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| The Death of Captain Miller in Saving Private Ryan |
Today marks the 72ndyear the allies stormed the beaches of Normandy in the name of freedom. At the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks’ character (Captain John Miller) tells Private Ryan (played by Matt Damon) to ‘earn this’ before he perishes. It was quite an emotional scene charging Ryan to carry a tremendous load in the decades that followed his life. But carry he did, and because of Captain Miller and his battalion’s sacrifice to find and save Private Ryan, generations of Ryans would flourish. I think of the depth of that sacrifice, and the letting go of what could have been. My own grandfather (deceased since 1968) was the only survivor of his battalion in World War One at Vimy Ridge. And I often wonder if he felt any guilt at being the last man standing. I certainly hope not or I wouldn’t be here now. Thank you, Grandpa.
My mother managed to survive World War Two while living in Hertfordshire, England. The war started when she was ten, and ended five years later in her mid-teens. Some of her stories have brought tears to my eyes, and her own just by remembering certain events and incidents. One such time, mom was telling me about when the Germans invaded France, and scores of British men and women raced across the English Channel to rescue as many French people as they could in whatever boats they owned. Another memory is simpler, yet so profound. Mom wanted to go to the movie theatre with her friend to see Bambi, but my grandmother told her no for some reason. The same movie theatre got bombed that day with many casualties, including my mom’s friend. Thank you, Grandma.
Many times my mother would go to school, and there would be empty seats where students once sat. Back then, there was no grief counselling, so the children would have to ‘deal with it’ as my mother would say, and move on. Bomb shelters were a part of life, but my grandmother tried to make a game of it for her three daughters to ease their fears. That horrific war certainly brought out the resilience and stamina in people, as they had to live their lives as normally as possible.
The next book in my young adult time travel series called The Last Timekeepers and the Dark Secret will take place during World War Two. Fittingly, it will be released October 17th, less than a month before Remembrance Day (November 11th). During my research, I learned a lot about what the people of that era endured and how they coped in such adversity. It was so humbling to read what the survivors had to do to keep moving forward with purpose, and to be as resilient as possible. I want to express my eternal gratitude to ALL the veterans of ALL the wars for keeping the peace, giving us our freedom, and making the world a safer place to live. Although evil still slithers around the globe and makes its ugly presence known from time-to-time, I truly believe that good people will always out-weigh the bad people. If you don’t agree, take it from somebody who’s been there:
In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. ~ Anne Frank
This D-Day, don’t forget to thank or hug a veteran. They’ve certainly earned it.
By David Bates
The expansion of the peoples calling themselves the Normans throughout northern and southern Europe and the Middle East has long been one of the most popular and written about topics in medieval history. Hence, although devoted mainly to the history of the cross-Channel empire created by William the Conqueror’s conquest of the English kingdom in 1066 and the so-called loss of Normandy in 1204, I wanted to contribute to these discussions and to the ongoing debates about the impact of this expansion on the histories of the nations and cultures of Europe. That peoples from a region of northern France should become conquerors is one of the apparently inexplicable paradoxes of the subject. The other one is how the conquering Normans apparently faded away, absorbed into the societies they had conquered or within the kingdom of France.
In 1916 Charles Homer Haskins’ made the statement that the Normans represented one of the great civilising influences in European – and indeed world – history. If, a century later, hardly anyone would see it thus, the same imperatives remain, namely to locate the Normans within a context in which it remains popular to write national histories, and, for some, in the midst of debates about the balance of the History curriculum, to see them as being of paramount importance. The history of the Normans cuts across all this, but is an inescapable subject in relation to the histories of the English, French, Irish, Italian, Scottish, and Welsh. Those currently fashionable concepts – and rightly so – ‘The First English Empire’ and ‘European change’ are also at the centre of the debates.
As a concept, empire is nowadays both fashionable and much argued about, a universal phenomenon of human history that has been the subject of several major television programmes. It is a subject that requires a multidisciplinary approach. Over the last two millennia, statements by both contemporaries and subsequent commentators have often set a proclaimed imperial civilising mission as a positive feature against the impact of violence and the social and cultural subjugation of the subjects of an empire. Seen thus, the concept of empire has an obvious relevance to the subject of the Normans. And, in relation to the pan-European expansion of the Normans, and, in particular, to the creation of the kingdom of Sicily, the term diaspora, as it is understood in the social sciences, constitutes a persuasive framework of analysis. Taken together, the two terms empire and diaspora create a world in which individuals and communities had to adapt rapidly to new forms of power and cultures and in which identities are multiple, flexible, and often uncertain. For this reason, the telling of life-histories is of central importance rather than simplified notions of social and cultural identity. One consequence must be the abandonment of the currently popular and unhelpful word Normanitas. The core of this book is a history of power, diversity and multiculturalism in the midst of the complexities of a changing Europe.
