Category Archives: History

The Gordon Riots

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As the 18th century limped to its end, leading British Catholics were paying court to King George III, assuring him and whoever else would listen that they were loyal subjects and could be trusted around gunpowder and sparklers. There’d been centuries of official hostility toward Catholics, but surely it was time to move on. And it seemed to be working. In 1778, Parliament passed the Papists Act, “Relieving his Majesty’s Subjects professing the Popish Religion from certain Penalties and Disabilities imposed on them by an Act, made in the eleventh and twelfth Years of the Reign of King William the Third, intituled, An Act for the further preventing the Growth of Popery .” 

It didn’t grant them freedom of religion and it didn’t bother to call their religion by its proper name, but it allowed Catholics to serve in the military if they swore their loyalty, allowed them to buy property, and reversed some bits of anti-Catholic legislation that dated back to 1698. It looked like everyone would come out ahead: the Catholics would have more freedom and the country would have more soldiers, which would be no bad thing, what with a growing empire and a war or three on its hands (France, Spain, the newly formed United States).  

What a deal. 

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s Wort, or rose of sharon

Not everyone was convinced, though. Catholics with political foresight saw trouble brewing. You know what it’s like: when a group of people have been discriminated against for long enough, a certain number of them become delicately tuned to the scent of brewing trouble. They also saw that the old law had pretty well fallen out of use and Catholics from Ireland and the Scottish highlands were already serving in the army. Wouldn’t it be smarter to leave well enough alone? The hatred of Catholics might have died down a bit but the embers were still burning. 

They had a point. Lord Gordon–a Member of Parliament–and the Protestant Association grabbed hold of the new law and used it to fan the aforesaid embers, and at this point I’ll sneak away from that metaphor before I burn down any forests. We’re in a drought here and it wasn’t an original image anyway. 

 Gordon et al claimed that the minute Catholics were in the army they’d plot rebellion. They’d foment treason. They’d join forces with European Catholics to attack Britain. They’d use the blood of Christian children to make their–

Nope, sorry, wrong conspiracy theory. I do struggle to keep them all straight. They’d jump into small boats and–

Nope, not that one either. Never mind. Bad things would happen. Overwhelmingly bad things, and to stop them a petition was circulated, calling for repeal of the new law, and for anyone who’s too young to remember the world before the internet, this was back when petitions were pieces of paper that had to be circulated by hand and signed with– Do you remember pens? They were signed with pens that had to be dipped in ink because they didn’t even carry their own supply.  

It was all difficult enough that a huge petition was a measure not only of public sentiment but of the political will behind it. This one accumulated some 45,000 signatures.

 

The riots

To deliver it, Gordon led some 50,000 followers to Parliament, and some of them broke into the building, intimidating enough MPs that they agreed to debate the issue at a later date. Which didn’t settle anyone down and a week of rioting followed, targeting Catholic chapels, Catholics’ property, the embassies of a couple of Catholic countries, and Catholics themselves, mostly working class Irish Londoners–people working class English Protestants saw as competition for jobs. 

The rioters also turned against authorities in general, burning down Newgate Prison (it had just been rebuilt) and releasing rioters held inside. They attacked the Bank of England, burned the tollbooth on Blackfriars Bridge, and harassed both onlookers and politicians. Shops, pubs, and other prisons were attacked. Bonfires burned across the city. Respectable observers–or some of them anyway–thought they were watching the beginning of a revolution.

When the Bank of England was attacked, the City authorities woke up, said some era-appropriate version of “Oh, my ears and whiskers how late it’s getting,” and sent armed troops and the City’s volunteer militia. By the time the riots ended, the troops had killed hundreds of people and arrested an additional 450. Afterwards, 26 were hanged.

 

So what was all that about?

I’m tempted to write that political change had run ahead of public opinion, but I’m not convinced anyone knows whether the riots reflected majority opinion. This was before polling, and we could have an interesting argument about how well polls reflect public opinion anyway.

What’s certain is that Gordon had tapped into a longstanding current of anti-Catholicicism and also that other channels of anger flowed into the riots. Exactly what those channels were, though, is hindsight. One article lists anger at poverty, at inequality, and at the justice and political systems. A good Wikipedia article quotes multiple conflicting interpretations of the riots, some of them overlapping:

  • The grievances were nationalist, economic, or political, rather than religious and Britain’s poor economy was a factor. Wages were falling, prices were rising, and people were out of work sporadically. 
  • The Catholic community wasn’t targeted so much as the rich. 
  • Or possibly the opposite. 
  • The article quotes someone as saying, “No matter how much one would like to interpret the Gordon Riots . . . as economically motivated, they remain fundamentally anti-Catholic in character.” 
  • And finally, many participants wanted the assorted wars to end. Others were supporters of American independence, and some wanted the right to vote widened.

Maybe we can settle for saying that people had a mix of reasons for rioting and that many of them could’ve been contradictory. What seems fairly certain is that they were angry and Gordon cranked them up and presented them with a handy target, Catholics. And it always helps to have a respectable leader saying that rioting’s good idea. 

 

The aftermath

After it all died down, Geroge Gordon was arrested and charged with high treason and he sat in jail for eight months, then he was found not guilty. Compared to being hanged, that looks pretty good.

The riots convinced the rest of Europe that constitutional monarchy was an inherently unstable form of government. That was lousy timing for Britain, which needed allies in its fight against the newly formed United States and wanted to undercut the support the US was getting from Spain–which was, awkwardly, Catholic and even more awkwardly now pulled out of some secret negotiations the two countries had been engaged in.

The riots also drew attention to Britain’s lack of a professional police force, which the people who decided these things had considered foreign and absolutist but which now looked less foreign and less absolutist.

 

Catholic emancipation

In 1791, the Catholic Relief Act pushed Catholic emancipation further, allowing Catholics the freedom to worship, run their own schools, hold junior public offices, and live inside of London. After that, Catholic rights got tangled up in Irish politics, where colonialism met nationalism met religion, resulting in some bitter history, many deaths, and some damn good songs. For fear of losing control of Ireland completely, Parliament passed the 1829 Catholic Emancipation Act, allowing Catholics to vote, to become Members of Parliament, and to hold (most) senior government offices, although they still had to pay tithes to the Anglican Church.

Most of the last restrictions were lifted in 1926. One had been left in place to this day: a Catholic still can’t inherit the throne.

1832: Britain expanded the right to vote

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You know how sometimes you fix a thing and end up making it so complicated that the only solution is crawling back to bed for a week or two, by which time no one will remember your part in it? Well, in 1832 Parliament rewrote the rules on who could vote. The bill’s usually told as a tale of progress, one step in the inexorable march toward democracy. 

Forgive me if I sound cynical. People died for the right to vote, and they had good reason to think it mattered. They couldn’t have guessed how many ways universal suffrage could be turned into a sham. Still, the progress story’s not wrong, it’s just more complicated than it looks. As usual.

What Parliament did was layer the new system over the old one and the result was messy enough to drive a Methodist to drink. Before I try to explain it, though, this might be a good time to pop an aspirin. Even Methodists allow themselves an aspirin when faced with something this headache inducing. 

I’m indebted to The History of Parliament website for most of what you’ll find here. I’ve linked to them before but never thought to acknowledge them directly. Thanks, folks.

Irrelevant photo: zantedeschia

 

A few people lost the vote under the new system

Overall, the 1832 reform increased the number of people who could vote, but some people were disenfranchised. Most of them don’t sound like people we’d waste sympathy on: they’d once had the right to vote in places where they didn’t live. I’m oversimplifying here but I’m telling you as much as I can untangle. Any more than that and I’ll be making it up, so don’t complain. Just take another aspirin. You’re supposed to take them in twos anyway.

Another group who lost out were women. Not many managed to vote under the pre-1832 rules, but there were a few, because the old system hadn’t specifically limited the vote to men. (That link refers you to myself–sorry–and an older post about women who did vote.)  Tradition did the work of keeping most of them away from the polls, but the old system left loopholes and a few women wriggled through, for all that they had huge sleeves and tiny waists, or so the 1830 fashion drawings swear. 

Fashion drawings wouldn’t lie. 

The new rules closed the loophole and left the tiny waists. And no doubt the sleeves.

 

Definitions

When you see the word  borough, you won’t go too far wrong if you substitute town or city. When you see county, try not-borough. It’ll work well enough. This matters because the rules are different for counties and boroughs. In both places, your right to vote rested on how much property you had, but having a single rule for both places would’ve been way too simple. 

Let’s tackle them separately.

 

Borough voters

Who could vote in the boroughs? Ooh, call on me, teacher, I can answer that: Any adult male who met the property qualifications and who lived within seven miles of the borough. Unless they were ancient-right voters–people who were claiming their right under the pre-1832 rules, in which case they had to live seven miles from the borough’s former main voting place. 

For new £10 households, though, the distance was measured by a straight horizontal line from the borough’s new boundaries.

If you’re still with me at this point, that’s good, because I’m not sure I am. Especially when it comes to the line being horizontal. 

