The Pilgrimage of Grace & Bigod’s Rebellion, or dissolving the monasteries part 3

Posted on by
26

Our most recent slogs took us through Henry VIII’s dissolution of England’s religious houses and then through the Lincolnshire Rising, which was an effort to restore the monasteries. But keep your muddy boots on, because we’re not done yet. We’ve still got the Pilgrimage of Grace to get through.

Need a recap before we head off? Henry VIII took England out of the Catholic Church (kings could do that sort of thing then: I believe this, so you will too) and confiscated the property and income of the monasteries, nunneries, friaries, and etcetaries, which he fed to his ever-hungry treasury. 

He put down a rebellion in Lincolnshire quickly but it led to a larger rising in neighboring Yorkshire, called the Pilgrimage of Grace, and that’s where we’re heading now. It was led by a well-connected lawyer, Robert Aske.  

How well-connected? He was the grandson of a baron and a third cousin to Jane Seymour, who had recently married Henry of the Six Wives. So quite.

Irrelevant photo: Montbretia. It’s invasive as hell, but it’s beautiful.

 

Before we get to what happened, though, let’s talk about why

Religion was the primary spark for the rebellions–people weren’t happy to walk or be chased away from the religion that had shaped their lives–but other elements fed into them as well. One was Thomas Cromwell’s attempts to increase the central government’s control in the North. I’m guessing this was more important to the gentry and aristocracy than to the common people. Folks who have some power aren’t usually happy to see it moved someplace else. 

Cromwell? He was Henry’s minister and (you could at least argue) his brains. He’s also the central character in the BBC’s fantastic series Wolf Hall. I leave it to you to decide which of those things is the most important.

Sorry, where were we? Other elements that fed into the risings. The church and its buildings played an important role in poor and rural communities. This wasn’t just about religion but also charity, jobs, education, and what health care and care for the elderly there was. Closing the monasteries put an end to that. 

Also the harvest had been bad the year before, so food prices had risen, and the Enclosure Movement meant landlords were taking away some peasants’ access to common land and pushing others off the land entirely, leaving them homeless and impoverished. That had started long before Henry and went on long after he was dust, and it had flat out nothing to do with the dissolution of the monasteries, but y’know, when people are feeling the pinch their anger can go in all sorts of directions.

Okay, it had a bit to do with the monasteries: the poor had been able to turn to them for a handout, and no one had a plan in place to fill that gap when they closed.

You can find a bit about the enclosure movement about halfway through this link. I really do need to write a separate post about it.

But before we get all starry eyed about the church and the good it did, remember that it was also a very rich landlord and fierce about dictating what people had to believe and how they could live their private lives–or what we might think of as private, although I’m not convinced they’d have seen it the same way.

For all that, the tone of the rebellion was heavily religious. To quote Robert Aske (remember him? leader of the rebellion?), “And that ye shall not come into our pilgrimage for no particular profit to your self nor to do any displeasure to any private person but by counsel of the commonwealth nor slay nor murder for no envy but in your hearts put away all fear and dread and take afore you the Cross of Christ and in your hearts His faith, the restitution of the church, the suppression of these heretics and their opinions by all the holy contents of this Book.”

 

The Pilgrimage

When the Lincolnshire rising disbanded, the government disbanded its army as well (England didn’t have a standing army until much later on), so when the Pilgrimage of Grace began, Henry’s government was sitting around with its proverbial thumb up its nose, unprepared for Aske to march into York with 30,000 armed–well, let’s say people. By some accounts, it was 30,000 men, but one of the fun side-effects of sexism in the English language is that it’s hard to tell when “men” means men and when “men” means people. In a popular rising, my best guess is that a wide swath of the population would’ve been swept up, including (gasp, horror!) women.

If you don’t keep your eye on those women, they’ll just show up everywhere. 

But let’s not get bogged down there. On October 24, Aske and 30,000 men and possibly not-men marched into York and restored the religious houses that had been closed. 

It’s worth knowing that Aske’s was a higher class of uprising than the Lincolnshire one, by which I mean that it had better connections. Not only was Aske a gentleman, his supporters included a baron and an archbishop, as well as some survivors of the Lincolnshire rising.

The rebels were divided into three hosts, and the one under Aske’s leadership engaged in no looting and no violence, although this wasn’t passive resistance. They did take at least one city. Still, the other hosts weren’t as well disciplined, threatening violence if local lords wouldn’t join them, and I assume making good on their threats although I haven’t been able to dig out any details. 

Rebel numbers continued to grow and rebellions to pop up in new localities. In Cumberland, a rising was led by captains called Charity, Faith, Poverty, and PIty.

Facing them all were the Duke of Norfolk and the Earl of Shrewsbury, with 12,000 men between them. The rebels now had 40,000, um, humans. Or maybe that’s 8,000 and 30,000. Or 27,000. Numbers were as liquid as spelling back then. Take them as a poetic way of saying a lot or people and a lot more people.

Whatever the head count was, the king’s forces were massively outnumbered, which is why Norfolk negotiated with the rebels, promising safe conduct for two delegates to meet the king, so off the delegates trotted–one rebel and one peacemaker–to Henry’s court, where he told them he knew more about religion than mere commoners but offered them a pardon if they’d hand over ten ringleaders. 

Back north they rode, reporting that Henry had found their demands “dark and obscure,” so rebel representatives hashed out a clarified set of demands at Pontefract Castle, which they’d seized. These were “24 Articles to the King,” also called “The Commons’ Petition.”  

They handed these to Norfolk to pass on to Henry, and Norfolk promised them a general pardon, a parliament that would be held at York within a year, and a reprieve for the abbeys until the new parliament could meet and discuss the matter. 

The rebels were divided over whether to trust Norfolk’s promises. Aske thought they could. Others were wiser, because (either at this point or earlier–I’ve lost track) Norfolk wrote to the king, “I beseche you to take in gode part what so ever promes I shall make unto the rebels for sewerley I shall observe no part thereof.” 

Sewerly? My best guess is that it means surely. Spelling? Liquid, and a thin one at that. 

That division within the rebel ranks was at least to some extent and division between the aristocrats and the commoners, with the aristocrats being more trusting and the commoners more realistic.

In early December, at Aske’s urging, the rebels disbanded and Aske was invited to court for Christmas, where he was well received.

 

Bigod’s Rebellion

Now we move on to Cumberland, where we find Bigod’s Rebellion, led by Sir Francis Bigod and John Hallam, a captain of the 1536 rebellion, neither of whom believed the promises the Pilgrims had been given. 

Unlike the bulk of the rebels, who were Catholic, Bigod was an evangelical–a full-blown Protestant–and all for England leaving the Catholic Church but not for Henry installing himself in the Pope’s place. I’d love to connect that to the rest of the post but I haven’t found a link. Still, it’s interesting and I’m leaving it in.

This new group of rebels planned to capture Hull, Scarborough, and the Duke of Norfolk, who they’d force to mediate with the government. For the sake of clarity, that’s two towns and a duke. I’m doing mix and match here.

But the gentry had survived two rebellions with their hind ends intact and weren’t in a mood to gamble on a third, and although commoners did rise, their risings were sporadic. They eventually converged on Carlisle, where they were defeated in February 1537. 

Norfolk hanged 74 rebels. His orders had been to “cause such dreadful execution to be doon upon a goode number of th’inhabitants of every town, village and hamlet . . . as well by the hanging up of them in trees as by the quartering of them and the setting up of their heddes and quarters….as may be a fearful spectacle.” 

He stopped short of quartering.

At this point, reprisals for the earlier rebellions started.  All told, 216 people were executed, including Aske and assorted lords, knights, abbots, monks, and parish priests. And I’d assume a lot of common folk. One of Henry’s goals was to divide the gentry from the common people, which worked, with the gentry sitting in judgment and commoners (with the exception of the lords, knights, and so forth) being judged.

When Robert Aske was tried, his own brother was on the jury. Only one of the people who were tried was found innocent.

 

So what, if anything, do we learn here?

