Category Archives: History

The South Sea bubble and the national debt

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It all started with the War of the Spanish Succession, which Britain got involved in, and lucky us, all we need to know about it is that it cost Britain money. Lots of money. £5 million a year, according to Roy Strong’s The Story of Britain. That was more then than it is now, but even today it’s more than you could raise by running a raffle.

Okay, I lied. We need to know one more thing about the war, and that’s when it happened: from 1701 to 1714. If your mind’s anything like mine, you’ll have forgotten that by the end of the next paragraph, but even so it’ll give you a picture of what sort of silly clothing people were running around in.

Irrelevant photo: mallow

Of course, war isn’t the only expense a country has, because governments cost money, so even though we started with the war, we can’t stop there. This was a time when bureaucracy was growing, and along with it the professionalization of government. As much as we like to complain about bureaucracy, the people who write about this time–at least the ones I’ve read–say its growth was a good thing. Governmental departments were now run by people who lived off their pay instead of off the fees they took in and what Strong calls perks, which I suspect we’d call bribes.

Maybe you had to live through the alternative to understand how good the growth of bureaucracy was.

The government also had other expenses. The king’s wigs, for example. They needed maintenance, and so did his palaces and his family and household and hangers-on. 

In 1698, parliament had created the Civil List, which paid for both the king or queen’s household’s expenses (think wigs, palaces, banquets, relatives, endless staff) and his or her government’s expenses. For life. This was a huge change. In the past, Parliament had voted the king money by the teaspoonful in order to keep some sort of power in the relationship. Now it had enough power that it didn’t have to do that.

The Civil List didn’t cover out-of-the-ordinary governmental expenses, such as war, but it did give the government a predictable base to work from.

At more or less the same time, what had once been the king’s debts became the national debt.  

The problem with all this is that once you have power, you’re responsible for running things and fixing whatever breaks, and a lot less fun than getting into power–something Boris Johnson may have noticed by now. So once parliament was in charge of the national debt, it had to figure out how to pay the damned thing. 

I know, we still haven’t gotten to the South Sea bubble. We will.

I said £5 million was more than you could raise in a raffle, but parliament did try paying off the debt by running a lottery. They also borrowed money from trading companies and sold annuities. They’d have sold Girl Scout cookies, but the Girl Scouts weren’t around yet. Cookies, however, were, although it’s hard to say whether they’d reached Britain. They’re first recorded in Persia in the seventh century. Or so Lord Google tells me.

While you were thinking about cookies, I changed books. A Short History of England, by Simon Jenkins, puts the national debt in this period at £50 million, although it doesn’t put a date on that. But what do we care? We wouldn’t remember it anyway. Somewhere along in here is close enough. 

So somewhere along in here, parliament was looking at a big debt and some genius came up with the idea of the South Sea Company taking on part of it. 

Why would a company do that? Because they planned to profit from it, of course. We’ll get to that, but first let’s talk about what the South Sea Company was. It was set up to sell slaves to the Spanish colonies in the Americas, and Britain had granted it a monopoly on the trade. So yeah, nice guys. And not all that unusual. Plenty of British traders and aristocrats made money off of slavery in one way or another. You could argue that it was money from the slave trade that fueled the industrial revolution.

We won’t, though, because that’s not our topic. 

Would somebody shut me up, please?

I said earlier, if you were paying attention, that the government had tried financing the national debt by selling annuities. The problem with annuities was they weren’t transferable, meaning you couldn’t sell them, and that limited their appeal. But now that the South Sea Company had entered the picture, if people wanted to convert their annuities into stock in the company, hey, that would be wonderful, because they could sell the stock any old time. And if they didn’t sell, they’d get dividends from the slave trade. They’d make money, money, money, and money causes people’s vision to go so fuzzy that they don’t notice where it’s coming from. 

The South Sea Company promised to pay the treasury £7.5 million just for the joy of taking over part of the national debt. It didn’t have the money, but never mind. Keep your eye on the shell with the pea under it. It’s right here in the center. 

It also promised to give the first lord of the treasury and the chancellor of the exchequer stock in the company, which they’d be able to sell back to the company once the price went up. That gave them an interest in seeing the price go up. According to one source, the stock didn’t exist, but I haven’t found a second source to confirm that and it doesn’t matter. Whether the stock was real or not, it was still a bribe. 

The pea’s on the left. 

If you want names, the chancellor was John Aislabie and the first lord of the treasury was the Earl of Sunderland. Which isn’t a name, but it’s close enough. We don’t really need to know them, but doesn’t the story feel authoritative now that they’re in place?

Company directors circulated rumors about the wondrous profits the company was making. The stock price went up. Then it went up more. The company took on a larger portion of the government’s debt. And everyone was happy. Except of course the slaves, who’ve been shoved to one side of the story anyway because unless all hell breaks loose–as it does periodically and has recently if you follow the news–history’s about the rich and powerful. 

Buying South Sea Company stock became a mania. Everyone with two guineas to rub together wanted it. The price rose to something like ten times its original price.

And then the price crashed. In part because the trade that the company was going to get rich on turned out to be more restricted than they’d hoped. Blame wars. Blame treaties. Blame all kinds of complications. 

But I said “in part,” so we need at least one more part to keep things in balance. The other part is that people lost confidence.  You can’t read much about the South Sea Company without someone telling you about the loss of confidence. What does it mean, though?

It means the whole thing had been a Ponzi scheme: You only made money if you convinced other people that they could make money. That pushed up the price of your shares. Look at how much that paper in your hand is worth! You’re rich!

Then some spoilsport started yelling that none of it was real–the pea wasn’t under any of the shells. Or–new metaphor–the poker chips were just bits of colored plastic (which hadn’t been invented yet). You couldn’t buy so much as a sandwich (which also hadn’t been invented) with them. 

Or forget both metaphors. There was no money to be made by owning the stock and its price collapsed. People who had fortunes lost them. People who’d taken out loans using their stock as security or sold land or property to buy shares went bust. Bankruptcy listings hit an all-time high.

To give you a quick picture of the moment, I’ll get out of the way and quote Jenkins: “The Riot Act had to be read in the lobby of parliament. Stanhope had a stroke in the House of Lords and died. The Postmaster General took poison and the chancellor of the exchequer . . . was thrown into prison.”

Everyone wanted someone to blame the disaster on, so the Commons set up an investigation, and this was when a lot of people who had reputations lost them. The king, however, wasn’t among them, even though he and his two mistresses had gotten involved in some questionable transactions. As had everyone with money for miles around. Sir Robert Walpole managed the investigation by sacrificing a few visible politicians and leaving the rest to skip merrily on.

One of those he didn’t save was Sunderland. Remember the Earl of Sunderland? One of the people whose name I said we wouldn’t remember? He resigned and Sir Robert Walpole replaced him as the first lord of the treasury, making himself pivotal enough that he effectively became the prime minister–Britain’s first, although the title didn’t come into use until later. The king gave him a house in Downing Street, which Walpole insisted should go with the job, not stay with him. And there you have 10 Downing Street.

Larry the Cat has done well out of it.

Britain’s chimneys and chimney sweeps

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Britain’s earliest chimneys were strictly for the rich, and in the Tudor era, they were the must-have accessory. The aristocracy’s news feeds were clogged with targeted ads saying, Heat Your Castle the Modern Way. 

Heat Your Hovel ads didn’t show up for many a year. 

Hovel-dwellers didn’t have news feeds anyway.

Hovel-dwellers lived in single-story houses with a central fire whose smoke worked its way out through the roof (thatch is good that way, and I’ve heard that slates aren’t bad) or through a hole in the roof. If you were clever about covering the hole, you could let the smoke out and keep the rain from pouring in, all in one go, but no matter how clever you were, above a certain height these houses were smoky.  

Irrelevant photo: osteospermum, with a bit of valerian getting ready to bloom.

With the introduction of the chimney, though, at least some of the the smoke went politely up and out, changing the residents’ lives and lungs. On the other hand, a good bit of the fire’s warmth was polite enough to follow the smoke, so the change wasn’t all about gain.

If you have a third hand, balance this on it: Chimneys also meant you could heat a second story. You could even add heat to rooms that didn’t have fireplaces. All they had to do was cuddle up against the back of the chimney and suck up a bit of warmth. 

By the seventeenth century, enough chimneys had been built around the country that they were worth taxing. Enter the hearth tax, which was based on the size of the house and, most importantly, the number of chimneys it had. 

So what did the rich do? To minimize taxes, they started running the flues of multiple fireplaces up a single chimney.  Many fireplaces, many flues, fewer chimneys. In a big house, they’d still end up with more than one chimney, but nowhere near as many as they had fireplaces.

What innocents they were back then. Today, they’d just build the chimney in a tax haven and have as many as they wanted. So what if it cost more to build them there and import the heat? They’d still be saving on taxes, and the point of the game, once you have that kind of money, is to pay as little in taxes as possible and then yell, “I win!”

