Author Archives: Ellen Hawley

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About Ellen Hawley

Fiction writer and blogger, living in Cornwall.

The Battle of Cable Street 

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Now that Britain’s racist riots are–I hope–behind us, this might be a good time to look back at what happened on London’s Cable Street in 1936.

The background? (If you stay here long, sooner or later you’ll end up slogging through a bit of background.) Hitler held power in Germany and Musolini ditto in Italy. The British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, claimed to have 50,000 members, and I’m not saying it didn’t, only that we’re taking their word for it and–oh, hell, it was a long time ago and for our purposes doesn’t really matter. It was big and it was most definitely fascist, complete with the antisemitism, the black shirts, the salute, and the violence. It had a gang of toughs known as the Biff Boys. 

 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: everlasting pea

The roots of antisemitism

Antisemitism was the Islamophobia of the era (in case you’re tempted to tell me that’s antisemitic, keep in mind that I’m Jewish), and it has deep roots in Britain. We could go back to 1290, when Edward I expelled the Jews from England, but let’s start instead at the turn of the twentieth century, when some of the people who opposed the Boer War (1899 to 1902; I had to look it up) blamed it on the Jews–they were imperialists, financiers, bankers, and capitalists. Not long after that, they were blamed for World War I (because they were financiers etc.) and the Russian Revolution (because they were communists). 

One of the oddities of antisemitism is that the Jews appear as both capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world and communist revolutionaries who want to overthrow the capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world. Basically, it works like this: if you see a problem, the Jews caused it. 

But antisemitism wasn’t all name calling and finger pointing. It was respectable. At University College London, in the name of improving the country’s genetic stock, Karl Pearson opposed Jewish immigration and argued that attempts to improve “inferior races” were a waste. Among other things, his work provided an intellectual grounding for the Nazis’ race theories.  

I focus on Jews here because we’re talking about antisemitism, but to be fair he was generous about handing out inferior race labels. 

Clubs and institutions–think golf clubs and things of that sort–had quotas to limit the number of Jewish members they’d accept. That continued into the 1960s. 

In the early 1930s, fascism was also respectable, not only for its antisemitism but because it offered a bulwark against communism, which in the midst of the Great Depression was a powerful force. Fascism appealed to industrialists who were desperate to keep their workers in line and to aristocrats, who’d lost considerable power–and along with it, money–to the industrialists. Again, to be fair, it didn’t appeal to all of them, but some went for it.

Take, for example, a 1934 headline in the Daily Mail, reflecting the opinions of its aristocratic owner, Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st (ahem) Viscount Rothermere: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Harmsworth saw fascism as the wave of the future, was enthusiastic about Hitler and Mussolini, and opposed votes for women and wrote, “The fact is that quite a large number of people now possess the vote who ought never to have been given it.” 

Archibald Ramsay, son of the Earl of Dalhousie, founded the Right Club,  whose logo was an eagle killing a snake with the initials P.J., standing for “Perish Judah.” 

As an article by Adam J. Sacks points out, any hereditary aristocracy has a built-in affinity with theories about pure blood. “Even today,” he writes, “adoptees into aristocratic families in the UK are ineligible to inherit titles or properties.”

Oswald Mosley himself was a baronet. As titles go, it’s minor-league, but hey, it’s one more title than I have.

Or want.

But why should we spend our time with baronets, viscounts, and other riffraff when we can talk about the king? Edward VIII was openly pro-fascist. After he gave up the throne, he told Hitler, “We are derived from the same race with the blood of the huns flowing in our veins.” He’s on record as having told the Nazi high command “that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.” 

Sacks sums it up by saying, “There is hardly a major British institution that was left untouched by fascism, from the Bank of England to the Daily Mail to the House of Commons. . . . If there is a story to be told about Britain and fascism, let it be this: while the people of Britain stood up to the Nazis, the British ruling class were in many cases enthusiastic collaborators–and found justification for being so in their own aristocratic roots and worldviews.”

 

The British Union of Fascists

Mosley overdid the violence at a couple of BUF rallies, where his Biff Boys beat up hecklers badly and more to the point, visibly, and he lost some of his support. That led him to refocus, organizing in a handful of working class neighborhoods. In 1935, the BUF newspaper said, “We are now the patriotic party of the working class.”

Led by a baronet.

One of the things they did was hold threatening open-air meetings on the fringes of the East End, which in the 1930s was a mainly Jewish neighborhood, and forget that noise about Jewish bankers and financiers, the people here were poor. Soup kitchens had lines outside every night.. And to double down on the parallel between antisemitism and Islamophobia, many of the Jews were immigrants. 

Individual Jews were attacked on the street, shopkeepers were threatened, antisemitic slogans were painted on walls. One or two of the articles talk about the residents feeling like they were living under siege.

 

Enough with the background. What happened?

Mosley announced that the British Union of Fascists would march through the East End, in uniform. 

The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism–the JPC–circulated a petition asking for the march to be stopped. Within two days they’d gathered 100,0000 signatures and the petition was presented to the Home Secretary, who said goodness, no, he couldn’t interfere with freedom of speech or movement. Instead, he sent a police escort (6,000 in one telling, 10,000 in another) to keep protesters from interfering with the march.

The JPC started organizing to do exactly that–interfere. Various sources credit slightly different combinations of groups for this, but let’s go with the counter-demonstrators being from the Jewish and Irish communities, from trade unions, and from the Independent Labour and Communist parties. More respectable Jewish organizations were urging the Jewish community to stay indoors and avoid confrontation. This was very much an action of the left, and the crowd that turned out on the day was big enough to block Gardiners Corner at Aldgate. The estimates I’ve seen range from 100,000 to 300,000. 

The march was made up of 3,000 Blackshirts, and they waited near the Tower of London for the police to clear them a path, which they tried to do by charging the crowd on horseback and wading in with batons. They’d beat the crowd onto the pavement and more people would stream onto the street. Four tram drivers abandoned their trams where they blocked the road.

Meanwhile around the Tower of London, fights broke out between Blackshirts and antifascists. 

Eventually, the police gave up on clearing a path and redirected the march to Cable Street, a narrow street leading to the docks. (In one telling, this was Mosley’s decision.) A combination of Jews and Irish dockers barricaded the street. (The final third of Cable Street was predominantly Irish.)

When the police broke through the barricade, they were faced with a second barricade and while that slowed them down women threw things at them from upstairs windows. 

Eventually the police retreated and told Mosley to head his march in the opposite direction and disperse. 

A member of the Jewish community later said, “I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of fascism.” 

Another said, “it was amazing because we saw Jews, Orthodox Jews with long silk coats and soft felt hats and the sidepieces standing shoulder to shoulder with Irish Catholics, dockers and Somali seamen. . . . They all felt there was a need to be out there to stand on that particular day.” 

A third said, “In Stepney nothing had changed physically. The poor houses, the mean streets, the ill-conditioned workshops were the same, but the people were changed. Their heads seemed to be held higher, and their shoulders were squarer–and the stories they told! Each one was a ‘hero’–many of them were. . . . The ‘terror’ had lost its meaning. The people knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves to do so.”

The acclaim wasn’t universal. Time magazine described it as an “anti-Fascist rampage . . . which turned out to be London’s biggest riot in years.”  

By the end of the day, 85 people had been arrested, 79 antifascists and 6 fascists. Many of the antifascists were beaten by the police and some were sentenced to hard labor. What happened to the fascists who were arrested I don’t know.

