Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.
A point I've made here at Skeptophilia more than once is that I don't automatically disbelieve in anyone's claim of having a paranormal or religious experience, it's just that I'm doubtful. The reason for my doubt is that having a decent background in neurobiology, I know for a fact that our brains are (in astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson's pithy phrase) "poor data-taking devices." We are swayed by our own biases -- put simply, what we expect to see or hear -- and are often overwhelmed by our own emotions, especially when they're powerful ones like fear or excitement.
What's alarming about this is that it doesn't honestly matter whether you're a skeptic or not; we're all prone to this. I heard a loud noise downstairs one evening -- it was, unfortunately, shortly after I'd been watching an episode of The X Files -- and as the Man of the House bravely volunteered to go investigate. I looked around for something with which to arm myself, and picked up a pair of fireplace tongs (prompting my wife to ask, "What're you gonna do, pinch the monster's belly fat?") By the time I actually went downstairs, I had worked myself up into a lather imagining what fearful denizens of the netherworld might have invaded our basement.
Turned out our cat had jumped up on the counter and knocked a ceramic mug onto the floor. I did not, for the record, pinch her belly fat with the tongs, although I certainly felt like she deserved it.
The thing is, we're all suggestible, and our imaginations make us prone both to seeing things that aren't there and misinterpreting the things that are there. It's why we have science; scientific tools don't get freaked out and imagine they've seen a ghost.
When I taught Critical Thinking, one of my assignments was for students to use PhotoShop (or an equivalent software) to create the best fake ghost, cryptid, or UFO photo they could. This was that year's winner. Pretty good, isn't it? [Image credit: Nathan Brewer, used with permission]
The reason this topic comes up is a pair of unrelated links I happened across within minutes of each other, that are mostly interesting in juxtaposition.
The first one is by "paranormal explorer, investigator, and researcher" Ashley Knibb. Knibb is a UK-based writer and ghost hunter who spends his time visiting sites of alleged hauntings with his team, then writing up their experiences. The one I stumbled across yesterday was about their recent investigation of Royal Gunpowder Mills, Waltham Abbey, Essex. The building, now a "Historical Site of Special Interest" maintained by the government, was (as you might guess from the name) originally an industrial complex for the manufacture of explosives. "Hundreds of lives had passed through these grounds; some of them cut short by the very materials that gave Britain its military edge," Knibb writes. "It’s no wonder the place has a reputation for being haunted... Nothing stirred, but there was an eerie sense that the building’s history had left an imprint. This was a place where weapons of war had been made, where accidents had claimed lives. Sometimes you don’t need voices; the atmosphere says enough."
The rest of the article, which is evocative and creepy, describes what Knibb and his assistants felt, saw, and heard during the night they spent in the Mills. One of them heard the name "Cooper" being spoken; another heard a faint "hello." They saw the sparkle of flashing lights that, upon arrival in the room where they seemed to originate, had no material source. More prosaic, one of their videocamera lights itself began to strobe. There were areas where the visitors experienced chills, and one of them had a profound experience of vertigo and nausea at one point. (To Knibb's credit, he recounts hearing a loud thud, which turned out to be the movement of a very-much-living staff member retrieving something from an upper room. "Ruling out," Knibb observes correctly, "is as important as ruling in.")
The second link is a paper in The Journal of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion, and is called "Sensing the Darkness: Dark Therapy, Authority, and Spiritual Experience." The gist of the paper is that there is a new trend called "Dark Therapy" where volunteers agree to spend a given amount of time in complete darkness, in search of numinous or otherwise enlightening experiences. Other senses are allowed; in fact, one of the purposes of being in the dark, proponents say, is to heighten your other sensory experiences. Some of these episodes are guided, and others not. The paper recounts the experiences of twelve participants who agreed to spend a block of time between seven and fourteen days in a well-furnished room that was completely dark.
Their responses are intriguing. The researchers (to their credit) do not weigh in on whether the experiences of the participants reflected an external truth, or were simply artifacts of the sensory deprivation and the workings of their minds. I would encourage you to read the original paper, but just to give you the flavor, here's what one person said after her stay in the dark room:
For the first time [in the dark] there was a lot of fear. Somehow like manifestation of fear that was coming, well, differently and sometimes it was like... sometimes sounds, sometimes some images, (. . .) some demonic visions (. . .) were appearing and finally I understood that this is all me, my projection, but that you have to go through it, but it was such realistic experiences, very realistic. (. . .) sometimes I heard something, or I had the feeling that somebody is there with me, and I don’t like it, I don’t like it at all.
What strikes me here is that like with ghost hunting, how much of what you experience is what you expected to experience? I don't doubt that Dark Therapy might be an interesting way to learn about your own mind, and how you cope with being deprived of one of your senses, and might even result in profound enlightenment. But there's a real danger with someone crossing over into believing that something like the "demonic visions" the volunteer experienced are manifestations of an external physical reality. We all come primed with our preconceived notions of what's out there; when in an unfamiliar situation where our emotions are ramped up, it'd be all to easy for those mental models to magnify into something that seems convincingly real.
Like I said, it's not that I'm saying I'm certain that Ashley Knibb's scary night at Royal Gunpowder Mills, or anyone else's experiences of the holy or the demonic or the supernatural, are one hundred percent imaginary. It's just that my generally skeptical outlook, and (especially) my training in neuroscience, makes me hesitant to accept personal anecdote as reality without any hard evidence. I'm convincible, but it takes more than "I saw it" (or, in the dark room, "I heard/felt it").
I might find your personal anecdote intriguing, or suggestive, or even worthy of further investigation. But to move from there into believing that some odd claim is true, I need more than that. The human mind is simply too frail, biased, and suggestible to trust without something more to back it up.
I'll end with a quote from John Adams, then a lawyer, later President of the United States: "Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."
There's a peculiar twist on confirmation bias -- which is the tendency to accept without question poor or faulty evidence in favor of a claim we already believed in -- that is just as insidious. I call it the bandwagon effect. The gist is that once a sensational or outlandish claim has been made, there'll be a veritable tsunami of people offering up their own version of "yeah, I saw it, too!", often supported by factual evidence that (to borrow a line from the inimitable Dorothy Parker) "to call it wafer-thin is a grievous insult to wafer-makers."
