So this is when all that “Whan that aprill with his shoures soote/ The droghte of march hath perced to the roote” got started. Yes, it’s the Canterbury Tales, which I’m sure you knew. And it was on April 17^th with its shoures soote that the author, Geoffrey Chaucer, first told them at the court of Richard II in 1397. A very English event… and not just because Chaucer’s verse and prose have struck fear into the hearts of English majors ever since.

Chaucer’s masterpiece adds another feather to Richard’s cap along with the great hammerbeam roof in Westminster Hall. For a grand total of two feathers. He was an awful king even if he does seem to have had exquisite taste. He made Chaucer became Controller of Customs and Justice of Peace in 1386 and then Clerk of the King's work in 1389, employment which allowed him to write his famous Tales. But it wasn’t a sinecure; he was evidently a talented bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat as well as an author. And his development and telling of the Tales at court isn’t just noteworthy if you have to try to decipher them.

The Canterbury Tales, as I’m sure you know, are told by a group of pilgrims on their way from London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas a Becket in that happy period between Henry II having Becket murdered and Henry VIII destroying his shrine and his bones. So in that sense they reflect conventional behaviour and piety. But they are a sharp satire on English society including religious hypocrisy. The Summoner and Pardoner are especially unattractive characters, though the Monk and one of the nuns aren’t about to be canonized either.

The Tales also reflect a kind of social fluidity and lack of deference that are characteristically English. Despite cheap laughs at the upper class that you can still get today, and not all of which are unjustified, the social equality famously prized in the United States and Canada have their roots in the mother country like so much else that we value which doesn’t include Middle English spelling and pronunciation.

Of course if you’d been there in 1397 it would all have been like contemporary slang or whatever and like you know man how people talked like then. And for what it’s worth, my opinion is that it was a considerably more appealing way of talking. Even “Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth”.

Do you like trains? I do. I really miss the Flying Scotsman without ever having been on it. But my attitude is more than a bit peculiar because I am nostalgic about trains whereas in their heyday they were hugely disruptive agents of modernization, about which I am not so much ambivalent as negative.

Take, for instance, the first passenger railway service in India, which opened on April 16 1853, connecting Bori Bunder with Thane. OK, I have no idea where either of them is, or at least I wouldn’t if Bori Bunder were not described in my source as “Bori Bunder, Bombay” which means it’s in Mumbai. (And it turns out it’s slang for “sack storage” which lacks the exotic feel of Bori Bunder.) Thane is a few miles up the coast. These things start small. And the next thing you know, you’re checking them out on Google Maps.

Including if you’re in India. For in the end the railway, and modernization, transformed India profoundly, unifying it, leading to an independence movement and, after a long detour through Soviet-style central planning, making it one of the genuinely promising emerging economies with a substantial high-tech component and a vast if frequently trite film industry. In short, an increasingly modern place.

I do not think most Indians would today wish to jettison all those things and go back to ox-carts and petty rajahs that are very quaint to read of in books or see in TV dramatizations. But I do not know how they feel about the fact that it is only because the British came, built railways, established schools, and set an example of a modern society that India is what it is today.

Without Adam Smith and James Watt, the Indians were not going to invent trains spontaneously for a very long time, probably ever. Without the West and the Industrial Revolution, there would not be one electric light switch anywhere in the South Asian subcontinent or, indeed, the world.

It is many years since I was in India and rode on what were then comically Third World railways, dirty, alarming, crowded and riddled with demands for baksheesh. I expect they are a lot nicer now and again I do not expect anyone to be nostalgic about what they were then like except tourists who get to swoop in, take photos and swoop out again. But perhaps some Indians are nostalgic about a world in which trains were a strange and dazzling novelty instead of a fading technology in a world where the elite flies, owns private cars and dreams of self-driving cars.

I do wonder how most people in India feel today about the British. When I was there the notion that British rule had been basically bad, unfair and insulting, and independence was at once the beginning of all good things and a reconnection with a pristine past unsullied by imperialism was still pretty much a shibboleth. Hence renaming Bombay Mumbai among many other things. But it was very bad history. Perhaps it is now recognized in part as such.