The use of terms such as hard power, soft power, hegemony, core and periphery, and cultural transfer can be used to frame interpretations of many national histories, including Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, as well as English. The crucial points in all cases are the mixture of engagement with the dominant imperial power and the perpetuation of difference and diversity through the exercise of agency beyond the core. The framework is one that works especially well in relation to the evolving histories of the Welsh kingdoms/principalities and of the kingdom of Scots. It also means that the so-called ‘anarchy’ of 1135 to 1154, the succession dispute between King Stephen and the Empress Matilda becomes a civil war which needs to be set in a cross-Channel context and through which there were many continuities. And Magna Carta (1215), of which the eight-hundredth anniversary is fast approaching, becomes a consequence of imperial collapse. However, a focus on England and the British Isles just does not work. Normandy’s centrality to the history of the cross-Channel empire created in 1066 is of basic importance. Both morally and militarily the creation of the cross-Channel empire brought problems of a new kind that were for some living, or mainly domiciled, in Normandy a source of anguish. The book’s cover has indeed been chosen with this in mind. It shows troubled individuals who have narrowly escaped disaster at sea, courtesy of St Nicholas. But they successfully made the crossing. And so, of course, did the Tournai marble on which they are carved.
Professor David Bates took his PhD at the University of Exeter, and over a professional career of more than forty years, he has held posts in the Universities of Cardiff, Glasgow, London (where he was Director of the Institute of Historical Research from 2003 to 2008), East Anglia, and Caen Basse-Normandie. He has worked extensively in the archives and libraries of Normandy and northern France and has always sought to emphasise the European dimension to the history of the Normans. ‘He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Emeritus Fellowship to enable him to complete a new biography of William the Conqueror in the Yale University Press English Monarchs series. His latest book is The Normans and Empire.
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Image credit: Section of the Bayeaux Tapestry, courtesy of the Conservateur of the Bayeux Tapestry. Do not reproduce without permission.
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On this day in history, October 14, 1066, the Battle of Hastings was fought between William the Conqueror and King Harold. To help us learn more about one of history’s most infamous battles I turned to Oxford Reference Online. From there I was led The Oxford Companion to Military History which had the entry below by Matthew Strickland on the battle. I hope your 14th is peaceful in comparison.
Hastings, battle of (1066)
Fought on 14 October 1066, between the forces of William ‘the Conqueror’, Duke of Normandy and King Harold (Godwinson) II of England, Hastings was one of the most decisive battles in the history of western Europe. William had a claim to the English throne and Harold expected him to invade, but William fortuitously landed on the Sussex coast when Harold was preoccupied with an invasion in the north. On hearing of William’s arrival, Harold immediately began a forced march south from York, refusing to wait in London for reinforcements, and arriving in the vicinity of Hastings on the night of 13 October. Less than three weeks earlier, at Stamford Bridge, he had defeated the army of Norwegian King Haraldr Harðraða, which he had caught completely by surprise. Now he hoped to repeat this successful strategy against William, but the latter was forewarned by his scouts and attacked Harold’s force before a third of it was drawn up, forcing him into a strong but confined defensive position on Senlac ridge. Harold, moreover, had lost some of his best men in the earlier battles of Fulford Gate and Stamford Bridge on 20 and 25 September .
The Norman archers, supported by heavy infantry, began the battle, but made little headway against the close infantry formations of the Anglo-Saxons, so densely arrayed, noted Duke William’s biographer William of Poitiers, that the dead could not even fall. Assaults by the Norman cavalry initially fared little better, and the well-equipped housecarls did terrible execution with their great two-handed axes. William’s left, comprised of Bretons, broke in panic amidst rumours that the duke was slain, and William narrowly avoided catastrophe by rallying his fleeing men and removing his helmet to show he was still alive. Launching a counter-attack, the Normans cut down those Saxons who had broken ranks in pursuit, and, exploiting the efficacy of this manoeuvre, they executed several ‘feigned flights’ with considerable success. Renewed assaults by Norman archers and knights gradually thinned the remaining English formation, which lacked sufficient archers to neutralize the Norman missilemen. Harold’s death effectively ended the battle; wounded first in the eye by an arrow, he was then cut down by Norman knights.
Hastings was by no means the inevitable triumph of feudal heavy cavalry over ‘outmoded’ Germanic infantry; the battle raged from dawn to dusk, the Normans came close to complete disaster, and it was chance alone that Harold, not William, was slain. Contemporaries regarded the battle as so closely fought that only divine intervention could explain William’s eventual victory.
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