The best example of this I've ever seen is the "Rendlesham Forest Incident," which has sometimes been called "Britain's Roswell." It occurred in December of 1980 in a forested area between Woodbridge and Orford, Suffolk, England, and UFO aficionados are still discussing it lo unto this very day.
On 26 December 1980, U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt, working as part of an American unit stationed at the Royal Air Force Base at Woodbridge, saw lights descending into Rendlesham Forest. He took some of his men to investigate the site where it appeared to land, and upon arrival saw "a glowing orb that was metallic in appearance with colored lights" that moved through the trees as they approached it. Simultaneously, some animals on a nearby farm "went into a frenzy." One of the servicemen who was with Halt called it "a craft of unknown origin."
Police were called in at around four A.M., and they found some burned and broken tree branches, and three small indentations in approximately an equilateral triangle. They also found an increased radiation level, on the order of 0.03 milliroentgen per hour (for reference, that's a little more than the total from a typical dental x-ray, spread over an hour's time).
Halt revisited the site in the early hours of 28 December, and reported that he'd seen three point sources of light, two to the south and one to the north, that hovered about ten degrees above the horizon. The brightest of these, he said, "beamed down a stream of light from time to time."
The incident was reported in the news -- and then the bandwagon effect kicked in.
There were several reports of domestic animals acting oddly, and one witness said he heard "a sound like a woman screaming." Multiple people reported that they, too, had seen lights in the sky that night, and one person said what he'd seen "was so bright it could have been a lighthouse." The USAF and RAF people at Woodbridge had their hands full over the next few weeks trying to figure out which of these accounts were true (if, perhaps, misinterpreted) and which were made up by folks who were simply trying to get in on the fun.
In the end, there was no further evidence uncovered. So for something touted as "Britain's Roswell," we're left with... not much.
But what about Halt's testimony?
It seems likely that Halt himself was caught up on the bandwagon. He did undoubtedly see something -- probably a meteor -- and after that, each subsequent piece of "evidence" simply added to his conviction that he'd witnessed something otherworldly. The colored lights Halt and his men saw were probably the flashing warning lights of a distant police car; in fact, a U.S. security policeman working at Woodbridge, Kevin Conde, later confessed that he'd contributed his own bit to the confusion by driving through the forest in a police vehicle with modified lights. The indentations in the ground were found to be scrapes dug by rabbits. The agitated domestic animals were simply because that happens when you have a lot of frightened people running around through farm pastures at night with flashlights. The "hovering point sources of light" Halt saw when he revisited the site were almost certainly stars; the position of the brightest one he reported, in fact, corresponds to the location of Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky.
As far as the flashing light "so bright it could have been a lighthouse" -- that's because it was a lighthouse. Specifically Orfordness Lighthouse, which is only about eight kilometers away and is easily visible from any high ground in the forest.
Colonel Halt's thoroughness was commendable, but even he can be mistaken. Without exception, everything he reported on his audiotape and in his written memo has a perfectly rational and unremarkable explanation... All that remains is the tale that the men were debriefed and ordered never to mention the event, and warned that "bullets are cheap." Well, as we've seen on television, the men all talk quite freely about it, and even Colonel Halt says that to this day nobody has ever debriefed him. So this appears to be just another dramatic invention for television, perhaps from one of the men who have expanded their stories over the years. When you examine each piece of evidence separately on its own merit, you avoid the trap of pattern matching and finding correlations where none exist. The meteors had nothing to do with the lighthouse or the rabbit diggings, but when you hear all three stories told together, it's easy to conclude (as did the airmen) that the light overhead became an alien spacecraft in the forest. Always remember: Separate pieces of poor evidence don't aggregate together into a single piece of good evidence.
Which is it exactly. But unfortunately, human nature is such that once the ball starts rolling, it's hard to stop -- and there are all too many people who are eager to contribute their own little push to keep it accelerating.
As I've said many times before, no one would be happier than me if we got unequivocal evidence of intelligent extraterrestrial life, at least until one of them decides to vaporize me with their laser pistol. But unfortunately, Rendlesham just isn't doing it for me. I tend to be very much in Neil deGrasse Tyson's camp when he says that as good skeptics, we need something more than "you saw it." "Next time you're abducted," he said, "grab something from the spaceship and bring it back. Then we can talk. Because anything of extraterrestrial manufacture, that has crossed interstellar space, is gonna be interesting."
But until then, we'll just have to keep waiting. And always, guard as well as we can against the inevitable biases that all humans are prone to. Because sometimes -- unfortunately -- a lighthouse is just a lighthouse.
I went into historical linguistics because of my fascination with origins.
It's manifested in other realms of study. My primary interest in biology, a subject I taught for over three decades, is evolutionary genetics; I'm endlessly interested in the family tree of life, and its connections to species migration, adaptation, paleontology, and extinction. More personally, I've been a devoted genealogist since I was a teenager, and although my hoped-for noble lineage never showed up (my ancestry is virtually all French, Scottish, and English peasants, rogues, ne'er-do-wells, and petty criminals), I still periodically add to my database of ancestors and cousins of varying degrees, which now contains over 150,000 names.
It's why when I find a curious origin story, it just makes my little nerdy heart happy. Like when I discovered something strange about a rather terrifying legend from northern England -- the tale of Jenny Greenteeth.
Jenny Greenteeth is a story that seems to be most common in Lancashire, Cumbria, and the western parts of Yorkshire, and is about a "river hag" -- a female water spirit that specializes in grabbing people, especially children, who have strayed too close to the water, and drowning them. She shares a lot in common with the Slavic Rusalka and French Melusine, which makes me wonder why people kept dreaming up stories about strange women lying in ponds. (Certainly it's no basis for a system of government.)
Well, like just about everything, the legend of Jenny Greenteeth didn't come out of nowhere; even folk tales have their origin stories. (I've written here about the absolutely charming piece of research by anthropologist Jamshid Tehrani, wherein he developed a cladistic tree for the various versions of "Little Red Riding Hood.") And Jenny Greenteeth has a bit of a surprise in store, because her name isn't because her teeth, or anything else about her, are green.