As for me, my nostalgia for steam engines is self-consciously paradoxical, a longing for a world that was not yet so dramatically transformed by modernization as to be as vulgar, hollow and materialistically empty as our own seems on a bad day. I even miss those early Indian trains because they are part of that vanished world in which Queen Victoria set the standard for decorum. Yet it is those same romantic trains that carried that world off. And I know it.

Today is the anniversary of the Pocotaligo massacre 301 years ago, on April 15 of 1715. It wasn’t much of a massacre as these things go, though as I’ve observed in other contexts, it would seem like a lot if you were among the four men horribly killed. But it’s a revealing start to yet another war between English colonists and aboriginals in North America.

As I’ve also said before, I have a good deal of sympathy for the original human inhabitants of the Americas as European settlement spread inexorably, powered by baffling technological and cultural dynamism and by diseases developed over thousands of years of agriculture and dense urban living to which aboriginals had no resistance. It is not surprising that at a certain point they took up arms, in terribly one-sided struggles. But it’s also not a get out of jail free card morally speaking.

In this case, the government of South Carolina knew trouble was brewing among the Ochese Creek and sent a six-man delegation to the Yamasee town of Pocotaligo to seek help arranging a summit with the Creek to discuss issues. The delegates spoke to the Yamasee on the evening of the 14^th and promised to try to deal with their grievances. That night their hosts murdered them in their sleep.

OK, not exactly in their sleep. After debating war versus peace they put on their war paint, woke them up and killed them, except two who escaped to raise the alarm, one of whom witnessed the ritual torture death of a colleague while hiding in a swamp.

The resulting war, really a series of scattered engagements between various tribes and the militia and armed private citizens of South Carolina, dragged on for a couple of years and saw hundreds of Europeans killed, as many as 7% of the European settlers, as well as a great many aboriginals. But the survival of the colony was pretty much assured when in January 1716 the Cherokee turned on their traditional Creek foes and allied themselves with the South Carolina government.

Several lessons result from this episode. First, the Indians were by no means united against the white man. They did not see these conflicts as a clash of civilizations so much as more of the tribal warfare to which they were long accustomed, with its generally inconclusive clashes, shifting alliances and, yes, treachery. The notion that before Europeans came the Americas were some kind of Eden filled with pacifist feminists to whom untruth was unknown does not survive even cursory acquaintance with the historical record. And the practice of ambushing sleeping diplomats and torturing prisoners was legitimately repellent to Europeans.

To repeat, I sympathize with indigenous peoples seeking their way of life suddenly overwhelmed. But they were not nicer to one another than Europeans were to them, nor more trustworthy, nor wiser. And had the power imbalance been reversed, their conduct in a conquered Europe would have been no more attractive and possibly a great deal less so.

We are all human, for better or worse. And we owe it to ourselves to be honest about our conduct, without prejudice based on race, creed or national origin. And if we are, we can see that the Pocotaligo massacre was a wretched piece of ill-conceived treachery not by whites against aboriginals, but the reverse. And it was not an isolated case.

Such things did happen. It’s no good denying it, or excusing it because it didn’t work very well.

Thunk. There went Edward IV. But where?

I ask because Edward won the decisive Battle of Barnet over the House of Lancaster on April 14, back in 1471, apparently ending the Wars of the Roses, securing the throne, and ushering in a second reign marked by… nothing. It was his second reign because he was also king from 1461 to 1470 when Henry VI had a brief and feeble return to the throne he had ineffectually occupied for nearly 40 years from 1422 to 1461. But the first reign was rather taken up with military affairs.

Not the second. So it’s odd. At least I find it odd. England was on the verge of dramatic changes, some very perilous. It had come out of the dramatic and largely constructive reigns of Edward I and Edward III with a surprisingly robust constitutional system, the power of Parliament dramatically confirmed when the first Lancaster, Henry IV, needed them to declare him king in 1400.

Then you had Henry V, whose reign as noted five days ago was frittered away in useless French wars before he died suddenly leaving his infant son Henry VI a throne he never convincingly filled. Henry was mentally unwell much of the time and just not up to the job. But along comes Edward IV, an outstanding military leader, a wise politician whose worst blunder seems to have been marrying for love, an effective king who restored law and order, a shrewd businessman and an effective administrator who tried to root out official corruption.

