Christmas Every Day

Last autumn I was strolling down a street in the old part of Tbilisi, Georgia when I chanced upon a monastery dedicated to the 40 Martyrs of Sebaste. “That’s a lot of martyrs in one place, ” I remarked and thought no more about it.

A week later I am in the Caucasus mountains in the village of Mestia which has a world-class museum of ethnography, housing treasures that have been stored by the clans for over a thousand years. Imagine my delight when I come across this icon. Yes, it’s those 40 martyrs.

While Emperor Constantine was legislating religious toleration in the western part of the Roman world, his colleague in the east, Licinius, was persecuting Christians. In 320, when it was discovered that members of the Twelfth Legion stationed in Asia Minor were Christians who refused to renounce their faith, they were ordered to strip and freeze to death on a nearby ice-covered lake. One of their number weakened and headed for a heated bath house but a guard watching over them was converted and joined the martyrs. 

This incident inspired numerous portrayals in icon form, some of them, like the one immediately below, showing the apostate heading for the bath house (where he immediately died of shock) and the guard disrobing.

Given the current unchecked spate of lies and misinformation polluting our society, it may be worthwhile to consult the opinions of Thomas Jefferson on the subject, written in an 1807 letter, substituting the word “newspaper” with the phrase “social media”.

To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted so as to be most useful, I should answer “by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only.” Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it’s benefits, than is done by its abandoned prostitution to falsehood.

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day.

I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time: whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables.

General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, but no details can be relied on. I will add that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Perhaps an editor might begin a reformation in some such way as this: Divide his paper into 4 chapters. Heading the 1st. Truths, 2d. Probabilities, 3d. Possibilities, 4th. Lies. The 1st. chapter would be very short...

Such an editor too would have to set his face against the demoralising practice of feeding the public mind habitually on slander, & the depravity of taste which this nauseous aliment induces. defamation is becoming a necessary of life: insomuch that a dish of tea, in the morning or evening, cannot be digested without this stimulant. 

Hume, for example, ignored the following response by James Beattie to his attacks on religion. People like Hume, Beattie wrote, should remember that “in the solitary scenes of life, there is many an honest and tender heart pining with incurable anguish, pierced with the sharpest sting of disappointment, bereft of friends, chilled with poverty, racked with disease, scourged by the oppressor; whom nothing but trust in Providence, and the hope of a future retribution, could preserve from the agonies of despair. And do they [the Enlightened], with sacrilegious hands, attempt to violate the last refuge of the miserable, and to rob them of the only comfort that had survived the ravages of misfortunate, malice, and tyranny!” 

– David Stove, Cricket versus Republicanism, 1995

This unaired British comedy sketch meant for the series The Complete and Utter History of Britain will appeal only to that reader who took years of Latin in high school and floundered, as I did, with verb forms. It features an ancient British couple, after the Roman invasion, coming to terms with the new Latin language.

WIFE: Where been have you?

HUSBAND: Ah! Flosburga (vocative)! Well I, a cup of mead, with Egfrith, having been enjoying, I his place was about to having been making the action of being about to go, when …

WIFE: You me that expect to believe?

HUSBAND: It the honest truth is… I, the hour being late and the mead having been much finished, not another one by with or from Egfrith would have been about to have had, had he, fearing lest I, thinking myself treated ungenerously to have been, either would feel I ought to have with him been staying or …

WIFE (leaping up and packing suitcase): Of this that enough is! To my mother’s I, this the last straw being, you too far having gone, am home going.

(She leaves)

HUSBAND: Wait! (imperative) (He shakes his head sadly) This for a lark stuff.

(Pulls out bottle of mead from his coat) Fear I my wife me just understand me not does.

– Roger Wilmut, From Fringe to Flying Circus, 1980

1199 Richard the Lionheart of England is hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt. Richard had laid siege to a castle in France either because of a feudal quarrel with the Viscount of Limoges or because a treasure trove was supposedly on the domain. This tawdry skirmish resulted in a wound that turned gangrenous and would kill him. Conflicting stories are told about the boy who shot him after he was taken prisoner – he was either pardoned and sent off with a reward by Richard or he was skinned alive by Richard’s angry men.

1401 Mongols sack Baghdad. The second great wave of Mongol expansion began in central Asia led by Timur (aka Tamerlane) and swept almost to the Mediterranean. On the way Timur besieged Baghdad for 40 days and on capturing it killed everyone in the city except for Muslim clergy.

