Category Archives: History

Why British history isn’t the story of a white country

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A new BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has set off (heavy sigh) yet another conversation about whether British history is the story of a white country. 

Why? Because either the show’s casting was color blind, where actors are chosen without regard to their skin color, or because (and my bet’s on this) the directors deliberately placed Black actors in major roles. 

Cue the predictable emails/phone calls/howls of outrage. Cue mentions of wokeness and political correctness. Sadly, I doubt we can cue any repetitions of that glorious confection of manufactured outrage, “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” The workerati had too much fun with it and the sleeperati had to retire it. But if you want to do your bit to keep the phrase alive, for £12.99 plus shipping and handling, you can buy a tee shirt announcing your reading and eating preferences.

It comes in a variety of designs, which says (a) it’s popular, (b) someone had too much fun to stop at one, or (c) it wasn’t all that popular and they’ve still got stock left. 

But forget the shirts. The assumption behind the complaints is that having a Black lawyer in a Dickens story is historically inaccurate and can only be explained by someone’s desire to rewrite history into something tofu flavored. 

 

Brief interruption for the sake of complete accuracy

I don’t like tofu. I can eat it–it’s not liver, after all–but I haven’t found a way to enjoy it and I’ve stopped searching for one. I do like the shirts, although I won’t be eating any. I probably won’t be wearing one either. I’ve stopped thinking people want to hear from my clothing.

Irrelevant photo: Cuckoo flowers–also called lady’s smocks, milkmaids, and mayflower. It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family, and yes, it will be on the test.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Complaints Department…

…the question we’re considering is, How likely would it have been in the Victorian (and slightly pre-Victorian) era, which is when Great Expectations takes place, to find a Black lawyer and an Indian law clerk? And would Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, be–um, it’s not immediately apparent from watching the series what her ethnicity is. I was going for someplace in Asia (it’s a big continent; surely it has a likely spot somewhere), but it turns out the actor playing her is of Mauritian and Thai heritage. She’s also described as an English-born Australian actor. That last bit isn’t relevant to the flap at hand but does remind us how complicated a person’s background can be. She has brown skin, though, and I’m assuming that does its bit to stir up the complainers.

To answer the question I’ve wandered away from, though: It’s quite accurate. English history is not all white, even if it’s often presented as if it were.

 

Georgian Britain

Let’s start with Georgian Britain, since that’s when Great Expectations begins (it then crosses into the Victorian era without needing to present a passport). The Georgian era ran from 1714 to 1830. Yes, I had to look it up, and I learned that it took four back-to-back Georges to cover that many years. 

At least 5,000 Black people lived in Georgian London, although that’s a minimum estimate, not a complete count. Data is (sorry: are) sparse–not just about Black people in London but about lots of people and things of the era. We have to work with what we’ve got. Many of them arrived as slaves and lived on in Britain as enslaved servants–it was quite the fashion among the upper class to have a Black servant in the household. Many of them escaped, though, disappearing into the general population. We know about them from newspaper ads calling for their capture and return. They’re often identified by the metal collars fastened onto their necks and by their scars.

Slavery within Britain itself was abolished in 1807, although the country continued to accumulate wealth from slavery in its colonies and trading relationships. Anyone who presents history as a simple picture is lying to you or themselves or both. So however ironically, British soil itself was free, and so were the people who stood on it.

Who, then, were these Black Britons? Most were poor and not lawyers in Dickens novels, but then so were most white Britons and you won’t find anyone offering that as an argument against casting a white actor as the lawyer. 

A few did become part of the middle and upper classes. 

How upper is upper?As far as I know, none of them inherited titles, but Queen Victoria  (you don’t get much higher in the class structure than that) had a ward and goddaughter, Sara Forbes Bonetta, who was Yoruba. 

So a Black lawyer? Entirely possible. 

As for the Indian law clerk and Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, when a country conquers an empire,it will be changed by the countries it conquers. The British Empire didn’t  just bring back money, textiles, tea, spices, opium, and new recipes to break up the same-old same-old of British cooking. People came as well, some by choice and some not. They came to work, to study, to live, to do all the assorted things humans do. Some stayed a while and went home. Others put down roots and became British. Communities formed.

That’s not to say there was no racism. 

 

Racism

British racism was (and, I think, still is) different from the American brand. For one thing, intermarriage wasn’t uncommon in Britain, whereas during large parts of US history it wasn’t just uncommon, it was illegal in many states. I mention that in part because a lot of readers here at Notes are American and also because culturally speaking I’m more American than British. I do know the US isn’t the world’s focal point, but I can’t help using it as mine a lot of the time. 

In the Victorian era, science was dragged in, kicking and screaming, to explain why racism and empire were natural and whites–and especially whites of the British persuasion–were superior to whoever else you had in mind. They measured heads and found that–surprise, surprise–the heads that happened to be shaped like their own had more brain power than anyone else’s, proving that their little twig of the human tree was by far superior to the other little twigs. They catalogued humanity into races, and no matter how many times later scientists have demonstrated that science provides no basis for the divisions, we’re still fighting our way out of that paper bag.

So again, we’re looking at a complicated picture. Racism, yes, but also Black people distributed–however unequally–throughout society.

And for the benefit of American readers, who see the word Black and understand it to mean someone of African heritage, in Britain it often includes Asians, although I think that’s shifting.

The Victorians didn’t invent racism, though. As soon as the country dove into slave-holding and the slave trade, it began to tell itself that the people it was enslaving were a lower grade of human. All the Victorians did was sprinkle a bit of pseudo-scientific glitter over it.

 

Moving backwards

Historians have relatively recently begun tracing Black British history in the Tudor era, picking individuals out of the sparse records that are available, and again the picture isn’t simple. Miranda Kaufman writes about a weaver, a sailor, a porter, travelers, a salvage diver, and an assortment of others. Onyeka Nubia combed through marriage and baptism records and found Black people who often married whites and over several generations disappeared into the gene pool. As he put it when I heard him speak to an almost all-white crowd, “This is not my history [he’s of African extraction]. This is  your history.”

Peter Fryer covers some of the same territory, but he starts with Roman legionnaires. 

Most of the stories they give us are, of necessity, limited. The written records mark  brief moments in people’s lives, then they disappear. But they were here. They lived, they worked, they died. They’ve been written out of British history. If someone writes them back in, it’s an act of restitution, not tofu addiction.

Does racism go back as far as the Tudor era? I’m not sure, but if it does it was probably different from the racism we know today. 

As early as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603, and yes, I had to look it up) we can find Liz issuing two separate orders to expell Black people from Britain because they were eating food that should have gone to her people, and besides, most of them were heathens. Or some of them were heathens. Or, well, never mind, they ate, and getting rid of them was easier than wrestling with inequality and famine.

Except that she didn’t get rid of them. She issued a couple of proclamations and there (give or take a bit of historical running back and forth, which we’ll skip) it ended. You can find the full tale here. 

Does it matter whether Black people were targets because they were Black, because some of them weren’t Christian, or because they were an immigrant community (with some  descendants of immigrants added in)? I’m not sure. None of those positions are comfortable. 

Onyeka Nubia argues that the Tudor era was more open and it wasn’t until later that the contributions of Black Britons were written out of the official history. I’d give you details but I haven’t gotten my hands on his books yet. Expect me to come back to the subject.

Archeology in Britain

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Have you ever read about an archeological dig and wondered how history’s layers get buried? Is the planet stealing soil from someplace and using it to hide the past? Do we keep the same amount of soil but does the wind blow all those layers of dirt over the past’s leavings? And if it does, why doesn’t it unbury an equal amount of history someplace else?

A book I stumbled across recently–Digging Up Britain: a new history in ten extraordinary discoveries, by Mike Pitts–finally answered the question for me, at least in part. A city, Pitts tells us, accumulates people–people who weren’t born there; people who don’t live there. While they’re there, they work, they trade, they eat, they drink, they sleep, and they do much of that within walls if they can. 

Most of those activities involve physical objects, so the city brings in wood and stone for its buildings, and tiles, slates, or reeds for its roofs. It brings in food for its, um, food. Okay, the rhetorical pattern’s breaking down here. We’ll sneak away without anyone noticing. It brings in leather and metal and fabric (or the raw materials to weave fabric) and everything else that you can think of and I haven’t.  

Irrelevant photo: The north Cornish coast

“Goods are also exported and people leave, but with time and decay, the city gains more than it loses. One generation’s walls become the rubble foundations for another’s. Every leather offcut, rusted nail, broken cup and lost penny finds its way into the teeming earth. Slowly, imperceptibly, the ground rises, covering the traces of the past.”

Well, yes, now that he’s planted the picture in my head, it’s a screamingly obvious one. The cause isn’t space dust. It’s people moving stuff from one place to another and wandering off without it. 

 

London

Pitts goes on to talk about some of London’s biggest ground-lifting events. Roman London had two fires that can still be spotted in layers of red earth. One of those would’ve been set during Boudica’s rebellion, when she burned London and two other cities to the ground. Then, when 1666’s Great Fire of London finally burned itself out and it was time to rebuild, stone was hauled in and a new city rose on the leveled remains of the destruction.

