past
is not just foreign, it's also dangerous.

233
00:13:13,369 --> 00:13:18,266
We have a sense that, behind that veil,
there are glinting swords and barred teeth

234
00:13:18,266 --> 00:13:20,297
that if we actually knew

235
00:13:20,297 --> 00:13:23,157
what went on in the past
and what went on in their minds,

236
00:13:23,157 --> 00:13:25,788
we might understand a bit more
about the human condition

237
00:13:25,788 --> 00:13:27,688
than we really want to.

238
00:13:27,688 --> 00:13:31,282
But I would suggest too that,
if we wanted to get to that foreign land,

239
00:13:31,282 --> 00:13:35,575
we have to be as it said the Macbeth:
"bold, bloody and resolute."

240
00:13:35,575 --> 00:13:37,108
We need to be brave,

241
00:13:37,108 --> 00:13:39,538
we need to step through the looking glass,

242
00:13:39,538 --> 00:13:41,388
into the other side,

243
00:13:41,388 --> 00:13:44,132
and not keep on
gazing at our own reflections.

244
00:13:44,132 --> 00:13:45,529
Thank you.

245
00:13:45,529 --> 00:13:46,850
(Applause)