Category Archives: History

Britain’s unexploded bombs

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In February, a builder in Plymouth was digging–something builders do a lot of–when his shovel hit a piece of rusty metal. That doesn’t sound like national news, but after a bit of exploration he recognized the size and shape of an unexploded bomb and hit the panic button. As did the experts once they were called in. 

What he’d found turned out to be a 500-kilo bomb left from World War II. (If you want that in pounds, multiply it by 2.2 and eat three squares of dark chocolate, preferably before breakfast.) Some 1,200 people were evacuated from the area and over 100 military personnel were brought in as a kind of unintentional trade. 

Or in a different article, over 10,000 people were evacuated, but let’s not worry about it. I suspect we’re looking at two different categories–the residents who had to move immediately; the ones who had to move later to clear the route the bomb took to its final exploding place; the ones who ran screaming from their houses even though they weren’t anywhere close. Or else we’re looking at a roving zero, which plonked itself down in somebody’s text. I love to see numbers mess with people other than me. I take up enough of their attention, so it’s only fair that I step back sometimes. Anyway, let’s just say a lot of people had to move out of their homes. Roads were closed. Trains and buses were stopped. Reporters and photographers gathered. Ink was spilled.  

Irrelevant and ever so slightly ironic photo: a sunrise, looking as hopeful as any sunrise will

It took days to dig the bomb out, and once that was done (without setting it off, mind you) they still had to move it through the city and out to sea, where they could detonate it safely. Or at least safely if you’re not a marine creature minding your own business in an area humans consider uninhabited. But let’s not think about that. Let’s just call this a happy ending. The alternative–or at least one alternative–was blowing the bomb up where it was, destroying homes for blocks around and threatening water and gas lines.

 

What’s an unexploded bomb doing in Plymouth?

Plymouth–like London; like a lot of British cities–was bombed heavily during World War II. It had a major naval dockyard and a large military presence, making it an important target. 

Not that a city needed strategic value to be bombed. Leftover bombs were dropped pretty much anywhere at the end of bombing raids so the if the planes carrying them were being chased they could gain height and speed and get the hell out of there. And non-strategic cities were bombed on the theory that destroying historic sites would damage morale, which is why Exeter was bombed. The target was the Cathedral, which they missed, but they wrecked a lot of the city center. When the city rebuilt, it left some of the wreckage in place as  monuments to–well, you can read the monuments any way you like: to those lost in the bombing, to everyone who died in the war, to everything that was lost. Maybe it’s the openness that makes the remains so moving. 

But back to Plymouth, with its value as a strategic target. Want to do numbers? Of course you do. Numbers make us all sound like we know something. 

During the seven worst days of the Blitz, the city was hit with 6,000 general purpose bombs (hands up anyone who knew there was such a thing as a general purpose bomb) and 105,000 incendiary bombs. In four years of bombing, over a thousand civilians died and over three thousand were injured, That’s out of a population a bit north of 200,000. More than four thousand properties were destroyed and eighteen thousand were damaged. The city center was pretty well flattened. It was rebuilt in the late forties and fifties and (unsolicited opinion follows) is pretty grim. 

Never mind. Those weren’t easy times and it’s easy to criticize when you don’t have to wrestle with the problems that must’ve been involved. 

To take in the scale of what Plymouth was  living with during the Blitz, though, you have to think about not just the 59 bombing raids but the 602 alerts, when people would  haul themselves out of bed and hide someplace they hoped was safe but knew to be, at best, only safer than staying put and pulling the covers over their heads.

In the midst of all that bomb-dropping, some 10% of the bombs dropped didn’t explode.

 

How many unexploded bombs is the UK sitting on?

It’s hard to get an exact count. You can call for them to put their hands up all you want, but they won’t do it. Something like 45,000 have been found, although that’s probably an underestimate. The Ministry of Defense deals with some of them, but others are dealt with by private companies, and there’s no central count for us to tap into.

If we can’t get a count of the bombs that have been found, we’re even further from getting a count of the ones sitting under someone’s garden, minding their own lethal business. The closest I could come to a number is that some 500,000 “items  . .  of unexploded ordnance” are in the waters around Britain, mostly from World Wars I and II, although some are from exercise drills and other fun stuff. 

Are they dangerous? Um, yes, at least potentially. Some are known and marked on maps. Others aren’t. 

Ooooh, don’t go wading. I think I see something just under the sand.

On land, though? The BBC says there are “potentially thousands.” We’ll go with that. It’s vague enough to be unchallengeable. And they’re at least as much of a threat as the ones underwater.

“What makes unexploded bombs dangerous is their unpredictability,” one expert said. Over time, they might have degraded. Or they might’ve become more dangerous. We’d be wise not to gamble that eight or so decades of sitting in the ground, contemplating the horrors of war, has made pacifists of them.

 

How did Britain deal with them during the war? 

At the beginning, badly. Bomb disposal officers could expect to live two months. They were issued a hammer, a chisel, a ball of string, and if they were lucky, a stethoscope. 

What was the string for? Your guess is as good as mine, but the stethoscope was for the bomb, not to see if their hearts were still beating.

“The running joke was ‘join the Army and see the world, join the bomb disposal squad and see the next world’,” historian Steve Day said.

(You’ll find that in the BBC link that’s just above if you want to make sure I didn’t invent it. I remember just enough about footnotes to get twitchy when I don’t put a link in for quotes.)

With time, they–those who lived and the folks in charge–got better at it. The key was understanding the fuses. One, Type 17, had a clock that could be set to go off anywhere from a minute to a few days after the bomb landed, but it could be gummed up with either a sugar-based fluid or a magnet. When the Luftwaffe upped its game and introduced an anti-tamper fuse, disposal experts learned to drill into the side of the casing, force steam in, and let the liquid TNT drain out. 

These days they use pretty much the same techniques, but robots get to do the most dangerous work.

Inventing the post office: A bit of British history

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Britain’s post office was established in 1660, under Charles II. Or in 1630, under Charles I. Or in 1711, under Queen Anne. Or in 1516, under Henry VIII.

All those dates have at least a semi-rational claim. One of the things I love about history is how clear-cut everything is. 

Let’s start with Henry. What he set up was a national network that would serve the court, although one website dates it to 1512, not 1516, and Cardinal Woolsey gets the credit instead of Henry, but we’re at least all talking the same language here, so it’s close enough for our purposes. 

The system involved relays of horses and messengers, and this was revolutionary stuff–the internet of its day. Up until then, if you wanted to send a letter, you had to send your own damn courier or find someone going in the right direction who’d carry your letter or package through the airport scanner for you. (“Did you pack your own luggage, sir?” “Of course not. I have minions who do that for me.” “Of course, sir. No problem, but you still can’t take your sword on the plane.”)

Or maybe Henry’s system wasn’t so new. According to WikiWhatsia, the first postal service was in Egypt, in 2400 BCE, and Persia had one in 550 BCE. Ancient Rome, ancient China, the Mongol Empire, and assorted other political entities can also stake early claims. Whether anyone in England knew about them at the time is up for grabs.

For us, it doesn’t matter. The system was new to England and people who were important enough to get close found ways to slip their own letters in with the court documents. 

Irrelevant photo: A camellia escaping a neighbor’s back yard in early February.

 

The service goes public

In 1630, the ill-fated Charles I (lost his head in the civil war) opened the service to the public. Or someone did it for him. Monarchs always get the credit for other people’s work, possibly because the initiative was theirs but possibly because they didn’t get in the other people’s way.

Never mind. Here’s how it worked: First we shift into the present tense, because it’s so much more exciting and because you want to drop Mom a note saying you’ll be home next Monday and what’s the point of doing that if Monday’s already in the past? You write your letter and take it somewhere–the write-ups aren’t clear on this, but it wasn’t your local post office and it wasn’t a mailbox, since neither exist yet. Probably to the nearest post, which is not a piece of wood driven into the ground but a place that’s part of the (ahem) postal network. The mail goes from one post to another, and the postmaster at each one pulls out the mail–sorry, the post–for his area and sends the rest on. 

We’re probably correct here in saying “his,” not “his or hers,” “theirs,” or some other awkward variation, although I can’t swear to that. Let’s let it stand this time.

England and Scotland have six main post roads, and letters travel along them, so if you and Mom aren’t that far apart but are in different postal areas that aren’t joined by a post road, your letter will first go to a post before it heads more or less backward to reach her. But it’s not all inefficiency, because the service works night and day, literally. 

Once your letter reaches the post in Mom’s area, it’s handed to a postboy, who’ll deliver it, either on horse or on foot, and if Mom wants it she’ll have to hand over some money, otherwise forget it: no letter. Of course, by the time it reaches her you might already be home, so she can save herself the expense.

How much does she save? It depends on weight and distance. When the system started, the charge was 2d for 80 miles for a single sheet of paper. 

