Category Archives: History

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

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Like so much of human history, England’s conflict between Protestants and Catholics (and between Protestants and Protestants) was played out against a backdrop of absurdity. That’s not to say it didn’t turn deadly with grim regularity, and at the time I’m sure it all would’ve looked perfectly sensible. Looking back, though–

Yeah, there’s nothing like hindsight. Let’s drop in on one small, strange moment.

The year is 1603. Elizabeth I has died and King James is riding from Scotland–where he’s already king–to London to have all the hocus-pocus of becoming the English king performed over and around him. Along the way he stops in Lancashire, and while he’s there, proto-king that he is, he’s handed a petition complaining that the local clergy and magistrates are keeping people from playing traditional games on Sunday. 

This, my friends, is important. So important that we’ll shift to the past tense.

Irrelevant photo: geranium

Enter the Puritans

The Puritans got their start inside the Church of England, and their goal was to cleanse the church of all traces of Catholicism–the ceremony, the fancy clothes, the incense, the stained glass, the bishops, and pretty much anything else that wasn’t mentioned in the Bible. And since dancing and Maypoles and archery hadn’t been mentioned–

Okay, I have no idea what was mentioned in the Bible. I’d feel safe betting on Maypoles. Dancing and archery? Those look like shakier ground and I won’t be placing any bets. 

But you know how a movement can start out with one clear argument–being or not being in the Bible is surely as simple as a baloney sandwich–and before it’s even lunchtime people are arguing about ketchup and mustard and pickles? And somebody in a fancy suit wants sliced tomatoes and sourdough bread and swears it’s spelled bologna? 

It was like that. Forget that business about the Bible, the rumor was going around that Catholics encouraged games on Sunday in order to keep people away from Protestant church services. Clearly, the only sensible response was to ban the games. Basically, the idea was to close off all other activities so people would come to church out of sheer boredom, although I don’t suppose they’d have made the argument in quite that way.

 

And now, enter James

James was a good audience for this particular petition. (Remember the petition? If not, return to Go and start over.) Several Puritans writers argued that kings who didn’t support the true religion could legitimately be deposed, which isn’t an argument calculated to win the heart of either king or proto-king. Kings were used to deciding which religion was the true one and watching their subjects fall into line.  

So that didn’t go down well. What’s more, there was a good argument to be made that banning sports on Sunday would drive people not to Protestant services but into the arms of–gasp, wheeze–Catholicism, which didn’t object to a bit of fun on a Sunday.

Sunday, remember, was most people’s only regular day off, so why not allow them a little fun. Catholics would positively come flocking to the Protestant cause.

Once James got to the other side of the checkerboard–or, more accurately, to London–and got himself kinged, he issued the Book of Sports, now known as the King’s Book of Sports, since any idiot can write a book but it takes a certain kind of idiot to be king, and people pay more attention to the second kind of idiot than the first. 

I wish I knew the secret of getting as much press as he did.

 

The book

The book wasn’t actually a book. It was a proclamation allowing (after Sunday afternoon services) dancing, archery, “leaping, vaulting, or any other such harmless recreation . . . having of May games, Whitsun ales and morris dances, and the setting up of May-poles and other sports therewith used, so as the same may be had in due and convenient time without impediment or neglect of divine service, and that women shall have leave to carry rushes to church for the decorating of it, according to their old custom.” 

Women, as ever, got to have all the fun. They were specifically left out of archery but were at least allowed to take part in the dancing. And no doubt the ales.

But not everything was allowed on a Sunday. There would be no “bear and bull-baiting, interludes, and (at all times in the meane [or in some versions, “meaner”] sort of people by law prohibited) bowling.” 

If you’re having trouble untangling that list, so am I, but it’s not law anymore so we don’t have to lose sleep over it. Tangled or not, though, it calls our attention to the class aspect of the conflict. The original petitioners were from the gentry–the “well-born” people below the level of the aristocracy but very much above, as James had it, people of the “meane [or meaner] sort.” 

Why was bowling on the list of no-no’s? It had become such a craze that working people were thought to be neglecting the work they should be doing. So it was banned for them. But the nation wouldn’t suffer if their betters neglected their duties to roll balls across the ground, because let’s face it, they weren’t producing anything anyway.

 

And so . . .

. . . merriness was restored to merrie England. (Scotland was still a separate country, which just happened to have the same king, so we’ll leave it out of the discussion.) But let’s not get too merrie, because in justifying his decree James mentions not only the likelihood of attracting Catholics to the Church of England, but the importance of healthy exercise in making men “more able for war, when We, or Our successors, shall have occasion to use them.”

Drink, dance, and be merrie, folks, for tomorrow the king may lead you to slaughter. 

Sorry, I always did know how to spoil a party.

In 1618, James ordered that his proclamation was to be read from every pulpit in the country, but in the face of an uproar from the Puritans, and on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury, he withdrew the order. 

His son, Charles I, wasn’t as wise. In 1633 he reissued the decree, with a few additions, and insisted that it be read, tossing matches into an already combustible situation and leading eventually to the Civil War. 

The class hierarchy in Anglo-Saxon England

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Let’s suppose you’re dropped into Anglo-Saxon England sometime between, say, 866 and 1066. It could happen to anyone, after all. It’s good to be prepared. So how are you going to negotiate the class structure? 

Badly, of course. You’re clueless, you’re an outsider, the class structure isn’t your most immediate problem, and you can’t figure out what anybody’s saying, but set all that aside for now. Let’s magic you up a set of appropriate clothes, slip you a miniaturized translator gizmo that hasn’t  been invented yet, pretend the question makes some sort of sense. The rest of us will hide in the bushes to see how you do. 

But before we start your Anglo-Saxon cheat sheet, a word about disillusionment: you may have read about how free and noble Anglo-Saxon society was. Well, here’s a packet of salt so you can sprinkle a grain or two on your former beliefs. It doesn’t weigh enough to slow you down and you will need it.

Irrelevant photo: rosebay willowherb, a.k.a. fireweed

Slaves

On the lowest rung of Anglo-Saxon society are the slaves–some 10% of the population. (Salt, please.) Some of them are slaves because they were born slaves. Others werethe defeated from one war or another or became slaves as a punishment for some crime–theft, say, or working on a Sunday. (To balance that out, a slave who’s forced to work on a Sunday will–at least in theory– be freed. It’s the one and only legal protection a slave has.) Yet another group sold themselves into slavery as an alternative to starvation. 

Slaves can be sold, and Bristol does a booming business selling slaves to Ireland. Dublin (it’s a Viking port just now) sells Anglo-Saxon slaves on to Iceland, Scandinavia, and Arabic Spain. That makes it pretty well meaningless to say that slaves are 10% of the population, but it’s the number we have, so let’s keep it.

Geburs

Just above the slaves are the geburs–semi-free peasants. (If anyone knows a bit of Old English, be tolerant. One source I’ve found has gebur as a plural and another one swears it’s singular. I’ve added an S for luck.) By the middle of the 1000s, they make up about 70% of the population and they owe their labor to their lord in return for the land they farm. When the Normans invade, they’ll be called villeins. We’d call them serfs. That’s another way of saying that feudalism, which we tend to think was introduced by the Normans when they invaded, had deep roots in free, upstanding Anglo-Saxon England. But we’ve now accounted for 80% of the population and we still haven’t run into anyone who’s free. You’ve got some salt left, don’t you? Toss a little more on.  

Coerls

Above the geburs are the free peasants–coerls–and the way to tell them from the unfree peasants is that they can sell their land. Or give it away. They have a lord–everyone in Anglo-Saxon society does–but they can choose theirs. They can also carry weapons (that might be a more useful identifier, come to think of it) and if they’re accused of a crime they can prove their innocence by swearing an oath. Because clearly they wouldn’t lie.

They can do the same for other people, so you might want to keep a coerl handy in case you violate a law you didn’t know about. It’s easy to do when you’ve just wandered in. The men can fight in the army–in fact, if the king commands it, they have to–and have a share of the village land and flocks. They play a part in the village courts this, I think, is where that image of freedom comes from. The Normans handed the administration of justice over to one person, the lord of the manor. By comparison, yes, Anglo-Saxon justice looks pretty good. 

Exactly how much of these freedoms also apply to women isn’t clear in the sources I’m using here. Women have far more rights in Anglo-Saxon England than they will for centuries to come. Sorry not to chase up a bit more detail, but I’m short on time just now.

In practice, many coerls aren’t much better off than their neighboring gebur. They make up some 15% of the population, so we’ve now accounted for 95% and we’d better hurry and squeeze in everyone who’s left.