Cable Street marked a turning point for the British Union of Fascists. The leaders turned on each other. Some resigned. The organization didn’t collapse but it did lose momentum. It also lost Mussolini’s financial support, which had been substantial. In 1940, not long after the start of World War II, Mosley and other leaders were in prison.

No, Britain hasn’t had a civil war lately

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As you may have read when the UK experienced a series of racist and anti-immigrant riots earlier this month, Elon Musk predicted that civil war was inevitable in Britain.  

Relax, kids. Bad stuff did happen, but a civil war it ain’t, and whatever else Musk is, he’s not a political sage.

 

What did happen? 

Bad stuff, genuinely. It all started when with a knife attack on a dance class in which three young kids were killed and eight people were injured. The attacker was arrested, and a social media campaign claimed he was a Muslim immigrant. He was neither. He was the Welsh-born son of Somali Christian immigrants. 

If anyone knows what his motivation was, they haven’t gone public with it. The best guess going is that he’s crazy, and craziness is an equal opportunity employer, but good luck convincing someone of that if they’ve put their bet on immigrants being the cause of all the country’s problems. Social media blamed an immigrant with a vaguely Muslim sounding (and incorrect) name, so folks got fired up. It was all the fault of immigrants and of Islam. The government was withholding the truth. Somebody had to do something!

The first something they did was riot in the town where the stabbings had taken place, attacking a completely unrelated mosque, burning a police van, and fighting the police–and they had so much fun there that they, or versions of them in other towns, went on to riot in other cities, attempting to burn down buildings housing refugees while people were inside. They also attacked mosques, minority-owned businesses, cars, Muslim gravestones, police, libraries, reporters, photographers, camera crews, individuals who weren’t white, and whatever else was available, including trash cans. 

I saw this broken window and sign in London shortly after the riots ended. I tried to go in and ask what they meant (with my still-American accent, no one’s surprised if I seem clueless), but they were closed. The slogan appeared when David Cameron, the first in a string of Conservative Prime ministers, claimed he was going to fix Broken Britain. We could argue about whether it was, in fact, broken, but he and the Conservative prime ministers who followed him have beyond doubt left it shattered. So I’m genuinely not sure what the thinking is behind this particular sign.

In places, the rioters came with helmets and metal bars, wearing balaclavas, and generally ready for to wreak havoc. An article in Foreign Policy reports rioters yelling, “Go home,” at anyone with brown skin, or more generally, “We want our country back.”

The riots have gotten most of the publicity, but they’ve gone along with a fivefold increase of threats to Muslims–death threats; rape threats; generalized hate messages–and a threefold increase in outright hate crimes against Muslims. (I’m focusing on those because statistics are available, not because threats and attacks are only against Muslims.) Predictably, many Muslims and people of color report not feeling safe in public–which was, of course, the point. An anti-racism activist, Nazir Afzal, said, “This feels targeted against people who are black and brown. I can’t have a conversation with any person of color at the moment without finishing with: ‘Keep safe.’ ”  

 

What’s the background?

The riots make no sense until you look at the background: we have entire dump trucks filled with politicians happy to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. In fact, they’ve built their careers on it. They’re from both the Conservative Party and, to its right, the new Reform UK. I’ll give you just a few of examples or I’ll get too depressed to go on tapping the keyboard:

  • Robert Jenrick, who’s in the running to lead the Conservative Party, called for the immediate arrest of anyone who shouts “Alluhu Akbar” at a protest. Betting sites give him the best chance to win.  So does the Telegraph.
  • The former home secretary Priti Patel got a lot of press for accusing “lefty lawyers” of keeping the government from cracking down on immigration. More recently, she’s accused the Labour government of “two-tier policing,” in which police are harder of whites than Blacks. 

Yeah, I know, but if you lot at the back of the room can stop laughing, please, we’ll go on.

Et cetera. They’ve shifted the conversation around immigration so far to the right that the Labour Party is afraid to say, Hey, this country needs immigrants. They contribute to its economy and culture, even though it’s true and would resonate with a substantial number of voters.

 

Who took part in the riots? 

Some participants were–as the papers put it cautiously–linked to the now-defunct English Defense League, which held that Muslims couldn’t be truly English. Some were Nazis, complete with swastika tattoos and straight-arm salutes. Others may have been football hooligans–a category of troublemaker I’d never heard of before I moved to the UK. They’re basically guys who like football and like a fight, so wouldn’t it be efficient to combine the two? I’ve been told–and it does seem to be true–that the British will organize a club for just about anything, and this is an example: they organize themselves to go out and get in a fight with people who support an opposing team. 

So here was the prospect of a fight. Whee. Let’s go join in. 

Are football hooligans inherently racist? A government site says no, they reflect the communities they come from, so some are and some aren’t.

Not all the rioters were there because they’re racists or hate immigrants, though, and I find that oddly reassuring. They wandered by, saw a riot, and were angry enough that rioting seemed like a great idea, so they joined in. Or saw looting going on and wanted some stuff. As one participant put it, “People just like rioting.”

Listen, fourteen years of Conservative governments have shattered not just the country but a lot of people’s lives. Let’s not be surprised if they’re angry. That wasn’t the cause of the riots, but it does seem to have been part of the picture.

Social media is another part of the picture, and was used in two ways: first to stir people up in general and second to let people know about specific riots. So although the articles I’ve read talk about the British far right as fragmented and can’t pinpoint any organizations responsible for the riots, it does sound like some non-organizations were effective in calling their non-members together. 

According to a former head of MI6’s Russia desk, Russia was involved in instigating the riots. How accurate that is I don’t know. He’s a former-head, not a current one. Tuck the thought in your pocket as a possibility, not a fact.

 

Counter-demonstrations

The day after the first riot, in Southport, neighbors from multiple backgrounds came out to clean up, to rebuild and raise money to rebuild the mosque that had been attacked, and to show solidarity. Any number of them were quoted as saying that the rioters weren’t from around there. 

There’s your first shred of hope for the day.

In Liverpool, an imam prepared for an expected riot by stocking up on burgers, chips (that’s British for french fries; you’re welcome), and cold drinks. About thirty people showed up ready to riot and were met by a couple of hundred who were there to protect the mosque–again, from many backgrounds. The imam crossed over to the thirty, handing out food, drinks, and when possible, hugs. Some people refused to talk with him, but with some he managed a dialogue.

There’s your second shred of hope for the day. 

The rioting lasted about a week and seems to have been stopped by a combination of arrests, with threats of heavy sentences, and large anti-racist counter-actions. There’s your third shred of hope. 

The anti-racist demonstrations really took off after it became known that a list of organizations supporting refugees had been circulated. The organizations on list either were or were believed to be targets for the next set of riots. Many of them were lawyers, and given Suella Braverman’s campaign against “lefty lawyers,” it wasn’t not irrational to think they’d be a target. 

Thousands of people showed up in multiple cities to protect them. 

Your fourth shred of hope is this: On Twitter, someone called RS Archer (@archer_rs) wrote, “I’m a lurking member of some far right discussion forums and they are VERY unhappy. They lament the lack of public support and recognise the fear generated by the high number of arrests and swift convictions. Also a lot of anger toward Farage [the most visible politician in Reform UK] who is seen as abandoning them.”

