Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War

The present paper examines the origin and socio-historical context of the Angels of Mons, a belief-legend that was a source of inspiration for British civilians and troops serving on the Western Front during the war of 1914-8. I trace the source of the legend to a fictional story that was in itself inspired by traditions of supernatural intervention in battle that were of great antiquity. During 1915 two versions, one based upon fiction and the other created from the cauldron of rumour and popular belief, became combined and transformed during oral transmission into a belief-legend that continues to survive in English folklore. My conclusion is that the Angel of Mons can only be interpreted within the context of what Fussell describes as a world of reinvigorated myth that appeared in the midst of a war characterised by industrialism and materialism (Fussell 1975, 115).     

“The Gudeman of Ballangeich”: rambles in the afterlife of James V

This article concerns a corpus of legends in which James V of Scotland disguised himself as the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” in order to enjoy amorous adventures. The traditions may or may not be contemporary, and equally there is no certainty about whether they reflect actual behaviour (although kings in general, including the Stuart kings, have been known to disguise themselves for a variety of reasons, including pleasure). However, in later centuries, allusions to the “Gudeman of Ballangeich” were used by Scots to refer surreptitiously to a Scots king, by Jacobites to refer to a Stuart king, and members of The Beggar's Benison, an eighteenth‐century libertine club, used tales of James V to evoke memories of a better, pre‐Union, pre‐Calvinist Scotland of cultural creativity and sexual liberty. The legends of James V helped maintain the positive, popular image of this monarch as the “poor man's king” in the face of less kind judgements from contemporary elites and subsequent generations of historians.     

Aspects of weathering of rhyolite and typological and technological considerations of this material based on the results of refitting

Some aspects of a refitting analysis of Stone Age material from western Norway are presented. Examples of post‐depositional weathering of stone artefacts, and the refitting of cores traditionally interpreted to be from different chronological periods into one block are described. The implications of the latter are explored in relation to the use of typology and with regard to the application of models of lithic technology.     

Notes & News

Abstract

This paper examines the British Museum unpublished records related to an Early Bronze (EB) Age pithos burial uncovered a century ago in the Inner Town at Carchemish. The grave, cursorily cited and variously dated (Chalcolithic, EB or even LBA) in the final reports, was described in some detail by Hogarth and Thompson; a precise dating is, however, possible today thanks to the information of paramount importance given by T. E. Lawrence who identified and took a picture of the associated finds, which was recently rediscovered in the Carchemish Archives. The pithos can be now ascribed to the third quarter of the third millennium BC and helps to confirm the recent theory according to which the Inner Town of Carchemish, with its massive earthen rampart, had already developed at the time of the second urbanisation in Syria and upper Mesopotamia.     

Servicing Customers in Revolutionary Times: The Experience of the Collectivized Barcelona Water Company during the Spanish Civil War

Debates on the total or partial privatization of water usually follow the rationale that efficient and rational management is best left to the private sphere. In this paper and using a historical example, we attempt to assess critically this assumption arguing that efficiency and rationality in resource management are and have been an asset of collective management as well. We present the case of the Barcelona Water Company, run by its workers during the Spanish Civil War, to illustrate how in certain cases, gains in economic efficiency and rational management that had been impossible to accomplish under standard private management, were achieved by collective action. Workers management during this period not only improved efficiency and rationality but to a large extent did so also procuring equity and fairness in the provision of water to the citizens of Barcelona despite the harsh conditions brought about by the war.     

Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism,the Commons,and Solidarity

Abstract: Articulations of climate justice were central to the diverse mobilisations that opposed the Copenhagen Climate Talks in December 2009. This paper contends that articulations of climate justice pointed to the emergence of three co‐constitutive logics: antagonism, the common(s), and solidarity. Firstly, we argue that climate justice involves an antagonistic framing of climate politics that breaks with attempts to construct climate change as a “post‐political” issue. Secondly, we suggest that climate justice involves the formation of pre‐figurative political activity, expressed through acts of commoning. Thirdly, we contend that climate justice politics generates solidarities between differently located struggles and these solidarities have the potential to shift the terms of debate on climate change. Bringing these logics into conversation can develop the significance of climate justice for political practice and strategy. We conclude by considering what is at stake in different articulations of climate justice and tensions in emerging forms of climate politics.     

Patterns and Laughter in Euripides’ Helen ∗

An examination of Euripides’ use of traditional stories in composing two remarkably similar plays of his, IT and Helena. In the first he draws on that of Troas and Hypsipyle, in the second on that of Odysseus’ return to Penelope. I suggest that the two plays, along with the now fragmentary Andromeda, formed a single trilogy, produced in 412 BC, just after the Athenian defeat at Syracuse, which seems to have influenced the mood of the two surviving plays.