Quotulatiousness

June 16, 2014

Magna Carta

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:35

Allan Massie says there was “nothing revolutionary” about the signing of the Magna Carta on June 15, 1215:

The document was presented to the king and his signature, by seal, extracted. He had violated so many customs of the realm and infringed long-established liberties, which we might rather call privileges, that his rule in its present form had become intolerable to the barons and landholders, to the Church, and to the merchants of boroughs protected by their own charters.

The Magna Carta rehearsed these customs and liberties. It was a reproof to the king, to compel him to mend his ways. Far from being an abstract statement of rights, it was a practical document: calling the king to order, reminding him of the limits on his power, and insisting that he was not above the law, but subject to it.

This was not unusual. Kings had been brought to a similar point before. Medieval monarchy was limited monarchy, in theory and of necessity. Kings had to govern in collaboration with “the Community of the Realm” (essentially the propertied classes) and with their consent. Ultimately, having neither a standing army nor a police force, they had little choice. Moreover, the society of the Middle Ages was intensely legalistic – and the purpose of Magna Carta was to remind the king of what the laws were and of his duty to observe them if he himself was to receive loyalty and obedience.

If Shakespeare makes no mention of the document it is because in the years of the Tudor despotism the balance between government and governed shifted in favour of the former. The Tudors made use of what were called the Prerogative Courts to bypass the common law of England. Torture, practised on “subversive” Roman Catholics by the Elizabethan government, was illegal under the common law (and indeed under Magna Carta), but inflicted by the judgment of the Prerogative Courts (the Star Chamber and High Commission).

It was the parliamentary and judicial opposition to the less effective (and less oppressive) despotism of the early Stuarts which revived interest in Magna Carta, now presented as the safeguard or guarantee of English liberty. Though it had been drawn up by Anglo-Norman bishops and presented to the king by Anglo-Norman barons, the theory was developed that it represented a statement of the rights and liberties enjoyed in Anglo-Saxon England by the “free-born” Englishmen before they were subjugated to the “Norman Yoke”.

This, doubtless, offered an unhistorical and rather-too-rosy view of Anglo-Saxon England before the Norman Conquest, but it had this to be said for it: that the Norman and Plantagenet kings had regularly promised to abide by the “laws of King Edward” – the saintly “Confessor” and second-last Saxon king.

March 21, 2014

Byzantium’s secret weapon

Filed under: Europe, History, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

Military History Now had a guest post from Κonstantinos Karatolios talking about the Byzantine secret weapon known as “Greek Fire”:

The thousand-year Byzantine Empire could not have survived through the centuries without its powerful military. But Constantinople’s mighty army and navy didn’t just keep enemies at bay, they also helped it to expand into new territories and ultimately dominate the whole of the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. Of course, while the Byzantines’ stunning battlefield success was in part a by-product of military knowledge inherited from the old Roman Empire, it was also born out of new tactics and weaponry. One example of this is Greek fire. Also known as thalassion pyr, skeyaston pyr and medikon elaion, this incendiary liquid, which could be squirted or hurled into the ranks of an enemy, was perhaps the most fearsome of all of the empire’s armaments. Its use, whether on land or sea, verges on legend and yet almost all we know about Greek fire remains clouded in mystery. We are sure of one thing however — it was used with devastating effect throughout the whole course of the Byzantine Empire.

Here are nine little known facts about Greek fire.

I think there’s a typo in the list, as it mentions the first recorded use of the weapon by Anastasios I in 541, which was actually the middle of the reign of Justinian I. Anastasios I reigned from 491 to 518.

February 28, 2014

“Reenactment’s for pussies”

Filed under: Europe, History, Russia, Sports, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:39

The SCA or Western Martial Arts not macho enough for you? You might be interested in medieval combat with steel weapons:

Steel kisses steel. Actual sparks fly. An axe snaps in half as it dents a helmet. A municipal garbage bin, carelessly left at the fringes of the fight, implodes in a sorry mess of dented plastic as four armored men collapse onto it.