A d? For no reason a rational person will ever remember, that stands for a penny, so 2 pence, or a day’s wage for a skilled tradesman. In other words, not cheap.

How fast was the system? (You’ll notice we’re in the past tense again, having forgotten all about you and your mother. Hope you had a nice visits.) A letter sent from Edinburgh to London might get a reply in something like two months. 

The system had competition from private carriers–hundreds of them, although I haven’t found any information on their systems, costs, or speed.

 

The Civil War and the Restoration

You’d think the English Civil War (it started in In 1642) might’ve distracted people, but staying connected mattered at least as much as it ever did, and the Commonwealth’s postal service covered England, Scotland, and Ireland. In 1657, the General Post-Office was granted a monopoly, getting rid of those pesky competitors, and a fixed rate was established for letters. No one seems to list this as one of the post office’s many founding dates, but it strikes me as having a reasonable claim. 

That carries us to Charles II and another founding date. 

In this telling, Charles–or at least his government–gets credit for not just founding the General Post Office (no hyphen this time–think how much time and ink that saved) but for rolling it out across the country, although it sounds like the Commonwealth had already done that.  

How was this different from the hyphenated post office set up by the Commonwealth? Haven’t a clue. It might’ve been a major improvement and it might just be a case of the Commonwealth’s work not being taken as seriously as the monarchy’s. You’re on your own. 

It was under Charles II that postmarks became standard. They showed the date a letter was mailed, pushing the carriers not to stash a bundle at the pub for a week or two when things got busy.

That brings us to postboys, the final link in the delivery chain and a problematic one, which they’d continue to be until late into the 18th century. They were badly paid and some of them dealt with that creatively, by robbing their post bags. Give them an A for initiative. 

However risky it was, it wasn’t uncommon for people to send cash. How else were you going to get money from Point A to Point B? Cheques weren’t used in England until 1640, the first checkbook wasn’t issued until 1830, and checks didn’t circulate widely until the late 1800s. 

But postboys weren’t the only people who thought of looking inside the post bags: highwaymen regularly attacked carriers and stole the mail.  

Even if no money was stolen and the mail wasn’t stashed at the pub for a week or two, the service was slowed down by roads that could be pot-holed, ankle-deep in mud, and in general a mess. And we’re talking about a 24-hour service, remember. In the dark, it wouldn’t have been easy to tell the road from the countryside around it. 

 

Following the money

In 1711, under Queen Anne, a bill created a single post office of the United Kingdom and set postage rates and delivery times, which is why some sources give that as the founding date. The Post Office (what the hell, let’s use caps here*) was now a branch of the Treasury and its goal was to raise money for the state.

Where had the money gone before that? During the Restoration, it was used to pay pensions to court favorites. After the Revolution (I think this means the Glorious Revolution, so 1688-1689) it paid pensions to peers and statesmen. By 1699, a third of the Post Office’s income went to pay pensions. Compare that to what the postboys and highwaymen stole and they’ll come across as minor-league players.

The bill took that nice little pot of money and put it in the state’s hands so it could do something useful with it, like fund a war. 

What war? I find two: Queen Anne’s War, where England and France fought for control of North America, and the War of the Spanish Succession, where assorted countries fought over, um, the Spanish succession. (You’d never have guessed that without my help, would you?) If I’ve missed any, feel free to pencil them in yourself. The point is, think what an improvement this was.

 

I’m bored. Could we have a scandal?

Oh, always. 

From the Restoration on, it was accepted practice for MPs and Lords to send and receive letters for free. That’s called franking, which comes from Latin francus, or free, and I had to look it up too.

By the 18th century, MPs (and I assume Lords) were sending other people’s mail for free under their signed covers–it was a nice little favor they could do for friends and supporters and general hangers-on–and by 1754  that was costing the post office £23,600 in lost revenue, which in 2023 money would be something north of £4,000,000. 

How did the post office deal with that? Why, it set up a system to look for abuse of the system, of course, and that brought in a new way to abuse the system. It could almost make a person cynical, couldn’t it? In 1735, opposition MPs complained that their mail was being opened in the post office on behalf of the ministry. 

What ministry? Damned if I know. Apparently it’s too obvious to need saying, but this was the government snooping on the opposition under cover of being sure they didn’t abuse their franking privileges.

This led to the revelation that the inspector of franks, Edward Cave, had been gathering material for his own publication, The Gentleman’s Magazine, from the newsletters and gazettes that passed through his hands on their way to (or possibly from) MPs. And although I’ve lost the link by now, one source mentioned money being stolen from the mail in the House of Commons post office. By the person in charge of it. In the name of being sure no one was misusing their franking privileges.

To deal with the problem, the Commons decried abuse of the franking system. We can all guess how effective that was. Then in 1764, an act dealing with franking set up “harsh penalties for those trying to defraud the Post Office, including transportation to the colonies.”

I can’t find a record of a single MP or Lord being transported under the act. I’m sure you’re as surprised as I am.

 

Want a bit of corruption that doesn’t qualify as a scandal?

Throughout the 18th century, the post office had two postmasters at a time. These were patronage positions: lucrative places to drop people you owed a favor to and who you knew had no interest in doing any real work. Most of the postmasters were peers or the sons of aristocrats at the end of their careers. One, Thomas Villiers, Baron Hyde of Hindon (later earl of Clarendon), called it “a very good bed for old courtiers to rest in,” 

Why isn’t that a scandal? It was business as usual. It’s only a scandal if enough people are shocked.

 

* My capitalization of post office is wildly inconsistent, but you know what? I’ve worked as a copyeditor and I’m  retired now. That means I officially don’t have to give a fuck. Whee.

Britain’s unwritten constitution and its, ahem, challenges

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You’d think Britain was a careful country. It’s concerned enough with health and safety to make a lot of jokes about it. (Or them if that’s a plural. The words have melded together so solidly in the national consciousness that it’s hard to tell.) It’s survived long enough to be obsessed with its own history, which keeps those of us who share that obsession occupied happily. Somehow, though, it got careless with its constitution and never wrote it down. 

Yes, that is embarrassing, but the country makes do with something called an unwritten constitution.

What’s an unwritten constitution? Well, it has words, it’s just that they’re not on paper. Or not any one piece of paper. They’re on lots of pieces, in lots of places, and I’m not convinced any two people agree on which pieces, which places, or which words. What everyone agrees on is that it’s made up of statutes, rulings, precedents, treaties, and a yellow onion aging gently in the back of my refrigerator. And because Britain takes itself and its history seriously (most countries do), people who’ve grown up here consider this normal. It’s only people like me, who having wandered in from other places, say, “An unwritten what?? Is that even possible?” 

It is: what exists must be possible, but its unwritten state puts a lot of pressure on precedent–not to mention on me, as the keeper of that onion. Precedent becomes not just history and habit and revered tradition but (I’m repeating myself but this is central, so bear with me) an element of the constitution itself. And that leaves everyone wondering which precedents go into the constitution (who knows? It’s not written) and which ones get filed under Anomalies.

Irrelevant photo: I have no idea what this shrub is, but it’s growing outside a neighbor’s house and it flowered in late January. I’m impressed.

I’m writing about this now because not because the status of the onion has changed (sleep well tonight: it’s fine) but because a recent political and legal uproar has brought it into focus–again.

 

The uproar

I’ll tell you the tale in a minute, but before I do I have to ask, Don’t I sound clever when I use words like anomaly? Hell, I even spelled it right without the help of my spellcheck. 

Thanks. Now I owe you the tale. 

In 1999, the Royal Mail introduced a new computer system called Horizon, which was made by Fujitsu and cost a billion pounds to install. I hope that included the purchase price, but you know, a billion pounds doesn’t go as far as it used to, as you’ll have noticed the last time you were in the supermarket. It definitely doesn’t include the legal costs of what turned out to be a royal fuckup. It’s way too early to calculate those.

Horizon was used by sub-post offices, which are post office counters set up in corner shops and village shops–mom-and-pop operations for the most part–and the users soon started reporting glitches. Serious glitches. The kind of glitches that said, “Your calculations are off by a few thousand pounds today.”

Since their contracts with the post office said they had to make up any shortfall, you should picture sub-postpeople tearing their hair out, weeping, shouting, and calling the post office to report a problem.

And to each of them, the post office said, “Geez, no one else is reporting any problems. It must be you.” The post office not only didn’t look for the source of the problem, it demanded its money and it prosecuted people for financial shenanigans.

Businesses were lost. Marriages were lost. People went broke. Disaster entered people’s lives in multiple forms. Some 4,000 sub-postpeople were accused of theft, fraud, and false accounting, 900 ended up in court, and a lucky 236 went to prison. Eventually, sub-postpeople contacted each other and compared notes. They discovered it wasn’t just them and went public with their stories.

