Quotulatiousness

February 14, 2025

Henry VIII, Lady Killer – History Hijinks

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 3 Feb 2023

brb I’m blaring “Haus of Holbein” from Six the Musical on the loudest speakers I own.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Britannica “Henry VIII” (https://www.britannica.com/biography/…, History “Who Were The Six Wives of Henry VIII” (https://www.history.com/news/henry-vi…), The Great Courses lectures: “Young King Hal – 1509-27”, “The King’s Great Matter – 1527-30”, “The Break From Rome – 1529-36”, “A Tudor Revolution – 1536-47”, and “The Last Years of Henry VIII – 1540-47” from A History of England from the Tudors to the Stuarts by Robert Bucholz
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February 12, 2025

Did Medieval People Eat Breakfast?

Filed under: Europe, Food, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 1 Oct 2024

Toasted white bread with sweet spices, white wine, and thick homemade almond milk

City/Region: England
Time Period: c. 1450

Some medieval people ate breakfast sometimes. It depended on things like your social status and job, your age, and what part of the Middle Ages it was. Bread, cheese, and ale were common breakfast items, and sops are mentioned in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. There are a lot of variations of sops, but essentially it’s toast that’s soaked in some kind of flavorful liquid like wine or ale.

This recipe for golden sops uses white bread that is soaked in white wine and topped with almond milk that has been simmered until it resembles a thin custard. I was worried that the wine would dominate the flavor, but it doesn’t. What comes through most are the warm spices and light sweetness that remind me of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Delicious.

    Soppes Dorre.
    Take rawe Almondes, And grynde hem in A morter, And temper hem with wyn and drawe hem throgh a streynour; And lete hem boyle, And cast there-to Saffron, Sugur, and salt; And then take a paynmain, And kut him and tost him, And wte him in wyne, And ley hem in a dissh, and caste the siryppe thereon, and make a dregge of pouder ginger, sugur, Canell, Clowes, and maces, And cast thereon; And whan hit is I-Dressed, serue it forth fore a good pottage.
    — Harleian MS. 4016, c. 1450

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February 9, 2025

What Was Life Like for a Servant at a Royal Palace? | Secrets of Kensington Palace with Dan Snow

Filed under: Britain, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History Hit
Published 19 Sept 2024

Dan Snow explores behind the scenes at the majestic Kensington Palace, the glittering centre of the royal court in early Georgian England. It’s a very special time to visit — the Historic Royal Palaces team has been delving deep into the archives to lift the veil of the public facing court and explore the lives of the many people who lived and worked here. Beyond the kings and queens in the stately rooms, there were hundreds of other men and women — people born high and low — who played a vital role in keeping the court going.

This exhibition brings together an amazing collection of objects, many of which have never been seen before. From an ice saw used by Frances Talbot, the “Keeper of the Ice and Snow” to the revealing scribbled notes of the Master Cook’s Book. From the intricate stitching of Queen Charlotte’s dress, contrasting with the plainer uniform of her dresser, Dan gets up close to objects which build a much more vivid picture of life in this palace, upstairs and downstairs. The extraordinary mural of George I’s court on the striking King’s Grand Staircase, as well as detailed portraits of individuals who worked in the palace, shed light on the real, often forgotten, people who worked, lived or attended court within these palace walls.
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January 28, 2025

Dining at the Wild Parties of Regency England

Filed under: Books, Britain, Food, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 24 Sep 2024

Drop biscuit-style cakes with dried currants

City/Region: London, England
Time Period: 1806

In the 18th and 19th centuries, members of the aristocracy threw wild parties called routs. These parties, which sound akin to a modern frat party, eventually devolved to rooms stuffed with way too many people, so that attendance consisted of jostling from room to room before leaving. If you were lucky, you could grab a rout cake to help sustain you while you party hopped.

These cakes are dense and dry, but not unpleasantly so. While they are delicious, because of the dryness I recommend enjoying them with a cup of coffee, tea, or party beverage of your choice. They’re just sweet enough, and the flavors of the brandy and the flower waters shine through.

    Rout Drop Cakes
    Mix two pounds of flour, one ditto butter, one ditto sugar, one ditto currants, clean and dry; then wet into a stiff paste, with two eggs, a large spoon of orange-flower water, ditto rose-water, ditto sweet wine, ditto brandy, drop on a tin-plate floured; a very short time bakes them.
    A New System of Domestic Cookery by A Lady (Maria Rundell), 1806.

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January 27, 2025

QotD: The bureaucratization of university administration

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On the consolidation of power within the administrative bureaucracy:

    The character of the college as a micro-community of academics is being doubly subverted: from within, by the rapid growth of bureaucratic roles taken up by professional administrators, and from without, by a university seeking to centralise control and elide differences among the colleges. The more uniform the overall environment becomes, the more rapidly it will suffer from the bad decisions inevitably yet to be made.

On the metastasis of overpaid, officious administrators:

    The content of this letter is extremely important, so please read it carefully.” It isn’t often that the university speaks to its employees in this way. This was a follow-up email from the former pro-vice-chancellor for strategy and planning, David Cardwell. He wanted academics to complete his Time Allocation Survey by tabulating how many hours were spent across a vast suite of possible activities. It is characteristic of contemporary Cambridge that the strongest rhetoric it can muster is directed toward this self-serving bureaucratic exercise. Cardwell rubbed shoulders with four other pro-vice-chancellors, all enjoying a salary that is several multiples of the typical university academic, and surpasses the Prime Minister’s.

