Category Archives: History

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.

The point in the English Civil Wars when ordinary people got involved

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A fair number of this winter’s posts have been about the English Civil Wars and the economic shifts, uprisings, and political maneuvering that led up to them. But politics was still a game for the wealthy. (Gee, how things have changed.) Only substantial property owners could vote, never mind run for the House of Commons. So when ordinary people’s grievances broke into the open, they tended to take the form of riots or uprisings. 

Listen, when no other channels are open–

But we’ve reached the moment when those unruly common people started to push their way into the parliamentary process. We owe them our attention. 

 

Root and Branch Petition

Let’s start in the winter of 1640 – 1641, when a group of Londoners delivered the Root and Branch Petition to Parliament. It called for the Church of England’s bishops “with all their dependences, rootes and branches [to] be abolished.” And for the church to stop pushing out dissenting ministers and shed all the high-church ceremonies and iconography, which more Protestantly Protestants considered superstitious and very nearly–deep shudder here, please–Catholic. 

There was more to it than that, but you get the flavor: it was religious and it was also deeply political. You’d have been hard put to draw a line between the two back then. It was also radical, uncompromising stuff. Dangerous stuff. But it’s not the substance I want to talk about: the petition was the result of a well organized effort, and a substantial number of ordinary people were bold enough to put their names to it. That was also radical. The dissenting churches and gatherings would have provided a readymade network for this. 

The way history’s taught leaves us with the habit of following big-name players, the ones who make speeches, wield power, have money, and get their names in the history books. (The book I’m drawing on heavily, Fiery Sprits, by John Rees, has so many important names I’d need a card file to keep track of them all.) But a lot of history’s important work is done out of sight, by people whose names never get recorded or are quickly lost. In this period, those people might’ve delivered pamphlets, which were the hot new method of communication–the social media channel of their day. They might’ve carried copies of the petition to people they trusted. 

Oliver Cromwell, with thanks to Wikimedia Commons. If you look closely, I think you’ll see a bit of lace on his collar, but if you don’t you’ll still have to admit that he’s got one hell of a pair of eyebrows.

The estimates of how many people signed the Root and Branch Petition range from 10,000 to 20,000, and its presentation was backed by a demonstration of 5,000 people. Or 1,500. Or possibly a few hundred. Let’s not get lost in the numbers. What matters is that enough people showed up outside Parliament to give conservative MPs (that’s Members of Parliament; you’re welcome) the heebie jeebies. 

Heebie jeebies? They’re kind of like the fantods. The screaming meemies. The, um, state of being upset.

Before they settled into a long debate over the substance of the petitions, MPs argued over the substance of the people who signed it–whether they were “persons of quality and worth” or “mean” ones. Because one way to attack the petition was to say that people who had no business in politics (translation: people with no money; people MPs didn’t need to listen to) were sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. 

 

Strafford

A similar thing happened when MPs were maneuvering to have the king’s favorite, the Earl of Strafford, either executed or saved. From outside Parliament came a petition with 20,000 signatures not only calling for Strafford’s conviction but criticizing the government’s handling of finances and its conduct of the war du jour. A few days later, a crowd of 15,000 headed for Parliament, “weapons and battonones in their hands.” 

Treat that number as gently as you treat the spelling. They’re likely to change shape or leak at any moment.

According to an observer, “all the rabble cryed aloud with one voice Justice and Execution.” When the lords arrived in their coaches, the “rabble” formed a lane for the coaches to pass through, demanding justice and execution but also saying “they could scarce get bread to maintain their families.”

The demonstrations grew and were joined by what Rees calls “artisans and the poor, joining with the middling sort, armed with swords and clubs.”

Parliament voted to condemn Strafford and the king was rattled enough by all these nobodies showing up outside the halls of government that he not only consented to Strafford being executed but to a bill that said Parliament could only be dissolved by its own action, not by his, which was an important shift of power from king to Parliament. 

But that wasn’t the only shift: the political battle wasn’t being played out only between king and parliament anymore. A third player, the populace, including the people who had no vote, was now a third force. 

 

The Grand Remonstrance

This wasn’t a petition from outside Parliament, it was a document from the Commons addressed to the king, and it started out with the requisite groveling: “We, your most humble and obedient subjects, do with all faithfulness and humility, beseech your Majesty.” 

Ho hum, right? Nothing new until you get to the substance of the thing, which was a list of more than 200 abuses of power, including “a malignant and pernicious design of subverting the fundamental laws and principles of government.”

