Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

A quick history of the English longbow

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England’s not-at-all-secret weapon against the French during the Hundred Years War was the longbow, and if you believe whatever gunk artificial intelligence scrapes off the internet floor, it’s a symbol of English pride. Which makes this a good place to mention that it came to England by way of Wales.

A very rare, nearly relevant graphic: An archer and some dead guy., both in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts the Battle of Hastings, which in turn is mentioned below. Courtesy of a free app that lets you design your own Bayeux-style Tapestry. No skills in needlework required. Are you worried that you might use your time too usefully? I heartily recommend this app. You can get lost in it for hours while accomplishing next to nothing.

A bit of background

Longbows have been around since neolithic times. Or paleolithic. Or–well, choose your source. A long time. That’s close enough for our purposes. So if England can’t claim to have originated it, neither can Wales. But it was the Welsh who brought it to the attention of the English by shooting them with it when they invaded, starting in the eleventh century and continuing into the thirteenth.  

Once it had Wales under its control, England conscripted Welsh archers into its armies to help invade Scotland, and it adopted the weapon itself, encouraging the English to train with it.

Did I say “encouraged”? I lied. Starting in 1252, all English men between 15 and 60 were required to train with the longbow once a week. Since the average lifespan of a man in the Middle Ages was 49, that meant he was required to train for 11 years after he died. Life wasn’t easy back then, and it doesn’t look like death was either. 

Why all that training? You can’t just pick up a longbow and expect to be any good with it. You train. And you train some more. And you keep in shape by doing some more training. The effect on the muscles and bones is powerful enough that archeologists can spot archers by looking at their skeletons, assuming they’re well preserved. 

Archers were so important to England’s armies that when Edward I (1272 – 1307; you’re welcome) banned all sport on Sundays, he made an exception for archery. All that emphasis on training explains why so many places in England are incorporate the word butts into their names: butts were the fields where men practiced archery. 

The longbow vs the crossbow

A longbow stood around six feet tall, making it taller than most men of the period, and a skilled archer could shoot a dozen or more arrows a minute. A crossbow might get off two or three shots in that time. (Those numbers will change depending on what source you consult; I’m going with conservative estimates.) 

At distances, the longbow wouldn’t have been as accurate as the crossbow, but if a mass of longbowmen were shooting at a mass of advancing horsemen or foot soldiers, they wouldn’t need whites-of-their-eyes accuracy. They’d shoot off a mass of arrows that fell close together on a tightly packed enemy.  

The longbow was cheaper to make than the crossbow, and its arrows flew almost as fast, which translates to hitting almost as hard. They could penetrate medieval armor. And they didn’t need the support team that helped a crossbowman cock the weapon and maintain it.

Crossbowmen were paid well, which if you happened to be counting up your pennies to see if you could fund an invasion of France would weigh heavily in favor of the longbow. 

Weighing against the longbow was the muscle power involved in drawing it. Factor in the archer’s exhaustion after marching and fighting and “only 10% of medieval archers would be effective at a range of 200 yards after just a week of campaigning,” according to an article from the John Moore Museum.  

Although the crossbow looks high-tech compared to the longbow, it dates back to 650 BC China. It spread from there to Europe, although it seems to have dropped out of use between the 5th and 10th centuries, when the French began using it again in sieges and at the Battle of Hastings, where the Normans conquered England, although if there’s a picture of one in the Bayeux Tapestry I haven’t spotted it. It continued to be the preferred military weapon in Europe for a good 500 years. Only England committed itself to the longbow. 

The Hundred Years War

With all that out of the way, what happened when the longbow went up against the crossbow? The Hundred Years War is our test site.

The Hundred Years War,  you should understand, lasted from 1337 to 1453, which is not a hundred years. The extra years came from one of those supermarket sales–116 for the price of 100. Who could resist, even if the extra 16 did go moldy in the refrigerator? The conflict was about land–how much of France France got to control and how much England could claim–and whether the English king could claim the French throne.

Yeah, I should do a post about it one of these days.

At the Battle of Crecy (1346), the English (longbow) defeated a much larger French force (crossbow, wielded by Genoese mercenaries). Popular belief holds that the crossbow shots fell short because the archers’ bowstrings were wet. 

Wasn’t it raining on the English too? Well, yes. Weather doesn’t play favorites and wet bowstrings lose some of their elasticity regardless of the bow they’re strung on. I’ve met people who say the English kept their bowstrings dry under their hats. I’m doubtful, since as soon as they came out they’d start picking up moisture, but feel free to choose the story you like and stand by it. It was a long time ago and no one’s likely to prove you wrong. Before you choose, though, I should toss in an alternative theory: the crossbowmen misjudged their distance because they were facing the sun. 

The sun does play favorites.

We do have an established fact, though: the French cavalry charged through their own bowmen, which didn’t improve their effectiveness or their health. According to one account, French knights hacked down the crossbowmen when they got in the way. Because bowmen were commoners and knights were aristocrats, or at the very least gentry, so what the hell, no one was going to hold them to account. 

The English held off 16 cavalry charges, spilled a lot of blood, and won a blue ribbon and history’s congratulations to the victor.

But let’s not slog through all 116 years battle by battle. I’m easily bored. We’ll jump to the Battle of Agincourt, in 1415. Again, smaller English army, larger French (and German, but never mind that) one. Longbow vs. crossbow. Rain, although nobody seems to talk about its effect on the bowstrings here. French knights getting killed mid-charge by a hail of arrows. English victory. 

More to the point of this post, longbow victory.

And after that?

The role of the crossbows shifted primarily to defensive warfare. If you wanted to defend a castle (or anything vaguely castle-like–a city wall might work) against a siege, the crossbow’s longer range would be useful.

But both gave way to the musket and the gun. The longbow was last used in warfare in 1644 during the English Civil War–in Scotland.

What was the English Civil War doing in Scotland? It’s complicated. And it’s a whole ‘nother story. Let’s settle for saying that it was a war that broke a lot of rules. 

Before it lost out to gunpowder, though, the longbow played a role not just in warfare but in fucking with feudalism. Nobles and all their friends and relations had been the bedrock of the military, with their horses, their armor, and their swords. They were the knights–the essence of power. Then along came these commoners with their relatively cheap-ass bows and guess who was more powerful.

That wasn’t enough to put an end to feudalism, but then a social and economic system doesn’t end from one lone change. It was a teaspoonful of sand poured onto the scales, where it joined an assortment of others. And I’m sure it put many a knightly nose out of joint.

Life in a medieval house

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Ever looked at a picture of some centuries-old house–or for that matter, at the real thing in all its hand-built glory–and gotten all misty-eyed, wondering what it was like to live there? Well, thanks to a street of 650-year-old houses and a plan to update them, we can inch a little closer to the answer. The update plan led to a newspaper article. The newspaper article led to my hunch that you might be interested in reading about it.  

The houses are owned by Wells Cathedral and for all their 650 years they’ve been lived in by the singers in the cathedral choir. They’re on what’s believed to be the most complete and continuously occupied medieval street in Europe.

So what’s it like to live there? Cold. According to one resident, “The windows leak £10 notes every time you put the heating on . . . and [enough with the metaphors] the roof leaks actual water.”

