Category Archives: History

Church and state in medieval England: Thomas Becket and Henry II

Posted on by
26

Medieval England had two mutually dependent centers of power, the church and the state. The state relied on the church for legitimacy. It was church ritual that turned a proto-king into a real one–someone who people believed had a god-given right to rule. And the church? It held land and riches, it had a near-monopoly on education and literacy, and people believed in it. All that gave it massive political clout. But it relied on the state’s network of laws and law enforcement.

So, two mutually dependent centers of power, and predictably, they didn’t always line up neatly. Take the tale of Thomas Becket and Henry II.

A rare relevant photo: the pulpit in Canterbury Cathedral

 

First, let’s get the name straight

When I first heard of Becket, he was called Thomas a Becket, which turns out not to have been his name. When he was born, he was called Thomas Beket. Spelling was a liquid back then. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a stray C. It looked good and he kept it. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he was known as Thomas of Canterbury. As a saint, he was (and I guess is) called Saint Thomas.

Then came Henry VIII, Anne Bolyn, England’s break with the Catholic Church, and all that stuff, and since Becket had thrown his weight behind the church and against a king when they came into conflict, he went decisively out of fashion. So in 1538, Cromwell (Henry’s brains as well as his tough guy) decreed that Saint T was to be known as plain old Bishop Becket.

In 1596, another Thomas, Thomas Nashe, a satirist and poet, added the a to Becket’s name.

Why’d he do that? It slotted in nicely with names in the Robin Hood legend (think Alan a Dale), which was popular right about then, and it made him sound like some rural bumpkin. In other words, this was the Anglicans making fun of the Catholics. 

The name stuck and by the 18th century the nifty rhythm of the a Becket form was clattering around after Tom Beket like a cluster of tin cans tied to his belt. Because regardless of its original intent, it does sound nice.

These days, people seem to have gone back to Thomas Becket, and in the interest of high-minded neutrality we’ll call him that. 

 

Henry and Becket

Becket was born in 1118 to Norman parents, and this was soon enough after the Norman invasion for that to place him among the elite. Ah, but his parents were merchants, so he was a long step below the elite of the elite, the aristocracy. He got an education (not a given back then), and after a detour as a city clerk and accountant went to work for Archbishop Theobald. 

Before we go on, though, a warning: you’ll want to keep your archbishops separate from your archdeacons in this paragraph, because it has an excess of arches. Becket pleased Theobald (the archbishop) well enough that he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury. That’s not as good as being an archbishop, but even so it brought him both power and money. Three months after that, he became Henry’s chancellor and confidant. That was in addition to being archdeacon, so Becket now held two posts, both of them important. 

Becket was, according to the accounts I’ve read, skillful and energetic and gifted at getting people to like him, although he does seem to have neglected the less glamorous work of archdeacon in favor of his job as chancellor, best buddy, and right arm to the king. 

He showed himself to be the king’s man when the church and state came into conflict over something called scutage, which was part of that impenetrable knot of relationships that defined feudalism. Basically, it was money that the holder of a fief could pay instead of sending knights to fight for the king. The church held fiefs that had to produce knights or money, and Becket, taking the king’s side, charged the church a high rate.  

To make this more sensitive, this was a period when the church was pushing for greater power relative to kings, who’d previously had considerable control over the church. This is called the Gregorian Reform, and I never heard of it either. Henry was holding out against the changes, claiming what he considered his ancestral rights. And Becket backed him. He was very much the king’s man.

 

Then it all went sour

When Theobald died, what could make more sense than for Henry to make Becket the new archbishop? He’d be the king’s man inside the church.

Henry tried to persuade Becket to accept the post and Becket tried to persuade the king hat the story wouldn’t end well if he did. Becket lost the argument and was duly made archbishop, at which point he stopped being the king’s man and became the church’s, taking its side in conflicts with the king–first in a disagreement over tax, later over the issue of whether the church or the state would try clerics who were accused of crimes. 

In Europe–and in England before the Norman conquest–the church tried clerics, and their punishments were generally lighter than lay people faced. No death penalty, no mutilation. 

Becket’s argument was that the church already punished clerics and they shouldn’t be punished twice for the same crime. Henry’s was that clerical crime was rife and encouraged by church protection. Basically, though, this was about power.

The conflict came to a head in 1164, with the king claiming several of what he considered his traditional rights. He forbade the excommunication of royal officials and any appeals to Rome. He claimed the revenues of vacant church sees the right to influence the election of bishops.

Becket, having initially accepted this, then registered his disagreement and appealed to the pope, who–no surprise here–took the church’s side. 

Henry’s next move was to summon Becket to a trial. By a state court. And guess whose side it would be on. Becket, being no fool, fled to France, where he lived for six years. By way of spitting in Becket’s and the pope’s collective eye, Henry had the archbishop of York crown his son crowned as co-king, although the archbishop of Canterbury traditionally had the right to crown the king. 

Becket responded by excommunicating a bunch of people.

England, by this point, had more or less withdrawn from obedience to the pope, and in case this isn’t confusing enough I should mention that in addition to a pope, the church had an antipope–a kind of spare pope in case the original went flat. 