Ouch. But again, let’s not get lost in the substance, let’s focus on something more radical: the decision to publish it and circulate it to that rowdy populace we were talking about. They were playing to a new audience. 

Parliament, remember, was bitterly divided between the king’s supporters and opponents, and the king’s opponents were looking outside of Parliament to win the arguments and seem to have been in control of their involvement. Some MPs apparently sent out messages calling for men to assemble outside Parliament, armed with swords and staves.

From here on, demonstrations outside Parliament seem to become more common. One observer described them as “Great Numbers of People gathered together in a tumultuous, unusual, and disorderly Manner about the Houses of Parliament.” Another crowd is described as, “armed with swords and staves, as if they came to besiege the Parliament house.” 

 

London’s apprentices

After the king appointed the unpopular Thomas Lunsford as lieutenant of the Tower of London, London’s apprentices became visible as a political force. 

Why did anybody care about the tower? These days, it’s a tourist attraction. Back then, it was an arsenal, a garrison, and an important part of the king’s defenses. It was also a safe place for London’s merchants to stash their wealth and it was where the country’s coins were minted. So it mattered who was in charge.

The apprentices weren’t alone in their opposition, but they were young and they were strong, and let’s assume at least some of them were hot-headed. They had delivered a petition with 30,000 signatures. 

In London, a newsletter talked about getting weapons, muskets, powder, and shot. Rumors circulated that the apprentices were rising. Or were about to rise.

Charles–that’s the king; remember him?–dumped Lunsford. 

Everything settled down, right?

Wrong. More demonstrations happened outside Westminster–that’s where Parliament met–and the crowds were armed and formed lanes the MPs had to pass through.

Enough. You get the point. People locked outside of the workings of government were showing up at its door, bringing their anger, their opinions, and sometimes their weapons. And the change wasn’t just about where they showed up: they knew what the issues were and their demands were well focused.

We can attribute part of that to that hot new medium I mentioned: pamphlets, and maybe the occasional leaflet. Printing was the internet of its day. Or the Tiktok, the Instagram, the–I don’t know, choose your comparison. I’m too damn old to get that one right. The government had lost control of what could be printed and what was getting printed was setting people’s minds alight.

 

The Levellers and the army

We’ll skip a few protests here, along with several fights, a multitude of accusations, and a wheelbarrowful of quaint spellings. Where the story bumps up a notch is when the Levellers walk on stage.

The Levellers? They were a political movement–political parties hadn’t been invented yet–that preached equality, religious tolerance, and not quite universal suffrage but wildly expanded. They had the radical idea that the Commons was there to represent the people. All that would’ve been damn near unthinkable not long before and was still radical enough to scare the lace off the MPs’ collars, even that of many who opposed the king.

Any number of Levellers were imprisoned at various points. You wouldn’t become a Leveller on a lark or because it looked like a smart career move. This was dangerous stuff.

By this time, king and Parliament had gone to war with each other, Parliament had formed the New Model Army, and the Levellers were systematically distributing their publications among the soldiers. My best guess is that it took a wild-eyed radical to imagine that ordinary soldiers not only could think but would be eager to. 

The pamphlets found an eager audience. One disapproving writer estimated that 1 soldier in 20 had become a “hotheaded sectarie.” That doesn’t say that all hotheaded sectaries were Levellers, but since we’re not talking about a party with dues and membership cards, just a movement– Let’s just say that many of them would’ve been. 

 

Parliament loses its central spot

Parliament was now being pushed by outside forces, and the most important of those was the army. 

What did that mean in practical terms? Well, kids, when Parliament made moves in the direction of disbanding the army, which it hadn’t paid–that’s never a wise move–or in the direction of sending it to fight in Ireland under officers the soldiers didn’t accept, a petition circulated in the ranks, and when the officers of one regiment tried to suppress it they were shouted down. 

As the conflict between Parliament and its soldiers continued, the soldiers decided to elect two men from each troop, called agitators, to take the petition to Parliament. The position of agitator was a powerful one. When regiments marched toward the coast, where they were to set sail to Ireland, the agitators overrode the officers’ commands and recalled them. If a regiment didn’t like its officer, the soldiers swept him aside. If they didn’t like Parliament’s orders, they followed their own, which included taking the king prisoner. 

