Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain

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If you follow nothing but the US news, you can be forgiven for thinking that reality’s out of fashion these days, but the British press, for all its faults, is still struggling to keep the real world in at least soft focus. So it was an embarrassment when the Times interviewed Bill de Blasio about Zohran Mamdani and–

Wait, though: Bill de Who? Blasio. The former mayor of New York. About the man who at the time was about to be elected the new mayor of New York and now has been. Only it turned out that the reporter wasn’t interviewing Bill de Blasio the former mayor but Bill DeBlasio a wine importer from Long Island.

Bill de Wine Merchant said some highly critical things about Mamdani. Bill de Mayor supported Mamdani and was furious to see his position misrepresented in the Times.

What happened? The reporter goofed. It’s a mistake anyone could make and we can all be grateful no one handed this guy the nuclear codes instead of what should’ve been a simple assignment.

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus, blooming out of season

As the wine importer explained it,  he hadn’t impersonated de Blasio.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio. . . . I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

On the topic of how their names are spelled, Wine DeBlasio said, “Low-class Italians use a little d.” 

If we have to take sides, I’m guessing we know who we like.

Wine DeBlasio had been getting low-class de Blasio’s email for years, which he described as a decade of getting “brutal, vicious hate mail.” When security guards at a baseball game offered to introduce him to “the real Bill de Blasio,” the mayor de Blasio asked, “How bad is it having the same last name as me?” 

“Dude, you’re killing me,” Wine DeBlasio said.

With this, I guess, he got his own back.

 

Sexism and magic tricks 

Back in the dark days of 1991, the Magic Circle, which is described as an elite society of magicians, had a revelation: it was time to admit women.

I know, but you don’t want to rush into these things. I mean, what if actual women showed up at the meetings and distracted the men or, you know, disrupted things? What if they turned out not to be any good at this magic business–or worse, what if they turned out to be better? 

Anyway, once the society joined the modern world, one member, Raymond Lloyd, revealed that he was, in fact, a she and had become a magician only so she could–

Okay, the newspaper article I’m working with says “infiltrate” the society. I’d say “fuck with it.” Either way, it wasn’t a simple task. Lloyd was already working as an assistant to the magician Jenny Winstanley, who was sick to the teeth of the boys-only policy but was too recognizable to fool them herself. 

So Winstanley and Lloyd hatched a plot and Lloyd spent the next two years not only learning magic tricks but creating the character of Raymond, a young-looking 18-year-old. In the photo that goes with the article, Raymond looks like a young 14-year-old, and a short one, but nobody thought to question  either his age or sex. Lloyd wore a wig, a body suit, gloves (her hands, she thought, would be a giveaway), and a bit of facial fluff. He spoke in a croaky voice. Or maybe she did. It’s complicated. Why don’t we have have non-gendered pronouns? The Finnish don’t and they’ve reproduced successfully for a long time now. 

The gloves made sleight-of-hand tricks particularly difficult, but the real trick was convincing the men sitting in judgement on her act that they were looking at a very young man. But you know how it is. Magic is built on keeping people from noticing what you don’t want them to notice. They saw only what they expected to see. 

Lloyd was accepted as a member and when the society voted to accept women she and Winstanley went public about their best trick ever. 

And what happened? The Circle threw Lloyd out. 

She worked as a magician for another ten years before packing it in and moving to Spain. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004. Then in early 2025, the Circle voted Lloyd back in and went on a hunt to let her know. She was, she said, inclined to pass up the honor–she hadn’t worked as a magician in years–but decided to accept it in Winstanley’s honor. 

The Circle is still 95% male but women no longer have to disguise themselves as 14-year-old boys to join. 

Who says the world isn’t making progress?

 

And from the world of artificial intelligence …

. . . comes just what you’ve been waiting for: deathbots. These are not bots that kill you–those are called drones, or sometimes self-driving cars–but programs that record the voices, speech patterns, and personalities of the dead, toss them in an electronic blender, bake at 350 F, and present them to the living so they can have a nice long chat with someone they miss.

I know. Bring an umbrella, friends, ‘cause it’s getting weird out there.

A project called Synthetic Pasts did some research on how this was working, using themselves, they said, as “our own test subjects. We uploaded our own videos, messages and voice notes, creating ‘digital doubles’ of ourselves.

“In some cases, we played the role of users preparing our own synthetic afterlives. In others, we acted as the bereaved trying to talk to a digital version of someone who has passed away.”

What did they learn?

The least creepy versions–that’s my judgement but I don’t think it’s too far off theirs–are basically archives, sorting the prospective dead person’s recorded memories (recorded while they’re still alive, in case that needs saying) into browsable categories. From there, though, it gets weirder.

Another version hosts a kind of electronic seance, prompting the prospective corpse to record memories so it can spit out its own version, complete with emojis, and not always emojis that match the emo.

How well does the bot handle the emotions this may call up in the living recipient those memories? 

Ummm. Yeah. Example:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I’m right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let’s take on today together, with positivity and strength.

So basically, a prefabricated motivational message. You could find the same thing in the greeting card department of your nearest stationery store.  If any are left where you live. And if one is, you might ask it to record its memories so we won’t have to mourn it when it closes.

As the experimenters point out, this is a business, complete with subscription fees and platforms that harvest users’ data–emotional and biometric–to keep engagement high. Loss, grief, and remembrance? Hell yes, let’s monetize ’em all. I’m sure Marx would’ve had something interesting to say about that if in his most irresponsible fever dreams he could’ve imagined such a thing.

The systems promise, eventually, to digitally resurrect the dead–their gestures, voices, personalities. If that becomes possible, the experimenters say it will change the experience of remembering, “smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction. . . . 

“Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory – and about ourselves – than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.”

*

But AI isn’t just talking for the dead. For a small fee it’s available to speak for the living and to the government. 

Britain has a system called planning permission, which limits what can be built where. Or at least it’s intended to. It’s complicated and everyone hates it (yes, I have checked with everyone and every last woman, man, and magician agrees) but it’s also kept the country from turning into the sprawling mess that re the suburbs of Chicago. 

How does it work? Let’s say your neighbors want to turn their attic into an extra bedroom, which involves a slightly higher roof and a few windows. Or wants to add a multi-level parking ramp. Or turn the garage into a nightclub. Or a developer wants to build 700 new houses on a nearby field. The proposal can be perfectly rational or completely insane. You know what humans are like. You and your neighbors will be informed about it and have a chance to object. 

Objecting takes a bit of commitment, though. You have to take one word and staple it to another word, then tape both to a thought that’s at least marginally related to your objection. And your objection has to be related to the planning regulations, because “I don’t like it” won’t get you past the gatekeepers of modern British living.

So you need to understand the planning regulations,  at least a bit, which–

Would it be fair to say no one does? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration. The article I’m stealing my information from calls the regulations labyrinthine. 

And here’s where we find not one but two AI services that offer to take your objection, dig out some backing from the planning regs, and turn it into a rational-sounding letter, complete with references to previous cases and decisions that–you know what AI is like–might never have been decided by any governmental body on this planet.

What will this do to the planning system? According to a lawyer who specializes in planning law, bring it to a grinding halt. The decisions are made by elected officials–sometimes very local ones–who know a little more about planning than I do about chemistry but not necessarily. 

“The danger,” the lawyer said, “is decisions are made on the wrong basis. Elected members making final decisions could easily believe AI-generated planning speeches . . . even if they are full of made-up case law and regulations.” 

Someone who campaigns for more homes to be built with community support said, “This will . . . lead to people finding obscure reasons” to object to planning applications. 

Meanwhile, the government is promoting AI as a way to clear the planning backlog and build 1.5 million homes by 2029.

***

I can’t blame artificial intelligence for my most recent fuckup, just a lapse in human intelligence. It was Fraggle who pointed out (thanks, Fraggle) that I posted a headline, midweek instead of Friday, with no content, in spite of which it got two likes. I may be at my most popular when I don’t say anything. 

Where was the content? she asked. In a dusty shoebox at the back of the closet, whence I have rescued it and poured it here, where it belongs. 

What happened? I hit Post when I should’ve hit Schedule. 

It’s been that kind of week. That’s the lovely thing about publishing: when you make a fool of yourself, you do it in public. Stick around to see what happens next. I’ll be as surprised as you.

