Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Strange English Customs: The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Game

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Something in England’s soil nurtures bizarre traditions, from the soberly political (think Black Rod) to the brutally folkloric. The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide football game belongs to the second category, and it puts the emphasis on brutal. 

What could possibly be more fun?

Basically, we’re talking about a mass football game that runs for two days. That’s eight hours each day. One article claims it has only two rules, you can’t move the ball in a motorized vehicle and you can’t murder anyone, but don’t take that too seriously. It has other rules, but not murdering anyone is important. It’s that kind of game. Although I’m not sure that’s a rule. One of the assorted articles I read says “unnecessary violence” is frowned on but it’s not banned. It doesn’t mention murder.

Irrelevant photo: a romantic-looking shed door.

 

Sounds like fun. How do I play?

It helps if you’re from Ashebourne, because the town divides into teams according to which side of the river you’re born on. Outsiders can throw themselves in on whichever side they want, but they’d be wise to be (a) large and (b) young enough to heal well. And probably male. I haven’t seen any women in the photos, and wild-eyed feminist that I am, I’m not about to campaign my way into this. Look at it this way: If a group of men decide to do something insanely stupid, being a feminist doesn’t mean I’ll join them in the name of equality. If someone else wants to, I’ll cheer her on, but I’ll do it from the sidelines. 

Here’s how the game works: Someone lets a ball loose in the middle of town and everyone tries to get hold of it, so it immediately turns into a shoving match involving hundreds of people. Odds are that for at least part of the time most of the players won’t have a clue where the ball is, so they’ll shove whoever’s closest and trust it contributes to the greater good. Or that it doesn’t, but at a certain point instinct takes over and who cares? Players get lifted off their feet. They get squeezed until they see stars–which actually does happen when your body doesn’t get enough oxygen. They get broken ribs, broken other things, bruises, black eyes, and injuries to any part of the human body that’s injurable.

The object is to get the ball to the opposite team’s goal–it’s a millstone–and the goals are three miles apart, so the rule about not using motorized transportation begins to make sense. Once you get it there, you hit the ball three times against the stone to score a point. 

It sounds like you need to jump in the river to do that. (See? There are rules.)

Then your teammates carry you back to the town center on their shoulders and if you made your goal before 6 pm, the whole thing starts over with a new ball and the game runs until 10. If it’s after 6, then play’s over for the day and everyone heads for the pub, where people buy you drinks. 

People will be buying you drinks for weeks to come, and you get to keep the ball, which is handmade and hand painted.

On the second day, everyone who isn’t too hung over does it all again.

 

And if I don’t want to play?

You’d be wise to stay well out of the way, because onlookers can get swept into the mayhem, as one reporter was, losing his notebook but gaining some experience in the process. At some point, someone grabbed him by the hood and yanked him out. 

The mob is called the hug and it isn’t entirely in anyone’s control, but it’s powerful. When I read about it knocking over walls, I thought I was reading a bit of poetic exaggeration. Then I saw a photo of a brick wall that had been pushed over. The reporter who lost his notebook wrote about the hug barreling through a barbed wire fence. Shops (wisely) board up their windows. 

And pubs? They sell a lot of beer. 

 

The history

No one knows how the tradition started, but that doesn’t stop people from making it up. According to one theory, it started with an execution. The severed head was thrown into the crowd (of course) and the fun began. You can choose to believe that if you like. No one can prove you wrong.

Or right, but that doesn’t bother people as much as it used to.

The game can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century but probably started long before. A fire wiped out the town records, so that’s as far back as we go. The medieval period’s not an irrational guess. 

A couple of other English towns have similar games at Shrovetide, but most places settle for running around flipping pancakes and seeing who crosses the finish line first.

 

What’s Shrovetide?

The days before Lent. And Lent is the days before Easter, the soberest holiday in the Christian calendar. You needed a Jewish atheist to explain that to you, right? As far as I can figure it out, the medieval approach to Lent was for people to give up everything they enjoyed–meat, dairy products, eggs. Sex. They’d eat one meal a day. 

People were supposed to go to confession at Shrovetide and do all that sober stuff in preparation for Lent. But flipping pancakes and shoving your neighbors through a barbed wire fence and into the river? That also makes sense as a preparation for a somber season. 

 

Mayhem and community spirit

Local people will swear that the point of the game is community spirit. “It’s the lifeblood of the town,” an Ashebournian told the reporter who lost his notebook to the hug. “The media focuses on the fighting, but that’s all forgotten the moment the game ends. The real legacy is how it brings people together.”

Backing that up, a different reporter got a quote from a local businesswoman: “It looks like Armageddon. It’s knee-deep in litter, there’s stuff everywhere piled up in the doorways, in the road.” But after the second day, “all the players will be out mending fences, they’ll help you take your boards down, they’ll be picking up litter, because they want it to continue the next year.” 

Quaint olde English laws

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London’s Millennium Bridge needed some work recently–some cleaning, some urgent repair, a good tooth brushing–and an ancient bylaw required the contractor to dangle a bale of hay over the side of the bridge to warn boats that the headroom had been reduced. 

How ancient is the bylaw? No one’s saying, but the contractor modernized the tradition by adding a light at night. Couldn’t do that in the old days. The hay would’ve caught on fire. 

News articles are talking about it all as one of London’s charming quirks, but what strikes me as far stranger is that five of the Thames river crossings are maintained not by local government but by a 900-year-old charity, which is British for a nonprofit organization. 

But any discussion of quaint bylaws leads, naturally enough, to quaint ordinary laws, and England does a flourishing trade in quaint. Let’s review a handful.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise behind the village shop.

In England, it’s illegal to:

  • Wear armor in Parliament. 
    • A recent article about fashion–I usually skip those but by the end of the sentence you’ll see why this caught my eye–tells me that chainmail is a hot look this season, giving us chainmail-look dresses, miniskirts, tops, and unspecified menswear. “Chainmail is sexy,” someone or other is quoted as saying.  
      • I’m pretty sure you still can’t wear it in Parliament.
  • Walk a cow through the streets between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
  • Be drunk in a pub. 
    • To be fair, the law bundles this together with being drunk in other public places, but pubs are the only places on the list that sell alcohol.
  • Be drunk when in charge of a cow, which neatly combines the two previous laws.
  • Cause a nuclear explosion, although who’ll be around to enforce that isn’t clear.  
  • Take off your black cocked hat at a ceremonial event, but only if a) you’re a woman, b) you’re a Thetford town councillor, c) it’s before 2016, and d) you don’t have the mayor’s permission. 
    • That was a loosening of the rules. Women used to have to keep the hats on, no matter what the god, the mayor, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas said. A whole different set of rules applied to men–of course.  

