History

"History is written by the winners," goes the old saying.  History has always been a tricky thing.  Just the other day I was looking through my brother's reading (he is a history prof) and read on a flyleaf about the American Revolution potentially being a preemptive action connected to England's push to free all of their slaves.  Long has the recording of events been a tricky subject.  The writers of histories all have agendas and biases, for good or ill, coloring every word (though the same can be said of every writer).  The further into history you go, the sketchier it gets.
    A concept of great interest to me is that the histories were not available to the general population.  What was recorded remained locked in private or church libraries.  The histories and traditions of the cultures were then oral traditions.  When I was in college, I was in a fraternal organization.  We had a little joke, "If we do something for two years, it's a tradition."  New guys don't know the difference.  If children are raised a certain way, they think it has always been that way (as long as the parents don't say otherwise).  It doesn't take long.  
     It's fascinating to think about what those people believed about the world they lived in. If you check out one of my older posts (References I Love V), you'll find an example of a relatively well read fellow (a merchant, if I remember correctly) who jumbles bits and pieces of various worldviews into his own personal cosmology.  Even more than today, there was great faith in the learned and the "truth" they delivered.  The gulf between the educated and the uneducated was enormous.  Thinking of the world outside of your personal sphere must have been overwhelming and not a little frightening.
    One of the ways in which history was transmitted to the people, was through song.  Meter and rhyme were used as memory tools to preserve the great deeds of heroes and kings.  They were generally propaganda pieces, employed for deification or ridicule.  Sung in mead-halls or around campfires, they could give weight to a reign and demonize the opposition.  As these artists rose in prominence, they began to be used in governmental roles to record laws (skalds were the first recorders of Norse history) and government occasions.  Every great lord came to need one.
    Gossip is another powerful tool.  As anyone who has ever lived in a small community knows, the more grotesque and juicier the tidbit, the faster it travels.  Read about some of the accusations made during the Inquisition trials and you'll see what I mean.  Many groups which had been threats to the ruling class were demonized and eliminated.  Of course, these things can run the other way, turning the population against the local lord.
    When your world is so consumed with day to day existence, you wonder how much the common people worried about the outside world at all.  No books, newspapers or internet to connect them, each community was essentially an island.  Tales carried by travelers would be gobbled up and disseminated like some pre-industrial version of Telephone.  You never really could know who to trust, but you also might wonder, "What does it matter?"