A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 7: Special Forces

This is episode 7 in a series of posts researching the mystery of the dramatic life of Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Mort d’Arthur.  Episode 1 can be found here.

 

Mark Bowden’s 1999 important and tragic history Black Hawk Down snapshots the US military at a critical period of transition.  He implicitly captures the rise of the small, modern special forces unit, the practical necessity such units meet, and  the stress they placed on larger, conventionally organized parts of the military and their culture at the time.  Within such units, rank and chain of command were less important and relevant than the flexible, varying organization and strategy such units adopted internally to accomplish their difficult missions.  Outwardly, their sometime disregard for military rules of dress and grooming was a source of stress for officers working to maintain traditional standards.

The 15^th century was also a period of military transition.  At Agincourt in 1415, Henry V’s army consisted of 5,000 archers and 900 men-at-arms of which as many as 10% were knights.   Later, in 1439, the Earl of Huntingdon’s expedition to recover Gascony, which Sir Thomas Malory could have participated in, consisted of 2,009 archers, 300 men-at-arms of which 2 were knight bannerets and 6 were knights, roughly 3%.  Since Crecy the percentages of knights and men-at-arms generally in English armies was declining.  There were multiple reasons.  Knights were required to maintain at least £40 per year of property income and to be equivalently compensated for military service whereas an esquire was compensated at £18 for performing the same tactical role.  And there may have been a cultural issue as well.  Beverly Kennedy in Knighthood in the Morte Darthur contrasts two views of late medieval knighthood.  In Libro del orden de caballeria, Ramon Lull sees knighthood as a divinely ordained office as old as human society itself with independent social  obligations for rule and judgment as well as the military obligations.  In contrast, Christine de Pizan provides very practical advice in Livre des fais d’armes et de la chevalerie for participating as a member of a contemporary medieval force and filling a functional military role.  Knights were complicated with ambiguous, changing moral and ethical responsibilities.  Knights may have had unique value as officers but esquires were probably more adaptable and easier to command.

This is important context for Sir Thomas Malory.  His father had acquired a distraint of knighthood to relieve himself of the obligation.  In contrast, Sir Thomas’ pursuit of knighthood, which he finally achieved sometime around the age of 39, was not a social obligation, nor was it implicit for someone in his social situation but it was an apparent life goal.  There are many possible motivations, including the pursuit of status, but, for what it’s worth, status alone is rarely the motivation for knighthood in Le Mort d’Arthur:  more often it is a platform for service and accomplishment, which Lull would have fully understood.  This is clear, but circumstantial evidence of Malory possessing a personal sense of noblesse oblige.

William Caxton, who published Le Mort d’Arthur also published Ramon Lull and Christine de Pizan, chivalric luminaries.  He was very careful to publish authors of whose audience he was confident.  Caxton’s choice to include Malory in his select company may also be circumstantial evidence alluding to his character.

 
Previously, I’ve mentioned Eric Jager’s The Last Duel, the story of the last judicial combat to the death in France.  Interestingly, it was between a knight and man-at-arms and the issue under such terrible arbitration was the rape of a woman.  The coincidences and social parallels and contrasts with the accusations against Malory deserve more time and I’ll come back to it in future posts.

Episode 8 is here

The Big MACC, Solar Eclipses, Very, Very Old High School Parties

I’ve lived the greater portion of my life in the American southwest.  I want to know it well.

But so much isn’t known.  That’s the reason, at the deepest level, Lynn and I decided to attend this year’s  “Big Meeting at Crow Canyon.”  It’s a day of interim current reports by archaeologists working in the American southwest, sponsored by the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, Colorado.

And, philosophy aside, it’s also incredibly great fun to spend a day listening to people working on the leading edge of southwest archaeology .

This year, the plain of southwestern Colorado and the cliffs of Mesa Verde were beautifully deep in new snow.  After registration, coffee and blueberry muffins that were distinctly better than usual conference fair, we gathered  in a modest conference room for the talks.

A note here about academic conferences.  I’ve attended innumerable international, national and regional  conferences.  The rigor, professionalism  and scholarship at “Big MACC” was uniformly impressive.  I filled 53 pages of my little field notebook with scribbled nearly inscrutable notes.

While I’ll necessarily forgo a précis of each of the 22 presentations I want to give you a sense of the diversity, strength and importance of the papers by describing a few.