This administrative overgrowth is, by the way, a historical novelty:

    All of this is new: until 1992, the role of vice-chancellor was covered in short stints by the Heads of House, who paused their college governance while the rest of Cambridge got on with what they were here to do. Now we have not only career administrators at the helm, but their five deputies, for an annual cost of around £1.5 million. All the while, the university fails to find the money to keep important subjects alive, such as the centuries-old study of millennia-old Sanskrit.

I’ve been pointing this out for years. Until very recently, administrative functions in universities were largely filled by senior academics: you got bullied into shouldering the unwelcome burden because somebody had to do it, and you drew the short straw. There is nothing that a serious person despises more than paperwork, especially a scholar, who would much rather be happily buried in whatever esoterica he has made his field of study. Forcing academics into administrative roles ensured that the people filling those offices were incentivized to keep the paperwork to an absolute minimum; the last thing they wanted was to create more of the hateful stuff.

Enter, some decades ago, the professional administrators. Initially, these usually had some sort of academic qualification, and still largely do – albeit typically in fake non-disciplines, “public administration” or what have you – but they were not in any sense scholars. They were managers. Give us your burden, they said; we’ll do all the annoying paperwork for you, and you can concentrate on your very important research, you very important scholars, you. Thus the professoriate, like gullible fools, handed over the keys to the kingdom.

Unlike professors, managers are incentivized to create as much administrative complexity as they can: the more administration there is to perform, the more administrators the institution needs, and the larger the fiefdoms senior administrators can command. Since admin typically has control of the budget, they were easily able to appropriate the necessary funds. The result has been the explosive proliferation of useless eaters with lavish salaries and ridiculous titles like Senior Vice Assistant Dean for Excellence or Junior Associate Student Life Provost. At many universities, administrators now exist in a 1:1 ratio with the student body.

Admin have sucked shrinking university budgets dry, with real intellectual consequences: they aren’t going to fire themselves, and they sure aren’t taking a salary cut, so to make up budget shortfalls academic programs with low enrolment get the axe. Butterfield’s reference to the closure of the Sanskrit program is an example of this; there are many such examples, and they are increasingly common. To brains built out of buzzwords and spreadsheets, everything is either a marketing technique or a revenue stream, and if a program isn’t popular enough to subsidize their summer vacations in Provence or social-justicey enough for them to brag to their beach friends about how progressive they are, it serves no purpose.

This ability of university administrations to close down programs illustrates something else, which is that they are the real power on campus. The academics are mere employees: they will teach whichever students the admin decides to admit, will teach those students whatever the admin says to teach them, will not teach what the admin tell them not to teach, will teach in whatever manner admin decides is best, and will evaluate the results of that instruction in whatever fashion admin mandates they be evaluated.

As members of the managerial class, university administrators are drones of the global managerial hive mind, and instinctively exert a homogenizing influence. Old, parochial practices must be jettisoned in favour of standardizing the institutions they manage.

    As for our age-old titles – of lecturer, senior lecturer, reader and professor – these were replaced with American titles so as to be “more intelligible” to a global audience. … To conjure up a world of “assistant professors” and “associate professors”, who in fact have no supporting relationship to “the professors”, makes a mockery of that venerable system.

Administrators dislike horizontal social relationships amongst faculty. Peer-to-peer network architectures are hard to control; they prefer a server-terminal model, with management as the server through which all communications pass, and professors as the terminals, who can be regulated through systems of permissions. Thus, they set about dissolving those institutions that facilitate conviviality amongst the faculty:

    It was telling that a few years ago the authorities silently closed down the University Combination Room, the 14th-century hall in which academics could freely convene outside their individual colleges.

Administration is also sneaky, adopting governance practices that minimize whatever legacy powers the professoriate still possesses:

    Although in theory Cambridge academics are self-governing, the move to online voting, with minimal announcement, allows for many university policies to be driven through by those who want them enacted.

Butterfield understands full well that the problems are hardly unique to Cambridge:

    All this I say of Cambridge. But these issues go right across the university sector … The public need to trust and respect the elite academic institutions they fund; but that respect is waning, as stories continue to reveal politicised teaching, grade inflation, authoritarian campus policies and lurid, even laughable, research grants. The ambitions of our whole education system are ultimately pegged to the achievements at the very pinnacle of academia. If Cambridge can’t resist decline, who can?

The obvious answer is: no one can resist this. Not Cambridge, not Oxford, not University College London, not Harvard, not Princeton, not MIT, and not Whittier College. The problem is too systemic; the rot too deep. Decades of administrative consolidation of power has subsumed the ivory tower into an appendage of the global asset management system. Generations of ideological infection by the mind virus of cultural Marxism, wokeism, critical social justice, gay race communism, whatever you want to call it, has poisoned the minds of too many of the faculty. Generations of steadily declining standards, an inevitable consequence of massively increased enrolment which of unavoidable necessity heavily sampled the fat middle of the IQ distribution, has thinned out the influence of the bell curve’s rarefied tail to statistical irrelevance. After all of this, the only way to save the university is to purge it, of the great mass of low-performing affirmative action students, of the diversity hire academics who substitute clumsy sermonizing for the scholarship they can neither understand nor perform, and most especially of the great tumorous mass of useless administrators.

Such a purge, to be effective, would need to be thorough. To be thorough, it would remove almost everyone in the system. This would be the same as destroying the system. To save the patient, one would have to kill the patient.

Therefore no such purge will take place.

Instead, the system will crumble, buckle under its own weight, and eventually collapse.

As, in fact, it is doing.

John Carter, “Crumbling DIEvory Towers”, Postcards From Barsoom, 2024-10-25.