If a voter met all those qualifications but had gotten alms or poor relief from the parish in the past year–even a free vaccination (smallpox vaccines date back to the previous century)–he lost his right to vote. 

If his borough was recognized before 1832, the £10 freehold was the only qualification he had to meet. If it wasn’t, then his borough carried over its ancient-right qualifications as well, no matter how much it complicated the picture.

You didn’t follow that? Good. Your mind’s still functioning.

Quick quiz: What’s a £10 household? It meant someone–let’s say you for the sake of simplicity–rented, leased, or owned a property that would bring in a rent of at least £10 a year. It could be a house, a shop, a warehouse, a whatever. Except that you had to have had it for at least a year and to have lived in the borough for at least six months. 

Only that’s too simple. You had to have paid up any parish poor rate and local taxes. And you had to pay a shilling to register.

But what about freemen, who were also known as burgesses or liverymen? If they didn’t live in the borough, they were disqualified. (There’s that business about people losing their vote.) Unless they were resident freemen who could vote on or before 1 March 1831 and could, therefore, keep right on voting during their lifetimes, as could their sons, but again I’m simplifying. I’m worried about that aspirin bottle, which is running low. And the Methodist is eyeing the gin.

Local customs determined how many sons could inherit a father’s freeman status, so that would vary from borough to borough.

If a freeman’s name dropped off the electoral register for two years running, he wasn’t sent back to Go, he was tossed out of the game entirely.

But we’ve left out a few ancient-right voters.

Ancient what? We did that before, or I think we did. Those were voters under the old law who could still vote as long as they still met their original qualifications and hadn’t dropped off the register for two years running.

First come the scot and lot voters–residents who paid local taxes. Scot came from the Anglo-Saxon silver coins called sceats. Lot? That meant a portion or part. 

Don’t ask me. 

Next come potwallopers, also called potwallers. They were residents who boiled their own pots. No, I don’t make this stuff up. I wish I could. It meant they had someplace to cook. I’m not going to tell you anything more about either category. I only mention them so you’ll understand what I’m sparing you, and I’ll bail out before we get to inhabitant householders,  inhabitants-at-large, burgage holders or tenants, and freeholders (who are not to be confused with freeloaders).

If your disappointed at the simplicity of all that, remember that boroughs would each have had their own layers of complexity to stretch over the basic system.

 

Counties 

Think it’s easier to live in the country? Well, again the basic qualification was that you had to be male and own property–legally, mind you, and for six months before the election if it was freehold or twelve if you were a leaseholder or occupier. Unless a few other conditions applied, in which case you got to roll the dice an extra time and throw popcorn at the other players.

What you didn’t have to do (mostly) was live in your property (the “mostly” is there because you did have to occupy some kinds of property). Living outside the country where you voted would make you an outvoter, as a lot of county voters were.

Except that some people who could vote in the counties did have to live there. 

Squint a little and that’ll all make sense. After that, don’t worry about it. 

You could be a county voter even if you didn’t pay local taxes.

Of course, if you were a freeholder, copyholder, or leaseholder, terms and conditions applied. Just check the box. Don’t bother to read the small print. No one does.

The property that gave you the right to vote didn’t have to be land or buildings. It could be shares in mines, canals, gasworks, cemeteries, sewers, steam engines, or burial plots. It could have been the right to collect tolls or tithes, and I’m not sure how or why, but church pews is on the list. 

Could someone amass enough church pews to gain the right to vote? Did the pews have to be in a church or could they just pile them up in a barn? I’ve read that the lord works in mysterious ways but what with being an atheist and all I had no idea how mysterious–not to mention strange–that could be. 

If you had freehold property, it had to be worth £2 a year in income or rent. 

After that it gets into leasehold property and you had to balance the value of the property against the length of the lease, not to mention the sub-leases or assignees of the above but only if they were resident and in actual occupation.

Have you ever wondered why lawyers were invented? And that’s before we mention fifty-pounders, occupiers, or £50 tenants-at-will. Those were tenants, who are lowly creatures, but if they paid a high enough rent, what the hell, they could vote. So could some of the people who lost their right to vote in a borough–they could use the property that wasn’t eligible in the borough to vote in the county that the borough that snubbed them was in. If, of course, they met the county’s qualifications.

And I haven’t even mentioned universities, which weren’t boroughs or counties and used a third system to decide who could vote. 

Every year counties, boroughs, and universities had to find their way through all of this and put together an electoral register. 

In 1867, Parliament revised the system again.

A quick history of women’s right to vote in Britain

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British women got the vote in 1918. They also got the vote in 1928. And in 1843, 1640, 1422 and several other dates.

It’s complicated. The interesting stuff usually is. Let’s start with the earliest date I have. I’m pretty sure it’s not the beginning of the story but it’ll do.

Irrelevant photo: north Cornish coast

1422 – 1437

The right to vote at this point belonged to a narrow group of people, and we’re talking about  voting for members of the House of Commons, of course. The House of Lords was for lords and they didn’t need electing, all they had to do was get themselves born to the right family in the right order and in possession of a Y chromosome, so stick them in a drawer and forget about them for now. 

We can also forget about Britain. As a political entity, it didn’t exist yet. We’re talking about England. I tell you, keeping track of this country stretches its language to the breaking point.

The counties (otherwise known as the countryside) sent representatives to Parliament, and that was relatively straightforward. Towns, villages, and hamlets, though, needed a royal charter making them parliamentary boroughs. No charter, no representatives in the Commons. Each of them sent two, no matter their size or population density.

Starting in 1429, anyone in the counties who owned property worth 40 shillings or more could vote, and that had to be freehold property, but let’s not get into that. Sorry, this post is full of things not to pay attention to. Focus on the right to vote depending on property ownership. Do not look at the man behind the curtain.

In the boroughs, voting still depended on property but it was wildly inconsistent. It might be only the mayor and town governors who had the right to vote or it might be anyone who had the freedom of the city, which was a larger group but still far from everyone. 

Freedom of the city? That’s another thing not to get into. It’s a feudal hangover that hasn’t completely gone away even now. I’ve heard that raw egg’s good for a hangover. It doesn’t cure anything but it takes your mind off your original problem.

The voting we’re talking about wasn’t the kind we’re used to. The local bigshot selected the candidates and the lesser folk got to vote for them, and one of the candidates he selected just might be the bigshot’s own good self. Who, after all, was more qualified? If there was any competition, as a rule it went on behind the scenes and before the actual election. So voting was more a process of ratification than selection. 

The vote was public, not secret. 

How did women come into this picture of ideal democracy? In small numbers, but historians are beginning to find a few. In seven Yorkshire elections held between 1422 and 1461, one historian discovered Joan Beaufort (countess of Westmorland), Maud Clifford (countess of Cambridge), Maud Neville (Lady Mauley), Elizabeth Pigot, Lady Elizabeth Roos, and Margaret Vavasour. 

How come they got to vote? They were wealthy, they were the widows of men who’d had the right to vote, and they sent lawyers to the county sheriff’s court, where the indentures were drawn up. (Indentures weren’t necessarily about apprenticeship. They were legal contracts.) And they hadn’t remarried. That was crucial because starting with the Norman invasion (1066; you’re welcome)English law held that married women couldn’t own property in their own names, and if only property owners could vote and married women couldn’t own property– 

You figured out where that’s going, right?

Women with husbands turned over those troublesome things like owning and voting to their men. 

Thanks, guys. That was not only kind of you but selfless.

So let’s go out on a limb and say these un-remarried widows were stepping into the positions their husbands had held and were acting for them post mortem. 

Still, women weren’t barred from voting. That didn’t happen until 1832. That was also the year the first petition supporting women’s right to vote was presented to Parliament. But we’ll get to that later.  

Tradition was probably another factor keeping women from voting. A woman would need to be pretty powerful–not just personally but financially–to override that.

 

1640

Let’s go to Heytesbury, in Wiltshire, where thirteen people were on a list of voters and two of them were women: Elizabeth Crayford and Agnes (or Agnete) Tarry. Again, both were widows and neither had remarried. Their property was their own.

An article from The History of Parliament is interestingly unclear about how to interpret the fact of the two women being able to vote:

“The explanation as to why their ‘voices’ were formally heard in 1640 has not yet presented itself. Were the successful candidates more than usually anxious in 1640 to secure sufficient votes? Was the presiding sheriff or the sitting bailiff ignorant of the usual rules? Was there in fact a tradition of suffrage among customary tenants that was no respecter of gender? If so, was this confined to Heytesbury? Some time ago Derek Hirst drew attention to an instance of women at the polls in Suffolk, also in 1640: on that occasion their participation was barred, but seemingly for considerations of potential dishonour rather than of illegality (The Representative of the People? (1975), 18–9). This example raises even more questions about electoral practice, but both examples provide that essential motivation for vigilance when casting my eye down those lists of names.”

 

Women who didn’t get to vote

Just because we find a few women who did vote, though, let’s not get carried away. They’re the exceptions. Other seventeenth-century women who tried were less successful, possibly because their status was lower, although as single women with property they met the local requirements. You know how it is: There are property owners and then there are property owners. 

