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Hugo Grotius (/ˈɡroʊʃiəs/; 10 April 1583 – 28 August 1645), also known as Huig de Groot (Dutch: [ˈɦœyɣ də ɣroːt]) or Hugo de Groot (Dutch: [ˈɦyɣoː də ɣroːt]), was a Dutch jurist. Along with the earlier works of Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili, he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. A teenage intellectual prodigy, he was born in Delft and studied at Leiden University. He was imprisoned for his involvement in the intra-Calvinist disputes of the Dutch Republic, but escaped hidden in a chest of books. Grotius wrote most of his major works in exile in France.
Portrait of Hugo Grotius
by Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, 1631
Delft, Holland, Dutch Republic
28 August 1645 (aged 62)
Rostock, Swedish Pomerania
Philosophy of war, international law, political philosophy
Theory of natural rights, grounding just war principles in natural law
Alberico Gentili, Bodin, Suárez
Gustav II Adolf, Milton, Selden, Hobbes, Cumberland, Pufendorf, Locke, Rousseau, Vico, Bynkershoek, Barbeyrac, Spinoza
It is thought that Hugo Grotius was not the first to formulate the international society doctrine, but he was one of the first to define expressly the idea of one society of states, governed not by force or warfare but by actual laws and mutual agreement to enforce those laws. As Hedley Bull declared in 1990: "The idea of international society which Grotius propounded was given concrete expression in the Peace of Westphalia, and Grotius may be considered the intellectual father of this first general peace settlement of modern times."[1] Additionally, his contributions to Arminian theology helped provide the seeds for later Arminian-based movements, such as Methodism and Pentecostalism; Grotius is acknowledged as a significant figure in the Arminian-Calvinist debate. Because of his theological underpinning of free trade, he is also considered an "economic theologist".[2]
Grotius at age 16, by Jan Antonisz. van Ravesteyn, 1599
Born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt, Hugo was the first child of Jan de Groot and Alida van Overschie. His father was a man of learning, once having studied with the eminent Justus Lipsius at Leiden, as well as of political distinction, and he groomed his son from an early age in a traditional humanist and Aristotelian education. A prodigious learner, Hugo entered the University of Leiden when he was just eleven years old. There he studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Franciscus Junius, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Rudolph Snellius.[3]
At age sixteen he published his first book: a scholarly edition of the late antique author Martianus Capella's work on the seven liberal arts, Martiani Minei Felicis Capellæ Carthaginiensis viri proconsularis Satyricon, in quo De nuptiis Philologiæ & Mercurij libri duo, & De septem artibus liberalibus libri singulares. Omnes, & emendati, & Notis, siue Februis Hug. Grotii illustrati [The Satyricon by Martianus Minneus Felix Capella, a man from Carthage, which includes the two books of 'On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury', and the book named 'On the Seven Liberal Arts'. Everything, including corrections, annotations as well as deletions and illustrations by Hug. Grotius].[4]
In Holland, Grotius earned an appointment as advocate to The Hague in 1599 and then as official historiographer for the States of Holland in 1601. His first occasion to write systematically on issues of international justice came in 1604, when he became involved in the legal proceedings following the seizure by Dutch merchants of a Portuguese carrack and its cargo in the Singapore Strait. [5]
De Indis and Mare LiberumEdit
Page written in Grotius' hand from the manuscript of De Indis (circa 1604/05)
The Dutch were at war with Spain; although Portugal was closely allied with Spain, it was not yet at war with the Dutch. The war began when Grotius's cousin captain Jacob van Heemskerk captured a loaded Portuguese carrack merchant ship, Santa Catarina, off present-day Singapore in 1603.[citation needed] Heemskerk was employed with the United Amsterdam Company (part of the Dutch East India Company), and though he did not have authorization from the company or the government to initiate the use of force, many shareholders were eager to accept the riches that he brought back to them.[6]
Not only was the legality of keeping the prize questionable under Dutch statute, but a faction of shareholders (mostly Mennonite) in the Company also objected to the forceful seizure on moral grounds, and of course, the Portuguese demanded the return of their cargo. The scandal led to a public judicial hearing and a wider campaign to sway public (and international) opinion.[citation needed] It was in this wider context that representatives of the Company called upon Grotius to draft a polemical defence of the seizure.[6]
Portrait of Grotius at age 25 (Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, 1608)
The result of Grotius' efforts in 1604/05 was a long, theory-laden treatise that he provisionally entitled De Indis (On the Indies). Grotius sought to ground his defense of the seizure in terms of the natural principles of justice. In this, he had cast a net much wider than the case at hand; his interest was in the source and ground of war's lawfulness in general. The treatise was never published in full during Grotius' lifetime, perhaps because the court ruling in favor of the Company preempted the need to garner public support.[citation needed]
In The Free Sea (Mare Liberum, published 1609) Grotius formulated the new principle that the sea was international territory and all nations were free to use it for seafaring trade. Grotius, by claiming 'free seas' (Freedom of the seas), provided suitable ideological justification for the Dutch breaking up of various trade monopolies through its formidable naval power (and then establishing its own monopoly).[citation needed] England, competing fiercely with the Dutch for domination of world trade, opposed this idea and claimed in John Selden's Mare clausum (The Closed Sea), "That the Dominion of the British Sea, or That Which Incompasseth the Isle of Great Britain, is, and Ever Hath Been, a Part or Appendant of the Empire of that Island."[7]
Arminian controversy, arrest and exileEdit
Further information: History of Calvinist–Arminian debate
Further information: Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas
Aided by his continued association with Van Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius made considerable advances in his political career, being retained as Oldenbarnevelt's resident advisor in 1605, Advocate General of the Fisc of Holland, Zeeland and Friesland in 1607, and then as Pensionary of Rotterdam (the equivalent of a mayoral office) in 1613.[8] In 1608 he married Maria van Reigersberch, with whom he would have eight children (four surviving beyond youth) and who would be invaluable in helping him and the family to weather the storm to come.
In these years a great theological controversy broke out between the chair of theology at Leiden Jacobus Arminius and his followers (who are called Arminians or Remonstrants) and the strongly Calvinist theologian, Franciscus Gomarus whose supporters are termed Gomarists or Counter-Remonstrants.[citation needed] Leiden University "was under the authority of the States of Holland – they were responsible, among other things, for the policy concerning appointments at this institution, which was governed in their name by a board of Curators – and, in the final instance, the States were responsible for dealing with any cases of heterodoxy among the professors."[9] The domestic dissension resulting over Arminius' professorship was overshadowed by the continuing war with Spain, and the professor died in 1609 on the eve of the Twelve Years' Truce. The new peace would move the people's focus to the controversy and Arminius' followers.[citation needed]
Controversy within Dutch ProtestantismEdit
The controversy expanded when the Remonstrant theologian Conrad Vorstius was appointed to replace Jacobus Arminius as the theology chair at Leiden. Vorstius was soon seen by Counter-Remonstrants as moving beyond the teachings of Arminius into Socinianism and he was accused of teaching irreligion. Leading the call for Vorstius' removal was theology professor Sibrandus Lubbertus. On the other side Johannes Wtenbogaert (a Remonstrant leader) and Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, Grand Pensionary of Holland had strongly promoted the appointment of Vortius and began to defend their actions. Gomarus resigned his professorship at Leyden, in protest that Vorstius was not removed.[citation needed] The Counter-Remonstrants were also supported in their opposition by King James I of England "who thundered loudly against the Leyden nomination and gaudily depicted Vorstius as a horrid heretic. He ordered his books to be publicly burnt in London, Cambridge, and Oxford, and he exerted continual pressure through his ambassador in the Hague, Ralph Winwood, to get the appointment cancelled."[10] James began to shift his confidence from Oldenbarnevelt towards Maurice.