January 14, 2025

Andrew Sullivan on the “grooming gangs” scandal in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

These rape gangs have been operating for more than a decade in English towns and cities yet the government does everything it possibly can to avoid taking action, for fear of being accused of racism (or perhaps fear of what they’d discover if they did properly investigate) and losing all those Muslim votes:

The first response of most human beings to news of irredeemably evil acts is to ask who committed them. And if the answer makes us deeply uncomfortable, we tend to move on pronto. You see this most obviously on social media with news of an atrocity. Was the shooter white, a Democrat, a Republican, Muslim, MAGA, woke, trans? And where did the victim fit into these categories?

Our priors instantly color our moral judgment, and even our sense of the seriousness of the offense. And the temptation simply to deny what seems to be in front of our nose can be overwhelming.

[…]

The more intense the horror, the more powerful the instinct to doubt when you first hear of it. The sex-abuse scandal in my own church first numbed and incapacitated me. It took some time for me to see the totality of what had happened, and how deeply it had destroyed Catholic moral authority. Again, when I first read about, say, the Catholic school for deaf children where a priest had picked his victims among those whose parents did not know sign language, the feeling of horror was almost too much to process at all. And as with the Bush administration’s torture policy, it took even more time to grasp how this moral rot had been enabled by the very top.

This is why, I think, the scandal of Britain’s Pakistani rape-gangs, and the institutional negligence toward tens of thousands of underage victims over several years, has had a second burst of life. A serious national inquiry on the scandal was conducted years ago (its recommendations not yet implemented). But several towns with the worst records were omitted from that inquiry; and the sheer scale and depravity of what happened has finally begun to sink in. The precipitant was Elon Musk pontificating about the scandal on X, as part of his campaign to bring down Keir Starmer.

The details are hard to absorb. Think of the hideous abuse suffered by that extraordinary French woman, Gisèle Pelicot, sedated and raped by dozens of French men, organized by her husband. Now think of that kind of organized gang-bang — but make it close to ubiquitous in some towns and the victims under-age girls: raped, brutalized, mutilated, beaten, their lives destroyed. Yes, it was that bad. Tens of thousands of rape victims across the country. This is how one British judge addressed some culprits at sentencing:

    You coerced her into providing sex to vast numbers of strangers. Up to four or five men would be invited to addresses so they could have sex with her … Threats were made to kill her … If she resisted, she would be coerced. Customers would become angry … If oral sex was required, her head would be pushed down, her hair pulled and she would be slapped. Strangers would burn her with cigarettes. A stranger almost throttled her. One deliberately scratched her vagina with his nails. One inserted a hairbrush into her vagina.

The victim was just 13 years old. And she wasn’t unconscious. In just one town, a “conservative estimate is that approximately 1,400 children were sexually exploited” between 1997 and 2013. And in communities dominated by men of Pakistani origin, largely from the Mirpuri region of Kashmir, who held huge sway over the police and local community — just like the Catholic Church in Boston — cover-ups were routine.

Among the abuse concealed: gang-rapes of a single minor by 20 men; putting a pump into a girl’s anus so more men could penetrate her at once; and constant threats of murder of the girls or their families if anyone spoke up. In one case, a minor was arrested and charged with prostitution for having oral sex in a car with a john. When she attended her trial, she discovered that the magistrate in charge of her case was the man she’d fellated. No one knows the full number of minor girls affected, but it is in at least the tens of thousands, and possibly in the six figures.

Why was this allowed to go on for so long? For the same reason the Catholic Church covered up child rape for decades, and Dick Cheney covered up torture. Because the orthodoxies of Catholicism, of the American military, and, in this case, the multicultural experiment were respectively involved. These orthodoxies were sacred, their cultural power extreme. Catholic Boston, conservative America, and elite liberal Britain therefore defended their own orthodoxies for a very long time. And with every successful deflection of responsibility, the number of victims increased.

The truth damns the multicultural project in Britain. Rather than integrating these men of Pakistani heritage, insisting that they adopt the laws and mores of the native population, and treating them like everyone else, the UK elites celebrated cultural difference, enabled the siloing of these populations, bemoaned their own white working-class populations, and forbade any criticism of Islam. So if you called out this stuff, you were instantly called racist. After all, to accuse a non-white minority of raping white girls was a trope right out of white-supremacist fever dreams. And yes, it is a hideous racist trope — from the depths of the American South. But sometimes the trope is the truth.

In all the major cases, I’ve found no reported evidence of Pakistani or Muslim girls being groomed and raped — only poor, white natives. The justification among the rapists, moreover, was that these non-Muslims were sluts who were asking for it and beneath contempt. Racist insults were common as these girls were brutally abused. These were not just rapes, but hate crimes of a grisly sort.

January 13, 2025

QotD: The rise of coal in England

As for conditions on the eve of coal’s rapid rise in the late sixteenth century, they were actually even less intense. Following the Black Death, London’s population took centuries to recover, and by 1550 was still below its estimated medieval peak. Having once had over 70-80,000 souls, by 1550 it had only recovered to about 50,000. And the woodlands fuelling London were clearly still intact. Foreign visitors in the 1550s, who mostly stayed close to the city, described the English countryside as “all enclosed with hedges, oaks, and many other sorts of trees, so that in travelling you seem to be in one continued wood”, and remarked that the country had “an abundance of firewood”.1 Even in the 1570s, when London’s population had likely begun to finally push past its medieval peak, the city seems to have drawn its wood from a much smaller radius than before. Whereas in the crunch of the 1300s it seemingly needed to draw firewood from as far as 17 miles away over land, in the 1570s even a London MP, with every interest in exaggerating the city’s demands, complained that it only sometimes had to source wood from as far away as just 12 miles.2