As time went on, women “increasingly found themselves excluded from parliamentary elections on grounds of propriety and social convention, or what was sometimes termed ‘decency’ and ‘nature.’ This is well illustrated by two examples. In the Suffolk election of 1640, a number of widows were stopped from voting by the sheriff, although he admitted that ‘they might in law have been allowed.’ He forbade them to poll, he explained, ‘conceiving it a matter verie unworthie of any gentleman’ and ‘most dishonourable’ for ‘an election to make use of their voices.’ In the borough of Richmond in 1679, similar scruples led to the female owners of qualifying burgage properties being refused the vote. It was agreed that ‘no widow should vote, it being against common right; but that widows should have power to assign their right to other persons.’ On this basis a Mr Wharton acquired no less than ‘30 assignments’ and ‘did then and there vote’. Proxy voting, as this example suggests, became customary in some constituencies before 1832, with men or attorneys exercising the franchise on behalf of qualifying females. It is the names of these men, of course, who appear in surviving printed pollbooks.” (That’s from the same article I quoted just above and, what the hell, will again here.)

If any sober historian’s looking through lists of voters for women’s names, that would be enough to drive her or him to drink.

 

1832

The 1832 Great Reform Act broadened the franchise, got rid of rotten boroughs (tiny places that sent MPs to Parliament while large industrial cities were massively underrepresented), and while it was at it, defined voters as “male persons,” closing the loopholes those few women voters had been wriggling through. It also ended their right to vote by proxy.  

Did I ever mention that progress is seldom straightforward? Or that roses are red except when they’re other colors?

The same law also disenfranchised tens of thousands of people who had been able to vote. 

 And created a registration system complicated enough that local registrars struggled to keep up and accidentally allowed a few women to register. So there were still a few names for our formerly sober and now pie-eyed historian to find, and new reasons to drink: Some names could belong to either sex (Alex, Evelyn, Glen, Hillary) and spellings hadn’t been standardised. 

Registering, though, wasn’t voting. Voting had to be done in person, and after 1832 it was rare for a woman to slip through far enough to cast a vote. 

Lily Maxwell managed it, though: she voted in a Manchester by-election in 1867. A clerical error let her register, the local branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage took up her cause, along with the Liberal candidate, and a befuddled polling clerk let her vote. Publicity followed and more Manchester women tried to register, with a few managing to vote in 1868. 

Before you cheer too long or too loud, a court soon ruled that no, women were not entitled to vote.

 

Non-parliamentary elections

Ah, but all that was about elections for parliament. There were also municipal elections, parish elections, vestry elections, poor law union elections, board of guardians elections, coroners elections, and town or improvement commissioners elections. And each one had its own rules over who could vote, based on local custom, local rules and, of course property ownership, taxes, residence, and status as a freeman.

Freeman? We skipped that when it showed up in the form of freedom of the city, but okay, let’s talk about it: It grew out of feudal law but came to mean a man (or sometimes a woman, apparently) “possessing the full privileges and immunities of a city, borough or trade gild to which admission was usually by birth, apprenticeship, gift or purchase.” 

But it is a side issue. Really.

In some of those elections, women could vote. Since different rules governed different elections, the list of voters was different for each. You can see why the local officials drawing up the lists might’ve felt overwhelmed. You can see why he might’ve joined our pie-eyed historian down at the pub. You can also see why the occasional woman showed up on a forbidden list.

Our picture of electoral mayhem isn’t complete until we catch up with one more variant: In 1843 in St. Chad’s parish, Lichfield, some women not only had the right to vote but had more than one vote in the election of assistant overseer. The more wealth you had, the more votes you got. The system wasn’t unique to St. Chad’s, and in places, the drive to open the vote to a wider group of men was posed as a conflict between less affluent men and wealthy women. 

When in doubt, be careful not to blame the people in charge. It’s safer and it’s still satisfying.

I have no idea what the assistant overseer assisted in overseeing. I trust both he and the voters did. 

In 1835 the vote in municipal elections was restricted to “male persons.” That held until 1869, when women taxpayers were once again allowed back in. As long as they were unmarried. That opened the door to single women who had property voting in elections for school boards (1870), county and borough councils (1888) and parish and district councils (1894), at which point married women were added. By 1900, 14% of the local government electorate was female.

 

1918 and 1928

In 1918, women over 30 gained the right to vote if they or their husbands met a property qualification and women were allowed to run for Parliament. In 1928 women finally gained equal voting rights with men: Anyone over 21 could now vote and we live in the best of all possible worlds. 

*

And with that out of the way, let’s talk about the important stuff: Notes was chosen as one of Feedspot’s 100 top UK blogs. 

What’s Feedspot? An aggregator for blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, and anything else you can think of. Bowties, maybe. Exotic pasta shapes. Don’t ask me. I publish a blog but this isn’t my world. Basically, it helps you find blogs.  A lifetime’s worth of blogs. But Notes is its top choice, amazingly enough, so I shouldn’t make too much fun of it, although when I asked what the criteria were, freshness was one, so here’s me being fresh. 

The other criteria were relevancy, authority, and social media followers. Since you’re here, don’t you just have good taste?

Surviving the Black Death & taking time off work in the medieval world

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The Black Death killed somewhere between one- and two-thirds of medieval Europe’s population, and unsurprisingly the art and writing of the time, along with the historians who followed, focused heavily on death. Who wouldn’t? But what’s to be said about the people who survived? 

It’s true that survivors got a mention or six. A medieval chronicler, Geoffrey le Baker, a clerk in Oxfordshire, wrote: 

“People who one day had been full of happiness, on the next were found dead. Some were tormented by boils which broke out suddenly in various parts of the body, and were so hard and dry that when they were lanced hardly any liquid flowed out. Many of these people escaped, by lancing the boils or by long suffering. Other victims had little black pustules scattered over the skin of the whole body. Of these people very few, indeed hardly any, recovered life and health.”

“Many” is a vague number, though, and we’re too late to ask ol’ Geoff for more detail. That’s one reason historians like records. If you understand the context, they can tell you something solid. 

I’ll come back to that business about context.

A street in London during the plague. Notice the death cart in the background. Am I always this much fun to be around? Yeah, probably. Credit: Wellcome Library, curtesy of Wikimedia.

In the meantime, records: historians like them, and medieval deaths triggered legalities, and legalities triggered records. If a person died owning property, it had to be transferred, and that left a record. And although a peasant wouldn’t have owned the land he farmed (we are generally talking about a he here, and I’ll come back to that too), he had a formal right to farm it and when he died his family had to pay the lord a heriot–usually their best animal–to transfer that right to one of them. All that would show up in the manor records. 

A person getting sick did none of that. And a person not getting sick? Ditto.

Recently, though, a group of historians were lucky enough to find a scrap of parchment in the accounts of a manor–Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire, whose monks had recorded the length of time that 22 peasants were off sick from the end of April to the start of August 1349. In a normal year, you’d be likely to find two or three absences, but the plague was burning its way across the country and this was ten times the average, so the odds are good that these peasants weren’t out sick with an attack of the whimsies.

The absences that Ramsey Abbey’s monks tracked ranged from the fleeting to the chronic. Sickness went up during the harvest (exhaustion, the historians speculate, or accidents caused by exhaustion). They also tracked how much it cost to hire a replacement for someone who was out sick (14 shillings for a ploughman to replace a Sussex tenant who was off for 84 days). 

 

What, a medieval peasant had the right to take off work?

What the monks were tracking didn’t include the time peasants were too sick to work on the land they worked for themselves. It was the days of work they owed the lord–in this case, the abbey–in exchange for the land that the lord, out of the goodness of his heart and pocketbook, let them work. And the more land they had the right to work, the more days they owed.

How much time the peasant owed the lord had been negotiated at some point, along with their rights to the common land and how much time they could take off if they were sick. 

Translation? Sick leave varied from manor to manor. On the low end, with zero days, was Wisbech, in Cambridgeshire, where the rule was that if the tenant “is ill nevertheless, he will do the labour services he owes.” On the other end, at Ramsey Abbey, peasants had a right to a year and a day–and widows could take leave when their husbands died. 

That does sound vaguely like a fairy tale: he lay ill for a year and a day and then returned to plow his lord’s field, although his strength had not returned.

On all manors, peasants could expect time off for religious festivals and feast days–and for some of the lunatic local festivals that enliven the weirder side of England’s history. (Take this one for example.)

The number of feast days would also have varied from region to region and from manor to manor. Trying to generalize about the middle ages is enough to chase a person from their own personal middle age deep into old age. It may explain how I got this old.

No one was supposed to work on religious festival days, and the church courts fined some for violating the rule, leaving us proof (in case we ever doubted it) that not everyone did as they were told. Some people were fined for working their own land and some for doing paid work on someone else’s. 

