Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

Serfdom, freedom, and misogyny in the Middle Ages

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Today’s excursion into English history takes us to a moment in the Middle Ages when misogyny, common law, and feudalism– Well, cars hadn’t been invented yet, so let’s say they had a cart crash. High speeds hadn’t been invented either, so they all came out intact if slightly battered.

We’ll start with the law part.

 

Common law

English common law dates back to the Middle Ages and if you’re a fan of convoluted systems I can’t recommend it highly enough. Basically, this is a system of law that’s based not on what I think of as law–you know, a set of written rules that you transgress at your peril–but on what courts have decided in the past. It can rely on a written law if it’s in the mood, but precedent is the driving force.   

The system gives judges a shitload of power in shaping the law, and I’m naive to think common law’s outside of my experience (although I still think it is), because the system’s in use today in an assortment of countries, including the US and UK, the two countries I’ve lived in. 

Shows you what I know.

A rare relevant photo: medieval rural life–somewhere.

 

Other systems of law in the Middle Ages

Just to confuse things, in the Middle Ages English common law coexisted with other legal systems. Church courts applied canon law, urban and rural courts applied local customary law, Chancery and maritime courts applied Roman law. 

The royal courts were for the most serious stuff and were run by a professional (in other words, paid) judge. Starting in the 13th century, those judges traveled to each county two or three times a year and held county assizes. 

County sheriffs held a court in each hundred. 

A hundred? It was an administrative/political division, smaller than a county but bigger than a pie. Starting in the 14th century, justices of the peace took the role over from the sheriffs. They were drawn from the local nobility and gentry, and they weren’t paid for the job but I’d bet a small pie that they got power and prestige from it. 

In towns, borough courts played a similar role.

After all that, we get to manor courts. These were run by the lord of the manor or the village. They dealt with petty crimes–debt, theft, fighting. The accused would more than likely have been the lord’s own villeins.

What’s a villein? That’s medieval-speak for a serf. Sort of, and it sounds nicer, though, doesn’t it? 

The sources I’ve found in a quick search contradict each other about what the difference is between a serf and a villein. One says villeins, like serfs, were tied to the land–not slaves but not free to leave either. Another says villeins were free to leave but generally couldn’t afford to. Both sources are more or less bite-size but the issue’s off to one side of the point I’m trying to make, so let’s use a word that dodges the whole issue: naif. 

If you consult Lord Google, he’ll inform you that it’s also spelled neif, but I’ll stick with the more familiar spelling. It’s the root of our word naive, and you can trace it back to Old French, where it meant “native inhabitant; simpleton, natural fool.” Or to the Middle Ages, when it meant someone who was born a serf. 

But we were talking about courts. Church courts could try lay people for things like adultery, homosexuality, gambling, or not showing up at church–you know, the stuff that really mattered. Priests acted as the judges and unlike the other courts they had no juries.

If you’re  feeling hemmed in and starting to hyperventilate, I’d say you understand the situation fairly well. Most people probably got through their lives without appearing before any of those courts, but it can leave the modern reader feeling, um, judged. 

 

Common law and serfdom

With all the throat-clearing out of the way, let’s move closer to that collision I promised. A whole lot of legal time and energy gets devoted, both then and now, to disputes over property, and under feudalism the most valuable properties would’ve been land and the naifs who were trapped on it.

This brings us to the blog Legal History Miscellany, and to a post, “All Bastards Are Free.” Understand, please, that the author, Sara M. Butler, isn’t talking here about people she doesn’t like. She’s using the language of the era. Being born inside or outside of marriage mattered. She saw a passing reference to the bastard children of villeins being born free, wondered if that could possibly be true, and off she went down a fascinating rabbit hole. 

As it turns out, the answer to whether bastard children were born free is both yes and no, and that’s due to common law’s annoying habit of changing without having to file a written notice in triplicate. For information, Butler turned to legal treatises, which are as close as you can get to codified law at this stage. 

In the 12th and early 13th centuries, the child of an unmarried, unfree woman was a naif, even if the child’s father was free. 

What if the parents were married? Worrying over that seems to have kept a good number of lawyers occupied, and they went into intricate detail over it.The result? If both parents were unfree, the child was unfree, whether the parents were married or not. If the man was free and the woman not? The child was unfree. If the mother was free and the father wasn’t? Guess what! The child still wasn’t free. In fact, if that free man married the unfree woman, he lost his freedom.

Go a little further into the 13th century, though, and the rules loosen up a bit: the child follows the status of the mother, so if the mother is free, the child is free.

By the end of the 13th century, opinion was branching out in different directions, as it will when judges are essentially making the law. One treatise held that “One who is begotten of a free man but born of a bondwoman out of wedlock is a serf.” Another held that either parent could pass freedom down to their child. A third held that the father was the determining factor: the child of a free man married to a naif would be free; the child of an unfree man married to a free woman wouldn’t be. 

What happened, then, when the jurors didn’t know who the father was and therefore didn’t know if he was free, unfree, or fur-bearing? According to this line of argument, the child “belongs to the lord of the manor, for his condition is determined by that of his mother, by whomsoever he may be begotten, freeman or serf.”

One of those tracts holds that when “jurors do not in truth know whether [a person] is a villein or a free man, judgement must be in favour of freedom.” Another says that the “blood of a man” should not be tried “by means of women,” which means–

Okay, I’m not entirely sure what it means. It sounds like a woman’s status shouldn’t determine a man’s. I mean, come on, it was humiliating enough that a man had to be born of a woman, but why take it further than that?

What Butler says is, “I would argue that it is in these two statements, when taken together, that we see the glimmer of the origins of the common law rule that all bastards are free. Here’s the problem: the only person who can definitively prove that a bastard child’s father is free is the mother: she knows who she slept with and when. Granted, it surely comes as no surprise to anyone who studies the Middle Ages that by the late thirteenth century authorities were not keen to rely on a woman’s word alone, especially if it meant that a man might lose his freedom, or that an elite man would lose the profits associated with a villein and his entire line.

“Did justices decide to declare all bastards free because they didn’t want to have to rely on the word of a woman?” 

The implied answer is yes.

As one judge put it in 1279, “No woman should be received in proof except in a marriage case.“

 

Who actually went to court over this?

As long as all this child-bearing stayed on the manor, I doubt there would’ve been much cause to go to court over anyone’s status. Everyone knew everyone and everyone’s nose was undoubtedly in everyone else’s business–and the lord of the manor was the judge anyway, with the locality’s wealthier citizens acting as jury, so the manor court wouldn’t be a smart place to sue for your or your child’s freedom. But if a naif hightailed it to a town, hoping to establish a new life as a free person, and a lord appeared to reclaim him or her, it was up to the lord to prove his right to the person by establishing that he or she came from a line of naifs. 

If the case Butler cites was typical, proving that was harder than it sounds. In 1280, William of Cressy tried to reclaim William son of Siward by producing a collection of (entirely male) relatives to prove that William S. came from a line of unfree men, but either William S. or his lawyer managed to undermine William C.’s claims about their status, one by one. 

Not only were the courts leaning against women, they seem to have been leaning more toward freedom than unfreedom. As one judge wrote, “Free law is more predisposed to save and maintain a man in his free estate than to condemn him or lead him into servitude and so, since you say that he is your villein and he says he is free, the law acts and we ought rather to act to save him and support him in his free estate than to maintain you in this to bring him back and reduce him to servitude, for it is clear that he is free until you have proved him the reverse by his blood.”

In another case, from 1326, Thomas son of Thomas the Elder tried to claim Richard Lachebere, using three unfree relatives as proof. Richard argued that they didn’t share the same blood because “he was a bastard and thus free.” The judge ruled that because Richard was a bastard, “he had estranged himself from every blood, so that he could not be proven a villein by any blood.” 

Or as Butler puts it, “Rather than rely on the word of a woman, it was simply easier to presume freedom.”

I do wonder, though, whether town courts were more inclined toward freedom since they sat outside the manorial system.

Immigration and the Windrush story

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When you read the history of Black immigration to Britain, you’ll find the story of the Windrush looming large.

The story of what?

A ship called the Empire Windrush. It docked in Essex (that’s in England; you’re welcome) in 1948, bringing immigrants from the West Indies–and also from other places, including Poland, but only the West Indian immigrants became part of the story. Think of the story as a paper bag full of groceries. The bottom got wet and everyone else fell. They haven’t been seen since. Sorry.

The Windrush gave its name to a generation, not because it was the first ship to bring immigrants from the West Indies but because it was the first to arrive after the passage of the British Nationality Act, which gave people from the colonies the right to live and work in Britain. 

History’s funny like that. A few events get to be fixed points in the story while other things, things that happened before, after, and around those fixed points, go missing. They’re hanging out with those Polish immigrants at the Invisibility Cafe and they’ll be there until a new generation of historians comes along to resurrect them.

Irrelevant photo: Geraniums hanging out with a California poppy.