The hint comes from the fact that in some areas of Cumbria, she's still called "Ginny Grendith" -- and the last bit has nothing to do with teeth, either. That the story evolved that way is like a folkloric version of convergent evolution; once people noticed the chance similarity between her original name and "green teeth," her last name morphed in that direction, probably because it gave her alleged appearance an extra little frisson of nastiness.
So where does "Greenteeth" come from? It turns out the name -- and its alternative form, Grendith -- are cousins to that of another creature from the English bestiary, the grindylow. Like Jenny, the grindylow was a water-dweller, a small humanoid with scaly skin, big nasty pointy teeth, and long arms ending in broad hands with grasping fingers. They, too, were said to be fond of drowning children.
It's a wonder any surviving kids in northern England who lived near water didn't become permanently phobic.
What's fascinating, though, is that the story doesn't stop there, because grindylow itself has even deeper roots. The name is thought to have evolved from yet another mythological monster, this one much more famous: Grendel.
Grendel by J. R. Skelton (1908) [Image is in the Public Domain]
Grendel, of course, was the Big Bad in the pre-Norman English epic Beowulf, who was eventually killed by the titular hero. In a translation by none other than J. R. R. Tolkien, Grendel is described as follows:
... the other, miscreated thing, in man's form trod the ways of exile, albeit he was greater than any other human thing. Him in days of old the dwellers on earth named Grendel.
Grendel was called a sceadugenga -- a "shadow walker," a creature who came out at night. He was a denizen of boundaries, not quite human and not quite beast, and frequented places that also were on the edge; the spaces between inhabited areas and the wilds, between lowlands and highlands... and between land and water. He was said to be a "swamp-dweller," living in fens, and that may have been how his later descendants, the grindylow and Jenny Greenteeth, became associated with ponds and marshes.
I've always felt sorry for Grendel. He did some bad stuff, but he was kind of just built that way. He didn't ask to be put together from spare parts. It's why I named a dog I had a while back Grendel. He was a bit funny-looking too, but he always meant well.
Maybe it's just that I always root for the underdog.
Where the name Grendel came from isn't certain. Some linguists believe it comes from gren ("grin") + dæle ("divided"), i.e. baring his teeth. Old English gryndal meant "fierce," but whether that came from the name Grendel or the other way 'round is unknown. Same thing for the Old Norse grindill, meaning "storm wind." The Beowulf story has its roots in old Germanic mythology, and there's no doubt it has ties to Scandinavia, but that one may be an accidental false cognate. Grendel could also come from the Old English grenedæl, "green lowland" -- so there might be a connection to the color green, after all.
In any case, it's an interesting, if unsettling, legend, which a curious history. I have a pond in my back yard in which I regularly swim, and thus far I haven't been grabbed by a creepy woman with green teeth. I'll keep my eye out, though. You can't be too careful about these sorts of things.
Nobel Prize-winning Hungarian biochemist Albert von Szent-Györgyi once made the pithy observation that "Discovery consists of seeing what everyone else has seen, and thinking what no one else has thought."
I think that's really what sets apart the scientists from the rest of us -- that ability to go from "wow, that's weird!" to "... and here's how I think it works." But there's another piece, too, that has unfortunately been lost over time through the sad fact of increasing specialization within the sciences.
And that's the ability to be conversant in a great many different disciplines, and the capacity for drawing connections between them.
Another accurate observation -- this one, I haven't been able to find an attestation for -- is that "Researchers these days are learning more and more about less and less, until finally they're going to know everything about nothing." One of my mentors, science educator Roger Olstad, called this "focusing on one cubic millimeter of the universe," and said that generalists make better teachers, because they can draw on information from lots of disparate fields in order to make sense of their subject for students. Fortunately for me; I'm an inveterate dabbler. I'd have been a lousy candidate for a doctoral program, because I don't seem to be able to keep my mind locked on one thing for five minutes, much less the five years or more you have to focus in order to research and write a dissertation.
What's kind of sad, though, is that it hasn't always been this way. Before the twentieth century, scientists were almost all polymaths; it behooves us all to remember that the word science itself comes from the Latin scientia, which simply means "knowledge." Consider, for example, the following advances, all made in the latter half of the seventeenth century. Do you know who was responsible for each?
Made the first accurate measurements of motion of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, allowing the astronomer Giovanni Cassini to calculate the planet's rotational period
Deduced the law of elasticity -- that for springs (or other elastic objects), the linear extension is directly proportional to the force exerted
Made the first-ever drawing of a microorganism (the fungus Mucor)
Figured out that the optimum shape for a weight-bearing dome is exactly the same as the curve of a hanging chain, only upside-down (the inverted catenary), revolutionizing architecture
Was the first to note that venous and arterial blood differ in appearance, pressure, and composition
Determined that the force of gravitation is an inverse-square law
Figured out (through microscopic analysis) that petrified wood retains the cellular structure of the living wood it came from
Studied waves in two-dimensional plates, and was the first to observe their nodal patterns (now called Chladni figures after an eighteenth-century physicist who did an extensive analysis of them)
Built the first balance-spring pocketwatch
Coined the term cell after seeing the microscopic holes in thin slices of cork, and likening them to the monks' quarters (celluli) in a monastery
Concluded, from studying lunar craters, that the Moon must have its own gravity
Was the first to analyze schlieren, the streaks caused when two transparent fluids with different indices of refraction mix (such as heat shimmer over a hot roadway, or when you stir simple syrup into water)
Speculated that there was a specific component of air that allowed for respiration in animals -- and that both respiration and combustion gradually removed whatever that component was
Developed the first clockwork drive for telescopes, allowing them to compensate for the Earth's rotation and track the movement of astronomical objects
You're probably on to me by now, and figured out that these advances in diverse fields weren't made by different people. They were all made by one man.
[Image is in the Public Domain]
His name was Robert Hooke. He was born on the Isle of Wight in 1635 to an Anglican priest and his wife, and because of frail health wasn't given much in the way of formal education. But his mechanical aptitude was evident from a really young age. He was especially fascinated with clocks, and after studying the workings of a brass pendulum clock in his father's study, he went off and built himself one out of wood.
