The local branch of McDonalds in High Barnet used to have a strange mural on the wall of the upstairs seating section. Above the cream moulded plastic seat/table booths, across the wall mediaeval horses and armour clad knights wielded their giant broad swords amid the fields and fog of High Barnet. The scene depicted was the decisive and legendary battle between King Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick which took place on 14th April 1471, somewhere in the fields around the High Street. I was thrilled that such an important and gruesome event had happened right here, where I came from.
I walk up to the obelisk marking the spot where the ‘Kingmaker’ Warwick was slain, thus bringing an end to that stage of the War of the Roses. It’s not the real spot - no one knows where that is, but it is where some Tory Baronet plonked his monument in the year of his own death, 1740. But I still make my pilgrimage there, sometimes weekly. There’s a bench next to the highstone where I can sit and try to imagine that, instead of watching the buses go up the A1001 to Potters Bar bus garage, there are hundreds of horses, soldiers and countless banners depicting the various houses clashing together in an almighty Braveheart style battle for supremacy.
I can’t really recall what the mural actually looked like, and my mum doesn’t remember it at all. Sometimes when I think about it, it appears as a Bayeux tapestry type comic strip, explaining all the stages of battle and complicated loyalties of the English nobility, spreading out in never ending fractals of information. But then my memory morphs the mural into a Delacroix type history painting depicting the moment of victory, King Edward slicing open Warwicks’ helmet, blood slushing into the mud. Neither seems likely, maybe the mural was never there at all and my memories have become assimilated from separate events; eating a chicken nugget with mum and remembering a trip to the highly unusual Barnet Museum with school. I have probably rendered this memory with more detail over the years, my continued fascination with the minutiae of mediaeval battles seeps across time, infiltrating the various versions of my consciousness backed up on the decaying hard-drives of my brain.
Barnet Museum volunteers have donned every single lamp post along the High Street to the fields with the banners from the main players involved in the battle. They are up all the time, not just for a special anniversary or reenactment, they are there all year round. I like to spot a different one every time I walk to the tube station. I have no idea who they represent or what the iconography means. There are the typical banner type things you would expect to see; rows of lions or fleur de lys, chequered backgrounds and swords. Surprisingly there’s one with a large black scythe on a white background - I wouldn’t want to come across that in a battle in the mist. And then there are the banners that are totally bewilderingly modern looking. There’s a black one hanging outside a pizza takeaway with what looks like three white plastic nitcombs on it, I think to myself, surely they didn’t have nitcombs then and even if they did, why would you put it on your family banner? Another favourite is one near the station that resembles three white owls travelling on a conveyor belt underneath a motorway bridge. I don’t make much effort to try and get to the bottom of this surprising and jarring imagery, but by chance I find a leaflet with all the banners printed alongside the name of the person they represented on the pavement outside a coffee shop. I can see which side of the battle they fought on, but nothing else. No explanation, no rendering of information.
I know I could make the effort and go to Barnet Museum to buy a small book probably titled something like Heraldry of the Battle of Barnet which would illuminate me, telling me exactly what each crescent moon and wolf’s head meant. But part of me resists, my fascination with these banners isn’t about what these symbols meant then. These newly made banners hanging on my daily walk to the tube through the dull, uber-suburbia of Barnet mean something else now in the exact context of my not knowing. As long as I resist, I am in perpetual primordial thought, the threshold of recognition. Returned to a time when I knew my letters but not how to read words. The banners and their symbols’ meaning remain unfixed in my mind, so rare a state but one to which I yield.
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“You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting. The painter’s work stands before us as though the paintings were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a wish to know more, they go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.” Socrates.
August 2024