Irrelevant photo–except that it was cold enough overnight to leave frost on the fields.

 

The original houses

When they were first built, the roofs wouldn’t have leaked, but the windows surely would have let the cold air in. And the warm air out if any was available. Before chimneys, smoke from the hearth had to find its own way out, taking any available warmth with it, so if an airtight house had been possible it would’ve been a health hazard. 

Even with the leaks, though, indoor life was smoky. That was a problem for anyone who relied on breathing, but if you wanted to preserve your–or someone else’s–voice it would be particularly problematic, which may be why Wells Cathedral was ahead of the curve. Chimneys weren’t common until the 16th or 17th centuries, but chimneys were added to the choristers’ houses in the 15th century, along with water pipes. 

This meant that, cold or not, the houses would’ve been miracles of convenience. So let’s set aside our notions of comfort. They’re not a good match for the era we’re talking about.

The houses originally had two rooms each and were built for single men.

Men? Yes. The choristers were all male, with boys singing the soprano parts. The buildings housed altos, tenors, and basses. I’m not sure where the kids lived. They were small. Maybe someone stacked them in a cupboard when they weren’t in use.

It wasn’t until the Reformation that the cathedral broke through some walls to double the houses’ size and make room for families, and it wasn’t until very recent times that soprano parts have been opened up to girls and (gasp) grown women–and even now (I believe) that’s only true in some choirs. 

If the houses weren’t built for families, does that mean pre-Reformation choristers were expected to be celibate? Apparently so, with the emphasis on expected.

Before the houses were built, the choristers lived in town, and the idea was that corralling them in one place would keep them from worldly temptations, by which the churchly fathers meant sex. It must not have worked (I know: that surprises you), because in 1459 (the houses were first occupied in 1348) the church added a bridge to the cathedral so that on their way to work the singers wouldn’t have to rub shoulders, even briefly, with real people and all the temptations they presented. 

As the current cathedral dean explained it, “They started to get into trouble with what they termed ‘incontinence,’ which meant getting involved with women.” A BBC video tour and explanation, which is worth watching, also mentions problems with singers not showing up on time. Move them all next door to the cathedral, though, and they couldn’t say, “I’d have clocked in an hour ago but traffic was backed up halfway to Bristol.” 

The singers ate in a common dining room. That lets us imagine strong community bonds among people working and eating together and living next to each other. It also lets us–or me anyway–imagine living with the constant presence of some busybody, either another singer or a church official, tracking everyone’s comings and goings, watching for the faintest hint of a sex life. 

 

The current houses

The current residents don’t own or rent the houses, and not all the residents are singers; some are cathedral employees of various other sorts. The houses are what’s called grace and favour houses. They come with the job. 

At some point kitchens were added, but residents say the sense of community remains.

The cathedral has gotten a grant of £4.4 million for repairs but needs to raise an additional £1.9 million to start the project. Which is, in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of money. 

Is it worth it? The cathedral’s dean would argue that it is. “The roofs are failing,” he said. “The guttering is failing. The windows are failing. If we don’t look after this treasure, we’re going to lose it. The stakes are that high.”

If the holidays are over, who’s watching you now? 

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Now that Christmas is over and the people who think Santa watches them have let their guard down, allow me to call your attention to a new source of anxiety: your air fryer is watching you.

Don’t have an air fryer? That’s okay. Your audio speakers are doing the same job. Don’t have either one? Some other household object is ready to fill in. Have you checked the salt shaker lately?

Britain’s oddly named consumer organization, Which?, reports that “data collection [on the products they tested] often went well beyond what was necessary for the functionality of the product – suggesting data could, in some cases, be being shared with third parties for marketing purposes.”

You’re shocked, I know. Me? I’m hard to shock, but the phrase “be being” kind of threw me.

Actually, the air fryer did too, but I guess that’s what you want for a spy–an appliance on one would suspect. 

Which? tested three air fryers, which “wanted permission to record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason.” Some asked for the new owner’s gender and date of birth when they set up an account, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports that age and gender don’t often affect cooking times. That’s based on a sample of one: me. I haven’t changed gender but I have gotten older and cooking times have held steady.

The questions aren’t optional. Unless, of course, you don’t bother to set up an account. I don’t have an air fryer myself, so I’m making a wild guess when I say you can probably use the beast without an account. Plug it into the wall. Turn on the heat. Fry air.

Semi-relevant photo: a camellia, blooming away in December. It doesn’t care who you are, how old you are, or even if you have a gender.

Smart watches, on the other hand, aren’t smart unless you agree to the small print. At least one, Huawei’s, wants permissions Which? considers risky, allowing it to bump around inside your phone, record audio, access files, and see what other apps you’ve installed in case it gets lonely and wants to commune with a few like-minded apps. 

It also wants to know your exact location. 

None of that, the company swears, is used for marketing or advertising. And it’s all justified, although how is anyone’s guess. 

Smart speakers are all over the map in terms of what they want to know and I got bored with the details, so if you need to know what your smart speaker’s up to, either assume it’s no good or go read the article. 

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Which? also conducted a survey about the worst holiday presents people were given. The most notable entries were a gravesite and a toilet seat. Probably not to the same recipient or from the same giver, but that’s a guess.

 

On the other hand . . . 

. . . not all technology wants to record our every electronic move. Some wants to help us be better people (as defined by its developers), and in pursuit of that goal Apple and never mind which other firms have created gizmos that can rewrite or summarize our emails before we send them. Presumably with our permission, but don’t count on that being true forever. The goal is to make us sound friendlier and more professional than in fact we are, but AI’s new to the job, so there’ve been a few glitches.

I do love a good glitch.

An email from a woman breaking up with her boyfriend was summarized as, “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment.” 

Whatever the original said, we can all agree the improved version’s much friendlier.

The text accompanying a photo of a kid working on a car with his father came out as, “Photo shared of child reaching into car hood; air filter changed.” A series of five emails were summed up as, “Russia launches missile and drone attack; shop early for Black Friday Deals.” And a message from Amazon said,  “Package was delivered tomorrow.”

AI has also been introduced to Ring door cameras. Since it doesn’t have human-generated text to improve, it–

Words fail me, so let’s cut to the example. One sent a message saying, “Dog took boot. Kitten cheese escaped the house.” 

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I don’t think we can blame either AI or a bot for this, but what the hell, it’s vaguely tech related, so I’ll drop it in here: a Swedish government minister’s emails–or possibly her staff’s emails–got loose in the world and informed one and all that she’s terrified of bananas. So much so that her aides sweep rooms before she enters to make sure no bananas can ambush her.

 

What happens when AI cross-pollinates with religion?

A church in Switzerland (full disclosure: that’s not in Britain; neither is Sweden) installed an AI version of Jesus that, unlike the original, can talk to people in 100 different languages. The church was short on space, so they set it up in the confessional, beaming in an image of Jesus as imagined by I have no idea who–my bet is someone northern European and white. Before people used it they were warned not to disclose personal information and had to confirm that, yes, they understood it was an avatar.

