Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Samuel Pepys, the Great Fire of London, and a wheel of parmesan cheese

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In 1666, Samuel Pepys’ maid woke him up, telling him about a fire. To which he said something along the lines of Ho hum and went back to sleep. London was a flammable town, full of wooden houses. Fire was nothing new. This one was far enough away that he wasn’t about to let it wreck a good night’s sleep. We know this because he wrote it–and endless other details of his life–down and his diaries survived him. I’ll be quoting from them extensively here. They’re online, and although each day’s entry has its own URL, I’ve only given a link to the first day. Start there. You’ll be fine.

The fire. With thanks to Wikimedia Commons

 

The next day

The next morning, September 2, the fire still didn’t look like anything to worry about, but “by and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.” 

Okay, he starts to take this seriously and walks to the Tower of London “and there got up upon one of the high places, . . . and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.” 

In other words, he thought the era-appropriate equivalent of Holy shit, this is serious and walked to the Thames, where he got a sense of just how serious. 

What he saw was “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters [they were flat-bottomed barges] that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. . . .

“Nobody, to my sight, [was] endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire . . . and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.”

 

The king and the firebreak

Pepys was a member of parliament, worked for the Navy Board, and was the kind of guy who could talk his way in to see the king and the Duke of York, which he did, telling them “that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire.”

Pulling down houses was pretty much the only way to stop a spreading fire. London had no professional firefighters and even if they had I doubt the technology of the day would have let them shoot any serious amount of water at a burning house. The way to keep a fire from spreading was to destroy buildings that weren’t on fire, creating a firebreak, and the king ordered the lord mayor to do that, with the D of Y offering to send soldiers if they were needed.

Off Pepys trotted to find the mayor and in the midst of this madness, with luxury goods being hauled away in carts and on people’s backs and sick people being carried in beds, he actually found him, and the mayor, basically, said, Nobody listens to me anyway, I’ve been pulling down houses all night, I don’t need any soldiers, and I’m going to bed.

He might’ve been pulling down houses all night–I don’t know–but when the fire was first starting to spread and he was asked to do exactly that, he refused. If he gave the order, the city would have to pay for the houses it had destroyed. If he waited for the king to give it, guess who had to pay then? 

Anyway, king’s order or no king’s order, he toddled off to bed.

At this point you’d expect Pepys to rush back to the king and the D of Y so they could do what the mayor wouldn’t, right? 

Nah, it was noon and he went home, where he had guests. They were all worried about the fire, “However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry, as at this time we could be.”

Then he went out and found the king and the D of Y, who were on the river, and they gave the order to pull houses down. “But little was or could be done, the fire coming upon them so fast . . . [and] the wind carries it into the City.”

Translation: this, I think, is where the wind changed direction.

By that night, Pepys was packing up his own house and worrying about where to put his gold. 

“I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place. And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts also there. . . .

“About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart; and, Lord! to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding, and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things. I find Sir W. Rider tired with being called up all night, and receiving things from several friends. . . . I am eased at my heart to have my treasure so well secured.”

 

At last we get to the cheese

“Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine [it would’ve been in barrels–in other words, large and heavy], did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”

Why would he bury a parmesan cheese? Because it was a luxury item. Even now, when you can find the stuff in any supermarket, a 36 kilo wheel of good parmesan can cost $1,450. Back then? Sorry, can’t quote you a price, but a lot. It was rare, it was valuable, and his would’ve weighed 80 to 90 kilos. 

What’s that in pounds and ounces? Make yourself a cup of coffee and multiply by 2.2. 

You’re welcome. You really don’t want me doing the math.

Are you getting the sense that this is one whale of a big hole they’ve dug? Would you like to bet that when he says they dug the pit, that means they had their servants do it for them?

But back to Pepys himself. 

“This afternoon, sitting melancholy with Sir W. Pen in our garden, and thinking of the certain burning of this office, without extraordinary means, I did propose for the sending up of all our workmen from Woolwich and Deptford yards (none whereof yet appeared), and to write to Sir W. Coventry to have the Duke of Yorke’s permission to pull down houses, rather than lose this office, which would, much hinder, the King’s business. So Sir W. Pen he went down this night, in order to the sending them up to-morrow morning; and I wrote to Sir W. Coventry about the business, but received no answer.

“Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than anything, but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it, though it kindled nothing almost.”

 

Aftermath

“Could not . . . find any place to buy a shirt or pair of gloves, Westminster Hall being full of people’s goods, those in Westminster having removed all their goods, and the Exchequer money put into vessels to carry to Nonsuch. . . . A sad sight to see how the River looks: no houses nor church near it, to the Temple, where it stopped. At home, did go with Sir W. Batten, and our neighbour, Knightly (who, with one more, was the only man of any fashion left in all the neighbourhood thereabouts, they all removing their goods and leaving their houses to the mercy of the fire), to Sir R. Ford’s, and there dined in an earthen platter — a fried breast of mutton; a great many of us, but very merry, and indeed as good a meal, though as ugly a one, as ever I had in my life. . . . Thence down to Deptford, and there with great satisfaction landed all my goods at Sir G. Carteret’s safe, and nothing missed I could see, or hurt.”

The next day he was able to borrow a shirt and wash. 

The fire burned four-fifths of the city: more than 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 livery company halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Pepys’ house did not burn and in a later entry he writes about unearthing his wine but doesn’t mention the cheese. Since he didn’t complain about losing it, we can probably assume the fire didn’t turn it into a giant grilled cheese sandwich, minus the bread.

*

For an exploration of how differently the rich and the poor experienced the fire and its aftermath, watch Ruth Goodman and Rob Rinder’s 90-minute documentary The Great Fire of London.

Shipwrecks and wreckers: a bit of English history

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Any coastal community sees storms deliver shipwrecks to its shores, and if times are hard no community lets those deliveries go to waste. 

Okay, even when times aren’t hard. As far as I can figure out, humans are wired to accept a free lunch. Or a free shipping container of slightly salted whatever. 

Before we go on, though, I need to build a wall between two words: Wreckers are people who scavenge what they can from wrecked ships or from the cargo that floats ashore. Wrecking is an activity that probably never happened. The Cornish are said (although not by the Cornish themselves, in my experience) to have used lights to lure ships ashore where they’d wreck. There’s not only no evidence that anyone actually did that, it’s questionable that it would even work. But it still means I can’t use the word wrecking here, since I’m talking about what did actually happen.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the right to wreck–wreck here meaning to scavenge a wrecked ship. And lets watch me jump through linguistic hoops to avoid the word wrecking.

 

The rocks where the L’Adaldise wrecked. (See below. It’ll all make sense.)

The right of wreck

If Wikipedia’s right on this (it has a good overall record even if it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness), the right of wreck, or jus naufragii if we’re going to pretend we know Latin, is a medieval European custom rather than an actual law. 

It was based on the idea that if a ship wrecked it was because god got mad at the crew for–well, something, clearly, so he drove their ship ashore. That made the ship, its contents, and in the early days its crew the property of the finders. Because god had set it all up that way.

Gradually that business about enslaving the crew dropped away, but claiming whatever was left of the ship and its contents? That continued powerfully enough for the Church to condemn it from the 12th century into the 16th.

If you want to know what’s actually happening in a time and place, look at what gets condemned or outlawed multiple times. It’s not foolproof–centuries of hysteria over witchcraft really doesn’t prove the existence of witches–but it’s still a good place to start.

Starting in Norman times, the English crown owned the land–the whole damn land–and that’s relevant because ships tend to wreck where the sea meets the land. The king could and did hand chunks of land to his followers, but it was still his and if one of them pissed him off too badly he could take it back. We could find a parallel there to god getting mad and wrecking a ship because, never mind human ownership, it’s his to wreck, but it won’t stand up to rough handling so let’s not push it too far.

So the king owned the country, even the parts other people owned. Try not to think about it too hard. Just nod your head and agree that of course he got to eat his cake and discover that it was still there, on the plate. He was the king, after all.

What matters for us is that he also owned whatever washed ashore, and he could and did assign it to others, just like he owned land and assigned it to others. 

 

The right to complicate the situation

Edward I (1239 –1307; you’re welcome) introduced a law stating that”where a man, a dog, or a cat escape quick [in other words, alive] out the ship,” the ship wouldn’t be considered a wreck, and neither would its contents. Its owners had a year to claim their property–minus fees, rewards, and droits.

What’s a droit? It seems to involve money, law, and ownership. Beyond that, it’s a rabbit hole. 

The new law kicked off all sorts of arguments and lawsuits about what actually happened in this, that, or the other shipwreck. Did everybody die? Was the cat alive and curled up at someone’s fireside? Was this black cat at fireside the black cat who used to be the ship’s black cat? In other words, was the ship a “true wreck” or was it not?

The abstract of an academic paper that I can’t get full access to (sorry) says, “Different views coexisted about the legality and propriety of shoreline activities, whether salvagers worked with or against established authority, whether wrecking constituted a service, a custom, or a crime, and whether common lawyers or the civil lawyers of the Admiralty had jurisdiction.”

In other words, the law complicated things. And you might want to notice that the paper’s using the word wrecking there in exactly the way I’m not, but I’m pretty sure they lost points for it and I haven’t. 

 

But let’s stop following the story chronologically . . .

. . . because I’m having trouble unscrambling this egg. The point I want to get to is that somewhere along the line the crown gave seaside landowners the right to salvage whatever god (in his fury) had smashed onto their bit of the king’s shoreline, and this turned out not to be simple either, because the king (in his wisdom) had given the right to the owners of both manors and of hundreds.

