I have been meaning to write something on my trip, last September, to Spain.   That I have not yet done so cannot be explained by want of inspiration, for whether driving through Andalusia or walking in the streets and alleyways of Granada, my head was spinning with thoughts, phrases, words and metaphors to explain and explore the images, the vistas and the history before my eyes.   Nor can I plead a lack of time, as I have had the time, which I have frittered away on God knows what.  Certainly not laziness: I continue to write copious amounts for work and occasionally even for the blog …

No, I have not written because I have been missing a “handle”, a theme, a Big Idea, with which to anchor the images and the phrases, disparate and confusing, that have crowded my head since the latest Spanish adventure.   So I have waited, and ruminated, and pondered, and searched, and sought.  All for naught – until last night, Christmas Eve.

The day began pretty much like every other day in a Swiss winter.  I woke up in the mountains, had breakfast with friends, went skiing, got my skis scratched because there was no snow … We came home early, put the turkeys in the oven, cut the veggies, buttered the carrots, spread the fois gras, and sat down to a sumptuous Christmas dinner.  And then, as we were picking on the bones of the poor bird, there was a knock on the window: “There's a fire; the chalet behind yours is burning.”   And so we went out, and an unusual Christmas Eve drama played itself out over the next two hours.  Many of you have seen the pictures I sent out.   But of course, then and there, it occurred to me that write I must, not only on Spain, but on the year, a year punctuated by more personal sadness for me than any other over the past twenty, and yet a year filled, almost overflowing, with wonders and happiness; a year of small personal triumphs and grand tragedies; and, as the chalet burnt before my eyes and yet no one was hurt, I thought, a year of tender mercies.

For those of you who have bothered to follow these epistles, the year began amazingly well and then sank into a trough for about three months.   I ushered in the new year at my place – as I have done in each of the past three years – in good health and with close friends who had come over for dinner and Champagne.   Soon after, I left for Toronto to teach an intensive course on trade litigation, the first such course in a Canadian law school.  I met the class on the 9^th and all seemed to go well …

Life – at least mine – has a habit of rebalancing itself.  For each triumph, I am saddled with a setback; to mark how ephemeral happiness is, Life occasionally ladles sadness onto my plate.   On January 13, I heard of the death of a good friend and mentor; soon after, I found out about a friend's wife having breast cancer; upon my return to Geneva, another friend was stricken by acute leukemia that took three courses of Chemotherapy and three months in the hospital to overcome.  

In May I started teaching at a Queen's University campus in the UK.  Lovely grounds, a Tudor castle, excellent students … the course went well; the students loved me; the Dean was really impressed with the programme and the course.  I came back, flushed with a small measure of professional success in my part-time teaching activities – to be faced with a serious professional setback in my day job.   I cannot claim – I cannot pretend – that I was not disappointed.  Of course, the setback – like all the others I have had from time to time – did not actually change anything in my life.   And, in any event, in the big picture, I've got everything I need right now and a promotion a year or two late – or never – would not really add to my state of happiness.   Still.  It was disappointing, and it was frustrating, and it remains both, though the initial shock has worn off and the sharpness of the first feeling of let-down has dulled to a low intensity grumble.

If I believed in God, I'd thank her for St. Augustine's serenity prayer; as it is, I can safely thank Khayyam and Hafiz and a thousand years of Persian Sufi mysticism and resignation for keeping me sane, still optimistic, and wary of cynicism.

It was thus, in this frame of mind, that I found myself in Siena, Venice and Croatia.   Having relaxed and spent an uneventful August in Geneva, I was ready to be seduced by the charms of Al-Andalus.  For this time, there was a specific object to my Spanish voyage: to go to Granada and to visit the jewel in the crown of Islamic architecture in Moorish Spain.

The Moorish civilization in Spain spanned some seven centuries and was responsible (at least in part) for the re-introduction of Greek classics to the barbarized Christian world.   At its height, the capital of the Moorish Empire, Cordoba, boasted a library of a hundred thousand volumes, three faiths living peaceably alongside one another, one of the most vibrant Jewish communities since antiquity – and architectural masterpieces that, nearly a thousand years hence, continue to captivate, seduce and marvel.

