History Becomes Alive

Reading history interests me, but actually being and seeing gives a much greater depth of color and experience.

Some times it is little things that bring history to life, like the small museum in Cirencester, the Corinium Museum. Cirencester in the beautiful Cotswolds was Corinium in the Roman days — over three centuries of Roman days. It was a provincial capital. The well laid out museum features Roman artifacts and large floor mosaics unearthed locally, as well as Saxon and medieval finds and remains. But what most intrigued me under the subject of "History Becomes Alive" was a museum wall with information about the English Civil War (1642-1651).

Off and on several times, I have read about the cavaliers versus the roundheads; the Royalists versus the Parlimentarians. Cromwell and an austere form of religion win and become dictators. The display on the wall in Corinium Museum shows how the people suffered from both sides. Leave aside the direct horrors of warfare and sieges. Think about damage to farms and property, theft to feed the armies, and forced billeting of soldiers. One young man kept a diary in which he recorded the hardships. It was quoted and printed on that wall.

That Civil War also left its mark on Dunnottar Castle. It was blockaded and besieged by Cromwell for months in his effort to take the Scottish crown jewels (the Honors) and destroy them.

Malmesbury Abbey,. What the Tudors left standing
still serves as a magnifiscent church

Then there is Henry VIII, his need for money, heirs and gratification, and Elizabeth I, and her need to surpress Catholic opposition. In the process, monasteries and abbeys were confiscated, sold off, and torn down, and churches stripped and defaced. The obvious scars today are all the many exterior wall naves on the many remaining cathedrals and churches in England. The statues are missing. Plaques on some historic houses describe how some of their stones were pilfered from the demolished monasteries.

We visited Culloden battlefield (1745). Today it is an open, grassy field with three red flags marking the English army positions and three blue flags marking where the Scottish Jacobites stood. Some two thousand mostly Scottish clansmen died or were wounded in that final decisive defeat of Scottish independence. For what? A mixture of religion, clan loyalty, and the vein arrogance of the twenty-six year old young Stuart pretender, the Italian raised and French supported "Bonnie Prince" Charlie. He fled the battlefield when the going got tough, leaving the clansmen to their fates.

Historical anecdotes: The Queen Mum
pulls a beer at The Bell at Stowe pub,
Stowe-on-the-Wold, Cotswolds.

The battlefield has its ghosts, but visiting castles in Britain bring the brutality home. Every one has its prison. Even churches have histories of being used as prisons. Jacobite prisoners were crowded in the dungeon rooms of Carlisle Castle without food or water. The castle brochures point out the worn stone where prisoners licked water dripping into the dungeon.

On a less violent theme, the Corinium Museum in Cirencester has a wall devoted to the wool trade that made the Cotswolds wealthy in the Middle Ages — until the invention of the cotton gin radically changed the economics of clothing. Sheep in the Cotswolds produced the wool that was exported to Flanders and Northern Italy where it was woven into cloth. This wall featured one man born a commoner who became ridiculously wealthy as a wool merchant, bought himself a noble title, and lived to the ripe old age of a hundred and one. He died only because he fell off a horse.

I wish I had taken a photo of that wall. I cannot find any reference to that merchant on the internet. Yet such anecdotes preserved in local histories provide the details that bring history alive -- at least for me.

Post Script:  Searching the Corinium Museum website I found the merchant's portrait and name, then this basic information on a BBC website. (God bless the BBC.)

John Coxwell was a self made man who made his money from the wool trade in the Cotswolds and rose from the ranks of the lower middle classes to that of the gentry. In the 14th and 15th centuries the trade in Cotswold wool was on an international scale

John was in his early twenties when the Abbey at Cirencester was dissolved. Twenty years later, when Elizabeth I sold off the Abbey estates, he purchased a significant amount of land using the money he had made from trading wool. Eventually he owned over 40 properties in Cirencester. In 1563 he purchased part of the manor of Siddington, ten years later he bought the manor of Ablington

John was 101 when he died after falling off his horse at Lechlade!