Category Archives: History

The Monmouth Rebellion and the king who wasn’t

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If you tied a knot in the thread of English history every time somebody led a rebellion, you’d make a mess of your sewing. So let’s skip the knots–they weren’t my best idea–and talk about the Monmouth Rebellion, which was led by (no points for guessing this one) Monmouth, the Duke of.

Okay, half a point if you got the Duke part right.

Like everything else of its time (1685) and place (England), the rebellion only makes sense when you paint in the background: the wrestling match between Catholics, Protestants, and super-Protestants for the soul–and more importantly, the throne–of England. 

Can a wrestling match have three contestants or does that make it a free-for-all? Does a contest involving three people take place between them or among them? Does anyone care about the answers to these questions?

Probably not. 

Irrelevant photo: mountain ash berries. Fall is coming. Or autumn , if we’re speaking British.

We’ll start our tale in (for no good reason) the present tense at a time when King Nobody (the first and last of that name) wears England’s crown. Cromwell and some of the super-Protestants are in power. The last king’s dead. The country’s kingless. The super-Protestants lack superpowers, though. They get their name (from me; no one else calls them that) because they’re further along the Protestant spectrum than the more moderate Church of England Protestants. 

That lack of superpowers explains why–

But I’m getting ahead of our story. Cromwell’s in power and Charles II, son of the now-beheaded Charles I, is in exile. 

 

What does Charles get up to while he’s in exile?

Some regal hanky-panky, and the fairly predictable result of that is a son, James.

Time rolls on, as time will. Everybody involved gets older. Cromwell dies. The super-Protestants don’t find a way to continue a kingless government. (See above: lack of superpowers.) Charles comes back to England as king, becoming Charles II. If you’ve seen portraits of the Charleses, he’s the one who looks like an aging and particularly dissolute Bob Dylan. The thought of anyone being or ever having been in bed with him–

No, let’s put that out of our minds.

Charles may be the king, but he doesn’t have superpowers either. All around him are forces pushing to lock the Church of England into place and edge both Catholics and nonconforming Protestants to the furthest corners of the national picture.

It’s in this context that he flirts dangerously with both Catholicism and Europe’s Catholic powers, and it’s also in this context that he and his wife fail to produce–forget a son, they don’t have any kids at all. So his brother is next in line for the throne and he’s–gasp, wheeze–a Catholic convert.

It’s easy to think this is all intolerant and silly, but the country has just emerged from a time when people killed each other in the name of religion, and even now, when things have settled down a bit, which religion you’d committed to decides what earthly doors are open or closed to you. So everyone has solid material reasons not to want Those People from the Other Religion(s) in power. 

That’s in addition to whatever religious reasons they have.

 

Yeah, but what about little James?

Well, James gets knocked around a bit. Before he’s ten, he’s kidnapped, jailed, exiled, and kidnapped again, this time by his father’s agents, who dump him into the household of his father’s gentleman of the bedchamber, where he’s barely educated. 

Gentleman of the bedchamber? It’s not a lascivious as it sounds. He dresses the king, waits on him when he eats alone, and generally hangs out with him. 

At some point, Charles wakes up, says, “Didn’t I have a kid around here somewhere?” and brings him to court, where he becomes a favorite and is turned into a Duke and given a bunch of other titles that if you’re not used to British traditions sound like something JK Rowling made up. He also has a variety of income streams arranged for him. When he’s older, he fights for the king here and there and gains quite the reputation as a soldier. He joins the privy council.

So far, he barely justifies a footnote to history, but the thing is, James is a Protestant and a king’s son, even if he wasn’t born with the right paperwork.

But hold on a minute. His mother (who’s now conveniently dead) always claimed that she’d been married to Charles, and since marriage records haven’t been computerized yet, no one can prove she wasn’t, even if, equally, no one can prove she was. That makes it possible to build a case that he should be the next–safely Protestant–king. So schemes to set James on the throne buzz around him like flies around roadkill.

Eventually he gets involved in a conspiracy, the Rye House Plot (it would’ve involved killing the king and his brother). After a bit of back and forth James goes to live in the Netherlands.

 

And doesn’t live happily ever after

Instead, when Charles dies, James–

But let’s call him Monmouth from here on. It’ll help us remember who’s the king (James, Charles’s brother) and who’s the wannabe (also James, Charles’s son a.k.a. Monmouth). 

So Charles dies and Monmoth launches a full-scale rebellion–or invasion if you prefer–that’s coordinated with an anti-Catholic Scottish rebellion in the highlands.

Why the Scots? Well, England and Scotland are two separate countries, but they have a single king, and if you think that’s confusing try to explain the pronunciation of Worcestershire to someone who learned to read English using phonics. 

The Scottish rising fails while Monmouth’s still crossing the Channel, though, leaving him and 82 men to land in Lyme Regis (that’s in Dorset, in the southwest) without anything to distract the government’s attention. 

Why such a small force? Monmouth’s counting on the country to rise in his support, and initially that seems to work. He’s popular in the southwest, and he gathers an army of 3,000, which is a nice number, trailing an appealing collection of zeroes. The problem with them is that none of them come from the gentry–the people with some soldierly training. He has an army of enthusiastic amateurs without much in the way of weaponry. 

By another count, his army is uphill of 1,000.  How far uphill? Will you stop splitting hairs? We’ll never get out of here. 

Monmouth’s not exactly claiming the throne at this point, just saying he has a right to it but will only take it with Parliament’s agreement. Let’s not split hairs, though. A lot of his followers call him King Monmouth, and they have time to defeat a few county militias before the king’s army arrives. Commoners and the poor flock to his banner, and in Taunton he’s proclaimed king. By now, he has some 6,000 soldiers. 

We’ll skip the back and forth. Monmouth’s and the king’s armies meet at Sedgemoor and Monmouth loses badly. After the battle, his soldiers are hunted down and killed on the spot. (They were commoners anyway, and you can do that to commoners and still sleep at night.) Some 200 who are caught later are tried before being killed. Another 2,000 are transported to the West Indies to work–in a weird and little-known footnote to history–to work alongside slaves from Africa.

Or by that other count, 320 executed and 800 transported. By a third, it’s 333 and 860. Let’s treat the numbers as rough guesses. 

Men, women, and children with remote connections to the rebellion are flogged. Monmouth is captured and executed. 

David Horspool, whose book The English Rebel I rely on whenever I write about rebellions (and I’m a sucker for a good rebellion), thinks Monmouth’s failure was a result of rushing into his rebellion instead of waiting for James to discredit himself. 

 

What happens then?

James discredits himself. He interprets Monmouth’s defeat to mean that the country values stability above everything else and overestimates their tolerance for religious tolerance. He appoints Catholics to important positions, most controversially to positions in the military. He grants for all religions more leeway than they’ve had. And when I say “all religions” here, we do seem to be talking about all religions, including Jews, Muslims, and dissenting Christians. As far as I know, that’s the limit of England’s religious population at this point.  He When judges, justices of the peace, and lords lieutenant resist his moves, he fires them and he comes into conflict with Parliament–nothing new for kings, but the whiff of Catholic incense hanging over the conflict supercharges the reaction he gets.  

Is he genuinely trying to build a state that tolerates multiple religions or is he making sneaky moves toward a Catholic state? I don’t know, but a lot of powerful Church of England Protestants think they do. They believe he’s favoring Catholics and setting the building blocks of a Catholic state in place. 

There’s something very contemporary about that fear, don’t you think? Just slot a more modern into place and the rhetoric’s the same. Immigrants, Muslims, Black people, whoever. There’s a lot of it going around. I know you’ve heard it.

 

Why does any of this matter?

Because it sets up the Glorious Revolution, which hits the Eject button that’s been quietly installed on James’s throne, replacing him with a Protestant monarchy. 

But that’s a story for another time. 

The control freaks of Tudor England

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Set aside your stereotypes of Tudor England. It wasn’t all heretics going up in flames and virgin queens wearing so much clothing that how could they help being virginal?. Tudor England also developed a level of control freakery that reached deep into society.

 

Clothes

The Tudors inherited sumptuary laws–laws dictating who had the right to wear what–from Edwards III and IV, but the Tudors went wild with them. Only the royal family could wear purple or cloth-of-gold. Except for dukes and marquesses, who could wear a bit as long as it didn’t cost more than £5 a square yard. Earls and upward could wear sable. Barons and upward could wear cloth-of-silver or satin. 

Other levels of society could wear silk shirts, gold or silver bordure (don’t ask; I’d guess trim but we don’t really need to know), crimson, blue velvet, scarlet, violet, and garments made “outside this realm.” The act listed the realm’s parts in case anyone wasn’t sure. Knights could wear this, lords’ sons could wear that. 

Irrelevant photo: Meadowsweet, which was once used to flavor mead.

Moving down the social scale, hose that cost more than ten pence a yard could only be worn by a husbandman, shepherd, or laborer if he owned goods worth more than £10. 

What’s £10 in modern money? Something along the lines of £5,000 in 1988 currency. Today it would be–um, more. 

What happened to people who broke the rules? The important people would be fined. The husbandman, the shepherd, and the laborer would be put in the stocks for three days, and they’d lose the offending piece of clothing. Half the value would go to the king (this particular stature was Henry VIII’s) and the other half to the informant.

Actors, foreign ambassadors, and a few others got a free pass. 

Servants, they weren’t supposed to wear blue, but blue became so common in servants’ livery that no gentleman would be seen in it. Which is enough to make a person wonder how much the laws were enforced.

All of that, though, was about men’s clothes. According to Jasper Ridley, whose book, The Tudor Age, I’m pulling this from, a woman who dressed “above her station” might be ridiculed, but she didn’t threaten the social order the way a man would and wasn’t legislated against. 

Being part of a despised group has its occasional small benefits. 