 

Postwar Britain

Britain came out of World War II exhausted, heavily bombed, and damn near broke. Wartime food rationing continued well into peacetime. To reconstruct, the country needed a lot of things, including workers. Some 260,000 British soldiers had died in the war. (That doesn’t count troops from the colonies, just the ones from Britain itself.) And when after the war some half a million migrants left Britain for the colonies to build new lives, Winston Churchill, by then a mere former prime minister, begged them to stay, saying “We cannot spare you.” 

To which they replied, in unison, “Your problem, buddy,” and off they toddled.

The government turned to its colonies, where they hoped to recruit workers who already spoke English from places where labor was cheap. 

Yes, it was all entirely high minded.

The West Indies were a prime target, since they were struggling economically, and West Indians responded, taking took jobs as manual workers, drivers, cleaners, and nurses, although when I took the Life in the UK test (you have to pass to get indefinite leave to remain), what I had to memorize was that they became bus drivers. Every last one of them.

Listen, when you have to pass a standardized test, you give ‘em what they want, no matter how strained its relationship to fact may be.

People from other colonies also took up the offer, but they too have dropped out of the story. If you want to know more about them, there’s this cafe I can recommend.

 

The welcome mat

So Britain put out the welcome mat, right? 

Sure it did. And the sun shone on this rainy island for 365 days straight. 

What happened was the usual hysteria about immigrants, because the thing about immigrants is that they’re from other countries. Where they do things differently. You know how it works: the country they come to may be divided against itself in six different ways, but drop in enough foreigners to hit critical mass and the country discovers it dislikes them  more than it dislikes its fellow countryfolk.

Sorry, I don’t mean to sound as cynical as I sound. It just sort of happens sometimes. 

Once you’ve cued up the usual hysteria, you can multiply it by the fact that the immigrants were Black and Britain was still overwhelmingly white. 

Result? As much as the country needed workers, jobs were mysteriously hard to find. One man from the Windrush generation said, “Apparently I was always just a few hours too late,” although they were so polite about it that he added, “The Englishman can be the nicest man out when he is telling you no.”    

Housing was equally hard to find. Rooms for rent were generally advertised on notices in the windows of local stores, and a lot of notices said, “No blacks.” Or in some cases, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.” 

Yes, kiddies, Irish and Black people were bundled into such a tight package that it was hard to tell them apart. In the rest of this paragraph I’ll be working from memory, so give me some leeway, but Ireland was the place where Britain honed its skills in justifying imperial conquest. It learned to write a story that showed the conquered people as a separate race, so incompetent, so inferior, that conquering them was damn near doing them a favor. In that contest, wrapping them all up together made a kind of sense. 

The things you learn, right?

Maybe the atmosphere of those early years is best summed up by a quick visit to MP Enoch Powell’s 1968 Rivers of Blood speech in Parliament. By then, hundreds of thousands of commonwealth immigrants had moved to Britain.

In a decade or so, he said, “the black man will have the whip hand over the white man.”

And it wasn’t just the immigrants he was talking about but their descendants, They’d erode the national character. He talked about a constituent who wouldn’t rent rooms to Black people. 

“She is becoming afraid to go out,” he said. “Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies.

“They cannot speak English, but one word they know. ‘Racialist,’ they chant.”

He was trying to defeat the Race Relations Bill, and the speech was so over the top that it ended his political career. The bill passed, making race-based discrimination illegal. But the speech did succeed in cranking up antagonism against Black people, so multiply the anti-immigrant hysteria by twelve if you would and write your answer at the bottom of your test paper and leave it in the trash can on your way out. Thank you. Everybody gets an A.

Thousands of people turned out onto the streets protesting Powell. And thousands turned out in support. 

The speech has found echoes in a recent speech by the current prime minister, Keir Starmer, who warned that immigration would make us “an island of strangers.” The speech was somewhat less hysterical but was still full of talk about uncontrolled immigration and incalculable damage to British society.

Starmer’s favorability rating is now – 46. (He’s Labour.) His most vocal opponent–the right-wing voice he’s trying to out-right-wing–is Nigel Farage (Reform), whose favorability rating is -26. Kemi Badenoch (Conservatives) is at – 39. That leaves Ed Davey (Liberal Democrats) at – 8 the clear winner.  

I’d love to explain how those ratings are calculated, but it involves numbers and we’ll all be better off if I don’t try. What we really need to know is that (a) a minus rating isn’t good, and (b) if you want everyone to love you, British politics isn’t the right place for you just now.

 

The Windrush Scandal

But back to our story. The immigrants landed, they worked, they built lives and families. Those who had children back home brought them over once they were settled. The country rebuilt, and–

Do you remember how people in Britain clapped for essential workers during lockdown? Essential workers were the people risking their lives, generally for low pay, to keep the rest of us fed and to keep the lights on, the hospitals running, and the trash collected. Once a week, we acknowledged how much we depended on them, then lockdown ended and the world forgot about them. Did they get a raise? The hell they did. The only visibility they have now is that at our local supermarket the people who round up the shopping carts–or trolleys if we’re talking British–still wear vests (or in British, gillets) with some slogan about essential workers. Probably because the store doesn’t want to spend money on replacing them. 

That was a longish digression, but if you subtract the clapping and the acknowledgement, that’s what happened to the Windrush generation, but again you’ll need to multiply it by twelve. 

Or possibly more than twelve, because in 2012, in the midst of a new wave of hysteria about immigrants, the government introduced a “hostile environment for illegal immigrants.” Landlords had to check a potential tenant’s right to be in the country; employers had to do the same; so did the National Health Service. Bank account? Ditto. Local government couldn’t offer support to people unless they could prove their right to be in the country. 

And guess what: a significant portion of the Windrush generation couldn’t prove its right to be in the country. Not because they’d done anything wrong but because the government hadn’t kept a record of who’d been granted the right to remain. They’d never issued the paperwork people needed to document their status and in 2010 they’d destroyed the landing cards that would’ve documented their arrival. 

Many of the people needing those documents had arrived as children, traveling on their parents’ passports, giving them one less document to rely on. 

Overnight a swathe of people who arrived legally became, officially speaking, illegal immigrants. People lost their housing, their jobs, their driving licenses, their bank accounts, their access to healthcare. Some were deported to countries they no longer remembered. Some were detained within Britain as illegal immigrants. 

As the scandal became public and individual stories emerged, assorted politicians made all the appropriate noises and in 2019 reparations were promised. In 2021, a committee of MPs found that the system of compensating people was so torturous that applying for compensation had become another source of trauma. The Home Office was and still is in charge of the process, which leaves it investigating its own fuck-ups, and many of the people who should get compensation are, not unreasonably, afraid to make themselves known. Some 15,000 people are thought to be eligible for compensation. As of February 2024, 2,307 claims had been accepted. 

The people who have applied have faced long delays, and this is a group of elderly people, and the thing about elderly people is that we keep getting older. If the government stalls this group long enough–apologies for reminding you–they’ll start to die off. We all do that sooner or later.

Many cases that are denied are overturned on appeal, but that depends on being able to launch an appeal.

Is free legal advice available? Don’t kid yourself.

I think it’s fair to say that when compensation has been given, it doesn’t match the wreckage that was made of the recipient’s life. One man who was deported ended up living on the streets in Jamaica for ten years. He’s only just been promised a return, although his case hit the newspapers months ago. Whether he’s actually been brought home yet I don’t know.

What sort of compensation makes up for that?

A quick history of Greenwich Mean Time

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 1675, Charles II appointed  John Flamsteed as the first King’s Astronomical Observator, a.k.a., the Astronomer Royal. For that he got £100 a year, use of the brand new, empty Greenwich Observatory, and no equipment. What a deal! He organized some equipment, supplied whathe couldn’t get donated himself, took on students to stretch his income, and set about studying the sky, which was the key to accurate navigation. This mattered intensely because Britain was increasingly a naval power. That makes this a story about power and money and empire, although they’re not what I’m going to tell you about. Brush the words aside, though, and you’ll find them right under the surface.

Flamsteed had come to Charles’ attention by working out a formula for converting solar time to mean time, and for that to make the least bit of sense, we need to take a step or six back, to the time before time was standardized. But before we do, let me sneak in the information that Flamsteed did something at Greenwich that will become central to our story: he drew an imaginary line right through the place and claimed it as the world’s prime meridian–the line that would divide east from west the way the equator divides north from south. 

At the time, the only people who cared were astronomers. Everyone else measured east and west from wherever they were standing and life rolled on as if nothing had changed.

Vaguely relevant photo: Navigation at sea comes into the story. Do I need to tell you this is the sea?

Clock time and solar time

For those of us who grew up with clocks–and I’m guessing that’s all of us–it goes against the grain to think that the hour hasn’t always been a fixed measurement, but it hasn’t, and this makes a certain kind of sense. As soon as you wander away from the equator, the day’s length varies over the course of the year, and–oh, hell, you know this–in the interest of domestic harmony, so does the night’s. So when people decided it would be convenient to divide the day into twelve equal segments and the night into twelve more, they came up with segments that were the same in the morning, at night, and at noon but that shifted over the course of the year, following the stretch and unstretch of the day.

