Fifty-eight per cent of us would rather travel to the past than the future, according to a new YouGov poll, which will, I suspect, surprise no one: better the devil you think you know than whatever fiery apocalypse awaits a few centuries hence. We also prefer the past, I think, despite the bloodshed and absence of analgesia, because we’re so relentlessly served our own history, from the medieval murk of King & Conqueror to the heaving cleavage of Bridgerton. Last week the new Downton film hit cinemas, and I also spotted that Puy du Fou, the gory and immersive French historical theme park, is getting a Cotswolds offshoot. Great news for people who enjoy their history with tiaras, oyster forks and ultra-low-stakes scandal, but also those who prefer blood spatter, decapitations and explosions.
There’s something for everyone, which is good, because we all have a favourite flavour of history. Canvassing opinion on the parts of the past that captivate people, I got votes for everything from Mesolithic times (“Before agriculture crept in and it all went wrong”) to the 1950s (“Socially incredibly important”, and more progressive than they’re given credit for). But what, if anything, does our preferred period say about us?
I live in York, a city where you can’t buy a Twix without falling over some “heritage”, and where more than 20 million Jorvik Centre visitors have enjoyed the sight (and smell) of Vikings having a poo. That made it easy to ask around about whether specific eras attract particular kinds of fans. Two sources, one professional historian and one hobbyist, who I’m collectively calling “Deep Scabbard”, were happy to divulge their incendiary opinions anonymously. Roman enthusiasts are swots, apparently, who read The Eagle of the Ninth, Rosemary Sutcliff’s tale of a young centurion’s adventures, at an impressionable age. Medievalists like a laugh, but Tudor types are “very serious … bone-shakingly scary”, “intense” and disproportionately likely to think they’re Anne Boleyn reincarnated (“it’s ALWAYS Anne”). Second world war fans are mostly men, often “harking back to the golden summer that never was”. Viking enthusiasts, meanwhile, “just want to get pissed, really: men, women and children”. I’m just passing on the experts’ views, so please don’t shoot (or decapitate) the messenger.