This doesn’t fit my nifty  it’s-illegal-to formula, but cab drivers are required to ask passengers if they have either the plague or smallpox. And that dates back only to 1936. I’m not clear what the driver’s supposed to do if the passenger says yes, but as a former cab driver, my impulse would be to get the hell out of there. Compassionate cab drivers do exist, but the job doesn’t push a person toward compassion.

Cab drivers are also forbidden to transport rabid dogs or corpses, and I’d like to put it on record that I never broke that law. And was never asked to. 

In another interpretation of the plague-or-smallpox law, the onus is on the passenger to tell the driver if he or she has the plague or smallpox–or any other notifiable disease. 

*

I doubt anyone other than me cares about the odd spacing between paragraphs. I’m sure there’s some way to control it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

Religious oaths in British history, or how to keep groups you don’t like out of Parliament

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The British state is as tangled in arcane rules as a kitten in a ball of yarn, but it’s not above issuing itself a scissors when either necessity or the political mood of the moment demands, and that’s what it did in 1833, when a Quaker, Joseph Pease, was elected as a Member of Parliament. 

The strand of yarn that needed to be cut was the requirement that MPs swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment. Who’s not called the monarch-of-the-moment but the king or the queen, with a capital letter I can’t be bothered to hand out, and it’s all taken very seriously, thank you.  

Irrelevant photo: This is what cats do on a rainy day. But hey, I did mention kittens…

 

Quakers and oaths

The problem in 1833 was that Quakers didn’t swear oaths, and I assume they still don’t. It’s against their religion, and you don’t have to read very far into Quaker history to find that when something’s against their religion, serious Quakers will go to no end of trouble not to do it. Their founder was well acquainted with prison. He was jailed for blasphemy, for refusing to take an oath, for having long hair, for assorted other things. That long-hair charge was ruled not proven (i’m not sure how–you’d think the evidence would be on hand, or on head), but he and several others weren’t released. Instead they were fined for refusing to take their hats off in court. They refused to pay the fine, which they considered unjust, and were returned to prison. 

They’re a stubborn lot, the Quakers. I admire them. 

So, no oath for Joseph Pease, who wasn’t the first Quaker elected to Parliament. One was elected in 1698 but never got to take his seat. Three years earlier, Quakers’ affirmations had been accepted in place of oaths in most situations. The exceptions were giving evidence in court, serving on a jury, and holding a paid crown office. (in 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence. (In 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence.)

MPs weren’t paid until 1911–they were assumed to be independently wealthy and the setup pretty much restricted the post to people who were–so it wasn’t irrational to think the new MP might be able to take his seat. He wrote to the speaker saying he hoped “my declarations of fidelity . . . might in this case, as in others where the law requires an oath, be accepted.”

The hell it would be. No oath, no seat in the Commons. A by-election was ordered and someone else was elected. 

 

Which brings us back to Joseph Pease

That explains why when Pease was elected he expected trouble. He told his constituents that he was prepared to “go through much persecution in your cause” and wouldn’t “be surprised if the [Commons’] Serjeant-at-Arms be ordered to take me into custody.” 

But it was now 1833–practically modern times, right? Two seventeenth-century laws that kept anyone but Anglicans out of public office had been repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed in 1829.  

So Pease showed up, announced that he wouldn’t take the oath, surprising no one, and was asked–or possibly told–to step outside while the Commons discussed its response. 

What the Commons did was set up a committee to look at laws and precedents, because what Britain has instead of a written constitution is an endless collection of precedents. How anyone who enters that maze finds their way back is beyond me, but find a way back they did, and in what must be record time they recommended that Commons accept his affirmation. The house agreed and he got to take his seat.

That same session of Parliament passed a law accepting affirmations for jury duty and public office from Quakers and Moravians.

Moravians? They’re a Protestant group founded in Bohemia by Jan Hus and predating Martin Luther. (Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t know about that pre-dating business.)

 

Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?

Um no. Because although Catholics had been admitted to Parliament in 1829, Jews had to wait until 1858. And voting was still restricted to people with money. 

Did I say “people”? I meant men. The idea of women either voting or running for office was too absurd to spend time on. So let’s focus on the next category of people to wriggle through the eye of the political needle.

Jews weren’t specifically excluded from Parliament, but to take a seat they had to swear an oath that included the words, “Upon my true Faith as a Christian,” and you can see what that’s a problem if you take this stuff seriously. Or even if you don’t. That would be a step too far, even for my own irreligiously Jewish self.

Disraeli, who’s known as Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, was born Jewish but converted as a child, when his parents did, so he had no problem a Christian oath. Interesting that he’s still considered a Jewish prime minister, don’t you think?

We can also unearth an MP and a Lord or two who had Jewish ancestors somewhere in the background but who was Christian enough to feel comfortable about the oath. Were they Jewish? Weren’t they Jewish? I’m sure it depended on who you asked, and quite possibly still does. 

In 1850, a clearly Jewish Jew was elected to represent Greenwich, and instead of disappearing politely as a previous Jewish would-be MP had, he took his seat and refused to leave, causing an uproar. The house voted on whether to adjourn and he cast a vote. He also spoke on a motion that he be asked to withdraw.

The whole thing went to the courts and he was fined £500 for every vote he cast.

Over time, the Commons passed more than one bill that would have allowed Jews to take a different oath, but the Lords kept blocking it. Eventually, a compromise allowed each house to modify their oaths by a special resolution for each Jewish member elected. 

None of this applied to people from other religions, or to atheists, although I haven’t seen evidence that any either ran for office or got elected at this point.

It’s hard to say when dissenting Protestants were allowed to take seats in Commons. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, according to Parliament’s website, some dissenters attended Church of England services occasionally to be sure they wouldn’t be excluded. That makes them hard or impossible to count. 

So basically, I can’t offer any information on them.

 

But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again

Once he took his seat, he had one last problem to contend with: In this period, men took off their hats as a sign of deference to their superiors, and Quakers refused to recognize either superiors or inferiors, so they kept their hats on their heads. That’s one of the things George Fox was jailed for. So as Pease came in, the Commons doorkeeper would sweep his hat off for him and leave it in the Commons library. 

