Things

Some time ago, Auriol and I decided to tour Windsor Castle. The castle is fantastic, and I greatly reccomend a visit to anyone who happens to find himself in the southeast of England. Not only is it a magnificent and beautiful castle, but it is stuffed full of the most amazing collection of artefacts. It has cannons from pirate ships taken as prizes at sea, and the acoutrements of defeated eastern emperors. For those whose interests lie elsewhere, it has Queen Mary's doll house, which I'm told is quite spectacular by those so inclined, and a selection of paintings, sketches, and writings of which a number of pages from Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks are the highlight.

Despite all this, the thing in the Castle which made the biggest impression on us was a little ball of lead. They had there the actual bullet which killed Admiral Lord Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar.

Tom, a friend of ours who tends to be rather enthusiastic about military history, was nevertheless unimpressed. He put forward the view that all these artefacts are so much clutter and that what really matters from the past are the deeds and the ideas, or the creations which we still use, not the things behind glass cases.

This is a view to make the curator of any museum break down and cry. It certainly made me uncomfortable, having as I do a probably unhealthy attatchment to material items, not least my historical coin collection, and having plans to volunteer at museums in the near future. It also struck me as rather odd, since he adheres to a religion which tends to attach great meaning to physical objects, often much more meaning than they attach to the ideas.

Do these relics matter? Obviously they do to the extent that we can use them as evidence to discover things about the past. This is not disputed. The question is whether there is a purpose to keeping and displaying them for reasons other than academic study. Why museums instead of storehouses, especially when display might pose greater risk to the artefact than being locked away?

There are many possible reasons, but I would hold up one in particular as extremely important. The physical remnents of the past remind us like nothing else can of the solid reality of what came before. They confirm that history exists independent of any description of it; what happened really happened, and nothing we say or do can ever alter it. This is something which even the briefest exposure to historiographical debate can put one at risk of losing sight of. Historians are always revising and re-revising our view of the past, in the light of new or reinterpreted evidence. This is as it should be. However what must always underlay this is the absolute knowledge that the events of the past were real, and actually happened one specific way. The relics of the past keep us anchored to this notion, and serve as an all-important bulwark against the arrogant and harmful notion that 'history' is created by historians.