Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
It’s a subjective matter, but some right wing comedy makes me laugh despite knowing I shouldn’t, but the comedians are quite funny. The likes of the mash report don’t even seem like they would be funny if you spent a night in their company. I don’t know. Most of my mates are pretty un PC right wingers, but they are funny as fuck. Left wing comedy just seems like miserable nerdy students moaning
Which rightwing comics and jokes make you laugh? I quite like what I have seen of Geoff Norcroft. He’s rightwing (apparently) but the stuff I have seen seems largely apolitical, I didn’t find it rightwing in the slightest.
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. I guess I don’t really like political comedy that much so when I say Right Wing I just mean the sort of thing that lefties complain about rather than politically motivated jokes
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. Misogynistic and bigoted jokes, but delivered well.
18 months back I saw Shane Ritchie star in a revival of The Entertainer, reset in the early Eighties, playing an old school comic with sexist, homophobic, even mother in law jokes. To get the character of Archie Rice right, he had to be both dislikeable and funny. The jokes got a laugh from the audience, albeit uncomfortable ones. This is him being interviewed about it:
Manning isn't my era, but I remember seeing him interviewed by Mark Lamarr, who basically said can you only do the sexist, racist jokes? And in response he fired off some jokes that weren't dodgy at all and had the audience laughing like mad, to which he basically said in his well known understated way, see I got talent to do it, most haven't....and then within 2 mins, out came the stuff he has become infamous for.
Harry and Meghan's main complaint is Meghan's treatment by the tabloids, not the alleged racism of the royal family. It has been all along. It seems to me unsurprising that the tabloids would focus almost entirely on the apparent besmirching of the good name of the royal family rather than the running sore of the tabloids' shoddy treatment of Meghan. I guess the couple's mistake was to give the tabloids the excuse to conveniently set aside the substance of the complaint against them (the tabloids) and focus on an entirely speculative story about who may or may not be a bit dodgy on race in the royal family.
If that's true then they should have directed all of their ire at the tabloids and made clear that they had no bone to pick with the royal family, but it wasn't for them and they weren't enjoying it as a result.
But, they didn't.
How Oprah failed to quiz Meghan about her own dysfunctional family relationships is beyond me.
Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
It’s a subjective matter, but some right wing comedy makes me laugh despite knowing I shouldn’t, but the comedians are quite funny. The likes of the mash report don’t even seem like they would be funny if you spent a night in their company. I don’t know. Most of my mates are pretty un PC right wingers, but they are funny as fuck. Left wing comedy just seems like miserable nerdy students moaning
Which rightwing comics and jokes make you laugh? I quite like what I have seen of Geoff Norcroft. He’s rightwing (apparently) but the stuff I have seen seems largely apolitical, I didn’t find it rightwing in the slightest.
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. I guess I don’t really like political comedy that much so when I say Right Wing I just mean the sort of thing that lefties complain about rather than politically motivated jokes
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. Misogynistic and bigoted jokes, but delivered well.
18 months back I saw Shane Ritchie star in a revival of The Entertainer, reset in the early Eighties, playing an old school comic with sexist, homophobic, even mother in law jokes. To get the character of Archie Rice right, he had to be both dislikeable and funny. The jokes got a laugh from the audience, albeit uncomfortable ones. This is him being interviewed about it:
Manning isn't my era, but I remember seeing him interviewed by Mark Lamarr, who basically said can you only do the sexist, racist jokes? And in response he fired off some jokes that weren't dodgy at all and had the audience laughing like mad, to which he basically said in his well known understated way, see I got talent to do it, most haven't....and then within 2 mins, out came the stuff he has become infamous for.
I thought I'd watch some Ronnie Corbett videos the other day because I used to like his rambling shaggy dog stories from the chair.
I had to give up after a minute as it was just so riddled with homophobia of a deeply unpleasant kind.
Public notice - in (most of) the USA we will be turning our clocks forward one hour early Sunday, for daylight savings time.
We will "spring forward" to coin a phrase.
Not sure that will affect anyone here to be honest.
Wrong. It means The Players Championship finishes a bit earlier meaning I get to bed at a reasonable time.
Sport is my main concern about moving to CET. Currently UEFA games kick off at 6pm and 8pm our time, which is 7pm and 9pm on the continent. I wouldn’t want to move to CET if it meant games would be kicking off at 7pm and 9pm our time.
Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
It’s a subjective matter, but some right wing comedy makes me laugh despite knowing I shouldn’t, but the comedians are quite funny. The likes of the mash report don’t even seem like they would be funny if you spent a night in their company. I don’t know. Most of my mates are pretty un PC right wingers, but they are funny as fuck. Left wing comedy just seems like miserable nerdy students moaning
Which rightwing comics and jokes make you laugh? I quite like what I have seen of Geoff Norcroft. He’s rightwing (apparently) but the stuff I have seen seems largely apolitical, I didn’t find it rightwing in the slightest.
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. I guess I don’t really like political comedy that much so when I say Right Wing I just mean the sort of thing that lefties complain about rather than politically motivated jokes
Bernard Manning makes me laugh. Misogynistic and bigoted jokes, but delivered well.
18 months back I saw Shane Ritchie star in a revival of The Entertainer, reset in the early Eighties, playing an old school comic with sexist, homophobic, even mother in law jokes. To get the character of Archie Rice right, he had to be both dislikeable and funny. The jokes got a laugh from the audience, albeit uncomfortable ones. This is him being interviewed about it:
Manning isn't my era, but I remember seeing him interviewed by Mark Lamarr, who basically said can you only do the sexist, racist jokes? And in response he fired off some jokes that weren't dodgy at all and had the audience laughing like mad, to which he basically said in his well known understated way, see I got talent to do it, most haven't....and then within 2 mins, out came the stuff he has become infamous for.