Two-thirds of the users said it was a spiritual experience. The other third? One said it was “trite, repetitive, and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar cliches.”

Criticism divided along sectarian lines. Catholics tended to be offended by the use of the confessional and Protestants by the use of imagery. Given the glitches AI’s prone to, the organizers may have had a worry or three about what Mr. J. would say, but disappointingly, he doesn’t seem to have said anything odd. No confabulated Bible quotes. No escaped cheeses. 

No, I’m not going to excavate the joke that’s just under the surface of that last sentence. We’ll move on.

 

Low-tech possibilities

A group called Forest Research has trained a dog to sniff out a disease, Phytophthora ramorum, that’s responsible for thousands of hectares of British trees being felled. It’s spread by rain, and even after 14 years of Conservative government Britain is still rich in rain.

Forest Research hopes to train dogs to spot other pests as well. As for prototype dog–Dog 1.0– he probably thinks he’s just out in the woods having a good time.

A new theory about Stonehenge

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The recent discovery that one lone piece of Stonehenge was brought some 700 kilometers, either overland or by sea, from northern Scotland has led to a new theory about the monument’s purpose: that it might’ve been built to unite the island’s early farming communities at a time of cultural stress. 

The monument’s stones come from Wiltshire, Wales, and Scotland. And they were set in place some 5,000 years ago, when (I remind you) the art of trucking hadn’t yet been perfected. Or invented. 

Even the most conveniently located stones had to be hauled more than 20 kilometers, so this was already a major commitment. I’d hesitate to move those beasts from my neighbor’s front yard to mine, and we’re within spitting distance of each other. So 20 kilometers? I’ll pass, thanks.

What I’m saying here is that a society committing to haul huge stones over long distances screams for an explanation. I mean, it’s not like the local shops had run out of stone.

Semi-relevant photo: I doubt much in this photo has changed since Stonehenge was built. Except that cameras were invented.

 

Cultural stress

The theory we’re playing with here belongs to archeologist Mike Parker Pearson, and the cultural stress he’s talking about is the arrival of a group of people who were new to Britain and are believed to have introduced metalworking to the island.. They’re known to us as the beaker people, after–um, sorry, we’re sort of going in circles here–the distinctive decorated beakers they made. 

What’s a beaker? In this case, a piece of pottery. The beakers were important enough that they buried them with their dead.

What do we call the earlier inhabitants? Good question and not one I can answer. All I’ve seen them called is Neolithic farmers, which is kind of generic but, sorry, I don’t make the rules, I only make fun of them.

The beaker people migrated into Britain from Europe, and the two cultures would have met, rubbed elbows, and–

Well, we have no idea what they did. Got roaring drunk, told each other lies, and traded songs? Fought? Circled each other warily? Could’ve been any of that, or all of it at different times. They don’t seem to have slaughtered each other, though. Not only have fewer markers of violence been found on skeletons from this period than on skeletons from the Neolithic, there’s also not much evidence of the extensive burning or destruction that would go along with warfare.

This is roughly the time when Stonehenge was built. Or, to be more accurate about it, rebuilt. If you’d lived near Stonehenge for a few thousand years, it would’ve been like having a family member who couldn’t leave the living room furniture in one place and also had to repaint, redecorate, and reconfigure regularly. And convinced everyone to pitch in. In other words, the place was changed significantly over time. What we’re talking about is the version of Stonehenge that we know. Let’s call it Stonehenge 2.0.

Parker Pearson’s theory is that it was built to bring people together–or “assert unity.”

If you want backing for that theory, consider the stone from Scotland. Unlike its more photogenic friends, it lies flat, not because it fell and hasn’t been set upright but because it was meant to be that way. And northeastern Scotland has a number of stone circles where the stones that were set in place that way. So the builders seem to have brought down not just a huge, heavy stone but a tradition.

 

What happened next

As usual when we’re talking about archeology, we don’t know the whole story, but in this case we get a particularly confused picture. The Neolithic farmers tended to cremate their dead, keeping them safe from the nosy archeologists who they knew would eventually come snooping around. That means we don’t know who lived where or when. 

What we do know is that the beaker people ended up largely (and slowly) replacing the original inhabitants, creating a 90% shift in Britain’s collective DNA. 

It’s easy to think that had to do with conquest and slaughter, but (see above) we have no evidence of that. It could’ve had to do with climate change, disease, ecological disaster, or any combination of those. It could also–convincingly, to my mind–be the result of a much smaller population getting absorbed into a larger one.

What can be documented is that for some 500 years the two cultures lived parallel lives while carrying out an extensive cultural exchange. Then, after some 300 to 500 years, they started having significant numbers of children together. 

No, I can’t explain that either. Maybe we’re talking about two unbelievably shy cultures.

“Just before the point where we can infer interbreeding,” according to Dr Selina Brace, “there was a hybrid culture between what came before and what came after. It is almost like it takes them a few hundred years to iron it out, but then they find an accord and develop this set of ideas that incorporates both cultures into something that they can all subscribe to.”

 

What that meant for Stonehenge

The beaker people found a new use for Stonehenge. Or at least, they found one that archeologists can track: it became a place to bury the prestigious dead. Interestingly enough, DNA indicates that the burials were all from the beaker people, not from the culture that build Stonehenge and not from the mixed descendants of both groups. 

How that went down with the builders we’ll never know.

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I normally post on Fridays and this was supposed to post on December 27. It didn’t. Because I screwed up. What the hell, no one’s paying attention, are they?

Lambert Simnel and the princes in the tower

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The line between history and farce wears thin in places, and with that bit of pseudo-profundity as a starting point, let’s talk about Lambert Simnel, pretender to England’s throne who was crowned Edward VI of England.

Sort of.

The coronation took place in Ireland, not in England, and you won’t find his name on any list of English monarch. He was ten years old when he was crowned and still had to ask permission if he wanted to stay up last enough to watch his favorite shows. 

The usual irrelevant photo: a Cornish hedge

 

The backstory

Simnel’s claim to the throne–or given his age, the claim made in his name–was that he was one of the princes in the tower. (If you’re about to yell that he never claimed that, stay with me. We’ll get there.) In the meantime, though, remember the princes in the tower? When they were 9 and 12 years old when they were imprisoned by their uncle Richard for the crime of being inconvenient. Or to take Richard’s side of the tale, for their protection.

Not long after that, their uncle became King Richard III.

The older boy had a decent claim to the throne–so decent that he was already King Edward V, although his coronation hadn’t been held yet. So yes, if you’re his uncle and want to be king, a pre-existing king who’s still alive is inconvenient. As is his younger brother, another Richard, who was next in line if Eddie turned up dead.

That makes a good and coherent story, and it’s the one most of us (if we’ve heard about them at all) know. But what happened to the kids isn’t 600% clear, leaving plenty of space for rumor and fantasy to do their work. 

But before I go on, an interruption: Names will be flying around here like bats at sunset. A lot of the actors have the same names, which any fiction writer can tell you is a bad idea. If you can keep them all straight, I admire you. If you can’t, don’t worry. Just keep up as best you can and nod when everyone else does. You’ll be fine. We’re overstocked on Richards and if you want a bargain on the name, this is the time to get out your wallet.