The biggest leveling of walls, though, was the blitz–the bombing of London during World War II–and when Pitts reaches this point, he focuses on a small area where two excavations found particularly rich Roman artifacts: On the night of May 10, 1941, bombing “disrupted” 8,000 streets, killing more than 4,000 people and seriously injuring 1,800. It wiped out most of the block he’s interested in, where there’d been 350 businesses “crammed into a warren of high Victorian terraces and narrow alleys.” They included cafes, a bookseller, a tailor, a dentist, accountants, and a postage stamp perforator.

Who knew there even were postage stamp perforators? I assumed that got done by some sort of machinery working where and when the stamps were printed. Or that someone with pointy little teeth came along and–

Never mind. Not much was left of the street, and in 1952, when it was redeveloped, the area was opened to archeologists just before an office building went up on the site. The digging had uncovered an underground temple to Mithras, and it was taken apart, and reconstructed (badly) above ground and facing the wrong way. And then in 2012, when the 1952 building was torn down and something newer and shinier was about to be built, archeologists got in there again, only with more time to do their job. What they found was “like a library of random news from across Roman London.” The area had been used as a dump, and archeologists love dumps. It turned out to be “the most productive single excavation of a British Roman site in modern times,” and included a horde of wood-and-wax tablets recording, for the most part, business transactions. It gave them a glimpse into the city before it had the grand public buildings we associate with Roman towns. This was a town in its early stages. 

The success of that second dig was made possible by a change in the relationship of archeologists and developers.

 

Archeologists and the construction industry

One of the major ways the past gets uncovered in Britain is that someone comes along with heavy-duty construction equipment and starts digging. They’re not hoping to find, say, a Roman villa or a Bronze Age settlement. In fact, they’re hoping not to. They want to build a parking ramp or a shopping mall. 

Until 1990, archeologists were dependent on the goodwill of the developers for access to their sites. Before that, if a developer stumbled into something of archeological importance, and if they didn’t sweep it under the metaphorical rug fast enough, archeologists had to rely on a mix of diplomacy, goodwill, and the public pressure set off by media coverage to get access. Because archeologists mean delays, and delays cost money.

In a showdown between history and national heritage on one side and money on the other, it’s not often that history and heritage win, but they did win when the foundations of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre were discovered by accident. A media storm set off a celebrity storm, which in turn set off a wider public storm, and under that pressure a delay was organized and the new building eventually went up over the theater’s foundations, which are now covered in water to keep the ground from cracking.

 

Irrelevant but interesting bit of information 

Exploration of the theater’s foundations brought us the news that hazelnuts were the popcorn of Shakespeare’s day. The shells were everywhere. 

 

The relationship changes

After the battle to save the Rose, things changed, and it kills me to say anything good about Margaret Thatcher’s government but I’m going to have to: they’re the ones who introduced Planning Policy Guidance 16–Archaeology in Planning, called PPG16 by its friends and admirers. 

PPG16 is a guidance paper that requires anyone building anything that needs planning permission–and in Britain, that’s just about any building at all–to consider its  impact on archaeology. According to Heritage Daily, PPG16’s impact was unintentional, but lovely, so I don’t have to be particularly nice about Thatcher’s government: they didn’t mean to do something good; they were just trying to shut everybody up.

Heritage Daily  describes the events at the Rose as an omnishambles, with “leading actors, including Sir Ian Mckellen and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, facing down the developers’ bulldozers, standing alongside archaeologists, the general public and local children waving placards declaiming, ‘Don’t Doze the Rose.’

“Faced with this highly public demand that the historic site be protected, the Environment Department, under Secretary of State Nicholas Ridley, proved utterly incapable of formulating a coherent policy to dig the developer Imry Merchant and the Government out of the mire. “

In the end, they cobbled together a system that had local and national governments, developers, heritage professionals, and the public working together to preserve whatever could be preserved in place, and to record, and sometimes move, whatever couldn’t be. It didn’t make developers or free-market purists happy, but it did keep politically damaging incidents like the Rose from happening again. 

 

The impact on archeology

All this meant archeology had to change. The profession came into this period as a mix of local heritage organizations, professors, and museums. None of them were equipped to meet the schedules or use “the same language as the architects and developers whose plans the system was designed to facilitate,” Heritage Daily says. 

After PPG16, “Archaeology as a discipline found itself putting on a suit, becoming a profession and sitting down in planning meetings with architects and developers to discuss fitting in an excavation alongside the other building site preparation and ground works.”

“It’s not perfect, but . . . once PPG16 and the concept . . . was in place, pipeline surveys and large scale infrastructure projects like Heathrow Terminal 5 and HS1, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, did offer the chance to develop practice and sample large transects of landscape to sometimes startling effect.”

Some years ago, not far from where I live, a new sewage line uncovered enough Cornish history that the archeologists involved organized a presentation in the village hall, and it was packed. That was my first hint of the working relationship between archeologists and the construction industry, and I was impressed.

One of the finds they talked about was a series of Christian and pre-Christian burials. You could tell them apart because the Christians were buried so that they’d be facing east when they rose on–what is it? Judgment day? Whichever. If it happens, I’m sure someone will have set an alarm clock, so I don’t need to worry. Anyway, they were supposed to rise from their graves and be facing east. The non-Christians, on the other hand, were buried with grave goods–things they’d used in life and would, presumably, want in the next one. Or maybe the goods were a way for the living to grieve and pay tribute. Who can know at this distance in time? Whatever the reason, that’s how they buried their dead. 

But the archeologists had found a few people who were hedging their bets–or at least whose descendants were. They were buried facing east but also with grave goods. Whichever way the afterlife played out, they’d be ready.

In Pitts’ last chapter, he mentions an enlargement of the A14 (that’s a road) near Cambridge that’s been a particular gift to archeology. They’ve uncovered ancient villages, industrial zones, religious monuments, 15 tones of bones and artifacts, pottery kilns, field layouts and more, all of which could so easily have been dug up, scattered, and lost to history.

The last invasion of Britain

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When was Britain last invaded? 

Sorry, no, it wasn’t in 1066. It was in 1797, France landed troops in Wales, and it played out more as farce than as pivotal historical moment. 

This was toward the end of the French Revolutionary wars, when Britain and France were at war, so invading Britain wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The French were backing a hoped-for Irish rising against the English, and invading Britain would make a nice diversion. 

Irrelevant photo: Primroses on a frosty morning.

 

What didn’t happen and what did

The original plan was to land troops in Cornwall, Bristol, Newcastle and–most importantly–Ireland, the last landing planned with the help of the Irish revolutionary leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who’d convinced revolutionary France that with its help Ireland could free itself of British domination. Before it got far, though, the project was already looking shaky. The raid on Cornwall was canceled, the raid on Newcastle was foiled by the weather, and the ships carrying 15,000 troops to Ireland were also dispersed by the weather and limped back to Brest. 

That left the expedition to Bristol–four ships carrying 1,400 soldiers under the command of William Tate. Why it wasn’t called off is anyone’s guess. 

Tate’s orders were “to bring as much chaos and confusion to the heart of Britain as was possible; to recommend and facilitate a rising of the British poor against the government; but whenever and wherever possible, to wage war against the castle, not the cottage.” 

Disciplined troops might have managed that distinction between castle and cottage, but Tate didn’t have disciplined troops. Over half were newly released prisoners and the rest (including Tate) didn’t have a whole lot of military experience. 

That made no difference to Bristol, because they never got there. The weather was against them and the ships landed instead near the mighty metropolis of Fishguard, Wales. I can’t find population figures for 1797, but the 2021 census reports a population of 3,421, up 2 from the 2011 census. It’s a fair guess that the place had 6 or 8 fewer people in 1797.

The ships actually landed outside Fishguard, not in the metropolis itself, dropping off Tate and his soldiers and sailing back to France and out of our story. 

Tate got down to business and sent out patrols and they set to work looting people’s houses. It’s a well known way of getting cottage-dwellers to support your cause. And since a Portuguese ship had run aground not long before, both houses and cottages were well stocked with brandy. Or in a different telling, wine. 

Okay, brandy turns out to be distilled wine. Lord Google just whispered that in my ear. The things I learn writing this blog.

Before long the soldiers were well stocked with brandy themselves and (I’m guessing here) roaring drunk. One is said to have shot a clock.

Take that, you sumbitch. You won’t try that again, will you?

I’ll guess again and say that had something to do with the brandy.

According to legend, they also cooked some geese in butter and got food poisoning. Now, goose cooked in butter may not be kosher but there’s no reason the soldiers would have known about that or cared if they had, and also no reason that eating goose cooked that way would give you food poisoning. We’re probably missing a piece of the puzzle but I’ve checked under the couch and it’s not there, so let’s go with what we’ve got and not complain. For either one reason or both, a good number of them incapacitated themselves.

One source questions whether the troops were even armed, raising the possibility that they counted on capturing weapons.