One of my favorites was the first,  “Social Connections in the Basketmaker III period:  Preliminary Results from the Basketmaker Communities Project by Shanna Diederichs et al.  In the Basketmaker III period, 500-750 AD, (which came just before the dawn of the Chacoan age) the population of the Mesa Verde region (100 miles to the north of Chaco) grew exponentially.  Diederichs and her colleagues are doing one of my favorite things in archaeology, they’re teasing important, abstract knowledge from careful and comprehensive analysis, often of the most innocuous evidence.  In particular, their multi-aspect analysis of the Indian Camp Kiva and the Dillard site generally shows that the migration which so strongly contributed to the population growth, came from the west, from Utah.  Further,  examination of the artifacts suggest a heterogeneous matrix of concurrent lifeways.  Artifacts in the only Pueblo III great kiva in the area show it was used not just for ceremonial activities but for feasting as well.  And so the outline of one of societies which prefigured Chaco, (possibly even essentially) continues to clarify and delineate.

A very cute piece of analysis was presented by Don Simonis in “Moon House or Sun House?”  Total solar eclipses are very rare, mean time between them is around 350 years and their paths are narrow, around 200 miles.  Using the publically available NASA tools he discovered that the paths of two, one in 1257 and another in 1259 intersected over the Four Corners Region.  At the moment of total eclipse the ambient air temperature drops by as much as 20 degrees, stars become visible, birds and other animal life are silent.  Total eclipses are often short but these were relatively long.  Whilst they wouldn’t have been total in Chaco, the first would have been over the ancient ruin of “Moon House” in Cedar Mesa and the second would have been nearly so.  Interestingly, that corresponds to the mural in Moon House itself, which previously everyone interpreted as a depiction of the phases of the moon.  Simonis drew the useful conclusion that archaeologists need to make effective use of the science and scientific results beyond their discipline.

Highest marks for humor has to go to Jerry Fetterman’s presentation on “Private Land Archaeology:  Balancing Private Landowner Concerns, Development and Historic Preservation.”  He presented a list of skeptical responses to the question of whether there was an archaeological site on a piece of private land.  Second best answer:  “there’s no site there:  just a bunch of shards.”  But by far the best was, “Oh, that’s just the remains of high school parties.”  Thousand year-old high school parties, probably.  Humor aside he accurately and intelligently presented challenges and strategies for balancing valid, sometimes conflicting interests.

And there were 19 others that were startling, provocative and always intelligent.  Jason Chuipka discussed  the challenges in identifying an early Athapaskan (such as the  Diné) presence in the Four Corners, an issue I’ve always been partial to because of the manifold possibilities that more knowledge may be present in their ethnography than has been credited.  Ben Bellorado discussed the result of a physically challenging survey of sometimes remote murals in delicate and failing ruins in one of my favorite areas.  They were able to date all and added 12 new ones to the 87 already known which is simply amazing.

Finally, Laurie Webster described her progress in a project to photograph and document perishable pre-historic artifacts from Cedar Mesa stored in various museums from the Field (800 artifacts) to the Smithsonian (400).  This latter project seems one of the most vital.  Contrary to popular belief, museums are often unable to maintain perishable artifacts as they should.  Yet those artifacts are one of our most important and powerful links to that past.  An ancient Puebloan sandal or a Macaw feather sash makes the people who lived in the ancient southwest  visceral and immediate in an entirely unique way that’s too easily lost or neglected.

And there were more.  Steven Lekson didn’t attend but he was there implicitly.  In nearly every presentation there was the sense that researchers were looking well beyond the local both in space and time, a very important and good thing, particularly as the discipline is beginning to cusp the large challenge of creating, managing and making effective use of multiple large data sets.  It’s incredibly difficult to scratch out a living as an archaeologist these days, but at times, and for some, it must be one of the most rewarding.

By now, you’re probably really sorry you weren’t there.  The good news is that Big Meetings at Crow Canyon aren’t quite as rare as total solar eclipses.

In We, Charles Lindbergh explains why he undertook to fly alone across the Atlantic and why he’s writing about it by reiterating Socrates practical observation:  “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Do you know who you are?  Grant that you are complex, nuanced and growing more so all the time.  Grant that you’re shaped by your human relationships, your experience of the natural world, possibly your religion or philosophy, your virtual experiences, your education, where you’ve traveled, where you’ve lived.  Do you know who you are?

Consider just that last element:  where you’ve lived.  Do you truly know the places you’ve lived?  They’ve shaped you.  Should you not know them, deeply?

(First image:  photo of Crow Canyon poster by author)

(2012 Solar Eclipse Image by Dr. Robert Jensen)

A Fine and Terrible Mystery - Episode 6: Ants, Hospitallers, A Contemporary Life

This is episode 6 in a series of informal personal essays about the mysterious discordance of the apparently nefarious, possibly criminal, life of Sir Thomas Malory and his seminal Arthurian romance, Le Morte d’Arthur which is so deeply concerned with Chivalric morality.  You can find episode 1 here.