Grotius joined the controversy by defending the civil authorities' power to appoint (independently of the wishes of religious authorities) whomever they wished to a university's faculty. He did this by writing Ordinum Pietas, "a pamphlet...directed against an opponent, the Calvinist Franeker professor Lubbertus; it was ordered by Grotius' masters the States of Holland, and thus written for the occasion – though Grotius may already have had plans for such a book."[11]
The work is twenty-seven pages long, is "polemical and acrimonious" and only two-thirds of it speaks directly about ecclesiastical politics (mainly of synods and offices).[11] The work met with a violent reaction from the Counter-Remonstrants, and "It might be said that all Grotius' next works until his arrest in 1618 form a vain attempt to repair the damage done by this book."[11] Grotius would later write De Satisfactione aiming "at proving that the Arminians are far from being Socinians."[11]
Decretum pro pace ecclesiarum (1613–14)Edit
Led by Oldenbarnevelt, the States of Holland took an official position of religious toleration towards Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants. Grotius, (who acted during the controversy first as Attorney General of Holland, and later as a member of the Committee of Counsellors) was eventually asked to draft an edict to express the policy of toleration.[12] This edict, Decretum pro pace ecclesiarum was completed in late 1613 or early 1614. The edict put into practice a view that Grotius had been developing in his writings on church and state (see Erastianism): that only the basic tenets necessary for undergirding civil order (e.g., the existence of God and His providence) ought to be enforced while differences on obscure theological doctrines should be left to private conscience.[13]
Statue of Hugo Grotius in Delft, the Netherlands
The edict "imposing moderation and toleration on the ministry", was backed up by Grotius with "thirty-one pages of quotations, mainly dealing with the Five Remonstrant Articles."[11] In response to Grotius' Ordinum Pietas, Professor Lubbertus published Responsio Ad Pietatem Hugonis Grotii in 1614. Later that year Grotius anonymously published Bona Fides Sibrandi Lubberti in response to Lubbertus.[11]
Jacobus Trigland joined Lubberdus in expressing the view that tolerance in matters of doctrine was inadmissible, and in his 1615 works Den Recht-gematigden Christen: Ofte vande waere Moderatie and Advys Over een Concept van moderatie[14] Trigland denounced Grotius' stance.
It is generally assumed that Grotius first propounded the principle of freedom of the seas, although all countries in the Indian Ocean and other Asian seas accepted the right of unobstructed navigation long before Grotius wrote his De Jure Praedae (On the Law of Spoils) in the year of 1604. Additionally, 16th century Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria had postulated the idea of freedom of the seas in a more rudimentary fashion under the principles of jus gentium.[15] Grotius's notion of the freedom of the seas would persist until the mid-twentieth century, and it continues to be applied even to this day for much of the high seas, though the application of the concept and the scope of its reach is changing.[citation needed]
In late 1615, when Middelburg professor Antonius Walaeus published Het Ampt der Kerckendienaren (a response to Johannes Wtenbogaert's 1610 Tractaet van 't Ampt ende authoriteit eener hoogher Christelijcke overheid in kerckelijkcke zaken) he sent Grotius a copy out of friendship. This was a work "on the relationship between ecclesiastical and secular government" from the moderate counter-remonstrant viewpoint.[11] In early 1616 Grotius also received the 36 page letter championing a remonstrant view Dissertatio epistolica de Iure magistratus in rebus ecclesiasticis from his friend Gerardus Vossius.[11]
The letter was "a general introduction on (in)tolerance, mainly on the subject of predestination and the sacrament...[and] an extensive, detailed and generally unfavourable review of Walaeus' Ampt, stuffed with references to ancient and modern authorities."[11] When Grotius wrote asking for some notes "he received a treasure-house of ecclesiastical history. ...offering ammunition to Grotius, who gratefully accepted it".[11] Around this time (April 1616) Grotius went to Amsterdam as part of his official duties, trying to persuade the civil authorities there to join Holland's majority view about church politics.
In early 1617 Grotius debated the question of giving counter-remonstrants the chance to preach in the Kloosterkerk in The Hague which had been closed. During this time lawsuits were brought against the States of Holland by counter-remonstrant ministers and riots over the controversy broke out in Amsterdam.
De Imperio Summarum Potestatum circa SacraEdit
Loevestein Castle at the time of Grotius' imprisonment in 1618–21
Main article: Trial of Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and Hogerbeets
As the conflict between civil and religious authorities escalated, in order to maintain civil order Oldenbarnevelt eventually proposed that local authorities be given the power to raise troops (the Sharp Resolution of August 4, 1617). Such a measure putatively undermined the authority of the Captain-General of the republic, Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange.[citation needed] Maurice seized the opportunity to solidify the preeminence of the Gomarists, whom he had supported, and to eliminate the nuisance he perceived in Oldenbarnevelt (the latter had previously brokered the Twelve Years' Truce with Spain in 1609 against Maurice's wishes). During this time Grotius made another attempt to address ecclesiastical politics by completing De Imperio Summarum Potestatum circa Sacra, on "the relations between the religious and secular authorities...Grotius had even cherished hopes that publication of this book would turn the tide and bring back peace to church and state".[11]
Grotius' escape from Loevestein Castle in 1621
The conflict between Maurice and the States of Holland, led by Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius, about the Sharp Resolution and Holland's refusal to allow a National Synod, came to a head in July 1619 when a majority in the States General authorized Maurice to disband the auxiliary troops in Utrecht. Grotius went on a mission to the States of Utrecht to stiffen their resistance against this move, but Maurice prevailed. The States General then authorized him to arrest Oldenbarnevelt, Grotius and Rombout Hogerbeets on 29 August 1618. They were tried by a court of delegated judges from the States General. Van Oldenbarnevelt was sentenced to death and was beheaded in 1619. Grotius was sentenced to life imprisonment and transferred to Loevestein Castle.[16]
From his imprisonment in Loevestein, Grotius made a written justification of his position "as to my views on the power of the Christian [civil] authorities in ecclesiastical matters, I refer to my...booklet De Pietate Ordinum Hollandiae and especially to an unpublished book De Imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, where I have treated the matter in more detail...I may summarize my feelings thus: that the [civil] authorities should scrutinize God's Word so thoroughly as to be certain to impose nothing which is against it; if they act in this way, they shall in good conscience have control of the public churches and public worship – but without persecuting those who err from the right way."[11] Because this stripped Church officials of any power some of their members (such as Johannes Althusius in a letter to Lubbertus) declared Grotius' ideas diabolical.[11]
The book chest in which Grotius escaped Loevestein in 1621
In 1621, with the help of his wife and his maidservant, Elsje van Houwening, Grotius managed to escape the castle in a book chest and fled to Paris. In the Netherlands today, he is mainly famous for this daring escape. Both the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the museum Het Prinsenhof in Delft claim to have the original book chest in their collection.[17]
Grotius was well received in Paris by his former acquaintances and was granted a royal pension under Louis XIII. It was there in France that Grotius completed his most famous philosophical works.[citation needed]
On The Truth of the Christian ReligionEdit
While in Paris, Grotius set about rendering into Latin prose a work which he had originally written as Dutch verse in prison, providing rudimentary yet systematic arguments for the truth of Christianity. The Dutch poem, Bewijs van den waren Godsdienst, was published in 1622, the Latin treatise in 1627, under the title De veritate religionis Christianae.