Keyvan and I visited one of these sixteen years ago on our small tour of the South-Western corner of Andalusia .  In Seville, I was simply awed and overcome by the intricate and yet graceful lines of the Alcazar; by the lovely gardens and its citrus trees; by the sheer – ah, that word again – civilization of the place.  Few other palaces in Europe have impressed me as much since; I think the jousting hall in the Prague Castle has come close, but that was that.  Until, that is, I went to the Alhambra.

The most amazing thing about the Alhambra is its scale: its human scale.   There are the occasional soaring arches and high ceilings, but by and large, the spaces are intimate rather than impressive; sensual rather than glorious; graceful rather than rich.   The intricate decorations, carvings and calligraphy reminded me of Iran, of course, and so did the gardens.  But they also reminded me of something else: descriptions of paradise in my childhood.   This was a veritable earthly pleasure palace, meant for the most refined and sensual of palates.

Contrast the grace of the Alhambra with two monstrosities that were built on the very same ground after the conquest of Granada , the last outpost of the Moors, by the Catholic Majesties, Isabella and Ferdinand, in 1492.  There is a renaissance church there; it sits in the gardens of Alhambra like a slab of overcooked boiled beef in the middle of a plateful of truffle-stuffed quail; Charles V, Isabella's grandchild, is said to have wept at the sight of the beast in paradise.   Well, weeping is fine – Charles used to do that a lot, especially when he sacked Rome in 1527 – but the point is, what do you do about it?  Charles V proceeded to build another monstrosity there: a palace of no discernible purpose or charm, looking passable only because the church next to it is so unutterably ugly …

The Alhambra proved to me two things. 

The first is a rather philosophical point about history.   There are those who believe in the “Great Man” theory of history, and others who consider history a movement driven by laws independent of the men and women who are affected by it.   I'm not sure about the first and certainly cannot vouch for the second, but I know this: it is possible that great nations arise regardless of the men and women who lead them; I have no doubt, however, that individual leaders have the capacity, irrespective of their populations, to destroy great nations.

Of all the tragedies that have befallen nations, few have had more calamitous results specifically traceable to a single reign than that of Spain under Isabella and Ferdinand.  They unified and re-Christianised Spain by throwing the Moors back to Morocco and driving the Jews out of Spain, but at what cost!   With the Moors gone, the flower of Spanish culture withered away; with the expulsion of the Jews, Spanish industry and commerce ground to a halt; with the Inquisition, Iberian creativity and spirit of discovery was killed.   On the strength solely of Habsburg arms and American gold, the Spanish Empire went on for a hundred years more (and then lost its Armada in one fell swoop), but inside, it was dead.   Only with the reintegration of Spain into Europe in 1986 has it begun to regain what it lost five hundred years ago.

The second point that a visit to Alhambra underlines with brutal clarity is the utter madness of Osama Bin Laden's claims in respect of recovering “Al-Andalus”, the Moorish name for Spain.  After all, the sensual, cultured and cosmopolitan Moors are as far apart from Bin Laden's Wahabbi austerity as would be Mother Teresa from George W.   Bin Laden's sick mind might well yearn for a Caliphate from the Hindu Kush to the Pyrenees; he and his ilk might even, one day, achieve it.  But let us not sully the Moorish accomplishments by claiming that their Al-Andalus would have anything to do with Bin Laden's.

Go visit the Alhambra; get lost in its paradise of a garden; enjoy the graceful notes of its chambers; weep for Spain for what it became, and for Islam for it has become.

Aside from Granada, we also stayed at two other places.  One of these was a lovely hotel in the mountains just West of Malaga.  The views were spectacular, the rooms lovely; we ate figs and oranges and walnuts and cactus fruits off the trees, played pool in the evening and mini-golf during the day, and walked in the pine forests.   On our last night in Spain, we stayed at a casino hotel South of Malaga; I played €50, lost it all in three minutes flat and remembered why I hate gambling – or “gaming” as it is called these days.