Hundreds? The hundred was a political unit smaller than a county, and a manor was a large estate of no specified size but smaller than a hundred (at least usually; I can’t guarantee that it always was) and larger than the egg I can’t unscramble. So a hundred could contain multiple estates. 

In other words, the king just granted the same right to overlapping landowners. This is not a recipe for harmonious living. Cue an assortment of lawsuits, and if you’re interested in them follow the link just above, because we’re headed off in another direction:

If a tenant found a wreck, they were expected to let the lord know, in return for which they’d get half the goods and the lord would get the other half. That amount would’ve ranged from the piddling to the spectacular, but ordinary people lived close to the edge and no find was too piddling to pass up.

What happened if the tenant didn’t notify the lord? In a case in Cornwall, two tenants carried off 54 gallons of wine, were caught, and were fined, although the source I’m relying on doesn’t say how much. More than the wine was worth, I’m sure. 

What we can’t know is how often tenants weren’t caught, because not getting caught leaves no record.

 

Then the laws got tougher

In 1714, anyone who boarded a wreck without permission or got in the way of the crew salvaging their cargo faced fines and imprisonment. After 1753, they faced the death penalty.

If you want to blame someone for that, I’m told you can blame the philosopher John Locke, who argued for the sacredness of property. The idea caught on among (no surprise here) people who had property, and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to say that the purpose of government was to protect and preserve property. Punishments for crimes against property became harsher, usually following some local event that the great and the good could whip themselves into a state of outrage over. Soon a person could face the death penalty for anything from picking pockets to poaching to stealing livestock. 

And here’s a spot where I have to stand on my head to avoid using the word wrecking: scavenging from a wreck went on the list. 

If you’re not in a mood to blame John Locke for that, you can blame the East India Company, which had plenty of property to consider sacred and had lost some expensive cargoes off Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Along with a few other companies who had a lot to gain, it lobbied to change what was still essentially a medieval law on wrecks. 

 

The aftermath of one wreck

In 1767 a French ship, L’Adaldise, wrecked off Cornwall, not far from where I live. To be clear, I wasn’t there. I’m not that damn old. I not only hadn’t been born yet, neither had my grandparents. I only come into the story because I know the area. 

A hundred people rushed to the shore, according to the account. At the time, the nearest village would’ve been very small indeed and (if AI can be believed, and it sometimes can) the whole parish (4,000 acres) had a population of 700. I’m guessing it would’ve taken a while to collect 100 people. But Cornwall was a poor county, and a wreck washing ashore could well have meant the difference between eating and not eating.

However many gathered, a lot of people rushed to the shore. Some were salvaging for the lord of the manor and some for themselves, or so the article I’m relying on says. Some had axes and chopped into the hold to get at the cargo, but they also carried off masts, anchors, cables, ropes, and anything else that could be put to use. 

Then everyone went home, including an elderly farmer, William Pearse, who for reasons that aren’t clear to me was the only person arrested (at home) and charged with wrecking. Under the new law, he faced the death penalty. He was held in Launceston jail, which the British in their inexplicable wisdom spell gaol. Eight years later, a reformer described the jail this way:

“The Prison is a room or passage twenty three feet and a half by seven and a half, with only one window two feet by one and a half;—and three Dungeons or Cages on the side opposite the window; these are about six and half feet deep…They are all very offensive. No chimney: no drains: no water: damp earth floors: no Infirmary . . . The yard is not secure; and Prisoners seldom permitted to go out to it. Indeed the whole prison is out of repair. . . . I once found the Prisoners chained two or three together. Their provision is put down to them through a hole in the floor of the room above. . . . And those who serve them there, often catch the fatal fever . . . a few years before, many Prisoners had died from it.”

Pearse was tried in Bodmin, and if he had any witnesses to defend him they would’ve had to make a rough trip across the moor, but no records of the trial exist so we can’t know. I can’t help wondering, though, how anyone could’ve appeared as a witness in his defense without having to admit that they’d been a participant. 

What we do know is that Pearse was convicted and sentenced to death, and so were six others that week, all for theft of one sort or another–except, possibly, for the one person convicted of house-breaking. 

 

Appeal

Death sentences were often handed out and then commuted them to transportation by the judge. (At the time, transportation was to the American colonies.) Four death sentences from that week were commuted, but not Pearse’s, and the elite of Launceston rallied behind him, campaigning for a royal pardon. 

Why did the local gentry rally behind a poor man? Possibly because they had a lot to gain from wreckers and a lot to lose if the crackdown held. Pearse was being used as a test case.

Campaigning for a pardon involved lawyers, and lawyers involved money, something Pearse didn’t have. It’s not clear who footed the bill, but the local gentry sound like a fair guess. 

Whoever was paying, Pearse now had a high-powered legal team, and local politicians were appealing for a pardon, arguing variously that he hadn’t taken much (“an inconsiderable quantity of rope” and a bag of cotton), that he wasn’t guilty, that the witnesses against him had lied, and that local people were deeply concerned about the case. Pearse’s age could also have been expected to argue for a pardon, and in any case the statute called for the death penalty only if violence was involved. 

Meanwhile, Pearse sat in that small, foul jail in Launceston.

Following standard procedure, the matter was referred back to the judge who’d condemned him (the logic was that he knew the case best), and the judge wrote, “‘As there were many common people in Court, I took the opportunity of inveighing very warmly against so savage a Crime, and of declaring publickly that no Importunities whatsoever should induce me to reprieve the Criminal.”

Pearse did not get his pardon.

It’s not irrelevant that the judge was also a legal representative for the East India Company. Remember them? The good folks who lobbied for the harsher law?

Pearse was the first person hanged as a wrecker under the new statute.

 

Current law

That doesn’t really take us to the present day, but let’s hit fast forward. Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1995, you have to report a wreck or any materials from a wreck to none other than the Receiver of Wreck. That could get you a salvage award, which will vary depending on the value of the wreck and what you had to do to rescue it. What you can’t do anymore is call in the entire village and cart everything away like ants carrying an entire picnic home to the nest.

The Home Office screws up yet again, and other news from Britain

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Britain’s Home Office–the scandal bedecked arm of government that’s supposed to deal with “crime, the police, drugs policy, immigration and passports, and counter terrorism” –could have a new scandal on its hands any day now: it’s lost track of an estimated 200,000 people who have the right to remain in the country. These are people who’ve lived in Britain for decades but who didn’t make their way into the computer system because they landed before the computer did. They got either a letter or a stamp on their passports confirming their right to remain in the country, and that was good enough. Until now. 

Now the Home Office wants them all digitized. So the paper documents? Pffft: they’re worthless. Everyone who has them has to go online and upgrade their documentation. 

Any time you hear the word upgrade, put on your flak jacket.

Okay, I admit, upgrade is my contribution to the discussion. The official language has to do with creating an online eVisa account. Either way, the Home Office says the process is going smoothly. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, that probably means it hasn’t caused the Home Office many problems. Users say they’ve had to fight their way through glitches. The an organization called 3 Million says the bigger problem is that the Home Office doesn’t know how to contact many of the people who rely on paper documents, so it hasn’t been able to tell them the documents they’ve been relying on are about to be worthless. 

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

Don't worry about the graphics here. They're almost all irrelevant to the text.

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

What happens to people who don’t have valid documents? The risk is that they could be treated as illegal immigrants, who are the current political boogeymen. They’ll be locked out of the pensions they worked for, along with housing, health care, and other services. 

And the problem isn’t just that they can’t all be reached. They’re none of them young–they arrived pre-computerization, remember–and they won’t all be technologically gifted. You know how that happens: The decades pass, you get older, the world changes, and you don’t necessarily keep up with it. 

But gee, it’s progress, and if a few bodies fall by the wayside, who cares? At least until there’s a public flap about it, at which point all decision makers will put on their surprised face.

 

The ghost of Boaty McBoatface

Having told us there’s no money for (almost) anything sensible, Britain’s government has decided to redesign the bank notes. Because, hey, why not? It’ll lift everybody’s spirits. And now that not many people use cash anymore, what could be a better time to redesign it? 

I haven’t been able to find out how much the redesign will cost, but what the hell, it’s only money.

So it all makes perfect sense that someone decided to get the public involved by asking what picture people want to see on the new notes. That worked really well when they–that’s the public, you understand–were asked to choose a name for an arctic research vessel and chose, by a wide margin, Boaty McBoatface. If you missed the story, you can catch up with it here. It’s a testament to both the British sense of humor and British bureaucracy at work. 

Already one writer, Athena Kugblenu, has suggested honoring British culture with a picture of an organge traffic cone. 

Why a traffic cone? 

Because the country has an uplifting tradition–which generally involves a combination of alcohol, youth, and athleticism–of putting them on the heads of statues.

If you want to suggest something for the redesign, here’s your link. And if it’s suitably absurd, leave it in the comments as well.

 

And since I mentioned statues

It seems folks have been climbing the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, not necessarily to add a traffic cone but during protests, although someone did add a strip of turf to give him a green mohican.  

 So in May the government made moves in the direction of turning that into a crime. Not the mohican and not climbing on statues in general, but climbing on this particular statue. As the Sun, one of the trashier of the right-wing papers put it, “Thugs who climb on Winston Churchill’s London statue face JAIL.”

I hate to link to the Sun, but what the hell, I am quoting it. And they did use all those capital letters. They had to. If they don’t use them now, Trump will gobble them all down and there’ll be none left for anyone else’s hysteria.