Who is Archer? No idea. Does he know what he’s talking about? I can’t say. It’s a shred. I won’t tell you it’s more than that, but I’m not above being glad of what it might tell us.

But with or without that fourth shred, sorry, Elon, we don’t have a civil war today and my reading is that we’re not on the edge of one either. We do have some ugly stuff happening, and we do have a problem, but I think we need to discuss the definition of civil war. Once we work that out, we can talk about what it takes to start one. 

Or not. I don’t believe we have the ingredients in stock, but even so I don’t want to hand you a blueprint. 

Who were the Bluestockings?

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You’ve just been dropping into the 18th century. You are a) privileged, b) clever, and c) female. That letter C) is going to cause you trouble. And you can expect some grief from the end parenthesis as well. You’re expected to be mindless, pretty (if possible), and above all, childbearing. After that–well, there is no after that. That’s your role. Abandon hope, ye who expected more out of life.

The rational creatures in your world are all male. Just ask one if you don’t believe it. If you think you’re also rational, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of it, and you’ll cause all sorts of social embarrassment by trying. 

Any form of ambition will also cause embarrassment.

You will, of course, have been educated, but only to be a wife and mother, to manage a prosperous household, and to be decorative–fashionable, demure, graceful, and several other adjectives. You will have learned reading, embroidery, music, dancing, drawing, a little history and geography, maybe a bit of French. Just enough to make yourself agreeable to men and above all, marriageable.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s pretty but it’s invasive.

Those are the limits of your expectations, so let’s shift to the past tense. I don’t want to trap you back there for too long. Or myself. I’m about to hyperventilate.

Did I make any of that up because I’m a childless cat lady? Sadly for the people who lived through that era–and sadly for our era, which inherited a surprising number of assumptions from theirs–no. By way of example, the statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1748 that women “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty-hours together.”

With a bit more generosity, Dr. John Gregory wrote in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of cultivated understanding.”

This is the world the Bluestockings came from and whose conventions they both broke and stayed within. 

 

The conventions they broke

The Bluestockings were never a formal organization. They were a social and intellectual circle made up for the most part of affluent English ladies, and they’re best known today for having hosted gatherings where men and women spoke on equal terms about literature, art, history, philosophy, science, foreign affairs, and pretty much anything except politics. And as Margaret Talbot puts it in the first article I linked to, England made room for them with, “a kind of condescending, self-congratulatory gallantry.” 

They hosted some of the age’s top talent, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, and other men of letters, aristocrats with a literary bent, diplomats, painters, politicians. In short, people who mattered.

But they were more than simply hostesses. These were highly educated women at a time when the doors of any serious school were closed to girls and women. Some were self-educated. Some were educated at home by unconventional parents. But having attained an education against all the odds, they were shut out of most of the public spaces, such as coffee houses, where men discussed the issues of the day. The only way they were going to be part of those discussions was to bring the discussions into their homes. Hence the hostessing.

The men they invited had something to gain as well. Gatherings that discussed serious subjects were in sharp contrast to the usual social evenings of their class, which involved drinking, cards (of course for money, silly), and, as Talbot puts it, getting up to “sexual shenanigans.” That helps explain why the Bluestockings offered lemonade and tea instead of booze.

But the Bluestockings did more than just host salons. Many of them went on to write novels, criticism, history, classical scholarship, and endless letters. Letters were the social media of the day. Others worked as translators. One of them, Elizabeth Montagu, published an essay that was influential in establishing Shakespeare as a central figure in England’s national identity. The essay first appeared anonymously and after it became a smash hit (in the small circles where these things could be smash hits) it was republished under her name. 

Publishing was more than just a way to participate in the national conversation. It was one of the few fields where a woman could keep the money she earned. She couldn’t go into business or own property in her own name, but she could publish. 

 

The conventions they kept

But far from throwing all conventions out the window, they lived the conventional lives of ladies of their class, running their households and caring for aging parents, as women were expected to. Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus held its place as the standard translation for the next century, is described by Gibson as “always careful to present herself as the perfect woman: meek and modest, diffident and self-effacing, completely unthreatening to male authority.” 

She could make a pudding as well as she could translate ancient Greek.

And then there was class. As ladies of their class were meant to be, they were snobs. One, Hannah More, had helped a working class woman publish her first book of poems, and when the book was successful enough to bring in some money she pressured the author to put her money in a trust administered by More and another upper-class Bluestocking, because how could “such a Woman” be trusted with her “poor Children’s money?”

(As you can see from the quotes, they didn’t break the conventions around capitalization either. They capitalized anything they damn well pleased.)

Another tale involves conventions around both class and women’s bodies. And religion. When the widow Hester Thrale married her daughter’s music teacher, her Bluestocking former friends were toxic about it. He was of the wrong class, he was foreign born, and he was Catholic. She was giving in to passion, and they were above passion. As one wrote, “Overbearing Passions are not natural in a ‘Matron’s bones.” 

Part of the problem with passion was that their intellectual claims rested on their respectability. One whiff of scandal and the whole structure might collapse. The rest of the problem was that in their world women were thought of as physical and men as intellectual, and in order to emphasize women’s rationality, they saw themselves as standing outside their bodies. That made them refined and respectable. That was the basis for equal treatment. Lose that and they were back to being just babymakers.

 

Their name

The name Bluestockings came not from what the w\omen wore but from a single man at one of those salons–or so the story goes. A botanist, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was invited and didn’t bother to change from the blue worsted stockings he wore in the field to the white silk stockings upper class men wore to formal occasions. Or else he was invited and declined because he didn’t have the appropriate clothes and his hostess told him to come “in his blue stockings.”

Or else–as one article claims–the respectable stockings were black, not white. It doesn’t matter and I can’t be bothered chasing that down. My money’s on white. Believe whatever version you like. Believe them all if you can manage. Either way, the story has nothing to do with what the women wore. The women accepted and used the term. 

Later, when their time had passed, Bluestocking became an insult–something to call a woman with intellectual ambitions and unbecoming opinions. And the radicals who might would’ve been sympathetic to their inherent feminism overlooked them as elitist and conservative. 

Still, history didn’t erase them. The Bluestockings had an effect on Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and much later Virgina Woolf, and through them, on us.

Nothing is lost. I swear it to you. 

England’s church ales

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If you’ve brushed shoulders with medieval history, you’ll know the Catholic Church wasn’t shy about raising money, but you may have to brush a bit more than your shoulder to learn about church ales. 

They were a way for local churches to raise money and for local people to throw a party, because an ale could involve not just the obvious–ale–but also food, sports, games, music, dancing, and whatever else local tradition dictated. Some were linked to the church calendar–Whitsun ales were common, as were ales to celebrate the church’s patron saint–and others were held to raise money for specific thing. A bride’s ale, for example, would raise money for a poor couple who were getting married, or an ale might also be help to pay the parish clerk.

But they were more than a way to raise money. They were massive social occasions–the kind of events that hold small communities together. 

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

A couple of examples

Woodstock, in Oxfordshire, had a Whitsun ale every seven years. The years without a Whitsun ale were dedicated to sleeping off the hangover, because on the seventh year, look out: the ale began on Holy Thursday and roared on all week. 

Since Whitsun’s related to Easter, following it by a fair few weeks, and since Easter’s related to Passover, which is calculated on a lunar calendar, Whitsun’s a restless holiday that moves around the calendar, usually between May and June. But don’t look at the calendar: whatever the month was, Woodstock set up a maypole, and decked it out with ribbons and flowers. The Duke of Marlborough paid for it. 