The fine print

In the east of England, the whole system of lords and manors and labor service seems to have been weaker than in the rest of the country. And by the end of the period we’re talking about, a coerl could move up and become a thegn by owning five hides of land, a bell house, and having a place in the king’s hall.

What’s a hide? Don’t worry about it. It’s a measurement of land.

And a bell house? Well, kiddies, an extensive two-minute search of the internet informs me it’s a house with a bell. In a tower. To summon people to prayer and whatever else you might want to summon them for. All of which tells us that the society allows for social mobility. That’s generally considered a good thing, and I’m not against it, but I’ll need a little more salt if we start talking about it as a great thing, because while social mobility works well for the people who move up the ladder, it does fuck-all for the people who don’t. 

Yes, I do swear. It’s good for me. It also helps with the earth’s rotation.

Shall we move on?

Thegns

This is the most varied category, ranging from minor nobility at the top down to their retainers. They form the backbone of the army and if they’re rewarded for some spectacular service with land they can become earls. If you want a comparison to post-invasion England, think of them as the country gentry. 

How much of the population are they? Annoyingly, the book I’m working from, Life in the MIddle Ages: Scenes from the Town and Countryside of Medieval England, by Martyn Whittock, switches from percentages to absolute numbers here, so 4,500 held estates that were defined by charters. 

Why do the charters matter? Because those are the records historians can work from. They’re a way to count them.

After this, we’ll stop counting because the numbers are too small. Also because I don’t have any numbers to give you.

Ealdormen

This translates as elders, but they’re powerful nobles who play a role in local government, the king’s court, the army, and the courts of justice. 

Earls

They have authority over regions that were once independent kingdoms. The position isn’t hereditary but by the end of the period it becomes customary to choose an earl from within a small group of powerful families.

The king

Here I can give you a number again: they have one lone king–at least once Anglo-Saxon England is consolidated into one lone kingdom–and the king has one lone family, or at least one that’s recognized. But kingship isn’t hereditary in the way most of us expect. The witan–a council of the most powerful nobles–chooses the king from within the royal family.

Don’t worry about that. You’re not likely to meet any of them, so fix your attention on the lower ranks.

How people slept in the Middle Ages

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Asking how people slept in the Middle Ages sounds embarrassingly pointless. Surely the answer is, the same way we do. 

Well no, they didn’t. That would make the post too short and I want to be sure you get your money’s worth here. They broke the night into two separate sleeps, which is the same way everybody in the pre-industrial world seems to have slept. The sources I’ve found are heavily tipped toward Europe, but some say the practice clings on in unindustrialized pockets of the world today. 

 

A rare relevant photo: Bedstraw

The two sleeps

We’re talking, remember, about a time before there was much in the way of artificial lighting, so no electricity, no gas lamps. They had candles, sure, but they were expensive and weren’t all that bright. And when people went to bed,they either blew them out or risked burning down the house. So when it got dark, they–or most of them anyway–toddled off to bed. 

We’ll talk about the definition of bed in a minute.

A couple of hours later, they woke up, not because that was the plan but because they just did, and they spent another couple of hours–let’s say from 11 to 1, although no one would’ve been watching the time–either lying awake or up and about, in both cases without fretting about what was wrong or how they were going to get back to sleep, because waking up in the middle of the night was just what happened.

This went on into the early nineteenth century, and a couple of studies have documented this way of sleeping among non-industrial people and people asked to live without industrial-age lighting and entertainment. 

 

What did they do in the interval between sleeps? 

Some people lay in bed and chatted, because at least in the medieval era, rare was the person who slept alone. Some got up and worked–by moonlight, by starlight, by rushlight (those were the waxed stems of rushes–the candle-substitutes of ordinary households), by candlelight if they could afford candles–although the people who could you probably didn’t need to work in the middle of the night. 

All the folks you’d expect to recommend prayer and meditation recommended the time between sleeps as a time for prayer and meditation, and no doubt some people did both. Folks drank their religion straight back then: no ice, no mixers.

I’ve read about monks and nuns getting up in the middle of the night and traipsing to the chapel for prayers, and it’s sounded downright punitive. I imagined someone having to haul them out of their sleepy little beds. This puts it in a different light. They were awake anyway. If the purpose of their lives was to pray, this was a time to go pray.

The time between sleeps was also a time for sex, and was considered a particularly good time to conceive children.  

Sex when people weren’t sleeping alone? For one thing, sharing a bed didn’t mean all its occupants had to get up or stay in bed in unison. For another–I’ll go out on a limb here (I’ve read this somewhere but haven’t looked for a source to confirm what my memory insists on) and say that sex wasn’t thought of as something people should do in private. Privacy wasn’t a thing yet. (Sex has always been a thing. In the early Middle Ages, even your local lord and lady bedded down in the hall with their kids, their hangers-on, their guests, their attendants, their servants, and anyone I’ve forgotten to list. The solar–a room for the aristocrats alone, along with maybe a servant or three on hand in case they were needed–didn’t come into existence until midway through the medieval period. 

Eventually, people went back to bed for what was called their morning sleep. 

 

Bed sharing

Beds were communal places, and an entire family might sleep together, with the couple in the middle, the girls arranged on the side nearest the wall, with the youngest closest to her mother, and the boys on the other side, also in age order. 

But it wasn’t just the family tucked up in bed. Non-family members would also be likely to crawl in, and they’d be on the outside–guests, friends, servants. And, as one article I found reminds us all, fleas and lice. When people traveled, strangers who stayed at inns would share a bed.

Sleepers and would-be sleepers were expected to minimize their fidgeting and avoid physical contact.

 

Beds

If you were rich enough in the medieval era, your bed was elaborate and impressive, with several mattresses–straw, then wool, then feather, and sheets, blankets, coverlets, pillows, bolsters, all that good stuff. The bed was your most important piece of furniture.

A coverlet? That was a bedspread, although in recent times it seems to have wandered off and become something smaller. 

The curtains and canopies we think of as the mark of the nobility’s beds came into use midway through the medieval period. 

Middle-ranking people had beds with simple wooden bedsteads with plain headboards and as much of the accompanying stuff as they could afford. The main thing was that they were up off the floor. 

Everyone else? It depends on what stretch of time we’re talking about, but at least in the early medieval period, they slept on the floor. They might have had a mattress stuffed with straw, wool, hair, rags, or feathers, or some mix of them. Whatever it was made from, it could be moved out of the way during the day. 

As I write this, a couple of wildflowers called bedstraw and lady’s bedstraw have just come into bloom in the hedges. I haven’t been able to find out much about bedstraw itself, but lady’s bedstraw (the lady in question of the Virgin Mary, not the local Lady Muck) was added to straw mattresses both for its fragrance and to keep fleas away. It was also believed to ease a birth.

If you were at the bottom of the economic and social heap, you slept on straw or hay–or according to one website, the earthen floor. A BBC article says the poor might sleep on a scattering of heather, and I hate to argue with the BBC, but we have some growing out back and it’s pretty woody stuff. I haven’t tried sleeping on it but I have a hunch I’d do better on the bare ground.

 

How do we know any of this?

In the 1990s, the historian Roger Ekirch was researching a book on the history of nighttime. He wasn’t expecting to find anything new for a chapter on sleep, but how could he write about night and ignore sleep? So good historian that he was, he started digging through court depositions, where all sorts of odd and wondrous facts about everyday life can be found.

What he found was a seventeenth-century case mentioning, casually, the first sleep, which implies a second sleep. The case was about an incident that happened in the interval between the two. He kept digging and found many mentions of what he was now calling biphasic sleep. It showed up in letters, diaries, medical textbooks, philosophical writings, newspaper articles, ballads, and plays. He found records or hints of it in Europe, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, Australia, South America, and the Middle East, the earliest dating back to the eighth century BC.

And somehow, all of that had slipped out of our awareness and our histories.

*

Important information about Britain’s recent election

In last week’s post, I missed a crucial bit of lunacy about the election. Nick the Incredible Flying Brick stood as a candidate for the Monster Raving Loony Party in Holborn and St. Pancras. His statement to voters said, “We have a manic-festo that includes scrapping January and February. It would help with fuel bills and the cost of living.” He got 162 votes against Keir Starmer’s 18,884.  

Somebody mentioned him in a comment, and I did look for it so I’d know who to thank, but I’m damned if I can find it now. Whoever you are, my thanks. Along with my apologies.

Britain’s Amateur Archeologists

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Let’s take a moment to appreciate Britain’s amateur archeologists–the people who do grunt work for real archeologists, who wave metal detectors over unpromising ground to see what turns up, who follow local legends and either find something ancient or go to the pub and decide when to try again. 

