Part One: The Men and the Myths, 1398-1403

The Welsh Dynasties:

In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, much of Wales was ruled by a succession of resolute Princes of Gwynedd, from the area around Snowdonia which the Anglo-Norman marcher lords had failed to penetrate. The princes strove to bring the whole of Wales under their banner, but they could only achieve this if the messy parochialism of separate territories could be sorted out by instilling in their rulers and sub-rulers the order of hierarchical allegiance demanded by the Anglo-Norman kings of the Welsh princes themselves. The Gwynedd dynasty was willing to pay this price so that, within Wales, they could exert the same feudal pyramid by referring to themselves as Princes of Wales. Through a clever combination of diplomacy and war they came close to achieving this, though not without upsetting other Welsh rulers and causing internecine strife. Wales might have emerged as a semi-feudal kingdom in a feudal Europe had it not been for the growing unease about an English kingdom which was undergoing the same process, combined with the deep mistrust felt by other Welsh princes and lords for the ‘modernising’ tendencies of the Gwynedd dynasty. When Llywelyn the Last was killed in 1282 at Cilmeri, near Builth Wells, far from his northern base, military initiatives designed to unify Wales disappeared for more than a century.

One major source of alarm in the century following Edward I’s establishment of an ‘iron ring’ of fortresses around Snowdonia was those Welshmen who took service with the enemies of the English kings. Outstanding among these was Owain ap Thomas ap Rhodri, a descendent of the Gwynedd dynasty, who from 1369 led a Welsh free company of mercenaries in the service of France. Owain Lawgoch,  of the Bloody Hand, based his claim on direct dynastic inheritance of the Llywelyns and announced the imminence of his arrival with a French fleet. He sailed from Harfleur on two occasions, and throughout the 1370s there were ripples of support for his name throughout north Wales. The English authorities took these threats seriously and sent one John Lambe to murder him in Mortagne-sur-Mer in 1378, paying him twenty pounds to do the deed. There were repeated security clampdowns in Wales itself, with a coastal watch, the manning of walls and the renewed exclusion of all Welshmen from any office of significance from 1385-6. In the Welsh poetry of the period there is a note of discord and dissatisfaction at the treatment of the Welsh gentry in their own country. Gruffydd Llwyd, for example, wrote a poem bemoaning the lack of honour accorded to Welshmen of merit of the old tradition. Few Welshmen were knighted and even his own patron, Owain Glyn Dwr, who to him seemed so worthy of such reward, had been slighted.

Where the idea of ‘the Return of Arthur’ could find an anchorage in political reality was the March, the borderland, among the Norman baronage which had long Welsh heritage. The Mortimer family could lay claim to such connections, since one of their number had married Gwladus, daughter of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth, in the previous century, and in the second half of the fourteenth century Roger Mortimer, fourth Earl of March, had probably as good a dynastic claim as any to the Principality of Gwynedd. He became the focus of extravagant hopes among the Welsh gentry.The poet Iolo Goch, one of his tenants, wrote an ode of loyalty in which he addressed Mortimer as the inheritor of the Arthurian mantle. Here was the Hero Returned who would rescue the Welsh from their degradation. What made this all the more poignant was that Mortimer also had a good claim to the inheritance of Richard II. With the accession of Richard II, some of the Welsh officials, at least in north Wales, returned to favour. Prominent among his supporters were the five sons of Tudur ap Gronw who, from their base in Anglesey commanded an influential set of familial connections in north Wales. Gwilym and Rhys Tudor in particular were favoured by Richard, who was as popular in north Wales as he was in Cheshire. It was at this time that the renaissance of the Welsh language was beginning to meet with judicial resistance. The language was resurgent in the Vale of Glamorgan and the Welsh became town-dwellers, in Oswestry, Brecon, and Monmouth, among others. A chorus of complaint against them burst out not only from these towns, but from merchants on the English side of the March.  Nearly every Parliament between 1378 and 1400 demanded action against the impertinent Welsh peasants, and there was even an anti-Welsh riot at the University of Oxford in which the cry went up to ‘kill the Welsh dogs!’

With this reaction, by the end of the fourteenth century, the administration of Wales was returned solidly under the control of the English crown. Wales had been experiencing growing tensions during the last quarter of the fourteenth century. At a time of falling agricultural revenues, the great landlords had become increasingly rapacious, exacting heavy fines and subsidies from their tenants. Despite the popularity of Mortimer and Richard II with the Welsh, the English king, at least, did not reciprocate in his appointments. Between 1372 and 1400, of the sixteen bishops appointed in Wales, only one was Welsh.The Welsh clergy had become increasingly outraged at the exploitation of ecclesiastical revenues by English bishops who had been appointed to the Welsh sees. Racial tensions were also growing among the burgesses of ‘English’ boroughs and their Welsh neighbours, as can be seen in the granting of charters such as that received by the Mortimer borough of St Clears in 1393, guaranteeing that cases involving burgesses should only be heard by English burgesses and true Englishmen (to the west of St Clears, along the southern coast to Pembroke, Englishmen had settled in large numbers since the Norman Conquest of Wales). There was also a significant power vacuum at the head of Welsh society. In 1398, somewhat inexplicably, Richard II exiled the dukes of Norfolk and Hereford, who had engaged in a bitter personal dispute. The banishing of Hereford, better known as Henry Bolingbroke, was an action which ultimately sealed the king’s doom. The crackdown on the over-mighty magnates, coupled with the death of Roger Mortimer (VI), meant that most of the marcher lords had been removed. Richard II’s favourites who had been appointed to the vacant lands were incapable of exercising similar authority to that of the old marcher lords, a factor which was made worse by the division of Mortimer lands by the Crown following Bolingbroke’s coup of 1399.

