[News of the wider world travels very slowly from the Royal court to the outskirts, but] information velocity within the sticks […] is very high. Nobody cares much who this “Richard II” cat was, or knows anything about ol’ Whatzisface – Henry Something-or-other – who might’ve replaced him, but everyone knows when the local knight of the shire dies, and everything about his successor, because that matters. So, too, is information velocity high at court – the lords who backed Henry Bolingbroke over Richard II did so because Richard’s incompetence had their asses in a sling. They were the ones who had to depose a king for incompetence, without admitting, even for a second, that
a) competence is a criterion of legitimacy, and
b) someone other than the king is qualified to judge a king’s competence.Because admitting either, of course, opens the door to deposing the new guy on the same grounds, so unless you want civil war every time a king annoys one of his powerful magnates, you’d best find a way to square that circle …
… which they did, but not completely successfully, because within two generations they were back to deposing kings for incompetence. Turns out that’s a hard habit to break, especially when said kings are as incompetent as Henry VI always was, and Edward IV became. Only the fact that the eventual winner of the Wars of the Roses, Henry VII, was as competent as he was as ruthless kept the whole cycle from repeating.
Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-25.
October 16, 2023
QotD: Differentials of “information velocity” in a feudal society
October 15, 2023
History Summarized: The Castles of Wales
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 23 Jun 2023Every castle tells a story, but when one small country has over 600 castles, the collective story they tell is something like “holy heck ouch, ow, oh god, why are there so many arrows, ouch, good lord ow” – And that’s Wales for you.
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September 7, 2023
J.R.R. Tolkien was completely at odds with the literati of his day
In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank marks the 50th anniversary of the death of J.R.R. Tolkien:
J.R.R. Tolkien
A romantic Edwardian, steeped in Northern European folklore and Victorian literature, Tolkien was and is despised by large parts of the fashionable literary establishment. I have known very few neutral reactions to his work. People either love or loathe Lord of the Rings, which seems doomed to eternally inspire adoration or ire, and nothing much in between.
The often ferocious response of many critics perhaps stemmed from the apparent anachronism of the book, combined with its massive popularity. It was published in 1954, at a time when literary modernism was dominant and pervading the academy. Modernist writers were obsessed with interiority, broke with prior literary convention, and traded in irony, ambiguity and convoluted psychology. Literary critics of the time were taking up the “New Criticism”, which dispensed not only with the previous generation’s fascination with historical context in favour of close reading, but also with the traditionalist concerns for beauty and moral improvement, which were regarded as subjective and emotionally driven. Spare, complex prose, focused on the darker side of society, was in vogue. Into this context dropped 1,200 pages of dwarves, elves and hobbits in a grand battle of good and evil. They were greeted with the sort of enthusiasm one can imagine.
Edmund Wilson called the books “balderdash”, a battle between “Good people and Goblins”. The book’s morality was a sticking point even for the most sympathetic critics, with Edwin Muir lamenting that “his good people are consistently good, his evil figures immovably evil”. As his work travelled into the 60s, political problems cropped up, with one feminist critic writing a book-length attack on the series to denounce it as “irritatingly, blandly, traditionally masculine”.
The mystery of how a book can so sharply divide opinion is answered perhaps by how profoundly original and unusual The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s wider legendarium are. They are shamelessly moralistic, written on the basis of exhaustive literary theory, linguistics, geography and world-building, and quite devoid of social commentary or Empsonian irony. Yet they are as much a radical departure from prior literary forms as modernist literature itself is, making the book doubly at odds with prevailing style and doubly original.
The moralism of Tolkien’s work is not, as some critics seem to suppose, the product of schoolboy simplicity. It is far too rigorous for that. So morally charged and orchestrated is the novel, that it would be numbered amongst the small number of works that might have passed Plato’s test for literature. Not only is this in respect of its exacting honouring of good characters and depreciation of wicked ones within its narrative framework, but equally in Tolkien’s utter refusal of allegory, thus meeting Plato’s challenge that poets are dangerous imitators of the world.