Nothing I’ve read tells me how people first discovered that chimneys had to be cleaned, but I’m reasonably sure the realization took the form of chimney fires, complete with the neighbors standing around saying, “I could’ve told them this would happen.” Or whatever the era-appropriate version of withering scorn was.

That’s how the occupation of the chimney sweep  was born, and when the country’s primary fuel shifted from wood to coal, which lines chimneys with creosote, it became even more important.

I’d love to pinpoint the moment when children were first used as sweeps, but I can’t find any information on it. My best guess is that children working in dirty and dangerous occupations was so much a part of life that for a long time it was barely worth mentioning. Kids worked in mines and quarries and everywhere else. In slate quarrying country, where I live, they’d send boys over the cliffs in baskets to set the explosives. It only made sense: They were lighter than the adults. 

A website maintained by a chimney sweeping outfit in Hartford, Connecticut, doesn’t give a start date but does say that kids were used most heavily as sweeps during the two hundred years between with the Great Fire of London (that’s 1666) and the mid-nineteenth century, when Britain outlawed them. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but any number of chimney sweepers’ sites include some history of the trade, and they’re reasonably consistent.

So let’s talk about those kids. The apprentices to master sweeps were usually boys but sometimes girls, and they were generally paupers or orphans. Anyone who had choices in life would look somewhere else for their kid’s apprenticeship. 

How old were they? Well, they had to be strong enough to be useful but small enough to climb up the inside of a chimney. And since narrow flues created a better draft, you’d be talking about a very small kid–usually around six, but they could (rarely) be as young as four.

And here we circle back to all those flues running up a single chimney. Remember them? The flues made sharp turns and had awkward angles, making them that much harder to get through and putting even more of a premium on smallness.

The kids worked their way up the chimneys using their backs, elbows, and knees, knocking the soot loose with a brush as they went, so it fell on and past them.

According to some sources, the apprenticeships were for seven years and according to others until the apprentice was an adult, although reaching adulthood wasn’t guaranteed. The dangers of sweeping chimneys included getting stuck, suffocating, and breathing the carcinogenic soot (one form of cancer was common enough to be called chimney sweep cancer). The kids also lived in the soot, because we’re talking about people who had minimal chances to wash and who generally slept on the sacks of soot that they collected and the master sweep sold. They grew up stunted and deformed and were prone not just to cancer but to lung problems. 

So yes,it was just like in Mary Poppins, all singing and dancing along the rooftops.

They also had to contend with hot chimneys and rough brick on their knees, elbows, and backs.

Their conditions horrified a fair number of respectable people, and many attempts were made to improve their conditions, mostly without changing anything substantial, although over time the pressure did grow. The turning point came when a twelve-year-old, George Brewster, got stuck in a chimney. A wall was pulled down and he was gotten out, but he died not long after. After that, child sweeps were finally banned.

The sweeps were replaced with brushes on long, long handles, which an adult could work up a chimney.

The bright spot in sweeps’ lives was their one yearly holiday, May Day, which coincided with local celebrations that predated chimneys and sweeps–and Christianity, for that matter. In a few places, May Day is officially a sweeps’ festival. 

Why that day? No idea. We just have to accept that it is and go with it.

I’ll leave you with a link to William Blake’s poem about a child chimney sweep. He wrote two versions. This strikes me as the stronger of them.

Censorship and freedom of the press in England: a quick history

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Let’s talk about freedom of the press in England.

Why not in Britain? Because we’ll start before Britain became a country and because English law doesn’t apply to all of Britain. It’s enough to make a non-Briton dizzy. Don’t think about it and you’ll be fine.

We’ll start in 1403, before the printing press was brought to England. Before, in fact, it was invented. That’s when the Guild of Stationers was recognized by London, and it’s an important part of the story, so stay with me. The guild’s members were text writers, book illuminators, booksellers, bookbinders, and suppliers of parchment, pens, and paper. Just to confuse things it’s also called the Stationers’ Company.

They were called stationers because they set up stations–what we’d be more likely to call stalls–around St. Paul’s Cathedral. So there’s one mystery solved. 

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, getting ready to bloom.

Then the printing press came to England and printers joined the guild. 

Printing was the hot technology of the day, so what would any sensible government do but restrict it? When William Tyndale translated the Bible into English–both Henry VIII and England were still Catholic at this point–he played hide and seek with government agents in print shops all across Europe, where he’d fled. Copies of his translation were printed in Germany and smuggled into England.

In England, though, printing could be done only by English citizens, and anything that was going to be printed had to be approved by the privy council. 

Eventually Mary Tudor became the queen and the Guild of Stationers got a royal charter. That gave them a monopoly on printing, so members didn’t face competition from outside the guild. They could only have seen that as a good thing. They also had to settle disagreements over who owned what works within the group, and that led to the invention of copyright. 

We won’t go down that rabbithole today. 

The royal charter also meant that the guild had the power–and presumably the responsibility–to search out seditious and heretical books. Or, as its preamble puts it, “seditious and heretical books rhymes and treatises [that] are daily published and printed by divers scandalous malicious schismatical and heretical persons”.

The heresy du jour  was Protestantism, but after Mary died the heresy du jour was Catholicism, along with more Protestant forms of Protestantism than the approved form of Protestantism. 

So the content of sedition and heresy changed but the concept itself didn’t. 

Isn’t the world a strange place?

In their search for heresy etc., the stationers had to power search, seize, and destroy. 

Didn’t they get to have all the fun? 

This wasn’t exactly state censorship. It was censorship by a body chartered by the state but working in response to its own interests. I’m speculating here, but you might have been safe enough printing heretical pamphlets on the quiet if you kept on the good side of the guild’s more powerful members. And you might have found some surprising pamphlets stashed in a quiet corner of your workshop if you pissed off the wrong person.

We won’t slog through the period Tudor by Tudor. Let’s just acknowledge that each of them had an interest in stamping out sedition and heresy, in all its alternating forms. Freedom of the press was the next-door neighbor of sedition and would’ve been a dangerous concept to defend in public. If you had nothing to hide, you wouldn’t have any problem showing it to the privy council. 

During the Civil War and under the Commonwealth–that brief period when England was a republic–religious and political thinking went in directions no one could have predicted and no one could control, and print, being the social media of the day, was what all that intellectual ferment poured itself into. 

Given that this was during and just after a civil war, if you’d wanted to argue that freedom of the press and anarchy went together, you’d have found a good stack of evidence for your argument.

Then Cromwell died and Charles II took the throne, and he needed to put all that debate and argument and printing back in the box. The government passed the Licensing Act of 1662. Anything printed now had to carry the name of its printer and its author, and it had to be submitted to a licenser–that was a government official–before it could be printed. 

The licenser kept a copy to check against the printed version, just in case some sly devil inserted a disparaging paragraph about the size of Charles’s wig.

If the text was approved, then it had to be registered with–they’re back again–the stationers. 

The act was meant to be temporary–a placeholder until something better could be pieced together–so it came with an end date, but when nothing better appeared it was renewed. Until 1679, when everyone important got into a tizzy because of Titus Oates’ fantasies about a popish plot, and the act lapsed.

Newspapers moved into the empty space where censorship had once been.

Six years later, the act was reinstated, but the fun had gone out of it, somehow. Licensing print didn’t have the appeal it had once had. It had grown a pot belly and a chicken neck, some mornings it didn’t bother to shave, and heads didn’t turn anymore when it walked down the street. 

But guess what: The government found it could still punish treason, seditious libel, and blasphemy, and it could keep the press in line pretty well that way. And it was all so much more efficient.

A Jacobite printer was executed to prove the point. 

The threat of prosecution was enough to keep most publishers well back from the political edges. And those didn’t stay back? Some were fined. Some were jailed. Some fled abroad. Most played nice.

Before long, London had multiple newspapers and towns around the country had their own papers. The newspaper had become an integral part of the political landscape and that’s glorious but a lot less interesting.

English defamation law has worked at times to limit freedom of the press, since it puts the burden of proof on the defendant, not the plaintiff. In other words, if someone wants to shut you up, unless you have enough money and sheer cussed energy to defend yourself in court, you might just consider shutting up. 

And there are specified limits on freedom of expression. They include making threats, harassment, glorifying terrorism, incitement to racial hatred, or–oh, hell–calling for the abolition of the monarchy. Or imagining overthrowing the monarchy.

That last one carries a life sentence, although the law hasn’t been enforced since 1879. The Guardian challenged it in court and lost on the grounds that the law was a relic of a bygone age and that any change was unnecessary.  

And with that, we’ve come to the present day, so let’s check in with the Stationers’ Company and see what they’ve become now that they can’t stamp out heresy and search other people’s premises. The organization says it has almost a thousand members and sounds deeply snoozeworthy. Most members are “senior executives in the complete range of trades within the Communications and Content industries.” That’s so dull I had to copy it and paste it into place. I tried typing the words but kept passing out.