Why twelve segments? Don’t ask. It’s what they did. Or at least what they did in the ancient Middle East. What they did elsewhere is on a different page of the book and I don’t have time to read it just now.

That system held until the astronomer, geographer, and mathematician Hipparchus (120 to 190 BCE; you’re welcome) realized that if he couldn’t find a more reliable way to divide time his brain would melt, so he took hold of the equinoxes, when day and night are equal, and measured the length of the segments, and said, “That’s it. This is the length of an hour.”

Only since he was Greek and ancient, he said it in classical Greek. And no, I’m not going to translate.

It was a brilliant idea and everybody who wasn’t a mathematician, astronomer, or some sort of specialist ignored it. Daylight went right on lasting for longer and shorter periods of time over the course of the year and in practice so did the length of an hour. And people kept on using those expandable, contractable hours until–oh, let’s say the 14th century, when mechanical clocks ruined the fun.

And that, children, is the difference between clock time and solar time.  

Hipparchus did one other thing that we need to know about: he introduced longitude and its non-identical twin, latitude. Between them, they kept geography from being as slippery as hours.

 

Longitude

Even after an hour in May had been strong-armed into being the same length as an hour in January, time was still slippery. Everyone could agree that noon came in the middle of the day, but the middle of the day came at different moments in different places, and people set their clocks to local time.

Well, what else would they set it to? Since transportation was slow and phones didn’t exist, hardly anybody cared and I’m willing to bet not many people even noticed.

The people did care, though, were sailors, because you need two fixed points to calculate your longitude. Or to put that in plain English, to figure out where the hell you are, and I’d love to explain why and how but it’s way above my pay grade. 

Knowing where you are is less of a problem on land, since you have, ahem, landmarks, and fixed points stay politely fixed, but at sea they’re badly behaved, and the difficulties this posed crashed into public and political awareness in 1707, when four British ships wrecked off the Isles of Scilly and 1,400 lives were lost, all because, through no fault of their own, they hadn’t been able to calculate their position reliably. 

Now let’s circle back to Flamsteed and his imaginary line through Greenwich. It was a fixed point that ships could compare their location to. If I understand this correctly–and that’s not guaranteed–they could use solar time at their location and compare it to clock time at Greenwich. All they needed was a clock they could set to the time at Greenwich. 

Nothing to it, except that the clocks of the era couldn’t keep time on a ship that was going up, down, and sideways. 

At more or less this point, Parliament offered a £20,000 prize–that would be something like £2 million today; in other words, more than enough money to hold people’s attention–for the person who could invent a seaworthy clock, and in 1773 John Harrison, a joiner and watchmaker, did just that. All sailors had to do after that was set it to the time at Greenwich and as long as they remembered to keep it wound they had their second fixed point. 

 

Greenwich Mean Time

For some hundred years, ships used that imaginary line as their ultimate reference point. Think of it as Patient Zero of the world’s time zones.

As the railroads grew, treating time as a liquid began to became less and less workable on land, and Britain’s railroads introduced Railway Time, which was basically Greenwich Mean Time under another name. Localities were welcome to adapt it or not, but since the trains ran on Railway Time, I expect there’d have been a good bit of pressure to reset village and town clocks so people could catch them. 

In 1880, Britain adopted Greenwich Mean Time as the national time.

In1884, the international Global Meridian Conference accepted the imaginary line through Greenwich as the world’s prime meridian. By then, the US had already based its time zones on it and 72% of the world’s commerce used sea charts that relied on it. But the conference’s acceptance didn’t commit individual governments to doing anything they weren’t already doing, and most of them didn’t.

Then the Titanic met the iceberg–this was in 1912–and it turned out that a French ship had radioed a warning of the danger, but it based its time on the Greenwich meridian and its longitude on the Paris one. The article I found that says said it wasn’t “the overall cause of the disaster,” but it made a hell of a good argument for getting everyone to use the same system and it actually swung a few more countries behind it.

The original imaginary line is now marked in brass, making it a real line, even if it’s not exactly the line that’s in use anymore, In the name of accuracy, efficiency, and confusion, it’s been nudged sideways a few times. Never mind, it made its point.

These days, international standardized time is called Coordinated Universal Time. And Greenwich Mean Time? It’s been downgraded to a simple time zone.

Death and technology: it’s the news from Britain

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A British court ruled that a will was valid even though it was written on the back bits of cardboard that started out in life as packaging for Mr. Young’s frozen fish and Mr. Kipling’s mince pies. As a result of the ruling, a diabetes charity will inherit £180,000.

Yes, I do hear the irony there–mince pies; diabetes–but relatives explained that diabetes runs in the family, so the pies aren’t necessarily responsible for the death. 

The will ended up in court not because of the unorthodox stationary but because the details of who got what were written on the frozen fish box and the witness’s signature was on the pie box, leaving the court to decide whether they were really part of the same document or if, maybe, some fundraiser for the diabetes charity hadn’t snuck in through a window, destroyed the packaging from four Yorkshire puddings, and scribbled out a new, more favorable version of the will on the fish box. But no: the court held that the same pen was used, hinting that they were written at the same time.

The family wasn’t challenging the will. It only ended up in court because–oh, you know. Overloaded court system. Frozen fish. It had to happen.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

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Since we’re talking about wills, let’s push a little further into the topic and talk about what happens to us after we die. Not as in heaven, hell, reincarnation, the underworld, all that sort of speculation, but as in whether AI will keep a virtual version of us going after the original goes the way of that Yorkshire puddings box. 

On the current evidence, it just might, but only if we pay enough money. For $199, one company will let you upload videos, voice messages, photos, whatever you’ve got, and then its algorithm will put them all in a blender, whizz them around a bit, and produce a version of you that the living can call on the phone or get text messages from. So twenty years after you’re dead, you can still say, “Am I the only person around here who knows how to wash a dish?” and your family will say, in unison, “Aww, that is so sweet.” 

If you want to go as high as $50,000 plus maintenance fees, you can have yourself made into a 3D avatar, holding up a greasy dish to illustrate your point.

The possibilities don’t end there, though. Bots can now generate content, so your ghost may not be stuck repeating the weary old lines you wrote for it. It could potentially come up with its own content, which it will deliver in your voice. Or what it’s decided is your voice. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

A few words from the Department of Things that Could Possibly Go Wrong

To answer this question, we have to leave the UK and head for the US, where the following story is the least of what’s going wrong. 

A tech entrepreneur got trapped in a self-driving cab in–oh, I think it was December of last year. (Sorry–I’m not a newspaper. I get around to these things when I get around to them.) The cab got him as far as to the airport, then began circling a cement island in the parking lot while he (let’s assume frantically) called the company and the voice on the other end told him to open his app because she didn’t have a way to shut the thing down.

After eight loops someone managed to shut the thing down and he emerged, dizzy and late for his flight–which was delayed so he caught it. He still doesn’t know if the voice on the other end was human or bottish.  

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That gives us a nice segue into technology.

A widely quoted psychologist and sex advisor from the University of Oxford, Barbara Santini, may not exist. The University of Oxford (a.k.a. Oxford University) is real enough, as is psychology. Sex advisor, though? Not a real job title, and just to make sure I’m right about that I checked with Lord Google. He knew of nothing between sex therapists on one end of the spectrum and brothels and call girl services on the other.

I’l going to be seeing some really annoying ads for a while here. 

In spite of working in a field that doesn’t exist, Santini’s been quoted in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the i, the Guardian, the Express, Hello, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Sun, BBC.com, and other publications, both impressive and unimpressive, talking about everything from Covid to vitamin D to playing darts to improve your health. A lot of her quotes link back to an online sex toy shop. 

Neither the shop not Santini were responding to journalists trying to confirm her existence, and articles quoting her are disappearing from the internet as fast as dog food at feeding time. 

Cue a great deal of journalistic soul-searching about how to verify their sources’ credentials in the age of AI, which has put pressure on journalists to work faster and made it fast, easy, and cheap to crank out an article on any topic you could dream up. 

Impressively, at least two of the publications that fell for the trick have published articles about it.

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Meanwhile, Amazon’s selling books written by AI. 

How do we know the authors aren’t human? Samples that were run through an AI detection program and scored 100%. 

It costs next to nothing  to throw a book together using AI, and hey, somebody’ll buy it. It would be bad enough if these were novels (I’m a writer, so that worries me) but these were self-help books. One on living with ADHD noted, helpfully, that friends and family “don’t forgive the emotional damage you inflict.” 

The one on foraging for mushrooms, though, wins the red-flag award for dangerous publishing. It advocated tasting–presumably to make sure they’re safe. 

AI is known for not being able to tell dangerous advice from common sense. It’s trained on solid science books but also on complete wack-a-doodlery, and it can’t tell the difference.