Anyone in Britain who stays awake for the 6 o’clock news heard about this years ago, and Parliament started hearings on the issue in 2021. The hearings ground on quietly until–I’m serious here–the BBC aired a TV show dramatizing the sub-postpeople’s fight, at which point, politicians said, with one voice, “You’re right. Somebody ought to do something.”

Then they remembered that they were the somebodies in charge. That’s even more embarrassing than forgetting to write down your constitution.

Shocking revelations from the hearings jumped from obscurity to page one of pretty much any paper you can think of. Except, maybe, the Sun. We all collectively found out that Fujitsu knew about the program’s glitches as early as 1999. We learned that the post office not only knew about the glitches but edited witness statements from Fujitsu so they didn’t acknowledge the program’s bugs. We learned that the post office didn’t disclose relevant information and now claims it’s not realistic for them to work evenings and weekends all these years later to find it. I could go on, but you get a feel for the shape of this mess, right?

With that sort of thing floating into public view, suddenly all the ways of addressing the problem that either weren’t necessary or weren’t possible before became not just possible but politically necessary, and if they weren’t exactly done they were at least promised, which in PoliticalLand is the same thing.

On the symbolic level, the former head of the post office gave back her CBE, an acronym that stands for Commander of the British Empire. 

What would the British Empire have done if she’d issued a command before giving back her award? Nothing. It doesn’t exist anymore. As far as I can figure out, all the CBE gives a person is bragging rights and a medal. If those matter to you, it’s important. If they don’t–well, you can put it on the table next to an egg, a sausage, baked beans, tea, and toast and you’ll have a small-scale version of an English breakfast, although I don’t recommend eating the medal. Or the beans.

On a more practical level, the government jumped in and promised compensation and said it would introduce a bill to overturn all those convictions for fraud etc.

How much compensation are we talking about? One former sub-postmaster says it would cover 15% of his losses. Another called the offer offensive and cruel. A third said it wouldn’t cover the interest on what she was owed. But let’s nod nicely to that little game of three-card monte (you’ll want to keep your hand on your wallet as we get close) and move on. We need to talk about the bill to overturn the convictions, because that’s the one that raises constitutional problems.

 

Why? What’s wrong with doing justice on the cheap?

At first glance, a bill to overturn unjust convictions looks good. Sweep a forearm across the table and shove all those convictions onto the floor, where they’ll land alongside the egg, baked beans, sausage, tea, CBE medal, and broken crockery. Labour–the opposition party just now–in the person of its leader, Keir Starmer, jumped in and said yes, the bill’s a great idea, and walked out of Parliament with baked beans sticking to his shoes. 

I was tempted to write that everyone strode off into the sunset singing “Rule Britannia,” only–did I mention that the empire’s dead and gone? What’s more, the Commons’ Defense Committee estimates that Britain’s army would run out of puff after only a few months of fighting a more or less equal power. So we’ll find some other song. “Goodnight Irene,” maybe. One verse goes, “Sometimes I live in the country / Sometimes I live in the town. / Sometimes I take a notion / To jump into the river and drown.”

You’re right. I shouldn’t be allowed out in public, but have faith, someone will come up with the right song. I look forward to fielding comments on the subject. Y’all are almost as irresponsible as I am.

In the meantime, the proposal has some built-in problems. If anyone really did steal money from the post office, the bill would overturn their convictions along with those of the innocent. In an effort to iron out that wrinkle, the government proposed that no one could get their compensation without swearing to their innocence. In writing. That way, if they turned out to be guilty, they’d end up back in court, because (ironically, given that the context here is an unwritten constitution) putting a statement on paper and swearing to it can be legally binding. 

That brings us to a new wrinkle: the sub-postpeople are understandably wary of swearing to anything. They don’t trust the courts, the post office, or the goodwill and sanity of bureaucrats or the government. They may be reluctant to open themselves up to another unfair prosecution. 

Larger than that, though, is the constitutional problem: Britain’s courts are independent of Parliament. In other words, politicians can’t overrule them, but here they’d be doing exactly that. This is written down exactly nowhere, but it’s a longstanding precedent and part of our invisible constitution.

What happens, then, when a new precedent comes along and overturns the old precedent? Irresistible force; immovable object. I never did know the answer to the question of what happens when one meets the other. The best I could do is say that either one turns out not to be immovable or the other one turns out not to be irresistible. I also don’t know what happens when a new precedent tries to elbow out an old precedent. Are they equally powerful? What does the constitution have to say?  The answer depends on interpretation, and on who gets to do the interpreting.

Ken MacDonald–sorry, Lord Ken MacDonald, the former Director of Public Prosecutions–explained the issue by saying, “What we have is Parliament seizing from the courts and the judges the right to say who is guilty and who is not guilty. And the problem is that once this dam is burst–we can all see it’s being done for the best of reasons here–who’s to say how such a process might be used in the future?”

It’s not unreasonable for him to worry. The government’s already going nose to nose with the courts over a bill to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. The Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional and right away a right-wing edge of an already right-wing Conservative Party called for Parliament to overrule the court and review the courts’ authority over the government. It called for the prime minister to “step up and do whatever it takes.” 

Depending on how recently you’ve had the wax cleared out of your ears, “whatever it takes” can sound either down-to-earth and practical or threatening. To my ever-so-clean ears, it sounds like a call for the courts to be swept aside when they get in the way of a party’s political agenda. 

To date, the prime minister has tried to placate the right without ripping up the invisible document that’s supposed to govern the way he governs. He’s introduced a bill that declares Rwanda to be a safe place to deport people to. The idea is that if Parliament says it’s safe, then it is, so the Supreme Court won’t be able to say it isn’t.

No, I didn’t make that up.  

The bill passed the House of Commons and is, I believe, currently being eviscerated in the House of Lords. If I’m right–and I don’t know how the vote there will go–it couldn’t happen to a nicer bill. The problem is that the Lords can only hold the bill up, not chop it into little pieces and put it on the compost heap. 

If you begin to get a picture of vocal sections of the country calling for the introduction of an authoritarian regime, then you’re standing in the same museum I am, and looking at the same picture. Precedents aren’t hard to find on the international scene, and they’re influential although they don’t get to become part of Britain’s constitution. 

The bill may not be necessary in any case. There’s a way to overturn the post office convictions without chopping holes in the invisible constitution: the Court of Appeals could speed up the appeals process by trundling in retired judges to help and hearing the cases in large batches, a bit like chocolate chip cookies in an industrial oven. But that doesn’t give anyone political credit for getting things done, so where’s the fun in it?  

Meanwhile, back at the post office . . .

. . . they’re still using the Horizon software. In fact, the post office paid £95 million to extend Fujitsu’s contract for two years. Or some amount along those lines. The article I pulled that from is full of numbers, and numbers and I aren’t on good terms. If you want serious numerical reporting, go follow the link and don’t bother me. What I can tell you is that Horizon’s still full of glitches and the post office is trying to replace it but seems to be trapped. It spent £31 million trying to move the work to Amazon–and failed. 

If the post office ever gets out of this mess, is the story over? Hell no. Last Sunday’s paper announced that the software used by Ofsted inspectors periodically wipes out everything they’ve put in, leaving them to recreate days’ worth of work from memory. 

Ofsted inspectors? They’re the folks who go into schools and rule–often on shaky grounds, if the reports I’ve read are correct–on whether a school is failing or fabulous. The school’s future depends on their judgment. Schools aren’t told when the inspectors are working from memory, so if they challenge an inspector’s conclusions, they can’t use that as evidence.  

An Ofsted spokesperson said, “Everything’s fine. Go back to sleep. We’ll wake you if we need you.”

Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

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We seldom know less than when we’re sure of ourselves, and since we all know that the men in Anglo-Saxon England were warriors and the women were, um, you know, women, a recent article revisiting those assumptions makes for good reading.

What did it mean to be an, um, you know, woman in Anglo-Saxon England? Oh, hell, we all know the answer to that. They pottered around the house, fussing over whether it needed new curtains. In their spare time, they birthed children and kept them from falling into the fire or the lake or the river, and they spun, wove, dyed, sewed, embroidered, cooked, baked, healed, fed, cut hair, made fires, sharpened blades, worked in the fields, churned butter, chopped wood, and basically didn’t matter one little bit to the economy or the culture.

I don’t sound sour, do I? I don’t have any reason to be.

Irrelevant photo: I’m reasonably sure these are  honeysuckle berries. Some species of honeysuckle have edible berries and some don’t, although as someone or other said about mushrooms, “They’re all edible, but some of them only once.” So beautiful as they are, I won’t be making jelly out of them. Especially since I don’t make jelly.

So what’s with this new study?

It re-examines pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon burials, focusing on the ones that were dismissed as outliers because they didn’t fit the expected pattern.

The pre-Christian part of that sentence is important, because people buried stuff with their dead–the things that mattered to them; the things they used in life–so they tell us a good bit about how people lived. Christian cemeteries don’t give us that gift. 

