February 19

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by gerryadmin

Back to precarity. In 17th-century London it was the responsibility of each parish to keep records of births and deaths. The birth part was easy as each child was required to be presented for baptism and its name entered. Here is how the procedure for establishing cause of death worked:

When anyone dies, then either by tolling, or by ringing of a Bell, or by bespeaking of a Grave of the Sexton, the same is known to the Searchers, corresponding with the said Sexton. The Searchers hereupon…examine by what Disease, or Casualty the corps died. Hereupon they make their Report to the Parish-Clerk, and he, every Tuesday night, carries in an Accompt of all the Burials, and Christnings, hapning that Week, to the Clerk of the Hall. On Wednesday the general Accompt is made up, and Printed, and on Thursdays published and dispersed.

Here is a sample for the years 1605-06. Note that deaths outnumbered births and that deaths caused by the plague were enormous and recorded separately.

John Graunt, a well-off London haberdasher collected such data for a period of two decades and in 1662 published the world’s first attempt at a demographic survey, Natural and Political Observations, Mentioned in a Following Index, and Made Upon the Bills of Mortality, 1662, by John Graunt, a London haberdasher. Graunt made it his concern to examine two decades worth of parish records and “bills of mortality”. Graunt was skeptical of the Searchers’ accuracy in many cases and used statistical inference to calculate life expectancy and more reliable assessments of the causes of death.

In the 21st century we still die from apoplexy (stroke) and strangury (urinary tract disease) but few of us perish from being “cut of the stone” (operation for removal of gallstones or kidney stones)  or leprosy. Note the dreadfully high death rate of “overlaid and starved” — children being smothered while sleeping in bed with adults or dying from lack of nutrition. Graunt blamed this on “the carelessness, ignorance, and infirmity of the Milch-women” (wet-nurses). 

Three years after Graunt’s first edition, in 1665, the year of the Great Plague, London bills of mortality showed 97,306 burials, of which 68,598 were deaths from plague.

February 18

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by gerryadmin

1900 The Battle of Paardeberg Drift begins

This engagement, fought during the Second Anglo-Boer War, was the first time that men in Canadian uniform, fighting in a Canadian unit, made war overseas. Troops from The Royal Canadian Regiment of Infantry under William Otter (who had taken part in putting down the Northwest Rebellion in western Canada in 1885) helped pin down some 4,000 Boers. Advancing by night towards the enemy lines, quietly digging trenches on high ground 65 yards from the Boer lines, they forced the enemy kommando to surrender.

It was the first significant British victory of the war, despite the blundering of British officers such as General Kitchener who insisted on frontal attacks on entrenched Boer positions — always a recipe for disaster. Hundreds of men on both sides, including 31 Canadians, died at Paardeberg.

February 17

Home / Today in History / February 17
by gerryadmin

Precarity is today’s topic. We are, all of us, mortal – pre-programmed to strut and fret our hour upon the stage and then be heard no more, at least upon this earthly stage. We are all destined to die, but medical advances of the last 150 years have led us to trust that we will spend our last days as elderly creatures awaiting a painless slide into whatever we hold to be beyond the veil. Early death is deemed a tragedy, an unexpected and unfair curtailing of what was supposed to be a long and healthy life.

Our ancestors held no such delusions. Death was ever-present and life was expected to be rough and painful and short. Prophets, poets, and philosophers for centuries mused upon mortality as the chiefest of subjects. The best meditation on the theme came from the pen of Jeremy Taylor, a 17th-century English clergyman, in the opening paragraph of his 1651 classic The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying. Taylor conjures up a series of metaphors as he struggles to find the best image to describe just how temporary and contingent human life is. We will meet some of the perils of early-modern life that he mentions in further posts.

