Move along! Nothing to see here but a dull, plodding, insufferably vain, wanna-be dilettante named Geoffrey Richard Driscoll Tobin. As befits this variant of human nature, I'm casually interested in many things, hold numerous unsupported strong opinions, think highly of my own intuitions and reasoning, am usually too lazy to do the hard yards, am hopelessly ignorant of street savvy, and make more numerous and egregious mistakes than most blunderers.
On the positive side, I do get rare glimpses of reality, and the occasional peculiar notion that entirely incidentally turns out to be true.
Since I'm male, why do I choose a female soubriquet? Zoe Heriot, played by Wendy Padbury, was a 21st century astrophysicist (astrophysics being a subject I loved to read about as a child) and a companion of the second Doctor Who, played by Patrick Troughton. The first doctor, played by William Hartnell, is in some ways my favorite: I particularly enjoyed the story on the Zarbi ("The Web Planet"), as did, according to http://tardis.wikia.com/wiki/The_Web_Planet_%28TV_story%29, 13.5 million residents of the UK, so I guess the letter "Z" stuck in my imagination.
A second motivation for choosing this name is that I admire capable and down-to-earth women such as Zoe, the car-mechanic wife of Twinsen in the exquisitely quirky French computer games Little Big Adventure (Twinsen's Adventure) and LBA2 (Twinsen's Odyssey).
Thirdly, but not leastly, just as a heliotrope is a flower that turns to the sun, so a zoetrope is someone or something that "turns to life", i.e. a pursues a healthy, well-balanced state of being and growing; I aspire to this, though admittedly feel that I fall further short of it every day.
Interests? I have a few, but none that I excel in. (Pace Francis S.) I enjoy mathematics and physics, but struggle with chemistry and biology.
Geography and history are loves of mine. I tend to obsess over certain topics, so my knowledge is ill-rounded (i.e. not at all well-rounded).
A couple of years ago I learnt of Alan Rufus, an often overlooked Breton companion of William the Conqueror who, Wace and Geoffrey Gaimar say, contributed significantly to the victory at the Battle of Hastings. Alan became fabulously wealthy, acquiring more and more land at the expense of other magnates - initially from Harold Godwinson's mistress Edith Swannesha in 1066/1067 (she was known in the Domesday Book as "Edeva the Fair" and "Edeva the Rich"), then from English rebels such as Edwin, Earl of Mercia, and Morcar, Earl of Northumbria, whom he helped to defeat in 1069, then from the Breton rebel Ralph de Gael et de Montfort, Earl of East Anglia, in 1075, and eventually even from his greatest rival, the ruthless Bishop Odo of Bayeux who, with the majority of magnates, rebelled against William II in 1088.
You'd think that a person in Alan's position would be insufferably arrogant, or at least an obsequious flatterer of the Kings who bestowed such wealth and power on him, but no: Alan was usually quiet, but he would defend the men he'd defeated from the royal ire: during the treason trial of William de St-Calais in Salisbury, in front of all the bishops and magnates of England, Alan even scolded King William II of England for transgressing the law and told him to respect freedom of conscience, otherwise Alan would cease to support him. Common descriptions that people who knew Alan used of him included "friend", "distinguished", "wealthy", "moral" and "valiant". One of those who befriended Alan was Abbot Stephen of Whitby[1] whose monks had been suffering persecution by William de Percy until Alan gave them St Olave's Abbey, which was soon to become the famous St Mary's Abbey, York.
Surely the English hated a man who had done so much to secure Norman rule? Apparently quite the opposite. Gospatric, Earl of Bernicia and Northumbria until he was deposed by the Conqueror in 1072, fled north to the Scotland of King Malcolm III (the Malcolm of Shakespeare's "Macbeth"). According to some accounts, Malcolm was friendly with Alan Rufus. In any case, Gospatric's son, Waltheof of Allerdale, named his heir Alan! (This Waltheof is not to be confused with the Waltheof, Earl of Northumbria, who succeeded Gospatric in that title until his fall in the 1075 Revolt of the Earls, though it's been speculated that the two may have been somehow related.)
Waltheof of Allerdale had other sons and daughters, one of whom he named Gunhilda. This is significant because Gunnhild of Wessex was the daughter of King Harold Godwinson and Edith Swannesha who took up with Alan Rufus and whom Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury (a founder of medieval Scholasticism) scolded harshly for loving Alan instead of staying a nun at Wilton Abbey. So, Waltheof was making a political point in naming his children. To emphasise this further, Gunnhild of Allerdale married Uchtred of Galloway, named his heir Lachlan Roland (Roland/Riwallon being a Breton name most famous from the Carolingian Song of Roland, reputedly sung in an early version by the Normans and Bretons before Hastings). Lachlan's heir Alan of Galloway advised King John to sign the Magna Carta.
