I always liked that name

Ian Anderson, leader of the band Jethro Tull, speaks of his regrets over the band's name (in Billboard):

Anderson adds that recording and touring under his own name now also allows him to shed some guilt he's felt since February of 1968, when the group's booking agency gave Jethro Tull the name of an 18th century British agriculturist after several other monikers were rejected.

"If you'd asked me 20 years ago did I regret anything about my musical career, my answer then, as it is today, has always been the name of the band," Anderson admits. "I can't help but feel more and more as I get older that I'm guilty of identity theft and I ought to go to prison for it, really. It's almost as if I watched old Jethro Tull at the cash machine and leaned over his shoulder as he put his credit card into the machine to check out his PIN and filched his credit card form from his back pocket as he walked away and then fleeced his bank account. It doesn't make me feel very good. I never paid much attention in history class, so I didn't realize we'd been named after a dead guy until a couple of weeks later."

Grateful for her fine fair discount, Tess cooperates

Did Britain produce a more evocative rock album in the early 70s than Selling England by the Pound?

Today CBC radio talked to a man who wrote a book about being a shepherd in England at the moment, how his way of life is in some ways the opposite of modernity, with even the flocks he looks after being the product of hundreds of years of human and sheep cultural development. He mentioned how people who were interested in continuing that way of life as kids were seen as losers. And I Know What I Like sprang into my brain. "Have to thank Old Miss Mort for schooling a failure!"

So now of course I'm listening to the whole album on YouTube.

Margaret E Owens, Afterlives of the Royal Funeral Effigies

I don't know if I learn something every day, but when I do it's often a happy experience. Yesterday Margaret Owens of the Department of English Studies at Nipissing University delivered a seminar presentation on how the royal funeral effigies (not the permanent tomb effigies) ended up becoming a permanent part of Westminster Abbey's royal souvenir collection. It was quite an interesting papery, but for me the chief point of interest was a very simple one. I had no idea that royal effigies were made to lie on the coffin of the dead monarch during the funeral procession, that most of them were still around, and that the faces of these figures were clearly taken from death masks, and reflect the actual features of such famous people as Edward III, seen above. (This practice began with Edward II and ended with Cromwell.)

How can I, who have worked fairly extensively in late medieval England, and have visited Westminster Abbey at least twice, been completely unaware of this? Humbling, I call it.

Anyway, if you are interested, you can perhaps go here and poke around. The Abbey doesn't make it particularly easy to find these effigies. I would have a webpage that links to all of them. If there is such a page I haven't found it.

The cathedral of Middlesex

The pic is from the Daily Mail.  Here's why it is in the news (the Guardian):

An extraordinary medieval barn once dubbed "the cathedral of Middlesex" by Sir John Betjeman has been bought by English Heritage in a move to save it from decay, it is announced on Monday.

Just beyond today's sprawl of Heathrow, between the roaring M25 and M4 motorways and the straggling warehouses and industrial estates around the airport perimeter, the Great Barn at Harmondsworth has stood since 1426.

It has long been famous among building historians and admired by the poet and conservation campaigner Betjeman. Repair work is now being carried out – including to its huge roof – and it will open to the public regularly for the first time this spring.

"This is the best preserved medieval barn in England, probably in Europe, and the ninth largest ever built in England. For its size, and its state of preservation, it is unique," said Michael Dunn, an English Heritage historic buildings expert, of the 60 metres long, 12 metres wide and 11 metres high timber structure.

Justine Bayley, an archaeologist who lives in Harmondsworth village and secretary of the group that has acted as guardians for the barn, said: "If we had a pound for everyone who walks in here and says 'wow!' we could have re-roofed the building twice over. It's really the only appropriate response."

 Those of us who have owned or used barns, packed them with hay for the winter will say "60 METERS LONG!"

This great barn was owned by a church corporation, which had the stability of ownership and wealth to build such a thing.  Imagine the fertility of the area necessary to justify the investment.  Now, of course, Middlesex is pretty much indistinguishable from suburban sprawl anywhere.

Thanks to sharp-eyed Paul Halsall.