I don't think Manning was that good even putting aside the subject matter. If you like that sort of thing, Chubby Brown has far better delivery imo.
Public notice - in (most of) the USA we will be turning our clocks forward one hour early Sunday, for daylight savings time.
We will "spring forward" to coin a phrase.
Not sure that will affect anyone here to be honest.
In California, the people voted to abolish daylight saving. Unfortunately, the Federal government refuses to allow it.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, some parts of the state observe daylight saving, while others do not.
American daylight savings time transitions are a PITA because they are all scheduled according to a state's local time, so that DST rolls across the United States at hourly intervals and God help anyone trying to schedule work overnight. Europe gets it right with all countries transitioning at the same time, 1am GMT.
"A trip abroad is nothing to be ashamed of While the rich head off on private jets, ministers are keen to guilt-trip everyone else into settling for a soggy staycation Matthew Parris" [£]
People seem to be confusing 'right wing' with supporting the current conservative party - they are not the same thing.When Sky TV removed Fox News from UK broadcasting 4 years ago there was not a murmur of protest from anywhere including the Tory Ministers at the Culture Dept (Karen Bradley,Matt Hancock and Tracey Couch). Thinking Conservatives used to be people who tried to be sceptical about utopian ideas on the the left.The modern Conservative party is a Utopian party.Brexit is Utopian .Carbon Neutral policies are Utopian.It embraces 95% of the Left's views on feminism , multi-culturalism and 'social justice'. There are no right wing comedians or shows on mainstream tv i am aware of in the UK.A right wing comedian would be attacking the Utopianism of Climate Change,Equality,Feminism and Multi-Culturalism.There is plenty of material for comedy there given how priviliged and self-righteous so many of the celebrities of the now Utopian establishment are. Fox News was mostly a biased and dumbed down news channel however it did provide voices on UK tv that questioned Utopian ideas in politics and exposed the way that facts were cherrypicked to support those Utopian ideas.As did Andrew Neills 'This Week' bbc show - now removed.Those voices are almost completely absent on UK mainstream media currently and whenever one appears such as Rod Liddle they are set up to be trapped. The so-called 'right wing ' voices who regularily appear on TV are not actually really right wing they are careerists who have noticed what is acceptable for the establishment to have advocated on tv and what is not i.e Norcott Hopefully Andrew Neill forthcoming New Tv Channel will give a home to maverick voices on the right
America has weird ideas. A decade or two ago a survey found that, tied equal worst with rapists, atheists were the least liked/trusted of potential hitchhickers.
Not to mention there's far more BLM bullshit in the US that believes there's white supremacy everywhere.
(2) The Royal Household needs to orchestrate a campaign of commonwealth leaders, ex commonwealth leaders, and dignitaries, around the world going on the record to say how hard HMQ, Charles and other royals have worked to unite people regardless of race, religion and background, and how generous they've been to them personally
The Empire is over, thankfully, so the queen can't just compel other heads of government to pump out her spin.
You must have missed the word "commonwealth" in my post.
The Queen is very widely respected by other commonwealth leaders in all the commonwealth countries, and has been for a long time, and, without any compulsion whatsoever, they've all just voted unanimously to have Charles as its next head.
So, a gentle request asking one of two of them if they wouldn't mind giving their own views and experiences of working with the royal family wouldn't be amiss.
Harry and Meghan's main complaint is Meghan's treatment by the tabloids, not the alleged racism of the royal family. It has been all along. It seems to me unsurprising that the tabloids would focus almost entirely on the apparent besmirching of the good name of the royal family rather than the running sore of the tabloids' shoddy treatment of Meghan. I guess the couple's mistake was to give the tabloids the excuse to conveniently set aside the substance of the complaint against them (the tabloids) and focus on an entirely speculative story about who may or may not be a bit dodgy on race in the royal family.
If that's true then they should have directed all of their ire at the tabloids and made clear that they had no bone to pick with the royal family, but it wasn't for them and they weren't enjoying it as a result.
But, they didn't.
How Oprah failed to quiz Meghan about her own dysfunctional family relationships is beyond me.
Oprah didn't quiz them about anything.
I don't even believe the statement she made at the start that they hadn't discussed what they were going to ask, and nothing was off limits.
Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
It’s a subjective matter, but some right wing comedy makes me laugh despite knowing I shouldn’t, but the comedians are quite funny. The likes of the mash report don’t even seem like they would be funny if you spent a night in their company. I don’t know. Most of my mates are pretty un PC right wingers, but they are funny as fuck. Left wing comedy just seems like miserable nerdy students moaning
Which rightwing comics and jokes make you laugh? I quite like what I have seen of Geoff Norcroft. He’s rightwing (apparently) but the stuff I have seen seems largely apolitical, I didn’t find it rightwing in the slightest.
Rightwing comedy has to disguise itself, to be acceptable. This is unsurprising, in the arts world, given that being a member of Mumford and Sons and simply "liking" a rightwing journalist's book can get you quasi-cancelled.
Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Sacha Baron Cohen are, I would humbly suggest, three rightwing comedians busily plying their trade in the political equivalent of drag.
Not so. I have no idea about Carr (unfunny) and Cohen, but Gervais is a left-libertarian rationalist and an extremely intelligent man. His main target is superstition.
***
Gervais is a staunch supporter of gay rights and has praised the introduction of same-sex marriage in England and Wales as "a victory for all of us" and stated "anything that promotes equality, promotes progress". He added, "You can't take equality 'too far'."[146]
He is a vegetarian,[147] an atheist[148] and a humanist,[149] and states that he abandoned religion at the age of eight. In December 2010, he wrote an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal defending his atheism.[150] He is an honorary associate of the UK's National Secular Society,[151] and a patron of Humanists UK, a British charity which promotes the humanist worldview and campaigns for a secular state and on human rights issues.[149]
I was at Uni with Gervais. Trust me, he's on the right. He just keeps it well-hidden (and good luck to him)
He’s constructed an entirely contrary persona as a pure fabrication? I mean, why bother? More likely, he’s just changed his views over time.
