G. G. Coulton - a Polemical Historian!

 It's nearly a month since my last post - the longest 'gap' yet. There are several reasons for this. First, I have been loading information about my book collection[s] onto an online database called https://www.libib.com/login and have now reached 2,681 added, before having a break. All the Victorian and earlier books in the back bedroom, about half of the books in the Study (17th-21st century History; History series such as Longmans, Oxford and Nelson; Local History and Reference; Castles and Religious Houses; and West Indies books) are on, and in the Library downstairs, I have added Constance Holme, Stanley Weyman, Daphne du Maurier, Josephine Tey, R. H. Forster, Barbara Willard, Mary Webb and others. Since the total allowed is 5,000, and I have just over 8,000 books, I have decided not to add my Puffins and Peacocks and any others of my large collection of fiction and non-fiction paperbacks; or my Oxford World's Classics, Buchan Family and John Meade Falkner collections.

Secondly, I have had to concentrate, for many hours, on preparing the next Accreditation Return (rather like Education's OFSTED) for Ashby Museum. Time I resent spending. Thirdly, I spent longer than I should have done on two books - Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the Autobiography of G. G. Coulton, an Historian mainly of medieval topics and one who I greatly admire. My last Blog, on 28th October, was on Conrad, so just a few lines on Coulton.

George Gordon Coulton was born in King's Lynn in 1858 (the same year as John Meade Falkner!) and educated at King's Lynn Grammar School, Felsted School and St. Catharine's College, Cambridge. He started teaching but then was ordained in the Church of England in 1883. Increasingly uncomfortable with the constraints of the official church and losing his sense of vocation, he took on further teaching jobs with spells abroad in Europe. He began writing articles and reviews as an independent scholar, gaining a reputation as a knowledgeable and skilled historian and controversialist/polemicist. In 1911 he gained a lecturing position at the University of Cambridge. He became a Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge in 1919 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1929. He died in March 1947.

His speciality was the Middle Ages, but he also wrote strongly opinionated articles/books on modern issues such as Pacifism - The Main Illusions of Pacifism (1916) and The Case for Compulsory Military Service (1917), being much influenced by the position in Switzerland. He was a fierce anti-Catholic (probably why I enjoy reading his works!) and engaged in embittered journalistic controversy with Hilaire Belloc, who detested him! He was convinced monasticism was an unnatural institution and he distrusted ecclesiastical potentates. His Autobiography was published in 1943 and is an interesting read.

First edition - C. U. P. 1943

He charts his life's journey through his boyhood, in particular recalling lovingly his early years in (King's) Lynn and Pentney, giving fascinating accounts of public school and university life in the latter half of the Nineteenth Century. He either kept very detailed diaries or he had amazing powers of recollection, as he inserts wonderful anecdotes about friends (and enemies!). He taught at Heidelberg, Sherborne, Sedbergh and Dulwich College, never for very long. I can't imagine he was an easy colleague! His last three Chapter titles really sum up his career: History and Controversy, An Extreme Case * and Soul's Ease. His strongly held views come across clearly: I at first entered the historical field frankly as an amateur; and academic officials had every right to receive me critically...but I feel now from inside, even more strongly than when I wandered outside its precincts, that History suffers more than any other Faculty from academic conservatism and pedantry. He published a series of 'controversial' pamphlets during his career, which were tied together in sets.  He is, perhaps, most famous for his three volume Five Centuries of Religion; Chaucer and His England; Medieval Panorama; and Ten Medieval Studies.  

        

                    Methuen first edition - 1908                      C.U.P. first edition - 1938

The Chaucer book deals not only with the poet's life but also is a far-ranging portrayal of the late fourteenth century - King and Queen, Knights and Squires, the Poor, Merry England, Priests and people. Medieval Panorama is exactly the sort of social history book I love delving into, with its chapters on the Village, Nature and Superstition, Cloister Life, the Town, Trade and Travel and so on. Coming in at 321 and 801 pages, these are big books, amply furnished with original source material. They recall similar books - A. L. Poole's Medieval England (2 vols. 1958 ed.); E. L. Cutts' Scenes & Characters of the Middle Ages (1925); J. J. Jusserand's English Wayfaring Life in the Middle Ages (1889); and G. M. Trevelyan's English Social History (1942). I know these are regarded by modern academics as old-fashioned and often misguided - but, I don't care. Narrative History of the old-fashioned sort is readable, unlike more recent tomes, festooned with graphs and charts. I come down firmly on the side (if sides there be) that History is Literature rather than Science - long live C. V. Wedgwood, A. L. Rowse, Arthur Bryant, Peter Ackroyd et. al.!

 

Coulton also published The Black Death, No. 46 in Benn's Sixpenny Library (which also included his enemy, Hilaire Belloc's, Oliver Cromwell!) and, back in 1906, a novel Friar's Lantern. Coulton called it his brief fantasia. It is a polemic, particularly against the Papacy, and I enjoyed it!

            

             Ernest Benn first edition - 1929          James Clarke first edition - 1906

* The penultimate Chapter in Coulton's Autobiography deals with the charge that for nearly thirty years, I concentrated criticism so steadily upon a Cardinal of the Roman Church as to arouse a natural suspicion , except among the few who knew me in private life, that I had some personal grudge to pay off. He further went on: My personal contact with the Cardinal was simply that of an ordinary reader (hardly!) who exercises his right of asking an author civilly for straightforward references, in the face of apparently incorrect assertions. The Cardinal was Abbot Gasquet, whose Henry VIII and the English Monasteries (1888), The Old English Bible (1897), Abbot Wallingford  (1900) and English Monastic Life (1904) so annoyed Coulton. I have a copy of the latter book, which includes a chapter on Nuns and Grace Dieu Priory, Leicestershire. Having researched the history of the priory, I can vouch for Gasquet's slapdash and totally partial writing.

Coulton's main charges came in his Ten Medieval Studies (1906; 2nd. ed. 1915; 3rd. ed. 1930):

                                              Beacon paperback edition - 1959

Gasquet, with others like Mgr. Robert Benson, was castigated with references throughout the book, but was particularly dealt with in the Appendix II: A Rough List of Misstatements and Blunders in Cardinal Gasquet's Writings (nearly 200 of them!). The Appendix runs from page 203 to page 270 in the paperback and, even if only half are proven, the mound of errors is appalling. Coulton in his Autobiography states: I shall not live to see it myself, but I am credulous enough to believe in the final victory of reason, however tardy (Truth the Daughter of Time?!), and to imagine a world in which the healthy initiative of writers, and the willing response of readers, will make cheating in History as disreputable, and therefore as rare, as cheating at cards. 

The magisterial Dom David Knowles wrote in his Cardinal Gasquet as an Historian (1956) that he was in the first place unusually inaccurate...from c.1900 Gasquet's pages crawl with errors and slips... towards the end of his life, his capacity for carelessness amounted almost to genius; and notes that he was not an intellectually humble man and he showed little insight into his own limitations of knowledge and training.  Knowles is clear: the academic victory lay certainly with Coulton.

Even the present respected Catholic Historian, Eamon Duffy, has said - Cardinal Gasquet, a great Benedictine historian, was both a bad workman and not entirely scrupulous about what he said. So you can be a churchman and a lousy historian.

G. R. Elton, the great Tudor Historian, simply wrote in the Bibliography of his England under the Tudors (1955) that Gasquet's work on Henry VIII and the Monasteries is best ignored.

So, Coulton can lie peacefully, perhaps smugly, in his grave!