Archive for the ‘Comment’ Category

January 11th, 2012

How to get into Cambridge University

If you’re thinking of applying, then this is a useful and illuminating article, which demystifies some aspects of an application and interview process that has often struck outsiders (as well as many insiders) as confusing and opaque.

Extract:

It’s a life-changing roll call. As the admissions tutor reads out names, the men and women gathered around the table reply crisply to each one: “Yep … yep … yep.” Each “yep” is actually a no. It’s a rejection of a candidate who has applied for a place at the University of Cambridge.

The weakest of the field have already been sifted out; up to a fifth of applications are declined before the interview stage. Now the tutors are gathered to consider the results of those interviews. Five women and seven men are gathered at a table, in a light-filled, rectangular room at Churchill College to discuss admissions to study natural sciences.

The easy ones go first. These are the candidates whose academic track record is – by Cambridge standards – marginal, and whose performance at interview has been disappointing. As one candidate’s name is read out, one of the academics notes that he got an interview score of two, out of a possible 10. “Oh dear,” says Richard Partington, the senior admissions tutor, who sits at the head of the table. Next to Partington is a steel trolley with the applicants’ files.

Then, they get down to business…

Source: The Guardian

Personal recollection: I interviewed at Pembroke, Cambridge in 1998, and went up in 1999. Having been to a state grammar school with virtually no record at the time of sending people to Oxbridge, I didn’t receive a great amount of guidance about the best way to approach the application/interview process. We did a mock interview with some teachers from the local public school, which I recall being a humiliating failure. Someone told me that the only wrong answer to a Cambridge interview question was ‘I don’t know’. That, pretty much, was that.

My tactics were therefore improvised. I knew I wanted to read History, and decided to apply to Pembroke because, when flicking through the university prospectus, I saw that the admissions tutor was an historian. His number was published in the prospectus, so I telephoned one afternoon, introduced myself and asked a long list of questions about what life at Pembroke was like, how the teaching worked, and whether it was the sort of place I’d fit in.

After that I went to an open day, saw the same admissions tutor and buttonholed him for another long conversation about history and the college, etc.

Subsequently, when I was called for interview, there were three sessions scheduled, each of about 20 minutes in length, one-on-one. The first two interviews were structured around discussing historical essays I’d written in school; but one of them, which started on something like the Weimar Republic, went off-track and we ended up discussing Kurt Cobain and the musical influence of Nirvana on the grunge scene.

The third interview was with the admissions tutor. It was the end of the day. I remember - although this may be fanciful - him emitting a groan when I walked into the room. We talked a bit about college and history and studying, then at the end of the interview he said he wasn’t going to ask me if I had any questions, as I’d asked quite enough previously, and he was keen to get things wrapped up so he could get off to play tennis.

On New Year’s Eve 1998 I received an offer.

Moral: I don’t know that there is a moral here, other than to say that in my case a measure of enthusiastic, precocious lobbying probably helped. Looking back, I suppose that another admissions tutor would have found it all wildly irritating, and life would have turned out differently.

(Sidebar: When I got up to Cambridge I was fortunate enough to be taught a bit by Richard Partington, who appears in the piece I linked to, above. Besides being, evidently, an open-minded and progressive admissions tutor at Churchill college, he is also a very brilliant medievalist, who knows more about Edward III than anyone else.)

December 19th, 2011

What history should we teach in schools - to those few school-children who can still be bothered to take it, I mean?

There have been countless articles like this published in the last year, bemoaning the fact that fewer and fewer school-children now bother taking history past the age of 14.

A typical statistic:

Last year, less than 30 per cent of 16-year-olds in comprehensive schools were entered for GCSE History, compared with 55 per cent of pupils in grammar schools and 48 per cent in private schools.

Alarmingly, there were 159 comprehensives where not a single pupil was entered for GCSE History; and in a majority of state secondaries, less than a quarter of pupils now take the exam. (Daily Mail)

That is concerning. And as Tristram Hunt MP pointed out on the radio this morning, it is particularly concerning if it means that studying history becomes an educational privilege restricted to private schools. For history to become as marginalised in the British curriculum as, say, ancient languages or classics would be catastrophic. That, however, is the way we’re going.

On the surface, it feels like the problem is that no one can make their mind up about what history is for, or indeed whether it should be for anything at all. Do we teach history to develop skills or knowledge? Do we teach history in order to educate our children about the people, events and values that have made Britain great, or to broaden their minds to the alternative narratives of all people all over the world? Should we be teaching them about Lord Nelson, or Nelson Mandela? Winston Churchill or Mary Seacole? Cicero or Confucius? And so on.