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Britain’s Ministry of Justice is–I think we need to tuck the word allegedly in here–developing a program to predict who is most likely to kill someone. The program was originally called the Homicide Prediction Project, but its name was toned down and it’s now called Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment. By the time anyone works their way through the new name, they’ll have dozed off.

You saw the movie, now live the full-on experience.

The Ministry of Justice says the project “is being conducted for research purposes only.” The prison and probation services already use risk assessment tools–I believe those are called algorithms–and says this is only an experiment to see if adding new data sources makes them more effective. So it’s all okay. 

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I admit I’m stretching the topic to shoehorn this in, but a university student had to be rescued from Mount Fuji (that’s in Japan, which is not, as you may be aware, anywhere close to Britain) not once but twice. The second time was because he’d gone back to find his phone.

England’s Star Chamber and the rule of law

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Let’s talk about England in those messy years before the Civil War broke out and everything got even messier. If you find a few modern resonances tucked into the tale, I didn’t put ‘em there–they’re baked in–but they did draw my attention to the tale. As usual, though, we’ll start a century or so earlier.

The Star Chamber

England’s Court of the Star Chamber grew out of the medieval tradition of a king presiding over a court that was made up of his councilors, and in  1487 Henry VII established it as a judicial body separate from the king’s council. Its judges were his councilors and it acted as the council’s judicial arm. The name came  from the star-patterned ceiling in the Westminster Palace room where it met. 

From 1485 to 1641 it acted as a law court and also supervised common-law courts. The number of cases it heard expanded from 150 a year in the 1530s to more than 700 by 1600, and its powers also grew.

Under the Tudors people seem to have thought well of it. It cut through the web of corruption and influence that entangled the common-law courts in, and it could deal with actions that weren’t illegal but did cause problems. To steal a contemporary phrase, it could get things done. 

Irrelevant photo: camellia blossom

I probably don’t need to say this, but that doesn’t usually stop me: there’s a good and a bad side to getting things done. Let’s say you’re the ruler. You are, of course, wise and good, so you only want good things to get done, and you set up a Get-things-done mechanism to do them. It’s efficient, it’s powerful, an lo, Things Get Done. But you don’t live forever. You may not even stay in power for the rest of  your life, so at some point you lose control of the Get-things-done machine, and eventually a person who’s not wise and good gets control of it they get to decide what things need doing. 

Remember how hard you made it for anyone to stop the machine? Yeah, history’s an ironic sumbitch, isn’t it? And we haven’t even talked about the possibility of you not being as wise or as good as you meant to be, or about the machine running out of control. 

But back to the Star Chamber. Its cases included issues of public disorder, riot, forcible entry, assault, fraud, official and judicial corruption, municipal, land enclosure, and trade disputes, and the occasional accusation of witchcraft. One source says that if you dig deeper you’ll find they private disputes about property rights. For our purposes, I’m not sure it matters.

Power

Since it was so closely aligned to the king or queen and since it functioned outside the common law, the Star Chamber Court wasn’t bound by rigid form the way common-law courts were. It didn’t need juries: it could indict or convict on its own say-so. It could act on someone’s complaint or petition but it could also act on information it received, without anyone initiating a complaint. In other words, it was effective and it didn’t have to listen to anyone except itself. Except of course the monarch-of-the-moment. 

Under Cardinal Wolsey, Henry VIII’s Official You-Name-It-and-More, the court began prosecuting forgery, perjury, riot, slander, and anything else he considered a breach of the peace. And offenses against legislation or the king’s proclamations. 

Since it was operating outside the law, its punishments weren’t set by law. It couldn’t sentence anyone to death, but short of that it had a free hand, and its punishments included imprisonment, fines, the pillory, whipping, branding, and mutilation. 

We’ve now run out of Tudors

Under the Stuarts, the Star Chamber turned its attention to religious dissenters–England was rich in religious dissenters–and under Charles I (one of the Stuarts) it also ran out of popularity. Charles was trying to govern without Parliament, since it hadn’t done what he wanted, and that left him filling the gap with royal proclamations, then using the Star Chamber to enforce them. He could issue a proclamation and the Star Chamber–his own advisors, remember–to enforce it, making it both executive and judiciary.

This united a range of opponents who might otherwise have wanted nothing to do with each other. The common-law courts saw the Star Chamber as a rival to its powers. A substantial faction of parliamentarians saw it as a rival to theirs. Dissenters–its prime target–were guaranteed to oppose it. The surprise component, though, was the gentry. Their influence was already being threatened by government centralization and they were horrified–according to the Britannica–by the use of the pillory and corporal punishment against dissenters.  

Why? Because the dissenters were fellow members of the gentry. Common-law courts would never have treated them that way. I mean, it was one thing to nail some peasant’s ear to a post, but a gentleman’s? It was unthinkable.

Charles wasn’t playing by the established rules.

And then what happened?

Eventually Charles had not choice but to recall Parliament–he needed money–and two women, Sara Burton and Susanna Bastwick, galvanized opposition to the Star Chamber by petitioning Parliament for the release of their husbands, Henry and John. 

By way of–of course–background, both men (and presumably the women) were dissenters and both men (and of course not the women) had published books criticizing the Church of England. Printing was strictly regulated and they’d cheated the system, so the Star Chamber made accusations against them and when they didn’ appear, the judges read that as a confession of guilt. Burton was stripped of his university degree and license to act as a minister. Both were fined impossible amounts of money, and sentenced to be pilloried and have their ears cut off. Then they were to be imprisoned for as long as the king pleased, but outside of England, on Guernsey and the Isles of Scilly, so a writ of habeas corpus wouldn’t apply. Or at least might not apply. 

I did warn you about those contemporary resonances, didn’t I?

The heavy fines had become pretty standard by then. It was a way to pour money into the king’s treasury. 

When they put Bastwick in the pillory and cut off his ears, Susanna climbed on a stool and kissed him, and once his ears were cut off demanded to have them handed to her so she could carry them away in her handkerchief.  

I know, but you have to admit, she made her point.

When they cut off Burton’s ears, they cut so close that they severed an artery. 

So that’s your background. When Parliament reconvened, the two women called for their husbands to be released and their cause was taken up by John Pym, a Member of Parliament, who brought their petition to the Commons, and before long other people were petitioning for the release of men imprisoned by the Star Chamber, and the house ordered a committees to evaluate both individual cases and the “excesses” of the court.

Both women were gutsy as hell and I’d planned to focus this post on them, but other than their petition to Parliament and that thing about the ears, I found next to nothing about them. I couldn’t even find online bios of them. They appear only in bios of their husbands.

Shutting down the machine

Not long after the women’s petition to the Commons, Sir Richard Wiseman petitioned the House of Lords for his freedom. He’d lost a case in the Star Chamber and turned to the king, alleging that he’d lost because his opponent bribed the judges. 

Bad move. It landed him back in front of the Star Chamber, this time charged with insulting the court. He was ordered to pay damages plus a £10,000 fine to the king, and to lose his ears and his knighthood. When he couldn’t pay (it was a huge amount of money at the time), he was dumped in the Fleet prison for years. 

Lord Montagu wrote that Wiseman “moved such compassion in us, especially the poor and beggarly array the man was in, that we fell into speech against the exorbitancy of the court, and chose a special committee to consider the proceedings thereof.” 

I mean, it was one thing to see a beggar looking beggarly, but one of their own? They freed him and voted him £50 for clothes and food–and they set up a committee to consider both Wiseman’s case and the Star Chamber itself.

Before long, Parliament had 47 petitions relating to the Star Chamber and the question became whether to regulate it or abolish it. Commons was the first to propose abolition, but within a few months the Lords fell into line. It had, Parliament wrote, “undertaken to punish where no law doth warrant, and to make decrees for things having no such authority, and to inflict heavier punishments than by any law is warranted.”

The king resisted for a while but he needed money, Parliament held it back, and he gave in.

A spy in Henry VIII’s court

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Henry VIII’s more famous for his wives than for his spies, but the wife story’s so well known that it’s hard to wring anything new out of it, so let’s talk about a spy: Petrus Alamire. Or Pierre Alamire. Or Peter van den Hove, Petrus Van den Hove, Petrus van den Hove (we lost a capital letter there, but spelling was still a liquid so we shouldn’t make too much of that), or if you like, Petrus van den Imhove. Because what’s a spy without a few names to spare? We’ll call him Petrus Alamire, because that’s the name he was wearing when I stumbled over him and it seems to be the main name he wears on the internet.

Which had not been invented when he was alive, you understand, but he might have enjoyed knowing he’d have a virtual afterlife.

Irrelevant photo: I was going to tell you this was an ornamental cherry but my phone swears it’s a plum. Either way, it doesn’t believe in growing fruit.

 

The family stuff

Alamire was born in 1470 and by one account was German-Dutch.  By another he was Netherlandish or German. Take your pick. I expect he did, more than once. Doesn’t any good spy need at least one extra nationallity? 