What of the Harrying of the North? An excellent, though sombre, question. It's not known whether Alan played any role in the destruction and death that ruined the country from York to Durham: but we know that Bishop Odo did, with relish, and repeated it on a more devastating scale in 1080, two years before he was imprisoned. But such evidence as we have suggests that during the terrible winter months of December 1069 and January 1070, Alan and his brothers protected their newly-won territory from the other magnates, and that the English refugees streamed inland, toward Alan's lands. According to Domeday's accounts, the Land of Count Alan in North Yorkshire was a large island of prosperity adjacent to a still-wasted landscape.
Towards the end of William I's reign, Alan convinced the Conqueror that, given the harm that the latter had caused to York, he should support St Olave's Abbey. In early 1088, to protect four acres of farmland he'd given the monks from the greedy eye of Thomas, the Archbishop of York, Alan persuaded William II to re-found St Olave's as St Mary's, with the other magnates (including Odo) and the bishops, watching on. To placate Thomas, Alan got William II to donate royal land to the archbishop and Abbot Stephen kindly pitched in with a gift of land too.
The historian Richard Sharpe has argued that Alan Rufus and Gunnhild of Wessex had an illegitimate daughter, Matilda, who married Walter d'Aincourt (a close associate of Alan's). Walter and Matilda are known to have had at least three sons, one of whom, named William, was buried at Lincoln and described in his epitaph as of "royal descent". Sharpe asserts that this is likely a reference to William d'Aincourt's (alleged) great-grandfather King Harold Godwinson, but I reckon it's to Alan's and Matilda's heritage through multiple descents from the ancient Kings of Brittany and the Emperors of the Franks. (Anyone who doubts whether descent from the Breton Sovereign House was considered significant should ask themselves why so many European Kings and Emperors made such a show of wearing Ermine.) Alan's own epitaph, copied by a monk from St Edmunds, refers to Alan's genetic and political connections to royalty no less than four times in seven lines. It's such a beautiful testament to a remarkable man, that I'll repeat it here, with the last line placed first, as suggested by the Breton historian and Benedictine monk, Andre Wilmart:
Vixit nobilium: praefulgens stirpe Brittonum.
Stella nuit regni: comitis caro marcet Alani.
Anglia turbatur: satraparum flos cineratur.
Iam Brito flos regum: modo marcor in ordine rerum.
Praecepto legum: nitet ortus sanguine regum.
Dux uiguit summus: rutilans a rege secundus.
Hune cernens plora: « requies sibi sit, deus » ora.
Loosely, stumblingly, and very inadequately translated:
In his life, he was noble, of glittering British stock.
A star of wisdom in the kingdom, Count Alan's flesh now withers.
England is deeply troubled, for the fairest of magnates has turned to dust.
Now the flower of the Kings of Britain only marks the natural order of things.
He was a shining upholder of the law, in whom ran the blood of kings,
A leader who thrived and attained the highest rank, in splendour second only to the King.
Weep for seeing this, and pray "May he rest in peace, God".
If the above evidence of Alan's character is correct, he was an extraordinarily decent and far-sighted person who stood out, as his epitaph says, like a star in the night - a light of kindness in the most unexpected place, shining from the heart of the most formidable of killers - the night here being a crowd of medieval bullies. To adapt the words that Shakespeare has Mark Anthony say of Caesar: "This was a man. This was the noblest Briton of them all."
Genealogy is a popular topic nowadays. Indeed, I first encountered details of Breton history while skimming various people's family trees online.
All of my ancestors moved to Australia in the 1800s, the last of whom to arrive was my paternal grandfather, John Bartlett Driscoll-Tobin, a London and Newcastle mariner and shipwright (born in Marylebone in 1862), who I gather disembarked in Sydney in the 1890s, then by an unknown sequence of events made his way to Melbourne where he married Alice Elizabeth "Annie" Chapman, the eldest grand-daughter of the Superintendant of Lights at Queenscliff, William Foy, formerly of Rockingham, northern Ireland.
The Driscolls are an Irish family from Cork who had migrated in Roman times from Antrim. How do we know that? The Driscolls are the most senior line of the Corcu Loígde, the Chiefs of the Dáirine, an Éireann (pre-Gaelic) tribe, who are recorded in Claudius Ptolemy's "Geographia" as living in north-east Ireland. They are said to have been related to the O'Neill High Kings. The tribal name indicates that they are descendants of a fellow named Dáire, which is Irish for Darius. How a Persian name came to be used in ancient Ireland is anyone's guess: perhaps it's a folk memory from around 390 BC when the Celts under Brennus (coiner of the phrase "Vae victis") were sacking Rome while the Persians were trying (and failing) to conquer the last of the independent Greek states? (The Irish have a legend of Fionn mac Cumhaill defeating an invasion of Ireland by Dáire Donn (Darius the Great), the Ruler of the World.) Or maybe the Celts encountered and intermarried with Persians or other Iranians during their travels? This isn't entirely far-fetched, because many Alans, an eastern Iranian tribe, under pressure from the expanding Huns, migrated to Gaul during the later Roman Empire and, immediately after Attila's defeat, were quickly assimilated into Breton and Galician society.