We’re just back from the Big Meeting at Crow Canyon Southwest Archaeology conference in Cortez, Colorado, whimsically called “The Big MACC” and I’ll post about it shortly.  During the long drive there and back again we listened to the recent BBC radio dramatization of the The Once and Future King, T. H. White’s classic novel which is, among other things, a set of fantasy variations on Malory.  I was happily surprised by the imagination and strength of the production and its fidelity to its source.  I recommend it for long drives through interesting country.

White’s Merlin educates Arthur using the natural world.  He turns him into birds, fish, animals and in an especially dark episode, a belligerent ant.  White’s ant world, reminiscent of the grim prolepses of Orwell and Huxley, was intended to convey the spiritual  and physical oppression of totalitarianism.  Arthur as an ant has a horrifically limited vocabulary (the only qualitatives are “done” and “not done”), is constantly connected to a distracting Nest WIFi broadcasting orders, organizational information and banal, patriotic songs.  It’s a superficial cultural life lacking imagination, art, nuance or contemplation.  Now, ironically, the allegory seems prescient in an entirely different way and contemporary parallels are ominously pertinent.

I’d forgotten how magnetic White’s novel is, how creatively he improvised on his source and how strongly it affects me emotionally.  Yet White isn’t Malory and it’s critical in this personal enterprise to see them distinctly.  White’s Arthur makes the imaginary leap of combining virtue and knighthood.  Malory saw them as integrally bound together.  Le Morte d’Arthur is more concerned with the specific individual dramatic consequences of that idea, and as a result, the discovery and refinement of knightly morality through the adventures, conflicts and dilemmas of the individual Round Table knights.  Malory’s Arthur doesn’t invent the idea of moral Chivalry but he dedicates himself to making it work.

What was knighthood in the 15^th century and how did it compare to Malory’s vision as he translated and, a little like White, selected, shaded and elaborated the sources he was translating?  Crecy (1346) and Agincourt (1415) demonstrated that large traditional and expensive forces of mounted, heavily armored Chivalry could be defeated by much less expensive integrated forces of archers, artillery and knights on foot.  By the 15^th century, fully armored infantry using highly efficient and deadly poleaxes functioned as a kind of deadly defensive special forces protecting the more lightly armed archers who were the primary offense.  Many of those bore the lower rank of “esquire,” as Malory did for a significant portion of his military career.  Jousting on horseback had evolved into an expensive, ritualized sport.  It was a different world.

Yet, Malory never seems to be looking back nostalgically. Rather, his selection of his subject and the immediacy of his treatment suggests he saw contemporary relevance in knighthood and the morality associated with it.  Hardyment points to his extended family’s several connections to the Knights of St. John, the Knights Hospitaller.  This seems particularly important.  By the middle of the 15^th century when Malory was writing there were and had been several orders of Chivalry and they functioned, evolved and inflected the basic ideas in very different ways.  This is something I may examine more closely in future posts.

P. J. C. Fields states in his conclusion to his Life and Times of Sir Thomas Malory that “any attempted full assessment of Malory’s personality from his writings…would require another book as long as this present once, and might still be doomed to failure.”  I agree.   Hardyment, in her later much longer book takes a cleverly different tack:  she has written a comprehensive speculative biography.  She explores every possibility for his range of his experience, including for example, a trip to Rhodes to serve with the Hospitallers as well as the possibility that he could have been present in the castle in Rouen where Joan of Arc was imprisoned.  The specific development, nature and quality of his personality is left to the reader which may be preferable in evaluating the veracity of the defaming charges leveled against him.

A couple of last comments for this post.  Armstrong and Hodges as well as Field make much of the multinational character of Arthur’s court and the complexity of rule with multiple factions.  That was the world in Malory’s age.  He’d seen it work relatively well when he was young and watched as it decayed into the disaster of “The Wars of the Roses.”  Nevertheless, there is never a wistful hint of nostalgia for a simpler, less complicated world.  At the same time he was writing about Chivalry and its morality he was also very much a man of his age.

Episode 7 is here.

(Photo of 15th Century Knight with Poleaxe by Skane-Smeden)

Bumblepuppy Confessions

Recently, I learned a new word, “bumblepuppy.”  Even if you don’t know what it means, you must admit its amusing and suggestive connotations.  I learned that while I most certainly am no longer a bumblepuppy I was one in the past and to this day occasionally encounter one and do my gallant best to weather the event with grace.  Further, and rather interestingly, I probably would have said precisely the same thing at any point in the past, that is after my first time.  You never forget your first time.