Gay sex, treason, and passionate friendships in Tudor England

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Ask about the legality of same-sex sex in Tudor England and you’ll find your Sat Nav–or your GPS if you use American English–no longer knows the difference between a road, a river, and a red brick wall. Or mine doesn’t anyway. I’m posting this report in the hope that someone will find it useful. If I’m not back in time for next week’s post, send sniffer dogs. 

Thanks. 

I’ve lived in Britain long enough to say thanks for everything. Even things that haven’t happened yet.

Utterly irrelevant photo: Castell Cricieth

The problems

The first problem we run into here is figuring out what we’re talking about. Should be simple enough, right? But as Bill Clinton so famously said when he was pushed to say whether he had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, “It depends on what your definition of is is.” 

Even at the time, the definition of sex struck me as more relevant than the definition of is. But forget Bill Clinton. He had been neither born nor imagined during the Tudor period, and no doubt it was better that way. Sex is, um, that thing two people do that’s kind of awkward to talk about around a third person. And sometimes between the two people as well.

Although of course it might involve that third person. Or a person who likes to talk about sex, which generally weirds out other people.

But even with all its amendments and althoughs, that definition wouldn’t hold up in court. So let’s try this, even though it’s guesswork: the men–and they were all men–who wrote the relevant laws seem to have thought of sex as something that could be done with a penis. Tudor women, generally speaking, didn’t have those. That means that people thought of same-sex sex as having to do with men. 

Women? Wrong equipment therefore not part of the discussion.

I’m not sure everyone will agree with me on this, but I’m filing that under Make Male Chauvinism Work for You.

Women were surely having sex (as we might define it) with other women, but if whatever they did made its way into the historical record I haven’t seen it. If anyone knows a reliable source on this, leave me a comment. I haven’t done anything like a deep dive into the topic. What with writing one post a week, keeping a life going on the side, working on a novel, and trying to find a home for a completed novel my publisher decided wasn’t a good fit– 

Yeah. Shallow dive. Some weeks it’s more like a bellyflop.

But back to the problems I ran into: a second one is defining homosexuality, and for this it makes sense to quote Alan Bray, who argues in “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England” that “the forms of sexuality are the creation of culture and change with it.” 

So what? Well, for one thing, like Bill Clinton, homosexuality hadn’t been invented yet. (Now there’s a sentence I never imagined myself writing.) I don’t mean the act of sex between men but the concept of homosexuality. The social mind hadn’t conjured up any group of people who were drawn to have sex with people of the same sex, because they didn’t think that impulse came from the nature of an individual person. They saw it as something sinful that anyone might do. As John Rainolds put it, it wasn’t just a “monstrous sin against nature” but a sin that “men’s natural corruption and viciousness is prone” to.

John Rainolds? Key translator of the King James Bible. Among other things, he gave us the word sodomy. Thanks, John. You’ve been no end of help over the yeas.  

So in contrast to more recent efforts to suppress same-sex sex, the Tudors didn’t go looking for people of a particular type. They looked for something anyone might take part in. 

 

But that’s not all that’s changed

So far we’ve had women and the existence of a sexual minority slip away. The next thing to go is a solid definition of the act itself. The charge of sodomy (the word buggery also finds its way into the conversation) covered a range of out-of-bounds sexual acts. Debauchery might be a better match for what they had in mind, and Bray argues that it wasn’t just a sexual crime but also a political and religious one. So when, during Elizabeth’s reign, Edward de Vere was accused of sodomy, he was also pictured as a traitor, an enemy of society, and a man given to lawless (as opposed to lawful) violence. Oh, and a liar, an atheist, and a blasphemer. All that symbolized, Bray argues, by the charge of sodomy.

Is Bray making this up? Am I? 

Not guilty, your honor. The jurist, barrister, and politician Edward Coke wrote about sodomy as “a sin horrible committed against the king: and this is either against the king celestial or terrestrial.”

It was also a handy thing to accuse a political enemy of, and to make sense of this we need to look at the nature of both beds and male friendship during the period–which may slide over a bit into the post-Tudor era, but people don’t throw out their entire culture just becasue the throne changes hands so I’m not cheating too much.

 

Bedfellows

One thing that made sodomy a handy accusation is that sharing beds was common enough to be nearly universal. Beds were also public, as were bedrooms. Rooms–where there was more than one–led one into the next. So finding two people in bed together? No big deal. In fact, no deal at all. Still, in a world with minimal privacy, beds were a place of intimacy, where people not only slept but talked. In other words, bedfellows often became more than physically close. 

And a bed, obviously, was also a place people could and did have sex, licit or illicit. 

Even outside of the bed, though, it was accepted that men were physically demonstrative.

 

Passionate friendships

If sodomy was the forbidden side of male friendship, passionate male friendships were not only acceptable but a deeply ingrained part of the culture. Men kissed each other, touched each other, used the language of love with each other, and left behind letters demonstrating all of that. This happened both between equals and between patron and client. Court networks depended on it.Take a 1625 journal entry from Archbishop Laud: 

“That night in a dream the Duke of Buckingham [his patron] seemed to me to ascend into my bed, where he carried himself with much love towards me, after such rest wherein wearied men are wont exceedingly to rejoice; and likewise many seemed to me to enter the chamber who did see this.” 

I hear the echoes of sex around the edges there, but I’m from the wrong era. What mattered to him wasn’t just the mark of favor but that it was public.

In James I’s court, someone’s described in a journal as leaning on another man’s arm, pinching his cheek, smoothing his “ruffled garment.” This marks an emotional bond but also the rise to power of the man who received those gestures. 

Or go back to 1570 and we find one man writing a jealous letter to his friend about a third man: do you love me best? he asked.

Some of this, inevitably, would have been as conventional and signing a letter “love” and whatever your name is. Some of it would’ve been a way to curry favor. And some of it would’ve been genuine. For any of it to be proper, though, it had to be between gentlemen. 

Did any of this go on between peasants, servants, cobblers, silversmiths? I doubt the evidence is available to us. Let’s give it a solid Maybe, followed by a Maybe Not.

What is known–or seems to be known–is that gay sex could and did occur between servant and master, who often slept in the same room. It also took place in taverns, farms, and alehouses, in the world of the theater and the church, in the army and the navy, at universities and royal courts. I’m sure it took place in the woods and behind hedges as well. 

So we have loving physical contact, passionate friendships that used the language of love, and people sharing beds. It wouldn’t have been easy, if you weren’t one of the two men in question, to know whether or when a relationship crossed the line into the forbidden zone. It would, though, have been easy to accuse someone of crossing the line and to back it up your accusation by presenting evidence of what would otherwise be conventional behavior. 

 

Legality

While England was still Catholic, sex with the wrong person (or the wrong species) was a matter for the Church, which had its own courts and the power to punish. Then came Henry VIII, who was interested in having sex, licitly, with the wrong person, and England left the Catholic Church, tearing down not just the monasteries but also the Church courts. 

New era, more or less the same rules. Parliament passed An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie. (Their idea of what letters to capitalize was as foreign to the modern sensibility as their approach to sex.) 

Buggerie was defined as a man having sex with a man or an animal, and in the spirit of equality, the animal could be of either sex. Not only could a man be hanged for an out-of bounds sexual act, whatever assets he had could be confiscated. That included not only his individual assets but also church or monastic property. 

In a fraught political era, you can see why the charge of buggery (or sodomy, or whatever word you dislike least) would be a nifty charge to add to, say, treason. 

Under Edward–Henry’s short-lived son–the law was amended so that widows and heirs could inherit. 

And after him? Mary took the throne, and presto change-o, the country was Catholic again. She repealed the Acte and for five years no one was in a position to prosecute runaway sexuality. I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that was an oversight. Then Elizabeth took the throne and the state stepped back into the role of policing sexuality. 

A quick note before you get to the most recent post 

Featured

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We live in dark times, and it’s feeling stranger and stranger to write this blog without acknowledging that. As someone other than me has already said, whatever you think the German people should’ve done in the 1930s, this is the time to do it. We can’t all be heroes but we can be honorable people. Sometimes that alone is heroic. Do what whatever is in your power, my friends. We can’t know how long the chance will last.

Prostitution and virtue in Victorian England: Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Acts

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One of the joys of being a woman in Victorian England must’ve been the multitude of people available to police your sex life–or as they’d have put it, your virtue. Let’s come at this by way of the reformers.

