Category Archives: Traditions

England’s thatched roofs

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Picture a typical English village–

No, sorry. Picture a stereotypical, anachronistic English village. It will have a not-quite-straight street and at least one house with a thatched roof. And flowers. Lots of flowers. It will be summer–and sunny.

That thatched roof sits at the heart of the way the English and the non-English alike construct Olde England in their imaginations, and that has a certain amount of logic to it. Thatch has been covering (some) English houses for a long time, even if it’s out of date now. 

The sunshine? It wandered in from some other picture. Forget I mentioned it.

The Hoops PH Bassingbourn

A bit of history

Humans have been trying to stay out of the rain since forever, and thatch is one of the oldest ways our species has found to do that. Archeological evidence dates it back to the neolithic era–4000 BCE. But  a leaflet from the New Forest National Park says we won’t find a lot of agreement on its development in Britain “and there has been little professional study of its origins.” So you’ll forgive me if I go a little vague here and skip forward a few thousand years. 

The word thatch comes from Anglo-Saxon, the New Forest leaflet says, and they used it as both a noun and a verb meaning, more or less generically, roof covering. That has the virtue of simplicity–or possibly oversimplification. Etymology Online traces the word back further and tells me more than I can take in about its journey through Old English, Proto-Germanic, Middle Dutch, and Old High German. 

I’m not good with heights, so when we got to Old High German I fled. We’ll go with the New Forest definition. Besides, Etymology Online also told me how to get rid of toenail fungus. It was an ad but it put me off all the same.

 

What was thatch made of?

Whatever was available, which is another way of saying it depended on where people lived. The list includes straw, heather, gorse, bulrush, sedge, and sod. 

Heather? I can’t see how to make that work either, but it’s on the New Forest leaflet list.

Over the years, layers of soot from open fires built up on the underside of some medieval houses’ thatched roofs and acted as a preservative, keeping a few hundred of them intact until this very moment. 

Why the open fires and the soot? Let’s talk about chimneys–or the lack of chimneys. 

Chimneys made their way to England in the late Norman period, but they were strictly for the rich.  Everyone else cooked and warmed their houses the way they’d always cooked and warmed their houses: they built a fire in the middle of the (one-room) house. The smoke rose and found its way out through the thatch or through a hole in the roof, and as much of indoor life as possible, took place below the level where the smoke was thickest. 

The roofs had to be high enough not to catch fire from the sparks, although (generalization alert here) people can be pretty clever when they need to be and I’m sure most of them learned to minimize both sparks and smoke. 

 

Let’s move on

For centuries, thatch roofed many an English house–the material was available locally and you could find a thatcher hiding in every haystack. Then came the industrial revolution and with it England’s canal and later railroad systems, which could carry tiles and slates around the country relatively cheaply. Thatch came to be seen as– Well, let’s quote Thomas Pennant, who wrote in 1782 that the cottage in general, “instead of being half covered with miserable thatch, is now covered with a substantial covering of tiles or slates, brought from the distant hills of Wales or Cumberland. . . .”

Where, I’m reasonably sure, slate and tile roofs had long been more common than thatch. 

Pennant? He was a traveler, an antiquarian, and a writer. He was from Wales, which may explain why he didn’t think to add Cornwall to the list of slate-producing parts of the country.

But what matters more is why Pennant considered thatch miserable. For one thing, it’s flammable–so much so that a lot of towns and cities had banned it, notably London after the Great Fire of 1666. You know about people and their prejudices. The flammable roof went out of fashion, leaving people to associate it with rural areas–places that got left behind by the driving might of etc. and so forth. Places where people didn’t know or couldn’t afford any better. 

Those rural areas that kept the craft of thatching alive. 

Another argument for thatch being miserable is that all sorts of critters can take up residence in it, uninvited. These days they can be kept out with wire netting over the thatch, but that’s a relatively recent development. Chicken wire (the closest thing I could think to ask Lord Google about) wasn’t invented until 1844. So thatch fell out of favor. In 1800, England had some 950,000 thatched buildings. By 1960 that was down to 35,000, but after the Second World War a wave of interest in historic preservation brought thatch into fashion. 

These days you can find a thatched roof here and there, but you can’t just wander through a randomly chosen village and be sure you’ll find one, never mind several. 

You can, however, wander around the internet and find sites and organizations offering advice on how to preserve your thatched roof if you happen to have one. 

 

The advantages and disadvantages of thatch

Other than looking fabulous and promoting the image of Olde England, what are the advantages of thatch? Sites–admittedly some of them are sites promoting it, so they’re hardly unbiased–talk up its sustainability. Thatch is also good insulation, they say, and keeps a house dry. (In Britain, damp is the enemy of indoor life the way cold is in Minnesota, where I used to live.) Bump around enough sites and you’ll find those basics said in seven different ways, pumping up the list of advantages until it’s ready to explode. 

