The English stately home, from rise to fall

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

If you want to rub elbows with the mystique of British history, you’ll want to explore either a castle or a stately home, also known as a great house. But castles are battered old things these days–they’ve had a rough few centuries–and what’s worse they were never any match for Walt Disney’s imagining of a castle, so for this post let’s stick with stately homes.

Cotehele House, Cornwall. Compliments of Wikimedia, Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license., whatever that means.

The rise

What we’re really talking about when we talk about a great house is an unfortified home fit for a feudal lord. This dates back to the Tudor era, when it became safe for lords to plant themselves and their families in the kind of house where the neighbors could walk up and ring the doorbell. No moats, no battlements. In fact, no doorbells. They hadn’t been invented yet. And I’m not sure about the neighbors, at least not the kind who could knock on the door. That kind of familiarity would’ve been reserved for equals, who wouldn’t have lived next door. Feudal lords had land–estates, thank you very much–surrounding their houses, or formerly their castles. You couldn’t pack them in side by each. The system demanded that they be spread around the country.

Living in an unfortified house was new, even daring, and no doubt more comfortable. But the country looked stable, so out from behind their battlements the lords crept. Which should serve as a reminder that stability is relative and that no one can see what’s coming next.

More great houses were added to England’s collection when Henry VIII confiscated the monasteries. Ever wonder about the word abbey in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey? It would’ve once been–yes indeed, folks–an abbey. Ditto Downton Abbey. Fictional ones, admittedly, but still.

By the time we get to Elizabeth I, it was no longer enough just to have a grand unfortified house. If you had the land and the money and a need to play with the big kids, you had to have an architect design you a house so grand it would make both your name and his own (and yes, it would’ve been a his). They were called prodigy homes, and apparently they still are, although I never ran into the phrase until just now.

These were about luxury, style, expense.

Skip to Charles I and we find the high and mighty throwing around words like neo-classical, Palladian, baroque, English baroque. Don’t worry about what they mean. Throw them into a sentence and you’ll sound like you know something.

The ultra-rich aren’t the only people trying to impress.

After Charles I, England stumbled, all unprepared, into the Civil War and discovered that those fortified homes still had a use. Some of them were still occupied, or occupiable, and some of them, even today, have bullet holes in the outer walls to demonstrate the uses they were put to.

The country house

By the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a new class was lusting after stately homes–or country houses if you like. Fortunes were being made in trade, in banking, in industry, in slavery. They needed houses to match their money.

Yes, dears, all those slave-related businesses–tobacco, sugar, cotton, the slave trade itself–were the basis of many a British fortune and of many a mansion that modern visitors pay to admire. (We’ll get to that.) In some of them, the captions telling the house’s history will acknowledge those origins, but boy was there ever shouting and finger-wagging when it was first done.

History was so much nicer when we didn’t talk about that stuff.

At the time, though, slavery and the money it produced were respectable. The monarchy itself invested. You can’t get more respectable than that. The non-respectable ways to make money were in industry and trade. They weren’t quite the equivalent of today’s drug money, but they were a reason for the old money to look down on the new.

So what would you do if you were one of the newly rich? You’d buy land, because land is what old money has. Land is respectable. And you build some huge country house or renovate one, and you try to outdo everybody else who has a country house. The old money will still look down at you but if you’re rich enough and your house is grand enough–and in good enough taste–it won’t turn down your invitations.

Probably.

Before long, it may even marry one or two of its kids to one or two of yours, trading a title for some cash, because new money’s raking in the cash and the aristocracy is struggling. It might even marry off a kid or two to the offspring of some no-name American tycoon.

I’m not sure which was more desperate, marrying an American or marrying the offspring of an industrialist, but it doesn’t matter. They were both signs of the times and ways the economy was shifting.

Ideally, whether you’re old money or new, you’ll have a place in London as well as one in the country. The country one–the great house–will be for hunting, fishing, shooting (which isn’t the same as hunting but something ends up dead all the same); it’ll be for hosting parties and escaping the noise and grit of London. When the family’s in residence, the great and the grand can spend their time visiting each other’s houses and either envying them or thinking how much better theirs is.