How would anyone know if a peasant worked when it was forbidden–or, for that matter if some different peasant was faking an illness? Manors were small, close-knit communities. Sure, a healthy person could lie in bed moaning and looking wan for a day or two, but if they were sick when they were supposed to work the lord’s land but were miraculously well enough to work their own, everyone would know. Ditto if they were working when they were supposed to be in church. Work was public. Land was and still is– Well, you know what land is like. It’s outdoors. People can see it, and see if someone’s out there working on it. 

As for taking time off from working both the lord’s land and their own, hunger would’ve gotten the final vote on that. People lived close to the edge.

 

So who survived the plague?

Let’s go back to Ramsey Abbey and that list of people who were out sick: a disproportionate number of survivors had larger holdings, adding weight to a theory among historians and archeologists (not a universal theory, but never mind) that the poor and elderly were more vulnerable than the stronger and better fed, who would’ve been more able to fight off secondary infections. 

The list also includes more men than women–19 out of the 22. It’s a meaningful number, but here’s where we come back to what I said earlier about context: the number doesn’t mean more men survived than women. The land tenure system selected for sex; the plague didn’t. A holding might go to a woman if no man in a family had survived, but men were the first choice. Women worked, and they existed, but they left only the slightest mark on medieval records. Legally speaking, a married woman disappeared behind her husband and his name is the one on the records.

 

The world after the plague

What sort of world, then, did the survivors survive to live in? One account says, “There was so great a shortage of servants and labourers that there was no one who knew what needed to be done.” And between the shortage of labor and (wouldn’t  you just know it?) disastrous weather, the 1349 and 1350 harvests were the worst medieval England had known. 

How the American Revolution affected Britain

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Every country has its mythology, and it’s entirely possible that some country’s is a fair match for its reality, even if I can’t think of an example. Never mind. The standard myth in the U.S. is that the American Revolution was a world-shaking event. I grew up in the US, although I live in Britain, and I was taught to think of the revolution’s opening shot as the shot heard round the world.

It’s a nifty phrase. It sticks to the inside of your brain like mental bubble gum. But a few years ago, it occurred to me to ask Lord Google for a British perspective on the loss of its 13 colonies and I found next to nothing.

Now, I might’ve been asking the wrong questions, although I did try several, but I began to wonder if the British response to that world-shaking event wasn’t a giant shrug. Had Britain slept through the shot heard round the world?

Quite possibly. I recently read “The Shot Heard Round the World” by Daniel Immerwahr. It was in the New Yorker and unfortunately it’s behind a paywall, but I’m including the link to prove I’m drawing on something real.

Irrelevant photo: peony

A bit of background

As usual, we need to take a step back before we go forward. When I was a kid, my history textbook skimmed the surface of the French and Indian War. I learned that it involved the French and the Indians, along with the British and their colonists. That seemed to be enough. I had no idea what it was about or why it mattered, but I got good grades so who cared?

Well, it turns out that if you rest your fingertips on history’s screen and do that magic expanding gesture, you can zoom out and see that the French and Indian War was part of the Seven Years’ War.

The what? 

A war. That lasted seven years and involved Asia, Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe. All the major European powers rolled the dice to see what they could win, or at least not lose. It could also be called the War of Great Powers Behaving Badly, but that wouldn’t distinguish it sharply enough from other wars, so we’ll stick with the Seven Years’ War. It involved a dizzying array of alliances and treaties and secrets, my favorite being le secret du roi: the French king Louis XV’s private network of diplomats, which was so private his foreign minister didn’t know about it. It pursued the king’s personal goals, which were often in opposition to the country’s official policies. 

That’s what I love about history. You can’t make this shit up. And even if you could, it’s a lot funnier knowing it’s real.

Sorry, we were talking about the Seven Years War. It ran from 1756 to 1763, which (depending on what months you start and end in and how your fingers work) may add up to eight years.  Never mind. The American part–the French and Indian War–started with a border dispute and a series of skirmishes between French and English colonists. It was sort of a sideshow in the bigger war. 

Everyone made peace in 1763–Britain, France, and Spain in one treaty and Saxony, Austria, and Prussia in a different one–and Britain ended up keeping a lot of the French and Spanish territories it had captured. 

I’ll get to the American Revolution eventually. Stay with me.

 

Tea and taxes

In the traditional telling, Britain also came out of the war broke, which led it to impose a new tax, the 1765 Stamp Act, a law that’s baffled many an American student. Stamps? we asked ourselves. Who gets upset over stamps? Because I (and I, of course, speak for all the country’s baffled students) grew up in the era of letters, which you sent by licking a stamp and gluing it to the corner. And that stamp cost money, although not much. Everything cost money. So paying for stamps? Why did the colonists get so exercised they threw tea in the harbor?

No one stopped to explain that the stamps in question weren’t the kind we knew. They were a mark acknowledging that the tax had been paid. And no one told us the thirteen colonies that became the U.S. weren’t the only ones who were upset about the new tax. Sure, their residents responded by hanging government officials in effigy, but on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, forget effigies, they threatened to hang the tax collector in person, and when he fled to the neighboring island of Nevis, followed him and burned houses. 

It’s not relevant to the line of thought I’m pretending to follow, but since I mentioned the tea thrown into the Boston Harbor in the Boston Tea Party, let’s tell the rest of the story: The Boston Tea Party wasn’t a protest over the stamp tax. It was about the tax having been reduced to help out the East India Company, which undercut local smugglers and sellers, offending many a righteous Boston colonist. As one of the colony’s wealthiest residents put it, “We are not Sea Poys, nor Marattas, but British Subjects, who are born to Liberty.” 

Translation? You can go treat funny-looking furriners badly, but not us: we’re British, so show some respect, please. We don’t want to pay more in taxes but paying less doesn’t work for us either.

 

Which colonies rebelled and who didn’t

Lots of colonies were getting restive right about then. Britain had twenty-six in America. Thirteen rebelled and thirteen–including the most lucrative, Jamaica–didn’t, although the thirteen rebel colonies did court them. Benjamin Franklin’s list of the colonies he hoped would join the rebellion included not only Britain’s American and Caribbean holdings but also Ireland. 

Politically speaking I see his point, but geographically that was always going to be a problem.

It’s easy to see why the Caribbean colonies didn’t rebel: they were plantation economies, with a small number of whites (most or many of them slaveholders) and a large number of enslaved Blacks. The whites were in no position to overturn the system. They relied on the British military to keep the enslaved from staging their own rebellion.

Canada? They attacked a statue of George III before anyone in the thirteen colonies thought to, but they were split between Catholics and Protestants at a time when that mattered fiercely, and a 1775-76 invasion by the rebellious colonies didn’t make the rebels to their south many Canadian friends. 

When you look for reasons the American Revolution took place where it did, the economics are worth a glance. The rebel colonies were relatively well off. American settlers’ incomes were equal to or slightly higher than English ones, and in real terms bought more. Their residents didn’t suffer through the famines that devastated the Irish and Indian colonies. So we’re not talking about people driven by desperation.

What about liberty, then? The American colonists talked a lot about liberty, but they weren’t unique in that. The Irish and Scots–some of them–felt much the same way, and in the 1760s there was a massive slave rising in Jamaica, a Native American confederacy fighting the British from what’s now Michigan to Virginia, and in India wars against the British East India Company. Lots of people had an interest in liberty, although they wouldn’t have been unanimous in how they defined it.

As as the article I’m leaning on puts it, the people who led the American Revolution weren’t ”the wretched of the earth but the fortunate sons of Britain who, at a certain point, found it more advantageous to become sons of liberty.”

 

So how, finally, did Britain react to American independence?

Let’s go back to the Seven Years War. Yes, Britain needed money but certainly by comparison it came out in good shape. France was broke and it wasn’t long before the French Revolution tossed its monarchy into history’s overflowing trash can. Spain lost most of its empire. Britain kept its monarchy and its Caribbean colonies. It took control of India. And it hung onto its trade with the newly independent United States. As Henry Clay put it, the United States were “sort of independent colonies” of England. They were “politically free, commercially slaves.”

Which isn’t at all the way I learned the story  but it goes a long way towards explaining why I found so little on the American Revolution’s impact on Britain. The loss of thirteen colonies doesn’t seem to have registered as a painful loss. Or possibly as any sort of loss. 

But what about the American call to liberty: was it heard round the world?

Possibly not. Hannah Arendt wrote that the French Revolution “made world history” but the American was “of little more than local importance.” Dig around and you’ll find historians who agree. And inevitably others who don’t. I’m no historian, just somebody sitting on the couch, but I see Arendt’s point. Slavery meant the American call for liberty sounded ever so slightly off key. That French hero of the American Revolution the Marquis de Lafayette later said, “I would never have drawn my sword in the cause of America if I could have conceived that thereby I was founding a land of slavery!”

Independence of the thirteen former colonies put power in the hands of the local elite, and many of them, including eight of the first ten presidents, were slaveholders. They were free to run their own country. They were free to expand westward, appropriating land from the Native tribes, free to own slaves, who were not free to be free.

During the revolution, most Native and Black Americans fought against the rebels. 

