What the British really talk about

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If the way to a person’s heart is through their stomach, the way to a culture’s is through its language. Mind you, I invented that theory on the fly, but let’s believe it for long enough to play with a couple of recent studies. 

Two linguists recently analyzed every word in the British National Corpus 2014.

The British National what? British National Corpus 2014 is a hundred million words of contemporary language, which are a sample of all the words that get spewed out in fiction, newspapers, magazines, informal speech (how they catch that I have no idea; my informal speech disappears as soon as I informally speak it), academic writing, and online writing, all of them written or (I guess) spoken between 2010 and 2020. 

Given those dates, I have no idea how 2014 snuck into the discussion. Not my fault, Your Honor. I’m only telling you what I read.

The researchers went through all those words and counted up how many times various topics appeared per million words. By hand, of course.

Irrelevant photo: crocuses

In order of frequency, they are:

Time and punctuality: Year and time were the two most frequently used nouns. Being on time, in time, and punctual are enough of an obsession to rate all three ways of saying roughly the same thing. 

Semi-relevantly, the word morning is used twice as often as evening and three times as often as afternoon. December is the most mentioned month. Summer gets talked about more than winter and Saturday and Sunday more often than whatever those other days are.

Weather and climate: The word sun gets more of a workout than rain, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey (HS&US) reports that we have a lot more rain than sun in Britain. (Do not trust the HS&US. It takes being unscientific entirely too seriously.) Still, the word weather only appears as often as the words pub and restaurant. Climate change and its related words appear frequently, and considerably more often than in previous years.

Food and drink: Dinner gets mentioned more often than lunch and lunch more often than breakfast. Cake gets mentioned more often than salad. That will surprise no one. Although breakfast doesn’t top the list, eggs do. Go figure. Chocolate ranks pretty high. So do boring things. Look it up yourself if you’re interested. I have a short attention span.

Drinks? Tea, wine, coffee, beer, milk, juice, and champagne all made the list. How much does champagne matter? Tea gets mentioned six times more often. I’m not sure how much more often beer gets mentioned, but in a race between champagne and beer, my money’s on beer. Tea and beer? I’m not sure I want to bet on that one.

Emotions: Finding emotions on the list of top mentions sounds like it breaks the stereotype of the British as a tamped-down culture, but happy is at the top of the sublist, often in phrases like, “I’m quite happy to stay at home.” That’s not what you’d call an emotional outpouring, more like a stoic acceptance of the inevitable. Sorry is right up there too. HS&US reports that the British give sorry one hell of a workout. 

Bodies: Or at least our metaphorical bodies, because whatever we can learn from the calculation here gets thrown off by phrases like “on the other hand.” Researchers from HS&US are going to either eliminate this category or insist that people discuss their livers, earlobes, and unmentionables. 

 

Is there some other way to measure what people care about?

Why, of course. Let’s throw most of that out the window and talk about alcohol. Or more accurately, let’s talk about how people talk about alcohol. If the number of words a culture has for something carries information about how important it is, the British are a nation of serious drinkers. Or of serious alcoholics. According to a study from Germany, the British have 546 words for getting drunk.

Or for being drunk. After a couple of drinks, the line between the two has a way of blurring.

Need a few examples? Pissed. Sloshed. Stewed. Wrecked. Hammered. Bladdered. Plastered. Mullered. Pickled. Bevvied. Rubbered. Tanked. Cock-eyed. Zombied. Blootered. Trolleyed. Rat-arsed. Wankered. Shit-faced. Arseholed.

Blootered? Yeah, that was new to me too. Blooter is Scots and means to kick something–usually a football–”fiercely and often wildly.” 

What about mullered? A muller is “a stone or piece of wood, metal, or glass used as a pestle for pounding or grinding.”  

The things you learn here. 

Hell, the things I learn here.

You can also get cabbaged, gazeboed, and carparked. Unless– Okay, I got this information second hand, from assorted newspapers, so it’s not impossible that someone’s messing with us there. But basically, you can take just about any noun, add -ed to it, and say you’ve been that way. 