 

Meanwhile in the other corner…

…was mighty Fishguard. What did it have by way of defense? The Fencibles, for one thing. They sound like something that could be sold illegally in a back alley but weren’t. They were a militia that could be called up for local service. Their members didn’t have much in the way of training and lived at home, so mobilizing them was slow and probably chaotic, but eventually they gathered at the local fort. Then they abandoned the local fort, marching off in the direction of greater safety, away from the French. On the way, they met the better trained Pembrokeshire Yeomanry Cavalry–professional soldiers–who gathered them up, turned them around, and organized everyone into a night raid on the French position.

At this point, I’m thinking, Hey, night attack. Guerrilla warfare. That’s novel stuff for the era. Shows you what I know. They stumbled along a country lane in the dark with the volume on their fifes and drums turned up to max, alerting (no surprise here) the French, who (as far as I can figure out) took up ambush positions, at which point the British thought better of that night attack idea and marched back the way they came.

 

Does anyone come out of the tale looking competent?

Yes: the local people, who gathered with scythes and pitchforks and rounded up French scouts and stragglers, killing at least one. The local cobbler, Jemima Nicholas, captured a dozen or so while armed with nothing more than a pitchfork.

Did she really capture a dozen soldiers, however drunk, food-poisoned, and badly trained, using only a pitchfork? Who knows. We’re dealing with legend here. She captured some. Presumably she had a pitchfork. She wasn’t a woman to mess with and became a local hero.

Because so much of what happened comes to us by way of legend, though, I’m having trouble putting together a coherent account, so I’ll step back a bit and tell the story from a distance: Local people and British soldiers (back, presumably, from their earlier retreat) lined the crest of the hill, looking to the French like a couple of thousand soldiers–an impression helped along by the local women’s custom of wearing red dresses and tall black hats, which were a fair match for British army uniforms, at least if you didn’t get too close. In fact, the French outnumbered the British but didn’t know it. 

Among the French, discipline was evaporating. Or had evaporated earlier, when all that the brandy signed up. Or it had never been present to evaporate. Tate sent a messenger to Fishguard with a note:

“The circumstances under which the body of French troops under my command were landed at this place renders it unnecessary to attempt any military operations, as they would only lead to bloodshed and pillage. The officers of the whole corps therefore intimated their desire of entering into a negotiation upon principles of humanity for a surrender. If you are influenced by similar considerations, you may signify the same to the bearer. In the meantime, hostilities shall cease.

“Health and respect,

“Tate, Chef de Brigade”

The British bluffed, demanding an unconditional surrender, and got it. The French surrendered and were imprisoned, which seems like an unkind response to someone who signs their note “health and respect.”

 

And then?

Then some of the French soldiers broke out, stole a yacht belonging to Lord Cawdor–the officer they’d surrendered to–and like the ships that had carried them to Wales, sail out of our story, no doubt savoring the occasional sweetness of life’s little ironies.

The building where the surrender was signed became a pub–but not immediately.

After that the story gets serious. Even here at Notes, that sometimes happens.

In 1798, a rebellion did indeed break out in Ireland, but by then the French would only commit enough forces to make minor raids along the Irish coast. Tone landed in Donegal with 3,000 troops and was captured. He was sentenced to be hanged but killed himself before the British got a chance.

Who lived in early medieval England? 

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We’re programmed to imagine early medieval England as a land of straw-haired Anglo-Saxons–so much so that an article debunking that belief is illustrated by (you guessed it) a picture of a straw-haired young woman wearing a leather headband and gazing soulfully up at the clouds. 

But before I go on, let’s define the early medieval period. English Heritage opens the doors at around the year 410 and tossing the drinkers out onto the street in 1066, which means it runs from the end of Roman rule to the Norman invasion. You could call it the Anglo-Saxon period without losing too many points on your essay, even though what you’re about to read messes with the standing assumptions about Anglo-Saxon England. You could also call it the Dark Ages, but you’ll lose points. It’s got more zing but it’s gone out of fashion. 

Irrelevant photo: hellebore

 

That straw-haired image

The stereotype we bought into–and forgive me if I pretend I can talk for all of us–grows out of having read that the Anglo-Saxons invaded that big central chunk of Britain we call England, pushing its earlier residents, the Celts, to the margins.

The margins? That’d be Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. 

Since the Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes, we can call Central Casting and tell them we need blonds–lots of tall, warrior types and a few wistful maidens.

Why the gender imbalance? Because we were taught the Anglo-Saxons came as warriors–big, blond guys with big, blond swords.

The archeologists who gave us that story did it in good faith. They were working with the tools they had. They’d dig up an early medieval village or graveyard, find Anglo-Saxon artifacts, and not unreasonably deduce that Anglo-Saxons lived there. But turn a few calendar pages and before we know what hit us, science has given them new toys to work with. In other words, the next generation of archeologists could work over the same ground but now sequence DNA and read tooth enamel well enough to identify people’s tribes and know where the tooth enamel- wearer had grown up, and that’s made the picture of early medieval England and the Anglo-Saxons more complicated. 

The article that pushed me down the road toward this blog post opens (once you get past that blond-haired maiden) by questioning the assumption that everyone in early medieval English villages looked alike or talked the same way. It’s based on a DNA study of 460 people from sites across northern Europe, 278 of them from the southern and eastern English coasts. 

The Anglo-Saxons and the Celts

The first change to the traditional story is that the Anglo-Saxons (or the incomers, anyway, whatever we’re going to call them) don’t seem to have driven the Celts out. Instead, the two groups settled down alongside them and played house: Many people in these settlements were of mixed heritage. 

The study did find evidence of mass migration into the British Isles after Roman government ended, but it wasn’t a migration of warriors. These were families.

Now let’s shift to a different article. It’s about the same study but juggles a few different details. It doesn’t talk about Celts and Anglo-Saxons but people of WBI (western British and Irish) and CNE (continental northern European) heritage. If you want the percentages from various communities, that’s where you’ll find it. I hope you know better than to look to me for numbers when they’re avoidable.

But the genetic makeup of the communities wasn’t limited to Celts and northern Europeans. One skeleton–a girl of about eleven, found in Updown (yes, seriously), in Kent–had two-thirds CNE ancestry and one-third West African ancestry. The modern grouping most closely related to her African ancestors would be the Esan and Yoruba peoples in southern Nigeria. 

How’d they show up there? Trade, probably. Early medieval England wasn’t an isolated place, ad traders often exchange more than just the goods they’re selling. They exchange culture, language, DNA.

Updown Girl was buried with her family members and with grave goods similar to theirs, like any other village girl, since that’s what she was, in a manner we still call Anglo-Saxon for lack of a better term. 

Why am I looking for a better term? Because the culture we still think of as Anglo-Saxon and that we used to assume was brought over whole by the Anglo-Saxon tribes seems to have belonged to a hybrid culture–the kind that grows up when cultures meet and mix. We don’t know what that mixing was like; we can only infer it from DNA, tooth enamel, and the goods people were buried with.

Grave goods and social patterns

The second article says, “Grave goods seem to have played only a very limited role in the signalling of different ancestries–assuming that was what was intended–and where it is seen, that signalling was dependent on biological sex.” In other words, you can’t tell from the goods people were buried with who was of primarily CNE (or Anglo-Saxon) ancestry and who was primarily WBI (or Celtic), although men whose ancestry was primarily WBI–what we’d call mostly Celtic–were more likely to have been buried with grave goods primarily WBI than women were.

How come? Dunno. Any answer will be wild speculation. If I was writing historical fiction, I could have fun with that, although someone somewhere would inevitably think it was fact.

The archeologists found that the two groups–the WBI and the CNE–didn’t generally keep themselves separate and people soon had mixed ancestry. The patterns varied from settlement to settlement, but all of them change our assumptions of what Anglo-Saxon means. It’s beginning to look like a culture adopted by a group of genetically mixed people rather than something brought over whole by invading tribesmen.

As the first article–the one with the straw-haired maiden–puts it, “Early Anglo-Saxon culture was a mixing pot of ideas, intermarriage and movement. This genetic coalescing and cultural diversity created something new in the south and east of England after the Roman empire ended.”

For people who believe in racial purity, the science of DNA must be a real pain in the backside.

A quick history of the Cornish pasty

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If Cornwall and Devon go to war–and nothing’s too crazy these days–it will be about either who baked the first pasty or who knows the right way to make a cream tea. You’ll agree, I’m sure, that these are reasonable things for neighboring counties to shed blood over, but they may have to wait until people aren’t quite so distracted by the cost of living crisis that the important things slip past them unnoticed.

In the meantime, allow me, please, to stoke the fires of cultural warfare by exploring, in my usual even-handed way, the history of the Cornish pasty. Or possibly the Devon pasty. 

We’ll skip that business about cream tea for now.

Irrelevant photo: a hellebore

What’s a pasty?

Basically, a semicircular pie made of beef, potatoes, onions, and turnips, only the turnips are called swedes. It might just possibly have other stuff as well, but before we get to that let’s dive down the closest rabbit hole and ask why turnips are called swedes.

According to one gardening catalog’s website, “The swede is thought to have been introduced into Britain around 1800. It is said that King Gustav of Sweden sent the first swede seeds as a gift to Patrick Miller (1731 – 1815) of Dumfries and Galloway, and that this act resulted in the vegetable being called ‘swede.’ ”

The website also says they’re called rutabagas in the US, from a Swedish word meaning thick root. Well, maybe and maybe not. I grew up in New York and remember turnips being called turnips, although I don’t remember that we ate them. Rutabaga, I think, is a regionalism. Or else calling a turnip a turnip is a regionalism. But that’s the wrong rabbit hole, so we’ll back out before we get stuck.