And not far along the coast from the city were also the huge woodlands of the Weald, which stretched across the southeastern counties of Sussex, Surrey and Kent, and which did not even send much of their wood to London at all. Firewood from the Weald was not only exported to the Low Countries and the northern coast of France, but those exports more than tripled between 1490 and the early 1530s, from some 1.5 million billets per year to over 4.7 million. That level was still being reached in 1550, when not interrupted by on-and-off war with France, but by then the Weald was also meeting yet another new demand, for making iron.3

Ironmaking was extremely wood-hungry. In the 1550s Weald, making just a single ton of “pig” or cast iron, fit only for cannon or cooking pots, required almost 4 tons of charcoal, which in turn required roughly another 28 tons or so of seasoned wood. England in the early sixteenth century had imported the vast majority of its iron from Spain, but between 1530 and 1550 Wealden pig iron production increased eightfold. The expansion would have demanded, on a very conservative estimate, the sustained annual output of at least 50,000 acres of woodland — an area over sixty times the size of New York’s Central Park. Yet even this hugely understates the true scale of the expansion, as pig iron needed to be refined into bar or wrought iron in order to be fit for most uses, which required twice as much charcoal again — or in other words, a total of 86 tons of seasoned wood had to be first baked and then burned, just to make one ton of bar iron from the ore. And all this was just the beginning. By the 1590s the output of the Wealden ironworks had more than tripled again, for pig iron alone (though the efficiency of charcoal usage had also halved — a story for another time, perhaps).4

Given the rapidity of these changes, it will come as no surprise that there were complaints from the locals about how much the ironworks had increased the price of fuel for their homes. No doubt the wood being exported was having a similar effect as well. But the 1540s and 50s were also time of rapid general inflation, because of a dramatic debasement of the currency initiated by Henry VIII to pay for his wars. This not only made imports significantly more expensive, and so likely spurred much of the activity in the Weald to replace increasingly unaffordable iron from Spain, but they also made exports significantly cheaper for buyers abroad — and thus unaffordable for the English themselves.

In 1548-9, in a desperate bid to keep prices down, royal proclamations repeatedly and futilely banned the export of English wheat, malt, oats, barley, butter, cheese, bacon, beef, tallow, hides, and leather, to which the following year were added — like a game of inflation whack-a-mole — rye, peas, beans, bread, biscuits, mutton, veal, lamb, pork, ale, beer, wool, and candles. And of course charcoal and wood.5 For us to have records of the Weald exporting large quantities of wood in 1550 then, they must either have been sold through special royal licence, or have all been shipped out before the ban came in force just halfway through the year in May. Presumably a great deal more than recorded was also smuggled out. In 1555, parliament saw the need to put the ban on exporting victuals and wood into law, adding severe penalties. Transgressing merchants would lose their ship and have to pay a fine worth double the value of the contraband goods, while the ship’s mariners would see all their worldly possessions seized, and be imprisoned for at least a year without bail.6

It’s perhaps no wonder that the Weald’s ironworks continued to expand at such a rapid pace: the export ban would have freed up a great deal of woodland for their use. And ironmaking soon spread to other parts of England too, to where it did not have to compete for fuel with people’s homes. Given iron was significantly more valuable by both weight and volume than wood, it could easily bear the cost of transporting it from further away, and so could be made much further inland, away from the coasts and rivers whose woodlands served cities. In the early seventeenth century, iron ore and pig iron from the southwest of England was sometimes shipped all the way to well-wooded Ireland for smelting or refining into bar.7 In the early eighteenth century scrap iron from as far away as even the Netherlands was being recycled in the forested valleys of southwestern Scotland.8

Whenever ironmaking hit the limits of what could be sustainably grown in an area, it simply expanded into the next place where wood was cheap. And there was almost always another place. England, having had to import some three quarters of its iron from Spain in the 1530s, by the 1580s was almost entirely self-sufficient, after which the total amount of iron it produced using charcoal continued to grow, reaching its peak another two hundred years later in the 1750s.9 Had iron-making not been able to find sustainable supplies of fuel within England, it would have disappeared within just a few years rather than experiencing almost two centuries of expansion.10

And that’s just iron. The late sixteenth century also saw the rapid rise in England of a charcoal-hungry glass-making industry too. Green glass for small bottles had long been made in some of England’s forests in small quantities, but large quantities of glass for windows had had to be imported from the Low Countries and France. Just as with iron, however, the effect of debasement was to make the imports unaffordable for the English, and so French workers were enticed over in the 1550s and 60s to make window glass in the Weald. Soon afterwards, Venetian-style crystal-clear drinking glasses were being made there too.

What makes glass even more interesting than iron, however, is that its breakability meant it could not be made too far away from the cities in which it would be sold, and so had to compete directly with people’s homes for its fuel. Yet by the 1570s crystal glass was even being made even within London itself. Despite charcoal supplies being by far the largest cost of production, over the course of the late sixteenth century the price of glass in England remained stable, making it increasingly common and affordable while the price of pretty much everything else rose.11

What we have then is not evidence of a mid-sixteenth-century shortage of wood for fuel, and certainly not of those demands causing deforestation. It is instead evidence of truly unprecedented demands being generally and sustainably met.

And despite these unprecedented demands, the intensity with which under-woods were exploited for fuel seems to have actually decreased. During the medieval population peaks, the woods and hedges that supplied London had been squeezed for more fuel by simply cropping the trunks and branches more often, cutting them away every six or seven years rather than waiting for them to grow into larger poles or logs. After the Black Death killed off half the population, the cropping cycle could again lengthen to about eleven. But under-woods in the mid-sixteenth century were being cropped on average only twelve or so years — about twice as long a cycle as before the Black Death — which by the nineteenth century had lengthened still further to fourteen or fifteen.12

The lengthening of the cropping cycle can imply a number of things, and we’ll get to them all. But one possibility is that in order to meet unprecedented demands, more firewood was being collected at the expense of the other major use of trees: for timber.