The penalty is up to 3 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. The bill, is if passes, applies not just to the Churchill statue but to monuments commemorating World Wars I and II as well.

Sleep well tonight, my friends. The country will be a safer place to live in once this passes.

 

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

In other important news, McVittie’s asked the Biscuit Museum (yes, there is such a thing) to remove Jaffa Cakes from the premises. 

We’ll get to why in a minute, but first, for the non-British speakers among us, what’s a biscuit? It’s what Americans call a cookie–something round, sweet, and flat. And the Jaffa Cake meets all those criteria. What’s more, stores (shops in Brit-speak) stack Jaffa Cakes in the cookie display–or at least the one in my village does–since they come in the kind of packaging most cookies inhabit. 

Still, McVittie’s insists it’s a cake, and since McVittie’s is the maker of the flat, round, sweet little beast–well, you’d think they’d like the publicity of being in a museum, even such an odd museum, but they don’t.

Why not? Tax law. If the thing’s a cake it’s not subject to VAT. 

To what? Value Added Tax, which is a long name for a hefty sales tax. Plain biscuits? No tax. Chocolate-covered biscuits, though? Tax. Obviously. And Jaffa Cakes are chocolate-covered whatever-they-ares, so this is Important. McVittie’s and the tax office arm-wrestled over it in 1991, McVittie’s won, and it’s not backing down. They’ve been sold as taxless cakes ever since.

It used to be theologians who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

A chatbot insists the dog ate its homework . . .

. . . but strictly in the metaphorical sense. 

Our story begins with someone–let’s call him Barry Smethurst, since that’s his name–waiting for a train, which is late, so he goes online and asks WhatsApp’s chatbot for TransPennine Express’s customer service phone number so he can ask what’s happened to his train. 

He gets a number. He calls the number. The number turns out to belong to someone who has nothing to do with TransPennine Express–he’s a property industry executive in Oxfordshire, 170 miles away, but he does use WhatsApp and his number’s on his company website, although Smethurst probably doesn’t know all that because he asks the bot what the number is. 

“Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!” the chatbot says cheerily and complete with exclamation point.

Smethurst no longer cares. He’s found something better to do while he waits: he wants to know why the bot gave him the number.

It was “based on patterns,” the bot says, and it would “strive to do better” in the future. The number, though, is “fictional.”

Bullshit, Smethurst doesn’t exactly say.

“You’re right, the bot says. It was “mistakenly pulled from a database.”

What database?

“I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

“Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do,” Smethurst tells it, although what good he thinks scolding a bot will do is anyone’s guess.

That’s where the story drizzles away, sadly. Maybe his train pulls into the station. Maybe he sinks into a pit of despond so deep that he can no longer type. We leave him there, phone in hand, feet on platform, bot within thumb’s reach, but he’s given me an excuse to move to a more bizarre story about AI gone wrong, although it happened outside of Britain’s borders. 

A Norwegian man filed a complaint against OpenAI’s ChatGPT after he went online to look for information about himself and was told that he was in jail for killing two of his children. 

Yes, it’s nuts to think you’ll learn more about yourself by looking online than by putting down your phone and spending some time with your own non-electronic self, but we’ve all done it. 

Okay, most of us have done it. Or at least some of us have done it. Or–screw it, I’ve done it, although I don’t have kids so if anyone tells you I killed some of them, understand that it’s not physically possible. 

Good manners in medieval England

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Medieval England isn’t famed for its polish, its manners, or its cleanliness. (Neither is medieval Europe, but it’s not our subject.) If you want to be a contrarian, though, and say, Poopash, they were civilized enough to have books of etiquette, you’d be right. They did have books of etiquette and I’ve stumbled over one from the early 1200s that does indeed prove they valued good manners. It also underlines in screaming red ink how the definition of good manners can change from one time and place to another. Not to mention the differences between the modern mindset and the medieval one. 

Allow me to throw you into the deep end of the pool.

Irrelevant photo: A morning glory–also called bindweed.

 

The Book of the Civilised Man, by Daniel Beccles

Not much is known about Daniel Beccles except that he wrote The Book of the Civilized Man, medieval England’s first known book of etiquette. He might’ve been in Henry II’s retinue for more than 30 years. That leaves open the possibility that he might not have been, but “more than 30 years” is pretty specific for a might, so let’s assume he was.

Why take the risk?

Because for our purposes it doesn’t matter.

Beccles’ book took the form of a 3,000-line poem in Latin. Or 2,800 lines according to a different source. I not only haven’t counted them myself, I haven’t gotten my hands on the full manuscript, although an English translation is bumping around out there somewhere. I’m working, as I usually do, from secondary sources.

Sorry, folks. I’m not a historian, just somebody sitting on a couch.

The book was addressed to boys and young men who were being trained in noble households–or as Beccles put it, “untrained boy-clerks”–and its existence speaks to a society where the rules of behavior were changing fast enough that people needed a guide. 

Let’s break the advice into categories. It gives me something to do. 

 

Religion and so forth

Predictably, given the time and place, a lot of the advice has to do with religion, or as one of the sources I’m using puts it, “a man’s duty to God. He should obey the law and the Commandments; he should be wary of vices and pursue virtues. He should endeavour to perform pious works, love learning and behave in church. He should think of the inevitability of death, the joys of Heaven and the terrors of Hell.”

That’s generic enough that it could’ve come from central casting, and the business of vice and virtue reminds me of someone whose father, after a bit of hemming and hawing, gave him this advice about–well, who knows? Possibly sex but possibly life in general: “Beware the pitfalls of life.” 

Panaiotis, I’m grateful to you for passing that on to me. My life is impossibly richer for knowing it, and I’m always grateful for a laugh.

Sorry. Rabbit hole. And to be fair to Beccles, that’s a summary. He seems to have been more specific than that. 

“If you want to be rude to someone, take a close look at who you are, whom you are speaking to, and what their circumstances are,” he wrote. 

That might sound like he’s advising a compassionate awareness of other people’s situations, but I have a hunch he’s warning the reader against pissing off anyone who’s more powerful. See the section on hierarchy for the reasons I think that. Other advice is unambiguously kind.

“If fickle Fortune favours you, fortuitous one, do not mock those bereft by her.”

“If anyone threatens those near him with cruel misfortunes, or if someone wicked cruelly holds sway over his neighbours, kicking and clawing, and cultivating wickedness among them, stand up to thwart his evil violence alongside the neighbours.”

“Do not oppress anyone for sport.”

For good sober reasons, it’s okay.

“Offer relief to the hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, wandering, and imprisoned in whatever way will set them right.”

We could find worse advice without having to look far. 

As for behaving in church, at least part of his advice is to stay awake.

 

The hierarchy

Just as religion shaped every thought about good and evil, hierarchy shaped every thought about whatever was left after that, and a lot of Beccles’ book is about how to behave to people who are higher up the ladder. 

“Eventually, it would be time for the inferior to wait on the lord as he went to bed. . . . When he sits on the privy in the usual way, take in your hands hay or straw, pick up two big wads of hay in your fingers and press them well together. You should prepare to give them to your patron when he wants them. Let the wads be given to him as you stand, not bending the knee. If two together are sitting on a privy, one should not get up while the other is emptying himself.” 

Have I mentioned that the medieval idea of privacy was different than ours? Or possibly nonexistent? And that they were pretty matter-of-fact about the human body and the various things it does. 

“If you are acting as a servant, stand by the bedside; cover your lord’s naked body.”

“Do not hunt for fleas on your arms or bosom in front of the patron or in front of the servants in the hall. . . . In front of grandees, do not openly evacuate your nostril by twisting your fingers.”

“Eating at the table of the rich, speak little.”

 

Eating

“Do not be a nose-blower at dinner nor a spitter; if a cough attacks you defeat the cough. . . .If you want to belch, be mindful to look at the ceiling.”

“Spoons which are used for eating do not become your property.”

“If a fat morsel lies in the dish in front of your companion, do not touch it with your finger, for fear that fingers will be pointed at you as a boor. . . . When your fellow drains his cups, cease eating. Beware of shouting ‘Wassail’ unless you are bidden to do so. While food is visible in your mouth, let your mouth savour no drink; while food is hidden in your mouth, let your tongue not minister to words. The morsel placed in an eater’s mouth should not be so big that he cannot speak properly if he needs to do so. Beware of drinking wine greedily like Bacchus. . . ..Sitting at table as a guest, you should not put your elbows on the table. You can put your elbows on your own table but not on someone else’s.”

 

The hall

When Beccles talks about the hall, he’s not talking about hallways–those corridors you walk through to get to some room where the action’s taking place. A medieval hall was where the action took place. Initially, it was where everyone ate and slept, but even after the lord and his family drew away from the communal mayhem to a room of their own, it remained the center of a lord’s home. 

“Let not a brute beast be stabled in the hall, let not a pig or a cat be seen in it; the animals which can be seen in it are the charger and the palfrey, hounds entered to hare, mastiff pups, hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and merlins.”

I apologize to any cats who subscribe to Notes. History comes in many shades of bitter. No point in pretending otherwise.

But since we already have horses in the hall, let’s acknowledge the limits: “When you are about to leave, let your cob [that’s a horse] be at the door. Do not mount him in the hall.”

 

The body

In case you didn’t believe me about the medieval era being frank about the body:

“When you are hungry and ready to eat, first empty your bowels. Afterwards, an attendant should give you a washcloth and water. If it is winter, you should be given warm water. The washcloth should be white and the water should be from a clean stream.”

