There used to be, it is said, history books which dealt largely with kings and princes and politicians and battles and dates. You learned the stuff by heart in class - and even chanted it in unison. Must have been a very long time ago. This was the sort of history "sent up" by two Englishmen, Sellar and Yeatman, in 1066 and All That, jokey and not always successfully jokey, but it went through about four teen editions in its first year. Sample: "Edward III had very good manners. One day at a royal dance he noticed some men about court mocking a lady whose garter had come off, whereupon, to put her at her ease, he stopped the dance and made the memorable epitaph: Honi soie qui mal y pense ("Honey, your silk stocking is hanging down"), and having replaced the garter with a romantic gesture gave the ill mannered courtiers the Order of the Bath. (This was an extreme form of torture in the Middle Ages.)
Today history, as taught in schools, tells us how people lived, what their surroundings were, their diet, perhaps, their local customs, the artefacts about them. This is Tree Week and an interesting aspect of our history is being presented in the RDS in Dublin on Wednesday (tomorrow).
It is about tenant tree planting in the 18th and 19th century. So it wasn't only the landlords to whom we owe what greenery we have. Professor William Smyth of the UCC Geography Department will talk, for example, of a series of Acts of Parliament between 1721 and 1783 which provided greater incentives for leaseholding tenants to plant and eventually own (!) the trees they put down. The lecturer will indicate who these tenant planters were, examine where they planted and will go into the type of trees they favoured. There was, it seems, a great surge of such planting which lasted up to the Famine. And in that relatively short phase an enduring rural landscape of hedgerows, avenues and shelter belts was created.
All this from John McLoughlin of the Society of Irish Foresters. It's the annual Augustine Henry Memorial Lecture. In the Merrion Room, RDS. Free.