When a parliamentary commissioner told Cornet Geroge Joyce, the soldier leading the troop that took the king captive, “that he deserved’d to lose his Head for what he had done,” Joyce answered, “May it please your Majesty . . . let it be drawn to a Rendezvous [a meeting of the soldiers], let me appear there before them, and let the Question be put, whether they approve of my Action in removing His Majesty from Holmby, if three or four Parts of the Army do not approve what I have said, I will be content to to be hanged at the Head of the Army.” 

Parliament was no longer running the show, and it was no longer the forum where crucial decisions were made. It mattered enough for outside forces to fight over it, though. As a Royalist letter of intelligence put it, “all of them, especially the great Lords, doe feare the power of the Army.”

Or as a different letter had it, “The King . . . made a Parliament he could not rule, the Parliament raised an Army it could not rule, the Army made Agitators they cannot rule, and the Agitators are calling up the people whom they will be as little able to rule.”

So few things go the way you expect. But at least they didn’t start a war with Iran.

The opening moves in England’s conquest of Ireland

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If you like a good rebellion–and who doesn’t, from the comfort of a couch–the English Parliamentarians are a reminder of how murky history gets and why it’s not always wise to take sides. 

Let’s talk about the Parliamentarians, King Charles, and, gulp, Ireland. 

 

A rare relevant graphic: Diarmait mac Murchada, King of Leinster and the beginning of a lot of trouble. He may look like he has a broom over his shoulder but  it’s sure to be something highly symbolic.

A bit of Irish history

We’ll keep this to a minimum or I’ll never find my way back to our alleged topic. 

After the Normans conquered England, they looked across the water and noticed one more island sitting off to the west. And did nothing. Then in the twelfth century, Ireland’s high king deposed one of its local kings, Diarmait, and Diarmait turned to England’s Henry II for backing. 

Many a colonial conquest has started out that way. 

Henry encouraged him to hire some of the Norman knights who’d been kicking around after being on the losing end of fighting in Wales. (Unemployed knights could be a hazard, so I expect this suited everybody.) Diarmait offered to pay them not in cash but in Irish land, which is how the first of the English lords sank their roots into Irish soil. By 1175 they were powerful enough that the Irish kings had recognized the English king as an overlord, hoping he’d stop the Norman lords from taking any more Irish land. 

It didn’t work. Before long–measuring that in historical time–the Normans had imposed feudalism on eastern Ireland, the part they controlled. The lords had parceled out land to their knights and a country of clans and herding became a country of manors and peasants. They’d swept away Irish law in favor of Norman, and ditto the Irish version of Catholicism in favor of Roman–the flavor that suited the Normans’ tastes. 

Over time, they integrated to some extent, intermarrying and adopting the language, but they continued to be a group of their own. As one of them, Maurice fitzGerald, complained, “Just as we are English as far as the Irish are concerned, likewise to the English we are Irish and the inhabitants of this island and of the other assail us with an equal degree of hatred.” 

Another relevant graphic: Henry II, King of England, so it’s a fair bet that he’s not holding a mop to balance Diarmait’s broom but something else highly symbolic.

In “Controversy: Oliver Cromwell in Ireland,” Micheál Ó Siochrú says there were three different ethnic groups in Ireland during the 1640s: the native Irish, who were between 80 and 90 percent of the population; the “old English”–the descendants of the those Norman colonists; and a new wave of Protestant English settlers (plus some Scottish soldiers, administrators, etc.), who’d been coming over since early in the seventeenth century.

The first two groups were Catholic and the Protestants–obviously–weren’t, so we’re looking at ethnic divisions with religious and class overlays. 

And if that didn’t produce enough tension, since the 1550s Irish land had been handed to English-born Protestant officials and by the seventeenth century Protestant settlers were displacing native Catholics in large parts of the country. All the situation needed was for someone to light a cigarette and toss the still-lit match over their shoulder.

 

The Irish Rebellion

With that in place, we’ll skip a few years. In 1641, a rebellion (I should probably say “another rebellion”) broke out. The rebels weren’t hoping to break with England or the crown, only to end religious and political discrimination against Catholics. The plan was for the rebellion to put them in a strong negotiating position. England, though, read it as an uprising that needed to be crushed. 

The rebellion started with a small, not particularly well organized group of Catholic gentry and military officers, who tried to occupy Dublin Castle–and failed. It was the match I was talking about, though. Around the country, Catholics attacked Protestants. Protestants attacked Catholics. The colonial government attacked Catholics. Thousands of people died on both sides–by one estimate somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000, which is another way of saying that no one was counting.