Odd corners of English history: the tax on playing cards

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As I was taught the story of the printing press, Gutenberg’s invention put the Bible into the hands of ordinary people. After that, it was no longer available only to the very few people who could afford a hand-copied, illuminated book. People could read it for themselves (those who could read), and interpret it for themselves, and the whole thing promptly got out of control, setting loose every imaginable variant of Christianity. 

What, only Christianity? 

Other religions had a whole different relationship to early printing. Stop complicating the story. 

Ah, but the headline said I was going to talk about playing cards. Well, Gutenberg’s invention did more than set the Bible loose among the masses. It redefined the audience for card games. 

Pre-Gutenberg, playing cards, like books, were made by hand. They were beautiful, each deck was unique, and they were out of  your price range. And mine.  

Not that I know what your price range is, but I’m assuming some level of sanity here. They were a luxury. For the aristocracy.

Do we have any aristocrats in the audience? 

It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me. 

An ace of spades from the 1800s, complete with the royal duty stamp. With thanks to Wikimedia.

 

The timeline

The forerunners of the playing cards we’re familiar with probably originated in China, somewhere around the ninth century, along with the technology–I believe we’re talking about paper here–to make them. A century later, people were using them to play a game that involved shuffling and dealing. Add another four centuries, give or take a few weeks, and cards had made their way to Europe, landing either in Islamic Spain or in Italy by way of India or the Middle East.

Or landing in some other European country by way of some other intermediary.

I know, it’s a burning issue, but it doesn’t seem to have been well documented. 

By this time, cards would’ve taken on a form we’d recognize: suits, royalty, competition, money. And they’d have been the hot item among the aristocracy, which is where they stayed until Gutenberg ruined the fun  by making them available to folks several steps down the economic ladder. 

Have you ever wondered why it’s the economic ladder but the social scale?

 

The tax

Once cards were mass produced and in the hands of ordinary people–well, Elizabeth I’s government was in need of money (it’s a habit monarchs  haven, and their governments along with them) and in 1588 someone came up with the idea of taxing playing cards. Why not? They existed, people bought them, so they were taxable.

That worked well enough and in 1710 the tax went up. A cheap deck now cost roughly 12 times what it once had, and an expensive one 1.5 times the old price. Or that’s what the article I’m leaning on here seems to be saying. It’s less than perfectly worded, but even if I’m off a bit we can understand that they’d created one hell of an incentive for someone to dodge the tax. 

So what’s a government to do?

First, they made the manufacturer, not the buyer, responsible for paying the tax. Then they made it illegal for them to print the ace of spaces. That privilege was reserved for the government. 

Have you ever noticed how much more elaborate the ace of spades is on some decks than any of the other cards? That was to make it hard to forge.

So manufacturers printed their decks, as you’d expect, only without the ace of spades, and off they toddled to the tax office–also known, just to confuse things, as the stamp office–with paper to match the other cards in their decks. The tax office would then print the ace of spades, using an expensive technology, engraved metal plates, that wasn’t widely available. The manufacturer would buy the printed aces from the government, add them to the decks, and off to market they went. The tax was in the government’s pocket before the manufacturer got out the door. 

As time went on, the aces became more elaborate to make them harder and harder to forge.

In the 19th century (if I’m piecing my sources together correctly), the system changed. Manufacturers now needed a license, and a legal stamp incorporating the royal coat of arms had to go on every ace of spades, which was called the duty card (or the duty ace, or Old Frizzle). A regulated label had to go on the deck’s wrapper. 

This whole rigamarole meant that the manufacturers of playing cards spent a fair bit of time traipsing in and out of the stamp commissioner’s office, or sitting around their own offices waiting for the commissioner’s office to deliver the stamped duty cards. 

But let’s say they didn’t bother getting licensed. Let’s say they forged the brass stamp that printed the ace of spades and made a counterfeit wrapper for the pack of cards. Looking on the bright side, they’d saved a lot of money in taxes. On the flip side, though, forgery had been a capital offense since 1805.

 

With that threat, everyone stayed in line, right?

Of course not or I wouldn’t have asked. 

Take the case of Richard Harding, a licensed card maker with two shops. He had a good business going and at some point the stamp office noticed that they hadn’t seen as much of him as they would’ve expected, so they sent out an investigator, who bought six packs of cards and found forged aces of spades in all of them. So he went back and bought more, and more again, until eventually he had 90 packs of cards, all with forged aces.

Harding was, by the by, charging the market rate. A bargain would’ve raised eyebrows–not to mention made him less profit.

By this time Harding must’ve gotten nervous: one customer, 90 packs of cards, relatively short period of time. Hmmm. Could there be something here to worry about? 

Well, yes, and careful soul that he must’ve been, when his home and offices were raided, not a forged ace was to be found. But the searchers poked around at the neighbors’ and eventually found 2,000 of them. And more again in his daughter’s house. (I’m guessing that’s Harding’s daughter’s, not the neighbor’s, but it was a long time ago, so what the hell, we’ll just go on.) 

Buried in the yard, they found the printing plates he’d used to forge the aces. 

How had he managed to print aces of spades convincing enough they didn’t raise the alarm with ordinary buyers? First he approached an associate, a stone-seal engraver called Hugh Leadbetter, to make plates for him.

What’s stone-seal engraving? I don’t really know, but you can buy kits to carve with today. Then you can write and tell me all about it.

Leadbetter was reluctant, but Harding pushed him hard, to the point of locking him in a room with some tools and expecting him to magic up a skill he didn’t have. 

The story rambles on until it includes a drunken engraver with shaking hands and Harding coming back to Leadbeater for help burying the plates that someone eventually made for him.

Harding was found guilty and hung, in spite of seven witnesses who swore to his good character. What happened to Leadbetter or the engraver with the shaking hands I don’t know.

The tax wasn’t repealed until 1960.

When sign language was first recognized in England

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At the end of the 12th century, the pope gave deaf people the right to marry, and yes, kiddos, the right was very much his to give. It was his church, after all, and England being a Catholic country at that point, it went along with the change and carried over it into the Protestant part of its history, even while it was virulently anti-Catholic.

Did it say thanks? The hell it did. 

Which pope did that? Innocent III. What are the odds that we’ll remember? 

What sounds like a limited change set off a cascade of changes. By allowing a deaf person to agree to a marriage by using sign, the church had effectively recognized that the deaf could understand. They could communicate their wishes. From there it was a small step to allowing confession in sign, because if a deaf person could understand, then they could also sin. 

From church law, that recognition seeped into the secular courts. Before this, in a tradition dating back to ancient Rome, the courts considered the deaf infants. They could no more understand or defend their rights, make contracts, or give legal consent than my dog can. 

Now, though, they could go to court over property rights, and by the beginning of Henry VII’s reign, legal students were routinely taught that signs could replace speech in property law. The deaf could also be held responsible for their crimes. 

When was progress ever an unmixed blessing? 

Irrelevant photo: Flowers. Two different kinds, with two different names. They have nothing to do with anything, so let’s not get worked up about what they’re called.

So was this the origin of BSL–British Sign Language?

Probably not, but it’s not clear. Deaf people have been around for roughly as long as hearing people, and they show up in all classes, ranks, ethnicities, and societies. The one place they haven’t appeared often, at least until relatively recently, is in written history, and that’s what makes the marriages of deaf people important: they give us a bit of solid information.

If we look at the early histories of British Sign Language (and we won’t because if I’m using secondary sources and you’re one step further removed than that, but let’s pretend), we’ll find that they were written in English, which is a whole ‘nother language from sign, and a lot of them were written by people who didn’t sign. That’s almost as good an idea as me writing a history of physics even though I don’t phys. 

BSL isn’t a written language. It’s possible to write it, but most people who use it as their primary language will write in English. That was a significant barrier to the early users of BSL writing its history; they would’ve been working in a second language, one designed by and for people who hear. It’s not an insurmountable obstacle but I’m not sure how well I’d do if I had to climb it.

So at the point where BSL was–presumably–consolidating, the people who used it left us no written record. In other words, we’re relying on guesswork, and the best guess is that the roots of BSL reach somewhere into the 18th century, when the growth of towns brought enough deaf people together that they could form communities. By the 19th century, when deaf schools opened, they used BSL. But they were independent of each other and spread out around the country, which isn’t a great recipe for coordination. Still, teachers moved from one to another and the schools themselves were in communication. They taught a single language, but it either developed or already had regional dialects. 

But I’m getting ahead of the story. We were talking about those early marriages. The signs that the participants used were probably what linguists call homesign–a set of signs that develops in small groups of deaf people. Or (and I’m adding this myself, so throw a pinch of salt on it) possibly between one deaf person and the family or community around them. As a language, it probably wouldn’t have been as complex as today’s official sign languages but it would’ve been complex enough for a person to express themselves and for a friend or family member to act as an interpreter. 

 

The marriages

The earliest deaf/hearing person marriage on record in England took place in 1576, in Leicester Cathedral. It was the groom, Thomas Tilsey, who was deaf, and he was a blacksmith, which speaks to his integration into society: he and the people around him communicated well enough for him to have served an apprenticeship and learned his trade and done on to do business. He made his wedding vows in sign, which was unusual enough that the clerk noted it in the parish records.