Like every medieval revolt I’ve read about, the participants in these were noisily loyal to the king. How could they not be? Unless you were backing some alternative kingship candidate and had planted a sword in a stone, opposing the king was more or less unthinkable. No alternative form of government had been imagined. So the goal wasn’t to get rid of the king but to let him know his people’s true situation and get rid of bad people around him (Cromwell was the focus of attention there). If they could do those two things, he’d govern justly. 

But kings were famously jealous of their power and not quick to hand any of it over to a bunch of upstarts. Commoners were threatening because there were so damn many of them and because they were everything the aristocracy looked down on–and feared if they had any sense. On the other hand, aristocrats, being closer to the center of power, were a different sort of threat. The biggest of the feudal lords still saw themselves as ruling under the king while the king saw himself as ruling, period–or if you want to be appropriately British about this, full stop. 

This takes us back almost full circle to the paragraphs about what elements fed into the rebellion, but now we’re looking at it from the other side: it wasn’t just religion that shaped Henry’s response. It was about centralizing power.

Did any of these rebellions stand a chance of success, then? 

It depends on how we define success. They couldn’t have taken power, but then they never imagined they could. That simply wasn’t a goal. They were trying to influence the king, and they did chalk up some successes that are worth noting alongside their more obvious devastating losses. 

  • The collection of the October subsidy–a major grievance–was postponed. 
  • The Statute of Uses was partly negated by a new law.
  • Four of the seven sacraments that the Ten Articles left out were restored, inching the Church of England away from outright Protestantism.
  • A royal proclamation of 1538 promised an onslaught on heresy, by which we should understand outright Protestantism. In practice, I’m not sure it amounted to an onslaught, but it did require the name of the printer and author on any book, which was designed “to auoide and abolish suche englishe bookes as conteine pernicious and detestable errours and heresies.” It put author and printer at greater risk.

In a sideways sort of way, those changes bear out something my parents used to say. They were union organizers back in the day and believed no strike is ever lost. It’s possible that no rebellion is either.

*

If you want a timeline–and I got lost enough moving between one article and the next that I was grateful for this one–take a look here. 

The Lincolnshire Rising, or dissolving the monasteries part 2

Posted on by
30

Last week we slogged through the dissolution of England’s monasteries (and nunneries and friaries and so-fortharies) under Henry VIII, and it might’ve looked, to the casual reader, like everything fell neatly into place for ol’ Henry: the order went out, the courts assessed the money and the goodies and handed them over to the treasury, and the nuns, monks, and friars were sent out into the world to manage as best they could with the pensions they were given. A couple of hundred people were executed for opposing the changes, but in the great scheme of things that hardly counts as major opposition, especially after a few hundred years.

It didn’t all fall into place that easily, though. Henry faced some widespread opposition, starting in October 1536 and centered on Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. If you don’t know your English geography, what matters is that they’re both up north, because the center of English politics has long been in London and more generally in the south. So think of this as happening in No-one-ever-pays-attention-to-usLand. 

 

Irrelevant photo: a geranium

 

The spark

There were two uprisings, and I won’t get as far as the second one this week. Sorry–it’s been that kind of week.

The first started in the town of Louth. Some royal commissioners showed up–those folks who went through a monastery’s belongings and claimed them for the crown–and one made a comment that may have been seen as a threat by the less-educated among the clergy. “Look to your books or there will be consequences.” In addition, new regulations had been introduced that affected the clergy, and taxes that affected secular folk. And people were looking not just at the closing of the religious houses but at the confiscation of  of all that expensive church-ware, some of which had been donated by local families, who therefor had a proprietary feeling about it. 

It’s worth noting that it was only the well-to-do who could donate, say, silver to a church or monastery, but ordinary people participated in grassroots fundraising that might touch up a saint’s statue that was looking weary or do something along those lines, so they too would have a sense of ownership.

As a result, three things happened. the vicar of Louth preached what one website calls an inflammatory sermon; a cobbler, Nicholas Melton, who came to be known as Captain Cobbler, seized a registrar and burned his papers; and a larger group of people held the commissioners hostage at a nunnery.

If you want to know the aim of these early uprisings, look at the documents they destroyed. Literacy was growing but still limited, and committing things to paper was a form of control. Destroy the list of what a monastery owned and it was easy to believe that you might just stop it from being confiscated.

 

But before I go on

I try not to use Wikipedia, because its entries change and it’s subject to the occasional fit of madness before the editors swoop in to correct it, but I couldn’t find articles with any depth to them anywhere else. So I’m leaning on it heavily here. I believe we’re on safe ground. 

Fair enough? Lets go on.

 

The rebellion

Before long, a full-scale revolt had broken out. The rebels came from several towns and converged on the city of Lincoln, where they dragged the diocese’s chancellor from his bed and beat him to death. We can probably take this as an indication that they weren’t in a good mood.

They sent a list of complaints to the king, and these focused on both taxes and religion. They objected to at least one of  Henry’s tax strategies, the Statute of Uses, and they demanded an end to taxation in peacetime. They also objected to the dissolution of the monasteries and to the Church of England’s first statement of its doctrine, the Ten Articles, and demanded that heretics be purged from the government, that the treasures in local churches be protected, and that they have the right to continue worshipping as Catholics. 

Henry dismissed the rebels as “rude and ignorant common people” and their entire county as “one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm,” so we can safely guess he wasn’t in a good mood either.

Who took part? Some 40,000 people, with the support of the gentry. Their opposition to the Statute of Uses  speaks to the gentry’s involvement, since it involved tax on the inheritance of land, but the number of people up in arms says the rebellion had support from people well below the level of the gentry.  

The protest–or rebellion, or whatever you want to call it–lasted from October 1 to October 4, when the king warned the rebels to go home or face the Duke of Suffolk and however many armed men he’d mobilized by then. By October 14, most of them had left Lincoln.

Why do they date the end of the protest to October 4, then? Sorry, you’re on your own there. I have no idea. What I can tell you is that after the protest broke up, the vicar of Louth and Captain Cobbler were captured and hanged, and over the next 12 days other leaders were executed, including a lawyer and a former monk–although he might not have considered himself former. An MP–that’s a member of parliament; you’re welcome–was not only hanged but also drawn and quartered for his involvement. The Tudors were nothing if not over the top about executing people.

Did that end of the tale? It did not. It led to a larger rebellion, the Pilgrimage of Grace. But for that, tune in next week.

Dissolving the monasteries

Posted on by
56

If people know anything about Henry VIII, it’s that (in descending order): he had six wives (divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived), he left the Catholic Church in a huff, and (sharp descent here) he dissolved the monasteries. 

Let’s talk about the monasteries.

Dissolving religious houses wasn’t new. For centuries, smaller monasteries either had blinked out of existence on their own or were dissolved so their endowments (their revenue-generating lands and churches) could be redistributed to other religious houses or used to fund colleges. Beyond pissing off some manageable number of people, that wasn’t controversial. What was  new under Henry was the scale. And the purpose. 

Oh, and where the money went.

 

Irrelevant photo: sunset

The why? of it all

First off, we’re using monasteries here as shorthand for not just monasteries but also abbeys, convents, and any religious houses that I’ve forgotten. It’s inaccurate and sexist but it’s simpler. Forgive me. 

If you roll all those religious houses together, you’ll have the wealthiest institution in Tudor England, owning a quarter of the country’s cultivated land and a lot of expensive bling, because devotion to god worked better when it was surrounded by gold and silver and jewels. 

All that bling was not only expensive, it was important. How would anyone know you had wealth if you didn’t show it off? It was what people and institutions did with it.

This being a time when wealth was measured not in bitcoins but in land and expensive objects, it was almost inevitable that Henry would cast his eye in the direction of those monasteries. His government was permanently short of money (blame wars–they’re expensive–and, um, lifestyle issues), and the monasteries not only had all those riches, they were aligned with the pope, who was now Henry’s enemy, what with Henry jumping into that huff and leaving the church, so they were a base of power capable of opposing him.