Sorry–I thought that was funny but it’s not accurate. Both pope and antipope claimed to be the one true pope. Let’s say it was a messy period in church politics and leave it there.

The pope backed Becket’s excommunications, and excommunication was serious stuff in the middle ages. It could cut a person or an entire nation off from church functions. Since we’re talking about a nation, it meant churches could be closed, people refused the sacraments, and churchyards closed to burials. It meant a country full of people who couldn’t take the sacraments, so they’d believe they were being denied their trip to heaven when they died. This is just the kind of thing that can trigger rebellions. 

So the king allowed Becket to return to Canterbury, but beyond that nothing was settled, and Becket excommunicated a few more people, including the archbishop of York, and refused to re-communicate the ones he’d already excommunicated. 

Henry had what’s known in high academic circles as a runnin’ hissy fit and said– 

Well, he said something. According to the Britannica, “He berated his household for being a pack of ‘miserable curs and traitors’ who stood idly by while a ‘low-born priest’ treated their king with contempt.” But according to Edward Grim, who was an eyewitness to Becket’s killing although not to the hissy fit, Henry said, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!”  

We’re not done yet, though. According to Peter O’Toole in the 1964 movie Becket, he said, “Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest?” Or maybe that’s “turbulent priest.” Go watch the film yourself if you want to get it right. It’s clearly the authoritative version, but I can’t be bothered. 

Whatever Henry said, four knights trotted off to Canterbury, where they killed the archbishop. 

 

Becket’s afterlife

No, not that kind of afterlife. We’re talking about the verifiable kind:

Within days, people were making pilgrimages to Becket’s tomb in Canterbury cathedral–or so says the Britannica, although I have trouble believing anyone constructed a tomb that quickly. Let’s not fuss over details, though. Miracles were quickly attributed to him. Pilgrims came. 

Henry (wisely) swore he never wanted Becket killed, and the next year he–that’s Henry, not Becket–showed up in Canterbury, allowed himself to be whipped by bishops while he prayed for forgiveness, and was duly absolved. His decision to do that might’ve had something to do with a revolt led by his sons and backed by France, which he claimed was a result of Becket’s killing.

And the knights who did the deed? They were excommunicated but asked for forgiveness and were sent to fight in the Crusades for fourteen years. 

Three years after Becket’s death, he was made a saint and people believed that the spot where his blood was spilled would heal the sick, and Canterbury remained an important goal for pilgrims until Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and had Becket’s tomb taken down, his bones burned, and his name erased from the service books.

A service book, in case this is all as foreign to you as it is to me, is “a book published by the authority of a church body that contains the text and directions for the liturgy of its official religious services.”

For all that, he wasn’t fully erased. These days, the cathedral burns a candle where Becket’s tomb once stood, and his name is engraved on the floor to mark the spot where he was killed.

Britain’s blue plaques–or how to make history snooze-worthy

Posted on by
28

Britain isn’t short on history, and it isn’t short of the impulse to celebrate it. Or at least some of it. The part of it that fits the dominant narrative, whatever that is at the moment. One of the least effective ways it’s found is the blue plaque scheme, which attaches–yes, you guessed it–blue plaques to walls commemorating people you may or may not have heard of. 

To learn more about this fascinating project, let’s quote Historic England, one of the assorted organizations that run the scheme: It “celebrates people from all walks of life who have made a significant contribution to human welfare or happiness; and/or have made an exceptional impact in their field, community or on society at large.”  

English Heritage, on the other hand, which runs the scheme in London, has it celebrating “the links between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked.”

We won’t get in between those two explanations. They can settle their differences in whatever way they find fitting.

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal on a (rare) sunny day. Apologies for the photo quality. It seems to be a WordPress problem that’s cropped up in the last few weeks.

The scheme

In British, scheme doesn’t imply anything scheming or underhanded. A scheme’s a plan–something systematic, and this particular scheme has been around for a while. The first plaques were put up in 1867. Since then, the London part of it has been handed from one organization to another. Unless you work for one of them, I’m reasonably sure you don’t care which they are. The national scheme is run by Historic England. But smaller cities don’t have to feel left out: they can find some local group to put up their own blue plaques.

The plaques say things like, “________ lived here from _______ to ___________.” Some of them say what the person did. A few don’t–you’re expected to know. Either way, the focus is on the here-ness of it all. It’s a low-key way of saying, Listen, dunderhead, you’re on a historic site. Be impressed.

Or something along those lines. Maybe they’re really saying, We’re so rich in history that all we need to do is put up a small blue plaque to commemorate it. Eat your heart out, foreigners. 

It’s all in the interpretation, isn’t it?

I’ve seen a Charles Dickens-related plaque that commemorates a house that used to stand someplace near where the plaque now is. It struck me as a bit forlorn.

Not all the plaques commemorate English or British figures. One of the earliest commemorates Napoleon III, who lived in exile in London, where he slotted himself neatly into high society. 

The people they commemorate are also not all famous. Commemoratees include a theatrical wigmaker, the woman who taught ju-jitsu to the Suffragettes, a bare-knuckle boxing champ, a homing pigeon, and Dolly the Sheep–the first animal to be born by cloning.

 

Unofficial plaques

But nobody gets to set a limit on blue plaques, and it’s possible–even legal–to put up unofficial ones. 

