When Was History?

History can be so vast, so incomprehensibly epic, that it's difficult to pin it all down.

The people who lived it move through our minds like so many extras in a Hollywood film. They aren't real. They didn't have thoughts and feelings. They wore funny clothes.

It doesn't help that they are depicted flat or strangely rendered, on tapestries, statues or stylized portraits. That's only the rich and noble, considered worthies in their time. For the poor, ordinary folk, there's nothing to see at all. No pictures to put a face to a name, except maybe an anonymous blob in an artistic crowd scene.

Without empathy for any of the players, it's easy to place history as being a long time ago; and utterly divorced from the modern day. It didn't happen to us, nor anybody like us, so it's barely worth the time to imagine their world.

The reality is that it did. Right now, as I write, as you read, we are experiencing our very own historic moment. By the time we reach the end of the page, it will be all over, notable only for a short time in memory, then gone.

The past was as vivid for those who lived it, as this very second is for me and you. Those who stood on the field at Agincourt or sailed in the Mayflower to America experienced all the same emotions that we do. The whole scope of the human condition was laid out for them, as it is for us.

Until we view them as living, breathing individuals, each with their own story to tell, then they will remain dustily distant. We will never learn the lessons that they have to teach us; nor the patterns of the past that keep repeating.

When was history? It was then and it is now.

In around 600 CE, the kingdom of Gododdin was being threatened by invaders. A massive army of Celts amassed to try and repel the Angles of Deira and Bernicia.

The two sides met at the Battle of Catraeth, which is probably modern day Catterick in Yorkshire.

It was a decisive clash, from which the Germanic forces emerged victorious. The territory gained was merged under King Æthelfrith, as Northumbria.

Are you bored yet? Or merely thinking that it sounds a bit like a footnote from Lord of the Rings, without even the saving grace of Orlando Bloom? History will always sound like that, as long as it's a series of bland names, dates and a bit of information.

To really get at the heart of it, you need someone to step inside. You need to see through their eyes; feel as they felt; and know what it was like to really be there. Until we see the humanity, we cannot grasp the history.

Fortunately for us, if not himself, Aneirin was there. He was only one of four Celtic survivors and he witnessed it all. It was his friends who were being slaughtered on the battlefield. It was his hands and knees, which were being chafed under freezing cold iron cuffs.

He was so scared. He was also in shock, because he was just a bard and he should have been safe. He was bleeding. The enemy had attacked him, while he was playing a sacred song. Aneirin couldn't even begin to get his head around that one.

'My friend in real distress, we should have been by none disturbed..' Aneirin told us. Later, his testimony is so stunned, that he refers to himself in the third person, trying to distance himself from his recollection. 'Gwaws, the defenseless, the delight of the bulwark of battle, was slain. His scream was inseparable from Aneirin.'

He's also terrified about what this defeat will mean for his girlfriend back home. There's no-one between her and the bloodthirsty Angles now. Aneirin just wants to run away and be there for her, 'I am anxious about the maid - The maid that is in Arddeg.'

I defy anyone to read Y Gododdin without wanting to help him. As he passes from the numb reciting of his friends' names, through fear, shock, anxiety, defiance and surrender, every word still rings. This really happened to someone, who is still in deep physical, mental and emotional pain, as he tells his story.

At the moment when you want to rush in and save him, it doesn't matter that it happened 1,400 years ago. It's as vital and real as your emotions right now. History has come alive.

'The men went to Gododdin with laughter.' He recalled, then later wept, 'I could wish to have been the first to fall in Catraeth.'

As for relevance to today, you are reading this in English. Don't you think it might have been in Welsh, had the Celts won that day? Cymru am byth? Or, as Aneirin put it, 'When all fell, thou didst also fall.'

It's as great a testimony as any that the people in the past were as living, breathing and emotional, as we are right now.

I was inspired to write this page by a poll which featured in a previous article. I asked then, 'What do you consider to be a long time ago?' In truth, I was pleased by the results.

Out of a possible eleven options, none of them was greatly favored over the others. Votes were scattered across them all. Even those nosing ahead only achieved 17% of the overall tally and had to share that with two others.

To my mind, there was no right or wrong answer. History was all of the above and any other period, which I hadn't included. It stretches from the dawn of time, through the present and into the future.

As long as the consequences of each moment are still felt, or the stories from those present have the power to move us, then all of history is right now.

Moreover, each historical event can be viewed as just one of many starting points for the chronicles of today. That makes it the news headlines, last year's Justin Bieber hit, your childhood memories and a terrified 7th century poet being led in irons away from a massacre, all at the same time.

Welcome to history.