Thatch is also lightweight (that surprised me too) and doesn’t need guttering. On the flip side, with no gutters you can’t collect water for your garden. 

You do have a garden, don’t you? You almost have to, to go with your thatch.

Disadvantages? Well, there’s that business about fire. Insurance companies get twitchy about that and only settle down when offered large sums of money at regular intervals. Then there’s the cost of reroofing, which can be terrifying, for a couple of reasons. 

First, there’s a shortage of traditional straw. As Hampshire-based master thatcher Tim Anderson writes, “Supply is very dependent on good weather. The seasons have changed in recent years with more heavy rain in June and July. Farmers cut the straw and then leave it to stand in the fields to dry for a couple of weeks. Two harvests ago, it rained for a month and the hay all turned brown and rotted away so there was little that was usable. Some farmers’ entire crops failed.”

All that helps explain why some of those formerly local materials are now being imported. Take one point off the sustainability column, please, and several off the affordability one.

Second, there’s the supply of thatchers. The craft went into decline, although it sounds like it might be a good one to train in now. Thatchers can be booked up for years in advance. 

An average cottage might need 15 to 20 tons of straw and  take 10 to 12 weeks. 

The tonnage there makes me question how light it is, but I swear I read that on–I don’t know, one of the sites I’ve linked to.

Put all that together and a cottage that might’ve once cost £30,000 to reroof can now set you back £60,000 to £100,000–and that’s before you add the cost of scaffolding. 

 

Durability

If you’re looking at that kind of money, you might just want to know how long a roof lasts. One site says a roof made with water reed can last 40 years. Notice the word can there. Notice water reed. They’re not all made that way. So this isn’t a question with a simple answer. The life span will depend on what it’s thatched with and how whatever it’s thatched with was grown. And you should expect the ridge cap to need replacing more often than the roof itself. 

You can add a new layer of thatch but sooner or later you’ve got to tear the thing off and start over. 

The life span will also depend on how well it’s maintained. A leak will cause problems deeper into the thatch if it isn’t caught and fixed. Too much moisture and you can find moss growing on your thatch. Wind can tear pieces loose. Too much sun and your thatch can turn brittle, shortening its life. 

If I read that right, too much weather of any kind should make you lose sleep. 

Bump around the internet, though, and you’ll find that techniques and materials have evolved and fire-resistant treatments, ventilation systems, and synthetic thatch have been added to the traditional approaches. How much they solve the problems is anyone’s guess.

Life in a medieval house

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Ever looked at a picture of some centuries-old house–or for that matter, at the real thing in all its hand-built glory–and gotten all misty-eyed, wondering what it was like to live there? Well, thanks to a street of 650-year-old houses and a plan to update them, we can inch a little closer to the answer. The update plan led to a newspaper article. The newspaper article led to my hunch that you might be interested in reading about it.  

The houses are owned by Wells Cathedral and for all their 650 years they’ve been lived in by the singers in the cathedral choir. They’re on what’s believed to be the most complete and continuously occupied medieval street in Europe.

So what’s it like to live there? Cold. According to one resident, “The windows leak £10 notes every time you put the heating on . . . and [enough with the metaphors] the roof leaks actual water.”

Irrelevant photo–except that it was cold enough overnight to leave frost on the fields.

 

The original houses

When they were first built, the roofs wouldn’t have leaked, but the windows surely would have let the cold air in. And the warm air out if any was available. Before chimneys, smoke from the hearth had to find its own way out, taking any available warmth with it, so if an airtight house had been possible it would’ve been a health hazard. 

Even with the leaks, though, indoor life was smoky. That was a problem for anyone who relied on breathing, but if you wanted to preserve your–or someone else’s–voice it would be particularly problematic, which may be why Wells Cathedral was ahead of the curve. Chimneys weren’t common until the 16th or 17th centuries, but chimneys were added to the choristers’ houses in the 15th century, along with water pipes. 

This meant that, cold or not, the houses would’ve been miracles of convenience. So let’s set aside our notions of comfort. They’re not a good match for the era we’re talking about.

The houses originally had two rooms each and were built for single men.

Men? Yes. The choristers were all male, with boys singing the soprano parts. The buildings housed altos, tenors, and basses. I’m not sure where the kids lived. They were small. Maybe someone stacked them in a cupboard when they weren’t in use.

It wasn’t until the Reformation that the cathedral broke through some walls to double the houses’ size and make room for families, and it wasn’t until very recent times that soprano parts have been opened up to girls and (gasp) grown women–and even now (I believe) that’s only true in some choirs. 

If the houses weren’t built for families, does that mean pre-Reformation choristers were expected to be celibate? Apparently so, with the emphasis on expected.

Before the houses were built, the choristers lived in town, and the idea was that corralling them in one place would keep them from worldly temptations, by which the churchly fathers meant sex. It must not have worked (I know: that surprises you), because in 1459 (the houses were first occupied in 1348) the church added a bridge to the cathedral so that on their way to work the singers wouldn’t have to rub shoulders, even briefly, with real people and all the temptations they presented. 

