Keeping History Alive
‘History is written by the victors’ is a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill, though its true origins are unknown. It conjures images of great wars; the tales of the defeated being lost behind the fanfares of victory. After all, when you peer back through the mists of time, there are many societies about whom we only have information because the people that conquered them wrote it down.
But there is another image conjured by this idea, for in our retelling of history we have allowed a small group of people to do all of the talking. The Great Man Theory of history; the idea that history is made by individuals, that these are mostly men, and they must be seen as ‘great’ in order to be relevant to our retellings of the past. But this idea maligns and ignores the vast majority of people, dismissing their lived experiences as inconsequential; not relevant to the grand narrative written by those Great Men, those Great Victors.
We are all taught the story of William the Conqueror and his victory at Hastings in 1066, but it is easy to forget that even with low estimates, 12,000 individuals were present at that battle. Each of whom had a life, family and friends. And let us not forget, it is because of those thousands of people that we know William the Conqueror’s story. He would not have gotten far without them.
The Battle of Hastings event, Oct 2022
It is only when this idea is deconstructed that we can truly begin to appreciate what history actually is. History is not textbooks, academic papers and professors in their ivory towers dictating what happened and who was responsible. As our modern times are demonstrating with increasing clarity, history is subjective. It is an amalgamation of people and their individual experiences, from the ruler to the ruled, the victors to the vanquished.
So with this mindset I was driven from the haughty world of history books and academia to the world of living history. We are taught from being children to try and be empathetic, to not judge someone until you’ve walked a mile in their shoes. And while this is a fitting metaphor, is there not more we can take from this? What if we tried to be more empathetic to the people of history? What if we wanted to literally walk in their shoes?
Living history came along and challenged everything I thought I knew about the past and the people who lived it. You are physically putting yourself in the clothing and the environment of people who lived centuries before you did. For all of the reading about the Legions of Rome, you never get a sense of what it must have been like to be Julius Caesar, because how could we ever know? There is little any modern person could do to recreate the conditions to get a true idea of what it must have felt like to be at the height of Roman society, in a world of cut-throat politics, violent conquest and vastly different cultural views to the ones we have today.
But what can we achieve? We can put ourselves in the clothing and environments of the people who most reflect our own individuality; the 99%. I know what it feels like to carry the four-stone of equipment a Roman soldier would have had to march eighteen miles a day with. I know what it feels like to try and bring an English longbow to full extension. I know what it feels like to try and keep warm in the cold with the clothing of my distant ancestors.
And through these experiences, I have found my love for history rekindled anew. I can get closer to the every-day folk whose lived experience was as real to them as yours is to you, or mine to me.
For what is history, truly? Is it a list of the most significant political events of a time? Of course. But it is also the story of humankind; it is estimated that 117 billion people have lived, and each of those individuals has had a life of social connections, emotions and daily lived experiences.
Images taken by Mike South - @mikesouthphotos
The mediaeval era has long been derisively called The Dark Ages, but even in those years, hidden behind the mists of time, there were people living their lives, who would scorn the idea that their entire existence had been reduced to a mere mention in a textbook.
Living history is a journey; a passionate yet one-sided conversation with people deep in the past. It is something I firmly believe is a path to empathy, allowing us to imagine the lives of the people who conventional history tells us precious little about. And by doing this, we can keep the memory of these people alive.
Written by James Cullen
Follow James @historicbritannia on Instagram