At Home - Bill Bryson [235]
Gradually, however, educated people came to accept that the world was not just older than biblically supposed but also much more complicated, imperfect, and confused. Naturally, all this undermined the confident basis on which clergymen like Mr. Marsham operated. In terms of their preeminence, it was the beginning of the end.
In their enthusiasm to unearth treasures, many of the new breed of investigators perpetrated some fairly appalling damage. Artifacts were dug from the soil “like potatoes,” in the words of one alarmed observer. In Norfolk, members of the new Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society—founded shortly before Mr. Marsham took up his position in our parish—stripped well over a hundred burial mounds, a good portion of the county total, without leaving any record of what they had found or how it was arrayed, to the despair of later generations of scholars.
There is a certain obvious and painful irony in the thought that just as Britons were discovering their past, they were simultaneously destroying a good part of it. Perhaps no one better exemplified this new breed of rapacious collector than William Greenwell (1820–1918), canon of Durham Cathedral, whom we met much earlier as the inventor of Greenwell’s glory, the celebrated (among those who celebrate such things) trout fly. In the course of a long career, Greenwell built up an extraordinary assemblage of artifacts “by gift, by purchase and by felony,” in the words of one historian. He single-handedly excavated—though devoured might be the better word—443 burial mounds all across England. His methods could be described as keen but slapdash. He left virtually no notes or records, so it is often all but impossible to know what came from where.
Greenwell’s one compensating virtue was that he introduced the resplendently named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers to the magic of archaeology. Pitt Rivers is memorable for two things: being one of the most important early archaeologists, and the nastiest of men. We have met him in passing already in this volume. He was the formidable figure who insisted that his wife should be cremated. (“Damn it, woman, you shall burn” was his cheery catchphrase.) He came from an interesting family, some of whose members we have also encountered before, notably two great-aunts of his who could fairly be described as firecrackers. The first, Penelope, married Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell. It was she, you may recall, who had an affair with an Italian count, then ran off with her footman. The second was the young woman who married Peter Beckford but fell disastrously in love with his cousin William, builder of Fonthill Abbey. Both were the daughters of George Pitt, first Baron Rivers, from whom our Pitt Rivers took both halves of his name.
Augustus Pitt Rivers was a large and intimidating figure with a fiery temper at the end of a very short fuse who presided imperiously over an estate of twenty-seven thousand acres called Rushmore, near Salisbury. He was notoriously mean-spirited. His wife once invited local villagers to Rushmore for a Christmas party, and was heartbroken when no one turned up. What she didn’t know was that her husband, learning of her plans, had sent a servant to padlock the estate gates.
Pitt Rivers’s particular speciality—a kind of hobby, it would seem—was evicting aged tenants. On one occasion he served notice on a man and his crippled wife, both in their eighties. When they begged him to reconsider, as they had no living relatives and nowhere to go, he responded briskly: “I was extremely sorry to get your letter & to see how much you