Governmental theory of atonementEdit
Grotius also developed a particular view of the atonement of Christ known as the "Governmental" or "Moral government" theory. He theorized that Jesus' sacrificial death occurred in order for the Father to forgive while still maintaining his just rule over the universe. This idea, further developed by theologians such as John Miley, became one of the prominent views of the atonement in Methodist Arminianism.[citation needed]
De Jure Belli ac PacisEdit
Main article: De jure belli ac pacis
Title page from the second edition (Amsterdam 1631) of De jure belli ac pacis
Living in the times of the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Netherlands and the Thirty Years' War between Catholic and Protestant European nations (Catholic France being in the otherwise Protestant camp), it is not surprising that Grotius was deeply concerned with matters of conflicts between nations and religions. His most lasting work, begun in prison and published during his exile in Paris, was a monumental effort to restrain such conflicts on the basis of a broad moral consensus. Grotius wrote:
Fully convinced...that there is a common law among nations, which is valid alike for war and in war, I have had many and weighty reasons for undertaking to write upon the subject. Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous races should be ashamed of; I observed that men rush to arms for slight causes, or no cause at all, and that when arms have once been taken up there is no longer any respect for law, divine or human; it is as if, in accordance with a general decree, frenzy had openly been let loose for the committing of all crimes.[18]
De jure belli ac pacis libri tres (On the Law of War and Peace: Three books) was first published in 1625, dedicated to Grotius' current patron, Louis XIII. The treatise advances a system of principles of natural law, which are held to be binding on all people and nations regardless of local custom. The work is divided into three books:
Book I advances his conception of war and of natural justice, arguing that there are some circumstances in which war is justifiable.
Book II identifies three 'just causes' for war: self-defense, reparation of injury, and punishment; Grotius considers a wide variety of circumstances under which these rights of war attach and when they do not.
Book III takes up the question of what rules govern the conduct of war once it has begun; influentially, Grotius argued that all parties to war are bound by such rules, whether their cause is just or not.
Natural lawEdit
Engraved portrait of Grotius
Grotius' concept of natural law had a strong impact on the philosophical and theological debates and political developments of the 17th and 18th centuries. Among those he influenced were Samuel Pufendorf and John Locke, and by way of these philosophers his thinking became part of the cultural background of the Glorious Revolution in England and the American Revolution.[19] In Grotius' understanding, nature was not an entity in itself, but God's creation. Therefore, his concept of natural law had a theological foundation.[20] The Old Testament contained moral precepts (e.g. the Decalogue), which Christ confirmed and therefore were still valid. They were useful in interpreting the content of natural law. Both biblical revelation and natural law originated in God and could therefore not contradict each other.[21]
Later yearsEdit
Many exiled Remonstrants began to return to the Netherlands after the death of Prince Maurice in 1625 when toleration was granted to them. In 1630 they were allowed complete freedom to build and run churches and schools and to live anywhere in Holland. The Remonstrants guided by Uytenbogaert set up a presbyterial organization. They established a theological seminary at Amsterdam where Grotius came to teach alongside Episcopius, Limborch, Curcellaeus, and Le Clerc.
In 1634 Grotius was given the opportunity to serve as Sweden's ambassador to France. The recently deceased Swedish king, Gustavus Adolphus had been an admirer of Grotius (he was said to have always carried a copy of De jure belli ac pacis in his saddle when leading his troops).[22] His successor's regent, Axel Oxenstierna, was keen to have Grotius in his employ. Grotius accepted the offer and took up diplomatic residence in Paris, which remained his home until he was released from his post in 1645.[citation needed]
While departing from his last visit to Sweden, Grotius was shipwrecked on the voyage. He washed up on the shore of Rostock, ill and weather-beaten, and on August 28, 1645, he died; his body at last returned to the country of his youth, being laid to rest in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft.[citation needed]
Personal lifeEdit
Syntagma Arateorum
Grotius' personal motto was Ruit hora ("Time is running away"); his last words were "By understanding many things, I have accomplished nothing" (Door veel te begrijpen, heb ik niets bereikt).[23] Significant friends and acquaintances of his included the theologian Franciscus Junius, the poet Daniel Heinsius, the philologist Gerhard Johann Vossius, the historian Johannes Meursius, the engineer Simon Stevin, the historian Jacques Auguste de Thou, the Orientalist and Arabic scholar Erpinius, and the French ambassador in the Dutch Republic, Benjamin Aubery du Maurier, who allowed him to use the French diplomatic mail in the first years of his exile. He was also friends with the Flemish Jesuit Andreas Schottus.[24]
Grotius was the father of regent and diplomat Pieter de Groot.
Commentary on GrotiusEdit
Andrew Dickson White wrote in Seven Great Statesmen in the Warfare of Humanity with Unreason (1910):
Into the very midst of all this welter of evil, at a point in time to all appearance hopeless, at a point in space apparently defenseless, in a nation of which every man, woman, and child was under sentence of death from its sovereign, was born a man who wrought as no other has ever done for a redemption of civilization from the main cause of all that misery; who thought out for Europe the precepts of right reason in international law; who made them heard; who gave a noble change to the course of human affairs; whose thoughts, reasonings, suggestions, and appeals produced an environment in which came an evolution of humanity that still continues.
In contrast, Robert A. Heinlein satirized the Grotian governmental approach to theology in Methuselah's Children: "There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the doctrine of Divine Mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. 'The Almighty,' he explained, 'finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.'"[25]
Bibliography (selection)Edit
Marble bas-relief of Hugo Grotius among 23 reliefs of great historical lawgivers in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives in the United States Capitol
Annotationes ad Vetus Testamentum (1732)
The Peace Palace Library in The Hague holds the Grotius Collection, which has a large number of books by and about Hugo Grotius. The collection was based on a donation from Martinus Nijhoff of 55 editions of De jure belli ac pacis libri tres.
Works are listed in order of publication, with the exception of works published posthumously or after long delay (estimated composition dates are given).[26] Where an English translation is available, the most recently published translation is listed beneath the title.