Since then, life has been pretty uneventful.  As of the first of December, I have co-rented an apartment in the mountains – in Verbier, one of the largest ski resorts in Switzerland – and even though we have not had much snow, the place is warm and cozy and simply wonderful to go and relax.   Friends have come in from Spain and Germany for Christmas, and other friends are organising a large party for the New Year.  And in the new year?   I don't know what life will bring; only that in the first week I am likely to go to Dubai to visit an aunt I have not seen since leaving Iran. 

The fires are no longer smouldering; the chalet that had lit up the night sky last evening is brooding over us, scarred and black and no longer in one piece.   But I find myself more or less in health, generally at peace and among friends.  I cannot ask the Universe much more that than.   And so it is that I bring to a close this long letter and a year filled with mixed emotions and vivid memories. 

Pictures:  

About ten kilometers to the city, the spires of the Cathedral come into view and soon, the entire edifice can be seen, on top of a hill, dominating the landscape.  It is not symmetrical: one spire dates from the XII c. while the bell tower is a Renaissance creation.  And as you get closer, it resembles more a massive heap of stone than any other Gothic church of its size: it lacks refinement and finesse; inside and out, it is dark and heavy; it does not so much sit as brood on top of its hill, hemmed in at ground level by medieval streets and old trees that all but hide it from every angle. 

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At first glance, aside from its sheer size (which can be oppressive) and the faint air of mystery inside, it does not impress or, indeed, commend itself too readily.

But of course, you would not be in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Chartres to have a “first glance” at the cathedral.  Much like Bourges, just about the only thing to bring you to Chartres is the cathedral itself and, more to the point, what you will already have read about it.  And so, it is nearly impossible to arrive at Chartres a tabula rasa; your impression of the building is necessarily shaped by its history. [On this, please see previous note.] And what a history!

The Cathedral of Chartres is the first church built in the High Gothic style.  The architect took elements of the Abbey churches of St. Denis and the Notre Dame cathedral and enhanced them in every direction.  For all its ungainly weight, it is a marvel of construction, a mass of innovations.  Indeed, its heft can be explained by the very innovations involved: the church was to be so tall and so light that it was not clear if the walls and the buttresses would work – indeed, elsewhere they did not and the roof collapsed.  You forgive the architect that he erred on the side of safety and sacrificed grace for solidity; indeed, the more you learn about the history, the more its very solidity signifies grace.  And then there are the statues and the stained-glass windows.  More on these later.

Chartres the town was not always so forlorn.  The Beauce, which lies outside Paris and of which Chartres was the market centre, was called the “granary of France”.  Chartres was also a major pilgrimage site in its own right, having a claim not only to periodic visits by the Virgin, but also the cloak of the Virgin in which she gave birth, or got pregnant, or got to “know” Joseph (the point is, she did something that made her other than a virgin).  A Romanesque cathedral was built in the IX c. to accommodate the relics and the pilgrims.  Soon after, it burnt down; the replacement cathedral burnt down barely a hundred years later; its replacement also went down to fire, only 14 years after completion, in 1194. 

Once again (as in 1144, when construction had begun on the newly burned-down church), Church, the state and society came together; money poured in from every corner of France; serfs and the nobility hitched themselves to carts and carried stones up the hill; hundreds of masons and glass-workers worked on a project that, because of its scale, none was to see to completion.  The geometric relations of the building are mind-boggling but not implausible; the soaring roof is built over a wide Romanesque foundation, thus requiring endless innovation and improvisation; in conception, it is a reflection of Platonist ideals.

According to Kenneth Clark, “[c]ivilisation means something more than energy and will and creative power[:] … a sense of permanence. … Civilised man must feel that he belongs somewhere in space and time; that he consciously looks forward and looks back.”  It is precisely in their conscious looking forward that the funders and builders of Chartres represent a new moment in European history; in its sense of proportion, its massive solidity, its permanence, Clark notes, “Chartres is the epitome of the first great awakening in European civilisation.”