Victorian Britain had a glut of reformers and  philanthropists. The most stereotypical were upper class, religiously motivated, and full of zeal for improving the poor–their morality, their health, their smallest daily routines. Surely if the poor learned to manage better, to be better, they’d get over their distressing habit of earning so little money. 

High on the list of the poor they set out to improve were prostitutes, or fallen women if we want to use era-appropriate language.

For all the reformers’ superiority and cluelessness about why the poor were poor, what it took to live on so little, and why women engaged in prostitution, some of the reformers managed to do some good in the world. And occasionally, if you dig deep enough, you stumble over an upper-class reformer who broke through the limits their world imposed. Allow me to introduce you, friends, to Josephine Butler. She didn’t break out entirely, but she makes an interesting tale.

Irrelevant photo: hills in North Wales.

 

The inevitable background

Butler was born in 1828 into an upper-middle class family. Her parents were Church of England–in other words, they belonged to the respectable church–and abolitionists, but the sort of abolitionists who were related to and hobnobbed with lords and prime ministers. 

Okay, make that one prime minister, but how many does it take to impress you people anyway?

If your point of reference is the US–as mine still is, even after 18 years in the UK–I should explain that Britain’s upper-middle class is considerably more upper than the US version. In addition to hobnobbing a prime minister, this was the sort of family whose kids had horses and whose girls were educated at home, learning music and whatever else was suitable for young ladies. At 17 Butler (sorry–I’m using her married name although she was still single; it’s simpler) had a religious conversion, one that didn’t involve packing up and moving to a different religion but becoming more intense about the one she already belonged to. In other words, she drank her religion straight from then on, without ice or mixers, thanks.

She married George Butler, a classical scholar and a believer in women’s equality. Marrying him was an opportunity to get as close to higher education as a woman could, and in one of his letters before they married proposed “a perfectly equal union, with absolute freedom on both sides for personal initiative in thought and action.”

This was as good as it was going to get. This was a world where a woman’s property and earnings–if she had any–belonged to her husband, she had no legal standing apart from him, girls’ education was at best narrow and decorative, a lady was expected to stay at home and ever so genteely lose her mind, and a single woman was an object of pity and likely to be broke or dependent on some male relative or both.

Over the next few years, Butler and her husband had three kids and moved around a bit, landing after a while in Liverpool, where as a way to cope with the death of their only daughter she began a ministry (we’re back to that religious thing) to women imprisoned in the workhouse and to prostitutes working the street. 

You could argue–convincingly, I think–that prostitution was central to any understanding of the condition of women. A man’s sexual drive was thought to be pretty much ungovernable and a woman’s, or at least a lady’s to be nonexistent. Prostitution was seen as a way to keep the pressure cooker from exploding. And prostitution was one of the few ways a woman could earn money if the factories weren’t hiring. So this wasn’t some random choice on her part.

Still, I know: fallen women; Victorian lady healing herself by swooping in to minister to the unfortunates. She hadn’t broken the mold yet, but she did overflow it a bit by taking some of the most desperate women into her house, often to die. 

She also joined campaigns to open higher education to women, questioning the deeply embedded belief that women’s role–their natural and only role–was to be a wife and mother. Where, she asked, did that leave the two and a half million women for whom no husbands were available, since there weren’t enough men to go around? How were they supposed to support themselves?

 

The Contagious Diseases Acts

Let’s take a step to the side here and catch up with the Contagious Diseases Acts. I’ll get back to Butler in a minute. 

The first of the acts was passed in 1864 and grew out of public reaction to the British military’s underwhelming performance in the Crimean War and the Indian Rebellion. They’d been disorganized, undisciplined, and immoral, the public (or whatever passed for the public) had decided. Their ranks were filled with bachelors, which might (gasp, wheeze) lead them into homosexual activity, and the soldiers and sailors were riddled with venereal disease.  

Something had to be done, even if that something had nothing to do with anything. You’ve been around long enough to see that solution implemented more than once.

The something that got done was to pass a law focused on port and garrison towns and aimed at stopping the spread of venereal disease by forcing women who were suspected of prostitution to accept medical examinations. If a woman showed signs of infection, she could be sent to a lock hospital for three months. Anyone refusing to be examined faced six months in prison, with or without hard labor.

This was, remember, before penicillin. Syphilis was still being treated, ineffectively and toxically, with mercury.  So locking infected women away for three months during which no effective treatment was available?

Yeah.  

What about men with venereal diseases?  The thinking was that they might resist, so the law gave them a free pass. One prostitute who’d chosen to go to prison rather than submit to an examination told Butler that the judge who condemned her had paid her for sex just a few days before.

The law’s definition of a prostitute was vague and the plainclothes police who enforced the law, like ICE in the US today, didn’t have to offer evidence against a woman. If they stopped her, she could choose to go to prison or accept an invasive physical exam and sign a form registering her as a prostitute.

Can’t say she didn’t have a choice.

Later versions of the act extended it to more parts of the country and added that women who’d been registered had to be checked every two weeks for up to a year. The lock hospital detention was extended to six and then nine months. Women working in brothels had to have tickets signed and kept up to date, establishing that they’d been examined.

Predictably enough, it was poor and working class women who were detained. 

 

The campaign for repeal

Multiple organizations were formed to push for repeal. One of them, the National Anti-Contagious Diseases Acts Association (NA), excluded women. 

No, I don’t make this stuff up.

In response, the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA) formed, and this is where Butler breaks out of the nice-lady savior mold. The NLA’s members were mostly upper- and middle-class women, but they collaborated with working-class women, with men, with prostitutes, and they invaded the all-male world of politics. In other words, they challenged the hell out of Victorian gender and class norms. Parliamentarians talked about it as a “revolt of women” and newspapers called them a “shrieking sisterhood.”  

In 1870 Butler became the leader of the NLA, a step that she and her husband both knew risked her respectability and his career. I can’t find anything that says his career did end up being damaged, but she was denounced in Parliament as “a woman who calls herself a lady” and “worse than the prostitutes.”  Philanthropy was one thing, after all, but she was out in the world speaking in public about sex. It just wasn’t done. 

She was a good speaker and seems to have been a speaking machine. In one year, she spoke at more than 100 public meetings and travelled something like 4,000 miles, addressing small groups and large ones, groups of women, groups of working class men. By licensing brothels, she argued, the state was profiting from women’s misery.

By returning detained women to their sinful lives, the government was making itself complicit with prostitution. 

This wasn’t a polite campaign or a safe one.  She spoke in a barn and someone set it on fire. Men smashed the windows of a hotel she was staying in, threatening to set it on fire. At one rally, pimps threw cow dung at her. At some point, a man asked,  “Can you ever reclaim prostitutes?” 

Prostitutes often asked her if men could be reclaimed, she answered.

A byelection came up where one candidate wanted to extend the law so it applied not just to prostitutes but to soldiers’ wives. The LNA seized on it, passing out leaflets, holding prayer meetings, hiding from angry crowds. 

The candidate lost.

But it wasn’t all agitprop and burnt barns. The LNA funded legal representation for women who were locked away and raised money to care for their children.

The repeal campaign ran for sixteen years. The acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886.

 

Hope Cottage

In 1885, Butler set up a non-sectarian house of rest in Winchester’s red light district. It was conceived as a contrast to the secure units churches set up to reform fallen women. 

Throw a few quotation marks into that last sentence, please. I’m using the language of the time, even though it gives me a rash.  

I’ve seen the place described as a faith hospital, as a place for the dying, as a refuge for women who were “friendless, betrayed and ruined, judged for one reason or another not quite suitable for other homes or refuges.” In its first year, it served more than 40 women. Butler’s husband–by this time ordained and a canon, which is a religious position, not something to fire at the enemy–preached there (informally, according to one website) on Sundays. Which means the place may have been non-sectarian but it wasn’t non-Christian. 

Addressing the economic roots of prostitution, women living there could earn money by making envelopes. Given how few ways a woman could earn money– Hell, it was better than nothing, although not by much.

 

A quick break here . . .

. . . to honor how murky life is. Butler wasn’t above making a distinction between prostitutes and, ahem, virtuous women. 

“The degradation of these poor unhappy women is not degradation for them alone,” she wrote; “it is a blow to the dignity of every virtuous woman too, it is dishonour done to me, it is the shaming of every woman in every country of the world.” 

