A quick history of England’s bastard children–and their mothers 

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Before we get started, isn’t bastard a nasty thing to call a person? 

It’s turned into an all-purpose insult, yes, but it’s still better than illegitimate child, which people use if they’re trying to be polite but which implies that some kids are legal and justified and some aren’t and maybe we should just ship ‘em into the outer darkness and be done with them. So yeah, I’ll go with bastard, in spite of its drawbacks.

 

How much can we actually know about them?

Less than I’d like. Probably less than you’d like. In an article about unmarried mothers in medieval England–called, surprisingly enough, “Unwed Mothers in Medieval England,” Becky R. Lee says,  “I have a confession to make. The claim of any historian to uncover the experiences of, and attitudes towards, any group from the past is at best hyperbole. When it is a group of women, and medieval women at that, the claim and the information is bound to be full of gaps.”

Ditto bastard children. 

Lee’s topic isn’t identical to mine, but it’s close enough: if you don’t have mothers, you don’t get children. I’ve drawn on her article heavily but managed to lose the site where it’s most easily available. Basically the link above proves it exists but– Um. Yeah. Sorry.

Irrelevant photo: rowan berries–or if you prefer, mountain ash

 

The medieval period

William the Conqueror–the big bad Norman who conquered England in 1066–wasthe  famously known as William the Bastard, and the chronicler Orderic Vitalis seems to have hinted (notice the two weasel words there, seems and hinted?) that William’s parents not having been married was less important than in his mother having the wrong pedigree. She was the child of either a tanner or an undertaker. How unseemly can you get?

In William’s time and place, a bastard child could inherit and could even rule. What mattered was being born to parents (preferably two, but William made do with one) who had power, money, titles, ancestry, and– Hey, you know how it is: the aristocrats have ancestry; the rest of us just hatched somehow. 

I started with William because it’s easiest to find information on the bastard children of kings and aristocrats. They left a record and historians and pseudohistorians have a fascination with them. But what about ordinary people? We can’t all be the bastards of kings and dukes.

In the early medieval period, the attitude toward ordinary bastards was linked to the way marriage worked: couples didn’t have to marry in the church or even just outside the door. Some did, but others married more casually: on the road, at the pub, at someone’s house, in bed. They also didn’t need witnesses, their families’ permission, or a priest. They didn’t have to throw a party or wear clothes they’d never use again. If the two people agreed to marry and exchanged a gift of some sort–often a ring–it was done, which is why marrying in bed was not only possible but convenient. 

This had a downside: it made it hard to prove you were married. Or weren’t married. So the line between married and not married wasn’t as clear as it is today.

The secular custom of trothplight (the first recorded use is from sometime around 1300) was more public: a couple exchanged vows before friends and family, after which they were considered married. 

When there was a public betrothal, it was acceptable for couples to live in the same house before the wedding. Ditto while the terms of a marriage were being hammered out. Presumably they had sex, although they didn’t let me know so I can’t say for sure. One writer describes marriage in this period as a process, not a one-time event. 

If the line between the married and the unmarried was hazy, so too was the line between bastard and not-bastard.

Don’t you just love it when I take something that used to be clear and murk it up a bit?

 

Inheritance

It’s not until the twelfth century that children born outside of any marriage were excluded from various kinds of inheritance. I would’ve assumed that shift was driven by the church, but according to one article (and again I’ve lost the link; sorry, I’m more than usually disorganized this week), it was initially driven by court battles over inheritance in which disinherited and very grumpy descendants who’d been born on the right side of the bed presented judges with bits of Church doctrine to back up their claim that the descendants born on the wrong side had no right to inherit. 

Still, the Church wasn’t irrelevant. Starting in the eleventh century, it began trying to take control of marriage and eliminate adultery and concubinage by limiting the rights of bastards. It now defined a legitimate child as one born to a couple who were free to marry and who’d married publicly and formally. 

Don’t take that to mean that everything changed at once, though. For one thing, Church and state had separate courts, and Church law and civil law weren’t necessarily in tune on this, so the two court systems might rule differently. Take a couple who had a child and then married. To the Church, that made the child no longer a bastard as long as the parents were free to marry when it was conceived. To the state, it changed nothing.

Another factor slowing the change was public opinion. Especially in a small community, people would have strong opinions about what was and was not a marriage and who was and was not in one, and those opinions would vary from place to place and time to time.

 

The economics of bastardy

Central to all of this was the cost of bringing up a child. At least among the poor, who were the vast majority of the population, it took two people to raise a child and it was a struggle even then. A single woman with a child would be desperate. In fact, a single woman would be desperate even without a child. Marriage integrated her into the economy, and many single (or somewhat single, given the haziness of the dividing line) women who had children went on to marry. 

Still, the birth of a bastard child would be a matter for either a manorial court, where the lord of the manor presided, or a Church court, and either court would demand to know who the father was. He’d have to contribute to the child’s support, and sometimes support the mother through her pregnancy and provide her with a dowry. If he couldn’t be found, his family might be called on. 

And if he wasn’t known, if he and his family had no support to give, if any number of other things went wrong? Then it came down to community support. It wouldn’t have been much but it was better than nothing. That support might come from the parish, a monastery, a guild, or a town, and at least one historian raises the possibility that the financial burden on an already poor community turned communities against the mothers, and/or their children.

Some babies were abandoned at the door of a church or hospital, but others were raised by their mothers–with, I’d speculate, the support of the women’s families–or more rarely their fathers. There are instances of fathers leaving bequests to their bastard children in their wills, especially (in case you were about to get all sentimental about that) when they had no living non-bastard children. 

 

Penance & Punishment

Having unauthorized sex was also a matter for the church and manorial courts–or it was if you got caught. A manorial court could levy a leyrwite, a fine for fornication, and these were more common and the fines were higher during hard times, when community resources were stretched thin and an extra child would be a burden. In some cases, the woman’s landholding was seized and she was expelled from the community. After the plague, though, when the population was depleted and an extra child would be welcome, no matter how it came into the world, fines were smaller and less common.

Predictably, more women than men were charged with fornication in manorial courts–men aren’t in the habit of getting pregnant and have a long history of saying, “Who, me?” when confronted with a pregnancy taking place in someone else’s body–and most of the women fined were poor. About a quarter of them later married. Others became trapped in a cycle of poverty, fines, repeated charges, and presumably sexual exploitation. Some of the charitable institutions that supported unwed mothers and their children excluded these women. They weren’t the deserving poor.

The Church went in not only for fines but also public penance–things like walking at the head of the Sunday procession or around the church in their underwear–and these sometimes landed on men but more commonly on women. One of the writers I read speculates that these rituals could’ve been a way for the punished to be accepted back into the community. Others see them simply as public humiliation. 

 

Names

You can’t play spot-the-bastard by looking at people’s names. Children whose fathers recognized them often took their father’s name; others took their mother’s. Fitz, as in Fitzwilliam, isn’t the mark of a bastard ancestor. It simply means son of, although many a royal bastard did become a Fitz, which is why it’s often assumed that it marks a bastard birth.

 

The late medieval period

By the time we get into the late fourteenth century, a bastard child could no longer inherit, but there were ways around that. Take Sir William Argentine, a bastard son whose father had entailed most of his estates, cutting out his non-bastard daughter and her two entirely respectable children. Along with the property went the right to serve as cup-bearer to Henry IV. Everybody involved went to court and William won.

If you’re not convinced yet that Fitz didn’t signify bastardy, William’s opponent in the lawsuit was his half-sister’s husband, whose last name was Fitzwaryn.

As for entailment, let’s skip the details: it allowed the person in possession of a property to control how it was distributed after his death–and I suspect we do mean his there. Women’s hold on property was rare and tenuous.

William went on to sit in parliament as a knight of the shire (they talked like that back then; trust me, I’m old enough to remember) and serve as sheriff for Norfolk and Suffolk. In other words, bastard birth or not, he was screamingly respectable.

 

A quick dash through a few more centuries

Once we get into the sixteenth century, we find laws like the Acte for Setting of the Poore on Work, and for the Avoiding of Ydleness (they spelled like that too), which in theory punished both parents but–well, you know how it is, what with fathers being unlikely to get pregnant and all. And since walking around the church in your underwear had gone out of fashion, it allowed the mother’s name to be announced  publicly instead. 

Shaming a woman for having had sex hadn’t gone out of fashion. 

After 1609, a mother could be sent to a house of correction for a year unless she gave security–in other words, money–for her bastard child.  Public opinion turned on women with bastard children if they became dependent on the parish, which was now more likely because when Henry VIII chased the Catholic Church into exile, it took with it its network of charitable support, however thin and patchwork it had been.

You notice a pattern here? Punishment fell on women who didn’t have the money to support their children. Well-connected bastards would be okay if their mothers’ families accepted them, or if their fathers’ did. Charles II’s bastards did very well, thanks. They were given titles and good marriages were organized for them. A bastard child brought up in a wealthy family might not be on equal footing with the other children but she or he wouldn’t be out on the street.

Or a wealthy man might pay some other man to marry a woman he’d made pregnant. If she wasn’t of his class, who was she to turn her nose up at a milliner or a tailor?

Poor women, though? As a measure of the desperation they faced, infanticide became common enough that in 1624 an Act to Prevent the Destroying and Murthering of Bastard Children was introduced . A woman could face execution if she concealed the dead body of a child she’d given birth to. 

With all that said, bastard children were less common than in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Skip to 1732 (that takes us into the Georgian era) and under the Bastard Child Act any man charged with being the father of a bastard child would be imprisoned until he agreed to pay the parish if he failed to shoulder the cost of raising the child. That was entered in the parish record and was called a bastardy bond. 

How would they know who the father was? It was the woman’s responsibility to name him. My best guess is that the threat of getting no support at all ensured that most would. 

In the eighteenth century, half of all conceptions happened outside of marriage, although only one in five births were recorded that way. That argues for a lot of hurried marriages. Under common law, those children wouldn’t have been able to inherit but I’d bet on a surprising number of premature children being born. And again, that workaround, entailment, was still available to let a father settle property on a child–as long as he had enough money to pay a lawyer, which narrows the field considerably.

Somewhere along in here we find people using euphemisms like base-born children, natural children, or by-blows for the bastard children of respectable men. 

 

Nineteenth  century

The 1833 Poor Law Commission Report on Bastardy argued that the existing poor laws were encouraging women to have bastard children. Parish relief was too easy and too expensive. (The arguments never seem to change, do they?) Parishes were being saddled with children they had to maintain. And if economics weren’t enough to win the argument, religion and morality went into high gear. Immorality and poverty became more or less the same thing. 

What was needed? Why, punishment. No one, male or female, who was able-bodied should get financial support–they either worked or went to the workhouse, which at its best was deliberately harsh.  

The 1834 Poor Laws did all that and also absolved fathers of any responsibility for bastard children.  

