No . 131 The Trusty Servant
Mark ’ s life-long academic interest was the early-medieval economy of Europe and the British Isles , a complex of problems which by its nature requires familiarity with the latest literature on coin hoards , burial goods , general archaeology , monastic estate records , the history of the landscape , and early medieval law codes . Mark was up to date : he bought and read the latest in German , Spanish , Italian and French although he disliked reading in foreign languages ; former pupils who became academic historians routinely received requests for photocopies of early-medieval estate records from the specialised publications which only university libraries can afford .
Wykehamists were the immediate beneficiaries : coins , dry-stone walls , village density , buried bodies , the importance of nitrifying bacteria for soil health : all hooks which lodged in young minds , and the more deeply as Mark showed them to be elements in an exciting compound . A future Warden of Winchester , quizzed in his Oxford interview about the circulation in the Christian West of coins minted in the Caliphate , must have made the interviewer wish he had never asked the question , but there were also other , more profound , benefits from Mark ’ s academic mastery of such a field . Above all , his teaching up to books could fill in the hinterland left dark by the standard literature on politics , such that Bertie Wilkinson ’ s The Later Middle Ages in England ( itself a book few would expect to encounter before university ) would be accompanied by a detailed digest of Academician Kosminsky ’ s findings on the Hundred Rolls and several weeks from Mark ’ s own resources on later medieval English demography .
History was thus revealed to 15-yearolds as the multi-faceted discipline of disciplines , requiring synthetic as well as analytic intelligence and , to
the painful surprise of generation after generation of Wykehamists , a knowledge of European geography - this last tested up to books by means of indecipherable assemblages of lines hand-drawn with questionable accuracy by Mark then duplicated in practically invisible purple ink by the school ’ s malodorous Banda machine , lines to which one was expected to assign the names of all the rivers one had never heard of from Mesopotamia , to the Urals , to the Iberian peninsula .
Wykehamists were taught university skills at 15 : to take notes from serious academic literature , to discuss problems arising from that reading ; they embraced in the process the liberating truth that real history books are not above criticism even by schoolboys , provided they are sufficiently alert ; it was also salutary to discover that a venerable medievalist ’ s English could be as deficient as one ’ s own , abounding with the same mixed metaphors , dead imagery (‘ How can the beginning of the fifteenth century see anything ?’), desultory logic and stagnant witlessness . Mark , a devoted reader of the great Russian novelists and playwrights , only put up with the semi-literacy of most academics because it was regrettably they who wrote the books he needed ; he was not minded to put up with it from Wykehamists , with the result that most of us were first taught to use our own language as a tool of argument by him , the first teacher we had ever encountered who treated our writing seriously enough to correct its every infelicity and solecism , however grateful we would have been for less attention .
On the business of history itself , all were given to understand that he was not infallible ; in the early stages there was perhaps something artificial about the procedure , but as we grew in confidence it was possible , indeed normal , to enter lively debate at eye-level with him because he encouraged such an active intellectual posture . When he couldn ’ t answer a question , he would bring an answer from his capacious library the next time . When we couldn ’ t answer questions , it was permissible to ask him if those questions had to be quite so difficult : in the wash-up session after an especially gritty examination up to books a pupil asked precisely that and was treated with scrupulous seriousness by Mark , who patiently and gently brought the boy to acknowledge that it was better to be over-stretched than patronised or bored .
His infuriating and pathological intolerance of the late-comer - in effect , of anyone who entered the room after him - could poison a lesson , but few of us were magnanimous enough to acknowledge at the time his extraordinary tolerance of those who arrived reeking of what he contemptuously referred to as ‘ cheap , low-tar tobacco ’: when smoking was seen by most dons as warranting detention , a telephone call to the parents , and generally lots of noise , Mark never punished , only insisting that the culprit run around Meads before re-joining the class .
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