There is of course more to the cathedral than its role in Western civilisation; and it would not be as much a tourist attraction as it is if it were the object only of medieval history buffs.  Despite what I have described as its massive darkness of construction (noting, of course, that they were attempting something that had never been done before, and so it was reasonable to make every precaution), the cathedral is remarkably light in two respects: its statues and its stained glass windows.

There are ten thousand of the one and 170 of the other.  And almost all date from the original construction.  It is impossible to do justice to the windows with mere words: and even the pictures do not entirely capture the beauty of the panels.  The details can be seen only through a zoom lens; the windows were truly made for the glory of God and not simply – or just – for propaganda purposes.  Of the statues – and there indeed is bewildering number of them – the elongated ones at the portals are the most striking.  They are of kings and queens and princes long gone and mostly forgotten; there is, then, no historical interest in seeing them.  Rather, it is the humanity of the faces that captures and captivates.  After all, when we hear Gothic, we think of gargoyles and Marilyn Manson; but these figures demonstrate a serenity of soul that is almost post-modern, new age: these are characters you would see as extras in Dharma and Greg and not on Ozzy Osbourne …

The Renaissance was supposed to have underlined the primacy of Man over Church; Michaelangelo is often said to be the highest point of the Humanist Art of the middle parts of the last millennium.  And yet, at least to these untrained eyes, Clark is right: this is the epitome of the great awakening; if anything, the terrifying images of Michaelangelo’s Last Judgement are a step down and away from the intimate humanity, immense calmness of soul and softness of features carved into these thousand-year old stones.  I came away from Chartres lightened and enlightened.

From there to the coast of Normandy is a physical distance of about a hundred kilometers and a moral one of an entire universe.

The city of Caen captures what might be called the most immense irony in the sad history of mankind.  At the heart of the city are two abbey churches and a castle dating from the XI c., built by and for William the Bastard, otherwise known to history as William the Conqueror (of England), who established a French dynasty that ruled England directly, and in French, for over four hundred years.  On the outskirts of Caen is the Memorial to the landing of the Allied forces on the beaches of Normandy, just shy of 900 years after William’s invasion forces left these same beaches.  And yes, it really did take all that time for second invasion force to cross the channel.  This time, the English came to restore France to the French …

The Abbaye aux Hommes and the Abbaye aux Dames were constructed by William (the same bastard) and his wife Isabelle to atone for the fact that they were cousins and so in the eyes of the Church were committing incest by marrying one another.  Either because of that, or because William was a bastard (in all the manifestations of that word) or for some other reason, the churches were not consecrated until well after they well build.  Still, the Abbaye aux Homme is a remarkable piece of late- Romanesque architecture – at least, from the outside.  Inside is a slightly different story.

Like many other churches and abbeys, the Abbaye was ransacked during the Revolution that was supposed to bring reason and liberty to the equal brotherhood of Man.  One of the casualties was the tomb of the Conqueror.  His remains were dug up and scattered.  The revolutionaries forgot the memo on Western civilisation. (Asked what he thought of Western Civilisation, Gandhi is reported to have replied, “it would be a good idea.”)  Eventually, someone recovered a single femur and proclaimed it as one belonging to William the Fat Bastard.  Some time later, when the waters were calmer, the femur was re-interred and a whole new tombstone placed on the grave.  In 1927, on the occasion of William’s 900^th anniversary, the town of Hastings donated two panels of grates for the polished tomb.  I found the new décor inside somewhat garish; I’d like to think the donation as a typical British ironic statement: “We not only add to the garishness, but ensure that you are forever imprisoned in there.”

Two closing notes on William before we leave him, his castle, his incestuous marriage and his undignified final final burial.  Thirty kilometers south-west of Caen is the town of Bayeux.  The cathedral there is a tiny gem; its Bishop, Odo (not to be confused with the security chief on Deep Space Nine – so far as we know, the good bishop was not a shapeshifter), William’s half-brother, blessed the invading force in this very cathedral.  And, when the force was victorious, ordered the making of the “Bayeux tapestry”, a 70-meter scroll of linen that sets out the story of Harold Godwin’s betrayal of William and William’s ultimate victory at Hastings.  It’s a remarkable piece of story-telling – and propaganda.