A Man is a Bubble (said the Greek Proverb); which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, All the world is a Storm, and Men rise up in their several generations like Bubbles descending, from God and the dew of Heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from Nature and Providence: and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of Water, having had no other businesse in the world but to be born that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy, and being crushed with the great drop of a cloud sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing than it was before. So is every man: He is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning Mushromes, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulnesse; some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad, and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of Vanity be expired, and then peradventure the Sun shines hot upon their heads and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them. But if the bubble stands the shock of a bigger drop, and outlives the chances of a childe, of a careless Nurse, of drowning in a pail of water, of being overlaid by a sleepy servant, or such little accidents, then the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a Doves neck or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are phantastickal; and so he dances out the gayety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures, only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humor: and to preserve a man alive in the midst of so many chances, and hostilities, is as great a miracle as to create him; to preserve him from rushing into nothing, and at first to draw him up from nothing were equally the issues of an Almighty power. And therefore the wise men of the world have contended who shall best fit mans condition with words signifying his vanity and short abode. Homer calls a man a leaf, the smallest, the weakest piece of a short liv’d unsteady plant. Pindar calls him the dream of a shadow: Another, the dream of the shadow of smoak. But St James spake by a more excellent Spirit, saying, Our life is but a vapour, viz., drawn from the earth by a celestial influence: made of smoak, or the lighter parts of water, tossed with every winde, moved by the motion of a superior body, without vertue in it self, lifted up on high, or left below, according as it pleases the Sun its Foster-Father. But it is lighter yet. It is but appearing; a phantastick vapor, an apparition, nothing real: it is not so much as a mist, not the matter of a shower, nor substantial enough to make a cloud; but it is like Cassiopeia’s chair, or Pelops shoulder, or the circles of Heaven: appearances, for which you cannot have a word that can signify a veryer nothing. And yet the expression is one degree more made diminutive; a vapour, and phantastickal, or a mere appearance, and this but for a little while neither; the very dream, the phantasm disappears in a small time, like the shadow that departeth, or like a tale that is told, or as a dream when one awaketh: A man is so vain, so unfixed, so perishing a creature, that he cannot long last in the scene of fancy: a man goes off and is forgotten like the dream of a distracted person. The summe of all is this: That thou art a man, then whom there is not in the world any greater instance of heights and declensions, of lights and shadows, of misery and folly, of laughter and tears, of groans and death.

February 16

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by gerryadmin

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” So said L.P. Hartley in a 1953 novel The Go-Between (made into a 1971 film with the divine Julie Christie.) Though human nature has remained unchanged since Adam and Eve were evicted from their garden tenancy, human customs change wildly over time. Our ancestors have done things very differently. In the next few postings I’m going to show mindsets that are alien to those of today.

 Take, for instance, this image. It’s an ostrakon, a potsherd (or, occasionally as in this case, a piece of limestone) which was used in the ancient world as a surface to write on. Athenians used shards of broken pottery as ballots when voting on whether to exile (thus ostracize) over-ambitious politicians. This example was used in Egypt, c. 1250 BC, as a way to record absences from a work site.

As you might expect, illness is the most frequent reason for not showing up to work but other reasons reveal a world far from our contemporary lives. How many modern Human Resources offices have received the following excuses?

  • Embalming his brother                        
  • Fetching stone for the scribe
  • Brewing beer                                  
  • Wife was menstruating
  • Libating his god                            
  • Daughter was menstruating
  • Building his house                                
  • Wrapping the corpse of his mother
  • Burying the god                                    
  • Strengthening the door
  • Making remedies for the scribe’s wife
  • Libating for his son                            
  • The scorpion bit him
  • Fetching stone for Qenherkhepshef

February 15

Home / Something Wise / February 15
by gerryadmin

We haven’t had any dazzling flashes of insight for a while. Here we go.

Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike? May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion? Without all doubt, we may. Herein all the children of God may unite, notwithstanding these smaller differences. – John Wesley, sermon 39 “Catholic Spirit”

Sorrow never comes too late. – Thomas Grey, “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”

Love is like a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the snow weasels come.  – Matt Groening, Love is Hell

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none. – Charles Dickens, Our Parish

One must be always drunk. Everything lies in that; it is the only question worth considering. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art?– As you will ; but intoxicate yourself. – Charles Baudelaire, Little Poems in Prose

Every man has some reminiscences which he would not tell to everyone, but only to his friends. He has others which he would not reveal even to his friends, but only to himself, and that in secret. But finally there are still others which a man is even afraid to tell himself, and every decent man has a considerable number of such things stored away. That is, one can even say that the more decent he is, the greater the number of such things in his mind. – Feodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground

Night is the darkest of weathers, necessity is the hardest of fates, sorrow is the sorest burden, sleep is most like death. – Anonymous Anglo-Saxon poet, c. 900

February 14

Home / Today in History / February 14
by gerryadmin

St Valentine’s Day

A grumpy nineteenth-century critic of the English Valentine’s Day said that it was “now almost everywhere a much degenerated festival, the only observance of any note consisting merely of the sending of jocular anonymous letters to parties whom one wishes to quiz, and this confined very much to the humbler classes.”

An eighteenth-century English Valentine custom was described thusly:

On the eve of St. Valentine’s Day the young folks in England and Scotland, by a very ancient custom, celebrate a little festival. An equal number of maids and bachelors get together: each writes their true or some feigned name upon separate billets, which they roll up, and draw by way of lots, the maids taking the men’s billets, and the men the maids’: so that each of the young men lights upon a girl that he calls his valentine, and each of the girls upon a young man whom she calls hers. By this means each has two valentines: but the man sticks faster to the valentine that has fallen to him than to the valentine to whom he is fallen. Fortune having thus divided the company into so many couples, the valentines give balls and treats to their mistresses, wear their billets several days upon their bosoms or sleeves, and this little sport often ends in love.

In the 1750s an English magazine article described this girlish fortune-telling practice:

Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before, I got five bay-leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle: and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk, and filled it with salt: and when I went to bed, ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it?—Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay a-bed and shut my eyes all the morning, till he came to our house: for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world. 

Since Chaucer’s day it has been imagined that February 14 was linked to the love life of birds. John Donne made this connection in a poem celebrating the wedding of England’s Princess Elizabeth to Frederick, the Elector Palatine (aka “the Winter King”) which took place on Valentine’s Day 1615.

Hail, Bishop Valentine! whose day this is:
All the air is thy diocese,
And all the chirping choristers
And other birds are thy parishioners:
Thou marryest every year
The lyric lark and the grave whispering dove:
The sparrow that neglects his life for love,
The household bird with the red stomacher:
Thou mak’st the blackbird speed as soon
As cloth the goldfinch or the halcyon–
This day more cheerfully than ever shine,
This day which might inflame thyself, old Valentine!

February 13

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by gerryadmin

1503 The Challenge of Barletta

Early in the 16th century much of Italy was a battlefield as armies of independent city states, France, Spain, and the papacy vied for control of the peninsula. On this date in 1503 French and Italian knights battled, not over politics, but national honour.

In southern Italy a number of French knights were taken prisoner in a skirmish and brought as captives to the town of Barletta. In chivalric fashion, they were invited to a banquet where one of them, a mouthy individual named Charles de la Motte, made disparaging remarks about the courage of Italian men of war. Feelings were hurt, an argument ensued and the upshot of it was a challenge: 13 Italian knights would joust with an equal number of Frenchmen. Winners would be awarded the horses and weapons of the vanquished as well as 100 ducats. De la Motte would lead the French and Ettore Fieramosca, a famous leader of condottieri would be at the head of the Italian knights.

In a series of encounters that went on all day and into the evening, the Italians emerged triumphant, winning all 13 battles. The French were forced to apologize for their intemperate speech. News of the challenge spread throughout Italy and became the stuff of legends. A monument was set up in Barletta to commemorate the event, but 300 years later when Napoleonic armies invaded the area, French troops tore the statue down. It was put back up when the Corsican Tyrant was defeated and to this day Barletta is nicknamed Città della Disfida, “City of the Challenge”. An annual festival celebrates the encounter and costumed figures recreate the day of battles.