 

Hats, caps, and consumer protection

Along with the restrictions went some bits of consumer protection, dealing with cloth that shrank, overpriced cloth and caps, and a few other specifics. This led Parliament into some fairly intricate legislation limiting who could buy wool (middlemen pushed the price up), who could work as a weaver, and where weavers could set up their looms.

To protect the people who made hats and caps, though, Parliament limited imports: they had to be sold at the port where they landed and no one could buy more than twelve at a time. In 1571, a new act required anyone over the age of six to wear a woolen cap (made in England, thanks, with English wool) on Sundays and holy days unless they were traveling outside the town or village where they lived. 

Nobles and men who owned land worth 20 marks a year could ignore that business with the woolen caps, and so could “maidens, ladies and gentlewomen.” 

 

Wages & work

All this control stuff got serious when it came to work and pay. Two things led the government to at least try to keep a lid on wages: the plague (it hit England in the 14th century) and the gradual end of serfdom (also the 14th century). A series of pre-Tudor laws already capped wages and made it a criminal offense to pay more, although it was okay to pay less. When their turn came, the Tudors passed updated versions. The employer who paid over the maximum could be fined, and so could the person who accepted higher pay. Any unemployed artisan or workman who was offered work at those wages and refused it could be jailed until they agreed to take the job. 

And the workman who quit before his contract was out could be both jailed and fined–unless, of course, his master gave his permission to quit or if a man joined the king’s service. 

It wasn’t exactly serfdom, but it wasn’t what we’d call freedom either. 

I assume this applied to women as well, but once writers decide that the word man includes women, as writers did so casually a thousand years ago when I was young, it’s hard to tell who anybody’s talking about at crucial moments.

Hours were also fixed, because “artificers and labourers retained to work and serve waste much part of the day and deserve not their wages.” 

Whoever wrote that sentence wasted much part of a number of words (cut “retained to work and serve” and you haven’t changed the meaning) but probably didn’t dock his own pay. 

Summer and winter hours were fixed, along with meal breaks. 

Working people responded by refusing to enter into the usual work contracts, which ran for three months or a year. They became casual laborers, working from day to day, and could leave when they damn well pleased. That was outlawed in 1550, because that sort of people “live idly and at their pleasure, and flee and resort from place to place, whereof ensueth more inconveniences than can be at this present expressed and declared.”

More wasted words also ensued.  

Under this new law, craftsmen–shoemakers, weavers, etc.–who hired unmarried workers without a contract were risking a fine and jail time. And journeymen had to accept a contract if it was offered, and if they couldn’t agree on a wage, a justice of the peace would set it. 

All this seems to have been widely ignored, and under Elizabeth they tried again, but with wage rates that recognized inflation. Some other details changed, but they were reaching for the same thing: drive those lazy working people into the jobs that were going begging. I’ve heard contemporary politicians making pretty much the same noises, although the punishments have changed.

A few decades later, another act covered the same territory and complained that the earlier one wasn’t being enforced.

 

Pronunciation

If all that strikes you as too practical to count as control freakery, try this: Scholars disagreed about how a word should be pronounced in Greek. That was ancient Greek, mind you, so they couldn’t just hop on a cheap flight to Greece and ask around. The lack of any possible certainty left them free to argue, and the argument came with religious overtones (don’t ask). And since all religion was political, this mattered enough that it made perfect sense for the chancellor of Cambridge University to threaten any undergraduate using the pronunciation he disapproved of with a whipping.

I’m willing to bet the wrong pronunciation was whispered over many a pint of ale.

 

Warfare and sports

By the Tudor era, Europe had learned about explosives and figured out how to pour them into a tube so they could shoot projectiles–not just tubes the size of cannons but smaller weapons called arquebuses, which the English called hagbuts, and eventually pistols. But the longbow still had its uses. It was faster and it worked in the rain. 

Even then, the English knew a lot about rain.

What’s that got to do with control freakery? England needed to keep its archers in practice, so a 1487 act, after deploring the decay of the country’s archery skill, set a maximum price for longbows. By 1504, though, they’d decided that the problem wasn’t the price of bows, it was the popularity of the crossbow. So a new law made it illegal for the average person to shoot a crossbow. 

That must not’ve worked, because four more laws made it a crime for the average person to keep a crossbow at home or to carry one on the king’s highway. An exception was made for people living near the Scottish border, the sea, or several other areas that were considered lawless or vulnerable to attack. The small print said that if someone who owned land worth more than £100 a year saw the wrong person–basically, a poorer person–with a crossbow, they could confiscate it and have themselves a nice crossbow. Or the profit from its sale.

It was that kind of small print that made the Tudor control machine work. 

Every man between 16 and 60 had to keep a longbow and arrows at home. From 7 on up, boys had to have a bow and arrows so they could learn to shoot.

In 1512, the government decided that the problem wasn’t just the crossbow, it was sports in general, so it limited tennis, bowls, and skittles to the upper classes. It also banned football, a game that could’ve passed for unarmed warfare, with no limit on the number of players and damned few rules. If someone had the ball, they (it could be a man or a woman) could be stopped by hitting, punching, tripping–pretty much anything short of murder. 

Then in 1542 a new act noted that people were evading the older law by inventing games that hadn’t been banned yet (which is how shuffleboard got started) and it banned them, except at Christmas–and of course only for the lower classes. It added dice, cards, and quoits to the existing list. 

 

Vagrants

Vagrants were an ongoing obsession of Tudor government, so let’s ask who became vagrants. Some were sailors or soldiers who’d been discharged. Some had been retainers of noblemen but had been let go when Henry VII limited the number of retainers a nobleman could keep. Some were cut loose when Henry VIII closed the monasteries. Some were laborers of one sort or another who refused to work for the pay and conditions that were offered. Some were university students. Some were children. Many were people who’d been pushed off their land by the enclosure movement, and I won’t go into that here. If you’re interested–and it’s worth knowing about–here’s a link. The enclosure movement comes in about a quarter of the way through the post.  

Tudor laws also paint a picture of unauthorized physicians, solicitors (that’s one flavor of lawyer), palm readers, pardoners, actors, and players in unlawful games roaming the country and making trouble for the authorities. It’s enough to keep a sensible monarch awake at night.

Vagrants could be punished by whipping, by having their ears cut off, and by being returned to their home parishes. People who gave a vagrant food or shelter could be punished. Constables who refused to whip beggar children or cut off the ears of vagabonds could be punished, which hints that getting the laws enforced wasn’t a simple process, or necessarily a successful one. 

After a certain number of non-lethal punishments, according to one law, a vagabond could be hanged. A different law would force a vagrant to work for any master who’d have them–for pay if possible, for food and drink if not. If the vagrant refused, the justice of peace could brand them and keep them as a slave and mistreat them in an assortment of specified ways.

Do you get a sense of the lawmakers settling on wilder and wilder solutions to a problem that wouldn’t go away? 

In a fit of mercy and realism, the act proposing slavery was repealed in a few years and the country relaxed into mere ear-cutting and whipping–and taking away any children over the age of five and putting them to work without pay. Until a few decades later, when capital punishment was reintroduced on the third offense. 

Starting in 1550, some provision began to be made for people who couldn’t work–the aged and impotent poor, they called them. They would be sent to abiding places and put to working doing whatever they could. 

Welcome to the greatness of Tudor England. Your best bet is to hope you were born lucky.

 

Enforcement

Ridley calls the Tudor era despotism on the cheap. The government didn’t have hordes of civil servants–or what we’d call civil servants. What it had was a lot of enthusiastic but unpaid amateurs, and with the exception of Wales and parts of Northumberland, and of the occasional rebellion (Ridley counts eight) or riot, the country was pretty orderly. And the trains ran on time. None were scheduled for several centuries, so that was easy enough.

Local government was in the hands of sheriffs (and above them, lord lieutenants), mayors, justices of the peace, and on the lowest level, by constables, bailiffs, and officers of the watch. That’s not a  lot if you think about keeping a country within the bounds of all those rules.

But the general public had to turn out and help catch any fugitive and had good reason to actually do it: If a felony was committed in the parish and the baddie (or some plausible substitute) wasn’t caught, every last householder was fined. 

To keep criminals from escaping into Wales, ferries were banned from carrying anyone across the Severn at night. And the ferryman wasn’t to carry anyone unless he knew who he was and could report his name and address if he was asked. Which would’ve taxed the memory of anyone who couldn’t write.

In Northumberland, landlords could only rent land to people who found two men of property to vouch for them.   

How well did any of this work? It’s hard to say. When you see various versions of the same law passed time after time, it’s a hint that the first ones didn’t work. So they probably didn’t stamp out sports, working people did continue to push for better pay, and vagrants, beggars, and vagabonds continued to roam the land, since the conditions that had produced the first batch continued to produce even more of them. And although servants weren’t supposed to wear the color blue, it was such a common part of their livery that no gentleman would be seen in it.

The House of Lords: how it formed and what it does

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Britain’s House of Lords traces its history back to the 11th century, which means it predates the country itself, because although Britain did eventually show up at the party, it was unforgivably late.

The part of the 11th century that we happen to be talking about is the Anglo-Saxon part of the century, before the Norman invasion, when the king had a witan–a group of advisors to consult if and when he wanted to. It would’ve been made up of the king’s ministers plus the most powerful of the lords and religious leaders–you know, the country’s big bruisers–and a wise king sometimes made sure they’d support whatever he had in mind before going too far out on a limb.

Although having said that, there’s some debate about who got invitations to the witan and who got to stay home and sulk. A lot of Anglo-Saxon history is subject to debate, but we’re going to rampage through this quickly because we were looking for Britain, remember? And Britain isn’t here yet.

Irrelevant photo: morning glories, a.k.a. bindweed

Before we leave, though–have a drink while I’m messing around, why don’t you?–I should mention that whatever the Witan did (and that sounds a little hazy too), it did get to select the king. The Anglo-Saxons didn’t automatically go with the oldest son. 