One of the group’s goals is to create a broad balance of membership. Toward what end? Why, so it can maintain balance, of course. In its membership. 

Listen, don’t ask me these things. They have a hall. You can rent it if the pandemic ever ends.

The Anglo-Saxons and the Normans: how hunting turned to poaching

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If you read enough English history, you’ll start to wonder how life in England changed once the Normans conquered the place.

Or you will if you’re me, anyway. Which admittedly, you’re probably not.

Be grateful. It’s strange in here.

Let’s look at one change: hunting and access to the woods. I’m working in part from The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium, an Englishman’s World, by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. It’s a book–one of those odd things involving paper and ink. I just love them, but then I’m several hundred years old. To me, they’re still an exciting new technology.

Irrelevant photo: Camellia blossoms. They weren’t here when the Anglo-Saxons and Normans were running around–they were a much later import.

One important change involved hunting. Before the Normans invaded and seized the place, the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy hunted with expensive dogs and birds and horses but any free-born Anglo-Saxon had the right to hunt.

Notice the restriction there. Anglo-Saxon England  had slavery, and wars were fought in part to capture slaves. What percent of the population was enslaved? Dunno. But however many people were involved, you can take that group of people and set them outside the freedoms the rest of the inhabitants had.

Don’t forget they’re there. It’ll keep you from romanticizing things.

The forest was as important and productive a part of free people’s world as their fields were. They didn’t just use them for hunting, they gathered wood and turned their animals out to forage in them. How did that coexist with private ownership of woodlands? I’m not sure. My best guess–and I haven’t been able to verify this–is that we’re talking about local people’s access to local woodland. In other words, to woods owned by a lord they had some sort of relationship with.

As a whole, the population ate well. Lacey and Danziger argue that the people of that time were as tall as people living today. Where recent generations have grown taller than their ancestors, it’s because during the intervening generations their ancestors were overcrowded and underfed.

The Normans–somewhere between 4,000 and 8,000 of them–barged into this well-fed country, and William made himself the owner of the whole shebang. Under him were 180 chief tenants, who owed him military service. And under them? More tenants, who owed military service through the people above them. The top lords were all or almost all Normans, and they replaced the entire upper crust of Anglo-Saxon society.

And to make sure he’d have a matching set, William did the same with administrators and church officials: He replaced them with Norman versions.

William kept a fair bit of Anglo-Saxon administrative organization–it was efficient and, for its time, centralized–but (among many other things) dramatically changed people’s rights to use the forest. The right to hunt was now reserved for the top one percent of the one percent. Maybe I should add another “of the one percent” there, but forget the numbers: It was reserved for the aristocracy–the landowners, that thin (and Norman) top layer of the population. Anyone else was poaching–stealing the lord’s game.

This was codified into the forest law, which protected the animals so the king could hunt them and also protected everything the animals fed on. Common people not just lost their right to hunt, but to fish, to gather fruit and wood, to dig peat and clay, to pasture their animals. It was a disaster for a people whose living had depended in part on the forest.

What happened if they broke the law? The punishments ranged from fines to death, and in the early years after the conquest the law was enforced with a heavy hand. Hunting had gone from being something any free man might do to something reserved for the aristocracy.

But what was this about pasturing their animals in a forest?

Under Norman law, forest didn’t mean forest as in a place with lots of trees. It could mean woods, but it could also mean pastures and even villages. It meant a place the king might want to hunt and it meant anything that fell within that place he might want to hunt. If he designated it a forest, it was a forest, and you wouldn’t want to stand there arguing about its lack of trees. If you happened to live inside what he said was a forest, you not only couldn’t hunt or cut wood or do any of those other things, you couldn’t use a fence or a hedge to protect your crops because it might get in the way of the hunt.

At the time of the Domesday Book–William’s massive, nitpicking survey of the land he’d conquered–there were 25 royal forests, but forest law applied not just to royal forests but also to forests owned by major lords of various flavors.

Norman forest law led to a lot of confusion over land ownership. Since all land belonged to the king and was granted downward from there–and since it could, if the king got mad at you, be un-granted–ownership had some murky edges. The law was muddled enough that it was possible to own part of a forest but not have the right to hunt in it or cut trees.

All of this is what made the 1217 Charter of the Forest so important: It gave free men certain rights in royal forests–and by then there were 143 royal forests. Commoners could gather wood, honey, and fruit; dig clay; fish; cut peat; and pasture animals. The charter laid the groundwork for rights that held (and were fought over) throughout the medieval period and for the rights of commoners today on some 500 surviving commons.

On the other hand, only about 10 percent of the population was free. Serfs weren’t slaves but they weren’t in any realistic or legal way free. So although the charter was important, both in practical terms and in terms of the precedent it set, but it was also limited.

Covid-19 and the Dunkirk spirit 

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We’ve all (I’m going to assert on the basis of no proof whatsoever) heard about the Dunkirk spirit, and then (ignoring my assumption) I’m going to explain what it is anyway. Because we all know better than to believe me entirely. 

We’ll get around to Covid and why Dunkirk is suddenly relevant. Stay with me.

Lord Google tells me the Dunkirk spirit is ”an attitude of strength, determination, and camaraderie, especially by the British people as a whole, during a difficult and adverse time or situation.” 

Thank you, Lord G. I have left my data in more places than I realize and I trust you’ve scooped it in by now. I also trust that you’ll accept data as a singular even though we both know it’s technically plural.

The Dunkirk spirit has been evoked a lot lately because, what with the pandemic and all, we’re wading through rising water, wondering where the shore is and whether we still have one. Not to mention (so I can stretch the metaphor closer to the breaking point) wondering how high the water’s going to rise. 

Being of the short persuasion, I’m particularly concerned with that last bit.

Semi-relevant photo: This is called honesty, which comes into the story toward the end, when we talk about myth-making.

So what happened at Dunkirk? 

Let us go back, children, to May 1940, which is so long ago that not even I had gotten myself born. Yes, history really does go back that far and, lo, even further than that. Germany was ruled by the Nazis. Not Nazis as in a couple of syllables you carelessly tack on to something you don’t like (feminists and grammar come up a lot in this context, although you may notice that those aren’t closely related categories)–

Let’s start over, because I’ve wandered. It’s your own fault for leaving me in charge.

The people running Germany were real Nazis. The kind who killed first their political opponents and pesky unionists, then the disabled, then the Jews and the Gypsies and the gays, then assorted categories of people I’ve forgotten to mention by name but yes, even you might have fallen into one of them. The kind of Nazis who invaded lots of other countries and forced people into slave labor. The kind who–

Okay, you get the point: that kind. The kind also called fascists. Not the dangerous kind who pester you about your use of who and whom or don’t put up with jokes about their breasts. 

By May 1940, Nazi Germany had already signaled that it had its eye on expansion. Most recently, it had invaded Poland. How did the other European powers respond? They told themselves they were playing a long game. If they waited, they could defeat Germany through economic warfare.  

Oh, and Britain–since that’s the country we’re focused on here–dropped propaganda leaflets on Germany and passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, giving the government amazing internal powers in case of a war. It could detain anybody it decided was a threat and take any property needed by the government other than land, which sounds like a strange exception, but remember the aristocracy’s base is in land ownership. It could also enter and search any property and change any existing law if it was necessary for the war effort.

As an opponent commented at the time, those were fairly fascistic powers with which to combat the fascists.

Winston Churchill, the country’s newly minted prime minister, wasn’t what you’d call a natural antifascist. In 1927, he’d told Mussolini–who led Italy’s equivalent of the Nazis–that he’d “rendered a service to the world” by destroying the Italian labor movement. “If I had been an Italian, I am sure I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.”

To be fair–and I do occasionally want to be fair, if for no better reason than that it confuses people–Britain and France were more or less expecting to fight a war, but they were torn about whether Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union was the greater threat.

France was prepared to fight a better version of the last war with Germany. This would be a version where they didn’t (slight exaggeration warning here) lose the male half of an entire generation. One where they won a decisive victory and they came away with undisputed bragging rights. 

In comparison, Hitler had tried out all sorts of new war toys in the Spanish Civil War. He’d saved the instruction manuals and was prepared to fight the next war. 

After its invasion of Poland, Germany turned west and invaded the Netherlands and Belgium, which were (and still are) a whole lot closer to France and Britain than Poland was and is, and all of a sudden playing the long game didn’t look like as good an idea to France and Britain as it had the week before. 

Belgium and the Netherlands joined Britain and France in an ad hoc anti-fascist coalition, complicating what sounds like an already chaotic command structure. Governments and orders contradicted each other. Belgian and Dutch resistance collapsed. The allied troops retreated and the Germans advanced. 