The mothers were solely responsible. Since babies don’t take well to being tucked in a drawer somewhere so that their mothers can work a twelve-hour day–well, if they couldn’t manage job and child, into the workhouse with them. What did they expect when they got themselves pregnant? 

You now find talk about the “vicious mother” and the “great offence against the sacrament of marriage.” The Lord Chancellor in the House of Lords denounced “the lazy, worthless, and ignominious class who pursue their self-gratification at the expense of the earnings of the industrious part of the community.” 

In case the picture isn’t grim enough, abortion became illegal in 1861. 

Enter baby farming: people would place ads offering to find a home for babies in return for some payment from their mothers. Some of the children died of malnutrition, neglect, or abuse, which in an age of high infant mortality hardly draw attention. 

At the end of the nineteenth century, legislation began to regulate both adoption and foster care. 

In 1926, after-the-fact legitimization was allowed. Sorry–I wasn’t going to use that word. De-bastardization? Call it what you like, it became legally possible. In 1969, a bastard child was allowed to inherit if her or his parents died without a will. 

How Britain adds a group to its list of terrorist organizations

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To add a group to Britain’s list of proscribed organizations, first the Home Secretary has to declare it a terrorist organization–”one that engages in or promotes terrorism,” according to a government website–and then Parliament has to approve the addition. 

If you aspire to get your local birdwatchers group added to the list, those are the hoops you’ll have to jump through. As soon as those two things are done, it becomes illegal to belong to it or promote it. Or invite support for it. Or arrange or assist with a meeting that supports it. Or address a meeting that etc., presumably even if you stand up at the meeting and say, “Everybody stop this and go home.” Or publicly wear clothes that “arouse suspicion of membership or support.” Or display anything that arouses suspicion of etc. 

If this is starting to sound abusably wide-ranging, stay with me. We’ll get to that.

The maximum sentence for any of those things can be as high as 14 years. Plus a fine. 

 

Palestine Action

Not long ago, the British government added a group called Palestine Action to the list, so now anyone who’s a member or who “recklessly expresses” support for the group (I’m quoting from yet another government website there) is dicing with the possibility of a prison sentence. Two other organizations were added at the same time: the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement.

Palestine Action describes itself as disruptive but nonviolent and targets companies involved in arms sales to Israel. They’ve occupied premises, destroyed property, gotten themselves arrested, and used spray paint. They’ve probably even gotten spray paint on their clothes. They haven’t killed, tried to kill, or threatened to kill anyone.

A demonstration in Barnstaple, Devon, against the genocide in Gaza.

The Russian Imperial movement is a white supremacist and monarchist organization that promotes a Russian imperial state and has been linked to a series of letter bombs and has a paramilitary training wing based in Russia.  

The Maniac Murder Cult is an international white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization that exists mostly online. It encourages acts of violence against homeless people, drug addicts and migrants. Its leader’s known as Commander Butcher and is facing charges in the US for allegedly telling an undercover federal agent to dress up as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to non-white kids and students at Jewish schools. The disconnect between Jews and Christmas seems to have gone over his head. A fair number of non-religious Jews do celebrate it–my family did, although without the poison candy–but families who send their kids to specifically Jewish schools? They’re really not Santa’s target audience. 

What I’m saying here is that in addition to being allegedly homicidal, this guy needs career counseling. And jail time. 

That leaves Palestine Action as the odd one out on the list. 

 

Meanwhile, in what passes for the real world

Banning Palestine Action has led to more than 700 arrests, and here’s where we get to that business about the law being abusably wide-ranging. In Kent, a woman was arrested for holding a Palestinian flag and signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide.” She filmed the police telling her that the words free Gaza supported Palestine Action and that it was illegal “to express an opinion or belief supportive of a proscribed organization.”  

In Leeds, a man was arrested for carrying a cartoon from the magazine Private Eye. The text read:

PALESTINE ACTION EXPLAINED

Unacceptable Palestine Action 

Spraying military planes with paint 

Acceptable Palestine Action 

Shooting Palestinians queuing for food

“It’s a cartoon from Private Eye,” he told his arresting officer. “ I can show you. I’ve got the magazine in my bag,” 

By that  time, they were putting him in handcuffs. He was released on bail six hours later, but on the condition that he not attend any more Palestine Action rallies.

The rally where he was arrested hadn’t been organized by Palestine Action.

A few days later, charges were dropped. 

“If I go on another demo,” he asked the anti-terrorism officer who called to tell him that, “and I hold up that cartoon again, does that mean I will be arrested or not?” 

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s done on a case-by-case basis.”

As indeed it is. The magazine’s editor hasn’t been arrested. Neither has the cartoonist. 

An 80-year-old woman was arrested at a rally in Wales and the police searched her house, removing a Palestinian flag, books on Palestine and on the climate crisis, iPads, drumsticks, and the belt for a samba drum. They brought in a geiger counter–or what a friend who walked in to feed the cats in the middle of the search thought was a geiger counter–and poked long cotton buds into jars of dry food. 

 

The phrase Palestine Action gets loose in the world

All that is why there was a demonstration in Parliament Square, in London, on August 9, where people showed up with blank signs and markers. Once more than 500 who were willing to be arrested had gathered, they made signs saying, “I support Palestine Action.” All 532 were duly arrested. Half of them were over 60. 

One of them, though, wasn’t holding a sign but wearing a tee shirt that read “Plasticine Action” and was designed to mimic the Palestine Action logo. I’m not sure if that makes it 531 arrests there or 533. Or if we stay with 532. 

As he waited to be booked, his arresting officer reappeared and told him, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”

Plasticine Man–his name is Pickering–asked for the good news.

“I’m de-arresting you.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.”

Pickering is now selling the tee shirts to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestine. It comes in your choice of 26 colors.  

As far as I know, I’m not risking arrest by linking to that.

Palestine Action has won the right to appeal its ban, but until the case is heard it’s still officially a terrorist organization. When I went to a local demonstration against the starvation of Gaza, I picked my way carefully through the English language before making a sign asking, “Are we allowed to say Gaza?”

As a naturalized citizen, I’m not in a position to risk arrest.

There have been no demonstrations asking to free the words Maniacs Murder Cult or  Russian Imperial Movement.

The starvation of Gaza continues. And the next planned demonstration against the ban on Palestine Action is asking people who get arrested to refuse to be processed on the street and released. If they’re taken to the police station, they’re entitled to a lawyer and can clog the jails.

*

Meanwhile, in the Protestant section of Belfast, Northern Ireland, vigilantes calling themselves Belfast Nightwatch First Division are patrolling the evening streets, challenging dark-skinned people to produce identity documents and explain what they’re doing in the eastern part of the city, threatening anyone whose responses don’t satisfy them.

One member was quoted as telling a Black man sitting on a bench, “Hey boy, I don’t want to catch you around our parks any more.”

Nightwatch First Division is not on  the list of terrorist organizations, although to be fair to a government that pisses me off with amazing regularity, it’s new and may or may not have any structure behind the name.

A neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour (the phrase comes from the Hitler Youth) is also not on the list, although the government says it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” it’s involved in “terrorist activities through promoting and encouraging terrorism, seeking to recruit people for that purpose and making funds available for the purposes of its terrorist activities.”

It has frozen its assets.

The Boer War: civilians, concentration camps, and Emily Hobhouse

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The Boer War (1899-1902; you’re welcome) was fought between white settlers who’d already colonized parts of South Africa–they’re the Boers–and the British, who’d done likewise and wanted the parts the Boers already had. You might be more familiar with the Boers if we call them Afrikaaners. 

Spoiler alert: the British won, although, as Britain’s National Army Museum’s website puts it, “not without adopting controversial tactics.”

Um, yeah. The controversial bit is that the British pioneered the use of concentration camps. I’d have used a stronger word myself, but in our enlightened times I doubt you’d have to go far to find someone ready to defend them.

Most summaries of the war sideline the African people–the original people whose land the two sides were fighting over. 

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus

 

The war 

The British and the Boers had already fought one war, from 1880 to 1881, and the Boers won it. Or at least the British didn’t. It’s not our focus, so let’s not bother.

Then 1886 came around and gold was discovered. Whee. Ring out the bells, because everyone can get rich quick. Or at least they can dream about getting rich quick. As long as they’re white, anyway. Immigration from Britain skyrocketed. Tension grew between the bits ruled by the Boers and the bits ruled by the Brits until war broke out. 

Am I oversimplifying? Hell yes. If I didn’t, we’d never get to the end.

The Boers fought a guerrilla war. The British had a professional army and outnumbered them. But a-symetrical warfare’s an unpredictable beast: the Boers won a few battles, sending the British public into shock. It wasn’t supposed to happen that way, and in a fit of patriotic fervor, men signed up to join the military until Britain had 400,000 soldiers in South Africa. The Army Museum counts this as “the first campaign in which British people from all sectors of society took up arms”–a kind of foreshadowing of the First World War. 

 

The context

In the early stages of the war, both sides made what the Army Museum website calls a tacit agreement not to arm the Black population. Because when you take someone else’s land–and what else is colonization?–it’s so much nicer if you’re armed and they’re not. But as the war ground on, neither side could hold to it. 

Eventually something like 15,000 to 30,000 Black Africans served as scouts and sentries for the British Army. Another 100,000 worked as labourers, transport drivers, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, farriers, and builders. Some smaller number of Indians (another British colony, remember, and many Indians had immigrated to South Africa) served as stretcher bearers and servants. Some 300 of them were free, another 800 were indentured workers from sugar estates, who didn’t get a choice: they were sent by what the museum, keeping a straight face the whole time, calls their employers. 

The early battles, when the Boers were winning, involved sieges and hunger among both British soldiers and civilians, and especially (no surprise here) among the Black population.   Then the tide turned and the British began to conquer territory but their control kept slipping away as soon as the army moved on. That’s guerrilla war for you. So the British began burning farms, destroying crops and livestock, and poisoning wells to deny food to the enemy and punish people who’d been supporting the Boers, and if that has a familiar sound, you’ve been following the news.

After a while, the British created those concentration camps I mentioned, imprisoning both the Black and the Boer women and children. In separate camps, mind you, because the decencies had to be maintained. 

Why imprison the Black population? It was partly about denying supplies to Boer fighters but it was at least as much about forcing the men into the gold mines as laborers, which you could do more easily if you’d driven them off the land and taken their families prisoner.

And here at last Emily Hobhouse makes her entrance.

 

Enter Emily Hobhouse

Hobhouse was from St. Ive (not to be confused with the better known St. Ives), Cornwall, and was an archdeacon’s daughter. After her father’s death and with the support of her uncle–a baron, no less–she did what the website of a museum dedicated to her calls “social upliftment work” among the Cornish miners in Minnesota. She got engaged, bought a farm in Mexico (yes, that is a long way from Minnesota), and lost most of her money. The museum website calls it a failed engagement. A different site calls it a failed romance and links the farm (and presumably the man) to the disappearing money. I don’t know anything more than you do but I’m placing my bet on the second version. It not only sounds more realistic, it makes her sound more interesting. That doesn’t make it right but it is more fun.