Why does the you get a washcloth and water but the lord hay and straw? I’m tempted to blame different translations but haven’t been able to convince myself. A cloth is a cloth. Hay is hay. I have no explanation. It doesn’t make moving up to lordly status sound appealing.

“Do not get up after the meal to urinate in the bushes, nor to void your bowels, unless nature compels you. Guests, messengers, and servants should not urinate on the premises. The master of the house can urinate in his own home. Guests may urinate indoors, if they so wish, at night after they have retired.”

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if others notice any of your smelly filth. If it happens that your intestines are caught in a windstorm, look for a place where you may relieve them in private.”

“Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate.”

 

Sex

Beccles wasn’t a fan of women. Common sense in his era insisted that women were over-sexed, and Beccles was full of common sense. 

“When tempted by sweet words, even a chaste, good, dutiful, devout and kindly woman will resist scarcely anyone,” he wrote. Basically, she’s ready to fuck “a cook or a half-wit, a peasant or a ploughman, or a chaplain. . . . What she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff. . . . Such are the things that charm and delight women.”

Which is news to me, but what do I know? 

“Whatever your wife does, do not damage your marriage. . . . If you are a cuckold, do not whisper a word about it. . . . When you are a cuckold, learn to look up at the ceiling.”

That’s the second time looking at the ceiling has come up. If you know what was written on those medieval ceilings, do let me know.

“If the wife of your lord turns her eyes on you too often and wantonly looses shameful fires against you, letting you know that she wants to have intercourse with you; if she says, ‘The whole household and your lord, my husband, shall serve you for ever, you alone shall be my darling, you shall rule everything, everything which belongs to you lord shall be open to you’ . . . consult me, my son; what I counsel is planted in your heart; between two evils, choose the lesser evil; your safer plan is to feign illness, nerve-racking diseases, to go away sensibly and prudently.”

He also warns his reader against having sex with holy women, his godmothers, or relatives. He should avoid men or boys who masturbate or have sex with animals or boys. 

If you’re getting a picture of our lonely boy-clerk surrounded by temptation but forbidden to join in, take heart. Beccles didn’t exactly approve of going to prostitutes but he was resigned enough to give advice on how to visit, and that sounds pretty joyless as well–not just for the prostitute but for the boy-clerk.

“If you are overcome with erotic desire when you are young and your penis drives you to go to a prostitute, do not go to a common whore; empty your testicles quickly and depart quickly.”

If I’m reading this right and if Beccles is anything to judge by, we’re looking at a culture that’s frank about sex and frank about the body but at the same time repulsed by both. 

 

What about kids?

You’ll find no joy there either.

“They cover their clothes with ashes, they make them dirty, they dribble on them; they wipe their noses flowing with filth on their sleeves.”

The evolution of medieval warfare

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The feudal world–generalization alert here–glorified warfare. Or at least the folks at the top did. Why wouldn’t they? They got to the top and they stayed there because they were armed and dangerous. If we want to explain their role nicely, it was to protect the country from invaders. If we’re not in a mood to be nice, the English aristocracy was there because they’d been the invaders, killing people and taking over what had once been theirs. And because they were too big and scary to get rid of–not that some of the Anglo-Saxons didn’t try.

But they were happy to fight any new invaders. And sometimes each other. And occasionally to be the invaders in other people’s lands. 

Yes, if you didn’t mind a bit of bloodshed and you were born on the winning team, it was a fine old time to be alive.

Yet another relevant photo: Stained glass window with what I assume to be a knight in the centerfold. And if it’s not a knight (is that a halo behind him?), what the hell, he’s on a horse. Close enough. From Canterbury Cathedral.

 

The cult of knighthood

To be part of a class defined by warfare meant training from childhood. I’m leaning heavily here on Ian Mortimer’s book (remember books?) Medieval Horizons, and he writes about the aristocracy “deriving satisfaction” from war and “committing acts that caused enormous suffering but which they regarded as their right.”

They were enthusiastic enough about fighting that when they didn’t have a war at hand,they needed to be kept occupied, and raids were a good training ground for warfare–not to mention a good way to keep a restless set of knights amused. The English raided Wales and Scotland repeatedly, although the raids on Scotland seem to have been written up as invasions and the Scottish invasions as raids. That may be about numbers and it may be about nationalism, but the line between war and raid looks a bit blurry to me.

I’m less certain about Wales. Sorry.

When raids were out of season, restless aristocrats could always recreate war in the form of a joust, and in the earlier medieval period we’re not talking about the kind of fancified, one-on-one, controlled jousts we see in movies. Those came later. In 1341, Sir William Douglass (whoever he may have been) challenged the earl of Derby (he was the earl of Derby, that’s who he was) to a joust. The conditions were that no one wear armor and that they all fight with sharpened lances. 

You’d do the same on a rainy Saturday when you’d gotten tired of listening to some damn minstrel plunk away on the lute. You know you would.

Twelve men fought on each side. Three were killed and there’s no record of how many were injured. The survivors agreed it was a great party and wrote very nice thank-you letters, saying, “Let’s do it again soon.”

The culture of chivalry, with its tales and songs and myths, glorified it all. It was all about personal courage, personal honor, personal strength. 

From what I’ve found, serfs and associated non-nobles did get drafted into the wars the aristocrats started and commanded. They were foot soldiers, archers, and whatever else was needed. But they were the backup band, not the lead singers. The aristocracy hogged the spotlight.

Not to diminish that business of personal honor or anything, but real warfare, as opposed to jousts, could also be profitable. If you captured a knight (or–jackpot!–the king), you could hold him for ransom. It sounds like a board game, doesn’t it? I’ve seen references to ransoming archers as well, so commoners may have been ransomable, but the emphasis is pretty clearly on aristocrats, and the higher up the food chain the captive was, the bigger the ransom. 

Historians argue about when and why that business of ransom began. It’s an interesting rabbit hole and we’re not going down it but you’re welcome to. Let me know when you get back and I’ll put the kettle on.

Another source of wartime profit was looting, and I’m not sure what more I can say about that. Soldiers took stuff, but to be fair, only when they could. 

 

Attempts to rein in the brutality

A few winds blew in the direction of toning down the brutality of war. In the tenth century, the Peace of God movement– 

Well, okay, not a lot is known about the Peace of God movement, but it started in southern France and popped up at assorted Church councils. 

Back to the Peace of God movement, though. It was a response to the inability of, specifically, France’s Carolingian dynasty to impose anything like order, but more widely it was an effort to tone down the violence of the period. It urged combatants to make a distinction between soldiers (legitimate targets) and non-combatants. Warriors were not to commit rape and not to kill women, children, churchmen, or merchants. 

A bit later, the Truce of God movement tried to ban fighting from sunset on a Wednesday until dawn on a Monday as well as during Lent and Advent, and if that strikes you as bizarre, think of it as a reminder of how different the medieval mindset was from the modern one. The ban parallels the restrictions on when a person could have sex or eat meat. 

No, I didn’t make that up. 

The Truce of God movement would’ve made perfect sense at the time, even to people who disagreed with it.

Two English kings, Edward III and Henry V, also tried setting some limits. Edward ordered that “no town or manor was to be burnt, no church or holy place sacked, and no old people, children, or women in his kingdom of France [France and England were hopelessly tangled at the time] were to be harmed or molested.” Henry’s ordinances instructed his soldiers to protect churches and religious buildings–not to steal from them; not to harm or capture clergymen and -women (or maybe that’s women and clergymen; Medieval Horizons’ wording leaves it open); not to take clergymen hostage unless they were armed and hostile; and not to rape any women.

The instructions are more interesting as an indication of what was happening than as a list of what they managed to stop. Still, warfare was changing, although not in the ways either movement hoped for.

 

The decline of the knight

Knights’ effectiveness depended on the massed charge, which could overwhelm a defense, but in the fourteenth century the knight started to lose his status as hero of the battlefield. In 1314, Robert the Bruce (Scotland; real person; also a movie that I remember as endless) scattered sharp metal gizmos–caltrops in case you care–across the ground English knights would have to charge across. He also had pits dug and planted them with sharpened stakes. He organized his men so that knights who got past the gizmos and the stakes charged their horses into a wall of pikes. 

This sounds harder on the horses, who didn’t choose to be there, than on the knights–although to be fair a knight on his way to the ground wasn’t in an enviable position. But when the alternative is letting the knights kill you, you know how it is: a person’s ruthless side can come to the surface. 

For our purposes, what matters is that knights charged foot soldiers and lost. 

The English had longbowmen and might have won if they’d used them first, but they sent in the knights, in their full heroic cluelessness, and lost the battle. 

Like the Scottish wall of pikes (and those sharp little gizmos, which would upset the balance of the sentence so let’s leave them out), the English longbow tipped battlefield power away from knights and toward ordinary soldiers. Longbowmen–commoners, remember, and beneath a knight’s notice–fought from a distance, in relative safety, and a wise commander let them decimate the enemy before turning the heroes on horses loose, even if doing so upset the social order.

By the end of the fifteenth century, armies had grown larger and knights no longer trained for a massed charge. Now it wasn’t just longbows and pikemen they’d be coming up against, but cannons. You couldn’t charge a cannonball and there was no heroism in getting splattered by one.

 

Regulating warfare

As the middle ages became middle aged and the structure of society changed, warfare needed a bit more justification. The papacy had become more powerful, so if one Christian king was going to fight another, he needed to justify it–if not to god at least to the Pope. That didn’t put an end to wars between Christian kings but it did boost everyone’s creativity by a factor of twelve.