I find it interesting that the implication of that comment is that you assume one can’t be right wing and also in favour of gay rights, a vegetarian, and an atheist. I mean vegetarians are just weird but otherwise surely none of that’s a right/left thing?
It's not determinative but is reasonably predictive. There are plenty of Labour supporting cricket fans who read the Telegraph as it has good cricket coverage. But if you saw someone carrying a copy of the Telegraph and had to guess their voting plans...
Worth noting that Hitler was an atheist, vegetarian, eco-sensitive gender-queer. Who adored dogs
Hitler wasn’t an atheist. He was a deist with very muddled and simplistic views on the subject of religion, which were expressed by his idea he was an instrument of ‘eternal providence.’
If you have two asexual people having dinner, they might not have explicitly ruled out frisky time, but it isn't going to happen. I'm sure Winfrey 'could' have asked whatever she wanted.
Like assaulting an African and stealing his lunch is not an untruthful way to describe rescuing a child from a lion.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
I hope Rachel Parris gets another gig. Her monologues were always the best bit, with their cheery put downs of Nish Kumar. The Mash Report used to try and do some balance by putting the excreable Geoff Norcutt on, but he was never funny.
Launching Michael Spicer was another of the Mash Report credits. Comedy sketch shows have always been patchy. There was plenty of stuff that fell flat in NTNON and Monty Python too.
Still, it makes space for more repeats of Dad's Army and It Ain't Half Hot Mum I suppose. 🙄
Rachel Parris was teeth-clenchingly awful, with her faux grin and overly rehearsed and politically obvious diabtribes. I could always guess where she was going, and it wasn't funny.
I can only conclude from the rest of your post that you don't have a great sense of humour.
Boris is a liar and a racist. Is that what counts for comedy these days?
The beauty of that kind of left wing comedy is that anyone can do it - being funny is not a requirement. So people missing The Mash Report can just get their mates to say ‘Isn’t Jacob Rees-Mogg an out of touch posh arrogant throwback” (whilst looking disgusted) to get their fix
Isn't that just a criticism of a lot of satire from all directions?
I do kind of agree that there's a risk that the political point takes priority over the fundamental question "but is it funny?" There are satires which don't fall into that, but quite a lot that do.
But that isn't only true of left wing comedy. A lot of right wing comedy is like that, but with the added disadvantage of tending to punch down (attacking Rees-Mogg for being posh suffers for not being interesting or funny... for attacking recent immigrants it's both those things plus nastier).
It’s a subjective matter, but some right wing comedy makes me laugh despite knowing I shouldn’t, but the comedians are quite funny. The likes of the mash report don’t even seem like they would be funny if you spent a night in their company. I don’t know. Most of my mates are pretty un PC right wingers, but they are funny as fuck. Left wing comedy just seems like miserable nerdy students moaning
Which rightwing comics and jokes make you laugh? I quite like what I have seen of Geoff Norcroft. He’s rightwing (apparently) but the stuff I have seen seems largely apolitical, I didn’t find it rightwing in the slightest.
Rightwing comedy has to disguise itself, to be acceptable. This is unsurprising, in the arts world, given that being a member of Mumford and Sons and simply "liking" a rightwing journalist's book can get you quasi-cancelled.
Ricky Gervais, Jimmy Carr and Sacha Baron Cohen are, I would humbly suggest, three rightwing comedians busily plying their trade in the political equivalent of drag.
The premise here is that "right-wing" comedy is either attacking the political Left (so jokes about Neil Kinnock, Corbyn or Scargill, would qualify) or that it's just offensive to minority groups. I think those on the right would tend to think it's the former and those on the Left would highlight (and caricature) the latter as it makes it easier to hate. That's why 70s stand-ups and Jim Davidson are always plucked out.
Examples of well-balanced comedy for me would include Fawlty Towers, Not The Nine O'Clock News (remember that Trade Union negotiation sketch, but also the one about the bigotted copper), Blackadder, Men Behaving Badly and Alan Partridge. Also the office.
In other words, just sending anyone and anything up that needs it in clever and creative ways, as a comment on contemporary society, with some remarkable insights too. That's why I think contemporary Wokeness needs including because it's rich with contradictions, absurdity, and pompous earnestness, and yet also entirely humourless.
But ditch the overt politicking. Because it's only funny to the faithful.
Most of us posting on here (and certainly all those of largely British descent) will have ancestors who fought at the battle of Hastings, even though we don't know their names.
I find that a remarkable thought.
Quite possibly yes. A few people might even know about them. Certainly I seem to recall there being a story in the news a few years ago about two women who placed an "In Memoriam" notice in a newspaper, in tribute to an ancestor who died at the Battle of Maldon in 991. Whether they were able to trace the family tree quite back that far or were filling in some of the details with guesswork or imagination I don't know, but it's quite a romantic notion all the same.
I expect Charles has a few ancestors that fought at Hastings, and knows which local fyrd they commanded
Oh no sir. Our Charles comes from good Norman stock. Part of the ruling elite.
A good point, sir. Although he probably has ancestors on both sides. HMQ manages to be descended from Alfred (and Woden), as Henry I married an English princess.
We haven’t be called Anglo-Normans for almost 20 years!
Most of us posting on here (and certainly all those of largely British descent) will have ancestors who fought at the battle of Hastings, even though we don't know their names.
I find that a remarkable thought.
Quite possibly yes. A few people might even know about them. Certainly I seem to recall there being a story in the news a few years ago about two women who placed an "In Memoriam" notice in a newspaper, in tribute to an ancestor who died at the Battle of Maldon in 991. Whether they were able to trace the family tree quite back that far or were filling in some of the details with guesswork or imagination I don't know, but it's quite a romantic notion all the same.