In 1898, with all that under her belt and (I assume) sadder but wiser, she went back to Britain–to London, not Cornwall–where she became a Suffragist, campaigning to expand the vote not just to women but to all men and women. She became chair of the People’s Suffrage Federation and then the Women’s Industrial Council, investigating child labor.

When the Boer War broke out, she became involved in the South African Conciliation Committee, which opposed it, chairing its women’s branch (anyone here old enough to remember the days of ladies’ auxiliaries?). When word reached Britain about the conditions of Boer women and children in the camps, she  established the South African Women and Children Distress Fund and in 1900 went to South Africa to distribute aid and investigate conditions.

What she found in the camps was hunger, disease, overcrowding, and terrible sanitation. The death rate in 1901–the year it was highest–was 344 per 1,000 people in the white camps. One source says the dead were mostly children and that the numbers may be an underestimate. 

I can’t find parallel numbers for the Black camps but one article says they were similar. I’ll go out on a limb and guess they weren’t as well documented.

All told, 28,000 white and 20,000 Black people died in the camps. Civilians made up more than 60% of the war’s dead. Measles were probably the greatest single killer but malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor sanitation paved the way. And typhoid. We mustn’t forget typhoid.  

With the permission of the military, Hobhouse waded into the camps, distributing aid and demanding milk, clothing, soap, and medicines. Although the officers in charge of the camps apparently had no idea who she was, she had the clothes, the accent, and the sense of entitlement that can perform magic if all the stars are in the right position. I don’t say that to diminish what she did, only to keep it in perspective.

More importantly, though, she documented conditions in the camps and when she got back to Britain published a report, lectured the secretary of state for two hours, wrote reams of letters to newspapers, and turned the issue into a national scandal. She was called a traitor, “that bloody woman,” and “a weapon used wherever the name of England was hated.”  

As far as I can tell–and I’m working from secondary sources, so take that into account–her focus was on conditions in the Boer camps, not the Black ones.

In response to the scandal, the government sent a committee to investigate. It reported back pretty much what Hobhouse had, although it managed not to mention her. In 1901 she returned to South Africa. She was refused permission to land and put on a ship bound for Britain.

She went back in 1903, after the war, to set up rehabilitation projects–again they seem to have been focused on Boer women–and returned again in 1913 for the unveiling of a monument to the Boer women and children who’d died. 

During that visit, she met Gandhi, who talked to her about the suffering of the Indian community and she helped set up a meeting between him and the South African prime minister, Louis Botha. 

Was she cluelessly racist? As far as I can tell, yes. She doesn’t seem to have seen past the Boers–or if she saw she didn’t act on what she saw. On the other hand, meeting with Gandhi wasn’t something most whites would’ve done at the time, and he wrote in her obituary that she “was one of the noblest and bravest of women. She worked without thinking of any reward. . . . She loved her country and because she loved it she could not tolerate any injustice caused by it. She realised the atrocity of war. She thought Britain was wholly in the wrong. . . . She had a soul that could defy the might of kings and emperors with their armies.” 

Let’s acknowledge both sides of the story. Reality’s a bitch but I’m committed to it, at least as far as I’m able to find it.

 

Aftermath

We’ve now gone past the Boer War, but let’s follow Hobhouse a little further. When World War I broke out, she wrote to every well-placed contact she had, trying to stop it. (You have to have well-placed contacts to think you can stop a war by talking to a few people.) That included Lloyd George, who had backed her on the camps during the Boer War and who became prime minister after the war started, in 1916. 

She also wrote letters to newspapers. In one to the Manchester Guardian, she wrote “Few English people have seen war in its nakedness. . . . They know nothing of the poverty, destruction, disease, pain, misery and mortality which follow in its train. . . . I have seen all of this and more.’ 

The war started in spite of her efforts–you saw that coming, right?–and at Christmastime she organized an open letter from 100 British women to German and Austrian women: “Do not let us forget our very anguish unites us. . . . We must all urge that peace be made. We are yours in this sisterhood of sorrow.” In March, a matching open letter was published from a similar number of German and Austrian women, carrying warm greetings.

When the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (it was founded in 1915) based its office in Amsterdam, she served as secretary for three months while its main organisers were in the United States, making it to Amsterdam although Britain had asked its embassies in France, Italy, and Switzerland to send her home.

Before the war’s end, she attended the socialist Second Zimmerwald Conference, along with socialists from both warring and neutral states. The manifesto they hammered out opposed the war, which had been a contentious issue among socialist parties. 

The Foreign Office revoked her passport, but it took them a while to find her, since the Swiss police couldn’t give out foreigners’ addresses, and when they did find her and asked her to call in at the Legation, she hightailed it to Belgium–then occupied by Germany–to look into the conditions of noncombatents. Then she spent five days in Germany, where she met with the foreign secretary and came away convinced that he wanted peace and that she’d been asked to serve as an intermediary. When she got home, the British government wasn’t convinced. 

Two or three years later, when Britain was negotiating an exchange of internees with Germany, the negotiator found the Germans offering the same concessions Hobhouse had listed.

After the war, she worked for the relief of civilians who’d been caught up in the war. 

Toward the end of her life, money was raised in South Africa to buy her a house in St. Ives (this is the town with the S at the end), Cornwall, and much later South Africa’s apartheid government honored her by naming a submarine after her. 

She would have hated that.

How the English got hereditary family names

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If that title makes it sound like I’m about to tell you how the alligator got its tail, I sort of am but it’s not alligators and it’s not tails. It’s about a tradition–hereditary family names–that those of us who grew up with it tend to forget isn’t inevitable. 

 

Let’s start with the Anglo-Saxons 

The Anglo-Saxons had a pressing need to tell one Aelfgifu or Aelfstan from all the other Aelfgifus and Aelfstans. Because as far as I can tell the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy all had the same damn names. 

Okay, I admit, I haven’t done a deep dive into the Anglo-Saxons, and the names are one of the things that put me off. But I can still explain the system. Or systems, really. 

Irrelevant photo: evening light, north Cornwall

 

Some people got nicknames: the king Aethelred Unraed translates to Aethelred the poorly advised. Since Aethelred means wise counsel, the pun must’ve been irresistible. He’s gone down in history as Ethelred the Unready, and having gotten named with a pun in one language, it was probably inevitable that he’d get saddled with a parallel pun in the language that picked up from it.

He was neither ready nor well advised in the face of Viking invasions, so the name’s not a bad fit. 

But the nicknames weren’t necessarily insults. The woman who married Harold II, the last of the  Anglo-Saxon kings, was Edith (Aelfgifu in Anglo-Saxon) Swanneck. 

Well, she sort of married him. It was a handfast marriage, not one recognized by the church, which apparently left him free to also marry Edith of Mercia, and that brings us neatly to the second way they could keep track of their Aelfgifus and Aelfstans: by adding a place name to a given name. 

The third way was to use a patronymic–forming a second name from the father’s name, so one of the six Cuthberts in a village might be Cuthbert Edmund’s son. But Cuthbert’s son would be Aelfric Cuthbert’s son. It was a family link but only for one generation. 

What about the Celts, though? They seem to have started out using patronymics–that one-generation use of the father’s name, although the Welsh sometimes listed more than one generation. Cornwall, at least, was slower than England to stabilize last names. One article I found gives examples from the fifteenth and sixteenth century of families changing their names when they moved, sometimes using the place they lived as a last name.

 

Enter the Normans

Hereditary family names were still fairly new in France when the Normans invaded England. (That’s 1066–one of the few dates I don’t have to look up.) Or more to the point, they were new in Normandy, which was where the Normans came from. It was part of France except for the ways in which it wasn’t part of France. It was a duchy within France and didn’t become a French province until the fifteenth century, so– 

Yeah. It’s complicated. It’s also pretty much irrelevant, but I’ll stop here long enough to say that it doesn’t help to see history through modern glasses. Let’s think of it as vaguely French. All we’re talking about is naming practices, and Lord Google assures me that in the eleventh century a hereditary family name was the must-have item for any aristocratic French family. So of course the Normans brought theirs when they crossed the channel.

Your average French family, though? Didn’t have one, didn’t need one. Last names were strictly a prestige item, emphasizing pedigree and unbroken tradition and all that stuff you have to believe matters if you’re going to convince yourself that aristocracy makes sense.

So when the Normans set foot on English soil, they brought those invisible prestige items with them, although just to contradict everything I’ve said, William the Conqueror–the big, bad chief of the Normans–never did have a hereditary last name. Before the invasion, he was William of Normandy or William the Bastard. Then he became William the Conqueror. 

Following that tradition, England’s (and later Britain’s) royal families ran around without surnames until 1917, when the current lot took the name Windsor. Before that, they were known by their dynasties: the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts–

How’s that different from having an inherited last name? Let’s admit that we’re splitting hairs, but it’s what the experts say, so we’ll just nod wisely and play along. 

We have a handy way to check in on how this last name business all played out after the Norman conquest. William–he’s now the Conqueror, not the Bastard or the of-Normandy–demanded an inch-by-inch and tenant-by-landlord survey of his new toy, England, and it took the form of the 1068 Domesday Book, where you find a mix of surnames and no-surnames: Gilbert Tison, Ralph Paynel, and Robert Malet, but also Walter the deacon and Walter the crossbowman. 

 

Commoners 

Over the course of a few centuries, inherited surnames slid downward until every Tom, Dick, and Edith had one. By 1400, most English families were using hereditary last names.

I got drawn into this topic by last week’s post, about Johanna Ferrour, a leader of the Peasants Revolt, who had at least three different last names and three spellings of her first. The system was shifting but the pieces weren’t locked into place yet. 

One source links the spread of family names to those poll taxes that set off the Peasants Revolt Johanna Ferrour helped lead. How else are you going to track who’s paid and who hasn’t? 

When Henry VIII introduced parish registers that recorded each parish church’s births, marriages, and burials, the country lurched further in the direction of hereditary surnames, but even then in some parts of the country a person could still be baptised under one name, married under another, and buried under a third.

The village I live in is small enough that a lot of people know a lot of people but don’t necessarily know their last names. We end up identifying people by their jobs if they’re visible ones, or by their partners, or occasionally by their dogs. We’re not stuck in the medieval era, but the early medieval system is handy.

To be fair, back when I drove cab–this was in the seventies and in the US–we did the same thing. We had an Al and a Big Al. We had a driver known by not just his last name but also by his favorite phrase, Shitya.