In Norfolk, the Common Lot theatre group discovered that only 25 of the city’s 300 blue plaques commemorated women and set out to remedy the imbalance, commemorating rebel women of Norwich. Their women they commemorate include:  

  • The 16-year-old Emma de Gaudar, who’s said to have held Norwich Castle against a siege by William the Conqueror
  • The butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine
  • Suffragette Mabel Clarkson, who became a lord mayor of Norwich and a city councillor before women achieved the vote
  • Dorothy Jewson, the first female Labour MP, who attended Norwich High School for Girls
  • Women thrown out of a Quaker meeting house for being profane and opinionated for talking about women’s rights
  • And the former location of a ducking stool for women accused of witchcraft

In Hull, Alternative Heritage set up a plaque saying, “Our brand of mavericks and creatives decided to celebrate Hull’s history, whether factual or fictitious.”

I could get to like these people.

They go on to say, “Official English Heritage plaques can only be commissioned for a proposed recipient 20 years after their death, through strict criteria. But what about the living legends and stories that make our city special today? Here at Drunk Animal Creative Studio, we designed a series of our own plaques, fittingly titled ‘Alternative Heritage.’

“Our plaques celebrate our history, from Hull’s charismatic folk to lore spread in playgrounds. Whether factual or fictitious, the contents of the plaques come straight from the heart of Hull.”

So what have they put up? One plaque says, “Goodbye, 2020. You won’t be missed.” Another says, “On this spot, 1918. Alf hugged his wife for the first time in four years. He was lucky – thousands across the country never got to hug their loved ones again.”

Their site includes a map of plaques around the city and a form you can use to propose a plaque.

 

The Liz Truss plaque

The reason I got started on blue plaques is that someone’s put up a blue plaque outside the shop where the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss was bought.

What am I talking about? Liz Truss is Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. In less than two months, during 2022, her bare-knuckle budget proposed doing everything Conservative politicians had talked about but hesitated to do in any unrestrained way: slash taxes and spending without worrying about how the numbers would add up. In next to no time at all, the country was teetering on the brink of recession. The pound tanked. The markets had multiple nervous breakdowns. The cost of government borrowing shot up. Mortgage deals fell through. People who ran pension funds–or who had pensions in those funds–came unglued.

Headline writers, on the other hand, had a field day. 

Truss’s popularity fell so low they had to dig trenches in the newsroom floor. Then some genius at one of the newspapers bought a head of lettuce, dropped a blond wig on it, and trained a live cam at it, asking who’d last longer, Liz or Lettuce.

The lettuce, famously, won. And is now commemorated with a highly unofficial blue plaque of its very own. Truss, meanwhile, is promoting a book about how to save the West. The rest of the world, presumably, isn’t worth bothering with.

How well is it selling? In its first week (I haven’t found more recent data), it was 70 on the bestseller list, behind an air fryer cookbook and RuPaul’s memoir, with 2,228 copies sold. Given the name recognition you get as a former prime minister, that’s not great, although I’ll admit it leaves my novels in the dust. On the other hand, I’m not followed by pictures of lettuce the way she is.

Skara Brae and neolithic Britain

Posted on by
32

Every last one of us was born too late to visit neolithic Britain. Sorry. Most of us wouldn’t handle it well anyway. But we can get a surprising glimpse of late stone age life from the island of Orkney, off the northeast coast of Scotland. 

These days, Orkney’s located almost exactly in the middle of nowhere, at least if by nowhere you mean a lot of water, but back then it seems to have been the center of a civilization, if for no other reason than that it was a midway point between northern Europe and Britain. For that, being in the middle of a lot of water is useful.

Not much is known about stone-age boats, but we can pretty well guess that traveling in one made a stop on a long voyage welcome. The break would’ve let people indulge in a neolithic cultural exchange, which I’m going to guess involved food, fresh water, alcohol, gossip, songs, gifts, and possibly an era-appropriate ritual or three.

I tossed in the rituals because Orkney’s rich in sites that hint at them, and every one of them involved an immense amount of labor. You don’t do all that if they don’t matter to you and if you don’t have time and energy to spare. 

Irrelevant photo: hemp agrimony

Skara Brae

Around 5,000 years ago, a group of people built a village on Orkney that’s now called Skara Brae. What they called it is anyone’s guess. A lot can get lost in 5,000 years, including a name. The people who lived there farmed, hunted, and fished.

The village is older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids, and older than me. It was inhabited for something along the lines of 650 years and abandoned for reasons we can only guess at, but for us what’s significant about it is that at some point it was covered over by sand, which preserved it until a storm swept the sand off in 1850, uncovering an archaeologist’s dream.

The village is a circle of stone-built, single-room houses linked by roofed passages, with one larger building that according to one article might’ve been a workshop, although I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been a place for everyone to gather. The walls were made of two layers of stone with insulation in between and the roofs were slate. Each house had a hearth, two beds outlined by stone slabs, which would have kept the bedding in place, and what are called dressers because–well, they have to be called something. To me, they look more like stone bookshelves, although this was a bookless, writingless world, so let’s stick with dressers. It’s chilly up there. People would’ve worn clothes, although that might not have been what they stored on them. They could’ve stored useful stuff, beautiful stuff, things they didn’t want to step on in the dark–say the neolilthic equivalent of Lego pieces.

