Medievalism

And toothache

I recently had a conversation with a teenage lad about his strong dislike of modern technology. He’s a teenager, surrounded by 98% of his peers perpetually staring at a little screen.

He abhors smartphones, does not have any contact with social media of any kind and as a result is excluded from millions of shallow conversations that have little bearing on human progress or greater understanding of our reason to be.

So, no great loss there.

He had a copy of Plato’s republic in his back pocket, he’s fascinated by history and didn’t seem to have much of a grasp of contemporary politics. All very fine and I fully sympathised with him. I saw a few similarities between him and myself at that age, however I have to point out this young chap is ten times more intelligent than I will ever be.

But I certainly had a fascination with medieval styles and and ancient buildings, books and art. I was not alone, since the mid 17th century in Britain, the styes and art of the medieval period, running from roughly 500 to 1400 AD have been very popular.

It’s when a lot of European churches and cathedrals were built and as they make up the majority of surviving structures around now, it’s clear they have had an influence on art and architecture for many centuries.

The Victorians loved a bit of Gothic architecture, they went redbrick Gothic crazy. This was also the period that spawned the Arts and Crafts movement and the pre Raphaelites, William Morris and swirly wallpaper as well as revolutionary pre communist political treaties.

Pre-Raphaelite painting of medieval knight and willowy Princess by John Waterhouse, 1905.

That’s all well and good but I loved the long hair and dress codes of medieval knights and Princes, and I was also strongly influenced by two films that were made in the early 1970’s. The Decameron and The Canterbury Tales both written and directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini.

I knew the stories of The Canterbury Tales because we’d studied them at school, well, some of them as they are quite raunchy and agricultural, much talk of farting, fucking and fighting, so we didn’t get to read those particular stories until later.

The Decameron was all new to me, it was an Italian film based on a series of stories written in the 14th Century by Giovanni Boccaccio. I know this now, back then I just enjoyed the spectacle, the saucy and slightly slapstick sex scenes and the amazing costumes.

But, and this is now harder to imagine, I was also hugely influenced by Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit. But I’m talking about the books, not the more recent movies.

His writing, hand drawn maps and runes absolutely fascinated me and took me out of the grim, cold grey reality of early 1970’s Britain, with strikes, power cuts, damp buildings, toxic air and general, poverty stricken misery.

When I was that age, I’m talking 16 to 19 age range, where we are, in modern parlance, struggling to find an identity, I was obsessed with the medieval world. I wanted to be dressed like a medieval knight and ride through sun dappled forests on horseback, and obviously meet and fall in love with a willowy medieval princess. So perfectly realistic fantasies.

I learned to write in runes and for a few months kept a diary, entirely written in runes, in a medieval looking book I had made out of leather and sewn together sheets of paper. Sadly I cannot find this medieval tribute now, it’s been languishing in some old suitcase for many decades and I fear it may now be in landfill.

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Heartbreaking. Not that I could read it now, as you can see, runic writing is quite different to Latin text.

But at the height of my medieval romance, I could be seen striding around the ancient lanes of Oxford with a staff, a small hunting dog, green leggings, huge battered leather boots, an old woolen jacket I had crudely re-tailored to look like a medieval surcoat and a heavy, studded leather belt which, due to annoying 20th century laws, had no sword or dagger attached.

Then I got toothache.

What did medieval knights do when they got toothache?

They drank a few tankards of mead and a butcher, barber or similar would get a crudely fashioned pair of blacksmiths pliers and rip the offending tooth out of your mouth.

So I got on my trusty steed, a bicycle, and rode to the dentist on Iffley Road and he dealt with the abscess causing the pain. I then took antibiotics and rapidly recovered.

So, the buildings, the clothes, the horses, long bows, art, not the religion, that didn’t interest me, but the general old world style. Loved it.

The medicine. Not so much. And that, for me, was an early turning point. Modern technology had plenty of drawbacks, problems we have become ever increasingly aware of since the 1970’s, but my goodness, it’s got lots of advantages.

While I was flouncing around in jumble sale medieval garb in Oxford in the 1970’s, the first lithium-ion battery was invented in the physics department at Oxford University.

When I was flouncing around on stage in the 1980’s, the first personal computers were starting to become affordable for more people.

When I was flouncing around with a rubber head in Red Dwarf in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, personal computers were getting much cheaper and better, but my first Apple Mac, an SE 2/20 was still about £3,000. An insane price now for a computer with a 9 inch black and white screen.

When I was flouncing around on a Scrapheap in Los Angeles in the early 2000’s computers had become ubiquitous and a handful of engineers were developing electric drive trains, battery packaging and battery management software.

And through all this, there were massive improvements in medicine and dentistry, a greater understanding of the damage our activities were doing to our environment, we learned how to grow more food, less people were in abject poverty, the global birth rate started to drop, there were still massive problems but on the whole, things were slightly better today than they were yesterday, and tomorrow will be slightly better than today.

And that development hasa continued, the birth rate has fallen further and steeper than anyone predicted, the technology we rely on has become smaller and more energy efficient, of course things could go horribly wrong at any moment, but taken as a whole, the world is better now than it was in 2004, or 2014.

Not for everyone, not every day, but in terms of big picture, seen from space overview, things have improved.

So while I admire anyone’s rejection of modernity, and I really admire anyone who can follow historical trends and remind us that many of the issues we’re seeing now have happened before and we should learn from that, and we should be critical of things like endlessly scrolling garbage on a smartphone, I’m really glad we have the technology that is inside smartphones because it is utterly amazing.