To be fair to Richard-the-Uncle, he didn’t invent locking up and crown-stealing. There was a lot of it going around. We’re dancing at the edge of the Wars of the Roses, when two branches of the Plantagenet family, Lancaster and York, fought over who was going to be the king of the mountain–or more accurately, of England. So an Edward locked up a Henry and took his crown, along with all that it symbolized. The Edward married an Elizabeth, offending a Richard, which I only mention to confuse us all. 

The couple had kids.

Are you still with me?

Henry’s supporters broke him free and re-crowned him. At best, that’s awkward. Once should be enough for any monarch. Edward fled with his brother, the Richard we were talking about earlier–the one who would later be king himself.

The alarm just went off, reminding me that it’s 1471.

The Edward we were talking about a minute ago popped up again, bringing an army with him. He defeated the Henry, killed his son and heir, and locked Henry back into the tower, which was getting a lot of use. 

Henry then proceeded to die, either of melancholy (the official explanation) or because he was murdered (the rumor), or possibly of some undiagnosed disease (an easy guess given this period). Take your pick. What matters is that being dead he could no longer be king, and the same could be said of his son, and that was the end of the Lancastrian line, leaving Edward as king, his son Edward as heir, and his son Richard as the backup band, or as they called it then, the heir presumptive.

See what I mean about the names?

In 1483 Edward (that’s the king) died, having named his brother Richard protector of his heir Edward. Richard-the-Brother took control first of Edward-the-Heir and then of Richard-the-Backup-Band, and had an assortment of people executed, including at least one stray Richard. 

And we still haven’t gotten around to Lambert Simnel.

Before Edward-the-Heir’s coronation could be held, the boys were declared illegitimate (don’t ask; it doesn’t really matter) making Richard-the-Uncle the next in line.

Ta da! I give you King Richard III.

The princes went from luxurious quarters in the tower to prison in the tower. They were seen less and less and then not at all. No one accused Richard of killing them until much later, when the Tudors were in power and Richard-the-Evil-Uncle suited their narrative. He probably did have it done, but it was a long time ago and definitive proof is out of reach, although a few hundred years later the skeletons of two boys of about the right age were found in the tower. 

 

Finally, we get to Lambert Simnel

In 1485 Richard III died in a battle with Henry Tudor, who then became Henry VII. Henry could claim a place on the Lancastrian family tree, although it was too far from the trunk to make him an obvious candidate, and he married a descendant of the Yorkist line, the oldest sister of the princes who were no longer in the tower, which you’d expect to put the Wars of the Roses to rest.

But you know how hard it is for people to let these things go. A young boy popped up, claiming to be the Richard who’d been in the tower and who had, he said, escaped and been on the run. Soon afterward, though, he claimed to be Edward, the Earl of Warwick, who’d also been in the tower. If either claim was true, it made him one of the last surviving males on the York family tree.

Except that  he probably never claimed to be Richard. The Richard story didn’t surface until some hundred years later, and over that length of time people’s memories tends to grow hazy. So all that business about the princes in the tower was irrelevant. I apologize. I was having too much fun to leave them out. What we have to do now is forget Richard. We have too many of them anyway. The boy claimed to be Edward from the start. Let’s focus on that.

Edward had been imprisoned in the tower. He was rumored to have died, but look, here was a boy of about the same age with a striking resemblance to some of the Yorks and a good tale about his escape, not to mention the backing of some important surviving Yorkists. Who was to say it wasn’t him?

These days, pretty much everyone. The agreement is that he was Lambert Simnel. Nothing’s known about his mother, but his father was a carpenter. Or possibly a cobbler. Or–well, something along those lines. Not an aristocrat. He was probably from Oxford and was spotted by a priest, who was yet another Richard, unless his first name was William. His last name was Symonds . Or Simons. Or else Simon. 

Listen, don’t try to keep all this straight. It’ll only end in tears. Let’s just call him the priest. He spotted a resemblance between this handsome body and–oh, hell, whoever the last Yorkist king was. (Edward IV, but it won’t be on the test.) The story goes that the priest groomed the boy to be a stand-in for the lost Yorkist heir, then took him to Ireland–a  Yorkist stronghold. By now the boy’s backers included John de la Pole (if you’re watching Wolf Hall, you’ll have heard the family mentioned); assorted survivors of a failed Yorkist rising in 1846; and Warwick’s aunt, Margaret of York, the dowager duchess of Burgundy. That’s worth underlining, since it’s impossible to keep these people straight: the aunt of the boy Simnel was claiming to be backed his claim to be her nephew. 

They had him crowned in Dublin as Edward VI. The Vth, remember, is the one who’d been imprisoned in the tower and then disappeared. 

Somewhat awkwardly, the Edward he was claiming to be was still alive and Henry had him paraded through the streets of London, but communications being what they were his appearance failed to go viral. Those who noticed didn’t care. Those who cared didn’t notice. 

 

What do you do after an irrelevant coronation?

By now we have Lambert/Edward crowned but without a country to rule, so there was nothing to do but invade England, which is what his puppet-masters did in 1487, with 2,000 Flemish mercenaries paid for and shipped to Ireland by Margaret-the-Aunt; some Irish troops (all I know about them is that they were poorly supplied and took the worst of it); and a few English supporters.

Most of England’s nobles were as interested in joining a rebellion as they were in catching the plague. They didn’t join. And Henry had been gathering troops to invade Ireland, whether to deal with the Simnel’s backers or because the English never could resist invading Ireland I don’t know. I think the former, but either way, it meant he had troops at hand and was able to react quickly. 

The king–you will have already figured this out by now–won. Assorted people were executed. Symonds was spared that because he was a priest but was imprisoned for life. 

And Simnel? He was a kid who’d been used by adults. Henry pardoned him and put him to work, first in his kitchens and later as a falconer. You’ll find at least some historians arguing that Henry never used more cruelty than could be helped. You could also argue–and I’m tempted to–that it might have pleased him to have a pretender to the throne working as a servant in his kitchen, but that’s pure speculation.

Not much is known about Simnel’s later life. He might have married and might have had a son, Richard Simnel (every third boy was name Richard), who became a canon of St. Osyth’s Priory in Essex during the reign of Henry VIII. 

Even Simnel’s name is uncertain. The one we’re using is the one that stuck. 

 

And now for the important stuff

First, Simnel did not give his name to the simnel cake, which predates him. I can’t swear that his name didn’t come from the cake. 

Never heard of simnel cake? That’s a sign you’re not British. It’s–umm, it’s a cake. Unless someone offers you a slice, what more do you need to know? In its earliest incarnation it was a sweet bread. At that stage, cake meant something breadlike involving sugar, butter, fruit, nuts–you know, that sort of thing.  

Second, in the process of invading England the Yorkists–some 8,000 of them–landed on the 50-acre Piel Island.  

They faced no resistance and they didn’t stay long, but they behind a bit of local legend: an unsubstantiated belief that the Kings of Piel are Simnel’s descendants, along with a battered, high-backed wooden chair, which sits in the island’s only pub and is the King of Piel’s throne. Any hapless visitor who sits in it has to buy a drink for everyone who happens to be there at the moment.

