Agincourt, Information Architecture and the Apache

Today is the 600^th anniversary of the battle of Agincourt and, somewhat to my surprise, I find my feelings and thoughts surprisingly complex.  It’s not the facts of the event themselves, or the facts of the literary and cultural consquences,

 “…Then shall our names,

Familiar in his mouth as household words-

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered-…”

Nor is it a desire to pass some kind of superfluous judgment.  Rather, it’s a desire to see all of it, and correctly understand the connections.  At its root is the basic human will to reason out how the world, how the universe, works.

Some days ago I found myself standing on a small remote promontory in the Southwest overlooking a quiet pastoral valley, almost a glen that was subtly, autumnally beautiful.  It was also, not so long ago, the site of a massacre, in which two dozen men and women and fifty children were ruthlessly killed early one evening.  It’s an event I know very little about.  Yet, I found myself deeply emotionally affected.  It was as if there was something now in the place itself.

I still don’t know what to make of my reaction.  I’d had such experiences a very few times before, at Omaha Beach and at the Dachau Concentration Camp for example, but on each of those occasions I was more than conversant with the history.

Near the end of a fireside conversation in Chaco Canyon a week or so before, Philip Tuwaletstiwa recommended I search out a book by the cultural and linguistic anthropologist, Keith H. Basso, Wisdom Sits In Places.  Steve Lekson, who was sitting with us, strongly concurred.  Though my “to read” list is particularly full at the moment, (mostly with Arthuriana), I made a note to do so.  Their combined and strong recommendation was something I couldn’t resist.

Basso’s book begins as a narrative of an innocuous project to develop a map of Apache place-names in the area around Cibecue, Arizona during late summer months when he traveled with three occasionally recalcitrant and ironic but always witty Apache guides.  It soon becomes apparent that both they and he are after much more elusive and dangerous game than a sheet of paper with a large scatter of phonetically accurate aboriginal labels.  He is studying and they are trying to teach him how different kinds of narrative, including history are developed, recorded and used in Apache culture.  Not surprisingly, it is very different from the traditional western post-Enlightenment traditions.  What is surprising, to me, is how pragmatic, efficient and rational it is.

As I read Basso, I couldn’t help but think about his ideas in an entirely different context:  computer science.  Here is a trivial, inaccurate but sufficient model of a modern computer for my sequel:  a computer is large sequentially numbered set of mailboxes (memory locations) and a robot (the CPU) who can retrieve information from those mailboxes and do a limited set of things with the contents, such as move it to another mailbox or perform an arithmetic operation on it.  Of course, almost none of the information we use in life fits that structure, therefore so much of the work of any computer program (the recipe which the robot follows to continue the metaphor) is mapping, structuring and manipulating data.  These days, after decades of research and experimentation, people generally follow a set of reasonably good practices, however, there was a time when the world was a bit wilder, when deep, philosophical questions, such as the difference between a thing and the symbol which stands for it found concrete expression in the way a computer program worked.  Sometimes the most pragmatic of computer programs could also be seen, quite reasonably, as a philosophical experiment.  More often than not, the core issue was “referencing:”  when should one block of information point to another.  At one extreme, one might try to avoid referencing all together: imagine putting everything there is to know about a place or a subject into its name.  At the opposite end the information could be so fragmented that the information becomes apparently invisible:  all you see are pointers, or pointers to other pointers even pointers to other recipes to construct the information you need.

One narrow, but useful way to look at Apache narrative, history and place-naming is through the formalism of information architecture.  Almost immediately, it’s apparent how well-designed it is, how naturally it suits the culture’s needs.

Most interesting is how the information is structured to make culturally productive use of the imaginations of its individual members.  Obviously, I find myself wondering how the western historical tradition can and should be informed by its model.

Which brings me back to that sodden Friday in 1415 and its manifold references and pointers.  We know so much.  We remember so much.  We have the words of the greatest dramatist in the language to help us see his vision of it.  But I’m not sure our rich, unruly set of pointers, and the implicit values therein make best use of our understanding and imaginations.

“…We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

A Fine and Terrible Mystery – Episode 11: The Fall of London

This is Episode 11 in a series of posts about the mysterious life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

Jack Cade:   I thank you, good people: there shall be no money; all shall eat and drink on my score; and I will apparel them all in one livery, that they may agree  like brothers and worship me their lord.
Dick:  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers...
All:  Oh brave! 