As the uprising grew, the Catholic elite, who’d hoped for a polite, apartment-size rebellion, were horrified, and in an effort to take control they set up a government, which for a while held part of the country, while the royalists another held part, the Scots held a third bit, and the Parliamentarians (a.k.a. the English Protestants) held a fourth. 

Eleven years of war followed. 

Meanwhile, in England . . .

. . . news of Catholics slaughtering innocent Protestants circulated. In some tellings, more Protestants were slaughtered in Ireland than actually lived there. But you know how these things go: Popular news sheets featured the stories. Preachers thundered. Tables were thumped. Money was raised. The stories flew on the wings of outrage and people believed the most lurid of them. Why wouldn’t they? They fit so neatly with the English image of the Irish. And the waves of fIrish Protestants taking refuge in England added credibility to the stories. 

To be fair, there does seem to have been slaughter and I believe the first killings were of Protestants, but it didn’t match the lurid stories and soon the killing was on both sides.

As a side point, since I’ve mentioned the English image of the Irish, I’ve read an argument that it was during its occupation of Ireland that England first learned to portray a colonized people as ignorant, lazy, dumb, brutish, and any other negative adjective you want to tack onto the list. Ugly? You bet. Smelly? I haven’t seen it but I’m sure someone said so. 

Take the argument for what it’s worth. To me it has a convincing ring. You’ll find one colonized group after another portrayed that way.

But back to our story: All this was happening in 1641, which matters because it was when the king (Charles I; you’re welcome) and Parliament were arm wrestling over who was going to run the country and who was going to be merely decorative. One of the few things they’d have agreed on was that someone had to do something about those pesky Irish Catholics. They’d even have agreed that doing something involved sending an army. Where all that love and harmony broke down, though, was over who’d be in charge of the army, because whoever controlled that army– 

Yeah. They were bright enough to know the army equaled power. 

By 1642, king and Parliament were openly at war with each other, giving the Catholic forces in Ireland a bit of breathing space, which they used to form a united movement. Or at least a government that was more united than England’s. And than England’s armed forces in Ireland, which were split between king and Parliament, with some Scottish forces  and a settler army thrown in just to complicate the picture.

 

Financing the army

Where the story gets interesting–as in, I hadn’t known even a hint of this before–is when they got to the question of how to pay for the conquest of Ireland, because armies are expensive. Keep that in mind if someone offers you one. What Parliament did was basically to create a public-private partnership that parallelled Diarmait’s agreement with the knights he hired: People would lend money to the state and be paid in Irish land once it was conquered. Some 18% of the country’s profitable land, or 2.5 million acres, was promised. 

Whose land was it? Catholic land. Rebel land. That way Parliament could break the power of the Catholic landowners and pay off their investors all at once.

The investors were called the Irish Adventurers. 

A parallel bill to finance ships offered the reward of “all Ships, Goods, Monies, Plate, Pillage,and Spoil, which shall be seized or taken by any of the Persons by them employed by Force of Virtue of this ordinance.”

Basically, it was piracy. 

The adventurers included radicals from the Parliamentary party, rich City merchants who could invest £1,000, smaller investors who’d put in £25–a year’s pay for a tradesman. The investors also included a handful of men who went on to become Levellers–campaigners for equality, near-universal suffrage, and religious tolerance. I’d love to explain that but I can’t.

 

And then?

And then for a while nothing happened. There was this little business of the English Civil Wars going on and Ireland was off on the other side of the water. It was only once Charles was reliably dead and guaranteed not to cause any more trouble that Parliament picked up its quarrel with Ireland, sending its New Model Army, with Oliver Cromwell in command. His orders were to bring Ireland “to the obedience of the Parliament of England.”

Yes, it’s an odd thing how easily people who start out saying, We demand freedom, can turn around and say, You have to obey us, but turn around they did, using the 1641 Rebellion as a rallying cry: Those bloodthirsty Irish had, as Cromwell put it, had “imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood.”

There was more to it than that, though. It was also an economic necessity. The merchant adventurers had to be paid back. And Parliament’s army–the New Model Army–hadn’t been paid, in some cases in years. They had to be paid, and Parliament already had a model of how to use Irish land to pay English debts.

The war dragged on into 1651 and 1652, with the Catholic armies turning to guerrilla warfare and the New Model Army killing civilians, destroying food, and setting bubonic plague loose, although to be fair that last part wasn’t deliberate.

Ó Siochrú talks about it as a genocidal conflict “in which the people of Ireland–the civilian population–were deliberately targeted. People were driven out of their homes and killed, crops were destroyed, infrastructure was wrecked, and it really had an absolutely disastrous impact on the population of Ireland.” 