 

Women’s last names

Everything I’ve said so far about hereditary names has a built-in problem: it applies to men, not to women. Sorry. I don’t usually write as if men represented humanity at large. What with being a woman and all, I’m constantly getting reminders that it’s inherently problematic to say “people” when you mean men. But men’s last names defined the system and we needed to slot the system into place.

So now let’s talk about women’s names.

In the fourteenth century–around the time of the Peasants Revolt and the poll tax, England was developing the legal theory of coverture, which meant that when a woman married anything she owned was transferred to her husband. (There were a few exceptions, but not many.) The rest of Europe followed Roman law, which gave the husband management of the wife’s property but not ownership. 

She herself also became his property.

Yeah, history’s a bitch and the present has a few problems of its own.

Women took their husbands’ last names when they married. (That wasn’t necessarily true in other countries.) The woman disappeared behind the man. Taking his name wasn’t mandatory and there were exceptions, but it was the default setting–common enough that the exceptions were sometimes written into marriage contracts. This mostly happened among people of property when the woman’s fortune was bigger than the man’s and the woman’s family had no other way for its name to continue. Which by then would’ve been a central concern to any aristocratic family.

 

Inevitability

I started out by saying that those of us who grew up with hereditary family names tend to think the tradition’s inevitable and pretty much universal. But the world’s more imaginative than that. In many places, women who marry keep their own names and no one expects a family to have the same last name. Some cultures continue the tradition of forming a last name from the father’s name–and sometimes if less commonly from the mother’s. In places, people use their given name and that’s pretty much it. The idea of a family name isn’t universal.

 

A bit of personal history

This is pretty much irrelevant, but since we’re talking about how those solid-seeming family names turn out to be fluid, I thought I’d toss it in: names on both sides of my family have been changeable. On my mother’s side, Baruch seems to have become Benedict and Weill became into Wiley.

My father’s family name was Gurievich when my grandfather left Russia for the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, but he wrote it in the Cyrillic alphabet. And/or in the Hebrew alphabet–your guess is as good as mine and possibly better. I’m not sure how many languages he knew–Russian, Yiddish, and Hebrew, surely–but English doesn’t seem to have been one of them when he landed at Ellis Island. That came later. So some immigration clerk wrote down Hurwitz. What the hell, it had a few of the same sounds. That happened to a lot of immigrants.

When he’d saved up enough money to bring his family over, they became Hurwitzes.

My father was born in the U.S. with the name Hurwitz, but as a young man he played bit parts in the theater, and it was a time when Jewish actors took non-Jewish stage names. He took that a step farther and he changed his last name legally, and a generation and many extra years later here I am with this absurd ultra-English name. When I was younger I thought of changing it back, then asked myself how far back I wanted to go and on which side of the family, although on either side I’d be tracing men’s names, which put me off the idea a bit. I talked about it with one of my aunts and she, who’d changed her own name when she married but had also taken the professional name of Delza (she was a dancer), told me I should stay with the name I had.

“It’s who you are,” she said.

She was right, but it left me wondering who she was.

So I kept the name I was born with, and I’d always assumed it was Anglo-Saxon, but Lord Google assures me of several contradictory origins, including Norman, Anglo-Saxon tinged with northern English and Scottish, and (if AI is to be believed, which it isn’t necessarily), Viking. It seems fitting that I get to choose my own origin for the name I have such tenuous title to. But in case that’s not murky enough and I need a coat of arms–and who doesn’t in these difficult days?–Lord G. led me to nine variations I could claim, and I just can’t decide which suits me best.

I have no idea if any of them is real, and that seems fitting too.

Women in the Peasants Revolt: Johanna Ferrour

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If you’ve read anything about the Peasants Revolt (England, 1381; you’re welcome), the image it calls up is of–okay, I’m being obvious here–peasants, and I’ll bet they’re peasants of the male persuasion. Because if I meant peasants of the female persuasion, surely I’d say something along the lines of peasant-ettes, right? Or following the common format of saying female astronaut, or female judge, I’d call them female peasants, because the people whose job titles don’t come adorned with adjectives–well, they’re male.

Besides, we’re talking about a revolt, and historically speaking the people who fight were male. People who led were male. People who left a mark on the world were male. And so on for another six paragraphs.

Ha. Allow me to introduce you to Johanna Ferrour. Or to Joanna Ferrour. Or if you prefer, to Joan Marchall. Same person, and I’ll get around to explaining that in a minute. What I need to slot into place first is that she was a leader of the Peasants Revolt and is (as far as I can tell, given my status as a non-expert) only recently being reclaimed for history.

Irrelevant photo: toadflax

Let’s get the name issue out of the way

Last names were still a liquid in fourteenth-century England. The tradition of hereditary family names had crossed the English Channel with the Normans in 1066, but married women didn’t have  last names. They were their husbands’ possessions and didn’t need them. As one court put it in 1340, “When a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of.’ “

Thanks, guys. 

As far as I can tell, that business of last names started out by applying only to the people who mattered–the aristocracy–and gradually trickled down from there. The BBC article I’m drawing on here implies that vassals had no surnames. 

That’s a rabbit hole, even if it does look like an interesting one. Maybe I’ll throw myself down it another time. Now, though, let’s sneak ahead of our story for a paragraph: by the fifteenth century, the interpretation of–or at least the verbiage about–marriage had softened and the husband and wife were seen as one person. Except, of course, that person was the husband and the woman took his surname. Legally speaking, she either didn’t exist or barely registered.

In Johanna/Joanna/Joan’s time and among her class, last names (not to mention their spellings) were still fluid and usually drawn from a person’s work or home. She was married to a blacksmith who made horseshoes–a farrier, or ferrour. Or marchall. It all means the same thing.  

Her first name was also fluid. Johanna, Joanna, and Joan were all variations of the same name. Let’s call her Jo. If we don’t, I won’t be responsible for my actions.

 

The rebellion

Although a lot of things contributed to the Peasants Revolt, the cause closest to hand was the imposition of a poll tax, a poll being a head. If you had a head and you were an adult, you paid a tax of 12 pence for the privilege–the same amount the lord and lady of the manor paid for their more luxurious heads.

It was the third poll tax in four years.

What did 12 pence mean to, let’s say, a skilled worker? To answer that, we have to go deep into the realm of guesswork. Too many variables are involved and in a moment of carelessness the fourteenth century’s computer files have been wiped. Still, at a guess, in 1351 a mason might’ve earned 4 pence a day and a carpenter 3. Emphasis on might. So the tax came to three or four days’ pay for a skilled worker and more for a laborer, at a time when keeping a family fed took everything most people had. 

But the revolt wasn’t about just the new tax. The Black Death had left labor in short supply and workers of all sorts in a position to demand better pay. If you’re one of the people who’s paying wages, that’s a Bad Thing. So the government passed the Statute of Labourers, which made it illegal to pay laborers more than they were paid in 1346. 

The final gripe was the enclosure movement, which had started in the twelfth century and was still grinding on. This meant (insert Simplified Explanation warning here) that landowners were seizing common land, which peasants used to use for grazing, gathering firewood, fishing, or–well, it varied from place to place. Landowners across the country were now claiming it as theirs and enclosing it with hedges or fences. For peasants, this was the difference between subsistence and hunger. 

Even though we’re talking about something called the Peasants Revolt, the poll tax and the Statute of Labourers gave townspeople and artisans like Jo and her husband reasons to get pissed off, and the revolt involved not just serfs but also artisans, tradespeople, and tenant farmers–people who rented their land and wanted to shed the feudal inheritance of service their landlords demanded. 

In other words, the king and all his friends and relations were looking at  a large group of pissed-off people. They rose, they marched toward London, destroying tax records and documents that were evidence of serfdom, and one of the interesting things about the Peasants Revolt is that they  don’t seem to have acted like a mob but in a well-organized way. In London, their actions were tightly focused on the people they held responsible for passing and collecting the poll tax. 

If you’re still seeing men when you picture that not-a-mob, consult Professor Sylvia Federico, who argues that women were at the heart of the revolt and did pretty much the same things the men did. They incited crowds. “They were not shy to pick up staffs, sticks, and staves and wield them against perceived oppressors.” One woman was accused of encouraging a group to attack the prison at Maidstone in Kent, another of leading rebels to plunder a number of mansions, leaving servants too scared to return. 

 

Where does Jo come into the picture?

Um, we don’t really know. And neither do the experts. This is the problem with early history in general, but especially about the early history of common people and of women. The lower you sat in the hierarchy, the thinner a record you left behind. Not much is known about the revolt’s leader, Wat Tyler, either. So we can’t blame sexism alone for the lack of information. 

Sorry. I’d love to. Really I would.

What we do know is that Jo and her husband, John, lived in Rochester and owned what a Wikipedia entry (sorry–I try to use more stable sources but I’m desperate) describes as a “not insignificant amount of land.” 

From there, let’s fill in the picture around them: the revolt started in Essex and Kent and swept toward London–not that far if you have a car but a longer trip if you’re on foot with an impromptu army of your fellow furious commoners. Jo and John became part of that army. Court documents describe Jo as “chief perpetrator and leader of rebellious evildoers from Kent.” 

I’ll let the documents tell the tale, because they’re what we have to draw on:

“Joanna wife of John Ferrour of Rochester in the county of Kent went as the chief perpetrator and leader of a great society of rebellious wrongdoers from Kent on Thursday 13 June 1381 to the Savoy in the county of Middlesex and, as an enemy of the king, burned the said manor; she seized a chest containing £1000 and more belonging to John, Duke of Lancaster [you may know him as John of Gaunt], and then she put the said chest into a boat on the Thames and made off with it, all the way to Southwark, where she divided the gold between herself and others.”

How much money was £1,000? In 2024, it would’ve been something along the lines of $1,000,000, although why we’ve changed from pounds to dollars there is anybody’s guess. 

“On Friday 14 June 1381 the said Joanna went as head of the said company to the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem in England and made a fire there and completely burnt that house, and carried off two horses loaded with wool worth 6 marks. And the same Joanna together with others went as chief leader to the Tower of London, and laid violent hands first on Simon, lately archbishop of Canterbury, and then on [treasurer] Brother Robert Hales, lately Prior of St John of Jerusalem in England, and she dragged them out of the Tower of London and ordered that they be beheaded.”

The same acts are also attributed jointly to her and her husband. And no, she or they didn’t burn down a building where the sick were cared for. Hospital didn’t take on that meaning until the sixteenth century, and it didn’t mean a place to look after the needy until the fifteenth. 

It’s anybody’s guess what Jo and John’s roles were before the moments when they appear in the historical record, as is what happens afterward. That’s the problem with history: you have to work with the facts. All the damn time. And when they’re scarce you don’t get to make them up.