A different gardening catalog site says the swede is “bigger, tougher skinned, yellow fleshed and much hardier than a turnip.“ So basically, by this definition they’re the same thing but different.

You needed to know all of that, right? Now we’ll leave the rabbits and their burrow in peace and get to something vaguely resembling the point. 

Before Britain left the European Union, the Cornish pasty got protected status from the EU, meaning that if a pasty wasn’t made in Cornwall, it couldn’t claim to be a Cornish pasty. Or, since no pasty makes claims on its own behalf, the person selling it couldn’t make that claim.

To translate that into handy bureaucratese, “At least one stage of the production, processing or preparation of the product must currently take place in Cornwall.”

If I’m reading that correctly, you could run the length of Cornwall with a potato and a knife and just as you’re about to cross the Tamar River into Devon cut the potato in two, then use one or both halves to make a pasty in Devon, and still call the result a Cornish pasty, although you’d have gone to a lot of trouble without getting much benefit from it.

Besides, Cornwall left the EU along with the rest of Britain, so the pasty lost its protected status. I admit, that’s well down the list of problems Brexit caused, but the Devon pasty never had protected status to lose, so if we’re keeping score that’s one point for Cornwall. Unless you’re a Brexiteer, in which case you’ll give that point to Devon anyway.

 

Do pasties always have beef, potatoes, and whatever?

As far as most people are concerned, yes. If someone asks for a pasty, they’re expecting beef, potato, onion, and swede, wrapped in pastry and crimped along the edge. You might slip in a bit of carrot or five army-green peas, but I understand they’re controversial. These days, though, you can also buy cheese and onion pasties, vegan pasties, gluten-free pasties, steak and stilton pasties. In Padstow, I’ve even seen apple pasties and chocolate pasties in displayed shop windows. 

The tourists don’t know any better, but Cornwall’s patron saint, Piran, is in despair and rumor has it he’s taking applications from other counties, hoping they’ll show more respect for their traditional foods.

 

Was that always what was in a pasty?

Of course not. Where’s the fun in writing about something that has a simple history? If we go back to medieval times, we can find recipes that use venison, beef, lamb, seafood, and eels, flavoring them with gravies and fruits. 

Okay, someone else can find the recipes for us. I’ll surprise no one if I admit to relying on secondary sources. 

Were those the first pasties, then–the pasty pioneers? Once again, of course not. Those are the ones that got written down. Folk pasties, like folk songs, had to make their way in the world without benefit of written records. 

In addition to their having been written down, what tells us that these aren’t folk pasties is that only the rich (along with a lucky poacher or two) ate venison. So if ordinary folk ate pasties–and they probably did–that’s not what they wrapped their pastry around, and if you’ll follow me further into the realm of guesswork, I’m going to assert that they used whatever they had, because most people lived on the edge. Food was scarce. They made what they could out of what they had. And before 1586, that wouldn’t have included potatoes because they hadn’t reached Britain yet. They’re a New World import.

The ordinary Cornish pasty–what we could call the folk pasty, although no one else does–first becomes visible with the rise of the Cornish mining industry in the 1700s. Pasties were filling enough to keep a miner going through a hard day’s work at a time when not even the wildest of wild-eyed radicals were suggesting the 8-hour day or the 5-day week. 

The website of the Cornish Pasty Association (of course there’s Cornish Pasty Association) tells us that “the wives of Cornish tin miners would lovingly prepare these all-in-one meals to provide sustenance for their spouses during their gruelling days down the dark, damp mines.”

I won’t argue with dark or damp, but I will argue with the double L in grueling because I’m American by birth and spelling. I’ll also argue about every last pasty being prepared lovingly. Some wives and husbands were loving. Others were disappointed and bitter. A few were baffled or indifferent or repelled. Either all or almost all were exhausted, which takes a good bit of the love out of cooking, and sometimes out of love itself. Still, make them they did, because carryout (or takeout, or whatever you want to call it) hadn’t been invented, and neither had disposable income.

In everything I’ve read about miners and pasties, no one’s bothered to mention whether the bal maidens–the women who worked above ground at the mines–also ate pasties. It’s always the men eating and the women cooking. Interesting, isn’t it? 

Bal? It’s the Cornish word for mine. 

 

The shape

The standing belief is that the reason pasties were (and are) shaped like a capital D was to allow miners to hold the crust at one end with a work-grimed hand, then throw that final piece away. Arsenic was a presence in Cornish mines–so much of it that in the nineteenth century mining companies dug it out and sold it as a pesticide, and it was from that humble start that arsenic went on to power many a British mystery. How else was a mere woman to kill her husband?

That business about holding the pasty by the crust isn’t an established fact, though. Some people argue that miners carried their pasties in muslin bags, or in paper ones, and used the bags to hold the pasty while they ate. At least one photograph supports the argument, and it only makes sense considering that they had to not only carry their pasties to the mine but set them down someplace filthy until lunchtime.

According to legend, miners used to leave the final piece of crust for the knockers, who were–well, I can’t find a reliable source for this, so let’s go with WikiWhatsia. Knockers lived underground and were about two feet tall, with big heads, long arms, wrinkly skin, and white whiskers. They dressed like miners and were mostly benevolent. If you listened to their knocking, they could help you find productive seams. They could warn you of an impending collapse. They could also steal your tools or put out your candle. So a bit of crust from your pasty? Sure. You’d want these guys to like you. 

How did these creatures exist if they were all guys and all had whiskers? One strand of belief held that they were the spirits of miners who’d died underground. Another held that they were the ghosts of Jews who worked the mines in the eleventh and twelfth centuries–or possibly earlier.

Yes, kids, we’re getting deep into the land of unsubstantiated legend here. Some tales have Jews coming to Cornwall in ancient times–ancient enough that you can throw a few Phoeniceans into the conversation and not have it get any stranger than it already is. Others have Jews working the mines in the decades leading up to 1290, when Edward I spoiled the fun by expelling all the Jews from England.

Unsubstantiated as they are, you will find the word Jew in a few Cornish place names. Penzance, for example, has a Market Jew Street. Speaking as a marginally Jewish Jew, I’ve never figured out whether I should be offended by that or not. On a balance of probabilities, my guess is that I should, although I’m not exactly, just deeply weirded out.

Academic guesswork holds that these names are the descendants of unrelated Cornish words, which as the Cornish language was lost became corrupted to match local legend. 

The presence of Jews in Cornwall can’t be documented before the eighteenth century.

Didn’t think we’d get here from pasties, did you?

 

Oggy oggy oggy

While we’re chasing after unsubstantiated beliefs, this would be a good time to chase after the chant “Oggy, oggy, oggy.” 

Authoritative sources are too smart to weigh in on this, but Lord Google led me to sources offering various explanations: An oggy is a pasty–a corruption of a Cornish word for pasty. (At least it didn’t end up as Jew.) Or else the chant came from (gasp) those pesky Devonians, trying once again to claim the pasty as their own. Or it’s what the miners’ wives called down the pit when the pasties they were baking on the surface were ready to eat. (Take that with a cup or three of salt. The shafts were deep and the miners were likely to be working far from the entrance. You could call, “Oggy” all you wanted, they wouldn’t be likely to hear you.) Or it’s what pasty sellers on the streets called to drum up business.

Whatever it meant and wherever it was heard, the correct response if you hear it is, “Oi, oi, oi.”

Somehow or other it ended up as a Welsh rugby chant.

Do you begin to understand why it’s easy to think no Jews were involved in the making of Market Jew Street?

 

So who gets to claim the pasty, Devon or Cornwall?

An account book in Plymouth (that’s in Devon) mentions pasties in either 1509 or 1510. But a Cornish website cites earlier mentions, one involving Great Yarmouth and another St. Albans Abbey. Neither is in Devon. Neither is in Cornwall either, but they do undermine the value of that Plymouth mention. 

Take that, Devon.

A BBC article notes, with the print equivalent of a straight face, that a Cornish chronicler of the pasty claims that ancient Cornish cave paintings depict the pasty.

Does Cornwall have ancient cave paintings? Well, no, but let’s not let that ruin a good argument.

Okay, go ahead, rule out the cave paintings. That leaves us with some written records–more of them than I mentioned–but no one’s going to prove much about the pasty’s origins by citing written records. And we weren’t doing all that well with the unwritten ones, were we? It’s entirely possible that no one’s going to prove anything at all. Devon’s case isn’t strong. And Cornwall’s isn’t either, but we’ll say that quietly if you don’t mind. I live in Cornwall. I have to be careful.

None of that is likely to stop the rush to war, but I did try.

 

Yeah, but what about that cream tea?

Oh, that. We’re out of space. I’ll have to refer you to that notorious non-expert, me, for an explanation. 

What was life like in Viking England?