But what really tamped things down was that war had become expensive, even with the countervailing lure of loot and ransoms. The side with more cannons and more soldiers was likely to win, and both cost money. 

Money? In the early middle ages, it was around but it wasn’t central. In the 1150s, if you’d spread England’s supply of money evenly, everyone would’ve had 6 pence. By 1320 it would’ve been 10 shillings. (Twelve pence to the shilling. You’re welcome, and I had to look it up.) The shift to a money economy was underway. By the time we reach the later medieval period, warfare was measured in money–for arms, for soldiers, for all those little incidentals you forget to factor in at your peril. All that meant taxes, and in England it meant the king going to that ever-annoying Parliament, which had the power to approve or not approve some new tax to finance a new war. 

That took some of the fun out of going to war.

And in the sixteenth century, after the War of the Roses went further and ruined the reputation of internecine warfare, Henry VII got rid of private armies by making it illegal for lords to keep supporters who wore their livery. 

Translation? Every lord had his colors and symbols and assorted rigamarole. They dressed their followers to match. Think of it all as a uniform. 

Building an army was now the prerogative of the king. Warfare had been nationalized.

 

Numbers

Wars in the early middle ages were likely to involve a few thousand men. Battle of Hastings, where the Normans took England? Seven thousand to eight thousand men on each side. Before 1300, most battles were much smaller. Sure, chroniclers wrote about armies of up to 80,000, but then I regularly claim to be a thousand years old. Don’t believe everything you read. Historians–those clever devils–look at the financial record to dig out more realistic numbers, and they say (or at least one says) it was rare to find more than 10,000 on a side. 

By the sixteenth century–and by this time the middle ages isn’t just middle aged, it’s bald and has bad knees, if it’s still the middle ages at all–the English army had 30,000 men (do you really care where?). The Spanish had 200,000 and the French 80,000. And you can tell from the numbers that these weren’t drawn from the top of society. The top layer wasn’t big enough and didn’t see any glory in getting killed by cannonballs anyway. The percentage of noblemen dying of violence went from 25% in 1400 to 2.5% in 1750. Kings no longer risked their lives leading their troops. They delegated. 

No two people agree on exactly when the middle ages ended, but for the sake of convenience let’s say it ends here.

The English castle: a quick history

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When the Normans conquered England, they didn’t just bring their language–basically French, but you can call it Norman French if it makes you happy–they also brought the castle.

Not physically. Castles are heavy and prone to sea sickness. They brought the idea of the castle, and they set about building them in strategic spots as a way to keep control of their newly conquered land. 

 

A rare relevant photo: Okehampton Castle, in Devon–or what’s left of it. In 1384, according to a nearby sign, it was owned by the Courtenays, who arrived with a household of 135 people: the family, of course, plus 61 servants, 41 esquires, 14 lawyers, 8 clergymen, and 3 damsels–young, unmarried women. I’m tempted to add six geese a-swimming and five gold rings but the sign doesn’t mention them so I won’t. When the family moved on, they left behind a small garrison, a gatekeeper, a constable, and a few men-at-arms.

 

The hell you say: didn’t the Anglo-Saxons have castles?

Nope. To defend the country from the Vikings, A couple of hundred years earlier, Alfred the Great–known in his own time as plain old King Alfred–had promoted the building of fortified towns, called burhs, and to attract settlers who’d defend them, he offered free plots of land inside the walls. I was about to write that it wasn’t a bad deal if you lived through an attack, but your chances of getting killed were probably just high if you were cutting hay. So, not a bad deal and I won’t add any qualifiers.

But burhs weren’t castles. They were closer to the fortified towns the Romans had built before they toddled off back to Rome (and the many other places they’d come from). In fact, some burhs used what was left of Roman fortifications as a starting point. 

One theory holds that the Normans conquered England relatively easily because the country lacked castles. As Orderic Vitalis (monk; chronicler; son of an Anglo-Saxon mother and a Norman father; born in 1075, not long after the conquest) explained, “The fortifications that the Normans called castles were scarcely known in the English provinces, and so the English – in spite of their courage and love of fighting – could put up only a weak resistance to their enemies.”

 

So okay, castles were something new

The Normans built their first castles quickly, cheaply, and Ikea style. William the Conqueror–chief Norman and the new king–divided the land up among his newly be-lorded followers, and that land came well stocked with forests and dirt, which they used to assemble motte and bailey castles. 

Motte and what? A motte was a big mound of earth (and inevitably, yes, some stone) and a bailey was the ditch and bank surrounding it. At the top was a wooden tower. 

The problem with a wooden castle, though, was that if the Big Bad Anglo-Saxon Wolf came bearing a torch and followed by a bunch of pissed-off Anglo-Saxon wolflets, it would burn. What’s more, it would burn just as cheerily if instead of an Anglo-Saxon some invader set it alight. And if none of that happened, give it thirty or so years and the timbers would rot.

So William sent out a memo: rebuild the castles in stone.

More work, yes, but more durable, and as it happened Ikea had a kit for this too: the land held stone as well as wood and dirt. And lo, the lords followed the pictures on the instruction sheet and assembled more durable castles. Some kept the motte and bailey style; others went for a newer pattern that relied on massive stone walls to repel attackers. 

But we’re not going to talk about architecture. I get bored easily. Let’s talk about . . . 

 

. . . Why castles mattered

Have you ever wondered why an invading medieval army couldn’t just bypass the castles and rampage through the countryside while the lords and knights who were supposed to defend the land sat behind their walls eating, drinking, and acting lordly and knightly? Did the invading army really have to come to the door and challenge them to a fight?

As you may have figured out by now, military strategy isn’t one of my strengths, but here’s what I know: First, castles had a habit of getting themselves built where they could control a stretch of land: near roads, navigable rivers, ports, that sort of place. Helicopters hadn’t been invented, so the castles wouldn’t have been easy for an army to bypass. 

Second, an invading army stomping around anywhere near a castle would’ve set the lines of communication buzzing. Word moved more slowly than it does today, but move it did, and it would’ve reached the castle and been a cue for the lord to gather up as many fighters as he could and get out into the field. 

Third, if you were an invading army and the defending soldiers didn’t come out to meet you, you might have wanted to stop and dig them out while you knew where they were. Even if it did slow you down by a few weeks. Or in rarer cases, a few years. 

And fourth, it was how things were done. How many of us think to question that? 

But castles weren’t just forts. They were also administrative centers and homes to the lord, his family, his servants, his knights, and whatever other soldiers he had on hand–more in times of war; not so many in times of peace. 

You notice that bass note thumping away there? His, his, his, his. Especially in the early part of the medieval period, this was a heavily masculine world, and a militarized one. The whole point of the aristocracy was to fight, but that job belonged only to the species. 

Militarization was baked into the social structure: peasants toiled, priests and their churchly associates prayed, and lords fought. Warfare justified the aristocratic male’s existence and his dominance over the, ahem, lower orders. In Medieval Horizons, Ian Mortimer argues that not only were their lives centered around fighting, they–or many of them anyway–enjoyed the sheer brutality of it. 

 

Why castles stopped mattering as much

Cannons took a lot of the fun out of castles. It’s true that cannons were big and heavy and not easy to lug around the countryside, and it’s also true that Ikea didn’t stock them, so they couldn’t be assembled on site, but from around 1400 on, they could wreck a castle wall. So they were well worth dragging around. 

Forget waiting out a siege inside your thick stone walls. Warfare had changed.

 

Why were castles still used, then?

A castle was still good for what Ian Mortimer (Medieval Horizons; remember?) calls “regional control.” If you want to substitute “oppressing the peasantry,” be my guest. I wouldn’t sink to such a biased way of putting it but I can’t find an argument against you using it.

They also still served as residences, administrative centers (not unrelated to that oppressing business), and big honkin’ status symbols. The largest lords had multiple castles, and moved from one to the next, along with their households–lady, children, servants, hangers-on (secular and clerical)–taking their belongings with them, from beds to wall hangings to candlesticks and no doubt the candles as well. In times of peace, there would’ve been fewer soldiers and knights; in times of war, more. For an example, see the note under the photo. Breaking with all my traditions, the photo’s relevant to the post this week.

In the early century or three after the Norman invasion, traveling from castle to castle was about keeping that retinue fed. I can’t help thinking of them as a horde of locusts, needing to move on before they’d stripped the land clean. Move further into the middle ages, though, and that becomes less of an issue. One explanation I’ve seen is that the medieval warm period (800 – 1250 or 950 – 1250, depending on who  you ask) came along and more food was grown. Another is that  trade expanded. Between 1100 and 1300, more than 1,600 markets were established–something that can be traced because they needed permission. You can add a thousand fairs, so food could now follow the aristocrats and the aristocrats didn’t have to follow the food. And that’s as far as I can take that discussion. Sorry. I’m sure there’s more to be dug out.

As the castle’s military value decreased, the ratio of men to women evened out, and as the middle ages wore on, trekking from castle to castle became less of a thing. Lords tended to settle into a primary residence and make it more comfortable.

Murder & the law in medieval England

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Medieval England had only one punishment for murder: death. In fact, death was a kind of one-size-fits-not-all-but-a-lot punishment. It was just the right size for poaching, theft, heresy, and petty treason. 

Petty treason? That was when, say, a servant killed their master or mistress, a wife her husband, or a priest his superior. If you owed a person “faith and obedience,” killing them was (of course) treason.  

Big-league treason? The penalty for that was a much more painful death. Long-term imprisonment wasn’t a prominent item on the punishment menu. 