For some fabulous photos, follow the link.

The houses also had tanks set into the floor. One house had an indoor toilet, although since plumbing was still a long way in the future that might not have been a great idea. I wasn’t there, so I can’t know.

Around the settlement, archaeologists have found dice, jewelry, tools, carved stone objects (objects here meaning things that are mysterious to us), and pottery in a style that spread to mainland Britain, supporting the argument that Orkney was an important site in the culture–a place that led the way. What hasn’t been found is weaponry, and the village wasn’t in an easily defended spot, arguing that this was a time and place of peace.

Not far from Skara Brae are two stone circles, The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness; a chambered tomb, Maes Howe; and an assortment of unexcavated sites that hint at being ceremonial, burial, and settlement sites. The places that have been excavated show evidence of feasting–lots of feasting.

I won’t try to take you through the details of the excavations. I wouldn’t trust myself to get it right anyway. Follow the links if you want to know more. You’ll find lots of measurements and layouts. Or else settle for knowing that a lot went on in this seemingly isolated spot. 

So, did this important cultural center contribute the Stonehenge altar stone that’s recently been spotted as having come from somewhere in northeast Scotland or the Orkneys? It would make sense. They built similar monuments, but no. Orkney’s been ruled out and the search for the source of the altar stone goes on.

Are foxhunters an ethnic group?

Posted on by
36

A pro-foxhunting group, Hunting Kind, says it’ll be going to court to prove that fox hunters are an ethnic minority, which they’re convinced will protect their hunts from the barbarian anti-foxhunting hordes. The group’s chair argues that people who support foxhunting suffer persecution by animal rights extremists and that their hunts are an extension of natural selection because they only kill the foxes that are old or weak or slower than a pack of dogs. Or who, you know, overindulge in suicidal ideation. 

“I can tell you for a fact [foxhunting] is not cruel,” he said, “because I take no delight in the suffering of an animal.”

Point proven, then. 

The group claims it meets the five qualifications for an ethnic group: 

  • A long and shared history of culture which is distinct from wider society
  • Distinct customs of their own
  • A common geographical origin
  • Common ancestors
  • Common language or literature

Irrelevant photo: a begonia

Where’d the five points come from? I haven’t been able to trace them to any source. The 2021 census says a person’s ethnicity “could be based on” culture, family background, identity or physical appearance. That’s four and sounds kind of tentative.

The Law Society says its “usually been used to refer to long shared cultural experiences, religious practices, traditions, ancestry, language, dialect or national origins.” That’s seven and not what you’d call rock solid.

Basically, ethnicity’s a hazy term. But let’s not get hung up on how many characteristics it takes to solidify a bunch of people into an ethnic group. What’s striking here is that the desire to be one speaks to a longing on the part of a privileged group to be certified as unprivileged so it can claim the privileges of the unprivileged.

Did I lose anyone on the hairpin turns back there? 

Are foxhunters privileged? Well, foxhunting started out as an aristocratic passtime. In its current form, it dates back to the 19th century and was strictly for the upper crust. These days the hunts are marginally more democratic: you don’t have to be an aristocrat but you do need deep pockets. As George Monbiot explains it, “Not everyone who hunts today is a member of the aristocracy–far from it. But this is the way in which you aspire to become one. To look posh you buy a Land Rover, green wellies, a tweed hat and a waxed jacket: the livery of field sports. You buy a house in the country. You get yourself a horse and you join the hunt.”

You can see why they long to be certified as society’s victims.

 

A bit of history

Farmers have long had it in for foxes. They attack some of the smaller farm animals and they have beautiful fur. It doesn’t do to be too beautiful, friends. I’m telling you. In this case, it led to fur envy: the aristocrats could wear that fur themselves and tell themselves they looked foxy in it. But it wasn’t until the 18th century, with the decline of the country’s deer population, that fox hunting turned into a sport. Because, hey, if they could go out hunting deer they had to kill something, didn’t they?

What happened to the deer? Well, history just loves irony. England’s landowners–a rich and powerful class of people–discovered they could make more money by getting rid of those annoying people who lived on the land and farmed it. They enclosed the land, making smaller fields and raising sheep in them. It’s called the enclosure movement. Cue massive displacement and poverty, not to mention political unrest, but never mind all that, there was money to be made.

In enclosing the land, they got rid of the places deer liked to breed. It wasn’t the most important result, unless you’re a deer, but it left a wealthy group of people in need of something to kill. And there was the fox, who had no hand in all this, with its beautiful coat and inconvenient need to eat. 

To turn up the volume a bit, along came the Industrial Revolution, with its improved network of roads and its new network of railroads, making the countryside more accessible to would-be hunters living in towns and cities. For a few days, they could pretend to be country gentlemen. 

Or gentlewomen. 

Awkwardly for anyone who argues that foxhunting is about pest control, the enthusiasm for foxhunting led to a shortage of foxes, which led to huntmasters buying pests for the hunters to eliminate. They were imported from France, the Netherlands, and Scotland, and in England organized gangs stole them from land that happened to be well stocked. 