Okay, I can’t tell how fully appreciative you just were, so I’ll take us through a few things amateurs have done lately and see if we can’t push the appreci-ometer upwards a bit.

Irrelevant photo: St. John’s wort, a.k.a. rose of sharon

The Palace of Collyweston

Collyweston was home to Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, but by the modern era the palace had disappeared so thoroughly that efforts to find it in the 1980s and 1990s came up with nothing. 

Enter the Collyweston Historical and Preservation Society. It had three things going for it when it decided to look: a group of amateurs, ranging in age from their teens to their 80s; local legend; and ground-penetrating radar. 

Yeah, that last thing was important. Equally important, I suspect, was a fourth thing: local people, some of whom had grown up hearing about the palace. It was out there and they damn well wanted to find it.

“We had no money, no expertise, no plans, no artist impressions to go off,”  the society’s chair said, “and nothing remaining of the palace. It’s naivety and just hard work that has led us to it.”

They used “local folktales and hearsay” to narrow down their search, then they brought in the radar and got permission to dig in people’s gardens, where they found stone mouldings–the remains of the castle. Historians from the University of York will verify their findings, plan the next moves, and preserve what’s been found. 

It’s got to be exciting, seeing a castle emerge from your compost heap, your veg bed, or your kids’ sandbox. 

 

A Bronze-Age Hoard in Dorset

A retired pensions consultant paid £20 to join a group of metal detectorists working on private farmland in Dorset, but he managed to get himself lost and ended up with what he called the find of a lifetime. About 8 inches below ground, he found a sword from the middle Bronze Age, a bronze ax head, and what the paper’s calling “a decorative arm bangle.” Before I moved to Britain, I read about bangles and wondered what they were. Allow me to translate in case you’re as clueless as I was: a bangle is a “stiff usually ornamental bracelet or anklet slipped or clasped on.” So, basically a bracelet. Unless of course it’s on an ankle, but let’s not complicate things. 

You feel much wiser now, right? 

The director of collections at the Dorset Museum said, “This hoard is incredibly special. The rapier sword is unusual because of the cast bronze handle. The bracelet decoration was quite unusual as well. . . . Finds like this tell us about how people were traveling, meeting, and exchanging ideas with others on the continent in the centuries before the Roman invasion. 

“There was a farming community here and people generated enough wealth to be able to barter for or exchange objects others had made.”

And since nothing matters in our culture unless it can be measured in money, let’s give it a price: the museum raised £17,000 to buy the finds. That was divided between the finder and the landowner.

 

Deep Time

This is a project that had some thousand people looking through high-resolution satellite images and I have no idea what else to find hints of archeological sites. They covered some 200 square miles of ground in Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Northumberland, and Dorset, finding Bronze Age burial mounds, Roman roads, abandoned medieval villages, and some 13,000 other old places. 

Okay, potentially old places. The next step is to go out in the field and decide which sites to excavate. 

 

And in General . . .

. . . amateur archeologists are having a moment. A long moment. 

Back before the pandemic (remember a time when you didn’t know the word pandemic?), my partner and I joined some other volunteers at Tintagel Castle, in Cornwall. The glamorous work involves uncovering stuff, in this case the foundations of several early medieval buildings on a headland surrounded by the Atlantic on three sides. 

We joined the crew that came along to rebury what the first crew had uncovered. The idea is uncover, document, and then rebury in order to preserve. It’s less glamorous than finding, but it left us with a strong sense of connection to the site. And working in dust and a wet, salty wind, left us dirtier than I’d thought it was possible to be. Salt, it turns out, binds dirt to the human skin in ways that no one has yet explained to me.

More recently, schoolkids have unearthed what’s being called a 1,400-year-old possible temple near Sutton Hoo. (Sutton Hoo itself is an over-the-top medieval burial involving an entire ship and a shipload of treasure.)

More schoolkids helped unearth a Bronze Age hillfort in Wales. Injured ex-servicemen helped with excavations in the Salisbury Plains, and in Greenwich Park (that’s Greenwich as in Greenwich Mean Time) volunteers have uncovered Charles II’s steps, a swallow brooch, clay pipes, coins, the lens of a sextant, and a Sony mobile phone “that was buried pretty deep.” 

Earlier community excavations in Greenwich found a World War II air-raid shelter and a Saxon burial mound. 

A TV show, The Great British Dig: History in Your Back Garden has encouraged people to find out what they’re living on top of. Its presenter–an archeologist–talks about Britain as having been densely populated, which increases the odds of an amateur finding something. Put a shovel in the earth and who knows what will come up. In our very own back yard, I found a small plastic toy spawned, no doubt, by a TV show I’m not familiar with. I reburied it–uncover, document, rebury in order to preserve. It will be a golden find for some future archeologist. 

Lord Google, who’s always anxious to help, thought I’d want to know about ways a person can volunteer on a dig and led me to the Council for British Archaeology. (Please note the stray A wandering around the word archeology. It’s presence is what tells you the organization is genuinely British, not some American knock-off.) 

Yes, you can volunteer on a dig. You can be a Casework Input volunteer and help plow through applications involving historic buildings in England and Wales. You can join a local group. You can “inspire young people.”

Sorry, at that point they got too upbeat for an old cynic like me and I closed the tab. But never mind. You can sign up to help on a dig, although some digs will cost you, because volunteering ain’t necessarily free.

The Hundred Years War in two thousand words

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Taking a long view, the Hundred Years War (1337–1453) started a few hundred years before the count begins, in 1066, with a careless invasion of England. You know how these things happen. You look across the ocean and see a country that needs a king. Sure, it’s got some guy who says he already is king, but it so clearly needs you as king, because let’s face it, you don’t want to stay home and be nothing more than a duke. So you invade and become both a king and a duke. 

Sounds good. You just planted the seeds of a war that won’t blossom for centuries. 

You do have problems, of course. One is that between your kingdom and your dukedom lies that body of water you were looking out over, so you can’t just hop on a bus to move between them. Another is that your dukely self owes fealty and loyalty and several other -ties to a king who isn’t you: the French king.

It’s all a bit awkward, but even so it’s lucrative, and it won’t become a serious problem until after you die, and that makes it somebody else’s problem. 

In case your dual identity as king and duke has left you confused, I’ll clarify: you’re standing in for William the Conqueror today, and what with being dead and all, you now drop out of the picture and we move on to everyone who follows you.

Irrelevant photo: Valerian growing in a neighbor’s hedge.

More kings

The tension between being a duke in one place and a king in another will continue and be made more complicated by the nobility’s habit of marrying only people whose families have land and power and titles, all of which are inherited. High-end medieval marriages are supposed to cement alliances, and they probably do in the short term, but they also lead to disagreements over who gets to inherit what. They also blur the line between (in this case) what’s English and what’s French.

Hold onto that idea of conflict. We’ll get to it, but first let’s dredge up an example of how those lines get blurred. In 1154, when he becomes king of England and duke of Normandy, William the C’s great-grandson Henry II is already the count of Anjou and duke of Aquitaine. So he has four titles and three of them are in France, although his top-ranking title is English. That makes him not only the king of France’s theoretical equal but also the most powerful of the king of France’s subordinates. Under those circumstances, it can’t be simple figuring out who bows and who gets bowed to. It may depend on whose living room they’re in and whose TV they’re going to watch. Not to mention who’ll make the popcorn.

At times, the French king has direct control over less of France than the English king does, although (this being feudalism and all) the English king always plays second fiddle to the French king for those French lands, and it can get dangerous when the second fiddle is powerful enough to challenge the first violinist. So the French kings do what they can to strip away English holdings in France. In return, the English do what you’d expect: try to hang onto them. 

This is a time bomb, and it’s going to explode only a few episodes into the miniseries. But since I promised you a 2,000-word limit, we’ll skip a lot of the details.

 

Dynastic marriages

Let’s go back to those marriages and the conflicts they plant. Edward III of England is the nephew of Charles IV in France because all the appropriate people married other appropriate people. You wouldn’t expect them to marry (gasp) commoners, would you?

When Charlie dies, he doesn’t have a male heir, and French law won’t accept a (more gasps) female on the throne. So the French barons unroll the genealogical charts and–eek!–the closest male heir is the king of England.  Right. They unroll a few more inches of chart and find a cousin, Phillip, who’s not only certifiably male but French.

Eddie protests. France argues that Ed’s claim to the throne comes through his mother and, what with being female and all, she couldn’t transmit the right to a crown she couldn’t claim herself. 

After a bit of grumbling, Eddie caves–at least, that is, until Phil takes away one of his French toys, Gascony, at which point Eddie decides he really is the king of France. He takes the title King of France and the French Royal Arms. 