On my mother's side, which hails from Queensland, there's her father, a drover surnamed Kitchen whose family migrated from Cornwall, and her mother who was of a horse-loving, landowning family surnamed Tweed who originated in Cheveley, Cambridgeshire. They were the "poor" Tweeds, as opposed to "the rich ones" who lived across the border in Suffolk. The Tweeds had lived in East Anglia since at least the 15th century. What's a name like Tweed doing so far from the Scottish Borders? Firstly, it's not known for sure what Tweed means: many think it is a description of the border river of that name, while I think it simply means "family" (cognate with Welsh "Twyd"), but it's agreed that the word comes from ancient Britain. In the family, it's claimed that the river is named after them.
Despite their long presence in the heartland of the Angles and the conventional view of them as Scottish, the Tweeds identify closely with Welsh culture, participating in Eisteddfods and sometimes giving their children Welsh names. In fact, until well into the 1800s, those Tweeds who lived in Scotland didn't dwell by the river, but rather in Ayrshire. This is significant because Ayrshire was heavily settled by Bretons in the 12th century: the ancestor of the Stewarts was Alan the steward ("dapifer") of the Bishop of Dol in Brittany.
As evidence for the Bretons fancying the name Tweed, there is a river in Leicestershire in central England, which the Anglo-Saxons called the Bar Wella (Boar Stream), but which was renamed the Tweed. Close by the Tweed is Barwell, where, perhaps by some strange coincidence or perhaps significantly, stands Simon de Montfort Football Park, named after the Earl of Leicester who organised the first sovereign, elected Parliament. A branch of the Montforts later became Dukes of Brittany during the Hundred Years' War.
The Bretons are so-named because they migrated in waves from Britain to Armorica in north-west Gaul: the first to arrive in large numbers, in 383, were in the army of the Roman general, Flavius Clemens Magnus Maximus, Dux of Britain and subsequent Augustus of the West. Later, influxes of refugees came from the warfare caused by the collapse of order following the Roman departure in 410 and the subsequent conflicts caused by infighting and the rise of Saxon influence in southern Britain.
Brittany declared independence from Rome in 407, and had to repel invaders such as the Goths and Franks for centuries to follow. In 907, just as the Bretons were celebrating their quincentenary, and had presumably everywhere relaxed their guard, their allies the Loire Vikings treacherously seized the opportunity to overrun Brittany, driving the Breton court into exile, ironically to Edward the Elder's England, and creating enormous damage, destroying churches and countless priceless manuscripts, and making everyone's life a misery.
The Breton heir, Alan II, was raised in an England also beset by Viking raids, made all the worse by the vast pirate base that Brittany had become. Alan grew up into a brave and intelligent knight and gained the favour of King Athelstan, who supplied men and resources to Alan to build a fleet and an army to deal with the Loire Vikings for both their sakes. Alan crossed the Channel (perhaps he fought viking fleets on the way?), landing at Dol in 936, and by a combination of cunning and sheer prowess, in a sustained twelve-month campaign, defeated the Vikings in detail. By 937, he had taken the last major Viking base, which lay at the mouth of the Loire.
Presumably this caught the attention of William I Count of Rouen, whose father was Rollo the founder of Normandy and whose mother was Poppa, quite possibly the daughter of Berengar II of Neustria and his Breton wife: the Franks had granted Breton land they did not own (in "Lower Normandy") to Rollo, and many of the Norman subjects were ethnically Breton, or Gallo and sympathetic to Brittany, so a renewed Brittany posed both external and internal threats. This tension was somewhat reduced in the later 900s when Duke Geoffrey I of Brittany married Hawise, the sister of Duke Richard I of Normandy and then Richard married Judith, Geoffrey's sister. A consequence of this was that their children, Duke Alan III of Brittany and Count Eozen of Penthievre, and Duke Robert of Normandy, were double-cousins, which is as close to being brothers germane as is possible without sharing parents. It also meant that the Dukes of Brittany and Normandy were even more closely involved in each other's internal affairs, a cause of both tribulation and comfort in the years to come.