John was acquitted of the charges against him. Jo wasn’t executed, which implies that she was acquitted, although there’s no record of it. Both their names appear later on the paperwork for houses they gave to Walter Northampton for we’ll never know what reason. You have to be alive for that, so let’s take it as evidence that they lived on after the revolt, unlike most of its leaders. 

How’d they manage that? John might’ve saved the life of the young Earl of Derby, Henry Bolingbroke, who went on to be Henry IV. He also might not have. Some sources name the man who saved Bolingbroke as John Ferrour of Southwark, not of Rochester. One has the kid’s life being saved by a guard named John Ferrour, which wouldn’t be the John Ferrour we’re following. Basically, we’ll never know, but it’s unusual that any leaders of the revolt survived. Most were hanged, with additional killings in Essex, where the revolt hadn’t quite died out. 

No records of women being executed after the revolt  have been found. 

 

And so . . . 

. . . we leave Jo and John in the middle of their story. They lived on. They gave someone a house. John was accused of murder later on and pardoned. And that’s about all we’ve got. The work of reclaiming history’s lost figures usually comes down to filling in a picture around them and leaving the center, where they should stand, empty. 

*

I’ve focused on Jo here, and to some extent on John, which leaves the Peasants Revolt in the background. If you want the story of the revolt itself–and it’s an interesting bit of history–you can jump to an earlier post, where it’s foreground. 

Samuel Pepys, the Great Fire of London, and a wheel of parmesan cheese

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In 1666, Samuel Pepys’ maid woke him up, telling him about a fire. To which he said something along the lines of Ho hum and went back to sleep. London was a flammable town, full of wooden houses. Fire was nothing new. This one was far enough away that he wasn’t about to let it wreck a good night’s sleep. We know this because he wrote it–and endless other details of his life–down and his diaries survived him. I’ll be quoting from them extensively here. They’re online, and although each day’s entry has its own URL, I’ve only given a link to the first day. Start there. You’ll be fine.

The fire. With thanks to Wikimedia Commons

 

The next day

The next morning, September 2, the fire still didn’t look like anything to worry about, but “by and by Jane comes and tells me that she hears that above 300 houses have been burned down to-night by the fire we saw, and that it is now burning down all Fish-street, by London Bridge.” 

Okay, he starts to take this seriously and walks to the Tower of London “and there got up upon one of the high places, . . . and there I did see the houses at that end of the bridge all on fire, and an infinite great fire on this and the other side the end of the bridge.” 

In other words, he thought the era-appropriate equivalent of Holy shit, this is serious and walked to the Thames, where he got a sense of just how serious. 

What he saw was “everybody endeavouring to remove their goods, and flinging into the river or bringing them into lighters [they were flat-bottomed barges] that layoff; poor people staying in their houses as long as till the very fire touched them, and then running into boats, or clambering from one pair of stairs by the water-side to another. . . .

“Nobody, to my sight, [was] endeavouring to quench it, but to remove their goods, and leave all to the fire . . . and every thing, after so long a drought, proving combustible, even the very stones of churches.”

 

The king and the firebreak

Pepys was a member of parliament, worked for the Navy Board, and was the kind of guy who could talk his way in to see the king and the Duke of York, which he did, telling them “that unless his Majesty did command houses to be pulled down nothing could stop the fire.”

Pulling down houses was pretty much the only way to stop a spreading fire. London had no professional firefighters and even if they had I doubt the technology of the day would have let them shoot any serious amount of water at a burning house. The way to keep a fire from spreading was to destroy buildings that weren’t on fire, creating a firebreak, and the king ordered the lord mayor to do that, with the D of Y offering to send soldiers if they were needed.

Off Pepys trotted to find the mayor and in the midst of this madness, with luxury goods being hauled away in carts and on people’s backs and sick people being carried in beds, he actually found him, and the mayor, basically, said, Nobody listens to me anyway, I’ve been pulling down houses all night, I don’t need any soldiers, and I’m going to bed.

He might’ve been pulling down houses all night–I don’t know–but when the fire was first starting to spread and he was asked to do exactly that, he refused. If he gave the order, the city would have to pay for the houses it had destroyed. If he waited for the king to give it, guess who had to pay then? 

Anyway, king’s order or no king’s order, he toddled off to bed.

At this point you’d expect Pepys to rush back to the king and the D of Y so they could do what the mayor wouldn’t, right? 

Nah, it was noon and he went home, where he had guests. They were all worried about the fire, “However, we had an extraordinary good dinner, and as merry, as at this time we could be.”

Then he went out and found the king and the D of Y, who were on the river, and they gave the order to pull houses down. “But little was or could be done, the fire coming upon them so fast . . . [and] the wind carries it into the City.”

Translation: this, I think, is where the wind changed direction.

By that night, Pepys was packing up his own house and worrying about where to put his gold. 

“I did remove my money and iron chests into my cellar, as thinking that the safest place. And got my bags of gold into my office, ready to carry away, and my chief papers of accounts also there. . . .

“About four o’clock in the morning, my Lady Batten sent me a cart to carry away all my money, and plate, and best things, to Sir W. Rider’s at Bednall-greene. Which I did riding myself in my night-gowne in the cart; and, Lord! to see how the streets and the highways are crowded with people running and riding, and getting of carts at any rate to fetch away things. I find Sir W. Rider tired with being called up all night, and receiving things from several friends. . . . I am eased at my heart to have my treasure so well secured.”

 

At last we get to the cheese

“Sir W. Batten not knowing how to remove his wine [it would’ve been in barrels–in other words, large and heavy], did dig a pit in the garden, and laid it in there; and I took the opportunity of laying all the papers of my office that I could not otherwise dispose of. And in the evening Sir W. Pen and I did dig another, and put our wine in it; and I my Parmazan cheese, as well as my wine and some other things.”

Why would he bury a parmesan cheese? Because it was a luxury item. Even now, when you can find the stuff in any supermarket, a 36 kilo wheel of good parmesan can cost $1,450. Back then? Sorry, can’t quote you a price, but a lot. It was rare, it was valuable, and his would’ve weighed 80 to 90 kilos. 

What’s that in pounds and ounces? Make yourself a cup of coffee and multiply by 2.2. 

You’re welcome. You really don’t want me doing the math.

Are you getting the sense that this is one whale of a big hole they’ve dug? Would you like to bet that when he says they dug the pit, that means they had their servants do it for them?

But back to Pepys himself. 

“This afternoon, sitting melancholy with Sir W. Pen in our garden, and thinking of the certain burning of this office, without extraordinary means, I did propose for the sending up of all our workmen from Woolwich and Deptford yards (none whereof yet appeared), and to write to Sir W. Coventry to have the Duke of Yorke’s permission to pull down houses, rather than lose this office, which would, much hinder, the King’s business. So Sir W. Pen he went down this night, in order to the sending them up to-morrow morning; and I wrote to Sir W. Coventry about the business, but received no answer.

“Now begins the practice of blowing up of houses in Tower-streete, those next the Tower, which at first did frighten people more than anything, but it stopped the fire where it was done, it bringing down the houses to the ground in the same places they stood, and then it was easy to quench what little fire was in it, though it kindled nothing almost.”

 

Aftermath

“Could not . . . find any place to buy a shirt or pair of gloves, Westminster Hall being full of people’s goods, those in Westminster having removed all their goods, and the Exchequer money put into vessels to carry to Nonsuch. . . . A sad sight to see how the River looks: no houses nor church near it, to the Temple, where it stopped. At home, did go with Sir W. Batten, and our neighbour, Knightly (who, with one more, was the only man of any fashion left in all the neighbourhood thereabouts, they all removing their goods and leaving their houses to the mercy of the fire), to Sir R. Ford’s, and there dined in an earthen platter — a fried breast of mutton; a great many of us, but very merry, and indeed as good a meal, though as ugly a one, as ever I had in my life. . . . Thence down to Deptford, and there with great satisfaction landed all my goods at Sir G. Carteret’s safe, and nothing missed I could see, or hurt.”

The next day he was able to borrow a shirt and wash. 

The fire burned four-fifths of the city: more than 13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, 52 livery company halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, and St Paul’s Cathedral. Pepys’ house did not burn and in a later entry he writes about unearthing his wine but doesn’t mention the cheese. Since he didn’t complain about losing it, we can probably assume the fire didn’t turn it into a giant grilled cheese sandwich, minus the bread.

*

For an exploration of how differently the rich and the poor experienced the fire and its aftermath, watch Ruth Goodman and Rob Rinder’s 90-minute documentary The Great Fire of London.

Shipwrecks and wreckers: a bit of English history

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Any coastal community sees storms deliver shipwrecks to its shores, and if times are hard no community lets those deliveries go to waste. 

Okay, even when times aren’t hard. As far as I can figure out, humans are wired to accept a free lunch. Or a free shipping container of slightly salted whatever. 

Before we go on, though, I need to build a wall between two words: Wreckers are people who scavenge what they can from wrecked ships or from the cargo that floats ashore. Wrecking is an activity that probably never happened. The Cornish are said (although not by the Cornish themselves, in my experience) to have used lights to lure ships ashore where they’d wreck. There’s not only no evidence that anyone actually did that, it’s questionable that it would even work. But it still means I can’t use the word wrecking here, since I’m talking about what did actually happen.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about the right to wreck–wreck here meaning to scavenge a wrecked ship. And lets watch me jump through linguistic hoops to avoid the word wrecking.

 

The rocks where the L’Adaldise wrecked. (See below. It’ll all make sense.)

The right of wreck

If Wikipedia’s right on this (it has a good overall record even if it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness), the right of wreck, or jus naufragii if we’re going to pretend we know Latin, is a medieval European custom rather than an actual law. 

It was based on the idea that if a ship wrecked it was because god got mad at the crew for–well, something, clearly, so he drove their ship ashore. That made the ship, its contents, and in the early days its crew the property of the finders. Because god had set it all up that way.

Gradually that business about enslaving the crew dropped away, but claiming whatever was left of the ship and its contents? That continued powerfully enough for the Church to condemn it from the 12th century into the 16th.

If you want to know what’s actually happening in a time and place, look at what gets condemned or outlawed multiple times. It’s not foolproof–centuries of hysteria over witchcraft really doesn’t prove the existence of witches–but it’s still a good place to start.

Starting in Norman times, the English crown owned the land–the whole damn land–and that’s relevant because ships tend to wreck where the sea meets the land. The king could and did hand chunks of land to his followers, but it was still his and if one of them pissed him off too badly he could take it back. We could find a parallel there to god getting mad and wrecking a ship because, never mind human ownership, it’s his to wreck, but it won’t stand up to rough handling so let’s not push it too far.

So the king owned the country, even the parts other people owned. Try not to think about it too hard. Just nod your head and agree that of course he got to eat his cake and discover that it was still there, on the plate. He was the king, after all.

What matters for us is that he also owned whatever washed ashore, and he could and did assign it to others, just like he owned land and assigned it to others. 