Problem solved. 

Breaking with tradition, he didn’t address the Speaker of the House as sir, and where other MPs referred to each other in speeches as the honorable member, he settled for the member. The roof did not fall in.

 

What oath do MPs take these days?

It’s all loosened up considerably. If they’re going to swear, they use a wording settled on in 1868. They get to choose their sacred book and say, “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to [his or her] Majesty [fill in the appropriate name], [his or her] heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” 

I’d recommend inserting an and before “heirs and successors,” but no one’s asked me. 

Having a choice of sacred books reminds me that, to date, no Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster member has been elected as an MP, which is a shame because they’d have to appear with a colander on their head and hold a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

May I live long enough to see that happen.

But we’re not done with the choices now available. They can take the oath in Welsh, in Cornish, or in Scottish Gaelic. They can hold the book up. They can raise a hand but not hold the book. They can kiss the book. They can dance the hula and leave everyone speechless.

No, you can’t trust everything I say.

On the other hand, if they’re going to affirm, they say, “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to” etc. 

I don’t know why they have to both declare and affirm, but it’s okay because it comes with a side of fries and a fizzy drink, but they don’t get to dance the hula.

What happens if you’re an anti-monarchist? You have a problem. Would-be MPS who don’t either swear or affirm their loyalty to the crown can’t take their seats, speak in debates, vote, or receive a salary. They can’t pass Go. And they can be fined £500 if they try to do any of that. And if that isn’t enough, their seat sill be declared vacant “as if they were dead.”

Lucy Hay, England’s civil war, and history looking the other way

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Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle–not to be confused with Ann Hay, Countess of Something Irrelevant–played a small, double-edged part in England’s Civil Wars, and you might not want to get too close to those edges, because they were sharp. She was the daughter of an earl but, what with being a woman and all, couldn’t inherit a title of her own. You know how it is. I didn’t inherit a title either, and I’m willing to bet you didn’t. 

So Lucy married a man who soon became an earl, although he was a lowly baron when she married him.

Irrelevant photo: Cornwall’s foggy cliffs–or one of them anyway.

 

A digression

English being the wild-eyed, confusing thing it is, the wife of an earl is a countess. This almost makes sense if you think back to the Norman invasion of England. 

No, I know you weren’t alive then. None of us were. Imagine yourself back to the Norman invasion. The Normans brought the word count with them from the Continent, only since they were coming from France the word was counte. You’ll want to be careful how you pronounce that. However you spell it, though, the word never made the transition to English. It was defeated in hand-to-hand combat by the Anglo-Saxon word eorl (now earl), which applied to roughly the same small group of men. 

And so it is that in English you only get to be a count if you bought your title abroad. Buy it in Britain and you’re an earl. And if you want to know why the wife of an earl isn’t an earless–

Damn. I was going to refer you to the overstuffed Mysteries of the English Language file for an explanation, but then I typed the word and saw that the imaginary wife in question would probably be ear-less instead of an earl-ess. I doubt that explains the discrepancy, but it is a satisfying absurdity. Let’s quit while that’s fresh in our minds.

 

But we were talking about Lucy Hay

Lucy–I repeat, for no good reason–had to marry to get herself a title, and James Hay, the soon-to-be earl she married was a major player in first James’ and then in Charles I’s court. He was knight of the Bath, master of the wardrobe, keeper of the warm fuzzy towel, groom of the stool, and gentleman of the bedchamber, although not all at the same time.* The titles are ridiculous–you have to travel in very select circles to even say them with a straight face–but they mark his political influence.

The kings poured money and possessions over him, but let’s skip the details. He’s not our focus. For our story, what matters is that he brought Lucy to court, where she made an impact in her own right. She was beautiful–probably the quality that was most valued–witty, charming, and smart. Or at least she had a reputation for all of the above. I wasn’t there either, so I can only take other people’s word. She was celebrated by assorted poets and rumored to have affairs with a range of men. I wouldn’t put too much weight on the rumors, because (a) we don’t seem to have anything to back them up, and (b) it’s what was (and still is) said about any woman who accomplished anything, because surely it’s the only way a woman could get anywhere.

From here on, we’ll find that respectable sources don’t say much about ol’ Lucy, so I have to rely partially on the less official ones. They may be correct–they’re at least fairly consistent–but as historical citations they’re not much more impressive than, ahem, I am. So, for what it’s worth:

Lucy became lady of the bedchamber to Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, and went on to be a close confidant. Then in 1636, Lucy’s husband died. By some accounts he left her a wealthy widow. By others, he left nothing but debts. Either way, she chose not to remarry and became close to Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Stafford and the king’s main advisor, sparking a rumor that they were sleeping together, because what else could a man and a woman do when they’re together?

How influential was she? It’s hard to know. For the most part, women had to operate in the political shadows, so we’re not going to find a lot of documentation. That’s great if you’re writing novels–no one will prove you wrong, so you’re free to have a good time–but not so great if you’re writing history.

 

But why do we care about Lucy?

Because Charles I is the guy who got his head cut off. You know: English Civil Wars. Conflict between Protestants, Very-very Protestants, Catholics, and Possible Catholics, not to mention between king and Parliament.

Parliament was pushing for more power. Charles was pushing for more power. But there was only so much power to go around. Non-Church of England Protestants were pushing for religious freedom, at least for themselves if not for anyone else. Everybody was maneuvering for something. And Stafford–remember him? C’mon, it’s only been a few paragraphs. King’s adviser. Lucy’s good buddy. Parliament noticed that Stafford was vulnerable and had him executed–and Charles (that’s the king; remember him?) put his seal to the order. His political position was already shaky and he either couldn’t or wouldn’t risk his royal neck for a mere favorite advisor.

In some tellings, that’s why Lucy turned against Charles and toward the more moderate of the Presbyterian groupings in Parliament. (They were the relative moderates; the radicals were the Puritans.) But that’s guesswork. All we know is that she became close to John Pym, the most visible advocate for Parliament’s power, and when Charles decided to arrest Pym and four other MPs who were getting on his royal nerves, she tipped them off, so that when the king marched into Parliament with armed men, they were nowhere to be found.

