205
However grim and severe the thirteenth century baron might be in his public duties, at dinner-time it was all wine, laughter and song.
The English barons of the thirteenth century were men lordly and stern, knights bold enough to present King John with the Great Charter at Runnymede in 1215, and to bring John’s son Henry III to heel at the Battle of Lewes in 1264. But they could afford to unbend a little at home, where they kept a splendid and lively table.
Posted July 28 2022
206
Peoples of another culture or region will not long tolerate a Government that uses guns and soldiers to secure their obedience.
By the 1720s, there were already rumblings of discontent coming from England’s American colonies, but John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon warned against strictness from London. When government of a distant or culturally different people falls to your lot, the only way to keep them on side is to give them a mutually satisfactory degree of freedom and self-determination.
Posted July 28 2022
207
John Lynch, exiled to France by Cromwell’s men, lamented the way that Irish was being labelled as a language of sedition.
By 1495 and the reign of Henry VII, attempts to stamp out Irish language and culture in ‘The Pale’, the area of English governance in Ireland, had largely failed. And a good thing too, said Irish priest John Lynch, writing in 1662. Exiled in France thanks to Cromwell’s brutal rampage in Ireland, he decried the politicisation of language by ruling powers.
Posted July 27 2022
208
Lionel of Clarence, Edward III’s younger son, went to Ireland as his Lieutenant in order to stop English expats becoming like the Irish.
In 1366, Edward III’s son Lionel presided over a parliament in Kilkenny in Ireland. The issue was the Pale, the area around Dublin that was under English law, and disturbing reports that many Englishmen had so intermingled with the Irish beyond it that one could hardly tell them apart. Amongst several other Statutes, the English were strictly commanded to keep to their own language and customs.
Posted July 26 2022
209
‘Alpha of the Plough’ wished that he had been born with the gift of a winning smile.
For many years, newspaper editor AG Gardiner wrote short essays for the Star under the pseudonym ‘Alpha of the Plough’. The following passage is taken from a reflection on the value of the smile, a reflection that ended with a warning. “Smiles,” he wrote, “like poets, are born, not made.”
Posted July 24 2022
210
William Cobbett was delighted with one young woman’s protest against Mr Pitt’s ingenious ways of raising money.
In 1784, the use of a horse for purposes other than farming was subjected to tax, one of Prime Minister William Pitt’s many ingenious tax-grabs. William Cobbett (who blamed the taxes on the national debt racked up by unnecessary wars) chuckled with delight nearly forty years later, when he stumbled across a farmer’s wife making a gentle protest.
Posted July 23 2022