Some of the best French units didn’t do much fighting. Their orders had them chasing hither and yon without anyone getting much use out of them. Read enough articles and you come across descriptions of generals being unable to take decisive action and of other officers being without orders for eight days. The word farcical comes up.

Churchill prime ministerially promised France that it would have British military support. Meanwhile his secretary of state for war, Anthony Eden, was (apparently) agreeing with Lord Gort, who was in command of the British troops, that the only possible thing they could do was fight a retreat to the coast.

The French defenses collapsed and the Germans swept into northern France. By May 15 the French government considered itself defeated, although a BBC article (and a few other sources) say that a concerted allied attack at this point could have stopped the German advance. They were vulnerable, exhausted, and low on fuel. A lot of their tanks had broken down.

Instead, French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud called Churchill and said, “We have been defeated. We are beaten; we have lost the battle.” The French government was burning its archives, assuring the public that everything was fine, and preparing to abandon Paris.

What was left of the allied forces fell back to the coast at Dunkirk, and French and British troops (which includes Muslim troops fighting under the French flag) formed a perimeter, holding off the advancing German troops. Those who weren’t killed in the fighting were captured and either became prisoners of war or were killed on the spot.

They don’t get a whole lot of acknowledgement.

As soldiers gathered on the beach, Britain launched Operation Dynamo–an evacuation of as many troops as possible. The optimistic goal was 45,000. But the beach at Dunkirk is shallow, making it impossible for the navy’s ships to get in close, and there was only one usable, although less than ideal, jetty. So a call went out for small craft, and some 800 to 1,200 responded, ferrying troops from beach to ship. It was a patchwork collection of fishing boats, pleasure crafts, and just about everything above the level of a rowboat.

Some of the small craft–and according to one source, most of them–were crewed by navy personnel. Others were crewed by civilians–their owners and crew. 

The evacuation went on from May 26 to June 4, with the German air force bombing the beach, the town, and the harbor. Sunken boats quickly added yet another problem to an already messy evacuation.

On the beach, in between runs by bombers, the troops lined up nicely and waited to be evacuated. It was, on the one hand, absurd–the British forming orderly lines as if they were waiting to buy ice cream cones, while bombers shrieked above them and the ships they were waiting to board were blown out of the water. And on the other hand, it avoided panic and people fighting to be first. It surely saved lives.

In the end, some 198,000 British and 140,000 allied troops–mostly French–were evacuated, and many thousands of British, French, Polish, and Czech troops were evacuated from other, less well-remembered, beaches in northern France. 

What made the Dunkirk rescue possible? British air cover helped. The discipline of the troops gets a mention. The heroism of all those civilians in their small boats was part of it, however overplayed. The heroism of the troops who died or were captured protecting the evacuation doesn’t form as large a part of the picture as it should–especially (let’s face it) those who weren’t British.

But in large part it was Hitler who made it possible. German troops were in a position to cut off the allied troops by May 23, but on May 24 Hitler ordered them to pull back. Historians argue about why, and some half a dozen reasons are suggested. It’s probably enough to say that he did give the order, and it was hugely important. 

When people talk about the Dunkirk spirit, they’re talking about a British win. In a masterful piece of propaganda (or spin, to use a more modern word) it was cast as a story about civilians in tiny boats, braving bombs and the angry sea to save not just hundreds of thousands of people but the country and possibly the war itself.

Saving so many battle-hardened soldiers might, arguably, have saved the war, but Dunkirk still wasn’t a win. The British army had to abandon almost all its heavy equipment and lost 50,000 troops. Of those, 11,000 died, a handful escaped, and the rest became prisoners of war. If you count the allied troops, 90,000 were lost. Thousands of French troops were left behind and either taken prisoner or massacred.

At the end of the evacuation, if you were standing on Britain’s coast and looking across to Europe, Germany looked like it could conquer anything and anyone. And the body of water separating you was frighteningly narrow.

Creating the story of the Dunkirk spirit meant the propaganda machine had to (or could, with relief) bury the bungling that made Dunkirk inevitable. It was wartime. People needed hope. They needed something to believe in.

We create our myths–or accept them if we’re not their creators–only by being selective. Are they lies? Well, yes. Not entirely, but they’re not the truth, the whole truth, the et cetera truth either.

And here we are in 2020, with all but a few governments bungling their response to the pandemic and a few bungling it on an epic scale. I was about to write “on a Wagnerian scale” but I’ve never seen a Wagner opera and caution got the better of me. But really, the incompetence with which they’ve met this has been stunning. You almost have to admire how awful they’ve been, because it’s not easy to screw things up that thoroughly and still haul yourself out of bed in the morning, never mind trumpet your successes. And yet they do both.

Britain has responded with the Dunkirk spirit. People make protective gear for hospitals. They deliver food to their more vulnerable neighbors. They raise money for a National Health Service that the government has been starving of money for a decade. Every one of those acts is a triumph of the human spirit and community. 

And they became necessary because of massive government bungling.

As Bertolt Brecht said, Unhappy the land that needs heroes.

Marriage, sin, and sexuality in Tudor England

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Even if you know nothing more about English history than Henry VIII and his assorted wives, you will have figured out that people back then had sex. Throughout history, people mostly did. But how did they think about it? Because how people think about it colors everything.

I’m working largely from Ruth Goodman’s How to Be a Tudor here. Hence the lack of links.

The late Tudor period was a time of increasing literacy. Printed books–in English, yet, as opposed to Latin–were increasingly available, and they included advice books. It’s one of the oddities of human nature that no matter how little a person knows on a subject, someone will turn to them for advice. And I’m going to go out on a limb and say that in any society and any time period, some fixed number of the people who know nothing, next to nothing, or less than nothing will offer themselves up as experts. These days they’re all over the internet. Back then, they were limited to print.

But of course, printed books were the internet of their day. 

Irrelevant (and note very good) photo: Daffodils. I need to take more pictures. Apologies.

Goodman draws from both advice books and popular songs–another era-appropriate version of the internet. Ballads were printed and sold relatively cheaply. She describes some being plastered to ale-house walls. Even then, the English sang when they drank. 

She also draws from writings that educated men circulated among themselves, some of which were downright salacious, and from the sexual language, both positive and negative, that was in use. 

The Tudor period wasn’t entirely medieval, so we can’t just plaster medieval attitudes (to the extent that we know what they were) over the era. But it wasn’t entirely not medieval either. By Henry VIII’s time, the hermit crab of English history was poking its head out of the medieval shell it had been living in and thinking it might be time to find something more comfortable. And not just because the country was shifting from Catholicism to Protestantism. The economy, education, and government also needed a bigger shell. 

Inevitably, there were holdovers from the medieval period, including a belief in the purity of virginity and of chastity in general. But even so, most people married, and married sex was considered chaste. 

I had assumed–the belief is so deeply embedded in our culture that all you have to do is breathe for bits of it to lodge in your lungs–that it was only unmarried women that society had no place for, but it turns out not to have had much use for unmarried men either. To be fully adult, you had to marry. An unmarried man couldn’t head up a household any more than an unmarried woman could, and like an unmarried woman he faced a lifetime of living in other people’s households–a spare part from a bit of machinery that had long since been lost. 

He also couldn’t take on an apprentice or hold public office. Marriage that central to how society was organized.

The culture appreciated sex, not just for procreation–which was the only kind of sex the Catholic Church approved of–but for its ability to hold a couple together. It was the sweetness in a marriage, the source of love that helped a couple get through its difficulties. And they expected both partners to find pleasure in it. Both had a right to expect it, each owed it to the other, and a marriage that wasn’t consummated could be annulled. 

Medical experts disagreed on what it took to produce a child. One group saw the woman’s womb as a field where the man’s seed could take root. The other believed that both the man and the woman had to produce a seed. From that second theory it followed that if the woman didn’t have an orgasm, she didn’t produce a seed. And with no seed, there was no baby. 

On the positive side, this meant that everyone involved (and they didn’t share our concept of privacy) had an incentive for the woman to enjoy herself. Even the Catholic Church–and England was Catholic for a fair part of the Tudor era–had an interest in it. On the negative side, it followed that if woman became pregnant after being raped, she was must have enjoyed consensual sex.

Some days–some whole eras–you just can’t win.

For at least for part of this time, marriage wasn’t entirely in the hands of the church. Starting in late medieval times, the church had been pushing toward taking control of it, and it had made inroads, but still, if two people said some version of “I marry you” and then had sex, they were married. It was legal, it was binding, and it didn’t need witnesses or a written record. But it was also hard to prove if one party decided to ride off into the sunset claiming to still be single. 

Marriages didn’t have to happen in the church, although most couples did go to the church door and have a ceremony. 