So give her one point for solidarity and take one away for still being tangled in the spiderwebs of Victorian morality. And if we’re surprised, take a point away from us.

 

Enter Rebecca Jarrett and W.T. Stead

Somewhere along in here Butler met a former sex worker named Rebecca Jarrett, who’d kept a brothel dealing in virgins. Or that’s what one source says. What I’ve learned of the world tells me that most people only stay virgins for just so long, after which they mysteriously become not-virgins, so Jarrett’s trade was either a bit less limited or open to being sued for false advertising. 

But that’s neither here nor there. Jarrett had kept a brothel, had been saved by the Salvation Army, and moved into Hope Cottage. I’m tempted to ask for more quotation marks so I can spend them on the word saving, but Jarrett described herself as a “poor broken up drunken woman,” so maybe we should pocket the quotation marks so we can pull them out on some clearer occasion. Either way, Jarrett went on to help set up a second home, similar to Hope Cottage. And here’s where the story’s pace picks up.

W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was running an expose on child sex trafficking and wanted to stage the buying of a child to demonstrate how easy it was. Butler put him in touch with Jarrett and they found a 13-year-old, Eliza Armstrong and paid her mother £2, promising £3 later on. That would be about £760 pounds today.  

Several sites say they took the child someplace safe–I’ll catch up with her story in a minute–and Stead published “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.”

The Victorians didn’t do understatement. 

The article led to Jarrett and Stead being arrested but also to sensational headlines in the rest of the press. The trafficking of children was now in the public eye and within weeks Parliament raised the age of consent from 13 to 16. 

Did that mean Jarrett and Stead weren’t prosecuted? The hell it did. Because Eliza’s father hadn’t okayed Eliza’s sale–only her legally irrelevant mother had–Jarrent was imprisoned for six months and Stead for three. Butler defended them, writing to the Hampshire Chronicle, “Rebecca Jarrett, at my own urgent request . . . undertook some of the most difficult tasks connected with the recent exposure.” 

Butler wasn’t charged.

After her release, Jarret continued to work with prostitutes for a while, then spent the rest of her life “in the care” of Butler.

 

Eliza Armstrong

Traumatizing a kid didn’t seem to be a consideration in all this–you know, greater good and all that–but in talking about trauma I may be importing a theory that hadn’t formed yet. Jarrett took Eliza to a midwife/abortionist, who examined her and verified that she was a virgin. She sold Jarrett a bottle of chloroform and Jarrett took Eliza to a brothel, where she drugged her lightly. 

Stead then came in, playing the role of a man buying himself a virgin, and he waited for her to come to. When she did, she screamed, which apparently implied that he’d–as they said–had his way with her. Your guess is as good as mine here. 

She was then handed over to Bramwell Booth, a general in the Salvation Army, who took her to France and left her with a Salvation Army family.

After the trial, the prosecutor raised money for Eliza’s family, which paid for her to attend the Princess Louise Home for the Protection of Young Girls, where she was trained to work as a servant. She married twice, had ten children, and maintained a friendly correspondence with Stead. 

If you know a weirder story than that, leave it in the comments. 

 

Purity

In the 1870s, Butler’s speeches to young men began to focus on purity, personal morality, and the dangers of uncontrolled sexuality. It sounds prim and scolding, and–yeah, well, it is prim and scolding, but in a context where men could give almost free reign to their sexual impulses and women not only couldn’t follow theirs but were handed the consequences of and the blame for men’s–. 

Context, people. Context.

Butler wasn’t alone in calling on men to keep it buttoned up. The National Vigilance Association was headed down the same road, but when it began supporting the prosecution of prostitutes and brothel keepers, Butler set up a rival group, the Personal Rights Association, which warned against “Purity Societies,” calling them “stampers on vulnerable people.” 

Her later campaigning also focused on women in colonial India who were being forced into prostitution by the British army. So let’s give her back that point we took away earlier.

Cambridge University and the women suspected of evil

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Let me take you back to the good old days, when men were men, kings were kings, and things weren’t at all the way we imagine. Those manly men of the court? They wore ruffs and earrings. And the king in question was a queen. 

Shall we start over? Back in the days when Elizabeth I was on the throne, she granted a charter to Cambridge University that allowed it to arrest and imprison any woman  “suspected of evil.” I don’t know what happened behind the scenes to bring that about, but if she’d set out to prove that a woman wielding power doesn’t necessarily improve life for all women, she did a pretty fair job of it.

irrelevant photo: Men-an-Tol, in Cornwall.It’s from the Bronze Age and your guess is as good as mine what it was for.

 

What kind of evil did she have in mind?

Do you need to ask? Sexual evil, of course. 

The university was a perfect set-up for out-of-bounds sexuality. Until the 1880s, its dons (translation: the men–and they were all men–who taught there) weren’t allowed to marry. That meant they weren’t allowed to have socially (and university-) approved sex. With anyone–presumably including their own lonely selves. 

Admittedly, there’s always a massive gap between the rules and real life, but Cambridge was an all-encompasing institution whose fellows ate, drank, slept, played, prayed, and taught in one fairly limited space. They wouldn’t have expected or found much privacy. 

Into that claustrophobic container, pour half a gallon of hormonally driven adolescent males, also single. Into a series of separate containers, measure out a full gallon of parents worried that loose women would tempt and corrupt their babes. 

Now stir, being mindful to keep the parents at some distance from their offspring but close enough to press their worries on the dons and the university. 

The resulting mixture was combustible, so while both dons and undergraduates could and did keep mistresses, the university had to make gestures in the direction of protecting the undergraduates from sin, temptation, and anything else that might worry a concerned parent or a church.

In other words, it had to arrest any young woman who might represent the forces of sin and temptation, because it sure as hell wasn’t going to arrest its students. 

 

How Cambridge differed from the rest of the country

Under the ordinary laws of Liz’s time, a woman could only be arrested for prostitution if there was something at least vaguely resembling proof that she was, in fact, engaged in prostitution. Under its shiny new charter, though, Cambridge University didn’t have to bother with proof. Its proctors–senior members of the university–could arrest any young woman who was out of the streets after dark. And they did. 

The woman would then be tried by the vice chancellor in a private court, which required no witnesses and no witness statements. The woman had no right to legal defense and wasn’t allowed to say anything more than her name. The university could then imprison her in the Spinning House, a repurposed workhouse. It was cold and damp and the food was bread and sometimes gruel. In 1846, a 17-year-old, Elizabeth Howe, died after spending a December night on a damp bed in a cell with a broken window. She’d been arrested for walking with a friend–another woman–near a brothel, which was enough to demonstrate that she was up to no good.

A friend–possibly the same one but I’m not sure–described her as gentle and kind. The friend tried to get a doctor for her but was stopped by a proctor and threatened with arrest herself. She went home and Elizabeth died.

Women were held for two and three weeks at a time, and anyone who didn’t go along quietly when she was arrested was given a longer sentence. Once inside, anyone who raised hell was held in solitary confinement. In 1748, the vice chancellor paid the town crier 10 shillings to whip “10 unruly women.”

 There’s no way to know how many of the women held there were in fact prostitutes–surely some; prostitution was one of the few ways desperate women could make a little cash–but also surely not all. At one point, the wife and daughter of a councillor (that would be a local politician) were stopped because they’d walked ahead of him and were on the street un–ahem–chaperoned.

I’m going to assume he was able to get them released. No woman could match the power of a respectable man intervening for her, especially when he was aided by a respectable explanation and a bit of local power. Intervening for herself, though, would only get her into deeper trouble. 

Basically, any woman on the streets at night was fair game. Their crimes were listed in the committal books as “street walking” or “suspected of evil.” Over the course of the 19th century, more than 5,000 women were held there.

All this comes from a book, The Spinning House: How Cambridge University Locked up Women in Its Private Prison, by Caroline Biggs. 

“The town,” Biggs says, “was run for the benefit of the university, not the townspeople. The women in my book represent the ultimate example of how the University wanted to run things to suit themselves. They were so frightened of the undergraduates being tempted that they treated the townswomen, mainly working-class women, with great cruelty.”

Semi-relevantly, the university also controlled the sale of alcohol, the licensing of pubs, and how much credit students were allowed, although how they managed that last one is beyond me. 