He had even more skills and occupations than names and nationalities: he was a scribe, specializing in illuminated copies of musical compositions. He was also a singer, composer, instrumentalist, mining engineer, merchant (he sold manuscripts, musical instruments, lute strings, and paintings), diplomat, courier, and spy. And somewhere in there he found time to be a chaplain, although only one source mentions that. But what the hell, why not? TV hadn’t been invented. A fellow had to do something in those long hours before the candle itself burned itself out.

He was from a family of merchants–details are thin; make them up if you’re in the mood–and created the name Alamire from the syllables given to the musical scale (la, mi, and re are notes six, three, and two), tossing A–a note on an instrument–in front for good luck. 

At some point he married, and I have a name–Katlyne vander Meeren–but not a date or anything substantial about her.

 

The times

The Netherlands were cranking out more composers than the rest of Europe rolled in together, spreading the gospel of polyphonic music, so it was the right time and place to be a skilled copyist and illuminator, and as musicians spread outward into the European courts, so did Alamire’s work and reputation.

To remind you of what you may already know, because that’s part of my job description, music was a Big Thing in the European courts, and moving it from place to place involved hand-made copies, which take a bit longer than downloads or even sheet music, and Alamire made work for Philip I of Castile and Archduke Charles, among others.

Alamire’s manuscripts weren’t just for some low-life musician to play, though. They were collectables made for royals and aristocrats. Each copy had to be unique and a thing of beauty, hence the illuminations. Think of them as singable, playable works of art, which made them nifty gifts. Want to buy a vote in the election of the Holy Roman Emperor? One of Alamire’s manuscripts would be perfect, which is why when Archduke Charles emerged from his cocoon he was, thanks to many expensive gifts, some made by Alamire, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

But when I talk about Alamire’s work, I’m not talking about Alamire alone, I’m talking about is him and all the people working under him, because he had an entire atelier–a workshop full of skilled but unfamous people doing his bidding.

 

Henry’s court

It’s impossible to tell Alamire’s story in any sane sequence without making things up, so we’ll skip over I have no idea how many crucial events and drop in at the point where Alamire gave Henry some musical gifts, including a beautiful manuscript. 

Why did he do that? Dunno, but gifts were the oil that kept the court machinery of many countries working smoothly, so let’s assume he was trying to catch Henry’s eye. Or ear. In return, he might get trade concessions, information, orders, connections. Sadly, he wouldn’t have gotten a cup of tea out of it because it wasn’t available yet. Tea didn’t hit Europe until 1555, and it took longer than that to reach England. Still, I’m sure it was worth his while.

People who know these things (which is to say, not me) believe the manuscript he sent was made for Louis XII and of France and his wife, Anne of Brittany, but they died before he could deliver it and–well, hell, you don’t just chuck something like that behind the filing cabinet and move on. He changed the names and poof, it was made for Henry and only Henry.

We need a date here, don’t we? Louis died in 1515, and 1515 was when Alamire started traveling between England and Europe, doing his merchant/musician/chaplain thing, and dropping in, ever so casually, on Richard de la Pole, who Henry had every reason to want to keep tabs on.

Who was de la Pole? He could–and oh my, did he–trace his descent back to the Yorkist kings–the ones Henry’s father had run off the playing field. His mother was a Plantagenet and the sister of Edward IV. and Richard III, and Richard was pretty clear about wanting to be de la Pole the First. 

Okay, it probably would’ve been Richard IV, but far be it from me to get it right on the first try. And it doesn’t matter because he never became king. In an effort to keep his head attached to his neck, he went into exile and planned to invade England a couple of times but the first draft was rejected by the publishers and he died in 1525, before the rewrite could go to press.

All of that, since he wasn’t dead yet, made him into a person Henry wanted to keep an eye on, and musicians made good spies. They had a reason to travel from court to court, and they may have had a certain invisibility, since as commoners–servants of a sort–they weren’t people who mattered. They might be off to the side, doing their music thing and in a position to eavesdrop, in rooms where important stuff was discussed. Or so says one of the sources I used. I’m not 600% convinced about the eavesdropping. If you’ve ever tried to sing in the car when the news is on,  you’ll know how little of the news you actually take in. But the other stuff–the travelling from court to court and all the rest of it–that makes sense.

It’s worth mentioning that at this point Henry, his court, and his country were still Catholic. He was still married, uncontroversially, to Catherine of Aragon. But that didn’t exempt him from worrying about invasions, enemies, spies, and things that went bump in the night. He had enough worries to make you wonder why de la Pole would want to be king.

Here again we’ll skip a few important bits of information. We don’t know what information Alamire sent back to Henry or how useful it was. What we do know is that Alamire became a counter-spy, giving de la Pole information about Henry’s court and Henry’s travels in England, which would’ve been many since kings were constantly on the move, stitching their realms together by being seen, keeping their nobles’ loyalties in place, and not so incidentally getting their extensive retinues fed at someone else’s expense.

Alamire’s letters to both the king and de la Pole have survived, making it clear that he was playing for both teams.

At some point, Henry and his chief advisor, Cardinal Wolsey, started to distrust him and not even a gift of five part books (see Ubi Dubium’s comment, below, for a convincing explanation of what a part book was), a parchment choir book, eight cornetti, many lute strings, and some political information were enough to buy his way back into Henry’s good graces.   

Alamire had the good sense to make himself scarce. He never returned to England and not many English composers show up in his manuscripts. 

That didn’t end his career, though. During the 1520s he was a diplomat and courier (getting banned from Henry’s court didn’t mean he was banned from all courts) as well as a music illustrator and copyist, and he carried letters between leading humanists of the time, including Erasmus, who described him as “not unwitty,” which probably wasn’t the glowing praise he was hoping for but could be worse. In his surviving letters, he has assorted clever and insulting things to say about other musicians. 

At some other point Christian III of Denmark paid him a hefty (if unspecified–sorry) sum of money for what’s called in the records instruction in the “craft of mining.”

Was that a way of saying spying? Or did mining really mean mining? We’re back to my old friend Dunno here. 

In 1534, Maria of Austria gave him a generous pension in return (presumably) for a number of manuscripts. Although another source calls her Maria of Hungary. Either way, she was the governess of the Low Countries after Margaret of Austria, all of which is a bit of history I’ve never stubbed my toe on until now.

And then he disappears. As will I for another week.

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My thanks to 63Mago for suggesting spies and spying when I asked what people would like to read about. I’m sure that thought will have me wandering into related corners at some point.

And finally, apologies for posting this late. It’s been sitting around and ready to go for a week but I screwed up. I plead temporary insanity.

Things that got lost: it’s the news from Britain

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Ever since some inventor turned metal detectors loose in the world, people have been finding loot in British fields–Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon silver hoards, prehistoric whatevers–and especially when I read about those coins I can’t help wondering, Who put them there? Were they lost? Were they hidden? Why haven’t they been found until now? 

I won’t pretend to answer any of those questions, but I thought I’d remind us–a category in which I somewhat obviously include myself–that it’s not just ancient people who lose stuff. We do it all the time. So let’s talk about stuff that gets found in Britain, since that implies it got itself lost in the first place.

Irrelevant photo: a camellia

Secret documents

Someone going to a football game in Newcastle parked his car and found documents spilling out of a black plastic bag. Being the nosy sort of person I admire, he looked to see what they were and found what the paper called “potentially confidential military information,” including names, ranks, emails addresses, shift patterns, details of weapons they were issued, and codes for an armory’s intruder detections system. 

Wheee. 

What were they doing spilling out of a black plastic bag and strewn along a street in Newcastle? The Ministry of Defense is “looking into this urgently.” They’ll get back to us when hell freezes over, or possibly a few weeks after.

Coins

No metal detectorist of the future is likely to find this set: as Britain sleepwalks its way toward a cashless society, significantly fewer children are being rushed to hospitals after swallowing coins. They’re harder for sticky little hands to find.

How significant is “significantly fewer”? From 2012 to 2024, the number of under-18s who had nose, airway, or throat surgery after swallowing a small object declined by 29%. Historically, coins swallowed by children younger than 6 accounted for 75% of those surgeries, since not a whole lot of 17-year-olds swallow coins, probably because no one’s promoting it on TikTok. 

Yet.

Parents still have to worry about magnets and button batteries (shiny, smooth, highly appealing, and I bet I’d have tried one if they’d been around when I was at the coin-swallowing age). 

Remarkably few toddlers swallow credit cards.

Monsters

Here I admit I’m pushing the category. This story’s not from Britain but the US, which doesn’t have a lot of ancient coin hoards to be found but has more than enough political monsters to make up for a shortage in any other category.

A babysitter in Kansas was having trouble getting one of the kids settled in bed because there was a monster under the bed.

No monster, she said. I’ll take a look to prove it.

She looked and found a man lying on the floor. 

