History is funny . . that's why i'm so serious about it

Published on Thursday 12 February 2004 00:00

THERE is something unsettling about meeting Terry Jones. While you keep telling yourself he’ll be well-dressed and polite like the good Oxford graduate he is, there’s still a half-hope that somehow he’ll appear in true Monty Python style, with blue rinse and pink frilly apron screeching "spam, spam, spam, egg and spam".

Naturally, he doesn’t - he looks rather distinguished in a navy blazer and beige shirt - yet the whole time we’re together I secretly wait for one of his immortal characters to appear in front of me instead. All credit to his numerous "old dear" impressions, of course.

Jones, as if it needs explaining, is one sixth of the legendary Monty Python’s Flying Circus team, along with John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam and Graham Chapman. He and Palin were friends from Oxford and met the others when they were recruited as writers for The Frost Report.

They went on to create comedy history, but while his Python years saw plenty of laughs, he says the prevailing memory is that they were tough. "It was hard doing Python and it was not as successful then as it seems to have been. We had a muted reaction from the audience in our first shows - the BBC had provided an audience of old aged pensioners who thought they were coming to see a circus. There’s something about Python that people love the memory of it more than they did at the time.

"I certainly didn’t expect to still be talking about it 30 years later."

These days, 62-year-old Jones is interested in creating history of a different kind. Despite being best known for his comical send-ups of medieval peasants, damsels, minstrels, monks, kings and knights, his fascination with the Middle Ages runs deeper. He showed his early leanings towards history in two of the Python films - Life of Brian and The Holy Grail. "When we were discussing The Holy Grail I was actually doing research into the 14th century at the British Library. The first script for the movie was 50 per cent medieval, with the other 50 per cent set in modern times. I thought I’d like to get into that whole medieval world and I said, make it all medieval. I was quite surprised when the others all agreed."

His fascination has continued with a TV documentary series about the Crusades, several one-off projects and, most recently, a book on Chaucer’s Knight, published last October after two years of work.

"I got very interested in Chaucer," he says. "What Chaucer writes is really funny and witty and concise. A lot of his meaning is not in what he says, but in what he doesn’t say. I found myself getting very

interested in late-14th century military history, which is not something I thought I would be interested in at all."

His latest project is Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives, a book accompanying a BBC series of the same name currently going out on Monday nights. He feels strongly that history should be taught far more widely in schools and blames dull, pompous teaching for the public’s lack of interest. "History is full of ludicrous things. It is funny, but the way history’s taught in schools, they take out the politics, the sex, the humour and the stories and all that’s left is a list of dates and kings and battles. History should be about the stories we tell each other and how we learn about human nature.

"What fascinates me about history is not the differences as much as the similarities. You see the same people in power again and again."

To prove the point he draws a comparison between Henry IV and the current government’s woes. According to Jones, Henry produced a "dodgy dossier" in his bid to oust Richard II in 1399. "So he gets an army together and by the time Henry gets into power it’s too late to question the dodgy dossier," he laughs.

JONES is also keen to stub out the myths which linger about the Middle Ages - which he defines as lasting from 1066, the year of the Battle of Hastings, to 1536. "There’s a lot of misconceptions about the Middle Ages - most of them are deliberate misconceptions invented by the writers of the Renaissance who wanted to rubbish the centuries that had preceded them. The Renaissance was a very conservative movement. They were trying to say the only times of enlightenment were two pinnacles of ‘now’ in the 15th/16th centuries and, before that, the times of ancient Greece and Rome.

"They wanted to pretend that everything in between was a sink of ignorance and superstition. They invented the term ‘Middle Ages’ and it was their propaganda which we’ve swallowed."

The biggest misconception of the lot, he says, is our belief that medieval man thought the Earth was flat. "Roger Bacon, a friar writing in the 13th century, talks about curvature of the Earth and in the 1390s, Nicholas Oresme, the intellectual adviser to the French king, begins one of his books by saying the world was round like a ball.

"The idea that people in the Middle Ages thought the world was flat was invented by an American journalist, Washington Irving, in the 19th century. It’s one of these untruths which took hold and formed part of the modern myth about the Middle Ages but it was made up. I think people have a need to believe that people were stupid and to think that we’ve progressed."

The notion of medieval man as primitive, misogynist and puritanical, particularly in relation to sex, he says, is nonsense. While the common stereotype of Middle Age peasants is one of toothless idiots he says they were far more sophisticated, and often more liberated, than we acknowledge.

"Being a peasant after the Norman Conquest would have been a pretty rough time, but by the 14th century, peasants would probably have ben having a pretty good time," he says. "They had a lot more free time - 80 Holy Days a year, compared with nine now. I don’t think people realise how awful the Industrial Revolution has been in reducing the quality of life for people."

Most peasants, he says, were required to work just 60 days per year, as their "feudal burden" to their landowner. In return, the lord would provide two banquets every year. The rest of the time, they lived off their own pickings, working the ten or 20 acres given them.

Women also had a far better deal than prevailing historical accounts allow. "I think the 14th century was a pretty good time for women," says Jones. "There was a better relationship between the sexes. Women were in positions of power, running their own businesses.

"In the Middle Ages, women were highly sexualised - they had the right to go public about a husband’s poor performance in bed if they liked." Indeed in one 13th century court case, a woman complained her husband, William de Font, was impotent. "The court said he should be examined by 12 worthy matrons. They examined him and said that his member was ‘useless’. One even bared her breasts and with her hands warmed at the fire, fondled his member, but nothing happened." Mrs de Font was granted a divorce.

It was the Victorians, he says, who "totally desexualised women", stripping them of their rights and often persecuting them as a reaction against their power. "In the 19th century, if a woman was interested in sex, it was described as a medical condition that they needed treatment for."

Just the sort of character you could see Jones morphing into. Instead the historian-comedian-author is now busy writing more of his children’s Squire Series, which began with The Knight and the Squire, followed by The Lady and the Squire, which was shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Award. "It was beaten by that b****** Philip Pullman," he grins.

And for any Roald Dahl fans out there, a BFG screenplay is also in the pipeline. "It’s a wonderful script," he says. "I hope it’s totally sympathetic to Dahl."

But in the immediate future, he hopes his book and television series makes medieval history more accessible, more interesting and more entertaining. As long as nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

• Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives is published by BBC Books priced 18.99. The series is on BBC2 at 8pm on Mondays