I’m witnessing, from the far side of a flimsy rope, something much more violent than your average historical battle reenactment. These men are engaging in full-contact medieval combat in an open training session for the U.K. iteration of a growing global society. More GBH than LARP, it substitutes foam weaponry for real steel and scripted acting for unpredictable scuffling, and despite the mayhem, operates under tightly controlled rules and regulations.

[…]

The team’s press officer, Nick Birkin, agrees. “Reenactors are used to dink, dink,” he says, mimicking the prissy swordplay anyone who’s sat through a retelling of Agincourt will no doubt cringe to recall. Another weekend warrior sums up the distinction more succinctly: “Reenactment’s for pussies.”

I first heard about the Russian origins of this new organization from a co-worker who was still upset he’d had to leave his chainmail and weapons behind when he came to Canada from St. Petersburg. It sounded like great fun … but was significantly more injury-prone than the SCA combat of my youth.

The Russian connection also brings with it some aspects that make Western practitioners uncomfortable:

The West’s notions of fair play and how an international tournament should be run are, it would seem, at odds with that of the East’s. Dissent has been stirring among the camps and honor was called into question on several sides, and complaints started to be raised about the Russian organizers. The first to percolate were stories about rule-changing and underhand tournament organization.

“They said that under no circumstances can you have a metal handle on your shield, and that you can’t wear titanium armor,” U.S. team captain Andre Sinou tells me later over the phone from his native New Jersey. Sinou is also the owner of an armory manufacturer called Icefalcon. “So I told my guys that. Then when we went out there, all the Eastern teams had metal handles. We complained, and they said, ‘Oh, we sent out a memo’, which none of the Western countries got.”

Many of the Eastern fighters were wearing Kevlar armor under their suits and came with lethal equipment — such as two-handled halberd axes — that was banned for anyone else. “The weapons that some of the Eastern teams were using were just dangerous,” Sinou says. “They were pointy, they didn’t follow the rules for sharpness. After 2013, we had puncture wounds — we had a meaty guy who got punctured all the way down to the bone on the shoulder. It hit his spine. He could have been paralyzed.”

Nick Birkin from Team U.K. echoes many of these complaints and adds his own stories of match fixing, detailing devious techniques that would put a Sochi figure-skating judge to shame and which apparently allowed Russian teams to progress further and enjoy longer rest breaks between contests. But the growing concerns of an increasing number of countries was met by a response almost laughably Kafkaesque.

H/T to Steve Muhlberger for the link.

October 30, 2013

Dr. Richard Holmes – Agincourt 1415

Filed under: Europe, France, History, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:46

Published on 3 Oct 2012

Dr Richard Holmes’ TV Documentary series from 1996 entitled War Walks. This episode concerns the legendary Battle of Agincourt. Unfortunately, Richard Holmes — my favourite military historian — died of Pneumonia only last year (2011).

March 5, 2013

David Friedman reviews The Birth of the West by Paul Collins

Filed under: Books, Europe, France, Germany, History, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:21

David Friedman on the recent book The Birth of the West: Rome, Germany, France, and the Creation of Europe in the Tenth Century, by Paul Collins.

Take five or six soap operas set in central and western Europe in the 10th century. Chop in pieces, stir, and glue together more or less at random. You now have something reasonably close to the picture that emerges from The Birth of the West, 427 pages of 10-century history as presented by the Australian author and broadcaster Paul Collins. The reader is left wondering whether the chaos is a bug or a feature, a failure of the author to shape his material into a coherent story or a deliberate attempt to show the reader the chaos of the period.

[. . .]

The most interesting thing about the book may be what it implies about how much we do not know. Thus, for instance, Collins offers a lurid account of Theodora and Marizia, a mother and daughter heavily involved in papal politics. (Marizia was supposedly the mistress at age 14 of an 80-year-old pope.) He then mentions that his source was writing 50 years after the events he describes, that another source presents a much more attractive picture, and that both have axes to grind. But he goes on to treat the first account as accurate. He offers a glowing portrait of Theophano, a Byzantine princess who became the wife of Otto II and mother of Otto III, dismissing a much more critical picture from a contemporary source. A historian with a different set of biases could have given us an equally convincing version in which some of the good guys and bad guys switched hats.