Would history have played out differently if he’d gotten his hands on them? We’ll never know. He didn’t. A civil war broke out, and Lucy sided with Parliament until the Puritans came to dominate it, when she switched back to the Royalist side, pawning a necklace to raise £1,500, which she gave to the cause. That was a big honkin’ sum of money at the time and it’s not to be sneezed at today. She generally kept communication open with, in no particular order, Charles (that’s Charles, Jr., who later became Charles II), the queen, and scattered bands of Royalists. Parliament had her arrested and held in the tower for 18 months, and from there she stayed in communication with Charles, Jr., by cipher.  

Also by email.

In spite of all that, when Charles II got to the side of the board where they put an extra checker on his head, kinging him, she didn’t regain her old influence. 

Why not? History doesn’t say. Maybe because she wasn’t of use anymore. Maybe she was no longer young and beautiful enough to get the (male, remember) poets cranked up. Maybe her contacts in the new court weren’t strong enough. That’s all speculation, though. The court–the one she’d held restore–had moved on, leaving her behind.

She died of apoplexy not long after Charles II became king. 

Apoplexy? It’s a dated word for a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke. In a more general way, though, it means to be really, truly furious. Which she might well have been by then, although I have nothing more than a hunch to back that up. If she’d known history was going to pretty well ignore her, she’d have had all the more reason to be apoplectic.

 

* Note: I only made up one of those titles. The rest, I swear to you, are real.

The Conservative Party drains its shallow pool of talent

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I’ve suspected for quite a while that the Tory talent pool would run dry, but we seem to be seeing the final drops of run out. 

What am I talking about? Well, the story starts some years ago, when Labour was in power and Gordon Brown was, so briefly, the prime minister. He committed the country to building HS2, a high-speed rail line that would link London with the north–Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Whether it was a good idea is open to raucous debate, but since then one government has tossed it to the next–from Labour to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to a series of Conservative governments–and it’s gone further and further over budget. 

The initial budget was £32 billion. Okay, it was £32.7 billion, but when you’re dealing with billions, who cares about the .7? According to some estimates, the whole thing would now cost £100 billion.  

Irrelevant photo: Not a dandelion but one of a zillion flowers that look like them but aren’t.

Ah, but the whole thing won’t be built. One leg of a Y-shaped line was canceled years ago, and now the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the entire northern part of the project is going in the scrap bucket and the money that saves will be spent on other transportation projects in the north of England. 

Why the north? Because the whole thing was sold as a way to connect London and the north, and prime ministers du days past, especially Boris Johnson, made a lot of noise about how that would bring prosperity to the north, which could use a bit of that, thanks. His favorite phrase was the annoying leveling up. I expect he was nervous about letting that scary word leveling run around bare-ass nekked, because folks might think the project would take something away from London. 

So he reassured London that it would continue to be the favored child, but the north would now become just as favored, just as rich. Every child would be the favorite. And I’ll become my own grandmother.

It’s in this context that, in the midst of the Conservative Party conference, the government published a 40-page prospectus to back up Sunak’s cancellation of the northern leg of the line: Network North: transforming British transport. On the first page, it plonks Manchester down where Preston’s supposed to be. Since I can’t locate either Preston or Manchester, I’m taking the word of two sources, one of which says, cautiously, “At first glance . . . it seems to relocate. . . .”

I’m not sure what happens at second glance or why it only seems. Still, even appearing to misplace a major city does give the impression of carelessness.

But let’s not be hasty. The prospectus is clearly the product of deep thought and careful work. It promises to fund an extension of the Greater Manchester Metrolink system to the airport, although the system linked to the airport in 2014. It promises improvements in Plymouth, which even I can find, right down there on the south coast, which is another way to say, Not in the north. Bristol–also not in the north–was promised a £100,000 investment until, overnight, the promise disappeared in the online document and was replaced with some vague verbiage about the west. Which is, likewise, not in the north. And then there’s a commitment to upgrade a road near Southampton (situated where the name makes you think it would be, not in the north), but that was a mistake. They meant Littlehampton, which isn’t on the south coast but is pretty damn close. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to love British politics.

 

So what’s left after the cancellation?

What’s left is an expensive train from London to Birmingham. Which–I’m getting tired of typing this–isn’t in the north. It’s in the Midlands, where it’s always been. After trains reach Birmingham, they might end up using the existing track to Manchester, but instead of being high-speed, they’ll run slower than the trains that already run on that line. The existing trains tilt. The new ones won’t. The article I stole this from doesn’t say so, but I assume that means they have to slow down on the curves. 

Oh, and the platforms are too short for the high-speed trains the system was originally planned for, so they’ll be replaced by skateboards. 

Can’t stay upright on a skateboard? Get out on the highway and stick out your thumb.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, has since clarified that his department was only giving a few examples of where the money might be spent so we needn’t get so starchy about it all. 

And did I mention that £1 billion has already been spent on the canceled part of the line–or at least invoices amounting to that have already been submitted? You see why I can’t get worked up about the £.7 billion, right?

Queerness and the natural order of things: it’s the news from Britain

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Kew Royal Botanic Gardens is celebrating the queerness of nature this month–“the diversity and beauty of plants and fungi,” as they put it, especially those that “challenge traditional expectations.” 

They’re messing with us, right? 

Well, no. Not unless we’re the sort of people who accuse the natural world of political correctness when it doesn’t meet our expectations. Included in the Queer Nature festival are:

The Ruizia mauritiana, which grows male flowers when it’s hot and female ones when it’s cool

Citrus trees, which can switch between asexual and sexual reproduction.

Avocado trees, which flower twice, the first flowers being functionally female and the second, functionally male. 

And fungi, which have worked out thousands of ways to reproduce.

Thousands? Apparently. What else do you have to think about if you’re a fungus?

You might want to see the exhibit soon, before someone decides it’s unnatural and shuts it down.

*

Irrelevant photos: Beach huts near Whitby. What are beach huts? They’re a British thing. A very British thing. If they make no sense to you someone other than me may have to explain them to you. But aren’t the colors wonderful?

 

Speaking of nature and the unnatural, someone cut down a much-loved sycamore that was growing along Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, in a spot that was named after it: Sycamore Gap. The tree was some 300 years old. 

