Perhaps this is what Anne Boleyn looked like – but why should we care?

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/feb/17/anne-boleyn-portrait-history

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Putting faces on people from the past is a dangerous delusion. It makes us think we can understand past centuries more easily than is the case. But worse, it casts a spotlight on a tiny number of individuals and throws the vast majority of humankind into their shadow. Inevitably, the best-preserved, most-portrayed faces are those of the few – kings and queens, ladies and lords. Our obsession with knowing exactly what they looked like reveals a deeply conservative attitude to history that slavers over monarchs and forgets the lives of peasants.

Now it is Anne Boleyn whose face – apparently – shines out of the dark. Face recognition software has enabled Californian researchers to claim that a portrait held by Bradford Art Galleries and Museums is of Boleyn. Most of her portraits were destroyed after she was beheaded in 1536. Using a rare image of her on a coin as their template, the scientists matched it with the Bradford painting – but not with other supposed portraits of her.

Well, maybe. The trouble is that the coin the computer was shown does not look like a very authoritative portrayal itself – the face on it is a crude doodle. Still, some portraits really do show what individuals looked like. When the skeleton of Richard III was found and his face rebuilt, the features that emerged from the earth turned out to be uncannily similar to those in contemporary portraits.

And yet a pattern is emerging. Anne Boleyn, Richard III … These are among the most famous names in British history. They are part of our royal story – the pageant of our rulers that plays everywhere from Wolf Hall to the latest pictures of royal offspring. In the 21st century we are more obsessed with this narrow version of British history than we’ve ever been. And a good reason for that obsession with the powerful is that they are so easy to relate to as characters. Their words, and their faces, are preserved.

Whatever happened to history from below?

The most audacious history books of the 20th century spurned the history of kings and queens. They tried to recover the stories of labourers and villagers, the untold lives of ordinary people. Books such as The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (1963), Montaillou by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie (1978) and Society and Culture in Early Modern France by Natalie Zemon Davis (1975) showed that it is possible to rescue the lives of the common people from what Thompson called “the enormous condescension of posterity”. These and other historians proved that history does not have to be written from above: the daily doings of royals and their ministers are not the only interesting human lives.

Related: Possible Anne Boleyn portrait found using facial recognition software

Inevitably, the history of the people involves less attention to faces, and more to numbers. My first essay on a university history course in the 1980s was about the population history of England and Wales, and how it can be reconstructed from parish registers. Had I signed on for maths by mistake?

Our desire to assign faces to the past is of course deeply human and inescapable. It makes someone seem more real if you know they had black eyes that darted about flirtatiously – which is how contemporaries described Boleyn. But how it stacks the odds against the people’s history – what are the chances of a medieval peasant being remembered as an individual? Bertolt Brecht defined the dream of a “history from below” when he asked:

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates?In the books you will read the names of kings.Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?

But of course, when we picture ancient Egypt we do not see the faces of temple builders. We see the golden mask of Tutankhamun shining out from an ocean of oblivion. The pharaoh’s face is remembered, reconstructed, endlessly gazed on. The Egyptian poor are dead and gone.

There are exceptions to the rule that only powerful people’s faces are preserved. The ancient Celts threw criminals and sacrificial victims into bogs. Peat preserved them, so the most visible faces from prehistoric northern Europe are, for once, those of outsiders and victims. Lindow Man, slaughtered and chucked into a Cheshire peat bog, grimaces down the corridor of time.

Elsewhere, the rule holds that if you fixate on faces from the past, you are wallowing in the history of the powerful. There are many more portraits of 18th-century slave owners than there are portraits of slaves. Does that make the owners more worthy of historical interest?

You just have to do the maths – as they tried to teach me when they set me to read Wrigley and Schofield. The tiny number of faces preserved down the centuries are overwhelmingly those of the powerful, the wealthy, and most of all, the royal. We really need to forget faces if we want a more human history. Our desire to gaze on Anne Boleyn’s black eyes is a pathetic replacement for a proper interest in the history of the many.

That history is closer than it seems. The other day I picked up a clay pipe by the Thames. Who smoked it? Not Richard III, nor King Tut, nor Anne Boleyn. But someone just as real, whose fleeting presence it was a privilege to hold in the palm of my hand.