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English histories don’t ignore the Vikings. Who could? As raiders and as invaders, they left a mark that’s hard not to notice. But although the histories I’ve read mention the chunk of England the Vikings ruled, they treat it as if it was surrounded by an electric fence–they walk the perimeter, touch a quick finger to the wire, but then shy away to talk about the real England, which is (why, of course) the one the Anglo-Saxons ruled.

Well, screw that. Let’s go trespassing. I want to know what life was like in the Danelaw.

 

The what?

The Danelaw–the part of Britain ruled by the Danes (or Vikings, or Norse–it was all fluid at this point) and where Danish law was in force. It filled north, central, and eastern England (England didn’t exist yet as a political entity, but let’s use the name anyway) and included London. In other words, this was a big chunk of land. For a while there, it extended up into Scotland as well.

If you want to look like you know something no one else does, you can also spell it Danelagh or Danelaga. The price for that is that no one will know what you’re talking about. I don’t recommend it.

Irrelevant photo: Azalea blossom. In January. Indoors, I admit, but even so…

 

How’d the Danelaw get there?

Most of us first got to know the Vikings through cheesy movies, TV shows, and comic books. (Yes, we’re a high-culture lot around here.) They were raiders with horns on their helmets and they came in long, narrow boats, smashing, grabbing, and terrorizing. They were big, they were hairy, and they were scary.

Except for the business about the horns, that’s not untrue, but it’s also not the whole truth. 

Okay, I can’t vouch for the big and hairy part. They might not have been bigger or hairier than anyone else on the scene. Scary, though? Definitely. 

The rest of the story is that they were also settlers (or immigrants, or invaders–take your choice), farmers, craftspeople, and traders. They timed their raids to the agricultural year, because they were needed at home for the planting and harvesting. 

The raids weren’t England’s first experience of the Vikings. Britain and Scandinavia had a history of trade, and if you want to find cultural similarities, start by looking at England’s Sutton Hoo ship burial. But whatever the relationship was, no one wrote about it, leaving the Vikings to appear in the eighth century as raiders along the English coasts.

In the ninth century the Vikings shifted from raiding to settling in what became the Danelaw, replacing the Anglo-Saxon kings and landlords. It would be fair to say that they weren’t neighborly about those replacements. 

They settled most heavily in York and four other towns (they’re called the five boroughs, and York was dominant) and less heavily in rural areas. Some of them intermarried with the local population, so that it wasn’t long (at least in historical terms) before no clear genetic line could be drawn between Dane and non-Dane.

Not that they knew about genes, but everyone knew about sex. 

In some ways, the incomers adapted to the country they’d conquered. Buildings, for the most part, didn’t take on a Scandinavian style. Scandinavian runic writing disappeared. The incomers converted to the Christianity of Anglo-Saxon England fairly quickly, although a paper from the University of Leeds (sorry–I can’t find the author’s name) notes the difference between conversion and the more gradual process of Christianization and argues that “conversion might not be so much a matter of individual conscience as a question of social and political expediency.” In other words, the formal changes happened faster than the deeper ones. No surprise there.  

 

Language

Discussions about the Vikings’ impact swerve pretty quickly into language. In a period that didn’t leave us much evidence, it’s one of the things that can be traced. So place names get mentioned. The endings -by (village or farmstead), -thorpe (new village), -thwaite (meadow), and -dale (valley) mark a Viking presence. Personal names get mentioned. You can’t tell from a person’s name whether they were of Danish or Anglo-Saxon descent or a mix of both, Word borrowings also get mentioned.

Word borrowings? Tuesday and Wednesday are on loan from the Norse gods, although I’m cheating a bit since it was the Anglo-Saxons who brought more or less the same gods into English before they converted to Christianity. In contrast, Old English outright stole egg, steak, law, die, bread, down, fog, muck, lump, scrawny, and a long list of other words, and we’ve had them long enough that no one’s likely to ask for them back. Skirt, cake, freckle, neck, moss, sister, window, knife, smile, seat, gift, cross, leg, husband, law, and wrong are also ours illegally. So are words that start with SK, like sky and skin. Possession is 90% of the law. 

Most of those linguistic thefts were of everyday words, arguing (according to one article) that the two peoples lived side by side, passing a cup of flour and a bucket of words over the fence, as needed. They fall into a category of words a language can’t have too many of: nouns, adjectives, that sort of thing. If we have multiple words for tan (and if you’ve ever worked in the garment industry you know how many we have), the language can absorb that. But English somehow borrowed the word they from Old Norse (it was originally a masculine plural, but English got bored and made it gender neutral). Pronouns, it turns out, fall into a different category: the language chokes, coughs, and spits if it has multiples of them. The transfer (according to that same article) seems to testify to a close relationship between speakers of the two languages. In fact, the two languages may have been mutually intelligible–they’re both Germanic–which surely would’ve helped.

Compare all that to the French words that entered the language after the Norman conquest. We have more borrowings from French than from Norse, but they’re about high culture, hunting, law, cooked food as opposed to uncooked animals, and government, not about ordinary things like window, smile, knife, and seat.

Old Norse might have still been in use when the Normans invaded but it had probably dropped out of use by the twelfth century. Its speakers had been absorbed into the general population. 

Some academics argue that modern English is a descendant of the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, rather than of the Anglo-Saxon language, which I learned to call Old English. Other academics say, “Bullshit,” only more politely and at greater length. We’ll keep our hands in our pockets and let them fight that out, okay? May the best argument win.

 

Law

This is another place where the Vikings’ impact can be traced. With a lovely sense of irony, we stole the word law from them, along with by-law. The by there means “town.”

Central to the Viking legal system was the Thing–or in some spellings, Ting: a representative gathering that served as both legislature and court. (If you have nothing better to do, try googling “What is a thing?”)  

Someone accused of a crime could be brought before the Thing, with people stating what they believed to be the facts of the case. Or claimed to believe. Or–well, we’re an imperfect species. That hasn’t changed. 

A law-sayer would explain what the law had to say about the crime, and a jury or 12–or 24, or 36, if the case was important enough–would decide whether the accused was guilty or innocent. A person who was found guilty could be fined or outlawed–banished to the wilderness, denied help from friend and family, and fair game for his (or presumably her) enemies. 

When the old gods held sway, disputes could also be settled with duels, but Christianity put an end to that, introducing the civilized practice of the ordeal by fire. If you could grab a piece of iron out of boiling water and walk nine paces with it, you were innocent. Ditto if you could walk twelve paces over red-hot iron and not have infected wounds three days later. 

To be fair–and I do occasionally want to be fair–having introduced the ordeal by fire, Christianity later abolished it, but it took a while, and left a lot of burned feet.

Even after the Norman invasion, as late as the twelfth century, the old Danelaw area was recognized as having a customary system of laws that was different from the formerly Anglo-Saxon part of England’s.

 

Social structure

Viking women were freer than most women of their age. They could own land, divorce a husband, and reclaim their dowries if a marriage broke apart. With their men so often away pillaging, their role in the family was a powerful one, and some seem to have fought beside the men. 

All that is ripped wholesale out of discussions of Scandinavia, but it’s a fair bet that it carried over into Viking England. 

Solid evidence about women’s role is sketchy, though. Until recently, the assumption was that the invaders were men and that when they settled down they married local women. Recently, though, metal detectorists have found enough Scandinavian women’s jewelry to convince at least some experts that a fair number of women either journeyed with or later joined the men.

The strong impact of Old Norse on English also argues for the presence of Norse women. Language is transferred primarily in the home. A bilingual household is less likely to preserve the incomers’ language.

Or so the theory goes.  

Poor farmers also had more independence in Viking England than they did in Anglo-Saxon England. On the other hand, both the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons held and traded slaves, so poor farmers weren’t at the bottom of the social scale. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it? 

I could–in fact, I will–toss a handful of words at you that mark the Viking social structure: sokeman (a small farmer with more independence than the English equivalent), wapentake and sulung (units of tax assessment, which tells us that yes, these big, hairy people did have a governmental structure), jarl (which became earl), riding (an administrative unit that continued into the 1970s). The words hint at social changes that would’ve been significant to the people living through them.

What else do we know about the Danelaw? It experienced growth in industry–mass-produced metalwork; pottery that was thrown on a wheel and glazed–and that may have been due to increased trade.

It’s not much, is it?

 

And then what happened?

Viking and Anglo-Saxon England fought. Anglo-Saxon England paid Viking England not to fight. Everybody fought some more. People were born. People died. Everyone got mixed together in complicated patterns. A handful of English kings were Scandinavian. The last Anglo-Saxon king, the unfortunate Harold–he of the arrow in the eye–had Norse ancestors. 

The closer you get, the more complicated the picture is. You think you can draw a clean line between two groups of people and two cultures, but you can’t.  

Welcome to the real world.

Why the Normans invaded England–not to mention how

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The usual path to the Norman invasion runs through the invaded country and begins with Edward the Confessor–very nearly the last of the Anglo-Saxon kings. But you know what? We’re not taking that route. We’ll go through France and start with a French king named Louis the Stammerer.

Louis had reason to stammer. He’d secretly married a woman his father, Charles the Bald, hadn’t selected. (Bad prince. Daddy’s very displeased with you.) He and his contraband wife had two sons with boring names, then Charles the Bald had the marriage annulled and got Louis the Stammerer married to a woman he–that’s Charles the Bald–had chosen. They had one son, Charles, later known as Charles the Simple, who wasn’t born until after Louis the Stammerer died. 