 

Then it all fell apart

In 1825, parliament gave the university the power to maintain its own police force, nicknamed bulldogs, who patrolled the night streets alongside the proctors. They were supposed to go after women found in the company of members of the university but Biggs says they pursued any rumors–”every morsel of tittle-tattle”–about young women in Cambridge.

That situation held until 1891, when a 17-year-old, Jane Elsden, was arrested although she was alone on the street, not with a member of the university, and a few months later another 17-year-old, Daisy Hopkins, was hauled in although a man admitted he had solicited her, not the other way around. 

At this point, it all gets a little hazy–possibly not in Biggs’ book but in the articles I’ve found. Sorry–I’m not even using secondary sources but tertiary ones. Someone brought a case of habeaus corpus involving one or both of the women, which meant a judge got to rule on whether she or they were imprisoned legally and ruled that she/they wasn’t/weren’t. One or both of them was or were released.

When I looked for more information on the first woman, Jane Elsden, I found the blog of a distant relative who tells the story that’s come down through her family. It holds that Elsden and Hopkins were friends and were both prostitutes. They’d been arrested and the students they’d been with were given only a mild rebuke. Somehow Elsden escaped from the Spinning House, breaking windows in the Wesley House Chapel as she went. 

“She aroused such fierce debate that eventually the power of the University was challenged and changed.”  

Take it for what it’s worth. If you pass a story down through enough generations, it will evolve, but it will probably still carry some bits of truth. Somehow or other, the two cases caused a public uproar and after 1891 women arrested by the university were allowed legal representation. Then in 1894, parliament revoked Elizabeth’s charter and with it the vice chancellor’s right to arrest women. The Spinning House was torn down not long after that and in a sour little bit of irony a police station was built on the site.

Public consultations: it’s the news from Britain

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In a stunning leap into the modern world, the Wirral Council got rid of a 1935 bylaw that made it illegal to beat a carpet, sing wantonly, or sound a noisy trumpet along a stretch of the Merseyside coast. 

Is it possible to play a non-noisy trumpet? No offense to trumpet players, but I’m under the impression that they’re pretty much all tuned to the key of loud, although any quiet trumpet players out there are welcome to tell me I’m an ignorant git. I do not now play nor have I ever played the trumpet.

But back to the law change: It’s also now legal–or at least not illegal–to incite a dog to bark, make a violent outcry, or erect a “booth, tent, bathing machine, shed, stand, stall, show, exhibition, swing, roundabout or other like erection or thing.” 

What’s a bathing machine? It’s not a machine that throws itself into the bathtub. It’s a wheeled hut that could be pulled into the water, allowing victorian ladies to change into clothes that wouldn’t drown them but not have to walk across the beach in anything revealing. Why anyone bothered to ban them in non-victorian 1935 is beyond me.

Irrelevant photo: My phone tells me this is whitebeam. It’s sometimes right but it did once swear that a dahlia was a carnation, so don’t place any heavy bets on this, okay? What I can tell you definitively is that it’s a neighbor’s tree.

What inspired the changes? Bikes–or as they call them in Britain, push bikes. The old law made it illegal to ride one along what’s now a popular bike route, which left the council in the awkward position of wanting to post informational signs related to a common but technically illegal activity. 

Before 2011, local governments in England needed permission to get rid of out-of-date bylaws. Now all they have to do is hold a public consultation, which brings me, at long last, to today’s headline.

Maybe you know what public consultations are like, but in case you don’t, they work like this: You (the you here being a governmental body) open some online site up to the public, inviting them to comment, but no one knows about it unless the Anti-Bathing-Machine Society finds it and publicizes it to their members, in which case they all write in and make the case that the beach will fill up with bathing machines. You either read what they’ve written or you don’t. Either way, you’ve consulted, the rules have been followed, and you can repeal the law in peace. 

I’m sure London followed those procedures when it repealed a law against transporting horse carcasses in Hammersmith and Fulham. As did Whitstable, in Kent, when it repealed a law against drying clothes in parks. And so we stagger into the modern age, unencumbered by history. 

 

Consulting the not-public

Meanwhile, the House of Lords consulted itself (at least as far as I’ve been able to work it out) about whether to change its rules so that lords will no longer have to register nonfinancial interests that might influence their work. And guess what: it decided the rule was too burdensome and dropped it.

Does a nonfinancial interest  matter, though? Since we live in a society where money rules all, you wouldn’t expect it to, but it can involve anything from being the unpaid chair of a board to involvement in a thinktank or lobbying group. Tortoise Media found that some members of the Lords only participated in debate on topics they’d registered a nonfinancial interest in. 

And following the trail of a declared nonfinancial interests has, at times, led to undeclared financial interests coming to light.

 

Not consulting a proofreader

At the recent Conservative Party conference, attendees were given chocolate bars with a wrapper misspelling Britain–the place the party would like to take another run at governing.  I hate to defend the Conservatives, but they have company: the Scottish Labour Party misspelling Scottish in an election leaflet and the Reform Party misspelled the name of one of its two Members of Parliament, who went ahead and shared the leaflet on social media.

 

Consulting the wrong people

Whoever the organizers of the Great North Run, in Newcastle, consulted when they ordered participation medals and tee shirts for their race, they were the wrong people. The souvenirs proudly carried a map of the wrong city: Sunderland. 

Give them a few years and they’ll be collectors items.

 

Consulting more wrong people

The British aren’t–hmm, how do I say this diplomatically–famous for their food, and when a popular website, Good Food, ran a recipe for cacio e pepe, which you may have guessed is Italian (the language is a hint) it set off a storm. First mistake, the website said it was easy. It’s not. I can testify that the easy part is how easily it goes wrong. Second mistake, they got the ingredients wrong. 

Butter? No. No butter.

Parmesan? Nope. Pecorino romano. 

An Italian association of restaurants demanded a correction and, in case that wasn’t enough, took the issue up with the British embassy. But let’s not be too hard on the British about this. The New York Times got in the same kind of hot water by adding tomatoes to a carbonara sauce. 

 

Let’s drop the consultation theme

In Bavaria (that was in Germany last I looked), someone called the police about a wiseacre ringing their doorbell in the middle of the night and being nowhere around when they answered the door. You know how the game works: some teenager rings the bell, then runs giggling around the corner. Except that the ringing didn’t stop.

The police did show up and noticed not just that the bell was still ringing but that a motion-detection light hadn’t gone on, which led some clever devil to notice a slime trail crossing the doorbell sensors. A slug had set them off. Or–what do I know?–a snail.

The police claim to have explained territorial boundaries to the little beastie. I doubt it’ll help, but the story made the news in multiple countries, including Britain (making this almost legitimate blog fodder), for whatever that moment of fame is worth to the sleep-deprived.  

 *

Meanwhile, back in Britain, 210 teenage army recruits were put through the wrong training course when the army forgot to notify an outsourcing company, Capita, about a change in its requirements. By now, everyone will have been shuffled into the right course but the mistake will extend the length of their training. 

The Army’s struggled lately to recruit enough trainees to replace the soldiers who are leaving. It’s currently short more than 2,000 trained personnel. This is unlikely to help.

Anne Wentworth, feminism, and the spirit of prophecy

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When did feminism start in England? If you’re in the mood, you could start with Boudicca–warrior queen who took a hefty bite out of the Roman army and turned Roman towns to cinders–but let’s start with Anne Wentworth instead. She was fiery but not in as literal a way. 

Admittedly, Wentworth’s a random place to start, but so’s Boudicca. The real answer is that feminism doesn’t have any single starting point, so I’m almost playing fair here.

Anne Wentworth was born in 1629. Or 1630. Close enough since we’re too late to send a birthday card. The Romans were long gone by then and she was no warrior, but she fought the good fight. 

Even more irrelevant photo than usual: Madron Holy Well, Cornwall. The strips of cloth (and hair scrunchies, and dog bags) represent– Well, they represent whatever the people who left them there wanted them to represent: prayers, wishes, respect, anything else you can think of. I found them oddly moving.

 

Anne Wentworth steps out of line

Her story starts off conventionally enough: She married William Wentworth–probably a glove dealer–in her early twenties and they had a daughter. They lived in London and were (this gets less conventional) Anabaptists, a small and persecuted religious group that was a forerunner of (improbable list warning here) the Baptists, Mennonites, and Quakers. 

