A guest blog post by Dr Emily Hayes, Oxford Brookes University.

Over the last few years I have intermittently assisted Dr Innes Keighren with his research into the Scottish plantation owner and trader William Macintosh who lived in and around Avignon during the 1780s and 1790s. The transcription and translation work that I undertook provoked some reflections upon my own European and cross-Channel upbringing, education and identity. What follows are some thoughts about my experience of working with multilingual archives, language learning and the teaching and learning practices of historical geography.

During my own recent research I came across a few lines in the British geographer, Halford Mackinder’s The Teaching of Geography and History: A Study in Method (1914), which resonated: in a little-known sensitive moment, Mackinder compared a child to a ‘little observatory’. A child who moves around a lot ‘sees many things but never sees thoroughly, in perspective and with correlation, the little universe which is accessible from any one home.’ A teacher’s aim, he said, was training a child ‘to obtain its bearings’ (p. 15). I often contemplate this claim and the implications that I interpret from it. Yet I am not sure that I agree with it.

Between the age of ten and sixteen I attended seven schools in three different countries. In 1988, when I was ten years old, my parents, in search of the good life or at least an escape from Thatcherite Britain, decided to move to France. As in the tiny school which is documented in the film Être et avoir (2002), my first French school was a small establishment in the village of Renescure in France’s northernmost region. My own CM2, or fourth junior year, class consisted of eleven pupils. We shared our class room, and teacher, with the ten pupils of the year group below (CM1). Somehow, Mme Delattre, our Maîtresse, taught both year groups at once. Enthused by the incipient European Community project that was then taking place, she had bravely agreed to take me on, a British girl with very little French, in what was already a complicated situation. She called me un pigeon voyageur, a messenger pigeon, because though I had just transferred from a UK school, I had also then recently, aged ten, spent four months at the American International School in Budapest in Hungary. There, before the Berlin Wall came down, I had a new form of mathematics, US spellings and what felt like a very alien American history and geography, drilled into me by new learning methods such as spelling bees and the dreaded public speaking. A discussion of the diverse teaching/learning methods and combined teaching of Histoire-Géo in France (excellent in my experience) might feature in a later post. At the time I just tried to keep on adapting.

Returning to my work for Innes on William Macintosh’s archives, the project has spotlighted a number of points about geography and language. The documents, many of them household bills and private correspondence, are often multilingual. They are written in both French and English and sometimes and to varying degrees, a mixture of both. Rather than solely or automatically pretentiously cosmopolitan, I believe that this was, and still is, reflective of daily life for many expatriates. Marina Warner brilliantly shows this to be the case in her fascinating and culturally critical memoire about her Anglo-Italian childhood in end-of-Empire Egypt, Inventory Of A Life Mislaid (2021, especially pp 221–34): expatriates speak, think with and, often, write in an idiosyncratic and unorthodox jumble of languages between themselves, and depending on the purpose.

As Innes’s previous blog posts have demonstrated, William Macintosh’s name appears in a spectacular array of variations across his extensive archive. My recent work on Macintosh suggested a relatively high literacy rate amongst the local tradespeople, many of them men, in and around Avignon in the final decades of the eighteenth century. Only one document recorded that the author signed their name with an ‘X’ because they could not write. However, it also showed that the many local tradespeople who billed Macintosh, related this foreign name to words that they already knew in French. For example, my favourite recently discovered variant of Macintosh was Mr le marquis decintosh, in a document written by Roubaud, a builder or estate manager, dated 7 September 1784. The writer attributed an aristocratic title to Macintosh because that is what he heard (rather than saw on paper) in the name ‘Macintosh’.

In relative terms, across all times and spaces, verbal and non-verbal methods of communication, rather than textual ones, have been the dominant means of negotiating human relations. In reading the documents, and again because of the many spelling variations in them, it was as if I started to hear the words on the page spoken by their authors. I wondered whether one of the bills had not been written by a French person (anonymous and undated) who was reporting the spoken words voiced by a person with a strong British accent as, for example, in the document which records Macintosh living in the Rue de lay garden meaning les jardins. Or was this just my imagination…?