I expect Charles has a few ancestors that fought at Hastings, and knows which local fyrd they commanded
Oh no sir. Our Charles comes from good Norman stock. Part of the ruling elite.
Am quite sure that Charles is prudent enough, to have had progenitors in both camps - the best strategy for familial success.
It’s the only way to be sure of winning. Although I do have a certain sneaking respect for Lord Stanley’s approach at Bosworth
Most of us posting on here (and certainly all those of largely British descent) will have ancestors who fought at the battle of Hastings, even though we don't know their names.
I find that a remarkable thought.
Quite possibly yes. A few people might even know about them. Certainly I seem to recall there being a story in the news a few years ago about two women who placed an "In Memoriam" notice in a newspaper, in tribute to an ancestor who died at the Battle of Maldon in 991. Whether they were able to trace the family tree quite back that far or were filling in some of the details with guesswork or imagination I don't know, but it's quite a romantic notion all the same.
I expect Charles has a few ancestors that fought at Hastings, and knows which local fyrd they commanded
Oh no sir. Our Charles comes from good Norman stock. Part of the ruling elite.
A good point, sir. Although he probably has ancestors on both sides. HMQ manages to be descended from Alfred (and Woden), as Henry I married an English princess.
We haven’t be called Anglo-Normans for almost 20 years!
I knew the turn of the millennium would change something.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Virtually all empires were multicultural prior to the emergence of the modern concept of the nation state in Seventeenth Century Europe. Loyalty was to a monarch rather than to a nation before that period.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
So you are saying how multicultural life was under the Normans... 🤔
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
Good question! Only thing that's popped into my head so far, is Fall of Jericho. And the Vikings who founded Rus (Varangians)?
The Battle of Nahavand in 642AD. Known to the Arabs as 'The Victory of Victories'. It saw the destruction of the Sassanid Empire and the permanent conversion of Persia to Islam.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Virtually all empires were multicultural prior to the emergence of the modern concept of the nation state in Seventeenth Century Europe. Loyalty was to a monarch rather than to a nation before that period.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
The Persian Empire was an autocracy that literally tried to conquer as many territories as it could. It would have crushed ancient Greece and Rome if it could. And it wasn't a Woke paradise inside it's borders either; your status depended very much on which religion you were, for example, and your family.
Please don't try and use classical history to make points about your contemporary politics. It's cringeworthy and embarrassing.
People seem to be confusing 'right wing' with supporting the current conservative party - they are not the same thing.When Sky TV removed Fox News from UK broadcasting 4 years ago there was not a murmur of protest from anywhere including the Tory Ministers at the Culture Dept (Karen Bradley,Matt Hancock and Tracey Couch). Thinking Conservatives used to be people who tried to be sceptical about utopian ideas on the the left.The modern Conservative party is a Utopian party.Brexit is Utopian .Carbon Neutral policies are Utopian.It embraces 95% of the Left's views on feminism , multi-culturalism and 'social justice'. There are no right wing comedians or shows on mainstream tv i am aware of in the UK.A right wing comedian would be attacking the Utopianism of Climate Change,Equality,Feminism and Multi-Culturalism.There is plenty of material for comedy there given how priviliged and self-righteous so many of the celebrities of the now Utopian establishment are. Fox News was mostly a biased and dumbed down news channel however it did provide voices on UK tv that questioned Utopian ideas in politics and exposed the way that facts were cherrypicked to support those Utopian ideas.As did Andrew Neills 'This Week' bbc show - now removed.Those voices are almost completely absent on UK mainstream media currently and whenever one appears such as Rod Liddle they are set up to be trapped. The so-called 'right wing ' voices who regularily appear on TV are not actually really right wing they are careerists who have noticed what is acceptable for the establishment to have advocated on tv and what is not i.e Norcott Hopefully Andrew Neill forthcoming New Tv Channel will give a home to maverick voices on the right
Fox was amusing entertainment (with cute presenters). But it only had a few thousand viewers and lost money for Sky
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
So you are saying how multicultural life was under the Normans... 🤔
I think under your expansive definition you'd say it was multicultural under the Anglo-Saxons (all those Angles, Saxons and Jutes mixing with Britons and Celts) under the Romans (ancient Celtic tribes mixing with Romans from all across the Empire, and Picts and Scots creeping in) and under ancient British too (all those settlers crossing over from the continent over the dogger land bridge).
You'd say all culture has always been multicultural, and there has thus never been a "culture" of any polity.
We know why you do it. To allow yourself to try and be agnostic and dismissive of any English culture or identity today.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Virtually all empires were multicultural prior to the emergence of the modern concept of the nation state in Seventeenth Century Europe. Loyalty was to a monarch rather than to a nation before that period.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
The Persian Empire was an autocracy that literally tried to conquer as many territories as it could. It would have crushed ancient Greece and Rome if it could. And it wasn't a Woke paradise inside it's borders either; your status depended very much on which religion you were, for example, and your family.
Please don't try and use classical history to make points about your contemporary politics. It's cringeworthy and embarrassing.
I never denied it was autocratic. Indeed I pointed out that multiple cultures were permitted as long as they remained loyal to the monarch. This was the norm at the time.
The Roman Empire was much the same, with local cultures, languages and religions permitted, provided loyal to Rome. That some emperors were oppressive is undeniable, but the Roman Empire was multicultural, as indeed was the British Empire.