The legend has two problems: Simnel was around ten, which is young to have descendants, and the kings aren’t each other’s descendants. The title goes to whoever runs the pub. Still, when each new publican becomes king, he gets a rusty helmet and a saber and a bucket of beer poured over his head.

The Pilgrimage of Grace & Bigod’s Rebellion, or dissolving the monasteries part 3

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Our most recent slogs took us through Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s religious houses and then through the Lincolnshire Rising, which was an effort to restore the monasteries. But keep your muddy boots on, because we’re not done yet. We’ve still got the Pilgrimage of Grace to get through.

Need a recap before we head off? Henry VIII took England out of the Catholic Church (kings could do that sort of thing then: I believe this, so you will too) and confiscated the property and income of the monasteries, nunneries, friaries, and etcetaries, which he fed to his ever-hungry treasury. 

He put down a rebellion in Lincolnshire quickly but it led to a larger rising in neighboring Yorkshire, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and that’s where we’re heading now. It was led by a well-connected lawyer, Robert Aske.  

How well-connected? He was the grandson of a baron and a third cousin to Jane Seymour, who had recently married Henry of the Six Wives. So quite.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s invasive as hell, but it’s beautiful.

 

Before we get to what happened, though, let’s talk about why

Religion was the primary spark for the rebellions–people weren’t happy to walk or be chased away from the religion that had shaped their lives–but other elements fed into them as well. One was Thomas Cromwell’s attempts to increase the central government’s control in the North. I’m guessing this was more important to the gentry and aristocracy than to the common people. Folks who have some power aren’t usually happy to see it moved someplace else. 

Cromwell? He was Henry’s minister and (you could at least argue) his brains. He’s also the central character in the BBC’s fantastic series Wolf Hall. I leave it to you to decide which of those things is the most important.

Sorry, where were we? Other elements that fed into the risings. The church and its buildings played an important role in poor and rural communities. This wasn’t just about religion but also charity, jobs, education, and what health care and care for the elderly there was. Closing the monasteries put an end to that. 

Also the harvest had been bad the year before, so food prices had risen, and the Enclosure Movement meant landlords were taking away some peasants’ access to common land and pushing others off the land entirely, leaving them homeless and impoverished. That had started long before Henry and went on long after he was dust, and it had flat out nothing to do with the dissolution of the monasteries, but y’know, when people are feeling the pinch their anger can go in all sorts of directions.

Okay, it had a bit to do with the monasteries: the poor had been able to turn to them for a handout, and no one had a plan in place to fill that gap when they closed.

You can find a bit about the enclosure movement about halfway through this link. I really do need to write a separate post about it.

But before we get all starry eyed about the church and the good it did, remember that it was also a very rich landlord and fierce about dictating what people had to believe and how they could live their private lives–or what we might think of as private, although I’m not convinced they’d have seen it the same way.

For all that, the tone of the rebellion was heavily religious. To quote Robert Aske (remember him? leader of the rebellion?), “And that ye shall not come into our pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private person but by counsel of the commonwealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts put away all fear and dread and take afore you the Cross of Christ and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions by all the holy contents of this Book.”

 

The Pilgrimage

When the Lincolnshire rising disbanded, the government disbanded its army as well (England didn’t have a standing army until much later on), so when the Pilgrimage of Grace began, Henry’s government was sitting around with its proverbial thumb up its nose, unprepared for Aske to march into York with 30,000 armed–well, let’s say people. By some accounts, it was 30,000 men, but one of the fun side-effects of sexism in the English language is that it’s hard to tell when “men” means men and when “men” means people. In a popular rising, my best guess is that a wide swath of the population would’ve been swept up, including (gasp, horror!) women.

If you don’t keep your eye on those women, they’ll just show up everywhere. 

But let’s not get bogged down there. On October 24, Aske and 30,000 men and possibly not-men marched into York and restored the religious houses that had been closed. 

It’s worth knowing that Aske’s was a higher class of uprising than the Lincolnshire one, by which I mean that it had better connections. Not only was Aske a gentleman, his supporters included a baron and an archbishop, as well as some survivors of the Lincolnshire rising.

The rebels were divided into three hosts, and the one under Aske’s leadership engaged in no looting and no violence, although this wasn’t passive resistance. They did take at least one city. Still, the other hosts weren’t as well disciplined, threatening violence if local lords wouldn’t join them, and I assume making good on their threats although I haven’t been able to dig out any details. 

Rebel numbers continued to grow and rebellions to pop up in new localities. In Cumberland, a rising was led by captains called Charity, Faith, Poverty, and PIty.

Facing them all were the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury, with 12,000 men between them. The rebels now had 40,000, um, humans. Or maybe that’s 8,000 and 30,000. Or 27,000. Numbers were as liquid as spelling back then. Take them as a poetic way of saying a lot or people and a lot more people.

Whatever the head count was, the king’s forces were massively outnumbered, which is why Norfolk negotiated with the rebels, promising safe conduct for two delegates to meet the king, so off the delegates trotted–one rebel and one peacemaker–to Henry’s court, where he told them he knew more about religion than mere commoners but offered them a pardon if they’d hand over ten ringleaders. 

Back north they rode, reporting that Henry had found their demands “dark and obscure,” so rebel representatives hashed out a clarified set of demands at Pontefract Castle, which they’d seized. These were “24 Articles to the King,” also called “The Commons’ Petition.”  

They handed these to Norfolk to pass on to Henry, and Norfolk promised them a general pardon, a parliament that would be held at York within a year, and a reprieve for the abbeys until the new parliament could meet and discuss the matter. 

The rebels were divided over whether to trust Norfolk’s promises. Aske thought they could. Others were wiser, because (either at this point or earlier–I’ve lost track) Norfolk wrote to the king, “I beseche you to take in gode part what so ever promes I shall make unto the rebels for sewerley I shall observe no part thereof.” 

Sewerly? My best guess is that it means surely. Spelling? Liquid, and a thin one at that. 

That division within the rebel ranks was at least to some extent and division between the aristocrats and the commoners, with the aristocrats being more trusting and the commoners more realistic.

In early December, at Aske’s urging, the rebels disbanded and Aske was invited to court for Christmas, where he was well received.

 

Bigod’s Rebellion

Now we move on to Cumberland, where we find Bigod’s Rebellion, led by Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallam, a captain of the 1536 rebellion, neither of whom believed the promises the Pilgrims had been given. 

Unlike the bulk of the rebels, who were Catholic, Bigod was an evangelical–a full-blown Protestant–and all for England leaving the Catholic Church but not for Henry installing himself in the Pope’s place. I’d love to connect that to the rest of the post but I haven’t found a link. Still, it’s interesting and I’m leaving it in.

This new group of rebels planned to capture Hull, Scarborough, and the Duke of Norfolk, who they’d force to mediate with the government. For the sake of clarity, that’s two towns and a duke. I’m doing mix and match here.

But the gentry had survived two rebellions with their hind ends intact and weren’t in a mood to gamble on a third, and although commoners did rise, their risings were sporadic. They eventually converged on Carlisle, where they were defeated in February 1537. 