 

The right to complicate the situation

Edward I (1239 –1307; you’re welcome) introduced a law stating that”where a man, a dog, or a cat escape quick [in other words, alive] out the ship,” the ship wouldn’t be considered a wreck, and neither would its contents. Its owners had a year to claim their property–minus fees, rewards, and droits.

What’s a droit? It seems to involve money, law, and ownership. Beyond that, it’s a rabbit hole. 

The new law kicked off all sorts of arguments and lawsuits about what actually happened in this, that, or the other shipwreck. Did everybody die? Was the cat alive and curled up at someone’s fireside? Was this black cat at fireside the black cat who used to be the ship’s black cat? In other words, was the ship a “true wreck” or was it not?

The abstract of an academic paper that I can’t get full access to (sorry) says, “Different views coexisted about the legality and propriety of shoreline activities, whether salvagers worked with or against established authority, whether wrecking constituted a service, a custom, or a crime, and whether common lawyers or the civil lawyers of the Admiralty had jurisdiction.”

In other words, the law complicated things. And you might want to notice that the paper’s using the word wrecking there in exactly the way I’m not, but I’m pretty sure they lost points for it and I haven’t. 

 

But let’s stop following the story chronologically . . .

. . . because I’m having trouble unscrambling this egg. The point I want to get to is that somewhere along the line the crown gave seaside landowners the right to salvage whatever god (in his fury) had smashed onto their bit of the king’s shoreline, and this turned out not to be simple either, because the king (in his wisdom) had given the right to the owners of both manors and of hundreds.

Hundreds? The hundred was a political unit smaller than a county, and a manor was a large estate of no specified size but smaller than a hundred (at least usually; I can’t guarantee that it always was) and larger than the egg I can’t unscramble. So a hundred could contain multiple estates. 

In other words, the king just granted the same right to overlapping landowners. This is not a recipe for harmonious living. Cue an assortment of lawsuits, and if you’re interested in them follow the link just above, because we’re headed off in another direction:

If a tenant found a wreck, they were expected to let the lord know, in return for which they’d get half the goods and the lord would get the other half. That amount would’ve ranged from the piddling to the spectacular, but ordinary people lived close to the edge and no find was too piddling to pass up.

What happened if the tenant didn’t notify the lord? In a case in Cornwall, two tenants carried off 54 gallons of wine, were caught, and were fined, although the source I’m relying on doesn’t say how much. More than the wine was worth, I’m sure. 

What we can’t know is how often tenants weren’t caught, because not getting caught leaves no record.

 

Then the laws got tougher

In 1714, anyone who boarded a wreck without permission or got in the way of the crew salvaging their cargo faced fines and imprisonment. After 1753, they faced the death penalty.

If you want to blame someone for that, I’m told you can blame the philosopher John Locke, who argued for the sacredness of property. The idea caught on among (no surprise here) people who had property, and suddenly it seemed perfectly sensible to say that the purpose of government was to protect and preserve property. Punishments for crimes against property became harsher, usually following some local event that the great and the good could whip themselves into a state of outrage over. Soon a person could face the death penalty for anything from picking pockets to poaching to stealing livestock. 

And here’s a spot where I have to stand on my head to avoid using the word wrecking: scavenging from a wreck went on the list. 

If you’re not in a mood to blame John Locke for that, you can blame the East India Company, which had plenty of property to consider sacred and had lost some expensive cargoes off Cornwall and the Scilly Isles. Along with a few other companies who had a lot to gain, it lobbied to change what was still essentially a medieval law on wrecks. 

 

The aftermath of one wreck

In 1767 a French ship, L’Adaldise, wrecked off Cornwall, not far from where I live. To be clear, I wasn’t there. I’m not that damn old. I not only hadn’t been born yet, neither had my grandparents. I only come into the story because I know the area. 

A hundred people rushed to the shore, according to the account. At the time, the nearest village would’ve been very small indeed and (if AI can be believed, and it sometimes can) the whole parish (4,000 acres) had a population of 700. I’m guessing it would’ve taken a while to collect 100 people. But Cornwall was a poor county, and a wreck washing ashore could well have meant the difference between eating and not eating.

However many gathered, a lot of people rushed to the shore. Some were salvaging for the lord of the manor and some for themselves, or so the article I’m relying on says. Some had axes and chopped into the hold to get at the cargo, but they also carried off masts, anchors, cables, ropes, and anything else that could be put to use. 

Then everyone went home, including an elderly farmer, William Pearse, who for reasons that aren’t clear to me was the only person arrested (at home) and charged with wrecking. Under the new law, he faced the death penalty. He was held in Launceston jail, which the British in their inexplicable wisdom spell gaol. Eight years later, a reformer described the jail this way:

“The Prison is a room or passage twenty three feet and a half by seven and a half, with only one window two feet by one and a half;—and three Dungeons or Cages on the side opposite the window; these are about six and half feet deep…They are all very offensive. No chimney: no drains: no water: damp earth floors: no Infirmary . . . The yard is not secure; and Prisoners seldom permitted to go out to it. Indeed the whole prison is out of repair. . . . I once found the Prisoners chained two or three together. Their provision is put down to them through a hole in the floor of the room above. . . . And those who serve them there, often catch the fatal fever . . . a few years before, many Prisoners had died from it.”

Pearse was tried in Bodmin, and if he had any witnesses to defend him they would’ve had to make a rough trip across the moor, but no records of the trial exist so we can’t know. I can’t help wondering, though, how anyone could’ve appeared as a witness in his defense without having to admit that they’d been a participant. 

What we do know is that Pearse was convicted and sentenced to death, and so were six others that week, all for theft of one sort or another–except, possibly, for the one person convicted of house-breaking. 

 

Appeal

Death sentences were often handed out and then commuted them to transportation by the judge. (At the time, transportation was to the American colonies.) Four death sentences from that week were commuted, but not Pearse’s, and the elite of Launceston rallied behind him, campaigning for a royal pardon. 

Why did the local gentry rally behind a poor man? Possibly because they had a lot to gain from wreckers and a lot to lose if the crackdown held. Pearse was being used as a test case.

Campaigning for a pardon involved lawyers, and lawyers involved money, something Pearse didn’t have. It’s not clear who footed the bill, but the local gentry sound like a fair guess. 

Whoever was paying, Pearse now had a high-powered legal team, and local politicians were appealing for a pardon, arguing variously that he hadn’t taken much (“an inconsiderable quantity of rope” and a bag of cotton), that he wasn’t guilty, that the witnesses against him had lied, and that local people were deeply concerned about the case. Pearse’s age could also have been expected to argue for a pardon, and in any case the statute called for the death penalty only if violence was involved. 

Meanwhile, Pearse sat in that small, foul jail in Launceston.

Following standard procedure, the matter was referred back to the judge who’d condemned him (the logic was that he knew the case best), and the judge wrote, “‘As there were many common people in Court, I took the opportunity of inveighing very warmly against so savage a Crime, and of declaring publickly that no Importunities whatsoever should induce me to reprieve the Criminal.”

Pearse did not get his pardon.

It’s not irrelevant that the judge was also a legal representative for the East India Company. Remember them? The good folks who lobbied for the harsher law?

Pearse was the first person hanged as a wrecker under the new statute.

 

Current law

That doesn’t really take us to the present day, but let’s hit fast forward. Under the Merchant Shipping Act of 1995, you have to report a wreck or any materials from a wreck to none other than the Receiver of Wreck. That could get you a salvage award, which will vary depending on the value of the wreck and what you had to do to rescue it. What you can’t do anymore is call in the entire village and cart everything away like ants carrying an entire picnic home to the nest.

The Home Office screws up yet again, and other news from Britain

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Britain’s Home Office–the scandal bedecked arm of government that’s supposed to deal with “crime, the police, drugs policy, immigration and passports, and counter terrorism” –could have a new scandal on its hands any day now: it’s lost track of an estimated 200,000 people who have the right to remain in the country. These are people who’ve lived in Britain for decades but who didn’t make their way into the computer system because they landed before the computer did. They got either a letter or a stamp on their passports confirming their right to remain in the country, and that was good enough. Until now. 

Now the Home Office wants them all digitized. So the paper documents? Pffft: they’re worthless. Everyone who has them has to go online and upgrade their documentation. 

Any time you hear the word upgrade, put on your flak jacket.

Okay, I admit, upgrade is my contribution to the discussion. The official language has to do with creating an online eVisa account. Either way, the Home Office says the process is going smoothly. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, that probably means it hasn’t caused the Home Office many problems. Users say they’ve had to fight their way through glitches. The an organization called 3 Million says the bigger problem is that the Home Office doesn’t know how to contact many of the people who rely on paper documents, so it hasn’t been able to tell them the documents they’ve been relying on are about to be worthless. 

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

Don't worry about the graphics here. They're almost all irrelevant to the text.

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

What happens to people who don’t have valid documents? The risk is that they could be treated as illegal immigrants, who are the current political boogeymen. They’ll be locked out of the pensions they worked for, along with housing, health care, and other services. 

And the problem isn’t just that they can’t all be reached. They’re none of them young–they arrived pre-computerization, remember–and they won’t all be technologically gifted. You know how that happens: The decades pass, you get older, the world changes, and you don’t necessarily keep up with it. 

But gee, it’s progress, and if a few bodies fall by the wayside, who cares? At least until there’s a public flap about it, at which point all decision makers will put on their surprised face.

 

The ghost of Boaty McBoatface

Having told us there’s no money for (almost) anything sensible, Britain’s government has decided to redesign the bank notes. Because, hey, why not? It’ll lift everybody’s spirits. And now that not many people use cash anymore, what could be a better time to redesign it? 

I haven’t been able to find out how much the redesign will cost, but what the hell, it’s only money.

So it all makes perfect sense that someone decided to get the public involved by asking what picture people want to see on the new notes. That worked really well when they–that’s the public, you understand–were asked to choose a name for an arctic research vessel and chose, by a wide margin, Boaty McBoatface. If you missed the story, you can catch up with it here. It’s a testament to both the British sense of humor and British bureaucracy at work. 

Already one writer, Athena Kugblenu, has suggested honoring British culture with a picture of an organge traffic cone. 

Why a traffic cone? 

Because the country has an uplifting tradition–which generally involves a combination of alcohol, youth, and athleticism–of putting them on the heads of statues.

If you want to suggest something for the redesign, here’s your link. And if it’s suitably absurd, leave it in the comments as well.

 

And since I mentioned statues

It seems folks have been climbing the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, not necessarily to add a traffic cone but during protests, although someone did add a strip of turf to give him a green mohican.  

 So in May the government made moves in the direction of turning that into a crime. Not the mohican and not climbing on statues in general, but climbing on this particular statue. As the Sun, one of the trashier of the right-wing papers put it, “Thugs who climb on Winston Churchill’s London statue face JAIL.”