Next to the maypole was the drinking booth, and opposite that a shed–okay, a shed some 50 feet long–decorated with evergreens. That was called the Bowery. Not Bowery as in New York’s old skid row. A bowery was a shady, leafy place. Or a dwelling. Or a lady’s bedroom. Or several vaguely related other things.  

Never mind. We’ll come back to this particular Bowery.

A lord and lady were chosen to preside over the ale, along with a waiting-man and a waiting maid and two men who carried a painted wooden horse. We’ll come back to the horse as well.

They’d go around the town in a procession, with the lord and lady offering a Whit cake for people to taste in return for a small payment. Whole cakes were also for sale.

The lady’s parrot and the lady’s nutcrackers were hung up in front of the bowery. These were an owl and a hawk in cages and a pair of threshing flails. Anyone who called them flails, owls, or hawks was fined a shilling. If they didn’t cough up, they were carried around the maypole on the wooden horse. If they still wouldn’t pay up, someone confiscated their hat.

Students from Oxford came over to ride the horse for the sheer hell of it and they frequently ended up fighting with the morris dancers when they wouldn’t pay the shilling.

Did we mention the morris dancers? Morris dancers show up everywhere.

*

In Reading, Berkshire, parishioners also elected a king to preside over Whitsun, and there was ale, morris dancing, and feasting in the churchyard.

If you’re not a fan of morris dancing, I’m sure it looks better after some ale.

At Hock Tide (also linked to Easter but not a religious festival), the women of the parish kidnapped the men on the first day of the festival and held them for ransom, with the money going into the parish funds. On the second day, the men kidnapped the women. 

According to a source on the festival, “In St Laurence’s, there may have been a division of the sexes for the feasting, with the accounts recording separately the ‘wyvis soper [supper]’ and the ‘bachelers soper.’ ”

In some parishes, the women were responsible for organizing the activities for an ale, and at least one set of parish records lists the expense of a supper to thank them for their work. For what it’s worth, in the village where I live, it tends to be women who organize local events, and the organizing itself, although not formally a way to socialize, still brings people together. 

*

In Crowcombe, Somerset, parish ales were held in a two-story house that had been built in 1515, in response to church authorities frowning on ales being held in the church nave. (Naves are where the congregation stood during church services; they didn’t have pews yet, so they were generally the largest open, indoor space in a village, and they were separated from the sanctuary by a screen, which–I’m speculating here–may have made them feel less like a religious space and more like a secular one.)

The house was given by the lords of two manors and the church was to pay rent for it. The goal was to meet the village’s needs for a community space.

Brewing and baking were done downstairs until the mid-1600s, and feasting and dancing were upstairs. Food and drink were carried up an outdoor staircase, in procession.

 

And then it all changed 

While we were paying attention to ales, the Church of England snuck in and replaced the Catholic Church. Some traditions continued seamlessly and others didn’t. Church ales were one of the things that carried over. 

But English Protestantism was made of multiple, conflicting strands, and church leaders gradually turned against ales–first against clerical involvement and later against the ales themselves. 

When the Commonwealth came along in 1649, it brought in an austere form of Protestantism. The monarchy was overthrown, the Church of England ceased to be the state church, and church ales were out.

Then the Commonwealth collapsed and the kings came back, bringing the Church of England with them, but not the ales. The church was happy enough not to revive them. Church rates were a more reliable way to raise money–and an easier one. 

Church rates? They were a tax that went to maintain the parish church, usually collected by churchwardens. The earliest known use of the phrase is from the mid-1600s. They were abolished in 1868–at least in England.    

Some ales were resurrected, both to raise money and to bring the community together. They never became as widespread as they had been, though. They were usually supported by local government or landowners. I’ve found a couple of contemporary ones. In July, Weymouth held a church ale and (yes indeed) teddy bear zipwire. And the parish church in St. Ives, Cambridgeshire, is holding (or just held–they’re less than forthcoming about the dates) a Booze in the Pews festival.

Adults are running Britain again, but there’s still fun to be had at the Tory leadership contest

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Does good news ever comes without a bit of bad news to balance it out? The good news is that Britain has, at long last, put grownups in charge of the government and the country’s a more stable place. On the other hand, I’m not having half as much fun with the news. 

But don’ lose hope. The Conservative Party’s in the midst of a leadership contest. 

Why? Because tradition has it that a party leader who lost an election is no longer suited to be head of the party. You’d have thought fourteen years of running the country would’ve convinced the Conservatives that failure is no obstacle to leadership, but it hasn’t, so they’re looking for a new leader. 

What will the new leader need? First, the backing of 10 Members of Parliament–presumably from their own party, although I can imagine an MP from a rival party thinking it would be a great move to endorse–oh, say, whoever the British equivalent of JD Vance might be. 

But no, probably not. 

A rare relevant photo: This is Li’l Red Cat, a.k.a. Kitten Little, who still can’t figure out why some humans think childless cat lady is an insult.

MPs can only back one candidate, and once nominations close, the Conservative MPs will vote and the top four will go to the next stage. Those four will need to come up with £50,000. If they do, they get to sell their goods at the party convention in the fall. Their money will go toward paying for the convention. 

After the convention and a few dog-and-pony shows around the country, the party’s MPs will vote again, choosing the final two. 

Have you kept track of which shells are hiding the remaining peas, because I’m not sure I have? 

The remaining two candidates now need to come up with £150,000. Why? Because raising that much money is taken as a sign that a candidate is a good fundraiser. 

Being a good fundraiser is taken as a sign that the candidate is a good leader. This doesn’t entirely explain how things have gone so wrong for the party in the past fourteen years, but it could be part of the explanation.

The candidates aren’t allowed to spend more than £400,000 on their campaigns. That’s probably in total, at all stages, but I can’t swear to that. 

After all this spending and eliminating and moving the shells around, the party’s members choose between the two remaining candidates. 

And after that? The rest of us ask, What were you thinking?

*

One of the current crop of contenders, Tom Tugendhat, started his campaign with the slogan

Together we can, 

Unite the party. 

Rebuild trust. 

Defeat Labour.

The capitalization isn’t his (his was all caps), but the line breaks are. When someone noticed that the first letters in each line spell out TURD, the slogan was withdrawn.

Could I make this stuff up? I wish. 

*

And in late news from the election, Jacob Rees-Mogg not only lost his seat in the House of Commons, he had to stand next to a candidate wearing a baked bean balaclava to hear the vote count read. Barmy Brunch was a Monster Raving Loony Party candidate running on a platform of introducing a statutory brunch hour, when all workplaces would have toMake stop and serve brunch. His slogan in Make Brunch Great Again, which at least doesn’t spell out turd.

What (if you’re not British) you ask does that have to do with baked beans? One of the mysteries of British culture is people’s attachment to baked beans. They’re as essential to a full English (or Welsh, or Scottish, or I assume Northern Irish) breakfast as air is to life. So a statutory brunch hour? Yup, baked beans. 

No, I can’t explain it, but I can report that people also eat them on toast and on baked potatoes. Voluntarily. 

Mr. Brunch lost the £500 deposit every candidate has to pay to run in a general election. They get it back if they receive at least 5% of the vote. He got 211 out of 51,267. You’re welcome to figure out what percentage that is. I don’t dare, but it’s less than 5. I expect he’d tell us it was money well spent.

