Category Archives: History

Britain’s Amateur Archeologists

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

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

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

The Palace of Collyweston

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

A Bronze-Age Hoard in Dorset

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

You feel much wiser now, right? 

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

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

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

 

Deep Time

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

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

 

And in General . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Hundred Years War in two thousand words

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

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

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

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

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

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

More kings

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

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

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

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

 

Dynastic marriages

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

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

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

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

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

 

War

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

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

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

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

Different era, different standards. 

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

 

Peace, and then more war

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

But it’s not over yet 

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

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

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

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

 

Why do we care about any of this?

Many reasons. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Nationalism

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

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

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

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

Who’d have thunk?

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

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

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

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

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

Your bad luck.

Irrelevant photo: a rhododendron

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The early English novel: morality and–oooh–transgression

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

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

 

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

The Georgian Era

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

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

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

Increasing numbers of people could read.

That sound you hear is history’s cracked laughter.

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

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

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

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

 

Enter the novel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The middle class

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

What’s all this got to do with morality?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Tune in next week . . .

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What coins are we talking about?

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

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

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

 

The research

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

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

Did that help?

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

Here’s what I learned:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The early days of Britain’s National Health Service

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

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

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

 

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

 

Background

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

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

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

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

 

The Beveridge Report 

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

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

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

 

Churchill, Atlee, the war, and the welfare state 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The NHS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

And now?

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

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

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

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

*

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

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

A quick history of Britain’s gun laws 

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

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

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

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

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

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal

 

What are Britain’s gun laws?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

And after that?

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

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

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

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

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

 

And the result?

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

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

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

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

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

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.”