As a general rule, weapons, horse-riding equipment, and tools (as in, not household tools) are associated with men. Jewelry, weights for spinning yarn, sewing equipment, and beads are associated with women. But that’s not an absolute. The exceptions are those outliers, and for years archeologists dismissed them because they messed with their expectations. 

A study by James Davison looks at what’s been swept aside, arguing that the Anglo-Saxon approach to gender may have been more fluid than we’ve assumed. Working with burials that took place between the fifth and eighth centuries in Buckland, Dover, he finds that grave goods don’t always align with the sex of the skeleton, and in an article about his work he talks about two burials in particular, both of people who had high status in the community.

How does he know their status? From how much effort went into digging the graves. Digging graves is hard work. I haven’t dug any myself, but I’ve planted plants and dug a drainage ditch, both of which are easy by comparison, and I can testify that the earth we live on is heavy and full of rocks and roots and clay and other fun stuff. People put more effort into the graves of people they considered important.

And then there are teeth. Cavities indicate that the person had access to sugar, which was a luxury, and an absence of horizontal lines on the teeth (enamel hypoplasia, in case you care) indicates that the person didn’t go short of food. All of that plus rich grave goods will tell a clear story about a person’s standing in the community.

With that bit of background tucked under our gender-appropriate haircuts, let’s consider Grave 30, which holds the skeleton of a person who was somewhere between 35 and 40 years old. The skeleton’s definitely male and the grave was particularly deep for the period–0.61 meters–so figure high status. Other markers of status are the teeth (five cavities, so a taste for sugar, and if we still measured status by cavities, I’d be a fucking queen) and no markers of malnutrition. 

If you’re still not convinced by that, you can run your virtual fingers through the grave goods: a bone comb, a silver-gilt brooch and a silver pin (standard parts of a woman’s clothing, but upscale ones), 84 beads, a silver pendant, a buckle, a knife, and a set of iron keys. High status. 

Keys? They were important markers of women as keepers of the home. Some women were buried with actual keys and some with symbolic ones–presumably because the real ones couldn’t be spared.

Hang on, though: this is a male skeleton. With the kind of things that would typically mark a woman’s burial. And they were held in high esteem by the community.

What can we make of this? It’s hard to know, since the people who could’ve explained it are dead and nobody seems to have thought it was worth documenting. Should we decide the person was a transexual? That strikes me as importing a twenty-first-century interpretation onto a seventh-century life. So should we say this was a man who was accepted as a woman? Or who was accepted as a man but lived the way women typically lived. After all, you don’t have to renounce one sex to live in a way that’s more typical of the other one. 

Basically, we can’t know. What we can know is that the picture of Anglo-Saxon culture that we’ve been given is oversimplified. 

 

Grave 93

Now let’s wend our morbid way to Grave 93, where we’ll find a skeleton of about the same age that’s written up as possibly female, since it’s not as well preserved as the one in Grave 30. The grave isn’t as deep, but it’s large, so the person was of high status, if not quite as high. The teeth are interesting: they show some evidence of cavities but also of occlusal fissures, which are often caused or exacerbated by feminizing hormones, particularly during pregnancy. 

Hoping to move our skeleton from the Possibly Female category into the Probably Female one, I asked Lord G about hormones and occlusal fissures and ended up trolling through a series of articles about dental sealants. In other words, I learned nothing of any use. So we’ll have to leave our friend in the Possibly Female file. 

Sorry. I liked the story I was building, but we’ll be boring and stick with the few facts we have at hand.

Whatever sex the person was, they were buried with a sword, a spearhead, fragments of a decorated shield, one glass bead (it was probably attached to the sword, and I could spin you a good story around that too, but we’re trying to stay with fact, remember), an iron rod, a bronze band, iron fragments from a buckle, and a bronze ring. Swords were associated with the burials of men, but not just any men. Swords were for (sorry to keep using the phrase) a high-status men. Of the seventeen graves excavated, only this one contained a sword.

If the skeleton was female, what do we make of what was buried with it? Maybe that this person lived and fought as a man and was considered a man. Maybe that women–or at least this woman–fought as a man without having to be considered a one. In other words, women could be accepted as warriors. A person doesn’t have to be transexual to mess with gender roles. It’s also possible that this woman was the last survivor of her family and was buried with the family heirlooms, although if that had been true I’d expect her to have had the traditional woman’s goods as well. 

 

C’mon, though, give us a conclusion

Sorry, I can’t. Archeologists are amazing in their ability to unearth bits of the past, but they’re frustrating creatures who refuse to give us details they don’t actually know. Or the good ones are, anyway. So hats off to the ones who refuse to oversimplify the picture of how people lived in the past, and a boot up the backside to the ones who left us with the neat and inaccurate images we’ve carried in our heads for so long.

English slavery: the legal history

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This post comes to you from the Department of Contradictions. It’s a big department, so don’t wander off on your own, please. We may never see you again.

The most familiar parts of England’s relationship with slavery–at least to me, so I’ll quietly assume it’s true for you too, since I’m clearly the pattern for all humanity–are the slave-based economy of its colonies and its involvement in the slave trade. And right behind that comes the work of its abolitionists. But if we stick to those, we’ll miss a couple of messy and interesting parts of the story. So let’s look at whether slavery was legal under English law. It’ll be heavy on top-down history, but in a later post I hope I’ll be able to get into what English slaves did to free themselves. It’ll be useful to know the legal stuff when we get to that.

Ready? Good. Stick together please. I did warn you.

Irrelevant photo: Fields showing the medieval divisions–long strips, because those plows were hard to turn.

Early history

I’m American originally and make a lot of standardized (not to mention silly) American assumptions, so first let me remind you (we’re identical, remember, so your mind will be as silly as mine) that slavery hasn’t always been based on color differences, or even on national or ethnic differences.

You already knew that? So did I, but the image in my mind appears in black and white anyway, so it’s worth repeating. 

When William the Conqueror seized England’s throne and everything that went with it, he sent his minions to count up what he’d conquered, and in 1068 they reported that, among other things, 10% of the population was enslaved. At least some of these would’ve been Anglo-Saxon slaves held by Anglo-Saxon slaveholders. 

A bit later, in 1102, England abolished slavery. Take a minute to notice that, please: slavery was outlawed. 

The country kept serfdom, though, and although serfdom wasn’t slavery, it was a close and unpleasant relative, the kind who drinks too much, doesn’t wash often, and starts fights at family parties. It wasn’t until the 17th century that the last form of serfdom, villeinage, was abolished.

But even in the middle ages, some people (for which you can read some people who were powerful enough to have left a record of their opinions) found it abhorrent. Henry II (1154 to 1189; you’re welcome) freed some of his villeins “because in the beginning nature made all men free, and afterwards the law of nations reduced some under the yoke of servitude.”

Just after you think, Wow, you ask yourself, Why didn’t he free them all, right? It’s a fair question. The answer is that I haven’t a clue, but if you’re constructing an argument that England’s law, culture, and history don’t accept slavery and its various cousins, make a note of that quote. It’ll be useful. 

Be careful to ignore all the evidence that runs counter to your argument. You’ll find plenty of it and it’ll only confuse the picture.

Now let’s zip forward to 1569, when someone named Cartwright was seen whipping a man and the courts got involved, because it looked like assault–or technically, battery.

Wait, though, Cartwright said. He’s my slave, so I have the right.

The court disagreed and ordered the man freed, saying that  “England was too pure an air for slaves to breath in.” 

No, the spelling isn’t mine. The letter E was rationed back then. They weren’t going to waste one just to mark the difference between breath and breathe. They knew we’d figure it out.

As far as is known, the slave was  from Russia. He was white and Christian.

Important as the ruling was, exactly what it meant in terms slavery’s legality remained hazy, but it would’ve been clear enough for the Russian. He was free. 

History’s an ironic s.o.b., though, because at about this same time England first got involved in the international slave trade, and from here on the picture is black and white, not white and white, because the slaves they were transporting came from Africa. 

Slave trading was small-scale stuff at first, but by 1660 the Royal African Company was incorporated and it went into the trade on an industrial scale, transporting 212,000 slaves, almost all of them branded on their chests with either the name of the company or DY, for Duke of York. Out of those, 44,000 died on the slave ships. I trust I don’t need to tell you about the conditions on the slave ships. If I do, ask Lord Google about the Middle Passage. The conditions were brutal, degrading, and–look at the numbers–often lethal. 

That 212,000 isn’t the total number of slaves transported by English ships, only by that one company. The total would be something along the lines of 3.1 million, and only 2.7 million of those survived the trip.

If you want a historical landmark for the start of industrial-scale slave trade, we’re talking about Charles II’s reign, and yes, I had to look that up, so don’t feel bad. 

And with that, we’re ready to introduce a new subhead, because this one’s wearing out.

