Stonehenge: Making Space 9781474215589

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Dialogues 2: Contested Landscapes

The choice of pasts is negotiated in a shifting present Herzfeld 1991: 257

Dialogue with Ronald Hutton Ronald Hutton is Professor of History. He has written (among other things) Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991), The Rise and Fall of Merry England (1994), and The Stations of the Sun: a History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996). He is particularly interested in the relationship between ancient pagan images and the modem British imagination. I met him at a conference and he said that, although he liked Chapter 4, he was concerned with the rather repressive relationship I had sketched between the medieval Church and the commoners. I asked him to elaborate. I then discovered that he is working on contemporary paganism, and has some very interesting things to say about developments at Avebury. So I got into another dialogue with him, which comes later (p. 184). RH: The view we had of the medieval Church until the 1980s was that it was a rather repressive body that patrolled people's religion and existed on top of the cheerful semi-pagan populace who continued with a lot of the old superstitions - Green Men and whatever - on the sly and occasionally blended in with the Church practices. What we did in the 1980s was to actually go through the Visitation Records and the Parochial Records which people hadn't really used before and which have given us a rather 133

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different picture of popular Christianity in the Middle Ages. What we're finding is a flourishing popular religion which is developing so fast that the Church authorities are not so much imposing it from above as trying to run as hard as they can to catch up and to retain any sort of monitoring. This popular religion makes paganism totally irrelevant, totally unnecessary, because it reproduces in parallel pretty well all its characteristics. You have polytheism in the sense that the most active centres of devotions are the saints, not Jesus. Christianity only becomes more Christocentric at the end of the Middle Ages. And there are hundreds of saints to choose from - some of them are international, lots of them are local. And the relationship is, as in ancient paganism, totally ad hoc: if you've got a problem you choose your saint and go to him or her. What you don't have is a direct transfer from paganism - you don't find many pagan deities being turned into saints. And people choose how to use their religion according to their saint. And this is reflected in church building - by the fifteenth century the average parish church will have, cluttering up its nave, fifteen to twenty shrines built to particular saints with their own altars and often their own clergy. The parish guilds are associations of laity - often very poor laity - and they pay a penny a year, which suffices to pay a pittance to a priest who is there to worship at that particular little altar on behalf of that particular little body of thirty to forty people. BB: So how do you regard the work of the French historians - people like Le Goff and Bloch? There's a wonderful article by Le Goff about attitudes to dragons and the way in which the Church tended to see things in black and white, good and evil, whilst the ordinary people were more circumspect, they saw shades ofgrey and tended to want to propitiate the beast. 1 I was very taken with this sense of a hardening of attitudes - the Church calling the stones 'The Devil's Chair' or whatever. The way they're naming things in more oppositional ways. RH: The problem with the Le Goff picture is that it's part of a tendency amongst French intellectuals, in the 1970s in particular, to see an extraordinarily horizontal division in society with intellectuals on one side of it and the populace on the other, and the populace being 'acculturated' - the great buzz word of the seventies. British and American historians questioned this in the eighties, pointing out that when people like Le Goff talk about 'The Church' they 1. Le Goff (1980: 179).

Dialogues 2

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Tresize then made an alliance with the State government and attempted to get the whole area designated as a World Wilderness. The proposal was that the Aborigines would have the right to apply for traditional hunting and gathering and fishing - but that otherwise it was wilderness! But it didn't get through and the State government took it over and made it into a State park. Finally, the most recent twist. Nine months ago (1995), to my amazement, under the Labour government, land rights were introduced for the first time into Queensland and a claim for Laura and its rock art was lodged by the local Aborigines. The claim was challenged from Hopevale which is on the coast, about six hours drive. An Aborigine ordained Lutheran from the Mission at Hopevale had seen a confidential report that I'd written in the seventies in which I said that no one had ever tried to follow up any of the Aborigines who had been dispossessed of their land and shoved allover the place, including Hopevale, to see whether there wasn't anyone who might know something about the paintings. This bloke from Hopevale got hold of this, and lodged a counter claim against the local Laura Aborigines. So sitting over in Hopevale are people claiming to be the descendants of the painters who had been thrown out of Laura and dumped over there! The past being dragged into the present to be used by different groups, partly because money's involved, partly as a claim on place, a reiteration of identity, as resistance to something being taken from them by white people . .. all those things ... Yes, the art has gone in and out of the modern situation in at least three very different contexts - the same body of material ... How many local people are we talking about? Very few, hundred and fifty maximum - probably much less. They're very nomadic. In the wet it was probably much less. From one day to the next the number at Laura would treble. There were about twenty houses. Some of the old people, like Henry Lee Chew didn't normally live in Laura. Those people who were not Laura-based only became interested when they could see that it could bring money in. But Henry Lee Chew was adamant that they knew this art long before Tresize came through - that he'd been involved in rituals in which people would use the paintings in some way? Yes, absolutely. And that fits in with Bob Layton's work in other parts of Australia. The Aborigines - for example, a very old

