Heads Will Roll

I’m always a bit shocked when people say they hated history in school, and don’t devour it now in their spare time. What’s the matter with you? History is awesome, and I feel like I should convert a part of this front page into telling you how awesome it is. Basically, every moment of your life has been dictated by men — some of whom are thousands of years dead — whose first response to any bad situation was to have eight year old girls gangraped in front of their fathers as a sort of object lesson. And that was the more benign option. (Braveheart didn’t get to scream “Freedom” in an Australian accent because they stuck his severed cock in his mouth. As one does…)

From my first history class in junior high (I went to a Catholic school in grade school and they didn’t teach history there — seriously), I was enthralled. Even cleaned up for the classroom, man’s inhumanity to man was appalling. Reading between the patriotic lines of fluff about George Washington, for example, you soon find yourself exploring the life of a Talented Mr. Ripley-style sociopath whose methods in wartime make the Viet Cong seem amateurish, lackadaisical, and downright gentle.

Even the boring shit — like late 19th Century diplomatic history, where everyone was trying to artificially create peace in a world full of people who really, really, really wanted to chew each other’s faces off — is full of madness. In the middle of dates and treaties and stuffy diplomats, you see the horror slowly rising like some sort of blood-laced death vomit. The decisions made, the people oppressed… The kettle slowly boils over in oh-my-god-oh-my-god fashion until, finally, everything explodes on a scale that the brain just can’t comprehend. You’re reading all the blah, blah, blah stuff, and then you’re reading about how tens of thousands of people just got gunned down in 15 minutes and nobody won this battle and everyone then spends the better part of a decade literally throwing themselves on top of bombs for no clear reason and you start whining to yourself: “Stop it…stop it! Stop it! Stop fighting! Stop this now! What are you doing? No! No! No!…”

Then it’s all over and the same motherfucking stuffy fucking fucks who started the whole thing are all “Tra-la-la, let’s do this, and this, and then this, and then that’ll solve the problem” and you throw the book against the wall and slam your head on your desk.

I’ve always had this “wiki-hole” approach to history, even before the idea of a “wiki-hole” existed. I take a date, or a person, and then sort of drop through the totally fucked up events swirling around that start point and apply it all to some sort of overall “what have we learned” (nothing!!) conclusion.

Take the Plantagenet kings of England, for example. They’re all the rage now for some reason and, since I mentioned Braveheart, let’s go to 1272 and look at Edward I. He’s Longshanks, played with delicious villainy by McGoohan in Braveheart. From him, you fall down the rabbithole of the Arthurian legend — he was cripplingly obsessed with the myth of King Arthur, and even renamed tournaments, somewhat nonsensically, to “round tables.” But, like Team Constantine and Christianity, Edward basically made up his own wild interpretation of the whole myth (and got it to stick).

There was an Author legend as early as the late 900s, but in that version — and the version originally immortalized in print in the 1100’s — Arthur was purely a Welshman fighting everyone who was not Welsh and improbably conquering as far as Greece, creating a gigantic post-Roman empire that flourished briefly until he was betrayed.

So Edward (who was soon to fucking annihilate the Welsh with extreme prejudice) decided to change things up. He loves Arthur, sees in the story a real populist folk hero thing, and figures, well, we can play on that… But he can’t be Welsh!

When you think of King Arthur, do you think of a rebel Welsh king with a global empire? Or do you think of an English king surrounded by valiant knights and wielding a magic sword? It’s the latter, and that’s all on Edward. He gives Arthur a new past — that of a Romanized (i.e. civilized) Briton fighting the savages (i.e. Saxons, Celts, Gauls, etc.). These are stand-ins for European political rivals in the Germanic Holy Roman Empire and the ever-present French threat, two groups that were slowly devouring the once extensive Anglo-Norman holdings on the continent, and, of course, the Welsh themselves, whom Edward was really quite bizarrely obsessed with exterminating entirely.

Simply saying that Arthur, the “king of the Britons,” is not Welsh doesn’t quite fly. You’ve got the established story, right? It’s like telling everyone that Cinderella was a black man from Detroit. So how do we go about this, eh?

You all know Glastonbury Tor, right? That iconic ruin on a hill in hippie-dippy Glastonbury. You’ve seen the pictures. It was once the fully functioning Glastonbury Abbey until Edward approached the monks and worked out a lucrative deal (all this is recorded by Edward’s chronicler, by the way, just in case you want a step-by-step guide on how to convince your friends and neighbors that Cinderella was actually a black man from Detroit). In exchange for a hefty payment, and a guarantee that they would get to tend to the site and cash in on the pilgrim trade, Edward had the Abbey burnt down — an “accidental fire,” if youse knows what I means, Vinnie. The monks, playing their part, then went about clearing the ruins and seeing what they could salvage and — gasp! — they find a secret tomb!

Call the press! Get the cameras in here. We’re going to open the secret tomb… And, yes, there inside, it’s the final resting place of Arthur and Guinevere. The tomb is bedecked in suspiciously 13th century splendor, and included with the two skeletons is a suspiciously 13th-century-style chronicle which, lo and behold, contains the actual true definitive history of King Arthur. The legend become reality.

Edward’s all, dude, this is the greatest English king, like, evar! And I’m just like him as you can see from these suspiciously-recently-minted coins we found with the corpses. He makes himself the new Arthur, fighting the savages, and generally just riding around for umpteen years raping and murdering everyone while beggaring the English crown. He even calls his sword Excalibur. Which was just as crazy even in 1272 as it seems now.

Fascinating guy. But way lost to history, yes? Yet this footnote of an olden times king has shaped our pop culture for the last 800 years. The King Arthur in your mind right now has barely changed from the legend Edward single-handedly crafted, purely for the purpose of subduing Wales and turning an otherwise foreign, conquering, and unforgivably violent dynasty into something vaguely acceptable to the masses.