 

The mechanics of dissolution

In 1536, Henry’s government went after monasteries that had an income of less than £200 a year and fewer than 12 “inmates.” Sorry–not my word. They were probably counting nuns, monks, or friars but not their servants. They were closed down and their buildings, land, and money went to the crown. 

To give a sense of what £200 was worth, you could’ve bought 42 horses or 160 cows with it. It was the daily wage of 6,666 skilled artisans–or of one working for a long damn time. 

Then in 1539, the government moved against the larger monasteries, and by the next year they were being closed at the rate of 50 a month. The land and buildings of both large and small houses were sold and the bling–the movable assets–auctioned off.

In the first stage of dissolution, the confiscated buildings weren’t badly damaged, although lead was stripped from the roofs (it was valuable stuff), glazing was removed, and bells melted down. The plan was to sell or use the buildings themselves, and some of the buildings were repurposed for grand homes. You’ll still find stately homes called SomethingOrOther Abbey, and yes, they were once abbeys. 

In the later stages of the dissolution, orders went out to pull down the buildings: “Pull down to the ground all the walls of the churches, steeples, cloisters, fraters [refectories], dorters [dormitories], chapter houses.” This wasn’t cheap. The cost of tearing down Furness Abbey was 10% of the money raised by selling its property. 

Many of the buildings were partially pulled down and left to decay. Today, they make scenic ruins and people pay admission to wander through, take selfies, brush up against a bit of history, and then buy tea and sandwiches. 

 

The courts

All this confiscating and selling created a major administrative headache, and in 1535 the Court of Augmentation was set up to sort through the monasteries’ assets and income. Then in 1540, the Court of First Fruits and Tenths took charge of money the monasteries had once sent to Rome, because the end of the monasteries didn’t mean the end of the payments people owed them. 

What were first fruits, though? The first year’s profits that the new holder of a benefice owed the church. (A benefice was a church office that brought revenue to the person who held it.)  And the tenths? The 10% of each year’s income that the benefice’s holder owed the church each year until forever. All that had to be assessed, catalogued, dealt with.

The courts were part of Thomas Cromwell’s work of replacing the king’s medieval household administration with something we’d recognize today as a civil service. 

The treasury came out of the dissolution some £1.5 million richer. That would’ve been lifetimes of work by those skilled artisans we were talking about.

 

The monks, nuns, and servants

That accounts for the income, the bling, and the land and buildings, but it leaves the people who made their lives in the monasteries unaccounted for. So let’s do numbers. Some people love numbers. 

Roughly 14,000 monks, nuns, and friars were de-monked, de-nunned, and de-friared when the monasteries closed. If they cooperated, they received pensions. If they didn’t–well, some 200 people were executed for opposing the dissolution. 

I haven’t found a number for the servants who were now out of jobs and I don’t know if they were counted.

Monks and canons typically received a pension of around £5 or £6 a year, which was roughly what a chaplain was paid.

What’s a canon? I had to look it up. “A member of the chapter of (for the most part) priests, headed by a dean, which is responsible for administering a cathedral or certain other churches.”

Did you really need to know that?

The heads of religious houses did better, and as in everything else at this time, connections mattered. Family mattered. One abbot who was close to Cromwell received £100 a year–roughly the income of a rich country gentleman. Cooperation also mattered. Those who played along might be allowed to wander out into the secular world in possession of some of the house’s bling or cattle.  

Nuns–you won’t be surprised to learn–got less, sometimes no more than £1 a year. Even after the convents closed, they weren’t allowed to marry, although some did anyway. But many found no choice but to return to their families. Convents had long been refuges both for women who didn’t want to marry and dumping grounds for the unmarriageable daughters of the gentry and middle-ranking families. Both groups of women were likely to be seen as  burdens if they returned home. 

As for the servants, there would’ve been more of them than of monks or nuns. Sawley Abbey’s 18 monks had 42 servants–farmhands, plumbers, cooks, kitchen boys, carpenters, grooms, masons, laborers, and washerwomen.  

A monastery would also have had a steward–far higher up the scale than a washerwoman but still a servant–who managed legal relationships and relations with the outside world. 

With the closing of the monasteries, the servants who lived there, as many did, would have been homeless in addition to unemployed. Some dissolution commissioners made provision for them–which implies that some didn’t. At Furness Abbey, the servants were owed a good bit of back pay, and the commissioner made sure this was paid, although they got nothing, as far as I’ve read, beyond that. 

Almsmen living at the abbey received a cash settlement. 

 

Gain and Losses

Although the politically well connected and the backers of Henry’s reforms were in the best position to profit from the sales of land and buildings, traditional Catholics also bought up property. This created a group of wealthy families whose interests now lay with keeping the Church of England in place. Even when Mary took the throne and restored the Catholic Church, she couldn’t re-establish the monasteries. Whether you count that as a gain, a loss, or simply clever politics depends on your point of view.

The closing of the monasteries created some concrete problems that no one seems to have planned for. The monasteries had been home to massive libraries–collections of illuminated manuscripts. But the printed book was replacing the hand-copied one, so who needed those old things? Some were saved but many were destroyed.

Monastic and convent schools had educated boys and girls (separately of course, you barbarian), and the church had offered one of the very few ways a bright boy could climb out of poverty. With the closing of the monasteries, the schools closed.

The church also ran hospitals, and many of these were attached to monasteries. Those were lost. 

Let’s not let the word hospital fool us, though. It shares a root with hospitality, and not all hospitals dealt with illness. In England and Wales, 47% housed the poor and elderly. Another 12% housed poor travelers and pilgrims and 10% cared for the non-contagious sick. The rest housed lepers.

Monasteries also gave alms in the form of money or food to the poor. Not enough to keep them from being poor, mind you, and not enough to make a dent in their own riches, but when people are hungry–and this was a society full of people living on the edge–food is food.

No one made plans to replace any of this.

 

Nursery rhymes

According to legend, the nursery rhyme about Little Jack Horner come from this time. 

Little Jack Horner
Sat in the corner,
Eating a Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb,
And pulled out a plum,
And said ‘What a good boy am I!

Thomas Horner was (allegedly) steward to Richard Whiting, the last abbot of Glastonbury, and before the abbey was destroyed Whiting was supposed to have sent Horner to London with a huge Christmas pie with the deeds to a dozen manors hidden inside. Because if the Court of Augmentations couldn’t find them, they couldn’t claim them. Possession is nine-tenths and all that.

Again supposedly, Horner opened the pie somewhere along the way and stole the deeds to the manor of Mells, in Somerset, which had lead mines, making the plum in the rhyme a play on the Latin plumbum, meaning lead. 

A Thomas Horner did become the owner of the manor, but that doesn’t prove he found it in a pie and doesn’t explain why he’s called Jack.

Class and language in England

Posted on by
93

In class-obsessed England, one of the bits of wisdom that gets passed from person to person is that the upper class (abbreviated as U) picks its vocabulary from one list and the middle and lower classes (abbreviated as non-U) pick theirs from a different and, oh, so much less prestigious one. Non-U people find four jacks in their card decks and put serviettes on the table. The upper class? Four knaves and table napkins, only they wouldn’t stoop so low as to set the table themselves. Someone would do that for them. Maybe someone even plays cards for them so they don’t have to be bothered. But what do I know? I’m just someone sitting on a couch, working from a recent study on the subject, a couple of articles, many stereotypes, and too many old movies.  

A couch? That’s an Americanism. The U equivalent is allegedly sofa. The non-U for that would be settee. 

How do we know any of this? Well, as it turns out, we don’t. We just think we do. The lists and the shorthand of U and non-U come from the 1950s, when Alan Ross, a professor of linguistics at the University of Birmingham, published a paper in that widely read journal Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, which is–or at least was–published by the Modern Language Society of Helsinki. 

Have you saved your back issues? They might be valuable by now.

