This is the oldest history newsletter in the world!
(On Substack, about the global, deep past, written in Yorkshire, by me)
Hello lovely reader,
I hope you’ve had a good week!
Here in Yorkshire, there isn’t much to report (which is good) except that it is suddenly extremely cold (which I’m seeing as good because it means I get to pull out all my most stylish woollens - let’s hear it for hand warmers!).
I also got some reader feedback on the manuscript of my book on the Western Indian Ocean (which is definitely excellent, because it took me a ridiculously long time to write, during which I became very scared, many times over, that it might be terrible, and apparently a bunch of wonderful and expert people think it isn’t. Hurray!).
And I’m proofreading a book about liminality in the Byzantine Empire, which is super fun. I’ll write more about it here when it officially comes out!
This week also caused me to run into a phenomenon that has been on my radar for a very long time, so grab a coffee…
and let me ask you…
The first, the oldest
…have you ever found yourself reading, hearing, or even saying something like ‘this is the oldest/first [wedding cake icing] in all of [northeast west central Yorkshire], with [fondant frog decorations], to be made by [my aunt Nora], using only [whipped cream and concrete powder]!?
Well, blow me down with a feather! The very first, you say?
Claims like this are all over the place and I don’t mean to suggest that they are (all) absurd. Often they are sincere, seriously researched and deeply felt and that is actually what interests me about them. They are also often competitive.
Take this statement from the website of Balliol College, part of Oxford University:
Balliol has existed as a community of scholars on its present Broad Street site without interruption since about 1263. By this token it claims to be the oldest college in Oxford, and in the English-speaking world.
It is carefully worded to side-step this statement from the website of Merton College, Oxford:
Merton College, the first fully self-governing College in the University, was founded in 1264 by Walter de Merton, sometime Chancellor of England and later Bishop of Rochester.
Beer is another place where I’ve come across a lot of firsts and oldests. Compare this claim…
Shepherd Neame is Britain's oldest brewer - and while 1698 is the Brewery's official founding date, there is clear evidence that its heritage pre-dates even this period.
…with this plucky Midlands contender for the oldest licensed brewery in England:
The oldest brewery in England is set to smash the £1 million sales barrier for the first time in its 372-year history – a decade after it almost folded.
The Three Tuns Brewery – which was saved from closure ten years ago by a former Wall Street broker from Wolverhampton – was granted a licence by King Charles I in 1642.
From a 2014 article in the Birmingham Mail. The brewery is still going and you can find out more about their range here, including a selection made to the brewery’s old recipe books. As a proud Wulfrunian (someone who comes from Wolverhampton), obviously, this one gets my vote for best claim, because... Well, that’s part of the point.
Both of these go up against Sambrook’s in London where you can:
Step into history at our Heritage Centre, situated on the oldest continuous brewing site in the UK, with roots dating back to the reign of Henry VIII.
If you like beer, I suggest trying them all, just to be sure you’ve drunk the oldest!
My examples here are all from England, but they don’t have to be.
A friend of a friend returned from a holiday where they had apparently seen three contenders for the fourth oldest cathedral in Bulgaria.
On the German Wikipedia page for the oldest city in Germany, there is a short note adding that, during the Cold War partition of Germany, Arnstadt took the title of oldest city in the DDR (East Germany).
When I first began studying peninsular South India, I was bewildered by the numerous claimants for the title of oldest (continuously used) temple (building) in (South) India.
Perhaps it is about things we can easily take for granted (like, in a British/European context, beer and universities, in South India, temples and, in lots of places, cities). When we accept something as part of the fabric of everyday life, maybe it is exciting to know that there was a first and therefore a time before there were any.
That may be a factor but it doesn’t quite seem to fit, especially not when I look at this statement by Purdue University:
The first Department of Computer Sciences in the United States was established at Purdue University in October 1962.
Computer Science is not exactly a field hallowed by ancient tradition or one that generally validates its importance by age, and yet, says Royal Holloway Department of Computer Science:
Welcome to the Department of Computer Science. Created in 1968, we are one of oldest computer science departments in the World.
Not to be outdone, the University of Cambridge Department of Computer Science and Technology begins its account of its history in the 13th century (as an international centre of learning, not necessarily in computing) before stating:
The department of Computer Science and Technology was founded in 1937 (as the Mathematical Laboratory, and later the Computer Laboratory) for work on mechanical calculators and analogue computers. It became involved in digital computing after 1945 under the direction of Professor Maurice Wilkes.
There can be very real consequences for being the first in science and technology, in the form of patents, prizes and profits, but that doesn’t seem to be what is going on here, either. None of these and other departments (the number of computer science departments currently competing to be ‘[one of] the first’ is pretty huge!) is staking any kind of legal or financial claim.
So, why do so many cultures (but not all) care about first and oldest?
Oldest, first and… best?