Have you ever wondered whether the introduction of family-based last names improved life? Using only the evidence we have on hand, I’d argue that it did.

Charles the Simple was considered the legitimate heir, since officially speaking an annulled marriage was rolled backwards until it had never happened, but it was a long time before C the S could do much more than eat, shit, and cry, which is another way of saying that even after he’d gotten himself born it took a while before he was any sort of political force. That left a blank spot and Wife Number One–the annulled wife–stepped into it: In 879 she maneuvered her sons onto the throne as joint rulers. 

Want to make your own Bayeux Tapestry? You can do it online, thanks to Leonard A-L, Matieu, and Maria, whoever they are. Thanks, folks.

The brothers and the successors

The country the brothers were supposed to rule–that’s France, in case you’ve forgotten–had been beset by Viking raids for something like forty years and had been alternately fighting the raiders and buying them off. Neither approach worked for longer than forty minutes.

When the second of the co-kings died, France’s nobles installed Charles the Fat as king. We’re up to the year 884 now. Charles the Fat was the son of Louis the German, which isn’t particularly relevant but I can’t leave out anyone who has a good name. 

C the F wrecked his reputation by not just paying the Vikings to end their siege of Paris (so far, so familiar) but also suggesting they go raid Burgundy instead. That did it for C the F and the nobles installed someone who was competent enough but had a dull name but had no family ties to previous kings. That problematic DNA meant he couldn’t be real a king, so to hell with competence, after ten years they got rid of him and installed Charles the Simple, who’d had the wisdom to emerge from an approved womb. He was nineteen.

To say Charles was simple wasn’t to say he was simple minded. It meant he was direct. Even so, the act he’s remembered for wasn’t his own idea but his nobles’: He made a treaty with a Viking chief who’d stayed in France after the siege of Paris and was using it as a base to conduct even more raids. The deal was that the Viking–Rollo the Walker–would recognize Charles as his king, convert to Christianity, marry Charles’s daughter, and stop with the raiding. In return, he was to become duke of the land now known as Normandy–from Norman: the Norsemen; the Vikings–and make it into a buffer state against future Viking raids. 

Before formalizing the agreement, Rollo puffed up his fur, showed Charles how scary he was, and did some last-minute renegotiation, but he did put an end to the Viking raids on France and build a stable, Viking-inflected state in France.

From there Charles the Simple passes out of our story and we’ll follow Rollo for a few minutes, because he’s the three-times great-grandfather of William the Conqueror, the guy who invaded England.  

 

Rollo

What do we know about Rollo? Not bloody much. He lived, he raided France, he became the Duke of Normandy and the three-times-great etc. of someone much better known. And he died.  He was known as Rollo the Walker because–so rumor had it–he was too big to ride a horse. A trash-inflected web site that leans heavily toward explaining the history behind a marginally historical TV show tells me he was (or was said to be) 2 meters (that’s 6½ feet) tall and 140 kilos (that’s 308 pounds) in weight.

Well, other than weight what would he be 140 kilos in? Debt? Love? But don’t blame the trash-inflected site for that phrasing. It’s mine. I’d change it to something more graceful but I’d rather make fun of myself.

If you’re a fan of not knowing much about public figures, Rollo’s your guy. When archeologists opened the tomb of Rollo’s grandson and great-grandson, hoping to establish where Rollo himself came from (Norway? Denmark? Jenny Craig’s Weight Loss Clinic?), the bodies they found were some 200 years older than grandad/great-grandad himself. 

Does it matter? To us, no. All we care about is that we’ve gotten the Normans settled into France, where they intermarried with the local population, integrated into the French power structure, and curled up in bed with a nice cup of hot chocolate. 

 

The invasion

Okay, I’ll be honest with you: chocolate hadn’t made its way to Europe yet, and maybe that’s why William the Bastard–later known as William the Conqueror, which he probably preferred–got restless at being nothing more than the duke of Normandy, so that when Edward the Confessor died, having neglected to produce an heir, William decided to be a king in England as well. I mean, why not? Didn’t he have  a marginally credible tale linking himself to Edward’s empty throne? 

The problem was that another contestant lived closer and parked his hind end on it before William could, leaving an invasion as the only way to claim the fancy chair. 

But invasions aren’t simple, so let’s go through the steps he had to take. First, he counted up the forces he could call on–his vassals and all their knights and assorted foot soldiers–and decided they weren’t enough, so both he and the vassals scooped up mercenaries, either paying them or promising them plunder in England. Wars were a business opportunity back then. Aren’t you glad we live in enlightened times? 

The next step was to get everyone across the Channel, which is wet, even on a calm day.

Knowing we’d ask how he did that, English Heritage maintains a site telling us how to invade England. This isn’t a security risk. It’ll only help the modern invader who knows how to scroll technology back to what was available in 1066. 

William needed enough ships to get 7,000 men across the channel. Or 5,000 to 8,000 if we go with a different source. Either way, it was more men than you’d want to invite home, even if they hadn’t been the kind of thugs you’d hesitate to let in the door.

Quick interruption: The combination of endemic sexism and the English language have, historically speaking, encouraged people to say “men” when they mean people, leading to no end of confusion, but this was a testosterone-soaked adventure and the men involved were biologically male. I can’t swear that there wasn’t a woman or two tucked into the invasion force, but they’d have been either add-ons or well hidden. (Yes, there is a history that’s only recently being uncovered of women going to war in disguise. That doesn’t mean one joined William, but I’d raise the possibility even if it’s for no better reason than to mess with our assumptions.)  

Not all those men-of-the-male-persuasion would’ve been knights or even foot soldiers. To function, an army needed servants of various kinds. Nothing was automated or prepackaged. Everything that was done had to be done by hand. And it needed sailors–people who know how to keep the ships right side up. 

In addition to all those people, William had to make room for the knights’ horses, because if you take away the horses, knights weren’t knights anymore. So let’s say 2,000 horses, And all those people and horses had to be fed and watered or they’d be no use to anyone. And the humans had to have alcohol or they’d get grumpy.

Or maybe they didn’t all have alcohol, but William did. He brought wine. 

He also needed space for weapons, armor, and tempers. With all those mercenaries, you can figure that not everyone knew each other, liked each other, acted the same way, or spoke the same language, so we can pour a few regional and national rivalries into the human mix and stir in some alcohol. 

I’m convinced they had alcohol.

By now we’re probably talking about 700 to 800 ships. One chronicler wrote that William had 3,000 ships, but we can take that as a poetic way of saying “a shipload of ships.” Even using the lower number, though, it really was a lot of ships and Normandy didn’t have enough, so they had to build them. You can see little figures in the Bayeux Tapestry cutting the trees to make the planks to construct the ships that lived in the house that Jack built.

Sorry. My mind skipped a groove there. The story has no Jack. That’s a children’s rhyme.

 

What happened next?

The fleet sailed. The fleet landed. The invaders took over the country. But this wasn’t a case of one population overrunning another, it’s is a tale of one elite displacing another, leaving the people on the bottom of the heap in place so they could keep working to support the people at the top. Without people at the bottom, the country wouldn’t be worth having. So all but a handful of Anglo-Saxon nobles lost their land and William’s most important followers gained it. Job done.

How well did William’s less important followers–the foot soldiers and mercenaries–do? The details of how spoils were divided is a bit hazy, but rank weighed heavily in the process. It’s a fair bet that the foot soldiers who lived through the fighting were better off than they would have been if they’d stayed home, but they wouldn’t have vaulted up the social ladder. To each according to his station. 

So William’s key followers were paid off in land, but they weren’t given the power that in other situations would have gone along with it. The land was William’s to hand out, but the people he gave it to held it at his pleasure. In other words, he could also take it away. He’d created a highly centralized state, with himself–surprise, surprise–at the top. 

*

Following the Norman invasion from the Norman perspective has made me realize that in most of the respectable histories–at least until recently, when the pattern’s started to break apart–tales of colonization and invasion are told from the invader’s perspective. New Zealand? Start with England and Captain Cook. The Americas? Africa? Asia? Start in Europe. Ireland? Start in England. The Norman invasion, though? This tale starts in England. That may be heavily flavored by my own limitations, because I don’t read French well enough to tackle anything above the level of a comic book, and they’re more work than they’re worth, but working through the process from this direction reminds me how much nationalism and other biases shape what we accept as history and how easy it is to forget there’s more than one way to tell the tale.

A US tradition invades Britain, and other news

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The British are (generalization warning here) touchy about cultural imports from the US, and some people are downright sniffy about them. Halloween? I can’t get through the fall without someone telling me that not all that long ago kids wouldn’t have dreamed of going door to door asking for candy. So it’s interesting no one has yet felt the need to remind me about Black Friday’s roots in the US, although it was brought over far more recently than Halloween candy. Maybe that’s because it involve shopping, bargains, and adults, so it slots into the culture with fewer rough edges. But an import it is. 

Irrelevant photo: I almost remember the name of this, but that’s not quite enough. It’s a flower, and I didn’t grow it.