 

Irrelevant photo: begonia

 

But it’s about more than vocabulary

Ross didn’t write only about language, he wrote about behaviors that marked the upper classes. (How many upper classes are there by his measure? Haven’t a clue, but the plural has worked its way in here and my job description doesn’t include asking it to leave.) These behaviors, he wrote, included important things like not playing tennis in what the British call braces and Americans call suspenders. 

Okay, I have to interrupt myself here: in British, suspenders are–or were, anyway–those things women wore to hold up their stockings before pantyhose swept them off the field. And yes, I’m sure some men wore them too, but these were the bad old days, so they couldn’t wear them publicly. Americans called them garter belts. In any vocabulary, they were horrible.

Did anyone ever actually play tennis in braces/suspenders? Or garter belts, for that matter? Quite possibly not. Stay with me and we’ll get to that in a paragraph or two. 

Ross claimed the other behavior that marked the upper classes was that “when drunk, gentlemen often become amorous or maudlin or vomit in public, but they never become truculent.”

That’s the quote that led Grant Hutchison (no linguist; he’s a retired doctor and a careful reader) to decide Ross might not have been entirely serious about all this. It’s a defensible argument. 

Another U behavior Ross mentioned was “an aversion” to high tea. (The quote’s from an article on Ross’s article, not necessarily from Ross himself. Sorry.) 

If you’re not British, you may have high tea mixed up with afternoon tea, so let’s stop and sort those out, because you can never tell when you might need to know this. High tea might sound like it’s what people on the high end of the class hierarchy have, but it’s not. It’s (gasp; horror) working class–the hot meal working people would eat, with tea, when they got home from work. Since they’d eat that at a high table, it became high tea, although the high has dropped away and these days it’s just tea. Exactly who calls the meal tea, as far as I can figure out, depends not just on class but on region. Like everything else involving the English language, it’s complicated. What I can tell you is that people talk about going home to eat their tea. Even after 17 years in this country, it still throws me.

The high-end tea Americans mistake for high tea is afternoon tea. It started out as an elite indulgence that was introduced by the Duchess of Bedford in the nineteenth century, and it involved cake, little sandwiches, titled ladies, and painfully good manners. And maybe some scones, 

These days, the idea of taking a break in the afternoon to have a cuppa has worked its way into the fabric of the country, and along the way it dropped the three-tiered cake stands, the painful manners, and the fancy offerings. But if someone talks about afternoon tea, they’re still talking about the fancy stuff, which will put any thought of supper (or dinner, or [gasp] tea,) out of your mind.

End of digression. We will now rejoin our alleged topic.

 

Alan Ross again

Ross’s paper would’ve been forgotten twenty minutes after it was published if the novelist Nancy Mitford–who was excessively U–hadn’t mentioned it in print, causing the U/non-U distinction and the idea of separate vocabularies to go viral well before going viral was either a phrase or a thing. People didn’t have to read the original article: they knew as much about it as they needed to.

Ross justified his focus on specific words this way:

“It is solely by its language that the [English] upper class is clearly marked off from the others. In times past (e. g. in the Victorian and Edwardian periods) this was not the case. But, to-day, a member of the upper class is, for instance, not necessarily better educated, cleaner or richer than someone not of this class.”

Which made it all the more important not to be mistaken for what was once the great unwashed but was now not only washed but educated and possibly even rich but still not good enough to mix with the aristocracy. 

So what words are giveaways? A few are (allegedly–we’ll get to that): 

  • Drawing room (U) and lounge (non-U). I call it a living room, making me not only not-U but non-non-U. 
  •  Jam (U) and preserve (non-U). 
  • Looking glass (U) and mirror (non-U).

The list is now some 70 years out of date, so don’t take it too seriously. But we’ve recently been handed another reason not to take it to heart: Ross doesn’t seem to have done any research on his topic. His paper was based on armchair linguistics. So to spoil everybody’s fun, two linguists, Natalie Braber and Rhys Sandow, designed some experiments to see if his distinctions hold up, and clever devils that they are, they didn’t ask people directly, because the minute you ask you’ve made people self-conscious about their word choices. In one experiment, they showed people two pictures and asked how they were different, which prompted the participants to talk about different color couches or sofas or settees without thinking about their vocabulary.

They found the supposedly U words sofa and napkin were more common than their non-U equivalents, and if they’re commonly used, then they’re no longer markers of upper classness–if they ever were. On the other side of the scales, the supposedly non-U toilet was more common than the U equivalent, loo. Where they did find a difference in usage, it generally depended on age. Older speakers were more likely to use the non-U serviette and settee, but also the U word loo.

Draw whatever conclusions you can manage.

How do people perceive those words, though? They asked people to judge a writer’s class based on two versions of social media posts, one using supposedly U words and one using supposedly non-U ones. Perception, they reported, wasn’t uniform, but the “higher socioeconomic group” thought sofa was more posh–posh being a non-U word for U. People from the lower socioeconomic group thought settee was more posh.

Everybody seemed to agree that serviette was posh, although Ross listed it as non-U. 

You might’ve noticed that Braber and Sandow are talking about socioeconomic groups, not the aristocracy and the great newly washed. Did that affect the value of their research? Possibly. Also possibly not.

 

What does it all mean?

That Ross is at best outdated and was at worst stitching thin air into a theory. And that if you’re trying to penetrate a class other than the one you were raised in, you shouldn’t start by looking up vocabulary lists, especially ones that are 70 years out of date.

Exporting segregation: Black G.I.s in Britain during World War II

Posted on by
31

The best-known stories about American G.I.s in Britain during World War II involve white soldiers, who the British liked to say were over overpaid, overfed, oversexed, and over here. Not long ago, I met someone who quoted that to explain why he didn’t know what part of the US his American grandfather came from. 

But there’s another story about U.S. soldiers in Britain: over the course of 3 years, some 240,000 Black U.S. soldiers passed through Britain and their situation was complicated, not because Britons didn’t welcome them but because they did. 

Screamingly irrelevant photo: The river Something or Other, flowing through Canterbury’s city center

 

The segregated army

Let’s back up. Hang around here long enough and you’ll get used to that. The US Army was segregated until 1948, three years after the end of World War II, so during the period we’re talking about Black and white soldiers served in separate units. They had separate barracks or camps along with separate hospitals or wards, blood banks (yes, seriously), medical staff, and recreational facilities. 

The US military didn’t consider Black soldiers fit for combat, so they were limited to support roles. They drove, cooked, cleaned, built roads and buildings and air bases, unloaded supplies, dug ditches, and worked as mechanics, generally under white officers. The few Black soldiers who did become officers could only command Black troops, and Black soldiers faced all the harassment you’d expect–and depending on how low you set your expectations, probably more.

In case anyone needs it, here’s the ten-second summary of US segregation: America’s southern states were segregated by law. Blacks and whites had separate drinking fountains, separate schools, and separate pretty much everything else. And whatever was for white people got more money–a lot more money–than what was for Black people. Those laws were enforced not just by the police and the courts but by terror. To cross the line that separated Black and white was to risk your life–at least if you were Black. This is what the federal government was carrying over into the armed forces. 

But segregation wasn’t just about separating the two groups, it was about enforcing inequality. By way of example, unlike white soldiers, Black soldiers weren’t allowed to marry women they formed relationships with overseas, which added to the number of children abandoned by their G.I. fathers.

Now we get to the contradictory–which is to say the interesting–part: for all that Britain brought segregation to its colonies, it had no color line at home. That doesn’t mean it was free of racism. When the US first proposed bringing over Black troops, Anthony Eden, the secretary of state, objected on the grounds that Black people weren’t suited to the climate. 

Britain had some 8,000 identifiably Black citizens at the time, and they seemed to survive the climate well enough, but never mind that. Sometimes you grab the first argument that flits past, and after that there’s nothing to do but keep a straight face and repeat it. 

 

A quick interruption

What does identifiably Black mean? Over the course of several centuries, a lot of Britons with Black ancestors were absorbed into an overwhelmingly white population and no longer counted as Black. Many of them wouldn’t have known of any reason not to count themselves as white. So we’re talking about whoever was visible. 