The economics of the great house

Ah, but all those grand homes were expensive, not just to design and build and expand and furnish but to run. You needed a staff to go with the house–a big staff: people to cook and clean and garden and serve, to buttle and to maid and to shine the shoes and groom the horses. You needed people to stand around in expensive uniforms looking necessary. And if Historic UK’s to be believed (the link’s above), those big staffs tied a great house into the area’s economy, because when times were hard (and that would’ve been often, or possibly always) great houses provided relatively good jobs–jobs that kept a roof over a servant’s head and food on the table, which was (again, according to Historic UK) the definition of a good job. That tells us a more about how hard times were than about how good the jobs were. English Heritage is less rosy about working in the great houses, and that’s a better match for what I’ve read elsewhere.

Either way, a great house could easily need an indoor staff of 20 and an outdoor staff to match. Those lawns don’t mow themselves, you know.

But a country estate wasn’t just for show. Even as late as the Victorian age (1837-1901; you’re welcome), it could bring its owner a good income, which added considerably to its appeal. It might be mortgaged up to the windowsills to provide dowries, pay off debts, or fund the ludicrous lifestyle that went with it, but if farm prices stayed steady and money kept coming in, the dance could go on.

Until, of course, it didn’t.

From 1815 to 1846 the Corn Laws kept the price of grain high. (Of course you want to know all about the Corn Laws, and for that I refer you to that non-expert, myself. In the meantime, though, let’s settle for a sentence: imported grain would’ve been cheaper than domestic if the Corn Laws hadn’t added a big whackin’ tariff to the imported stuff. That worked well for the people who were selling grain, in this case the owners of those grand estates. But it left the poor hungry–literally–and sometimes starving. Since–you won’t have noticed this, I’m sure–things that benefit the rich are hard to overturn, it took decades of rioting, lobbying, advocating, and assorted other forms of political action to get rid of them.

Prices didn’t do an immediate nosedive after the Corn Laws were repealed, but by the 1870s and ‘80s, with railroads in the Americas carrying wheat to ports, where it could be shipped, they did fall, and between 1870 and 1900, British food prices dropped by half. For the vast majority of people, and especially for anyone overly familiar with hunger, this was great news. For the owners of those vast estates, it was disastrous. Yes, they were rich, but not so rich that they could lose part of their income.

And to make it worse, when the estates’ income went down, so did the value of the land.

If an owner had mortgaged the place, if he was careless about his bookkeeping or his spending, if any one of several other things had happened, he’d find himself selling, say, his art collection to fund his estate. Or his first editions. Or his whole damn property, and someone richer and less indebted would buy it up. Or some public (which, of course means private) school would. Or possibly no one would and the place would end up being torn down, because the land was worth more than the building.

C’mon folks, let’s have a bit of feeling here for the hardships of the formerly immensely rich.

To complete the picture, estate and property taxes started going up in the 1880s.

The twentieth century

Then World War I began and those wonderful jobs in country houses (if indeed they ever were wonderful) were no longer the only jobs on offer. Young young men left for the war, some willingly and some because they were drafted. Women left for factory jobs, which were not only better paid but had predictable hours and allowed for a less restrictive, more independent life.

After the war, not many people came knocking on the (back) door asking if their old jobs were still open. The upper class had to make do with a reduced staff and had to (gasp) offer better pay to those who remained. They talked about “the servant problem.” Even now, “Just can’t get the staff these days” is a standing joke. It gets a sour sort of laugh–or at least that’s how I hear it, foreigner that I am.

In the 1920s and ‘30s, more country houses were sold off or demolished.

During World War II, some were requisitioned to be used as hospitals, military headquarters, supply depots, you name it. At the end of the war, they were handed back, not necessarily in good shape.

In 1945, a Labour government was elected and got to work crafting a welfare state in a country that the war had pretty well bankrupted. Taxes went up on country estates.The coal industry was nationalized, cutting off the income some owners had gotten from coal rents. Even where an estate was still making a profit, its owners didn’t necessarily want to pour money into the house itself–or live there, for that matter.

It’s at this point that the nation began to see the great houses as a bit (a large and expensive bit) of its history, which should be preserved, so heirs who couldn’t pay the inheritance tax could hand over land and houses to the treasury instead, ridding them of an expensive and now useless inheritance. Assorted nonprofit organizations were set up to restore and maintain them and open them to the (paying) public.

