Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle Read Free Book Online Page B

be happening to them. And, if you bear in mind the major alteration to our view of history that will take place when Ash: The Lost History of Burgundy is published, perhaps we would be wise not to dismiss anything too casually.
Sincerely,

DR PlERCE RATCLIFF Ph.D. (War Studies)
Flat 1, Rowan Court, 112 Olvera Street, London W14 OAB, United Kingdom
Fax: ██████████
E-mail: ██████████
Tel: ██████████
Anna Longman
Editor
█████ University Press
█████████
█████
███████
15 October 2000
Dear Anna,
No indeed – although my conclusions will completely supersede theirs, I feel myself very fortunate to be following in the academic footsteps of two profound scholars. Vaughan Davies’s Ash: A Biography was still a set text when I was at school! My love for this subject goes back even further, I must confess – to the Victorians, and Charles Mallory Maximillian’s Ash: The Life of a Female Mediaeval Mercenary Captain.
Take, for example, Charles Mallory Maximillian on the subject of that unique country, mediaeval Burgundy – because, although the emphasis in the opening part of the main ‘Ash’ texts is on the Germanic courts, it is with her powerful Burgundian employers that she is finally most associated. Here is CMM in full flood in 1890:–
The story of Ash is, in some ways, the story of what we might call a ‘lost’ Burgundy. Of all the lands of Western Europe, it is Burgundy – this bright dream of chivalry – which both lasts for a shorter period than any other, and burns more brightly at its peak. Burgundy, under its four great Dukes, and the nominal kingship of France, becomes the last and greatest of the mediaeval kingdoms – aware, even as it flourishes, that it is harking back to another age. Duke Charles’s cult of an ‘Arthurian court’ is, strange as it may seem to us in our modern, smoky, industrial world, an attempt to reawaken the high ideals of chivalry in this land of knights in armour, princes in fantastic castles, and ladies of surpassing beauty and accomplishment. For Burgundy, itself, thought itself corrupted; thought the fifteenth century so far removed from the Classical Age of Gold that only a revival of these virtues of courage, honour, piety, and reverence could make it whole.
They did not foresee the printing press, the discovery of the New World, and the Renaissance; all to happen in the last twenty years of their century. And indeed, they took no part in it.
This, then, is the Burgundy which vanishes from memory and history in January, 1477. Ash, a Joan of Arc for Burgundy, perishes in the fray. The great bold Duke dies, slain by his old enemies the Swiss on the winter battlefield at Nancy; lies two or three days before his corpse can be recognised, because foot-soldiers have stripped him of all his finery; and so it is three days, as Commines tells us, before the King of France can give a great sigh of relief, and set about disposing of the Burgundian princes’ lands. Burgundy vanishes.
Yet, if one studies the evidence, of course, Burgundy does not vanish at all. Like a stream which goes underground, the blood of Charles the Bold runs on through the history of Europe; becoming Hapsburg by marriage, merging into that Austro-Hungarian Empire which still – an ageing giant – survives to this day. What one can say is that we remember Burgundy as a lost and golden country. Why? What is it that we are remembering?
Charles Mallory Maximillian (ed.), Ash: The Life of a Female Mediaeval Mercenary Captain, J Dent & Sons, 1890; reprinted 1892, 1893, 1896, 1905.
CMM is, of course, the lesser scholar, full of romantic Victorian flourishes, and I am not depending on him in my translations. Ironically, of course, his narrative history is far more readable than the sociological histories that followed, even if it is more inaccurate! I suppose I am trying to synthesise rigorous historical and