By way of contrast, in the US at the time, the one-drop rule held that if you had any Black ancestry at all (“one drop of blood”)–and of course if anyone knew about it–you were considered Black. 

 

The two systems collide

With that out of the way, let’s go back to the British government: it was a reluctant host. James Grigg, the secretary of state for war, wrote in a memorandum labeled “to be kept under lock and key, ”that “the average white American soldier does not understand the normal British attitude to the colour problem, and his respect for this country may suffer if he sees British troops, British Women’s Services and the population generally drawing no distinction between white and coloured. . . . 

“This difference of attitude might clearly give rise to friction. Moreover, the coloured troops themselves probably expect to be treated in this country as in the United States, and a markedly different treatment might well cause political difficulties in America at the end of the war.”

Why was that kept under lock and key? Probably because Britain was in no position to object to an American plan. It depended on the US to fund the war effort. So while Grigg chewed on his fingernails, the US brought its soldiers over, and it brought US-style segregation with them.

Where Britain did manage to draw the line was at enforcing segregation: that would be up to the US. On occasion, that left Britain trying to keep segregation from being imposed on Black soldiers from British colonies.

Isn’t it interesting how something starts out looking like it’ll be clear but turns out to be murky as hell?

Black American soldiers were generally welcomed by the local population, most of whom had never met a Black person before. As George Orwell put it, “The general consensus of opinion appears to be that the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.”

Orwell may have been making a political point there, but people with no name recognition at all are quoted (anonymously) saying roughly the same thing. A West Country farmer said, “I love the Americans, but I don’t like those white ones that they have brought with them.” And when white G.I.s gave the landlady of a pub grief for serving Black soldiers, she’s reported to have told them,”Their money is as good as yours and we prefer their company.”

Some businesses, however, did refuse Black customers for fear of losing white soldiers’ business. So the picture wasn’t unmixed. 

Before I go on, let’s be clear: Britain wasn’t free of racism. A cricketer from the West Indies who lived in Britain in the 1920s said that “personal slights” were “an unpleasant part of life in Britain for anyone of my colour.” At the end of World War I, a race riot kicked off over fears that demobilized troops from the empire would take white Britons’ jobs. And at the end of World War II, when Black people from the West Indies moved to Britain in large numbers and looked for places to live, they found signs saying, “No blacks, no Irish, no dogs.”

But during the war, the British generally welcomed Black soldiers, and the raw racial hostility that white troops brought with them seems only to have made that welcome more pronounced. 

An element of nationalism probably fed into that as well. Britons didn’t want to be pushed around by the US–the rising imperial power.

 

So what happened?

Not every white G.I. in Britain was a racist, but those who were were outraged by what they found, which turned everything they’d taken for granted on its head. Not only were Blacks occupying spaces they expected to be exclusively white, they were dancing with white women and going out with white women. For a segregationist, this was the ultimate horror–the thing segregation was supposed to defend against: a Black man with a white woman.  

No, seriously. Within living memory–mine, since you ask–the question that was supposed to demolish any white support for the civil rights of Black Americans was, “Yeah, but would you want your sister to go out with one?”

Gasp, wheeze, end of argument. How could anyone accept that?

If the situation in Britain was a pressure cooker, it blew that little valve on the top more than once, with violence sometimes being set off by white soldiers, sometimes by military police, and at least once by Black soldiers marching into the nearby town that was off limits to them but not to white soldiers. 

In Bamber Bridge, Lancashire, white troops tried to establish a color line in the village and locals responded by putting “Black Troops Only” signs outside the village’s three pubs. 

Maybe you have to be as old as I am, as well as from the US, to be tickled by the quiet genius of local people saying, Fine, you want a color line? We’ll draw it here and you’re on the wrong side. 

In June 1943, still in Bamber Bridge, an argument started between MPs and a Black serviceman outside a pub. Local people and British servicewomen took the side of the soldier. Somebody brandished a bottle. An MP (that stands for military police, by the way, not member of parliament) brandished his gun. The MPs drove away, gathered reinforcements, and later that night ambushed the Black soldiers. A melee broke out, fought mostly with billy clubs, bottles, and cobblestones, but one Black soldier was shot, after which 200 Black soldiers gathered and confronted their white officers. The unit’s only Black officer had calmed the situation until a dozen MPs showed up with jeeps and a machine gun, at which point the Black soldiers seized most of the available arms and fought the MPs for several hours. 

The incident ended with one man dead, several injured, and a hefty number of Black soldiers (32, I believe) convicted of everything from ignoring orders to mutiny. Still, Historic UK counts it as a “turning point in handling racial tension within the military.” Specifically, “A subsequent overhaul led to the removal of racist officers from the trucking units and the introduction of black officers into the MP units.” 

There were also violent confrontations in Launceston, Cornwall; Tiger Bay, Wales; and Leicester. You can ask Lord Google for details if you want them. In the meantime, we’ll jump to what happened at Combe Down, Somerset, where Leroy Henry, a Black soldier, was accused of rape, found guilty by a court martial, and sentenced to death 

That might’ve been the end of it, but a local baker was shocked by the lack of evidence against the man and started a petition, which 33,000 people from the area signed. A national newspaper picked up the story. This was just before D-Day and southern England was packed with troops. It wasn’t a good time for a scandal, and General Eisenhower overturned the conviction. Leroy Henry returned to his unit–and survived the war.

 

So was James Grigg right?

You’ve forgotten James Grigg already, haven’t you? The secretary of state for war who said (among other things) that seeing a country without a color bar might cause political trouble when Black soldiers returned home. Well, around a third of the leaders of the US Civil Right Movement of the 1950s and ‘60s were World War II veterans. That doesn’t say they all spent time in Britain and it doesn’t say they needed to stand on British soil to imagine a life free of segregation. But the experience of Black soldiers in Britain surely added a few drops of water to the rivers that–help! my metaphor’s in danger of going wrong here–rose so powerfully in the postwar US, washing away segregation’s legal structure. 

That flood didn’t solve all our problems, as you will have noticed if you live there or follow US politics at all, but it did move history forward by an inch or three.

*

I’ve relied heavily here on a BBC TV documentary, Churchill: Britain’s Secret Apartheid. If you can find it, it’s well worth your time.

Sewage, patents, and post-truth politics: it’s the news from Britain

Posted on by
29

In these days of post-truth politics, it shouldn’t surprise me that someone paid a polling company to ask what percent of the British public thinks one of our many former prime ministers, Boris Johnson, was telling the truth in his memoir. It shouldn’t surprise me but it does. Just when I think I’m cynical enough to keep up with reality, something like this comes along.

What did they learn? For the sake of simplicity, let’s focus on two questions: only 25% of the people polled believed Johnson’s claim that Buckingham Palace asked him to convince Prince Harry not to leave the UK and 31% believed his claim that Britain was able to get Covid vaccines faster because it had left the European Union. 

A baffling number of people gave answers that fell in the probably zone, saying a claim was probably true or probably false. I understand that they didn’t have inside information, and some of the questions asked what they believed Johnson believed, which leads us onto wobbly ground indeed. But come on, people. I wouldn’t believe the man if he told me today was Friday. 

In fact, as I write this, it’s not Friday. It will post on Friday, and you’ll read it on whatever day you damn well please, if at all. I’m typing it, though, on Monday and editing on Tuesday. You see how slippery truth can be? Muddy the waters enough and everyone will stop caring what’s true–or so the theory goes. Still, no matter what day of the week Johnson tells me it is, I’ll check my phone or today’s newspaper. 

Or possibly my phone and today’s newspaper. 

Irrelevant photo: An azalea blossom

If you get past the list of questions, the poll offers some hope for people’s political sanity: 72% of Britons describe Johnson as untrustworthy. True, that’s down from the 76% when he was just about to slither out of office, and I’m not sure Johnson would consider their low opinion a problem–he’s built a career out of convincing people that whatever he gets up to is cute–but it does let me think three-quarters of the population is paying some minimal attention.

I’d love to tell you who paid for the poll and why, but I have no idea. What I do know is that no poll–yea, no breath–gets taken without somebody paying for it.