[. . .]

Collins presents the conventional view of the dominant role of religion in medieval Europe, cites several books by the French medievalist Georges Duby, but not the one in which Duby argues that the picture is badly distorted by the fact that almost all of our sources are clerical. The point is relevant for modern sources as well: Collins himself spent much of his life as a Catholic priest before resigning over a dispute with the Vatican and taking up a second career as writer and broadcaster.

None of that means that the story he tells is wrong. The modern reader inclined to take any single historical view as gospel might consider how much disagreement there is on issues for which we have enormously better information — the Vietnam War, say, or the evaluation of controversial political figures such as FDR, Reagan, or Thatcher. It does not even mean that the book should have been written differently. The story Collins tells is confusing enough as is; it would be far more confusing if he had tried to keep all of the alternative narratives going at once. And, to his credit, while he tells a single story, he makes it clear that alternatives exist — almost all of my critical comments are based on information he himself presents. I would not recommend the book as light reading, but it does provide a vivid picture of the century.

March 27, 2011

Over-analyzing the Bayeux Tapestry

Filed under: France, History, Humour, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:39

Chris Mellor looks at the Bayeux Tapestry from a data storage perspective:

The Bayeux Tapestry, the victor’s view of the events, was finished in 1077, ten years after it was begun, making it 934 years old. At 224.3ft long and 1.6ft wide the total surface area is 358.88sq ft.

Our understanding is that the Tapestry features 45 to 48 threads per inch which gives us a resolution approximating 47dpi with a colour depth of 8, ignoring later repairs. Thus, in information terms, the tapestry contains 2.429MB of information, assuming 1-bit per colour, 47dpi, and a 51,678.72 square inch surface area.

From the writing point of view it took ten years for English (Saxon) seamsters, seamstresses or embroiderers to write this 2.429MB of data, which must be some kind of record. Assuming an eight-hour, 350-day working period for these ten years, that implies a write bandwidth of 10.84 bytes/hour; a spectacularly slow data rate in information transfer terms.

What makes it worse is that there were multiple parallel write heads — seamsters or seamstresses — and we could envisage a team of five on average, meaning each write head in this theoretical Bayeux Tapestry archiving model wrote at a rate of 2.168 bytes/per hour (17.344 bits/min). A truly amazingly poor information write bandwidth from our IT viewpoint, but a blur of flickering needles and fingers seen from the embroiderers’ seat.

May 30, 2010

QotD: The first great back-to-the-land experiment

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Europe, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:39

. . . the plundering, the lack of invention, the barbarians and above all Diocletian’s red tape did for Rome in the end. As the empire disintegrated under this bureaucratic burden, at least in the west, money lending at interest stopped and coins ceased to circulate so freely. In the Dark Ages that followed, because free trade became impossible, cities shrank, markets atrophied, merchants disappeared, literacy declined and — crudely speaking — once Goth, Hun and Vandal plundering had run its course, everybody had to go back to being self-sufficient again. Europe de-urbanised. Even Rome and Constantinople fell to a fraction of their former populations. Trade with Egypt and India largely dried up, especially once the Arabs took control of Alexandria, so that not only did oriental imports such as papyrus, spices and silk cease to appear, but those export-oriented plantations in Campania became the plots of subsistence farmers instead. In that sense, the decline of the Roman Empire turned consumer traders back into subsistence peasants. The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund): you ground your own corn, sheared your own sheep, cured your own leather and cut your own wood. Any pathetic surplus you generated was confiscated to support a monk, or maybe you could occasionally sell something to buy a metal tool off a part-time blacksmith. Otherwise, subsistence replaced specialization.

Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, p. 175

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