I’d love to give you a blow-by-blow of what happened next, but all I know is that there was a fight, the babysitter and one kid were knocked down, and the man took off running but was arrested the next morning. He used to live there, although not under the bed, and already had a court order to stay away. 

The kid will never sleep again.

Creme Eggs

If you’re not from Britain, you need to know that Creme Eggs appear every Easter. They’re chocolate and have horrid-looking white and yellow stuff inside. I don’t know what they taste like and I’m afraid to find out. I suspect that you have to grow up with them to think they’re a good idea and you might’ve figured out by now that I didn’t.

However. The people who love them love them, and a man in Dogsthorpe, which is in Peterborough, which is someplace or other in Britain–it hasn’t been lost lately–was arrested after stealing 325 of them. That’s £220.50 worth of chocolate-covered runny goop. When he was arrested, he had a duffel bag full of them and a “suspicious bulge” in his jacket. The arresting officer went to unzip it and the suspect warned him, “It’s all gonna fall out.” Which is what makes this qualify as stuff that gets found. In Britain.

Aldi

Can I slip in something that doesn’t get found? A Welsh village of 500 people was listed online as having an Aldi store. (Aldi’s a discount supermarket chain.) More people than the roads can handle promptly showed up to do their shopping and a milk tanker got stuck in a narrow lane trying to make a delivery.

The farmer who went to help the driver said, “Poor fella tried pulling up and backing the trailer up our hill in a misguided attempt at turning around. Went down with a tractor but the fella had no idea where the towing eye was, so I left it to the experts.

“They straightened him out to go to Hiraethog to turn around. As he was rounding the corner at the bottom of the hill, he slowed down to open his window and thank us–and nearly got stuck again, bless his cotton socks.”

It’s surprising how easily a truck can get stuck in Britain’s narrowest roads. Or a camper van. Or anything like that. A road near us is locally famous for swallowing trucks whole. It now has a sign, put up by the residents, warning of narrow lanes, stone walls, sharp turns, and enough other dangers to make the sign pretty much unreadable. They left off the dragons, hostile residents, and Vandal hordes, but my partner and I are thinking of adding them some night under cover of darkness.

The phantom store was apparently the work of a prankster, but when the story ran in January, Aldi’s website hadn’t gotten rid of the imaginary store. 

Bananas

In Nottinghamshire, a plate of peeled bananas has been appearing once a month. When the article I’m stealing this from first ran, also in January, the bananas had been showing up for more than a year. If anyone knows what they mean or who’s leaving them, they’re not talking.  

They don’t appear to have been lost, only found.

Cave art

In 2005, Banksy smuggled a cave art-style drawing, Peckham Rock, into the British Museum and it stayed there for three days before it was spotted. It showed a human figure, an auroch-type beast with two arrows in its side, and a supermarket trolley, which is what I’d call a supermarket cart. The cart was the giveaway, as was the cement it was drawn on. 

The staff only spotted it after Banksy’s website challenged people to find it. 

It was returned to him and thirteen years later he lent it back to the museum as part of an exhibition called I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent.

A government report

The Home Office spent at least £22,000 and three years trying to bury an internal report on the Windrush scandal. The scandal? Well, the Home Office had announced that it would create a hostile climate for illegal immigrants and ended up detaining and deporting hundreds of legal immigrants whose presence in Britain dated back to the Windrush generation: immigrants from British Caribbean islands who’d been encouraged to immigrate to Britain to help it recover from World War II. 

The report found that the scandal had its roots in 30 years of racist immigration law. You’re shocked, I know. So was the Home Office. That’s why they decided to bury it.

A transparency campaigner managed to get the report released. Without using a metal detector.

Norfolk Island

We’re leaving Britain for this one, but we’ll touch base briefly before we head out the door for another week. 

You probably already know about Trump imposing tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands, which are both uninhabited, at least by humans. Less well known is the 29% tariff imposed on Norfolk Island, population 2,188 squeezed into 13.4 square miles. But small as it is, Trump & Co. found it.  

What did the place do to get whacked with that tariff? They seem to have gotten their silly selves mixed up with Norfolk, UK, Norfolk; Virginia (if you’ll look on a map you’ll find that in the US); and New Hampshire, which is also in the US and is abbreviated NH, not NI, but hell, they’re all letters so you could see how a person might mix them up.

The administrator of Norfolk Island said, “There are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States.” 

That didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity–

Okay, I need to interrupt myself here: that sounds like a department I’d invent but I’m quoting an article in a reputable newspaper, The Guardian. And I checked with Lord Google to be sure. It appears to be entirely real. 

So: that didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity from either blaming or crediting it–take your pick–for exporting £504,000 worth of goods to the US. 

The problem seems to stem from errors on the bills of lading, although the article says, as if tippy-toeing through a minefield, that it’s not “alleging that the companies are responsible for the errors.” I believe that translates to, “Don’t sue us.”

Don’t sue me either. I’m not alleging anything. I’m just sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and bothering you about it.

History

History was lost briefly and then found and restored on a US government website.

A US National Parks Service page about the Underground Railroad–a network that helped slaves escape to freedom–took down a photo of Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who made repeated, not to mention wildly risky, trips into the slave states, leading something like 70 people to freedom.

The Underground Railroad? That was a network that sheltered escaped slaves on their way to safety. So, yeah, why mention its best-known conductor?

After an outcry, to my surprise, the page has been restored, at least to the point of including Tubman. The revised page–the one that you won’t find anymore–emphasized “Black/White Cooperation,” not the efforts of enslaved people to escape slavery. In fact, the first paragraph avoided any mention of slavery.

Give the folks in charge a bit more time and we’ll find that slavery never happened at all. It was all just another experiment in Black/White Cooperation and a bit of a misunderstanding.

Dido Elizabeth Belle: more on the ambiguities of slavery in England

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Dido Elizabeth Belle was born a slave, raised in an aristocratic English family, and given the education and many of the and-so-forths of an English aristocrat. Her story messes with pretty much any assumptions we carry in our luggage. In some tellings, she’s Britain’s first Black aristocrat. That makes a great headline but it stretches the truth.

Let’s call her Dido, since her mother comes into the story and her last name was also Belle.

Dido Elizabeth Belle (left) and her cousin, Elizabeth Murray. 

Maria, John, and Dido

Dido was born in 1761. Her mother was Maria Belle, who was then a slave, which would have made Dido a slave, and her father was John Lindsay, an officer in the Royal Navy.

Sorry, Make that Sir John Lindsay. I just love italics. They do sarcasm so well. 

It’s not 600% clear how he and Maria Belle met, but Lindsay was where you’d expect a naval officer to be, on a ship, and his particular ship was protecting British trade routes and capturing the ships of countries Britain was at war with, along with the ships’ cargoes. In other situations, that’s called piracy, but when you have your government’s stamp of approval it’s called foreign policy. 

Exactly how John and Maria (what the hell, let’s call them all by their first names) crossed paths isn’t clear. Maria might’ve been part of the–ahem–cargo on a ship he captured. She also might not have been. 

Whatever happened, they met, Dido ensued, and John and Maria seem to have had something approaching a relationship, because in 1774 Maria built a home in Pensacola, Florida, where John had bought a plot of land for her. The property record calls her “a Negroe Woman of Pensacola in America but now of London afore and made free.” Her manumission papers are also from  1774 and acknowledge “the sum of two hundred Spanish milled dollars . . . paid by Maria Belle a Negro Woman Slave about twenty eight years of age.”

Although having said that, another source talks about John having given her her freedom, not sold it to her. Either way, working backward from those numbers, Maria would’ve been around fifteen when Dido was born.

But that business about the house, the property, and her freedom jumps ahead of the story. Somehow–again it’s not clear how–Maria and Dido show up in London when Dido’s around five, something we know because her baptism is recorded, thanks to Henry VIII having introduced the requirement that churches record baptisms, marriages, and burials. Maria’s listed as the wife of Mr. Bell, whoever he might’ve been.

John isn’t listed as the father, although she was widely acknowledged as his child and he was involved enough that Dido was placed with his brother’s family at Kenwood House.

Before you decide that Dido’s parents had the love affair of the century, defying differences of class, color, and national origin to explore their mutual passion until the end of the earth or their deaths, whichever came first, I should tell you that John made a socially acceptable marriage in 1768 and had four more children with four more women, none of whom was his wife. He doesn’t sound like lasting romance material to me.

Somewhere along the line he was knighted and in 1776 he became a part-owner of a plantation in Nevis, which was worked by slaves, as they all were at the time, so off the top of my head I’d say we can’t count him as an opponent of slavery any more than we can nominate him for faithful non-spouse of the year.

And Maria? We’re not going to find out. She drops off the historical record.

 

Dido

Dido went to live with the family of her father’s uncle, William Murray, First Earl of Mansfield and Lord Chief Justice–in other words, the most powerful judge in England. In the spirit of rampant inconsistency, we’re not going to call him by either his first or last name but Mansfield. Don’t ask me to justify that. It’s what most of the articles I’ve read call him. If you have a grand enough title, you get handed a whole poker hand’s worth of names to choose from.