OK, so he may have had Henry VI murdered and did have his younger brother George executed for treason, supposedly by drowning in a butt of malmsey wine (see the Feb. 18 2016 entry in this series). But nobody’s perfect and if they were it wouldn’t have been George.

In short, Edward’s victory at Barnet should have set the stage for a golden age, not least because it saw the demise of the turbulent Richard Neville, 16^th Earl of Warwick, a.k.a. “Warwick the Kingmaker”, commanding the Lancaster forces.

Instead he died suddenly in 1483, we know not why, possibly of pneumonia, typhoid, poison or an unhealthy lifestyle. And with that you got the reign of Richard III, the death of the “Princes in the Tower” and the victory of the scary brutal upstart Tudors in a revival of the Wars of the Roses into which they had typically elbowed their way on a flimsy pretext.

Strange. Everything about Edward suggested he should be remembered as a near-great king. Instead even I struggle to remember him at all because his legacy basically doesn’t exist.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZTZRtRFkvk Hallelujah! It’s a great word. I don’t care if you’re religious or not. If you’re really really happy, if something truly great just happened to you, you’re likely to shout it. Or sing it. Which you can do because of Handel’s “Messiah” oratorio complete with Hallelujah chorus, first performed in Dublin on April 13, 1742.

It’s not a battle or a coronation or an assassination or that sort of thing. And those do matter: they change history, shape people’s lives and get written about in this series. But if you’d been in the Fishamble Street hall (yes, I’m afraid that was its name) on that April 13, you’d have stood staring, awestruck, transported, knowing something truly and genuinely new had come into the world to stay, something good that would give joy and satisfaction for as long as men and women had ears.

Creativity is a remarkable thing. It is very different in different people. And when it comes to music I don’t have it. Indeed, violins flee at my approach.

The closest I have ever come, and it’s not very close, is that as a writer and speaker I have sometimes turned what I thought was a good phrase, either laboriously in my study by revising, weighing, testing, deleting and rephrasing, or spontaneously at a podium or a keyboard in ways that could not be improved.

It’s a very small thing, to be sure. If I may quote Chesterton, and I’m the author so I may, he once said “I never in my life said anything merely because I thought it funny; though of course, I have had ordinary human vainglory, and may have thought it funny because I had said it.” And yes, sometimes I think my phrases apt simply because they are mine. But other times they really are. The world actually became very slightly richer, fuller, and more elevated because something sprang like Athena from my forehead.

It’s an odd feeling, in retrospect, to hear or read your own words and go yeah, that actually was a moment when something worthwhile came into existence that wasn’t there before. (I was suddenly struck on this point, the other day, listening to classic Rolling Stones, by an image of Keith Richards listening to a solo he himself performed live in concert half a century ago and thinking every note is absolutely perfect and those were my fingers on the string making it happen.) But obviously I never experienced anything remotely like what Handel must have felt suddenly hearing the Hallelujah chorus in his mind, something never before experienced, and writing it down and then the world could hear it. Again and again.

Or Beethoven with the choral finale to his last symphony. I don’t actually know whether he welded it together note by note or whether he was walking along thinking of something else and suddenly there it was in his brain, sublime, undeniable, brilliant. New. And permanent. And right.

In some sense something discovered rather than invented. Not to deny the creativity, or the hard work behind the creativity. And if Handel had been run down by an oxcart there is no reason to believe someone else would one day have written the Messiah. And yet the familiar, magnificent tune isn’t something imported into or forced on the universe. It is something liberated from the underlying flux of possibility, something at once brilliantly free and entirely logical. Something wonderful and affirmative. It’s like making a truly outstanding move in chess, a game that is relentlessly logical and yet does allow for surprising creativity. Except a lot more so, and bringing joy to a lot more people

Of course. Now just because you say “Hallelujah” doesn’t mean you or your emotional excitement are necessarily good, let alone holy. I cherish, in the sarcastic “what a piece of work is man” sense, the story of a Colorado church that split over the spelling of “hallelujah” versus “alleluia” so bitterly that one guy was nearly brained by a rock thrown through his window with a one-word note attached: “hallelujah!” I cannot imagine that God, or Handel, would be amused.