And the second note?  Ah … sitting in a café called “La Conquête” in the central square of a tiny Norman village on the coast (as with every other square along the coast, this one is called “Place de Guillaume le conquerrant”), you occasionally hear the French mutter “les maudits rosbifs” under their breaths: The English are invading and gobbling up the land around here.  They have money and their launching an invasion force across the English Channel is not as difficult as it used to be.  It only took 900 years … but better late than never …

I never made it to the actual landing sites of the Allied Forces, but I did get to Arromanche, where the artificial ports (called “mulberries”) used by the Allies in the landings can still be seen.  A bit further up the coast I went to see the German guns and bunkers overlooking the Channel.  As you stand here, looking out into the sea, at the coastline and inland, you get a wholly new appreciation of the immense challenge the invaders were facing: and, with that, renewed, reinforced admiration for the courage of the men, and boys, who landed on these shores.

The Memorial at Caen gives you only a small indication of what it was all about: it is a celebration of life more than of war; of the hard-won freedom than the hardness of the winning.  The most poignant statement at the Memorial site was the one on a slab of rock from Norway: “Son, protect the freedom we have won.”  And the most incongruent – positively insulting, in my view – was the famous statue of a knotted handgun, with the inscription “Non-violence” under it.

For one thing, as a general matter, the banality of “non-violence” as a creed, as a philosophy, in the face of palpable evil is nowhere more apparent than in the writings of Gandhi on the question of Jews in Germany.  He writes, in November 1938:

I am convinced that if someone with courage and vision can arise among them [German Jews] to lead them in non-violent action, the winter of their despair can in the twinkling of an eye be turned into the summer of hope. And what has today become a degrading man-hunt can be turned into a calm and determined stand offered by unarmed men and women possessing the strength of suffering given to them by Jehovah. It will be then a truly religious resistance offered against the godless fury of dehumanised man. The German Jews will score a lasting victory over the German gentiles in the sense that they will have converted the latter to an appreciation of human dignity.

A month later, in response to criticisms from Germany and elsewhere, he notes:

Herr Hitler is but one man enjoying no more than the average span of life. He would be a spent force if he had not the backing of his people. I do not despair of his responding to human suffering even though caused by him.

Six million Jews, four million Poles, ten million Russians – dead, killed through the active agency of German citizens or passive starvation – twenty millions dead, and this, only in Germany, not counting the scores of millions who were killed in other theatres.  It is surely a moral monstrosity of the first rank to suggest, as Gandhi did, “I do not despair because Herr Hitler’s or the German heart has not yet melted.  On the contrary I plead for more suffering and still more till the melting has become visible to the naked eye.”

The banalities of “the Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a fakir” aside, I had a specific problem with the “Non-violence” statue on the grounds of the Memorial.  Allied victory was bought at the price of the blood of a generation of men, by the force of the most massive Armada ever assembled in our rich history of massed forces, and against the most lethal armed machine that the evil mind of man could conceive. 

Let Non-violence be celebrated, if it must; let Gandhi’s statues adorn public places and Martin Luther King Day be declared a holiday.  But, in the name of all that is sacred, not here; not on the grounds of the Memorial to the thousands who gave their lives on these beaches.

Let us not forget that it was blood, gunpowder and steel, and not prayer and passive suffering, that won the freedoms we enjoy today.  The objective was not to melt the heart of Herr Hitler, but to drive the invading forces out of occupied lands.  As we face more blood and gunpowder, but also as we face more subtle threats to our liberty, let us heed the Norwegian call to her Sons, which is a noble call to all of us: “protect the freedom we have won.”

Chartres and Caen

Normandy WWII

I spent the last three weekends giving a series of lectures to a group of Canadian law students at the invitation of the International Study Centre of Queen’s University.  The University has a sort-of campus at a Tudor castle near Herstmonceux in East Sussex, some 70 miles south of <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />London and 30 miles east of Brighton.