As the current cathedral dean explained it, “They started to get into trouble with what they termed ‘incontinence,’ which meant getting involved with women.” A BBC video tour and explanation, which is worth watching, also mentions problems with singers not showing up on time. Move them all next door to the cathedral, though, and they couldn’t say, “I’d have clocked in an hour ago but traffic was backed up halfway to Bristol.” 

The singers ate in a common dining room. That lets us imagine strong community bonds among people working and eating together and living next to each other. It also lets us–or me anyway–imagine living with the constant presence of some busybody, either another singer or a church official, tracking everyone’s comings and goings, watching for the faintest hint of a sex life. 

 

The current houses

The current residents don’t own or rent the houses, and not all the residents are singers; some are cathedral employees of various other sorts. The houses are what’s called grace and favour houses. They come with the job. 

At some point kitchens were added, but residents say the sense of community remains.

The cathedral has gotten a grant of £4.4 million for repairs but needs to raise an additional £1.9 million to start the project. Which is, in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of money. 

Is it worth it? The cathedral’s dean would argue that it is. “The roofs are failing,” he said. “The guttering is failing. The windows are failing. If we don’t look after this treasure, we’re going to lose it. The stakes are that high.”

Are foxhunters an ethnic group?

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

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

Point proven, then. 

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

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

Irrelevant photo: a begonia

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

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

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

Did I lose anyone on the hairpin turns back there? 

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

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

 

A bit of history

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

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

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

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

Or gentlewomen. 

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

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

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

British traditions: tea, tomatoes, and the House of Commons

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Is tradition any more important in Britain than it is in other countries? Probably. This is a country that, in advance of the monarch’s address to Parliament, searches nonexistent cellars for gunpowder because in 1605 some was hidden there. (The building had cellars then.) The people who do that searching wear uniforms that are traditional enough to have gone eye-catchingly out of sync with what your average human actually wears these days.

A relevant photo, which is a rare item around here. These are Yeomen of the Guard, in uniform, searching the nonexistent cellars, using lanterns and looking entirely serious about the whole thing.

During the address, a Member of the Commons (yes, they capitalize that) is ceremonially held hostage in Buckingham Palace until the monarch is safely returned from the hostile territory that is the Commons. That dates back to 1649 and Charles I, who was eventually beheaded and did, arguably, have a good reason to think the neighborhood was dangerous.   

So yes, tradition’s a powerful force. We’ll get to its role in politics in a minute. First let’s look at the breakfast table. 

 

Tea

If I’ve learned anything from living in Britain, it’s this: Don’t mess with the tea. It sits at the heart of British culture and outsiders shouldn’t meddle. I’m not sure about insiders, but they’d probably be wise not to mess around either.

Did it take me 17 years (and counting) to learn that? No, but however long it took I’ll pass it on to you for free so you’ll be spared the fate of American chemistry professor Michelle Francl, whose book Steep: The Chemistry of Tea has been greeted with caffeinated giggles on this side of the Atlantic.

What did she do? She told us to add a pinch of salt to our tea. If you’re American and don’t understand how that went over, imagine a British writer telling you to add–oh, I don’t know, let’s say ketchup to your coffee. If you’re not British and not American, I don’t want to go too far out on a limb but you could, just maybe, imagine me recommending that you take your national beverage and filter it through a pair of old socks.

What’s Francl’s salt supposed to do? Take the bitterness out of the tea. 

Am I brave enough to try it? Hell no. I did think about it and lost my nerve. So far I’ve only found one food writer who tried, and she admits that it “brings out savoury notes” in the tea, which she’s “not averse to,” although that’s not what you’d call an enthusiastic endorsement.

The others? They’re all either too outraged or laughing too hard to experiment.

Francl also recommends heating the milk before you add it on the grounds that it reduces the risk of it curdling.

Has cold milk ever curdled when I’ve added it to my tea? Only when it was older than me, in which case it was kindly warning me to pour out the tea and start over. 

To be fair, Francl also recommends some sensible things, like boiling the water, a trick your average American has trouble with. I don’t know what it is about Americans, but (generalization alert here) we’re convinced that if you allow lukewarm water in the same room as a stove, it’s hot enough to make brew tea. 

It’s not. You could get as much good out of your teabag by taking it into the bathtub with you.

So boiling the water is good advice, but it’s not enough to redeem her. Tea is British culture. It’s tradition. It’s what you turn to in a crisis. It’s what you offer someone who crosses your threshold (assuming you want them there). It’s–you know, it’s Britain. So that thing with the salt? It’ll see Francl banned from Britain forever.

 

Breakfast

Asking what’s for breakfast just became unexpectedly controversial. The English breakfast is under threat from no less traditional an organization than the English Breakfast Society.