For eighteen years, the Wentworths lived together unhappily. Or at least Anne was unhappy. She later described herself as suffering “great oppression and sorrow of heart.” I don’t know the details, and I’d be surprised if she published them. They weren’t the point, but she did write about being “grossly abused” mentally and physically and she described William as a “scourge and lash,” so that she “lived in misery.”

That’s not the misery memoir we expect today but it was shocking at a time when women were expected to put up with whatever situation their marriages had landed them in and shut up about it.

In 1670, when their daughter was about ten, Anne had what she considered a visit from god.

As she later described it, she came down with a “hectic fever,” nearly died, and came out of the experience believing god had spared her for a reason. It was time to stop living a lie and to start–yes, folks–prophesying. And prophesy she did, which neither her church nor her husband welcomed.   

The sequence of events may be clear to the experts but they’re not to me, so let’s throw any attempt at a timeline out the window. What I can piece together is this:

  • She and the church parted ways, although it’s not clear whether she walked out or was pushed.  
  • Her husband locked her out of the house and destroyed her writings,
  • in spite of which, she published four accounts of her experience, including: A True Account of Anne Wentworth’s Being Cruelly, Unjustly, and Unchristianly Dealt With by Some of Those People Called Anabaptists (1676; no one went in for understatement back then) and A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (1677).
  • Anne and her daughter hid from William for a while. 
  • A year after he pitched her out, with the help of her supporters she got back into the house and changed the locks.

 

Giving the church a right of rebuttal

I’m not sure what document we’re quoting here–that’s a problem when you work with secondary sources–but her church considered her a “proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented, and mad woman,” (you may have figured out by now that proud wasn’t a compliment, especially for a woman). She had “unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of [her] husband” and had “wickedly left him.” They charged her with “rejecting and neglecting their church” and with “dissatisfying” her husband.

 

Gender and timing

If that doesn’t convince you that gender was an issue, I’m not sure what will, but gender doesn’t entirely account for why Wentworth’s prophecies weren’t a smash hit. Her timing was off. The high tide of prophecy had passed. After the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate, and the religious upheaval associated with all of that, a lot of people were nervous about inventive religions. They figured the world had received all the prophesies it needed, thanks, and everybody could just make do with what they had.

Still, if you have a visit from god–or if you’re convinced you do, anyway–you’re probably not going to say, “Couldn’t you have told me this twenty years ago?” Wentworth was sure she was living in the end times and god had chosen her as his “battleaxe,” so she did battle with her pen.

Her timing was also bad in that she predicted the would happen apocalypse before New Year’s Day 1678, even thoughtfully warning Charles II and London’s lord mayor about it. 

Then it didn’t happen, which will lose any prophet a bit of credibility, not to mention popularity, but she kept on writing and continued to have supporters–see above about the people who helped her get back into her house. 

She wouldn’t be the last prophet to get the timing wrong on the apocalypse, and probably not the first either. Let’s not hold it against her.

 

So what makes her a feminist?

The word didn’t exist, so she wouldn’t have considered herself one. The first recorded use is from the 19th century and it was used to mean nothing more than the state of being feminine.  

How the world has changed.

But in the face of opposition from husband and church, she claimed the right to speak and publish the truth as she saw it, and at a time when the idea that a woman shouldn’t be dominated by a man was almost unthinkable, she thought it. And went public with the thought. 

It must’ve scared the hell out of her. She wrote, “Here is a case that cannot possible be brought to an end without coming into the publick view of the World, though it is so contrary unto my nature, that I would rather suffer unto death than be in any publick way; but am constrained now, & thrust out by the mighty power of God, who overpowers me, that I must no longer confer with flesh and blood, and yield to my own reason of my weakness, foolishness, and fearful slavish nature, that am daunted with a look of any terrible, fierce, angry man.”

After that, the passage gets so religious, not to mention so 17th century, that I wandered off to feed the cats, but even if Wentworth and I pour our passion into different molds, I have to respect hers.

The Brigantes: a bit of Roman-era British history

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When the Romans invaded Britain, some of the British tribes weighed the odds of defeating them, didn’t like their chances, and cut deals with them. As far as I know, you won’t find statues to those tribes. They got their payoff at the time and to hell with posterity. 

By way of contrast, Boudicca–leader of the Iceni and scourge of the Romans–has a very nice statue in Westminster. Or if it’s not nice, it is at least big.  

Boudicca earned her statue by leading an uprising against Rome, burning what are now Colchester, St. Albans, and London. According to a Roman source, her troops killed 70,000 Romans and pro-Roman Britons and made mincemeat of the Ninth Legion. 

The word mincemeat isn’t in the original. It’s my translation and since I don’t know Latin you shouldn’t give it too much weight, but you might also want to substitute “a lot” for that 70,000. It’s from that impeccable source, the Britannica, which got it from a Roman writer, but at the time statistical reporting was no better than my Latin. 

I also question the number because Wikiwhatsia (sorry–handy for a shallow dive on a beside-the-point topic) estimates the late-second century population of what’s now the UK at somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million, which is close enough for a blog post. If we subtract all the people who lived outside of the area the Romans occupied, and then  eliminate children, old people, and people who had migraines when the battles took place or who were nine months pregnant (women fought–consider Boudicca–so we’re not eliminating them all), we’re left with–um, nowhere near as many people as we started out with. And we haven’t even eliminated all the people who weren’t pro-Roman.

What I’m saying is that if 70,000’s the right number, she would have killed off an unlikely proportion of the fighting population. I suggest we take it as a deceptively specific way of saying she did the Romans a lot of damage.

The Romans did eventually defeat Boudicca, but many centuries later she got her statue.

The tribes who collaborated with the Romans not only don’t get statues (as far as I know), they also don’t get much press, but I stubbed my toe on one of those tribes, the Brigantes, recently and I hate to let that pain go to waste, so let’s stop and learn a bit about them.

Okay, I’m pushing it here. This is a fougou–an elaborate prehistoric tunnel whose purpose no one’s sure of–at Carn Euny, in Cornwall. Wrong end of Britain for this story, but the village was in use until the fourth century CE. 

The Brigantes

The Brigantes were a confederation of tribes–the largest on the island at the time–occupying most of northern England. Or northern what’s-now-England. Or else they were one large honkin’ tribe, not a confederation. Take your pick. We’ll probably never know.

In 43 CE (that’s where we pick up the story), they were led by a queen, Cartimandua, who made an alliance with the Romans in order to avoid an invasion. 

Not invading, though, didn’t mean the Romans stayed out. It just meant they didn’t kill people on their way in. They came, they settled, and they rubbed their hands in glee at the minerals that were to be had. Above all, they made money. 

Unfortunately, the Brigantes left no written records, so we only get to see what happened from Roman sources and from archeology, and with all due respect to archeologists, they can never tell the full story of people’s lives. So we don’t know much about Cartimandua’s life and we don’t know the Brigantes’ experience of having the Romans move in. What we do know is that the Roman pattern was to create what an article on a Warwick University site calls “mutually beneficial relationships with the local elite.”

It would be a long time before the non-elite put their point of view on the record.

We also don’t know whether Cartimandua was one of the eleven British “kings” who surrendered to Emperor Claudius and who were mentioned–not by name–on his triumphal arch, but she might’ve been. It might’ve made more sense to the Romans to call a woman a king than to acknowledge a woman as a ruler.

 

Resistance to Rome

While Cartimandua was cutting her deal, some of the tribes to the south surrendered to the Romans and others fought the. The Catuvellauni tribe fought and lost, and Caratacus, the son of their king, fled to Wales–or what’s now Wales–where with one of the local tribes he kept the fight going for nine years. 

When he was finally defeated, he fled into the territory of the Brigantes, hoping for sanctuary. That makes it sound like he hadn’t been reading the newspapers–the Brigantes; deal with the Romans; should’ve been front-page stuff–but that can happen when you’re fighting an asymmetrical war. You’re too busy to send a kid running to the newsstand. Or you send the kid but then you don’t have time to unfold the damn paper, never mind read it. You’re too busy dodging spears and mending your shield and wondering how you’re going to feed your warriors. 

It’s also possible that he knew Cartimandua had cut a deal with the Romans but he didn’t have any other cards in his hand so he played the one he had.

Either way, Cartimandua handed him over to Rome.