It worked.
He got the rudiments of drawing from a short-lived apprenticeship with painter Peter Lely, but once again his health interfered; according to an 1898 biography, "the smell of the Oil Colours did not agree with his Constitution, increasing his Head-ache to which he was ever too much subject." So he went on to more generalized study, first at the Westminster School and then at the University of Oxford, from which he graduated in 1662.
Three years later, he'd accomplished so much he was appointed Curator for Life to the newly-founded Royal Society of London.
It's hard to exaggerate Hooke's contribution to Enlightenment science. He was interested in everything. And damn good at pretty much all of it. The misses he had -- not beating Newton to the Universal Law of Gravitation, for example -- were more because he stopped pursuing a line of inquiry too soon, usually because he went on to some other pressing interest.
Hooke got a reputation for being prickly -- one biographer called him "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful" -- for his determination to get credit for his many discoveries. This picture of Hooke as having a sour, grasping personality comes mainly from his conflict with two people; Christiaan Huygens (another remarkable polymath, who tangled with Hooke over who had the right to the patent for the balance-spring pocketwatch), and none other than Isaac Newton.
Newton was not a man to piss off. Not only was he brilliant in his own right, he was apparently "cantankerous, envious, and vengeful." He and Hooke started out at least on speaking terms, and exchanged some information with each other, but it very rapidly devolved into a vicious rivalry. Newton, for his part, never did acknowledge that Hooke had any role in the development of the Universal Law of Gravitation. In a 1680 letter, Newton wrote, "yet am I not beholden to [Hooke] for any light into that business but only for the diversion he gave me from my other studies to think on these things & for his dogmaticalness in writing as if he had found the motion in the Ellipses, which inclined me to try it ..."
There's an allegation -- disputed by some historians -- that when Newton was appointed president of the Royal Society at Hooke's death in 1703, Newton had all of Hooke's portraits destroyed. The one surviving painting supposedly of Hooke is almost certainly not him, but of Flemish chemist Jan Baptiste van Helmont. In fact, all we have left of Hooke's likeness for certain is an unflattering description of him from his friend John Aubrey: "He is but of midling stature, something crooked, pale-faced, and his face but little below, but his head is lardge, his eie full and popping, and not quick; a grey eie. He has a delicate head of haire, browne, and of an excellent moist curle. He is and ever was temperate and moderate in dyet."
His odd posture and appearance -- as well as his ongoing health problems -- are now thought to be due to the degenerative spine disease Scheuermann's kyphosis, which eventually led to his death at the age of 67. But what he accomplished despite his physical handicaps is somewhere beyond remarkable.
Now, imagine if Hooke's career had begun in a typical Ph.D. program where he was told, "focus on one thing only."
Don't misunderstand me; I'm grateful for experts. The current anti-expert bias in what passes for a government in my country is nothing short of idiotic. It amounts to, "I'm going to discount this person who has spent her/his entire adult life studying this topic, in favor of some crank with a website." But there's also room for the generalists -- people who aren't afraid to delve into whatever takes their fancy, and bring that breadth of experience to whatever they undertake.
People like the extraordinary polymath Robert Hooke.
I've mentioned before how much I love a good mystery, and there's a hell of a good one underneath the town of Margate, Kent, England.
It's called the "Shell Grotto." It consists of a set of steps, framed by an arch, leading down into a serpentine passageway through the chalk bedrock. Then there's a room called the "Rotunda," with a circular arched dome over walls arranged in an equilateral triangle. This leads into a winding underground tunnel about two and a half meters high by twenty-one meters long ending in a five-by-six meter rectangular space that's been nicknamed the "Altar Chamber."
The entire thing is lined by mosaics made out of seashells.
4.6 million of them.
Looking up into the Rotunda [Image is in the Public Domain]
The mosaic designs are constructed from the shells of mussels, cockles, whelks, limpets, scallops, and oysters, all relatively common in nearby bays. They feature patterns appearing to be stylized suns and stars, floral motifs, and some purely geometric or abstract designs.
The Shell Grotto was discovered when the entrance was stumbled upon in 1835, and immediately became a sensation. The West Kent Advertiser newspaper wrote the following in 1838 (which also should have taken first place in the Run-On-Sentence of the Year Contest):
Belle Vue cottage, a detached residence, has been lately been purchased by a gentleman, who, having occasion for some alterations, directed the workmen to excavate some few feet, during which operation the work was impeded a large stone, the gentleman being immediately called to the spot, directed a minute examination, which led to the discovery of an extensive grotto, completely studded with shells in curious devices, most elaborately worked up, extending an immense distance in serpentine walks, alcoves, and lanes, the whole forming one of the most curious and interesting sights that can possibly conceived, and must have been executed by torch light; we understand the proprietor intends shortly to open the whole for exhibition, at small charge for admission.
No one in the area had any memory of who had built it and why, so this opened up the floodgates for speculation. Historian Algernon Robertson Goddard, writing in 1903, listed the possibilities as follows:
a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century rich person's "folly"
a prehistoric calendar
a meeting place for "sea witches" (whoever those might be)
This last one made me snort-laugh, because there's a general rule that if there's something mysterious and you want to make it more mysterious, throw in the Templars. Umberto Eco riffed on this theme in his brilliant, labyrinthine novel Foucault's Pendulum, when he had his character Jacopo Belbo explaining to the main character (Casaubon) the difference between cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics:
A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn't know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn't concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.
Be that as it may, we still don't know who built the Shell Grotto. There are also extensive shell mosaics that were created by the Romans and the Phoenicians, but the archways in the Rotunda have impressed archaeologists as being more consistent with those used in twelfth-century Gothic cathedrals (although not nearly as large, obviously), and therefore not nearly old enough to be Roman or Phoenician in origin. It seems like the simplest thing to do would be to carbon date one of the shell fragments -- mollusk shells are largely calcium carbonate, so it should be possible -- but the site is under private ownership, and to my knowledge no one has done that yet.