But I’ve derailed us. Let’s stick with murder. Death being the only possible penalty doesn’t give us the full picture; most murderers, or alleged murderers, were never convicted.

Very nearly semi-relevant photo: Foxglove. It can be poisonous, so if you’re looking to kill someone . . .

A note 

I’ll be leaning heavily on the wonderful Medieval Murder Maps here. It’s a treasure trove and not limited to information about murders. If you’re interested in the medieval period, go rummage around. It’ll be worth your time, I promise.

 

How common was murder? 

In the 1340s, Oxford had an estimated (emphasis on estimated) murder rate of around 110 per 100,000 people. In fourteenth-century London, that was between 36 and 52 per 100,000. In 2020 Britain, it was 1 per 100,000. 

A BBC article explains the high rates by saying that the king’s justice would’ve been seen as too slow, too corrupt, or too both to count on, so arguments easily escalated into fights, and sharp instruments were always close to hand. If no other weapon was handy–and everyday tools could be lethal–just about everyone carried a small knife to eat with, to work with, to defend themselves with, to look cool on the street with. If that’s not enough, the population that skewed heavily to the young and (presumably) hot-headed and the culture that placed a high value on honor, which is a fragile beast that wants constant defending.

Figure in also that wounds which wouldn’t be fatal today would’ve been then. 

 

Prosecution

So okay, let’s say you murdered someone. Oops. You were now officially in deep shit–unless of course you were rich and powerful, in which case the shit wouldn’t be anywhere near as deep.

You could be brought to trial in two different ways: in the first, a jury indicted you and the coroner ordered the sheriff to arrest you and keep you in jail until you could be tried. Or until you died of the miserable conditions in prison, whichever came first. 

The second way was if someone launched what was called an appeal–a sort of private effort to bring a person to justice. A relative of the crime’s victim could do this, or an accomplice who’d turned king’s or queen’s evidence. (Sorry, that doesn’t make a lot of sense to me either but it’s all I know about it.) 

An appeal could be launched against the main accused or against accessories. 

Women could only launch an appeal if they’d been raped or if their husbands had been killed.  

Yes, it was a lovely time to live. 

 

But . . .

. . . most people who were accused of murder weren’t put to death for it, so let’s talk about what happened to them.

One group we can peel away either fled or sought sanctuary and abjured the realm.

Fleeing is clear enough. You turned, you ran, you tried never to be seen in the neighborhood again. As far as the coroner was concerned (and I admit I’m guessing here), that made you somebody else’s problem. In an era before CCTV, before anyone carried identification, it might not have been hard to disappear, although it was probably hard to eat and put a roof over your head once you’d cut yourself loose from the social structure. But if you weren’t fussy about eating, or if you had ready cash and connections, you might manage. Still, I wouldn’t want to underestimate the problems of disappearing if your flight took you through villages and hamlets where a stranger stood out like a fluorescent zebra. People did travel–what else were all those pilgrimages about?–but you’d hardly be invisible. 

Or you could forget all that, embrace your fluorescent zebrahood, and become an outlaw. 

So that’s fleeing. Seeking sanctuary and abjuring the realm, though, needs translation. By the fifteenth century, sanctuary held a recognized place in English common law, and it came in two flavors: taking time-limited sanctuary in a parish church (that was also called taking church) followed by abjuration of the realm and time-unlimited refuge in a chartered sanctuary.

If you took sanctuary in a parish church, you’d need to count the days. In most cases, you had forty before your claim of sanctuary ran out. After that you either surrendered or abjured–translation: renounced–the realm, which meant you confessed and gave up whatever protection the king’s peace offered, along with your rights as a citizen. Then you’d negotiate with the sheriff and coroner over what port you’d leave from and how long it would take you to get there. If you detoured off the highway, you could be killed, and once you got to the port you had to take the first available ship. 

Which assumed you could pay for your passage–or I guess convince a captain that you were worth hiring. 

Then you went into exile. Forever. Or until you were pardoned or came back without a pardon, hoping to be (a) forgiven or (b) not noticed. Or mistaken for a fluorescent zebra.

Chartered sanctuaries first came into being around 1400: a limited number of religious houses were granted the right to shelter felons from secular justice and debtors from the creditors who were trying to have them imprisoned. The felons, at least, had to confess their crimes, often in detail, and swear to keep the peace, follow the rules, and play nice. 

After that, they couldn’t set foot outside the chartered sanctuary’s precincts without risking arrest, and they had to find someplace to live within them–not to mention a way to support themselves, and since sanctuaries weren’t marketplaces or red-hot centers of business, ways to make money were scarce. So this was either for felons who could pay their way or for the ones who only planned on staying a few days and then disappearing into the night. 

By the time Henry VIII dissolved England’s monasteries, the number of people claiming sanctuary in either form had narrowed down to almost no one. Sorry, but I’m not sure why.

 

Prison

If you were accused of murder–or anything else while we’re at it–you’d have had good reason to flee: people died in medieval prisons while they were waiting to be tried. In Newgate Prison, the coroner recorded some prisoners as having died of starvation. Others died a ”rightful death and not of any felony.” That would’ve meant typhus (called jail fever), malaria, cold, or infected wounds.

To point out the screamingly obvious, if they died of neglect, starvation, and poor conditions, no one was at fault.   

If you’re inclined to think harsh punishment leads to less crime, do consider the middle ages.

Prisons were divided by class and by cash. The keepers could and did demand fees for admission (yes, seriously; otherwise no doubt that have been mobbed by people wanting to get in) and for release. They charged for food, bedding, and heating. In London, prisoners who could pay enough were kept on the Master’s side and the upper floors. Below them were the Common’s side, below ground level. The poorest prisoners (I’ll go out on a limb and guess those were the people who couldn’t pay for their admission) went into a common chamber. Anyone the keepers thought might escape was fettered.

 

Numbers

But we haven’t accounted for everyone who was accused of murder and not put to death, and to figure out what happened to the ones who didn’t flee or seek sanctuary, the makers of the Murder Maps combed through the “records of gaol delivery.” 

Gaol? That’s British for jail. And delivery? Starting in 1330, jails had to be “delivered,” which meant all the prisoners tried and the jail emptied, three (or possibly two; do you really care?) times a year. 

Of the people tried for murder, 90% to 95% were (a) acquitted, (b) transferred to an ecclesiastical prison, or (3) pardoned by the monarch, leaving 5 – 10% who were actually hanged. 

If you’re in that 5 – 10%, that’s not much comfort, but it does soften our image of the era.

 

Acquittals, priests and pardons

I couldn’t find any numbers that would let me take even a wild and irresponsible guess at how many people were acquitted. I’ve always assumed not many were, but that’s based on no information whatsoever. Don’t mistake it for a fact-related guess. 

Once we set that group aside, we’re left with two final groups to peel away; priests and people who were pardoned. 

If you were a priest, you could be convicted in the king’s court but only the church had the power to punish you, and the church didn’t have capital punishment, so you’d want to move your holy hind end into the church system. 

All well and good, but how was a court to decide, in the absence of centralized records, who was a priest and who was just pretending to be? Why, by asking them to do something priestlike: after 1351 (or from the 15th through 18th centuries, according to another source), anyone claiming benefit of clergy was asked to read psalm 51 in Latin.  If he could read it, he was a priest. Who else could read Latin, after all? It became known as the neck verse: it saved your neck. Some criminals were said to have memorized it, because you could never tell when it would come in handy. 

This only worked if you were male–at least until 1629, when it was extended to women, although women still couldn’t be priests. The only way to understand that is to accept that the law and religion follow a logic we mere mortals can’t always make sense of.

And according to one source, it worked only once: that first use earned you a brand on the thumb.   

Pardons came from the monarch, who had the power to pardon a person for any reason or for none. If you were wealthy enough, you could buy a one. If you were well connected (which pretty much implies wealthy, but let’s not quibble), you or your supporters could plead for one–say because you fought in one of the king’s wars. Or you could also be pardoned for agreeing to serve in a current one.

If you were pregnant, you could have your execution postponed, or sometimes reduced to a fine. Note: this did not work well if you were male. You’d have an easier time learning Latin.

Finally, you could give evidence against other people and if they were convicted you got to go into exile. That was called turning king’s approval. The bargain-basement option for people who couldn’t get pregnant and didn’t have the money or connections to wangle a pardon.

*

Unconnected to that: it’s deeply weird to be writing about medieval England while the US–my native country–sinks ever deeper into autocracy and (I don’t use the word lightly) fascism under the most bizarre leader elected in my (or anyone else’s) lifetime; as federal employees snatch immigrants and people who kind of look like they might be immigrants off the street and deport them to wherever without warrant or trial; as the people of Gaza starve; as–oh, hell, I could go on for pages but you know what’s happening out there. We all do. The world dances on the edge of disaster and those of us who can, go on leading our lives. Writing about this stuff is part of my life. 

Forgive me, though, if I take a moment to acknowledge what’s happening out in the real world. Because none of us can afford to look away, thinking our safety is guaranteed. We can’t afford to be silent. Our voices are small but we can’t know in advance what will make a difference. 

Be noisy, my friends. No effort is wasted.

In fear, in grief, in love,

Ellen

Murder, politics, and trashy gossip in medieval England

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. . . and of course religion. I should’ve squeezed religion into that headline. You couldn’t separate it from politics back then. It permeated everything.

The murder in question happened in 1337, in London, when a priest, John Forde, was killed on a busy street by a group of men who slit his throat and stabbed him in the stomach, and that’s the loose end of a tangled strand of yarn, so keep hold of it and let’s see if we can’t do some untangling.