The present government seems to have a preference for amending the historical curriculum to equip children to answer trivia questions about British political and constitutional history between the Roman invasion and the Falklands war. It thus fulfils the ‘citizenship’ function - a means by which to introduce kids from all backgrounds to a romantic, patriotic, conservative teleology of Britishness. This gets up lots of left-wing people’s noses, and understandably so.

But whatever. No one will ever settle that argument. For politicians - to bend an Orwell phrase - all history teaching is propaganda: a means of sowing their own political ideology on young minds in the hope that it may flourish in the future. (This may, of course, be one reason why state-school kids, who are not stupid, have no wish to study it.) In a way, it’s healthy that the argument should continue, for as soon as it stops, someone has won, and the propaganda has worked.

The most potent argument I can think for obliging children to continue learning history until the age of 16 (apart from the desire that there should be a forcibly expanded market for my own books, natch) is in fact one that has gone a bit out of fashion this year. History teaches essential, unique skills.

Yes, skills - but before you say ‘ugh, what a filthy, New Labouristic, dismal reason to learn about great events in the past’, think of this. My children - our children - will grow up during the business-end of the Information Revolution. As the internet continues to mature, these children will live their lives bombarded with more words, thoughts, arguments and voices than any generation before them. Wherever their lives take them, they will need to be consummate bullshit detectors.

Which is what history teaches you. Interrogate what you’re reading. Understand the partiality of everything. Think about what you’re being sold. Sniff out propaganda. Understand the myriad clever, and not-so-clever ways in which people have always tried to screw one another over. Spot the lie. Spot the spin. Spot the weasel. Appreciate real heroism. Don’t be gullible.

Well, if history doesn’t teach you that, what does?

In 1999 I took four A-levels: History, Economics, English Literature and Mathematics. If I were doing it all again now, I would do the same again, although perhaps I might swap Eng. Lit. for Computing. Those disciplines seem to me to give you both rigorous old-fashioned learning and valuable skills to make you a useful, engaged, agreeably suspicious person.

August 11th, 2011

The London Riots of 2011 and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381

I suppose this was inevitable. Here is my op-ed piece from today’s Evening Standard, in which I consider the events of the London riots of August 2011 with those of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.

I suppose it would also have made sense to mention Richard II’s words to the vanquished Essex rebels in 1381. “Villeins ye are, and villeins ye shall remain, not in bondage as before, but incomparably harsher”. It seems to reflect the hang ‘em high attitude which will likely prevail upon those identified as looters and rioters this week.

Exactly 630 summers ago, London burned at the hands of violent mobs. Angry men and women, drawn from the lower orders of society, rampaged the streets for nights on end - looting, setting fire to property, attacking other Londoners and paralysing the limited policing resources of an unpopular government.

Clouds of thick smoke filled the air as buildings were sacked and burned. Rioters communicated with messages composed in cryptic language and sent by covert means. Soon after the London riots began, copycat attacks followed in other English cities.

The upheaval scarred the city and the psyche of the well-meaning majority, who watched with horror as an underclass ran amok, seemingly delighted by the meaningless violence in which they indulged.

Two years ago I wrote a book: Summer of Blood: the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Harper Press), which charts the events of that rising. This week, during what has been dubbed the Chavs’ Revolt, it feels a bit like a warning from history.

Our city is no longer much like medieval London. And yet, when the capital riots, it does so in familiar fashion. The causes may be different but the methods and composition of the crowds don’t change much.

Mass riots do not happen solely because cities contain bad people. There is always a catalyst, and usually a set of acute underlying grievances. In 1381 a poll tax sparked violence against a political class who were seen as corrupt and self-interested. This week, the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan caused tensions between the police and disenfranchised young people who have never known discipline to spill over into violence.

But now, as then, the character of the riots has morphed quickly from principled protest to mindless destruction. The composition of a riot transcends history. It goes through stages. Shortly after a riot begins, those people who have a specific cause are joined by others who have a panoply of other grievances. Anger becomes general, directed at a whole government, system or way of life.

Then comes a dull thud of boots, heralding the arrival of the rent-a-mob: the herds of rough-necked scrotes who like trouble for its own sake. This is when a riot really hits its straps. In 1381, Londoners with scant connection to the original causes of the revolt massacred Flemish merchants and piled their bodies in the streets. This year, their dullard descendants burned furniture stores and nicked tellies out of betting shops.