I’m indebted to Fraggle for sending me a link to this priceless piece of political news. I wouldn’t stand a chance of understanding British political culture without it.

 

Politics in the US

I’m originally from the US, but I’ve lived in Britain for the past seventeen years, which is one reason I don’t write much about US politics. The more powerful reason is that what’s happening over there scares me shitless and that makes it hard to keep my sense of humor functioning. 

However, JD Vance’s entry into the vice presidential race is luring me back. 

If you’re not following US politics, Vance is Donald Trump’s running mate, and one of his first contributions to the race was an attack on childless cat ladies who live miserable lives–and apparently run the Democratic Party, and through it, the country. 

As a childless cat lady, I’m honored to be on his enemies list. I haven’t noticed the Democratic Party taking my opinions to heart, but maybe it’s all too subtle for me to see how it works. Perhaps he could mansplain it to me.

Ever since his comment, cat ladies have been coming out of the woodwork, gleefully forming imaginary organizations along the lines of Childless Cat Ladies for Harris. Dog ladies and men of various descriptions–eaten with envy–are announcing similar groups but without getting the same traction as cat ladies. Sorry, folks, it’s just not the same. Social media’s awash in cat lady memes. The best of them urges people NOT to send used kitty litter to Vance at 37 West Broad Street, room 300, Columbus OH 43215.

Given the price of international mail, I wouldn’t dream of it. 

Among the childless people Vance has mentioned are Pete Buttigeig, who has two children, and Kamala Harris, who has two stepchildren. But then, Vance also thinks Britain is an Islamist country, so we shouldn’t expect him to have a close relationship to facts. Besides, Buttigeig is gay as a bedbug, so his kids don’t count. As for Harris, those are stepkids, so where does she get off caring about them?

Vance seems to have done as much to energize Democrats as Harris herself has. Welcome to the race, JD. 

 

Rewilding in Sussex

An effort to rewild an area of Sussex has recruited dog walkers–and more to the point, their dogs–to spread seeds. The theory behind this is that wolves–which have been extinct in Britain since 1760–used to roam, on an average, 20 km a night, getting wildflower and grass seeds stuck in their fur as they went, and dropping them somewhere further on. So dogs are being recruited as the new wolves.

Thank you wolves. The fairy tales that left us terrified of you never mentioned that, but then they were written by humans. Sorry. We all have our biases and we’re sorry about the extinction bit. Really, really sorry. 

The Sussex project is based on one in Chile, which regenerated an area that had been devastated by wildfires. 

Dog walkers in the Sussex wildlife area can pick up doggy backpacks that have been poked full of holes and hold seeds mixed with sand. The person walks on a path. The dog runs wherever it wants, and the seeds filter out as it goes. And the dog walker doesn’t have to feel guilty about letting the dog off the leash.

The sand not only makes the seed go further but lets the rewilders see where the dogs have been. 

The project’s seeing some success already, but since most of the seeds are perennials, they’ll take a few years to establish themselves. 

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

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Like so much of human history, England’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) was played out against a backdrop of absurdity. That’s not to say it didn’t turn deadly with grim regularity, and at the time I’m sure it all would’ve looked perfectly sensible. Looking back, though–

Yeah, there’s nothing like hindsight. Let’s drop in on one small, strange moment.

The year is 1603. Elizabeth I has died and King James is riding from Scotland–where he’s already king–to London to have all the hocus-pocus of becoming the English king performed over and around him. Along the way he stops in Lancashire, and while he’s there, proto-king that he is, he’s handed a petition complaining that the local clergy and magistrates are keeping people from playing traditional games on Sunday. 

This, my friends, is important. So important that we’ll shift to the past tense.

Irrelevant photo: geranium

Enter the Puritans

The Puritans got their start inside the Church of England, and their goal was to cleanse the church of all traces of Catholicism–the ceremony, the fancy clothes, the incense, the stained glass, the bishops, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. And since dancing and Maypoles and archery hadn’t been mentioned–

Okay, I have no idea what was mentioned in the Bible. I’d feel safe betting on Maypoles. Dancing and archery? Those look like shakier ground and I won’t be placing any bets. 

But you know how a movement can start out with one clear argument–being or not being in the Bible is surely as simple as a baloney sandwich–and before it’s even lunchtime people are arguing about ketchup and mustard and pickles? And somebody in a fancy suit wants sliced tomatoes and sourdough bread and swears it’s spelled bologna? 

It was like that. Forget that business about the Bible, the rumor was going around that Catholics encouraged games on Sunday in order to keep people away from Protestant church services. Clearly, the only sensible response was to ban the games. Basically, the idea was to close off all other activities so people would come to church out of sheer boredom, although I don’t suppose they’d have made the argument in quite that way.

 

And now, enter James

James was a good audience for this particular petition. (Remember the petition? If not, return to Go and start over.) Several Puritans writers argued that kings who didn’t support the true religion could legitimately be deposed, which isn’t an argument calculated to win the heart of either king or proto-king. Kings were used to deciding which religion was the true one and watching their subjects fall into line.  

So that didn’t go down well. What’s more, there was a good argument to be made that banning sports on Sunday would drive people not to Protestant services but into the arms of–gasp, wheeze–Catholicism, which didn’t object to a bit of fun on a Sunday.

Sunday, remember, was most people’s only regular day off, so why not allow them a little fun. Catholics would positively come flocking to the Protestant cause.

Once James got to the other side of the checkerboard–or, more accurately, to London–and got himself kinged, he issued the Book of Sports, now known as the King’s Book of Sports, since any idiot can write a book but it takes a certain kind of idiot to be king, and people pay more attention to the second kind of idiot than the first. 

I wish I knew the secret of getting as much press as he did.

 

The book

The book wasn’t actually a book. It was a proclamation allowing (after Sunday afternoon services) dancing, archery, “leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation . . . having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom.” 

Women, as ever, got to have all the fun. They were specifically left out of archery but were at least allowed to take part in the dancing. And no doubt the ales.

But not everything was allowed on a Sunday. There would be no “bear and bull-baiting, interludes, and (at all times in the meane [or in some versions, “meaner”] sort of people by law prohibited) bowling.” 

If you’re having trouble untangling that list, so am I, but it’s not law anymore so we don’t have to lose sleep over it. Tangled or not, though, it calls our attention to the class aspect of the conflict. The original petitioners were from the gentry–the “well-born” people below the level of the aristocracy but very much above, as James had it, people of the “meane [or meaner] sort.” 

Why was bowling on the list of no-no’s? It had become such a craze that working people were thought to be neglecting the work they should be doing. So it was banned for them. But the nation wouldn’t suffer if their betters neglected their duties to roll balls across the ground, because let’s face it, they weren’t producing anything anyway.

 

And so . . .

. . . merriness was restored to merrie England. (Scotland was still a separate country, which just happened to have the same king, so we’ll leave it out of the discussion.) But let’s not get too merrie, because in justifying his decree James mentions not only the likelihood of attracting Catholics to the Church of England, but the importance of healthy exercise in making men “more able for war, when We, or Our successors, shall have occasion to use them.”

Drink, dance, and be merrie, folks, for tomorrow the king may lead you to slaughter. 

Sorry, I always did know how to spoil a party.

In 1618, James ordered that his proclamation was to be read from every pulpit in the country, but in the face of an uproar from the Puritans, and on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he withdrew the order. 