The Hallelujah chorus is another matter. Or rather, transcending of matter. A physical man, using paper and ink, writes little marks symbolizing some odd electrochemical process within his brain made of meat so others, sustained by putting bits of chopped up plant and animal in the hole under their noses (I have never been able to locate the source of this characterization but I do not believe I invented it), can go into a place with Fishamble in its name and vibrate bits of metal, wood and catgut so that something so sublime, magical, unforeseen and right emerges that we want to shout “Hallelujah!”

And it lingers. It stays with us. It can be performed again and again. It’s a daily miracle of creativity defying the claim that the universe is bleak and hostile, waiting since before time began to be born spontaneously and given to us forever on April 13 1742.

This is a bit of an odd one. For on this date, April 12, 637 AD, Edwin of Northumbria converted to Christianity.

It might not seem odd because we know, as a general fact, that the pagan Germanic inhabitants of southern and eastern England, the fearsome barbarians who had swept aside the remains of Roman Britain, were converted to Christianity. It says so in history books. But how can such a thing have happened?

I mean seriously. As I hinted in the April 8^th installment of this series, imagine you’re some monk or cleric in the warm, hospitable Mediterranean area where Christianity has been familiar for half a millennium and established for over three centuries, since Constantine I’s “In hoc signo” moment. And the pope or some such character calls you in and says you’ll never guess, we’re sending you somewhere cold, foggy, unknown and full of people who think a “blood eagle” is funny so you can tell them their religion is rubbish and a dead Jewish carpenter is God.

You respond with a grim declaration that “I am going to die. These people are definitely going to cut bits of me off to satisfy their dreadful gods.” And the pope says oh, don’t worry, the odds are pretty good you’ll drown in a shipwreck along the way or something. Ha ha ha, you reply, and then off you go. And it works.

Huh? It what?

It works. It really works. Instead of mangling you they listen respectfully, weigh the matter, agree that their religion is rubbish, burn their idols and adopt yours.

Reading the Venerable Bede on the subject today we are tempted to laugh it off as naïve propaganda. There’s Edwin of Northumbria (which if you’re trying to remember or figure out where it is, by the way, think “North” and “Humber”; there, that was easy, right, a lot easier than this business with the blood eagles and the dead Jewish carpenter) turning to his advisors and asking what they think, and his priest goes well, you know, sire, you’ve certainly been very devoted to our traditional gods and they don’t seem to have done anything for you, and other members of Edwin’s witan say yeah, that’s true, isn’t it, and then the priest says OK, I’ll burn our idols myself and they get baptised and live happily ever after at least until Edwin is killed in battle and becomes a saint which I guess was a good result for him.

Yeah, right, you say. Especially when you read Bede’s account of an unnamed councillor standing up, brushing off the muck, and saying “The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately out another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.”

Right. Like anyone in the Dark Ages could talk like that, or think like that. Except if they couldn’t, what did happen? How do you explain it? How do we get from marauders who seem to have left the carcasses of half the Celts in Britain for wolves and crows to the reign of Alfred the Great in four centuries?

Just possibly humans have been much the same everywhere and at all times. Just possibly they have had the same fears and anxieties, the same sense that life must mean more than we see in this world, the same odd combination of clinging tenaciously to the familiar and being willing to take a wild chance. And just maybe those pagans evangelized in seventh century Britain didn’t kill all the monks right on the beach precisely because the monks’ story was so bizarre, and their own religion such thin gruel, that they really did react pretty much the way Bede says they did, even coming to jeer and staying to listen.

Alternatively, it may just have been Edwin’s wife Aethelburg, who was evidently very sympathetic to Christianity. Maybe the king took a “happy wife, happy life” approach to his personal affairs and, if so, he is not so removed from us today. Or where we should be, anyway.

However you explain it, one fact remains. It’s totally absurd on the face of it. Bede’s account is absurd because what it describes is absurd.

Except it happened. It really happened. And while any theory of history that treats remarkable events as mundane is unsatisfactory, any theory of history that dismisses them even though they happened is itself a great deal more absurd than the events it waves off because it cannot explain them.

This is the anniversary of the Battle of Basque Roads on April 11 1809. A rousing chorus of hip hip huh?