During the imperial phase, there was an emperor-cult. By and large, Romans were happy for people to have their own gods too. But when Christianity became the state religion it didn't take long for paganism (to use an anachronistic term) to be attacked and cast down, despite Julian's late attempt to resurrect it.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
So you are saying how multicultural life was under the Normans... 🤔
I think under your expansive definition you'd say it was multicultural under the Anglo-Saxons (all those Angles, Saxons and Jutes mixing with Britons and Celts) under the Romans (ancient Celtic tribes mixing with Romans from all across the Empire, and Picts and Scots creeping in) and under ancient British too (all those settlers crossing over from the continent over the dogger land bridge).
You'd say all culture has always been multicultural, and there has thus never been a "culture" of any polity.
We know why you do it. To allow yourself to try and be agnostic and dismissive of any English culture or identity today.
It's a bit transparent mate.
No, but cultures are not fixed in aspic, they develop over time, are influenced by migration, and migrants in turn adopt some of the attributes of native communities*. Cultures change and evolve, albeit slowly, and contentious. That is all part of the rich tapestry of life, particularly in a place like Britain where there is, and always has been, considerable movements of peoples in or out.
*Normans were French speaking descendents of Vikings, for example, having adopted some French culture.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
The main difference is that, until we finally lost Calais in the 16th Century, the country's wealth was drained in attempts to maintain and extend the lands held in France.
The Anglo-Saxons were more concerned with establishing their overlordship of Britain than of Normandy, Gascony, etc.
During the imperial phase, there was an emperor-cult. By and large, Romans were happy for people to have their own gods too. But when Christianity became the state religion it didn't take long for paganism (to use an anachronistic term) to be attacked and cast down, despite Julian's late attempt to resurrect it.
Yes, there is a big difference between proselytising religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam compared with non proselytising ones such as Paganism and Hinduism in terms of attitudes to minorities. The latter may be oppressive, but don't necessarily want conversion, just loyalty to the Sovereign.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Virtually all empires were multicultural prior to the emergence of the modern concept of the nation state in Seventeenth Century Europe. Loyalty was to a monarch rather than to a nation before that period.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
The Persian Empire was an autocracy that literally tried to conquer as many territories as it could. It would have crushed ancient Greece and Rome if it could. And it wasn't a Woke paradise inside it's borders either; your status depended very much on which religion you were, for example, and your family.
Please don't try and use classical history to make points about your contemporary politics. It's cringeworthy and embarrassing.
I never denied it was autocratic. Indeed I pointed out that multiple cultures were permitted as long as they remained loyal to the monarch. This was the norm at the time.
The Roman Empire was much the same, with local cultures, languages and religions permitted, provided loyal to Rome. That some emperors were oppressive is undeniable, but the Roman Empire was multicultural, as indeed was the British Empire.
That was the genius of Rome, and a key as to how a single city came to rule a continent; the elites were offered co-option as citizens of Rome, with all the accompanying privileges including voting rights even if, in the absence of either postal voting or fast economic transport, the latter were of little value for those at a distance.
I am not best pleased to receive a letter from the Census Office inviting me to complete the survey online - or to ring a freephone line to request a hard copy. Deeply resent the assumption that people wish to use the Internet for this. Frankly unless the hard copy is provided in the normal way, they can sing for their supper!
Why bother havent done a census ever
You don't see it as a public duty then.
Not in the least no
Although it carries a fine of up to £1k. So I wouldn't broadcast it too widely.
Shrugs yet to be fined and lets face it the whole thing is a joke unless you really think we have half a million jedi's
That's hardly the only information the emerges, and it's a voluntary question anyway, so some useful info may well be gleaned.
I would be interested to know if they ever fine people for not completing the census, as I doubt they expect perfect compliance and as long as they get sufficient compliance for somewhat reliable public policy planning it's likely not worth chasing too hard.
But at least a refusal to fill out the damn thing makes more sense that getting mad on behalf of other people who don't have the internet, even though those people can still fill it out.
As I replied to Kinablu the only thing I would tell them is what they already know so its pointless
I had heard it is considered that in future there won't be censuses for the very reason all the info will be able to be compiled from other sources. Interesting if that is the case.
They said that in 2011 and 2001.
Apart from anything else, the census isn’t terribly accurate. Lots of HMOs housing illegal immigrants that are apparently inhabited by one old woman and her cats, while supermarkets and pressure on local sewage systems all show there are far more people there than officially recorded.
:LOL:
Those claims are, how can I put it, utter shite.
Then you should have told my former line manager at the ONS that, because I’m quoting her.
Got a name? I might have worked with her in 2011.
Truthfully, I can’t remember it. It was a long time ago. She was Australian if that helps.
I knew one Australian whilst I was there, but it probably wasn't them.
I slogged my guts out getting the HMOs right in 2011 and then spent a lot of time working with our field team to make sure we were capturing all the beds in sheds etc.
I even created records for one set of people the police wouldn't let us enumerate. Well, that's not quite true. They told us that it wouldn't be a good idea to try to enumerate them as the situation at the time was delicate.
I spent a great deal of time doing that too.
That’s one reason I am so confident a decade later that they were completely wide of the mark.
You worked on 2001? The worst thing about 2011 was that we were separating communals from the household list. Trying to reduce the overlap without missing anything was not fun.
Trouble is for all those refusing to complete the census or anything else leading to it being discontinued is that they are ruining a vital source of historical information. It is true that the Government can get the information other ways but anyone else cannot. Historians set huge store by the census for social and economic history, for things like house history and for myriad other lines of research. They simply cannot have access to all those other sources of information, many of which are considered private even long after people have died. Whilst it is true that we will not see the post war census returns until probably after I am dead it saddens me that people in the future may not be able to reply on this information.
I am particularly shocked by the response of ydoethur who is, I believe, a history teacher.
And has published research on nineteenth century census data, at that.
But that was then, this is now.
If you are saying it no longer has use then I have along list of professional historians who would beg to differ. Indeed I attended a talk by several of them only last week.
