Memento Mori

Watched a recent film on Netflix this afternoon, called The Dig, directed by Simon Stone. Set around the events of the discovery of the Sutton Hoo Saxon burial hoard in the weeks leading up to the outbreak of The Second World War, the film is actually a meditation on time, mortality and human legacy. It also highlights class prejudice and snobbery: the man who did most of the work in discovering and excavating the hoard at the behest of the (altogether benevolent and decent) landowner, the dying Edith Pretty; was a gifted working-class amateur archaeologist, Basil Brown, whose subsequent contribution was never mentioned, let alone lauded, at the time of the hoard's first public showing in London. In fact, he was not credited until much, much later; posthumously.

It kind of served as a nice backdrop to our binge-watching the first series of Robin of Sherwood (1983, starring Michael Praed), which portrays the true face of Richard the Lionheart: the much-mythologised but real King of England, who in most tellings of the myth of Robin Hood is portrayed as a benevolent and wronged monarch betrayed by his brother and his barons, where in actual fact the complete opposite was true; Richard being no better than the robber barons he left in effective charge of his Kingdom whilst he spent the majority of his time waging foreign wars and Crusades and leaving the population of the country in thrall to the power and greed of the stooges who fed his coffers with the cash to pay for his adventuring. Some things never change, I guess; humankind being capable both of extraordinary creativity and unbelievable cupidity, oftentimes simultaneously: but the lesson needs to be learned that one's legacy is out of one's control: it lies squarely in the gift of history alone.