Rioters have always found ways to organise in such a way that they will elude the authorities, too. BBM and Twitter are new mediums for a very old message. In the Middle Ages, strange letters were circulated by organisers, calling on rioters to “chastise well Hob the Robber and take with you John Trueman”. A very loose modern translation: “let’s fuk up da feds, bruv!”

And there are two more historical notes to add. First: it was the Mayor of London, William Walworth, who saved the day in 1381, when he stabbed to death the rebel leader Wat Tyler during negotiations with the king. Second: another rioter was tried and executed in East Anglia for the crime of saying “he was a messenger of the great society”.

There’s a message there for Boris - and for Dave, too, I fancy.

March 26th, 2011

The face of protest

London, 26 March 2011: If you watch the news tonight, you’ll probably see images of ‘anarchists’ (read: a hotchpotch of criminals, vandals and thugs) smashing up the Ritz, throwing paint at Topman, smashing the window of a Porsche dealership, throwing paint-bombs at the police and generally doing a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.

These are the images that will represent a day of demonstrations against the coalition government.

And yet. According to most reporters on the ground in London, the people causing criminal damage and wreaking havoc on the city constitute only a tiny minority of the 400,000 demonstrators who have come to the capital to protest government policy towards tax and public spending.

I suppose it was ever thus. Read the chronicle accounts of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381, and you are struck immediately by very similar, if more extreme headlines: the sack of the Savoy (then a palace, not a hotel, but very arguably the Ritz of its day); attacks on super-wealthy London merchants suspected of corrupt political collusion; violent, murderous attacks on government officials and, yes, a lot of other fairly disagreeable rampaging.

In 1381 the worst violence was perpetrated by a similarly small, violent and criminal element of the rebels. They were the rebels that remained longest in London, committed the most barbaric acts and were eventually slaughtered with the greatest prejudice by the government.

What one hears very little about when the news gets made (and when history is written) is the vast herds of non-violent protesters, who have political grievances but wish to express them noisily, peacefully and within the law.

The thing about those protesters, be they public sector workers in 2011 or over-taxed rural landowners in 1381, is that what they do is interesting but essentially quite boring.

Or to put it another way: we would rather read about a nutter chucking a bin through the window of the Vodafone store and a mad priest chopping the archbishop of Canterbury’s head off, than a mildly cheesed-off ordinary Joe exercising his right to protest (as is now) and then going home.

I’m not saying that’s right. I’m saying that’s the news for you. And that’s history too, to an extent. We get our kicks from studying the exceptional and the extreme.

PS I should probably say at this point that if you want to know more about 1381, and thus learn a little more about where we stand in 2011, then you can buy my book, here.

March 13th, 2011

The new Whigs?

Everyone should read this brilliant essay by Professor Richard J. Evans, analysing the current government’s approach to history teaching in schools. Super stuff.

December 21st, 2010

A new age of revolt

So long, 2010. Welcome in, shortly, 2011. To be honest, it is hard to be enthusiastic about the approaching year. It seems that it will bring with it a period of social distress, industrial action and popular disgruntlement that will accord with the worst experienced during either the 1970s and 1980s.

Even if you are in broad agreement with the thrust of present government policy, that is not a welcome thought.

It seems obvious for this blog to compare current levels of popular anger with those demonstrated in 1381. (At least, it does when the Evening Standard calls and asks you to, anyway.)

And although it is quite difficult and probably rather fatuous to make anything more than superficial comparisons between the conditions that preceded and surrounded the Peasants’ Revolt and those that we see on the streets today, there are some very basic similarities.

The following points have occurred to me:

1. There is now, and was then, a general hostility towards a political elite that is regarded as a self-interested, self-protecting class. In 1381 there was violent protest against a political class at large, which encompassed men in central government, local government and office-holders of all varieties. We have seen a similar strain developing this year, which is traceable back at least as far as the scandal concerning parliamentary expenses, which broke back in 2009. I should think that one of the reasons that Ed Miliband has proved so utterly feeble as leader of the Labour party is that he either cannot or dare not try to position himself in line with popular discontent, since he knows he himself - as a career politician - is one of the marked men.

2. A feeling of general outrage that the rich are forcing the poor to pay for a financial catastrophe for which they bore no responsibility. This was very much the order of the day in 1381. Government had been widely seen as corrupt and financially incompetent since the mid-1370s. England’s public finances were in disarray due to catastrophic mismanagement (the war with France) that was seen to have been cooked up by a privileged few and paid for, through poll taxes, by the struggling masses. Now, the public finances are in a mess due to a global recession, blamed widely on the ultra-rich banking classes. Public spending cuts are widely viewed to be as regressive as poll taxes - thus creating a similar feeling today as there was in 1381. To wit: the rich got us into this mess; now they’re making the poor buy us out of it. The analysis is pretty dodgy in both cases, but it’s easy to understand and also to believe.