 

Okay, we know politicians lie. Private companies tell us the truth, though, right?

Of course they do, dear. Now go to sleep or Santa won’t bring you any presents.

*

If the kids, having despaired of ever getting a straight answer, are asleep, let’s tell secrets: Britain’s privatized water companies cheated on thousands of pollution tests.

Did I mention that they got to monitor themselves on those tests? Because all that red tape we used to have was bad for us. 

How’d they rig the tests? They stopped the outflow of effluent–a polite name for liquid waste or sewage that gets discharged into rivers or seas–when they were about to test the outflow. And guess what: everything was fine! Isn’t that wonderful? Then they opened the taps and the sewage poured forth.

Britain has a serious water-pollution problem. To quote the BBC, “The amount of raw sewage spilling into England’s rivers and seas doubled in 2023, with 3.6 million hours of spills compared with 1.75 million hours the year before.”  A different BBC article says just 14% of Britain’s rivers are in good ecological health, and the problem comes not just from untreated waste (we have a lot of that) but also from sewage that’s only partially treated. The final stage of treatment, sand filtration, is optional. (See above for how red tape is bad for us.)

Meanwhile, in the 2021/22 financial year, water companies paid their shareholders a total of £965 million and their CEOs took home £16.5 million. Thames Water, the biggest of the water companies, was almost £15 billion in debt as of last March. In July, it asked the regulator to increase annual bills by 23% between 2025 and 2030. Since then, it’s said it needed to raise them by 53%. 

Pay up, folks. You get what you pay for–with sewage on top.

There’s talk of renationalizing Thames Water, but that will stick the government with its debt (it just got a £3 billion loan that will help it survive past Christmas), along with its other problems. I think I see why the government’s hesitating.

 

Yes, but what’s Britain really like?

Well, you can tell a lot about a country from its patent applications. Here are a few inventions Britons patented in 2023:

  • A flatpack coffin
  • A robot dog that vacuums and can go up and down stairs
  • A computer table that lets you lie under your desk and work looking up (it can also work as a conventional desk)
  • A plywood cow–useful if you want to practice lassooing cattle
  • Smart gloves that record a goalie’s performance data
  • Cheese made of potatoes
  • Shoes that can be worn on either the left or right foot 

and most practical of all

  • A machine that vibrates the mucus out of your nose

What does this tell us about Britain? I’m at a loss. You tell me.

Church and state in medieval England: Thomas Becket and Henry II

Posted on by
26

Medieval England had two mutually dependent centers of power, the church and the state. The state relied on the church for legitimacy. It was church ritual that turned a proto-king into a real one–someone who people believed had a god-given right to rule. And the church? It held land and riches, it had a near-monopoly on education and literacy, and people believed in it. All that gave it massive political clout. But it relied on the state’s network of laws and law enforcement.

So, two mutually dependent centers of power, and predictably, they didn’t always line up neatly. Take the tale of Thomas Becket and Henry II.

A rare relevant photo: the pulpit in Canterbury Cathedral

 

First, let’s get the name straight

When I first heard of Becket, he was called Thomas a Becket, which turns out not to have been his name. When he was born, he was called Thomas Beket. Spelling was a liquid back then. Somewhere along the line, he picked up a stray C. It looked good and he kept it. As Archbishop of Canterbury, he was known as Thomas of Canterbury. As a saint, he was (and I guess is) called Saint Thomas.

Then came Henry VIII, Anne Bolyn, England’s break with the Catholic Church, and all that stuff, and since Becket had thrown his weight behind the church and against a king when they came into conflict, he went decisively out of fashion. So in 1538, Cromwell (Henry’s brains as well as his tough guy) decreed that Saint T was to be known as plain old Bishop Becket.

In 1596, another Thomas, Thomas Nashe, a satirist and poet, added the a to Becket’s name.

Why’d he do that? It slotted in nicely with names in the Robin Hood legend (think Alan a Dale), which was popular right about then, and it made him sound like some rural bumpkin. In other words, this was the Anglicans making fun of the Catholics. 

The name stuck and by the 18th century the nifty rhythm of the a Becket form was clattering around after Tom Beket like a cluster of tin cans tied to his belt. Because regardless of its original intent, it does sound nice.

These days, people seem to have gone back to Thomas Becket, and in the interest of high-minded neutrality we’ll call him that. 

 

Henry and Becket

Becket was born in 1118 to Norman parents, and this was soon enough after the Norman invasion for that to place him among the elite. Ah, but his parents were merchants, so he was a long step below the elite of the elite, the aristocracy. He got an education (not a given back then), and after a detour as a city clerk and accountant went to work for Archbishop Theobald. 

Before we go on, though, a warning: you’ll want to keep your archbishops separate from your archdeacons in this paragraph, because it has an excess of arches. Becket pleased Theobald (the archbishop) well enough that he was appointed archdeacon of Canterbury. That’s not as good as being an archbishop, but even so it brought him both power and money. Three months after that, he became Henry’s chancellor and confidant. That was in addition to being archdeacon, so Becket now held two posts, both of them important. 

Becket was, according to the accounts I’ve read, skillful and energetic and gifted at getting people to like him, although he does seem to have neglected the less glamorous work of archdeacon in favor of his job as chancellor, best buddy, and right arm to the king. 

He showed himself to be the king’s man when the church and state came into conflict over something called scutage, which was part of that impenetrable knot of relationships that defined feudalism. Basically, it was money that the holder of a fief could pay instead of sending knights to fight for the king. The church held fiefs that had to produce knights or money, and Becket, taking the king’s side, charged the church a high rate.  

To make this more sensitive, this was a period when the church was pushing for greater power relative to kings, who’d previously had considerable control over the church. This is called the Gregorian Reform, and I never heard of it either. Henry was holding out against the changes, claiming what he considered his ancestral rights. And Becket backed him. He was very much the king’s man.

 

Then it all went sour

When Theobald died, what could make more sense than for Henry to make Becket the new archbishop? He’d be the king’s man inside the church.

Henry tried to persuade Becket to accept the post and Becket tried to persuade the king hat the story wouldn’t end well if he did. Becket lost the argument and was duly made archbishop, at which point he stopped being the king’s man and became the church’s, taking its side in conflicts with the king–first in a disagreement over tax, later over the issue of whether the church or the state would try clerics who were accused of crimes. 

In Europe–and in England before the Norman conquest–the church tried clerics, and their punishments were generally lighter than lay people faced. No death penalty, no mutilation. 

Becket’s argument was that the church already punished clerics and they shouldn’t be punished twice for the same crime. Henry’s was that clerical crime was rife and encouraged by church protection. Basically, though, this was about power.

The conflict came to a head in 1164, with the king claiming several of what he considered his traditional rights. He forbade the excommunication of royal officials and any appeals to Rome. He claimed the revenues of vacant church sees the right to influence the election of bishops.

Becket, having initially accepted this, then registered his disagreement and appealed to the pope, who–no surprise here–took the church’s side. 

Henry’s next move was to summon Becket to a trial. By a state court. And guess whose side it would be on. Becket, being no fool, fled to France, where he lived for six years. By way of spitting in Becket’s and the pope’s collective eye, Henry had the archbishop of York crown his son crowned as co-king, although the archbishop of Canterbury traditionally had the right to crown the king. 

Becket responded by excommunicating a bunch of people.

England, by this point, had more or less withdrawn from obedience to the pope, and in case this isn’t confusing enough I should mention that in addition to a pope, the church had an antipope–a kind of spare pope in case the original went flat. 

Sorry–I thought that was funny but it’s not accurate. Both pope and antipope claimed to be the one true pope. Let’s say it was a messy period in church politics and leave it there.

The pope backed Becket’s excommunications, and excommunication was serious stuff in the middle ages. It could cut a person or an entire nation off from church functions. Since we’re talking about a nation, it meant churches could be closed, people refused the sacraments, and churchyards closed to burials. It meant a country full of people who couldn’t take the sacraments, so they’d believe they were being denied their trip to heaven when they died. This is just the kind of thing that can trigger rebellions. 