Did somebody say “parish records”? There were almost surely earlier marriages involving a deaf person or two, but parish records only began under Henry VIII (1491 to 1547; you’re welcome). We’d have to figure that in the nearly 400 years since that papal decree, somebody would’ve married somebody who was deaf, but they did it without leaving any trace. 

And even after the start of parish-level record keeping, a marriage involving a deaf person could easily have taken place in sign without the clerk having thought to mention it. 

 

Were there any impediments to this marriage?

You bet your ass there were. Before Tilsey was allowed to marry, he had to prove to the mayor, the town council, and the bishop that he understood what marriage was. Or as the article I’m leaning on puts it, “that he was intellectually capable of understanding,” which isn’t exactly the same thing, so I’m not entirely sure what we’re talking about here. I’m going to guess that they weren’t worried about whether he understood the physical side of marriage, but I have no evidence for that. At all. 

Once he’d proved himself, his friends and family had to vouch for him. And in the ceremony he had to use pre-approved signs that followed the spoken service rather than the signs he would have chosen for himself. Sign generally, or maybe always, follows its own grammar. I’m guessing they threw it out the stained glass window here, coming up with something that made more sense to people who didn’t understand it.

 

Deaf people in conflict with their families

The question of whether a deaf person was capable of understanding might’ve been settled for centuries, but the minute a deaf person came into conflict with their family, the family could start arguing about it all over again. Was the deaf person able to give informed consent? Was this deaf person able to give consent? 

In 1618, the mother of apprentice Thomas Speller was hell bent to stop him from marrying Sarah Earle, his master’s daughter, and she got the bishop involved. Her son was being forced into it, she argued. Earle was a fortune hunter. Speller wasn’t capable of giving informed consent.

Speller testified to the bishop’s representative in sign, saying he wanted to marry Earle, and the marriage license was issued. They married a few weeks later, in sign, with the parish clerk noting, “We had never seen the like before.”

Fast forward a couple of decades and George Blunt wanted to marry a family servant–“one of our menial servants of unclear parentage.” Blunt’s father wrote to the local magistrate, again arguing that Blunt wasn’t capable of giving informed consent. That triggered an investigation, although by this time the couple was already married. The vicar and witnesses from the wedding testified that Blunt had been “full of understanding.” 

The couple moved away from his parents–wisely from the sound of it–and lived happily ever after. Or at least more happily than they would have been if they’d stayed close.

Odd corners of British history: the politics of the hat

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In early modern England, it was pretty nearly unthinkable for a respectable man to go out bareheaded. A gentleman or a well-off artisan wore a hat (or as we stumble into the later part of the era, a wig). Further down the social order, a man wore a flat cap. Only if he was destitute (as a sign of poverty, going bare-headed was right up there with going barefoot) or out of his bare-headed mind would he stick his head out the door without some sort of covering. 

What was that about? 

Health, for one thing. Any doctor would’ve told you it was unhealthy to leave your headownloads bare. Even in bed, you’d want a nightcap. But there was also convention to consider. You wore one because you wore one because everyone wore one, and since everyone wore one you couldn’t imagine doing otherwise. 

It was also a marker of your class–and of course your sex. It let everyone know how to treat you and what to expect from you.

Laugh at them if you will–I sure as hell do–but we’re not that different.

“School,” about 1652, although painted in 2005. Robert Hooke (bareheaded) as a pupil at Westminster School. Dr. Richard Busby (in the hat) was the headmaster. By Rita Greer. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

 

Manners 

Among the hat-wearing classes, more-or-less equals could greet each other by taking their hats off. You can see how gracious that was if you watch what not-equals did: The person lower down the social ladder took off his hat or cap–not just to his landlord or some random gentleman, but to his parent, his boss, a magistrate, whoever. And his superior would leave his hat where it was and feel free to respond in any old way he wanted. A nod would do. No nod wasn’t out of the question. It depended on and reinforced the social distance between them.

All this was called hat-honor, and it wasn’t set out in law but it might as well have been. When the issue came up in court, judges “ruled that custom was sufficient to make it obligatory, while clerics explained that the biblical commandment to honour one’s father and mother applied to every position of authority.”

I’m quoting–no, I didn’t make up his name–from Bernard Capp, who’s made a study of this. He quotes 16th and 17th century tracts that talk about how “doffing the cap” is a “signe of obedience and humility.” 

Humility was good, remember–at least if you weren’t among the humbled. It kept the order in social order.

From all this nonsense, we inherited the phrase “going hat in hand” (or “cap in hand”) for humbling yourself and begging a favor.

The flip side of that was that someone could show favor to an inferior by allowing him to keep his hat on. That was a big deal. And we’re not talking only about lords and kings. It went down the social scale at least as far as craftsmen and tradesmen.

The system was pervasive and it grated on–well, not on everyone but on some people. The system was starting to creak at the joints, and people weren’t as willing to put up with what might once have seemed natural. Or if not natural, at least necessary. During the Civil Wars and the years that led up to them, a small sort of revolution went on, with people on one side signaling, You’re not my better and I’m not your inferior, and people on the other side signaling, Oh, yes you are.

 

Examples?

In Worcestershire in 1608, a parish officer refused to take off his hat to a knight, who had his servants beat the man up. Other incidents ended with someone knocking off the offender’s hat.

Take that, you bad-mannered hat. 

The Quakers were known for refusing to take their hats off. George Fox, a founder of the Quakers (I’ll be quoting Capp again), considered his refusal “a gesture against the sins of vanity and pride, but did not hide his contempt for the deferential ‘crouching, scraping, capping’ the elites demanded in the name of ‘that they call their civilitie.’”

In 1646, when John Lilburne, a Leveller, was taken from jail to appear in front of the House of Lords, “he resolved to ‘come in with my hat upon my head.’”

In 1649, when Charles I was on trial, he made the same gesture, refusing to take off his hat, signaling that as king he recognized no superior.

 

Hats in church

Just to confuse the issue, men were expected to take their hats off in church but women were expected to keep their heads covered. I’m sure there’s a perfectly rational theological explanation for that and I’m sure my brain would fry if I tried to follow it.

In the period before the English Civil Wars, when everyone available was playing tug-of-war over religious issues that seem small and silly a few hundred years later, the hats-in-church issue became important enough that men were officially mandated to take their hats off during services. As Capp puts it, “Conformists railed against ‘Ruffians and rude ones’ who wore their hats while psalms were being read or sung, and defiant puritans ‘putting them off but half way.’” 

After the Restoration, nonconformists often attended church to avoid prosecution but registered their dissent by either taking their hats off during the sermon and putting them on during prayers or doing exactly the opposite. Both gestures carried the same meaning. Both groups had theological arguments to support their choice–as did the people who kept them off the whole time. In the interest of protecting my brain, I won’t dig out their rationales.

 

Fashion 

During the medieval era, people wore low hats, caps, or hoods. Each of those announced a person’s place in society–didn’t everything?–but all of them were at least practical. In the early modern period, though, the brims of hats got wider, the crowns got taller, and the odds of them staying on a head got thinner. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that wearing something that impractical showed you didn’t have to do physical work.

In the first half of the 17th century, the hats were “so incommodious for use,” someone or other wrote, “that every puffe of wind deprived us of them.” In fact, the wind took a royalist commander’s hat at the siege of Scarborough (1644; you’re welcome) and he fell off a cliff trying to get it back.

During the Restoration, wigs came into fashion, either with or instead of a hat, and here we add another reason for not being seen bareheaded. Men who wore periwigs shaved their heads, so going wigless would leave their heads cold and endanger their health. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the inmates of Bedlam–that dread mental institution–also had their heads shaved, making an awkward parallel. Capp offers instances of gentleman handing over their money and jewellery to highwaymen but as a point of honor (and to protect their health) balking at handing over their wigs and hats, although they were worth less.

Going hatless was so unthinkable that in 1659, when Thomas Ellwood’s father wanted to keep him from running off to Quaker meetings, he confiscated Thomas’s hats, effectively trapping him in the house for months, “unless I would have run about the country bare-headed, like a mad-man: which I did not see it my place to do.”

 

The statute cap

Since everyone thought they had to wear a head covering, in 1571 it made sense to pass a law mandating that “Every Person above the Age of seven Years… Except Maids, Ladies, Gentlewomen, Noble Personages [and other aristocratic men and clerics]” had to have a particular kind of woolen cap and wear it on Sundays and holidays. It became known as a statute cap.  

Why bother? The short answer is that when Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, he also (beware of unexpected consequences) ended the only support available to the destitute. Elizabeth I’s government made some gestures in the direction of filling that gap, and one of them was finding work for them, in this case making those woolen caps. It cost the government nothing, since the people who had to wear them also had to fork out the money for them, and it kept the poor busy. Idleness, after all, led to disorder, moral decary, and rebellion. So put the poor to work and guarantee a market for the caps they made. 

