{"id":6187,"date":"2016-11-10T09:16:55","date_gmt":"2016-11-10T14:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6187"},"modified":"2016-11-10T09:16:55","modified_gmt":"2016-11-10T14:16:55","slug":"foundation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=6187","title":{"rendered":"****Foundation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"bayeux-tapestry\"By Peter Ackroyd, narrated by Clive Chafer – Is it anxiety about the future that\u2019s propelling me to spend much time lately thinking about the past? I\u2019ve pulled out the family genealogy to work on a new (updated and improved!) version. And I read award-winning British biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd\u2019s 2013 Foundation: The History of England from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Tudors: The History of England Book 1<\/em>. Several subsequent volumes are planned, four of which have been published..<\/p>\n

Foundation<\/em> takes you from England\u2019s earliest pre-history and the building of Stonehenge, through its occupation by the Romans, the Norman Conquest, the revolt of the barons, and up to the reign of Henry VIII. That\u2019s a lot of history to cover, and to cover it takes more than 18 hours (or almost 500 pages in the print edition).<\/p>\n

If one thing is clear from those often difficult and violent early centuries, history doesn\u2019t move forward in a straight line. It\u2019s full of contingencies. There are setbacks, and unexpected jogs in the path. Yet, the habits and customs of the English people, the rights they accumulated, their preoccupations, and, especially, the development of the common law and a vigorous language are part of the patrimony of Americans today. In that sense, this volume is well-named.<\/p>\n

Starting with William the Conqueror (1066), I already knew a bit about English monarchy (enough anyway to recite the succession of \u00a0kings and queens over the past millennium, an especially lively rendition after a g&t). What fascinated me about Ackroyd\u2019s approach is not so much the parade of often-bloody regime changes, but his parallel descriptions of the lives of everyday people. What was life actually like for those masses we don\u2019t see much of in a BBC costume drama? Makes you glad to live in the 21st century, I can tell you.<\/p>\n

Scholars have quibbled with bits of Ackroyd\u2019s research and speculations and lament the lack of footnotes, maps, and documentation\u2014a problem irrelevant in the audio version\u2014but can\u2019t fault him for readability. Foundation<\/em> isn\u2019t written for them.<\/p>\n

Chafer is a fine narrator, a little stiff, but his presentation matches well with his subject matter. This is another one of those books that I wish I\u2019d read in paper and had a physical copy to flag and refer back to. Much in it is worth rereading and remembering. In an interview with Euan Ferguson<\/a> in The Guardian<\/em>, Ackroyd said, \u201cwhat underlines that random happenstance (of history) are the deep continuities of national life that survive, uninfluenced by surface events.\u201d One can hope.
\n