3. If revolt comes, it will probably be a lower middle-class revolt, not a working class revolt. The rebellion in 1381 was led by artisans, village constables and parish priests, and furthered by city apprentices. It had much to do with the crushed hopes of the aspirant middling sort, and was not an early rise of the proles. When I look at the protesters on the streets of London now - be it the UK Uncut lot or the tuition fee protesters - I see students and politically articulate young people. Some of them might identify themselves as working class, but they are clearly a rung above the lowest levels of society, who never tend to rebel in any age, as they are too busy trying to survive the next 24 hours.

4. The gleeful involvement of troublemakers. Every revolt attracts the rent-a-mob. There were plenty involved in the 1381 revolt who just wanted to smash things up a bit. Ditto today.

5. Xenophobia. One of the most savage acts that took place in 1381 was the massacre of London’s Flemish merchants. Was this undertaken by the Kent/Essex rebels? I very much doubt it - it smacked of the London mob, who hated foreigners as a rule and took the opportunity to behead a few. Today, the largely Left-wing protests against tax loopholes, big business, student fees etc do not seem to have attracted the involvement of those racist movements alive in the UK and represented politically by nationalist parties like the EDL or BNP. But it would not be too great a stretch, should we face the nightmare scenario of a general strike/mass, general anti-government protest, to see the anti-immigration skein of political discontent in the UK start to entwine with the anti-cuts/anti-capitalist/anti-government thread.

I’m sure there are some more superficial similarities to be noted. I’ll jot them down here as and when they occur.

In the meantime, and having said all that, have a very merry Christmas. Let’s worry about the new year when we get there!

Dan

February 22nd, 2010

'Plantagenet' on BBC Radio 4: Episode 2

Richard The Lionheart

So. Episode 2 was a little better than the first. We had Henry II dying, betrayed and heartbroken, as his beloved Le Mans burned to the ground. Then we had Richard I giving Saladin’s heathen johnnies the right royal runaround in the Holy Land, then falling out with his ‘lover’ (never bought that, myself) Philip I of France and draining England of its gold in the process.

But this series is still pretty undercooked. The characters are too thin, and their motives painfully oversimplified. It’s not a subtle family drama, but it’s not a political thriller either. There are some infuriating tics: the habit of referring to the ‘King of Anjou and England’ has started to really get my goat.

And weirdest of all, this episode was narrated by a breathy, almost orgasmic Eleanor of Aquitaine, who seemed to be auditioning for a job doing the next batch of M&S food ads. It right gave me goose-bumps, and not in a good way.

Sigh.

February 16th, 2010

'Plantagenet' on BBC Radio 4

Henry IIHaving missed the Classic Serial, ‘Plantagenet’, on Radio 4 this Sunday, I caught up this morning on iPlayer.

The first episode, ‘What is a Man?’ focused on the squabbles between Henry II and his sons, Henry the Young King, Richard and Geoffrey, which dominated his reign from the Great War of 1173/4 until the elder Henry’s death in 1189. Fantastic material: this is perhaps one of the stormiest stories in the whole of the later Middle Ages, as the politics of dynasty-building are played out through the folly of human ambition. There was also one hell of a war (in 1173/4), which involved virtually every major magnate from Scotland to the Pyrenees.

Walker’s storytelling was surprisingly tame. He painted the scene by numbers: the conflict between family and kingship exposing the troubled contradictions between the instincts of kings and princes, and the instincts of fathers and sons. But in doing so, the politics were oversimplified and watered down, the characters never fully fleshed out, and the battles literally non-existent. Here were a load of rich folk squabbling. Nothing more.

There were also some clumsy inaccuracies, and while I don’t have any massive objection to historical liberties being taken in the name of improving drama or dialogue, in this case they didn’t really seem to do that.

For example: the old myth about Henry’s family descending from the devil was rehashed. Fine, but none of them subsequently came across very diabolical. A bit peeved and pottymouthed, maybe. But hardly Satanic. Likewise with the Eleanor of Aquitaine stereotype: as per usual she was painted as the jilted poet queen of the south, but in her scene with the old king, as he swept her off to exile in England following her conniving in the rebellion of 1173, she was unflustered and leaden.