His son, Charles I, wasn’t as wise. In 1633 he reissued the decree, with a few additions, and insisted that it be read, tossing matches into an already combustible situation and leading eventually to the Civil War. 

The class hierarchy in Anglo-Saxon England

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Let’s suppose you’re dropped into Anglo-Saxon England sometime between, say, 866 and 1066. It could happen to anyone, after all. It’s good to be prepared. So how are you going to negotiate the class structure? 

Badly, of course. You’re clueless, you’re an outsider, the class structure isn’t your most immediate problem, and you can’t figure out what anybody’s saying, but set all that aside for now. Let’s magic you up a set of appropriate clothes, slip you a miniaturized translator gizmo that hasn’t  been invented yet, pretend the question makes some sort of sense. The rest of us will hide in the bushes to see how you do. 

But before we start your Anglo-Saxon cheat sheet, a word about disillusionment: you may have read about how free and noble Anglo-Saxon society was. Well, here’s a packet of salt so you can sprinkle a grain or two on your former beliefs. It doesn’t weigh enough to slow you down and you will need it.

Irrelevant photo: rosebay willowherb, a.k.a. fireweed

Slaves

On the lowest rung of Anglo-Saxon society are the slaves–some 10% of the population. (Salt, please.) Some of them are slaves because they were born slaves. Others werethe defeated from one war or another or became slaves as a punishment for some crime–theft, say, or working on a Sunday. (To balance that out, a slave who’s forced to work on a Sunday will–at least in theory– be freed. It’s the one and only legal protection a slave has.) Yet another group sold themselves into slavery as an alternative to starvation. 

Slaves can be sold, and Bristol does a booming business selling slaves to Ireland. Dublin (it’s a Viking port just now) sells Anglo-Saxon slaves on to Iceland, Scandinavia, and Arabic Spain. That makes it pretty well meaningless to say that slaves are 10% of the population, but it’s the number we have, so let’s keep it.

Geburs

Just above the slaves are the geburs–semi-free peasants. (If anyone knows a bit of Old English, be tolerant. One source I’ve found has gebur as a plural and another one swears it’s singular. I’ve added an S for luck.) By the middle of the 1000s, they make up about 70% of the population and they owe their labor to their lord in return for the land they farm. When the Normans invade, they’ll be called villeins. We’d call them serfs. That’s another way of saying that feudalism, which we tend to think was introduced by the Normans when they invaded, had deep roots in free, upstanding Anglo-Saxon England. But we’ve now accounted for 80% of the population and we still haven’t run into anyone who’s free. You’ve got some salt left, don’t you? Toss a little more on.  

Coerls

Above the geburs are the free peasants–coerls–and the way to tell them from the unfree peasants is that they can sell their land. Or give it away. They have a lord–everyone in Anglo-Saxon society does–but they can choose theirs. They can also carry weapons (that might be a more useful identifier, come to think of it) and if they’re accused of a crime they can prove their innocence by swearing an oath. Because clearly they wouldn’t lie.

They can do the same for other people, so you might want to keep a coerl handy in case you violate a law you didn’t know about. It’s easy to do when you’ve just wandered in. The men can fight in the army–in fact, if the king commands it, they have to–and have a share of the village land and flocks. They play a part in the village courts this, I think, is where that image of freedom comes from. The Normans handed the administration of justice over to one person, the lord of the manor. By comparison, yes, Anglo-Saxon justice looks pretty good. 

Exactly how much of these freedoms also apply to women isn’t clear in the sources I’m using here. Women have far more rights in Anglo-Saxon England than they will for centuries to come. Sorry not to chase up a bit more detail, but I’m short on time just now.

In practice, many coerls aren’t much better off than their neighboring gebur. They make up some 15% of the population, so we’ve now accounted for 95% and we’d better hurry and squeeze in everyone who’s left.

The fine print

In the east of England, the whole system of lords and manors and labor service seems to have been weaker than in the rest of the country. And by the end of the period we’re talking about, a coerl could move up and become a thegn by owning five hides of land, a bell house, and having a place in the king’s hall.

What’s a hide? Don’t worry about it. It’s a measurement of land.

And a bell house? Well, kiddies, an extensive two-minute search of the internet informs me it’s a house with a bell. In a tower. To summon people to prayer and whatever else you might want to summon them for. All of which tells us that the society allows for social mobility. That’s generally considered a good thing, and I’m not against it, but I’ll need a little more salt if we start talking about it as a great thing, because while social mobility works well for the people who move up the ladder, it does fuck-all for the people who don’t. 

Yes, I do swear. It’s good for me. It also helps with the earth’s rotation.

Shall we move on?

Thegns

This is the most varied category, ranging from minor nobility at the top down to their retainers. They form the backbone of the army and if they’re rewarded for some spectacular service with land they can become earls. If you want a comparison to post-invasion England, think of them as the country gentry. 

How much of the population are they? Annoyingly, the book I’m working from, Life in the MIddle Ages: Scenes from the Town and Countryside of Medieval England, by Martyn Whittock, switches from percentages to absolute numbers here, so 4,500 held estates that were defined by charters. 

Why do the charters matter? Because those are the records historians can work from. They’re a way to count them.

After this, we’ll stop counting because the numbers are too small. Also because I don’t have any numbers to give you.

Ealdormen

This translates as elders, but they’re powerful nobles who play a role in local government, the king’s court, the army, and the courts of justice. 

Earls

They have authority over regions that were once independent kingdoms. The position isn’t hereditary but by the end of the period it becomes customary to choose an earl from within a small group of powerful families.

The king

Here I can give you a number again: they have one lone king–at least once Anglo-Saxon England is consolidated into one lone kingdom–and the king has one lone family, or at least one that’s recognized. But kingship isn’t hereditary in the way most of us expect. The witan–a council of the most powerful nobles–chooses the king from within the royal family.

Don’t worry about that. You’re not likely to meet any of them, so fix your attention on the lower ranks.

How people slept in the Middle Ages

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Asking how people slept in the Middle Ages sounds embarrassingly pointless. Surely the answer is, the same way we do. 

Well no, they didn’t. That would make the post too short and I want to be sure you get your money’s worth here. They broke the night into two separate sleeps, which is the same way everybody in the pre-industrial world seems to have slept. The sources I’ve found are heavily tipped toward Europe, but some say the practice clings on in unindustrialized pockets of the world today. 

 

A rare relevant photo: Bedstraw

The two sleeps

We’re talking, remember, about a time before there was much in the way of artificial lighting, so no electricity, no gas lamps. They had candles, sure, but they were expensive and weren’t all that bright. And when people went to bed,they either blew them out or risked burning down the house. So when it got dark, they–or most of them anyway–toddled off to bed. 

We’ll talk about the definition of bed in a minute.

A couple of hours later, they woke up, not because that was the plan but because they just did, and they spent another couple of hours–let’s say from 11 to 1, although no one would’ve been watching the time–either lying awake or up and about, in both cases without fretting about what was wrong or how they were going to get back to sleep, because waking up in the middle of the night was just what happened.

This went on into the early nineteenth century, and a couple of studies have documented this way of sleeping among non-industrial people and people asked to live without industrial-age lighting and entertainment. 

 

What did they do in the interval between sleeps? 

