A Tale of Two Simons: the Montforts

I’m enjoying Michael Wood’s BBC series The Story of England but found myself a bit taken aback by his rather breathless account of Simon De Montfort that ‘champion of liberty’ beloved of the peasants. Obviously, I was not there at the time and so for all I know Simon de Montfort was a great guy who a lot of miserable historians have later tried to discredit. Civic leaders in Leicester have certainly promoted him over the last one hundred and fifty years, his statue adorns the clocktower and he has a square, a street, a concert hall and a university named after him.

There were two Simon de Montforts, father and son, and both were earls of Leicester through a connection by marriage. Simon de Montfort the elder was only notionally so as he never visited England let alone Leicester. He was a crusader and general of international reputation, notorious for his brutal suppression of the Cathars during the Albigensian crusade in the South of France. The younger Simon de Montfort, unlike his father, did establish himself in England where he was destined to become a major player on the national stage. Little is known about his early life but it is likely that after his father’s death he was involved with his elder brother Amaury in the renewed crusade against the Cathars.

‘I went to England and asked my lord the King to give me my father’s inheritance’ so wrote the young Montfort. As a younger son his financial prospects were bleak. He acquired ‘the honour ’of Leicester with the permission of Henry 111 and, at first, the income he squeezed out of Leicester was absolutely essential to him but his position and income was greatly enhanced when he married the King’s sister in 1238. However, his relationship with Henry deteriorated and in 1263 to 1264 he led a group of barons in rebellion against the King. This culminated in military success for Montfort at the Battle of Lewes in 1264.

The rebellion was a reaction to alleged mismanagement of government on the part of Henry and sought to introduce a parliament that placed the sovereign under institutional control. A reforming parliament was held in 1264 and for the first time the principle of election was introduced with shires and selected boroughs to send two elected representatives. For this reason Simon de Montfort has frequently been credited as an early pioneer of the modern parliamentary system. His regime however was eroded by factionalism and soon collapsed. A royal force defeated Montfort and his followers at the Battle of Evesham in 1265 where Montfort himself was killed.

So what are the differences between Simon de Montfort the actual historical figure and the heroic Simon de Montfort created by myth and tradition? Montfort’s public cause was government reform, however, his commitment was clearly not only to the common good. He was consistently quick to advance his own interests in terms of power and he used the rebellion to significantly enrich himself and his family. Montfort’s relationship with Leicester was chiefly about the income that he derived from the estate and extorting money from local tradesmen. Notoriously, Montfort also expelled the Jews from the town Leicester demonstrating the same militant zeal that his father had shown before him.

This was not meant to be a complete hatchet job-replies are welcome from Montfort fans.

Maddicott, J.R., Simon de Montfort (Cambridge 1997).
Simmons, J., Leicester Past and Present. Volume One: Ancient Borough (Leicester 1974.).

Icons and History: Made in Dagenham

You know something must be historically significant when there’s a film made about it, right?! But what is more difficult (and especially mind blowing for historians) is to tease out whether a film produced about a historical event has anything to say about History. (For example, Braveheart had revealed a lot about Scottish tourism but not a lot about anything historians had ever written!)

As a historian of the womanly persuasion I, of course, went to see Made in Dagenham. A film set in 1968 about a group of female machinists at Ford, who went out on strike in a campaign for equal pay. I liked it, and I’ll tell you why -not as a film critic (I am an awful film critic- exemplified in the fact that I am the only person in the world who likes Sophia Copolla’s Marie Antoinette) but as someone interested in women’s participation in society and pop culture past and present.

...As an aside, the reviews I read of this film made wide use of the word “perky”. I may be a radical sceptic, but I feel this has something to do with the fact that the major roles were played by women and film critics are predominantly male. The four lead characters were generally not involved in ‘steamy’ sex scenes, and so said critics appeared to be at a loss to describe them and the film as anything other than “perky”...tells us something about the persistence of gender stereotypes in the film industry?

Anyways, despite the critics’ lacklustre reactions, I thought this film failry tactfully referenced the major points of present-day interest in the ‘sixties’ -access to grammar school education and opposition to corporal punishment in school, life on post-war housing estates, furnishing flats ‘on tick’, debates on the virtues of Biba over Mary Quant and, of course, the myriad of issues surrounding women in paid employment. Being a film, the story of ‘what happened’ during the women’s industrial action at Dagenham was not what you’d find in published histories. It did also contain some pretty shoddy representations of contemporary politicians and trade unionists, but it wasn’t a film about them.

It was a film about working women. The working conditions in the factory, the juggling of paid work with housework, the derision women faced for defying the economic dominance of ‘male breadwinner’ all came though. Perhaps one of the most valuable aspects to the film is how the women’s actions at work challenge their relationships with their husbands at home. In one particular scene, Rita’s husband challenges her continuing participation in the strike action. He argues he is a good husband, helps out with the kids, doesn’t drink or sleep around, and doesn’t beat her. Rita (the hero-leader of the striking women) replies that that’s how things should be, that not getting beaten-up shouldn’t be a privilege.

Since seeing the film I’ve been asking myself: how would this film have looked if it had been made in the ‘sixties’? Would the women have been portrayed as ‘ditzy’, would the men have ‘slapped them around’? One thing I’m certain of is that everyone would have been smoking more! Thinking of the film in this way, the telling of the Ford machinists’ story is valuable -not because it gives recognition to ‘women’s struggles’ in a long line of historic events- but because it shows how the ‘real life’ actions of the women in the 1960s was important bringing about changes in how women can be represented in popular culture today. I’m not suggesting that women are not often sexualised by numerous outlets in today’s media and pop culture, but films such as Made in Dagenham offer do offer counterpoints.

I’m convinced, this film would have looked very different in the sixties, but because of women’s increasing engagement in the workplace, politics and the pop culture since then, the Dagenham strikers can be visualised in a very different way today than the female protagonists of sixties film culture.