So the king allowed Becket to return to Canterbury, but beyond that nothing was settled, and Becket excommunicated a few more people, including the archbishop of York, and refused to re-communicate the ones he’d already excommunicated. 

Henry had what’s known in high academic circles as a runnin’ hissy fit and said– 

Well, he said something. According to the Britannica, “He berated his household for being a pack of ‘miserable curs and traitors’ who stood idly by while a ‘low-born priest’ treated their king with contempt.” But according to Edward Grim, who was an eyewitness to Becket’s killing although not to the hissy fit, Henry said, “What miserable drones and traitors have I nurtured and promoted in my household who let their lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a low-born cleric!”  

We’re not done yet, though. According to Peter O’Toole in the 1964 movie Becket, he said, “Will no one rid me of the meddlesome priest?” Or maybe that’s “turbulent priest.” Go watch the film yourself if you want to get it right. It’s clearly the authoritative version, but I can’t be bothered. 

Whatever Henry said, four knights trotted off to Canterbury, where they killed the archbishop. 

 

Becket’s afterlife

No, not that kind of afterlife. We’re talking about the verifiable kind:

Within days, people were making pilgrimages to Becket’s tomb in Canterbury cathedral–or so says the Britannica, although I have trouble believing anyone constructed a tomb that quickly. Let’s not fuss over details, though. Miracles were quickly attributed to him. Pilgrims came. 

Henry (wisely) swore he never wanted Becket killed, and the next year he–that’s Henry, not Becket–showed up in Canterbury, allowed himself to be whipped by bishops while he prayed for forgiveness, and was duly absolved. His decision to do that might’ve had something to do with a revolt led by his sons and backed by France, which he claimed was a result of Becket’s killing.

And the knights who did the deed? They were excommunicated but asked for forgiveness and were sent to fight in the Crusades for fourteen years. 

Three years after Becket’s death, he was made a saint and people believed that the spot where his blood was spilled would heal the sick, and Canterbury remained an important goal for pilgrims until Henry VIII broke with the Catholic Church and had Becket’s tomb taken down, his bones burned, and his name erased from the service books.

A service book, in case this is all as foreign to you as it is to me, is “a book published by the authority of a church body that contains the text and directions for the liturgy of its official religious services.”

For all that, he wasn’t fully erased. These days, the cathedral burns a candle where Becket’s tomb once stood, and his name is engraved on the floor to mark the spot where he was killed.

The Americanization of British English and the Anglicization of German

Posted on by
64

The British (generalization alert here) love to blame America for corrupting their culture. Already the US has inserted trick-or-treating into Halloween and Americanisms into the language.  

Or maybe I should say “we’ve inserted,” since I’m American. And also British, but my language is American, so yeah, if you want someone to blame–and it’s so satisfying to personalize these things–I’m available. My reach isn’t long enough for me to be responsible for even a small part, of that, but accuracy isn’t big in public life these days, so don’t worry about it. Picture me sitting on my couch right now, corrupting the language. 

I am a dangerous person.

But while we’re doing maybes, maybe I should’ve said “the English,” not “the British.” I’ve lived in Britain for more than 17 years and still struggle with what characteristics to file in which national folder. So until clarity whacks me on the head, let’s say it’s the British and wait for someone to correct me. And if I’m wrong, please do. Hearing from people is what makes writing this thing worth the effort.

Semi-relevant photo: The white cliffs of Dover, guarding England against an invasion of foreign words

 

What Americanisms are we talking about? 

A 2017 article from someplace deep inside Cambridge University (is that authoritative enough for you?) lists the use of guy, was like, and I’m good as having increased considerably. The use of closet (the British for that is wardrobe; you’re welcome), season (for TV shows), and right now had also increased but not as much. Annoying business-speak words and phrases like going forward and touch base showed–mercifully–no clear growth. 

What do I have against American business-speak? Two things: it uses words to say nothing and  it makes me want to throw things at people. But hey, life’s full of these small hazards. We struggle onward.

Less authoritatively, assorted British speakers mention the creepage of stores replacing shops, leaving British English with convenience stores and department stores even though people still talk about going to the shop. As a neighbor explained the difference to me, a store is still where you store things and a shop is where you shop for them. That’s the reason our village shop didn’t end up having the small used book store I wanted to set up. Instead it has a small used book stall, which isn’t a shop because it’s outside, in a weather-proof box, unattended, a bit like those little free libraries that have popped up around the US and Canada and can be found but not as often in other countries.   

I’ll admit to seeing logic in the shop/store distinction, but I still do my own shopping at a store. Or at least I think I do. Other people will have different opinions. 

An Americanism that doesn’t seem to be making much headway but that’s around enough to make a subset of British speakers shudder is the word gotten. To me, it’s such an invisible word that before I moved here I couldn’t have imagined anyone getting emotional about it, but I worked briefly with a purist who objected to my use of gotten, weighting her objections with such heavy doses of right and wrong, educated and ignorant that I created for extra spots to drop gotten into my sentences. 

 

Purity

To be clear: I’m not saying the British are a nation of disapproving pedants. As far as I know, you’ll find purists in any culture, along with the kind of people who drive them crazy, and there seems to be a balance between the two. In Britain, that means enough people adopt Americanisms to keep the purists satisfyingly upset. It’s hard to guess at the numbers, though. Dictionary-thumpers are over-represented in places where people comment on new and impure words. It’s their natural habitat. They list. They make their arguments. They shake their heads to indicate despair. The opposition? Most of them ignore the arguments and adopt the words they like, which is why no amount of sniping will ever convince a language to stay pure. 

And that, at long last, brings us to the reason why I mention German in my blog title. While I’ve been busy corrupting British English, purists in Germany are blaming the English language–pure users and impure ones alike–for what they call the idiot’s apostrophe.

The what? Well kidlets, I don’t know German, so this is all second hand, but from what I’ve read, the way German tells the world that someone’s in possession of something isn’t to add an apostrophe and an S to the someone, it’s to, ahem, decline the word for that someone. In other words, they change the ending of the word in a more intricate way–one that doesn’t involve apostrophes.

But Anglecisms have been creeping into German for some time and now the Council for German Orthography has decreed that as of 2025 it will be acceptable to use an apostrophe. Small businesses are already doing it, giving the world Andi’s Imbiss (Andi’s restaurant) and Kim’s Kiosk. And purists are having fits. One argued that relaxing the rules makes German more complicated by saying several different things can be correct at once. 

Can more than one thing be correct at once? Umm, I’d say so. It depends on time, place, and circumstance, but it’s not out of the question. 

Is this the beginning of the end of the German language? Possibly. If it is, will that destroy the world as we know it? Probably. Forget our overheating planet. Forget genocide and the rise of fascism. The end of the world is being brought to us courtesy of the humble apostrophe. 

Britain’s blue plaques–or how to make history snooze-worthy

Posted on by
28

Britain isn’t short on history, and it isn’t short of the impulse to celebrate it. Or at least some of it. The part of it that fits the dominant narrative, whatever that is at the moment. One of the least effective ways it’s found is the blue plaque scheme, which attaches–yes, you guessed it–blue plaques to walls commemorating people you may or may not have heard of. 

To learn more about this fascinating project, let’s quote Historic England, one of the assorted organizations that run the scheme: It “celebrates people from all walks of life who have made a significant contribution to human welfare or happiness; and/or have made an exceptional impact in their field, community or on society at large.”  

English Heritage, on the other hand, which runs the scheme in London, has it celebrating “the links between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked.”

We won’t get in between those two explanations. They can settle their differences in whatever way they find fitting.

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal on a (rare) sunny day. Apologies for the photo quality. It seems to be a WordPress problem that’s cropped up in the last few weeks.

