new rul ers of the land reached back to a Celti c hero to leg itimi ze the ir rule, gatheri ng up the tales of King Arthur, which were soon enshrined as the national epic. But, the drift of forgetfulness and the piling-up of e laboration during the more than six centuries that had passed s ince Arthur's g reat battl e of Badon Hill around 500AD generated confu sion as to just when he had lived and what hi s battles were about. Thi s led to some amusing anachroni sms in the tales of Arthurian chiva lry as they come down to us today; but the defen se of C hri stianity was no anachroni sm, it was a vital part of the RomanoCeltic cause-and a part that ultimately prevailed . Arthur 's use of so ldi ers mounted on horseback (the word "chivalry ," is from the French "cheval," or " horse") was no anachroni sm either; it was the military reality that enabled Arthur to form the mobile reserve (akin to the " masse de manoeuvre" that Winston Churchi ll looked for in vain to stop the German tanks slicing through stati c French defenses in the invasion of France in 1940) that kept the primitive invading Germanic tribes, or Anglo-Saxons, at bay for a few critical decades. Thus the Britons had avoided the catastrophic mudslide that engu lfed the other provinces of the Roman Empire as Goth and Vandal slaughtered and looted the ir way through the last strongholds of civ ilization in the West.
A Defining Myth This story of persi stence and endurance is at the core of the Arthurian myth which the Normans seem con sciou sly to have built into their settlement with Ce ltic Briton and Anglo-Saxon in England. Arthur 's story became, with notable consequences, the defining myth of the remade nation. It is signifi cant that thi s myth had been kept alive among the common people and also through church records now lost to us. Geoffrey of Monmouth , the Norman cleric who revived Arthur as an historic figure in hi s History of the Kin gs of England, refers to a sou rce of such record s. The Normans al so recogni zed the rough democracy of the law of the shires, evolved from case to case and from generation to generation. They made thi s the Common Law of the land , which, with its juries ofordinary c iti zens and its reliance on evolved solution s to problems of justice, rather than a mandated , centrally admi nistered code of justice, became the law of the United States and SEA HISTORY 76, WINTER 1995-96
all the nation s where English is the main language today, from New York to Toronto, and Bombay. It is worth pausi ng to consider the Norman settlement as it took shape. It seems a stunning acc ident of history that the Normans, who imposed their adopted French language and modes of governance on Briton and Saxon alikequite firmly-should have kept the Britons' nationa l myth and the Saxons' rough-hewn tribal law. But I can hear a Norman baron telling me: "This was no accident! " Rud ya rd Kipling wrote percipiently early in thi s century of how the Norman ruled over Briton, Saxon and Dane in Puck of Pook' s Hill , tales of a re-imagined past living on in the storied countryside of southeastern England. In these tales, rooted in the native folklore (for which Kipling had a ve ry good ear), the Norman overlord is always relying on the judgement of the Engli sh yeoman farmer in the day-to-day conduct of affairs, and never pushing him when he digs hi s hee ls in , when he becomes dangerous. You might say at this point, what has a ll thi s to do with the Cape Horn storythe story of mankind ' s opening of the ocean road and round the world? That ' s what we came for, isn ' t it? We ll , yes it is. Perhaps we should be ex ploring the ri se of the great Islamic power that arose in Arabia in the 700sgo ing on from there to take in North Africa, Spain, the Middle East, Turkey and much of southeast Europe-or the tremendous, violent reaction of the West in the Crusades aimed at recapturing the Holy Land, and the flowering of the Ita li an maritime republics which fueled the Renaissance. Instead, we find ourselves standing around listening to fo lklore dispensed on the Kentish downs. But I ask yo ur patience in this matter. l , like any storyteller of yore, can tell you on ly what I have learned, in the hope and endeavor to pass it on to yo u as I learned it. And I tell you that in this matter of Britain we are see ing seeds planted that will burst fo rth in totall y unpredicted ways-ways some hi storians even today do not seem to recognize in their full reach and flowering.
The Yeoman Archers To resume, then, the Viking adventure had pretty well run its course by the time of the orman Conquest of I 066. But it had left its mark in Eng land. Winston Churchill , in hi s History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples , c ites amo ng the Vi-
king legacies, in their settlements in the British Isles, the priceless heritage of the c iti zen so ldier, the yeoman trained in arms. No con tinenta l European power had this tradition, or indeed could afford it. In medieval soc ieties the nobility sustained itse lf by the strategy, all too familiar in our time, of milking the economy and controlling a depe ndent peasantry through "entitlements." The rulers believed that arming the people of the land wo uld lead to their own sure destruction-an ass umption proved correct in later European hi story. England, however, was fortunate in escapi ng the worst depravities of medi eval soc iety through the progressive settlements that had been reached. And these continued to evolve. Under Magna Carta, the Great Charter of 12 15 , the king became ob li gated to consult local magnates and bo und himself to observe basic c ivil rights protecting the peopl e aga inst arbitrary search and seizure, imprisonment without verified cause, and the like. In the following century a parliamen t which gave some voice to public concern s came into being. It was a voice which often proved confused and quarrelsome, but through many vic iss itudes was not to be sil enced until , centu ries later, it became the dominant vo ice in public affairs, as its descendants are in most of the world ' s nations today. And the vo ice it soon began to speak in , with overlays of Norman French and C hurch Latin where matters of state or the es ta bl ished reli gion were concerned, was Eng li sh! This, in a form recognizable to Eng li sh-speaking people today in Geoffrey C haucer's Canterbury Tales of the late 1300s, was the native Germanic language of the peop le, whi ch had naturall y passed through m any changes in its 800-odd years ashore, but retained its sturd y, adaptab le nature. These evo lv ing changes in Engl ish li fe and society did not do much to affect the course of hi story at first. But this slow ferment in ways of thought, speech and ac tion did produce one highly visible phenomenon from which Europe and the Eng li sh themselves might have learned much had they had the advantage of the hindsight we enjoy. That phenomenon was the Engli sh longbow, wh ich in the hands of yeoman arc hers, who trained at the butts on Sunday afte rnoons, introduced a kind of artillery into warfare, wel I before the development of effective gun s.
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