Why France and its royal arms are separate things is beyond me, but he’s convinced that they are and that he’s king of them both. The year is 1337. The Hundred Years War is about to start, although nobody’s calling it that yet.

 

War

For a while, the war goes well for the English. Eddie stirs up enough of the discontented nobility to make war on the cheap, because even when the English aren’t fighting, France still has to. Parts of the country become ungovernable–or at least Paris can’t govern them. The local lords can.

It’s in this period that England has the victories at Crecy and Poitiers that wander happily through the fields of English memory, often without much in the way of context, leaving the impression that it’s always summer, the wildflowers are always in bloom, and England always prevails. 

But don’t trust me too far on that business of English memory. I’m not English and I imported my memory from elsewhere. What you can trust is that the early signs are all good from the English point of view. They do major damage to the French economy and at Poitiers take the French king (not Phillip; by now it’s John II, or John the Good) prisoner, forcing him to sign a treaty so unfavorable to France that the country repudiates it.

Short digression: I’m having a little trouble figuring out why he’s John the Good, unless it’s because his primary enemy was Charles the Bad and it does make for some pleasing symmetry. John not only signs a bad truce, he marries his daughter to his bitter enemy (would you marry your kid to someone called John the Bad?) then doesn’t come through with her dowry, giving Charles even more reasons to be bad. And if that’s not enough, he gives some of Charles’ lands to his (that’s John’s) constable, no doubt causing further unhappiness in  his daughter’s home. He looks like a shady character to. But John the Good he is. 

Different era, different standards. 

Somewhere in the midst of all that, the Black Death sweeps through and conquers everything it damn well wants. 

 

Peace, and then more war

Starting in 1360, we get nearly ten years of peace, which breaks down when France and England back different claimants for the throne of Castile. Which, I remind you, is in Spain. You’d think that would make it irrelevant, but you’d be wrong. 

This is why I’m going light on the detail. My hair would catch fire if I spent too much time with this stuff. 

The French and the English start fighting again. The English launch raids into French territory. The French, in alliance with Spain, raid English cities along its south coast. France narrows England’s French possessions down to a strip along the coast.

Everyone’s tired and takes a couple of decades off. Mostly. They give serious thought to a lasting peace and say, “Nah, let’s not.” 

And this is where another English victory wanders triumphantly into the National Memory Banks: Agincourt. It’s all going so well that the English are within spitting distance of taking Paris.

In response, the splintered French powers meet to form an alliance against England. But instead of forming an alliance, though, one side assassinates the leader of another side and the French end up signing a treaty that will lead to the English king marrying the French king’s daughter, because these marriages work out so well for everyone, right? The English king will also inherit the French throne once the current king–who’s already not well–dies, and the English king will be regent for the French king while he lives. That disinherits the dauphin–the French heir–who was the guy who messed up that three-way meeting.

The muse of history (that’s Clio, in case you want to invite her to your next party) laughs at their plans. The English king dies before the French king, which leaves a nine-month-old, in all his wisdom, in charge of both countries. 

 

But it’s not over yet 

The south of France backs the dauphin against the baby king, Joan of Arc rides in on her pony, winning a victory for the French, and the dauphin is crowned. France now has two kings. One speaks French, the other (I’m guessing) has yet to speak a full sentence.

Joanie’s captured, tried, and burned for heresy. The French take Paris back. A truce is negotiated. The English indulge in a little last minute sacking and looting, since that’s what medieval warfare’s all about. The truce is abandoned. 

Are you starting to feel hopeless about this thing? Just imagine how people felt at the time. 

The French take back all of France except for Calais. Effectively, although not officially, the war’s over. 

 

Why do we care about any of this?

Many reasons. 

Since the war’s been fought on French soil, and since civilians are fair game (unlike, ahem, in our enlightened times), France has been devastated. All that looting and pillaging has had a massive impact on France. 

And even where they’re not looting and pillaging, soldiers are like a plague of locusts. They need to eat, and guess who gets to feed them? Local people, and payment is not guaranteed. That felt not only in France but also in southeast England, where English armies were been stationed before they shipped out. 

In England, though, most ordinary people feel the impact primarily in the form of taxes, and there’ve been a mass of them. War’s expensive. All those taxes led, among other things, to the Peasants Revolt.

They also led to Parliament becoming more powerful, because each time the king introduces a new tax, Parliament has to wave its magic feather to approve it. As gets Parliament stronger, the king gets weaker. 

Another way for the king to raise money has been to increase the number of nobles, and by the end of the war the size of the nobility has tripled and the crown’s created new ranks–esquire and gentleman.

It all brings in money. It’s also never enough. By the time the war ends, the English treasury is just about empty. 

 

Nationalism

Throughout the war, assorted kings and the church have drummed up a patriotic frenzy, as governments do when they have a war brewing. Among other things, this has led to the country adopting St. George as its patron saint. Hell, he’d been a soldier, hadn’t he? What could be better? 

The problem with patriotic frenzy, though, is that it turns against the leader who loses a war. You’ll find a box of historical examples by the door. Grab a handful on your way out. They’re both instructive and sobering. This particular patriotic frenzy, according to the BBC, which knows all, “had much to do with the outbreak in the mid-1450s of civil war (the ‘Wars of the Roses’). The recovery of the lost lands in France long remained a wishful national aspiration.” No one introduced the slogan Make England Great Again, but that’s only because the baseball cap hadn’t been invented.

Both England and France came away with an increased sense of nationhood and an increased indulgence in nationalism, not to mention a habit of looking down on each other. The English are still snippy about the French, and as far as I can tell with my limited French, the French are the same about the English, although they haven’t gone to war with each other lately. 

One final, and surprising outcome is the development of diplomacy. You wouldn’t expect such a mess of a war to lead to that, but it did. Experience began to be recognized as a surprisingly useful quality in negotiations. 

Who’d have thunk?

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I’m now fifty-two words over my limit. If you send me a self-addressed, stamped envelope, I’ll send your money back.

The early English novel, part 2: Clarissa, which was too long even in the abridged form

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Last week, class, we discussed how the English novel emerged from the murky soil of class, gender, and (gasp) sexuality, although you shouldn’t spend too much time on that image. I’m reasonably sure it’ll come apart. (If you weren’t taking notes, you can find the post here.) Among other things, I said the early novels depended on the intensity created by the collision of (a) society’s limits on sexuality and (b) the possibility of transgressing those limits. No limits, no transgression. No transgression, no thrill.

So let’s look at one of the novels of the period. You thought you’d get out of here without having to do that, didn’t you? No such luck. We’re going to drag ourselves through Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa.

Why Clarissa? Because I had to read it in high school, and even though it was, mercifully, an abridged version it was still endless and until now I haven’t been able to redeem the time I lost to that book.

Your bad luck.

Irrelevant photo: a rhododendron

Clarissa tells the story of a virtuous young thing (VYT) sequestered by a louche older man (LOM) who threatens her virtue–repetitively and all because she strayed off the path and couldn’t tell the difference between Grandma and a wolf, the silly girl. It wasn’t entirely her fault—someone had set out diversion signs—but still, she took that first fatal step and it doesn’t matter whose fault it is: if it happened to her, and that moved her beyond redemption.

Admittedly, her parents (not her grandma, who as far as I can remember doesn’t appear in the story) have been unwise, insisting that she marry someone repellent. But they had to be or they’d never set the book in motion.

So: the sequestered VYT writes letters to her one and only friend (OOF) because letters are the social media of the day. Occasionally she tells LOM, “Wait, my quill just beeped,” which is enough to keep his hands off her for another hundred or so pages. The letters are the novel. VYT writes to OOF. OOF writes to VYT. LOM writes to his friend, clarifying his wickedness and VYT’s saintly stupidity.

It’s more than a little stilted, but hey, it was an early novel. Writers were still figuring out the form. Hell, I came along hundreds of years later and am writing what I hope will be my sixth novel and I’m still figuring out the form.

You want to know how the story ends, right? Clarissa loses her technical virtue (in other words, her virginity), which leads her to become even more genuinely virtuous, but she dies because how could a woman robbed of her technical virtue live to the last page? Decent society has no place for her, and decent women can’t survive outside of decent society. Decent authors kill them off. Decently.

I had to look up the ending. I not only didn’t remember it, I don’t remember much of what led up to it. What I did remember is that it all happened over and over, and in letters.

In hindsight, the idea that a woman’s virtue consisted of something more than an unnecessary bit of flesh was forward-looking. As was Richardson’s attitude toward money marriages. When I read it in high school, though, I was in possession of all the historical perspective of most teenagers–in other words, I didn’t get it–and his attitude toward women, sex, and morality offended (and bored) the hell out of me, even though this was back in the dark ages of the early 1960s, when we were supposed to accept absurd limits on women’s sexuality, even if we were past arranged marriages. I was one of those forward-thinking young people who was bored and offended before my time.