Undoubtedly. Just as you will find long lists of professional historians who bemoan the loss of telephone directories. Or newspapers. Or local libraries. Or national railway timetables. All of which are incredibly valuable in doing historical research.
All of which still exist.... well with the exception of national railway timetables and I happen to know there is a whole loose society of enthusiasts who religiously record those from the various websites on a daily basis. They even have various rail companies providing them with details of cancelled services.
But for most historians the census is pretty much irreplaceable as a snapshot of occupation.
You still get telephone directories in Lincs? I haven’t had one in years. Only once since moving north, I think.
As for local libraries, when it comes to keeping local records they are a very pale shadow of what they once were. Even twenty years ago when I was doing my BA it was perfectly normal to travel to different local libraries to consult several collections of local material. Now, they’re more or less all gone. Cannock is a particular disappointment in that regard.
True, county archives heroically try to gather up the slack, but they’re hopelessly under-resources and pushed for space as it is.
I must be lucky. Both Grantham and Newark libraries have excellent records. And yes I am also a reader at both Lincoln and Nottingham CROs so - before covid at least - spent far too much time poring over old documents. Enclosure maps and Turnpike Acts are my favourites. Oh and Tithe maps.
I’m delighted to hear it, but such libraries are increasingly exceptional, sadly.
I’m particularly sad and angry at what happened to Gloucester’s local collection, which was basically sold off, but even that‘s better than the fate of one of the finest local collections on classical Britain, at Carlisle, which ended up in a skip.
It is one reason why I would urge people these days to think very carefully before donating archaeological artefacts to museums. Far too many of them have decided they can no longer afford to keep the artefacts and have just skipped them. We had a real fight with Newark museum at the time of its conversion to the National Civil War Centre to prevent them dumping large amounts of ceramics and other artefacts dating back to the Roman period.
Well, speaking as someone who has visited and enjoyed Newark museum, we owe you a debt of gratitude for that fight.
But ultimately, it unfortunately comes down much too often to lack of funding. If they haven’t got the money, they make hard choices and very often it’s the historical material that’s of interest to fewer people that gets squeezed out.
That’s even true of uni libraries, although there are others that are infamous for not making sensible choices (apparently Lampeter university library still has an excellent geography section two decades after the geography department closed).
But why would a museum chuck excess artefacts in the bin, as Richard alleges?
Insane. There must be hundreds of kids - in any sizeable town - with a passion for history who would be delighted, enlightened and energised by the outright gift of some Roman pottery shards or medieval glassware and so on. Give these things away.
I've got a collection of two dozen tiny little historic objects in my living room. I found them all myself which adds to their lustre, but I would love them anyway - a flint arrowhead from Gobekli Tepe, a bit of amphora handle from the Valley of the Shadow of Death, some shrapnel from Gallipoli, a Piece of Pol Pot's Patio.
I love these things. Historical objects are history you can touch. Priceless. Never bin them!
I lusted after a Gobekli Tepe arrowhead (there's no shortage of them) but didn't have the bottle to try to smuggle one out - my Turkish phrase book usefully gives the translation for "I am terribly sorry Mr Customs Officer, I had no idea about the savage penalties for unlicensed antiquity exports," and I have watched Midnight Express.
I remember when I found my Gobekli Tepe arrowhead I was almost overcome with excitement. I pocketed it eagerly (and clandestinely). Then I had a big spasm of guilt and looked around, with a mind to putting it back - then I realised I was standing on a hill of flints which was practically all arrowheads and axes. Thousands of them
So I kept it and took it home. And I can see it now as I type. An arrowhead knapped by the same hunter-gatherers who built the world's oldest structure, a veritable temple in Eden, maybe 12,000 years ago.
Marvellous
Arrowheads form a nice thematic thread though this topic, since, according to Herodotus, the Scythian king Ariantas had each of his nomadic subjects contribute an arrowhead to his census - on pain on death - as a simple means of estimating their population. Once these arrowheads were all collected, they were used to manufacture a giant bronze vessel of over 5000 gallons in volume to serve as a monument to his rule. And indeed that's the only reason anyone has ever heard of him...
And our entire nation would be very different if it weren't for the arrow in Harold's eye
The Anglo-Saxons came quite close to winning at Hastings, DESPITE the handicap of having fought and won a brutal battle against the Norse, and King Harald Hardrada, a few days before. Like beating the Springboks then taking on the All Blacks, later that same weekend
If he'd won the 2nd battle, like the first, Harold Godwinsson would now be the greatest hero in English history, instead of a footnote, and an image on a tapestry. Discuss.
And the world would also be very different, shaped by a different Britain - or not shaped at all.
English victory at Hastings is an alternative history favourite, though frankly it's so far back in time and would represent such a significant deviation from established events that its long-term effects can only be vaguely guessed at.
And who is to say the Normans wouldn't have been back another year. They weren't know for just sitting around and enjoying what they had already.
But the Normans would probably have turned west and south rather than north. Invading and conquering England is very hard. Note that no one has succeeded since. The Spanish vowed to try a 2nd time after the failure of the armada, but, in the end, they didn't. Nerves failed.
The Normans, after a failure in England, would have had a go at Brittany, or gone down the French coast to Aquitaine. Much easier.
And of course after winning at Hastings a triumphant and vindicated Harold Godwinsson would 1, have shored up his defences and 2, might have gone on the offensive himself, now rid of any Viking threat from the east
I agree.
But as it stands, 14th October 1066 remains the single day that shaped Britain more than any other.
John Stuart Mill famously disagreed: 'The battle of Marathon, even as an event in English history, is more important than the battle of Hastings...'
Good job it was a long time ago. The battle of Snickers just doesn't have the same ring to it.
Seriously though, I'd like to hear Mill's reasoning. It seems rather implausible to me.