I hate to link to the Sun, but what the hell, I am quoting it. And they did use all those capital letters. They had to. If they don’t use them now, Trump will gobble them all down and there’ll be none left for anyone else’s hysteria.

The penalty is up to 3 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. The bill, is if passes, applies not just to the Churchill statue but to monuments commemorating World Wars I and II as well.

Sleep well tonight, my friends. The country will be a safer place to live in once this passes.

 

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

In other important news, McVittie’s asked the Biscuit Museum (yes, there is such a thing) to remove Jaffa Cakes from the premises. 

We’ll get to why in a minute, but first, for the non-British speakers among us, what’s a biscuit? It’s what Americans call a cookie–something round, sweet, and flat. And the Jaffa Cake meets all those criteria. What’s more, stores (shops in Brit-speak) stack Jaffa Cakes in the cookie display–or at least the one in my village does–since they come in the kind of packaging most cookies inhabit. 

Still, McVittie’s insists it’s a cake, and since McVittie’s is the maker of the flat, round, sweet little beast–well, you’d think they’d like the publicity of being in a museum, even such an odd museum, but they don’t.

Why not? Tax law. If the thing’s a cake it’s not subject to VAT. 

To what? Value Added Tax, which is a long name for a hefty sales tax. Plain biscuits? No tax. Chocolate-covered biscuits, though? Tax. Obviously. And Jaffa Cakes are chocolate-covered whatever-they-ares, so this is Important. McVittie’s and the tax office arm-wrestled over it in 1991, McVittie’s won, and it’s not backing down. They’ve been sold as taxless cakes ever since.

It used to be theologians who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

A chatbot insists the dog ate its homework . . .

. . . but strictly in the metaphorical sense. 

Our story begins with someone–let’s call him Barry Smethurst, since that’s his name–waiting for a train, which is late, so he goes online and asks WhatsApp’s chatbot for TransPennine Express’s customer service phone number so he can ask what’s happened to his train. 

He gets a number. He calls the number. The number turns out to belong to someone who has nothing to do with TransPennine Express–he’s a property industry executive in Oxfordshire, 170 miles away, but he does use WhatsApp and his number’s on his company website, although Smethurst probably doesn’t know all that because he asks the bot what the number is. 

“Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!” the chatbot says cheerily and complete with exclamation point.

Smethurst no longer cares. He’s found something better to do while he waits: he wants to know why the bot gave him the number.

It was “based on patterns,” the bot says, and it would “strive to do better” in the future. The number, though, is “fictional.”

Bullshit, Smethurst doesn’t exactly say.

“You’re right, the bot says. It was “mistakenly pulled from a database.”

What database?

“I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

“Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do,” Smethurst tells it, although what good he thinks scolding a bot will do is anyone’s guess.

That’s where the story drizzles away, sadly. Maybe his train pulls into the station. Maybe he sinks into a pit of despond so deep that he can no longer type. We leave him there, phone in hand, feet on platform, bot within thumb’s reach, but he’s given me an excuse to move to a more bizarre story about AI gone wrong, although it happened outside of Britain’s borders. 

A Norwegian man filed a complaint against OpenAI’s ChatGPT after he went online to look for information about himself and was told that he was in jail for killing two of his children. 

Yes, it’s nuts to think you’ll learn more about yourself by looking online than by putting down your phone and spending some time with your own non-electronic self, but we’ve all done it. 

Okay, most of us have done it. Or at least some of us have done it. Or–screw it, I’ve done it, although I don’t have kids so if anyone tells you I killed some of them, understand that it’s not physically possible. 

Good manners in medieval England

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Medieval England isn’t famed for its polish, its manners, or its cleanliness. (Neither is medieval Europe, but it’s not our subject.) If you want to be a contrarian, though, and say, Poopash, they were civilized enough to have books of etiquette, you’d be right. They did have books of etiquette and I’ve stumbled over one from the early 1200s that does indeed prove they valued good manners. It also underlines in screaming red ink how the definition of good manners can change from one time and place to another. Not to mention the differences between the modern mindset and the medieval one. 

Allow me to throw you into the deep end of the pool.

Irrelevant photo: A morning glory–also called bindweed.

 

The Book of the Civilised Man, by Daniel Beccles

Not much is known about Daniel Beccles except that he wrote The Book of the Civilized Man, medieval England’s first known book of etiquette. He might’ve been in Henry II’s retinue for more than 30 years. That leaves open the possibility that he might not have been, but “more than 30 years” is pretty specific for a might, so let’s assume he was.

Why take the risk?

Because for our purposes it doesn’t matter.

Beccles’ book took the form of a 3,000-line poem in Latin. Or 2,800 lines according to a different source. I not only haven’t counted them myself, I haven’t gotten my hands on the full manuscript, although an English translation is bumping around out there somewhere. I’m working, as I usually do, from secondary sources.

Sorry, folks. I’m not a historian, just somebody sitting on a couch.

The book was addressed to boys and young men who were being trained in noble households–or as Beccles put it, “untrained boy-clerks”–and its existence speaks to a society where the rules of behavior were changing fast enough that people needed a guide. 

Let’s break the advice into categories. It gives me something to do. 

 

Religion and so forth

Predictably, given the time and place, a lot of the advice has to do with religion, or as one of the sources I’m using puts it, “a man’s duty to God. He should obey the law and the Commandments; he should be wary of vices and pursue virtues. He should endeavour to perform pious works, love learning and behave in church. He should think of the inevitability of death, the joys of Heaven and the terrors of Hell.”

That’s generic enough that it could’ve come from central casting, and the business of vice and virtue reminds me of someone whose father, after a bit of hemming and hawing, gave him this advice about–well, who knows? Possibly sex but possibly life in general: “Beware the pitfalls of life.” 

Panaiotis, I’m grateful to you for passing that on to me. My life is impossibly richer for knowing it, and I’m always grateful for a laugh.

Sorry. Rabbit hole. And to be fair to Beccles, that’s a summary. He seems to have been more specific than that. 

“If you want to be rude to someone, take a close look at who you are, whom you are speaking to, and what their circumstances are,” he wrote. 

That might sound like he’s advising a compassionate awareness of other people’s situations, but I have a hunch he’s warning the reader against pissing off anyone who’s more powerful. See the section on hierarchy for the reasons I think that. Other advice is unambiguously kind.

“If fickle Fortune favours you, fortuitous one, do not mock those bereft by her.”

“If anyone threatens those near him with cruel misfortunes, or if someone wicked cruelly holds sway over his neighbours, kicking and clawing, and cultivating wickedness among them, stand up to thwart his evil violence alongside the neighbours.”

“Do not oppress anyone for sport.”

For good sober reasons, it’s okay.

“Offer relief to the hungry, naked, thirsty, sick, wandering, and imprisoned in whatever way will set them right.”

We could find worse advice without having to look far. 

As for behaving in church, at least part of his advice is to stay awake.

 

The hierarchy

Just as religion shaped every thought about good and evil, hierarchy shaped every thought about whatever was left after that, and a lot of Beccles’ book is about how to behave to people who are higher up the ladder. 

“Eventually, it would be time for the inferior to wait on the lord as he went to bed. . . . When he sits on the privy in the usual way, take in your hands hay or straw, pick up two big wads of hay in your fingers and press them well together. You should prepare to give them to your patron when he wants them. Let the wads be given to him as you stand, not bending the knee. If two together are sitting on a privy, one should not get up while the other is emptying himself.” 

Have I mentioned that the medieval idea of privacy was different than ours? Or possibly nonexistent? And that they were pretty matter-of-fact about the human body and the various things it does. 

“If you are acting as a servant, stand by the bedside; cover your lord’s naked body.”

“Do not hunt for fleas on your arms or bosom in front of the patron or in front of the servants in the hall. . . . In front of grandees, do not openly evacuate your nostril by twisting your fingers.”

“Eating at the table of the rich, speak little.”

 

Eating

“Do not be a nose-blower at dinner nor a spitter; if a cough attacks you defeat the cough. . . .If you want to belch, be mindful to look at the ceiling.”

“Spoons which are used for eating do not become your property.”

“If a fat morsel lies in the dish in front of your companion, do not touch it with your finger, for fear that fingers will be pointed at you as a boor. . . . When your fellow drains his cups, cease eating. Beware of shouting ‘Wassail’ unless you are bidden to do so. While food is visible in your mouth, let your mouth savour no drink; while food is hidden in your mouth, let your tongue not minister to words. The morsel placed in an eater’s mouth should not be so big that he cannot speak properly if he needs to do so. Beware of drinking wine greedily like Bacchus. . . ..Sitting at table as a guest, you should not put your elbows on the table. You can put your elbows on your own table but not on someone else’s.”

 

The hall

When Beccles talks about the hall, he’s not talking about hallways–those corridors you walk through to get to some room where the action’s taking place. A medieval hall was where the action took place. Initially, it was where everyone ate and slept, but even after the lord and his family drew away from the communal mayhem to a room of their own, it remained the center of a lord’s home. 

“Let not a brute beast be stabled in the hall, let not a pig or a cat be seen in it; the animals which can be seen in it are the charger and the palfrey, hounds entered to hare, mastiff pups, hawks, sparrow-hawks, falcons and merlins.”

I apologize to any cats who subscribe to Notes. History comes in many shades of bitter. No point in pretending otherwise.

But since we already have horses in the hall, let’s acknowledge the limits: “When you are about to leave, let your cob [that’s a horse] be at the door. Do not mount him in the hall.”

 

The body

In case you didn’t believe me about the medieval era being frank about the body:

“When you are hungry and ready to eat, first empty your bowels. Afterwards, an attendant should give you a washcloth and water. If it is winter, you should be given warm water. The washcloth should be white and the water should be from a clean stream.”

Why does the you get a washcloth and water but the lord hay and straw? I’m tempted to blame different translations but haven’t been able to convince myself. A cloth is a cloth. Hay is hay. I have no explanation. It doesn’t make moving up to lordly status sound appealing.

“Do not get up after the meal to urinate in the bushes, nor to void your bowels, unless nature compels you. Guests, messengers, and servants should not urinate on the premises. The master of the house can urinate in his own home. Guests may urinate indoors, if they so wish, at night after they have retired.”

“In public, your bottom should emit no secret winds past your thighs. It disgraces you if others notice any of your smelly filth. If it happens that your intestines are caught in a windstorm, look for a place where you may relieve them in private.”

“Do not attack your enemy while he is squatting to defecate.”

 

Sex

Beccles wasn’t a fan of women. Common sense in his era insisted that women were over-sexed, and Beccles was full of common sense. 

“When tempted by sweet words, even a chaste, good, dutiful, devout and kindly woman will resist scarcely anyone,” he wrote. Basically, she’s ready to fuck “a cook or a half-wit, a peasant or a ploughman, or a chaplain. . . . What she longs for is a thick, leaping, robust piece of equipment, long, smooth and stiff. . . . Such are the things that charm and delight women.”