The scheme

In British, scheme doesn’t imply anything scheming or underhanded. A scheme’s a plan–something systematic, and this particular scheme has been around for a while. The first plaques were put up in 1867. Since then, the London part of it has been handed from one organization to another. Unless you work for one of them, I’m reasonably sure you don’t care which they are. The national scheme is run by Historic England. But smaller cities don’t have to feel left out: they can find some local group to put up their own blue plaques.

The plaques say things like, “________ lived here from _______ to ___________.” Some of them say what the person did. A few don’t–you’re expected to know. Either way, the focus is on the here-ness of it all. It’s a low-key way of saying, Listen, dunderhead, you’re on a historic site. Be impressed.

Or something along those lines. Maybe they’re really saying, We’re so rich in history that all we need to do is put up a small blue plaque to commemorate it. Eat your heart out, foreigners. 

It’s all in the interpretation, isn’t it?

I’ve seen a Charles Dickens-related plaque that commemorates a house that used to stand someplace near where the plaque now is. It struck me as a bit forlorn.

Not all the plaques commemorate English or British figures. One of the earliest commemorates Napoleon III, who lived in exile in London, where he slotted himself neatly into high society. 

The people they commemorate are also not all famous. Commemoratees include a theatrical wigmaker, the woman who taught ju-jitsu to the Suffragettes, a bare-knuckle boxing champ, a homing pigeon, and Dolly the Sheep–the first animal to be born by cloning.

 

Unofficial plaques

But nobody gets to set a limit on blue plaques, and it’s possible–even legal–to put up unofficial ones. 

In Norfolk, the Common Lot theatre group discovered that only 25 of the city’s 300 blue plaques commemorated women and set out to remedy the imbalance, commemorating rebel women of Norwich. Their women they commemorate include:  

  • The 16-year-old Emma de Gaudar, who’s said to have held Norwich Castle against a siege by William the Conqueror
  • The butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine
  • Suffragette Mabel Clarkson, who became a lord mayor of Norwich and a city councillor before women achieved the vote
  • Dorothy Jewson, the first female Labour MP, who attended Norwich High School for Girls
  • Women thrown out of a Quaker meeting house for being profane and opinionated for talking about women’s rights
  • And the former location of a ducking stool for women accused of witchcraft

In Hull, Alternative Heritage set up a plaque saying, “Our brand of mavericks and creatives decided to celebrate Hull’s history, whether factual or fictitious.”

I could get to like these people.

They go on to say, “Official English Heritage plaques can only be commissioned for a proposed recipient 20 years after their death, through strict criteria. But what about the living legends and stories that make our city special today? Here at Drunk Animal Creative Studio, we designed a series of our own plaques, fittingly titled ‘Alternative Heritage.’

“Our plaques celebrate our history, from Hull’s charismatic folk to lore spread in playgrounds. Whether factual or fictitious, the contents of the plaques come straight from the heart of Hull.”

So what have they put up? One plaque says, “Goodbye, 2020. You won’t be missed.” Another says, “On this spot, 1918. Alf hugged his wife for the first time in four years. He was lucky – thousands across the country never got to hug their loved ones again.”

Their site includes a map of plaques around the city and a form you can use to propose a plaque.

 

The Liz Truss plaque

The reason I got started on blue plaques is that someone’s put up a blue plaque outside the shop where the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss was bought.

What am I talking about? Liz Truss is Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. In less than two months, during 2022, her bare-knuckle budget proposed doing everything Conservative politicians had talked about but hesitated to do in any unrestrained way: slash taxes and spending without worrying about how the numbers would add up. In next to no time at all, the country was teetering on the brink of recession. The pound tanked. The markets had multiple nervous breakdowns. The cost of government borrowing shot up. Mortgage deals fell through. People who ran pension funds–or who had pensions in those funds–came unglued.

Headline writers, on the other hand, had a field day. 

Truss’s popularity fell so low they had to dig trenches in the newsroom floor. Then some genius at one of the newspapers bought a head of lettuce, dropped a blond wig on it, and trained a live cam at it, asking who’d last longer, Liz or Lettuce.

The lettuce, famously, won. And is now commemorated with a highly unofficial blue plaque of its very own. Truss, meanwhile, is promoting a book about how to save the West. The rest of the world, presumably, isn’t worth bothering with.

How well is it selling? In its first week (I haven’t found more recent data), it was 70 on the bestseller list, behind an air fryer cookbook and RuPaul’s memoir, with 2,228 copies sold. Given the name recognition you get as a former prime minister, that’s not great, although I’ll admit it leaves my novels in the dust. On the other hand, I’m not followed by pictures of lettuce the way she is.

Skara Brae and neolithic Britain

Posted on by
32

Every last one of us was born too late to visit neolithic Britain. Sorry. Most of us wouldn’t handle it well anyway. But we can get a surprising glimpse of late stone age life from the island of Orkney, off the northeast coast of Scotland. 

These days, Orkney’s located almost exactly in the middle of nowhere, at least if by nowhere you mean a lot of water, but back then it seems to have been the center of a civilization, if for no other reason than that it was a midway point between northern Europe and Britain. For that, being in the middle of a lot of water is useful.

Not much is known about stone-age boats, but we can pretty well guess that traveling in one made a stop on a long voyage welcome. The break would’ve let people indulge in a neolithic cultural exchange, which I’m going to guess involved food, fresh water, alcohol, gossip, songs, gifts, and possibly an era-appropriate ritual or three.

I tossed in the rituals because Orkney’s rich in sites that hint at them, and every one of them involved an immense amount of labor. You don’t do all that if they don’t matter to you and if you don’t have time and energy to spare. 

Irrelevant photo: hemp agrimony

Skara Brae

Around 5,000 years ago, a group of people built a village on Orkney that’s now called Skara Brae. What they called it is anyone’s guess. A lot can get lost in 5,000 years, including a name. The people who lived there farmed, hunted, and fished.

The village is older than Stonehenge, older than the pyramids, and older than me. It was inhabited for something along the lines of 650 years and abandoned for reasons we can only guess at, but for us what’s significant about it is that at some point it was covered over by sand, which preserved it until a storm swept the sand off in 1850, uncovering an archaeologist’s dream.

The village is a circle of stone-built, single-room houses linked by roofed passages, with one larger building that according to one article might’ve been a workshop, although I can’t help wondering if it wouldn’t have been a place for everyone to gather. The walls were made of two layers of stone with insulation in between and the roofs were slate. Each house had a hearth, two beds outlined by stone slabs, which would have kept the bedding in place, and what are called dressers because–well, they have to be called something. To me, they look more like stone bookshelves, although this was a bookless, writingless world, so let’s stick with dressers. It’s chilly up there. People would’ve worn clothes, although that might not have been what they stored on them. They could’ve stored useful stuff, beautiful stuff, things they didn’t want to step on in the dark–say the neolilthic equivalent of Lego pieces.

For some fabulous photos, follow the link.

The houses also had tanks set into the floor. One house had an indoor toilet, although since plumbing was still a long way in the future that might not have been a great idea. I wasn’t there, so I can’t know.

Around the settlement, archaeologists have found dice, jewelry, tools, carved stone objects (objects here meaning things that are mysterious to us), and pottery in a style that spread to mainland Britain, supporting the argument that Orkney was an important site in the culture–a place that led the way. What hasn’t been found is weaponry, and the village wasn’t in an easily defended spot, arguing that this was a time and place of peace.

Not far from Skara Brae are two stone circles, The Ring of Brodgar and the Stones of Stenness; a chambered tomb, Maes Howe; and an assortment of unexcavated sites that hint at being ceremonial, burial, and settlement sites. The places that have been excavated show evidence of feasting–lots of feasting.

I won’t try to take you through the details of the excavations. I wouldn’t trust myself to get it right anyway. Follow the links if you want to know more. You’ll find lots of measurements and layouts. Or else settle for knowing that a lot went on in this seemingly isolated spot. 

So, did this important cultural center contribute the Stonehenge altar stone that’s recently been spotted as having come from somewhere in northeast Scotland or the Orkneys? It would make sense. They built similar monuments, but no. Orkney’s been ruled out and the search for the source of the altar stone goes on.