 

Then the Normans invaded and everything changed…

…except for what didn’t. Kings still summoned the country’s big bruisers once or twice a year. Because in theory the kings might’ve been all-powerful, but they couldn’t govern without the backing from their lords–at least not well and not for long. It’s not hard to find examples of English kings offending the nobility more than they were willing to be offended and ending up in history’s large and unsentimental trash can. 

After one of those not-quite-all-powerful kings was forced into signing Magna Carta (1215, and yes I did have to look it up), he and all the kings who came after him were committed to asking the barons’ consent before they imposed taxes. This gave his proto-parliament–that yearly or twice-yearly gathering of lords–a well-defined power. 

As the thirteenth century wore on, locally elected representatives of counties, cities, and boroughs also began to be summoned when taxes needed to be approved. Among other things, this made the taxes easier to collect. 

Representatives of the towns and cities were called burgesses and tended to be rich lawyers and merchants. Representatives of the counties were called knights of the shire and were mostly from the landed gentry. I haven’t a clue what representatives of the boroughs were called. They may also have been called burgesses, since the root word looks the same and a borough was nothing but a town with a fancy hat. 

The burgesses outnumbered the knights and were paid two shillings a day when parliament met, but the knights (probably) dominated the proceedings because they were better connected and, as everyone at the time would’ve agreed, more important and better looking, and in recognition of all that were paid four shillings a day. 

After 1325, no parliament met without the commoners.

Now let’s get to the small print: When I said these assemblies could approve taxes, that doesn’t mean it was easy for them not to approve them. They had to go pretty far out on a limb to say no. In 1376, when they did refuse one, they had to claim that funds had been misappropriated by some of the king’s courtiers. 

Short of saying no, though, they could negotiate. They could drag their feet and sulk. They could, in general, be a pain in the neck. 

Never underestimate the power of being a pain in the neck.

Much to the monarch-of-the-moment’s annoyance, he (or the occasional she) needed Parliament. The monarchy’s income from its own lands had decreased over the years–hey, it’s tough up there at the top of the heap. And they kept taking the country to war, which is an expensive little habit. So however annoying parliament became, the monarch was constantly driven to call it back and ask for some new tax. 

Parliament was also the place where communities and individuals, high and low, could go to petition the king, and it was petitions involving the affairs of the country gradually drew parliament into a law-making role. At first, it was the king’s prerogative to initiate a law, but in the 14th century parliament began petitioning the king about this or that and making gradual moves into what the king’s territory.

 

The houses separate

But we’ve spent entirely too much time brushing our refined elbows against the commoners elbows. We should be talking about lords.

If we can duck back for a minute to the 13th century, we’ll see a forerunner of the House of Lords in a small group of councilors clustered around the king. And by councilors, of course, I mean important people, and by important people I mean nobles. By the 14th century, they’d become a larger group that began meeting separately. These were dukes, earls, barons, marquesses, viscounts, and the top layer of the clergy. They were called, collectively, the peerage. 

And I’m sure the peers were much happier meeting that way. The commoners had been getting too big for their little bootsies. An anonymous publication from the 1320s argued that parliament’s barons could only speak for themselves, unlike (as the BBC puts it) “the knights, citizens and burgesses who represented ‘the whole community of England’ . . . who alone should grant taxation on behalf of the people.”

Yeah. A pesky lot, those commoners. 

As the two groups separated, the king’s key officers–the chancellor of the exchequer, the treasurer, the senior royal judges and key members of the royal household–met with the lords, not the commoners, and the real business was done there, at the top. As someone put it in 1399, the commons were merely “petitioners and suitors,” and all judgments of parliament “belong solely to the king and lords.”

 

The mysterious shrinking peerage

This isn’t strictly relevant, but it’s interesting: during the Tudor period (start counting in 1485 and stop when Elizabeth I dies), the number of peers shrank. Part of that was the War of the Roses–the count dropped from 64 to 38–but nobles had always died in wars; under normal circumstances dead ones would’ve been replaced with live ones who were either their heirs or, if no heir was to be had, someone the king owed a favor to. Or liked or wanted to placate or hoped to control. Or whatever motivated that particular king at that particular moment. 

Henry VII, though–the first of the Tudors–didn’t replenish the stock, probably because he didn’t want a group of powerful nobles who might challenge him, starting another war. He’d seen enough of that, and the country was out of roses anyway. 

So start there, then run through the rest of the Tudor kings and queens and count the number of nobles executed for treason whose titles were taken from them, which meant their heirs didn’t inherit them. I doubt being a Tudor-era peasant was a barrel of laughs, but belonging to the nobility had its own dangers. Romanticize it all you want, the Tudor era was a dangerous time to be part of the nobility.

For the last 30 years of the Tudordrama, the country had zero dukes, in spite of the after-VII Tudors (not to be confused with After Eight Mints) having created some new peers as they went along, and most of the 16th-century nobility were of recent coinage. 

With the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, the number of abbots in the House of Lords (no surprise here) shrank, and by the end of Elizabeth’s reign there wasn’t an abbot to be found in the Lords, and only 26 bishops. For the first time, the secular lords formed a majority. Semi-relevantly, the secular lords were and still are called the Lords Temporal, because everything needs a fancy name.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled drama.

 

From the Civil War to the 19th century

From the Tudor period, it’s a short march to the Civil War, when Parliament seized power. In 1642, it excluded bishops from the House of Lords. Then in 1649, it abolished both the monarchy and the House of Lords. I’m sure that made the bishops feel better about having been tossed out. Guys, the party ended just a few years after you left, so don’t feel bad.

When the monarchy was restored, everybody pushed the Reset button and Parliament was reconstituted in its old form–Commons, Lords, Church worthies–and when (you thought we’d never get there, didn’t you?) Scotland and then Ireland were folded into the batter that became first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom, the Scottish and Irish peers elected representatives to the Lords. 

Now we do a couple of fancy steps until we get to the 19th century, when the number of bishops in the House or Lords was limited to 26 and the monarch got to create life peers. That’s as opposed to hereditary peers. Once they’re appointed, they can put down roots and make themselves at home, but they can’t shoehorn their kids in after them.

 

20th century

In the 20th century, the story gets interesting enough that I’ll slow it down again. By the beginning of the century, it was standard for the prime minister to govern from the House of Commons, so basically the power had shifted. The last PM to govern from the Lords was the Marquess of Salisbury in 1902.

Then we get to 1906, when the Liberals won a big honkin’ majority in the Commons–132 seats–and figured they’d use it to introduce radical things like sick pay and old age pensions.

Horrors, the Lords said in one aristocratic voice. And double horrors because the programs would be paid for by a tax on the rich–especially on the landed rich: in other words, on the people sitting in the House of Lords.

You might have already figured out that the House of Lords had a built-in Conservative–and lower-case conservative–bias. So predictably enough, the Lords refused to pass the budget. After a bit of back and forth, including a general election, the Lords did pass the budget, though, along with the Parliament Act of 1911, which limited  the Lords’ power. 

Why’d they do that? Because the government threatened to flood the house with 400 new Lords, all of them Liberals. 

The bill left the Lords with the power to, at best, delay money bills by a month, and it completely lost the ability to veto bills. It could delay non-budget bills for two years, but that was the limit.

The two years have since been reduced to one.

That takes us to 1958 and the Life Peerages Act, which poured in a group of life peers, including experts in various fields and for the first time–gasp; horrors–women. It was a gesture in the direction of counteracting the house’s built-in rightward tilt. 

Then we skip forward again. Tony Blair had a three-stage plan that would fold the House of Lords into a paper airplane, sail it out to sea, and replace it with a fully elected house. 

How did that fare? Well, the House of Lords started 1999 with 758 hereditary lords and ended the year with 92, but then it all bogged down. The plan’s probably still stashed on some governmental shelf, gathering dust, and we still have 92 hereditary peers. They’re chosen by all the country’s hereditary peers, making the aristocrats, in a nice little piece of irony, the only elected members of the Lords.

People who think seriously about these things, along with people who don’t but who shoot their mouths off anyway, have suggested all sorts of ways to reform what’s clearly an antiquated system, including setting a limit on the number of lords, but tradition allows outgoing prime ministers to shovel in new members, and we’ve been through a lot of prime ministers lately. Each one got a shovel of their very own. A committee’s supposed to weed out anyone who’s inappropriate, but the committee doesn’t get the final say. 

At the moment, 779 people sit in the House of Lords. Or don’t sit there. Nothing says they have to show up. 

Conscientious Objectors in World War I Britain

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Let’s wriggle into a small, dusty corner of British history and see what someone left behind. In other words, let’s talk about Britain’s (as far as I can establish) first conscientious objectors: the men who refused to serve in the military during World War I. 

But–as usual–we have to take a step back before we go forward. To have conscientious objectors, a country needs a draft–a system of conscription that forces all physically fit men between certain ages into the armed forces. Without that, there’s nothing to object to, conscientiously or otherwise. 

From the information I’ve found, World War I marked the first time Britain introduced universal conscription. The fighting was on an unprecedented scale and it called for an unprecedented number of fighters.  

The war started out with brass bands and a tide of patriotism, working the country into the kind of fever you need to recruit soldiers. Men and boys signed up, and at some point some number of women–it was probably a small number but they’ve been written into history in bold-face type–began handing white feathers to men who looked able-bodied enough to be soldiers but who visibly weren’t to publicly shame them.

Irrelevant photo: campion and stitchwort growing by the roadside

But the number of volunteers wasn’t high enough. The war was turning soldiers into dead bodies on a massive scale: 6% of the adult male population died in the war–12% of serving soldiers. They had to be replaced, so the country introduced a draft.

 

The conscientious objector category

It’s against that background that we take our snapshot of Britain’s conscientious objectors–or COs, since (a) they were often called that and (b) my fingers are convinced conscientious is spelled some other way.  