August 17, 2023
QotD: The decline of the British aristocracy
In the years between 1920 and 1940 it was happening with the speed of a chemical reaction. Yet at the moment of writing it is still possible to speak of a ruling class. Like the knife which has had two new blades and three new handles, the upper fringe of English society is still almost what it was in the mid-nineteenth century. After 1832 the old landowning aristocracy steadily lost power, but instead of disappearing or becoming a fossil they simply intermarried with the merchants, manufacturers and financiers who had replaced them, and soon turned them into accurate copies of themselves. The wealthy ship-owner or cotton-miller set up for himself an alibi as a country gentleman, while his sons learned the right mannerisms at public schools which had been designed for just that purpose. England was ruled by an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus. And considering what energy the self-made men possessed, and considering that they were buying their way into a class which at any rate had a tradition of public service, one might have expected that able rulers could be produced in some such way.
And yet somehow the ruling class decayed, lost its ability, its daring, finally even its ruthlessness, until a time came when stuffed shirts like Eden or Halifax could stand out as men of exceptional talent. As for Baldwin, one could not even dignify him with the name of stuffed shirt. He was simply a hole in the air. The mishandling of England’s domestic problems during the nineteen-twenties had been bad enough, but British foreign policy between 1931 and 1939 is one of the wonders of the world. Why? What had happened? What was it that at every decisive moment made every British statesman do the wrong thing with so unerring an instinct?
The underlying fact was that the whole position of the monied class had long ceased to be justifiable. There they sat, at the centre of a vast empire and a world-wide financial network, drawing interest and profits and spending them – on what? It was fair to say that life within the British Empire was in many ways better than life outside it. Still, the Empire was underdeveloped, India slept in the Middle Ages, the Dominions lay empty, with foreigners jealously barred out, and even England was full of slums and unemployment. Only half a million people, the people in the country houses, definitely benefited from the existing system. Moreover, the tendency of small businesses to merge together into large ones robbed more and more of the monied class of their function and turned them into mere owners, their work being done for them by salaried managers and technicians. For long past there had been in England an entirely functionless class, living on money that was invested they hardly knew where, the “idle rich”, the people whose photographs you can look at in the Tatler and the Bystander, always supposing that you want to. The existence of these people was by any standard unjustifiable. They were simply parasites, less useful to society than his fleas are to a dog.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
August 5, 2023
The Anglo-Scottish “Debatable Lands”
In the visible portion of this post on the history of the Debatable Lands, Ed West considers the differences between national heartlands and the borders:
Border regions tend to be different, something I thought about during the summer before Brexit when we underwent a mammoth trip across five of those six countries (we never got around to Luxembourg, for which apologies). The journey from Alsace to Baden-Württemberg, or Liguria to Provence, brings home how nationality is often a matter of gradations and unnatural boundaries imposed on the whims of bureaucrats in distant capitals – often more alien than supposed foreigners across the border.
But once you leave that tunnel, things are different; there is no ambiguity between Calais and Dover, only ocean. You’re either in England or France. The same is not true of England’s northern frontier, Britain’s great zone of ambiguity, and in particular the area between Carlisle and Langholm which has historically been known as the “Debatable Land” – the subject of Graham Robb’s book.
Robb, an Anglo-Scot who mostly writes about France, moved back to this part of Britain in the 2010s, and describes it with his characteristic style of history, personal narrative and social commentary.
The border people are a unique subset of the English nation, being the last to undergo the pacification of government. Until the Union of Crowns in 1603, the region’s unusual position outside the orbit of either London and Edinburgh helped create a culture that was clannish and marked by violent feuds and cattle rustling.
Among the notorious Borderer clans were the Scotts, Burns and Irvines north of the border, and Fenwicks, Millburns, Charltons and Musgraves on the English side, while some could be found on both, among them the Halls, Nixons and Grahams. Many of these clans were outlaws and some were lawmen; others were both or either, depending on circumstances.