The book was a great hit when it was published, among other things because it gave young girls an example of how to write a letter if they were ever sequestered by an LOM who threatened their virtue.

The point, however, is that the earliest English novels balanced on a social tightrope. Whatever respectability they had–and it was pretty tenuous (see last week’s post)–depended on promoting conventional morality, while their readability depended on the thrill of transgressing it. Daniel Defoe wrote rogues who rollicked along sinfully for pages and pages only to find remorse and respectability by the end of the tale, at which point they became too dull for the book to go on. And Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones caroused his way across many a page before finding a way back into society and family because a man’s virtue didn’t depend on a disposable bit of flesh or a spotless past.

I’m sure you can still find people who’ll swear the culture’s been going downhill ever since the novel came along, but (or maybe that should be because) it opened up a space where women could discover themselves, and crucially women did this not only as readers but–and this was shockingly new–as writers.

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I’m looking for topic suggestions, especially for odd corners of English history or culture that might be interesting to explore. I can’t promise to take them–some topics just don’t work, however promising they look at first–but I’d love to hear from you.

The early English novel: morality and–oooh–transgression

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It’s easy to think about the past as one long, undifferentiated stretch of sexual repression for women, during which rich men sexually harrassed the servants, kept mistresses, and picked up prostitutes, all while maintaining their status as upstanding members of the community, and single women who had the bad luck to become pregnant were tossed out into the snow to become prostitutes because what else was left for them and, after all, how else was the supply of prostitutes to be maintained?

That’s not completely off base, but it’s also not completely on base either. Nothing’s ever that simple.

 

Irrelevant photo, with an important update: I originally said I was reasonably sure this is a speedwell. I was wrong. It’s alkanet. A wildflower, though, growing in what it decided was the right place.

The Georgian Era

Let’s plunk ourselves down in the Georgian era (that’s, oh, say 1714 to 1830), because sexual attitudes were changing, especially among what one essay I read calls, without defining them, the upper classes. Think of those classes as the zone where the aristocracy met the monied upstarts. As attitudes shifted, upper-class men could be open about having mistresses, and upper-class married women could conduct affairs, although if one of them got pregnant decency demanded that she give up her child.

Decency’s a strange old bird and not prone to making logical demands.

Why the change? Several reasons: One, more of the population had moved to cities, where people couldn’t do as good a job of watching (and gossiping about) each other as they had in villages and small towns, so community sexual policing wasn’t as efficient as it had been. Two, the power of both extreme Protestantism and the Church of England were fading. People were sizing their morality to fit themselves rather than having it handed to them, all stitched and starched into predetermined dimensions. And three, printing–the technology that had made the Bible accessible to anyone who could read it–now made male-oriented pornography (or erotica if you’re happier thinking of it that way) available to anyone who could afford it (and, of course, read–this was before photos).

Increasing numbers of people could read.

That sound you hear is history’s cracked laughter.

Printing also made written advice about sex available, in the forms of both sex manuals and anti-masturbation tracts. You can date the culture’s obsessive fear of masturbation to this era.

Men were assumed to have sexual needs. Women were assumed to be, by nature, more virtuous. This edged out the earlier belief that women were naturally more lustful, which somehow coexisted with the belief that men just kind of naturally raped women if they wanted to and could.

Don’t try to make sense of it. Your brain will catch on fire.

So sexuality (at least for the upper class) was changing, but only within limits. Step outside the limits and society wouldn’t be forgiving–at least not if you’d shown the poor judgement to be of the female persuasion. But society had at least drawn a larger circle for people to stay within, and stepping across that new line was not only imaginable but thrilling. So writing about it could be lucrative.

 

Enter the novel

We could argue about who wrote the first English novel, but since you’re not actually present and I don’t much care, we won’t. Let the experts place their bets on Chaucer or Defoe or–oh, never mind, other people. We’ll just date it to the early eighteenth century (locking Chaucer out; sorry Geoff) and slam the door in case the experts get noisy. We–or to be more accurate, I–are or am more interested in using the novel as a way to drop into eighteenth century English society.

If you want to argue that we should be talking about Britain instead of England, please do. I have trouble finding the borders. They danced back and forth a bit over the centuries, and no matter where they were people flowed back and forth, books flowed back and forth, even kings and politics flowed back and forth, so how would I know where they were at just the badly defined moment when the novel came into existence?

But while you’re putting your arguments together, I’m going to take advantage of the silence and talk about the novel’s position in eighteenth-century England: Decent people looked down their upper-class noses at it.

What was wrong with it? Well, it appealed to–and was often written by–the middle class. And if that wasn’t bad enough, it was read for the most part by (oh, the shame of it) women. On top of which, it was commercial, and that’s another way of saying it was popular, which even today is understood to mean that it couldn’t possibly be any good.

Who understands popular that way? Why, the people who matter, of course, and I’m always in favor of annoying them.

So the novel was a way for silly people to waste their time, and that attitude still hangs in our cultural corners like a cobweb. As late as the 1980s, when a friend of mine taught at a girls’ public school (if you’re not British, understand that public means private; don’t try to make sense of it), the school librarian informed her that one didn’t read novels in the morning. They were (just barely, I’m guessing) acceptable in the afternoon, but the morning was for nonfiction–in other words, for books that improved one’s mind and character.

Ah, but the novel committed worse sins than frivolity and popularity and keeping bad company. Any number of women wrote novels–some even under their own names–and what’s worse they made a success of it.

Well, no wonder people looked down on the form. And by people, of course, I mean people who thought they were better than women and the middle class. In other words, we’re talking about a small but influential number of folks.

 

The middle class

Here we’d better stop and define the middle class, because it’s easy to find people who’ll tell you how important it’s emergence was, politically, culturally, or economically, but it’s hard to find a solid definition of what they’re talking about. Does being middle class depend on your income, your lifestyle (don’t get me started on what, if anything, lifestyle means), your aspirations, your education, your relationship to the means of production? Or since we’re talking about Britain (or possibly England), your accent or your ancestors?

The answer depends on who you ask, and anything that hard to define should be approached with caution and a supply of dog treats in case it bites. As (at least in part) an American, I’m acutely aware of this, since almost the entire U.S. population considers itself middle class. Dog treats may not be enough.

In Britain of the eighteenth century, the definition was either complicated or clarified, or possibly both, by the existence of a hereditary aristocracy and an impoverished urban and rural working class. Pretty much anyone you couldn’t slot into either of those two groups qualified as middle class.

The problem there is that such a varied collection of people got dumped into the middle class bucket that they didn’t have a whole lot in common. The bucket accumulated everyone from threadbare clerks to mega-industrialists, along with lawyers (great and small) and managers and engineers and the most marginal shopkeepers. But hazy as the definition is, large as the bucket had to be to hold them all, it’s the definition we have. Let’s work with it.

Whatever the middle class was, it grew rapidly in the seventeenth century, both in numbers and in (unevenly distributed) power. A number of people who weren’t part of the aristocracy were rude enough to get rich off the industrial revolution, and the aristocracy resented that. In the logic of the times, it made sense that the aristocracy looked down on them all. The only respectable way to make money was from land—preferably land that had been in your family since the Norman invasion—and the newly rich were making their money from (do forgive me if I use coarse language here) trade.

And then, to further complicate the picture, a group of people who didn’t get rich got solvent (in either absolute or relative terms), and they had the nerve to proliferate.

But despise the middle class as they would, the aristocracy was stuck with them–especially with the brash industrialists who had too much money to dismiss entirely. So much money, in fact, that the aristocracy shamefacedly married some of their kids to industrialists’ kids.

So parts of the middle class lived very comfortably, thanks, while other parts clung as hard as they could to the lower edges of respectability. And many of them, on all parts of the spectrum, wanted a bit of culture, some because it brightened their lives and their brains and others because culture was the kind of thing that people with money were supposed to buy and at least pretend to appreciate.

Put that together with the growing number of people who could read and had a bit of leisure and what happened? The publishing industry invented itself. Booksellers popped up–mostly men but a few women–and they often doubled as publishers.

But this growing middle class audience wasn’t impressed with the books the aristocracy liked. They wanted books that spoke to their experience of the world, and when the novel came along, that’s what it spoke to, so the novel became an important part of the book trade. Some of those novels were what we think of today as the classics, but they were joined by any number of now-forgotten (probably forgettable and often anonymous) novels that writers cranked out to pick up on the trend of the moment.