Irrelevant photo: begonia

 

The coroner, the sheriff, and the jury

Right after the murder, the coroner and sheriff were called and they did what they were programmed to do: gather an investigative jury–usually 12 local men but that could go as high as 50. For this murder, they gathered 33, signaling that it was a high-profile case. 

Juries generally included witnesses, community members, and people who claimed to know something about what had happened. They all had to be men and of good social standing, and their first job was to figure out the cause of death: was it unnatural (slit throat? yeah, probably), and had a felony had been committed (a fair bet)? 

Juries also interviewed witnesses, examined the body, and considered suspects and motives. Combine that with juries being made up of people who knew something about the incident or thought (or claimed or were told) they did and you’re likely to find that the story a jury put together was colored by local gossip and the interests of local and professional communities. Predictably enough, jurors weren’t immune to pressure or political convenience. 

This particular jury identified a set of suspects and said there’d been a longstanding feud between Forde–that’s the priest, remember, who was now extremely dead–and the wealthy and aristocratic FitzPayne family. Sorry: make that wealthy, aristocratic, and powerful, so although a suspect’s possessions were supposed to be confiscated and held in safekeeping, this jury swore blind that they had no idea where to find these well-known, powerful people, and also that at least one of them had no belongings to confiscate.

According to the coroner’s report, “The jurors found that there had been a long-standing dispute between Ella, the wife of Sir Robert FitzPayn, and John Ford. Ella hence persuaded Hugh Lovell, her brother, Hugh Colne and John Strong, latterly her servants, Hascuph Neville, a chaplain, and John Tindale, to kill him. Accordingly, on the preceding Friday after Vespers, they waylaid John Ford as he walked up Cheapside, opposite the junction with Bread Street, and Hasculph.”

 

The background

Ella (or Ela; to promote inconsistency, I’ll spell it both ways) was married to Robert FitzPayne (or Payn; and Forde is sometimes Ford; listen, spelling was a liquid at the time and in the interest of making life difficult some of the spelling’s have been modernized some of the time)–

Where were we? Ella was married to Robert FitzPayne, and back in 1332 someone had denounced her to the archbishop of Canterbury for having sex with “knights and others, single and married, and even with clerics in holy orders.” 

Mind you, we have no way of knowing who she had sex with and whether. My default setting is to be skeptical about sexual accusations against women. It was–and to a lesser extent still is–a cheap and easy way to wreck a woman’s reputation, at a time when reputation (especially a woman’s) was all-important. And all it boils down to is horror at the idea of a woman having unsanctioned sex. 

The only man named as her lover in the accusation was the priest, John Forde.

By way of punishment, the church–which had the power to punish its members–banned her from wearing gold, pearls, or precious stones; she was also to donate some whopping sum of money to monastic orders (to be used, at least in theory, for the poor); and by way of public shaming, every autumn for seven years she was to walk the length of Salisbury Cathedral barefoot, carrying a four-pound candle to the altar.

To all of which she apparently said, “Oh, yeah, how you gonna make me?” because a second letter claimed she’d abandoned her husband and was hiding in Rothermere, and had been excommunicated. 

Forde, who hadn’t gone into hiding, doesn’t seem to have been punished. 

 

The background to the background

Ah, but it all goes back further than that, to 1322, when Ella, John, and Robert were indicted by a royal commission for conspiring with a gang of extortionists to raid a Benedictine priory. 

Robert? You remember him. Her husband. He was lord of the nearby castle, Stogursey. 

The lot of them smashed up the priory’s gates and buildings, felled trees, raided the quarry (stone, you may be aware, is heavy, which argues for a fair number of people being involved here), then drove 18 oxen, 30 pigs, and 200 sheep back to the castle and held them for ransom.

Do you get the sense that aristocrats thought of themselves as untouchable?

This was in the period leading up to the Hundred Years War between England and France, and the priory they raided was an outpost of a French abbey. If you wanted to attack a French-aligned abbey, this wasn’t a bad time to do it. 

Even so, what’s a priest doing in the middle of that? Well, his church was on the FitzPayne family’s estate and they could well have been its patrons, leaving him torn between the church, which had authority over him, and the FitzPaynes, who might have had a more immediate power. But that’s guesswork.

This all happened at a time when the archbishop was trying to police the morals of the aristocracy and gentry, and he might have read Forde’s involvement in the raid as signaling that his loyalty to the church was coming second to his more worldly loyalties. Exactly how that connects to the archbishop sentencing Ella to public humiliation ten years later is anyone’s guess, but it’s hard not to draw a line from one dot to the other and label it Retribution.

It’s also hard not to draw a line between Ella being denounced to the archbishop–presumably by Forde, since he went unpunished although he was the only lover named in the complaint–and Forde’s murder. Let’s label that line Retribution as well.

It might be good, though, to remember that a lot of guesswork went into those last paragraphs. 

The archbishop died in 1333, at which point he drops out of the story, and for four years everything went quiet, at least as far as we can tell from this distance in time. Then four years later, Ela (presumably) had Forde killed. 

Manuel Eisner, who (along with multiple other people) created a wonderful website called Medieval Murder Maps, speculates that she was taking revenge for the humiliation the archbishop imposed on her–or at least tried to impose. He cites the public nature of the killing, saying it was designed to remind people who was in control. 

“Where the rule of law is weak,” he said, “we see killings committed by the highest ranks in society, who will take power into their hands.”

 

And at the end of that strand of yarn?

Only one man was indicted for the murder, and predictably enough he was one of the servants–and even that was five years after the murder. As far as we can tell, everybody else went on with their lives.

It’s worth repeating that we have no idea whether Ela slept with any of the men she was accused of being involved with. She was denounced and the church handed her a penance. That’s all we know. Even before the invention of the printing press gave the world sleazy newspapers, a sex story about a woman was sure to sell copies.

And with that out of the way, go explore the website. It’s wonderful.

AI and the weirder aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry: it’s the news from Britain

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Let’s start today’s post in Chicago, which you may already know is not in Britain, but it’ll all make sense if you stay with me a while. 

In May, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list, as newspapers do when summer threatens and they need some fluff to fill their column inches. I don’t know if they have any book reviewers left on staff, or if they ever had them, but they farmed the work out to a freelancer, who farmed it out to AI, because why would a responsible newspaper hire someone who actually reads books to write about books?

It might be relevant that the paper cut its staff by 20% recently. Or to put that less delicately, fired 20% of its staff. 

The article that the freelancer turned in and the paper printed recommended six imaginary books, although to be fair they were credited to real writers. It even had synopses for them, and reasons people might like them. 

Irrelevant photo: poppies

The article included a few real books, also by real writers, but nobody’s perfect. 

The Sun-Times said, “We’re looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”

Which makes it sound a bit like some AI-generated copy stormed the newsroom and locked the reporters in closets so it could put itself into print. 

It might be worth adding, in this context, that a summer supplement quoted a food anthropologist who also doesn’t seem to exist. 

And the connection to Britain? We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to play a greater role in British military procurement.

What could possibly go wrong?

*

I was going to leave it there, but I can’t resist an AI-gone-wrong story. Britain’s high court is less than happy about dozens of false citations and quotes from case law being relied on in court–presumably generated by AI. An £89 million damages case had 18 of phantom citations and I have no idea how many phantom quotes, so it seems fair to guess that these aren’t all being generated by your street-corner mom-and-pop law firm.

 

How to tell if you’re in Britain

I mentioned that Chicago isn’t in Britain, and I stand by that statement, but if you ever find yourself in a strange city–or town, for that matter–and need to know if it’s in Britain, the simplest way is to head for someplace that serves food and ask for tea, or better yet, builder’s tea. If you get a funny look, you’re not in Britain. If no one thinks that’s odd, you are. If they tell you they don’t serve tea but get all apologetic about it–yeah, that’s Britain.

*

You could also look for the nearest mass-participation race. If some of the runners are dressed up as anything other than runners, that’s another sign you’re in Britain, although admittedly not as useful a test since races aren’t happening all the time on every corner. Still, an article about April’s London Marathon mentioned runners dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a chicken, Spiderman, the Elizabeth Tower (that’s the tower that houses Big Ben, which is a clock), and a rhino.

The rhino gets special mention, because the runner inside the costume broke a Guinness world record for the most marathons completed in a 3D costume: this was his 113th dressed as a pachyderm. 

Listen, fame is fleeting. You have to grab any chance you get. 

 

How clear is biological sex?

Back in May (remember May?), Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the words sex, woman, and man in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex. You know: XX or XY. Vagina or penis. Pink baby clothes or blue. 100% pay or 87% pay. Any idiot can tell the difference and as of now everybody has to go to the corner–not to mention the toilet–assigned to them at birth. 

It all sounds simple until you talk to someone who actually knows about this stuff. I’m not going to do even a shallow dive into it here but a Scientific American article does a great job of exploring the complicated reality behind what’s supposed to be simple. 

 Among other things, it says, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. . . .

“When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have . . . uncovered variations in . . .  genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. . . .

“These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.”

And that’s just the part I happened to grab on my way out the door. It really is worth a read. 

If determining a person’s sex was as simple as the Supreme Court seems to think–

Listen, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but people studying the Bayeux Tapestry–that massive history-of-the-Norman-Conquest in pictures–are debating whether it includes 93 penises or 94. 

If that strikes you as an awful lot of genitalia stitched into a single tapestry, even a massive one, I should mention that 88 of them are on horses. That may or may not normalize the situation.

