Facts and Ummm!?

    As we know all too well, Dear Reader, facts can be manipulated to create falsehoods. History has its facts but the history of wars is  written by the victors. That has a tendency towards bias even in the most uncontentious of events. I have a story which I heard many years ago. I believe that it is based on sound research but it could equally be urban legend. So, Dear Reader, if you have any insights or information regarding the following tale then please help me out.

Sometime in the middle of the 20^th Century an educational department in a respected English university decided to do some research into the games that were played in primary school playgrounds in England. So off the team went and conducted detailed analyses of schools dotted around the country. They took a game like hopscotch, studied the rules used in one playground after another, described the terminologies that the children had adopted and tried to work out a pattern.  What they found was that there were similarities between schools in certain regions and then movement across an imaginary boundary showed a marked difference in the culture. Eventually researchers decided to draw a line across the country showing the divisions. Further analysis showed that the frontier between the differences almost exactly matched the ancient boundary between the Northern Danelaw of Viking rule and the southern Anglo-Saxon lands. Culture had been handed down for a thousand years through the mouths of babes in a school playground! Let me know if you can enlighten us further regarding this phenomenon. Of course this really should not have come as that much of a surprise. The more obvious evidence of a cultural settlement remains to this day in place names, suffixes such as –by, -thorpe and –thwaite denoting definitive Viking settlements, names not found in southern Anglo-Saxon England.

The following story is certainly true based on DNA analysis. In the Cheddar Caves in the county of Somerset in the west of England, a body was found in the early 20^th Century. It was discovered that he was a Mesolithic Man about 9,000 years old. The remains, of course, found their way into a local museum. In 1997 a DNA test was conducted. This was followed up with further tests with living local people. It was discovered that Adrian Targett, a 42 year old local man, had the same DNA as the Middle Stone Age man. His direct 9000 year old ancestor was found just down the road from where he lived! I have an image, Dear Reader, of a modern day tourist finding their way into a local Cheddar pub and taking an empty seat at the bar much to the consternation and indignation of the locals for whom the seat was sacred.

“That be Adrian Targett’s seat, ‘e allus sits there. ‘Is dad sat there afore ‘im”.

Well, actually maybe a smidge further back than his dad although I doubt that the pub was built when Mesolithic man fancied dropping in for a pint after a hard day’s hunting and gathering.

http://www.ancient-origins,net/history/900-year-old-cheddar-man-has-living-descendant-still-living-same-area-006961

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/9000-year-old-cheddar-man-has-living-descendant-still-living-same-area-006961

My final vignette in this little trilogy concerns the late author and Governor-General of Canada, John Buchan. He achieved fame as the writer of “The Thirty-Nine Steps” before becoming Lord Tweedsmuir and dying in office as GG. He lived from 1875 to 1940. In his autobiography, “Memory Hold the Door”, Buchan revealed that when he was a boy, he had an ancient uncle who used to tell him stories. The old man told him that when he was a boy he had a nanny who as a child was awoken one night by the sound of marching feet outside her window. She pulled back the curtains and saw the shapes of many men. This was Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army marching south to invade England in 1745 as part of the Young Pretender’s claim to the British throne. That verbal link over a period of 205 years fascinates me. It must have felt to John Buchan that he was hearing the steady shuffling of Jacobite feet past his own window all those years before. Wonderful to think that the sound handed down by word of mouth from two centuries distance was nothing more than a footfall, and yet, if we allow ourselves to hear something so simple then we must permit previous people and prior ages to have their place in our memories, must we not, Friends? By doing so, we can perhaps influence our own futures.

OK, Dear Reader, I am in danger of becoming too glib here and reading too much into events which are really quite simple. But sometimes, just sometimes, if we ignore the honest knock at the front door then we are forced to come to terms with unwelcome appearances at the back. If history tells us nothing else then it should tell us that for bad people and worse events to succeed all that is needed is for good people to do nothing. Standing by and waiting for a threat to appear, be that a disease, a weather event, a failure of democracy or a coming war, is really Rome burning while Nero fiddles.   

Hah, rereading this, Dear Friends, it really sounds negative and depressing but it isn’t meant to be. We have seen over the past couple of years great innovation, wonderful adaptation, and an upsurge of support for each other in many aspects of our existence. Maybe this short iteration has not mitigated the blueness of the previous paragraph but one has to be true to oneself, doesn’t one?

I think, that there is a wee smidge of reality in both statements. Let me know what you think. I have really enjoyed reading your responses to these blogs.

I hope that the holiday season is good to you and yours.