Anton Howes, “The Coal Conquest”, Age of Invention, 2024-10-04.


    1. Estienne Perlin, “A description of England and Scotland” [1558], in The Antiquarian Repertory, vol.1 (1775), p.231. Perlin must have visited Britain in early 1553, as he mentions the arrival of a new French ambassador, which occurred in April 1553, as well as the wedding of Lady Jane Grey, which occurred in May of that year. Also Danielo Barbaro, “Report (May 1551)” in Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, Vol 5: 1534-1554 (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1873). And: Paul Warde and Tom Williamson, “Fuel Supply and Agriculture in Post-Medieval England”, The Agricultural History Review 62, no. 1 (2014), p.71

    2. Galloway et al., p.457 for the estimate of 17.4 miles overland as the outer limit of London’s firewood supply; Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, Vol I: 1558-1581, ed. T.E. Hartley (Leicester University Press, 1981), p.370: specifically, the London MP Rowland Hayward complained of the cost of firewood billets and charcoal having increased in price over the previous 30 years (which would encompass the period of debasement-induced inflation), before noting that “Sometimes the want of wood has driven the City to make provision in such places as they have been driven to carry it 12 miles by land”.

    3. Mavis E. Mate, Trade and Economic Developments, 1450-1550: The Experience of Kent, Surrey and Sussex (Boydell Press, 2006), pp.83, 92, 101.

    4. These statistics are derived from a combination of Peter King, “The Production and Consumption of Bar Iron in Early Modern England and Wales”, The Economic History Review 58, no. 1 (1 February 2005), pp.1–33 for the iron production estimates, and G. Hammersley, “The Charcoal Iron Industry and Its Fuel, 1540-1750”, The Economic History Review 26, no. 4 (1973), pp.593–613 for the estimates of how much charcoal, wood, and land was required at a given date to produce a given quantity of pig or bar iron.

    5. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations., Vol. I: The Early Tudors (1485-1553) (Yale University Press, 1964), proclamations nos. 304, 310, 318, 319, 345, 357, 361, 365, 366.

    6. 1 & 2 Philip & Mary, c.5 (1555)

    7. William Brereton, Travels in Holland, the United Provinces, England, Scotland and Ireland 1634-1635, ed. Edward Hawkins (The Chetham Society, 1844), p.147

    8. T. C. Smout, ed., “Journal of Henry Kalmeter’s Travels in Scotland, 1719-20”, in Scottish Industrial History: A Miscellany, vol. 14, 4 (Scottish History Society, 1978), p.19

    9. See King. Note that there was an interruption to this growth in the mid-seventeenth century, for reasons I mention later on.

    10. There was a period in the early-to-mid seventeenth century when English ironmaking stagnated, but this was due to the growth of a competitive ironmaking industry in Sweden.

    11. D. W. Crossley, “The Performance of the Glass Industry in Sixteenth-Century England”, The Economic History Review 25, no. 3 (1972), pp.421–33

    12. Galloway et al. On cropping cycles in particular, see pp.454-5: they note how the average cropping of wood in their sample c.1300 was about every seven years, but by 1375-1400 — once population pressures had receded due to the Black Death — the average had increased to every eleven. See also Rackham, pp.140-1. John Worlidge, Systema agriculturæ (1675), p.96 mentions that coppice “of twelve or fifteen years are esteemed fit for the axe. But those of twenty years’ standing are better, and far advance the price. Seventeen years’ growth affords a tolerable fell”.

January 6, 2025

The rape gangs in Britain were enabled and protected by “good people” who didn’t want to be accused of racism

Tom at The Last Ditch confesses his early complicity with the official culture of silence that protected and encouraged the exploitation of girls and young women in Britain for decades:

Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was “part of the problem.” I had a choice between believing what he told me about “honour killings” in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.

In that moment, I very much was “part of the problem” and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the “honour” killers to justice (or prevented both phenomena altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant’s test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did.

I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.

Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we’re honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a “moral panic” as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell’s MiniTru.

Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history’s greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to “go fuck themselves.” Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.

My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – “Parliament is supreme”

December 8, 2024

Why your landscape photos are boring 🥱

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Yorkshire Photo Walks
Published Jun 9, 2024

In this video Tom outlines a five-step process for turning your landscape photos from flat, boring shots to professional looking images.
(more…)

December 3, 2024

David Starkey’s view of history

Filed under: Britain, Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Daily Sceptic, James Alexander summarizes how historian David Starkey’s views of history — British history specifically — provide a useful way to analyze British political issues today:

David Starkey, 2004.
Screenshot via IMDB.com

What David Starkey is trying to do is deliver to the British (or English) public a jeremiad informed not by moral posturing or theoretical commitment but by a sense of history. This is so valuable it should almost come without criticism. I think that Starkey’s vision of history is so arresting it deserves to be expressed in short form and so I will attempt a summary of the position. Starkey is an admirably entertaining speaker, and offers a vision that is several dimensions more complicated than we hear from anyone else at the moment. He is full of prepared lines, and has a ready mind: “Niall Ferguson, the good Niall Ferguson, not the bad Neil Ferguson …”; “All bad ideas begin with the French”; “The Union of England and Scotland made the modern world”; “The monarch changes religion as he crosses the border: he begins Anglican, and becomes Presbyterian”; “The Labour party is the equivalent of the Nomenklatura of Soviet Russia: a privileged class”; etc.

I have some criticisms. But first, his vision of our history.

Let me begin by summarising Starkey’s view of history as it conditions the present. He argues the following:

1. On the nature and relevance of history. History is fundamental. We cannot understand ourselves using theory. Avoid abstraction. Use history instead. It is concrete. He suggests that we have always studied history for the sake of the present, though in recent centuries we have also studied it for its own sake. He adds that we should make analogies between past and present.