1603 Tokugawa leyasu begins the Tokugawa Shogunate, an isolationist dynasty that crushed high-ranking provincial lords, nearly exterminated Japanese Christianity, and forbade contact with the outside world. It will end only in the mid-19^th century when the American navy forces open the country to foreign trade and diplomacy.

1989 The tanker Exxon Valdez runs aground in Prince William Sound, Alaska and spills  240,000 barrels of crude oil. This ecological disaster did much to advance the cause of environmental activism and new mandates for maritime safety. 

493 The Murder of Odoacer

In the late 5th century the Roman Empire in the West was largely a fiction. The territories had been overrun by a number of Germanic tribes looking for loot and places to settle. The imperial throne was the plaything of rebellious generals and their barbarian allies. In 476 a Gothic/Hunnic military leader, Odoacer, deposed the last western emperor, Romulus Augustus, and sent the kid home without much ado.

Odoacer dispatched the regalia to Zeno, the eastern emperor in Constantinople, and henceforth claimed to be administering Italy in his name. For 12 years he ruled with notable success, collaborating with the Senate in Rome, keeping his land-hungry tribesmen happy, and making sure civilization still functioned. (Without the Roman civil service who was going to collect the taxes?) Though he was an Arian Christian he seems to have had decent relations with his Catholic subjects.

Odoacer’s big mistake was to join with other rebels in trying to depose Zeno, sensing that the emperor was viewing him as a danger. Zeno responded by turning to another Gothic general, Theoderic, who invaded Italy. After years of fighting, Theoderic had Odoacer cornered in Ravenna, where he was protected by easily-defended marsh land. In 493 a peace was negotiated whereby the peninsula was to be shared by the two warriors but at a banquet of reconciliation, Theoderic stabbed Odoacer to death, and ordered his wife and children to be murdered as well.

Theoderic wisely adhered to Odoacer’s policy of cooperation with the Roman elite and ruled Italy happily for over 30 years.

1931 Birth of Georges Dor

After the British conquered New France in 1759 during the Seven Years’ War, they decided to let the inhabitants keep their French language, Catholic religion, and civil law, partly as a counterweight to the restive English-speaking colonies to the south. This allowed the Québecois to develop a unique culture, as distinct from the rest of Canada as it was from France. 

In the 1950s and 60s, this culture became self-consciously aware and aggressively separatist, producing writers, composers, and singers who were proud to flaunt their indifference to American and Canadian artists. This was particularly marked among the singer-songwriters known as chansonniers, such as Gilles Vigneault, Pauline Julien, and Georges Dor.

Dor was a radio disk jockey and news director who wrote poetry in his spare time. In 1968 he penned his masterpiece “La Manic”, a love letter from a lonely worker in the north of Québec labouring on the Manicouagan power project. It rose to the tops of the Quebec charts and even captured the fancy of Anglophone prairie boys a thousand miles to the west. He sings it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2RzMhqbrkY

Its beginning in French goes:

Sumptuary laws

How we clothe and adorn our bodies has always been a public concern. Every religion has something to say about proper or improper dress or headwear or hairstyles. Every state has regulations regarding the outward show of a decent citizen. The outlandish garb of the 21st century against we oldsters impotently rail have their antecedents in every culture. Inevitably, the more outré clothing has been fingered as the cause of national calamities. 

Pierre Lacroix, a writer of the 19th century – an era which produced such crimes against fashion as the bustle, tartan trousers, and leg-o-mutton sleeves – here rants against the dandies of the 14th century.

“We must believe that God has permitted this as a just judgment on us for our sins,” say the monks who edited the Grande Chronique de St. Denis, in 1346, at the time of the unfortunate battle of Crecy, “although it does not belong to us to judge. But what we see we testify to; for pride was very great in France, and especially amongst the nobles and others, that is to say, pride of nobility, and covetousness. There was also much impropriety in dress, and this extended throughout the whole of France. Some had their clothes so short and so tight that it required the help of two persons to dress and undress them, and whilst they were being undressed they appeared as if they were being skinned. Others wore dresses plaited over their loins like women; some had chaperons cut out in points all round; some had tippets of one cloth, others of another; and some had their headdresses and sleeves reaching to the ground, looking more like mountebanks than anything else. Considering all this, it is not surprising if God employed the King of England as a scourge to correct the excesses of the French people.”