Is there such a group? Yes indeedy deed, kids, it’s real. I’d have made it up if I could, but I don’t need to and it would never have crossed my mind anyway.

The society hit the headlines with an announcement that people should get rid of the mushrooms or tomatoes that are a longstanding part of the English breakfast (along with a fried egg, baked beans, bacon, sausage, toast, and of course unsalted tea) and add a slice of pineapple instead. 

The society’s founder and chair–

Hang on. Founder and chair? What is it, a closed shop? I’ll admit to wondering if the society has any actual members, but its website lists 31 fellows, so apparently it does. It also assures me that it’s a “learned society.” I feel smarter already.

Anyway, its founder and chair, Guise Bule de Missenden, said nobody ever liked the tomatoes anyway, “So why shouldn’t we swap them?” 

And he knows this how? Because he taps into the psyche of the entire nation when it sleeps, that’s how. He knows what people eat  not because they like it but because they feel they have to. He knows what they shove to the side of their plates. He’s the founder and chair of et cetera, after all.

And this being Britain, he bases his suggestion on history and tradition. Pineapples were a luxury item in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, he tells us (as if we didn’t all know that already). The elite ate them at breakfast, he says, and he doesn’t say but I’ve learned elsewhere that they served them at their fancy dinners. Then pineapples came down in price and, come on, what was the point of eating them if they didn’t demonstrate how rich and important you are? I mean, even if they do taste good. So they fell out of favor. 

Why add them to the English breakfast now? Because they’re traditional, at least if you bend your history around corners at just the right times. And maybe the society felt it was in need of a headline. Or got a kickback from the Pineapple Promotion Society. 

I don’t predict a long life for this new tradition, but then if you’d asked me whether baked beans would catch on as part of a traditional English breakfast I’d have laughed myself into insensibility. So don’t bet heavily against this based on my say-so.

 

How do we decide what becomes a tradition?

Good question, even if I did ask it myself. The tomatoes became part of an English breakfast sometime around World War I, so they’re not in the same category as thatched roofs or monarchy. Mushrooms and hash browns came along even later, but the English breakfast itself only dates back to the Victorian era, when it was the breakfast of the wealthy. Still, it’s been adopted enthusiastically, and maybe that’s the dividing line between tradition and non-tradition: enthusiasm trumps longevity.

Or maybe not. Let’s slide carefully onto thicker ice. A YouGov poll (you see how important this is) asked people what the essential ingredients of the English breakfast were. For more than half the people polled, they were bacon (89%), sausage (82%), toast (73%), beans (71%), fried egg (65%), hash browns (60%), mushrooms (48%), and black pudding (a lonely 35%). A whopping 83% said they liked a full English breakfast and 15% said they didn’t; 2% said, “Don’t bother me, I’m eating.”

 

Political traditions

Tradition, of course, isn’t only about food, it’s also about politics. As far as I can figure out from reading the papers in recent years, it’s perfectly acceptable to destroy the country’s infrastructure, safety net, and human rights record as long as you color within the lines that tradition dictates.

To wit: having very nearly drained his party’s talent puddle, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was driven to resurrect former Prime Minister David Cameron and give him the office of foreign minister, and that’s brought us all nose to nose with an obscure political tradition, and a slightly less obscure problem, which is that recent convention says ministers should be either MPs–Members of Parliament–or members of the House of Lords, and Cameron was neither.

Why is that a convention instead of a tradition? Beats me.You need a law degree and a dowsing rod to find the line between the two. What matters is that Sunak solved the problem by be-lording Cameron: making him a lifetime peer, entitled to sit in the House of Lords, wear a fancy robe on dress-up days, and collect £332 on any day he shows up for work and/or passes Go. Plus expenses and subsidized food and drink.

I can tell you–reliably, since I have a link right her on my computer screen, and now on yours –that this isn’t the first time a minister has been chosen from outside Parliament, so we’re still inside those all-important lines. Be-lording them is a recent way of handling the awkwardness, but it turns out not to solve all the problems, because if you’re not an MP, you can’t just walk into the House of Commons and address the country’s highest legislative body and its only elected one.

Why not? 

Because it’s not done.

Wait, though. MPs are expected to scrutinize what the foreign secretary’s up to. How are they supposed to do that if he’s not allowed in? 

Before we get to that question, let’s ask what  they mean scrutinize. 

Well, kiddies, it’s political-speak for giving him grief (if you’re in the opposition party) or support (if you’re in his own). The Commons is a raucous place that traditionally (see how I snuck that word in again?) rewards braying and hear-hear-ing and verbal bullying as long as the MPs say the people they’re berating are honorable, as in, “The honorable member has surely mistaken a Dr. Who episode for a budget.”

Hear-hear? That’s what a minister’s supporters bray when they’re trying to drown out the opposition’s heckling. Yes, this is politics in the hands of adults.