The Mortimers had ruled the borderlands, the Marcher Lordships, virtually unopposed, and that was enough for the English to stomach. But Bolingbroke’s usurpation of Richard II, by which he became King Henry IV opened an era of instability in the succession in England, interwoven with the repeatedly renewed French wars, which thrust real power into the hands of the aristocracy, not least those in the March, where there were disturbances as factions moved against each other. When Henry IV made his son Prince of Wales, a French knight commented, but I think he must conquer Wales if he will have it… 

Resentment soon led to outright rebellion. As heavy communal levies were imposed, Lord Grey of Ruthin reported serious misgovernance and riot beginning in the north-eastern March, and demanded action throughout Wales, particularly against Welsh officials who were kinsmen of the troublemakers. By the spring and summer of 1400, the administration at Caernarfon was nervous. It claimed evidence of letters passing between the Welsh and the Scots which called for rebellion: men in Merioneth were stealing arms and horses; ‘reckless men’ of many areas were meeting to plot sedition. In Anglesey, certainly, the Tudors were planning a protest in their island to tap the widespread dismay of their cohort of cousins.

Who was Owain Glyn Dwr?

On his father’s side, Glyn Dwr was a member of the dynasty of northern Powys and, on his mother’s side, a descendent of the princes of Deheubarth in the south-west. The family had fought for Llewelyn ap Gruffydd in the last war of independence and regained its lands in north-east Wales through a calculated alliance with the Marcher lords of Chirk, Bromfield and Yale. In 1328 it abandoned Welsh law and secured its estate with the English feudal hierarchy. They were therefore rooted in the official Welsh aristocracy. Glyn Dwr’s grandmother was a member of the lesser aristocrat family of Lestrange.

Glyn Dwr himself held the lordships of Glyn Dyfrdwy and Cynllaith Owain near the Dee directly of the king by Welsh barony. He had an income of two hundred pounds a year and a fine, moated mansion at Sycharth with tiled and chimneyed roofs, a deerpark, heronry, fishpond and mill. He was a complete Marcher gentleman and had put in his term (possibly seven years) at the Inns of Court. He must have been knowledgeable in law and married the daughter of Sir David Hanmer, a distinguished lawyer from a cymricised Flintshire family, who had served under Edward III and Richard II. In 1386 Glyn Dwr appeared at the same court of chivalry, together with a throng of baronial youth. He had served in the French wars in the retinues of Henry of Lancaster and the Earl of Arundel. In the Scottish campaign of 1385, according to the poet, he had worn his scarlet flamingo feather and driven the enemy before him like goats, with a broken lance.

In the troubles of 1399-1400, however, Glyn Dwr ran up against a powerful neighbour in Reginald de Grey, lord of Ruthin, an intimate of the new king, Henry IV. They quarreled over common land which de Grey had stolen. Glyn Dwr lost his dispute, and could not get justice from either king or parliament; Welshmen were seen as suspect, due to their support of Richard II – What care we for these barefoot rascals? A proud man, over forty and grey-haired in service, Glyn Dwr was subjected to malicious insults and the conflict turned violent. His response was a traditional one for a Marcher lord – he would avenge his honour with his sword. But he was more than a Marcher.

He was one of the living representatives of the old royal houses of Wales, Powys, an heir to Cadwaladr the Blessed, in a Wales strewn with the rubble of such dynasties. The bards had already reminded him of this heritage, which, in any case, he was himself steeped in. His correspondence suggests that an effort was made to contact the disaffected elsewhere, and when he raised his standard outside Ruthin on 16 September 1400, his followers at once proclaimed him Prince of Wales at his manor of Glyn Dyfrdwy. This was the signal for spontaneous outbreaks in north Wales, which within a matter of weeks had devastated town like Oswestry and engulfed the whole region of north-east Wales. The response to this call was extraordinary and may have startled even Glyn Dwr himself. Supported by the Hanmers and other Norman-Welsh Marchers, together with the Dean of St Asaph, he attacked Ruthin with several hundred men and went on to ravage every town in north-east Wales: Denbigh, Rhuddlan, Flint, Hawarden, Holt, and Welshpool. Rhys and Gwilym Tudor raised a rebellion in Anglesey. Hundreds of people rushed to join and churches followed towns into flame. The lesser clergy in north Wales joined promptly, as did the Cistercians throughout Wales. In Conwy, Strata Florida, Whitland, Llantarnam they rallied to the cause. In the latter of these, the Abbot, John ap Hywel, joined Glyn Dwr’s army as its chaplain and went on to fall in battle. The Franciscans also joined the cause; the friars at Llanfaes were ejected by Henry IV’s forces and their house was ravaged. There was an immediate response from Oxford, too, where Welsh scholars at once dropped their books and picked up arms, flocking home. They entered into ‘treasonous correspondence’ and met to plot the destruction of the kingdom and the English language. There were rumours that Welsh labourers in England were downing tools and heading for home. The English Parliament at once rushed to place anti-Welsh legislation on the books. As Edward I had done more than a century before, they singled out the bards of Wales in particular.

