The Godfather: Peter Corris on myths busted
Robin Hood and Little John they both have gone to the fair ’o …
When I was a child my mother made a point of visiting Cheshire’s bookshop in Melbourne on her excursions to the city and buying one of the Cheshire’s Children’s Classics. These were cheap, stapled, simplified versions of adult histories. My imagination was fired by these books with their stories and characters like King Arthur and his knights; King Canute and his attempt to hold back the waves; King Alfred burning the cakes; Lady Godiva riding naked through the town; Robert the Bruce being inspired by the persistence of the spider; Robin Hood and his merry men; rats being the cause of the Black Death; and Richard III murdering the little (they were always referred to as little) princes in the Tower.
I suppose I believed them all to be true at first, but over time I learned to sort fact from fiction. An unbeliever from a very young age, as I’ve said before, I was never interested in the quest for the Holy Grail and simply enjoyed the fights. It was no surprise for me to learn in time that Arthur and Camelot never existed in any way approximating to the legend. The lady in the lake and Excalibur had always seemed unlikely.
In a recent, admiring, reading of Peter Ackroyd’s Foundation: The history of England, volume I, I was interested to see, as an adjunct to my appreciation of his research and the flair of his writing, what status he assigned to the stories that fell within the scope of his book. Arthur? A legend, of course. Canute and the waves? Not mentioned, but I’d long known that the story was misrepresented in the kids’ version and that the king was demonstrating the limits of his power, not their extent. Alfred and the cakes? An invention of two centuries later.
Lady Godiva? Ackroyd finds no evidence that it ever happened. Robert the Bruce and the spider? Not mentioned
Scholars, particularly Stephen Knight in Robin Hood: A complete study of the English outlaw (1994), have established the legendary status of the famous outlaw. Ackroyd sorts through the evidence and suggests something new to me – that the outlaw band may have been remnants of the defeated force of Simon de Montfort – a nice romantic touch a novelist could work with. But I suspect many people still believe Robin to have been real and, after all the books, comics and films, I can’t help wishing he had been.
Rats and the Black Death? Not guilty, Ackroyd says without explanation. Presumably he has picked up on modern research showing that the bacteria surfaced in Central Asia from humans eating rodents and then was spread by humans themselves.
Richard III and the little princes in the Tower (one was 12 years old and, given the size of some Plantagenets, probably not so little)? Many books have delved into this question, including, in popular vein, Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time (1951). Tey acquitted Richard but Ackroyd convicts him using logic that I found convincing. It is thus the only cherished (if that’s the word) story of my childhood that this fine book, which I’d recommend to anyone wishing to get a grasp on the early history of England, leaves intact – apart from Bruce and the spider. Having a strong strain of Scots ancestry in me, and no English, I might just hang on to that one, whatever the truth.