There were also a number of howlers. Henry as ‘the King of Anjou and England’? That’d be the King of England, duke of Normandy and Aquitaine, count of Anjou (etc) then. And right at the start, Henry II was addressed as ‘your majesty’ - a term introduced for the English monarch by Henry VIII. There were more, but it’s pedantic to list them.

I feel bad hating on a serial I was really looking forward to, and which I applaud Radio 4 for commissioning. But it was just a little bit thin. As I have mentioned here before, I am writing the history of the Plantagenets at the moment, for publication next year. So I wished this series nothing but well - these rich and wonderful times deserve their place in the zeitgeist. I’m hoping it will improve next week, when the story moves on to Richard I’s reign. I will certainly be tuning in.

February 12th, 2010

The scrapheap of history, part II

According to this report at the Telegraph, another English university has directed cuts in Government funding towards parts of the History faculty.

Sussex University is reportedly considering a proposal to withdraw from research and specialist teaching “in English social history before 1700 and the history of continental Europe before 1900”. Not as drastic a cut as the Telegraph would spin it up to: their standfirst, referring to a letter published in today’s paper, is ‘Academics have attacked a decision by a top university to scrap research into English history before 1700′, which is technically accurate but implies a broader raft of cuts than actually seems to be proposed.

Nevertheless, it is part of the trend reported earlier in the week at King’s College, London, where the Paleography chair is to be made redundant. No doubt we will see a further trickle of these sorts of stories over the coming weeks, as academics dig in to protect their own specialist subjects and departmental funding by kicking up as big a stink as they can, knowing that the conservative press can use each case study as a political grenade to hurl at Labour.

Of course, the truth is that the Tories will have to cut at least as much from university budgets as Labour proposes to do. Will they be able to cope with the same sort of criticism, should more non-profitmaking, specialist courses and teachers go to the wall? Furthermore, how long will British universities allow themselves to be driven by the wind of political economics? Strikes me that Oxbridge and any number of the better redbricks have little to lose and everything to gain by cutting as loose as they can from government funding and looking towards an American model of private payment supported by a massively broadened scholarship system. It wouldn’t look pretty to the left, but the quality and depth of British higher education would stand a far better chance of maintaining its international prestige….

February 9th, 2010

Writing goes to the wall

A medieval manuscript, yesterday

As has been reported today, King’s College, London, is directing some of the pain of its wider academic cutbacks towards the faculty of paleography, where the UK’s only specialist chair in the discipline is being abolished from August.

The protest has been rather noisy. There’s already a Facebook group with more than 4,000 members, and an online petition with more than 5,000 signatories. Mary Beard has written intelligently about the subject at the Times, calling King’s in particular on its preposterous use of academic sub-committee speak in justifying its wider cutbacks (They’re aiming “to create financially viable academic activity by disinvesting from areas that are at sub-critical level with no realistic prospect of extra investment” - got that?) And David Blackburn at the Spectator has implied that this is just another consequence of Labour’s economic incompetence, cultural vandalism, cackhandedly egalitarianist dumbing-down etc.

Now, all this foot-stamping is hardly on the scale of the NHS hashtag business, or that hullaballoo Jan Moir attracted for going overboard when the lad from Boyzone died. But for the abolition of a paleography seat to have caught national headlines and thrown up such sizable breakers on the web is still interesting in itself.

Paleography is a highly technical and difficult discipline. It is something that could and can only be done professionally when subsidised in a university - few and far between are the high-flying paleography jobs in the private sector. Its value is as a humanity per se - it advances our understanding of our common cultural heritage, decodes the past the better to elucidate the present, and so on. Hanging the paleographers out to dry because - essentially - thems don’t pays thems way really does misconstrue the whole business of paleography.

But then again, these are the times. The entire nation is busy opening a vast, hitherto unheeded pile of bank statements, final demands etc, and realising just how much we cannot afford. The financial pressure on universities has never been greater, and is unlikely to ease whoever wins the next election. In such an environment, faculties that can be seen as drains on a university’s balance sheet, rather than attractors either of private investment or heavy student demand, are going to be extremely vulnerable to the sort of expedient cutbacks that could see unglamorous but culturally valuable areas of expertise snuffed out for a generation or more.

I’m about as far from a Guardian-reading anti-capitalist crybaby as it gets. But this, I will concede, is the problem with unregulated market forces. They don’t suit paleography faculties one bit. Not in a recession, at any rate.

The Author

Dan Jones

Dan Jones was born in 1981 and graduated from Cambridge with a First in History in 2002.

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The Book

Summer of Blood

Summer of Blood:
The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 Available to buy now from Amazon.co uk