The English ‘marchers’ were utterly unable to cope with the rebellion. The sheer scale and ferocity of the Welsh attacks overwhelmed both the Principality and the March. Henry IV marched a big army in a great arc right across north Wales, burning and looting without mercy. He left the pacification to Henry Hotspur who offered general pardons , except to the ringleaders, in order to soften the heavy communal fines which were to follow. Whole populations scrambled to make peace. Over the winter of 1400-01, Glyn Dwr took to the hills with just seven men. In the Spring, however, the Tudors snatched control of Conwy Castle by a clever trick. The capture of the castle on Good Friday 1401, while the garrison was at prayers, was an act of great bravado which captured the imaginations of many disaffected Welshmen. It was a major propaganda coup, humiliating the English and inspiring the Welsh. Owain’s little band moved quickly into the centre and the south of Wales and once more hundreds ran to join the rebel army at Mynydd Hyddgen in the Pumlumon range, where they won a decisive victory. Carmarthenshire also erupted into revolt and so many rushed to arms that the government panicked that there might be an invasion of England. Another royal army was sent to trudge in futility through south Wales, the Welsh guerilla forces melting into the countryside before it, attacking its baggage trains as it retreated. Meanwhile, a powerful onslaught on Caernarfon drove the King’s Council to consider peace terms.

The key men were coming over to Glyn Dwr’s side, the gentry. There also seems to have been a network of supporters even in the towns. Glyn Dwr’s letters went to men such as Henry Dwnn of Kidwelly, who had served under John of Gaunt in France in 1371-2 and Richard II in Ireland in 1393-4. Dwnn had already had his estates confiscated once, in 1389. His retinue of two hundred men were said to terrorise the district. Many more local magnates like him joined Glyn Dwr’s cause. It was during 1401 that Owain became fully aware of his growing power to attract such support from local populations across Wales. He also addressed letters to the Irish, in Latin, and to the Scots, in French, reminding them of the prophecy that Wales would not be freed without their assistance and urged them to send support. In his letters to south Wales he declared himself as the divinely-appointed liberator who would deliver the Welsh from their oppressors. By the end of 1401 the revolt had spread across western and central Wales, though the English government still controlled large areas in the marches, and the southern lordships were as yet untouched.

Legendary Battles and Sieges:

In June 1401, Glyn Dwr had defeated an English Army at the Battle of Hyddgen near Brecon, and the next June (1402), he personally led a force into mid Wales. To combat this, Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the ten-year old earl, also Edmund, assembled an army of Herefordshire men at Ludlow, later joined by a contingent from Maelienydd. The Mortimer forces met Glyn Dwr in open battle on 22 June 1402 at Bryn Glas near Pilleth, Hay-on-Wye. Many English knights were eager to engage the Welsh forces in open battle for the first time. Although Owain’s men had waged successful guerilla campaigns, they had only once faced the English in open conflict, at Hyddgen. The odds were stacked against them and the English were expecting to slaughter the upstarts. There were about 2,500 English troops and less than a thousand Welshmen. The Welsh wore light armour but were armed with a variety of deadly hand-to-hand combat weapons adapted from farmyard tools. The English knights had polished armour-plate, battle-axes and swords. The Welsh archers, however, had the strategic advantage of the high ground at the top of a steep hill, while the English position down in the valley was hampered by marshland, through which they had had to march in order to take it up. When they saw the Welsh archers taking up their position on the brow of the hill, the English knights decided to charge up it to do battle. They were supposed to be given cover by the long bowmen whom they had recruited from Maelienydd. At a crucial moment in the battle, this contingent lowered their bows, turned around, and fired upon the English infantry below them. Under attack from all sides and immobile in their heavy armour, they provided easy prey for the Welsh peasant foot soldiers, especially once they were down off their horses.  By the end of the battle, the English had suffered a heavy defeat, losing more than a thousand men compared with Owain’s losses of just two hundred. It was a total and terrifying slaughter after which the land was said to be a sea of mud and blood. Perhaps the most important result, however, was that Sir Edmund Mortimer was captured and taken to Snowdonia by Glyn Dwr.

Following the disaster at Bryn Glas, the Percies and other relations of the Mortimers began to raise money for the ransom of Sir Edmund, but the king, already suspecting collusion between Mortimer and Glyn Dwr, forbade the payment of the ransom, and instead ordered the confiscation of Sir Edmund’s plate and jewels. Partly as a result of this, Edmund decided to make common cause with his captor, marrying Owain’s daughter, Catherine, at the end of November, then ordering his people to rally to Glyn Dwr. This may have been a ploy to obtain a quicker release, or might have been motivated by the deeper dynastic values and issues already referred to. The marriage echoed that of Ralph (II) Mortimer to Gwladus Ddu, the daughter of Llywelyn ab Iorwerth in 1228, and was popular with the Mortimer ‘clan’, which had always been attracted by Cymric lore in relation to the early British kings. The family genealogy and chronicle is preceded by a ‘Brut’, a chronicle of the ancient kings of Britain, drawn up some time after 1376 when John of Gaunt was attempting to secure the royal succession for his heirs. This was used as a means of harnessing legendary ancestry to the rival Mortimer claims. It is also significant that two of the three ‘Round Tables’, tournaments and entertainments with an Arthurian theme, were hosted by the Mortimers. The first, a great four-day event, took place at Kenilworth in 1279 and celebrated the knighting of the three sons of Roger (III) Mortimer.

