Cleopatra and King John also play a part in recent northern turnings of simple historical assumptions on their heads
The Press Association news agency circulates the media every day at about 3am with brief not on famous anniversaries. Today's is headed: 323BC: Alexander the Great, King of Macedonia, died after a prolonged period of feasting.
That is how I would like to go; albeit not in the manner of King Henry I of England, whose fatal meal – as any fule kno, in Nigel Molesworth's words as told to Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle – was a surfeit of lampreys. The blood-sucking eel-like fish isn't always so disastrous for royalty. It was used in the present Queen's Coronation Pie, and Gloucester's jubilee gift to her is another one.
This outbreak of history in the Guardian Northerner is triggered by two things: a feisty lecture on women Pharoahs of Egypt at Leeds Phil & Lit, given by York university's engaging expert on the subject, Dr Joann Fletcher, and a new book on Yorkshire's history by George Peter Algar, author of The Shepherd Lord.
Dr Fletcher covered both Alexander the Great and King Henry's great-grandson King John, linking them in that engaging way which encourages you to reconsider the past. Alexander's general Ptolemy founded the final line of Pharoahs ending in Cleopatra who was the first of them to learn Egyptian instead of her native Greek. King John, a terrible villain in history as portrayed by his victorious rivals (Magna Carta etc) was the first Norman monarch to take English seriously and speak it himself. Previous royal icons of England such as Richard the Lionheart couldn't.
In the same vein of challenging ancient historical assumptions, Agar's book is written by a Yorkshireman – from Horsforth on the edge of Leeds – which makes Lancastrians its heroes. Pardon? Yes. Impressively learned footnotes to advance publicity material include this:
During the medieval period much of Yorkshire and Norther England were under the sway of the House of Lancaster; the House of York was more technically associated with southern England.
Goodness. What will the Yorkshire Society have to say about that, come the county's Day on 1 August? Is it a threat to our notorious self-esteem? Or could further promotion of the fact lead to warmer relations across the Pennines and a sense of northern unity which would challenge metropolitan power with renewed vigour. We must tell the Hannah Mitchell Foundation and campaigners for an all-party Parliamentary group of northern MPs.
Agar's book is called Dead Man's Hill, and follows the later career of the 'shepherd Lord', Henry Clifford, a Lancastrian whose life is almost wholly Yorkshire-associated, especially with Skipton and that magical place Barden Tower in Wharfedale. To end in as learned way as I began, the latter was famously also the home of Romilly, the Boy of Egremont, who died in the Strid after his loyal greyhound mistakenly tried to pull him back in mid-leap.
Inspired by William Wordsworth's poem on the event, my mother jumped the Strid in her youth, which is a source of continuing family pride. But I never have and never would, and no-one else should either. I think it's wider and more eroded than her day.
Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society runs a mind-expanding series of lectures. Details here. George Peter Agar's Dead Man's Hill (a reference to the spot of that name above Scar House reservoir in Nidderdale) is published by Austin & Macauley.