Time for definitions; Dictionary.com provides two:  “An indifferent or erratic player” and “A Bridge game played haphazardly.”  According to Julian Laderman, author of “Bumblepuppy Days,” it originally referred to Bridge’s predecessor Whist.  Thus it can refer both to a player and a particular game which is rather unusual dual service for a word.  Everyone who plays Bridge, including Bill Gates, Thom Yorke, and Omar Sharif, even good old Harold Vanderbilt reinventing the game whilst sailing on Lake Michigan (I’m not sure I believe that story) were bumblepuppies at some point, if only for microseconds.

There was a time when Bridge was more pervasive in the culture at large; my sense these days is that those of us who play have become a subculture.  Hence, a few words about what Bridge is are in order.  It is a trick playing game using a standard 52 card deck.  It is not an inherent gambling game, such as Poker, rather it is a game of strategy and as such, more properly associated with Chess, or even better, Go, as unlike Chess, each hand is different, “each venture is a new beginning,” to borrow from MaCavity.  Success in Bridge mandates and exercises perfection of memory, selfless sacrifice to the good of the team, deductive reasoning, strategic planning and, at the highest levels, the clever, sometimes deceptive, management and communication of knowledge and information.

My earliest memories of Bridge, are my grandmother’s Bridge clubs when she’d exile me to play outside and two movies.  In one of the greatest war movies of all time, “The Enemy Below,” a group of officers on a Destroyer in the Pacific play what is definitely bumblepuppy Bridge in the opening scenes, an ironic preface for the clever strategic battle between two ships and two captains that is the heart of the film.  In “The List of Adrian Messenger,” John Huston’s sui generis mystery, it is regularly played by English aristocrats after fox hunting.

I was taught to play at last by an aunt, late one snowy Christmas night, along with two of my cousins.  She didn’t teach us the rules, which are actually not that complex, but rather by playing.  Thus, my first experience was like learning a foreign language, a practical metaphor in this context since so much of Bridge is communication, both with your partner and your adversaries.

Here’s a particularly interesting aspect of Bridge, at least for me: it heightens the experiences and memories with which it’s associated.  I remember that Christmas night clearly.  Then there was the trip Lynn and I took up the upper Amazon, from Manaus, Brazil to Iquitos, Peru from whence we flew over the Andes to Cuzco to explore the Sacred Valley.  The river trip was in an nicely appointed ship which usually saw service crossing the Drake Passage to Antarctica.  After dinner the first night, a bearish, white haired man asked loudly, “Who plays Bridge?”  Lynn and I exchanged skeptical glances, then admitted we did.  “Come on!” he ordered and led us to the game room which turned out to be nicely situated with excellent views.  Thus, began a sadly short but fine friendship with Frank and Babs Massie.  We played every evening after, and the memories I have of wading rivers, Zodiacing to remote villages and dancing with semi-nude women half my height are inflected with our passionate but civil games on board.  I remember over-bidding my hand on one occasion in true bumblepuppy fashion.  As I laid out my hand, Frank turned to Lynn, who was playing as my partner, and demanded  “Divorce him!”  Fortunately, she didn’t.

And there are many other occasions like that.  Lynn and I and her parents took what I think of as a micro packet steamer around several fiords north of Bergen, Norway.  As we sailed, we played Bridge.  Lynn’s mother was a particularly, gracious and intelligent player.  She was also highly competitive.  If you happened to defeat her in a difficult contract she’d order you to put out your hand and then give it a precise rap with the scoring pencil.  Her father, naturally conservative and taciturn when he was playing a contract, would often adopt a dangerous and radical strategy of not drawing trump and, to my chagrin, almost never paid a price for it.  And that leads me to one of the most subtle and interesting rewards of playing recreational Bridge:  revelation of character.  People tell you and teach you who they are.  They reveal themselves and reveal how they reveal themselves.

Lynn and I have been particularly lucky in the Bridge playing friends we’ve had, particularly the Records, the Benders, the Watkins and Jay Behrman and Eric Hanson.  Bridge was particularly important with the Watkins, as both of them are dangerously capable and predatory at Pool.  Bridge remains challenging:  last year a team of European physicists began exploring a way to use entangled quantum particles to improve the odds of winning at Bridge.

(The first image is from the Leonardo | Art Playing Cards Kickstarter Project by Dent-de-Lion du Midi)