Stately homes have turned out to be profitable. Visitors pay to wander through to gawp (I’ve done it myself), to disapprove, or to wish themselves back to that era, forgetting how few of us would be playing billiards instead of shining shoes. Then they (that’s the visitors in case you’ve lost track) move on to buy sandwiches, tea, cakes, maybe scones, sitting at tables in the courtyard and hoping it doesn’t rain. They stop at the gift shop and buy china teacups, nicely packaged candies, walking sticks. It all adds up to a successful enough business model that privately owned houses have followed the pattern.

To round out the picture, some great houses have been turned into hotels, schools, wedding venues, and before this all sounds like too much fun, nursing homes.

World War II spies and the mystique of British aristocracy

Posted on September 18, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

There’s nothing like a sprinkling of aristocratic fairy dust to make a spy’s target forget all caution. Or so I’ve read. I have no first-hand knowledge of either spies or aristocrats. Sorry if I’ve wrecked your image of me.

During World War II, the British government used three great houses to hold high-ranking German captives and put them too much at ease for their own good. One of them, Trent Park, has been in the news lately because it’s been turned into a museum. Let’s focus on it.

Trent Park, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Trent Park

Trent Park was built because in 1779 George III gave the royal doctor a 99-year lease on 250 acres of land, and when you get a gift like that, what can you do but build a great house?

As great houses go, the original version of Trent Park was small, but over the years, as house and land were passed from one family to another and one fortune to another, it got larger and grander and then even grander than that until by the 1930s the owner, Phillip Sassoon, was using it to entertain royalty, high society, and any other elite you care to add to the list. He also entertained penguins, black swans, and flamingos, but they stayed outdoors and weren’t offered champagne.

Then came the war (and coincidentally Sassoon’s death) and the government kitted the place out to hold high-ranking German prisoners, including 59 generals. There was barbed wire. There were guard towers and interrogation rooms, but there was also this mansion, complete with billiard room, a radio, ancient woodlands, and a German-language library lifted wholesale from the embassy Germany had abandoned at the start of the war. A tailor visited to maintain the officers’ uniforms.

And there was alcohol. Let’s not forget the alcohol. It does put people at ease. As one high-ranking officer put it, “We read, we played, we wrote, we meditated day after day as if there were nothing more natural in the world.” It was, they assumed, a fitting acknowledgement of their rank.

The place was also kitted out with microphones. They were in the walls, under the billiard table, in the light fixtures, on trees and plant pots and in rose bushes, and from all of them wires led to the basement, where some hundred people, mostly German-speaking Jewish refugees, wrote down every word the prisoners said.

I’m still trying to figure out how those listeners got in and out without being noticed, but they did. Maybe in surroundings like that, a person stops seeing the minions who keep the place running. A hundred or so unexplained people trudging in and out, working two shifts a day? Nyeh. What can they matter?

Still, you’d think someone would’ve wondered.

The translators

The amount of work involved was staggering. First they cut records of every conversation, with each record holding seven minutes of whatever was going on. That was transcribed, then checked by a second person, then checked by interrogators combing through for useful information. Then the draft was translated into English and typed up in both German and English, checked for errors, and sent to various government departments and agencies.

Think carbon copies. Probably lots of them.

Have you ever typed carbon copies? I was a lousy typist (I took the advice that women on the left gave each other in the sixties, “Never let ‘em know you can type,” to extremes), but I know enough to tell you that they were awkward, horrible things.

Initially, the listeners were Brits fluent in German, some of them from the Auxiliary Territorial Service–the women’s branch of the army. Or maybe all of them were. Decoding explanations that seem clear involves an absurd amount of guesswork.

But however fluent the listeners were, they hit their limit when faced with German dialects and technical vocabulary. And the number of prisoners increased, adding to the pressure. So they recruited native speakers, Jewish refugees serving in the Army’s Pioneer Corps.

Many Jewish refugees were interned during the war. They were from Germany, right? So Jewish or not, they might be enemies and Nazi sympathizers. How anyone decided who to recruit and who to lock up is beyond me.