Adamus exul (The Exile of Adam; tragedy) – The Hague, 1601
De republica emendanda (To Improve the Dutch Republic; manuscript 1601) – pub. The Hague, 1984
Parallelon rerumpublicarum (Comparison of Constitutions; manuscript 1601–02) – pub. Haarlem 1801–03
De Indis (On the Indies; manuscript 1604–05) – pub. 1868 as De Jure Praedae
Christus patiens (The Passion of Christ; tragedy) – Leiden, 1608
Mare Liberum (The Free Seas; from chapter 12 of De Indis) – Leiden, 1609
De antiquitate reipublicae Batavicae (On the Antiquity of the Batavian Republic) – Leiden, 1610[27]
The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic, ed. Jan Waszink and others (van Gorcum, 2000).
Meletius (manuscript 1611) – pub. Leiden, 1988
Meletius, ed. G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (Brill, 1988).
Annales et Historiae de rebus Belgicis (Annals and History of the Low Countries' War; manuscript 1612-13) – pub. Amsterdam, 1657
The Annals and History of the Low-Countrey-warrs, ed. Thomas Manley (London, 1665):
Modern Dutch translation of the "Annales" only in: Hugo de Groot, "Kroniek van de Nederlandse Oorlog. De Opstand 1559-1588", ed. Jan Waszink (Nijmegen, Vantilt 2014), with introduction, index, plates.
Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas (The Piety of the States of Holland and Westfriesland) – Leiden, 1613
Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas, ed. Edwin Rabbie (Brill, 1995).
De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra (On the power of sovereigns concerning religious affairs; manuscript 1614–17) – pub. Paris, 1647
De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra, ed. Harm-Jan van Dam (Brill, 2001).
De satisfactione Christi adversus Faustum Socinum (On the satisfaction of Christ against [the doctrines of] Faustus Socinus) – Leiden, 1617
Defensio fidei catholicae de satisfactione Christi, ed. Edwin Rabbie (van Gorcum, 1990).
A defence of the Catholic faith concerning the satisfaction of Christ against Faustus Socinus, tr. Frank Hugh Foster (W. F. Draper, 1889).
Inleydinge tot de Hollantsche rechtsgeleertheit (Introduction to Dutch Jurisprudence; written in Loevenstein) – pub. The Hague, 1631
The Jurisprudence of Holland, ed. R.W. Lee (Oxford, 1926).
Bewijs van den waaren godsdienst (Proof of the True Religion; didactic poem) – Rotterdam, 1622
Apologeticus (Defense of the actions which led to his arrest[28]) – Paris, 1922
De jure belli ac pacis (On the Law of War and Peace) – Paris, 1625 (2nd ed. Amsterdam 1631)
De iure belli ac pacis libri tres, ed. Francis W. Kelsey, with the collaboration of Arthur E. R. Boak (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1913–1925; reprint: Buffalo, NY: William H. Hein, 1995)
Hugo Grotius: On the Law of War and Peace. Student edn. Ed. Stephen C. Neff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)
De veritate religionis Christianae (On the Truth of the Christian religion) – Paris, 1627
The Truth of the Christian Religion, ed. John Clarke (Edinburgh, 1819).
Sophompaneas (Joseph; tragedy) – Amsterdam, 1635
De origine gentium Americanarum dissertatio (Dissertation of the origin of the American peoples) – Paris 1642
Via ad pacem ecclesiasticam (The way to religious peace) – Paris, 1642
Annotationes in Vetus Testamentum (Commentaries on the Old Testament) – Amsterdam, 1644
Annotationes in Novum Testamentum (Commentaries on the New Testament) – Amsterdam and Paris, 1641–50
De fato (On Destiny) – Paris, 1648
Christianity portal
Poetry portal
Coenraad van Beuningen
Emer de Vattel
English school of international relations theory
^ Hedley Bull; Adam Roberts; Benedict Kingsbury) (eds.). Hugo Grotius and International Relations. Oxford: Oxford UP. ISBN 978-0-19-825569-7.
^ Thumfart (2009)
^ See Vreeland (1919), chapter 1
^ Stahl, William H. (1965). "To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella". Speculum. 40 (1): 102–115. doi:10.2307/2856467. JSTOR 2856467.
^ "Hugo Grotius". www.tititudorancea.com. Retrieved 22 November 2018.
^ a b See Ittersum (2006), chapter 1.
^ Selden, John. Needham, Marchmont (trans.) (1652) Mare Clausum. Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea. Vols. 1 & 2. London: Printed by William Du-Gard, by appointment of the Council of State and sold at the Sign of the Ship at the New Exchange.
^ Vreeland (1919), chapter 3.
^ Edwin Rabbie (1995). Hugo Grotius: Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae Pietas, 1613. Brill.
^ Willem Nijenhuis (1972–1994). Ecclesia reformata: Studies on the Reformation. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill.
^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m Harm-Jan Van Dam (1994). "De Imperio Summarum Potestatum Circa Sacra". In Henk J.M. Nellen & Edwin Rabbie (ed.). Hugo Grotius Theologian – Essays in Honor of G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes. New York: E.J. Brill.
^ A translation edict is printed in full in the appendix to Vreeland (1919).
^ See his manuscript for Meletius (1611) and the more systematic De imperio summarum potestatum circa sacra (finished 1617, published 1647).
^ Hans W. Blom, ed. (2009). Property, Piracy and Punishment: Hugo Grotius on War and Booty in De iure praedae. Brill.
^ Nussbaum, Arthur (1947). A concise history of the law of nations (1st ed.). New York: Macmillan Co. p. 62.
^ Israel, Jonathan (1995). The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477–1806. Oxford: Clarendon Press. pp. 447–449. ISBN 0-19-873072-1.
^ "Hugo de Groot - Slot Loevestein". Slot Loevestein (in Dutch). Retrieved 23 January 2017.
^ The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis Kelsey (Carnegie edition, 1925), Prol. sect. 28.
^ Cf. Jeremy Waldron (2002), God, Locke, and Equality: Christian Foundations in Locke's Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (UK), ISBN 978-0-521-89057-1, pp. 189, 208
^ Ernst Wolf, Naturrecht, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3. Auflage, Band IV (1960), Tübingen (Germany), col. 1357
^ M. Elze, Grotius, Hugo, in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 3. Auflage, Band II (1958), Tübingen (Germany), col. 1885
^ Grotius, Hugo The Rights of War and Peace Book I, Project Gutenberg.
^ Bill Uzgalis, "Hugo Grotius" in Western Philosophers, Oregon State online notes (2003) Archived 20 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine.
^ Guillaume H.M. Posthumus Meyjes (ed.), Hugo Grotius, Meletius sive De iis quae inter Christianos conveniunt Epistola: Critical Edition with Translation, Commentary and Introduction, Brill 1988, p. 33, n. 67
^ Robert A. Heinlein (1958/1999), Revolt in 2100 & Methuselah's Children, reprint, Riverdale, New York: Baen, Chapter 3, pp. 324–325.