It’s not clear yet who cut it down or why, but when someone planted a sycamore sapling a few yards away from the stump, “to restore people’s faith in humanity bring a smile back to people’s faces, and just give them a bit of hope,” the National Trust, which owns the site, uprooted it. It’s a world heritage site, they said. It’s an ancient monument. You can’t just run around planting hope without permission from the proper authorities. It might mess with the archeology.

There may well be some solid reasoning behind this, but they don’t seem to have communicated it yet.

They’ll plant the sapling someplace else.

However. It turns out that sycamores can be coppiced–cut down so that shoots regrow from the stump. So this one may regrow, although it’ll look different. And semi-relevantly, sycamores aren’t a native three. They were brought to the country some 500 years ago. Or else they were brought by the Romans some 2,000 years ago. Take your choice.  

 

Correcting history

A former MP is–or may be–threatening to sue the University of Cambridge because a historian associated with the university named her as a descendant of the people who enslaved his ancestors. One article says she “threatened . . . legal action.” Another article says she “appears to threaten legal action.” 

So we don’t have any agreement on how solid the threat is, but either way she complains of being singled out, since other living relatives went unmentioned. She accuses the university of not protecting her privacy.

She does make clear that she finds slavery abhorrent, so we have to give her credit for being forward-thinking.

The work of the historian, Malik Al Nasir, documents the business empire that linked plantation slavery to shipping, banking, insurance, railways, distilleries, and the sugar trade. It’s been described as ground-breaking. 

 

Correcting the interview list

Almost 20 years ago, someone went for a job interview at the BBC and ended up on the air–not being interviewed for the job but as an IT expert who the interviewer asked about a legal dispute between Apple records and Apple computers. 

How’d that happen? The applicant, Guy Goma, was in one waiting room and the expert, Guy Kewney, was in another. When someone walked into the wrong waiting room and asked for Guy–well, Guy responded. And panicked his way through what must have been the weirdest job interview of this life. 

The clip seems to be immortal–it has 5 million views on YouTube alone–and Goma’s gone public to say he should be getting some royalties. I haven’t seen a comment from the BBC, but a new trailer for a BBC show, Have I Got News for You, shows him being mistaken for not one but three panelists as well as the host.   

Did he get the job? I don’t think so and I can’t help imagining that someone said, “Listen, if he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the interview, forget it.”

 

Correcting a death notice

A woman in Missouri applied for financial aid to help with an internship program and discovered that she was dead, at least officially. The financial aid office told her to withdraw immediately–either from the program or the request for aid, it’s not clear which, but if you’re dead I’m not sure it matters. 

The problem involved her social security number, so the woman, now known as Madeline-Michelle Carthen, called the Social Security Administration, which agreed that she seemed to be alive and told her to visit a social security office with some convincing form of i.d. She did, and she got a letter acknowledging that she was, in fact, alive, but over the next 17 years she was turned down for a mortgage, lost jobs, had her car repossessed, and lost her right to vote, all on the grounds that she was dead. 

She eventually changed her name and applied for a new social security number, but since it links to the old one, she’s still more or less dead.

About 10,000 living people in the US are listed as dead each year. May you never be one of them.

 

Meanwhile in Australia . . .

. . . a journalist thought it would be a good idea to test the country’s limits on what people can name their babies. Registrars are supposed to reject any name that’s offensive or not in the public interest, so the boringly named Kirsten Drysdale named her baby Methamphetamine Rules and waited to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. Nobody noticed anything strange about it and the name was registered. 

“We were just trying to answer a question for our viewers for our new show . . . which was just around the rules about what you can and can’t call your baby,” she said (semi-coherently, but under the circumstances, who can blame her?).

She and her husband will change–or else have already changed–the baby’s name, but the original will still appear on his birth certificate. Forever. 

A quick history of British lifeboats

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The thing about being an island is that you have coasts, and the thing about having coasts is that ships wreck on them. In the early 19th century, Britain and Ireland racked up an average of 1,800 shipwrecks a year. And–you will have figured this out already–the thing about shipwrecks is that people die. 

For most of Britain’s history, rescuing people from shipwrecks was a hit-or-miss business. People in ports did what they could, but seas stormy enough to wreck a ship are stormy enough to wreck the small boats they’d put out in, and there was a limit to what they could do. 

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

 

The organizational stuff

Mostly, people put out in whatever little boats they had, but in 1730 Liverpool introduced a boat dedicated to nothing but lifesaving, and in 1785 Bamburgh launched the first one specifically designed for it. Four years later, businessmen from Tyne and Wear ran a design competition for a lifeboat. Let’s toss in a name or two here, because they’re wonderful. The winning boat was designed by William Wouldhave, and it could right itself if it capsized. 

After that, the boatbuilder Henry Greathead was asked to combine the best features of the new boat and the earlier design, and in 20 years he’d built 30 hybrids. But lifesaving was still a local effort, dependent on local initiative, money, and energy. 

The first national effort started in 1824, when the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was formed. The founder (whose name is boring so we’ll skip it) was well connected–you could’ve called him Sir Boring Name and no one would’ve thought you were being weird–so he was able to approach the navy, the government, and assorted “eminent characters” for backing. They were generous with their moral support but didn’t cough up much in the way of cash.

It was an MP (whose name is also boring) who suggested tapping the wealthy but less eminent, and that shook loose the money he needed. There was prestige to be had in philanthropizing, and some of them probably even cared about the causes they donated to. Sir Boring Name raised £10,000 from them. That would be in the neighborhood of £1,000,000 today. In other words, it was more than enough to buy lunch, never mind launch a few boats and an organization. 

By 1825 the newly formed organization had 15 lifeboats and thirteen lifeboat stations to its name, which it changed to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1854. Neither name flows off the tongue happily, but since it’s now known as the RNLI, no one notices.

By 1886, when 27 lifeboat crew members died responding to the wreck of the Mexico, donations from the rich had stagnated. Maybe they’d gotten bored with the same old, same old and some other cause had eclipsed the RNLI. Causes go in and out of fashion, even when the needs they respond to stay around. It was local people who donated money to support the bereaved families, as I’m sure they had from time immemorial–that had never been the RNLI’s role–but the disaster also led to a couple deciding that RNLI funding needed to be dependent not on a wealthy few but on the nation as a whole. They democratized the effort, going for many small donations, and they raised £10,000 in two weeks. Since then, the RNLI has turned to the public for support and gotten it. 

You may have figured out by now that the organization isn’t part of the government and never has been. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know. Probably a bit of both. 