Essentially that Marathon (and Salamis a decade later) were pivotal battles in world history that determined the independent survival of the Greek city-states and more generally dissuaded the Persian Empire from spilling over into Europe. No independent city-states would have meant no Athenian democracy, and consequently perhaps also stifled the Western development of the genres of philosophy, history, oratory, drama, etc. that exploded in that century. And a Persian Empire with a foothold in Europe and no obvious check on its expansion might have continued West until it met the still-tiny Roman Republic ... and flattened it.
It's just an early bit of counterfactual historical theorizing, but a Europe and a world without classical Greece and Rome would be utterly different from the one that has evolved from them.
Classical Persia was a tolerant and multicultural empire. Certainly gets a good write up in the Bible compared to other states.
I love the modern penchant for reaching thousands of years into history and judging events by their perceived diversity policy.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
Virtually all empires were multicultural prior to the emergence of the modern concept of the nation state in Seventeenth Century Europe. Loyalty was to a monarch rather than to a nation before that period.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
The Persian Empire was an autocracy that literally tried to conquer as many territories as it could. It would have crushed ancient Greece and Rome if it could. And it wasn't a Woke paradise inside it's borders either; your status depended very much on which religion you were, for example, and your family.
Please don't try and use classical history to make points about your contemporary politics. It's cringeworthy and embarrassing.
I never denied it was autocratic. Indeed I pointed out that multiple cultures were permitted as long as they remained loyal to the monarch. This was the norm at the time.
The Roman Empire was much the same, with local cultures, languages and religions permitted, provided loyal to Rome. That some emperors were oppressive is undeniable, but the Roman Empire was multicultural, as indeed was the British Empire.
That was the genius of Rome, and a key as to how a single city came to rule a continent; the elites were offered co-option as citizens of Rome, with all the accompanying privileges including voting rights even if, in the absence of either postal voting or fast economic transport, the latter were of little value for those at a distance.
Yes, and once again parallels with the British Empire, with an assimilated elite to British cultural values, while the majority carried on with their lives largely undisturbed.
The combination of buying off and co-opting an elite, with ruthless oppression of rebellion is the formula for Empire. Things have adapted a bit over the years, but not fundamentally changed.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
So you are saying how multicultural life was under the Normans... 🤔
I think under your expansive definition you'd say it was multicultural under the Anglo-Saxons (all those Angles, Saxons and Jutes mixing with Britons and Celts) under the Romans (ancient Celtic tribes mixing with Romans from all across the Empire, and Picts and Scots creeping in) and under ancient British too (all those settlers crossing over from the continent over the dogger land bridge).
You'd say all culture has always been multicultural, and there has thus never been a "culture" of any polity.
We know why you do it. To allow yourself to try and be agnostic and dismissive of any English culture or identity today.
It's a bit transparent mate.
The point is that English identity, like American, is a historical amalgam, as is evident from study of the language before you even get on to culture. It has celtic, germanic, norse and Norman elements, and in more recent times Huguenot, Dutch, Jewish, Caribbean and South Asian. Much more of a melting pot than most; compare for example Polish, despite the Poles not actually having had their own country for much of history.
Is there any other case in history where a nation's defeat in a single battle led to a takeover and total domination by a foreign ruling elite that lasted hundreds of years, and arguably continues to this day, 954 years later?
With any invasion, doesn't the "foreign ruling elite" cease to be a "foreign ruling elite" very quickly indeed? People either assimilate or die in no time at all if that, rather than some more limited form of control (e.g. dominating and extracting rents for a foreign people) is the aim.
Yes, we're not the people we would have been had the Norman Conquest not happened. So what? It doesn't at all mean we've been dominated just that we ARE the assimilation of invaders and indigenous.
It's like Danny Dyer being related to Edward III. Very interesting they traced it, but the correct response is actually "you and 50 million others, mate".
Yes - I'm pretty confident (as confident as anyone making an argument that can't be disproved) that a modern England in which the Norman invasion of 1066 had been repelled would be *better*. But I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. We're all Normans, just as we're all Saxons, Angles and Vikings. So it's not a counterfactual I can wish for too strongly.
My thinking is that it's probably overegged. We had about 200-250 years of Norman oppression. It brought in overt feudalism and Norman French into our language, and a regime of castles and controls.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
So you are saying how multicultural life was under the Normans... 🤔
I think under your expansive definition you'd say it was multicultural under the Anglo-Saxons (all those Angles, Saxons and Jutes mixing with Britons and Celts) under the Romans (ancient Celtic tribes mixing with Romans from all across the Empire, and Picts and Scots creeping in) and under ancient British too (all those settlers crossing over from the continent over the dogger land bridge).
You'd say all culture has always been multicultural, and there has thus never been a "culture" of any polity.
We know why you do it. To allow yourself to try and be agnostic and dismissive of any English culture or identity today.
It's a bit transparent mate.
The point is that English identity, like American, is a historical amalgam, as is evident from study of the language before you even get on to culture. It has celtic, germanic, norse and Norman elements, and in more recent times Huguenot, Dutch, Jewish, Caribbean and South Asian. Much more of a melting pot than most; compare for example Polish, despite the Poles not actually having had their own country for much of history.
I am not an authority on Polish history, but it is worth noting how multicultural Poland was in both its historic and modern forms. Indeed it was tolerance under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that led to the flourishing European Jewish Shtetl culture.
Post war Poland being nearly mono-ethnic now is a result of other countries actions in redrawing its borders and either exterminating or deporting its other peoples. Only in the case of the expulsions of Germans in 1945-6 was this at the instigation of Poles themselves.
Comments
Meanwhile, in Arizona, some parts of the state observe daylight saving, while others do not.
I had to give up after a minute as it was just so riddled with homophobia of a deeply unpleasant kind.
Times change, which is often a good thing.