Does it work? I was so earthwormed I couldn’t see straight. Why not? Earringed? It might not be as convincing as cabbaged, but it works. Carburatored? Absolutely. 

Isn’t English a lovely mess of a language? 

Have fun.

The full list is here. Or a gesture in the direction of the full list. I haven’t counted. And a few that may or may not be extra are here. 

*

Several of the articles I saw mention that the Sami language has 300 words for snow. The Sami are the native people of northern Scandinavia and Russia, so yeah, snow matters to them. The point is supposed to be that we have many words for the things that are important to us, but the comparison to the British and being drunk breaks down when you realize that

the Sami words, at least as I’ve seen them explained, are for different kinds of snow: untouched snow; snow that’s hardened so much that reindeer can’t dig through it; snow your neighbors shoveled off their driveway and dumped on yours because you didn’t buy the cardboardy pizzas their kids were selling to raise money for their school. Or maybe that last kind of snow only falls in the US and the Sami don’t need a name for it.

The difference is that all those words for drunkenness describe a single state of near-oblivion, not variations on it. They have no purpose except to keep people amused, either until they sober up or until they can get drunk again.

Welcome to Britain.

Inventing the post office: A bit of British history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The service goes public

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Civil War and the Restoration

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

That carries us to Charles II and another founding date. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Following the money

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

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

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

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

 

I’m bored. Could we have a scandal?

Oh, always. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

Now out in paperback

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Available from Swift Press or The Bad Guys, who do at least make it internationally accessible. (The link is to Amazon US; if you’re elsewhere, Lord Google will be glad to point you in the right direction.) Also available from your local independent bookstore, which needs your support.

Speaking of which, if you can see your way to leaving a review on either Amazon or Goodreads, I’d really appreciate it. They do make a difference.

 

“Quietly magical. A book that draws you in and then refuses to let you go.”

Stephen May, author of Sell Us the Rope

Britain’s unwritten constitution and its, ahem, challenges

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The uproar

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

Thanks. Now I owe you the tale. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, I didn’t make that up.  

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

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

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

Meanwhile, back at the post office . . .

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

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

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

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

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.

Of mice and men and women and Barbie dolls

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It’s not easy for me to write about the news these days without wanting to slit either my wrists or someone else’s–I lean toward the second choice, always–but I can offer you a few wristless bits and pieces. Let’s start with a mouse in Wales.

Yes, the world is indeed going to hell when the best news I can offer starts with a mouse. 

A retired postman in Wales, Rodney Holbrook, noticed when he got to the workbench in his shed, small objects–clothespins, corks, nuts, bolts–weren’t where he’d left them: they’d been gathered up into a box. So Holbrook set up a night vision camera and it captured a mouse tidying away the stuff he’d left out. Holbrook thinks it’s using the junk to disguise its stash of nuts, but to date no one’s asked the mouse, so that’s guesswork. 

He’s named it Welsh Tidy Mouse.

To understand the story fully, you have to understand the relationship between British men and their sheds. I don’t come anywhere close to understanding it, unfortunately. All I can tell you is that there’s some sort of magnetic attraction between the two.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise

 

I can also tell you that when I say “a shed” I’m not talking about a place outside the house to stuff all your junk but about a workshop. The shed’s roots run so deep in the male side of the culture that when I consulted Lord Google on the subject of men and sheds he led me to the Men’s Sheds Association, which reassured me that I hadn’t made up the connection. The group provides sheds that are “community spaces where men can enjoy practical hobbies. They’re about making friends, learning and sharing skills. Many guys come just for the tea and banter – everyone’s welcome.“

They might or might not welcome someone who isn’t of the male persuasion (they did say “everyone”), but my guess is that they’d be less thrown by a tidy mouse joining them. When they say “everyone,” they could easily mean everyone we’re thinking of. 