So the Shell Grotto remains mysterious. It certainly represents an enormous amount of skill and dedication, whoever created it; just cutting a tunnel that long through chalk bedrock would take extensive and back-breaking labor, not to mention then hauling over four million shells there and somehow getting them to adhere to the walls in beautiful and flowing artistic patterns. It's open for visits from the public, and next time I'm in England I'd love to check it out. Just another reason to travel to a country I love -- as if I needed another one.
If there's one place and historical period I could choose to know more about, it would be England during, and immediately following, the withdrawal of the Romans in the fifth century C. E.
For one thing, this would settle once and for all the question of whether King Arthur was a real historical personage, a completely fabricated legend, or somewhere in that gray area in between. Whoever (or whatever) he was, I doubt our picture of him was anywhere near accurate:
This one, either:
Both of which are kind of a shame, for completely different reasons.
In any case, besides finding out more about the King of the Britons, I'd love to have more knowledge about what exactly was going on back then. There are very few written records from Britain following the withdrawal of Roman troops from the northern and western parts of the island by the (usurping) Emperor Magnus Maximus in 383. Things stabilized a little after Magnus was deposed and executed in 387, but Roman rule in the west was definitely crumbling. The final blow came in 410 when Roman settlers in what is now southern England -- many of whom had been born there -- pleaded for help from Rome against the "barbarian" Celts, who were not above taking advantage of the instability, and Emperor Honorius basically told them to bugger off and take care of their own problems because he had more pressing concerns, the biggest being that Rome had just been sacked by a shitload of Visigoths.
This meant that running England fell to whoever could manage to keep their head on their shoulders long enough to do so. In some places, these were the Romano-British magistrates who chose not to decamp when the powers-that-be back on the Italian peninsula left them to their own devices; in other places, Celtic or Pictish warlords. This period saw the beginning of the Saxon invasions from what is now Denmark and northern Germany, something that would historically and linguistically change the entire face of the country.
But the fact remains that we don't know much for certain. The earliest record we have of the era was written at least a century after the events it chronicles -- Gildas's De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain) -- but it contains as much hagiography and finger-wagging about pagan sinfulness as it does history. (For what it's worth, Gildas doesn't even mention King Arthur; the first time the Once and Future King appears in a written record is Nennius's Historia Brittonum, from around 900. If Arthur was real, this omission seems a little curious, to say the least.)
In any case, between the withdrawal of the Romans in 410 and the unification of England under King Æthelstan of Wessex in 927, we don't have a lot of reliable sources to go on. To be fair to the English, they had other fish to fry during those intervening centuries, what with the horrific Plague of Justinian ripping its way through Europe in the middle of the sixth century, repeated invasions by the Angles and Saxons, and then the depredations of the Vikings, starting with their destruction of the "Holy Island" of Lindisfarne in 793. Virtually the only people who could read and write back then were monks and clerics, and you have to figure that what they'd have been writing while they were being hacked to bits would have been gruesome reading anyhow. (Possibly, "Here may be found the last words of Joseph of Arimathea. He who is valiant and pure of spirit may find the Holy Grail in the Castle of Aaarrrrggh.")
The topic comes up because a new study out of the University of Cambridge that found something surprising -- at least in one region, the economy didn't tank completely when the Romans jumped ship. Pollution by heavy metals, as nasty as it can be, is a decent proxy record for the robustness of trade and industry; when things are really bad, chances are you're not going to be doing much smelting of silver, iron, and lead. The team, led by archaeologist Martin Millett, found that in sediment cores from the River Ure in Yorkshire, the levels of metal contamination stayed fairly constant throughout the period. This is evidence that the Roman settlement at Aldborough -- the Roman Isurium Brigantum -- continued to be a trading hub despite the chaos.
This, of course, doesn't tell you what was happening in other parts of the island. It could be that Aldborough just happened to hang on longer, for reasons we'll probably never know. Eventually, the plague and the repeated invasions caught up with them, too, and in the seventh and eighth centuries, there wasn't that much happening, at least not smelting-wise. The "Dark Ages" in England are "dark" not because they were necessarily any more barbaric than any other period, but because we know so little about them -- and this gives us at least a small piece of information about one town's fate after the fall of the Roman Empire.
I'm always attracted to a mystery, and there's something compelling about this period. Undoubtedly why there have been so many works of fiction that are set in pre-Norman England. It's nice to have one more bit of the puzzle, even if neither the worlds of Sexy King Arthur nor Silly King Arthur are likely to come anywhere near the reality of what life was like back then.
Have you ever heard of Mrs. Tottenham, of 54 Berners Street, Westminster, London, England?
I'm guessing probably not. At least I hadn't, until a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link about why she's memorable. Well, not her in and of herself, exactly; but what happened to the poor woman, through no fault of her own.
Mrs. Tottenham is described as a "wealthy woman of good social standing" who lived in one of the better parts of Greater London, and seems to have mostly led an ordinary life until the morning of November 27, 1810. She was awakened at five in the morning by a knock on the door. Hastily donning her dressing gown, she answered it, and was met by a chimney sweep who said he'd "been sent for." No sooner had she dismissed him, saying she'd done no such thing, than she was alarmed to see several other chimney sweeps approaching, followed in quick succession by a dozen different coal wagons, the drivers of each claiming that they'd been told to deliver coal to that address that morning.
But that was only the beginning.
At seven, the bakers started arriving. One of them carried an elaborate wedding cake. The bakers were followed by bootmakers. After that, according to The London Times, there followed "upholsterers' goods in cart-loads, pianofortes, linen, jewellery [sic] and every other description of furniture, [that] were lodged as near as possible to the door of No. 54, with anxious tradespeople and a laughing mob. With each new wave of arrivals, the crowd around the property grew, as many stayed to watch who would be the next to arrive... Police summoned to the scene arrived to find six stout men bearing an organ, surrounded by wine-porters with permits, barbers with wigs, mantua-makers with band-boxes, [and] opticians with the various articles of their trade."