Not everyone talked openly about sex, but some people did. The Victorian era it wasn’t. A man might be boastful about sex outside of marriage, but a woman pretty much had to find extenuating circumstances, because the consequences were harsher for her. In spite of acknowledging that women enjoyed sex, and even needing them to enjoy it, society was still patriarchal. Children born outside of marriage had no legal father and were seen as a drain on society’s resources, because men controlled the resources. It was somewhere between impossible and next to impossible for a single woman to raise a child without the support of the parish–that’s the local government–and that in turn meant the support of the people who paid taxes. So they had an interest in there being as few children as possible born outside of marriage, and in fact there weren’t that many of them. Communities were still small enough that policing people’s sexual activity was, for the most part, possible. And if I know what a village is like, the task was undertaken enthusiastically by at least some residents.

Any child born inside a marriage was legally the husband’s, even if he’d been away for two years, so society as a whole was less concerned about them. 

If Henry VIII is any guide, aristocrats–or at least the king and his lovers–weren’t held to the same standard as the average person. Contemporary accounts show Henry VII as faithful to his wife, but Henry VIII was open about his mistresses. 

As were wealthy men in Wales. Goodman has found wills men they left property to their “base born” children–something that wasn’t typical in England. Welsh legal tradition had allowed them to inherit if their fathers acknowledged them, but in 1536 English law replaced it and the wills she found may have been made by men looking for a way around the change.

Social attitudes were slower to change than the law was. The mistress of an elite man was in a better social position if she lived in Wales than she would have been in England. There was a grudging acceptance of long-term extra-marital relationships. The Church didn’t approve, but it didn’t yet have control.

Where it did have control, though, it was relentless. Church courts could convict people of sexual offenses and sentence them to physical punishment or to public shaming. Goodman mentions people having to kneel in front of the congregation for weeks, in their underwear, holding a candle. 

In general, there was no scale of sexual misbehavior that made one offense worse than some other. They were all bad–from thought to act–but the person who strayed often was worse than the person who only wandered off the path once, then skittered back to safety. Although homosexuality was a sin, it was also not a category. A person might have sex with the wrong flavor of human, and that was a sin, but that was as far as thinking on the subject seemed to go. The division wasn’t between straight and gay but between chaste and not chaste, and the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah was about all sorts of sexual sin, not homosexual sex alone. 

Sex between men, though, did seem to get people riled, and it became illegal under Henry VIII. The penalty was death, but it wasn’t clear exactly what act had been made illegal. Both prosecutions and accusations were rare. 

Sex between women seems to have been invisible. It shows up very little in writing and not at all in the courts.

In spite of all that emphasis on chastity, prostitution was often tolerated. It was most common in cities, where women were more likely to be away from family support and become desperate (men controlled the resources, remember), where enough potential clients could be found, and where some level of anonymity made it simpler. 

In the first half of the Tudor era, licensed brothels worked just outside of London under the protection of the Bishop of Winchester. Yes indeed, kids, the world’s a strange place and sometimes it’s even stranger than that. They were closed in 1546 out of fears about venereal disease and a new outbreak of the plague. 

At times, the authorities would crack down on prostitution, parading women through the streets and pillorying them, but a brothel with a powerful patron would be able to operate relatively freely.

There are references to be found to male stews–which is what they called brothels–but that’s about all the record has to offer us. 

The British census: What a country wants to know about itself

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Until I found out why so many people claimed to be Jedis on the 2001 census (and I’ll tell you the tale eventually), I thought censuses were inherently boring. They’re not. So let’s find out how the British census came into being and how it’s changed.

And yes, the plural of census does seem to be censuses, although the limited range of dictionaries I’ve been able to discuss this with don’t see any reason that the word should need a plural, so I’ve had to take Lord Google’s word on it. Corrections, arguments, and general moaning about the degradation of the language are all welcome.

The first official British census was in 1801, but long before that census-like creatures already roamed the land. The Romans wanted to know how many people they could tax. William the Conqueror wanted to know what he owned, down to the last chicken feather. He didn’t demand a complete count of the humans. Why bother? None of them had feathers.

Irrelevant photo: a hellebore.

In 1279, Edward I wanted to know about landholding, and since his survey was arranged in hundreds it became known as the Hundred Rolls. It recorded not only the number of cottars, villeins, serfs, and freeholders on each manor, but also their names, the size of their holdings, and their obligations to the lord. (The words cottars and so forth all describe a person’s relationship to the land and to its feudal lord–basically, their degree of freedom or unfreedom.)

Having collected all that information, Edward didn’t do anything in particular with it, but historians are grateful for the bits of it that have survived. They can read through them and see in detail the structure of the individual manors.

After Edward, interest in who and what was out there disappeared from the national discussion for a handful of centuries, and with it those roaming census-like beasts. Bishops were responsible for counting the number of families in their dioceses, but that was to a census as a cat is to a tiger. 

Starting in the seventeenth century, other countries began introducing censuses (no, that really is the plural)–Quebec (then New France, which counted 3,215 people) in 1666, Iceland in 1703, Sweden in 1749–but Britain retained a well of belief that it was a sacrilege to count people (something biblical about King David, a census, and a plague) and people who didn’t object on those grounds thought a census would reveal the country’s strengths and weaknesses to its enemies. 

In the eighteenth century, the pressure to take a census grew and a Cornish Member of Parliament, Thomas Potter, proposed a combined head count and register of births, deaths, and marriages. The last part of the proposal stirred the Anglican clergy into opposition, since registering those events was an important source of revenue. On top of which, if tracking the landmarks in people’s lives became a civil responsibility, the church’s role would shrink. Who could predict where that might lead? 

The next proposal was more modest. Another Cornish MP, Charles Abbott, proposed a simple census, dropping the idea of registering births, deaths, and marriages. In England, the Overseers of the Poor would count people, since they didn’t have a church to protest for them from the extra work. They were to be helped by tithingmen, constables, headboroughs, and other people you’ve never heard of.  

But Scotland didn’t have any parallel official, and the initial idea was to have ministers make the count, which the Scottish church objected to, so the responsibility was shifted to schoolmasters. They got six months more than the English to complete the work because the population was so spread out.

According to the National Archives, the census was composed of six questions involving “the number of inhabited and uninhabited houses in the parish and how many families occupied them; the number of people in the parish and their employment; and numbers of baptisms, burials and marriage.” It didn’t record names or addresses. The act didn’t apply to Ireland, where the first modern census was taken twenty years later.

But it wasn’t just the more modest dimensions of the census that moved parliament to allow it. The summer’s grain harvest had been a disaster–a quarter less than expected–and prices had doubled. Manufacturing went into a recession and workers were laid off. People were hungry and rioters were calling for limits on the price of food. And to add to the general good cheer, Thomas Malthus had already published his argument that population growth would outstrip food supplies very soon. So MPs were willing to hear Abbott’s argument that knowing something about the population of the country they were trying desperately to run was necessary for “wise legislation and good government.” 

Having said all that, some people argue that the more compelling drive was wanting to know how many able-bodied men were available to fight the Napoleonic Wars. 

Either way, “In March 1801 every overseer of the poor, of which there were more than 14,000, was charged with walking to every house or dwelling in their parish and recording the numbers of families, the number of men and women, and the number of persons employed in agriculture; trade, manufactures, or handicraft; or any other occupation.”

The population turned out to be 9 million. Estimates had ranged from 8 million to 11 million.

In 1841, the census was modernized, meaning a registrar general was put in charge of organizing it in England and Wales (that came later in Scotland) and local officers were put in charge of the work. 

This was also the first time that the heads of households were given a form to fill out on a specified day

The head-of-household system is responsible for my household refusing to fill out a 1970-whatever U.S. census. We struck a small blow against the assumption that one adult was the head of the household–that one being the male of the species if one was available–leaving the non-head to be the hind end of the household.

We didn’t bring the system down, but I’d do it again, and whatever the 1970-whatever U.S. census says, keep in mind that it’s incomplete.

But I’ve gotten ahead of the tale. Britain took a census every ten years except in 1941. In 1939, the National Registration Act did a thorough nose count so that identity cards could be issued. That was a good enough substitute. World War II was raging. The country had other things on its mind.

The 1931 census records, in case you’re looking for them, were lost in a fire.

From there on, it’s all boredom until we come to the 2001 census, when an email made the rounds urging people to write their religion down as Jedi. According to the email, if 10,000 people did it, it would become a “fully recognised and legal religion.”

This was fully recognized bullshit, but a lot of people did it anyway, possibly because the second argument was more compelling: “Do it because you love Star Wars,” the email said, “or just to annoy people.” 

The campaign accomplished two things: It got 390,127 people to say they were Jedis and it got a lot of people in their late teens and twenties–a group that’s usually undercounted–to complete the form. 

In that same census, 72% of the population said they were Christian, which the British Humanist Association considers a vast overstatement of people’s beliefs, as opposed to their historical and cultural association with the religion. Hawley’s small and unscientific survey says they’re probably right.