 

Launching the boats

Let’s focus for a moment on one lifeboat station, in Selsey, which is–um, hang on. 

It’s in West Sussex. I knew that.

Selsey built its first lifeboat station in 1861, and until 1913, when they built a slipway, it launched its lifeboats by hauling them over wooden skids laid on the beach. That’s for each launch, I believe, since the skids would’ve been either washed away or  buried by the tides if they’d been left in place. It was heavy work and it was slow. 

I can’t swear that this is true of the Selsey boat, but lifeboats were often launched and hauled out of the water by women, helped by horses if they were available. The men would already be onboard. 

In 1899, a lifeboat (not from Selsey; do pay attention; we left there sentences ago) was hauled ten miles overland for a rescue during a storm, either because it was safer than risking it in open water or they needed a more protected place to launch. Some 50 to 60 people dragged it across Exmoor with the help of 18 horses. They knocked down walls (that would’ve been stone walls, so no light job) and anything else that was in their way and occasionally had to lift the boat off its carriage to get it through gates. It took them ten hours. Everyone on board the ship was saved.

It would make a hell of a movie. Toss in a few lifelong enmities having to work together, gale-force winds, beards, and some of those long, heavy skirts (probably not on the same people as the beards, since this was a while ago and they could be stiff-necked about that stuff in public). 

Plus, of course, the horses. Never forget the horses. And a member of the local gentry giving orders to people who know their work better than him.

 

Rescue

The lifejacket was introduced to lifesaving crews in 1854. It was made from strips of cork sewn onto canvas and it was bulky. It didn’t catch on until 1861, when the only survivor of a lifeboat that went down was the only crew member wearing one. From there, people went on to improve on the design, gradually making it more buoyant and more comfortable.

In 1808, the breeches buoy was introduced. This was basically a pair of shorts attached to a life preserver and a line. The rescuers could shoot the line to the ship, secure it on both ends, and use it like a zip wire, sliding people one by one from the wreck to safety, then hauling the thing back. Even if the line broke, dumping the passenger in the drink, the life preserver would keep them afloat.

Sounds clunky? It was effective enough that it was used until helicopter rescue edged it out.

 

And today?

Life’s not all perfect. The RNLI’s national organization has come into conflict with some of its local branches–the ones that raise money to support the RNLI and whose members jump in the boats and risk their lives to save others.

They’re all volunteers. I haven’t mentioned that yet. The system may be organized nationally but it still depends on the passion and goodwill of local volunteers,

As far as I can see, a lot of the conflict is about which lifeboat stations get which boats and about local groups feeling disrespected by the national leadership. In one Scottish station, most of the crew signed a letter saying, “They’re putting an all-weather lifeboat in an in-shore position and an in-shore lifeboat in an open sea position.” 

To which the national organization says, Yeah, but look, we did a Lifesaving Effect Review, where we considered effectiveness and speed and size and modeling and numbers and which stations are big enough to hold which kind of boats and all sorts of other impressive stuff.

Which of course it not an actual quote. That’s what italics are for: cheating.

I’m sure paid good money for the review, but it doesn’t sound like it’s swayed the volunteers. One of them–sorry, another boring name–said, “I’m not going to be responsible for putting a boat like that into the open water in the North Sea. . . . It’s putting lives at risk.”

Another (I don’t know about their name–they asked to be anonymous) reminded the world at large, in the person an Observer reporter, who exactly keeps the organization on its feet: “The population of small coastal towns with lifeboat stations are the ones who keep it going. They do jumble sales, quizzes, Christmas cards, charity events.” 

If you’re running an organization, you alienate those people at your peril.

But as our previous Mr. Boring Name said, “We’ve been around for hundreds of years and these guys will be gone in three. We’ll still be here to pick up the pieces.”

The Posh Report: class, culture, and snobbery in England

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The English have a way of bringing almost anything back to class. Or maybe that’s not just the English but the British in general. Or–you know what? Let’s not worry about it. Let me give you an example to take our minds off the problem: I was walking dogs with a friend and when the time came to pick up after my pooch I tore a patterned plastic bag off a roll that was meant to fit inside a pickup pouch but had escaped.

“Very posh,” my friend said, and she showed me the greenish diaper bags she used, which at the time sold for–oh, I think it was 12p for hundreds of the things, or to put that another way, not much.

I explained that someone had given us (us being my partner and me) the pouch, along with the bags. Not having had kids–in this country or any other–I was a stranger to the greenish diaper bags and asked about them. I’ve used them ever since, although they left that 12p price tag in the dust long ago.

My point here is that this is a country that can even take dog shit and make it about class.

A rare relevant photo: a kind of hydrangea that someone once told me is posh. The more enthusiastic mopheaded kind are, apparently, just too much color for the delicate sensibilities of an aristocrat.

So what does posh mean

For the sake of my beloved fellow barbarians, let’s define posh. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as “elegant or fashionable.” The Collins Dictionary (enough with the links; you don’t really care, do you?) adds “expensive” and the Urban Dictionary tacks on “aristocratic.” People tell each other that the word stands for port out, starboard home, which was shorthand for the best cabins to have if a (posh) person was sailing from Britain to India and back again. They were the ones that get the morning sun and would be cooler in the evening.

The problem is, no one’s found any evidence to back up that origin story. The passenger line that’s supposed to have stamped P.O.S.H. on the more expensive tickets actually looked in its archives and came up with nothing. And cabins were numbered. They weren’t likely to have been identified as port and starboard. 

Another theory holds that it was university slang from the turn of the last century, which isn’t nearly as far in the past as it ought to be. That makes a kind of intuitive sense, since university educations were, with rare exceptions, reserved for the rich, but there’s no evidence for this origin story either. 

So let’s file them both in the Urban Myth folder and settle for the origin having been lost.

 

What do posh people do?

I’m not the person to know, thank all the gods I don’t believe in, but in 2017–which is nowhere near as long ago as the turn of the last century–Tatler came up with a list of phrases that it claimed posh people used. I’d quote them but they make me a little queasy and they sound suspiciously like a satire from the 1920s, so I can’t help but wonder if the magazine’s messing with our heads. You’ll have to look them up for yourself. 

Still, the fact that someone saw fit to make a list and the magazine saw fit to publish it, for whatever reasons, testifies to how important it is for the in group to create a code so they can spot the people who don’t belong.