^ See Catalogue of the Grotius Collection (Peace Palace Library, The Hague) and 'Grotius, Hugo' in Dictionary of Seventeenth Century Dutch Philosophers (Thoemmes Press 2003).
^ An extension of François Vranck's Deduction of 1587, see Leeb, I. Leonard (1973). Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution: History and Politics in the Dutch Republic, 1747–1800. Springer. pp. 21ff, 89.
^ This was for a long time the only source for what transpired during Grotius' trial in 1619, because the trial record was not published at the time. However, Robert Fruin edited this trial record in R. Fruin, ed. (1871). "Verhooren en andere bescheiden betreffende het rechtsgeding van Hugo de Groot". Google Books (in Dutch). Kemink en Zn. Retrieved 26 January 2019.
van Ittersum, Martine Julia (2006). Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies 1595–1615. Boston: Brill. ISBN 978-90-04-14979-3.
Vreeland, Hamilton (1917). Hugo Grotius: The Father of the Modern Science of International Law. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-8377-2702-8. Retrieved 16 February 2019 – via Internet Archive.
Bayle, Pierre. (1720). "Grotius", in Dictionaire historique et critique, 3rd ed. (Rotterdam: Michel Bohm).
Alvarado, Ruben. The Debate that Changed the West: Grotius versus Althusius (Aalten: Pantocrator Press, 2018).
Bell, Jordy: Hugo Grotius: Historian. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms, 1980
Blom, Hans W. (ed.): Property, Piracy and Punishment: Hugo Grotius on War and Booty in De Iure Praedae – Concepts and Contexts. Leiden, BRILL, 2009, 416pp
Blom, H. W.; Winkel, L. C.: Grotius and the Stoa. Van Gorcum Ltd, 2004, 332pp
Borschberg, Peter, 2011, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies, Singapore and Leiden: Singapore University Press and KITLV Press.
Brandt, Reinhard: Eigentumstheorien von Grotius bis Kant (Problemata). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1974, 275pp
Buckle, Stephen: Natural Law and the Theory of Property: Grotius to Hume. Oxford University Press, USA, 1993, 344pp
Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury and Adam Roberts, eds., 1990. Hugo Grotius and International Relations. Oxford Univ. Press.
Burigny, Jean Lévesque de: The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius: Containing a Copious and Circumstantial History of the Several Important and Honourable Negotiations in Which He was Employed; Together with a Critical Account of His Works. London: printed for A. Millar, 1754. Also Echo Library, 2006.
Butler, Charles: The Life of Hugo Grotius: With Brief Minutes of the Civil, Ecclesiastical, and Literary History of the Netherlands. London: John Murray, 1826.
Chappell, Vere: Grotius to Gassendi (Essays on Early Modern Philosophers). Garland Publishing Inc, New York, 1992, 302pp
Craig, William Lane, 1985. The Historical Argument for the Resurrection of Christ During the Deist Controversy, Texts and Studies in Religion, Vol. 23. Lewiston NY & Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press.
Dulles, Avery, 1999. A History of Apologetics. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock.
Dumbauld, Edward, 1969. The Life and Legal Writings of Hugo Grotius. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.
Edwards, Charles S., 1981. Hugo Grotius, The Miracle of Holland: A Study in Political and Legal Thought. Chicago: Nelson Hall.
Falk, Richard A.; Kratochwil, Friedrich; Mendlovitz, Saul H.: International Law: A Contemporary Perspective (Studies on a Just World Order, No 2). Westview Press, 1985, 702pp
Feenstra, Robert; Vervliet, Jeroen: Hugo Grotius: Mare Liberum (1609–2009). BRILL, 2009, 178pp
Figgis, John Neville: Studies of Political Thought from Gerson to Grotius 1414–1625. Cambridge University Press, 1907, 258pp
Gellinek, Christian: Hugo Grotius (Twayne's World Authors Series). Twayne Publishers Inc., Boston, U.S., 1986, 161pp
Grotiana. Assen, The Netherlands: Royal Van Gorcum Publishers. A journal of Grotius studies, 1980–.
Gurvitch, G. (1927). La philosophie du droit de Hugo Grotius et la théorie moderne du droit international,. Revue de Metaphysique et de Morale, vol. 34: 365–391.
Haakonssen, Knud: Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press, 1996
Haakonssen, Knud (1985). "Grotius and the History of Political Thought". Political Theory. 13 (2): 239–65. doi:10.1177/0090591785013002005.
Haggenmacher, Peter, 1983. Grotius et la doctrine de la guerre juste. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
Haskell, John D.: Hugo Grotius in the Contemporary Memory of International Law: Secularism, Liberalism, and the Politics of Restatement and Denial. (Emory International Law Review, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2011), [1]
Heering, Jan-Paul: Hugo Grotius As Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of His Work De Veritate Religionis Christianae, 1640 (Studies in the History of Christian Thought). Brill Academic, 2004, 304pp
Jeffery, Renée: Hugo Grotius in International Thought (Palgrave MacMillan History of International Thought). Palgrave Macmillan, 1st edition, 2006, 224pp
Keene, Edward: Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics. Port Chester, N.Y.: Cambridge University Press, 2002
Kingsbury, Benedict: A Grotian Tradition of Theory and Practice?: Grotius, Law, and Moral Skepticism in the Thought of Hedley Bull. (Quinnipiac Law Review, No.17, 1997)
Knight, W.S.M., 1925. The Life and Works of Hugo Grotius. London: Sweet & Maxwell, Ltd.
Lauterpacht, Hersch, 1946, "The Grotian Tradition in International Law," in British Yearbook of International Law.
Leger, James. St. (1962). The 'Etiamsi Daremus' of Hugo Grotius: A Study in the Origins of International Law (Rome: Pontificium Athenaeum Internationale).
Mühlegger, Florian. Hugo Grotius. Ein christlicher Humanist in politischer Verantwortung. Berlin and New York, de Gruyter, 2007, XIV, 546 S. (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte, 103).
Neff, Stephen C.: Hugo Grotius On the Law of War and Peace: Student Edition. Cambridge University Press, 2012, 546pp
Nellen, Henk J. M., 2007. Hugo de Groot: Een leven in strijd om de vrede (official Dutch State biography). The Hague: Balans Publishing.
——— and Rabbie, eds., 1994. Hugo Grotius, Theologian. New York: E.J. Brill.
O'Donovan, Oliver. 2004. "The Justice of Assignment and Subjective Rights in Grotius," in Bonds of Imperfection: Christian Politics Past and Present.
