Why I love history

It’s lurid. History’s all full of sex, intrigue, greed, passion, spectacle, treachery, quests, pursuits, color, eccentrics, weirdness, wildness, perversity, heroes and villains (mostly villains), melody, noise, incense and decay, betrayal, grandiosity, more sex, folly, and humor. And of course duels, affrays, dust-ups, murderings, backstabbings, bushwhackings, shootings, slaughterings, battles, and mayhem.

And sex. Did I mention sex?

These are, indeed, a few of my favorite things.

Stories! And they’re all true. Yes, History is the potboiler Humanity eternally writes about itself.

I bring this up because of what I’m currently reading for pleasure. I just finished Steve Stirling’s The Sword of the Lady: A Novel of the Change. Which is itself full of chunky alternate-history goodness. And also rocked. Of course, you can’t read it until September 1, 2009. Heh, heh. Privilege of belonging to the writers’ group.

(Although I gloat obnoxiously, I graciously give you the opportunity to pre-order it by clicking on the title. See? I’m a nice guy after all.)

Now I’ve moved on to Juliet Barker’s mad readable Agincourt: Henry V and the Battle That Made England, which you can also order by clicking on the title. (Go ahead – at least give it a look.)

I’m about a quarter was through it and already I have several great tidbits and anecdotes I intend to inflict on you share with you. I’ll spare you the earlier ones for now – I really ought to do some writing I’m actually going to get paid for, in order that I might, you know, get paid – in favor of one I hit today.

Unlike a lot of monarchs, Henry V believed in detailed planning, and had a keen appreciation for logistics. (Come to think of it, in that he’s unlike almost all modern rulers, as well.) And if you know anything about the battle of Agincourt (if you don’t, welcome to Wikipedia) you know he relied heavily on English and Welsh longbowmen. Who to be worth anything needed boatloads of arrows.

The flight feathers, which spun the arrows to stabilize their flight, came from geese. Barker doesn’t have the stats for Agincourt per se, but in 1418, three years later, Henry put in an order for 1,190,000 feathers. She indicates they tended to harvest six feathers per goose.

As you know if you read, well, anything I’ve ever written, I’m something of a weapons enthusiast. Yet what I find so damned funny here has nothing to do with the arrows themselves. It’s the geese.

They’re famously surly bastards. They’re often used as watch-beasts (an across-the-alley neighbor keeps some, apparently for such.) Their primary value is held to be that if they detect intruders they’re just noisy as Hell. But the fact is, they’re also big and strong and if you piss them off – which you generally do by a) existing, and b) getting in range – they’ll whack you woggle-eyed with powerful wings while pecking and biting you enthusiastically.

So let’s do the math. 1.2 million feathers at 6 feathers a bird is … 200,000 geese. Each of whom is really going to resent having those feathers plucked from its ass. (But honest, now: you would.)

Keep in mind you can’t kill the damned things. That’s the point to the per-goose limit in the first place:  it would just not be economically viable to whack enough geese to reap 1.2 megafeathers.It’s pure pluck-and-release.

Now think about being one of the His Majesty’s Own Goose-Ass Pluckers. You undoubtedly have a steep quota to meet. Which means: close encounters with some arbitrary number of really angry geese. And face it – any number greater than zero is really gonna hurt.

And you think your job sucks?

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