In Ireland, he says, the English “saw themselves as outside of the realms of civilised society and therefore the behaviour that could be justified in Ireland would never have been accepted in England, or indeed even in Scotland, and certainly not on the Continent.” Who won the war? You already know, right? The English eventually, and they reshaped Irish society to their own benefit, confiscating almost all Catholic-owned land and using it to pay off the investors (at least those who hadn’t sold their shares) as well as military veterans and Protestant supporters of Parliament. 

Catholic landowners who hadn’t supported the rebellion were compensated with some land west of the Shannon river but Catholic religious practices were banned in public, and priests executed. The Anglican Church was also forbidden, although for some reason the Quakers were tolerated.

The Parliament of Bats

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If you think politics were once sane and sensible, let’s take a quick dive into England in the fifteenth century. I don’t guarantee that things were either more horrific or more absurd back then than they are wherever you live with (I’m originally from the US, after all, which scores high on both scales right now), but a bit of history does keep us from thinking political idiocy’s a new invention.

The Duke of Gloucester, hanging his curtains. From Wikimedia Commons

The king, the uncles, the conflict

We’ll start with the king, since his personality, competence, hair style, and digestion were all political issues back then. Henry VI has gone down in history as a weak and unstable king, and we’re dropping in at a time when he’d been king for three years. You might think that would be long enough to get the hang of the job, but he was four years old and I’m no fan of monarchy but even I will forgive him for not being much use yet. 

While he played with his toys, two powerful men played with the country–and with the money and power it had to offer them: his uncle Humphrey, the duke of Gloucester, and Henry Beaufort, who was the chancellor, the bishop of Winchester, someone who could be counted on to lend money to the insolvent crown (at high interest rates), and uncle to the duke–who was, remember, uncle to the king.

England’s aristocracy would’ve fit in a fairly small laundry bag back then. And you know what some families are like: these two men didn’t play nicely together. They’d already had an armed fight on London Bridge. I mention that only to explain why, when Parliament was called into session in 1426, everyone expected a fight there too. Both men had power bases nearby, Humphrey in London itself and Beaufort in Southwark. So someone decided to avoid bloodshed by moving the meeting to Leicester–pronounced for no discernable reason, Lester.

Don’t get me started on English spelling or place names.

To keep the two sides from shedding blood, somebody pulled a 14th-century tradition out of a different, non-laundry bag. (England’s bag of arcane traditions is almost as big as its bag of arcane spellings.) Each Parliament had been opened back then with a proclamation banning swords, other weapons, and silly games.

Silly games? Yes, silly games. The good folk running the country had a habit of pulling men’s hoods off their shoulders, as any reasonable adult in a position of power would. 

But by now it was the 15th century, not the 14th, and people had grown up enough (and were grumpy enough) that no one expected games and the announcement was stripped down to a simple warning that “every man . . . should leave their weapons in their inns, that is to say their swords and shields, bows and arrows.” 

 

The bats

So what did everyone do? Left their swords and bows and arrows at their inns and armed themselves with bats–the wooden kind, not the avian. 

What were they doing with bats? No idea. As far as I can tell, people didn’t start playing cricket for another century, although an ancestor game, stoolball, was played in Essex, traditionally by milkmaids using their milking stools as wickets. Not, you’d think, the sort of game to attract a bunch of macho aristocrats.

Okay, I haven’t a clue why they had bats and I’m not sure anyone sensible will either. The country was full of local games. Whether Leicester was full of bats that the lords and Members of Parliament could appropriate I don’t know. Maybe a few good solid cudgels went down in history as bats because the scribe-of-the-day liked the sound of it. We’ll just have to squint and move on. The articles I’ve found somehow take it for granted that they had bats.

Don’t we all pack them when we travel?

The two sides brought their bats to Parliament. The next day they were told to leave their bats behind, so they brought stones–big ones–tucking them into their clothes, where no one would notice them.

How did both sides hit on the same strategy two days in a row? By hacking each other’s emails, of course. No other explanation is possible.

Eventually Beaufort and Humphrey spoke to Parliament, making their cases against each other and for themselves, and in the end Beaufort was made to step down as chancellor but by way of compensation was allowed to accept the Pope’s offer to make him a cardinal. The two men gritted their teeth and shook hands, no blood was shed, and the Parliament came to be known as the Parliament of Bats. 

And the king? Not long afterwards, he was knighted by a different uncle.