(One reenters with the heads of Lord Saye and his son-in-law on spikes) 
Jack Cade:  But is not this braver? Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive.  (The heads on spikes are made to kiss)  Now part them again, lest they consult about the giving up of some more towns in France.
- Shakespeare, King Henry VI, part 2, Act 4

No, that’s not a scene from this season’s “Game of Thrones,” though it could be.  Shakespeare’s sprawling trilogy about the age in which Malory lived is difficult for the uninitiated with its sweeping review of major events and prodigious cast.  Even Shakespeare had trouble keeping straight three successive Earls of Warwick:  in one place attributing the accomplishments of the first to the third.  Yet not surprisingly it has some extraordinarily powerful drama.  Jack Cade’s rebellion is particularly notable for its skillful macabre comedy of horror born of social chaos.

In March of 1551, a warrant was issued against Malory for an alleged attempt on the Duke of Buckingham’s life 14 months before. The Duke of Buckingham and sixty followers arrested him on the following July 25^th.  Nothing I’ve uncovered of Malory’s life before the attack explains it or the great delay in its prosecution.  Are there clues to be found in the lives of his nemesis Buckingham or the Earl of Warwick?  Perhaps. 

It’s appropriate to consider the events of those months and one signal event in particular.

King Henry VI was born in December of 1421; his father, King Henry V, died in August of the next year.  At first the council of peers ruling in the infant king’s name did so effectively, compromising and navigating administrative ambiguities, such as the role of the Lord Protector, Humphrey of Gloucester, Henry V’s brother (under whom, you may recall, Malory had served in France.)  In 1445, Henry VI, now 24, was married to Margaret, the fifteen year-old daughter of Duke René of Anjou, a match engineered by William de la Pole, who was made Duke of Suffolk for his efforts.  In spite of her youth Margaret soon became a significant force in the King’s court and she formed an alliance with Suffolk, the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Buckingham.

By late 1440s the court had become polarized.  The Queen’s party had exploited their power, impoverishing the Exchequer through appointments and gifts to their supporters and inept management of their French territories.  They had engineered the arrest of Gloucester on charges of treason in 1447.  (He died under suspicious circumstances five days later.)  In February of 1449 a speech in the Commons complained “that murder, theft, manslaughter were increasing daily.”  By February of 1450 the Commons had had enough.  They forced the impeachment of Suffolk for “high, great, heinous and horrible treasons.”  Suffolk avoided trial and submitted himself to the sole judgment of the King.

On March 17, all the Lords attending Parliament were summoned to the King’s private chamber with a gable window over a cloister at the Palace of Westminster.  Suffolk knelt before King Henry, the great list of charges was read and Suffolk proclaimed his loyalty and innocence on all of them.  It’s a telling moment.  Arguably, the most powerful peer in the land had been forced to judgment for capital offenses by popular pressure.  If it could happen to him, it could happen to anyone and no one was safe.  The King passed judgment:  Suffolk was found innocent of the charges but guilty of other “misprisons,” lesser charges, and sentenced to five years in exile.

I personally expect the event and sentence was a piece of legal theatre devised by all the lords in concert, to secure their positions, appease the Commons and restore public order.

It didn’t work.  Suffolk was chased from London.  At the beginning of his channel crossing, his boat was intercepted by another, “The Nicholas of the Tower.”  He was taken on board, summarily tried for his crimes by those on board and sentenced to death.  His head was struck off and his corpse was left on Dover beach with the head posted on a pike, possibly a gruesome pun on his name.  But his companions were released unharmed.  We don’t know who was ultimately responsible, although two men from Kent, Richard Lennard, a shipman, and Thomas Smith, a yeoman, were later indicted for participating in the incident before the Duke of Buckingham.  Was it the Duke of York, who was serving as the King’s lieutenant in Ireland at the time, the Duke of Warwick, the Duke of Norfolk, the enraged commons of Kent?

Certainly the commons of Kent feared they would be punished for it.  A rumour spread that the King intended to turn the entire county into a royal forest.  The result was rebellion.  On June 6, 1450, the Parliament, being held in Leicester learned that Kent was in revolt, led by one Jack Cade, a “captain of Kent” who was also going by the aristocratic name “John Mortimer,” which linked him to any royal pretentions of the Duke of York.  Dan Jones in his recent popular history characterizes Cade as an “effective captain capbable of articulating a sophisticated program of reform,” who counted the son of a peer amongst his followers, which is far from Shakespeare’s street-smart opportunist.

Henry VI returned to London and authorized two forces to repress the revolt, one under Viscount Beaumont and another under the Duke of Buckingham.  By June 11^th, the rebels were encamped at Blackheath, just south of Greenwich.  Negotiations proved fruitless.  The rebels retreated into Kent pursued by the King’s forces.  Near Tonbridge, two relatives of the Duke of Buckingham, another Sir Humphrey Stafford and William Stafford and a force of 400 were slaughtered.  London dissolved into riot and disorder.  Henry ordered the arrest of Lord Saye, a prominent beneficiary of Suffolk’s largesse and others but it was to no avail in quelling the disorder.