This proto-Wild West produced many characters, and among the famous border reivers of legend were men such as Archie Fire-the-Braes, Buggerback, Davy the Lady, Jok Pott the Bastard, Wynkyng Will, Nebless [noseless] Clem, Fingerless Well and Dog Dyntle [penis] Elliot.
“Debatable Land” most likely comes from batten, common land where livestock could be pastured, and it was this pastoral economy which shaped their psychology: the importance of honour, and a reputation for violence and revenge, as a deterrent against predators.
Violence was so common on the border that there sprung a tradition whereby truces were arranged in return for “blackmail”, a tribute to border chiefs, from the Middle English male, tribute; only in the nineteenth century did this come to mean any sort of extortion.
Another of the Borderers’ contributions to our language is “bereaved”, which is how you felt after the reivers had raided your land (it usually meant to have lost property rather than a loved one). Other local terms were less successful in spreading, such as “scumfishing”, which meant “surrounding a pele tower with a smouldering heap of damp straw and smoking out its inhabitants”, as Robb put it.
Border folk relied heavily on the protection of their clan, and so “for a reiver, the greatest disgrace was not excommunication but ostracism: if a man failed to keep his word, one of his gloves or a picture of his face was stuck on the end of a spear or a sword and paraded around at public meetings. This ‘bauchling’ was considered a punishment worse than death.”
Both the kings of England and Scotland regarded them as a nuisance. In 1525, the Archbishop of Glasgow excommunicated the reivers en masse; Parliamentary decrees issued by authorities in England and Scotland between 1537 and 1551 stated that “all Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock … without any redress to be made for same”.
In the 1580s the border area remained “verie ticklie and dangerous”. One adviser even urged Elizabeth I to build another Roman wall because he believed the “Romaynes” had built theirs to defend themselves “from the dayly and daungereous incurtyons of the valyaunte barbarous Scottyshe nation”.
July 31, 2023
The grim plight of the UK as global BOILING advances
Alexander McKibbin reports on the UK’s latest set of climate-related warnings from the Met Office:
No one who has read and digested this authoritative and comprehensive report can fail to be apprehensive about the future. Harnessing the technological power of its powerful computer modelling system, the Met Office can produce a highly accurate forecast of how the changing climate will affect the UK. It is a truly dystopian projection and one which should ring alarm bells in the top echelons of Whitehall.
Below is a selection of areas highlighted as being at risk if we do not achieve Net Zero by 2030.
Berwick-upon-Tweed
This charming border town with castle ruins and cobbled streets will disappear in the next five years, according to the Met Office. The picturesque Royal Border, Berwick and Union Suspension bridges will all be drowned by an unstoppable and ever-rising River Tweed. Displaced residents will need to find alternative accommodation and it is likely that looting and scavenging will become commonplace.
Kent
Known for centuries as “The Garden of England”, this delightful county currently plays host to gentle hills, fertile farmland and fruit-filled orchards. Country estates such as Penshurst Place, Sissinghurst Castle and Hall Place Gardens are all well known for the scenic views they offer.
Sadly, this will all shortly vanish under burning heat exceeding 200 degrees Fahrenheit. The rivers Stour, Medway, Darent and Dour will slow to a trickle and finally dry up completely. Dust storms and dust bowls will be part and parcel of daily living, as will camels and occasional prickly pear cacti dotted across a barren and arid wasteland. Dartford, the Met Office confidently asserts, will be a never-ending vista of shape changing sand dunes.
Yorkshire
Known to inhabitants as “God’s Own County”, no one can deny the many charms of England’s largest county with a population twice the size of Wales.
Horse-racing is a major attraction and with nine courses to choose from including Thirsk, Wetherby, Redcar and Catterick, no wonder Yorkshire is a popular tourist destination. What a pity that all of these temples to equestrian prowess will be lost to an all-consuming glacier that will blanket the land. The report is not sure whether at 104ft high the scenic Ribblehead Viaduct will avoid being trapped in this icy embrace. It is suggested that refugees should make their way south to seek food and shelter.