2. On English history. Starkey says that we were first part of Greater Scandinavia, then, from 1066, were part of an Anglo-French order. The third stage of our history began with the Reformation. Starkey likens the Latin Christendom of the Papacy to the European Union: and so calls Henry VIII the first Brexiteer. The consequence of the Reformation was that Britain and Europe become antagonists. For the first time the sea was reconfigured as a barrier, defended by the navy: and this happened at the same time that energies were thrown outward to the rest of the world. What the English managed to do, along with the Scots, was build something out of the strong language that rises from Chaucer to Shakespeare: the two home countries united to make it impossible to be invaded; they united to make an empire in the world; and they united to make use of remarkable innovations in finance and later industry.

One of Starkey’s great themes is this Union of England and Scotland: first by King in 1603 and second by Parliament in 1707. Starkey says England is not a nation. It lacks a ridiculous national dress (since its national dress, of coat and trousers with tie, was given to the world as universal official dress). And the Union was wholly original, as it subjugated Scotland to England’s Parliament, abolishing the Scottish Parliament, while leaving Scottish law, religion, military tradition and heraldry alone. England and Scotland are politically united, but only politically united. Starkey’s point about all this is that it was never about “identity”. There was no such thing as a “Briton”. There was no national system of education. So there was no nonsense of any modern-style post-French Revolution nationalism. Instead, we were natural liberals, able to take in immigrants without difficulty. However, throughout all this England is politically dominant in Great Britain and in the Empire.

3. On the present time. Starkey has two points of reference. One is the 1970s, when things went wrong, with a short reversal under Thatcher, and in the 1990s, when things went even more wrong, and perhaps permanently wrong, because constitutionally wrong. The 1970s was the culmination of the Labour politics of welfare, accepted weakly by Macmillan and Heath, but the 1990s was worse because political and constitutional. Labour took things in the wrong direction by making the Bank of England independent and by enabling a new Scottish Parliament to emerge: also by bringing about the Equality Act of 2010 (actually an innovation of Gordon Brown); also by creating a Supreme Court. Then, finally, Charles III removed Parliament from the Coronation, and there was no mention of politics: whereas, since 1688, the Coronation had been a political act. Political power has been fragmented and dispersed from the King-in-Parliament to the quangos, to the Bank of England, to the lawyers. The principle of balance is lost, as every institution has become an interest group, pursuing single issues: an entire raft of Anti-Corn Law Leagues.

Starkey suggests that England will remain an idea, much as the idea of Rome survived the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. This is pessimistic judgement. His optimistic judgement, or hope, is that some sort of “restoration”, like the Glorious Revolution, can be enacted. As far as I have heard, he has not yet sketched the form of his restoration, though it has been promised.

Is this clear? Henry VIII broke the monasteries, threw out the Papists, built Oxford and Cambridge in new form, fortified the coast and began the story of Greater England. If we fill the gaps, there were difficulties with the consequences, religious and political, through the reigns of Mary, Elizabeth, James and Charles, but these were resolved in 1688 and then 1707. Then Great Britain became a great power. This remarkable creation was politically and constitutionally destroyed by the theorists and politicians of the late 20th century, since they demoted England within Britain, unleashed petty nationalisms in political form, and, in passing, did not do enough to restrain the welfare state or, we might add, enough to prevent English tolerance being twisted to accommodate net immigration of 700,000 people of fairly antagonistic cultures per year. Britain is now ruled not by Government-in-Parliament but by delegated arbitrary powers and influences which offer sops to partial interests and mean that nothing can be done. No one has an adequate conception of the entire state.

December 1, 2024

QotD: Recording and codifying the land that William conquered

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, China, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I hesitate to recommend academic books to anyone, but I’ll make an exception for James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. Subtitled “how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed”, it’s the best long-form exposition I know of, that explains how process and outcome first deform, then negate each other.

[…]

In brief, Scott argues that the process of making a society “legible” to government officials obscures social reality, to the point where the government’s maps and charts and graphs take on a life of their own. It’s recursive, such that those well-intentioned schemes end up first measuring, then manipulating, the wrong thing in the wrong way, to the point that the social “problem” the process was supposed to address drops out entirely — all you have, at the end, is powerpoint girls critiquing spreadsheet boys because their spreadsheets don’t have enough animation, and vice versa.

Scott doesn’t use the Domesday Book as an example (IIRC from a graduate school class 20-odd years ago, anyway), but it’s one we’re probably all familiar with. The first thing William the Conqueror needed to know is: what, exactly, have I conquered? So he sent out the high-medieval version of spreadsheet boys to take a comprehensive survey of the kingdom. Turns out the Duke of Earl’s demense runs from this creek to that rock. He has five underlings, and their domains run from etc.

The point of all this, of course, was so that Billy C. could call the Duke of Earl on the carpet, point to the spreadsheet, and say “You owe me a cow, three chickens, and two months in the saddle as back taxes.” It worked great, except when — as, it seems, is inevitable — the high-medieval equivalent of the spreadsheet boys did the high-medieval version of “ctrl-c”; just copying and pasting the information over. Eventually the tax situation got way out of whack, as it did for most every pre-modern government running a similar system — one of the reasons declining Chinese dynasties had such fiscal problems, for instance, is that the tax surveys only got updated every two centuries or so, such that a major provincial lord was still only paying 20 silver pieces in taxes, when he should’ve been paying 20,000 (and his peasants were all paying 20 when all they could afford was 2).

In other words: unless the spreadsheet boys periodically go out and check that the numbers on their spreadsheets actually correspond in some systematic, more-or-less representative way to some underlying social reality, government policy is being set by make-believe.