From the time conscription was introduced (1916, two years after the war started, first for those who care, first for single men between 18 and 40, then for all men, married or otherwise) until the end of the war, 20,000 men applied for CO status, and that tells us two things. The most obvious is that it wasn’t a massive number of people but it wasn’t an insignificant one either, but the more interesting and less obvious thing is that a category had been created. If you either naturally or with some contortion could fit yourself into it, a recognized way had been made for you to refuse military service.

The Military Service Act–the same one that introduced conscription–set up tribunals where men could argue that they shouldn’t be drafted on the grounds of hardship, illness, education, essential work, or–pay attention here, because this is the point–a conscientious objection to military service, which could be religious or more generally moral.

The tribunals included someone from the military along with local men–and we can count on the local members being drawn from the area’s, ahem, important people, because class comes into everything in Britain. And elsewhere, but oh-so-visibly here. So if you showed up to argue that you shouldn’t be drafted, they were the ones who’d decide whether you had a legitimate reason or were just a coward–you know, the kind of lowlife who objected couldn’t see the patriotic joy in climbing out of a trench and running through a hailstorm of bullets. 

Some people’s objection to the war was political, and the act allowed no space for that. You could have a moral or religious objection or you could pick up your damn rifle and go fight.

The panels’ questioning was (no surprise here) often hostile. One CO described his hearing this way:

“They put me through the usual sorts of questions that these tribunals did. They had certain routine questions. A favourite one was, what would you do if your sister was threatened with rape by some German soldier or something like that? And I can’t quite remember what I answered but it was to the effect that that had nothing to do with being a CO against the war. I think that I said that I didn’t know what I would do and that it didn’t matter in the present context in the least what I would do. The thing was this was a protest against the war, that the war was wrong.”

If your argument was accepted, you were shunted off into the Non-Combatant Corps, and my fingers don’t object to the spelling there but it was called the NCC anyway. Let’s save a few of the keystrokes I’ve wasted explaining that and use the acronym. It was created by the same act that established the draft.

If it wasn’t accepted–and most weren’t–you were drafted and had to decide whether to serve or to refuse, leading to tales such as that of a rifleman who refused to load his rifle for target practice and another one who refused to put on his uniform.

 

The NCC

If your argument was accepted and you were shunted into the NCC, you  were expected to accept military discipline. You were also expected to accept acronyms. I can’t tell you any tales about what that was like in Britain, but I met an American World War I CO (he was the brother of an uncle-by-marriage–that’s how old I am) and he was sent to an army camp in the Midwest somewhere. Let’s randomly say Kansas. When he got there, conscientious objectors were rare enough they weren’t sure whether to lock him up (he might be a conscientious objector) or salute him (he might be a commissioned officer). His paperwork didn’t make it clear.

After a few days, unfortunately, they figured it out and the quality of his food went down sharply.

I had to slip that in. I never have found a spot for it before.

In the NCC, you might end up building, cleaning, loading or unloading anything that wasn’t munitions, and you might do it in Britain or where the fighting was. You might carry stretchers–a job that was as dangerous as being in the infantry–or work in the medical tents. You were subject to military discipline.

 

The refuseniks

On the other hand, you might join the hard-core COs and refuse to follow the NCC’s military discipline, in which case you’d be court martialed and end up in prison. 

As an alternative to prison, you could join the Home Office Scheme, which offered imprisoned COs the choice of doing “work of national importance under civil control”–building roads and reservoirs, say. You’d live in a camp, and if you weren’t in the military your life still wasn’t your own. In some camps, you’d be treated decently and in others badly. In one camp, the COs went on strike.

Or you could join the handful of COs who took an absolutist stance. For them, working on a road or a reservoir benefitted the government in wartime and was an acknowledgement that the government had a right to dictate to them. They were court martialed, sometimes repeatedly. Some went on hunger strikes and were force fed. Many were underfed. Seventy-three died of poor treatment either in prison or shortly after their release. And the abuse that COs faced often fell on their families as well.

Just short of 6,000 men were sentenced for resisting military authority. 

 

Legacy of the COs

After the war, some former COs went into politics and a few ended up in Parliament. Others struggled to find work and rebuild their lives. All continued to have acronym-haunted dreams.

Why British history isn’t the story of a white country

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A new BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations has set off (heavy sigh) yet another conversation about whether British history is the story of a white country. 

Why? Because either the show’s casting was color blind, where actors are chosen without regard to their skin color, or because (and my bet’s on this) the directors deliberately placed Black actors in major roles. 

Cue the predictable emails/phone calls/howls of outrage. Cue mentions of wokeness and political correctness. Sadly, I doubt we can cue any repetitions of that glorious confection of manufactured outrage, “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati.” The workerati had too much fun with it and the sleeperati had to retire it. But if you want to do your bit to keep the phrase alive, for £12.99 plus shipping and handling, you can buy a tee shirt announcing your reading and eating preferences.

It comes in a variety of designs, which says (a) it’s popular, (b) someone had too much fun to stop at one, or (c) it wasn’t all that popular and they’ve still got stock left. 

But forget the shirts. The assumption behind the complaints is that having a Black lawyer in a Dickens story is historically inaccurate and can only be explained by someone’s desire to rewrite history into something tofu flavored. 

 

Brief interruption for the sake of complete accuracy

I don’t like tofu. I can eat it–it’s not liver, after all–but I haven’t found a way to enjoy it and I’ve stopped searching for one. I do like the shirts, although I won’t be eating any. I probably won’t be wearing one either. I’ve stopped thinking people want to hear from my clothing.

Irrelevant photo: Cuckoo flowers–also called lady’s smocks, milkmaids, and mayflower. It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family, and yes, it will be on the test.

 

Meanwhile, back at the Complaints Department…

…the question we’re considering is, How likely would it have been in the Victorian (and slightly pre-Victorian) era, which is when Great Expectations takes place, to find a Black lawyer and an Indian law clerk? And would Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, Estella, be–um, it’s not immediately apparent from watching the series what her ethnicity is. I was going for someplace in Asia (it’s a big continent; surely it has a likely spot somewhere), but it turns out the actor playing her is of Mauritian and Thai heritage. She’s also described as an English-born Australian actor. That last bit isn’t relevant to the flap at hand but does remind us how complicated a person’s background can be. She has brown skin, though, and I’m assuming that does its bit to stir up the complainers.

To answer the question I’ve wandered away from, though: It’s quite accurate. English history is not all white, even if it’s often presented as if it were.

 

Georgian Britain

Let’s start with Georgian Britain, since that’s when Great Expectations begins (it then crosses into the Victorian era without needing to present a passport). The Georgian era ran from 1714 to 1830. Yes, I had to look it up, and I learned that it took four back-to-back Georges to cover that many years. 

At least 5,000 Black people lived in Georgian London, although that’s a minimum estimate, not a complete count. Data is (sorry: are) sparse–not just about Black people in London but about lots of people and things of the era. We have to work with what we’ve got. Many of them arrived as slaves and lived on in Britain as enslaved servants–it was quite the fashion among the upper class to have a Black servant in the household. Many of them escaped, though, disappearing into the general population. We know about them from newspaper ads calling for their capture and return. They’re often identified by the metal collars fastened onto their necks and by their scars.

Slavery within Britain itself was abolished in 1807, although the country continued to accumulate wealth from slavery in its colonies and trading relationships. Anyone who presents history as a simple picture is lying to you or themselves or both. So however ironically, British soil itself was free, and so were the people who stood on it.

Who, then, were these Black Britons? Most were poor and not lawyers in Dickens novels, but then so were most white Britons and you won’t find anyone offering that as an argument against casting a white actor as the lawyer. 

A few did become part of the middle and upper classes. 

How upper is upper?As far as I know, none of them inherited titles, but Queen Victoria  (you don’t get much higher in the class structure than that) had a ward and goddaughter, Sara Forbes Bonetta, who was Yoruba. 

So a Black lawyer? Entirely possible. 

As for the Indian law clerk and Miss Havisham’s adopted daughter, when a country conquers an empire,it will be changed by the countries it conquers. The British Empire didn’t  just bring back money, textiles, tea, spices, opium, and new recipes to break up the same-old same-old of British cooking. People came as well, some by choice and some not. They came to work, to study, to live, to do all the assorted things humans do. Some stayed a while and went home. Others put down roots and became British. Communities formed.

That’s not to say there was no racism. 

 

Racism

British racism was (and, I think, still is) different from the American brand. For one thing, intermarriage wasn’t uncommon in Britain, whereas during large parts of US history it wasn’t just uncommon, it was illegal in many states. I mention that in part because a lot of readers here at Notes are American and also because culturally speaking I’m more American than British. I do know the US isn’t the world’s focal point, but I can’t help using it as mine a lot of the time. 

In the Victorian era, science was dragged in, kicking and screaming, to explain why racism and empire were natural and whites–and especially whites of the British persuasion–were superior to whoever else you had in mind. They measured heads and found that–surprise, surprise–the heads that happened to be shaped like their own had more brain power than anyone else’s, proving that their little twig of the human tree was by far superior to the other little twigs. They catalogued humanity into races, and no matter how many times later scientists have demonstrated that science provides no basis for the divisions, we’re still fighting our way out of that paper bag.

So again, we’re looking at a complicated picture. Racism, yes, but also Black people distributed–however unequally–throughout society.

And for the benefit of American readers, who see the word Black and understand it to mean someone of African heritage, in Britain it often includes Asians, although I think that’s shifting.

The Victorians didn’t invent racism, though. As soon as the country dove into slave-holding and the slave trade, it began to tell itself that the people it was enslaving were a lower grade of human. All the Victorians did was sprinkle a bit of pseudo-scientific glitter over it.

 

Moving backwards

Historians have relatively recently begun tracing Black British history in the Tudor era, picking individuals out of the sparse records that are available, and again the picture isn’t simple. Miranda Kaufman writes about a weaver, a sailor, a porter, travelers, a salvage diver, and an assortment of others. Onyeka Nubia combed through marriage and baptism records and found Black people who often married whites and over several generations disappeared into the gene pool. As he put it when I heard him speak to an almost all-white crowd, “This is not my history [he’s of African extraction]. This is  your history.”