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As always, the teaching experience was very rewarding.  But the richness of the experience was particularly enhanced by the fact I stayed at the residences near the castle and managed to get to know the students as more than just – well, students.  Over breakfast, lunch and dinner, walks in the grounds, drinks in the pub, or playing fusball, I got a better understanding of my students than I have ever had before, despite the fact that I spent only 18 hours – less than the equivalent of half a term – with them in class.  All in all, it was quite an enjoyable and wonderful time away.

But then who doesn’t like having two dozen bright, intelligent and articulate individuals as a captive audience for three weeks?  What’s more, not only did some understand what I said, quite a few actually laughed at my jokes.  What’s there not to like?  Nothing remarkable there and I should not have bothered to write if it were not for the additional benefits of going to England to teach – and there were at least three.

First of all, the food. 

What, you don’t believe me?  Well, OK – this one’s too big a lie and the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge itself would not support the suspension of disbelief on this issue. (Yes, yes, the metaphor is heavy – no pun intended – and probably inapt, but at least it is original.  I think.  Bear with me.)  No, the food was awful and universally so.  It is not just that I am not used to student residence food – and that I am not.  It is that even outside the residence, the food was bad.  Overcooked vegetables, fatty meats, unsubtle fish, unimaginative deserts, dishwater “coffee” … worst of all, this came upon me soon after my three days in food heaven, the bed-and-breakfast in Cinque Terre, when my stomach was least resistant to crap.  On my way back at the end of the first weekend, I finally skipped dinner and slipped into a McDonald’s for a gourmet meal – Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese … But, I should not close this paragraph without giving credit where credit is due.  Whatever their culinary weakness might be, the English make damn good Toffee, with real butter and cream. (By the way, that was my dinner at the end of the third weekend.  Toffee and banana smoothie.)

The second major benefit was driving in the English countryside.

You don’t know what to make of that, do you?  I am not referring to driving on the left side of the road ….  Still no help?  OK – the tongue is firmly in the cheek.  On the flight over I looked down and was impressed by the sheer beauty of the rolling hills of Kent and Sussex.  The hills are alive with the sound of music … oh sorry, wrong movie.  Anyway, the country is utterly beautiful from above and I got the urge to get a car and drive on the tiny roads that wind in and out of the hills, farms, meadows and pastures.  Except that … people drove like madmen on these narrow roads, which had no shoulder to speak of and were always hemmed in by something, occasionally brick walls.  And of course I was driving on the wrong side and so had to have all my wits about me just to get safely to the Castle … beautiful country it may have been, but I saw nothing but the narrow strip of asphalt in front of me.  It did get better the second time I got a car.  Well, an SUV – gas prices and global warming be damned.  I, too, was soon barreling down country roads at high speed, pushing all and sundry in my way into hedges, ditches and the occasional wall.  In a couple of weeks, I guess, I’ll find out how many times I had my photo taken by speed traps …

The third additional benefit – and the real one – of going to England to teach is (by now you will have guessed it) the English countryside. 

Over two weekends, I drove through large parts of Sussex, Surrey and Oxfordshire, and I can report that I never once saw the kind of small town middle America-massif centrale monstrosity that I described in an earlier note (see “A rare taste” below).  This is a particularly prosperous and traditional part of the UK; perhaps that explains why all the villages and small towns I drove through were uniformly, almost pathologically, cute – and I mean that in the nicest sense of the word.  It is a bit of a cliché, but the English really do have lovely gardens, ivy-covered cottages dotting the landscape, sheep in the pastures and insane place names and signage: on my way to the castle from the airport I went through Nutley, Uckville and Upper Dicker; Bognor Regis and Pease Pound were around the corner; the map reads like an Oscar Wilde play (Worthing, Bracknell, Windermere); and signs warned me here and there of “Heavy Plant Crossing”, prompting me to look frantically around each bend in the road for waddling Begonias or overweight palms.  