Norfolk hanged 74 rebels. His orders had been to “cause such dreadful execution to be doon upon a goode number of th’inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet . . . as well by the hanging up of them in trees as by the quartering of them and the setting up of their heddes and quarters….as may be a fearful spectacle.” 

He stopped short of quartering.

At this point, reprisals for the earlier rebellions started.  All told, 216 people were executed, including Aske and assorted lords, knights, abbots, monks, and parish priests. And I’d assume a lot of common folk. One of Henry’s goals was to divide the gentry from the common people, which worked, with the gentry sitting in judgment and commoners (with the exception of the lords, knights, and so forth) being judged.

When Robert Aske was tried, his own brother was on the jury. Only one of the people who were tried was found innocent.

 

So what, if anything, do we learn here?

Like every medieval revolt I’ve read about, the participants in these were noisily loyal to the king. How could they not be? Unless you were backing some alternative kingship candidate and had planted a sword in a stone, opposing the king was more or less unthinkable. No alternative form of government had been imagined. So the goal wasn’t to get rid of the king but to let him know his people’s true situation and get rid of bad people around him (Cromwell was the focus of attention there). If they could do those two things, he’d govern justly. 

But kings were famously jealous of their power and not quick to hand any of it over to a bunch of upstarts. Commoners were threatening because there were so damn many of them and because they were everything the aristocracy looked down on–and feared if they had any sense. On the other hand, aristocrats, being closer to the center of power, were a different sort of threat. The biggest of the feudal lords still saw themselves as ruling under the king while the king saw himself as ruling, period–or if you want to be appropriately British about this, full stop. 

This takes us back almost full circle to the paragraphs about what elements fed into the rebellion, but now we’re looking at it from the other side: it wasn’t just religion that shaped Henry’s response. It was about centralizing power.

Did any of these rebellions stand a chance of success, then? 

It depends on how we define success. They couldn’t have taken power, but then they never imagined they could. That simply wasn’t a goal. They were trying to influence the king, and they did chalk up some successes that are worth noting alongside their more obvious devastating losses. 

  • The collection of the October subsidy–a major grievance–was postponed. 
  • The Statute of Uses was partly negated by a new law.
  • Four of the seven sacraments that the Ten Articles left out were restored, inching the Church of England away from outright Protestantism.
  • A royal proclamation of 1538 promised an onslaught on heresy, by which we should understand outright Protestantism. In practice, I’m not sure it amounted to an onslaught, but it did require the name of the printer and author on any book, which was designed “to auoide and abolish suche englishe bookes as conteine pernicious and detestable errours and heresies.” It put author and printer at greater risk.

In a sideways sort of way, those changes bear out something my parents used to say. They were union organizers back in the day and believed no strike is ever lost. It’s possible that no rebellion is either.

*

If you want a timeline–and I got lost enough moving between one article and the next that I was grateful for this one–take a look here. 

The Lincolnshire Rising, or dissolving the monasteries part 2

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Last week we slogged through the dissolution of England’s monasteries (and nunneries and friaries and so-fortharies) under Henry VIII, and it might’ve looked, to the casual reader, like everything fell neatly into place for ol’ Henry: the order went out, the courts assessed the money and the goodies and handed them over to the treasury, and the nuns, monks, and friars were sent out into the world to manage as best they could with the pensions they were given. A couple of hundred people were executed for opposing the changes, but in the great scheme of things that hardly counts as major opposition, especially after a few hundred years.

It didn’t all fall into place that easily, though. Henry faced some widespread opposition, starting in October 1536 and centered on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. If you don’t know your English geography, what matters is that they’re both up north, because the center of English politics has long been in London and more generally in the south. So think of this as happening in No-one-ever-pays-attention-to-usLand. 

 

Irrelevant photo: a geranium

 

The spark

There were two uprisings, and I won’t get as far as the second one this week. Sorry–it’s been that kind of week.

The first started in the town of Louth. Some royal commissioners showed up–those folks who went through a monastery’s belongings and claimed them for the crown–and one made a comment that may have been seen as a threat by the less-educated among the clergy. “Look to your books or there will be consequences.” In addition, new regulations had been introduced that affected the clergy, and taxes that affected secular folk. And people were looking not just at the closing of the religious houses but at the confiscation of  of all that expensive church-ware, some of which had been donated by local families, who therefor had a proprietary feeling about it. 

It’s worth noting that it was only the well-to-do who could donate, say, silver to a church or monastery, but ordinary people participated in grassroots fundraising that might touch up a saint’s statue that was looking weary or do something along those lines, so they too would have a sense of ownership.

As a result, three things happened. the vicar of Louth preached what one website calls an inflammatory sermon; a cobbler, Nicholas Melton, who came to be known as Captain Cobbler, seized a registrar and burned his papers; and a larger group of people held the commissioners hostage at a nunnery.

If you want to know the aim of these early uprisings, look at the documents they destroyed. Literacy was growing but still limited, and committing things to paper was a form of control. Destroy the list of what a monastery owned and it was easy to believe that you might just stop it from being confiscated.

 

But before I go on

I try not to use Wikipedia, because its entries change and it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness before the editors swoop in to correct it, but I couldn’t find articles with any depth to them anywhere else. So I’m leaning on it heavily here. I believe we’re on safe ground. 

Fair enough? Lets go on.

 

The rebellion

Before long, a full-scale revolt had broken out. The rebels came from several towns and converged on the city of Lincoln, where they dragged the diocese’s chancellor from his bed and beat him to death. We can probably take this as an indication that they weren’t in a good mood.

They sent a list of complaints to the king, and these focused on both taxes and religion. They objected to at least one of  Henry’s tax strategies, the Statute of Uses, and they demanded an end to taxation in peacetime. They also objected to the dissolution of the monasteries and to the Church of England’s first statement of its doctrine, the Ten Articles, and demanded that heretics be purged from the government, that the treasures in local churches be protected, and that they have the right to continue worshipping as Catholics. 

Henry dismissed the rebels as “rude and ignorant common people” and their entire county as “one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,” so we can safely guess he wasn’t in a good mood either.

Who took part? Some 40,000 people, with the support of the gentry. Their opposition to the Statute of Uses  speaks to the gentry’s involvement, since it involved tax on the inheritance of land, but the number of people up in arms says the rebellion had support from people well below the level of the gentry.  

The protest–or rebellion, or whatever you want to call it–lasted from October 1 to October 4, when the king warned the rebels to go home or face the Duke of Suffolk and however many armed men he’d mobilized by then. By October 14, most of them had left Lincoln.

Why do they date the end of the protest to October 4, then? Sorry, you’re on your own there. I have no idea. What I can tell you is that after the protest broke up, the vicar of Louth and Captain Cobbler were captured and hanged, and over the next 12 days other leaders were executed, including a lawyer and a former monk–although he might not have considered himself former. An MP–that’s a member of parliament; you’re welcome–was not only hanged but also drawn and quartered for his involvement. The Tudors were nothing if not over the top about executing people.

Did that end of the tale? It did not. It led to a larger rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. But for that, tune in next week.