Just don’t expect gentlemen to wear them.

The Glorious Revolution, a couple of religions, and a warming pan

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Let’s start with a recap to make sure we know when we are. The Civil Wars are over (Parliament won). Charles I–he was king before the Civil Wars–is dead and Oliver Cromwell became the Non-King after him, but he’s dead too and (one of history’s minor details) Cromwell the Sequel (Oliver’s son) proved unconvincing, opening the way for Charles the Sequel (Charles II to his friends) to become king in 1660. So we’ve had regicide, civil war, more civil war, exile, hide and seek, and some time off to mow the lawn and drink lemonade.

Are we caught up? Good, because when we’re studying English history it’s important to pretend we care about the order of the kings and queens. It gives us–. Nah, let’s start that over: It gives one the illusion that one knows something, or at least it gives one the ability to make other people think one does, which is more important. If one can say all that in Latin–even agonizingly bad Latin; just ask Boris Johnson–one appears to know even more. But now that one has done the order-of-kings-and-some-lemonade bit, one can forget about it and get to the fun stuff.

Irrelevant photo: sunrise

The fun stuff

One is dropping into crazy times here, so for no apparent reason one will stay with the present tense.

Everyone in Britain suspects that Charles the Sequel is Catholic, but he keeps his opinions to himself so no one has proof. The Church of England is the official church–all that Puritan, ultra-Protestant stuff that happened in between the Charleses has been packed in a trunk and stashed in the attic where only some crazy aunt knows about it–and whether he believes what the Church of England teaches or not, he’s still its head. Which is pretty bizarre, if you think about it for too long, so let’s not.

Religious gatherings of more than five people are banned unless they’re Church of England-approved gatherings. And that ban doesn’t just cover Catholic gatherings, it also covers more Protestantly Protestant ones. No one’s forgotten that religious change isn’t about walking quietly past one church to go to another (or, gasp, to none at all) on a rainy Sunday morning. (I was going to write “sunny,” but this is England.) Religious change is about arrests, wars, hangings, burnings, torment, death, civil war—

Okay, you get the picture: People are on edge. Understandably. Then Charles’s brother James, who’s also Charles’s heir since Charles and his missus haven’t produced an heir in the form of their own tiny baby, converts to Catholicism. Openly.

Everyone is now on a sharper edge.

 

Conspiracies

Then in 1678, a Church of England clergyman, Titus Oates, announces that Catholics are plotting to assassinate Charles and put James on the throne. Cue hysterical reactions, please. Thirty-five people (give or take a few) are executed. After they’re completely and entirely dead, the case against them falls apart. Oates is sued for libel and loses. Later on, he’s convicted of perjury and pilloried, flogged, and jailed. After that, he’s un-jailed and given a pension, although he can’t be unflogged or unpilloried any more than the dead can be unexecuted. Then he becomes a Baptist. Then he’s expelled from the Baptist Church. Then he dies in obscurity.

No one yet knows what the official religion of Obscurity is.

To understand why people are willing to believe Oates’s accusations without examining them, consider the two Treaties of Dover that Charles signed. One is official and one is secret. The official one’s dull and we’ll skip it. In the secret one, he agrees to convert to Catholicism and to back (Catholic) France’s war against the (Protestant) Dutch. In return, France will provide him with enough money that he won’t have to deal with that pesky parliament.

It’s the sort of thing that erases the line between reason and paranoia, leaving people prey to crazed conspiracy theories, although in our enlightened age we struggle to understand how people could happen.

Charles converts to Catholicism on his deathbed, leaving the country to work out its own problems. He figures he’s going to heaven and has no further need for France’s support or Parliament’s or anyone else’s.

So let’s settle in with James the Sequel, who (do I have to remind you of everything?) is Charles the Sequel’s Catholic brother. You can call him James II if you prefer. Or, if you’re in Scotland, James VII, because the kings of England, at this point, are also the kings of Scotland but Scotland introduced the James brand long before England did and that gave them time to work in extra Jameses. Lots of extra Jameses. In fact, they invented the brand, so James has two numbers after his name, one for each country. On days when his ego’s particularly inflated, he adds them up and tells the mirror he’s James IX.

He’s also the king of Ireland, but Ireland doesn’t get consulted about this, or about which number it likes better.

If you think that’s complicated, imagine how you’d feel if I told you numbers worked differently in Scotland.

 

The proto-parties

James’s Parliament is divided into two loose groupings that haven’t condensed into parties yet. One is happy about him being king because after all he is the king and that makes everything okay. The other isn’t happy because he is the king and, look, he’s Catholic.

The two groupings call each other Whigs and Tories. Both words are insults.

Tory comes from Ireland and means outlaw, highwayman. It’s used to describe the Irish Catholics who’ve been kicked off their land by English settlers and end up living as outlaws because they need to eat and what else are they going to do? The word has overtones of Catholicism, so the non-Tories pick it up to insult the MPs who support James, even though the parliamentary Tories aren’t Catholic, they’re high-church Anglican conservatives.

It’s a bitter kind of joke, but it’s a bitter kind of time.

Does it seem like we’re always dropping in on bitter times? That’s when the interesting stuff happens. Have you noticed how interesting our own times are getting?

Yup, I’m scared too.

Whig comes from Scotland and originally means someone who drives his horses to Leith to buy corn. You can see the connection, right? Or it may mean that. It’s all a little murky and depends on what sources you consult. (Sorry, I’ve lost my links here, both the ones on the internet and the ones in my brain.) From driving horses to Leith, it comes to mean a cattle driver. Or in some tellings, a cattle thief. Then it becomes a less than complimentary name for a Scots Presbyterian, which is why it becomes the less than complimentary name for the group of more Protestantly Protestant MPs who wanted to keep James from becoming king on the grounds that (I know, I’m repeating myself but the issue loops through endlessly) he’s Catholic. The word whig is associated with religious nonconformity, rebellion, and MPs who think they have the power to deny an heir the throne.

 

Heirs Protestant and Catholic

Although by now it’s too late to deny James the throne. The kingly hind end is planted firmly on the fancy symbolic chair that everyone agrees only monarchs get to occupy. Uneasy as the Whigs are about that, they mostly just mutter under their breath. It could be worse: James doesn’t have a son and his heir is his grown daughter, who’s Protestant, so as soon as he dies a Protestant will be back on the throne. And another Protestant daughter waits in the wings in case Protestant Daughter One Point Oh! dies. So mutter, mutter, mutter, it’ll all be okay eventually.

Except that James does several things that increase the volume on the mutterbox. After he puts down a rebellion (Monmouth, and it’s interesting but we’re skipping it anyway), he refuses to disband the army that did the downputting. And not only do standing armies still make people nervous, if this army stays standing, James could fill it with Catholics.

Then he boots an assortment of powerful people out of office and brings Catholics into positions of power.

And in case that doesn’t turn the volume up high enough, he resurrects something called the Declaration of Indulgence, which–oh, never mind, you won’t remember it anyway and neither will I. It’s a step toward freedom of religion. That’s enough to work with.  

Is he a champion of religious tolerance or is he using tolerance to pave the way for a Catholic takeover that won’t be tolerant at all? No one really knows–including, quite possibly, the king himself, since so few things in politics go according to plan.

It all reaches a breaking point over two things: First, seven bishops refuse to have the Declaration of Indulgence read in their churches and James (tolerantly) has them arrested. Second and most outrageously, James becomes a father again. And the baby’s a boy. And a boy trumps a girl, even if he’s too young to eat solid food, so as soon as the kid’s genitalia have been verified and long before he’s old enough to discuss theology or gender reassignment or complain that he’s bored in church, he’s edged out his sisters.

This is the cue for conspiracy theorists to get to work: “No way is that baby the queen’s,” they say. “Some Jesuit smuggled him into her bedroom in a warming pan. “

The theory circulates widely. It’s easy to believe the worst of anyone just now.

What’s a warming pan? A metal pan filled with embers. You—or (what was I thinking?) a servant uses it to warm the bed. They aren’t part of the standard priestly equipment–even I know that–and I have my doubts about fitting a baby into one. But regardless of whether James produces his male heir from a warming pan or a queen, the introduction of this tiny proto-Catholic as the next in line to the throne is a step too far for the Whigs. Before the kid can say his first Hail Mary, six peers and a bishop write to William, the Prince of Orange and the husband of James the Sequel’s Protestant daughter and former heir, Mary.

“Come investigate this alleged baby,” they say. “He looks suspicious to us.”

 

The Glorious Revolution

So William comes for a visit, bringing with him upwards of 400 ships, 21,000 men (or 35,000, or 40,000, but let’s go with the lowest number so I don’t get accused of exaggerating), and an assortment of horses. Not to mention 600 ballerinas wearing shocking pink tutus and an uncounted number of sequins.*

It’s the ballerinas who do James in. He flees, tossing the great seal into the Thames on his way out of London, which is the kingly equivalent of eating your list of computer passwords. It should be enough to halt business for at least a while.