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, the death in 1398 of Roger (VI) Mortimer, who enjoyed a considerable degree of support in Shropshire and north Wales, meant that his six-year-old son Edmund was not only heir to the whole Mortimer empire in England and Wales, but was also regarded as heir to the throne. Bolingbroke’s coup of 1399 had dramatically changed this situation. Henry IV’s first Parliament recognised Bolingbroke’s son Henry as heir apparent, and the young Edmund, as a royal ward, was kept under close scrutiny, though treated with respect. Although the Mortimer estates were initially split up, in February 1400 they were taken into the hands of the steward and treasurer of the Great Council in order that their revenues could be used to defray the expenses of the royal household. Edmund and his brother Roger were allowed three hundred marks per year for their maintenance. So, when Sir Edmund, his uncle, decided to switch sides in the war of independence, the young earl’s position became an uncomfortable one, at least in political terms.

By December 1402 Sir Edmund had returned to Maelienydd proclaiming  that he had joined Owain to restore Richard II, if alive, or otherwise to place his ‘honoured nephew’, Edmund earl of March, on the throne. In the event of the success of this scheme, Owain’s claims to Wales would be respected. The men of Maelienydd were again called up to join the campaign, and they were soon joined by the earl of Northumberland and his son, Henry (‘Harry’) Hotspur, who had recently had their own rather complex quarrel with the king. Despite the death of Hotspur and a number of leading rebel nobles at the bloody engagement at Shrewsbury on 21 July 1403, Glyn Dwr continued to make headway in south Wales. His forces stormed the towns and liberated Abergavenny, Usk, Caerleon, Newport and Cardiff. In 1402-3 the whole of Wales was at war, and the English were attacked wherever they went. But to gain complete control of the country he had to overcome the biggest and toughest obstacles, the castles. Each castle was garrisoned to deal with local rebellions, equipped and supplied to withstand lengthy sieges. Owain’s men used a variety of ingenious methods to gain control of the castles. At Conwy, the Tudors had used a trick. At Dynefor they ‘sounded out’ the garrison by shouting out all the gruesome things they would inflict on the English if they did not surrender. At Caerphilly they formed a human pyramid to jump over the walls and open the gates. By the middle of 1403 Glyn Dwr had captured most of the castles and was in control of the country. Gwyn Williams (1985) distilled the essence of the war in Wales in the following graphic terms:

The twelve-year war of independence was, for the English, largely a matter of relieving their isolated castles. Expedition after expedition was beaten bootless back. Henry IV, beset by Welsh, Scots, French and rebellious barons, sent in army after army, some of them huge, all of them futile; he never really got to grips with it and the revolt largely wore itself out, in a small country blasted, burned and exhausted beyond the limit of endurance. For the Welsh, it was a Marcher rebellion and a peasants’ revolt which grew into a national guerilla war , its leader apparently flitting so swiftly and mysteriously from one storm centre to the next that in English eyes he grew to be an ogre credited with occult powers, a name to frighten children with. This probably reflects the operation of widely scattered guerilla bands operating in his name.

The sheer tenacity of the war of independence was startling. Few revolts in contemporary Europe lasted more than a few months and no previous Welsh uprising had lasted as long. This one raged for more than a full decade and didn’t really end for fifteen. While guerilla bands lurked and fought throughout the length and breadth of the country, Owain was able to put armies of ten thousand men into the field. Adam of Usk credited him with an irregular force of thirty thousand at the peak of the war. They maintained themselves partly by sheer pillage, while Owain used a combination of fire, sword and blackmail, with whole districts as well as rich men being held to ransom. For their part, the royal armies exacted a terrible vengeance in wholesale arson, looting and confiscations, even as retreating rebels scorched their own earth. Many a town and village was trapped in the grim grip of terror and counter-terror. In February 1404 the people in the hill country above Brecon agreed to submit to the king if he could defeat the rebels in their area; if not, they would remain loyal to Owain. In effect, as well as cause, this was a state of civil war. Most of the English in Wales were viewed as enemies, especially in the towns. Thomas Dyer of Carmarthen lost a thousand pounds in the rebellion. Many Welsh families had split allegiances. Robert, Abbot of Bardsey, declared for Glyn Dwr; his brother, Evan, was killed defending Caernarfon Castle for the king. Even in Owain’s own family, his cousin Hywel tried to murder him.

Yet the English campaigns of 1400 to 1403 were unable to exploit these divisions and did little to dent Owain’s military and diplomatic successes. For this was more than mere rebellion. It had serious international dimensions. During 1402-3 the revolt became enmeshed in baronial conspiracies in England which were to rally the powerful northern Percies against Henry and to cost Archbishop Scrope of York his life. The Civil War had spread to the North of England.

(to be continued…)

Figuring it out: What is History Teaching and Learning?