July 30, 2023
QotD: Thomas Hobbes and Leviathan
One last point before we close: As we’ve noted here probably ad nauseam, modern English is far less Latinate than the idiom of Hobbes’s day. Hobbes translated Leviathan into Latin himself, and while I’m not going to cite it (not least because I myself don’t read Latin), it’s crucial to note that, for the speakers of Hobbes’s brand of English, “right” is a direction – the opposite of left.
I’m oversimplifying for clarity, because it’s crucial that we get this – when the Barons at Runnymede, Thomas Hobbes, hell, even Thomas Jefferson talked about “rights”, they might’ve used the English word, but they were thinking in Latin. They meant ius – as in, ius gentium (the right of peoples, “international law”), ius civile (“civil law”, originally the laws of the City of Rome itself), etc. Thus, if Hobbes had said “might makes right” – which he actually did say, or damn close, Leviathan, passim – he would’ve meant something like “might makes ius“. Might legitimates, in other words – the actually existing power is legitimate, because it exists.
We Postmoderns, who speak only English, get confused by the many contradictory senses of “right”. The phrase “might makes right” horrifies us (at least, when a Republican is president) because we take it to mean “might makes correct” – that any action of the government at all is legally, ethically, morally ok, simply because the government did it. Even Machiavelli, who truly did believe that might makes ius, would laugh at this – or, I should say, especially Machiavelli, as he explicitly urges his Prince, who by definition has ius, to horribly immoral, unethical, “illegal” (in the “law of nations” sense) behavior.
So let’s clarify: Might legitimates. That doesn’t roll off the tongue like the other phrase, but it avoids a lot of confusion.
Severian, “Hobbes (II)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-11.
July 23, 2023
QotD: Losing the Mandate of Heaven is fatal for a ruler
… so long as the rulers keep the Mandate of Heaven.
That no doubt seems like a stolen base, as something as amorphous as the “Mandate of Heaven” can be stretched to cover just about anything, but it’s the best I can do to convey what I mean. And I think you’ll see the utility of it when we look at a few examples. The negative first: Since Usurpers are much in the news these days, look at any successful one. England’s Henry IV, for example, or Henry VII. They had endless troubles during their personal rule, as all the people who mattered knew them when they were just one noble among many. Their sons, on the other hand, sat about as easily on the throne as any medieval monarch could, and while some of that was no doubt due to their sterling personal qualities,1 a lot of it was simply, for lack of a better term, “the Mandate of Heaven” — the Usurper who delivered stability and competence in his lifetime passed on the purple to a stable, competent son, which proves the regime’s essential rightness.
In other words, inertia kicks in — just an object in motion tends to stay in motion, a competent regime continues competent, in public perception at least. Those who are old enough to remember the Wars of the Roses (etc.) are just grateful that they don’t have to go through it again, while the younger generations simply don’t know any different. So long as the usurper’s son isn’t both personally loathsome and egregiously incompetent, things will go on much as before. (And please note what an extremely high bar that is — we’re talking Nero- or Commodus-level loathsome incompetence. France spent a lot of the Hundred Years’ War under the “leadership” of a filthy lunatic who thought he was made of glass, and they came out ok … largely because soon after he kicked, it was England’s turn to suffer the long reign of a filthy lunatic, but still. It’s got to be spectacular on both counts to kick off a revolution).
Severian, “Witch Trial Syndrome”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-01-27.
1. Opinions are bitterly divided on Henry VIII even among the laity, and professionals carry on blood feuds about it, but everyone agrees that for all his faults, the young Henry VIII was a seriously impressive guy. Contemporaries certainly thought so — Erasmus was a professional ass-kisser, but Thomas More was dazzled by Henry, too, and More was a tough guy to fool.
July 3, 2023
QotD: The key weakness of the royal cause in the English Civil War
[T]he power of the mighty hath no foundation, but in the opinion and belief of the people.