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Aborigine called Bob Flinders - took him and other archaeologists and anthropologists to places and they'd reincorporate reinterpret - rock art which we know was already there a hundred years earlier. They and their ancestors had been changing it and updating it all the time. Henry Lee Chew was so specific about these individual representations. It was quite difficult to recognise some of them but he'd say, 'No, you can see it'. BB: It's a great story. .. You managed to hear the voices of people who don't often get heard; but will their versions get lost once Laura becomes a State park and there are official interpretations? PU: I think that they have been heard because of the Land Rights Claim, but otherwise they might easily not have been heard. BB: One last question: is it only men that are doing the talking? There's not been a mention of a woman at any point in the story . .. PU: Certainly in my time only the men talked about any of this. Physically the women always sat back. I've no idea whether they got incorporated into the tourism.

Dialogues 3: Another Way of Telling. Stonehenge and Avebury

Who built Thebes of the Seven Gates? In the books you will find the name of kings Did the kings haul up the lumps of rocks? Caesar beat the Gauls. Did he not have even a cook with him? Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down.Was he the only one to weep? Every page a victory, Who cooked the feast for the victors? Every ten years a great man, who paid the bill? So many reports. So many questions. from Berthold Brecht's Questions from a Worker who Reads

Chapter 6 covered a great many different issues, so the Dialogues have been divided into two sections. In Dialogues 3 the emphasis is primarily on the contemporary situation at Stonehenge (and Avebury). In Dialogues 4 the discussion circles around exhibitions and multivocality.

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As an outsider, I sense a considerable difference between the National Trust and English Heritage. Whilst both bodies have begun to change their attitude towards acquisition and to go for a much broader remit, the National Trust seems to be more prepared to consider radical changes in both style and content of management. I imagine that part of the reason is that English Heritage is a government quango, whilst the National Trust is more vulnerable to pressure from increasingly vocal and often disenchanted shareholders. It may also be that the National Trust is being pushed (rom inside by an inflUX of lower management, less Establishment-orientated, workers. Whatever the reason, the National Trust has begun to recognise that it can't just act as steward to its various properties, it has got to enter the political fray and make its voice heard over issues such as environment, transport, building and agricultural policies. This is bound, I imagine, to lead to some interesting confrontations. The National Trust has also recognised that it needs to talk with, rather than to, local communities and has published an important volume appropriately entitled Linking People and Place. 2 Its sensitive stewarding of the very difficult site ofAvebury is a case in point (pp. 186-187). Again, maybe the National Trust's more political stance has something to do with the fact that it has begun to face a right-wing back-lash over the question of its stewardship of the big houses and the landscape. With everything else up for privatisation, National Trust stewardship has, in some quarters, been construed as a form of nannying, inimical to the private and individual ethos.3 So there's been a subtle shift in allegiances and people who might have had reservations about the National Trust Stately Home/ Laura Ashley image find themselves rallying to its support as a bastion against privatisation and entrepreneurship.

EH: Aren't you being a little starry-eyed? Given your credentials, doesn't it worry you that the National Trust is the biggest private land-owner in the country? BB:

You're not wTong!4 And while it's true that the National Trust is beginning to think about organic farming (on five out of2,217 tenant

farms!), and about car transport, houses in urban centres and so on, they never, as Monbiot points out, address the ethics of ownership. Monbiot suggests that the National Trust should encourage: 2. The National Trust (1995). 3. Wright (1995). 4. 590,000 acres of land; 550 miles of coastline; 207 historic houses; 60 villages (Monbiot, TIle Guardian September 1995).

Dialogues 4: Other Places, Other Ways of Telling

A Short Dialogue with Ian Hodder I have heard Ian Hodder talk about the complexity of view-points at the tell site of