The likelihood of spelling variations becomes higher and more common when you juggle phonemes, i.e. the blocks of sounds, in several languages. After six years of school in France, at sixteen, I discovered the hard way, that my written English was very bad. This was despite the fact that I was privileged to have access to thousands of books at home (as in Macintosh’s library, many of them were travel books, but unlike Macintosh’s library, there were also numerous histories of socialism and communism!) and that I was a keen reader. Over the years, as a family we increasingly spoke French or combined French and English. At school, I wrote and read in French (or German, Spanish or Latin), but never in English (and I did not study English as a second language either). The lesson then was that constant training and the need to regularly practice the multiple interconnected oral, aural and textual skills is necessary in the acquisition of language and, doubtless, other skills. For this a community is vital.

Over the years I have had to force myself to keep a running mental list of ‘false friends’ or the words which sound the same—or which have practically but not quite the same spelling—in English and in French. These include ‘government’ (English) and gouvernement (French); ‘parliament’ and parlement; ‘environment’ and environnement; ‘organization’ and organisation, ‘development’ and développement and ‘character’ and caractère, to name a few. For non-native language learners especially, homophone words which sound the same, such as ‘their’ and ‘there,’ are also problematic. Now, at the age of 42, I still have to pause, think and often check these spellings.

In growing up, the historical geographies of my own vocabulary—or vocabularies—have been brought into sharp relief. Reflecting my own travels and geographical movements, I am aware of where and when a specific word came on to my radar or when it became a word that I needed to use regularly. Having studied for an MSc in archaeology and environmental science jointly run by the Sorbonne and Nanterre in Paris, my knowledge of botany and, more broadly, the histories of French land management (and thus, by extension, geographical thought and methods) is in French (and to a lesser extent in Latin). The MSc dissertation that I wrote in French about organic residues and inclusions in pottery from the putative Empire of Mali in West Africa has also endowed me with a niche vocabulary that is organised, at least initially, in French in my mind. This recent work for Innes showed me that words such as vigne and vinaigre are ones that I know the spelling of in French first. I was stumped when it came to spelling their equivalents of ‘vine’ and ‘vinegar’, in English.

Yet, to that I would add, that although I have a mental habit of picturing in my mind’s eye equivalent words in several languages, one is never really fully bilingual in any language; it is a commonplace to say that language constantly evolves, but our individual linguistic needs constantly develop in additive and subtractive ways alike, according to opportunities of context, exposure and habit.

A further difference between French and English is that writing styles vary tremendously. This too can be seen in the Macintosh materials as letters and other documents penned by native French speakers (Le Seigneur de Ragnoni mentioned in Innes’s latest blog post, for instance) write sentences that are Proustian in length both in terms of the number of words that are set in motion and the clauses after clauses which pile up. A single comma does so many things in French. This style of writing was one that I too acquired and which, when I attempt to write in English and especially in academic English, I have to resist. Written short, staccato sentences and sharp syntax still rarely feel natural to me.

In undertaking more work on Macintosh, I was surprised to discover that the years that I grew up in la France profonde, or deep rural France, in both Les Hauts de France on the border with Belgium, and the Eure in Normandy, had provided an excellent basis for approaching Macintosh’s archive. Devoted to country life and day-to-day existence in small town France, as they are, many of the documents concern land management, household repairs and renovations. Others, which deal with horse management, suggest that Macintosh stabled up to five horses. Words such as licol (harness), selle (saddle), grenier à foin (hay loft) and maréchal-ferrant (farrier as distinct from ‘a smith’),and vermifuge (worming medicine) came naturally. As did brouette (wheel barrow) and chaux (lime white wash). The truth is that in rural France today you would still find, and your existence would likely depend upon, the goodwill and work of many in the very same tradespeople and suppliers as those documented in Macintosh’s archive.