O'Donovan, Oliver; O'Donovan, Joan Lockwood: From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Sourcebook in Christian Political Thought. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999, 858pp
Onuma, Yasuaki (ed.): A Normative Approach to War: Peace, War, and Justice in Hugo Grotius. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 421pp
Osgood, Samuel: Hugo Grotius and the Arminians. Hila, MT: Kessinger Pub., 2007
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Sommerville, Johann P.: Selden, Grotius, and the Seventeenth-Century Intellectual Revolution in Moral and Political Theory, in Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson, eds., Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2001, pp. 318–44
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Thomson, Erik: France's Grotian moment? Hugo Grotius and Cardinal Richelieus commercial statecraft. French History, Volume 21, Number 4, 21 December 2007, pp. 377–394(18)
Johannes Thumfart: "The Economic Theology of Free Trade. On the relationship between Hugo Grotius's Mare Liberum and Francisco de Vitoria's Relectio de Indis recenter inventis, following Giorgio Agamben's enhancement of Carl Schmitt's notion of Political Theology". In: Grotiana 30/2009, pp. 65–87.
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Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hugo Grotius.
Wikiquote has quotations related to: Hugo Grotius
Wikisource has original works written by or about:
Works by Hugo Grotius at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Hugo Grotius at Internet Archive
Works by Hugo Grotius at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
Works by Hugo Grotius at Post-Reformation Digital Library
Works by Hugo Grotius in Short Title Catalogue Netherlands (STCN)
Individual works by Grotius
On the Laws of War and Peace (abridged)
On the Laws of War and Peace (Latin, first edition 1625)
Logicarum disputationum quarta de postpraedicamentis; disputation, aged 14, at Leiden University
Physicarum disputationum septima de infinito, loco et vacuo; disputation, aged 14, at Leiden University
Extensive catalogue of Grotius' writings at the Peace Palace Library, The Hague
The Correspondence of Hugo de Groot (Grotius) in EMLO
Blom, Andrew. "Hugo Grotius". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Miller, Jon. "Hugo Grotius". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Hugo Grotius' Quotes
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hugo_Grotius&oldid=906022060"


Building and operating a business can be challenging, especially if you're also in charge at home. After a busy morning of getting everyone else ready for their day, you may not feel as ready to get to work.
work-life-balance tips to help you to find stability when managing a busy life at home and at work.
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If you'll be hiring help for childcare, make a list of all of the criteria that you think are essential in a caregiver. If they're missing anything on that list, they may not be the right childcare provider for you.
See if you can set up a trial day with the prospective nanny or babysitter so that you can see how they get along taking care of your kids while you're still there. That way, you'll have no worries while you're trying to take care of your business.
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At home, this could be as simple as establishing a place to keep everything that you use regularly. You won't have to worry about finding your keys if you put them in the same place every time you come home.
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For example, rather than withdrawing to a home office while you try to get business-related work done at home, get your kids and your partner involved. Even if they don't have any advice to provide when it comes to maintaining your business, talking to them about what's happening at work will give you a chance to vent.
In closing, being able to keep things organized is a great way to maintain life-balance when you're maintaining a business as well as a family.
Let us know what are some ways that you are able to obtain work and life balance in the comments section below.


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The Iron Harvest | Rob Hindle
Posted: September 12, 2018 | Author: Brian Lewis | Filed under: Rob Hindle | 2 Comments
Out in the Channel, the dead water
shines like melted wax. Behind in the dark
is England; ahead in the dark, France
and everything untold.
Miraumont Wundtwerk looking east (Rob Hindle)
A raw winter's afternoon. A track peters out into stones and earth, a slight slump in the middle of fields. Pylons step across the dun-grey landscape. We can see maybe two miles in each direction, a horizon of copses, hamlets, farms.
This is – more or less – where my great-grandfather Albert Brown was killed. We don't know exactly: he wasn't an officer, so the diary entry has only a few details, including the pencilled word 'killed', at the end of the brief record for the 26th February 1917. He was 37 and had been in France about six weeks; he left Annie to bring up six children.
His body wasn't found. The buzzing pylon and surrounding scrub don't feel like markers: we've just run out of track. We stand freezing for a few seconds, my dad and me; then we go back to the car.
The villages are ancient and they aren't. Aerial photographs from 1918 show nothing but dark weals; yet here are hedgerows, huge trees, honey-stoned cottages and walls. Graveyards cluster along the lanes, the same stone cut into trim slabs and lined up, almost touching. Everything is small and close: 100 graves in a garden plot; six villages in a ten-minute drive. A dozen fields run down to the Ancre. I look at the maps from 1914, 1916, 1917. The villages disappeared but the red lines were more or less the same. Men came up that road, year after year, and were killed. When it was finished people came back, rebuilt their houses, planted trees, ploughed the land again.
Around Ypres, over the border in Belgium, farmers call it the Iron Harvest. Each year their ploughs uncover munitions, barbed wire, remnants of rifles. Sometimes the flotsam of older conflicts turns up – lead and iron from the Napoleonic Wars (known, until 1918, as the 'Great War') and the Hundred Years' War.
Digging down takes me through horrors in the cultural strata. Wilfred Owen (who fought in the same fields as Albert) and David Jones; Napoleonic Frankenstein and his monstrous progeny, Goya and his; the macabre paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, who lived in the shadow of the Hundred Years' War (three million killed); and Thomas Malory, knight, possible veteran of France, probable career criminal. Here is a rough-stitched portmanteau of French romances and Celtic myth, spun with Christian morality and nationalism for the domestic market; and at its core, capacious and contradictory, the heroic, doomed quest of a fading empire. Bones jut out of the earth: men sent to fight someone else's battles. Those returning tell horror stories, or stay silent.
Miraumont Wundtwerk looking west (Rob Hindle)
In his introduction to Malory's Works, Eugène Vinaver is confident that Thomas Malory fought, not only in the Hundred Years' War but later (on the losing Lancastrian side) in the Wars of the Roses. These events, along with the long list of indictments and imprisonments, make him something of a Falstaffian figure. In this context, the Tale of the Sankgreal appears to occupy the same political ground as Shakespeare's Histories: an attempt to curry (or, in Malory's case, rekindle) political favour in turbulent times.
The narrative, unwieldy as it often seems (ellipses and non-sequiturs abound), can be summarised around a basic theme: the attempt to resurrect national unity of a once-great polity in the face of fading influence and factionalism. The Shakespearean seed-sowing in the first pages makes it clear not only that something is rotten, but that we are invited to anticipate a tragic arc. Gawain, as Arthur's nephew (and first champion), feels duty bound to announce the quest to find the Holy Grail with which the maimed king can be healed and the waste land made whole again. There are signs and wonders but also personal and political intrigues, centred round Launcelot (the current beste knight of the worlde) and his illegitimate son Galahad, newly arrived at court and stirring difficult emotions in his lover Guinevere. Arthur fears the worst – his grete sorowe lies in his reckoning that
my trew felyshyp shall never mete here more agayne.
A doomed adventure, then – but one in the course of which the destiny of the nation is played out through the lives and reckonings of individuals. A mask of confusion is sustained through a range of contemporary literary conventions (dream visions, 'miracles', and predestined occurrences) – as well as events and moods which for a modern audience bring to mind Gothic (revivalist) novels, grand guignol theatre, Bergman backlighting (school of Malory's near-contemporary Brueghel), or the ketchup and screams of Hammer films. Whether following the dismal trails of the knights over heaths and through forests, entering the ghost ship with Percivale (where his dead sister lies, having sacrificed herself to the Grail's thirst for blood), or witnessing the 'elevation' of the berserker Galahad, we are consumed by a dreadful trajectory. The achievement of the Grail by the pure means death; failure means a return to a home that is unchanged – and yet which is now estranged by the experience of those that undertook the quest. When Launcelot and Bors embrace in the final scene, we see them with a modern sensibility – as survivors of trauma.