Have you noticed that everyone in this tale has a last name that could also be a first name?

Mansfield and his wife were childless and had already taken in Dido’s cousin Elizabeth Murray, whose mother had died. The two girls were raised and educated together. 

What was usual and what was unusual about this? If a family sat high enough on the class scale, society wouldn’t faint from shock if it become guardians to a relative whose parents hadn’t been married. Or–hell, I’m dancing all over the lot, trying to avoid talking about legitimate and illegitimate children. The idea that a child could be illegitimate is bizarre, but that was the way people thought at the time. Let’s use the word. It simplifies my sentences. 

So, taking in an illegitimate child wasn’t shocking. What was unusual was for a mixed-race child, and the child of a slave or former slave, to be raised not as a servant but as a gentlewoman.

And yes, since we’re talking about absurd phrases that we’re more or less stuck with, let’s add mixed race to the list. Humans don’t divide into races. It just doesn’t work. The problem is that I haven’t found a phrase that slots into a sentence as well, so put a mental asterisk beside it and understand that we need some new language there.

But back to our story. We now have Dido safely ensconced in the very grand home of an earl and accepted into the heart of the family.

 

But . . .

. . . the family made a clear distinction between Dido and Elizabeth. Dido got an allowance of £30 a year. Elizabeth got £100. Mind you, £30 a year was good money–several times more than a domestic worker made and she didn’t work for it–but it says a lot about their ranking. When it was just the family present, she was family. When they had guests, she joined them after dinner, not during. In the portrait at the top of the page, Dido’s the secondary figure. It’s a portrait of her cousin.

Was that about color, legitimacy, or a bit of each? I don’t know that anyone can untangle those threads at this point. An illegitimate child was always ranked below a legitimate one. On the other hand, all the money that was being made from slavery guaranteed that racism had infused itself into the British belief system. In the portrait, she gets the turban and the bowl of exotic fruit; the cousin gets the chair and the more traditional headpiece.

Portrait artists were pretty heavy handed with their symbols. I’m not stretching things to mention those.

On a personal note, I was raised in the US and spent most of my life there, inevitably surrounded by the American brand of racism. I’m constantly noticing that the British brand is different. I don’t know of any story from the US that’s comparable to Dido’s. But that’s not to say that Britain’s free of racism. It’s just–you know, different wrapper, different ingredients, slightly different weight to the candy bar inside.

When Dido’s father died, his obituary described Dido–”his natural daughter”–as having an amiable disposition and accomplishments [that] have gained her the highest respect from all his Lordship’s relations and visitants.”

Accomplishments were a big thing for a lady of the period. Dido played music and had beautiful handwriting. Mansfield often dictated his letters to her–a job normally reserved for a male clerk. She also supervised the dairy and poultry yard, as genteel women of the time often did. (Come on, they had to do something or they’d have perished from  boredom, every last one of ’em.)

In 1784 Mansfield’s wife died and in 1785 Dido’s cousin Elizabeth married, leaving Dido to care for Mansfield until his death in 1793. His will left her £500 (about £40,000 today) as well as £100 a year–not as much as he left Elizabeth but nothing to sneeze at. And to clear up any doubt about her status, his will stated that she was a free woman. Or in some tellings, he granted her her freedom.

Does that mean that she and the family considered her to still be enslaved? Or was he only being cautious? I can’t begin to guess, but even if it was caution, knowing that he didn’t clear that up from the beginning kind of makes your blood curdle, doesn’t it?

After Mansfield’s death, Dido married a steward. To locate him in the all-important class hierarchy, he was a senior servant, so if she’d been fully a lady that would’ve been a shocker of a marriage. No one says that he wasn’t white, so we can probably assume he was. He was from France. That gets a mention. They had three sons and lived in London. Dido died in 1804, at 43. 

 

Dido, Mansfield, and slavery

Before we go on, let’s spend a moment remembering–or if you didn’t already know this, finding out–that Mansfield (Chief Justice, remember) presided over the 1772 Somerset case, which ruled on the legality of slavery in England. His ruling was, like so much of this story, ambiguous.

The question in front of him was whether James Somerset, an escaped slave, could be forced onto a ship and sent to the Caribbean, where he’d be sold. Mansfield ruled that he couldn’t, setting in place the precedent that no slave could be made to leave the country against his or her will. 

The ruling was widely believed to have ended slavery in England, but it didn’t. Slaves continued to work as slaves, and to be bought and sold. Escapees continued to be recaptured–or at least sought, since it was far easier for an escaped slave to disappear in England than in, say, the Caribbean, and many people freed themselves instead of waiting 61 long years for the law to do it for them.

Legal scholars argue about what precedent the ruling actually set. Unfortunately, I’m  no legal scholar, although I did once pass myself off–accidentally and in an email–as a lawyer, so we won’t dive into that. Instead, let’s acknowledge that although Mansfield described slavery as odious and argued that it was “of such a nature” that it couldn’t be introduced without some positive law to uphold it, which England didn’t have, he still stopped short of ruling it illegal. The economic fallout of that was more than he could face–or at least that’s the best explanation I’ve seen offered. His ruling made it clear that the case posed an important moral question, he picked up the legal bricks that could’ve built a case for abolition, and he put them down again without building it.

And he made sure in his will that his great-niece could live out her life as a free woman.

Mary Prince & the ambiguity of slavery in England

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In 1831, a couple of years before the British Empire abolished slavery, a former slave named Mary Prince published The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. It’s credited with giving a good strong push to the abolitionist chariot and it’s one of Britain’s pivotal slave narratives, the first written by a woman, remembered with Ottobah Cugoano’s from 1787 and Olaudah Equiano’s from 1789, although Cugoano and Olaudah are, I think, better known.

Why am I weaseling around saying “I think” there? Because I’m not originally British. I’ve lived here for–hang on, I’ll need access to my toes to count this high–18 years, give or take a toe, but when you come to a country as an adult there’s some ground you just don’t make up. You bring other gifts. Immigrants are handy to have around, although you wouldn’t know that if your only contact with us comes from following the news. But some of the stuff that happens in your brain when you’re young doesn’t happen when you’re not. And I’m very much not. So I have the impression that Prince is less well known, but y’know, most of British history is new to me, so I’m not the best judge. 

To be fair, a lot of British history would be new to most of the British if they were to stumble over it, just as most of American history would be new to most Americans, and a lot of people are working overtime to make sure it stays that way.

Irrelevant photo: daffodils growing in a hedge. I’d love to run a picture of Mary Prince but there are none.

 

But back to Mary Prince

Prince was born into slavery in the Caribbean, sold away from her family when she was twelve, and shuffled between islands and slaveholders until well into her adulthood. She escaped once briefly, as a child, and as an adult married a free Black man Daniel James, who offered to buy her freedom but was refused. 

In 1828, about a year and a half after her marriage, the last in that collection of slaveholders, John Adams Wood, took Prince to England as a servant, and–

You remember that first paragraph where I said she was a former slave? That’s both true and not true. Her status in England was ambiguous. 

 

The bit about whether slavery was legal

To make sense of this, we have to go back to a 1772 court ruling involving  James Somerset, a slave who escaped in England just as he was about to be shipped overseas and sold. The court freed him and that ruling was generally taken as putting an end to slavery within England’s borders, although not in its empire. 

In fact, it didn’t end slavery. A year after the Somerset ruling, a newspaper reported that an escaped slave had been recaptured and committed suicide. Other newspapers ran ads for the sale of slaves. In 1788, two anti-slavery campaigners bought a slave in England to prove that slavery continued within the country’s borders. 

In fact, the judge in the Somerset case, was aware enough of slavery’s ambiguous status that his 1782 will freed his grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle, who’d been born into slavery but who he’d raised and educated and who lived in England with his family. What he had in fact ruled illegal in the Somerset case was taking a slave out of the country without his or her consent. That left England in a thoroughly weird position: none of its laws gave slavery any standing, but none of them made it illegal either. 

 

And back to Mary Prince again

Not long after Prince arrived in London, she walked out on the slaveholders who’d brought her, and I’d love to tell you how long “not long” was but nothing I’ve found makes it clear. The sources I’ve found do say her health was getting worse–she had arthritis–and a couple of the sources make it sound like she struggled to do the work that the Wood family demanded. One source says they threatened to throw her out on the street.

Whatever happened, she walked out and turned to the Moravian Mission, a Protestant church that she’d joined in Antigua, and at some point she found her way to the Anti-Slavery Society and met Thomas Pringle, the secretary of the London branch. She also found work and, the ambiguities of the law be damned, lived as a free woman.

What Prince wanted was to return to Antigua as a free woman, though, and she and Pringle tried, first through a lawyer and later through a minister, to negotiate with Wood for her freedom. Wood refused to free her on any terms. 