Then, of course, is the sheer wealth of the land in terms of historical sites – if, that is, you are as great an enthusiast of English history as I am.  East Sussex, after all, is “1066 country”.  But more on that, later.

The castle itself – or, at least, the foundations – dates from 1441, and is one of the major Tudor brick buildings in England.  It was heavily rebuilt in the early twentieth century, and for some fifty years it played host to the Royal Greenwich Observatory – there are still working telescopes on the grounds, though the largest was moved to the Canaries about ten years ago.  The classes were held at the castle, which is not open to the public; the residence (which also serves as a bed and breakfast) was about 500 metres up the hill.  From my room, I had a beautiful view of the surrounding meadows, cows and observatories. (You can see the pictures of the castle, the grounds, and the cows here.)

The name of the castle, Herstmonceux, should give you an indication of the interesting history of the land: the Hersts were Saxon nobility, while de Monceux was a Norman knight that came over with William the Conqueror.  Some time in the XII century, about a hundred years after the Conquest, a de Monceux married a Herst, joined their names, and settled in the region.

It is said that the Norman Conquest was the last successful invasion of England (if you do not count that little incident in 1688, when William of Orange usurped the English and Scottish thrones; after all, he was already married to the daughter of the deposed king).  An earlier William, the Duke of Normandy, had been promised the throne of England by Edward the Confessor.  After Edward’s death, however, Harold Godwin, a Saxon claimed that Edward had named him as his successor.  Meanwhile, the Norwegians thought that England belonged to them – after all, they had plundered the land, pillaged the cities and raped its people for centuries; theirs was by far the strongest of William’s or Harold’s claim. 

Messy business. 

Harold, being in situ, took the crown; the Norwegians attacked from the north, and William invaded from the south.  Harold moved swiftly north and dealt a massive defeat on the Norwegian invaders – indeed, so massive that they never came back.  But, by the time he turned south to face the Normans (who were, incidentally, the descendant of Vikings – norse men- who evidently had come to prefer the delights of the French country side to Norway’s snowy coasts), his troops were too tired to fight.  The Normans attacked, were repulsed, took out their bows and showered the enemy with arrows; Harold took one in the eye and died, the English forces fought on but collapsed of exhaustion; and William established a French-speaking court in England that changed the face of the country, and that lasted until 1485.

William landed in what is now Pevensy Bay; the walls of a Roman fort that served as his first base are still there.  Within the remains of the Roman walls there are the ruins of a medieval castle; the early foundations of the castle date to 1067, a year after the invasion.  The final battle between the English and the Norman forces is known as the Battle of Hastings, though in fact it was fought a little north of Hastings, at what is now the village of Battle. (There is a joke in there somewhere, but it cannot be told without eliciting a collective groan, so I will forebear.) The village was built around the Abbey founded by William soon after the Conquest to commemorate the victory.  According to tradition, the altar of the Abbey church was placed on the exact spot where Harold died.  Not much is left of the Church; the Abbey lies in magnificent ruins; the battlefield is now covered in Narcissus.

And William?  Here is how Will Durant captures the scene of his death:

“He ordered his army to burn down Mantes and all its neighbourhood, and to destroy all its crops and fruits; and it was done.  Riding happily amid the ruins, William was thrown against the iron pommel of his saddle by a stumble of his horse.  He was carried to the priory of St. Gervase near Rouen. … All his sons except Henry deserted his deathbed to fight for the succession; his officers and servants fled with what spoils they could take. … The coffin made for him proved too small for his corpse; when the attendants tried to force the enormous bulk into the narrow space the body burst, and filled the church with a royal stench.

As I walked around the battlefields and the ruins, as I stood where the old Abbey church of Battle rose on the spot where Harold Godwin (and Saxon England) had met his death, I remembered the story of William’s exploding corpse and fleeing servants, and I recalled Khayyam’s quatrain (via Fitzgerlad):

They say the Lion and the Lizard keep
The Courts where Jamshyd gloried and drank deep:
And Bahram, that great Hunter–the Wild Ass
Stamps o'er his Head, and he lies fast asleep.