Deciding what to ask isn’t simple. Even the apparently simple question of what sex a person is has become complicated, or always was but we’re only just noticing. What does a country really want to know about itself, and what does it need to know? And once it gets the answers, how does it understand the information? 

I can’t answer any of those questions. I just thought I’d throw them at you and see what happens. When I was young and clueless and an intern, of sorts, at a social service agency, I was asked to redesign the form people filled out when they walked through the door. That they gave the job to me shows you how important they thought it was. It did keep me, briefly, from playing in traffic. Since every form I’d ever been handed asked my marital status, I started with that. 

Why, the person in charge asked, do we want to know this? 

I couldn’t think of a single reason, although there might have been one. But I’d never thought about approaching a form that way: What do we want this information for? I won’t say the question changed my life, but it has stayed with me. 

I don’t know if they ever redesigned the form, but that’s as far as I got with the job.

My point, though, is that you could probably learn as much about a country by studying what they ask as you could by reading the answers. 

The most recent census, 2011’s, asked a string of questions about who lived at what address, what their relationships were, and who was there overnight on one particular date. Then it wanted to know about the place itself–its heating, its ownership, its rooms. It wanted to know about the people: their age, sex, car ownership, marital status, health, country of origin, ethnicity, nationality (that includes the British nationalities: English, Welsh, etc.), primary language, comfort level with the English language, passport, religion, past residence, employment, and education.

A summary says the census shows “an increasingly ageing population; a more mobile population with more complex living arrangements; increasing numbers of migrant communities; greater numbers of people generally, and more single-person households and dwellings with multiple household occupation.” 

The summary itself shows confusion about the difference between commas and semicolons. 

You’re welcome to read it for yourself. I got bored.

Britain will take a new census is 2021, but that may be its last. The Office of National Statistics is looking for less expensive (and, they say, less intrusive) ways to collect more useful data more often. That’s neatly set up so you’ll agree with it: Who could argue with less, less / more, more? 

Me, possibly, although I’m not sure and no one cares anyway. I’m waiting to hear what the implications are, and I haven’t yet.

The new system might mean tracking every contact people have with government agencies and anonymizing it to produce a statistical picture of the country. It’s intrusive, but invisibly so. And what the hell, the corporations are already tracking us.

I haven’t seen anything about whether they’ll collect roughly the same sort of information, whether they’re considering other questions, or whether the system would allow some unforeseen but suddenly important question to be plugged in and calculated later. I have, however, read that in other situations anonymized data is less anonymous than you’d think. I don’t know if that will hold true for this.

The Great Fire of London and the search for culprits

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The 1666 wasn’t a good year to spend in London. First an outbreak of plague killed some 100,000 people–15% of the city’s population. Then, when the plague  was starting to wind down, the Great Fire devastated the place. You begin to wonder if England shouldn’t take out insurance against years that end in ‘66: 1066, 1666. I should be gone well before 2066, so someone else can deal with whatever happens, but if you’re still here, remember, I did warn you.

Before the fire, the part of London that lay inside the old Roman walls was, physically speaking, a medieval city. The streets were narrow and got narrower as you looked up, because the buildings jutted out over them, floor by floor, until you could have passed your across-the-street neighbor a beer from your upstairs windows to his or hers. If you liked your neighbor, had enough beer, and were in possession of long arms, because that description might involve just the slightest bit of exaggeration. But the space was, in all tellings, very narrow. A young and athletic fire could jump from house to house without much effort. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: strawberry leaves after a frost.

But the fire had a lot more than narrow streets to help it along. London’s old buildings were made of wood, the walls of poorer houses were waterproofed with tar,  and what light people had at night came from candles and oil lamps. They cooked and warmed themselves with wood or coal fires. So they were rich in open flames.

And did I mention that they didn’t have fire brigades? Once a fire broke out, all people could do was form a line and pass buckets of water along so that whoever was closest could keep pouring. Unless–as happened once in Northampton when a pub caught fire–they passed barrels of beer from the cellar up to the roof.

Talk about your dedicated drinkers. They did save the pub, but they must’ve wept over the waste of good beer.

Some early water pumps did exist, but the streets where the fire started were too narrow for them to get through, they couldn’t squirt all that much water anyway, and their squirting range was so limited that they had to get dangerously close to the fire to hit it. 

And London’s water pipes were made of wood. According to a BBC article, they didn’t have enough access points, so people broke into them to put out the fire, making holes where the water drained out. In other words, the water supply disappeared just when it was most needed. By the time the fire was over, the city’s water supply system was one of the casualties.  

But if London was a fire trap–and it was–so were other towns and cities. In A Time Traveller’s Guide to Restoration Britain (that’s a book–remember books? they’re wonderful), Ian Mortimer provides a handy list of devastating fires that didn’t get as famous as London’s but that fed on much the same combination of problems.

The Great Fire of 1666 wasn’t London’s first. As early as the 1170s, William Fitzstephen wrote that London had two “pests,” by which he meant recurring problems: “The immoderate drinking of fools and the frequency of fires.” In 675, the first St. Paul’s Cathedral burned down, and it burned down again in 1087, taking a good chunk of the city with it. It burned a third time in the Great Fire, making me wonder if St. Paul isn’t the patron said of pyromaniacs.

As a fire safety measure, in the twelfth century the city ordered that thatched roofs be removed. But thatch wasn’t just traditional, it was also easily available and cheap, which made it hard to replace. We can pretty much assume that the order wasn’t effective, because thatch was banned again in the next century, after a fire in which 1,000 people died. Or 3,000. Take your pick. Either way, a lot of people. 

But neither ban was complete. A thatcher’s website cites instances of thatch being used, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally. Still, by 1666 there was less of it, and if you’re looking for something to blame the Great Fire on, thatch isn’t your culprit–or not your main one. 

You might try blaming a dry summer, although it will have lots of company as potential and partial culprits by the time we’re done. The fire broke out in September, when the city’s wood was tinder-dry. 

Or you can blame James I, because sixty years before the fire his order that l new London buildings be made of brick or stone was a partial measure. It only applied to new buildings, not existing ones. And the order was repeated several times, so we can figure it wasn’t a roaring success. And although he may have given some thought to fire, he also had his eye on the timbers that were used to build houses. He wanted them to build ships for the navy. 

But let’s put the search for culprits on hold and talk about the fire itself. It started in a building with a tiled roof–a bakery in Pudding Lane. Almost every tale about the fire mentions Pudding Lane. The baker was Thomas Farriner (or Farrinor, or Farynor–spelling was a liquid back then), who supplied biscuits for the navy. 

On the night of the fire, Farriner put himself to bed without tucking his fire in properly and singing it to sleep. Sparks ignited the firewood stacked beside the oven and the house caught fire. Or they ignited some flour sacks. Or–and this is the version I lean toward–no one knows exactly what they ignited or even whether it was his fault. What matters is that something caught fire. Farriner, his family, and (in some tellings) one servant escaped through an upstairs window and along a roof edge, but one servant (or in some tellings, a bakery assistant) died. In some versions, she was too afraid of heights to go out the window. I have no idea if that’s true, but since I’m useless with heights, I’ll try to remember the lesson tucked inside that story next time my city’s on fire.

Now back to Pudding Lane. According to History Extra and the Hearth Tax records that it quotes, the bakery wasn’t on Pudding Lane at all, it was on Fish Yard, which was just off Pudding Lane. But that’s not the kind of  name writers long to drop into a story, so we’re stuck with Pudding Lane. 

From the bakery, the fire spread to neighboring houses, including an inn, where it set the straw and fodder alight. You can get rid of all the thatched roofs you want, but horses still need food and bedding, and horses were the internal combustion engines of their day. No city could function without them. 

Or that’s the sequence one tale tells. Another talks about a 1979 excavation, which found that a house near the bakery had been storing twenty barrels of pitch (that’s tar–in other words, highly flammable stuff) in the basement, so even if you could have magicked all the horses, straw, and hay out of London, it would have still had plenty of stuff to burn.

It’s not that those two versions of the tale are at odds, just that you can follow a story in any number of directions. The one thing you can’t do is include everything. 

At this point, the people in either Pudding Lane, or in Fish Yard, were still dealing with a localized fire–something Londoners had plenty of experience with. They woke the neighbors, poured water, and did what Londoners always did, but this time it wasn’t enough. 

Standard procedure would have been to destroy houses around the fire to keep it from spreading, but the mayor wouldn’t act. Without either an order from the king or the permission of the owners, he’d have had to pay the cost of rebuilding them our of his own pocket.

I don’t know how many owners would’ve given permission when they could have withheld it and hoped that either the fire would miss them or the mayor would act without their permission and have to pay for the rebuilding, but it didn’t matter: Most people in the area were renters, whose permission didn’t matter, so the houses stayed in place, and they caught fire, and the mayor became a handy scapegoat–as did those first fire fighters who decided they’d lost the battle and abandoned it to save their families and whatever belongings they could gather.