I’m over here, guys, and yes, I am laughing at you. Furthermore, I use greenish diaper bags to pick up after my dog these days. So my reporting is distinctly third-hand. Take it for what it’s worth. But in 2019, Tatler published a list of what was in and out among the posh, and it turns out that the word posh is non-posh. Or as they’d put it, non-U. 

U? That stands for upper class, and I learned that from an undated BBC article that also tells me that latte (you know, the fancy coffee with warm milk) is non-posh, along with brand names and Americanisms. 

But let’s go back to Tatler’s do-and-don’t-do list, which is kind of boring, really. Posh people eat fried eggs. They eat bread. They say no. (Seriously. It’s on the list.) If those are the hints we get for telling the posh from the non-posh, they’re going to find themselves–horrors–melting into the herd. 

But not all hope is lost. What non-posh people do is more telling: They wear makeup outside of London. No gender’s specified, which takes us into a whole ‘nother set of groups and distinctions. Personally, I don’t wear makeup inside London either, but then I’m not the point here, am I? They use the word posh. They use (or maybe that’s talk about) iPads. They eat dips. They–well, maybe this isn’t about individuals here. It seems the entire southeast of England is non-posh, so I guess they go there or live there or acknowledge its existence.

All of France with the exception of Paris is non-posh.  

It’s almost too easy to make fun of this stuff, but the attitude behind it is real–and thoroughly horrifying. 

The imaginary crime report from Britain

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A couple of dog walkers in Chapel St. Leonards (population 3,431, in case it seems relevant) called the police to report a mass killing a week or so back. They’d passed a cafe, looked in the windows, and saw people lying on the floor, laid out on their backs and unmoving, eyes closed, covered with blankets.

Ritual mass murder, they decided–as anyone would–and got out their phones. Five cop cars converged on the cafe, lights flashing, and all the inhabitants rushed to their windows to see what was happening.

It turned out to be a yoga class doing a relaxation. 

The perpetrators of the good deed have been sentenced to two months with no TV. 

Irrelevant photo: Trethevy Quoit

*

In Wales, someone has been snatching the trail-marking posts that tell walkers which way they need to go, leaving to wander off into who knows what swamp and raising questions about why the sign snatcher’s going to all the trouble of digging the posts up instead of just wrecking them where they stand, as any sensible citizen would.

I think I can explain, though: When I was a kid, having a fallout shelter sign (or the occasional street sign) in your bedroom was the height of cool, so I can’t help thinking some teenager’s bedroom is full of the things. 

In defense of my generation, the fallout shelters would have offered no protection and we all knew it, so who cared if you couldn’t find one when the apocalypse came? The signposts, on the other hand, really do make a difference. Kind of like, um, yeah, those street signs my friends (I was too much of a coward) stole so lightheartedly.

 

Lawbreaking animals

On a slightly different note (I’ve had one of those weeks, and anyone expecting coherence won’t be happy), two deer–horns and all–wandered into the hospital in Plymouth and ran around the maternity unit corridors until they got a look at the babies, saw that they were pitifully furless and couldn’t be theirs, and left in disgust. 

Okay, nobody’s saying how the hospital convinced them to leave, and in various versions of the story they trotted through the corridors and galloped through the corridors. The hospital’s own statement makes a point of saying that the cleaning staff sanitized the place and that the deer never came into contact with patients, and really, folks, it’s all okay but would everybody please keep the outside doors closed and not feed the deer, because none of them have any medical training whatsoever. 

 

And now to something that’s completely legal

The cosmetics chain Lush got £5.1 million in tax relief from the UK government last year, recorded a 90% drop in profits, and paid its managers £5 million in bonuses.

 

The extreme recycling report

Australian engineers have found a way to recycle coffee grounds into concrete, which could be used in walkways and pavements, decreasing the amount of sand used in construction and helping to build the city that never sleeps.

 

Enough of that. Let’s go out on a note of patriotic fervor

On the last night of the proms–

Hang on. I need to explain that for readers who aren’t British. The proms are concerts that run from July through September. They started in 1895 as Promenade Concerts in parks. In 1927, the BBC got into the act, and today they’re a big deal (and not in parks), and on the last night, in addition to whatever else is on the program, they play a bunch of patriotic stuff. You know, “God Save the [insert monarch of the appropriate sex or gender],” “Jerusalem,” “Rule Britannia.” 

There’s been a predictable flap in recent years about which songs can survive a modern sensibility, what with all that celebration of empire, and how many people of modern sensibility can survive the full range of patriotic songs. 

In 2020, “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” were going to be played but without lyrics, but after the predictable outrage the BBC backed down and they were sung, word by painful word. 

Traditionally, people wave British flags and sing along when “Rule Britannia” is played. This year, though, a whole lot of people waved European Union flags instead, getting up the noses of patriotic Brexiters. Let’s take a Conservative former Member of Parliament as typical (if a bit more visible than average) when he called for the BBC to investigate how so many EU flags were smuggled into the hall (in small boats, no doubt), “messing up a British tradition” and making a political gesture at an apolitical event. 

Or as the Daily Telegraph put it, “‘Rule Britannia’ represents freedom.” (And, if added, “sovereignty and self-determination, all absent in the European Union.”)

So what does this apolitical song about freedom have to say?

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves. / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” although it’s apparently okay if other people are. “The nations, not so blest as thee / Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall / While thou shalt flourish great and free: The dread and envy of them all.”

Make that the apolitical and freedom-loving dread. 

It’s funny how apolitical a person’s own opinions seem and how screamingly political a gesture from an opposing one is.

William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” on the other hand, is haunting and beautiful. And ambiguous enough that I still don’t understand how anyone, hearing the same words as I do, reads it as a straightforward patriotic footstomper.

 

Jerusalem 

And did those feet in ancient time                                                                                            Walk upon England’s mountains green:                                                                           

And was the holy Lamb of God,                                                                                                  On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

 And did the Countenance Divine,                                                                                           Shine forth upon our clouded hills?                                                                                           And was Jerusalem builded here,                                                                                       Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:                                                                                           Bring me my arrows of desire:                                                                                               Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!                                                                                    Bring me my Chariot of fire! 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,                                                                                              Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:                                                                                        Till we have built Jerusalem,                                                                                                         In England’s green & pleasant Land.

If you want the music (in a very non-proms version), you’ll find it here.