It’s not the sort of move that fills her descendants with pride, but if you narrow history down to feel-good stories about heroes, it’s no longer history, it’s propaganda. Which is of course not a comment on what’s been happening to school books and museum exhibits in the US lately. 

Caratacus’s defeat pretty much settled the question of who controlled Britain: Rome did. He and his family were shipped off to Rome and paraded through the streets. The humiliation of enemies brought glory to Rome. So I’m about to tell you he was executed, right?

Wrong. He gave an impassioned speech asking for clemency and Claudius–the emperor–pardoned him. He and his family lived out the rest of their lives in Rome, quietly.

If life was a movie, it wouldn’t make a good ending.

 

Cartimandua, Venutius, Vollocatus, and a soap opera plot

Cartimandua did well out of handing him over. Or out of her deal with the Romans. Either way, archeologists have unearthed luxuries–glass; rare tableware; amphorae for wine and olive oil–from what may have been her capital. 

Remember that business of the Romans cutting deals with the local elite? 

But we have to backtrack here, because Cartimandua had a husband, Venutius. He seems to have been the lesser power in the relationship and–speculation alert here–may have been the leader of another tribe and their marriage a political alliance. Who knows? They’re both dead and we can’t ask. 

Somewhere around 57 CE, they split up, and Cartimandua not only married his armor-bearer, Vellocatus, but shared power with him. Or so Tacitus, a Roman historian, tells us. Again, who knows? It’s as close to the story as we’re going to get. Let’s pretend to believe it. 

Theirs doesn’t sound like the kind of divorce where the couple gets together every Friday night to eat popcorn and watch TV with the kids, because at some point Cartimandua captured some of Venutius’s relatives, which (life advice warning here) is never a good move if you’re looking to keep peace in the not-quite-family.

Venutius attacked her, but when I say her what I probably mean is her territory. Her tribe. 

It’s possible–or better yet, probable–that this wasn’t all about who shared a bed but about politics. Handing over Caratacus might not’ve been a popular move. Becoming an accessory to a new ruling elite–the Romans–slotting themselves into place over the Brigantes might’ve made Cartimandua unpopular. 

A lot of things are possible. What’s known is that the Romans sent soldiers to defend Cartamandua and Venutius lost but lived and tried again ten years later, when Nero’s death left Rome in turmoil. He attacked, the Romans had only auxiliary troops to send, and Venutius won. 

What happened to Cartamandua? Dunno. She might’ve survived. She might not have.  After that, we’re out of possibilities. Vellocatus drops out of sight. Venutius, though, ruled the Brigantes only until the Romans booted him out and ruled directly. To hell with these client queens and kings; they’re too much trouble. What might’ve been Cartimandua’s capital–it’s now Stanwick–fell out of use and the center of power moved to what’s now Aldborough, which became a Roman administrative center. Where Stanwick seems to have been a place for gatherings rather than a town or stronghold, Aldborough followed the Roman pattern and became a town. A Roman legion was stationed nearby, in what’s now York, so let’s assume that all was not peaceful. Or at least that it was an uneasy peace.

 

What does it all mean?

Cartimandua’s come down to us–I keep saying this, don’t I?–only from Roman sources, and the Romans didn’t take well to the idea of women rulers. As they told her story, it was about a woman’s lust and lack of wisdom and the corrective violence of a tribe that couldn’t accept a woman’s rule. But with her and Boudicca as evidence, we can pretty safely say the tribes had no problem with women rulers. Or leaders, if that’s a better fit. The two queens sit at opposite ends of the political spectrum–fight the Romans; cut a deal with the Romans–but both held power and didn’t have to hide behind a man to wield it.

Cartimandua ruled for more than twenty years, which is more than most politicians can claim. Still, though, no statue.

Why am I so sure of that? Because when I asked Lord Google to help me find one, he led me either to Boudicca’s statue or to statues of people with heavy beards who I’m reasonably sure aren’t Cartimandua.

Shedding a bit of light on Dark Age Britain

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For a long time, pretty much anyone who paid attention to these things agreed that after the Romans left Britain, Anglo-Saxon invaders flowed in, the economy collapsed, trade withered away, and ignorance twined its thorny tendrils around the land. Roman cities and villas were abandoned and everybody proceeded to live in misery. 

That period was once known as the Dark Ages, although the name’s gone out of fashion, and if I’m reading the tea leaves correctly, that image of collapse is headed toward the same fate. 

Irrelevant photo: field and fog in September

 

Challenging the orthodoxy

The first challenge I stumbled across was Susan Oosthuizen’s. As she reads the period, the withdrawal of the Romans also meant the end of taxes and goods being siphoned off to Rome. People were able to keep more of what they grew, made, and mined. It’s true that in places land that had grown crops was converted to pasture, and that’s often cited as a sign of collapse, but she sees it as a kind of luxury. People could afford to do that now.

As for the invaders, she looks at the way land was used and finds that people were farming much of the same divisions of land in the same ways. That doesn’t speak to invaders swooping in and changing things to suit their needs. It speaks to immigration and accommodation. 

She paints a picture of immigrants and native people integrating themselves into a shared culture. If you look at their burial grounds, the only way to tell Anglo-Saxons from Celts is to test what’s left of their skeletons, looking for both their DNA and indications of where they grew up–something that’s only been possible recently. They were buried the same way and their grave goods show that their social standing wasn’t defined by which group they came from. 

We might do better to think of we’ve called the Anglo-Saxons as a culture, not an ethnicity or set of tribes.

The tests also show that they weren’t living in isolated communities. They had connections from as far afield as Byzantium and West Africa. That speaks to trade.

Forgive me for referring you to myself as if I was a sober historian–I am sober but a historian, sadly, I’m not. Still, I can’t link to her entire book and I wrote a bit more about some of this here.

 

So what survived after the Romans left?

Well, take Isurium Brigantum, now called Aldborough, in Yorkshire. The area’s rich in silver, lead, and iron, which set Roman noses a-twitching, and they–that’s the Romans, not the noses–set up a regional capital there. 

To see how much mining went on before and after the Romans picked up their toys and went home, Martin Millet, an archeologist associated with the site, looked at pollutants in the mud beside the river Ure. What he found was that instead of mining either ending or dying back when the Romans left, lead levels–the pollutant mining left behind–rose for the next two centuries. 

For later centuries, the lead levels paint an unsurprising picture of mining rising and falling to match wars, plagues, and kingly politics. The one surprise was the absence of a post-Roman collapse.

Still, some things may have collapsed. Isurium Brigantum was a walled town, and it may or may not have continued to be used, but the Roman villas with their mosaics fell into ruin, and archeologists have found the predictable coins, jewelry, and broken glass and pottery nearby. Websites for the site talk, justifiably, about the sophisticated design and decoration.

You can see collapse in all that if you like, but mining–that measurable activity–continued, but it was integrated now into a different kind of economy, one where for a long time coins were fairly peripheral. 

As for art, the Anglo-Saxon taste in decoration was different, but they weren’t without skill.

 

Yeah, but those abandoned villas . . .

The abandoned villas get mentioned as a sign that culture took a nosedive and everything was mud and misery. Who, after all, would voluntarily abandon plumbing and under-floor heating to live in a hovel? 

Not the person who posed the question, but back away for a minute and remember that very few people in Roman Britain owned villas or had plumbing and underfloor heating. That was the elite, the some-very-small percent. True, some larger number of people lived in or around villas as servants and slaves, but most or all of them would’ve been servicing the plumbing, not enjoying it. Someone had to keep the fires stoked if those hypocausts were going to work.

So asking who would voluntarily abandon plumbing and underfloor heating is sort of like asking if we, the world’s current population, would voluntarily abandon our luxury superyachts. For 99.someverylargepercent, that wouldn’t be a hardship. We don’t own them and never will. It’s not impossible to imagine a reconfiguration of the world’s resources that would leave the superyachts and all associated possessions abandoned but everyone living better.

If you look at post-Roman society from a distance, you can notice the disappearance of cities and villas and see loss. If you look at it from some peasant’s doorway, though, the change just might look like an improvement.

Stonehenge, cows, and technology: a roundup of British archeology

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A century ago, someone found a cow’s jawbone buried beside the entrance to Stonehenge. The placement looked deliberate, and historians have been speculating about it ever since. Now, the high-tech toys available to scientists have delivered new information, answering some old questions and leaving us with new ones: the cow came from an area with Paleozoic rocks–in other words, rocks that are more than 400 million years old. The closest place that fits that description is Wales, where Stonehenge’s bluestones were quarried. 