All of the examples I’ve cited are, in some form or other, advertising. They are about how institutions and their products are presented to a wider world, in the hope of generating sales, participation or just ‘brand recognition’.
Calling something ‘the best’ in advertising is notoriously tricky. On the one hand, it can be so ubiquitous or subjective as to be meaningless.
On the other hand, it can get people into trouble. You can’t just go around claiming to offer the best [insert product or service here] unless, at least in many jurisdictions, you want a visit from a regulator.
Perhaps that is where age comes in? If being older is perceived as an asset, then is oldest a tricky alternative to saying ‘best’ in a ‘provable’ way?
Plausible, but it begs a deeper question: why does being older make something seem ‘better’ (and better how?)?
For what it is worth, I think it does, even if I can’t completely explain why, at least in some areas. Nobody wants to be wearing the oldest underpants in Britain, but I might want to get a makeover at the first beauty parlour in Britain to offer Parisian waxing? [Actual claim made by actual business.]
But this link between oldest and best seems to work partly because we don’t think very hard about how the equation works and that is fascinating.
Practice makes perfect
One reason, we might argue, is that practice makes perfect. Especially when it comes to large organisations or makers of specialist things, or anything, in fact, that is complicated, we could claim that a body that has been doing that thing for a long time has had lots of opportunity to improve its processes and to iron out problems.
This isn’t necessarily true, of course. Old organisations can introduce terrible new ideas. They can change internally to dramatic degrees while keeping a traditional appearance. In its most extreme form, this transformation can involve being hollowed out entirely, leaving only a name.
Sambrook’s, in my beer list, now runs the oldest continuous brewing site in the UK, the Ram Brewery, for something like this reason: the site was sold in 2006 by what had until then claimed to be the oldest continuously operating brewery in the country: Young’s. Young’s was bought in 2006 by Charles Wells Ltd., which promptly closed the Ram site. For a brief moment in 2008, it looked as if the whole shebang might be sold off and turned into luxury apartments.
These days, you can still buy Young’s beer, made to very old recipes, and you can still drink beer at Ram Brewery, but it would be difficult to argue that a bottle of Young’s or a pint of Sambrook’s at Ram are more ‘perfect’ than any other beer because of consistent process improvement over 500+ years.
Standing the test of time
Another common saying in English is that something has ‘stood the test of time’, and perhaps this is another way of looking at the power of ‘first/oldest’.
Maybe something isn’t better because it has had the longest to make improvements. Perhaps age is proof that something is good because, however it got that way, lots of people, in lots of different circumstances, despite all the changes in fashion over time, have decided that this thing is excellent.
We can trust that it is best because many other people, with many other options, kept choosing it.
Again, this argument is not immune to some fairly easy criticism. Complicated things are hard to keep going in a complicated world. There are all sorts of reasons why a ‘better’ product or organisation (however we decide what that means) might not have survived while another one did, from bad luck, to problems that had nothing to do with the quality of the thing itself, to skulduggery.
Still, if something were bad, surely it would not have stood the test of time? So maybe even if oldest doesn’t mean best, it might still mean good?
Being part of something
Another possibility is that the ‘advertising’ view is a bit of a red herring: if people can say something to help their marketing or publicity they will, but that might not be the reason claiming something mattered in the first place or why it matters most now.
This appeals to me not least because I dislike cynicism as an explanatory framework. It is one of those logical paradigms that, if somebody wants to inhabit it, cannot be disproved.
It is always possible to construct an argument for the worst/most self-interested reason somebody might have done something, especially as we can’t see inside people’s heads to check. Still, I’m often perplexed at how willing many people are to believe explanations for how the world works that assume everybody is always hard-nosed, selfish and bigoted, while most people would laugh at explanations for how the world works that assume everybody is always kind, charitable, generous and fair-minded.
So, if claims about first/oldest are not necessarily adverts about something being ‘better’ without saying ‘better’, what else?
Some of the persistent sense I have from teaching history, engaging with heritage sites and generally thinking about, talking about and listening to people about history is that continuity with the past gives us a sense of being part of something: of having something in common with others, or, conversely, of having things that make us (collectively) distinctive and therefore special or recognisable in the world, of participating in things that last longer than human lifespans and affect the world beyond our immediate networks.
This is easy to see in the assertions of Oxford colleges and I think gets us closer to why computer science departments are now scrapping for ‘one of the oldest’. Computer science is a very new discipline, but it isn’t so new that people doing it now were there right at the start.
In fact, it’s not really surprising that, as the discipline reaches the point where the first people who could plausibly have identified themselves as ‘doing computers’ become figures of distant memory and record, computer science is becoming interested in historicising itself. For modern students or practitioners (who want to), it is a way of situating themselves in something bigger, of linking their choices with those of other people - choices that have, collectively, transformed the world.
But beer?