Severian, “The Finger is Not the Moon”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-09-14.

October 27, 2024

QotD: Puritans, predestination, and the Ranters

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The third problem with Puritan wokeness is that it sinister echoes in the history of predestination. When the creed reached its zenith in the seventeenth century, the logical hole at its centre became insanely obvious. If it does not matter to God how you behave, because your salvation was pre-determined at birth, why not behave however the hell you want to?

The outpourings of radical thought in the English Civil Wars included sects who came to exactly this conclusion. The Ranters, at least by reputation, advocated a lifestyle of Dionysiac excess. If orgies and boozing, gluttony and blasphemy did not have any material impact on whether you were going to heaven or hell, then why not shag, indulge and curse the Lord as much as you want?

The extent of their membership is disputed and the fear of the Ranters was strong among the Puritans, partly, I suspect, because the logical fallacy of the original tenet is so glaringly obvious. Many of the theological arguments espoused by the men who were labelled Ranters were more textured and complicated than a license to loucheness. But the essential point remains: if you are already damned, your actions and intent are irrelevant.

The Puritan response was a horrified recoil. If God has made you one of the elect, you have a responsibility to Him to behave as if you are elect. A rare few came to believe they were not elect, and tortured themselves with it. If this sounds familiar, you have probably met an apologetic white male ally of the woke.

Antonia Senior, “Identity politics is Christianity without the redemption”, UnHerd, 2020-01-20.

October 26, 2024

QotD: Henry VIII

Barbara Tuchman […] said something about medieval nobles once, to the effect of “the reason some of their decisions seems so childish to us is that a lot of them were children”. I don’t think she’s right about that — kids grew up pretty damn fast in the Middle Ages — but if you expand it a bit to “rookies make rookie mistakes”, she’s got a big, important point. No account of the reign of Henry VIII, for instance, can really be complete without considering that when he took the throne he was only 17, and had only been heir apparent for a few years before that. He was most definitely the “spare” in the old “heir and a spare” formula for medieval dynastic success; it’s likely that his father was preparing him for a Church career when his elder brother Arthur died suddenly in 1502, when Henry was 11. What Arthur had been in training his whole life to do, Henry got at most six frantic years of, under an increasingly feeble father.

Leaving all of Henry’s personal quirks aside — and his was a very strong, distinctive personality — that’s got to affect you.

So many of the changes in Henry’s reign, then, must have been driven in part by the fact that it was the same man, reflecting on a lifetime’s experience in a job he was never expected to have, wasn’t really prepared for, and didn’t seem to want (aside from the lifestyle). There’s been lots of pop-historical theorizing about what was “wrong” with the later Henry — senility, syphilis, the madness of power — but more naturalistic explanations of his later actions must take into account simple age. A man nearing the end of his life, knowing that his succession was very much in doubt and fearing for the state of his soul, will do things differently than a young man in the prime of life.

[…]

Life was hard back then, and cheap. When every other child dies before the age of five and the average life expectancy is 35, I imagine, you live your life cranked to 11 every waking moment. Accounts of grown men weeping like little girls at the theater aren’t an exaggeration; the whole age was given to extreme outbursts. And that’s just the baseline! Now consider that a guy like Henry never had a moment to himself, and I do mean never — not once, in his entire life. He even had a guy with him on the crapper, who would wipe his ass for him. The relationship between Henry and a guy like Wolsey, then — to say nothing of his relationship with the Groom of the Stool — must’ve been intimate in a way we can’t possibly grasp. Compared to that, you and your wife are barely on speaking terms. If Henry seemed sometimes to set policy just because he was pissed at Wolsey, we must consider the possibility that that’s exactly what happened.

The best you can do, then, is imagine yourself back there as best you can, and make your interpretations in that light, acknowledging your biases as best you can (I’m not a medievalist, obviously, but I’m a much better read amateur than most, and though Henry VIII is a very hard guy to like, he’s equally hard not to admire). Most of all — and this, I think, is the hardest thing for academic historians, more even than recognizing their presentist biases — you have to keep your humility. Perhaps Henry’s decision about ___ was part of a gay little frenemies spat with Wolsey. That’s sure what it seems like, knowing the man, and having no contrary evidence …

… but contrary evidence might always emerge. It might not have been the optimal decision, but it might’ve been a much better one than you thought, because Henry had information you didn’t, but now do. It makes for some restless nights, knowing that your life’s work could be overturned by some grad student finding some old paper at a yard sale somewhere, but … there it is.

Severian, “Writing Real History”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-08-18.

October 6, 2024

The rise of coal as a fuel in England

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest instalment of Age of Invention, Anton Howes considers the reasons for the rise of coal and refutes the frequently deployed “just so” story that it was driven by mass deforestation in England:

An image of coal pits in the Black Country from Griffiths’ Guide to the iron trade of Great Britain, 1873.
Image digitized by the Robarts Library of the University of Toronto via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s long bothered me as to why coal became so important in Britain. It had sat in the ground for millennia, often near the surface. Near Newcastle and Sunderland it was often even strewn out on the beaches.1 Yet coal had largely only been used for some very specific, small-scale uses. It was fired in layers with limestone to produce lime, largely used in mortar for stone and brick buildings. And it had long been popular among blacksmiths, heating iron or steel in a forge before shaping it into weapons or tools.2

Although a few places burned coal for heating homes, this was generally only done in places where the coal was an especially pure, hard, and rock-like anthracite, such as in southern Wales and in Lowlands Scotland. Anthracite coal could even be something of a luxury fuel. It was burned in the palaces of the Scottish kings.3 But otherwise, the sulphur in the more crumbly and more common coal, like that found near Newcastle, meant that the smoke reeked, reacting with the moisture of people’s eyes to form sulphurous acid, and so making them sting and burn. The very poorest of the poor might resort to it, but the smoke from sulphurous coal fires was heavy and lingering, its soot tarnishing clothes, furnishings, and even skin, whereas a wood fire could be lit in a central open hearth, its smoke simply rising through the rafters and finding its way out through the various crevices and openings of thatched and airy homes. Coal was generally the inferior fuel.