On the poster above you can see the coats of arms of the 13 Italian knights and the arms of the City of Barletta.

February 12

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by gerryadmin

Yesterday’s post concerned antique British positions associated with the Royal Household. Today I want to talk about distinctions that are handed out by the crown, twice annually – the Birthday Honours List and the New Year’s Honours list. Chief among these are awards of the various ranks of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire.

There are five ranks and from top to bottom they are the Knight (or Dame) Grand Cross, Knight/Dame Commander, Commander, Officer, and Member of the order. Holders of the first two may style themselves Knight or Dame, while the others are granted postnominals (lovely word) CBE, OBE, and MBE. These honours are granted for service to the nation in the arts, sciences, and charitable organizations. The Civil Service and the Military have their own systems.

So hats off to Sir Paul McCartney, Dame Helen Mirren, and Sir Mick Jagger and the host of others who have deserved well of the commonweal and have been invited to Buckingham Palace where they were invested by the Queen or another member of the Royal Family.

A large number of British notables have refused the offer of such honours for various reasons. Winston Churchill, for example, turned down a dukedom because it would mean his having to leave the House of Commons for the House of Lords. T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) declined a knighthood out of anger  at what he saw as British betrayal of the Arabs, while George Bernard Shaw turned up his nose at the Order of Merit believing that an author’s merit could only be determined by the posthumous verdict of history.

Others who more recently declined to accept an honour include Henry Moore (sculptor), Francis Bacon (painter), Francis Crick (scientist), Roald Dahl (author), Lucien Freud (painter), Robert Graves (author), and Aldous Huxley (author). CS Lewis turned down a CBE in 1952 because he thought it  “too political”.

The prize for the most determined decliner was the artist LS Lowry who refused an OBE, a CBE, a knighthood, and (twice) being named Companion of Honour (an exclusive award limited to 47 Britons). Lowry’s excuse was a severe case of anti-monarchy.

Others chose to make a spectacle of their refusal. John Lennon, who with his Beatlemates received an MBE in1965, returned his medal with a note to the Queen: “Your Majesty, I am returning this in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing, against our support of America in Vietnam, and against ‘Cold Turkey’ slipping down the charts.” The band’s George Harrison apparently declined a mere CBE because Paul McCartney had been granted a knighthood.

The poet Benjamin Zephaniah turned down an OBE, saying in his poetical way “No way Mr Blair, no way Mrs Queen. I am profoundly antiempire. … It reminds me of how my foremothers were raped and my forefathers brutalised.” The tiresome left-wing scold Yasmin Alibhai-Brown was moved by his example and returned her insignia, saying, “I was stupid once and allowed myself to accept an MBE, partly to please my mum. Then Benjamin Zephaniah shamed me. I returned the lovely object and have had to put up with scorn ever since, some deserved.”

February 11

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by gerryadmin

One of the great things about the English is that they cling fiercely to the past (a commodity of which they have more than North Americans.) Just watch the opening of Parliament by the monarch or debates in the House of Commons to see countless relics of days gone by. Why can’t the Queen enter the lower house? Why does she have to summon the Commons to the House of Lords? Why is the distance between the front benches of the ruling party and the Opposition greater than two swords’ length?

The Queen’s Swan Marker David Barber holds a cygnet before releasing it back into the River Thames, after it was counted and checked during the annual “Swan Upping” census on a stretch of the river between Staines and Windsor in southern England. This is part of the annual five-day journey to count the population of the waterway’s swans, which have theoretically belonged to the monarch since the 12th century. 

As every schoolboy knows, English swans are royal birds, formerly supervised by the Keeper of the King’s Swans and four swanherds, but now under the care of the Warden of the Swans and the Marker of the Swans. These worthies are responsible for the annual Swan-Upping.

