The landscape historian Oliver Rackham defines factoids thus: “A factoid looks like a fact, is respected as a fact, and has all the properties of a fact except that it is not true.”
Factoids abound in all branches of historical study, and in none more so than local history. Sometimes factoids have existed long enough to have acquired the patina of truth. Take the extraordinary story of the Biddenden Maids, distinctive for the Siamese twins at its centre. Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst are said to have been born in 1100 joined at the hips and shoulders, to have lived until 1134 when one sister died and the other refused to be separated, and to have founded a charity that to this day distributes bread and cheese to the needy in the Kentish village of Biddenden.
Learned papers have challenged the details over the years, including the degree of the twins’ conjoining, the century in which they lived and even their family name, which has now been bestowed on a local road. Neither the dates nor any name was recorded until the publication of a broadsheet on the Maids in 1808, but now that these details are themselves ancient, they are taken as gospel.
But the tale with all its trimmings is central to Biddenden’s identity. It appears on the internet in various forms, and local historian Prue Stokes seldom goes abroad without coming across someone who has heard of the Maids.
People need stories that make internal sense, and it does no harm to respect a local tradition whose lack of historical evidence has turned it into an article of faith. But it is this need for myth that certain modern thinkers entirely fail to appreciate.
Self-confessed atheists such as Richard Dawkins have published their view of God, that faith in Him is no longer necessary now that science and rational thought have provided all the answers. Science has, they proclaim, removed the need for a creator. It has taken the academic John Gray to point out the many flaws in their logic (Guardian Review, 15th March 2008). He writes: “It’s a funny sort of humanism that condemns an impulse that is peculiarly human.” And so Dawkins has failed to answer the very question he once posed himself: if religion is no longer needed, why is it on the rise?
The truth of this phenomenon has brought out the venom in atheist proselytisers who, in Gray’s view, demonstrate a degree of intolerance that would do credit to the most fundamentalist believers. He argues that their views owe more than they care to admit to Christian thought: “Lying behind secular fundamentalism is a conception of history that derives from religion.” It was Christianity that first spread the idea that human destiny is not cyclical but linear, travelling towards a predetermined goal which is salvation. “Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative.”
Instead, it is this notion Gray describes as myth and article of faith: “In fact, while scientific knowledge increases cumulatively, nothing of the kind happens in society… Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.”
He goes on: “The idea of progress in history is a myth created by the need for meaning.”
So it’s true we need our stories and our myths. “Religions have served many purposes,” continues Gray, “but at bottom they answer to a need for meaning that is met by myth rather than by explanation.”
The Gray view of humanity is a bleak one, and I have rendered here only a fraction of the scope of his article. As for God, his existence seems to matter little to Gray who does not pronounce one way of the other.
It may be a feature of our rationalism that we want physical evidence for the stories we have grown up with. Since the holy grail of medieval tales we have wished, like doubting Thomases, for something concrete to connect us to the Bible’s ethereal and distant reality. Didn’t we want so much to believe in the Shroud of Turin? Perhaps that too is a deeply human impulse. As post-enlightenment believers we seem to be caught between two worlds.
So perhaps it takes maturity to accept that in some things, this wish can never be fulfilled. This must apply as much to history, where evidence is buried by time, as to religion. A former rector of Biddenden, living in the 19th century, once received a letter from a friend containing some poems by a 12th century English monk, Bernard of Morlaix. As the monk complained of society’s unbelief and warned of divine retribution in the guise of extraordinary happenings, he wrote of two maids who, if the reader would but believe him, were joined in body. The good rector took this to be incontrovertible proof of the legend of the Biddenden Maids.
To this story our local historian Prue Stokes adds another twist. An Australian man emailed her recently to say he planned to use the birth year of the Maids, as disseminated on the internet, as a means to date the poems of Bernard of Morlaix. Oliver Rackham might have added that some factoids display circular qualities.