But despite this inferiority, over the course of the late sixteenth century much of the populated eastern coast of England, including the rapidly-expanding city of London, made the switch to burning the stinking, sulphurous, low-grade coal instead of wood.

By far the most common explanation you’ll hear for this dramatic shift, much of which took place over the course of just a few decades c.1570-1600, is that under the pressures of a growing population, with people requiring ever more fuel both for industry and to heat their homes, England saw dramatic deforestation. With firewood in ever shorter supply, its price rose so high as to make coal a more attractive alternative, which despite its problems was at least cheap. This deforestation story is trotted out constantly in books, on museum displays, in conversation, on social media, and often even by experts on coal and iron. I must see or hear it at least once a week, if not more. And there is a mountain of testimonies from contemporaries to back the story up. Again and again, people in the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries complained that the woods were disappearing, and that wood fuel prices were on the rise.

And yet the deforestation thesis simply does not work. In fact it makes no sense at all.

Not out of the Woods Yet

This should immediately be obvious from even just a purely theoretical perspective, because wood was almost never exploited for fuel as a one-off resource. It was not like coal or peat or oil, which once dug out of the ground and burned could only be replaced by finding more. It was not a matter of cutting swathes of forest down and burning every branch, stump and root, leaving the land barren and going off in search of more. Our sixteenth-century ancestors were not like Saruman, destroying Fangorn forest for fuel. Instead, acres of forest, and even just the shrubs and trees that made up the hedges separating fields, were carefully maintained to provide a steady yield. The roots of trees were left living and intact, with the wood extracted by cutting away the trunk at the stump, or even just the branches or twigs — a process known as coppicing, and for branches pollarding — so that new trunks or branches would be able to grow back. Although some trees might be left for longer to grow into longer and thicker wood fit for timber, the underwoods were more regularly cropped.4

Given forests were treated as a renewable resource, claiming that they were cut down to cause the price of firewood to rise is like claiming that if energy became more expensive today, then we’d use all the water behind a hydroelectric dam and then immediately fill in the reservoir with rubble. Or it’s like claiming that rising food prices would result in farmers harvesting a crop and then immediately concreting over their fields. What actually happens is the precise opposite: when the things people make become more valuable, they tend to expand production, not destroy it. High prices would have prompted the English to rely on forests more, not to cut them down.

When London’s medieval population peaked — first in the 1290s before a devastating famine, and again in the 1340s on the eve of the Black Death — prices of wood fuel began to rise out of all proportion to other goods. But London had plenty of nearby woodland — wood is extremely bulky compared to its value, so trees typically had to be grown as close as possible to the city, or else along the banks of the Thames running through it, or along the nearby coasts. With the rising price of fuel, however, the city did not even have to look much farther afield for its wood, and nearby coastal counties even continued to export firewood across the Channel to the Low Countries (present-day Belgium and the Netherlands) and to the northern coast of France.5 A few industries did try to shift to coal, with lime-makers and blacksmiths substituting it for wood more than before, and with brewers and dyers seemingly giving it a try. But the stinking smoke rapidly resulted in the brewers and dyers being banned from using it, and there was certainly no shift to coal being burnt in people’s homes.6


    1. Ruth Goodman, The Domestic Revolution (Michael O’Mara Books, 2020), p.91

    2. James A. Galloway, Derek Keene, and Margaret Murphy, “Fuelling the City: Production and Distribution of Firewood and Fuel in London’s Region, 1290-1400”, The Economic History Review 49, no. 3 (1996): pp.447–9

    3. J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry, Vol. 1 (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1932), p.107, pp.115-8

    4. Oliver Rackham, Ancient Woodland: Its History, Vegetation and Uses in England (Edward Arnold, 1980), pp.3-6 is the best and clearest summary I have seen.

    5. Galloway et al.

    6. John Hatcher, The History of the British Coal Industry: Volume 1: Before 1700: Towards the Age of Coal (Oxford University Press, 1993), p.25

August 22, 2024

QotD: The changing role of the Medieval housewife in England

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The transition may also have driven broader cultural shifts. In 1523, Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbandrie gave a list of a housewife’s jobs (“What warkes a wyfe shulde do in generall”) that included the household’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, and childcare, all of which are typically part of modern housewifery, but also milking cows, taking grain to the miller, malting barley, making butter and cheese, raising pigs and poultry, gardening, growing hemp and flax and then spinning it, weaving, winnowing grain, making hay, cutting grain, selling her produce at market — and, as necessary, helping her husband to fill the dungcart, plow the fields, or load hay. Roles were still highly gendered, but compared to eighteenth and nineteenth century household manuals this is a remarkable amount of time spent out of the house, and the difference holds even when you compare the work hired maids were doing in both periods. Around the time of the advent of coal, though, our descriptions of women’s work increasingly portray it as contained within the walls of the home — or, at most, in the dairy or the poultry yard. Of course social transformations are never monocausal, and the increasing specialization and mechanization that moved some production out of the household probably nudged things along, but Goodman suggests that “the additional demands of running a coal-fired household might have also helped push the idea that a woman’s place is within the home”. After all, if your cleaning takes twice as long, there’s simply less time available for all that agricultural labor and small-scale commerce.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.

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