Dissolving the monasteries

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If people know anything about Henry VIII, it’s that (in descending order): he had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived), he left the Catholic Church in a huff, and (sharp descent here) he dissolved the monasteries. 

Let’s talk about the monasteries.

Dissolving religious houses wasn’t new. For centuries, smaller monasteries either had blinked out of existence on their own or were dissolved so their endowments (their revenue-generating lands and churches) could be redistributed to other religious houses or used to fund colleges. Beyond pissing off some manageable number of people, that wasn’t controversial. What was  new under Henry was the scale. And the purpose. 

Oh, and where the money went.

 

Irrelevant photo: sunset

The why? of it all

First off, we’re using monasteries here as shorthand for not just monasteries but also abbeys, convents, and any religious houses that I’ve forgotten. It’s inaccurate and sexist but it’s simpler. Forgive me. 

If you roll all those religious houses together, you’ll have the wealthiest institution in Tudor England, owning a quarter of the country’s cultivated land and a lot of expensive bling, because devotion to god worked better when it was surrounded by gold and silver and jewels. 

All that bling was not only expensive, it was important. How would anyone know you had wealth if you didn’t show it off? It was what people and institutions did with it.

This being a time when wealth was measured not in bitcoins but in land and expensive objects, it was almost inevitable that Henry would cast his eye in the direction of those monasteries. His government was permanently short of money (blame wars–they’re expensive–and, um, lifestyle issues), and the monasteries not only had all those riches, they were aligned with the pope, who was now Henry’s enemy, what with Henry jumping into that huff and leaving the church, so they were a base of power capable of opposing him.

 

The mechanics of dissolution

In 1536, Henry’s government went after monasteries that had an income of less than £200 a year and fewer than 12 “inmates.” Sorry–not my word. They were probably counting nuns, monks, or friars but not their servants. They were closed down and their buildings, land, and money went to the crown. 

To give a sense of what £200 was worth, you could’ve bought 42 horses or 160 cows with it. It was the daily wage of 6,666 skilled artisans–or of one working for a long damn time. 

Then in 1539, the government moved against the larger monasteries, and by the next year they were being closed at the rate of 50 a month. The land and buildings of both large and small houses were sold and the bling–the movable assets–auctioned off.

In the first stage of dissolution, the confiscated buildings weren’t badly damaged, although lead was stripped from the roofs (it was valuable stuff), glazing was removed, and bells melted down. The plan was to sell or use the buildings themselves, and some of the buildings were repurposed for grand homes. You’ll still find stately homes called SomethingOrOther Abbey, and yes, they were once abbeys. 

In the later stages of the dissolution, orders went out to pull down the buildings: “Pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, fraters [refectories], dorters [dormitories], chapter houses.” This wasn’t cheap. The cost of tearing down Furness Abbey was 10% of the money raised by selling its property. 

Many of the buildings were partially pulled down and left to decay. Today, they make scenic ruins and people pay admission to wander through, take selfies, brush up against a bit of history, and then buy tea and sandwiches. 

 

The courts

All this confiscating and selling created a major administrative headache, and in 1535 the Court of Augmentation was set up to sort through the monasteries’ assets and income. Then in 1540, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths took charge of money the monasteries had once sent to Rome, because the end of the monasteries didn’t mean the end of the payments people owed them. 

What were first fruits, though? The first year’s profits that the new holder of a benefice owed the church. (A benefice was a church office that brought revenue to the person who held it.)  And the tenths? The 10% of each year’s income that the benefice’s holder owed the church each year until forever. All that had to be assessed, catalogued, dealt with.

The courts were part of Thomas Cromwell’s work of replacing the king’s medieval household administration with something we’d recognize today as a civil service. 

The treasury came out of the dissolution some £1.5 million richer. That would’ve been lifetimes of work by those skilled artisans we were talking about.

 

The monks, nuns, and servants

That accounts for the income, the bling, and the land and buildings, but it leaves the people who made their lives in the monasteries unaccounted for. So let’s do numbers. Some people love numbers. 

Roughly 14,000 monks, nuns, and friars were de-monked, de-nunned, and de-friared when the monasteries closed. If they cooperated, they received pensions. If they didn’t–well, some 200 people were executed for opposing the dissolution. 

I haven’t found a number for the servants who were now out of jobs and I don’t know if they were counted.

Monks and canons typically received a pension of around £5 or £6 a year, which was roughly what a chaplain was paid.

What’s a canon? I had to look it up. “A member of the chapter of (for the most part) priests, headed by a dean, which is responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches.”

Did you really need to know that?

The heads of religious houses did better, and as in everything else at this time, connections mattered. Family mattered. One abbot who was close to Cromwell received £100 a year–roughly the income of a rich country gentleman. Cooperation also mattered. Those who played along might be allowed to wander out into the secular world in possession of some of the house’s bling or cattle.  

Nuns–you won’t be surprised to learn–got less, sometimes no more than £1 a year. Even after the convents closed, they weren’t allowed to marry, although some did anyway. But many found no choice but to return to their families. Convents had long been refuges both for women who didn’t want to marry and dumping grounds for the unmarriageable daughters of the gentry and middle-ranking families. Both groups of women were likely to be seen as  burdens if they returned home. 

As for the servants, there would’ve been more of them than of monks or nuns. Sawley Abbey’s 18 monks had 42 servants–farmhands, plumbers, cooks, kitchen boys, carpenters, grooms, masons, laborers, and washerwomen.  

A monastery would also have had a steward–far higher up the scale than a washerwoman but still a servant–who managed legal relationships and relations with the outside world. 

With the closing of the monasteries, the servants who lived there, as many did, would have been homeless in addition to unemployed. Some dissolution commissioners made provision for them–which implies that some didn’t. At Furness Abbey, the servants were owed a good bit of back pay, and the commissioner made sure this was paid, although they got nothing, as far as I’ve read, beyond that. 

Almsmen living at the abbey received a cash settlement. 

 

Gain and Losses

Although the politically well connected and the backers of Henry’s reforms were in the best position to profit from the sales of land and buildings, traditional Catholics also bought up property. This created a group of wealthy families whose interests now lay with keeping the Church of England in place. Even when Mary took the throne and restored the Catholic Church, she couldn’t re-establish the monasteries. Whether you count that as a gain, a loss, or simply clever politics depends on your point of view.

The closing of the monasteries created some concrete problems that no one seems to have planned for. The monasteries had been home to massive libraries–collections of illuminated manuscripts. But the printed book was replacing the hand-copied one, so who needed those old things? Some were saved but many were destroyed.

Monastic and convent schools had educated boys and girls (separately of course, you barbarian), and the church had offered one of the very few ways a bright boy could climb out of poverty. With the closing of the monasteries, the schools closed.

The church also ran hospitals, and many of these were attached to monasteries. Those were lost. 

Let’s not let the word hospital fool us, though. It shares a root with hospitality, and not all hospitals dealt with illness. In England and Wales, 47% housed the poor and elderly. Another 12% housed poor travelers and pilgrims and 10% cared for the non-contagious sick. The rest housed lepers.

Monasteries also gave alms in the form of money or food to the poor. Not enough to keep them from being poor, mind you, and not enough to make a dent in their own riches, but when people are hungry–and this was a society full of people living on the edge–food is food.