Europe was full of wanderers
and sickness: men who'd tracked
the Grail roads and found only wastes
and dark versions of themselves.
A picture on the cover of a book, Forgotten Voices of the Great War. The book is full of personal accounts; but it was the cover, hand-coloured, that got me. Three injured soldiers walking towards us through a wrecked landscape, their faces bearing witness to horrors we can never know. They could be the 'champions' of Malory's Quest who return, damaged but alive, to tell their tales of prowess, ultimately to fall quiet, broken, perhaps, by survivors' guilt. In that story it is those who don't return – Galahad and Percivale in particular – who are most celebrated: pure, heroic, 'whole' men whose sacrifice is the ultimate, ennobling destiny.
The soldiers in the photograph – two British, one French – walk in step, arms linked in fellowship. What binds them – the shared experience of war – won't help them in their return to the everyday. The felyship of the Round Table, that necessary prerequisite to soldiery, cannot ultimately make a kingdom whole:
And ye have sene that they have loste hir fadirs and
hir modirs and all hir kynne, and hir wyves and hir
chyldren, for to be of youre felyship.
Albert signed up in 1915, before the slaughter of the Somme brought in conscription. It's easy to imagine how a community can persuade its lads to go to war (or at least, ensure that any act of objection is made in the face of wholesale disapproval, even disgust): but a working, family man in his thirties? The 2/5th wasn't a Pals battalion; nor was it likely, at the time of his enlistment (it was a Territorial battalion), to involve front-line service. The initial optimism of 1914 had begun to harden into a grimmer view: the sense was growing that the war would be long-lasting and attritional. In all likelihood, it was with a more general sense of 'doing his bit' that Albert joined up. No longer an adventure, it was still a just cause: in fact, as the casualties continued to mount, men still at home would have felt an increasing responsibility to play their part.
At home he dreamed of this:
his brothers' bodies cast
on the mud, piled like logs
for the earth's winter.
Track west from Miraumont Wundtwerk (Rob Hindle)
Edward Thomas was the same age as Albert when he was killed at Arras a few weeks after him – and he enlisted at a similar time. He had prevaricated, his conscience wrestling with a sense of, if not duty, then fellowship: an identification with his fellow countrymen and the physical connection with territory which is central to his poetry – and which provides a deep and enduring bond between him and his 'tribe'. Most Englishmen in the early twentieth century had not travelled abroad, and had no sense of shared identity with 'foreigners'. If the chain of events which led to war was political, it was nationhood, an emotional concept based on a sense of belonging – and, necessarily, not belonging – which provided an army. Though much is made of the power of community coercion – the Pals, the white feathers – millions of men joined up voluntarily in 1914–15 to protect their own against the 'other'.
It is argued that the period of the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453) saw the emergence of the idea of English national identity and the nation state, exemplified by the spread of vernacular English as an expression of national confidence. Though this view centres on the second half of the fourteenth century, focusing on the writing of Chaucer and Langland, it reached its fulfilment with Caxton's printing of Malory's Le Morte D'Arthur in 1485. Although the conflation of vernacularity and national identity can be seen as simplistic, Malory's overtly nationalistic schema – the 'matter of Britain' identified as a heroic quest to restore a broken realm – is persuasive.
Those three wounded comrades emerging out of the waste land trigger, then, an identification across five hundred years of nationalist politics which draws its soldiery from an idea of 'us' and 'them'. It goes on. The current rise of populist demagoguery and vicious nationalism across the West is but another, depressingly familiar tide, made possible by the limitations of human memory: those with direct experience of Western war grow old or are dead – so we are stirred by bugles more than we are appalled by horror, or feel it as physical fear.
View north from Miraumont Wundtwerk (Rob Hindle)
In 2014 the Telegraph published a remarkable series of photographs by Thom Atkinson. Inventories of War: Soldiers' Kit from 1066 to 2014 showed how little had changed in what British infantry took with them into battle – until the development of automatic weapons in the early 20th century. The similarities of both arms and personal items provided further correspondence, for me, between the wars in Malory's fifteenth century (and by extension, how he considered the experience of Arthur's knights) and the First World War. I have interleaved the sections of The Grail Roads with short comparisons as a way of maintaining a sense of identification between the conflicts.
We drive down to the river, follow it through villages and hamlets: Miraumont, Baillescourt, Beaucourt. The road turns uphill at the station towards Beaumont Hamel, where Albert camped the night before his death (and where those of his fellows whose bodies were recovered are buried). We are banked below the open fields to our right, formerly cut by the tangle of trenches, climbing gently to the pylons at the front line. A green lane tracks along to our left. It is quieter and warmer here. The regimental diary reports the advance of Albert's regiment on 25th February down this road 'and thence to Front Line… Shelling of Battalion Sector by evening normal.' The same continues the following day, with 'Shelling of 'B' Co's Sector'.
CASUALTIES: KILLED, 4885 Pte A. Brown, 'B' Coy, 3475 L.Cpl J.W. Pearson, 'D' Coy […]. WOUNDED, 3363 Pte W. Hope, 'B' Coy, 3703 Pte H. Hastelow.
The Grail Roads is the third full-length poetry collection by Rob Hindle. A beautifully produced 144-page hardback, it is available from Longbarrow Press for £12.99 (+ P&P). You can order the book securely by clicking on the relevant PayPal button below.
The Grail Roads: £12.99 (hardback)
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Rob Hindle is the author of several collections of poetry, including Some Histories of the Sheffield Flood 1864 (2006), Neurosurgery in Iraq (2008), The Purging of Spence Broughton, a Highwayman (2009) and Yoke and Arrows (2014). Five long poems and sequences, collectively titled Flights and Traverses, appear in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing (2013). The Grail Roads is his first full collection with Longbarrow Press. Click here for further details and to read poems from the book.
Cartography, Flights and Traverses | Rob Hindle
Posted: January 12, 2014 | Author: Brian Lewis | Filed under: Rob Hindle | Leave a comment
From the corner you could go anywhere, Leveson Street,
Warren Street, under the arches of Norfolk Bridge, over the river…
This is a place in Attercliffe, Sheffield – an intersection, where the narrator of one of my poems in The Footing, and the historical subjects he is tracking, raise their eyes to the possibilities of the urban horizon. It's a point on a map; it is also a moment: a place reached, a pause in which the narrator's present (which was mine, sometime in 2010) collides with the present of a gang of men, in the spring of 1925, walking away from a crime – a fatal attack on an Attercliffe man, for which two of them, a few weeks later, were to hang.
