larryhammer | Continuing International Honoring Your Influences Week (Reply)

Compulsory Preface
(This Means You)
Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader. No other history does this.
History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.
This is the only Memorable History of England, because all the History you can remember is in this book, which is the result of years of research in golf-clubs, gun-rooms, green-rooms, etc.

So begins the best history book ever, 1066 and All That. From "[t]his slim volume" (The Bookworm) you can learn all you need to know about English history.*

Or at least, all you need to misremember. Tallying things up, history consists of 114 Memorable Things, 45 Good Things, and 15 Bad Things. All of which are essentially true, even when wrong.

When Henry IV Part I came to the throne the Barons immediately flung down their gloves on the floor to prove

That Richard II was not yet dead
That Henry had murdered him.
Henry very gallantly replied to this challenge by exhibiting Richard II's head in St. Paul's Cathedral, thus proving he was innocent. Finding, however, that he was not memorable, he very patriotically abdicated in favour of Henry IV Part II.

There are, btw, a lot of lists. What strikes me, reading through now, is how dense the humor is. Most "humorous" pottings *coughBarrycoughArmourcoughLederercough* mangle one detail at a time;** Seller and Yeatman do mash-ups. Just look at the number of references in:

When Charles I had been defeated he was brought to trial by the Rump Parliament -- so-called because it had been sitting for such a long time -- and was found guilty of being defeated in a war against himself, which was, of course, a form of High Treason. He therefore ordered by Cromwell to go and have his head cut off (it was, the Roundheads pointed out, the wrong shape, anyway). So romantic was Charles, however, that this made little difference to him and it is very memorable that he walked and talked Half an hour after his Head was cut off.

This is the stuff that molds impressionable characters. For all this (and the surfeits of palfreys, living in brackets), I honor it.

* Unless you have a specialty that requires deeper, non-memorable knowledge, like Elizabethan literature, in which case you probably already worship this book.

** Okay, to be fair, Dave Barry does sometimes conflate more than two things together -- but usually only as comic climaxes. Also, The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody sometimes manages an almost Steve Miller density.

---L.