 

Contradictory rulings

In 1677, an English court heard a case involving a group of slaves who were “wrongfully detained.” (The quote’s from Peter Fryer’s book Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain, so no link. If you want to go deeper into the topic, the book’s a good place to start.) The case involved a squabble between two white men, a plantation owner in Barbados and a naval officer who argued that “as there could be no possession of people as property, therefore his action in detaining the enslaved persons was more akin to the feudal practice of villeinage, which tied people to land, thereby making them immovable as simple property.”

So we won’t find heroes on either side of this case. It was two charmers fighting over human property. One wanted them as slaves and the other as serfs. The court ruled that “since black people were bought and sold and as they were infidels, they ranked as merchandise and therefore could be treated as property for the purposes of the claim.” (We’ve gone back to Josh Hitchens for that quote. See the first link if you want to go deeper.)

Two things stand out in this ruling: one, people could be considered property; and two, this could be justified by checking their religion against England’s own. If they didn’t match, the people could become property. 

The people involved were not set free.

A second ruling at the end of the century repeated the role of religion in deciding whether a person could be property: “heathens” could be; Christians couldn’t.

Logically enough, this led to a widespread belief that becoming a Christian would free a person, and English slaveholders went to some lengths to make sure their slaves got no chance to convert, and ditto the communities where they–the slavers–kidnapped people to enslave them.

On the other hand, not long after that ruling we find one that says, “The common law took no notice of blacks being different from other people,” and another saying “That as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free. . . . One may be a Villein in England, but not a Slave.”

Neither ruling touched on the slave trade or slavery in English colonies. They applied only to within the borders of England.

 

Except…

Except that they didn’t exactly apply within the borders of England, because slavery did exist within its borders, unchallenged. They were about slaves coming into England. 

Why should the law consider them different from the slaves already there? Beats me, but it did. 

Still, slaveholders continued to bring their slaves into England, and they were worried enough about the risk that they asked the attorney general for an opinion on the subject, which he dutifully issued in 1729. A slave, he said, remained a slave while in England, baptism didn’t free a slave, and a slave could be compelled to leave England and return to the colonies. He didn’t cite case law or precedent–the altars English law worships at–but the opinion was taken seriously and used in court by lawyers who managed to keep a straight face while doing so.

 

A bit more case law

Legal rulings wobbled backwards and forwards on the issue for a good–or not so good–long time. In a 1749 ruling, slaves remained slaves. In a 1763 ruling, they not only became free, they could charge their former masters with ill treatment. 

Then we get to the case of Jonathan Strong, who was brought to England as a slave, beaten so badly that the slaveholder threw him out on the street when Strong was no more use to him, and later tried to reclaim him when he saw that he’d recovered. Strong was held in jail before he could be put on a ship, and he managed to contact the men who’d help him recover from his beating. 

It all ended up in court and Strong was set free, after which one of the men who’d helped him, Granville Sharp, was sued for £200–a shitload of money at the time–for interfering with the slaveholder’s property. The slaveholder also challenged him to a duel, an invitation Sharp was sharp enough to decline.

He was also sharp enough to defend himself in courts, since he couldn’t find a lawyer who thought he had any defense, and he did a good enough job that the plaintiff’s lawyers dropped the case and the plaintiff had to pay the costs.

Actually, three times the costs. So we get to do a victory dance, but we’ll have to cut it short because the ruling avoided setting a precedent. What’s more, five years after he was beaten and thrown out on the street, Jonathan Strong died as a result of his injuries. He was 25.

By now, Sharp had become a campaigner, and he was involved in a few more cases that rescued individuals but didn’t yield a decisive ruling on slavery’s legality. 

That sets the scene for the 1772 Somersett case. James Somersett had been enslaved in Massachusetts, was brought to England as a slave, and after two years escaped. He was recaptured and held on a ship bound for Jamaica but rescued by legal intervention.

When the case went to court–we’ll skip over the legal arguments–at last a judge came back with a decisive ruling: slavery was so “odious” that it could only exist if authorized by law–and no English law had ever authorized it.

But, despite appearances, the Somersett ruling didn’t abolish slavery in England, it only prevented slaves from being forced to leave the country against their will. This was no small thing, because the slaves in England tended to be servants. (I’ve read of one group who worked in a quarry, but they seem to be the exception.) Without minimizing the horrors of slavery, the threat of being deported to, say, a sugar plantation in Jamaica if they tried to run away was a powerful one. 

So slavery itself continued on English soil, and English newspapers continued to advertise the sale of slaves and searches for runaways. 

 

The abolition of slavery

England’s involvement in the slave trade became illegal in 1807, but slavery within England wasn’t abolished until 1838, when it was abolished in the colonies as well. Except, ahem, for the parts of the world ruled by the British East India Company, which were ruled by the company, not its government.   

The slaveholders were paid compensation. The slaves not only weren’t compensated, in the colonies they were pushed into what were a thinly disguised form of slavery called apprenticeships. By then, though, slavery had already died out within England, not because of new laws or court rulings but because, Fryer argues, the slaves themselves had become a powerful anti-slavery force and freed themselves.

But that’s another post–or it will be if I can find enough detail to make it work. 

Wards and guardians in medieval England

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As a culture (generalization alert here), we sentimentalize medieval England. At least when we’re not talking about its fleas and flies and plagues and dirt, we do. Still, the sentimentalizing outweighs the fleas-and-flies stuff. We like to think there was a time when nobles were noble, or at least when someone was. Shouldn’t someone be pure of heart in this mess of a world?

Of course they should, and it must’ve happened a long time ago, because we don’t have a lot of purity on show right now. Therefore–this is so obvious I hardly need to say it–it must’ve happened in the middle ages. After all, they did leave us some beautiful pictures, and some yarns we can swallow whole if we work at it. 

But medieval England was nothing if not upfront about making a profit, including from that thing we sentimentalize most, childhood. 

Okay, if childhood isn’t what we sentimentalize most, it comes right after kittens and puppies.

Irrelevant photo: Not some knight’s horse but a pony living wild on Dartmoor.

Wardship

Let’s say you’re the heir to one of medieval England’s aristocrats but, oops, your father dies while you’re still a minor–less than 21 if you’re male, less than 16 if you’re female. You’re going to become somebody’s ward and they’re going to be your guardian.

Why am I talking about only your father? Because your mother gets shoved off the chess board as soon as your father dies. 

I should squeeze an extra fact in here: If you’re male, you get to be the one and only heir, but if you’re female and no male is in line ahead of you, you and any sisters you happen to find will divide the inheritance among you. 

Why? 

‘Cause that’s how it works. 

We have most of the pieces in place now. There you are, heir to a big chunk of land–and land is wealth in medieval England–but too young to control it. You might think your mother could be your guardian but no, sorry, your mother’s good enough to take care of whatever children won’t inherit the land, but not of you, kiddo. That right–and we’ll come to why it’s a right more than a responsibility–goes to your late father’s feudal lord. Who’s likely to have their own best interests at heart, not yours. Having a ward is lucrative and wardships are bought and sold like any commodity. If it’s to their advantage, your guardian may hold onto your wardship. If it’s not, or if they need the money, they’re likely to sell it. 

Hold on, though. We shouldn’t talk about wardship as if it’s a single thing. It can be split up, with one person guardianing you, the actual child, and another guardianing–and, entirely legally, profiting from–the land you’ll inherit. And this is right and proper and necessary because as a child you can’t provide military service, and military service is the most important thing feudal lords owe as payment for their land. Whenever the king WhatsApps them, they’re expected to fight, and to bring some set number of armed men with them. 

And since too young to be trusted with a smartphone, the adult controlling your land will take responsibility for all that warrior stuff. And, again, since all the gear soldiers need–horses, weapons, armor, food, alcohol–doesn’t come cheap, profiting from your future estate makes sense, right? 

Well, it does if you can immerse your mind in the assumptions of a feudal world. 

So that’s the land. If the elements of your wardship are divided, though, somebody else will get to decide who raises you. They’ll have the right to arrange your marriage, and since marriage is about connections and land and power, and since you’re a rich heir, the right to arrange your marriage is a game piece worth having. Your guardian might marry you and your riches into their own family. They might marry you into a family they want to build an alliance with. They might sell your marriage.

If all this sounds cold, we haven’t even started. Your custody may not get settled permanently. Your child-self can be taken from one home by armed men and deposited in another. That’s called ravishment. You can then be deposited in some third household because the person who’s taken you isn’t interested in your charming company but in having control of you. You could then be ravished back to the first household, or to a third. 

“No provision for feudal heirs was final,” according to Sue Sheridan Walker, in “Widow and Ward: The Feudal Law of Child Custody in Medieval England.”

All the people involved can also go to court, and often do. What little is known about how this worked (and the tales are hair-raising) comes from court records–which, frustratingly, often end halfway through the story, so we never get to find out what happened. What we can pretty well guess is that they don’t end, “And they all lived happily ever after.” Happiness doesn’t seem to have been an expectation, although to be fair when you can only trace a bit of history only through court records you inherit a built-in bias toward the ugliest stories. When it all works smoothly, no one goes to court.