A king whose knights won’t ride out to battle on his behalf is just a weirdo in funny clothes. Charles I lost for a lot of reasons, but far from the least of them was that his “foundation” was badly cracked. However attached one might be to the notion of monarchy in the abstract, it – monarchy – is always intimately connected to the personality of the monarch … and Charles I was a real piece of work, even by the world-class standards of Renaissance princes. Parliament was outgunned, often outmanned, and suffered from what should’ve been a critical shortage of experienced leadership. But all those massive advantages were offset by the fact that the Royalist forces were fighting for Charles I, personally.
(This is not the place for a long discussion of the course of the English Civil Wars – and I’m not qualified to give you one in any case – but a quick look at the top commanders of the opposing sides will illustrate the point. Prince Rupert was arguably the equal, mano-a-mano, of any Parliamentary general, up to and including Cromwell. But he was still a Prince, and carried on like one (like a young one, to boot) … and even if he weren’t, he was still running the show on behalf of his uncle. Cromwell, on the other hand, inspired fanatic loyalty, not least because he embodied a cause that was much higher than himself).
Severian, “Hobbes (III)”, Founding Questions, 2020-12-12.
June 1, 2023
QotD: “The Puritans were the SJWs of their day”
The Puritans, as English Calvinists were called, wrote difficult prose, but in translation it sounds shockingly modern. The Puritans were the SJWs of their day, obsessed with their own pwecious widdle selves. They didn’t get around to making up xzheyr own pronouns, but they did give themselves self-righteous new names — when Ben Johnson called his caricature Puritan Zeal-of-the-Land Busy he got big laughs, but he wasn’t really joking, they really did stuff like that. To be a Puritan requires two things: An obsessive focus on the tiniest micro-movements of your own soul …
… and an equally obsessive focus on forcing other people to disclose the tiniest micro-movements of their souls. There’s nothing anyone could ever do, so trivial that a Puritan could in good conscience overlook it. Calvin’s Geneva was the closest thing to a police state 16th century technology allowed, and when their turn came, Oliver Cromwell and the boys gave importing it to England the old college try. And, of course, Plymouth Bay Colony started as a Puritan police state …
Ideology, then, removes the distinction between public and private. You can’t simply say you’re a Puritan, you really have to BE one — constantly, perfectly, since there’s nothing that Puritanism doesn’t touch. And the only way to do that, of course, is to do everything in full public view at all times. Calvin did — as Walzer remarks, John Calvin, the man, is almost completely absent from Calvin’s writings. (Unlike Luther, whose idiosyncratic, not to say lunatic, personality comes through in practically every sentence). Calvin achieved that clear windowpane prose Orwell claimed was the mark of a great writer — nothing between audience and subject at all. Calvin would, indeed, take the remark that he’s almost a complete cipher, personally, as a very high compliment.
Severian, “Ideology II”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-09.
May 28, 2023
Musical copyrights – crazy as they are now – were far worse in history
Ted Gioia outlines just how the concept of musical copyrights produced even more distortions in the past than they do today:
Assignments of copyrights photostat copies by mollyali (CC BY-NC 2.0) https://flic.kr/p/5JbsPE
People tell me it was never this bad before. But they’re wrong. The music copyright situation was even crazier 500 years ago.
The Italians took the lead in this, and it all started with Ottaviano Petrucci gaining a patent from the Venetian Senate for publishing polyphonic music with a printing press back in 1498. Andrea Antico secured a similar privilege from Pope Leo X, which covered the Papal States.
It’s hard to imagine a Pope making decisions on music IP, but that was how the game was played back then. In 1516, Pope Leo actually took away Petrucci’s monopoly on organ music, and gave it to Antico instead. You had to please the pontiff to publish pieces for the pipes.
Over time, this practice spread elsewhere. In a famous case, the composer Lully was granted total control over all operas performed in France. He died a very wealthy man — with five houses in Paris and two in the country. His estate was valued at 800,000 livres—some 500 times the salary of a typical court musician.