 

Black what?

The Black Friday tradition started in the 1950s, and it wasn’t until 2010 that the US shipped it to Britain. If you’re in the mood, you can blame Amazon for either the introduction or the delay. I’m always happy to blame Amazon–for anything. Still, it wasn’t until Asda joined the mayhem, in 2013 (or 2014 on other websites), that Black Friday really took off in Britain. 

The tradition–for you few happy souls who have no idea what I’m talking about–is that stores slash their prices massively on the day after Thanksgiving (that’s always a Friday), and when shoppers get a whiff of those bargains they go mad. Periodic post-Black Friday headlines in the US involve crowds breaking down doors or trampling innocent grannies in their frenzy to get to the discounted whatevers before they run out. 

What’s it like in the UK? Well, now that Black Friday’s safely in this year’s rearview mirror, let’s check in with a study by the oddly named British consumer group Which? that (or which) nibbled the numbers behind some 200 supposed Black Friday discounts and came back with the news that 86% of the items were either cheaper or no more expensive in the six months before they went on sale. To put that in simpler terms, they weren’t a bargain. A full 98% were either cheaper or no more expensive at other times of the year. None–0%–were cheaper on Black Friday alone.

Don’t you just love a deal? 

Some retailers raised their prices just before Black Friday so they’d be telling the truth when they claimed to have cut the price. 

Which?’s retail editor, Reena Sewraz, said, “It’s rarely the cheapest time to shop and you’ll probably find the things you want are the same price or cheaper as we head towards Christmas, the New Year and beyond.”

 

The history of Black Friday

If I’ve taken the fun out of bargain hunting, let’s talk about where the name Black Friday came from. 

Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey tells us that the most widespread explanation is this: The shopping day after Thanksgiving is when stores count on crossing over from the red (debt) into the black (profit). But Hawley’s Small and Unscientific etcetera also reports that this isn’t the only tale around.

An alternative explanation, from no less a source than the Britannica, is that it originated in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when the police used the phrase to describe the chaos created by masses of suburban shoppers descending on the city to start their Christmas shopping. 

It wasn’t a compliment.

But we can go back further than that and trace the history to the 1951 edition of that rivetingly titled magazine, Factory Management and Maintenance, which wrote about workers’ habit of calling in sick the day after Thanksgiving. 

“‘Friday-after-Thanksgiving-itis’ is a disease second only to the bubonic plague in its effects,” it said in an editorial. “At least that’s the feeling of those who have to get production out, when the ‘Black Friday’ comes along. The shop may be half empty, but every absentee was sick —and can prove it.” 

The editor recommended using the day as a bargaining chip in union negotiations, since employees were taking the day off anyway. 

“Shouldn’t cost too much,” he (and odds are a 1951 editor was a he) wrote.

For all you would-be union negotiators out there, there’s a lesson in this: If they’re happy to give you something you didn’t think to want, be suspicious. 

 

Another way to invade England

In France, a group called the La Mora Association is recreating one of the ships William the Conqueror sailed in. They plan to sail it across the channel in 2027, more or less the way William the C did in 1066.

William came over with (probably) 14 vassals–that’s vAssals–who brought an average of 60 vEssels each. Probably. One chronicler says W the C had 3,000 ships. Modern estimates are in the neighborhood of 700, 800, or 1,000. Still, that’s a lot of floating boatage.  

The ships would have been Viking-style longships–those long, narrow things with both a sail and oars, not to mention a dragon head. At least mostly. The Bayeux Tapestry shows a few, but it doesn’t show all 700, not to mention 3,000.  

Whatever they looked like, the ships carried something like 7,000 men and 200 horses, plus armor, weapons, shields, bacon (no, bacon was not used as a weapon; yes, bacon is the beginning of a new category), hard-baked bread, cheese, dried beans, and wine. Plus water and feed for the horses. 

The men were a mix of knights, foot soldiers, and servants. It would’ve taken a lot of servants to keep an army functioning. And a lot of beans.

When the recreation of W’s ship sails, it will leave the weaponry, the horses, and most of the men behind, along with the other 999 ships. And its crew will set a different tone than W’s did.

“We want this to be a symbol of Franco-British friendship,” the association’s president said.

Is he aware of how that worked out last time? 

Well, yes. He even knows about Brexit. But he thinks the ship can, “in the wake of Brexit . . . reunite our two countries,” although my best guess is that the rhetoric comes after the fascination with building an eleventh-century ship, using historic techniques, on the basis of not much more than a picture in a 230-foot-long tapestry and some reproductions of viking ships in a Danish museum. 

 

And in another story very marginally related to ships . . .

Want to vote on the word of the year? You’re too late, but Oxford Languages did open the contest to the public–sort of–so you had your chance.

Having learned from the Boaty McBoatface fiasco (or glorious success, depending on your point of view), in which the public voted in their gazillions to name a serious research ship Boaty McBoatface, forcing the serious research organization sponsoring the contest to publicly overrule them, this contest’s sponsors gave us three choices and only three choices:  metaverse, #IStandWith, and goblin mode. 

Zzzzzzzzzz.

But hey, after its snooze-making fashion, it is democratic. 

Who Elizabeth I really was: a conspiracy theory from English history

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If you’re in the mood for a good conspiracy theory–one that’s unlikely to boost your blood pressure–then come with me to Tudor England. Or to nineteenth-century England. Or to Bisley, in Gloucestershire, next May Day. Or last May Day. We’re dealing with a tradition here, so it doesn’t matter what year we show up. 

Let’s start in Bisley. It’s easier to get to than Tudor England. 

On May Day, instead of picking a May Queen and dressing her up with a flowery crown, Bisley picks a boy and dresses him up like a Tudor-era girl. 

We can link that to the nineteenth century because that’s when Bram Stoker–the guy who wrote Dracula–wandered into Bisley one May Day and couldn’t help asking why the boy was wearing out-of-date skirts. 

This being the nineteenth century, the boy didn’t say, “I’m nonbinary and what’s it to you, nosyface?” before going merrily on his whaleboned way. Or awkwardly, given what it must’ve been like to move in those clothes. Instead, villagers told Stoker a local legend.

 

If you get as far as the end of the post, you’ll discover that that this photo is entirely relevant, and Li’l Red is, as you can see, horrified.

The legend

The story starts when Elizabeth I was 9, or in another version of the tale 10. (People may not have been able to imagine being nonbinary back then, but numbers could.) Either way, she wasn’t yet Elizabeth the I, so let’s call her Elizabeth the 0, or just plain Elizabeth. 

Whatever we call her, she, her governess, and her guardian were sent to Bisley to get them away from the plague that was rampaging through London. But you can’t fool fate, can you? According to the legend she died there, although not necessarily of the plague.

Exit Elizabeth.

That created something of a problem for the governess and guardian, since their job wasn’t just to educate her and keep her out of trouble but also to keep her alive, and Daddy–a.k.a. Henry VIII–could be unforgiving. So they did what any rational pair of babysitters would do and found the nearest red-headed kid of roughly the same size–who just happened to be a boy named Neville–and swapped him for the defunct princess.

You believed every word of this until I said his name was Neville, right? Anyone would. And so, of course, did Henry when he came to visit. Aristocratic parenting not being a hands-on activity in that period, he couldn’t tell the difference. Even when the kid said, “Hello, Father. I’d like to be called Neville from now on. Have hormones been discovered yet?”

Liz-Neville and their two puppeteers stayed out of London for a year–time enough, presumably, to turn a village boy into an intimidatingly well-educated princess.

Eat your ‘eart out, ‘Enry ‘Iggins. 

 

Spreading the tale

That–minus a few embellishments–was the tale Stoker was introduced to, and he did what writers do, which was to put it on paper and push it as far out into the world as he was able, which may not have been all that far since I only heard the tale recently. But never mind, we are where we are and we’ve heard it now. He included it in his book Famous Imposters.

 

The Evidence

Every good conspiracy theory needs evidence, and this one reminds us Elizabeth never had children and never married. It reminds us she wore heavy makeup, wigs, ruffs, and large clothing that kept people at a distance so they wouldn’t notice that she had, oh, say, a five o’clock shadow.

She trusted either very few doctors or only one (the number depends on which website she was relying on at the moment, or possibly which one I was) and she insisted that there be no post-mortem on her body, even though she’d be dead by the time they performed it.

And at least one contemporary had the impression that Liz and her former governess and guardian had some secret promises between them. 

It relies, silently, on people who have trouble accepting that one of England’s most famous monarchs had no Y chromosome.

Legend has it that 300 years after the alleged swap, a local minister found an unmarked grave on the grounds of the house where Elizabeth and Co. lived, and it held a skeleton of a child in opulent Tudro-era girl’s clothing, but he reburied it someplace else and, conveniently, no one’s found it.

To date, Elizabeth’s grave hasn’t been dug up to demonstrate that its occupant is female.

 

Is there any chance this is true? 

I’d say the odds of it being true are roughly the same as the odds that I was swapped for a cat in infancy. 

Meow.