Peter Fryer covers some of the same territory, but he starts with Roman legionnaires. 

Most of the stories they give us are, of necessity, limited. The written records mark  brief moments in people’s lives, then they disappear. But they were here. They lived, they worked, they died. They’ve been written out of British history. If someone writes them back in, it’s an act of restitution, not tofu addiction.

Does racism go back as far as the Tudor era? I’m not sure, but if it does it was probably different from the racism we know today. 

As early as the Elizabethan era (1558-1603, and yes, I had to look it up) we can find Liz issuing two separate orders to expell Black people from Britain because they were eating food that should have gone to her people, and besides, most of them were heathens. Or some of them were heathens. Or, well, never mind, they ate, and getting rid of them was easier than wrestling with inequality and famine.

Except that she didn’t get rid of them. She issued a couple of proclamations and there (give or take a bit of historical running back and forth, which we’ll skip) it ended. You can find the full tale here. 

Does it matter whether Black people were targets because they were Black, because some of them weren’t Christian, or because they were an immigrant community (with some  descendants of immigrants added in)? I’m not sure. None of those positions are comfortable. 

Onyeka Nubia argues that the Tudor era was more open and it wasn’t until later that the contributions of Black Britons were written out of the official history. I’d give you details but I haven’t gotten my hands on his books yet. Expect me to come back to the subject.

Archeology in Britain

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Have you ever read about an archeological dig and wondered how history’s layers get buried? Is the planet stealing soil from someplace and using it to hide the past? Do we keep the same amount of soil but does the wind blow all those layers of dirt over the past’s leavings? And if it does, why doesn’t it unbury an equal amount of history someplace else?

A book I stumbled across recently–Digging Up Britain: a new history in ten extraordinary discoveries, by Mike Pitts–finally answered the question for me, at least in part. A city, Pitts tells us, accumulates people–people who weren’t born there; people who don’t live there. While they’re there, they work, they trade, they eat, they drink, they sleep, and they do much of that within walls if they can. 

Most of those activities involve physical objects, so the city brings in wood and stone for its buildings, and tiles, slates, or reeds for its roofs. It brings in food for its, um, food. Okay, the rhetorical pattern’s breaking down here. We’ll sneak away without anyone noticing. It brings in leather and metal and fabric (or the raw materials to weave fabric) and everything else that you can think of and I haven’t.  

Irrelevant photo: The north Cornish coast

“Goods are also exported and people leave, but with time and decay, the city gains more than it loses. One generation’s walls become the rubble foundations for another’s. Every leather offcut, rusted nail, broken cup and lost penny finds its way into the teeming earth. Slowly, imperceptibly, the ground rises, covering the traces of the past.”

Well, yes, now that he’s planted the picture in my head, it’s a screamingly obvious one. The cause isn’t space dust. It’s people moving stuff from one place to another and wandering off without it. 

 

London

Pitts goes on to talk about some of London’s biggest ground-lifting events. Roman London had two fires that can still be spotted in layers of red earth. One of those would’ve been set during Boudica’s rebellion, when she burned London and two other cities to the ground. Then, when 1666’s Great Fire of London finally burned itself out and it was time to rebuild, stone was hauled in and a new city rose on the leveled remains of the destruction.

The biggest leveling of walls, though, was the blitz–the bombing of London during World War II–and when Pitts reaches this point, he focuses on a small area where two excavations found particularly rich Roman artifacts: On the night of May 10, 1941, bombing “disrupted” 8,000 streets, killing more than 4,000 people and seriously injuring 1,800. It wiped out most of the block he’s interested in, where there’d been 350 businesses “crammed into a warren of high Victorian terraces and narrow alleys.” They included cafes, a bookseller, a tailor, a dentist, accountants, and a postage stamp perforator.

Who knew there even were postage stamp perforators? I assumed that got done by some sort of machinery working where and when the stamps were printed. Or that someone with pointy little teeth came along and–

Never mind. Not much was left of the street, and in 1952, when it was redeveloped, the area was opened to archeologists just before an office building went up on the site. The digging had uncovered an underground temple to Mithras, and it was taken apart, and reconstructed (badly) above ground and facing the wrong way. And then in 2012, when the 1952 building was torn down and something newer and shinier was about to be built, archeologists got in there again, only with more time to do their job. What they found was “like a library of random news from across Roman London.” The area had been used as a dump, and archeologists love dumps. It turned out to be “the most productive single excavation of a British Roman site in modern times,” and included a horde of wood-and-wax tablets recording, for the most part, business transactions. It gave them a glimpse into the city before it had the grand public buildings we associate with Roman towns. This was a town in its early stages. 

The success of that second dig was made possible by a change in the relationship of archeologists and developers.

 

Archeologists and the construction industry

One of the major ways the past gets uncovered in Britain is that someone comes along with heavy-duty construction equipment and starts digging. They’re not hoping to find, say, a Roman villa or a Bronze Age settlement. In fact, they’re hoping not to. They want to build a parking ramp or a shopping mall. 

Until 1990, archeologists were dependent on the goodwill of the developers for access to their sites. Before that, if a developer stumbled into something of archeological importance, and if they didn’t sweep it under the metaphorical rug fast enough, archeologists had to rely on a mix of diplomacy, goodwill, and the public pressure set off by media coverage to get access. Because archeologists mean delays, and delays cost money.

In a showdown between history and national heritage on one side and money on the other, it’s not often that history and heritage win, but they did win when the foundations of Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre were discovered by accident. A media storm set off a celebrity storm, which in turn set off a wider public storm, and under that pressure a delay was organized and the new building eventually went up over the theater’s foundations, which are now covered in water to keep the ground from cracking.

 

Irrelevant but interesting bit of information 

Exploration of the theater’s foundations brought us the news that hazelnuts were the popcorn of Shakespeare’s day. The shells were everywhere. 

 

The relationship changes

After the battle to save the Rose, things changed, and it kills me to say anything good about Margaret Thatcher’s government but I’m going to have to: they’re the ones who introduced Planning Policy Guidance 16–Archaeology in Planning, called PPG16 by its friends and admirers. 

PPG16 is a guidance paper that requires anyone building anything that needs planning permission–and in Britain, that’s just about any building at all–to consider its  impact on archaeology. According to Heritage Daily, PPG16’s impact was unintentional, but lovely, so I don’t have to be particularly nice about Thatcher’s government: they didn’t mean to do something good; they were just trying to shut everybody up.

Heritage Daily  describes the events at the Rose as an omnishambles, with “leading actors, including Sir Ian Mckellen and Dame Peggy Ashcroft, facing down the developers’ bulldozers, standing alongside archaeologists, the general public and local children waving placards declaiming, ‘Don’t Doze the Rose.’

“Faced with this highly public demand that the historic site be protected, the Environment Department, under Secretary of State Nicholas Ridley, proved utterly incapable of formulating a coherent policy to dig the developer Imry Merchant and the Government out of the mire. “

In the end, they cobbled together a system that had local and national governments, developers, heritage professionals, and the public working together to preserve whatever could be preserved in place, and to record, and sometimes move, whatever couldn’t be. It didn’t make developers or free-market purists happy, but it did keep politically damaging incidents like the Rose from happening again. 

 

The impact on archeology

All this meant archeology had to change. The profession came into this period as a mix of local heritage organizations, professors, and museums. None of them were equipped to meet the schedules or use “the same language as the architects and developers whose plans the system was designed to facilitate,” Heritage Daily says. 

After PPG16, “Archaeology as a discipline found itself putting on a suit, becoming a profession and sitting down in planning meetings with architects and developers to discuss fitting in an excavation alongside the other building site preparation and ground works.”

“It’s not perfect, but . . . once PPG16 and the concept . . . was in place, pipeline surveys and large scale infrastructure projects like Heathrow Terminal 5 and HS1, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, did offer the chance to develop practice and sample large transects of landscape to sometimes startling effect.”

Some years ago, not far from where I live, a new sewage line uncovered enough Cornish history that the archeologists involved organized a presentation in the village hall, and it was packed. That was my first hint of the working relationship between archeologists and the construction industry, and I was impressed.

One of the finds they talked about was a series of Christian and pre-Christian burials. You could tell them apart because the Christians were buried so that they’d be facing east when they rose on–what is it? Judgment day? Whichever. If it happens, I’m sure someone will have set an alarm clock, so I don’t need to worry. Anyway, they were supposed to rise from their graves and be facing east. The non-Christians, on the other hand, were buried with grave goods–things they’d used in life and would, presumably, want in the next one. Or maybe the goods were a way for the living to grieve and pay tribute. Who can know at this distance in time? Whatever the reason, that’s how they buried their dead. 

But the archeologists had found a few people who were hedging their bets–or at least whose descendants were. They were buried facing east but also with grave goods. Whichever way the afterlife played out, they’d be ready.

In Pitts’ last chapter, he mentions an enlargement of the A14 (that’s a road) near Cambridge that’s been a particular gift to archeology. They’ve uncovered ancient villages, industrial zones, religious monuments, 15 tones of bones and artifacts, pottery kilns, field layouts and more, all of which could so easily have been dug up, scattered, and lost to history.

The last invasion of Britain

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When was Britain last invaded? 

Sorry, no, it wasn’t in 1066. It was in 1797, France landed troops in Wales, and it played out more as farce than as pivotal historical moment. 

This was toward the end of the French Revolutionary wars, when Britain and France were at war, so invading Britain wasn’t an unreasonable thing to do. The French were backing a hoped-for Irish rising against the English, and invading Britain would make a nice diversion. 

Irrelevant photo: Primroses on a frosty morning.