Well, first of all, as you can tell by the word Roads, it was a naval battle. And the word Basque is a tipoff that it wasn’t in Spain. It was in fact off the former Huguenot stronghold of La Rochelle during the Napoleonic Wars. And Britain sort of won but not very.

The key action was a fireship attack on the French fleet. And it succeeded in driving all but two of the French ships aground. But in the next three days the British were unable to finish the French off, and they continued to operate out of the Basque Roads until the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

One British officer finished himself off. Captain Lord Cochrane, who led the fireship attack, accused commanding Admiral James Gambier of insufficient aggressive spirit. Gambier demanded and won a court-martial and his acquittal ended Cochrane’s naval career.

So what? Indeed. The battle is one of a great many such “on this day in history you fought where?” items that drives home for me George Macdonald Fraser’s observation in Quartered Safe Out Here that “the size and importance of an action is no yardstick of its personal unpleasantness.”

Fraser himself was in the British army in Burma in the final months of World War II. And while that war was clearly a key turning point in world history, the Allied victory vital to freedom and decency, and the Asian theatre a crucial one, his actions and those of his comrades there in 1945 were not that important.

It takes nothing away from their sacrifice. It takes just as much guts to go in harm’s way regardless of the importance of the action or the nature of the outcome. And ordinary soldiers and sailors don’t get a say in commanders’ decisions and aren’t accountable for them. But as Admiral Mountbatten put it in his first address to his troops on being made Supreme Commander in South East Asia: “I hear you call this the Forgotten Front. I hear you call yourselves the Forgotten Army. Well, let me tell you this is not the Forgotten Front, and you are not the Forgotten Army. In fact, nobody has even heard of you.”

Likewise showing up with scars you got at Basque Roads would have drawn blank stares even from people willing to cheer heartily for the victory over Napoleon. Of course you never know, if you put on a uniform and go into battle, whether this action will turn out to be a key victory, a crucial missed opportunity, or a minor victory, defeat or draw that helps buy time for critical actions elsewhere. But it must still be a bit annoying when someone who was at Trafalgar gets free drinks at the bar, and you’re stuck at the back talking to a hatrack.

On April 10 Big Ben was cast. Again. It happened in 1858 and it all started with a fire.

A nasty fire. In 1834 most of the ancient Palace of Westminster was leveled including the “Painted Chamber” where Edward the Confessor had supposedly died in 1066. Much history was lost, including St. Stephen’s Chapel where the Commons had met since the days of Henry VIII’s son Edward VI, though fortunately not the magnificent hammerbeam roof Edward II installed in Westminster Hall in virtually his only worthwhile act as king.

It was rebuilt in the magnificent faux Gothic form it still has, and the Commons chamber was done by 1852. (And parenthetically the stench from the Thames, then an open sewer, was so offensive to MPs when they occupied the new chamber that it helped prompt the magnificent engineering enterprise by Joseph Bazalgette during which the first parts of the famous Tube were also constructed; when it was over Bazalgette got the Order of the Bath and after digging through London’s filth I bet he needed it.) But the bell tower wasn’t ready until 1858.

So a great big bell was cast, named Big Ben for reasons that are now unclear, possibly prompted by some parliamentary crack unrecorded in Hansard. It had to wait two years to be transported to the new tower, accompanied by cheering crowds, where it was tested and um speaking of cracks, cracked.

So 16 tons of metal had to be schlepped off to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry where it was recast on April 10. The new 13.5-ton bell was hauled up the bell tower, which took 18 hours as it was over seven feet wide as well as mind-bogglingly heavy, and first rung in July 1859. Two months later it, um, cracked, possibly because some nit used a hammer more than twice the proper weight.

This time they didn’t melt it. Instead they kind of trimmed the crack and turned the bell so the hammer would hit somewhere else. So the most iconic tourist image in all Britain has rung with a slightly different tone ever since. I love it.

It reminds me of the chorus from Leonard Cohen’s Anthem:

“Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack in everything That's how the light gets in.”

Big Ben, at any rate, just wouldn’t be itself without a crack that, when it first appeared, doubtless prompted a range of highly emotional responses none of which were remotely connected with rejoicing.