From the Pudding Lane area, the fire spread to the warehouses along the river, with their stores of coal, lamp oil, tallow, rope, and everything else that could make a fire happy. 

Melted bits of pottery found in the basement that held the barrels of pitch led archeologists to say that the fire’s temperature reached 1,700 degrees Celsius. If you measure in Fahrenheit, that translates to insanely hot. More than hot enough to melt stone.

Eventually, the king issued an order and houses in the fire’s path were pulled down using the hooked poles that were standard for the job, but the winds were high and the firebreaks were too small to stop the fire.

Before long, people were fleeing in massive numbers. Some headed for the Thames to get away in boats, others filled carts with their belongings, and many left on foot. And as refugees poured out, sightseers poured in to watch and (some of them, anyway, ranging from the famous Samuel Pepys to an otherwise unknown fifteen-year-old schoolkid) leave written records of what they’d seen. 

St. Paul’s burned for the third time and lead melted off the roof and ran in the streets–or as Historic U.K. puts it, the acres of lead form the roof “poured down on to the street like a river.”  

Eventually, larger firebreaks were created by using gunpowder to destroy houses.

The fire burned for four days before it was contained. It left the ground hot enough to scorch people’s shoes, and some spots smoldered for months. Eight-nine parish churches had burned (or eighty-seven, but let’s not quibble), along with theGuildhall and assorted jails, public buildings, markets, and city gates, not to mention 13,000 houses. Hundreds of thousands of people were left homeless. Some 436 acres, containing 13,000 houses, was destroyed.

By some estimates, only six people died in the fire (or eight, or sixteen), but guesses run as high as several thousand.  Considering the number of homes destroyed, the higher number sounds convincing. Nobody sorted through the wreckage to count the dead. If you were poor or the middle-class, you died uncounted.

Not long after the fire was contained, a French watchmaker, Robert Hubert, was charged with starting it. He pleaded guilty and was convicted, even though the evidence he gave in court was contradictory, the jury considered him deranged, and the Lord Chief Justice told the king he didn’t believe a word of the man’s confession. What the hell, they hanged him anyway and the crowd tore his body to pieces.

It’s important, in these situations, to have someone to blame–preferably a foreigner.

Once bit of business was taken care of, evidence emerged that he hadn’t gotten to London until after the fire started. A parliamentary investigation declared the fire an accident. Hubert, however, remained dead.

When the city began to rebuild, a law ordered that  “no man whatsoever shall presume to erect any house or building, whether great or small, but of brick or stone.” If anyone ignored the rules, their house would be pulled down.

Alfred the Great: his world and his legend

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King Alfred–who you might know as Alfred the Great–could reasonably have expected not to become a king. He was the fourth, or possibly the fifth, son–it’s all a little hazy when you’re looking back that far–of King Aethelwulf of Wessex. But King Alfred he became, although we could also call him Aelfred, or if you want to go completely Dark Ages about it, Aelfraed.

Anglo-Saxon spellings make my teeth ache.

In addition to all those sons, there was a daughter in there somewhere, but she was married off to another Anglo-Saxon king in a political marriage and history doesn’t pay much attention to her. Did you ever wonder why so many women develop a sharp edge? It’s not because of her particularly, but she’s not a bad example of what happens.

Irrelevant photo: A camellia, stolen from something I posted last year. This year’s are out, though.

Back to our point, though: Aelfred was the king of Wessex from 871 to 899 and nobody at the time called him the Great. King was plenty, thanks.

What kind of place did he grow up in and rule? To start with, Anglo-Saxon England was split into an assortment of kingdomlets. Don’t try to count them because the numbers keep changing, especially once the Vikings invaded. They swallowed one, then another. 

Pretty much anything you read about the period talks not just about the Anglo-Saxon kings but also about sub-kings. The sub-kings don’t actually come into our tale, but they’re worth a mention because it’s interesting to know that power was divided up in ways we’re not used to. A king had to move carefully, balancing out the sub-kings’ strength, interests, loyalties, tempers, competence, and possibly incompetence.

Now let’s set them aside and talk about Aelf’s family background, and you should feel free to make fun of the names here because (a) I will and (b) nobody speaks Anglo-Saxon English anymore, so you won’t be stomping on any sensitive toes. 

Aethelwulf (that’s Aelfred’s dad, in case you’ve lost track of him already) fought the Vikings and had a bunch of kids. Then his wife died and he married a twelve-year-old, Judith. Unlike the sub-kings, she’ll come back into the story.

AethelW went on pilgrimage, taking youngest son Aelfred, who’d have been four or five, with him and leaving older son Aethelbald in charge of the kingdom. When he came back a year later, AethelB said, “Sorry, Dad, but I’ve kind of gotten to like being king. Now butt out.”

Instead of starting a civil war, AethelW divided the kingdom with AethelB. Then he died, as people will. Son Aethelberht, not to be confused with Aethelbald–let’s call him AethelB2–took AethelW’s throne. Then AethelB1 married AethelW’s widow, who in our times still wouldn’t have been old enough to buy herself a beer. 

Yes, it was all very weird back then. 

Before anyone had time to say, “It seems perfectly sensible to us,” AethelB1 died and AethelB2 glued the two kingdoms back together. Then he died and brother Aethelred followed him onto the throne. 

This sounds like the fairy tale about the billy goats gruff and the troll under the bridge, doesn’t it? Except instead of the youngest brother coming first, the oldest ones did.

I’m happy to report that neither AethelR or AethelB2 married poor ol’ Judith. She went home and later married someone unrelated to either her first husband or this tale. I hope she was old enough to order a beer by then, but I wouldn’t put any money on it.

And we still haven’t gotten to Aelfred.

You may have noticed that Aelfred is missing a syllable that all his brothers got: He’s plain old Ael-Something while they’re Aethel-Somethings. It’s like that when you’re the youngest kid. By the time you get yourself born, your parents are tired. They don’t have the energy to hand out extra syllables. And in a lot of families, money’s tight. In this one, they didn’t seem to be, but they were running short on thrones. If Aethelred hadn’t died, Aelfred would’ve had to sit on a stool or a bench, just like everyone else.

By the time Aelfred got himself a throne, with a wooden back and arms and everything else that signaled his importance, the Vikings had taken over most of England. The Anglo-Saxons called the Vikings the Great Heathen Army, because (a) they weren’t Christian and (b) it’s a lot scarier to be slaughtered by someone of a different religion than by someone of your own religion.

Aelf’s first task was to fight the Vikings, and we’ll skip the list of battles. We don’t have space for enough detail to make them interesting, and without detail you wouldn’t remember them anyway, would you? 

Okay, maybe you would. I wouldn’t.

What matters is that Aelf lost, and by 878 he’d been pushed back to a corner of the Somerset Levels, where he and a small band of fighters hid in the marshes, working to gather reinforcements. Eventually he had enough warriors to go on the offensive, defeat the Vikings, and as part of the peace settlement demand that Guthrum, the Viking king, become a Christian. Religion doesn’t seem to have been about deeply held beliefs but about–well, it strikes me as being more like joining a football team and agreeing to follow its rules. 

The Vikings eventually all converted to Christianity. Did that bring peace between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings? Hell no. It just meant Christians were fighting Christians instead of non-Christians. It meant everyone who died was killed by a co-religionist. You can see how that was a great improvement.

The peace between Aelf (for Wessex) and Guthrum (for the Danelaw, which is what they called Viking England) held for a while, but it wasn’t a stable peace, and Aelf built up his military, fortifying towns, building up a navy to face up to Danish ships, and generally preparing for the time they’d be at war again.

Danish, by the way, was another way to say “Viking.” 

Aelf’s theory was that the Viking invasion of England was a result of Anglo-Saxon England’s moral failings, so he set out to remedy them, in part by focusing heavily on education. One step was to demand that anyone in government had to be literate. Another was to set up a court school for–okay, the article I’m working from here  says “noble-born children.” I haven’t found anything that says the wording only meant boys, but I haven’t found anything that says it didn’t. Women were freer under the Anglo-Saxons than they would be later, under the Normans, but that’s a relative freedom, not an absolute one. 

The school also welcomed “intellectually promising boys of lesser birth.” 

It was under Aelf’s rule that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was begun. This was a year-by-year account of events, and it continued to be written for some time after the Norman invasion in 1066. It’s one of our few sources of knowledge about the period and a remarkable piece of work.

Aelf also wrote an ambitious law code, which was a mix of new and pre-existing law, threaded through with bits out of the Bible. In it, he wrote, “Doom [meaning judge; it’s pronounced dome] very evenly! Do not doom one doom to the rich; another to the poor! Nor doom one doom to your friend; another to your foe!”