 

What didn’t happen and what did

The original plan was to land troops in Cornwall, Bristol, Newcastle and–most importantly–Ireland, the last landing planned with the help of the Irish revolutionary leader Theobald Wolfe Tone, who’d convinced revolutionary France that with its help Ireland could free itself of British domination. Before it got far, though, the project was already looking shaky. The raid on Cornwall was canceled, the raid on Newcastle was foiled by the weather, and the ships carrying 15,000 troops to Ireland were also dispersed by the weather and limped back to Brest. 

That left the expedition to Bristol–four ships carrying 1,400 soldiers under the command of William Tate. Why it wasn’t called off is anyone’s guess. 

Tate’s orders were “to bring as much chaos and confusion to the heart of Britain as was possible; to recommend and facilitate a rising of the British poor against the government; but whenever and wherever possible, to wage war against the castle, not the cottage.” 

Disciplined troops might have managed that distinction between castle and cottage, but Tate didn’t have disciplined troops. Over half were newly released prisoners and the rest (including Tate) didn’t have a whole lot of military experience. 

That made no difference to Bristol, because they never got there. The weather was against them and the ships landed instead near the mighty metropolis of Fishguard, Wales. I can’t find population figures for 1797, but the 2021 census reports a population of 3,421, up 2 from the 2011 census. It’s a fair guess that the place had 6 or 8 fewer people in 1797.

The ships actually landed outside Fishguard, not in the metropolis itself, dropping off Tate and his soldiers and sailing back to France and out of our story. 

Tate got down to business and sent out patrols and they set to work looting people’s houses. It’s a well known way of getting cottage-dwellers to support your cause. And since a Portuguese ship had run aground not long before, both houses and cottages were well stocked with brandy. Or in a different telling, wine. 

Okay, brandy turns out to be distilled wine. Lord Google just whispered that in my ear. The things I learn writing this blog.

Before long the soldiers were well stocked with brandy themselves and (I’m guessing here) roaring drunk. One is said to have shot a clock.

Take that, you sumbitch. You won’t try that again, will you?

I’ll guess again and say that had something to do with the brandy.

According to legend, they also cooked some geese in butter and got food poisoning. Now, goose cooked in butter may not be kosher but there’s no reason the soldiers would have known about that or cared if they had, and also no reason that eating goose cooked that way would give you food poisoning. We’re probably missing a piece of the puzzle but I’ve checked under the couch and it’s not there, so let’s go with what we’ve got and not complain. For either one reason or both, a good number of them incapacitated themselves.

One source questions whether the troops were even armed, raising the possibility that they counted on capturing weapons.

 

Meanwhile in the other corner…

…was mighty Fishguard. What did it have by way of defense? The Fencibles, for one thing. They sound like something that could be sold illegally in a back alley but weren’t. They were a militia that could be called up for local service. Their members didn’t have much in the way of training and lived at home, so mobilizing them was slow and probably chaotic, but eventually they gathered at the local fort. Then they abandoned the local fort, marching off in the direction of greater safety, away from the French. On the way, they met the better trained Pembrokeshire Yeomanry Cavalry–professional soldiers–who gathered them up, turned them around, and organized everyone into a night raid on the French position.

At this point, I’m thinking, Hey, night attack. Guerrilla warfare. That’s novel stuff for the era. Shows you what I know. They stumbled along a country lane in the dark with the volume on their fifes and drums turned up to max, alerting (no surprise here) the French, who (as far as I can figure out) took up ambush positions, at which point the British thought better of that night attack idea and marched back the way they came.

 

Does anyone come out of the tale looking competent?

Yes: the local people, who gathered with scythes and pitchforks and rounded up French scouts and stragglers, killing at least one. The local cobbler, Jemima Nicholas, captured a dozen or so while armed with nothing more than a pitchfork.

Did she really capture a dozen soldiers, however drunk, food-poisoned, and badly trained, using only a pitchfork? Who knows. We’re dealing with legend here. She captured some. Presumably she had a pitchfork. She wasn’t a woman to mess with and became a local hero.

Because so much of what happened comes to us by way of legend, though, I’m having trouble putting together a coherent account, so I’ll step back a bit and tell the story from a distance: Local people and British soldiers (back, presumably, from their earlier retreat) lined the crest of the hill, looking to the French like a couple of thousand soldiers–an impression helped along by the local women’s custom of wearing red dresses and tall black hats, which were a fair match for British army uniforms, at least if you didn’t get too close. In fact, the French outnumbered the British but didn’t know it. 

Among the French, discipline was evaporating. Or had evaporated earlier, when all that the brandy signed up. Or it had never been present to evaporate. Tate sent a messenger to Fishguard with a note:

“The circumstances under which the body of French troops under my command were landed at this place renders it unnecessary to attempt any military operations, as they would only lead to bloodshed and pillage. The officers of the whole corps therefore intimated their desire of entering into a negotiation upon principles of humanity for a surrender. If you are influenced by similar considerations, you may signify the same to the bearer. In the meantime, hostilities shall cease.

“Health and respect,

“Tate, Chef de Brigade”

The British bluffed, demanding an unconditional surrender, and got it. The French surrendered and were imprisoned, which seems like an unkind response to someone who signs their note “health and respect.”

 

And then?

Then some of the French soldiers broke out, stole a yacht belonging to Lord Cawdor–the officer they’d surrendered to–and like the ships that had carried them to Wales, sail out of our story, no doubt savoring the occasional sweetness of life’s little ironies.

The building where the surrender was signed became a pub–but not immediately.

After that the story gets serious. Even here at Notes, that sometimes happens.

In 1798, a rebellion did indeed break out in Ireland, but by then the French would only commit enough forces to make minor raids along the Irish coast. Tone landed in Donegal with 3,000 troops and was captured. He was sentenced to be hanged but killed himself before the British got a chance.

Who lived in early medieval England? 

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We’re programmed to imagine early medieval England as a land of straw-haired Anglo-Saxons–so much so that an article debunking that belief is illustrated by (you guessed it) a picture of a straw-haired young woman wearing a leather headband and gazing soulfully up at the clouds. 

But before I go on, let’s define the early medieval period. English Heritage opens the doors at around the year 410 and tossing the drinkers out onto the street in 1066, which means it runs from the end of Roman rule to the Norman invasion. You could call it the Anglo-Saxon period without losing too many points on your essay, even though what you’re about to read messes with the standing assumptions about Anglo-Saxon England. You could also call it the Dark Ages, but you’ll lose points. It’s got more zing but it’s gone out of fashion. 

Irrelevant photo: hellebore

 

That straw-haired image

The stereotype we bought into–and forgive me if I pretend I can talk for all of us–grows out of having read that the Anglo-Saxons invaded that big central chunk of Britain we call England, pushing its earlier residents, the Celts, to the margins.

The margins? That’d be Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall. 

Since the Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes, we can call Central Casting and tell them we need blonds–lots of tall, warrior types and a few wistful maidens.

Why the gender imbalance? Because we were taught the Anglo-Saxons came as warriors–big, blond guys with big, blond swords.

The archeologists who gave us that story did it in good faith. They were working with the tools they had. They’d dig up an early medieval village or graveyard, find Anglo-Saxon artifacts, and not unreasonably deduce that Anglo-Saxons lived there. But turn a few calendar pages and before we know what hit us, science has given them new toys to work with. In other words, the next generation of archeologists could work over the same ground but now sequence DNA and read tooth enamel well enough to identify people’s tribes and know where the tooth enamel- wearer had grown up, and that’s made the picture of early medieval England and the Anglo-Saxons more complicated. 

The article that pushed me down the road toward this blog post opens (once you get past that blond-haired maiden) by questioning the assumption that everyone in early medieval English villages looked alike or talked the same way. It’s based on a DNA study of 460 people from sites across northern Europe, 278 of them from the southern and eastern English coasts. 

The Anglo-Saxons and the Celts

The first change to the traditional story is that the Anglo-Saxons (or the incomers, anyway, whatever we’re going to call them) don’t seem to have driven the Celts out. Instead, the two groups settled down alongside them and played house: Many people in these settlements were of mixed heritage. 

The study did find evidence of mass migration into the British Isles after Roman government ended, but it wasn’t a migration of warriors. These were families.

Now let’s shift to a different article. It’s about the same study but juggles a few different details. It doesn’t talk about Celts and Anglo-Saxons but people of WBI (western British and Irish) and CNE (continental northern European) heritage. If you want the percentages from various communities, that’s where you’ll find it. I hope you know better than to look to me for numbers when they’re avoidable.

But the genetic makeup of the communities wasn’t limited to Celts and northern Europeans. One skeleton–a girl of about eleven, found in Updown (yes, seriously), in Kent–had two-thirds CNE ancestry and one-third West African ancestry. The modern grouping most closely related to her African ancestors would be the Esan and Yoruba peoples in southern Nigeria. 

How’d they show up there? Trade, probably. Early medieval England wasn’t an isolated place, ad traders often exchange more than just the goods they’re selling. They exchange culture, language, DNA.

Updown Girl was buried with her family members and with grave goods similar to theirs, like any other village girl, since that’s what she was, in a manner we still call Anglo-Saxon for lack of a better term. 

Why am I looking for a better term? Because the culture we still think of as Anglo-Saxon and that we used to assume was brought over whole by the Anglo-Saxon tribes seems to have belonged to a hybrid culture–the kind that grows up when cultures meet and mix. We don’t know what that mixing was like; we can only infer it from DNA, tooth enamel, and the goods people were buried with.

Grave goods and social patterns

The second article says, “Grave goods seem to have played only a very limited role in the signalling of different ancestries–assuming that was what was intended–and where it is seen, that signalling was dependent on biological sex.” In other words, you can’t tell from the goods people were buried with who was of primarily CNE (or Anglo-Saxon) ancestry and who was primarily WBI (or Celtic), although men whose ancestry was primarily WBI–what we’d call mostly Celtic–were more likely to have been buried with grave goods primarily WBI than women were.

