Love learning like Æthelstan

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2:22Some learning from the past will help us today to live better, happier, healthier, or more productive lives.

2:32David, welcome to the podcast. How are you? I'm very well, thanks Dave. Thank you very much for having me. No problem at all. Tell me who Athelstan was and what he did in... I'm going to give you a minute. Yeah, sure.

2:43David Woodman:So Athelstan, he was the son of Edward the Elder. He became king of the Kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons in 924. He was crowned king in 925. And in 97, he created the Kingdom of the English for the first time. So he's the founding father of a polity that we would think of as England. So a significant political figure, a man whose work still redounds today. But when I asked you whether you had any sort of life lesson, you mentioned that perhaps we could think about Afolstan's passion for learning rather than his political activities. And in fact, you said that maybe we could think about embracing a passion for learning in the manner of King Afolstan.

3:21So tell us a little bit about his approach to learning. He doesn't sound like he would be a particularly intellectual figure. He seems on the surface to be more of a military sledgehammer. So what am I missing?

3:33David Woodman:Yeah. And I think that's one of the great paradoxes, I guess, of early medieval history, really, that he absolutely was a great military figure. He was somebody who secured his position by military victories of various kinds. He had to put down various different coalitions that rose against him. But simultaneously, he was somebody who had a very keen sense of the importance of learning and sponsoring reading, also sponsoring connections, I think. That's a good way to think about Athelstan too. He was somebody who encouraged European scholars to come to his court. So people like Israel the Grammarian, who we think was a Breton scholar, who came to Athelstan's court, brought texts of various poems with him, and exchanged those texts with people who were working at the court of King Athelstan himself.

4:14David Woodman:He was somebody who was facilitating learning and really saw the importance of it. We talked a bit about the importance of Athelstan in forming England in the first place, these great political achievements that he presided over. Now, what's very interesting is that at the same time that he's presiding over these big political achievements, he's celebrating those in literary terms. So the way in which those events are commemorated is via the writing of poetry, via the writing of these very learned, very ornate contemporary royal documents known as Latin diplomas. So the two are going hand in hand.

4:46David Woodman:An early medieval king had to be successful militarily, but also had to sponsor learning and wisdom as well. So this wasn't unusual, this wasn't unique that a ruler should also be an intellectual? I guess a big example for Athelstan had been his grandfather, Alfred the Great. So Alfred the Great was beset by Viking raids, crossed almost the duration of his reign, apart from a gap in the 880s. And in that gap in the 880s and into the 890s, we think that Alfred sponsored a rejuvenation of learning. He famously looked around and saw very few people who could read or write Latin, and he wanted to correct that.

5:23David Woodman:So he sponsors a reform of education, and he brings in people from Mercia and from the European continent to rejuvenate learning and to rejuvenate also the translation of texts from Latin into Old English. So I think that's a really potent example, the one of his grandfather for Athelstan. But I think the way in which Athelstan is very different is that he's driving this forward in everyday documents. So it's not just in narrative texts where we see this ethorescence, but it's in the mundane, as we might think of them, the everyday documents of royal diplomas where he's using this learned Latin.

5:58David Woodman:It's a straightforward grant of land from Athelstan to a high-ranking secular official or to a church, and yet it's dressed up in this very ostentatious learned Latin. Why does he do this? It's a statement of his abilities as king. It's a demonstration of the high learning that's taking place at his court. How did people react to this? Were the people on the other end of these diplomas, were they like, come on, just get to the point? Or were they also embracing this learning, do you think? Well, it's a really good question. In order to understand the brilliance of these diplomas, you have to do a very close reading of them today, where you uncover the literary allusions.

6:33David Woodman:We have allusions to 7th century works by Oldham of Malmesbury, for example, embedded in these works. Now, you can imagine that your average nobleman, who was sitting at meeting of the Royal Assembly of Athelstan, these illusions probably would have been lost on that person. There's no way that they would have been able to understand them. And in fact, maybe they thought, oh no, not another long turgid Latin diploma of the Royal Scribe Athelstan A being trotted out. And in a way, that's the point, I think. They were designed to impress. They were designed to show the advances that were taking place.

7:01Was he also particularly interested in board games?

7:04David Woodman:Yes, he was. Yeah, we have a manuscript that's in Corpus Christi College in Oxford, which has as one of its folios an image of a board game laid out, and it's known as the Gospel Dice, the Alia Evangelii in Latin. And laid out on this image of a board game are different pieces. And we think that it's an allegorical text. It's an allegorical game in that it's meant to be a sort of shorthand way of accessing different readings from the Bible for a reader. But the way in which the pieces are laid out looks to be done hierarchically. And it has been argued recently This is therefore an indication of a very early interaction with the game of chess, which comes from India.

7:44David Woodman:So if we're thinking about the way in which culture travels, the far distances in which these links are being created between the English kingdom and Europe and beyond, it's a very good indication of Atalstan's quarters and melting pot of all of those different influences. A place of scholarly advances, really, of cultural advances as well. It sounds like that particular game was also a learning tool to try and understand elements of the gospel. Exactly right. Yeah, it was a shorthand way for somebody coming to a copy of the Gospels of locating different readings that they wanted to get to without having to leaf through the Gospels.

8:17Okay, so it plays back quite nicely into this passion for learning and just a different way into learning, which does build out to thinking about where we are today, because obviously there are lots of ways that people can learn and gamification is a big way these days. I'm sure it's something that perhaps you employ when you're teaching your students at Cambridge. What can we learn, do you think? If we're looking to take a lesson from Afolstan and his passion for learning, where can we go? What can we learn from that?