I asked this question of a number of colleagues in the 1990s in the context of an ethnographic research programme carried out into dual language teachers and learners of history in Hungary. One teacher, Robi, put it like this:

History is not at all giving out dates and definitions; it’s a kind of thinking style or a framework of mind – and if you can give it to them…then that’s very important… I try to make parallels…because I want them to realize that history is not a separate…subject which you learn and there is no connection with life, so I like making parallels; some people don’t like (that). I had a teacher in university who firmly believed that we shouldn’t make any parallels, I remember. But I like making parallels because (although) sometimes they are not good, sometimes they can help understanding.

On the question of the presentation of different historians’ perspectives, another of my colleagues, Stefi, felt that whilst students may find it difficult to cope with a wide diversity of views in the time available, they needed at least to be moved away from the notion that whatever was written down in the history book, that’s true and this is how it was! In particular, they needed to be made aware that answers, whilst never final, are to be found in the complex webs of causation. Robi felt that if we had more books presenting differing perspectives, the students could then figure out (for) themselves by only using the facts…why that happened. They would then, obviously they thought, ‘come up with different views’. This is where we came, in our discussions, to the classroom discourse, and how collaborative it could be.

Stefi recalled that, after a certain time of looking at a certain topic, she moved away from looking at it as a collection of data and dates and names by trying to analyse the particular problem in the topic and predict the questions which the students might have, producing a presentation as a kind of answer to these questions. Robi agreed with this, defining a topic in history as a collection of problems. This also redefines the role of the history teacher as problem-poser rather than problem-solver, and suggests that the most important teacher-competences were therefore the ability to identify and present general issues or problems to students, to ask more specific questions of the students in clear, precise language, and to provide ‘model’ answers without giving the impression that they are either ‘correct’ or ‘objective’.

These brief extracts from our workshops in Hungary (see also the appendix) illustrate something of the value of developing teachers’ awareness of self in relation to subject. The next stage in teacher development is to explore teachers’ own theories related to what they perceive the discourses of their subjects to be. A useful way of doing this is through the exploration of metaphors. For instance, with history teachers, we might describe the discourse of history as being somewhat like an iceberg in terms of our awareness, i.e. that for most learners and teachers it is the story or narrative element which is above surface, most apparent in setting it apart from other curriculum areas. This is the one-fifth of the iceberg which always appears above the surface, but it is supported in this by four-fifths of chronicling and interpreting which lies beneath the surface, not so apparent or obvious in its day-to-day usage. This can be best shown in the following pictogram:

Fig. ‘The Iceberg Principle’

 

The iceberg diagram therefore represents a hierarchy of historical language. In developing this metaphor, I would explain that some theorists have argued (Husbands, 1996) that history has no specialist vocabulary, since it deals with length, breadth and depth of human experience. However, this does not mean that historical language can simply be acquired; there are key elements of the discourse which can be taught, including key terms and core concepts, starting with the terminology used to describe the tiers of historical language themselves.

Chronicling:

So, starting from the bottom up, two-fifths of the language of history could be described as the essentially fixed language of chronicling, the past-into-present intercourse, including the division of historical time into era, century, millennium, period, ancient, medieval, modern; the authentic names for events, dates, sources and artifacts, and the period-specific terms or ‘archaisms’ e.g. fief, beadle, reeve, galleon (used in the past only). Put simply, this is the raw data of the past itself and the discourse markers are usually conveyed in question form by simple ‘who?’, ‘what?’, ‘when?’ prefixes. To answer these, the learner is required to demonstrate a clear understanding of chronology and an ability to relate past events and people to each other within a series of timescales.

Interpreting:

The middle two-fifths of the iceberg could therefore be described as comprising the more shifting language of interpretation, the present-into-past intercourse of historical description and analysis (cause, factor, similarity, difference, change, continuity, primary source, secondary source, evidence), combined with terms which have shifted their meaning in transition from the past into present (nobility, monarchy, manufacture/ factory, orders, classes, revolution, radical, conservative, liberal, democracy). The typical discourse features of this tier in the hierarchy would be represented in question form as ‘what factors/ causes…?’, ‘what was the significance of…?’, ‘what do you think were…?’, together with questions prefaced by ‘how?’ and ‘why?’ To operate successfully within this tier, the learner is required to demonstrate an ability to use the language of enquiry in framing their own research questions, to retrieve and evaluate information from a variety of sources and resources, including archaeological evidence and artefacts, and to supply coherent answers relating the processes of change and continuity in human societies over periods of time.

Narrating:

The final fifth of the iceberg, representing the most sophisticated tier of discourse, combines all the structural and functional language contained in the four-fifths below the surface in addition to narrating the past using historical concepts and figures of speech such as the Victorian Working Class(es), the English Revolution, Enlightened Absolutism. These are labels for larger sets of ideas, drawing on higher levels of abstraction (Edwards: 1978). Questions at this level might be phrased ‘how far…?’, ‘to what extent…?’, ‘was this….or…..?’ Alternatively, they might be given simply in a statement form which is followed by a request to the student to ‘explain’ or ‘discuss’. The ability to produce extensive and ‘mature’ narratives at this tier of discourse requires the learner to demonstrate a clear understanding of historical writing, including the turns of phrase and figures of speech used by historians; to organise and communicate the results of enquiries in a variety of written, oral, pictorial and dramatic forms, including debate, role-play and re-enactment.