Now tuck all that in your back pocket and let’s review the pieces of the puzzle: We need the minister in the room so MPs can bray and heckle and hear-hear and occasionally ask useful questions, but only MPs are allowed into the House of Commons. Because it’s a tradition. 

You may be wondering why only MPs are allowed in. Think of it this way: let’s say the room where the MPs meet is a chicken coop and let’s say the Lords are geese. You can see where this isn’t going to work. Different feet. Different ways of sleeping. Different requirements of all sorts. Even the subsidized champagne they drink is different.

Sorry, I slipped right out of my metaphor there.

A further convention (or possibly tradition) holds that ministers stand at the dispatch box to speak to the Commons and be scrutinized and generally made miserable. But allowing the newly be-lorded Cameron (or any other Lord) to walk that far into the Commons would “risk blurring the boundaries between the two houses,” according to a cross-party procedure committee.  

Disaster looms. What are they to do? 

The committee proposed having him stand behind an actual, as opposed to metaphorical, white line on the Commons floor. It’s called the bar and visitors aren’t allowed to cross it when Commons is sitting. Because that would violate the Natural Order of Things. So he can address the Commons from there.

Last I heard, the government hadn’t responded to the committee’s recommendation. They might be happier if the foreign secretary wasn’t available to answer questions just now.

How much does a free portrait of the king cost?

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Britain’s government, in its wisdom, has set aside £8 million so that schools, police stations, courts, and any organization run by the state can request a portrait of King Charles. In full regalia, as a government website reminds us, making him sound like an action figure–the kind you’ll find on the shelves of your local toy store–and I won’t post the link for that because this is the first paragraph and posting links in the first paragraph is against my religion.

But this is not only a portrait of the king in full regalia that’s on offer, it’s a free portrait of et cetera. True, you don’t get any extras with it–no surprise gift, no fries, no pickle–but still, free is free. Especially if we don’t count that £8 the government will fork out for however many it sends or the £86.3 million the country pays to support the monarchy itself. 

Irrelevant photo: I think this is a kind of thistle. Anyway a wildflower. Definitely not a king.

The portraits will be particularly welcome in police stations and courts. There’s nothing like getting arrested to make a person grateful for a glimpse of the overdressed face of authority.

 

Hang on. How much does the monarchy really cost?

That £86 point whatever million is only the Sovereign Grant, formerly known as the Civil List–money that funds the monarch’s official duties, which include cutting ribbons, pulling cords that dramatically sweep back itty-bitty miniature curtains to unveil plaques. (Cue applause from thrilled spectators.) Ah, but that’s not all. The royal family’s duties also include dressing in improbable clothing for ceremonies, waving, smiling (not as easy as you think), and entertaining a carefully selected group of interlopers on the grounds of Buckingham Palace. 

The Sovereign Grant also has to cover property maintenance, travel, payroll, and whatever I’ve forgotten.

But that’s not the royal family’s only income. We haven’t counted the money it gets from Cornwall and Lancaster, which are duchies held personally by the prince of Wales (Cornwall; £21 million a year) and the king (Lancaster; £24 million). We also haven’t counted whatever else is included because that info’s private.  

Even without that, I may still be underestimating their cost to the country, because we should add security–possibly only security for special events like the queen’s funeral, but hey, this all gets murky pretty quickly–and I have no idea what else. Republic, an organization trying to establish (you saw this coming, right?) a republic, estimates the total annual spend at £ 345 million.  

So £8 million for a free portrait? Don’t be stingy. It’s a bargain.

 

By way of comparison

In 2012, the Department for Education was prepared to spend £370,000 to send a leather-bound copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country. The government was supposed to cough up the money, but all hell broke loose and the program ended up being funded by–well, the list I glanced through featured a lot of hedge-fund gazillionaires and donors to the parties that were then in power, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

That didn’t shut up anyone who thought the thing was a waste of money (most schools already had a bible, they said, so what was the point?), but it did let me compare the number of pages in the King James Bible (many) with the number of pages in the king’s portrait (one) and wonder what they’re printing these portraits on. I mean, yes, photographic paper’s expensive, and yes, the King James Bible Project only sent out 24,000 Bibles compared to no-one’s-saying-how-many portraits, but still, on a page-to-page and order-to-order comparison, it does sound pricey.

 

And since we’re talking about that Bible project

The then-education secretary, Michael Gove, was asked if he’d back a similar plan to send around copies of the Quran. 

Um, yeah, sure, he mumbled. The Quran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Talmud. What the hell. Name a holy book and he was all for it–and all the more so because you can’t say Quran in a positive context unless you buffer if with several other holy books

Oddly enough, that was the last we heard of those follow-up projects.

*

Discussing the bible project with Lord Google raised some interesting issues. People, he reminded me, often ask whether the British crown owns rights to the bible.

Sure, I thought. And it’s got a monopoly on god. 