No one made plans to replace any of this.

 

Nursery rhymes

According to legend, the nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner come from this time. 

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!

Thomas Horner was (allegedly) steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and before the abbey was destroyed Whiting was supposed to have sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie with the deeds to a dozen manors hidden inside. Because if the Court of Augmentations couldn’t find them, they couldn’t claim them. Possession is nine-tenths and all that.

Again supposedly, Horner opened the pie somewhere along the way and stole the deeds to the manor of Mells, in Somerset, which had lead mines, making the plum in the rhyme a play on the Latin plumbum, meaning lead. 

A Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, but that doesn’t prove he found it in a pie and doesn’t explain why he’s called Jack.

Class and language in England

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In class-obsessed England, one of the bits of wisdom that gets passed from person to person is that the upper class (abbreviated as U) picks its vocabulary from one list and the middle and lower classes (abbreviated as non-U) pick theirs from a different and, oh, so much less prestigious one. Non-U people find four jacks in their card decks and put serviettes on the table. The upper class? Four knaves and table napkins, only they wouldn’t stoop so low as to set the table themselves. Someone would do that for them. Maybe someone even plays cards for them so they don’t have to be bothered. But what do I know? I’m just someone sitting on a couch, working from a recent study on the subject, a couple of articles, many stereotypes, and too many old movies.  

A couch? That’s an Americanism. The U equivalent is allegedly sofa. The non-U for that would be settee. 

How do we know any of this? Well, as it turns out, we don’t. We just think we do. The lists and the shorthand of U and non-U come from the 1950s, when Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, published a paper in that widely read journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, which is–or at least was–published by the Modern Language Society of Helsinki. 

Have you saved your back issues? They might be valuable by now.

 

Irrelevant photo: begonia

 

But it’s about more than vocabulary

Ross didn’t write only about language, he wrote about behaviors that marked the upper classes. (How many upper classes are there by his measure? Haven’t a clue, but the plural has worked its way in here and my job description doesn’t include asking it to leave.) These behaviors, he wrote, included important things like not playing tennis in what the British call braces and Americans call suspenders. 

Okay, I have to interrupt myself here: in British, suspenders are–or were, anyway–those things women wore to hold up their stockings before pantyhose swept them off the field. And yes, I’m sure some men wore them too, but these were the bad old days, so they couldn’t wear them publicly. Americans called them garter belts. In any vocabulary, they were horrible.

Did anyone ever actually play tennis in braces/suspenders? Or garter belts, for that matter? Quite possibly not. Stay with me and we’ll get to that in a paragraph or two. 

Ross claimed the other behavior that marked the upper classes was that “when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.”

That’s the quote that led Grant Hutchison (no linguist; he’s a retired doctor and a careful reader) to decide Ross might not have been entirely serious about all this. It’s a defensible argument. 

Another U behavior Ross mentioned was “an aversion” to high tea. (The quote’s from an article on Ross’s article, not necessarily from Ross himself. Sorry.) 

If you’re not British, you may have high tea mixed up with afternoon tea, so let’s stop and sort those out, because you can never tell when you might need to know this. High tea might sound like it’s what people on the high end of the class hierarchy have, but it’s not. It’s (gasp; horror) working class–the hot meal working people would eat, with tea, when they got home from work. Since they’d eat that at a high table, it became high tea, although the high has dropped away and these days it’s just tea. Exactly who calls the meal tea, as far as I can figure out, depends not just on class but on region. Like everything else involving the English language, it’s complicated. What I can tell you is that people talk about going home to eat their tea. Even after 17 years in this country, it still throws me.

The high-end tea Americans mistake for high tea is afternoon tea. It started out as an elite indulgence that was introduced by the Duchess of Bedford in the nineteenth century, and it involved cake, little sandwiches, titled ladies, and painfully good manners. And maybe some scones, 

These days, the idea of taking a break in the afternoon to have a cuppa has worked its way into the fabric of the country, and along the way it dropped the three-tiered cake stands, the painful manners, and the fancy offerings. But if someone talks about afternoon tea, they’re still talking about the fancy stuff, which will put any thought of supper (or dinner, or [gasp] tea,) out of your mind.

End of digression. We will now rejoin our alleged topic.

 

Alan Ross again

Ross’s paper would’ve been forgotten twenty minutes after it was published if the novelist Nancy Mitford–who was excessively U–hadn’t mentioned it in print, causing the U/non-U distinction and the idea of separate vocabularies to go viral well before going viral was either a phrase or a thing. People didn’t have to read the original article: they knew as much about it as they needed to.

Ross justified his focus on specific words this way:

“It is solely by its language that the [English] upper class is clearly marked off from the others. In times past (e. g. in the Victorian and Edwardian periods) this was not the case. But, to-day, a member of the upper class is, for instance, not necessarily better educated, cleaner or richer than someone not of this class.”

Which made it all the more important not to be mistaken for what was once the great unwashed but was now not only washed but educated and possibly even rich but still not good enough to mix with the aristocracy. 

So what words are giveaways? A few are (allegedly–we’ll get to that): 

  • Drawing room (U) and lounge (non-U). I call it a living room, making me not only not-U but non-non-U. 
  •  Jam (U) and preserve (non-U). 
  • Looking glass (U) and mirror (non-U).

The list is now some 70 years out of date, so don’t take it too seriously. But we’ve recently been handed another reason not to take it to heart: Ross doesn’t seem to have done any research on his topic. His paper was based on armchair linguistics. So to spoil everybody’s fun, two linguists, Natalie Braber and Rhys Sandow, designed some experiments to see if his distinctions hold up, and clever devils that they are, they didn’t ask people directly, because the minute you ask you’ve made people self-conscious about their word choices. In one experiment, they showed people two pictures and asked how they were different, which prompted the participants to talk about different color couches or sofas or settees without thinking about their vocabulary.

They found the supposedly U words sofa and napkin were more common than their non-U equivalents, and if they’re commonly used, then they’re no longer markers of upper classness–if they ever were. On the other side of the scales, the supposedly non-U toilet was more common than the U equivalent, loo. Where they did find a difference in usage, it generally depended on age. Older speakers were more likely to use the non-U serviette and settee, but also the U word loo.

Draw whatever conclusions you can manage.

How do people perceive those words, though? They asked people to judge a writer’s class based on two versions of social media posts, one using supposedly U words and one using supposedly non-U ones. Perception, they reported, wasn’t uniform, but the “higher socioeconomic group” thought sofa was more posh–posh being a non-U word for U. People from the lower socioeconomic group thought settee was more posh.

Everybody seemed to agree that serviette was posh, although Ross listed it as non-U. 

You might’ve noticed that Braber and Sandow are talking about socioeconomic groups, not the aristocracy and the great newly washed. Did that affect the value of their research? Possibly. Also possibly not.

 

What does it all mean?

That Ross is at best outdated and was at worst stitching thin air into a theory. And that if you’re trying to penetrate a class other than the one you were raised in, you shouldn’t start by looking up vocabulary lists, especially ones that are 70 years out of date.