The prisoners

It’s not that the prisoners didn’t worry about surveillance. They did, but they had no idea how completely Trent Park was bugged. At one point, two prisoners leaned out a window so they could speak freely and were picked up by a microphone on an outside wall.

The prisoners were also being politically choreographed. Prisoners from opposing Nazi factions roomed together to see what would emerge. And decoys were planted among them, guiding conversations in useful directions. A former bank clerk passed himself off as a Nazi-sympathizing Scottish peer, Lord Aberfeldy, complete with kilt, pictures of his castle, and a small bag of aristocratic fairy dust.

He entered into the role so deeply that he refused to drop it when he was off duty.

Other decoys included German-Jewish refugees, who mingled with the Nazis undetected.

A fake news report was planted to elicit information about German weapons capabilities. One response allowed the allies to find and bomb the factory that made V2 rockets, the first long-range ballistic missiles.

All told, 3,000 conversations were recorded, some of which helped Bletchly Park unravel the Enigma code. The first information about the Holocaust came from Trent Park and was taken down by Jews who had left families behind in Germany. In one conversation, a Nazi officer said, “The worst job I carried out was the liquidation of the Jews.”

What was done with that information? Not a damn thing. Not only at the time but later, during the Nuremberg trials. It would’ve exposed the secret of Trent Park, although the secret doesn’t seem to have mattered anymore.

A footnote about Jews and Quakers

At one point, Trent Park Museum’s website notes, the house was owned by “a local Quaker who was a successful banker,” and later by “Sir Edward Sassoon . . . [who] was the head of a Jewish merchant dynasty.” George III’s favorite doctor? He might as well not have had either a religion or an ethnicity. Neither one gets a mention, and if the place had other owners along the way they don’t come into the story at all.

Have you ever noticed that when some absurdly rich person wanders into the conversation, their religion or ethnicity is 79.6% more likely to get mentioned if they’re a Quaker or a Jew than if they’re some run-of-the-mill Christian?

That percentage, by the way, is entirely imaginary but the rest of the sentence is not. This leaves people with the impression that (a) rich people are likely to be Jews or Quakers and that (b) Jews and Quakers are likely to be rich.

The same thing may happen to people from other backgrounds without me having noticed. If you have noticed, leave me a comment.

The Quaker owner of Trent Park is pretty much irrelevant to the story and I haven’t bothered to name him although the museum’s article does. Sassoon (he was Jewish, by the way) is worth a few relevant paragraphs. His visitors included Winston Churchill, Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, the future George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Charlie Chaplin, George Bernard Shaw, Rex Whistler and T.E. Lawrence. That’s Lawrence as in of Arabia, not Lawrence as in Sons and Lovers, which was written by D.H.

Edward VIII was a Nazi sympathizer, but he wasn’t so antisemitic that he’d turn down an invitation from a Jew if he was well enough connected and had a glamorous country house.

I don’t know, maybe the black swans and flamingoes helped.

The right to vote in 19th century Britain

Posted on September 4, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

If you see human history as a story of unending progress, leading from ignorance to enlightenment, you might at the very least want to admit that progress hasn’t gone in a straight line. Take, for example, Britain and the right to vote. The number of people who could vote did gradually expand, but boy did the country find some interesting ways to go a-wandering on its path toward universal suffrage.

I’m picking up here on an earlier post about the 1832 voting reforms. This one isn’t specifically about that set of changes, although it is connected. If you haven’t read the older one, I’ll never know, but if you want to go back and fill in the blank, here’s your link. Meanwhile, the rest of us will waddle on, never knowing whether you’re with us or not.

Irrelevant photo: Mallow

Women, men, and freedom of the city

In many nineteenth-century boroughs–that pretty much translates to towns and cities–men with the freedom of the city had the right to vote.

The freedom of the what?

The phrase goes back to feudal times, when a freeman was someone who wasn’t the property of a feudal lord and when living in a city for more than a year and not getting hauled back to the land could free you.

Were there free women? Yes, but they don’t seem to have gone into the language in the same way. Funny how that works.

Even while feudalism was turning to dust, echoes of the system were burrowing their way into the language, and the freedom of the city is one of the echoes. In those nineteenth-century boroughs (didn’t think I’d get back to that, did you?), having the freedom of the city gave you more than the right to vote. Depending on what city you lived in, it might also give you the right to trade or own property in the city; it would connect you to a network of people with money and power; it might allow you to graze your cattle on the town square, but only if you actually owned cattle. But let’s focus on that one benefit, the right to vote.

