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Wild English Women
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Historical, literary Oxford
All-male patrons of 'The Eagle and Child' dub their favourite pub 'The Bird and Babe'. But the birds, ahem, the women, now remind them that it was they - not mere men - who frightened the pants off Roman invaders.
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CYCLING THROUGH HISTORY
If you were to ride a bike through European history, as I did recently, you would bump into very few women.
Women have had short shrift from historians in the last 4,000 years
- which is no surprise because the job of recording it has been
reserved universally and almost exclusively for males. And if you
expect gender equality to be restored soon; with your children or even
grandchildren being taught a balanced version - don't hold your breath.
As I pedalled down the Thames in Britain this Spring, then up the Loire Valley in France, these thoughts often interrupted a glorious meander.
Concern about the feminine role - or rather lack of it - was prompted by something else, however. Perhaps it was because when a bunch of exceedingly veteran, once macho-men ride for weeks without their wives or partners beside them, their eyes tend to follow all the women who cross their cycle path - analysing them in a coolly academic and aesthetic sense of course. ("Look at her!" said the youngest in the Tour de Farce, falling off his bike].
Or perhaps it was because women riders and rowers dominated the cycle paths and the River Thames where our Tour de Farce team began pedalling in the damp, vigorous weather of an early English May. There seemed to be four female riders to every solitary male cyclist threatening to collide with us on the bridle-paths, cycle paths and tow paths.
On the river - the Isis near Oxford and the Thames near Windsor - we noted women in two-, four- and eight-women boat crews bending to their oars. Coxes coaxed them in high-pitched tones or coaches of either sex, shouted instructions from the embankment. There were comparatively few male teams at practice on the water - though the boat-race season was going full-oar!
At one stage, a female runner - a woman training for the Olympics, we had to assume - passed us as we cycled up a rocky, uphill stretch. We caught up with her on our bikes only miles further on.
On another occasion, when we offered to heave a woman cyclist's bike over one of those tall concertina gates between meadows on the riverbank, she laughed, up-ended her bicycle so that it stood vertically on its back wheel, and wiggled it through without lifting it off the ground.
"You got through faster than us!" one of us said, reflecting genuine praise, not in the patronising tone Tour de Farce riders reserve for each other's feats.
"It's practice," she laughed. "I've done it hundreds of times."
Hundreds of times. . . it reminded me of Boadicea, or Boudicca as she is called in the wider media coverage she is attracting these days. All they told us in my schooldays was that she rode a chariot with knives on the wheels to chop up the Romans before they could break rank. It sounded a little unsporting. Nowadays we are reminded that she was considered a goddess, no less; equal to other Druidic goddesses, and equal of course, to kings and men of power. British students today are reminded that the ancient Celts treated all women as equals with men. The Romans simply could not grasp this. They found her more than uppity.
Dio Cassius described her as "huge of frame, terrifying of aspect. .. A great mass of bright red hair fell to her knees. . . she grasped a spear, to strike fear into all who watched her."
Boudicca and her daughters had been deliberately humiliated with flogging and ritual rape by Romans after the invaders killed her husband and ocupied his kingdom. Boudicca retaliated by taking up arms again, and sacrificing to the Goddess of Victory, those she defeated in battle. She carved up countless Romans. She took no prisoners. Yow!
Boudicca - or Boudica as author Manda Scott insists on calling her - today features in a series of popular books. The fourth appeared in England in 2006. But unfortunately they are fiction.
She wasn't the only real woman to frighten the Romans, though. Tacitus recorded that many women were seen "running through the ranks in wild disorder, their apparel funereal; their hair loose to the wind, in their hands flaming torches, and their whole appearance resembling the frantic rage of the Furies."
The Romans, Tacitus reported, stopped in their tracks, but that "true to their training", they eventually obeyed and attacked the women, killing most of them. They also destroyed the Celts sacred sites, which (according to Tacitus) contained much evidence of human sacrifice. Yow, again.
Already today's history is more interesting than the version taught in my day.
And palaeontologists have since found evidence of the existence of the 'Swanscombe Woman' close by the Thames. She is the only survivor of a lost species. She is one of the mothers-of-all-mankind who lived about 500,000 years ago - even before homo sapiens was born. Now that gives you a new perspective on history. A quarter of a million years makes the Celtic Goddess Boudicca, the two Queen Elizabeths, the Celtic Princess Diana and all known and unappreciated heroines appear like today's news.
That's what your mind does when you are cycling along the Thames. In a week or fortnight you can experience, with all your senses, the history, the historic pubs, the people, the pasture smells, the flowers and swans, the 'quiet lanes' (cars may not pass) the cycle trails and towpaths, bridlepaths and country walks - all of them to be enjoyed fully only by riding through them on a bike.
Wild French Women follow |