Does that mean Stonehenge was built by Welsh cows? 

When they sober up, archeologists aren’t convinced of that, but there is speculation–sober speculation–that cows or oxen were used to drag the stones overland. It’s only recently that archeologists have found evidence that cattle were used to pull heavy loads in the Neolithic era, when Stonehenge was built, but they’re now pretty sure they were, and that fits nicely into the jawbone puzzle.

If you forgot to set your watch, the Neolithic era took place somewhere around 2990 BCE. 

Marginally relevant photo: Stonehenge it’s not, but it is a stone circle. This one’s from Minions, in Cornwall.

But cows and oxen pulling the bluestones sits squarely in the land of speculation, so let’s not commit too heavily to it. We can’t prove that the cows in general or this cow in particular helped pull the stones. We don’t even know for sure that the cow in question was brought to Stonehenge alive, although if you’re going from Wales to Stonehenge, you’ll find it’s a long way to carry a cow. Or even a cow’s head, especially in the era before refrigeration. Humans are indeed strange, but not, I like to think, quite that strange. 

What’s known for certain is that the cow was indeed a cow, not an ox or a bull. And that someone left her jawbone in a significant spot, like a note saying, “This means something,” and don’t we wish they’d told us what.

 

Cows, sheep, and pigs

Animal bones also figure in a recent article about bronze age gatherings in what’s now Britain. People traveled long distances to get together and eat. And, presumably, solidify the relationships between tribes or–well, whatever groupings we’re talking about. They would’ve known. The same techniques that inform us about Stonehenge’s Welsh cow also tell us where their animals came from before they became the feats. 

Whatever it means, at one site they mostly ate beef; at another, mutton; and at a third, pork. 

 

A Danish woodhenge

A circle of 45 wooden posts has been discovered in Denmark. It’s believed to have been built between 2600 and 1600 BCE–the late stone age and early bronze age–and it’s the second woodhenge that’s been found in the area. What experts take from this–or one of the things they take from it–is that Denmark, Britain, Ireland, and parts of northern Europe, which all have similar henges, were strongly connected. 

The axis of the newly discovered henge matches that at Stonehenge, underlining the assumption that the builders had shared beliefs and technologies.

 

The Melsonby Hoard

Someone with a metal detector found what’s described as one of the biggest and most important hoards of iron-age glitz in Britain: a collection of more than 800 objects. It was found in a field in the north of England and includes wagon and chariot parts, bridle bits, ceremonial spears, and two ornate cauldrons, all of which shows evidence of burning, possibly as part of a funeral. 

The expert who was called in after the detectorist reported his find said, “Finding a hoard of ten objects is unusual, it’s exciting, but finding something of this scale is just unprecedented. . . .

“Some people have regarded the north as being impoverished compared with the iron age of the south of Britain. This shows that individuals there had the same quality of materials and wealth and status and networks as people in the south. . . . The north is definitely not a backwater in the iron age. It is just as interconnected, powerful, and wealthy as iron age communities in the south.” 

The find also provides the first evidence of four-wheeled vehicles in use among the tribes. 

 

The Romans and the Welsh

A huge Roman fort that was in use from the first through third centuries has been found in Pembrokeshire, Wales, in an overgrown farm field. It may rewrite the history of relations between the Romans and the Demetae–the tribe that lived there. The belief had been that they were on peaceful terms, but the presence of a fort this size throws that into doubt, indicating a strong military presence.

The fort explains why the field was never worth cultivating: the farmer, and probably many before him, kept hitting stone. It was found by an archeologist from Pembrokeshire, who had often wondered whether an unusually straight road might not be Roman. (You may have to live in Britain to understand why a straight road would cause a person to wonder.) Then  he looked at a satellite image and spotted the field, which is the size and shape of a Roman fort.

He drove out to see it and as he described the moment, “Sticking out of the ground was a triangular piece that looked like a Roman roofing slate. I thought: ‘Surely not?’ I pulled it up and lo and behold, it’s an archetypal Roman roofing slate, an absolute peach. Flip it upside down and you can see underneath a diagonal line where it was grooved to fit into the one that was underneath it. It’s a real beauty. . . .

“That was the diagnostic evidence I was looking for, which is a miracle, because it’s a huge site.”

The current best guess is that the fort held some 500 soldiers.

 

England and West Africa

We’ve moved to the 7th century CE, so reset your watches if you would, and we’re poking around disrespectfully in a couple of graveyards, one in Kent, on England’s southeast coast, and one in Dorset, a long walk to the west, even if you’re being dragged by a cow. 

Sorry, no. Wrong era. Forget the cow. But in the same way that the Stonehenge story follows one cow to make sense of the Stonehenge story, this one follows two unrelated humans to get a glimpse of life in early medieval England. These burials hint at people traveling much greater distances in the early medieval period than we would’ve expected: both had a paternal grandparent from West Africa. Their grave goods show they were both buried as typical and well-thought-of members of their communities, and the ancestors of the people buried nearby were either northern Europe or western British/Irish.

That western British/Irish business is, I think, a way of saying Celtic now that it’s looking questionable that a group of people called Celts ever existed. 

The Kent and Dorset communities had very different cultures, the eastern one Anglo-Saxon and in frequent touch with Europe, the western one on the fringes of European influence and primarily–um, whatever we say if the word Celtic’s gone up in smoke. Both, though, had contact with far-away West Africa.

 

And finally, a mere 800 years ago

In Leicester–pronounced, through some miracle of English spelling, Lester–in the twelfth century, 123 women, men, and children were buried, in a short space of time, in a narrow shaft near the cathedral. That would’ve been something like 5% of the town’s population and it’s one of the largest pit burials found in Britain. 

“Their bones show no signs of violence – which leaves us with two alternative reasons for these deaths: starvation or pestilence,” said Mathew Morris, project officer at Leicester University’s archaeological services. “At the moment, the latter is our main working hypothesis.”

Initially, the archeologists assumed the deaths were from the bubonic plague, but when the bones were radiocarbon dated the centuries were wrong. But the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles do mention pestilences and fevers, severe mortality, and miserable deaths from hunger and famine in England from the mid-tenth century through to the mid-twelfth century. The pit burials seem to back that up.

“It is also important to note there was still some form of civic control going on,” Morris said. “There was still someone going around in a cart collecting bodies. What we see from studying the bodies in the pit does not indicate it was created in a panic. . . . There was also no evidence of clothing on any of the bodies – no buckles, brooches, nothing to suggest these were people who were dropping dead in the street before being collected and dumped.

“In fact, there are signs that their limbs were still together, which suggests they were wrapped in shrouds. So their families were able to prepare these bodies for burial before someone from a central authority collected them to take to the pit burial.”

In a roundabout way, the find is the result of Richard III’s body being discovered, minus the feet, in a nearby parking lot. His body was reburied in the cathedral and since then visitor numbers have gone wild, so the cathedral decided to build a heritage learning center in the cathedral garden, which had once been a graveyard. 

In Britain, construction like that means an archeological survey, and tha turned up what was left of 1,237 people buried between the eleventh and nineteenth centuries. Below them was evidence of Anglo-Saxon dwellings below that, a Roman shrine. 

“It’s a continuous sequence of 850 years of burials from a single population from a single place, and you don’t get that very often,” Morris said. “It has generated an enormous amount of archaeology.”

***

Totally unrelated to any of that, I wonder if a reader or readers can enlighten me on something that’s happened here lately. Notes used to get 2,000 to 3,000 hits per week, but about a month ago it started getting between 10,000 and 20,000, with as far as I can tell all the growth coming from China. That’s lovely–whoever you are, welcome–but it’s also strange. For one thing, it wasn’t slow growth; all those new hits appeared between one week and the next. For another, the list of posts that get the most hits hasn’t changed: Britain’s gun laws, Britain’s native foods, the shift to metric measurements, the scone. (I know: it’s an odd list.) I’d have expected a shift in readership to bring a change in interests, but it hasn’t. So is this a bot, clicking away mindlessly and reading nothing? Or is this something real?

If you’re a new reader from China, or if you’re not but know something that might explain what’s happening, or if you just want to tell me how strange this is, leave me a comment, will you?

Thanks.