If you want a modern parallel, think about science fiction or mysteries. They’re popular, so a lot of pretty awful ones get published on the theory that someone’ll buy them–and someone often does. If you want to look down on either genre, you’ll find lots of ways to prove they’re schlock. Some, though, are competent entertainment and others are not only well written but look deeply into our convoluted world. Both forms have opened up ways to consider the world that earlier genres didn’t make possible.

The same thing happened when writers who weren’t straight, white, middle-to-upper class, Christian, and male broke into print. They spoke to new groups of readers, and they brought new life, energy, understanding, and excitement to publishing–along with new readers.

And a predictable number of people despised them for it and blew trumpets announcing the end of literature, or possibly Western civilization and culture in general.

That’s what it was like when the novel brought middle-class voices into the public conversation. A whole new world became visible. The books may look like the same-old same-old now, but in their time they were a quiet revolution.

By the mid-eighteenth century, circulating libraries (as opposed to the private libraries belonging to either institutions or the wealthy) had come along, and by the end of the century you could find them even in small towns. Books were expensive, but you could pay a library subscription and borrow one after another after another. And again, novels made up a healthy portion of the libraries’ stock.

The public library hadn’t been dreamed of yet. If a poor person could read and was hungry for books, they’d be well advised to steal them. And to be careful about how they did it, because the punishments for even small thefts were horrifying.

 

What’s all this got to do with morality?

Dragging along in the novel’s wake, with their heads dipping below the waves as they went, came the moralists, sputtering disapproval every time they surfaced. The novel’s reader, they reminded anyone who’d listen, was typically a woman. A young woman. An impressionable young woman (sorry—this level of hyperventilated disapproval demands italics; be grateful I haven’t broken into the exclamation points), who could easily be led astray or overstimulated.

No, I’m not sure what they meant by overstimulated either. I suspect it had something to do with sex, which impressionable young women weren’t supposed to know about or be interested in, although they were prone to falling in love inconveniently, but that, of course, was sentimental, not sexual because see the beginning of the sentence, Q.E.D. And if that seems like circular reasoning, it lost none of its power just because it made no sense. It kept a fair number people trapped in its eddy for many a circuit.

Did I mention that the above applied only to decent impressionable young women? If we’re talking about fallen women and women of the lower classes, a whole different set of truisms would have to be taken out of mothballs.

Middle-class women read novels in part because the more respectable they–that’s the women, not the novels–were, the less likely they were to be able to take any action in the world. They couldn’t work. They couldn’t run a business or own anything in their own names. They couldn’t vote. They had no legal claim even on their children. If their husbands had enough money, they couldn’t clean or cook or get muddy in the garden, because lesser mortals would do that for them. Their education had suited them better for decorative roles than for useful ones.

If they read, it was because they could. Sitting around looking decorative can get old, and a book can open a larger world. And it doesn’t leave dirt under your fingernails, so no one has to know what you’ve been up to.

I started out by saying that sexual conventions were changing, and they were, but they were contradictory and still powerful, especially for marriageable young women, whose sexuality had to be controlled. A good marriage depended on the bride being a virgin, or at least passing for one.

Conventions and morals, though, are never a perfect fit for the real world. Young women faced twin perils: men and themselves. Even the best-protected woman might be raped, and forget the trauma that caused, it would ruin her on the marriage market unless it could be covered up. As for herself, even the most carefully brought up young woman might fall in love with an inconvenient man.

This was the novel’s home turf: convention and transgression. The novel needed both. Without rigid conventions, it couldn’t have transgression. Without transgression, it couldn’t have thrills.

 

Tune in next week . . .

. . . for the next exciting installment, because this is already too long. I’ll post the second half of it, which at long last makes use of a dismal novel I had to read in high school.  What could be more enticing?

The Anglo-Saxon silver penny and the blank spots in Anglo-Saxon history

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Read the British press long enough and you’ll start to think every third Briton is out wandering the fields in the hope of digging up ancient metallic goodies. The country’s awash with people waving metal detectors over the earth, and when one or another of them finds a horde, often of coins, it’s news. And why not? We all love a story about some average Joe (and it does tend to be a Joe, not a Josie) finding buried treasure. 

But what happens to the coins after they find their way to a museum? I’ve pretty much assumed they sit in a case so we can look at them and think how thrilled we should be but aren’t. 

Although maybe that’s just me. I can appreciate a helmet or a brooch. Coins, though? I tend to nod off. But for all I know, seeing a pile of coins in a display case sets other people alight. Either way, a team of researchers has been studying Anglo-Saxon coins and they’re doing something more than just looking at them in a display case.

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–which wouldn’t have been in Britain when the Anglo-Saxons were traipsing around.

What coins are we talking about?

Silver pennies. Something like 7,000 of them have been found, dating to a 90-year period, 660 to 750 CE. That’s as many as have been found from the rest of the Anglo-Saxon era (the 5th century to 1066 CE)–and I’ll go out on a limb and assume that means as many coins, not specifically pennies. The wording in the sources I’m working from is ambiguous.

The silver penny came into existence to replace a small, gold coin called scillinga, or as the word’s come down to us, schilling. At the time, that would’ve seemed like a big change–if, of course, you were part of the money economy. But this period marks a shift: more and more people were being drawn into the money economy. 

The silver penny remained England’s primary coin until the 14th century. 

 

The research

To study the coins, the researchers looked at trace elements and took microscopic samples so they could analyze their lead isotopes. 

Why bother? Because “lead isotopic ratios may be used in age dating and petrogenetic tracing of igneous, metamorphic, and hydrothermal rocks.”

Did that help?

I didn’t think it would. Basically, analyzing lead isotopes can tell you stuff , but only if you know how to listen. I don’t, so I trotted along behind the experts and listened to them instead.

Here’s what I learned:

First, that they used a new technique involving lasers and very tiny samples of the coins. In other words, they took so little that they got to have their cake and eat only the tiniest sliver of it. 

Second, that although these are silver pennies, they have traces of gold, bismuth, and other elements I know next to nothing about except that they can tell  the researchers where the silver came from, which in turn tells historians who was trading with who and how much.

Third, that the coins weren’t made from recycled Roman silver–either old Roman coins or fancy tableware. The silver was from Byzantium. The study’s lead author, Dr Jane Kershaw, said, “These coins are among the first signs of a resurgence in the northern European economy since the end of the Roman Empire. They show deep international trade connections between what is now France, the Netherlands, and England.” 

But the silver itself would’ve gotten to western Europe decades before the coins were made, because trade and diplomatic contact were at a low point in the late 7th century. They probably spent the intervening years as fancy stuff that impressed the neighbors. 

One of the study’s co-authors speculates that Byzantine silver found its way to England by way of trade, diplomatic payments, and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army.

According to a co-author, Rory Naismith, “Elites in England and Francia were almost certainly sitting on this silver already. We have very famous examples of this: the silver bowls discovered at Sutton Hoo and the ornate silver objects in the Staffordshire Hoard.”

Sutton Hoo? That’s where an Anglo-Saxon king was buried in an entire ship with a hoard of treasure. If someone had melted down the Sutton Hoo silver, they would’ve had enough silver for 10,000 pennies. 

The Staffordshire Hoard? More of the same but minus the ship. And the burial. It’s “the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork ever found,” Take a look at the museum’s photos in the link two lines up. It’s beautiful stuff–and no one has a clue why it was buried.

As Kershaw explained, such “beautiful prestige objects would only have been melted down when a king or lord urgently needed lots of cash. Something big would have been happening, a big social change.

“This was quantitative easing, elites were liquidating resources and pouring more and more money into circulation. It would have had a big impact on people’s lives. There would have been more thinking about money and more activity with money involving a far larger portion of society than before.”

In other words, more people were being pulled into an expanding money economy: more money in circulation and more people circulating it.

I’d love to line that up with a quick sketch of some relevant events in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms at the time, but although I can find some irrelevant ones, relevant poses a problem. So little is known about the era. And that’s what makes this way of thinking about the coins important: it hints at ways the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were changing, and if it doesn’t quite fill in the blanks it does at least let us pencil some possibilities into the picture. But we’ll have to learn to live with a lot of blank spaces.

The early days of Britain’s National Health Service

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The National Health Service–known to friends and wolves-in-friends’-clothing alike as the NHS–began in 1948, when World War II was over but food was still both scarce and rationed, the economy was just staggering out of a severe recession (no, I hadn’t heard of it either), and the empire was in the process of collapse. 

Introduce anything so ambitious these days and every sober advisor in (and out of) sight would tell you, Get serious. Maybe you could just replace the program with a nice slogan. So how did the prime minister, Clement Atlee, and his minister of health, Aneurin Bevan, manage this little trick?