In addition to linguistic awareness, skills and abilities, learners in all three tiers also need to apply, to varying degrees, the other core educational competences in geography, numeracy, computer literacy, problem-solving, inter-cultural values and conflict resolution. These are common humanistic competences which are perhaps less dependent on linguistic skills. Therefore, historical learning cannot be treated as a metaphorically isolated ‘iceberg’, but needs to be placed within a more holistic ‘ecology’ of education. That, of course, is the responsibility of ‘craft’ historians, history teachers and educators in general. We need to remind ourselves, as well as our students, that history is about the whole of human life in the past, related to the present.

What does this look like in practice? Teaching and Training.

In our initial workshops, Robi highlighted the difference between chronicling and narrating when dealing with a topic like the Hundred Years’ War between France and England. Whilst a purely chronicling approach might deal solely with the events in sequence, a what happened at Crécy? approach, a truly narrative approach might focus on the role of the Welsh bowmen in the battles of Crécy (1349) to Agincourt (1415) relative to other military factors and developments. It would result in a question emerging in preparation and teaching such as how did warfare change by the power of the longbow? It would refer back to previously gained knowledge about these changes from studies of earlier chronological topics. So, a narrative approach would, in simple terms, combine ‘what?’ and ‘why?’ to result, through interpretation of the relationship between events, factors, in an explanation of ‘how’ the change transpired. A chronicling approach, by contrast, would simply confine itself to ‘when?’ and ‘what?’ and result in students producing a timeline of dates and events in their notes.

Narrative approaches turn time-lines into flow-diagrams or web-charts, on which references back to earlier factors and changes are shown. The ‘mature’ narrator is thus able to produce an extensive explanation of the process of change following the ‘SEE’ pattern familiar to many history teachers – make a Statement, Explain its validity and provide Examples from sources of evidence to support it. In any teacher-training course, the tiers of historical discourse would need be matched with these types of notional cognitive and linguistic hierarchies. Whilst a great deal of work has been done in recent decades on adolescent cognitive development (Shemilt: 1980, 1984; quoted in Husbands: 1996), very little work has been done on linguistic competences of students, whether in their first or second language, beyond the general recognition that historical description is drenched in linguistic convention (Husbands).

More positively, ‘studying’ history should enable the learner, at any level, to personalise topics and content more generally, to ‘unpack’ complex historical processes and relate them to descriptions in their own lives (Husbands). The metaphor of unpacking personal baggage in a training workshop is potentially a useful tool for a variety of reasons; a specific use here might be to demonstrate how students need to ask and answer the question ‘what’s your story?’ by getting them to relate the happenings they can label in the lives of recent generations of their own families to contemporary-historical events, developing elementary chronicling language in the creation of simple time-charts or time-lines.

At the level of interpreting, activities might be developed to bestow ‘significance’ to ‘historic’ events in teachers’ lives, perhaps drawing twists and turns along a teacher’s ‘career path’, encouraging the use of interpretative language. Finally, being asked to explain or narrate their path (or those of others) involves changing word order and tense structures to show cause and effect, etc. The representation of significant events in words and pictures might also provide plenty of scope for the exploration of figurative language in narrative accounts. Activities like these might enable teachers to personalise ‘the iceberg principle’ as well as providing an introductory exercise with students to gauge both linguistic and cognitive levels.

 

Story as a Vehicle to Learning and Teaching History

In any teacher-training course, this sequence of activities would lead on naturally to considering ways of working with stories, or ‘Story as Vehicle’ (Garvie, 1990) for language learning. Whilst English language teachers have come to accept this as a valid methodology in their teaching in recent decades, it has tended to be jettisoned from the ‘baggage’ of many history teachers, largely because narrative approaches have been seen as methodologically counterpoised to interpretative ones. Teachers telling stories, giving anecdotes or providing parallel narratives, fell out of fashion in the 1970s and 80s, to be replaced by an emphasis on students developing analytical tools and skills in pursuit of scientific ‘objectivity’ (Husbands); in Hungary, as demonstrated in my workshops and interviews with Hungarian teachers of history, the method has survived such ‘pedagogical’ pressures, and has continued to be used as a means of helping students to access the past.

Some skeptical ‘western’ academics have represented the narrative form as an immature mode of analysis; history teachers have also tended to be dismissive, associating it with the ‘great tradition’ and ‘active didacticism’ of the history teacher relaying a mainly national folklore to essentially passive pupils (Sylvester: 1994, quoted in Husbands). This was never a real problem in Hungary and in central Europe more generally, where the post-war linguistic, philosophical and pedagogical traditions were, until recently at least, never so nationalistic. More recently, cultural anthropology has reinstated the role of narrative accounts in history throughout Europe, particularly through the development of ethnographic approaches to primary sources (Husbands). A pan-European training course for history teachers would need to build on these approaches to show how they have led to a methodological emphasis on students themselves figuring out what the stories mean or show.