But the most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”
If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.
But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note. Not even the Marvin Gaye estate makes those kinds of demands.
Tallis died a decade after the patent was granted—putting Byrd in sole charge of English music. I’d like to tell you that he exercised his monopoly with a fair and open mind—especially because I so greatly esteem Byrd’s music, and also I’d like to think that composers are better at arts management than profit-driven businesses. But the flourishing of music publishing in England after the expiration of the patent — when, for a brief spell, anybody could issue scores — makes clear that Byrd did more to constrain than empower other composers.
May 19, 2023
They made a MOVIE about the discovery of Richard III’s remains!!!
Vlogging Through History
Published 16 Sept 2022Here’s a fantastic hour-long breakdown of the entire search and discovery process – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsTyG…
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May 6, 2023
Face-palm-worthy Coronations of the past
I’m sure almost everyone — except the tiny number of Republicans in England — hopes for a smooth and spectacular Coronation for His Majesty King Charles III, there are plenty of examples of past Coronations that were anything but:
The Imperial State Crown, worn by the British monarch in the royal procession following the Coronation and at the opening of Parliament.
Wikimedia Commons.
Whereas so many traditions are 19th-century inventions, as any student of history knows, the coronation of Britain’s monarch is a rare example of a truly ancient custom, dating to the 10th century in its structure and with origins stretching back further, to the Romans and even Hebrews. As Tom Holland said on yesterday’s The Rest is History, it is like going to a zoo and seeing a woolly mammoth.
It is a sacred moment when the sovereign becomes God’s anointed, an almost unique state ceremony in a secular world. The custom originates with the late Roman emperors, associated with Constantine the Great and certainly established by the mid-fifth century in Constantinople. In the West, and following the fall of that half of the empire, barbarian leaders were eager to imitate imperial styles (a bit like today). Germanic and Celtic tribes had ceremonies for new leaders in which particular swords were displayed, a feature of later rites, but as they developed the practice of kingship, so their rituals began to imitate the Roman form.
[…]
Athelstan, the first king of England, had been crowned in 925 at Kingston, a spot where seven kings of England had been enthroned. Perhaps the most notorious was Edwig, a 16-year-old whose proto-rock star qualities were not appreciated at the time of his coronation in 955. Indeed he failed to turn up, and when Bishop Dunstan marched to the king’s nearby quarters to drag him along, he found the teenager in bed with a “strumpet” and the strumpet’s mother.
However, Edwig died four years later, and Dunstan was elevated to Canterbury, became a saint and, through chronicles recorded by churchmen, got his version of history.
This reign might seem impossibly distant and obscure, yet it was under Edwig’s brother Edgar that the current coronation format was established. Edgar was a powerful king, and the last of the Anglo-Saxon rulers to live a happily Viking-free existence. His coronation on 11 May 973 was an illustration of his strength, and also his aspirations. Held at Bath, most likely because of its association with Rome, it involved a bishop placing the crown on the king’s head, in the Carolingian style, and would become the template for the ceremony for his direct descendent Charles III.
But not all coronations would run so smoothly. After Edgar’s death his elder son Edward was killed in possibly nefarious circumstances, and his stepmother placed her son Ethelred on the throne. Ethelred’s reign was plagued by disaster, and it was later said in the chronicles — the medieval equivalent of “and then the whole bus clapped” Twitter tales — that Bishop Dunstan lambasted the boy-king for “the sin of your shameful mother and the sin of the men who shared in her wicked plot” and that it “shall not be blotted out except by the shedding of much blood of your miserable subjects”.
This would have been merely awkward, whereas many coronations ended in riot or bloodshed. The most notorious incident in English history occurred on Christmas Day 1066: Duke William got off to a bad start PR-wise when his nervous Norman guards mistook cheers for booing and began attacking the crowd, before setting fire to buildings.