As the day progressed, she was accosted by forty butchers and forty fishmongers, each bringing a delivery of their respective viands, and pastry chefs with an estimated 2,500 raspberry tarts. The police attempted to put a stop to it by blocking off both ends of the street, but people simply climbed over the barriers, saying they had their jobs to do. In the mid-afternoon the chairmen of the Bank of England and the East India Company arrived, and shortly afterward the Duke of Gloucester, the last-mentioned of which was told that he'd been summoned to the deathbed of an obscure relative.
At five in the afternoon, about fifty women showed up, saying that they'd been informed there was an opening for domestic servants. But the real pièce de resistance came at six, when an undertaker arrived bearing a coffin -- made to Mrs. Tottenham's measurements.
The hilarity -- for everyone but poor Mrs. Tottenham -- kept up until after dark, when the crowds finally dispersed, and the disappointed and pissed off merchants et al. gave up and went home.
A drawing of the Berners Street hoax by William Heath (1810) [Image is in the Public Domain]
The entire day, from a rented room across the street, there was a young man watching. His name was Theodore Edward Hook. Hook was the scion of minor nobility, and had been a brilliant (and precocious) student at Oxford University, matriculating at the age of sixteen. He was a talented writer and musician, and in fact published his first novel when he was a teenager.
He was also a wicked practical joker.
He had made a bet -- the winner received one guinea -- that he could turn any address in London into the most talked-about spot in the world. Working with two accomplices (who have never been identified, but one was alleged to be "a famous actress") he sent out between one and four thousand letters and postcards in the weeks preceding November 27. The instructions differed, of course, but most of the recipients were given a specific time to arrive. A bevy of dance instructors were told that Mrs. Tottenham was looking for lessons in the art for her daughter. Some estate salesmen were informed that she required assistance in selling some property. The two aforementioned chairmen were sent sinister notes that there had been allegations of fraud against an (unnamed) employee, and they should come to that address to hear "information that would be to their benefit."
Once Hook saw that his prank had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, he got a little scared and decided it would be prudent to absent himself from town for a while, so he spent several weeks in the countryside with friends. And sure enough, a search for the perpetrator(s) was undertaken, and significant rewards offered -- to no avail.
But it's an interesting thing about the psychology of people like Hook; they can't bear thinking that no one will ever find out how astonishingly clever they are. (There have been murder mysteries predicated on this theme, my favorite of which is the brilliantly-crafted And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie, which I first read at age twelve with the result of being hooked on mysteries for life.) Hook knew he was suspected of having had something to do with the Berners Street hoax, but no one could prove it, so all too quickly the furor died down.
Exactly what an egotist like Hook didn't want. So...
... he admitted it.
It was in his semi-autobiographical novel Gilbert Gurney, and spoken by the eponymous main character, but still, it's about as close to a confession as you can get:
[T]here's nothing like fun – what else made the effect in Berner's Street? I am the man – I did it... copy the joke, and it ceases to be one; – any fool can imitate an example once set – but for originality of thought and design, I do think that was perfect.
Gilbert Gurney wasn't published until 1836. There was no statute of limitations in England in the early nineteenth century, but after twenty-six years, the justice system didn't seem to think it was worth the trouble to go after Hook. And interestingly, there was at least one allegation that he was laying claim to something he hadn't done. Hook died in 1841 (of the effects of "dissipation"), and afterward his friend Nancy Matthews said that the prank wasn't Hook's doing, but had been perpetrated by "a young gentleman, now one of the most rigid churchmen in the kingdom."
Most people, though, think that Matthews was trying to cover up for the lousy reputation of the Dearly Departed, and that Hook really was the guilty party. Why he had targeted the unfortunate Mrs. Tottenham is unknown; some think he had a grudge against her for some reason, others that she was simply wealthy, a little uptight... and there was a room for rent across the street from where she lived.
I find it interesting to consider what would impel someone to do something like this. It's funny, yes -- I have to admit laughing several times while reading the account -- but good heavens, consider the poor merchants and tradespeople who brought thousands of items thinking they were going to make some sales, and were turned away without so much as a ha'penny. I'd have been pissed. And Hook is damn lucky he wasn't caught; he'd likely have ended up in prison, and sued for everything he had to pay all the people whose services he'd fraudulently requested.
I've been the victim of practical jokes myself -- probably everyone has -- and there are ones that were genuinely good-hearted, like the students who put a huge wooden replica of the black obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey in my classroom on the last day of school, and arranged for the principal to play the theme music over the loudspeakers as soon as I walked in the door. (I have never before or since been awake and so convinced I was dreaming.) But practical jokes often contain a streak of cruelty, or (like Berners Street) at least a touch of "I don't give a damn whom I inconvenience." "I was just joking" has been used way too many times to cover up for real harm done. (It's why in general I loathe April Fool's Day.)
Anyhow, that's the story of one of the most elaborate pranks ever staged. And I have to admit he planned the whole thing to a fare-thee-well. Mrs. Tottenham came out none the worse for wear, and apparently told the story to uproarious laughter at cocktail parties for the rest of her life. Me, though -- I'd much prefer having other stories to tell to my friends, so if any of you get any clever ideas, please don't. For one thing, my three dogs would freak right the hell out. For another, I have recently moved to an uncharted island off the coast of Mozambique, so you couldn't find me anyhow.
One of the strangest tales out of old England comes from the turbulent reign of King Stephen, which lasted from 1135 to 1154.
Stephen was the grandson of William the Conqueror; his mother, Adela of Normandy, was William's daughter. When the legitimate heir to the throne, William Adelin (son of Henry I) died in the "sinking of the White Ship" in 1120, it set up a succession crisis as Henry had no other legitimate sons. So when Henry died in 1135, Stephen seized the throne.
The problem was, Henry did have a legitimate daughter, Matilda, who basically said "Oh, hell no" (only in Norman French). And honestly, Matilda's claim to the throne was better, according to the law of primogeniture. But (1) Matilda was a woman, which back then was for some reason a serious problem, and (2) she was arrogant to the point of pissing off just about everyone she came into contact with. Personality-wise, though, Stephen was not a lot better. So they squared off against each other -- and thus began the First English Civil War.