It turns out the question isn’t as silly as I thought. The King James version is covered by crown copyright, which applies to work made by civil servants, government ministers, and other people you can stuff into related categories. To quote WikiWhatsit, “There is . . . a small class of materials where the Crown claims the right to control reproduction outside normal copyright law due to letters patent issued under the royal prerogative. This material includes the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer.”

I don’t usually quote Wikipedia. On an average, it’s as accurate as standard encyclopedias (or was when I was working for a standard encyclopedia and looked it up), but it’s also subject to brief fits of madness, and it changes, making it an awkward beast to cite. But it’s late in the week, I post on Fridays, and I’m short of time. It’ll do.

According to a copyright advice website, “To split hairs a bit, the King James Bible is not subject to copyright in the UK, however because of Letters Patent issued by the Crown, only the Queen’s Printer may print, publish and distribute the KJV Bible within the UK and its Overseas Territories.” 

A grammar advice website (mine will do in a pinch) would tell you to replace the comma before “however” with either a semicolon or a period. You’re welcome. 

But to return to the copyright issue, if you planned to print the King James Bible in the back bedroom and you live in the UK, you’re advised to find a new hobby. If you have other plans for the weekend, this won’t affect you.

Strange English Customs: The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide Football Game

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Something in England’s soil nurtures bizarre traditions, from the soberly political (think Black Rod) to the brutally folkloric. The Ashbourne Royal Shrovetide football game belongs to the second category, and it puts the emphasis on brutal. 

What could possibly be more fun?

Basically, we’re talking about a mass football game that runs for two days. That’s eight hours each day. One article claims it has only two rules, you can’t move the ball in a motorized vehicle and you can’t murder anyone, but don’t take that too seriously. It has other rules, but not murdering anyone is important. It’s that kind of game. Although I’m not sure that’s a rule. One of the assorted articles I read says “unnecessary violence” is frowned on but it’s not banned. It doesn’t mention murder.

Irrelevant photo: a romantic-looking shed door.

 

Sounds like fun. How do I play?

It helps if you’re from Ashebourne, because the town divides into teams according to which side of the river you’re born on. Outsiders can throw themselves in on whichever side they want, but they’d be wise to be (a) large and (b) young enough to heal well. And probably male. I haven’t seen any women in the photos, and wild-eyed feminist that I am, I’m not about to campaign my way into this. Look at it this way: If a group of men decide to do something insanely stupid, being a feminist doesn’t mean I’ll join them in the name of equality. If someone else wants to, I’ll cheer her on, but I’ll do it from the sidelines. 

Here’s how the game works: Someone lets a ball loose in the middle of town and everyone tries to get hold of it, so it immediately turns into a shoving match involving hundreds of people. Odds are that for at least part of the time most of the players won’t have a clue where the ball is, so they’ll shove whoever’s closest and trust it contributes to the greater good. Or that it doesn’t, but at a certain point instinct takes over and who cares? Players get lifted off their feet. They get squeezed until they see stars–which actually does happen when your body doesn’t get enough oxygen. They get broken ribs, broken other things, bruises, black eyes, and injuries to any part of the human body that’s injurable.

The object is to get the ball to the opposite team’s goal–it’s a millstone–and the goals are three miles apart, so the rule about not using motorized transportation begins to make sense. Once you get it there, you hit the ball three times against the stone to score a point. 

It sounds like you need to jump in the river to do that. (See? There are rules.)

Then your teammates carry you back to the town center on their shoulders and if you made your goal before 6 pm, the whole thing starts over with a new ball and the game runs until 10. If it’s after 6, then play’s over for the day and everyone heads for the pub, where people buy you drinks. 

People will be buying you drinks for weeks to come, and you get to keep the ball, which is handmade and hand painted.

On the second day, everyone who isn’t too hung over does it all again.

 

And if I don’t want to play?

You’d be wise to stay well out of the way, because onlookers can get swept into the mayhem, as one reporter was, losing his notebook but gaining some experience in the process. At some point, someone grabbed him by the hood and yanked him out. 

The mob is called the hug and it isn’t entirely in anyone’s control, but it’s powerful. When I read about it knocking over walls, I thought I was reading a bit of poetic exaggeration. Then I saw a photo of a brick wall that had been pushed over. The reporter who lost his notebook wrote about the hug barreling through a barbed wire fence. Shops (wisely) board up their windows. 

And pubs? They sell a lot of beer. 

 

The history

No one knows how the tradition started, but that doesn’t stop people from making it up. According to one theory, it started with an execution. The severed head was thrown into the crowd (of course) and the fun began. You can choose to believe that if you like. No one can prove you wrong.

Or right, but that doesn’t bother people as much as it used to.

The game can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century but probably started long before. A fire wiped out the town records, so that’s as far back as we go. The medieval period’s not an irrational guess. 

A couple of other English towns have similar games at Shrovetide, but most places settle for running around flipping pancakes and seeing who crosses the finish line first.

 

What’s Shrovetide?