How could you get the freedom of the city?

You could get it by being apprenticed to a freeman or you could inherit it from your father. Or grandfather. Or–well, how many generations back you could go would depend on what city’s freedom you were claiming.

In some towns, only one son could inherit it; in others multiple sons could. And in some, a daughter could inherit, only she couldn’t use it to cast a vote herself. What she could do was enfranchise her husband so he could vote. The widow of a freeman (again, only in some boroughs) could do the same, enfranchising a second husband, and if he died, possibly a third.

After the 1832 electoral reforms, the number of boroughs where women could enfranchise a husband shrank from 90 to 15 (did I mention that progress doesn’t know what a straight line is?), but at a time when women’s power in the public sphere was somewhere between minuscule and not noticeable at all, this bit of compromised power is worth noticing.

Like everything else connected to this story, terms and conditions applied and they varied from place to place. As did the proportion of voters who were enfranchised by their wives rather than voting in their own right: it might’ve been a third here, a sixth someplace else. Pull a number out of a hat and you can convince me that it applied somewhere.

In some boroughs, marriage wasn’t enough to enfranchise a man. The wife’s consent was required as well.

Why the right to vote mattered

I’ve always taken it for granted that having the vote was about political power, so expanding it was about spreading the power outward and giving new groups of people a voice. I’ve lived around universal suffrage all my life, which is long enough to know that it hasn’t even come close to spreading power out universally, but that didn’t completely knock the rose-colored glasses off my face.

The belief that having the vote meant you had a voice isn’t entirely wrong–people fought for it and some died for it, and it has made a difference–but it isn’t the whole story either. In the nineteenth century, having the vote gave you some immediate benefits many people would’ve found more useful than that abstraction about having a voice.

Political wheelers and dealers might’ve offered them free food, drink, and until polling places moved closer to the voters, (generous) travel expenses on polling day. Outright bribes weren’t uncommon. In 1774, in Hindon, Wiltshire, householders (a group who were eligible to vote after the 1832 reforms expanded the electorate) were given as much as 20 guineas each. That would be something along the lines of £2,000 in today’s money.

It wasn’t legal but it also wasn’t uncommon.

People’s votes were public, so they couldn’t just pocket the money and vote for the candidate they liked. Not only did they have to declare their vote publicly, it would be written down, along with their name, occupation, and address, becoming part of the public record.

A candidate might also get an opponent’s supporters too drunk to vote. If you’re the opponent, that’s dirty pool, but if you’re a voter and don’t much care who wins, a drink is a drink and a chance to get so drunk you land on the floor? Let’s drink to that.

So forget about using their vote, these voters were without question being used, but for a lot of people the material advantages of being voters would’ve outweighed any abstraction. And I’ll bet a ham sandwich that it was a rare election when the outcome made a difference to the voters’ circumstances after the food and drink were gone and the bribes had been spent.

The Gordon Riots

Posted on August 28, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

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

What a deal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The riots

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

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

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

So what was all that about?

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

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

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

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

The aftermath

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

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

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

Catholic emancipation

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

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

1832: Britain expanded the right to vote

Posted on August 7, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

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

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

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

Irrelevant photo: zantedeschia

A few people lost the vote under the new system

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

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

Fashion drawings wouldn’t lie.

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

Definitions

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

Let’s tackle them separately.

Borough voters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t ask me.

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

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

Counties

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1867, Parliament revised the system again.

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

Posted on July 3, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

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

Irrelevant photo: north Cornish coast

1422 – 1437

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The vote was public, not secret.

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

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

You figured out where that’s going, right?

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

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

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

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

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

1640

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

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

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

Women who didn’t get to vote

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

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

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

1832

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Non-parliamentary elections

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

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

But it is a side issue. Really.

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

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

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

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

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

1918 and 1928

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on June 19, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

Posted on June 12, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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

Posted on May 15, 2026 by Ellen Hawley

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.

Notes from the U.K.

Exploring the spidery corners of a culture and the weird stuff that tourist brochures ignore.

Category Archives: History