The documents suggest that Macintosh’s understanding of French, and written fluency in it, was excellent. Where, when and with whom he initially learned it is, I think, unknown—Innes has mentioned to me that Macintosh had not yet mastered the language when he first arrived on the largely Francophone island of Grenada in 1763. However, textual traces, nevertheless, constitute only partial evidence. Macintosh may have used a dictionary when writing. He may have found gaps in his vocabulary and frequently had to learn new words. Written documents rarely record regional accents. What did Macintosh’s spoken French sound like? How well did he handle the formal and informal registers of French speech? Did he have a Scottish accent? It is likely that he did not speak French with what is called l’accent du sud or the ‘southern accent’. So, I ask myself what Macintosh’s life as an expatriate and, perhaps, the communication problems he experienced, were really like.

As Hungary, and then France (and later Japan and other places), did for me, even short periods abroad can mark you profoundly and dramatically change the course of your life. I therefore wondered whether Macintosh ever considered Avignon as home or as a home. Was he ever accepted as a local or did he remain an outsider both in his mind and in those of those around him? If so, then how did he feel about this? What insights into the idea of a ‘universal’ human nature, and to which he adhered, did this give him? How did a decade or so in southern, rural France change him? What linguistic, or other, legacy did he leave in Avignon? How did he change the people and the place he eventually left behind?

My own cross-Channel education and life is inscribed in my mind and its shaping, and is manifested in my writing and spoken language in French and English. This is the basis for my feeling disposed of the English language, but also of my belief in regularly correcting students’ spelling mistakes: to take writing and spelling seriously is to take yourself seriously; to be able to write well and to spell correctly is to be taken seriously in life. And yet I still make mistakes… In addition, this makes me aware of the fact that I am stronger at learning to speak languages than I am learning to write them.

There are also broader, and perhaps more important, points to make here about cultural hierarchies and the over-privileging of text-based knowledge, histories and communities as well as particular languages and registers of language.

As many readers will know, in 1994 France ratified the Toubon law which stipulated that only French words should be used in government, parliamentary and public communications. This protectionist measure was, it was claimed, taken as a form of cultural conservation. Today, at a time when there continues to be concern about, as well as rampant resistance to, anglophone dominance in academia, the Macintosh archive evidences, across a number of human and spatial scales, the longevity, and pre-twentieth-century history, of the international hybridization and intermixing of the French and English languages.

Additionally, the research on Macintosh suggests the urgency of writing, but also of relocating within existing histories, what are called popular histories. My own work on popular geography and historical geographies of magic lantern practices indicates the need for this reconfiguration. Across the centuries-long and global histories of magic lantern use, and across Macintosh’s lifetime, most people around the world did not read or write. However, cross-cultural communication took place because of the common referents of a stock of shared mental images, emotions and sensations.

Though I lived, studied and worked in regions of northern France and Paris, many aspects of Macintosh and his retinue’s late eighteenth-century existence in the south of the country feel eerily familiar and little different from what I have known from the 1980s on. Here French food-related trades are especially revealing as the archives attest to the fact that Macintosh treated himself to the finer things in life. In another guest blog post I would like to discuss the archive’s feast of flavours, dishes, and words in relation to haptic and sensory historical methods.

I want to conclude by referring back to the image of the sculpture titled ‘Cheeky Little Astronomer’ (2013) by the British-Nigerian artist, Yinka Shonibare (b. 1962), as well as the quote from Mackinder at the top of this post. Further research on what this might have meant in terms of Mackinder’s own education is necessary here. The ‘little observatory’ of a child does, undoubtedly, need some fixed coordinates, but these reference points do not have to be geographical or, rather, the topographical, cultural and linguistic scale of these references does not have to be narrow, static or singular. The celestial and earthly constellations which astronomers, but also historical geographers, observe and to which they affix knowledge are incessantly moving. Coordinates can therefore be values which transcend, and reflect what lies beneath, the trappings of time, place, people and language.