For starters, the system they introduced didn’t drop from the sky. It had been taking shape since at least 1909. 

 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia–although if you read to the end it becomes semi-relevant since you could argue that it’s deepest pink. Or at least tinged with red.

 

Background

Here at Notes, we–by which, of course, I mean I–can never tell a story without going backward first, so let’s go backward. What happened in 1909 was the publication of the Minority Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law, under the leadership of Beatrice Webb. The commission was looking for something that would replace the Poor Law and the punitive Victorian workhouses. The minority report argued for “a national minimum of civilised life . . . open to all alike, of both sexes and all classes, by which we meant sufficient nourishment and training when young, a living wage when able-bodied, treatment when sick, and modest but secure livelihood when disabled or aged.”

Its focus was on preventing poverty rather than providing relief once it was entrenched. But this was a minority report. The majority report argued for individual responsibility and charity. 

What happened? The party in power, the Liberals, tossed both reports into the revolving file, also known as the trash, but Webb and her fellow Fabian socialists printed copies of the minority report and sold 25,000 of them. I’d be happy to see one of my books sell half as well. 

The minority report had far more impact than the majority’s and became  central to the thinking that eventually formed Britain’s welfare state. In some estimates, it led to the Beveridge Report, which leads us to our next subhead.

 

The Beveridge Report 

Despite its name, this was not a misspelled report on what people drank. It was a 1942 report that created the blueprint for a cradle-to-grave social services system. Most importantly for our purposes, it included the idea of a free health service, funded by the state and spreading the cost of healthcare out over the country’s population instead of having it fall on the individual or family unlucky enough to get sick. 

Some 250,000 copies of the full report were sold, along with 370,000 of an abridged version and 40,000 of an American edition. In twelve months. 

Britain’s 2,700 hospitals, at this point, were run by a mix of charities and local governments. National insurance existed, but it only covered people who were working. The number of wounded coming back from the war pushed the system toward bankruptcy, adding to the pressure for a unified, state-run health service.

 

Churchill, Atlee, the war, and the welfare state 

During the war–that’s World War II in case you got lost somewhere along the way–the Conservative and Labour parties governed in coalition. Churchill–a Conservative–was the prime minister, and Labour, the junior partner. pushed for the Beveridge report to be put into practice. Churchill was reluctant to commit the country to hefty new expenses until the postwar economic picture was clear, but he also advocated a “national compulsory insurance for all classes for all purposes from the cradle to the grave.” He didn’t oppose the Beveridge Report but wouldn’t commit himself to implementing it, and privately called Beveridge “a windbag and a dreamer.” 

That left Labour in a position to campaign as the party that would put the report–”the full Beveridge”–into practice, and in the first election after the war Labour won a big honkin’ majority: 393 seats to the Conservatives 197. Labour was a socialist party at this point (it no longer is) and on the first day the new parliament met, its MPs sang (or in some tellings, bellowed) the socialist anthem, “The Red Flag.” 

The link will take you to the song if you can’t go on without hearing it. This version is sung, not bellowed, which is a bit more important than being shaken not stirred.

Once he was prime minister, Atlee threw his weight behind the creation of a welfare state–a huge undertaking, including not just medical care but housing, education, and financial assistance to the unemployed, retired, and disabled.

“We had not been elected to try to patch up an old system but to make something new,” he said. “I therefore determined that we would go ahead as fast as possible with our programme.”

The program also included the construction of housing and the nationalization of key industries. Railroads and coal mines were “so run down,” as the Britannica puts it, “that any government would have had to bring them under state control. In addition, road transport, docks and harbours, and the production of electrical power were nationalized. There was little debate. The Conservatives could hardly argue that any of these industries, barring electric power, was flourishing or that they could have done much differently.”

I should probably stop here and say what will be obvious to some people and not at all to others: there’s no single definition of socialism that all socialists agree on. I think a fair summary of this version is that key industries were nationalized and the state was responsible for supporting people’s overall welfare. It was a form of socialism that coexisted with capitalism.

But let’s go back to the end of the war. The country was well past its eyeballs in debt and Keynes had warned earlier that the country faced a “financial Dunkirk.” It had borrowed massively to fund its role in the war (a lot of it from the US), and wartime industries like aviation were bigger than it now needed while basic industries like coal and railroads needed serious repair–which is to say, investment. As the Britannica (again) puts it, “With nothing to export, Britain had no way to pay for imports or even for food.”

Loans from the US and Canada helped the country get through a short stretch. The Marshall Plan got them through another stretch of time. But food continued to be rationed, and the fifties were a pretty gray time for the country.

In that situation, how were they going to pay for this massive investment in a welfare state? At least part of the answer was the National Insurance Bill–an extension of a system put in place before World War I–which had working-age people paying in every week specifically to support the benefits everyone in the country could draw on. (Married women who worked didn’t pay in, but don’t worry, they suffered enough inequalities to more than make up for it.)  

 

The NHS

In 1948, the National Health Service was launched, under the leadership of Aneurin–called Nye–Bevan, the minister of health. 

Bevan had started work as a miner at 13 and chaired his miners’ lodge at 19. He also chaired the local Medical Aid Society, a system that had members paying in and getting healthcare in return. Initially, this didn’t include miners’ families. During his tenure, membership expanded to include non-miners,until 95% of the town was eligible. This became his blueprint. 

“All I am doing is extending to the entire population of Britain the benefits we had in Tredegar for a generation or more,” he said. “We are going to ‘Tredegarise’ you.” 

The NHS was set up to help everyone, and care would be free and based on need, not ability to pay. “A free health service is pure socialism,” he said, “and as such is opposed to the hedonism of capitalist society.” 

Opposition came from the Conservative Party, the British Medical Association, and the right-wing newspapers.

Okay, historians argue about whether the Conservatives belong on the list. Their 1945 manifesto backed health services available to all citizens but didn’t commit to it being free. At any rate, they voted against Bevan’s version of the NHS and compared it to Nazism. That probably makes it fair to say they opposed it.

No one argues over whether doctors opposed the plan, at least as a group. Bevan claimed he won them around by “stuffing their mouths with gold”– allowing consultants to treat paying patients privately and still work inside the NHS. He later claimed he’d been “blessed by the stupidity of my enemies.”

 

And now?

I’d hoped to take you through a bit of more recent NHS history, but I dipped a toe into that water and just about drowned. Now that I’m back on the couch, safe and dry, I’ll risk nothing more than the most superficial of summaries. The NHS is immensely popular–basically, it’s the national religion–and most people find the idea of medicine for profit both shocking and counter-intuitive. But profit has crept into the system, and for the moment at least, socialism has been pushed to the political fringes. 

I’ve lived in Britain for 18 years and seen the NHS reorganized in assorted ways, all of them disastrous. Huge chunks have been privatized so one corporation or another could make a profit by running it as cheaply as possible, all in the name of efficiency, but somehow, magically, it all gets less and less efficient. At the moment, the NHS is suffering from years of underfunding. Waiting lists are long, jobs can’t be filled, and nurses and doctors are leaving the system to work somewhere–anywhere–else. 

With the next election predicted to return a huge Labour majority, I’d like to think the problems will be fixed–or at least addressed in some way that serves the public interest–but I’m doubtful. The current party leadership has been telling us we can’t expect much from them and I’m inclined to think they’re telling the truth. 

Still, for all its problems–and they’re many–the NHS is a magnificent thing: a system that makes healthcare free at the point of delivery, as the saying here goes. I’m originally from the US, so I’ve seen what the alternative looks like. A for-profit system is primarily interested in, um, making money, so what matters is whether a person can pay. US healthcare can and does bankrupt even the comfortable and well insured. It neglects the poor and milks the rich and–oh, hell, I could go on but you get the point. Both systems have their problems, but I much prefer the problems of a socialized system.

*

Now that Labour’s taken distance from any suggestion of socialism, I wondered if it had also taken distance from its old song, “The Red Flag.” Apparently not. Its 2022 party conference made headlines when the delegates sang it. The song opens with the words, “The people’s [or “workers’,” depending on the version you choose–and probably your politics] flag is deepest red / It’s shrouded oft our martyred dead.” A parody runs, “The people’s flag is deepest pink / It’s not as red as you might think.”

And with that I’ll leave you for the week. Stay well out there, people. It’s not safe to get sick.

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

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Britain has some of the world’s toughest gun regulations, and not only do the vast majority of people approve of that, 76% think they should be stricter. That’s from a sober poll taken in 2021, but Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports pretty much the same thing. 

How did I conduct my survey? Effortlessly. I’m an American transplant, which leads British friends and acquaintances to ask periodically, “What is it with Americans and guns anyway? Are you people crazy?”