Which is news to me, but what do I know? 

“Whatever your wife does, do not damage your marriage. . . . If you are a cuckold, do not whisper a word about it. . . . When you are a cuckold, learn to look up at the ceiling.”

That’s the second time looking at the ceiling has come up. If you know what was written on those medieval ceilings, do let me know.

“If the wife of your lord turns her eyes on you too often and wantonly looses shameful fires against you, letting you know that she wants to have intercourse with you; if she says, ‘The whole household and your lord, my husband, shall serve you for ever, you alone shall be my darling, you shall rule everything, everything which belongs to you lord shall be open to you’ . . . consult me, my son; what I counsel is planted in your heart; between two evils, choose the lesser evil; your safer plan is to feign illness, nerve-racking diseases, to go away sensibly and prudently.”

He also warns his reader against having sex with holy women, his godmothers, or relatives. He should avoid men or boys who masturbate or have sex with animals or boys. 

If you’re getting a picture of our lonely boy-clerk surrounded by temptation but forbidden to join in, take heart. Beccles didn’t exactly approve of going to prostitutes but he was resigned enough to give advice on how to visit, and that sounds pretty joyless as well–not just for the prostitute but for the boy-clerk.

“If you are overcome with erotic desire when you are young and your penis drives you to go to a prostitute, do not go to a common whore; empty your testicles quickly and depart quickly.”

If I’m reading this right and if Beccles is anything to judge by, we’re looking at a culture that’s frank about sex and frank about the body but at the same time repulsed by both. 

 

What about kids?

You’ll find no joy there either.

“They cover their clothes with ashes, they make them dirty, they dribble on them; they wipe their noses flowing with filth on their sleeves.”

The evolution of medieval warfare

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The feudal world–generalization alert here–glorified warfare. Or at least the folks at the top did. Why wouldn’t they? They got to the top and they stayed there because they were armed and dangerous. If we want to explain their role nicely, it was to protect the country from invaders. If we’re not in a mood to be nice, the English aristocracy was there because they’d been the invaders, killing people and taking over what had once been theirs. And because they were too big and scary to get rid of–not that some of the Anglo-Saxons didn’t try.

But they were happy to fight any new invaders. And sometimes each other. And occasionally to be the invaders in other people’s lands. 

Yes, if you didn’t mind a bit of bloodshed and you were born on the winning team, it was a fine old time to be alive.

Yet another relevant photo: Stained glass window with what I assume to be a knight in the centerfold. And if it’s not a knight (is that a halo behind him?), what the hell, he’s on a horse. Close enough. From Canterbury Cathedral.

 

The cult of knighthood

To be part of a class defined by warfare meant training from childhood. I’m leaning heavily here on Ian Mortimer’s book (remember books?) Medieval Horizons, and he writes about the aristocracy “deriving satisfaction” from war and “committing acts that caused enormous suffering but which they regarded as their right.”

They were enthusiastic enough about fighting that when they didn’t have a war at hand,they needed to be kept occupied, and raids were a good training ground for warfare–not to mention a good way to keep a restless set of knights amused. The English raided Wales and Scotland repeatedly, although the raids on Scotland seem to have been written up as invasions and the Scottish invasions as raids. That may be about numbers and it may be about nationalism, but the line between war and raid looks a bit blurry to me.

I’m less certain about Wales. Sorry.

When raids were out of season, restless aristocrats could always recreate war in the form of a joust, and in the earlier medieval period we’re not talking about the kind of fancified, one-on-one, controlled jousts we see in movies. Those came later. In 1341, Sir William Douglass (whoever he may have been) challenged the earl of Derby (he was the earl of Derby, that’s who he was) to a joust. The conditions were that no one wear armor and that they all fight with sharpened lances. 

You’d do the same on a rainy Saturday when you’d gotten tired of listening to some damn minstrel plunk away on the lute. You know you would.

Twelve men fought on each side. Three were killed and there’s no record of how many were injured. The survivors agreed it was a great party and wrote very nice thank-you letters, saying, “Let’s do it again soon.”

The culture of chivalry, with its tales and songs and myths, glorified it all. It was all about personal courage, personal honor, personal strength. 

From what I’ve found, serfs and associated non-nobles did get drafted into the wars the aristocrats started and commanded. They were foot soldiers, archers, and whatever else was needed. But they were the backup band, not the lead singers. The aristocracy hogged the spotlight.

Not to diminish that business of personal honor or anything, but real warfare, as opposed to jousts, could also be profitable. If you captured a knight (or–jackpot!–the king), you could hold him for ransom. It sounds like a board game, doesn’t it? I’ve seen references to ransoming archers as well, so commoners may have been ransomable, but the emphasis is pretty clearly on aristocrats, and the higher up the food chain the captive was, the bigger the ransom. 

Historians argue about when and why that business of ransom began. It’s an interesting rabbit hole and we’re not going down it but you’re welcome to. Let me know when you get back and I’ll put the kettle on.

Another source of wartime profit was looting, and I’m not sure what more I can say about that. Soldiers took stuff, but to be fair, only when they could. 

 

Attempts to rein in the brutality

A few winds blew in the direction of toning down the brutality of war. In the tenth century, the Peace of God movement– 

Well, okay, not a lot is known about the Peace of God movement, but it started in southern France and popped up at assorted Church councils. 

Back to the Peace of God movement, though. It was a response to the inability of, specifically, France’s Carolingian dynasty to impose anything like order, but more widely it was an effort to tone down the violence of the period. It urged combatants to make a distinction between soldiers (legitimate targets) and non-combatants. Warriors were not to commit rape and not to kill women, children, churchmen, or merchants. 

A bit later, the Truce of God movement tried to ban fighting from sunset on a Wednesday until dawn on a Monday as well as during Lent and Advent, and if that strikes you as bizarre, think of it as a reminder of how different the medieval mindset was from the modern one. The ban parallels the restrictions on when a person could have sex or eat meat. 

No, I didn’t make that up. 

The Truce of God movement would’ve made perfect sense at the time, even to people who disagreed with it.

Two English kings, Edward III and Henry V, also tried setting some limits. Edward ordered that “no town or manor was to be burnt, no church or holy place sacked, and no old people, children, or women in his kingdom of France [France and England were hopelessly tangled at the time] were to be harmed or molested.” Henry’s ordinances instructed his soldiers to protect churches and religious buildings–not to steal from them; not to harm or capture clergymen and -women (or maybe that’s women and clergymen; Medieval Horizons’ wording leaves it open); not to take clergymen hostage unless they were armed and hostile; and not to rape any women.

The instructions are more interesting as an indication of what was happening than as a list of what they managed to stop. Still, warfare was changing, although not in the ways either movement hoped for.

 

The decline of the knight

Knights’ effectiveness depended on the massed charge, which could overwhelm a defense, but in the fourteenth century the knight started to lose his status as hero of the battlefield. In 1314, Robert the Bruce (Scotland; real person; also a movie that I remember as endless) scattered sharp metal gizmos–caltrops in case you care–across the ground English knights would have to charge across. He also had pits dug and planted them with sharpened stakes. He organized his men so that knights who got past the gizmos and the stakes charged their horses into a wall of pikes. 

This sounds harder on the horses, who didn’t choose to be there, than on the knights–although to be fair a knight on his way to the ground wasn’t in an enviable position. But when the alternative is letting the knights kill you, you know how it is: a person’s ruthless side can come to the surface. 

For our purposes, what matters is that knights charged foot soldiers and lost. 

The English had longbowmen and might have won if they’d used them first, but they sent in the knights, in their full heroic cluelessness, and lost the battle. 

Like the Scottish wall of pikes (and those sharp little gizmos, which would upset the balance of the sentence so let’s leave them out), the English longbow tipped battlefield power away from knights and toward ordinary soldiers. Longbowmen–commoners, remember, and beneath a knight’s notice–fought from a distance, in relative safety, and a wise commander let them decimate the enemy before turning the heroes on horses loose, even if doing so upset the social order.

By the end of the fifteenth century, armies had grown larger and knights no longer trained for a massed charge. Now it wasn’t just longbows and pikemen they’d be coming up against, but cannons. You couldn’t charge a cannonball and there was no heroism in getting splattered by one.

 

Regulating warfare

As the middle ages became middle aged and the structure of society changed, warfare needed a bit more justification. The papacy had become more powerful, so if one Christian king was going to fight another, he needed to justify it–if not to god at least to the Pope. That didn’t put an end to wars between Christian kings but it did boost everyone’s creativity by a factor of twelve.

But what really tamped things down was that war had become expensive, even with the countervailing lure of loot and ransoms. The side with more cannons and more soldiers was likely to win, and both cost money. 

Money? In the early middle ages, it was around but it wasn’t central. In the 1150s, if you’d spread England’s supply of money evenly, everyone would’ve had 6 pence. By 1320 it would’ve been 10 shillings. (Twelve pence to the shilling. You’re welcome, and I had to look it up.) The shift to a money economy was underway. By the time we reach the later medieval period, warfare was measured in money–for arms, for soldiers, for all those little incidentals you forget to factor in at your peril. All that meant taxes, and in England it meant the king going to that ever-annoying Parliament, which had the power to approve or not approve some new tax to finance a new war. 

That took some of the fun out of going to war.

And in the sixteenth century, after the War of the Roses went further and ruined the reputation of internecine warfare, Henry VII got rid of private armies by making it illegal for lords to keep supporters who wore their livery. 

Translation? Every lord had his colors and symbols and assorted rigamarole. They dressed their followers to match. Think of it all as a uniform. 

Building an army was now the prerogative of the king. Warfare had been nationalized.

 

Numbers

Wars in the early middle ages were likely to involve a few thousand men. Battle of Hastings, where the Normans took England? Seven thousand to eight thousand men on each side. Before 1300, most battles were much smaller. Sure, chroniclers wrote about armies of up to 80,000, but then I regularly claim to be a thousand years old. Don’t believe everything you read. Historians–those clever devils–look at the financial record to dig out more realistic numbers, and they say (or at least one says) it was rare to find more than 10,000 on a side. 

By the sixteenth century–and by this time the middle ages isn’t just middle aged, it’s bald and has bad knees, if it’s still the middle ages at all–the English army had 30,000 men (do you really care where?). The Spanish had 200,000 and the French 80,000. And you can tell from the numbers that these weren’t drawn from the top of society. The top layer wasn’t big enough and didn’t see any glory in getting killed by cannonballs anyway. The percentage of noblemen dying of violence went from 25% in 1400 to 2.5% in 1750. Kings no longer risked their lives leading their troops. They delegated. 

No two people agree on exactly when the middle ages ended, but for the sake of convenience let’s say it ends here.