In 1829 she petitioned Parliament, asking them to free the enslaved people of the Caribbean, making her the first woman to petition Britain’s Parliament. And in what seems to be a separate petition, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned for her manumission. 

Sorry for the murkiness. I’m working from multiple articles here and frankly some of them are better on rhetoric than on detail. Anyway, if there were two petitions, both failed. If there was one– 

Yeah. You get it.

At some point she became unemployed and the Pringles hired her as a domestic servant, and it was while she lived with them that she suggested testifying, in book form, to the brutality and violence of slavery. 

“I have felt what a slave feels,” she wrote, “and I know what a slave knows; and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains, and set us free.”  

Prince could read and write, but she dictated the book to an English abolitionist, Susanna Strickland, who compiled it, and an abolitionist who’d lived in Antigua “helped on the Antigua section,” whatever that means. An additional slave narrative, by Louis Asa-Asa, was added to the book. He testified to his experience of being captured in Africa and brought ashore in St. Ives, Cornwall, when storms took the ship off course. 

Scholars argue about the extent to which Strickland and Pringle shaped the manuscript. By extension, I’d guess they’re arguing about how much the voice is Prince’s. No one these days seems to question the reality of her evidence, which is graphic and raw. 

 

The book and the lawsuits

At the time, though, the book was questioned, and it wasn’t long after the book was published that the lawsuits started. First Pringle, as the publisher, sued someone who claimed in print that the story was a fraud. Pringle won and was awarded £5 (more or less £485 in 2025 money, and from here on I’ll leave you to do the calculations) plus costs–a total of £160. 

Then Wood–the last in that line of slaveholders, remember–sued Pringle for defamation and Pringle countersued. The court decided that story was exaggerated and Wood was awarded £25 but not costs. All of which added to the book’s popularity. It went through three editions in its first year. 

 

And after that . . . 

. . . Prince drops out of the public record and we don’t get the end of the story. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the British empire, except for, ahem, the parts controlled by the British East India Company, and that first ahem is followed by a second ahem, because for a period of years slavery was replaced with an apprenticeship system that was slavery under a different name.

Still, it’s possible that Prince returned to Antigua and her husband. It’s also possible that she didn’t. 

Bermuda counts her as a national hero and observes a holiday in her honor.

A quick history of Britain’s railways

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Britain’s first railroads revolutionized the country, in a profit-making sort of way. Goods–coal, fruit, newspapers, stuff–could now speed around the country. So could people. Time was standardized. Once people could move fast enough, they noticed–or at least cared–that different places were using slightly different times.

Companies formed. Track was laid. Stations were built. More companies formed, laying track parallel to where some other company had already laid track. Money was made. Money was lost.

We’re talking about frenzied amounts of money here: £3 billion between 1845 and 1900. In 2025, that would amount to £216.5 billion, give or take a few million, because who cares about the small change? 

That’s based, in case you care, on the 1900 value of the pound and I recklessly used artificial intelligence as the calculator. Sue me if it’s wrong. I’ll happily refund the money you spent reading this free post, although I draw the line at paying for your computer, your internet connection, your time, or any other background expenses.

At the end of that frenzy, Britain had something like 120 railroad companies, a lot of them in direct competition with each other, maintaining parallel tracks and parallel infrastructure and parallel administrative structures. 

Irrelevant photo: crocuses

 

World War I

Then World War I started and the railroads were put under state control. Not nationalized–the businesses still made the business-type decisions and pocketed whatever profits they made–but under the control of a government committee, the Railway Executive Committee. 

If your eyebrows just shot up, you can let them float gently back into place. The same thing happened in France and Germany. It was wartime. War has an odd habit of making the politically impossible possible. All those troops and their supplies had to be moved from here to there, and that took priority. Timetables were revised, civilian travel was curtailed, and priority was given to the military, to keeping the country fed, and before long to moving the wounded to hospitals on ambulance trains, because war, you may know by now, has certain unfortunate side effects.

After the war, the chaos of the old system was visible enough that nationalization was considered, although that’s as far as the idea got. Instead, but in the name of efficiency, the 120 companies were consolidated into 4 regional monopolies–Southern; Great Western; London, Midland & Scottish; and London North Eastern–and left in private hands.

 

World War II

Cue another world war and In 1939 the railroads went back into government control. The number of passenger trains was reduced. Seat reservations, restaurant cars, and some reduced fares disappeared. It was all about moving soldiers to ports, evacuating civilians from cities, and keeping the country fed.  

How many people are we talking about in those evacuations? In 1939, 1,334,360, mostly of them kids but some adults. That involved 3,823 special trains. In four days.

After the 1940 disaster at Dunkirk, when retreating allied troops had to be rescued from the beaches by an improvised flotilla of small boats, no one had any idea how many soldiers would be landing or where they’d land. Trains were put together from the rolling stock from all four companies and waited at central locations so they could be sent where they were needed as soon as somebody figured out where that was. They ended up moving 319,000 troops while still evacuating children. 

Add bombing raids to that picture if you would. 

Enough numbers. You get the point: the trains were crucial and the logistics were–I’m guessing here–a nightmare.

 

Nationalization & Dr. Beeching

By the end of the war, the rail network needed serious investment and the rail companies were in no shape to do it. The system was nationalized and updated. That included replacing the steam engines with diesel and electric and repairing bombed-out track.

It’s not all a happy story, though. By now the system faced competition from roads–for passengers, for freight, and for public funds. It was losing money, and in 1962 a guy called Dr. Beeching was appointed to head the newly formed British Railways Board and make the trains profitable.  

Yes indeed, folks. It was time to Make the Railways Great Again, only MRGA isn’t pronounceable and nobody embroidered it on a hat. I don’t think baseball caps had discovered Britain yet in any case.

His solution was to shrink the service, closing smaller lines and stations, and to lure more freight off the roads and onto the trains with a faster, simplified service.

And passengers who’d been served by smaller lines? They could take the bus. 

The trains did attract more freight, although I can’t find a clear answer to whether it worked as well in reality as on paper. I’m not convinced anyone has a clear answer. What is clear is that Beeching overestimated the savings he could make. The trains continued to lose money. Cars and roads were the hot new technology.  

Some 5,000 miles of track had been closed and more than 2,300 stations closed. Beeching is still hated today. 

 

A couple of reversals

Time staggered forward, as it will if you turn your back on it, and in 1993 the network was privatized into a system that’s too complicated to explain, creating a ticketing system that’s even more complicated than that. 

Want to buy the cheapest ticket? You’ll need a PhD. 

I could find you articles arguing that it wasn’t full privatization, but I won’t. They’re out there. I could probably find you articles arguing that they had to be on drugs to put the pieces together the way they did, but I haven’t looked. Pretty much anyone over the age of five could find reams of articles arguing that it’s been a disaster. In a 2014 poll, 60% of the public wanted the trains re-nationalized and only 20% didn’t. What about the remaining 20%? They were eating supper when the pollsters called and either hung up or offered them a few of their chips. 

If you’re American, those are french fries.

Four years later, that had risen to 64% and people were keeping their chips to themselves.

The main reasons people support re-nationalization seem to be 1) fares that have risen well over the rate of inflation and 2) service that on some lines is so bad you almost have to admire it as an art form, although there’s also 3) the companies making high profits while letting the system fall apart. 

How high are the profits? Using a study done under a Conservative government, the rail union estimates that £31 billion has flowed out of the rail system, mostly to shareholders, and that £1.5 billion a year could be saved by nationalization. The government estimates it could save an extra £2.2 billion a year by cutting waste.

I don’t doubt there’s waste to be cut, but I break out in hives lately when politicians talk about cutting waste. It means they’ll cut funding and then shrug when things fall apart. Or if you’re in the US, they send in a team of nutburgers with electronic axes. It’s so much easier than actually thinking about what might work better–or what might work at all.

But I’ve wandered off topic, haven’t I? You have no one to blame but yourself. Who did you think was supposed to keep an eye on me? 

The current government, before it was in office and when was still in campaigning mode, swore it would renationalize the trains within five years. Since the government licenses the private rail companies, that’s both cheap and, politically speaking, simple. They might even do it.

Meanwhile, trains have been making something of a comeback. In spite of high fares and poor service, more people are riding–9% more in 2024 than in 2023. You could also measure that in kilometers traveled, or in revenue, or in cups of tea consumed in transit, but instead let’s move on and go . . . 

 

. . . back to Dr. Beecham

The current momentum is in the direction of reopening branch lines and stations that Beecham closed in the fifties and sixties. It’s more expensive to drive than it used to be, and increasing numbers of people are counting the environmental cost of driving. 

So how many lines and stations have been reopened? Forgive me for getting technical about it, but it’s a fair number. 

Okay, I couldn’t find a number. The best I can do is refer you to a survey of the reopened line near me, impeccably conducted by Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Surveys, Inc., which reports that the line is well used. There’s even talk of extending it. There’s also talk of not extending it because the land was sold off. 

You can always rely of Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Surveys, Inc. We won’t discuss what you can rely on them for.