Does any of that make them an ethnic group? Well, England’s aristocracy is inbred enough to have a common set of ancestors, but we just shifted ground there from foxhunters to the aristocracy as a whole. They have a few words or phrases the rest of us wouldn’t bother using but they’re stuck sharing their basic language, literature, history, and geographic origins with the rest of us. 

Not me, of course. I wasn’t born in Britain, but there aren’t enough of me to make them an ethnic group. 

Stonehenge: the story keeps changing

Posted on by
40

Want to change history? You have two choices: do something that changes the future or change the way we see the past. Neither one is easy, but a group of scientists studying the Stonehenge rocks have managed to change the way historians understand late stone age Britain. 

If you read much about Stonehenge, you’ll probably read about sarsen stones first–the uprights and the massive crosspieces that sit on top of them, forming the outer circle. They were hauled a mere 16 miles. On the other hand, they weigh an average of 25 tons, so however hard you worked last week I’m pretty sure you didn’t do that.   

Once you’re done being impressed, you’ll read about the bluestones–the stones that form the inner circle–which came from 140 miles away, in Wales. Before the invention of smartphones, which would at least have let the people who dragged them document the challenge.

Think about doing that without a single online follower leaving a Like. Where’s your incentive?

The bluestones weigh between 1 and 3 tons. 

A rare relevant photo, with thanks to K. Mitch Hodge, who made it available online at Unsplash.

What most of us wouldn’t have read about is the altar stone, but it’s the one that’s making headlines and retroactively changing history. 

In spite of its name, there’s no reason to believe it was ever used as an altar. It’s lying flat and it must’ve reminded someone of an altar. The name stuck, but don’t get carried away with the idea. 

The new information is that the stone traveled something like 500 (or 350, or 800) miles to play its part in Stonehenge–that’s pretending it went in a straight line–from what’s now Scotland, somewhere around the neighborhood of Inverness, John O’Groats, and Orkney. It’s a big neighborhood, but someone will be out there even now working to narrow it down. 

Why does that matter? Because it tells us that late stone age Britain (known to its friends as neolithic Britain) was a lot more connected than anyone knew. And it tells us that whatever function Stonehenge had, it had it for a whole lot more people than any recent residents suspected. 

 

Moving the stones

How did they get the stone from Scotland to the Salisbury Plain? It’s tempting to think, No problem. Just plop that beast on a boat, but we’re talking about a 6-ton stone. In a boat built in the late stone age. That might not comply with health and safety guidelines. Personally, I’d think two or three times before I jumped in and started to paddle.

Information about ocean-going boats in this period seems to be pretty limited, but they’d have been small and a little sticker on the side would’ve said, “Not recommended for the transport of any stone above 1 ton in weight.” 

Evidence of cross-Channel trade between Britain and Europe has been found, and that meant boats–it’s wet out there, people–but the evidence consists of lighter things like pottery, axes, and cattle. 

Okay, I admit, cattle aren’t light. But compared to the stones we’re talking about? You could lift two of them before breakfast.

The experts are still arguing about how the stones were transported. One experiment tried to move the equivalent of the bluestones across the Severn on rafts. They sank. 

The Severn? Most likely body of water on the way from Wales to Wiltshire, currently playing host to some large stones that future archeologists will try to explain in some marginally rational way.

That doesn’t prove it can’t be done, only that it couldn’t be done the way they tried to do it. Neolithic people would’ve had a lot more experience with neolithic boats than even the best modern-day experimental archaeologist. With so little known about late stone-age boats, it’s all guesswork. So we can’t rule out boats.

But there’s another compelling reason to take the stone overland. An archaeologist who wasn’t involved in the study explained it this way: “If you put a stone on a boat out to sea, not only do you risk losing the stone–but also nobody can see it.” 

But if we spend a few years dragging it the length of Britain, people along the route will get involved. Maybe they’ll help drag it a few miles. Maybe they’ll make us a nice cup of–

No, sorry, we’re centuries too early to get a nice cup of tea. Or even instant coffee, and forget about that frothy, expensive stuff folks have fallen for. We might be offered some nettle tea, though. It’s supposed to be good for sore muscles and arthritis. The island’s rich in nettles, and after hauling that stone we’re rich in sore muscles. We’re also building up the prerequisites of future arthritic problems. So whatever it tastes like, drink that tea and look happy. These people are being hospitable.

Most settlements will lay on a feast, or share what they can if it’s been a bad year. They’ll make us feel welcome and speed us on the next leg of our journey. And with each stop, more people will feel involved with the project. They helped pull that stone. They welcomed the people who delivered it. For generations, people will talk about it. 

The stone, the expert said, will become “increasingly precious . . . as it travels south.”

If dragging a 6-ton stone the length of Britain sounds impossible, I refer you to a BBC documentary–sorry, the name sank into the sludge that passes for my memory–about the bluestones. The presenters somehow got an entire class of primary school kids to pull a stone very much like the bluestones using nothing more than ropes and (if my memory isn’t playing tricks on me) a wooden sledge and logs for it to roll across. Maybe thirty ordinary kids, none of them even close to full grown. And the stone slid across the ground as if that’s what it had in mind all along. 

Admittedly, the ground was flat and it wasn’t full of boulders or forests, but it does show what plain old muscle power can do. 