Other contemporary writers, and amongst these Pope Urban V and King Charles V, inveigh against the poulaines, [long-toed shoes] which had more than ever come into favour, and which were only considered correct in fashion when they were made as a kind of appendix to the foot, measuring at least double its length, and ornamented in the most fantastical manner. The Pope anathematized this deformity as “a mockery of God and the holy Church,” and the King forbad craftsmen to make them, and his subjects to wear them. All this is as nothing in comparison with the profuse extravagance displayed in furs, which was most outrageous and ruinous, and of which we could not form an idea were it not for the items in certain royal documents, from which we gather that, in order to trim two complete suits for King John, no fewer than six hundred and seventy martens’ skins were used.

More from Pierre Lacroix and the strange world of our medieval predecessors.

Because the rudimentary police forces of the Middle Ages were so ineffective, it was widely believed that punishment should be harsh, exemplary, and public. The Church did its best to rein in the more barbaric customs, both those inherited from the Romans and those introduced by the Germanic peoples. In 866, for example, Pope Nicholas V. condemned the Bulgarian custom of torturing the accused, telling them it was considered contrary to divine as well as to human law: “For,” says he, “a confession should be voluntary, and not forced. By means of the torture, an innocent man may suffer to the utmost without making any avowal; and, in such a case, what a crime for the judge! Or the person may be subdued by pain, and may acknowledge himself guilty, although he be not so, which throws an equally great sin upon the judge.” Priests could not shed blood nor take part in any procedure that might result in the death penalty. The Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 abolished the various forms of trial by ordeal. 

Nonetheless, every state employed torture and gruesome methods of imposing penalties on the culprit. In Germany public executioners could attain civic prominence and prosperity (though still be shunned by decent folk). In England, there was no such officer and executions were often botched by amateurs. Of his own country, Lacroix notes:

 In France, the executioner, otherwise called the King’s Sworn Tormentor, was the lowest of the officers of justice. His letters of appointment, which he received from the King, had, nevertheless, to be registered in Parliament; but, after having put the seal on them, it is said that the chancellor threw them under the table, in token of contempt. The executioner was generally forbidden to live within the precincts of the city, unless it was on the grounds where the pillory was situated; and, in some cases, so that he might not be mistaken amongst the people, he was forced to wear a particular coat, either of red or yellow. On the other hand, his duties ensured him certain privileges. In Paris, he possessed the right of havage, which consisted in taking all that he could hold in his hand from every load of grain which was brought into market; however, in order that the grain might be preserved from ignominious contact, he levied his tax with a wooden spoon. He enjoyed many similar rights over most articles of consumption, independently of benefiting by several taxes or fines.

We may add that popular belief generally ascribed to the executioner a certain practical knowledge of medicine, We which was supposed inherent in the profession itself; and the acquaintance with certain methods of cure unknown to doctors, was attributed to him; people went to buy from him the fat of culprits who had been hung, which was supposed to be a marvellous panacea. 

1882 An assassination attempt on Queen Victoria

P.G. Wodehouse said, “It is never difficult to distinguish between with a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.” One such irate Hibernian, Roderick MacLean, was annoyed with English folk and Queen Victoria in particular and entered the annals of infamy with a bungled regicide.

Roderick MacLean was born in 1854 and seems to have fallen into a what we could today a state of paranoia schizophrenia, convinced that he was beset with enemies and secret watchers.  He believed that he spoke personally with God who had assured him that he would ascend the British throne someday. God also gave him the secret number four and the colour blue as his lucky signs. After stating that he was intent on killing someone — anyone — his sister had him committed to a lunatic asylum. On his release he acquired a pistol and made his way to Windsor.

On March 2, 1882, as Queen Victoria made her way from the train to her coach, MacLean raised a gun and fired on her. The shot missed and he was set upon by the crowd. He was put on trial for high treason but a jury took only 5 minutes to pronounce him not guilty by reason of insanity. He spent the rest of his days in Broadmoor Prison, dying in 1912.

This was the last of 8 assassination attempts made upon Queen Victoria. They may well have led to an increased popularity with Britons. The monarch told her daughter that she was moved by the “enthusiasm, loyalty, sympathy and affection” shown by her subjects, and added: “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”