William was not your garden variety conqueror; he comprehensively changed the face of Saxon England.  He introduced feudalism and established a landed nobility of largely Norman stock, the traces of which can still be seen today: in English, the cow in the pasture becomes beef on your plate; the same with veal and pork.  This reflects the fact that the Saxon peasants raised the cows and calf and pigs, but sold or offered boeuf, veau, and porc to the Lords in the Manor.

One of William’s principal supporters in the English venture was a certain Roger de Montgomery, who offered 60 ships to the invasion.  As a reward, he got the “rape” of Arundel (including what became Arundel Castle), one of the six “rapes” of County Sussex parceled out by William to his friends.  (The origins of the word “rape” are not clear, but it might well have come from the French rapiner, to plunder, which is what the Normans did to the Saxon lands.)  But Roger's son backed the wrong guy in the wars of succession that followed and lost the land.  Henry I, William’s son, gave the grounds to his second wife; she remarried, and eventually hosted Empress Matilda, Henry’s daughter and England’s first Queen, at Arundel Castle in 1139.  The formidable Matilda, or Maud, was never crowned; she was in London for all of seven months before Londoners got fed up with her manners and threw her out of town.  Her son eventually became king of England as Henry II, the husband of Eleanor, about whom I have written elsewhere (See “A rare taste” below).  It was this Henry who created the first Earl of Arundel, whose descendants still inhabit the Castle over eight hundred years later.

Along the way, the Earls of Arundel married into or produced other Earls, Dukes and sundry Lords, some of whom had their heads removed at the convenience of the Sovereign.  The family also produced the two most unfortunate Queens of England, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, who were nieces of the 3^rd Duke of Norfolk; both went to the block.  The 3^rd Duke escaped beheading by Henry VIII only because Henry died of Syphilis the night before the Execution. (Yet another bloated king whose corpse exploded.)  The 4^th Duke, however, was not so fortunate; he was relieved of his head by the order of Queen Elizabeth.  Now, before you say a word against the Virgin Queen, bear in mind that the House of Lords had sentenced Norfolk to be hanged, drawn and quartered; the Queen felt compassion and after months of dithering, only had Norfolk beheaded.

My next stop was Stonehenge.  Sadly, I did not see any druids there.  Even more disappointingly, for fear of vandalism you are kept a good distance from the stones.  I walked around on the designated pathway, listened to the audio-guide yammer on about the construction of the thing and the properties of “blue” stone, took pictures, and ate a tuna sandwich for lunch.  I had in mind all the stories I had read about the magical properties of Stonehenge; I was half-hoping to find a time-portal or something on the path … but no such luck.  I suppose it’s interesting how four thousand years ago hundreds of people got together to build themselves what is in effect a stone calendar … but then, around the same time, the Egyptians were building the pyramids.  I guess the moral of the story is, if you want to see Stonehenge in person, go there before you visit Egypt, otherwise you risk having your perspective screwed up.

My final stop was Oxford.  I had persuaded myself that it was worth driving 250 km to see Oxford; I am still not sure whether it was.  Still, it was good finally to see the place I had read so much about in Brideshead Revisited and the life of Oscar Wilde.  There is, I should add, an odd serenity about the place; this is what a University should feel like, I thought to myself as I walked around Christ Church meadow.  But then, it could well be that I have been conditioned to think that way.

And this is the thing: how often in life do we come across an image or a place with utterly fresh eyes?  Is it even possible to conceive what a “fresh eye” might be like, might feel like?  Would Stonehenge have been more impressive had I not seen the pyramids?  Would it still be impressive if I did not know its age, or the significance of its particular orientation during Spring equinox or Summer solstice?  Would Oxford, the city and the university, be Oxford, without the lenses of Wilde and Waugh?  But then, what is a place, a building, a historical artifact, but the sum total of our experiences, gathered and received?

After a week of rain, the sun is finally breaking through the clouds.  The mountains beckon.