January 4
1066 and All That, W.C. Sellar & R.J. Yeatman (1931)

Shortly after I joined the postal Diplomacy hobby, many many years ago, I learned that one of the first British dipzines was titled 1901 and All That, and that is how I first came to hear of this book that inspired the title. Much later, I happened to see an inexpensive paperback copy at a used book store (with a different cover illustration than the one pictured here), so I bought it for my shelf. Although I skimmed through most of it, I'm pretty sure I never read it cover to cover until now, so it gets to lead off this year's "books I've read" list.

1066 and All That is a classic, sort of. It's a short narrative review of English history with the names and events amusingly jumbled, reminiscent of those lists you sometimes see purporting to be humorously wrong answers given by real students on real history tests, but without the phony claim of authenticity. Very little of the book is laugh-out-loud funny, but it's pleasantly witty in a dry but lowbrow sort of way.

Here's a typical passage chosen at random:

Another one, which I rather like:

Curiously, reading the book was actually useful in consolidating my grasp of real English history. For some reason — maybe unconscious contrarianism, or maybe just coincidence — I tend to avoid branches of history which are too heavily studied, so I never really got into British history. I picked up bits and pieces of it here and there but never quite got it all straight, thus leaving me in pretty much the same position as the book's intended audience. The book, for all its munging of the details, does follow the basic chronology, giving me a chance to put the known episodes in order in my mind.

In recent months a combination of separate events conspired to make me brush up on English kings and queens. It began in November, when Ericka happened to mention something about Elizabeth and Mary. She's read a lot of historical fiction set in that era, so she knows the stories better than I do — though I can't help wondering which of those stories are fact and which are long-established myth. I forget what the details were, but something she said sounded like it didn't add up right in terms of years. Naturally, this sent me running to the encyclopedia, where I discovered that the reason it sounded wrong to me is that I was getting Mary I (aka "Bloody Mary") mixed up with Mary Queen of Scots. In my muddle-headedness I hadn't quite grasped that there were two different Marys who were rivals to Elizabeth, a generation apart.

Not too long after that came the King Williams College Quiz, with its twelve questions related to English monarchs — ten in the section devoted entirely to royal marriages, and two more in the "William" section. One of the latter asked, "Who, in a work dedicated 'Absit Oman', discovered the National Debt?" We knew from other questions in the section that the answer to this had to include the name "William". Once Pat pointed out to me that 1066 and All That is dedicated "Absit Oman", it was just a matter of skimming through the book looking for Williams.

"Absit omen" is an old Latin phrase meaning something like "let the omen not be" — sort of a Roman version of "Heaven forbid". I'm not sure where he humor is in misspelling "omen" as "Oman". Was the author wishing non-existence upon a certain Arabian kingdom? Robert Graves uses the correctly spelled phrase in Claudius the God (the sequel to I, Claudius):

After I finished the quiz, the book was still there on my desk, so on a whim I read the whole thing. It's not very long.

Last week, during our little trip to Anchorage, while at Ericka's friend's grandparents' house (the grandparents were out of town, the friend was staying there, and Ericka was visiting) I noticed a pack of "Fax-Pax" cards devoted to Kings and Queens of England. There is a card for each monarch (except for poor Jane Grey, whose abbreviated term was evidently too short for inclusion), with a picture on one side and a short history/biography on the other. Ericka and I amused ourselves by reading these cards to one another during idle moments, of which there were few on that trip. We only got as far Charles I before the week was over. But no matter. Having gotten into the habit of carrying the cards around with us, we inadvertently brought them back to Seattle with us. The grandparents don't return for another month, so we have time to finish before mailing them back.

Before the Alaska trip, about a week after I read 1066 and All That, I watched an episode of Jeopardy! in which the Final Jeopardy category was British monarchs, offering me the rare pleasure of getting right a question which all three of the contestants got wrong. The answer was "One of the three years in which there were three different English kings", or something to that effect. It's a roundabout way of asking for one of the three kings whose term in office began and ended within a single year, with the added caveat that he, his predecessor, and his successor must all be male (once again excluding poor neglected Jane).

I think I would have got the question anyway, but thanks to recent study I could even identify all three of the short-term kings, albeit not by name. The second and third, I was pretty sure, were "the kid who was killed in the Tower near the end of the Wars of the Roses" and "that guy who abdicated in order to marry the American widow", but I didn't know either one's name, much less year. The first one, however, was the Harold who was deposed by William the Conqueror. I remembered learning once upon a time that the main reason that William was successful in his conquering is that poor King Harold was still exhausted from just finishing a war against a rival for the succession. Figuring that Harold must be the remaining king whose reign was encompassed in a year, my guess was the famous 1066.

And so it was. One of the contestants figured out it was the king who abdicated, but he missed by one in guessing the year. The other two didn't have a clue.

A passing knowledge of British monarchs is particularly useful for Jeopardy. Over years of watching I feel like I've gotten dozens of questions right just from knowing that Victoria reigned for the latter two-thirds of the 1800s and that George III reigned from well before the American Revolution to well after Napoleon. Those are some big chunks of modern history for just two monarchs.

It wasn't until reading William the Conqueror's Fax-Pax card last week that I realized he had a prior connection with Harold II. In 1064 Harold had been shipwrecked on the Normandy coast. William rescued him there, but only in exchange for Harold swearing an oath of fealty. When Harold became England, William felt that the oath should make England his, and that became the legal rationale for his conquest.

It wasn't until writing this article today that it occurred to me that the Jeopardy question's limit to three acceptable answers is somewhat arbitrary. I know that English monarchs are often reckoned as beginning with William the Conqueror, excluding all the earlier ones. (Why is that, anyway? Why is William the Conqueror any more English than, say, Edward the Confessor?) If the kings start with William, then 1066 shouldn't count for the Jeopardy question, because the first two kings of that year weren't really kings of England. If the pre-Norman kings do count, then what about the year Canute was crowned? What if someone had answered 1016, arguing that Aethelred the Unready, Edmund Ironside, and Canute the Dane were three English kings of that year. On what grounds could the Jeopardy judges call that wrong? I wish I remembered the exact wording of the answer.

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