8:43David Woodman:Well, for me, I think in this age that we're living in, we're witnessing a revolution in terms of the way that people access information. I think large language models, things like ChatGPT, they are enabling instant access to lots and lots of details, things that are very, very useful tools that are at our fingertips. But I do think we lose something in that shorthand access to detail. It's only by engagement, close reading of a scholarly article or a primary text that you really get a sense of that text. you really understand the nuance of it. If we're only accessing that through, I guess, what are summary forms of that in LLMs, I think that we're definitely losing something.

9:22David Woodman:I think the more that that happens, there's a greater danger there of an inability to do this for ourselves in the first place. For me, a big lesson from the reign of Athelstan is that emphasis on engagement of learning, on close reading, and I guess also connections with other people, other scholars, working away, people who are interested in education in various ways. So it's a very important example, I think, from the reign of Athelstan. Do you worry that we are, as a people, sort of losing mental acuity because we have these tools now at our fingertips that help us to study? I mean, I suppose if we say that, then we kind of can go back and probably rehearse conversations about people being worried about calculators and probably abacuses and all manner of things in the past.

10:04But do you think we're in a different sort of situation now with AI?

10:07David Woodman:I think so. I mean, I can talk about my own experience of this, which is that, you know, I'm constantly on my phone, constantly looking things up to the extent that I really feel that my memory has changed, for example. That actually we live in an era of instant information, that you don't have to remember things in the same way that you can look things up. So actually all of the skills that the early medieval historians would have employed, mental images, mental maps of houses and rooms that they would picture different snippets of factual detail in to try and recall them instantly, I think those are super useful skills that we are in danger of losing.

10:39David Woodman:It's also that deep thought that a close reading and engagement with a text, you know, in the flesh rather than on a screen, for me at least, it's a different experience. And I think I think about things differently when they are written down and in a book in front of me, rather than that instant access by your phone, you know, whipping your phone out, which I do all the time, you know, when I'm walking around or on the train. Yeah. So if we're looking to channel Lafflestan, we should not take our phone out when we want to know something. We should try and trawl our memories to see if we can recollect it to keep our minds active.

11:09David Woodman:Is that a way of thinking about things? I think so. I think so. And so much so that certainly, you know, for Athelstan in the early 10th century, they so valued the importance of the written word that, you know, the manuscripts that he commissions are very beautifully decorated, for example. I mean, these weren't just texts of utility. They were texts designed to be kept. They were precious objects in their own right, very highly decorated and prized possessions, things that could be stolen. You know, they had they add physical value too. And I think that's the way in which certainly I like to think about writing and learning.

11:38I imagine, I expect, I hope that someone like you does find the time to sort of step away from the phone and have these moments of concentration when you can really get your head into a manuscript and look at it closely. Do you still do that or are you constantly distracted by thinking? Oh, very much so.

11:55David Woodman:No, no, I'm very much engaged with, I mean, the best bit I think about what I do is looking at the manuscripts themselves, going to the British Library and looking at a charter of Athelstan, for example, or whatever it may be. You get so much more from looking at the real thing. I mean, libraries across the world have done phenomenal things. And again, this has been a revolution in the last few years about projects of digitisation, making manuscripts in their collections freely available. And it's extraordinary that you can sit at your desk, anybody can sit at the desk and look up precious manuscripts that Athelstan commissioned, look up these things and look at them for yourselves directly.

12:29David Woodman:But I still feel that you lose something by that, looking at it through the screen. For me, it's only when you go to the manuscript in the library in question, look at it, you're able to turn its vellum pages, you're able to see things that are lost in the digitisation of them, that brings the story of that manuscript to life. How is it used by its readers? How do people access it? What are the kind of notes they're making? What's the kind of binding that's used? How was it put together in the first place? These are fundamental questions if we're trying to understand the history of books, the way that they were accessed by those in the 10th century and afterwards.

13:02What do you think Athelstan would think of the world today? Would he be shocked that we had all these tools at our fingertips?

13:09David Woodman:Yeah, I think, and again, I think the way to, you know, Athelstan probably would have wanted to harness them. And I think they need to be complementary to one another. You know, we need to maintain that close reading, that close understanding, but we also need to use tools like ChatGBT to advance our knowledge in various ways. You can get so much more done, I guess with these LLMs, the way in which they can access data, trawl through data much faster than us, that's a huge advantage. So I think if they're using complementary terms, that's very important. But we need not to forget the core skills that we have in the first place.

13:39David Woodman:So that close reading and things like translating to the ability to read these texts in their original Latin, their original Old English, whatever the language may be, it's very, very important that we still have access to the original so that we understand that any given word might have multiple, might be capable of multiple different meanings and multiple different interpretations so that we're not reliant on a translation or something that's come to us via an alarm. Okay, to finish up, and this may lean on the passion for learning, maybe something else, or you may not do this at all. But I wonder, in your day-to-day life, when you're going out getting a coffee or going shopping, do you ever sort of think about your knowledge of the past?

14:15Is there anything that ever sort of informs the way you do things? Any life hacks that kind of draw on what you know about Athelstan, the 10th century or the early medieval period generally?

14:27David Woodman:Yes, I think is the answer to that. I very often remember to try to switch off my phone, or at least not to look at it as much in day-to-day life and try to remember things in their own right. And in fact, try to read physical books, physical papers, physical journals. For me, that's very, very important. And it's that memory of Athelstan and his court where they were hard at work and reading texts, exchanging ideas, that comes to my mind quite frequently. That was Professor David Woodman from Cambridge University. You can hear more from him on Atholstan on the main channel of the History Extra podcast.

14:58And of course, his book, The First King of England, Atholstan and the Birth of a Kingdom, is a cracking read as well. Thanks for listening.

15:21started at akamai.com.gpu.