Some people lay in bed and chatted, because at least in the medieval era, rare was the person who slept alone. Some got up and worked–by moonlight, by starlight, by rushlight (those were the waxed stems of rushes–the candle-substitutes of ordinary households), by candlelight if they could afford candles–although the people who could you probably didn’t need to work in the middle of the night. 

All the folks you’d expect to recommend prayer and meditation recommended the time between sleeps as a time for prayer and meditation, and no doubt some people did both. Folks drank their religion straight back then: no ice, no mixers.

I’ve read about monks and nuns getting up in the middle of the night and traipsing to the chapel for prayers, and it’s sounded downright punitive. I imagined someone having to haul them out of their sleepy little beds. This puts it in a different light. They were awake anyway. If the purpose of their lives was to pray, this was a time to go pray.

The time between sleeps was also a time for sex, and was considered a particularly good time to conceive children.  

Sex when people weren’t sleeping alone? For one thing, sharing a bed didn’t mean all its occupants had to get up or stay in bed in unison. For another–I’ll go out on a limb here (I’ve read this somewhere but haven’t looked for a source to confirm what my memory insists on) and say that sex wasn’t thought of as something people should do in private. Privacy wasn’t a thing yet. (Sex has always been a thing. In the early Middle Ages, even your local lord and lady bedded down in the hall with their kids, their hangers-on, their guests, their attendants, their servants, and anyone I’ve forgotten to list. The solar–a room for the aristocrats alone, along with maybe a servant or three on hand in case they were needed–didn’t come into existence until midway through the medieval period. 

Eventually, people went back to bed for what was called their morning sleep. 

 

Bed sharing

Beds were communal places, and an entire family might sleep together, with the couple in the middle, the girls arranged on the side nearest the wall, with the youngest closest to her mother, and the boys on the other side, also in age order. 

But it wasn’t just the family tucked up in bed. Non-family members would also be likely to crawl in, and they’d be on the outside–guests, friends, servants. And, as one article I found reminds us all, fleas and lice. When people traveled, strangers who stayed at inns would share a bed.

Sleepers and would-be sleepers were expected to minimize their fidgeting and avoid physical contact.

 

Beds

If you were rich enough in the medieval era, your bed was elaborate and impressive, with several mattresses–straw, then wool, then feather, and sheets, blankets, coverlets, pillows, bolsters, all that good stuff. The bed was your most important piece of furniture.

A coverlet? That was a bedspread, although in recent times it seems to have wandered off and become something smaller. 

The curtains and canopies we think of as the mark of the nobility’s beds came into use midway through the medieval period. 

Middle-ranking people had beds with simple wooden bedsteads with plain headboards and as much of the accompanying stuff as they could afford. The main thing was that they were up off the floor. 

Everyone else? It depends on what stretch of time we’re talking about, but at least in the early medieval period, they slept on the floor. They might have had a mattress stuffed with straw, wool, hair, rags, or feathers, or some mix of them. Whatever it was made from, it could be moved out of the way during the day. 

As I write this, a couple of wildflowers called bedstraw and lady’s bedstraw have just come into bloom in the hedges. I haven’t been able to find out much about bedstraw itself, but lady’s bedstraw (the lady in question of the Virgin Mary, not the local Lady Muck) was added to straw mattresses both for its fragrance and to keep fleas away. It was also believed to ease a birth.

If you were at the bottom of the economic and social heap, you slept on straw or hay–or according to one website, the earthen floor. A BBC article says the poor might sleep on a scattering of heather, and I hate to argue with the BBC, but we have some growing out back and it’s pretty woody stuff. I haven’t tried sleeping on it but I have a hunch I’d do better on the bare ground.

 

How do we know any of this?

In the 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch was researching a book on the history of nighttime. He wasn’t expecting to find anything new for a chapter on sleep, but how could he write about night and ignore sleep? So good historian that he was, he started digging through court depositions, where all sorts of odd and wondrous facts about everyday life can be found.

What he found was a seventeenth-century case mentioning, casually, the first sleep, which implies a second sleep. The case was about an incident that happened in the interval between the two. He kept digging and found many mentions of what he was now calling biphasic sleep. It showed up in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles, ballads, and plays. He found records or hints of it in Europe, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America, and the Middle East, the earliest dating back to the eighth century BC.

And somehow, all of that had slipped out of our awareness and our histories.

*

Important information about Britain’s recent election

In last week’s post, I missed a crucial bit of lunacy about the election. Nick the Incredible Flying Brick stood as a candidate for the Monster Raving Loony Party in Holborn and St. Pancras. His statement to voters said, “We have a manic-festo that includes scrapping January and February. It would help with fuel bills and the cost of living.” He got 162 votes against Keir Starmer’s 18,884.  

Somebody mentioned him in a comment, and I did look for it so I’d know who to thank, but I’m damned if I can find it now. Whoever you are, my thanks. Along with my apologies.

Odd stuff about Britain’s election

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By the time you read this, Britain will have a new government, and if you want details on that you’re in the wrong place. I’m writing this on the day of the election (which is also the day before I post) and I’ll be snoring by the time the results come in.  

So what can I tell you about the election, then? 

Semi-relevant photo: A red flower. A peony in this case, not the red rose that Labour uses as its logo.

Forget the polls . . .  

. . . let’s turn to Etsy for a prediction.

  • Someone was selling a Tory Meltdown Wallchart (Tory is another name for the Conservatives). It divides candidates into ranks from “the inevitable” (bound to lose their seats) to “there is a God” (their loss would be a gift from the universe). 
  • Other people were selling bingo cards–two versions, both intended to help players enjoy Tory losses. The promo on one said, “Even if you lose the game, you win.” One was called Tory Wipeout Bingo.
  • You could also buy assorted games where you gain points by spotting things–a Labour majority of more than 100, say, or any mention of Boris Johnson.

As the votes were being counted, a website, Portillogeddon.com, went live. If Liz Truss lost her seat, a lettuce was programmed to fall from the sky.

The virtual sky, I assume. 

Why a lettuce? Because Truss’s prime minister-ship (Tory, of course–they’ve had 14 years in power) got into trouble so soon that an inspired website trained a camera on a head of lettuce to see if it would outlast her.

It did.

And Portillo? Wiktionary defines a Portillo moment as “an election loss for a prominent politician.” It comes from the surprise 1997 defeat of Conservative defence secretary Michael Portillo, who was even being talked about as a future leader of his party. His opponent was so sure he’d lose that he didn’t write a victory speech.

That was part of a Labour landslide that ended 18 years of Tory rule, and as you may have gathered, a lot of people have been watching for Portillo moments. Labour was expected to win a majority that falls somewhere between huge and groundbreaking, and by now the Conservatives might have succeeded in landing not in second place but in third. It’s going to be an interesting night. I’m going to bed. The news will all be there in the morning.

As for the voting itself . . .

. . . the British press are sworn to silence about the voting until 10 pm. That leaves reporters posting stories about tortoises at polling places, or horses, along with lots of dog photos. The BBC took a quick run through (I assume) its files to come up with odd election day stories, and since I’m going to bed instead of staying up to post details you can find out in more detail on some more sensible site, that leaves me posting odd election day stories. I’m indebted–as I often am–to the BBC.

In 2021, a chicken wandered into a polling station in Lancashire, unaccompanied by any human, voting age or otherwise. It was friendly and it stuck around so long that the people in charge took to saying, “Come in, don’t mind the chicken.”