William has a claim on the throne in his own right, but he’s lower on the legitimate-heir list than his wife, and now that he’s in London this hurts his manly pride, which (I’ve been told) is a brittle thing and demands constant care. He doesn’t want to hang around the palace as a mere king-consort, sitting on a lower throne and being addressed as Mister Queen. It’s one thing for women to put up with that kind of thing, but a man?

Don’t be silly.

Cue a bit of arm wrestling with Parliament and next thing you know William and Mary are proclaimed joint king and queen, each in their own right. In return, though, they have to accept a Bill of Rights limiting the monarchy’s power. They can’t suspend laws that Parliament passes, raise an army during peacetime without its agreement, mess around with Parliamentary elections, inflict cruel or unusual punishments, deny Protestant subjects the right to bear arms “suitable to their Conditions and as allowed by Law,” punish MPs or members of the Lords for anything they say in debates, or smuggle babies into bedrooms in warming pans. Unless the babies have sworn their allegiance to the Protestant faith.

Parts of that will sound familiar to Americans. This is where we stole the wording from. But what’s most important here aren’t the particulars, it’s that the king and queen have been chosen by Parliament and have agreed to the limits Parliament put on their power.

The wrestling match between Parliament and the monarchy is over. Parliament’s won.

This is called the Glorious Revolution. Why? Because it’s not a revolution and because if you chose the right side back there at the beginning, you feel glorious.

 

* Okay, I invented the ballerinas. And the sequins, although (to my surprise) they did exist in the 17th century and were used on both men’s and women’s clothing. 

The Levellers, the New Model Army, and the Hot-Water Wash

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Welcome to England of 1645 and to the present tense, which in spite of all logic is going to apply to the past. We’re in the middle of the Civil Wars, which has glorious capital letters. Isn’t it just impressed with itself?

Parliament is at war with King Charles and has just substituted the New Model Army for the private armies its supporters raised and for the local Trained Bands, part-time, local militias that might or might not be willing to serve outside their home regions.

We’re back to irrelevant photos: It’s spring. Have a daffodil.

The New Model Army

What’s new about this army? Unlike the local militias, it’s full time. It’s professional. It can be sent anywhere in the country. Unlike private armies, it has a unified command and people will be promoted on the basis of their competence instead of their titles and status and money. And unlike both militias and private armies, if you wash it, even in the hottest water, it won’t shrink. It is truly a miraculous creation.

But there’s more. Its officers are barred from holding seats in either the Commons or the House of Lords, at least when it’s first formed. This keeps the aristocracy from leading it, since members of the Commons can resign their seats to become officers but members of the Lords remain lords no matter what they do. No one seems to have imagined that a person might un-lord himself. And if they can’t imagine it, they can’t do it. If a lord gets silly enough to claim he’s a commoner, all the other actors will say, “Oh, no you’re not,” and no matter how many times he says, “Oh, yes I am,” he won’t be.

That last joke only makes sense if you’ve seen a panto, a form of British theater where the only joke revolves around repetition of “Oh, no you’re not” and “Oh, yes I am.”

See how much you learn here?

Like most miracle products, though, once you look closely, the New Model Army has some problems. It’s made of a mix of volunteers and draftees; of veteran soldiers and terrified newbies; of deeply committed Puritans, assorted other religious dissenters, and (it includes draftees, remember) people who’ve spent their lives worshiping in the old ways and aren’t easy about all these changes. In other words, it’s stitched together from an assortment of all the scraps in England’s fabric shop.

Before long, some of the draftees desert. Some of the dissenters dissent. The wool and the lace are hard to stitch together. Neither of them goes well with hessian. Some of the dye runs. 

By the end of the First Civil War, the army’s fallen out of love with Parliament. If it ever was in love, which we haven’t actually established. The soldiers aren’t getting paid regularly, and that’s never a smart move; I mention that in case you happen to form an army yourself one day. Soldiers get grumpy when they’re not paid.

Parliament wants to either disband the army or march it off to Ireland, where the soldiers have as much chance of seeing their back pay as they have of becoming Pope–all of them at the same time, in their anti-Catholic multitudes. So no, the army isn’t about to do either of those things. Or at least the soldiers aren’t. The soldiers and their officers aren’t of one mind about this. Or much of anything else right now.

And if that’s not enough, Parliament, or part of it anyway, is leaning in the direction of restoring the king without increasing the country’s political or religious freedoms. The soldiers are starting to ask each other what they’ve been fighting for anyway.

So each regiment elects two agitators–yes, that’s what they‘re called–and they join the army’s senior officers in an Army Council, where they put together the army’s demands to Parliament. 

I’m simplifying. We’d be here all night if I didn’t and, apologies, I don’t have enough eggs on hand to make breakfast for all of us. Keep saying “Great sweep of history.” It’ll get you home in time to give the kitty a treat before bedtime.

 

The Putney Debates

What the agitators and the Army Council do, first in existing at all, second in sitting down to talk, and third in making demands of Parliament, is radical enough. This is an army, remember, and armies are built on hierarchies and orders and yes-sirs, not on discussing your purpose and goals and philosophy and then voting on whether your orders are worth carrying out. But the troops do more than discuss. They put together an even more radical set of demands for constitutional change. If it’s put into practice, it will seriously democratize the country.

Spoiler alert: That doesn’t happen.

While this intellectual brew is fermenting, the army’s moving toward London–not in any sort of a hurry, since Parliament’s captured the king and that’s kind of like a commercial in the middle of the TV show, so everyone’s wandered off to the kitchen to see how well the beer’s fermenting. Besides, there might be some popcorn left from last night. Then in late October and early November 1647, the army does an amazing thing: It stops to hold the Putney Debates, an argument over what kind of country they’re all fighting for. Some five hundred soldiers argue politics and philosophy with their officers.

The argument boils down to two positions, one held by the top-level leaders’ (called the Grandees) and the other, more radical one proposed by the Levellers and held by some hefty but unmeasurable number of soldiers.

What the Levellers propose is that all men get the right to vote–or almost all men. It depends on what source you read and when you tune in, since their ideas evolve. The idea that women should vote is as far out of reach as Instagram and the theory of relativity. They also call for freedom of religion—not just for their own religions but for everyone—for the opening up of enclosed land, for an end to conscription, and for an assortment of other political and economic changes, including equality before the law, an end to the censorship of books and newspapers, and no taxation of anyone earning less than £30 a year.

Since the participants have a sense that they’re making history, they’re kind enough to take notes for some (but unfortunately not all) of the debates. Let’s toss in a few quotes about whether people with no property, or not much property, should have a right to vote:

From the Grandees’ side: “I think that no person hath a right to an interest or share in the disposing of the affairs of the kingdom, and in determining or choosing those that determine what laws we shall be ruled by here–no person hath a right to this, that hath not a permanent fixed interest in this kingdom. . . . First, the thing itself [a greatly expanded vote] were dangerous if it were settled to destroy property. But I say that the principle that leads to this is destructive to property; for by the same reason that you will alter this Constitution merely that there’s a greater Constitution by nature–by the same reason, by the law of nature, there is a greater liberty to the use of other men’s goods which that property bars you.” —Henry Ireton.

Do people really talk that way? Apparently. Can they follow each other through those convoluted sentences? They must, because they understand each other well enough to argue, and here’s the argument from the soldiers’ side:

“I think that the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore truly, Sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that Government.” —Thomas Rainsborough

“We have engaged in this kingdom and ventured our lives, and it was all for this: to recover our birthrights and privileges as Englishmen–and by the arguments urged there is none. There are many thousands of us soldiers that have ventured our lives; we have had little property in this kingdom as to our estates, yet we had a birthright. But it seems now except a man hath a fixed estate in this kingdom, he hath no right in this kingdom. I wonder we were so much deceived.” —Edward Sexby

For the Grandees, the idea that all men–or almost all men–should have the vote flirts with anarchy. For the Levellers, it’s essential.

Leveller leaders and Grandees negotiate, looking for something they can agree to present to Parliament.

They don’t find common ground and the Levellers walk out.

The Grandees demand an oath of loyalty from the soldiers, which means signing up to the Grandees’ alternative to the Levellers’ manifesto. Many sign–and it’s not irrelevant that they’ve been promised their back pay. Some refuse. Stones are thrown. Swords are drawn. Leaders of the radicals are arrested. One is executed on the spot. The agitators are surgically removed from the Army Council, which becomes a Council of Officers.

Mutinies continue for a while–over pay, over the Leveller manifesto, over orders to go to Ireland–but they’re isolated. The Grandees are back in control. But what’s happened can’t be un-happened. Ordinary people have thought the unthinkable and spoken those thoughts to each other and to the most powerful men in the country. That can’t help but percolate through the coming decades and centuries.

I know. That’s what always gets said about the losing side, especially by those of us who wear our political hearts on our left sleeves. It’s true that the Levellers’ demands come to nothing. Their voices are silenced. In the brutal calculations of power, they lose.

The odd thing is, though, that if you listen carefully you can hear the whisper of an echo of what they did, wrote, and said.