In this approach to story, the temporal sequence is often subordinated to explanation and interpretation – back-tracking to clarify causal connections (Lively, 1979). The teacher therefore facilitates the story-telling, or collaborates in the telling; he certainly does not provide a moral, though he may help learners to discover their own – the exercise of history is never an amoral or neutral venture. No story is simply received or heard; it is re-made, recounted, with the sequence and characters altered. The listeners have an active role in this process, and their expressions of interest, boredom, apathy and concern shape the story. They are taught to listen to the silences among the traces left by people of past times (Williams, 1979), because these pauses may be evidence in themselves, which also need interpreting. Their stories thereby become shared experiences, as they are ‘related’ to ‘the organising principles’ of causation, continuity and change involved in the development of complex historical discourse (Husbands). This is the major difference between the language of interpretation and that of narrative; the former is essentially divergent, because it explores the past in relation to differing present positions (a woman probably will not ask the same questions as a man, for example). Narrative language attempts to arrive at a shared understanding of the past, and is therefore integrative and convergent.

In a training pack, or on a training course, these theories could be given a practical focus by lesson planning based on language classroom activities similar to those set out by Morgan and Rinvolucri (1983), Rosen (1988) and Garvie (1990), among others. Their use of ‘staging-posts’, repetitions and other story-telling techniques could be used to demonstrate the concept of discourse markers. Teachers could then be asked, in collaborative groups, to reproduce historical narratives from their own teaching experiences, sketching simple outline chronicles, then re-ordering, using a variety of different time-expressions and tenses (according to predetermined language levels), also incorporating staging-posts and repetitions. Each group could then, in turn, present their story in a micro-teaching exercise to the other participants.

Developing Language Awareness

As a means of developing language awareness among both pre-service and in-service teachers, they could be given the following ‘grammatical guidelines’ for reproducing stories (examples taken from/ adapted from Fisher & Williams, ‘Past into Present 3’ (1989: 31-33):

• For chronicling, use the simple past to show a sequence of events; e.g. …

“In July 1789, people in Paris attacked the Bastille; In August, they published ‘the Declaration of the Rights of Man’.”

• Use the past continuous with the past simple to show the relationship between general activities and specific actions; e.g. …

“By mid-1793 France was at war with most of Europe. The British, Dutch and Austrian armies were invading from the north, the Prussians from the north-east, the Piedmontese and Austrians from the east, and the Spaniards from the south.”

• For interpreting and narrating, use the past perfect to show the relationship between the event you have chosen to begin with and an earlier causative event or situation, e.g. …

“A young army volunteer, Gabriel David, was found guilty of writing ‘infamous words’ and was imprisoned. He had written ‘shit on the nation’ on his leave pass.”

Ten Steps on a Linguistic Staircase

A linguistic framework would help move history teachers away from a transmission model of history which is increasingly inappropriate in both multi-lingual and inter-cultural terms, in the context of the modern multi-cultural and international classrooms in Europe (Husbands). It would replace this with an interpretative-narrative model, in which teacher-talk and the way learners interact with both the teacher and their peers, play central roles in how they learn about the past. All learners need the scaffolding of historical language in order to interpret human experience, and within it their own individual, familial and cultural identities. In addition to raising awareness about discourse features and markers, there are some specific techniques which history teachers can be helped to develop to provide students with greater access to an increasingly international curriculum, whether delivered in their first or second language. These are partly adapted from Sears (1998) and are set out here as ‘ten tips’, rather than as a set of formal recommendations, so that teachers can be encouraged to experiment with them as part of their own classroom action research:

• stop to ‘talk with texts’, especially by displaying the text on an interactive white board, so that the learners can also engage in dialogue with the text in a shared activity, rather than viewing reading and interpreting text as an individual exercise;

• show students how to highlight and extract information which they can then summarise in their own words; modify and gloss texts, especially using cloze gap-fill exercises;

• develop group jigsaw reading techniques, so that learners are not overcome by the sheer volume of text, but can share ideas in working out meanings, and can then collaborate in presenting their own interpretations and summaries;

• use visual adaptations, especially web-charts to show factors in a web of causation; use interactive CD-roms, Power-Point presentations and subtitled DVDs, providing glossaries as appropriate;

• provide a balance of activities in all four skills areas – reading, listening, speaking and writing – with plenty of pre-reading and post-reading comprehension activities; don’t allow any students to be passive; challenge them to explain meanings, give synonyms and make simple linguistic and cultural comparisons;

• give presentations of new ‘key’ concepts and terms, especially for abstract archaisms; present ‘shifting’ vocabulary in context, e.g. ‘comrade’; a glossary may not be enough; a web-chart may be better, showing context and collocation, or etymology and parts of speech;

• use visual prompts through ‘vocabouts’, identifying simple words, phrases and especially archaic usages in mini ‘field’ trips, and realia, photographs, maps and other pictorial clues in the classroom; make clear distinctions between ‘past only’ and ‘past into present’ vocabulary;

• allow translation with fixed meanings in bilingual groups, in conjunction with an English to English glossary with phonic spellings; encourage learners to do preparative reading and note-making before topics are dealt with in classwork, giving them an opportunity to prepare the new vocabulary; set up, encourage and monitor L1 subject reading, using the Internet where other L1 resources are limited or unavailable.

• teach learners a list of common abbreviations (including Latin forms – e.g., etc., i.e.) and show them how develop their own ‘shorthand’ system to take and make grammar-less notes at speed, and then to re-formulate these into connected prose;

• set process-writing exercises, especially in project work and collaborative course work, so that learners can benefit from your comments before producing a final draft; don’t set writing only as an individual homework activity or use homework simply for writing-up; use the SEE pro-forma – Statement, Explanation, Evidence as a ‘template’ for academic writing in groups.