I’m paraphrasing heavily. Most people are too polite to ask if we’re crazy, but if you listen you can hear the question pulsing away, just below the surface. Basically, they’re both baffled and horrified by the US approach.

I should probably tell them that a majority of Americans (56%) also want stricter gun laws but haven’t managed to dominate the national conversation yet. That’s probably because they haven’t poured as much tightly focused money into political campaigns as the pro-gun lobby. 

Am I being too cynical? In the age-old tradition of answering a question with a question, Is it possible to be too cynical these days?

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

For a long time, they were somewhere between minimal and nonexistent. 

Way back when William and Mary crossed the channel in small boats, the price they paid to become Britain’s joint monarchs was accepting the 1689 Bill of Rights, which acknowledged that Parliament was the source of their power. It also guaranteed the right to bear arms–unless of course you were Catholic, who were the boogeymen of the moment. You were also excluded if you were some other (and barely imaginable) form of non-Protestant.

The relevant section says, “The subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions, and as allowed by law.” 

That leaves some wiggle room: “suitable to their conditions”; “as allowed by law.” (The US second amendment is ambiguous as well. Maybe it’s something about weaponry.) So when in 1870 a new law required a license to carry a gun outside your home, it wasn’t a violation of W and M’s agreement, because this was a law. As far as I can tell from the wording, if all you wanted to do with your gun was set it on the kitchen table and gloat over it, you could skip the license.

In 1903, a new law required a license for any gun with a barrel shorter than 9 inches and banned ownership by anyone who was “drunken or insane.” 

You could have a lot of fun poking holes in that. Could I get a license if I was sober all week but on the weekend I routinely got so drunk I fell in the horse trough? If I had a title and expensive clothes, would I still be considered a drunk (or a nut)?

Never mind. That was the law they passed. Nobody asks me to consult. It’s a mystery.

But let’s go back a couple of years, to 1901, as Historic UK does in its post on gun laws. Handguns were being widely advertised to cyclists, with no mention of licenses, although the ;need for them may have been so obvious to everyone involved that they didn’t need mentioning. Or enforcement may have been patchy.

Bikes were the hot new thing–the AI of the day–and everyone who had any claim to with-it-ness was rushing around on one. And maybe the cyclists felt vulnerable, out there in the countryside on their own, or maybe gun manufacturers saw an opportunity and manufactured a bit of fear to boost sales. To read the ads, every cyclist needed a handgun. They were advertised, variously, as the cyclist’s friend and the traveler’s friend. One ad said, “Fear no tramp.”

Before World War I (it started in 1914; you’re welcome), Britain had a quarter of a million licensed firearms and no way to count the unlicensed ones. Then the war turned Britain, along with a good part of the rest of the world, on its ear. One of its smaller side effects was that when it ended soldiers came home with pistols. 

How’d they manage that? The army didn’t want them back? I consulted Lord Google on the subject, but I seem to have asked the wrong questions, because he went into a sulk and refused to tell me anything even vaguely relevant. But bring guns home they did, in large enough numbers that the government started losing sleep over it, because this was a turbulent time and  the government had a lot of things to lose sleep over. For one thing, the Russian Revolution not only meant it had to share a planet with a revolutionary socialist government, it also kicked off a wave of revolutions in Europe that must’ve made it look, for a while, as if Britain would end up sharing the planet with multiple socialist governments. 

Life was turbulent on British soil as well. Not all that long before the war, in 1911, a shootout in London involved two Latvian anarchists, a combination of the Metropolitan and City police departments, the Scots Guards, and Winston Churchill. The anarchists might not have been anarchists, though, but expropriators, carrying out robberies to support the Bolshevik movement. Either way, they were well armed and the police were armed only with some antique weapons they pulled together. Until the Scots Guards showed up, they were outgunned. 

In “Forging a Peaceable Kingdom: War, Violence, and Fear of Brutalization in Post–First World War Britain,” Jon Lawrence argues that postwar Britain lived with a fear of violence from returned soldiers, the general public, and/or a government “brutalized” by the war. (The quotation marks are his. I’ll hand them back now that we’re ready to move on.) 

The press was full of violent crime reports. When isn’t it, and when don’t we at least partially believe it’s a balanced picture of the world we live in? Still, the stories are part of the picture: fear was the air people breathed.

The soldiers returning from the war are also part of the picture: they came home to unemployment and its cousin, low pay. A wave of strikes swept the country, including a police strike and in 1919 a strike by soldiers–or if you want to put that another way, a mutiny. Some of that was violent and some wasn’t. All of it kept the government up at night.

In many cases, unemployment led to whites turning their anger on Blacks and immigrants, blaming them for taking their jobs. Familiar story, isn’t it? (Black, in this context, includes people from India. I only mention that to remind us all how fluid the categories that seem so fixed in our minds really are.) 

Longstanding Black British communities were joined by a good number of sailors from both the military and the merchant fleets who were stranded in Britain when they were fired and their jobs filled by white sailors. Their hostels were a particular target for violence. Black and immigrant communities often defended themselves, leading to some full-on battles–and more lost governmental sleep.

For a fuller story on that, go to Staying Power: the History of Black People in Britain, by Peter Fryer. We’ll have to move on, because most of that is, again, a side issue to this topic. The point is that that was a turbulent period with a nervous government. In 1920, a new law allowed the police to deny a firearms permit to anyone “unfitted to be trusted with a firearm”–a loose category if there ever was one. 

 

And after that?

In 1937–a different era but the midst of the Great Depression, so still a turbulent time–most fully automatic weapons were banned, then in 1967 shotguns had to be licensed. Applicants had to be “of good character, . . . show good reason for possessing a firearm, and the weapons had to be stored securely.” 

In 1987, a man killed 16 people and himself, using two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun, and the government came under pressure to tighten the laws. In response, semi-automatic and pump-action rifles were banned, along with anything that fired explosive ammunition and a few other categories of weapons. Shotguns remained legal but had to be registered and stored securely. 

After a 1996 shooting of 16 schoolkids and their teacher, in which the shooter used four legally owned pistols, a new law banned handguns above .22 caliber, and in 1997 .22s were outlawed.

In 2006, in response to a series of shootings, the  manufacture, import, or sale of realistic imitation guns was banned, although it was still legal to own one. The logic there is that they look realistic enough to commit crimes with, so this isn’t exactly gun control; it’s more like toy control. The maximum sentence for carrying an imitation gun was doubled, and it became a crime to fire an air weapon outside. The minimum age for buying or owning an air weapon went from 17 to 18, and air weapons could now be sold only face to face. 

In 2014, police were required to refuse or revoke a firearms license if the applicant or license holder had a record of domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, or mental illness, which implies that they’re expected to actually check.

 

And the result?

I know a few people in Britain who own rifles and shotguns that they hunt with. When they applied for licenses, they had to show that they had a secure place to store them, that they had a legitimate reason for owning a firearm, and that they were “of sound mind.” They had to pass police checks and inspections of their health, property, and criminal records. If any of them have moaned about it, I haven’t heard it. 

As a way of looking at the impact, I thought I could find a nice, simple set of statistics comparing homicide rates in the US and UK, but nothing’s ever simple. If you use two different sites, one for each country, you end up comparing apples and motor scooters, but I did eventually find one that compares many countries’ murder rate per million people. In 2009 in the UK, it was 11.68; in the US, it was 44.45–four times higher. We’ll skip the intentional homicides, which aren’t  the same as murders, along with the accidental deaths and the suicides. They might all be worth thinking about if we’re talking about the impact of gun ownership on death rates, but they’ll make my life more difficult and I don’t know how you feel about that but it won’t make me happy, so basically, screw it.

Another site I found compares mass shootings between 1998 and 2019. The UK’s had one. Twelve people died in it and one was injured.  The US has had 101, making it the world’s leader in mass shootings. In the deadliest, sixty people died and more than eight hundred were injured. In the second deadliest, forty-nine died and fifty-eight were injured. 

So is the US, with its permissive gun laws, a freer country than the UK? That’ll depend on how you define freedom, and that’s above my pay grade since I do this for free. Some people measure freedom by a country’s voting system, some by people’s sense of security and safety, and some by the right to carry a gun. I have yet to meet anyone in Britain who feels oppressed by the gun laws or measures their freedom by their access to weaponry. I’m sure someone out there does, but they’re a minority, and a small one. 

What about the argument that access to weapons makes the little guy a more powerful political force? My observation is that the little guy struggles to be heard in both countries, but that guns and threats of violence in the US are allowing a minority–a sizable one but still a minority–to increase its power at the expense of their fellow citizens. That’s not a good fit for my definition of freedom.