We all know that Henry Ford said 'History is Bunk.' Oddly enough it is history which tells us this fact, which Henry would not like.
To look back at ‘History’ is a bit wierd. I suppose it all took place but I wouldn't bet on it.
It seems as if it was all 'created' like a film, until the time that we ourselves arrived and it then starts to get real. Within my own memory I will acknowledge that history has genuinely been created by the passage of time and events. In my youth I remember old type cars. In television programmes, when they want to recreate this period, say the forties, they hire a preserved Morris Eight and a Rover twelve and there you are. So it's easy to present the appearance of history, but only when I can remember it myself, do I believe it. I cannot confirm anything before my time so, deep down, I don't think it happened. There was only a quick-fire, made up, scarcely believable pageant. Like an epic film, two-dimensional, till I pop up.
So that is what happened before I was born. The wattle and daub huts were rented, perhaps as a complete medieval village, by the day. Serfs and flocks of geese, ditto. . It's all too neat you see, like that widescreen film, with a fine director and the best continuity staff that groats can buy. And everything is just where the best scriptwriter would put it, to maintain our interest. Dinosaurs, a master-stroke, there didn't have to be dinosaurs, so huge so awesome, so incredible, the Special Effects man who dreamed them up and put them in deserves a bonus. In the middle of the film, the Middle Ages start to drag and wham, we've got the Renaissance. The diversity of the Kings and Queens of England is part of this fantastic plot. Six wives, hunchbacks, virgins, mad, beheaded, all fantastic. If history was true there would probably have been just John the first to John the Twenty Seventh.
In future, History may be more believable as people are now recorded. Documentation is a great thing, recording a name now is to make that person live in the Civil Service of Civilisation. Before this, for example in AD 1200, a man still had a name, say Jack Smith, but it was never recorded anywhere, never written down. Now he is dead. He was a farm labourer. He is not remembered any more than the turnips he grew. More reason to believe that he may never have existed at all, despite the drawing of a cross gartered adze wielder in the School Book of the Dark Ages.
As these medieval generations of people, up to about the 15th century, were not recorded individually, only roughly counted from time to time, the vast majority of the population lose their reality. I visualise in my historical play, our country populated by about five hundred people, Kings, some Nobles, Explorers, Highwaymen, and Chaucer.
So I disbelieve that real life, society, speech, action, or anything else really took place in what is called 'History,' and so far as I am concerned 'History' can only start from when there were proper toilets. :rolleyes:
Peter