How come? Dunno. Any answer will be wild speculation. If I was writing historical fiction, I could have fun with that, although someone somewhere would inevitably think it was fact.

The archeologists found that the two groups–the WBI and the CNE–didn’t generally keep themselves separate and people soon had mixed ancestry. The patterns varied from settlement to settlement, but all of them change our assumptions of what Anglo-Saxon means. It’s beginning to look like a culture adopted by a group of genetically mixed people rather than something brought over whole by invading tribesmen.

As the first article–the one with the straw-haired maiden–puts it, “Early Anglo-Saxon culture was a mixing pot of ideas, intermarriage and movement. This genetic coalescing and cultural diversity created something new in the south and east of England after the Roman empire ended.”

For people who believe in racial purity, the science of DNA must be a real pain in the backside.

A quick history of the Cornish pasty

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If Cornwall and Devon go to war–and nothing’s too crazy these days–it will be about either who baked the first pasty or who knows the right way to make a cream tea. You’ll agree, I’m sure, that these are reasonable things for neighboring counties to shed blood over, but they may have to wait until people aren’t quite so distracted by the cost of living crisis that the important things slip past them unnoticed.

In the meantime, allow me, please, to stoke the fires of cultural warfare by exploring, in my usual even-handed way, the history of the Cornish pasty. Or possibly the Devon pasty. 

We’ll skip that business about cream tea for now.

Irrelevant photo: a hellebore

What’s a pasty?

Basically, a semicircular pie made of beef, potatoes, onions, and turnips, only the turnips are called swedes. It might just possibly have other stuff as well, but before we get to that let’s dive down the closest rabbit hole and ask why turnips are called swedes.

According to one gardening catalog’s website, “The swede is thought to have been introduced into Britain around 1800. It is said that King Gustav of Sweden sent the first swede seeds as a gift to Patrick Miller (1731 – 1815) of Dumfries and Galloway, and that this act resulted in the vegetable being called ‘swede.’ ”

The website also says they’re called rutabagas in the US, from a Swedish word meaning thick root. Well, maybe and maybe not. I grew up in New York and remember turnips being called turnips, although I don’t remember that we ate them. Rutabaga, I think, is a regionalism. Or else calling a turnip a turnip is a regionalism. But that’s the wrong rabbit hole, so we’ll back out before we get stuck.

A different gardening catalog site says the swede is “bigger, tougher skinned, yellow fleshed and much hardier than a turnip.“ So basically, by this definition they’re the same thing but different.

You needed to know all of that, right? Now we’ll leave the rabbits and their burrow in peace and get to something vaguely resembling the point. 

Before Britain left the European Union, the Cornish pasty got protected status from the EU, meaning that if a pasty wasn’t made in Cornwall, it couldn’t claim to be a Cornish pasty. Or, since no pasty makes claims on its own behalf, the person selling it couldn’t make that claim.

To translate that into handy bureaucratese, “At least one stage of the production, processing or preparation of the product must currently take place in Cornwall.”

If I’m reading that correctly, you could run the length of Cornwall with a potato and a knife and just as you’re about to cross the Tamar River into Devon cut the potato in two, then use one or both halves to make a pasty in Devon, and still call the result a Cornish pasty, although you’d have gone to a lot of trouble without getting much benefit from it.

Besides, Cornwall left the EU along with the rest of Britain, so the pasty lost its protected status. I admit, that’s well down the list of problems Brexit caused, but the Devon pasty never had protected status to lose, so if we’re keeping score that’s one point for Cornwall. Unless you’re a Brexiteer, in which case you’ll give that point to Devon anyway.

 

Do pasties always have beef, potatoes, and whatever?

As far as most people are concerned, yes. If someone asks for a pasty, they’re expecting beef, potato, onion, and swede, wrapped in pastry and crimped along the edge. You might slip in a bit of carrot or five army-green peas, but I understand they’re controversial. These days, though, you can also buy cheese and onion pasties, vegan pasties, gluten-free pasties, steak and stilton pasties. In Padstow, I’ve even seen apple pasties and chocolate pasties in displayed shop windows. 

The tourists don’t know any better, but Cornwall’s patron saint, Piran, is in despair and rumor has it he’s taking applications from other counties, hoping they’ll show more respect for their traditional foods.

 

Was that always what was in a pasty?

Of course not. Where’s the fun in writing about something that has a simple history? If we go back to medieval times, we can find recipes that use venison, beef, lamb, seafood, and eels, flavoring them with gravies and fruits. 

Okay, someone else can find the recipes for us. I’ll surprise no one if I admit to relying on secondary sources. 

Were those the first pasties, then–the pasty pioneers? Once again, of course not. Those are the ones that got written down. Folk pasties, like folk songs, had to make their way in the world without benefit of written records. 

In addition to their having been written down, what tells us that these aren’t folk pasties is that only the rich (along with a lucky poacher or two) ate venison. So if ordinary folk ate pasties–and they probably did–that’s not what they wrapped their pastry around, and if you’ll follow me further into the realm of guesswork, I’m going to assert that they used whatever they had, because most people lived on the edge. Food was scarce. They made what they could out of what they had. And before 1586, that wouldn’t have included potatoes because they hadn’t reached Britain yet. They’re a New World import.

The ordinary Cornish pasty–what we could call the folk pasty, although no one else does–first becomes visible with the rise of the Cornish mining industry in the 1700s. Pasties were filling enough to keep a miner going through a hard day’s work at a time when not even the wildest of wild-eyed radicals were suggesting the 8-hour day or the 5-day week. 

The website of the Cornish Pasty Association (of course there’s Cornish Pasty Association) tells us that “the wives of Cornish tin miners would lovingly prepare these all-in-one meals to provide sustenance for their spouses during their gruelling days down the dark, damp mines.”

I won’t argue with dark or damp, but I will argue with the double L in grueling because I’m American by birth and spelling. I’ll also argue about every last pasty being prepared lovingly. Some wives and husbands were loving. Others were disappointed and bitter. A few were baffled or indifferent or repelled. Either all or almost all were exhausted, which takes a good bit of the love out of cooking, and sometimes out of love itself. Still, make them they did, because carryout (or takeout, or whatever you want to call it) hadn’t been invented, and neither had disposable income.

In everything I’ve read about miners and pasties, no one’s bothered to mention whether the bal maidens–the women who worked above ground at the mines–also ate pasties. It’s always the men eating and the women cooking. Interesting, isn’t it? 

Bal? It’s the Cornish word for mine. 

 

The shape

The standing belief is that the reason pasties were (and are) shaped like a capital D was to allow miners to hold the crust at one end with a work-grimed hand, then throw that final piece away. Arsenic was a presence in Cornish mines–so much of it that in the nineteenth century mining companies dug it out and sold it as a pesticide, and it was from that humble start that arsenic went on to power many a British mystery. How else was a mere woman to kill her husband?

That business about holding the pasty by the crust isn’t an established fact, though. Some people argue that miners carried their pasties in muslin bags, or in paper ones, and used the bags to hold the pasty while they ate. At least one photograph supports the argument, and it only makes sense considering that they had to not only carry their pasties to the mine but set them down someplace filthy until lunchtime.

According to legend, miners used to leave the final piece of crust for the knockers, who were–well, I can’t find a reliable source for this, so let’s go with WikiWhatsia. Knockers lived underground and were about two feet tall, with big heads, long arms, wrinkly skin, and white whiskers. They dressed like miners and were mostly benevolent. If you listened to their knocking, they could help you find productive seams. They could warn you of an impending collapse. They could also steal your tools or put out your candle. So a bit of crust from your pasty? Sure. You’d want these guys to like you. 

How did these creatures exist if they were all guys and all had whiskers? One strand of belief held that they were the spirits of miners who’d died underground. Another held that they were the ghosts of Jews who worked the mines in the eleventh and twelfth centuries–or possibly earlier.

Yes, kids, we’re getting deep into the land of unsubstantiated legend here. Some tales have Jews coming to Cornwall in ancient times–ancient enough that you can throw a few Phoeniceans into the conversation and not have it get any stranger than it already is. Others have Jews working the mines in the decades leading up to 1290, when Edward I spoiled the fun by expelling all the Jews from England.

Unsubstantiated as they are, you will find the word Jew in a few Cornish place names. Penzance, for example, has a Market Jew Street. Speaking as a marginally Jewish Jew, I’ve never figured out whether I should be offended by that or not. On a balance of probabilities, my guess is that I should, although I’m not exactly, just deeply weirded out.

Academic guesswork holds that these names are the descendants of unrelated Cornish words, which as the Cornish language was lost became corrupted to match local legend. 

The presence of Jews in Cornwall can’t be documented before the eighteenth century.

Didn’t think we’d get here from pasties, did you?

 

Oggy oggy oggy

While we’re chasing after unsubstantiated beliefs, this would be a good time to chase after the chant “Oggy, oggy, oggy.” 

Authoritative sources are too smart to weigh in on this, but Lord Google led me to sources offering various explanations: An oggy is a pasty–a corruption of a Cornish word for pasty. (At least it didn’t end up as Jew.) Or else the chant came from (gasp) those pesky Devonians, trying once again to claim the pasty as their own. Or it’s what the miners’ wives called down the pit when the pasties they were baking on the surface were ready to eat. (Take that with a cup or three of salt. The shafts were deep and the miners were likely to be working far from the entrance. You could call, “Oggy” all you wanted, they wouldn’t be likely to hear you.) Or it’s what pasty sellers on the streets called to drum up business.

Whatever it meant and wherever it was heard, the correct response if you hear it is, “Oi, oi, oi.”

Somehow or other it ended up as a Welsh rugby chant.

Do you begin to understand why it’s easy to think no Jews were involved in the making of Market Jew Street?

 

So who gets to claim the pasty, Devon or Cornwall?