One objection to the land route theory is that it’s hard to coordinate that many people, but teamwork would’ve been an integral part of any late stone-age community. And they wouldn’t necessarily have seen the length of time involved as a problem. They might’ve seen it as something like a pilgrimage. 

Getting places in a hurry is a relatively modern obsession.

The terrain wouldn’t have been easy, but the idea that Britain was wall-to-wall forest is, apparently, a myth. 

One theory holds that the stones could’ve been moved to Wiltshire by the glaciers, but finding a stone from Scotland wrecks this. 

“From Orkney, I can’t see a way that the stone hikes a ride on half a dozen glaciers in the right order to end up on Salisbury Plain,” a geologist said.

But forget about moving the stones. How did they set them upright?

An archeologist who’s raised the 12-ton cap stone on neolithic tomb using wooden levers said it’s easy, 

So if you buy a Stonehenge from Ikea, those are your assembly instructions.

*

If all that doesn’t sound like enough work, Stonehenge was built in several stages, each one involving a different configuration. I won’t take you through all them but it must’ve been like living with someone who insists on moving the furniture every few thousand years, only the furniture is multiple tons of rock and soil. 

We’ll probably never know what went on there or why, but we’re pretty safe saying that whatever it was, it was important. To a lot of people.

The Battle of Cable Street 

Posted on by
32

Now that Britain’s racist riots are–I hope–behind us, this might be a good time to look back at what happened on London’s Cable Street in 1936.

The background? (If you stay here long, sooner or later you’ll end up slogging through a bit of background.) Hitler held power in Germany and Musolini ditto in Italy. The British Union of Fascists, led by Oswald Mosley, claimed to have 50,000 members, and I’m not saying it didn’t, only that we’re taking their word for it and–oh, hell, it was a long time ago and for our purposes doesn’t really matter. It was big and it was most definitely fascist, complete with the antisemitism, the black shirts, the salute, and the violence. It had a gang of toughs known as the Biff Boys. 

 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: everlasting pea

The roots of antisemitism

Antisemitism was the Islamophobia of the era (in case you’re tempted to tell me that’s antisemitic, keep in mind that I’m Jewish), and it has deep roots in Britain. We could go back to 1290, when Edward I expelled the Jews from England, but let’s start instead at the turn of the twentieth century, when some of the people who opposed the Boer War (1899 to 1902; I had to look it up) blamed it on the Jews–they were imperialists, financiers, bankers, and capitalists. Not long after that, they were blamed for World War I (because they were financiers etc.) and the Russian Revolution (because they were communists). 

One of the oddities of antisemitism is that the Jews appear as both capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world and communist revolutionaries who want to overthrow the capitalist bloodsuckers who control the world. Basically, it works like this: if you see a problem, the Jews caused it. 

But antisemitism wasn’t all name calling and finger pointing. It was respectable. At University College London, in the name of improving the country’s genetic stock, Karl Pearson opposed Jewish immigration and argued that attempts to improve “inferior races” were a waste. Among other things, his work provided an intellectual grounding for the Nazis’ race theories.  

I focus on Jews here because we’re talking about antisemitism, but to be fair he was generous about handing out inferior race labels. 

Clubs and institutions–think golf clubs and things of that sort–had quotas to limit the number of Jewish members they’d accept. That continued into the 1960s. 

In the early 1930s, fascism was also respectable, not only for its antisemitism but because it offered a bulwark against communism, which in the midst of the Great Depression was a powerful force. Fascism appealed to industrialists who were desperate to keep their workers in line and to aristocrats, who’d lost considerable power–and along with it, money–to the industrialists. Again, to be fair, it didn’t appeal to all of them, but some went for it.

Take, for example, a 1934 headline in the Daily Mail, reflecting the opinions of its aristocratic owner, Harold Sidney Harmsworth, 1st (ahem) Viscount Rothermere: “Hurrah for the Blackshirts!” Harmsworth saw fascism as the wave of the future, was enthusiastic about Hitler and Mussolini, and opposed votes for women and wrote, “The fact is that quite a large number of people now possess the vote who ought never to have been given it.” 

Archibald Ramsay, son of the Earl of Dalhousie, founded the Right Club,  whose logo was an eagle killing a snake with the initials P.J., standing for “Perish Judah.” 

As an article by Adam J. Sacks points out, any hereditary aristocracy has a built-in affinity with theories about pure blood. “Even today,” he writes, “adoptees into aristocratic families in the UK are ineligible to inherit titles or properties.”

Oswald Mosley himself was a baronet. As titles go, it’s minor-league, but hey, it’s one more title than I have.

Or want.

But why should we spend our time with baronets, viscounts, and other riffraff when we can talk about the king? Edward VIII was openly pro-fascist. After he gave up the throne, he told Hitler, “We are derived from the same race with the blood of the huns flowing in our veins.” He’s on record as having told the Nazi high command “that continued heavy bombing will make England ready for peace.” 

Sacks sums it up by saying, “There is hardly a major British institution that was left untouched by fascism, from the Bank of England to the Daily Mail to the House of Commons. . . . If there is a story to be told about Britain and fascism, let it be this: while the people of Britain stood up to the Nazis, the British ruling class were in many cases enthusiastic collaborators–and found justification for being so in their own aristocratic roots and worldviews.”