 

Let’s go back to the mother, though

Mothers get to raise their younger children–who cares about them?–although if the heir dies, the next in line will have to replace him. And an aristocrat’s widow will have the income from her dower lands to support what’s left of her family.

Her what?

Dower lands are generally a third of her husband’s estate, and a widow has a lifetime right to them. When she dies, they revert to the estate–presumably to her son. Since we’re talking about a group of people with a high death rate, both through illness and warfare, a woman might be widowed multiple times, acquiring dower lands as she goes and becoming quite wealthy. So even though she might not have the right to act as her own child’s guardian, as a feudal landlord she might become the guardian of some tenant’s heir, and she might either act as guardian herself or sell the wardship.

When a child’s orphaned, the question people ask isn’t, Who’s the best person to raise this child? It’s, What rules govern the land the child will inherit?  

 

Yes, but…

As an heir, you just might live with your mother if your guardian approves or if your mother buys your wardship, but we can’t assume she’ll think her home is the best place for you. Aristocratic childhoods are short. Children–orphaned or not–are commonly sent to other households at 6 or 7, generally a household that’s a step up the feudal food chain, where they’ll make important connections and get an education. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of who’s literate and who isn’t. The answer will depend on what part of the medieval period we’re talking about anyway. But whatever book learning he acquires, the most important things an aristocratic boy can learn are warfare and what it takes to be an adult in this stratified society–or as one article put it, he needs to “learn breeding.” So even if you stay with your mother, you can’t expect to stay with her for long, and the household you grow up in might turn out to be your in-laws’. Marriages are arranged early and it isn’t uncommon for a very (very) young betrothed couple to grow up together.

Which leads us to ask why, if she’s going to send you away anyhow, your mother might want to buy your wardship, and one possible answer is, for profit: a child can be sold into marriage. Or she might want to marry you off to fulfill an arrangement the family made before your father’s death, which would strengthen or confirm an alliance. 

She might also want to control whose home you’re raised in. Marriage and fostering were highly charged political moves.

If she’s one of those mothers who ravish their children–that’s stealing them from their guardians, remember–she might not be doing it because she misses your charming companionship and the crayon artwork you left on the castle walls. A marriage made against your legal guardian’s wishes will still be valid.

And as Walker points out, medieval mothers aren’t necessarily involved deeply with their children. As infants, the kids are in the care of wet nurses. They’re sent away while they’re still young. Books on deportment are singularly silent on what a mother’s duties to a child are. 

 

And finally, there’s another form of guardianship

Medieval England has another way an aristocrat might hold land, though: socage. It doesn’t have the prestige of holding land that you pay for in military service. In fact, it moves us closer to the peasant level. You pay for your land either agricultural service (this isn’t for the aristocracy) or in money. But even though there’s less cachet in holding land this way, you can hold one bit of land in socage and another bit by knight-service, so your socage parcel doesn’t move you down the food chain. 

Don’t look for a simple picture.  

If you’re the heir to land held under socage tenure, then guardianship goes not to the feudal lord but to your nearest male relative who isn’t entitled to inherit the land. If you’re female, you can contract a marriage without the lord sticking his long feudal nose into the arrangement. (Yes, the source I’m stealing this from said you could contract a marriage by your very own self. You don’t have to depend on someone else doing it for you.) If you’re male, you may find that being the oldest male doesn’t entitle you to inherit the whole parcel of land; it may be divided. It’ll depend on all sorts of complexity that’s above my pay grade. As far as the topic of wardship goes, though, it sounds like you’re less of a pawn than if you’d inherited high-prestige land.

After 1660, knight-service tenure was wiped out and it all became socage.   

Parliament, the British crown, and the tug-of-war over money

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It wouldn’t be irrational to track English, and then British, history by following the financial wrestling match between the monarch of the moment and the parliament of the moment. 

We won’t do that any kind of justice here, we’ll just ice skate over the top, mostly following the mechanism through which the monarchy’s funded. 

 

The Sovereign Grant

As of 2012, Britain’s ruling king, queen, or what have you–along with what are called the minor royals and what Winnie the Pooh would call all Rabbit’s friends and relations–are funded by the Sovereign Grant. This rolls together three earlier grants and presumably makes everything simpler. For all I know, it may actually do that, although I can’t help remembering that every time the US made income taxes simpler, the forms got harder to fill out. 

Never mind. Different country, so let’s go backward, to the Civil List.

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

The Civil List

The Civil List dates back to 1689 (or 1698, but let’s not quibble; if one of those is a typo, it’s not mine) and to the joint monarchy of William and Mary. Parliament voted them £600,000 to cover civil and royal expenses. 

What’s the difference civil expenses and royal ones? No idea. I’m just parroting what the Britannica says but it covers all those minor royals, staff, palace upkeep, and–I don’t know, maybe polishing the jewelry and the sivlerare.

Before the Civil List, the monarchy relied on its own income (it owned stuff–lots of income-generating stuff and still does) and whatever taxes Parliament approved for its use. When that wasn’t enough (it never was for long, especially when a special occasion came up and someone wanted to throw a war), the monarch had to go back to Parliament and say, “Please, sir, I want some more.”

Parliament could, and sometimes did, keep a monarch underfunded so–

Well, for this to make sense you have to understand that the king or queen could send Parliament to bed without supper, or more to the point, send them home, where they had no power to recall themselves; they had to wait for the monarch to call them back into session. And since Parliament could be a pain in the royal backside, a king or queen might not call them back for a long stretch of time.

Unless they needed money, so we’ve come full circle: it suited Parliament to keep the crown underfunded.

After William and Mary took their her-and-his thrones, power shifted decisively to Parliament. The monarch was now bound to summon Parliament regularly. That was the cost they paid for becoming the kingsy and the queensy, but even so, as one MP said, “when princes have not needed money, they have not needed us.”

So, yeah, keep that monarch short of money and Parliament had a job for life.  

In 1690, Parliament set up the Commission of Public Accounts, which tracked the crown’s spending. It could then earmark money for certain expenses but not for others. So we’re watching Parliament’s control increase.

That says the Civil List didn’t exactly give the crown the keys to the candy store, but it did give them a lot of candy. What did they do with it? The Georges (I, II, and III) were known for using it to buy friends. Here was a sum of money the crown had under its control. 

George III gets a particular mention here for handing some money to supporters in Parliament in the form of secret pensions and assorted other bribes. Parliament struck back in 1762 by supervising the account and in 1780 by banning secret pensions. 

The fun was over. Victoria was allowed to grant pensions to people in the arts and sciences, or who’d served the crown one way or another but only on the advice of her ministers.

Religious oaths in British history, or how to keep groups you don’t like out of Parliament

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The British state is as tangled in arcane rules as a kitten in a ball of yarn, but it’s not above issuing itself a scissors when either necessity or the political mood of the moment demands, and that’s what it did in 1833, when a Quaker, Joseph Pease, was elected as a Member of Parliament. 

The strand of yarn that needed to be cut was the requirement that MPs swear their allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment. Who’s not called the monarch-of-the-moment but the king or the queen, with a capital letter I can’t be bothered to hand out, and it’s all taken very seriously, thank you.  

Irrelevant photo: This is what cats do on a rainy day. But hey, I did mention kittens…

 

Quakers and oaths

The problem in 1833 was that Quakers didn’t swear oaths, and I assume they still don’t. It’s against their religion, and you don’t have to read very far into Quaker history to find that when something’s against their religion, serious Quakers will go to no end of trouble not to do it. Their founder was well acquainted with prison. He was jailed for blasphemy, for refusing to take an oath, for having long hair, for assorted other things. That long-hair charge was ruled not proven (i’m not sure how–you’d think the evidence would be on hand, or on head), but he and several others weren’t released. Instead they were fined for refusing to take their hats off in court. They refused to pay the fine, which they considered unjust, and were returned to prison. 

They’re a stubborn lot, the Quakers. I admire them. 

So, no oath for Joseph Pease, who wasn’t the first Quaker elected to Parliament. One was elected in 1698 but never got to take his seat. Three years earlier, Quakers’ affirmations had been accepted in place of oaths in most situations. The exceptions were giving evidence in court, serving on a jury, and holding a paid crown office. (in 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence. (In 1828 that was modified so that affirmations were accepted if they were giving evidence.)

MPs weren’t paid until 1911–they were assumed to be independently wealthy and the setup pretty much restricted the post to people who were–so it wasn’t irrational to think the new MP might be able to take his seat. He wrote to the speaker saying he hoped “my declarations of fidelity . . . might in this case, as in others where the law requires an oath, be accepted.”

The hell it would be. No oath, no seat in the Commons. A by-election was ordered and someone else was elected. 