Why are the experts unsure? Surely, even with the boundaries between the sexes blurring, a penis is still a penis.

Well, in real life, to the best of my knowledge–and I’ll admit to not being an expert on the subject–it probably still is, but this is art, not life, and art is notoriously messy. Some experts say the object in question could be the scabbard for a sword or dagger. 

As Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?” Although I’m pretty sure he was talking about almost anything else. 

The Supreme Court has not seen fit to rule on this. Yet. But the debate has led to wonderful quotes, including one to rival Fats Waller’s: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

 

Okay, that was weird; let’s talk about politics

Two members of the Middleton St. George parish council got in a fight that ended up with scratches, blood, bruised fingers, and a broken pair of glasses, all of which filled a fair number of column inches and could have saved that Chicago newspaper from having to review nonexistent books.

The men involved in the fight are both in their 70s, and if both are telling the truth they each hit the other one first. Sadly, no one was wearing a body camera, so we may never be sure, but an audio recording does include one of them saying, “David, no, please, there are women in here.”

Women? Horrors! What are they doing in a meeting? Never mind, they won’t stay long. Both of you sit back down and pretend to be grownups until the ladies go back to the kitchen to make the tea.

*

If anyone’s gotten into a physical fight in Parliament lately, I missed the story, so we’ll have to make do with fires in Westminster Palace, where Parliament meets: there’ve been 44 in the past ten years. The building’s also full of toxic material, and no, I’m not casting aspersions on any political parties, although it wouldn’t take much to tempt me. I’m talking about asbestos, which has been found in over a thousand items.

Items? Beats me. It’s an odd word for the context.

The building was built between 1840 and 1860, which makes it newer than a lot of British buildings, but it’s held together by chewing gum and political bile. Specifically, disagreements over whether to spend money on either replacing the building with something new and functional or on the serious repair work that would make it safe. 

The problem is that either approach would cost billions and take ten years at an optimistic estimate. Less optimistically, it could take seventy years. Putting it off would cost more in the long run and risk the whole place going up in highly embarrassing flames. But spending billions on a refurb of Parliament’s meeting place isn’t a good look at a time when we’re being told there isn’t enough money to put the National Health Service back on its feet, when money’s being pared away from the disabled, and when–oh, hell, I could extend the list for many dismal paragraphs but won’t. 

Prediction? The story will drag on for years, unresolved. Unless it goes up in flames.

*

Boris Johnson–former Conservative prime minister and continuing national embarrassment–was selling a photograph (that’s of him, with you, in case I haven’t been not clear) for £121 before an event called “An Evening with Boris Johnson.” Tickets were extra, but for your £121 you did at least get a free handshake. 

If you only bought a ticket, all you got for your money was a seat. 

Unnamed allies of Johnson’s say he’s scoping out the possibility of a political comeback: he’s bored out of Westminster and thinks there’s unfinished business. Which, no doubt, only he can wrap up. 

To be fair to him, he’s not our only continuing national embarrassment. If we could make money exporting embarrassing politicians, we’d even out the balance of trade–which was, as I’m sure you know–£3.70 billion in March 2025. 

*

Meanwhile, back at Westminster, a Conservative MP claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of Whos’ Who, which are available for free in the House of Commons’ library. 

Why did he need his own? I’m speculating here, but probably because he’s listed in it. And, you know, some days you just need to open the book and reassure yourself that you exist. And existed in three previous years, because he bought copies for each of four years. 

I’m sympathetic. Sometimes I have to look at my blog to remind myself that I exist. I mean, who doesn’t? Why else do we publish these things?

A political party, a lettuce, and a tortoise walk into a court: it’s politics in Britain

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Back in 2022–you remember 2022, don’t you?–Britain’s Conservative Party held a big honkin’ majority in the House of Commons and Boris Johnson had just resigned as prime minister, having found multiple creative ways to bring himself and his office into disrepute. 

Great sigh of relief, right? Better days lay ahead, surely.

Ha.

 

How Britain forms a government

But before we go on, we need to understand how Britain chooses a prime minister, because it was time to choose Johnson’s replacement. 

The thing is, British voters don’t choose a prime minister. People vote for someone to represent their area–a member of parliament, or MP if we’re going to save ourselves a few keystrokes. Then whoever leads the party with a majority of MPs becomes the prime minister. 

A head of lettuce. Stay with me and it’ll all make sense.

And if no party has a majority? Oops. The politicians head for the back rooms and try to cobble together a coalition of two or more parties that will make up a majority. Usually the party with the most MPs ends up holding a smaller party by the hand like a babysitter taking a four-year-old across the street. Yes, the babysitter has to promise the kid an ice cream or some screen time, but the babysitter’s still in the lead. 

Where the parallel breaks down is if the four-year-old decides to cross the street with a different babysitter–not the party with the most MPs but a smaller one that still has enough for the two to make up a majority. Until the kid commits to one party or the other, she or he still has some power. After that it depends on how canny the kid and the babysitter are. It can get pretty fractious.

Once a coalition’s formed, the king or queen waves a magic feather and turns the leader of the leading party into a prime minister. 

Since the UK tends to have two major parties and a handful of small ones, someone can usually put together a majority. If not, the largest party can govern unsteadily as a minority government and if you bet on a new election being held before too much time’s gone past you’re not likely to lose your money.

But we were talking about 2022, when the Conservatives held that big honkin’ majority and had just lost their leader. Because when you step down as prime minister, you also step down as leader of your party. You’re both things at once and it’s  anyone’s guess how you know at any given time which one you’re acting as.

Or maybe it works the other way around: you step down as leader first, then find you’re not the prime minister anymore. It’s like one of those dreams where you realize you’re riding the bus and realize you’re stark fucking naked. You don’t stop to wonder what came first. All  you want to do is find some clothes.

In that case–and we’re talking here about the prime minister/party leader case, not the bus/no-clothes case–the governing party chooses a new leader, and that leader is ipso facto and several other Latin phrases that not many people understand the country’s prime minister.

I never studied Latin, unlike Boris Johnson, who was known for tossing phrases of (I’ve read) questionable accuracy into speeches, but I can translate this bit of political reality for you: it means that one political party, not the electorate, chooses the country’s next leader. Who–because the position of party leader/prime minister is a powerful one–may steer the country in an entirely new direction. I mean, when you voted for your MP, you knew who was leading the party. You at least had the illusion that you knew what and who you were voting for. Now it’s out of your hands.

The interesting–not to say bizarre–thing here is that the party elects its leader by following its own rules. So if the majority party’s rules say they choose their leader by allowing each member one vote and each local party club 100 votes, then that’s the way the new prime minister will be elected. If the rules say they do it by shoe size–okay, it’s their party. They get to set the rules.

 

Enter Liz Truss; exit Liz Truss, chased by a lettuce

That’s what happened in 2022. Following party rules, the Conservative MPs narrowed the possible candidates down to two and tossed those two to the members like raw meat to the lions.  And the members voted for Liz Truss, who crashed the economy, became the shortest-serving prime minister in British history, and was famously outlasted by a head of lettuce set up in front of a live camera online. 

I should probably add that the lettuce wore a blond wig. Political writers rely on that sort of detail to liven up their column inches. A fake blue plaque–the kind used in Britain to commemorate historical sites–has since been set up at the supermarket where the lettuce was bought.

But back to the election: what’s known is that 81,326 people voted, all of course Conservative Party members. 

How many registered voters did the country have? 48,208,507.

What percentage of the electorage chose the new prime minister? Sorry, I can’t do numbers, but a very small one.

Full disclosure here: the number for the registered voters is two years off–it’s from 2024–but it’s close enough to give you a sense of the weirdness of it all. And it gets weirder than that, because the Conservative Party itself oversaw the election, not any state body, and we can’t peek behind the curtain to know how it was conducted.

All of that led Tortoise Media–new owner of the Observer newspaper–to tug at the curtain, trying to find out how Truss was actually elected. Initially, they asked the Conservative Party how the election was run, how or whether they ensured it was safe, and whether the voters were all citizens, of legal age, and for that matter even real.

The party answered that they didn’t appoint the prime minister, the sovereign did, using his or her (her in this case) magic feather. Furthermore, the party was a private club and no one’s business.

 

The courts

So Tortoise Media went to court, arguing that the party was serving a public function and in that election acting as a public authority, so it should be subject to judicial review and the public’s right to know under European law.

Hang on. European law? Didn’t Britain leave the European Union?

Yup, but it didn’t leave the Council of Europe, which is a different beast with a similar name, so it still recognizes and is subject to the European Court of Human Rights. 

Who knew, right?

To help make their point, Tortoise bought Conservative Party memberships for a tortoise–an actual one–under the name Margaret Thatcher, and for two other dead people. 

Three years and two courts later, Tortoise (the media company, not the actual one) lost. The court ruled that the party wasn’t serving a public function. Boris Johnson had advised the queen to appoint the new prime minister not as party leader but as the outgoing prime minister, so the way the party ran the election wasn’t a matter for public scrutiny.

Did you follow that? Did you picture Boris Johnson naked on a bus? If so, you have my deepest sympathy.

Parliament could, in theory, vote itself or some public body the power to oversee mid-term transfers of power, but my best guess is that the current government is too busy overseeing its own unpopularity to bother. If the prime minister resigns midway through his term, which I wouldn’t rule out since everyone close to him is busy denying the possibility, the election will be overseen by a different party–Labour, this time–and pigs may not fly but tortoises could well vote.