Ah, beer and history. When I started taking an interest in beer, it was its sociality that drew me in as much as the flavour. The ‘beer world’ is vast enough to be the subject of entire newsletters and blogs of its own (and, indeed, is!).
Briefly, though, yes: for people who are so inclined, beer drinking most definitely invokes a sense of being part of something larger.
Personally, I love it when breweries take on historical recipe projects. I enjoy tasting what people thought was delicious 50 or 100 or 200 years ago, and seeing if it still is now, to me, but that is the intellectual side of an experience that is also emotional.
Local breweries can evoke a sense of home or a place once visited. The sound, feel and smell of an English pub and an American bar are as different as the beers they serve and the communities they create.
Eating and drinking things made or consumed in the same way as people have for generations is a sensory connection. In that moment, we can imagine a link across time. No wonder food and drink are central to so many rituals and celebrations all over the world. And because everybody eats and drinks, food and drink can embody histories even for people and groups who have not traditionally had a place in books and museums.
Among the oldest
There is another thing about claims to be the first/oldest that speaks to being part of something bigger.
Most such claims are careful, as we have seen (brewery site/brewing company/licensed brewery?) because they are competitions for space in tight clusters.
Any university (by the European definition) claiming to be the oldest, by whatever specific definition, is usually going to be fighting over a date some time between the 11th and 13th centuries.
Why? Because that is roughly when universities became a thing in Europe.
Breweries in England: the contest is really over whether your date starts with a 15 or a 16 and which decade follows.
Why? Because the 16th-17th centuries in England saw an increase in commercial brewing (as a result of an increase in urban populations) and in the licensing of premises and producers to serve food and drink (because of a feared increase in urban poisonings and a desired increase in urban taxes). Prior to this, brewing had, for the most part, been a household affair, in the sense of businesses being run from households and mostly by women.1
Most of the time, pinpointing exactly who was ‘first’ in any absolute sense is futile because lots of people, in a given time and place, will be reacting to similar circumstances and to each other in ways that defy any simple ‘A did X, then. B copied A and produced Y, then C copied B…’ kind of way.
On top of that, in the clusters of people doing similar things at similar times for similar reasons, especially if that was a few centuries ago, we’ll not have the full records anyway, so even if there was some innovating and some copying going on, and even if people could agree of which was which at the time, we won’t necessarily know now.
When people say ‘first/oldest’, in other words, they are not really claiming that their company or organisation or thing was something nobody had ever done before that suddenly sprang out of the ether in a moment of genius.2
Instead, they are staking a claim as part of something bigger that only matters to stake a claim in because it is bigger: because it is something that, at a collective level, made a difference.
The first university ever to have existed, if the whole university movement had not taken off, but some peculiar commune had somehow managed to eke out nearly a millennium in a Bologna backstreet (for the University of Bologna holds the generally accepted claim to be the first European university, having got going in 1088), would probably not be much to boast about.
However, the first/oldest/locally oldest/one among the oldest in a tradition of organisations that have radically changed knowledge and education across centuries and continents is a claim to matter.3
It’s taking part that counts
And, ultimately, as silly as the precise iterations of such claims can be, I think that is why I quite enjoy first-ism.4
Although they are competitive, claims to be the first or oldest are also very often collaborative. They are a recognition that the claim means nothing without a context in which to matter. Being the oldest or first of anything is no claim at all unless there are seconds, thirds, fourth, fifths...
There is actually a predictable script to these claims that is a dead giveaway. I might even go so far as to suggest is diagnostic:
If you come across something (a hobby, a profession, an organisation, a settlement, a comestible) that seems to attract a sense of identity around it, try to figure out if there are people arguing over where or what the first/oldest manifestation of it was. If there are, and especially if they are rules-lawyering about exactly what they mean by first/oldest, you probably have a real community on your hands!
Bennett, Judith M., Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300 - 1600, (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
Some people making these claims might think that is what they are saying, but if we’re interested in why the claim is worth making at all, rather than how much people think much about historical context, that is by the by.
This can, of course, have negative consequences: some people will find ways to be crap to other people using whatever tools they have. This can be just another device for snobbery and exclusion, but the fact that some people can do horrible things with something does not necessarily make the thing itself odious. We’re a wonderfully, tragically creative species that way.
Another term for ‘first-ism’ is ‘protochronism’ (from Greek, meaning ‘before in time-ism’) and is also a problem that scholars can suffer from. However, although they definitely overlap, my feeling is that everyday first-ism and scholarly protochronism also have subtle differences to do with what people are trying to prove, why and what they get out of it. As a scholar, for example, being able to say, ‘hey, the people I studied did [important thing] before [other people]’ gets a lot closer to those patents, prizes and profits for scientific discovery, albeit often mainly in the Monopoly money of academic prestige, than to the sense of community participation I’m talking about here. That doesn’t mean people aren’t sincere, just that the pressures towards wanting to find something to be older are distinct.