When they couldn’t trace the owner, a local farm family offered to take it for the time being. That seemed like a good solution. Exit chicken, in the hands of the farmers.

Minutes later, a five-year-old showed up. The chicken was his pet and its name was Matilda.

Cue panic. Had they just given Matilda to heartless, chicken-eating farmers?

Well, no, they hadn’t. They were farmers, definitely, and chicken-eating, possibly. But heartless, no. The farmers put Matilda in a pen with other chickens, although that turned out to be a bad decision. The home-team chickens decided Matilda was what was wrong with their lives and all proceeded to peck her until her family swooped her up, took her home, and gave her a bath.

I’m going to assume that Matilda liked her baths, although I’m making that part up. 

A few hours later–presumably Matilda and her pet boy had recovered by then–the family came back to the polling station to say thanks, bringing chocolates and a tray of eggs. 

*

At a different polling station, a woman dropped her ballot into the box and her engagement ring followed it in. Her £40,000 engagement ring.

Could they open the box, please, so she could have it back?

Well, no, they could not. Ballot boxes stay sealed until the votes are counted, so the woman had to wait until the end of the day, then go where the votes were counted and wait until they got around to her particular box. That gave her all kinds of time to consider the wisdom of getting her ring resized.

Until 15 years ago, ballot boxes were closed with sealing wax, and if the wax got hot enough the wax would smolder, raising the possibility–however remote–that the ballots themselves would catch fire. And, of course, poll workers weren’t allowed to take the wax off. That would invalidate the ballots. 

The BBC says, “Polling station workers couldn’t open the box to put out the potential flames so instead had to find a way to get liquid into the box to put out the fire without causing too much damage to the votes.” 

Into the box? Wasn’t the wax on the outside? Almost surely, since no one’s small enough to seal the box from inside, then slither out. Let’s not worry about it, though. Let’s just enjoy the thought and not lose sleep over the mechanics.   

Britain’s Amateur Archeologists

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Let’s take a moment to appreciate Britain’s amateur archeologists–the people who do grunt work for real archeologists, who wave metal detectors over unpromising ground to see what turns up, who follow local legends and either find something ancient or go to the pub and decide when to try again. 

Okay, I can’t tell how fully appreciative you just were, so I’ll take us through a few things amateurs have done lately and see if we can’t push the appreci-ometer upwards a bit.

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, a.k.a. rose of sharon

The Palace of Collyweston

Collyweston was home to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, but by the modern era the palace had disappeared so thoroughly that efforts to find it in the 1980s and 1990s came up with nothing. 

Enter the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society. It had three things going for it when it decided to look: a group of amateurs, ranging in age from their teens to their 80s; local legend; and ground-penetrating radar. 

Yeah, that last thing was important. Equally important, I suspect, was a fourth thing: local people, some of whom had grown up hearing about the palace. It was out there and they damn well wanted to find it.

“We had no money, no expertise, no plans, no artist impressions to go off,”  the society’s chair said, “and nothing remaining of the palace. It’s naivety and just hard work that has led us to it.”

They used “local folktales and hearsay” to narrow down their search, then they brought in the radar and got permission to dig in people’s gardens, where they found stone mouldings–the remains of the castle. Historians from the University of York will verify their findings, plan the next moves, and preserve what’s been found. 

It’s got to be exciting, seeing a castle emerge from your compost heap, your veg bed, or your kids’ sandbox. 

 

A Bronze-Age Hoard in Dorset

A retired pensions consultant paid £20 to join a group of metal detectorists working on private farmland in Dorset, but he managed to get himself lost and ended up with what he called the find of a lifetime. About 8 inches below ground, he found a sword from the middle Bronze Age, a bronze ax head, and what the paper’s calling “a decorative arm bangle.” Before I moved to Britain, I read about bangles and wondered what they were. Allow me to translate in case you’re as clueless as I was: a bangle is a “stiff usually ornamental bracelet or anklet slipped or clasped on.” So, basically a bracelet. Unless of course it’s on an ankle, but let’s not complicate things. 

You feel much wiser now, right? 

The director of collections at the Dorset Museum said, “This hoard is incredibly special. The rapier sword is unusual because of the cast bronze handle. The bracelet decoration was quite unusual as well. . . . Finds like this tell us about how people were traveling, meeting, and exchanging ideas with others on the continent in the centuries before the Roman invasion. 

“There was a farming community here and people generated enough wealth to be able to barter for or exchange objects others had made.”

And since nothing matters in our culture unless it can be measured in money, let’s give it a price: the museum raised £17,000 to buy the finds. That was divided between the finder and the landowner.

 

Deep Time

This is a project that had some thousand people looking through high-resolution satellite images and I have no idea what else to find hints of archeological sites. They covered some 200 square miles of ground in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Dorset, finding Bronze Age burial mounds, Roman roads, abandoned medieval villages, and some 13,000 other old places. 

Okay, potentially old places. The next step is to go out in the field and decide which sites to excavate. 

 

And in General . . .

. . . amateur archeologists are having a moment. A long moment. 

Back before the pandemic (remember a time when you didn’t know the word pandemic?), my partner and I joined some other volunteers at Tintagel Castle, in Cornwall. The glamorous work involves uncovering stuff, in this case the foundations of several early medieval buildings on a headland surrounded by the Atlantic on three sides. 

We joined the crew that came along to rebury what the first crew had uncovered. The idea is uncover, document, and then rebury in order to preserve. It’s less glamorous than finding, but it left us with a strong sense of connection to the site. And working in dust and a wet, salty wind, left us dirtier than I’d thought it was possible to be. Salt, it turns out, binds dirt to the human skin in ways that no one has yet explained to me.

More recently, schoolkids have unearthed what’s being called a 1,400-year-old possible temple near Sutton Hoo. (Sutton Hoo itself is an over-the-top medieval burial involving an entire ship and a shipload of treasure.)

More schoolkids helped unearth a Bronze Age hillfort in Wales. Injured ex-servicemen helped with excavations in the Salisbury Plains, and in Greenwich Park (that’s Greenwich as in Greenwich Mean Time) volunteers have uncovered Charles II’s steps, a swallow brooch, clay pipes, coins, the lens of a sextant, and a Sony mobile phone “that was buried pretty deep.” 

Earlier community excavations in Greenwich found a World War II air-raid shelter and a Saxon burial mound. 

A TV show, The Great British Dig: History in Your Back Garden has encouraged people to find out what they’re living on top of. Its presenter–an archeologist–talks about Britain as having been densely populated, which increases the odds of an amateur finding something. Put a shovel in the earth and who knows what will come up. In our very own back yard, I found a small plastic toy spawned, no doubt, by a TV show I’m not familiar with. I reburied it–uncover, document, rebury in order to preserve. It will be a golden find for some future archeologist. 

Lord Google, who’s always anxious to help, thought I’d want to know about ways a person can volunteer on a dig and led me to the Council for British Archaeology. (Please note the stray A wandering around the word archeology. It’s presence is what tells you the organization is genuinely British, not some American knock-off.) 

Yes, you can volunteer on a dig. You can be a Casework Input volunteer and help plow through applications involving historic buildings in England and Wales. You can join a local group. You can “inspire young people.”

Sorry, at that point they got too upbeat for an old cynic like me and I closed the tab. But never mind. You can sign up to help on a dig, although some digs will cost you, because volunteering ain’t necessarily free.