[…]
Perhaps the most scandalous coronation took place at the newly completed St Paul’s Cathedral in February 1308. The young queen, Isabella, was the 12-year-old daughter of France’s King Philippe Le Bel, and had inherited her father’s good looks, with thick blonde hair and large blue, unblinking eyes. Her husband, Edward II, was a somewhat boneheaded man of 24 years whose idea of entertainment was watching court fools fall off tables.
It was a fairy tale coronation for the young girl, apart from a plaster wall collapsing, bringing down the high altar and killing a member of the audience, and the fact that her husband was gay and spent the afternoon fondling his lover Piers Gaveston, while ignoring her. Isabella’s two uncles, who had made the trip from France, were furious at the behaviour of their new English in-law, though perhaps not surprised.
[…]
One of the most disastrous coronations occurred during the Hundred Years’ War. Inspired by Joan of Arc, in 1429 the French had beaten the English at the Battle at Patay, after which their leader Charles VII entered Reims and was crowned at the spot where the kings of France had been enthroned for almost a thousand years. In response, on 26 December 1431 the English had their candidate, the 10-year-old Henry VI, crowned King of France at Notre-Dame in Paris, where one road was turned into a river of wine filled with mermaids, and Christmas plays were performed on an outdoor stage.
Unfortunately, the coronation was a complete mess. The entire service was in English, the weather was freezing, the event rushed, too packed, filled with pickpockets, and worst of all the English made such bad food that even the sick and destitute at the Hotel-Dieu complained they had never tasted anything so vile.
May 1, 2023
Britain’s first embassy to India
In The Critic, C.C. Corn reviews Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire by Nandini Das, a look at the first, halting steps of the East India Company at the court of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir early in the seventeenth century:
The late Sir Christopher Meyer, the closest thing modern British diplomacy has produced to a public figure, enjoyed comparing his trade to prostitution. Both are ancient trades, and neither enjoys a wholly favourable reputation. Any modern diplomat will discreetly confirm that the profession is far from the anodyne, flag-emoji civility and coyly embarrassed glamour they project on Twitter.
Whilst none of our modern representatives are working in quite the same conditions as their predecessor Sir Thomas Roe, they may well find uncanny parallels with his unfortunate mission.
The fledgling and precarious East India Company, founded in 1600, had sent representatives to the Mughal court before, but they were mere merchants and messengers. The stern rebuff they received called for a formal representative of the King.
After the company persuaded James I of the necessity, Thomas Roe (a well-connected MP, friend to John Donne and Ben Jonson, and already an experienced traveller after an attempt to reach the legendary El Dorado) was dispatched to the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir in 1615. He remained there until 1619, in an embassy that the cultural historian, Nandini Das, describes in Courting India as “infuriatingly unproductive”.
The company kept rigorous records, and Roe meticulously kept a daily diary. Professor Das uses these and the reports of other English travellers to narrate Roe’s journey, as well as contemporary literature and, more importantly, their Indian equivalents. It is not so much the diplomatic success that fascinates Das about Roe’s embassy, but the mindset of the early modern encounter between England and India.
In a boom time for histories of British colonialism, this is an intelligent and gripping book with a thoughtful awareness of human relationships and frailties, and a model approach to early modern cross-cultural encounters.
The privations suffered by Roe’s embassy are striking. Only three in ten people had a chance of coming home alive from the voyage to India. Das’s recreation of the journey out is as intense and claustrophobic as Das Boot, with rotten medicine, cruel maritime punishments and untrained boys acting as surgeons. Dead bodies onboard would have their toes gnawed off by rats within hours.
In India, the English sailors excelled themselves as uncouth Brits abroad: drinking, fighting and baiting local customs, such as killing a calf. A chaplain was notorious for “drunkenly dodging brothel-keepers and engaging in half-naked brawls”. For most of his time, Roe — seeking to keep costs down — lived with merchants and factors already in India, in a cramped, filthy, dangerous house.
April 22, 2023
The Big Four
Jago Hazzard
Published 1 Jan 2023It’s 100 years since the Grouping – what happened, why and how?
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