Sport is my main concern about moving to CET. Currently UEFA games kick off at 6pm and 8pm our time, which is 7pm and 9pm on the continent. I wouldn’t want to move to CET if it meant games would be kicking off at 7pm and 9pm our time.
While the rich head off on private jets, ministers are keen to guilt-trip everyone else into settling for a soggy staycation
Matthew Parris" [£]
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/a-trip-abroad-is-nothing-to-be-ashamed-of-rbcsstl2v
Thinking Conservatives used to be people who tried to be sceptical about utopian ideas on the the left.The modern Conservative party is a Utopian party.Brexit is Utopian .Carbon Neutral policies are Utopian.It embraces 95% of the Left's views on feminism , multi-culturalism and 'social justice'.
There are no right wing comedians or shows on mainstream tv i am aware of in the UK.A right wing comedian would be attacking the Utopianism of Climate Change,Equality,Feminism and Multi-Culturalism.There is plenty of material for comedy there given how priviliged and self-righteous so many of the celebrities of the now Utopian establishment are.
Fox News was mostly a biased and dumbed down news channel however it did provide voices on UK tv that questioned Utopian ideas in politics and exposed the way that facts were cherrypicked to support those Utopian ideas.As did Andrew Neills 'This Week' bbc show - now removed.Those voices are almost completely absent on UK mainstream media currently and whenever one appears such as Rod Liddle they are set up to be trapped.
The so-called 'right wing ' voices who regularily appear on TV are not actually really right wing they are careerists who have noticed what is acceptable for the establishment to have advocated on tv and what is not i.e Norcott
Hopefully Andrew Neill forthcoming New Tv Channel will give a home to maverick voices on the right
America has weird ideas. A decade or two ago a survey found that, tied equal worst with rapists, atheists were the least liked/trusted of potential hitchhickers.
Not to mention there's far more BLM bullshit in the US that believes there's white supremacy everywhere.
Rather hoping Mercedes continues to have bad days. Some variety would be nice.
The Queen is very widely respected by other commonwealth leaders in all the commonwealth countries, and has been for a long time, and, without any compulsion whatsoever, they've all just voted unanimously to have Charles as its next head.
So, a gentle request asking one of two of them if they wouldn't mind giving their own views and experiences of working with the royal family wouldn't be amiss.
I don't even believe the statement she made at the start that they hadn't discussed what they were going to ask, and nothing was off limits.
If you have two asexual people having dinner, they might not have explicitly ruled out frisky time, but it isn't going to happen. I'm sure Winfrey 'could' have asked whatever she wanted.
Like assaulting an African and stealing his lunch is not an untruthful way to describe rescuing a child from a lion.
Hopefully, future historians won't have these painfully contemporary hang-ups.
That said, Englishness a level of challenge against that was reasserting itself by the 14th Century, arguably earlier if you trace some parts to Magna Carta and the early 13th Century, including the nascent Parliaments, and once the 100 years war was over it really became history.
Most of our language and much of of our culture - including juries - derives from Anglo-Saxon times but we might have been a tad less class-ridden and a bit more Scandinavian in our attitudes without it, although this can be overcooked too.
I can only conclude from the rest of your post that you don't have a great sense of humour.
Examples of well-balanced comedy for me would include Fawlty Towers, Not The Nine O'Clock News (remember that Trade Union negotiation sketch, but also the one about the bigotted copper), Blackadder, Men Behaving Badly and Alan Partridge. Also the office.
In other words, just sending anyone and anything up that needs it in clever and creative ways, as a comment on contemporary society, with some remarkable insights too. That's why I think contemporary Wokeness needs including because it's rich with contradictions, absurdity, and pompous earnestness, and yet also entirely humourless.
But ditch the overt politicking. Because it's only funny to the faithful.
The fact that the Jews were cast into harsh captivity by the Ancient Babylonians, and liberated by the Persians is established in the Old Testament in the books of Isaiah, Daniel, Nehemiah and Ezra. Having prospered in exile, and forming a distinct religious community there, the book of Ezra tells of the rebuilding of Solomons Temple on the instruction of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes. The author of Ezra rather condemns the lax observance of the Israelites who were not in exile, with the strict observances of the exiles.
A set of books written 2500 years ago is hardly a modern source, but rather a contemporaneous one. Certainly the Greeks were less keen on the Persians, but it is hard to justify the Persian Empire as oppressive by the standards of its times, and indeed compared to many before and after it was rather benign.
Please don't try and use classical history to make points about your contemporary politics. It's cringeworthy and embarrassing.
Pretty much the only way today’s GOP can win at the national level.
https://twitter.com/AriBerman/status/1370057060793077772
You'd say all culture has always been multicultural, and there has thus never been a "culture" of any polity.
We know why you do it. To allow yourself to try and be agnostic and dismissive of any English culture or identity today.
It's a bit transparent mate.
The Roman Empire was much the same, with local cultures, languages and religions permitted, provided loyal to Rome. That some emperors were oppressive is undeniable, but the Roman Empire was multicultural, as indeed was the British Empire.
During the imperial phase, there was an emperor-cult. By and large, Romans were happy for people to have their own gods too. But when Christianity became the state religion it didn't take long for paganism (to use an anachronistic term) to be attacked and cast down, despite Julian's late attempt to resurrect it.
*Normans were French speaking descendents of Vikings, for example, having adopted some French culture.
The Anglo-Saxons were more concerned with establishing their overlordship of Britain than of Normandy, Gascony, etc.
New thread
The combination of buying off and co-opting an elite, with ruthless oppression of rebellion is the formula for Empire. Things have adapted a bit over the years, but not fundamentally changed.
Post war Poland being nearly mono-ethnic now is a result of other countries actions in redrawing its borders and either exterminating or deporting its other peoples. Only in the case of the expulsions of Germans in 1945-6 was this at the instigation of Poles themselves.