Eozen married Agnes, a daughter of Alan Canhiart the Count of Kernev, and they had many sons and daughters. Eozen also had children by the ever-popular extramarital liaison. Duke Robert had one, illegitimate, son, William, by his mistress Herleva, whose name might be Breton. Herleva later married Herluin de Conteville (again his given name sounds British), and they had two sons, Odo and Robert, and some daughters, including Muriel whose name is definitively Breton. William became the most famous Duke of Normandy, and with the close help of several of his Breton (Eozen's sons Alan Rufus, Alan Niger and Brian) and Norman relatives (Odo, Robert and numerous more distant kin such as Roger of Montgomery) and other associates, conquered England.
Odo, who had served in the Breton wing of the army at Hastings, became Bishop of Bayeux, and was perhaps the most predatory of all William's barons. Robert, Count of Mortain, had many Breton tenants, especially in south-west England which he received when Alan's brother Count Brian, injured in battle, retired to Brittany. One day, Robert, thinking himself a capable general, attempted to raid the Breton town of Fougères, but had his army annihilated by the townsfolk and he was held in prison until he gave a daughter in marriage to its lord.
Alan Rufus made his brother-in-law, Enisant Musard of Pleveno, Lord of Cheveley, and later brought him to be the first Constable of Richmond Castle. Now, the Tweeds, when they weren't in Cheveley, were to be found in Duxford and other towns that Alan Rufus had held as tenant-in-chief, towns that had belonged to Edith the Fair. Often they would return to Cheveley, as though this village held a special place in their hearts. According to 19th century English censuses, even those Tweeds who lived outside Cambridgeshire, resided predominantly in shires where Alan was a leading magnate, such as Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, and Yorkshire. (Curiously, I have not found any evident Tweed presence near Richmond.) Nowadays, Cheveley is surrounded by many of England's leading racehorse studs, a suitable destiny for a location closely associated with such an eminent and well-bred knight.
It would be a mistake to think of Alan as principally a general, even though he fought beside, or for, William I and William II in many places in England and France. Much of the time, Alan was on diplomatic missions, and most importantly for the future of Britain, in promoting commerce. At Boston, Lincolnshire, administered from his manor of Drayton, and several other locations near the Wash, Alan seems to have charged zero rent - a refreshing contrast to the price-gouging and sharp practices of, for example, Count Robert. One can only presume that Alan forewent this rental income to encourage people, especially merchants, to move and trade there, because Boston together with its neighbouring towns quickly became England's busiest harbour, trading salt, wool and lead. The lead and surely other products were brought downstream from inland regions, such as Derbyshire and others where Alan's friend Walter d'Aincourt held land.
America owes a measure of debt to Alan Rufus, because Massachusetts was settled by dissenters from Boston in Lincolnshire and by academics from Cambridge University (which stands on a site where Alan was also active; the University coat-of-arms bears a Cross Ermine, ermine being the emblem of Brittany) and from places in East Anglia where Alan had influence. The first governor of the colony, John Winthrop, a wealthy lawyer from a family of merchants, was lord of the manor of Groton, Suffolk, which had been held by the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, where Alan was laid to rest. The Winthrops were, it's said, from Winthorpe in Nottinghamshire, which was held by the Bishop of Lincoln in 1086; there's also a Winthorpe in Lincolnshire, where Alan and his men held much land.
Tweed family members (presumably from the wealthier Suffolk branch) also went to America, where they produced some of America's most prominent lawyers, including Harrison Tweed, a principal of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy, who was in charge of legal affairs for the Rockefeller trusts but was also a proponent of civil rights under John F. Kennedy. Along the way, the Tweeds intermarried with the Winthrops and, at least twice, with the Roosevelts (on the Theodore side). (Tweed Roosevelt is the Roosevelt family historian.)
There's said to be some sort of family connection with Oliver Cromwell (who was MP for Cambridge), but I gather that early support by the Scottish Tweedies (who owned Oliver Castle and other fortifications along the border, and who are claimed in genealogies to be kin of the Tweeds) turned to dismay at the ridiculous strictures he imposed; the Tweedies later supported Bonnie Prince Charlie! The Tweeds have always been active militarily and politically, and also loved literature: Captain Thomas Frederic Tweed became Lloyd George's campaign manager and wrote novels. According to a citation from Major-General John Gellibrand, Darcy Tweed, a great-uncle of mine, a mere Temporary Corporal, led his comrades to capture a German machine-gun nest and "numerous" German soldiers, "near Péronne" (so possibly in the Battle of Mont Saint-Quentin), during the Second Battle of the Somme (1918), so saving many allied lives, while suffering no casualties in the process. Darcy was a Roman Catholic, I guess because his mother (my great-grandmother), Rebecca Malone, was. The Tweeds often married Celts, and it didn't seem to matter much what their spouses' beliefs were, so long as they were of good and honourable character. Since Henry VIII's day, many Tweeds have been Anglican, but Darcy had two Methodist cousins who were unfortunate victims of the fighting earlier in 1918.