On June 25^th the King and his court deserted the capital for the safety and canons of Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire.  Cade returned to Blackheath, then captured Southwark and fought his way over the bridge.  His followers pillaged London.  Saye was pulled out of imprisonment in the Tower and executed.  Shakespeare’s scene is accurate.  Finally, on July 5^th, the Lord Mayor with Lord Scales and Mathew Gough collected a force and after a bloody twelve hour street fight on the bridge managed to expel the rebels.  The rebellion then collapsed and Cade was subsequently apprehended and killed in Kent.

The capital and the country had seen nothing like it since the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, seventy years before.  That time King Richard II, just 14, had remained in London and had played an important role in ending the rebellion.  This time the King abandoned the city, leaving it to suffer riot, murder and wholesale destruction for 11 days.  The lesson was that the King could not guarantee the safety of his greatest city and wealthiest subjects.  When the Duke of York returned from Ireland in September calling for reform, the Queen’s party was never so vulnerable, and none more so, perhaps, than the Duke of Buckingham.  Not only had he witnessed Suffolk’s fall and the rebellion, he’d lost two of his family.

It was a “wolf time,” to use the Anglo Saxon phrase meaning a time of insecurity when everyone is forced to look after only themselves.  The Pastons’ letters record that the Duke of Norfolk was doing everything he could to solidify his position in East Anglia.  No doubt the Duke of Buckingham was doing the same in Warwickshire where he held Maxstoke Castle,20 miles from Sir Thomas Malory’s home at Newbold-Revel.

Episode 12 can be found here.

Missing Fencing

I have a severe case of the grumps. Today I’m missing a second fencing tournament in as many weeks due to a respiratory infection. I’m now on an antibiotic and am starting to respond but the antibiotic does nothing for the grumps which is particularly dangerous since I’ve suffered from chronic curmudgeonery for some time. I also was unable to ski this week. My sophisticated, wise, witty comment about this? “Grump, grumpity grump, grump, grump.” Feel free to quote me.

So what does one do when one isn’t up to fencing?

One reads. In particular, I’ve returned to Czajkowski’s Understanding Fencing. I first started it six months ago but quickly discovered that my fencing lexicon was not what it needed to be. To my surprise that state of affairs has greatly improved. The language of fencing, a little like Russian, which can be particularly challenging due to the large number of irregular verbs and constructions (thanks to Old Church Slavonic, the Greek Orthodox Church’s attempt to create a rational, literary version of the language in the 9th century), is an amalgam of several traditions each of which both modified existing diction and introduced new words. My lexicon is now sufficiently complete and nuanced that I’m finding the book both interesting and enjoyable. My fencing may even improve as a result.

One of Czajkowski’s several, useful points is that feints are not practiced nor attended to nearly as much as attacks or counter attacks but that they should be.

Of course, they should: a feint is the means for setting up a successfully attack. If your feints are weak and predictable the success of your attacks will be random at best and probably much worse as your opponent will easily guess what you’re up to. Also, as I read that I realized that it both characterized one of the most important strengths of a fencer in the club who’s style I particularly admire and that the paired drills our coach has us practice almost always include feints as a key element.

At the same time I’ve also been re-reading George R. R. Martin’s “Fire and Ice” books, inspired by HBO’s decision to create a series from the first one which will be broadcast in April. The first time through, I found the books overly fragmented. Martin jumped between characters so often that I found it difficult to ignite the necessary imaginary engagement which is essential for enjoying that kind of fiction. This time, no doubt due in part to familiarity, that is much less of a problem and I’m finding the dramatic arcs much more satisfying. They are more successful as individual novels.

So, I’m looking forward to the series and from what I’ve seen on the web it’s received the budget and attention to detail that could make it very good indeed. Having said that, however, it makes me long for someone to undertake a more ambitious project, one of Martin’s obvious inspirations: the century of conflict in English history known as the War of the Roses. The period is rife with the stuff from which good drama is made, from the relentless ambition of the Duke of York to the cruelty of Margaret, Queen of England, the “She-Wolf of France.” And it’s already been scripted into 8 amazing episodes by a reputable writer.

I refer, of course, to Shakespeare’s 8 English history plays. The first four, which are later works, are widely recognized as the masterpieces they are, but the three Henry VI plays, which were among Shakespeare’s first, are better than many people know. As with Martin, the number of characters and complexity of events sometimes obscures the strength of the drama. Nevertheless, a coherent, historically accurate production of all eight, even possibly augmented by dramatization of events in the Pastons’ letters, could be amazing. If only someone had the requisite courage and imagination.