An account book in Plymouth (that’s in Devon) mentions pasties in either 1509 or 1510. But a Cornish website cites earlier mentions, one involving Great Yarmouth and another St. Albans Abbey. Neither is in Devon. Neither is in Cornwall either, but they do undermine the value of that Plymouth mention. 

Take that, Devon.

A BBC article notes, with the print equivalent of a straight face, that a Cornish chronicler of the pasty claims that ancient Cornish cave paintings depict the pasty.

Does Cornwall have ancient cave paintings? Well, no, but let’s not let that ruin a good argument.

Okay, go ahead, rule out the cave paintings. That leaves us with some written records–more of them than I mentioned–but no one’s going to prove much about the pasty’s origins by citing written records. And we weren’t doing all that well with the unwritten ones, were we? It’s entirely possible that no one’s going to prove anything at all. Devon’s case isn’t strong. And Cornwall’s isn’t either, but we’ll say that quietly if you don’t mind. I live in Cornwall. I have to be careful.

None of that is likely to stop the rush to war, but I did try.

 

Yeah, but what about that cream tea?

Oh, that. We’re out of space. I’ll have to refer you to that notorious non-expert, me, for an explanation. 

What was life like in Viking England?

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English histories don’t ignore the Vikings. Who could? As raiders and as invaders, they left a mark that’s hard not to notice. But although the histories I’ve read mention the chunk of England the Vikings ruled, they treat it as if it was surrounded by an electric fence–they walk the perimeter, touch a quick finger to the wire, but then shy away to talk about the real England, which is (why, of course) the one the Anglo-Saxons ruled.

Well, screw that. Let’s go trespassing. I want to know what life was like in the Danelaw.

 

The what?

The Danelaw–the part of Britain ruled by the Danes (or Vikings, or Norse–it was all fluid at this point) and where Danish law was in force. It filled north, central, and eastern England (England didn’t exist yet as a political entity, but let’s use the name anyway) and included London. In other words, this was a big chunk of land. For a while there, it extended up into Scotland as well.

If you want to look like you know something no one else does, you can also spell it Danelagh or Danelaga. The price for that is that no one will know what you’re talking about. I don’t recommend it.

Irrelevant photo: Azalea blossom. In January. Indoors, I admit, but even so…

 

How’d the Danelaw get there?

Most of us first got to know the Vikings through cheesy movies, TV shows, and comic books. (Yes, we’re a high-culture lot around here.) They were raiders with horns on their helmets and they came in long, narrow boats, smashing, grabbing, and terrorizing. They were big, they were hairy, and they were scary.

Except for the business about the horns, that’s not untrue, but it’s also not the whole truth. 

Okay, I can’t vouch for the big and hairy part. They might not have been bigger or hairier than anyone else on the scene. Scary, though? Definitely. 

The rest of the story is that they were also settlers (or immigrants, or invaders–take your choice), farmers, craftspeople, and traders. They timed their raids to the agricultural year, because they were needed at home for the planting and harvesting. 

The raids weren’t England’s first experience of the Vikings. Britain and Scandinavia had a history of trade, and if you want to find cultural similarities, start by looking at England’s Sutton Hoo ship burial. But whatever the relationship was, no one wrote about it, leaving the Vikings to appear in the eighth century as raiders along the English coasts.

In the ninth century the Vikings shifted from raiding to settling in what became the Danelaw, replacing the Anglo-Saxon kings and landlords. It would be fair to say that they weren’t neighborly about those replacements. 

They settled most heavily in York and four other towns (they’re called the five boroughs, and York was dominant) and less heavily in rural areas. Some of them intermarried with the local population, so that it wasn’t long (at least in historical terms) before no clear genetic line could be drawn between Dane and non-Dane.

Not that they knew about genes, but everyone knew about sex. 

In some ways, the incomers adapted to the country they’d conquered. Buildings, for the most part, didn’t take on a Scandinavian style. Scandinavian runic writing disappeared. The incomers converted to the Christianity of Anglo-Saxon England fairly quickly, although a paper from the University of Leeds (sorry–I can’t find the author’s name) notes the difference between conversion and the more gradual process of Christianization and argues that “conversion might not be so much a matter of individual conscience as a question of social and political expediency.” In other words, the formal changes happened faster than the deeper ones. No surprise there.  

 

Language

Discussions about the Vikings’ impact swerve pretty quickly into language. In a period that didn’t leave us much evidence, it’s one of the things that can be traced. So place names get mentioned. The endings -by (village or farmstead), -thorpe (new village), -thwaite (meadow), and -dale (valley) mark a Viking presence. Personal names get mentioned. You can’t tell from a person’s name whether they were of Danish or Anglo-Saxon descent or a mix of both, Word borrowings also get mentioned.

Word borrowings? Tuesday and Wednesday are on loan from the Norse gods, although I’m cheating a bit since it was the Anglo-Saxons who brought more or less the same gods into English before they converted to Christianity. In contrast, Old English outright stole egg, steak, law, die, bread, down, fog, muck, lump, scrawny, and a long list of other words, and we’ve had them long enough that no one’s likely to ask for them back. Skirt, cake, freckle, neck, moss, sister, window, knife, smile, seat, gift, cross, leg, husband, law, and wrong are also ours illegally. So are words that start with SK, like sky and skin. Possession is 90% of the law. 

Most of those linguistic thefts were of everyday words, arguing (according to one article) that the two peoples lived side by side, passing a cup of flour and a bucket of words over the fence, as needed. They fall into a category of words a language can’t have too many of: nouns, adjectives, that sort of thing. If we have multiple words for tan (and if you’ve ever worked in the garment industry you know how many we have), the language can absorb that. But English somehow borrowed the word they from Old Norse (it was originally a masculine plural, but English got bored and made it gender neutral). Pronouns, it turns out, fall into a different category: the language chokes, coughs, and spits if it has multiples of them. The transfer (according to that same article) seems to testify to a close relationship between speakers of the two languages. In fact, the two languages may have been mutually intelligible–they’re both Germanic–which surely would’ve helped.

Compare all that to the French words that entered the language after the Norman conquest. We have more borrowings from French than from Norse, but they’re about high culture, hunting, law, cooked food as opposed to uncooked animals, and government, not about ordinary things like window, smile, knife, and seat.

Old Norse might have still been in use when the Normans invaded but it had probably dropped out of use by the twelfth century. Its speakers had been absorbed into the general population. 

Some academics argue that modern English is a descendant of the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, rather than of the Anglo-Saxon language, which I learned to call Old English. Other academics say, “Bullshit,” only more politely and at greater length. We’ll keep our hands in our pockets and let them fight that out, okay? May the best argument win.

 

Law

This is another place where the Vikings’ impact can be traced. With a lovely sense of irony, we stole the word law from them, along with by-law. The by there means “town.”

Central to the Viking legal system was the Thing–or in some spellings, Ting: a representative gathering that served as both legislature and court. (If you have nothing better to do, try googling “What is a thing?”)  

Someone accused of a crime could be brought before the Thing, with people stating what they believed to be the facts of the case. Or claimed to believe. Or–well, we’re an imperfect species. That hasn’t changed. 

A law-sayer would explain what the law had to say about the crime, and a jury or 12–or 24, or 36, if the case was important enough–would decide whether the accused was guilty or innocent. A person who was found guilty could be fined or outlawed–banished to the wilderness, denied help from friend and family, and fair game for his (or presumably her) enemies. 

When the old gods held sway, disputes could also be settled with duels, but Christianity put an end to that, introducing the civilized practice of the ordeal by fire. If you could grab a piece of iron out of boiling water and walk nine paces with it, you were innocent. Ditto if you could walk twelve paces over red-hot iron and not have infected wounds three days later. 

To be fair–and I do occasionally want to be fair–having introduced the ordeal by fire, Christianity later abolished it, but it took a while, and left a lot of burned feet.

Even after the Norman invasion, as late as the twelfth century, the old Danelaw area was recognized as having a customary system of laws that was different from the formerly Anglo-Saxon part of England’s.

 

Social structure

Viking women were freer than most women of their age. They could own land, divorce a husband, and reclaim their dowries if a marriage broke apart. With their men so often away pillaging, their role in the family was a powerful one, and some seem to have fought beside the men. 

All that is ripped wholesale out of discussions of Scandinavia, but it’s a fair bet that it carried over into Viking England. 

Solid evidence about women’s role is sketchy, though. Until recently, the assumption was that the invaders were men and that when they settled down they married local women. Recently, though, metal detectorists have found enough Scandinavian women’s jewelry to convince at least some experts that a fair number of women either journeyed with or later joined the men.

The strong impact of Old Norse on English also argues for the presence of Norse women. Language is transferred primarily in the home. A bilingual household is less likely to preserve the incomers’ language.

Or so the theory goes.  

Poor farmers also had more independence in Viking England than they did in Anglo-Saxon England. On the other hand, both the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons held and traded slaves, so poor farmers weren’t at the bottom of the social scale. 

Nothing’s ever simple, is it? 

I could–in fact, I will–toss a handful of words at you that mark the Viking social structure: sokeman (a small farmer with more independence than the English equivalent), wapentake and sulung (units of tax assessment, which tells us that yes, these big, hairy people did have a governmental structure), jarl (which became earl), riding (an administrative unit that continued into the 1970s). The words hint at social changes that would’ve been significant to the people living through them.

What else do we know about the Danelaw? It experienced growth in industry–mass-produced metalwork; pottery that was thrown on a wheel and glazed–and that may have been due to increased trade.

It’s not much, is it?

 

And then what happened?

Viking and Anglo-Saxon England fought. Anglo-Saxon England paid Viking England not to fight. Everybody fought some more. People were born. People died. Everyone got mixed together in complicated patterns. A handful of English kings were Scandinavian. The last Anglo-Saxon king, the unfortunate Harold–he of the arrow in the eye–had Norse ancestors. 

The closer you get, the more complicated the picture is. You think you can draw a clean line between two groups of people and two cultures, but you can’t.  

Welcome to the real world.