 

Which brings us back to Joseph Pease

That explains why when Pease was elected he expected trouble. He told his constituents that he was prepared to “go through much persecution in your cause” and wouldn’t “be surprised if the [Commons’] Serjeant-at-Arms be ordered to take me into custody.” 

But it was now 1833–practically modern times, right? Two seventeenth-century laws that kept anyone but Anglicans out of public office had been repealed in 1828, and the Catholic Emancipation Act had been passed in 1829.  

So Pease showed up, announced that he wouldn’t take the oath, surprising no one, and was asked–or possibly told–to step outside while the Commons discussed its response. 

What the Commons did was set up a committee to look at laws and precedents, because what Britain has instead of a written constitution is an endless collection of precedents. How anyone who enters that maze finds their way back is beyond me, but find a way back they did, and in what must be record time they recommended that Commons accept his affirmation. The house agreed and he got to take his seat.

That same session of Parliament passed a law accepting affirmations for jury duty and public office from Quakers and Moravians.

Moravians? They’re a Protestant group founded in Bohemia by Jan Hus and predating Martin Luther. (Bet you didn’t know that. I didn’t know about that pre-dating business.)

 

Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?

Um no. Because although Catholics had been admitted to Parliament in 1829, Jews had to wait until 1858. And voting was still restricted to people with money. 

Did I say “people”? I meant men. The idea of women either voting or running for office was too absurd to spend time on. So let’s focus on the next category of people to wriggle through the eye of the political needle.

Jews weren’t specifically excluded from Parliament, but to take a seat they had to swear an oath that included the words, “Upon my true Faith as a Christian,” and you can see what that’s a problem if you take this stuff seriously. Or even if you don’t. That would be a step too far, even for my own irreligiously Jewish self.

Disraeli, who’s known as Britain’s first (and only) Jewish prime minister, was born Jewish but converted as a child, when his parents did, so he had no problem a Christian oath. Interesting that he’s still considered a Jewish prime minister, don’t you think?

We can also unearth an MP and a Lord or two who had Jewish ancestors somewhere in the background but who was Christian enough to feel comfortable about the oath. Were they Jewish? Weren’t they Jewish? I’m sure it depended on who you asked, and quite possibly still does. 

In 1850, a clearly Jewish Jew was elected to represent Greenwich, and instead of disappearing politely as a previous Jewish would-be MP had, he took his seat and refused to leave, causing an uproar. The house voted on whether to adjourn and he cast a vote. He also spoke on a motion that he be asked to withdraw.

The whole thing went to the courts and he was fined £500 for every vote he cast.

Over time, the Commons passed more than one bill that would have allowed Jews to take a different oath, but the Lords kept blocking it. Eventually, a compromise allowed each house to modify their oaths by a special resolution for each Jewish member elected. 

None of this applied to people from other religions, or to atheists, although I haven’t seen evidence that any either ran for office or got elected at this point.

It’s hard to say when dissenting Protestants were allowed to take seats in Commons. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, according to Parliament’s website, some dissenters attended Church of England services occasionally to be sure they wouldn’t be excluded. That makes them hard or impossible to count. 

So basically, I can’t offer any information on them.

 

But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again

Once he took his seat, he had one last problem to contend with: In this period, men took off their hats as a sign of deference to their superiors, and Quakers refused to recognize either superiors or inferiors, so they kept their hats on their heads. That’s one of the things George Fox was jailed for. So as Pease came in, the Commons doorkeeper would sweep his hat off for him and leave it in the Commons library. 

Problem solved. 

Breaking with tradition, he didn’t address the Speaker of the House as sir, and where other MPs referred to each other in speeches as the honorable member, he settled for the member. The roof did not fall in.

 

What oath do MPs take these days?

It’s all loosened up considerably. If they’re going to swear, they use a wording settled on in 1868. They get to choose their sacred book and say, “I swear by Almighty God that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to [his or her] Majesty [fill in the appropriate name], [his or her] heirs and successors, according to law. So help me God.” 

I’d recommend inserting an and before “heirs and successors,” but no one’s asked me. 

Having a choice of sacred books reminds me that, to date, no Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster member has been elected as an MP, which is a shame because they’d have to appear with a colander on their head and hold a copy of The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. 

May I live long enough to see that happen.

But we’re not done with the choices now available. They can take the oath in Welsh, in Cornish, or in Scottish Gaelic. They can hold the book up. They can raise a hand but not hold the book. They can kiss the book. They can dance the hula and leave everyone speechless.

No, you can’t trust everything I say.

On the other hand, if they’re going to affirm, they say, “I do solemnly, sincerely, and truly declare and affirm, that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to” etc. 

I don’t know why they have to both declare and affirm, but it’s okay because it comes with a side of fries and a fizzy drink, but they don’t get to dance the hula.

What happens if you’re an anti-monarchist? You have a problem. Would-be MPS who don’t either swear or affirm their loyalty to the crown can’t take their seats, speak in debates, vote, or receive a salary. They can’t pass Go. And they can be fined £500 if they try to do any of that. And if that isn’t enough, their seat sill be declared vacant “as if they were dead.”

Lucy Hay, England’s civil war, and history looking the other way

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Lucy Hay, Countess of Carlisle–not to be confused with Ann Hay, Countess of Something Irrelevant–played a small, double-edged part in England’s Civil Wars, and you might not want to get too close to those edges, because they were sharp. She was the daughter of an earl but, what with being a woman and all, couldn’t inherit a title of her own. You know how it is. I didn’t inherit a title either, and I’m willing to bet you didn’t. 

So Lucy married a man who soon became an earl, although he was a lowly baron when she married him.

Irrelevant photo: Cornwall’s foggy cliffs–or one of them anyway.

 

A digression

English being the wild-eyed, confusing thing it is, the wife of an earl is a countess. This almost makes sense if you think back to the Norman invasion of England. 

No, I know you weren’t alive then. None of us were. Imagine yourself back to the Norman invasion. The Normans brought the word count with them from the Continent, only since they were coming from France the word was counte. You’ll want to be careful how you pronounce that. However you spell it, though, the word never made the transition to English. It was defeated in hand-to-hand combat by the Anglo-Saxon word eorl (now earl), which applied to roughly the same small group of men. 

And so it is that in English you only get to be a count if you bought your title abroad. Buy it in Britain and you’re an earl. And if you want to know why the wife of an earl isn’t an earless–

Damn. I was going to refer you to the overstuffed Mysteries of the English Language file for an explanation, but then I typed the word and saw that the imaginary wife in question would probably be ear-less instead of an earl-ess. I doubt that explains the discrepancy, but it is a satisfying absurdity. Let’s quit while that’s fresh in our minds.

 

But we were talking about Lucy Hay

Lucy–I repeat, for no good reason–had to marry to get herself a title, and James Hay, the soon-to-be earl she married was a major player in first James’ and then in Charles I’s court. He was knight of the Bath, master of the wardrobe, keeper of the warm fuzzy towel, groom of the stool, and gentleman of the bedchamber, although not all at the same time.* The titles are ridiculous–you have to travel in very select circles to even say them with a straight face–but they mark his political influence.

The kings poured money and possessions over him, but let’s skip the details. He’s not our focus. For our story, what matters is that he brought Lucy to court, where she made an impact in her own right. She was beautiful–probably the quality that was most valued–witty, charming, and smart. Or at least she had a reputation for all of the above. I wasn’t there either, so I can only take other people’s word. She was celebrated by assorted poets and rumored to have affairs with a range of men. I wouldn’t put too much weight on the rumors, because (a) we don’t seem to have anything to back them up, and (b) it’s what was (and still is) said about any woman who accomplished anything, because surely it’s the only way a woman could get anywhere.

From here on, we’ll find that respectable sources don’t say much about ol’ Lucy, so I have to rely partially on the less official ones. They may be correct–they’re at least fairly consistent–but as historical citations they’re not much more impressive than, ahem, I am. So, for what it’s worth:

Lucy became lady of the bedchamber to Charles I’s queen, Henrietta Maria, and went on to be a close confidant. Then in 1636, Lucy’s husband died. By some accounts he left her a wealthy widow. By others, he left nothing but debts. Either way, she chose not to remarry and became close to Thomas Wentworth, the earl of Stafford and the king’s main advisor, sparking a rumor that they were sleeping together, because what else could a man and a woman do when they’re together?

How influential was she? It’s hard to know. For the most part, women had to operate in the political shadows, so we’re not going to find a lot of documentation. That’s great if you’re writing novels–no one will prove you wrong, so you’re free to have a good time–but not so great if you’re writing history.

 

But why do we care about Lucy?

Because Charles I is the guy who got his head cut off. You know: English Civil Wars. Conflict between Protestants, Very-very Protestants, Catholics, and Possible Catholics, not to mention between king and Parliament.