The days before Lent. And Lent is the days before Easter, the soberest holiday in the Christian calendar. You needed a Jewish atheist to explain that to you, right? As far as I can figure it out, the medieval approach to Lent was for people to give up everything they enjoyed–meat, dairy products, eggs. Sex. They’d eat one meal a day. 

People were supposed to go to confession at Shrovetide and do all that sober stuff in preparation for Lent. But flipping pancakes and shoving your neighbors through a barbed wire fence and into the river? That also makes sense as a preparation for a somber season. 

 

Mayhem and community spirit

Local people will swear that the point of the game is community spirit. “It’s the lifeblood of the town,” an Ashebournian told the reporter who lost his notebook to the hug. “The media focuses on the fighting, but that’s all forgotten the moment the game ends. The real legacy is how it brings people together.”

Backing that up, a different reporter got a quote from a local businesswoman: “It looks like Armageddon. It’s knee-deep in litter, there’s stuff everywhere piled up in the doorways, in the road.” But after the second day, “all the players will be out mending fences, they’ll help you take your boards down, they’ll be picking up litter, because they want it to continue the next year.” 

Quaint olde English laws

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London’s Millennium Bridge needed some work recently–some cleaning, some urgent repair, a good tooth brushing–and an ancient bylaw required the contractor to dangle a bale of hay over the side of the bridge to warn boats that the headroom had been reduced. 

How ancient is the bylaw? No one’s saying, but the contractor modernized the tradition by adding a light at night. Couldn’t do that in the old days. The hay would’ve caught on fire. 

News articles are talking about it all as one of London’s charming quirks, but what strikes me as far stranger is that five of the Thames river crossings are maintained not by local government but by a 900-year-old charity, which is British for a nonprofit organization. 

But any discussion of quaint bylaws leads, naturally enough, to quaint ordinary laws, and England does a flourishing trade in quaint. Let’s review a handful.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise behind the village shop.

In England, it’s illegal to:

  • Wear armor in Parliament. 
    • A recent article about fashion–I usually skip those but by the end of the sentence you’ll see why this caught my eye–tells me that chainmail is a hot look this season, giving us chainmail-look dresses, miniskirts, tops, and unspecified menswear. “Chainmail is sexy,” someone or other is quoted as saying.  
      • I’m pretty sure you still can’t wear it in Parliament.
  • Walk a cow through the streets between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m.
  • Be drunk in a pub. 
    • To be fair, the law bundles this together with being drunk in other public places, but pubs are the only places on the list that sell alcohol.
  • Be drunk when in charge of a cow, which neatly combines the two previous laws.
  • Cause a nuclear explosion, although who’ll be around to enforce that isn’t clear.  
  • Take off your black cocked hat at a ceremonial event, but only if a) you’re a woman, b) you’re a Thetford town councillor, c) it’s before 2016, and d) you don’t have the mayor’s permission. 
    • That was a loosening of the rules. Women used to have to keep the hats on, no matter what the god, the mayor, or the Grinch Who Stole Christmas said. A whole different set of rules applied to men–of course.  

This doesn’t fit my nifty  it’s-illegal-to formula, but cab drivers are required to ask passengers if they have either the plague or smallpox. And that dates back only to 1936. I’m not clear what the driver’s supposed to do if the passenger says yes, but as a former cab driver, my impulse would be to get the hell out of there. Compassionate cab drivers do exist, but the job doesn’t push a person toward compassion.

Cab drivers are also forbidden to transport rabid dogs or corpses, and I’d like to put it on record that I never broke that law. And was never asked to. 

In another interpretation of the plague-or-smallpox law, the onus is on the passenger to tell the driver if he or she has the plague or smallpox–or any other notifiable disease. 

*

I doubt anyone other than me cares about the odd spacing between paragraphs. I’m sure there’s some way to control it, but I’m damned if I know what it is.

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

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

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

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

 

Quakers and oaths

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

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

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

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

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

 

Which brings us back to Joseph Pease

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Happy days. Have we reached the promised land?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

But let’s got back to Joseph Pease yet again

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

Problem solved. 

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

 

What oath do MPs take these days?

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

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

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

May I live long enough to see that happen.

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

No, you can’t trust everything I say.

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

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

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

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. 

Why a Member of Parliament can’t resign, and how they do it anyway

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Since we’ve seen a handful of MPs resign from the House of Commons lately, this might be a nice time to talk about what an MP has to do to escape MPdom. Because like everything else in Britain, it’s wrapped up in tradition and more complicated than you’d think.

Officially speaking, MPs can’t resign. A 1624 law locks them into their jobs unless they’re expelled, disqualified, or dead. Since relatively few politicians are willing to squeeze their feet into those uncomfortable shoes–I’m not a politician, but the dead part would make me hesitate–and since over the course of a long and complicated history some MPs were deeply committed to getting out of the job, a workaround was invented: they can be appointed to one of two “paid offices of the Crown. These are the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Chiltern Hundreds and the Crown Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead.” 