 

The British Union of Fascists

Mosley overdid the violence at a couple of BUF rallies, where his Biff Boys beat up hecklers badly and more to the point, visibly, and he lost some of his support. That led him to refocus, organizing in a handful of working class neighborhoods. In 1935, the BUF newspaper said, “We are now the patriotic party of the working class.”

Led by a baronet.

One of the things they did was hold threatening open-air meetings on the fringes of the East End, which in the 1930s was a mainly Jewish neighborhood, and forget that noise about Jewish bankers and financiers, the people here were poor. Soup kitchens had lines outside every night.. And to double down on the parallel between antisemitism and Islamophobia, many of the Jews were immigrants. 

Individual Jews were attacked on the street, shopkeepers were threatened, antisemitic slogans were painted on walls. One or two of the articles talk about the residents feeling like they were living under siege.

 

Enough with the background. What happened?

Mosley announced that the British Union of Fascists would march through the East End, in uniform. 

The Jewish People’s Council against Fascism and Anti-Semitism–the JPC–circulated a petition asking for the march to be stopped. Within two days they’d gathered 100,0000 signatures and the petition was presented to the Home Secretary, who said goodness, no, he couldn’t interfere with freedom of speech or movement. Instead, he sent a police escort (6,000 in one telling, 10,000 in another) to keep protesters from interfering with the march.

The JPC started organizing to do exactly that–interfere. Various sources credit slightly different combinations of groups for this, but let’s go with the counter-demonstrators being from the Jewish and Irish communities, from trade unions, and from the Independent Labour and Communist parties. More respectable Jewish organizations were urging the Jewish community to stay indoors and avoid confrontation. This was very much an action of the left, and the crowd that turned out on the day was big enough to block Gardiners Corner at Aldgate. The estimates I’ve seen range from 100,000 to 300,000. 

The march was made up of 3,000 Blackshirts, and they waited near the Tower of London for the police to clear them a path, which they tried to do by charging the crowd on horseback and wading in with batons. They’d beat the crowd onto the pavement and more people would stream onto the street. Four tram drivers abandoned their trams where they blocked the road.

Meanwhile around the Tower of London, fights broke out between Blackshirts and antifascists. 

Eventually, the police gave up on clearing a path and redirected the march to Cable Street, a narrow street leading to the docks. (In one telling, this was Mosley’s decision.) A combination of Jews and Irish dockers barricaded the street. (The final third of Cable Street was predominantly Irish.)

When the police broke through the barricade, they were faced with a second barricade and while that slowed them down women threw things at them from upstairs windows. 

Eventually the police retreated and told Mosley to head his march in the opposite direction and disperse. 

A member of the Jewish community later said, “I was moved to tears to see bearded Jews and Irish Catholic dockers standing up to stop Mosley. I shall never forget that as long as I live, how working-class people could get together to oppose the evil of fascism.” 

Another said, “it was amazing because we saw Jews, Orthodox Jews with long silk coats and soft felt hats and the sidepieces standing shoulder to shoulder with Irish Catholics, dockers and Somali seamen. . . . They all felt there was a need to be out there to stand on that particular day.” 

A third said, “In Stepney nothing had changed physically. The poor houses, the mean streets, the ill-conditioned workshops were the same, but the people were changed. Their heads seemed to be held higher, and their shoulders were squarer–and the stories they told! Each one was a ‘hero’–many of them were. . . . The ‘terror’ had lost its meaning. The people knew that fascism could be defeated if they organised themselves to do so.”

The acclaim wasn’t universal. Time magazine described it as an “anti-Fascist rampage . . . which turned out to be London’s biggest riot in years.”  

By the end of the day, 85 people had been arrested, 79 antifascists and 6 fascists. Many of the antifascists were beaten by the police and some were sentenced to hard labor. What happened to the fascists who were arrested I don’t know.

Cable Street marked a turning point for the British Union of Fascists. The leaders turned on each other. Some resigned. The organization didn’t collapse but it did lose momentum. It also lost Mussolini’s financial support, which had been substantial. In 1940, not long after the start of World War II, Mosley and other leaders were in prison.

Who were the Bluestockings?

Posted on by
28

You’ve just been dropping into the 18th century. You are a) privileged, b) clever, and c) female. That letter C) is going to cause you trouble. And you can expect some grief from the end parenthesis as well. You’re expected to be mindless, pretty (if possible), and above all, childbearing. After that–well, there is no after that. That’s your role. Abandon hope, ye who expected more out of life.

The rational creatures in your world are all male. Just ask one if you don’t believe it. If you think you’re also rational, you’ll have a hard time convincing anyone of it, and you’ll cause all sorts of social embarrassment by trying. 

Any form of ambition will also cause embarrassment.

You will, of course, have been educated, but only to be a wife and mother, to manage a prosperous household, and to be decorative–fashionable, demure, graceful, and several other adjectives. You will have learned reading, embroidery, music, dancing, drawing, a little history and geography, maybe a bit of French. Just enough to make yourself agreeable to men and above all, marriageable.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s pretty but it’s invasive.

Those are the limits of your expectations, so let’s shift to the past tense. I don’t want to trap you back there for too long. Or myself. I’m about to hyperventilate.