The result was what always happens; years of back-and-forth-ing, and the ones who suffered most were the common people who just wanted to survive and put food on the table. It wasn't helped by the fact that both Stephen and Matilda seemed to excel most at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Both of them came close to winning outright more than once, then did something so catastrophically boneheaded that they blew their chance. (If you want an interesting perspective on the war against the backdrop of some entertaining fiction, Ellis Peters's charming Chronicles of Brother Cadfael are set during Stephen's reign.)
Eventually, everyone got fed up with it, including the two principals. In 1153 Stephen more or less capitulated, and agreed that if Matilda would give up her claim to the throne and cease hostilities, he'd name her son Henry (the future King Henry II) as his heir. Treaty signed. Stephen only lived another two years, Henry became king, and the Plantagenet dynasty was founded.
So it was a mess, and in fact is sometimes called "the Anarchy," which isn't far off the mark. And it was from during this chaos that we have the odd story of the "Green Children of Woolpit."
Woolpit is a town in Suffolk. Its curious name has to do with wolves, not sheep; it was originally Wulfpytt -- a pit for catching wolves. In any case, some time during the war, when things were at their worst, two children showed up in Woolpit, a boy and a girl. They spoke no English (or French either, for that matter), only a strange language no one in the area recognized, and refused all food except for raw beans, which they ate voraciously.
Also, their skin was green.
Naturally, this raised more than a few eyebrows, but they were taken in by one Sir Richard de Calne, a nobleman of Norman descent who lived near Woolpit. The boy died soon afterward, but the girl lived, was baptized with the name of Agnes, and gradually learned to speak English. She adjusted to her new life, although remained "very wanton and impudent," according to one account. When she was able, she told her caretakers that she and her brother had come from a land where the Sun never shone, and the sky was a perpetual twilight. Everything there was green, she said.
The place was known as "St. Martin's Land."
The brother and sister had been herding their father's cattle, she told them, and had heard the sound of cathedral bells coming from a cave in a hillside. Curious, they entered the cave, at first losing their way, but eventually coming out near where they were found in Woolpit.
Two contemporaneous writers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, both give accounts of the Green Children, which substantially agree. Over time the green color of Agnes's skin gradually faded until she looked more or less normal. She eventually found work as a servant, but rose in status when she married Richard Barre, a scholar and justice who worked for both Henry II and Richard I. The details of her later life are unknown.
First, it seems pretty certain that something real happened -- i.e., that it's not just a tall tale. There are too many apparently independent references to the story to discount it entirely. Needless to say, though, I'm not inclined to believe that they were aliens, or some of the Fair Folk, or any of the other fanciful quasi-explanations I've heard. It's been suggested that the green color of their skin was due to hypochromic anemia (also known as chlorosis), which can be caused by chronic iron deficiency, which would explain why the coloration went away in Agnes's skin once she had a better diet.
It's also been suggested that their lack of knowledge of English was because they were Flemish. Both Stephen and Matilda had invited in Flemish mercenaries to help them in the war, and some of these settled in England permanently. It might be that they were the children of some of these Flemish settlers.
But.
If the cause of the green coloration really was malnourishment, the condition should have been much more widespread, because as I noted earlier, during the First English Civil War just about everyone was starving. And hypochromic anemia doesn't really make you green, it makes your skin waxy, yellowish, and pale. The children's green color was striking enough to merit emphasis, which suggests strongly that it was something no one who saw the children had ever seen before. As far as their being Flemish, their guardian, Sir Richard de Calne, was a well-educated nobleman; both of the principle chroniclers, Ralph of Coggeshall and William of Newburgh, were multilingual. There is no way that if the children had been speaking Flemish, none of them would have recognized it, especially given how many Flemish soldiers and merchants were in England at the time.
Plus, if all the children had done was go through a cave in a hill and come out of the other side, they can't have been far from home. We're talking Suffolk, in flat East Anglia (Suffolk's highest elevation is only 128 meters!), not the freakin' Rocky Mountains, here. Why did both of the children think they'd been transported far away -- far enough away that they couldn't just walk back across the hill and then home? (It's possible, of course, that they had been abused and didn't want to go home. But still. Surely if all they'd done was cross a few hills, someone would have recognized them as locals.)
So the prosaic, rational explanation of the story doesn't itself hold up to scrutiny.
Likewise, claims that the story of the Green Children was a moralistic tale invented as a social commentary on "the threat posed by outsiders to the unity of the Christian community," as historian Elizabeth Freeman put it. seem as far-fetched as suggestions that they were aliens. As I said earlier, the independent accounts of the children, as well as their interactions with real historical figures, indicate that they did exist -- whoever they were, and wherever they'd come from.
So we're left with a mystery that I doubt will ever be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.
Understand that I'm not advocating for any kind of paranormal explanation; whatever did happen back in twelfth-century Suffolk, I'm sure it had a rational, scientific cause. I'm just saying we don't know what it is. Odd to think, though, that since Richard Barre and Agnes had children, very likely there are people in Suffolk (and those with ancestry there) who descend from the surviving "Green Child."
If you're one of them, consider where that drop of your blood might have come from. And let me know if you ever find yourself with a craving for raw beans.
Me, I've always wondered what the attraction is. I guess for some people the proximity to power -- and thus, obtaining some measure of power themselves -- is enough. There's usually money to be had as well. But... the risk! When allegiances shift, which they inevitably do, someone in the inner circle can find themselves on the outside mighty quick. (Sometimes all the way out, if you get my drift.) Factional jockeying and backstabbing kind of come with the territory.
The problem with selling your soul is that it usually doesn't stay bought.
Surprisingly enough, I'm not talking about Donald Trump here, although this certainly applies to him and his cadre. The topic comes up because I just finished reading the excellent Henry VIII: The King and His Court by Alison Weir. Henry VIII, especially toward the end of his life, had a lot in common with Trump -- the egotism, the touchiness, the deflection of blame for... well, for everything. Weir writes:
[H]e was given to such unpredictable and terrifying explosions of rage that those about him concluded they had to deal with "the most dangerous and cruel man in the world." On days when he was in an irritable mood, his courtiers had to keep their wits about them, for "when he came to his chamber he would look [around] angrily, and after fall to fighting." Few dared contradict him, since his egotism was such that he was unable to conceive that he might be in the wrong.