The small print says that accepting either position disqualifies them as MPs. So without dying or being expelled, they get to push open the fire exit without setting off alarms. Neither position is paid, but they do become the recipients of a shitload of capital letters. 

Irrelevant photo: roses in a nearby town.

What does a former MP have to do if they’re  appointed to one of those positions?

Nothing. The jobs are long past their best-before date and have been kept alive only to allow MPs an exit that doesn’t involve death, expulsion, or uncomfortable shoes, although MPs–especially those of the female variety–are free to wear uncomfortable shoes if they so choose. I disapprove, but hey, who asks me? They’re not my feet.

 

What are the Chiltern Hundreds?

The hundreds are divisions of government and taxation–or at least they were back in the Anglo-Saxon long ago. In terms of size they stand somewhere between a village and a shire.

What’s a shire? 

It’s the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a county.

The Britannica says the hundred was probably an Anglo-Saxon area of a hundred hides, with a hide being the amount of land it took to support a family. Each hundred would have a court to settle  criminal cases and disputes between neighbors. Originally, everyone who lived within the hundred would be expected to attend, but gradually they came under the control of the lords. By the time you get into the medieval period, if a crime was committed, the hundreds were collectively responsible unless they could cough up the perpetrator, or someone who’d pass for the perpetrator.

The hundreds weren’t formally abolished until 1894, although by then they’d pretty well lost all relevance.

 

A bit more history

I’m not clear on whether the 1624 resolution established the rule against resignation or built an escape hatch. Parliament’s website seems to be arguing both sides. On the one hand, it says many MPs saw serving in Parliament as an obligation, not an honor or opportunity to be chased after. So members weren’t encouraged to step down. On the other hand, Parliament didn’t usually stay in session for more than a few weeks, so ”a procedure for resignation was hardly necessary.”

Take your pick. 

It goes on to say that if an MP accepted a paid office from the crown, he (and at this point he would’ve been a he) could no longer be expected “to scrutinise the actions of the Crown or the Crown’s government,” so he’d have to step down.

Did I say “step down”? It was nothing so gentle: “All Offenders herein shall be expelled this House.”

So take that, you offenders.

Once upon a time, lots of crown stewardships roamed the land and could be used this way. They paid actual money and had actual responsibilities. Only two survive and they exist only as a back door out of the House of Commons. You can think of them as a nearly extinct species. They only surviving pair are preserved in the zoo that is the Parliament.  

 

Are there any other ways out of the job?

Yup, and although some are appealing and some are not. An MP can bail out of Commons:

  • By becoming a member of the House of Lords. 
    • A couple of the MPs who left with Boris Johnson were hoping for that promotion, and when their names were crossed off the list felt–okay, I’m speculating here, but it looks to the casual observer like they felt cheated. Here they’d been expecting a job that pays £332 plus travel expenses and access to subsidized restaurants on any day they show up, plus the occasional loan of an ermine robe, and then they’re told they didn’t get the job? Hey, that’s hard on the old ego. https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/how-do-house-of-lords-expenses-work/ 
  • By becoming a police and crime commissioner or a member of the National Assembly for Wales, the Northern Ireland Assembly, or a non-Commonwealth legislature (except the Houses of the Oireachtas of the Republic of Ireland). 
    • The Houses of the Oireachtas? That’s Ireland’s parliament. Exactly why you can be a member of that and not be disqualified as a British MP is way over my head.
  • By being “sentenced to be imprisoned or detained indefinitely for more than a year in the United Kingdom, Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, or the Republic of Ireland; or if they are convicted of treason.”
    • Sometimes, you know, you’re better off just showing up at the goddamn job you already have, no matter how much you hate it. 
  • By going bankrupt, but only under some circumstances.
    • Please don’t ask which circumstances or why those and not others.  
  • Or, as we’ve seen, by accepting “one of a number of offices which are incompatible with membership of the House of Commons.”

So on the off chance that you wake up some morning and find that against your will and despite all your protestations you’ve been made a Member of Parliament, don’t despair. It doesn’t have to be a life sentence. The Chiltern Hundreds would be happy to act as your host, for however short a time.

How do members of the House of Lords resign? By writing a nice little note to the Clerk of Parliaments and then going out for a cup of tea. Or, of course, they can get their mothers to write the note: “Please accept Lord Supper-Dish’s apologies for withdrawing from the House of Lords. His time is currently occupied helping the police with their inquiries.”

But once the door slams behind the ex-lords, they’ll find that champagne’s more expensive on the mean streets of the real world than it is in the Lords’ subsidized eating and drinking establishments. The transition’s a tough one.

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And having nothing to do with any of that, if you’ve read or will be reading my new novel, A Decent World, it would really help if you’d leave a review on Goodreads of Amazon. Or if you have a blog and want to review it yourself, that’d be great. Anything that makes it visible, from social media to graffiti, helps.

Except possibly the graffiti.