Book Review of The Bone Chests by Cat Jarman

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Using old bones and science to answer historical questions and, perhaps, ask new some ones.

(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

This book tells the story of Wessex, Mercia and then England in the five centuries or so leading up to the reign of William Rufus, through modern attempts to literally unscramble bones mixed up by an act of sacrilege another five centuries after that, in THE English Civil War. Along the way, reference is made to other English civil wars and numerous Viking raids, occupations and two actual conquests. Which by itself shows how much more complex our history is than our general understanding of our own history.

As well as showing us what science can tell us about the fairly distant past, this well written and well-researched work shows us which kinds of historical question science cannot answer: science can tell us whether a traditional account or even a contemporary record is possibly true and it can sometimes tell us when it definitely isn’t true. But that isn’t the same as knowing what really happened in any detail not evident in the long-term consequences of an historical event.

Whilst nearly all of the evidence cited here was found in Winchester, the case cited to best exemplify the limitations of forensic science as well as its power comes from the discovery of the bones of King Richard III under a car-park in Leicester. Because, even though the DNA evidence (popularly supposed to be the gold standard of forensic evidence in modern criminal cases) is actually a bit open to question, pretty well ALL the circumstantial evidence favours the bones discovered in Leicester being those of Richard III, not least the fact that the body was more or less exactly where one researcher had already predicted it might be (and the first place she looked), based on years of work with available records. The body was on its own, it had been buried with no reverence whatsoever, the deceased had suffered from the right sort of long-term skeletal health problems and had died in battle not wearing a helmet and suffering more than one potentially-lethal injury. Possibly several enemy soldiers had gone for the same man at the same moment, which suggests that either they were running out of targets, or he was the target that would end the war!

Despite all that, this work does tell us which Saxon and Norman-era legends and myths might well be actual history and gives some clues as to which might well be fabrications. What it does NOT do, is apply the same patient methodical analysis to the Civil War-era accounts of the desecration of the bone chests and Winchester Cathedral, upon which the whole narrative is hung. That’s not so much a failing as an opportunity for further study and further questions:

If you chuck bones that are between two and five centuries old at stained-glass leaded lights of any quality, do those bones retain anything like the mass and density (“ballistic coefficient”) to actually wreak anything like the destruction claimed?

If men inside the cathedral break the windows by any means whatsoever, how does the glass end up mingled with the bones, also inside the cathedral?

Parliamentary soldiers systematically and habitually desecrating OTHER cathedrals and churches hurled (and shot) much more effective projectiles than very old, almost certainly lightweight and friable human bones!

Wouldn’t a more likely scenario have been something more like the Parliamentary soldiers doing what they had some considerable practice at doing: smashing the windows and doors in from the outside in order to concentrate the broken glass in the space used by (kneeling, if non-Puritan) worshippers before coming inside to see what else needed to be smashed?

How likely is it that the bone chests were actually the LAST thing the Parliamentary soldiers set out to desecrate (definitely the hardest objects to reach, not immediately obviously important), thus explaining why their officers became impatient and called a halt before ALL the bone chests were broken up and their contents thrown around inside the cathedral to mingle with the broken glass?

Might the old and friable bones have done so little damage that soldiers simply got bored with throwing them at things which didn’t break in a spectacular way? Or had they already broken every available glass object by other means?

Using old bones to answer long-standing questions is applied science.

Real science is using the evidence (old and new) to ask new questions.

The Bone Chests, Unlocking the Secrets of the Anglo-Saxons, by Cat Jarman is published by William Collins on the 14^th of September 2023.

 

Book Review of Steel Girls at War by Michelle Rawlins

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(This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via Net Galley UK.)

A city, workplace community and families under the stress of war.

If the previous titles in this series seemed a bit rose-tinted, it’s perhaps because the opening months of WW2 actually were a bit rose-tinted. Dire pre-war predictions of massive civilian casualties hadn’t yet come to pass (and in the UK they never quite did) but the phoney war lulled many people into no longer expecting anything really bad to happen -and then, of course, it did. This book in the series covers the summer of 1940 when the really bad stuff happened and it didn’t look as if Hitler would ever be stopped in his tracks. (NB: even winning the battle of Britain didn’t immediately change this perception, no matter how it’s presented in the feature film of that campaign.)

This story is about what it was like for real people on the receiving end of both real bombing raids and the more shapeless threat of invasion and conquest that lay behind them. And it’s well told:

A woman already driven to the point of collapse with worry about the fate of her husband, missing in France, learns that he’s now in hospital in Portsmouth: one of the cities now being bombed. The psychological impact on the man in question of his frying-pan to fire experience being well described. Another woman and her daughter are coping with a husband and father still traumatised by his experiences in the first world war. Food is short, unless you have somewhere (and the time) to grow your own.

Other characters are still loving and hoping and to some extent this is what allows those in a worse situation to feel a bit of hope themselves.

The author sets out to show how destructive selfishness, even excusable selfishness, can be in high stress, high-risk situations and that, I fear, is a lesson we all need to learn, because the coping mechanisms of nineteen-forties British society have largely been suppressed and dismantled in the present day.

If, in the earlier books in this series, the levels of neighbourly love and community spirit seemed absurdly high to the modern reader, the summer of 1940 was when those “absurdly” high levels of neighbourly love proved to be just barely enough.

Steel Girls at War is published in the UK by HQ on the 31^st of August 2023