Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

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.

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

*

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.  

*

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.

*

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.

*

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. 

*

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.

*

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.