					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Cornwall’s Prayerbook Rebellion

			
						

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It’s 1549, we’re in Cornwall, and (I’m taking a gamble here) none of us speak the language, because it isn’t English, it’s Cornish. Enough people speak English that we can probably buy a loaf of bread and a pint of beer (we’ll want to stay away from the water), but it’s embarrassing to depend on other people being better at languages than we are.


 


The inevitable background


What else do we need to know? Edward the Kid is on the English throne. That makes him sound more like a wild west gunslinger than a monarch, though, so let’s be conventional enough to call him Edward VI. He won’t last long–he becomes king at 9 and dies of TB at 15–but right now he’s sitting in the fancy chair, and he’s seriously, Protestantly Protestant, and more to the point, so are the people around him who, since he really is a kid, are powerful forces. 


This is when (and why) crucifixes and saints’ images are stripped out of the churches. Stained glass is destroyed. Masses for the dead are banned, and so are rosaries and church processions. The clergy’s gotten permission to marry. 


But in Cornwall it’s gone further than that. Churches can’t ring bells for the dead. Church ales–fundraising banquets that are one of the important ways local churches raise money–have been banned. Priests’ vestments have to meet strict guidelines, and parishioners have to pay for that. 


Irrelevant photo: A magnolia blossom. For some reasons, it decided to bloom a second time this summer


These West Country rules come from William Body, who (I’m quoting David Horspool’s The English Rebel here) “got his hands on the archdeaconry of Cornwall against local opposition,” and then managed to line his pockets once he did.


In Penryn two years ago (that was 1547), there was a demonstration against him and the changes he’d introduced. It came off peacefully, and so did the government’s response. 


But the next year, the foundations that sang masses for the dead were suppressed, and in Helston Body was attacked and murdered by a mob led by a priest. 


Do I need to point out that this wasn’t peaceful? The priest and eleven other people were executed. This wasn’t a peaceful response.


Aren’t you glad I’m here to tell you these things?


Still, Edward, his advisors, or a combination thereof, didn’t think the opposition meant much. It happened in Cornwall, for fuck’s sake–the outer edges of beyond. They were convinced that people were thirsty for their reforms, but even if they’d believed the opposite, they might have acted the same way. Because they were right. It said so in their holy book, or it did once someone put the correct interpretation on it. So they moved ahead and introduced a major change in church services: they’d now be in English instead of Latin, and they’d follow the Book of Common Prayer. 


The Latin mass was now an endangered species, and if you insisted on saying it you’d be endangered yourself.


And since we’ve caught up with our timeline, we’ll shift back to the present tense. It almost makes sense if you don’t think about it too hard.


Conducting church services in a language people understand is a very Protestant move, and the English church has been edging in this direction for a while, first including snippets of English, then tolerating–maybe even encouraging–English-only masses in a few churches. Now, though, every last church has to use the Book of Common Prayer, and nope, they’re not negotiating this.


This sets off a massive flap. Catholics cling to Latin, and they’re horrified. But people who are further along the Protestant spectrum are equally offended because the Book of Common Prayer doesn’t break as sharply as they’d like with Catholicism. 


And–we’re finally getting to the point here–it offends the Cornish, because say what you like about how a service in the language people actually speak brings religion closer to the people, English isn’t their damn language and their priests can’t say services in Cornish because that’s not how it’s being done this week.


I’m not sure anyone wanted to say the service in Cornish, mind you. I’m just pointing out that the compromise wasn’t on the table. The Act of Uniformity bans every language except English from church services.


 


Cue the rebellion, please 


We’ll start in Bodmin, which is more or less the geographical center of Cornwall. It’s the first day the new services are scheduled to be heard. So people gather. People protest. They convince a local member of the gentry, Humphrey Arundell, to lead them.


Yes, I do notice the strangeness of people having to convince someone to lead them. It speaks, I think, to how deeply ingrained the hierarchy is. Without a gentleman to lead them, how could they possibly know what to do, even if they had to set him up there and tell him to do it?


Instead of going home at the end of the event, the protesters set up camp.


On the same day and for the same reasons, a protest breaks out in Sampford Courtenay, in Devon, the next county up from Cornwall, and nine days later the two groups set up camp a few miles outside Exeter and prepare to lay siege to the city. Figure there are some 2,000 rebels out there. Or some 4,000. Let’s not bog down over the details. A lot of people. More than you’d want at your birthday party.


The rebels put together several versions of their demands, and most of what they want is about religion. The center of religious reformation is in London. In the West Country, they hold to the beliefs and traditions that have been part of daily life for centuries. Still, they don’t call for a full return to the Catholic Church but to a return to the way things were under Henry VIII. And like so many rebels in monarchical countries, they don’t see themselves as challenging the king but the bad counselors around him. 


Yes, everybody’s drunk the monarchical KoolAid. It won’t be until the Civil War that they turn to other drinks.


The siege of Exeter lasts five or six weeks, and Exeter is left to defend itself until John Russell, who just happens to be the Lord Privy Seal (and people take these titles entirely seriously, remember) arrives with soldiers and defeats the rebels. 


Estimates of the number of rebel dead are roughly the same as the estimates of the rebels themselves: 3,000 to 4,000. 


Again, don’t try too hard to make the numbers work. The leaders are hauled to London to be ritually hanged, drawn, and quartered. 


 


The aftermath


As a BBC historical article puts it, “The insurrection was eventually crushed with hideous slaughter – some three to four thousand West Country men were killed – and in its wake the ruling classes may well have come to associate the Cornish tongue with rebellion and sedition, as well as with poverty and ‘backwardness’. This in turn may help to explain why the Book of Common Prayer was never translated into Cornish, as it was later to be translated into Welsh. What is certain is that the failure to provide a liturgy in the Cornish tongue did much to hasten the subsequent decline of the language.” 


The decline is more or less geographical, with English leaking across the Devon border and pouring south and west. By 1640, Cornish has retreated into the toe of Cornwall’s sock, and as the language dies out, the process of assimilation into England gathers force. By 1700, only 5,000 people speak Cornish.


The last native speaker of Cornish is Dolly Pentreath, who’s born in 1685 and dies in 1777. 


But. The sense of separation stays strong and plays a role in Cornwall taking the royalist side in the Civil Wars–partly (or so the BBC article speculates) because they saw Charles as  British and the Parliamentarians as English. With his defeat, the Cornish identity took another hit.