 

Speaking of men and women, though

Mattel, the company that makes Barbie dolls and that was thoroughly spoofed in the movie Barbie, is trying to cash in on the film by releasing four new dolls: a studio executive Barbie, a film star Barbie, a director Barbie, and a cinematographer Barbie. In response to which screenwriter Taffy Brodesser-Akner tweeted, “Where is Screenwriter Barbie? Does Mattel not know how to make sweatpants? Does Mattel not know how to get avocado toast on a t-shirt and just kind of leave it there?”

David Simon, who created The Wire went a step further, calling for a grip Barbie, a teamster Barbie, a “key set PA Barbie who has to go into Movie Star Barbie’s trailer and tell the delicate flower to get the fuck down to set because 120 other pissed-off Barbie’s are waiting for her. That film taught Mattel nothing.”

 

Enough of that. Is it safe to talk about politics?

Yes, but not for long or my (or someone else’s) wrists will be in danger. We’ll stick to the peripheral stuff.

When Boris Johnson was mayor of London, he made regular appearances at LBC Studios, which Lord Google tells me is a talk radio station but which uses a camera. Don’t ask me; when I hosted a radio show, we were invisible and free to wear as much avocado toast as we wanted, although this was so long ago avocado toast hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had avocados. Or toast. There wasn’t a camera to be found.

The reason the camera’s important is that Johnson made such a habit of mumbling and sliding his chair out of camera range in response to tough questions that eventually they bolted the guest’s chair to the floor. They called it the Boris Bolt. It didn’t stop him from mumbling when he didn’t have anything sensible to say, but it did at least keep him on camera when he did it.

*

Okay, just a little more about politics. This is from Ottawa County, Michigan, where a group of commissioners affiliated with Ottawa Impact, a right-wing Christian group, took over the county board in November 2022. One of the things they did was try to get rid of the county’s public health officer, Adeline Hambley. She and her department had supported mask mandates and Covid vaccinations, making her an instrument of government tyranny. They’d also offered sexual health tests at a Pride festival, which the new commissioners saw as “encouraging sexually perverse behavior,” according to a Washington Post article. 

Hambley wasn’t about to go quietly. As she saw it, her job was about health, not about serving the board. “I want to work with the commissioners so we can protect the community,” she said. “But I am not their subordinate.”

After ten months of negotiation (fighting might be a better word), both parties agreed that the county would pay her $4 million in return for her resignation.

Then the commissioners discovered that bad things would fall off the top shelf of the county’s financial closet and smack them on their heads if they went through with the deal, because they hadn’t consulted the most important player in the game, their insurers. 

What sort of bad things am I talking about? They’d lose their insurance, which would lose the county its AAA bond rating, which would drive up the cost of borrowing.

Oops.

At last call, the county was trying to back out of the deal and Hambley and her lawyers were trying to enforce it. 

If they ever do get rid of her, the plan is to replace her with a local HVAC (that’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) safety manager who’s never held public office and, I think we can all assume, knows a bit more about public health than the Welsh Tidy Mouse.

Hambley? She’s an environmental health specialist with an MBA in business administration and a minor in government tyranny. 

In the most recent article I found, the mess was still working its way through the courts.

Telling the girls from the boys in Anglo-Saxon England

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

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

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

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

So what’s with this new study?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Grave 93

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

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

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

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

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

 

C’mon, though, give us a conclusion

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

English slavery: the legal history

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

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

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

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

Early history

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Contradictory rulings

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

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

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

The people involved were not set free.

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

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

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

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

 

Except…

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

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

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

 

A bit more case law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The abolition of slavery

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

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

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

Spring flowers in January

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Having lived in Minnesota, a state that’s in the middle of the US and hangs from the Canadian border by clinging to an icicle, I suspect that what my neighbors in Cornwall call winter is really spring. Here are a few flowers that bloomed not in January (the headline’s a lie) but in December.

Primroses on a neighbor’s lawn

Camellia, ourside a differnt neighbor’s house

Periwinkle–ours. It’s a good thing it’s pretty, because it’s trying to take over the yard.

Wishing you good weather, wherever you are. Apologies for the not-quite-convincing post. I need a bit of down time.

Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.