Did I make any of that up because I’m a childless cat lady? Sadly for the people who lived through that era–and sadly for our era, which inherited a surprising number of assumptions from theirs–no. By way of example, the statesman Lord Chesterfield wrote to his son in 1748 that women “are only children of a larger growth; they have an entertaining tattle, and sometimes wit; but for solid, reasoning good sense, I never knew in my life one who had it, or who reasoned and acted consequentially for four-and-twenty-hours together.”

With a bit more generosity, Dr. John Gregory wrote in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), “If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from men, who look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of cultivated understanding.”

This is the world the Bluestockings came from and whose conventions they both broke and stayed within. 

 

The conventions they broke

The Bluestockings were never a formal organization. They were a social and intellectual circle made up for the most part of affluent English ladies, and they’re best known today for having hosted gatherings where men and women spoke on equal terms about literature, art, history, philosophy, science, foreign affairs, and pretty much anything except politics. And as Margaret Talbot puts it in the first article I linked to, England made room for them with, “a kind of condescending, self-congratulatory gallantry.” 

They hosted some of the age’s top talent, including Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, David Garrick, Horace Walpole, and other men of letters, aristocrats with a literary bent, diplomats, painters, politicians. In short, people who mattered.

But they were more than simply hostesses. These were highly educated women at a time when the doors of any serious school were closed to girls and women. Some were self-educated. Some were educated at home by unconventional parents. But having attained an education against all the odds, they were shut out of most of the public spaces, such as coffee houses, where men discussed the issues of the day. The only way they were going to be part of those discussions was to bring the discussions into their homes. Hence the hostessing.

The men they invited had something to gain as well. Gatherings that discussed serious subjects were in sharp contrast to the usual social evenings of their class, which involved drinking, cards (of course for money, silly), and, as Talbot puts it, getting up to “sexual shenanigans.” That helps explain why the Bluestockings offered lemonade and tea instead of booze.

But the Bluestockings did more than just host salons. Many of them went on to write novels, criticism, history, classical scholarship, and endless letters. Letters were the social media of the day. Others worked as translators. One of them, Elizabeth Montagu, published an essay that was influential in establishing Shakespeare as a central figure in England’s national identity. The essay first appeared anonymously and after it became a smash hit (in the small circles where these things could be smash hits) it was republished under her name. 

Publishing was more than just a way to participate in the national conversation. It was one of the few fields where a woman could keep the money she earned. She couldn’t go into business or own property in her own name, but she could publish. 

 

The conventions they kept

But far from throwing all conventions out the window, they lived the conventional lives of ladies of their class, running their households and caring for aging parents, as women were expected to. Elizabeth Carter, whose translation of Epictetus held its place as the standard translation for the next century, is described by Gibson as “always careful to present herself as the perfect woman: meek and modest, diffident and self-effacing, completely unthreatening to male authority.” 

She could make a pudding as well as she could translate ancient Greek.

And then there was class. As ladies of their class were meant to be, they were snobs. One, Hannah More, had helped a working class woman publish her first book of poems, and when the book was successful enough to bring in some money she pressured the author to put her money in a trust administered by More and another upper-class Bluestocking, because how could “such a Woman” be trusted with her “poor Children’s money?”

(As you can see from the quotes, they didn’t break the conventions around capitalization either. They capitalized anything they damn well pleased.)

Another tale involves conventions around both class and women’s bodies. And religion. When the widow Hester Thrale married her daughter’s music teacher, her Bluestocking former friends were toxic about it. He was of the wrong class, he was foreign born, and he was Catholic. She was giving in to passion, and they were above passion. As one wrote, “Overbearing Passions are not natural in a ‘Matron’s bones.” 

Part of the problem with passion was that their intellectual claims rested on their respectability. One whiff of scandal and the whole structure might collapse. The rest of the problem was that in their world women were thought of as physical and men as intellectual, and in order to emphasize women’s rationality, they saw themselves as standing outside their bodies. That made them refined and respectable. That was the basis for equal treatment. Lose that and they were back to being just babymakers.

 

Their name

The name Bluestockings came not from what the w\omen wore but from a single man at one of those salons–or so the story goes. A botanist, Benjamin Stillingfleet, was invited and didn’t bother to change from the blue worsted stockings he wore in the field to the white silk stockings upper class men wore to formal occasions. Or else he was invited and declined because he didn’t have the appropriate clothes and his hostess told him to come “in his blue stockings.”

Or else–as one article claims–the respectable stockings were black, not white. It doesn’t matter and I can’t be bothered chasing that down. My money’s on white. Believe whatever version you like. Believe them all if you can manage. Either way, the story has nothing to do with what the women wore. The women accepted and used the term. 

Later, when their time had passed, Bluestocking became an insult–something to call a woman with intellectual ambitions and unbecoming opinions. And the radicals who might would’ve been sympathetic to their inherent feminism overlooked them as elitist and conservative. 

Still, history didn’t erase them. The Bluestockings had an effect on Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft, and much later Virgina Woolf, and through them, on us.

Nothing is lost. I swear it to you. 

English Protestantism and the King’s Book of Sports

Posted on by
22

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

Posted on by
24

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

Posted on by
61

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.