Posted on 10/03/2010 12:36:01 PM PDT by Lorianne
As snowflakes swirled around the peasants' houses in the depths of January 1414, a travel-weary horseman galloped up the muddy lanes of the Leicestershire village of Kibworth Harcourt. After a frantic two-day ride from London, the messenger was cold and exhausted. But he lost no time in leaping from his horse and rushing straight across the cattle yard and into one of the timber-framed farms on Main Street. For he had terrible news to impart to the woman of the house. Emma Gilbert, a widowed merchant's wife, hailed from one of the oldest and most respected families in Kibworth. She had a daughter, Alice, and a number of grandchildren. Perhaps they were at Emma's side when the messenger delivered his blow: her sons, Walter and Nicholas, had been executed in London.
Their deaths would have been an appalling shock for the family, residents of Kibworth for more than a century and pillars of the community. Earlier that year, the two brothers had left the village to take part in an extraordinarily dangerous rebellion against the new English King, Henry V, and against the whole edifice of the Catholic Church. But it had failed disastrously.
Soon to be hailed as the victor of Agincourt, young Henry was far too skilled a soldier to be caught unawares by such a poorly hatched plan. The rebels had raised nowhere near the hoped-for 20,000 men and had been easily crushed.
The King was merciful to most of the defeated — after a few months in Newgate Prison, many were pardoned and sent home — but a terrible fate awaited Walter and Nicholas.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Once. They were warriors, now they are dhimmis.
Whenever anyone tells you he’s going to tell you history from the bottom up, run for the hills. Unless he himself has experienced life at the bottom of the heap today, you’ll get a good dose of his own modern spin with his own preferred bogeyman (undoubtedly the eeeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvvviiiiiiiiiillllllllll Church).
Besides, his protagonists are not bottom-dwellers in 1414. They are part of the middle. Portraying Lollards as bottom-dwellers, innocent victims of the eeeeeeeeeevvvvvvvvviiiiiiilllllllll king/church already has distorted things by implying that the movement was a movement of the poor and powerless, innocent victim-heroes.
When, in fact, John of Gaunt, just about as near to the top as one could get in that day, supported them and lots of Lollards were from the middle-to-the-top of the heap.
Bottoms-up, sure.
Very interesting. Not unlike what has happened in America.
Even the technique is not new. Parker Rowland published a fascinating “history of England through the eyes of a single village” back in 1975, titled Common Stream: Two Thousand Years of the English Village.
It’s an interesting read, to be sure, and I’m sure Wood’s TV program is interesting. But groundbreaking and innovative it is not and a no-spin zone, most assuredly not.
It’s not clear from the article, but my guess is that the 1414 executions were tied to the 1413 uprising led by Sir John Oldcastle. Hmmmmmmm. Wonder why Woods didn’t mention that upfront? He makes Nicholas and Walter, at most bit players, into the central figures.
Oldcastle’s rebellion was a bottoms-up revolution but a revolt led by lower gentry, one of hundreds of such power-struggle uprisings by noblemen that had taken place for centuries and would continue to take place until the absolutist kings finally crushed the nobles in the 1500s. The whole late 1300s and the rest of the 1400s would be characterized by exactly this sort of power struggle among elites, not bottoms-up revolutions.
Even the technique is not new. Parker Rowland published a fascinating “history of England through the eyes of a single village” back in 1975, titled Common Stream: Two Thousand Years of the English Village.
It’s an interesting read, to be sure, and I’m sure Wood’s TV program is interesting. But groundbreaking and innovative it is not and a no-spin zone, most assuredly not.
It’s not clear from the article, but my guess is that the 1414 executions were tied to the 1413 uprising led by Sir John Oldcastle. Hmmmmmmm. Wonder why Woods didn’t mention that upfront? He makes Nicholas and Walter, at most bit players, into the central figures.
Oldcastle’s rebellion was not a bottoms-up revolution but a revolt led by lower gentry, one of hundreds of such power-struggle uprisings by noblemen that had taken place for centuries and would continue to take place until the absolutist kings finally crushed the nobles in the 1500s. The whole late 1300s and the rest of the 1400s would be characterized by exactly this sort of power struggle among elites, not bottoms-up revolutions.
no. 5 was posted in error. No 6 has the correct “Oldcastle’s rebellion was NOT . . .”
I’m pretty sure that then (as today) you could gather quite a following for your cause du jour from the bottom classes by promising them loot.
There have been few, if any, truly bottom-up revolutions in world history.
All revolutions I’m aware of have been led by disgruntled members of the upper or middle classes. Supported in many cases by the lower echelon, of course, but then who else is going to support a revolution?
My kind of people. Their distrust is well founded.
I have read about the Lollards and think I know some other groups that have some of the same traits. Have read about those connections elsewhere.
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Recently read “ London” by Edward Rutherfurd.
Amazon.com review: Rutherford belongs to the James Michener school: he writes big, sprawling history-by- the-pound. His novel, London, stretches two millennia all the way from Roman times to the present. The author places his vignettes at the most dramatic moments of that city’s history, leaping from Caesar’s invasion to the Norman Conquest to the Great Fire to (of course) the Blitz, with many stops in between. London is ambitious, and students of English history will eat it up. The author doesn’t skimp on historical detail, and that’s a signal pleasure of the book. Ultimately, though, the structure of the novel determines the lion’s share of its success. Rutherfurd is a good storyteller and each vignette makes for a good story; however, he has given himself the inevitable task of beginning what amounts to a new book every 40 pages or so. Just as one begins to warm to the characters, they are hurried off the stage. You can’t read London without a scorecard—but that’s part of the fun.
He ties it all together by keeping track of the ups and downs of the same families through the centuries. And some bodies and personal posssessions of previous centuries turn up in modern times via the Blitz and archeological digs.
mark
Ahh, yes; the 'root' of Tolkien's "Saruman".
Orthanc itself seems to derive in part from another unconnected, but similar-sounding, entry in the dictionary: Searoburh is the name for the city of Salisbury, or rather for Old Sarum (for the city was moved after the Anglo-Saxon period). It is a striking site, now deserted, atop an ancient hill fort, surrounded by great defences and once topped by the spire of the cathedral. There is more than a passing similarity to Saruman’s dwelling, which, moreover, he took over as an ancient construction, just as Sarum was a Roman and Iron Age fort far antedating the occurrence of Searoburh in Old English. The name Orthanc itself is firmly Old English, meaning ‘original thought, ingenuity’, with an obvious semantic connection to a searuman, a ‘cunning man’; in fact, in Old English the word searoþanc occurs, ‘cunning thought’, which directly links Orthanc with Saruman. Orþanc, however, has two other meanings: one is as a gloss of Latin machinamenta, ‘mechanical devices’, and the other (really a homonym) is ‘thoughtlessness’ or folly. All these meanings come together in the contrivances Saruman was engaged in at Orthanc, in the machines he installed there, and in the complete folly of his exploits. It will be noted that Tolkien uses the form Saruman, not Searuman, as we would expect from the dictionary entries. This is because he has deliberately given his character a Mercian, rather than West Saxon, dialectal form.
Tolkien and Old English: The Background to the Golden Hall Scene (page 9)
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