These ‘tips’ have been given in no particular order of priority, since this will be determined by the teaching and learning context, together with the needs, language levels and ages of learners.

The Continuing Upward Spiral of Development

My own teaching and classroom research have shown how ethnographic approaches, an essential part of ‘the Humanities’, lead to a form of continuing professional development which enables teachers to focus on areas of concern and enthusiasm within their own teaching. In my case, a shared interest in the nature of collaborative discourse in the dual language history classroom has led to a significant raising of awareness and sharing of teaching resources and insights. Personally, I continued to develop them to meet challenges involved in integrating second language students into mainstream English-medium subject area teaching, and more recently in multi-lingual contexts in international secondary schools. These have provided fresh discourses through continuous engagement in new ethnographic cycles and collaborative upward spirals with learners and teachers.

Appendix: On ‘What is history?’ (Jan 1996)

“Robi: It’s the accumulated experiences and knowledge .., the past …, events of the past=

“Stefi: =Or story about the past=

“R: =Story about the past, yes …,=

“…….

“R:=Events of the past …, interaction …, .., what processes and events had an influence on processes and events in other parts of the world ..,/=

“/=………………………..

“R: ..,/= .., how the events happening in different parts of the world interlinked with each other …, connected to each other .., is a cumulative process …, how one thing instigated the happening of another thing (…….) …, that’s what I’m most interested in .., this part of history ..,=

“……………………………………………….

“R: .., ‘történelem’ .., comes from ‘történet’ …, linked with story .., the word story, I think ..,=

“S: = Something which happened some time ago …

“……………………………………………..

“R: One thing that I read once and I really like this .., that if you take logic .., as a discipline (….) logika? /mm/.., if you take formal logic .., then, according to formal logic, you have a premise or two premises; you have a conclusion and you’re almost certain, especially in sciences, if that happens ((..)) certainly something else will happen ((non-verbal actions)) .., (for example) if you boil the water and the water’s going to be hot .., it will evaporate .., OK? //mm// .., so that’s why .., you can ((coughs)) e:r, e:r, foresee, …, or you can foretell (…) what will happen .., because the direction of logic (so it’s) forward-going //mm// but with history, OK? /mm/ e:r .., the enquiry – or the enquiry of history – is turning backwards /mm/.., so it’s not necessary .., so what will happen according to formal logic in sciences – what will happen later on – is necessary .., /mm/ but if you have an event which happened – let’s say there was a war in 1515, OK? .., you cannot say with certainty what was the cause of that war, because it happened earlier …, /mm/ do you understand that? And the rules of logic – the rules of formal logic – cannot be applied to that /mm/ , so one thing can have many causes /((……..))/=

“/=………………………/

“/=………………………………………../

“R: = /((………)) If we go further and further back then we don’t have enough information, if we’re talking about the Roman .., e:r, Roman Empire or the , e:r, Greeks .., we have limited resources (…), sources (…), and on the basis of that limited sources we have to figure out why the thing happened /mm/ .., right? So partly we have limited (re)sources and partly the rule(s) of formal logic is forward-going, so we cannot say that that happened exactly because of that. //aha, mm// Because, e:r, e:r, the reasons behind the events, or behind certain processes, could be, e:r, could be absolutely different; so it could happen because of the social situation; it could happen because of the economic crisis; it could happen because of personalities (right) /mm/ for example, the French Revolution (and the) Jacobins, when they argued with each other /mm/ – Danton and Robespierre – it was all about personalities; or the Girondins and the Jacobins, it was all about personal, e:r, e:r, what is that?, e:r, ..,=

“S: =Rivalry?

“R: =Yes, personal rivalry /aha/ yes, they wanted to have more .., so there could be several causes and we can never be sure, e:r, what exactly contributed to the, e:r, development of a certain situation, and that is very interesting, I think /aah/ in history.

“…………………….

((pause in recording))

“((conversation in Hungarian))/

“Andrew: / Right, so, (….) what you’re saying… is that when you do a scientific experiment, for example, /uhhumm/ you can isolate what the cause or the catalyst of a certain reaction is /exactly! yes, .., with great certainty!/ …, I mean I often talk about catalysts when I’m teaching history as well as causes, you know – origins, causes, catalysts etc., /uhum/ and it’s a very complex situation /yes!/, and you’re saying that history therefore cannot be seen as a kind of science in that way?/exactly!/ or certainly not as a pure science?/yes,yes!/ but the most it can be seen as is an, uhm, applied science /yes/ if you like, e:r and I suppose the other question is there .., of course we apply ourselves to the past, don’t we? /uhum/ and we look at the past, e:r /uhum/ with our own particular concerns .., so the /yes!/ questions a woman asks about the past /exactly!/ (….) would be different from the questions a man /exactly/ asks; …, different the..the..e:r questions a central European /uhum/ would ask would be different from a western European /yes!/, different from an African etc.? /yes/

“R: Yes, that was exactly another point that I wanted to raise (out) of that; that was one of the points that I said to the American students when I was teaching there .., I..I..I see history and I teach history in a subjective way; there is no objective history teaching, I think, //uhu, aha!// because everybody .., yeyeah, there’s a difference between a woman and a man asking questions about history and our personal interests, our personality, what we are interested in (…), so I think history teaching is subjective.”

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