We can learn from this that he was even-handed and just and placed a high value on exclamation marks. Assuming, of course, that they weren’t added by the translator, because however antiquated that sounds, it’s not Anglo-Saxon English.

Aelf was either wise or canny enough to appoint a biographer, which is one reason he’s come down to us as perfect in all ways. Aelf’s biographer wasn’t independent; he worked for Aelf. That can’t help but color a writer’s work. So Aelf was pious, brave, learned, truthful, a man who ate not five but six helpings of fruits and vegetables every day. Even kale, which wasn’t in the supermarkets yet. Supermarkets weren’t even in the supermarkets yet.

And I say that without diminishing his stature. He seems to have been a far-sighted guy, but let’s not get suckered into the propaganda.

In spite of all his wonderfulness, Aelf was never made a saint, and this meant he disappeared from sight for a while. When the Normans took over England, they played up their connections to the Anglo-Saxon kings, but they leaned toward the ones the Church had made saints of, ignoring the ones who were merely saintly. That meant they ignored Aelf.

Much later, when England broke away from the Catholic Church, finding a saintly-but-unsainted king who just happened to have had a good biographer came as a gift to a country struggling to redefine itself. And there Aelfred was, unsullied by Catholic approval. They dug him out, turned him from Aelf (or Alf, by then) into Alfred the Great, and used his writings and translations to prove that the Anglo-Saxon church had been pure before the Normans came along and made it Roman Catholic. As Barbara Yorke puts it, “With a bit of selective editing, [the Anglo-Saxon church] came to bear an uncanny resemblance to Elizabethan Anglicanism.” 

The Tudors weren’t the only folks to do some selective editing. In later centuries, Aelf was rewritten in an assortment of ways no one would have predicted. The Victorians held him up as an example to kids–the perfect, and probably deadly dull, person they should all model themselves on. (Go hole up in a swamp and eat kale, children, until you’re strong enough to defeat the Vikings.) He was also dragged into racist arguments to demonstrate how great the Anglo-Saxons were and how inferior everyone else was. 

How did Alfred feel about all this? He was past caring–or at least past letting us know his feelings and opinions. I mention it to remind us all that historians aren’t impartial reporters of history. Some start with the story they want to tell then choose their facts to fit it. Others play fair, but even they shape the story. 

And I do the same thing. If you don’t shape the story, you don’t have one, you have a scrambled mess of facts.

Besides, I’m not a historian, I just play one on the internet.

*

My thanks to the Tiny Potager’s oldest kids for suggesting both this topic and next week’s.

Coronavirus, British quarantine, and the Eyam plague village

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As we watch the spread of coronavirus, it’s sobering to remember that when the bubonic plague swept through Europe–this was in the middle ages and later–people (understandably) fled, and some number of them (inevitably) carried it with them to new cities, towns, and villages, helping it meet new people and (in many cases) kill them.

Silly people, you’ll think, even as you wonder if you’d have the strength to take your chances in a plague-hit town. (You’ll notice how neatly I tell you what you think. So neatly that you barely notice I’m doing it.)

Isn’t it good that we’re wiser these days? Because what did countries that were free of the corona virus do when they understood the danger it carried? Why, they evacuated their citizens–or as many of them as they could–along with whatever germs they were carrying. 

And what did Britain do about the possibility that they’d brought the virus home with them? Its first move was to tell them to self-isolate–in other words, to stay home. 

Marginally relevant photo: Pets are wonderful germ vectors. You pet them, you leave your germs on their fur, then–faithless wretches that they are–they go to your nearest and dearest to get petted, because one person is never enough, and they bring your germs with them. This particular germ vector, in case you haven’t met him, is our much-loved Fast Eddie. You’re not seeing him at his fastest.

Could they go out to buy groceries? Well, people do need to eat. But after that, seriously, people, no contact. Except with the people they live with, of course. And with the person who delivers that pizza they ordered, who’ll only be at the door a minute. And of course anyone their families, roommates, and the pizza person come into contact with. 

In fairness, figuring out whether to impose a quarantine isn’t an easy call, and I’m grateful that it’s not mine to make, but if you wonder why the virus has spread you might start your wondering with that decision.

The country moved to more serious quarantine measures not long after, but a newspaper photo of a bus that took plane passengers to a quarantine center shows one person dressed like an astronaut to prevent contagion and right next to him or her (or whatever’s inside the suit) a bus driver dressed in a red sweater, a white shirt, and a tie, without even a face mask–the effectiveness of which isn’t a hundred percent anyway.

As for the tie, I’ve never worn one or figured out how they’re tied, but I do know that germs aren’t afraid of them. Contrary to common belief, they weren’t invented to prevent the spread of infection. Breathe in a germ and your tie won’t be tight enough to keep it from reaching your lungs. 

So what have we learned since the medieval period? A lot about how diseases work, but less about how to contain them than we like to think. The coronavirus isn’t the plague and doesn’t seem to be the flu epidemic of 1917 either, but it’s instructive to see ourselves flounder.

So let’s talk about a village that, when it was struck with the plague, did exactly what it should have done. Heroically.

In 1665, a tailor in the village of Eyam (pronounced eem; don’t ask), in Derbyshire (pronounced something like Dahbyshuh, at least in the Cambridge online dictionary’s audio clip, although I’m sure other accents take it off in different directions; ditto). Where were we before I got lost in pronunciation? A tailor received a bale of cloth from London. It was damp, and his assistant, who was only in Eyam to help make clothes for an upcoming festival, hung it in front of the fire to dry. That woke up the fleas who’d hitched a ride from London.

The plague had already taken root in London and the fleas were carrying it. The assistant, George Vickers, was the first person in Eyam to come down sick.

Between September and December, 42 people in Eyam died of plague. That’s out of a population of somewhere between 250 and 800. Whichever number’s closest to right, that’s a lot of people in a small place, and a lot of them were getting ready to do what people did in the face of the plague, which is flee. The local museum estimates the population as at least 700.

Enter William Mompesson, the village rector, who felt it was his duty to contain the plague. He’d been appointed only recently, and he wasn’t popular. To make the least bit of sense out of that, we have to take a quick dive into English history and religion. I’ll keep to the shallow waters, so stay close.

Charles II–the king who followed England’s brief experiment with non-monarchical government and anti-Church of England Protestantism–introduced the Book of Common Prayer to the English church, and the Act of Uniformity dictated that ministers had to use it. Most of Eyam, though, had supported Cromwell and his vein of Protestantism. In other words, they were anti-royalist, anti-Church of England, and anti-Act of Conformity. So Mompesson represented everything that pissed them off, politically and religiously. 

And Mompesson must have known that, because he approached the man he’d replaced, Thomas Stanley, who was living on the edge of the village, “in exile,” as Eyam historian Ken Thompson puts it. The two of them worked out a plan and in June they stood together to present it to the village: They would, all of them, go into voluntary quarantine. No one would leave. No one would come in. The earl of Devonshire, who lived nearby in the obscenely lush Chatsworth House (although it may not have been quite as overwhelmingly overdone at the time), had offered to send food. 

Mompesson’s wife, Catherine, wrote in her diary about the day they presented the idea to the village: “It might be difficult to predict the outcome because of the resentment as to William’s role in the parish, but considering that the Revd Stanley was now stood at his side, perhaps he would gain the support necessary to carry the day.”

People had misgivings, she wrote, but they agreed. 

August was unusually hot that year, meaning the fleas were more active, and five or six people died per day. The husband and six children of Elizabeth Hancock died within a space of eight days and she buried them near the family farm. And “buried” here doesn’t mean she stood by the grave demurely, wearing clean black clothes while someone else shoveled dirt in. It means that she dug the graves, dragged the bodies to them, and tipped them in single handed. People from a nearby village, Stoney Middleton, stood on a hill and watched but didn’t break the quarantine to help.

Most of the dead were buried by Marshall Howe, who’d been infected but recovered and figured he couldn’t be reinfected. He was known to pay himself for his work by taking the dead’s belongings. Or he was said to, anyway. Village gossip worked the same way then as it does now. There are no secrets, but there’s a hell of a lot of misinformation.

Mompesson wrote that the smell of sadness and death hung over the village. He assumed he would die of plague, describing himself in a letter as a dying man, but it was Catherine, his wife, who died of it. She had nursed many of the sick. Mompesson survived.

By the time the plague burned itself out, 260 villagers had died, giving Eyam a higher mortality rate than London’s. No one can know how many people the quarantine saved, but the guesswork is “probably many thousands.”

Mompesson was later transferred to another parish, where his association with the plague terrified people and initially he had to live in isolation outside the village.

Meanwhile, in our enlightened age, a couple of British-born brothers of Chinese heritage shared an elevator with someone who announced, “We’ll be in trouble if those guys sneeze on us.” Other people who are either of Chinese heritage or who assumed to be report having eggs thrown at them, having people move away from them, and being harassed on the street and online.