The title of my sequence is 'Flights and Traverses', chosen because I wanted to indicate how the poems describe movement away from a point (the 'flight') and also the phenomenon of that movement (the 'traverse' or crossing). But the sequence also has a subheading: 5 Itineraries; and it had an earlier, working title: 'A Cartography'. Both suggest the original motive: I wanted to follow footsteps – but I was also interested in the imaginative possibilities of mapping and the itinerary.
'Itinerary' has its roots in the Latin for 'travelling' and is usually understood to mean either a plan or a record of a journey: it can therefore refer to an experience anticipated or recollected. There is also something of the professional: it traditionally refers to a day's travel especially for the purpose of judging, or preaching, or lecturing. In many senses, it is a 'setting out'.
When we consider the word 'itinerant', however, the intention is less about professing, more about exchange. We think of salesmen or peddlers: tinkers: wanderers: tramps. A story or song from the road for a fag or a sup. There is something, perhaps, about a bargain or a contract. This is implicit in the flights and traverses I've chosen to map out. A man pays his way out of his homeland at the toll house on Grindleford Bridge:
Far as I can.
When will you get there?
Where have you come from?
Over the moor.
Will you return?
He accepts the deal; and intrigued, taken in, I follow. Here is a story: a narrative: a passage from something known to something unknown.
I have a memory of childhood: a halt on a moorland track, my dad 'getting the map out', taking bearings, making judgements. We are at the moment between getting lost and finding a way forward – between the original itinerary and a new route, made at that moment and not until then. I find this moment entirely creative, and settling, and inspiring. We might be on a track thousands of years deep, but in passing along it, we are itinerant: we are at a point between the journey recorded and the journey anticipated. And when we stop and take bearings and judge our surroundings, we acknowledge this. I now stop with my family and 'get the map out'.
There's a milepost on the old turnpike road over Houndkirk Moor. What you can't see, obviously, is the other side – which, due to the weather, is a pitted surface, entirely illegible.
Between a dry green wall and the brown clatter of water
a milepost
Tidʃwell – 10
Buxton – 17
On the north face just runes and weather.
My ancestor Richard Marsden, traversing the Moor and at this point, in sight neither of the valley he grew up in, or of the town to which he was headed, is at this point itinerant. He must make a new map.
On midsummer's day in 1842, an Attercliffe woman walked out of her house, set herself behind the coffin of her son and started the slow walk through Sheffield to the General Cemetery. The cortege passed 50 thousand people, come to observe the procession of the Chartist Samuel Holberry, broken by hard labour in Northallerton Gaol and dead at 27.
When I set out on this journey, the maps I consulted were relics: the Blitz of 1940 and the go-getting 1960s had done for the medieval town. Had I found a record of the route taken – most likely along Norfolk Street, Union Street and South Street, then up Cemetery Road – I would have felt compelled to follow it: The Crucible, Café Rouge, The drills and hoardings on The Moor. Fortunately, I found only the barest details: a connection between two points, and an understanding that the route must have crossed the river at Lady's Bridge, where there had been a travellers' chapel,
a plate by the chancel where you'd drop a coin for safe journey,
the water light through the glass
pattering the walls
I had the opportunity, then, to make my own path: to drift: to become itinerant. I could go off-grid, turn corners into quiet, slower route-ways, peer through smashed windows.
They turn into Eyre Lane,
its workshops full of shades.
These were his neighbours;
they have stilled their wheels
and files for him.
I could stop and notice things growing – now in the middle of the city, then at its edge, the sounds of its industry still proximate to the rush of the Porter Brook:
In an alley near South Lane
someone has planted flowers
in drums and pails:
poppies, daisies, nasturtiums;
sweet peas, pink and lilac
against the black brick.
Over the Brook – now, over the Ring Road – I should have climbed the hill to the old gate on Cemetery Road, with its worm and leaf mould all ruin and renewal. But, honouring Holberry, I wanted to make a way to the grander entrance on Cemetery Avenue: to cross the Porter Brook once more, formally this time, paying my dues of passage into the underworld, from where I could look back, take stock:
Now they can see where they came,
the line of people all the way back
to the town. Still they come.
There are other ways of map-making. In 1932, my great-uncle Harold died in the South Yorkshire Asylum – later called the Middlewood Hospital, and now a housing development which, with its tidiness and discreet cameras, aspires to gated status.
I never knew I had a great-uncle Harold. He spent most of his life in institutions – his learning difficulties presumably too much for the wider world to handle – and died in this one aged 27.
This was the first journey I took – a short, harrowing walk from his parents' house off Hillsborough Corner up to Middlewood. It is the most personal section of 'Flights and Traverses': not only because of Harold, but because I recognise these terraced streets:
Now there is the click of a back door,
the chitter of a budgerigar.
Then you are hurrying from one of these houses,
hair brushed, tangled feet booted,
your undone laces tripping behind you.
There is something inevitable, too, about the journey which, though in terms of its topography is a gentle climb, is emotionally and psychologically a descent. I follow Harold towards his end, beyond the tram terminus; and I walk back – and down – through a bit of my own past:
This was once my territory, that hill with the GR
post box at the bottom, school at the top,
the park where I rushed along one day, my mind,
gleeful and vicious, running after me. Middlewood,
childhood cant, that thing in all our cellars,
I shouldn't have dared. I pay out my breaths
like twine, each step shortening.
I expected ghosts at the Asylum, in the bottle-green shade of the Cemetery, by the milepost on Houndkirk Moor. I got glimpses: stilled vices through workshop windows, arches upturned on the skin of the river, the ghost of myself in the glass of Saville House. Walking through an urban landscape, particularly, enables you to accrue perspective: there is a traversing of time as well as space. You lose yourself, take note, adjust your bearings, set out again. Cutting away from current thoroughfares, you pass into other ways, older, narrower, quieter. You uncover or discover gennels, doorways, rat runs: even when you are tracing itineraries which are irrevocable, you are making new paths, unfurling the twine of a narrative by which to mark your way back.
Where I finish in 'Flights and Traverses' is a picture of chaos:
Stained glass exploding into Campo Lane,
corn from a slashed sack.
The map shows where, in December 1940, the bombs fell, which was everywhere, just about; but even this catastrophe can be narrated. The bombers came from a point in space, departed for another; the bombs fell thinly on the leafy places, thickly on the old centre; they fell crashing into the silence of the school
but spared the church,
its praying faithful, its sinners.
When I get off the bus on the Hathersage Road, it is a winter afternoon, the sun near to setting. The shires range southwards, hills, woods, fields. North, across the boundary stream, the road begins its descent into Sheffield. My long shadow stretching out in front of me,
I start down.
Rob Hindle's Flights and Traverses appears in the Longbarrow Press anthology The Footing. 'Cartography, Flights and Traverses' is the text (and accompanying images) of a presentation by Hindle that opened the launch of The Footing at The Shakespeare, Sheffield, 25 November 2013. Click here to visit Rob Hindle's website.
The provincial sublime: transcendence and the post-industrial | Pete Green
Touching the Gleam | Mark Goodwin
Meridian: The First Cut | Nancy Gaffield
Seven Forms Through | Mark Goodwin
Depending Angles | Mark Goodwin
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