No one at court ever felt truly safe, for the King had amply demonstrated that he "never made a man but he destroyeth him again, either with displeasure or with the sword." Even his outward bonhomie could be sinister, for he often showed a smiling face to those whom he meant to destroy. Abroad, he was known as "the English Nero," and it was said that "in England, death has snatched everyone of worth away, or fear has shrunk them up."... [A] man arrested in Kent for slandering him was not exaggerating when he said, "If the King knew every man's thought, it would make his heart quake."
I find it baffling that anyone would choose to associate with someone like that. I'm not talking about his wives here; of the six of them, two were divorced and two beheaded, but back then women didn't have much choice in marriage, and if the king wanted you, well... you just sort of had to go along with it. (Of the two who were executed, it seems like Anne Boleyn was herself a bit of an arrogant power-grubber who made herself some dangerous enemies, and Katherine Howard appears to have been simply young, naïve, and boy-crazy.)
But Henry was surrounded by nobles (both of the to-the-manner-born and the up-and-coming nouveau-riche types) who were desperately elbowing each other out of the way to capture the king's approval. Even though one after the other, they ended up paying for it.
Here are a few examples:
Edward Stafford, 3rd Duke of Buckingham -- made the twin mistakes of being too close a cousin to Henry for comfort, and being outspoken in criticizing him. He was accused of plotting to kill the king and was executed.
Cardinal Thomas Wolsey -- rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, but became powerful enough that he was destined to fall. He was recalled to London to face capital charges of high treason, but (luckily?) died of natural causes on the way there.
George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford -- brother of Anne Boleyn, he was caught up in her downfall, and accused (almost certainly falsely) of having incest with her. He was beheaded.
Jane (Parker) Boleyn, Lady Rochford -- George's wife, who was a dedicated gossip of the "let's see how many people I can get in trouble" type. She probably didn't rat out her husband, as has been claimed, but had no scruples about telling tales on anyone and everyone else. She finally got caught in her own web during the downfall of Henry's fifth wife, Katherine Howard, and was five minutes behind the queen in stepping up to the executioner's block.
Thomas Cromwell -- Lord Chamberlain and Lord Privy Seal, and one of Henry's closest confidants, Cromwell is another one who grew too powerful and made enemies. He also ended up losing his head on Tower Hill. Henry later said he regretted Cromwell's death, but blamed it on being "misled by others," on the strength of whose statements he "had put to death the most faithful servant he ever had."
Sir Thomas More -- the eminent theologian and philosopher refused to accept the annulment of Henry's marriage to Katherine of Aragon, and (worse) take the Oath of Supremacy recognizing Henry as the head of the Church in England. More was beheaded, ending his life with his characteristic humor -- the story is he said to the guard, "See me safely up to the scaffold, sir -- on the voyage downwards I'll fend for myself."
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey -- a quarrelsome hothead who made the mistake of angering the powerful Seymour family, he pissed off enough people that he was accused of treason on trumped-up charges and was beheaded only nine days before the king himself died. His father, the Duke of Norfolk, was also condemned to death, but managed to escape the axe for a few more days and was pardoned after Henry shuffled off this mortal coil.
What strikes me about all this is that all these people must have known what Henry was like. How could they not? And yet one after another, they pushed further and further into court intrigue, and one after another paid for it with their lives.
Henry VIII in 1537. Is this a face you would trust? (Portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger) [Image is in the Public Domain]
It reminds me of the incident a few years ago where some people were at an inspirational weekend seminar by motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and the culmination was walking barefoot across a fire pit. Dozens of people ended up in the hospital with severely blistered feet. I (sort of) get how the first couple were injured; you're told, "Okay, if you do this right and just believe in yourself, you won't get hurt." For them, it's just a matter of having trusted the wrong person. But after the first five or six people are obviously getting their feet scorched, wouldn't you think the rest of the participants would say, "No, thank you?" Thirty people ended up injured, which led me to speculate that they'd lined up in reverse order of IQ or something.
But reading the biography of King Henry VIII makes me question that assessment. Because these noblemen (and even a few women) who were part of Henry's ongoing royal court row of dominoes weren't fools. They were arrogant, a lot of them, and power-hungry, but they were very far from stupid.
So why, after seeing what happened to some of the early victims -- men like Buckingham, Rochford, and More -- did people not say, "Nope, I'll pass on an appointment to the Privy Council. If you need me, I'll be in my manor house in a remote part of the Lakes District."
That's sure as hell what I'd have done.
But that isn't what happened. However many of the dominoes fell, there never seemed to be a shortage of people stepping up to be next. Up to the very end, the nobles were still jockeying for Henry's approval. At the time of his death the Seymours, relatives of Henry's third wife Jane, were in ascendancy, but they too didn't last long. During Henry's son Edward VI's short reign, Edward's uncles -- the brothers Edward and Thomas Seymour -- both ended up losing their heads to the executioner's axe as well.
I mean, how strong can a belief in "it won't happen to me" get?
I said I wasn't going to focus on Trump, but I have to wonder the same about his loyalists. Do they really think he has any loyalty to them? People like Michael Cohen and Anthony Scaramucci found out how quickly Trump will throw his devotees under the bus when it serves him. Trump is scarily similar in personality to Henry VIII -- not nearly as smart, but as ruthless, humorless, egotistical, and self-serving.
If I were at all inclined to be in politics, I would not want to bet my career on an association with a man who has no fealty to anyone but himself. But like King Henry, Trump seems to be surrounded by people clamoring to be part of his inner circle. (At the time of this writing, Elon Musk seems to be in a rapidly-escalating feud with Trump -- just illustrating that even erstwhile kingmakers can find themselves in royal disfavor more or less overnight.)
I guess this is just further evidence that I don't understand my fellow humans very well. Hardly the first time I've made this observation. I guess that's one thing that keeps me fascinated with history -- it leaves me saying, over and over, "People are so weird."
But more to the point, this is a beautiful illustration of Mark Twain's comment that "History doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes."