For scale, and for the fun of it, another pic from the Guardian:

Farmers on the move, 8000 BCE

This blog is called Muhlberger's Early History for a good reason: I'm often making a connection between things that happened centuries ago and things that our neighbors are doing somewhere in the world today. In the classroom I love talking about remote origins. If I were teaching ancient history now, you'd bet this would be included ( exceerpt from the UK's Daily Mail):

European farming began around 9,000 BC in the Fertile Crescent - a region extending from the eastern Mediterranean coast to the Persian Gulf and which includes modern day Iraq, Syria, Israel and southeast Turkey.

The region was the cradle of civilisation and home to the Babylonia, Sumer and Assyrian empires.

The development of farming allowed people to settle down for the first time - and to produce more food than they needed, leading to trade and the freedom to develop new skills such as metal working, building and writing.

Some archaeologists have argued that some of these early farmers travelled around the world - settling new lands and bringing farming skills with them.

But others have insisted that the skills were passed on by word of mouth, and not by mass migration.

The new study suggests the farmers routinely upped sticks and moved west when their villages became too crowded, eventually reaching Britain and Ireland.

The waves of migrants brought their new skills with them. Some settled down with local tribes and taught them how to farm, the researchers believe.

'When the expansion happened these men had a reproductive advantage because they were able to grow more food so they were more attractive to women and had more offspring,' said Prof Jobling.

'In total more than 80 per cent of European men have Y chromosomes which descend from incoming farmers.

'It seems odd to think that the majority of men in Ireland have fore fathers from the near East and that British people have forefathers from the near East.'

The findings are published in the science journal PLoS Biology.

Dr Patricia Balaresque, a co-author of the study, said: 'This means that more than 80 per cent of European Y chromosomes descend from incoming farmers.'

In contrast, other studies have shown that DNA passed down from mothers to daughters can be traced by to hunter-gatherers in Europe, she said.

'To us, this suggests a reproductive advantage for farming males over indigenous hunter-gatherer males during the switch from hunting and gathering, to farming - maybe, back then, it was just sexier to be a farmer,' she said.

I don't think anyone had a clue about this 20 years ago when I first taught Ancient Civilizations. What fun!

(And let's hear it for SE Turkey getting proper credit.)

Gobekli Tepe -- the first great human monument

I am not teaching ancient history this year but I am still very interested. It's hard to imagine anyone with a feeling for any sort of early history not being fascinated by this one.

Archaeologists working in that part of the fertile crescent which is now located in Turkey have found a huge hill which seems to be the remains of late Stone Age temple building on a grand scale at a place now called Gobekli Tepe. The great stone structures date to long before Sumer -- as one archaeologist says, there is more time between Gobekli Tepe (9000 BC) and Sumer than there is between Sumer and us -- and in fact before agriculture was invented. Somehow hunter gatherers mustered the resources to build what was not a town or settlement or fortification but simply an immense complex of stone monuments.

Smithsonian Magazine has a very good article, the best part of which for me is the speculation by the archaeologists that it was the demand for resources to build such a site that made necessary agriculture and domestication of animals. For a very long time historians have been telling students and the general public and each other that it was the invention of agriculture which made possible big projects like Gobekli Tepe; but maybe it's the other way around.

Thanks to Phil Paine and Skye Sepp for drawing my attention to this.

Image: Gobekli Tepe from Smithsonian Magazine. This is just one of a collection of amazing pictures at the Smithsonian site.

I will give a fig for it

When it is appropriate to do so, I love talking about food and the origin of various crops in my history classes -- in the past, this has generally meant world history and ancient history courses. Ancient Middle Eastern crops came out in discussing the background to early Islamic history a couple of weeks ago, and I had a fair amount to say about dates, a very important crop in Iraq at any time in its history. Soon after, I ran across this National Public Radio piece on figs as one of the earliest crops, a possibility revealed by new explorations near ancient Jericho, which rated a mention in my discussions of early towns and agriculture. I promised a link to the Islamic history class, and here it is!

Image: from NPR, showing an ancient fig (L) next to modern Iranian and Turkish figs (R).