Did you know that English coronations up until the reign of William IV were proceeded by a challenge from the King’s Champion? Here is the last version, used in 1820. “If any person, of whatever degree soever, high or low, shall deny or gainsay our Sovereign Lord George, King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, son and next heir unto our Sovereign Lord the last King deceased, to be the right heir to the imperial Crown of this realm of Great Britain and Ireland, or that he ought not to enjoy the same; here is his Champion, who saith that he lieth, and is a false traitor, being ready in person to combat with him, and in this quarrel will adventure his life against him on what day soever he shall be appointed.” When King Charles III is crowned in a few years look for the Royal Standard Bearer: he will be by law a descendant of the hereditary King’s Champion.

Did you know that at the 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the Grand Falconer  was forbidden to enter Westminster Abbey unless he swapped his live bird for a stuffed one?

February 10

Home / Something Wise / February 10
by gerryadmin

What’s Wrong with the Enlightenment?

Both my readers are asked to forgive me today for indulging in a rant, even though it is historically based. I have been wading too long in books by sundry atheists and secularists: Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress and Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters.

Such authors are fans of the Enlightenment who often frame the matter as the triumph of Reason over Revelation and claim that it is only when great thinkers began to reject religion was humanity able to accelerate toward a world of science, technological advancement, and an amelioration of society. Faith was a Bad Thing, the product of earlier ages of ignorance. David Hume, the Scottish skeptic, wrote in his 1757 Natural History of Religion:

Examine the religious principles, which have, in fact, prevailed in the world. You will scarcely be persuaded, that they are anything but sick men’s dreams: Or perhaps will regard them more as the playsome, whimsies of monkeys in human shape, than the serious, positive, dogmatical asseverations of a being, who dignifies himself with the name rational.

 So much for the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes, I Corinthians 13, and the simian whimsies that gave us Michelangelo’s Pietà, Mozart’s Requiem and “Amazing Grace”, though Voltaire did admit a certain utility in such fantasies.

I want my lawyer, my tailor, my servants, even my wife to believe in God, because it means that I shall be cheated and robbed and cuckolded less often . . . God is needed to provide a divine sanction for morality. It is absolutely necessary not only for ordinary people, but also for princes and rulers to have an idea of the Supreme Being, Creator, governor, rewarder, and avenger profoundly engraver on their minds …. If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

The fruit of religion seemed to be intolerance, violence, obscurantism, and sexual repression and the sooner the last king was strangled with the entrails of the last priest, the better off humanity would be. In fact, the material betterment of humanity and profound social reforms that marked the centuries since the Enlightenment cannot be attributed to secularism and an elevation of Reason. The inventors of the steam engine, Newtonian physics, modern chemistry, antiseptic surgery, electromagnetic theory, the computer, genetic variability, and quantum mechanics, were all men of faith. It was Quakers, Anglicans, and Evangelicals who pressed for the abolition of slavery, and Methodists who led the way in penal and factory reform, etc.

But the West, having embraced Enlightenment principles and secularized society, seems not to have produced the utopia that was promised. Reason has justified the invention and use of poison gas, germ warfare, and atomic weapons, and provided excuses for class war, racial extermination, and genocide. What went wrong?

The great error of the Enlightenment was its mistaken anthropology. Hobbes’s view of human nature was abandoned (man is wolf to man), first for Locke (blank slate) and then Rousseau (born free but everywhere in chains).  If humans were born good and only ruined by society, then changing society would lead to better humans; perfectibility was a possibility. If only we could get rid of the old ways: kings, popes, private property, the middle class, Jews, kulaks, people who wore glasses, city life, etc. Thus was born every conceivable -ism and their toxic waste products – positivism, Marxism, anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, fascism, feminism, Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse Tung Thought, Black Power, Arab Socialism, juche, Trotskyism, liberation theology, racial science, deep ecology, the Terror, Red Guards, the University of Regina, and cats and dogs living together.

The truth lies with Immanuel Kant who said “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” Humans are born broken and every generation has to be tamed into sociability by law, custom, and family. Attack those and you get what you see today.