Parliament was pushing for more power. Charles was pushing for more power. But there was only so much power to go around. Non-Church of England Protestants were pushing for religious freedom, at least for themselves if not for anyone else. Everybody was maneuvering for something. And Stafford–remember him? C’mon, it’s only been a few paragraphs. King’s adviser. Lucy’s good buddy. Parliament noticed that Stafford was vulnerable and had him executed–and Charles (that’s the king; remember him?) put his seal to the order. His political position was already shaky and he either couldn’t or wouldn’t risk his royal neck for a mere favorite advisor.

In some tellings, that’s why Lucy turned against Charles and toward the more moderate of the Presbyterian groupings in Parliament. (They were the relative moderates; the radicals were the Puritans.) But that’s guesswork. All we know is that she became close to John Pym, the most visible advocate for Parliament’s power, and when Charles decided to arrest Pym and four other MPs who were getting on his royal nerves, she tipped them off, so that when the king marched into Parliament with armed men, they were nowhere to be found.

Would history have played out differently if he’d gotten his hands on them? We’ll never know. He didn’t. A civil war broke out, and Lucy sided with Parliament until the Puritans came to dominate it, when she switched back to the Royalist side, pawning a necklace to raise £1,500, which she gave to the cause. That was a big honkin’ sum of money at the time and it’s not to be sneezed at today. She generally kept communication open with, in no particular order, Charles (that’s Charles, Jr., who later became Charles II), the queen, and scattered bands of Royalists. Parliament had her arrested and held in the tower for 18 months, and from there she stayed in communication with Charles, Jr., by cipher.  

Also by email.

In spite of all that, when Charles II got to the side of the board where they put an extra checker on his head, kinging him, she didn’t regain her old influence. 

Why not? History doesn’t say. Maybe because she wasn’t of use anymore. Maybe she was no longer young and beautiful enough to get the (male, remember) poets cranked up. Maybe her contacts in the new court weren’t strong enough. That’s all speculation, though. The court–the one she’d held restore–had moved on, leaving her behind.

She died of apoplexy not long after Charles II became king. 

Apoplexy? It’s a dated word for a cerebral hemorrhage or stroke. In a more general way, though, it means to be really, truly furious. Which she might well have been by then, although I have nothing more than a hunch to back that up. If she’d known history was going to pretty well ignore her, she’d have had all the more reason to be apoplectic.

 

* Note: I only made up one of those titles. The rest, I swear to you, are real.

A quick history of British lifeboats

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The thing about being an island is that you have coasts, and the thing about having coasts is that ships wreck on them. In the early 19th century, Britain and Ireland racked up an average of 1,800 shipwrecks a year. And–you will have figured this out already–the thing about shipwrecks is that people die. 

For most of Britain’s history, rescuing people from shipwrecks was a hit-or-miss business. People in ports did what they could, but seas stormy enough to wreck a ship are stormy enough to wreck the small boats they’d put out in, and there was a limit to what they could do. 

Irrelevant photo: rose hips

 

The organizational stuff

Mostly, people put out in whatever little boats they had, but in 1730 Liverpool introduced a boat dedicated to nothing but lifesaving, and in 1785 Bamburgh launched the first one specifically designed for it. Four years later, businessmen from Tyne and Wear ran a design competition for a lifeboat. Let’s toss in a name or two here, because they’re wonderful. The winning boat was designed by William Wouldhave, and it could right itself if it capsized. 

After that, the boatbuilder Henry Greathead was asked to combine the best features of the new boat and the earlier design, and in 20 years he’d built 30 hybrids. But lifesaving was still a local effort, dependent on local initiative, money, and energy. 

The first national effort started in 1824, when the National Institution for the Preservation of Life from Shipwreck was formed. The founder (whose name is boring so we’ll skip it) was well connected–you could’ve called him Sir Boring Name and no one would’ve thought you were being weird–so he was able to approach the navy, the government, and assorted “eminent characters” for backing. They were generous with their moral support but didn’t cough up much in the way of cash.

It was an MP (whose name is also boring) who suggested tapping the wealthy but less eminent, and that shook loose the money he needed. There was prestige to be had in philanthropizing, and some of them probably even cared about the causes they donated to. Sir Boring Name raised £10,000 from them. That would be in the neighborhood of £1,000,000 today. In other words, it was more than enough to buy lunch, never mind launch a few boats and an organization. 

By 1825 the newly formed organization had 15 lifeboats and thirteen lifeboat stations to its name, which it changed to the Royal National Lifeboat Institution in 1854. Neither name flows off the tongue happily, but since it’s now known as the RNLI, no one notices.

By 1886, when 27 lifeboat crew members died responding to the wreck of the Mexico, donations from the rich had stagnated. Maybe they’d gotten bored with the same old, same old and some other cause had eclipsed the RNLI. Causes go in and out of fashion, even when the needs they respond to stay around. It was local people who donated money to support the bereaved families, as I’m sure they had from time immemorial–that had never been the RNLI’s role–but the disaster also led to a couple deciding that RNLI funding needed to be dependent not on a wealthy few but on the nation as a whole. They democratized the effort, going for many small donations, and they raised £10,000 in two weeks. Since then, the RNLI has turned to the public for support and gotten it. 

You may have figured out by now that the organization isn’t part of the government and never has been. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I don’t know. Probably a bit of both. 

 

Launching the boats

Let’s focus for a moment on one lifeboat station, in Selsey, which is–um, hang on. 

It’s in West Sussex. I knew that.

Selsey built its first lifeboat station in 1861, and until 1913, when they built a slipway, it launched its lifeboats by hauling them over wooden skids laid on the beach. That’s for each launch, I believe, since the skids would’ve been either washed away or  buried by the tides if they’d been left in place. It was heavy work and it was slow. 

I can’t swear that this is true of the Selsey boat, but lifeboats were often launched and hauled out of the water by women, helped by horses if they were available. The men would already be onboard. 

In 1899, a lifeboat (not from Selsey; do pay attention; we left there sentences ago) was hauled ten miles overland for a rescue during a storm, either because it was safer than risking it in open water or they needed a more protected place to launch. Some 50 to 60 people dragged it across Exmoor with the help of 18 horses. They knocked down walls (that would’ve been stone walls, so no light job) and anything else that was in their way and occasionally had to lift the boat off its carriage to get it through gates. It took them ten hours. Everyone on board the ship was saved.

It would make a hell of a movie. Toss in a few lifelong enmities having to work together, gale-force winds, beards, and some of those long, heavy skirts (probably not on the same people as the beards, since this was a while ago and they could be stiff-necked about that stuff in public). 

Plus, of course, the horses. Never forget the horses. And a member of the local gentry giving orders to people who know their work better than him.

 

Rescue

The lifejacket was introduced to lifesaving crews in 1854. It was made from strips of cork sewn onto canvas and it was bulky. It didn’t catch on until 1861, when the only survivor of a lifeboat that went down was the only crew member wearing one. From there, people went on to improve on the design, gradually making it more buoyant and more comfortable.

In 1808, the breeches buoy was introduced. This was basically a pair of shorts attached to a life preserver and a line. The rescuers could shoot the line to the ship, secure it on both ends, and use it like a zip wire, sliding people one by one from the wreck to safety, then hauling the thing back. Even if the line broke, dumping the passenger in the drink, the life preserver would keep them afloat.

Sounds clunky? It was effective enough that it was used until helicopter rescue edged it out.

 

And today?

Life’s not all perfect. The RNLI’s national organization has come into conflict with some of its local branches–the ones that raise money to support the RNLI and whose members jump in the boats and risk their lives to save others.

They’re all volunteers. I haven’t mentioned that yet. The system may be organized nationally but it still depends on the passion and goodwill of local volunteers,

As far as I can see, a lot of the conflict is about which lifeboat stations get which boats and about local groups feeling disrespected by the national leadership. In one Scottish station, most of the crew signed a letter saying, “They’re putting an all-weather lifeboat in an in-shore position and an in-shore lifeboat in an open sea position.” 

To which the national organization says, Yeah, but look, we did a Lifesaving Effect Review, where we considered effectiveness and speed and size and modeling and numbers and which stations are big enough to hold which kind of boats and all sorts of other impressive stuff.

Which of course it not an actual quote. That’s what italics are for: cheating.

I’m sure paid good money for the review, but it doesn’t sound like it’s swayed the volunteers. One of them–sorry, another boring name–said, “I’m not going to be responsible for putting a boat like that into the open water in the North Sea. . . . It’s putting lives at risk.”

Another (I don’t know about their name–they asked to be anonymous) reminded the world at large, in the person an Observer reporter, who exactly keeps the organization on its feet: “The population of small coastal towns with lifeboat stations are the ones who keep it going. They do jumble sales, quizzes, Christmas cards, charity events.” 

If you’re running an organization, you alienate those people at your peril.

But as our previous Mr. Boring Name said, “We’ve been around for hundreds of years and these guys will be gone in three. We’ll still be here to pick up the pieces.”