The Corn Laws: food, money, and political power

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As today’s post opens, the Napoleonic Wars are being fought over in Europe somewhere. Think blood, mud, Russian winter, and the Duke of Rubber Boots.* But all that is off stage. We’re in Britain, where the Corn Laws are about to be passed, and they won’t make sense until we talk about the price of corn. And about farmers and landowners and political power. And hunger. In fact, nothing makes any sense until we talk about everything. 

Sorry, that’s just how it works.

I’m more American than British, as you’ll know by now if you’ve been around here for long, but this is English history, so when I type “corn” I don’t mean the stuff I’d normally call corn, which in British is maize. I’m going all pseudo-British on you and using it to mean any old grain. So corn is the country’s most important food just now. And by now, of course, I mean during the Offstage Wars involving Mr. Rubber Boots, Napoleon, and Russia’s most efficient officer, General Winter. Corn’s so important that for a long time Britain’s been eating more of it than it grows, relying on imports to make up the difference.

But the Offstage Wars have interrupted those imports, so farmers have stepped in and patriotically grown more of the stuff than they used to. And government has stepped in and encouraged them. And throughout the wars, the price has stayed high, since no one’s been around to undercut it. If you’re a farmer, it’s a nice arrangement.

Sooner or later, though, every war ends, and whoops, the Offstage Wars did, just this minute, throwing everything out of whack. Back in 1812. corn cost 126s. 6d. a quarter. Now, in 1815,  it costs 65s. 7d. We won’t bother with the complicated math it takes to understand that: What you need to know is that the price has dropped. Drastically. 

Oh, hell, you want to get below the surface of the numbers, don’t you? Fine, we’ll break them down. Don’t blame me if we can’t get them back together. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: Li’l Red Cat, helping with the laundry.

 

The math

A quarter, an s. and a d. are long-dead measurements that everyone but us knows how to work with, since we’re dropping in from another era. An s. is a shilling and a d. is a penny, because shilling starts with S and penny doesn’t start with d. The d. wandered in from Latin, because the Romans had a coin called a denarius. It hasn’t been used since the third century BCE.

You can see how much sense this is going to make, right?

You need 12 pence to make a shilling and 20 shillings to make a pound, although for reasons I can’t begin to understand when they calculate the price of corn no one wants to shift from shillings to pounds, they just keep stacking up the shillings until they tip over. Only people who’ve lived with the system can explain it, but it seems so natural to them that they won’t understand why we want an explanation so don’t ask. 

That’s the money side of things, but we’re not done. A quarter is eight bushels. Its full name is quarter-hundredweight, which is sensible enough since it is a quarter of a hundredweight. Hang onto that, because it’s the only bit of sanity we’ll have until we escape this paragraph and possibly for some time afterward. A hundredweight doesn’t weigh a hundred of anything–or if it does, it’s only by accident: It’s 112 pounds, or 8 stone. 

Just to complicate the situation, in the US a hundredweight weighs a hundred pounds, but its use is limited to livestock, some kinds of grain, paper, concrete additives, and a few other things with obvious similarities. They’d use it more widely but it’s too confusing having a hundredweight weigh a hundred pounds.  

How much grain is in 8 bushels? Enough to cover my living room floor nicely, thanks. 

 

Grain prices, farmers, and a few other things

I know. Sometimes it seems like we’ll never get to the point, but here we are. It’s 1815, the Napoleonic Wars are over, and imported grain has made its way back into the country, knocking the price down. The farmers who stepped in and patriotically grew more grain  are patriotically stepping up and complaining  about the loss of what was effectively a monopoly. 

Who are we talking about when we talk about farmers? Most importantly, large landowners, and it’s the aristocracy who own most of the land. The only respectable way to be rich is to make your money from land. Below them, though, and still in the category are the farmers who rent from them or who own smaller amounts of land. But it’s the large landowners who matter, because they have the political clout, so when they tell the government to get off its hind end and protect them from these unpatriotic imports, the government duly gets off its hind end and passes the Corn Laws, which tax imported grain so that it’s no longer cheaper than patriotic British grain. 

Hold onto that thought while we look at the kind of country the government’s governing. 

The end of the war brings several changes in addition to the danger of grain prices falling. For one, former soldiers have come home and a lot of them can’t find work. In England’s textile towns, wages fall but the taxes that were introduced to support the war don’t, they walk into the peacetime years like zombies. 

The country enters a postwar depression. 

Britain’s also turning from a rural country into an industrial one. Huge numbers of people who can’t make a living in the countryside pour into the cities, desperate for work. The cities aren’t prepared to house them, though, and people are packed in on top of each other. Sanitation verges on nonexistent. That’s not, strictly speaking, relevant, but helps us understand what life was like, so let’s leave it in. Wages, hours, and working conditions in the factories (and elsewhere) are terrible, and strikes are illegal: The Combination Acts mean you’re risking three months in prison if you and your co-workers walk off the job in any organized way, or even if you prepare to. Or even, as they say in Texas, if you’re fixin’ to get ready to prepare to.

You’re still welcome to quit your job individually and go starve somewhere if you like.

No, I’m not being dramatic. People live close enough to the margin that we’re often talking about eating or not eating. Or ending up in the workhouse, which sets you a very small step above starvation.

When the 1816 harvest is bad, grain prices go up and food’s in short supply, but the government doesn’t get off its hind end for this, because people who can’t afford bread don’t have political power. The Corn Laws keep the price of imports high.

Food riots break out. They’re one of the few channels discontent can pour itself into.

Petitions are legal, though, and  between January and August 1842 the House of Commons is the lucky recipient of 467 of them against the Corn Laws. They carry a total of 1,414,403 signatures. The Commons also receive 1,953 petitions in favour, carrying 145,855 signatures. In case that went over your head, that’s fewer signatures for the laws than against, but they’re better signatures, with pricier accents, so they carry more weight.

The Corn Laws are a focus of demonstrations as well. Two examples:

In 1817, a hunger march left Manchester for London. The marchers were called Blanketeers, and the march was broken up along the way. Only one marcher reached London to hand in their petition, but since he’s reported to have two very different names, he may be mythical.

Repeal of the Corn Laws was also one of the demands of the rally on St. Peter’s Field, which became known as the Peterloo Massacre. https://notesfromtheuk.com/tag/voting-rights/ 

 

The opposition

You don’t gather over a million signatures or pull off marches and rallies without some sort of organization, and you can usefully break the opposition into two groups: One is the middle class and led by the richer and more powerful part of it. The other is made up of industrial and agricultural workers. By way of examples, on the respectable side is the Anti-Corn Law League, which mobilizes the industrial middle class against the landowners. The less respectable opposition comes from groups like the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread-Tax Society, which gets a mention since its name saves me a lot of explaining. Both groups are working for the same change but their interests aren’t identical. 

What business people want is free trade: Get rid of those damn tariffs and business will expand endlessly in this best of all possible worlds. That will expand employment, lower the price of bread, make British agriculture more efficient, and promote international peace through trade contact. It will turn straight hair curly unless you want it to work the other way around and cure all ills of body and soul. 

I didn’t make up that business about international peace, even if it sounds like I did. The business with the hair, though? That’s questionable.

For the working class, this is about bread costing less so they can eat more. 

I’ll get out of the way and quote Ebeneezer Elliot, called the Corn Law Rhymer, who said, “The people will soon enough discover the frightful extent of the chasm which separates them from every man who has a decent coat on his back.”

Which should also remind us that this is a time when having a decent coat marked you as middle class. 

For both groups, it’s about political power. 

 

Support for the Corn Laws

The argument in favor of the Corn Laws is that, as one petition puts it, they “protect the British agriculturist from competition with the continental corn grower” and “could not be repealed without imminent danger to the best interest of the country.” 

Besides, if the price of bread drops, wages will also go down, so what’s the point? For landowners, there’s a finite amount of profit to be made and this is about whose pocket it’ll land in, theirs or the industrialists’. The people will be hungry either way: That’s a given.

 

Repeal

After much agitation and argument, the Corn Laws are repealed in 1846, not long after the start of the Irish potato famine. That’s enough for many sources to link the two, but as early as 1841 the prime minister, Robert Peel, had been looking at whether the price of European grain was high enough that imports wouldn’t hurt British farmers. At least one historian sees it as a case of the famine giving Peel a reason to end a policy whose value he isn’t convinced of.

The price of bread doesn’t fall dramatically, although it does fall a bit, and the potato famine goes on until 1852, largely unaffected by the repeal. Ireland loses a quarter of its population to starvation, disease, and emigration. 

What does repeal change? By one estimate, landowners’ income drops by 3% and workers and industrialists gain 1% in spending power. 

Where’d the other 2% go? Remember what I said about curly hair? It went into hair products.

Britain enters the era of free trade. For policy wonks, that’s the most important thing about agitation around the Corn Laws. For rebellion wonks, the importance lies in the campaign itself. Both the middle class and the working class are finding ways to organize, and to push for political power. The working class is organizing for a lot more than that, with wages and working conditions high on the list. 

 

* If you’re not British you’ll need a translation of that Duke of Rubber Boots crack. High rubber boots are called Wellingtons.  The style was introduced by Wellington, but the originals were leather riding boots. They weren’t made in rubber until 1856. 

It could be on a quiz some day.