Are Intellectuals a Myth?

Twitter, love it or hate it, if used correctly it can be very educational. It has brought me into contact with people who are very knowledgeable on the subject of the Tudor age. So when the article “Is 'Tudor England' a myth?” appeared online, on the Oxford University's website, it caused a bit of flutter on Twitter.

Here is a link to the article. http://www.ox.ac.uk/media/news_stories/2012/122905.html

The article has been written by an Oxford historian, so he must be better educated than me (I have one GCSE and two NVQ's at level 2, to my name, so far). As a result, he will be much better paid, than I will ever be. Yet, despite this education and the fact that he works at “one of the leading universities in the world”, his words seem rather pointless.

The article states "Cliff Davies of Oxford University’s History Faculty and Wadham College scoured official papers, chronicles, poems, plays and pamphlets for  the ‘Tudor’ name but found it hardly used as a designation of the monarchy until the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, and even then sparingly." From a curiosity point of view, it might be interesting to do this, but it doesn't serve any real purpose, does it.

Let me illustrate. As a subject of the English monarchy, I refer to our queen as Elizabeth II, not Elizabeth Windsor. If I was to ask the man on the street who our queen is, I doubt many would say Elizabeth Windsor. Here is a link to the official website of the British monarchy. http://www.royal.gov.uk/Home.aspx Search and see if you can find the queen's surname mentioned, I can't.

While the monarchy still plays an important role, probably more important than we will ever realise, in the business of running our country, its role isn't as “absolute” as it used to be. So, if we refer to our queen as Elizabeth II, why would subjects of any of the Tudor monarchs have needed to use the Tudor name “as a designation of the monarchy”? Was there some confusion as to who the monarch was back then?

Cliff Davies further states "Periods’ are artificial constructions by historians. What makes the concept of the ‘Tudor period’ so seductive is that we believe it to have been current at the time. This was not the case.  We need to revise our concepts." He's right about this. Did stone age man think of himself as stone age man? Did Georgians think of themselves as living through the Georgian era? I doubt it. What will the time we live in now be labelled as in the future, the Windsor era? Is that how we think of it? No, we call it the modern age, but hasn't every age, been the modern age, to the people living through it?

Of course, I understand what he is trying to say. Some historians are simply not up to scratch. Good historians invest all their energy in writing or conveying a detailed and accurate image of the time period they are discussing or writing about. Bad historians are lazy and rely on the fact that simply uttering the phrase, the Tudor age, will evoke all the cliched, stereotypical and sometimes completely false ideas about the Tudor age that they cannot be bothered to research or write about. Its a time saver. But, anyone, historian or not, who is passionate about the subject of the Tudor age will look beyond the obvious and seek out the truth.

To me, this article is just the result of some supposed “intellectual” who has too much time on their hands and as a result, wastes time on over thinking an insignificant point. The simple fact of the matter is, that to the man on the street, the phrase the Tudor age simply means the time when the monarchs that bore the Tudor name sat on the throne. I know this to be true, because I asked. Phrasing it any other way, wastes about as much time as this “historian” did on his research.