Some facts about the middle finger:
My favorite essay on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:
History of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms
By Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
excerpt
Because for a thousand years, no village of peasants with their scythes and pitchforks could stand up to a mere handful of the helicopter gunships of that time, the mounted knight in his coat of mail.
Only the landed gentry could afford a warhorse and a suit of armor. Let even three or four of these medieval equivalents of the Abrams tank enter your village, and the peasant's only hope was to drop to one knee and plead for his life. Take the cattle, take our daughters, use them as you will ...
Why did this ever change? Do you think it's because the guys in charge just got tired of having it all their way?
Of course not. This changed in the mid-1400s, at Crecy and Agincourt, when mere English commoners found they could destroy the cream of the French aristocracy--drowning thousands of armored noble knights in the mud beneath their own toppled horses--by dint of one simple, technological advance: the Welsh longbow, an inexpensive weapon best deployed by large gangs of anonymous peasants.
The French considered this so barbarous they threatened to cut off the index and middle fingers of any English archers they caught, rendering them incapable of using their dreaded bows. The Brits responded by defiantly waving these two fingers in the air--or sometimes just one of them.
Far from banning them from bearing arms, by the 16th century English law actually required commoners to practice their archery at least one weekend per month, to remain ready should the king need them. Suddenly--coincidentally?--the "rights of Englishmen" began to be interpreted to mean the rights of commoners under the law, not just the rights of nobles, as envisioned in the Magna Carta of 1215.
This new state of affairs reflected the new reality of the field of battle, where commoners could and did dictate terms to defeated monarchs--even going so far as to behead the King of England in 1649.
Can you imagine that? They cut off his head.
Of course, some lessons take a little time to sink in. Marching south from Lake Champlain to the Hudson in the early autumn of 1777, Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne sent out mercenary Hessian scouting parties to demand fodder for his horses from the local peasantry.
The New York farmers watched the brilliantly-uniformed Hessians walk into their farmyards demanding free food for the general's army ... and shot them dead, sometimes wiping out entire detachments to a man.
This was unheard of in continental Europe, where most peasants were still expected to know their place.
But things only got worse for Burgoyne's army, its morale sapped by the heat, the humidity, the sudden storms, the bugs and the venomous snakes of what Americans now consider the "resort district" of Glens Falls and Lake George. (Thank goodness these wimps didn't find themselves in North Florida--the Yankees would probably have ended up owning Devon, Somerset, and half of Wales.)
As the exhausted army and its overladen baggage wagons emerged from the woods and climbed toward the open lands around Saratoga, a few isolated bands of Yankee farmers in homespun took up position behind the trees, and began "firing on the officers' persons."
I have always loved that quotation from Johnny Burgoyne's journal. The words so succinctly capture the outrage and incredulity of a dying class. British officers knew they ran the risk of being struck, along with their men, by unaimed volley fire. But to have enemy peasants--commoners--purposely take aim at an officer's person, using a Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifle which by an outlandish historical accident proved to be more accurate than the standard-issue British Brown Bess musket ... well, it was unthinkable.
Students of American history know it was the leadership of Gen. Benedict Arnold of Connecticut--rising again and again despite his wounds to lead from the front as his horse was shot from under him--that turned the tide of battle at Saratoga, the turning point of the Revolutionary War, the battle that brought in France as America's ally and thus sealed Cornwallis' eventual fate.
But few recall the first question that occurred to both King Louis and King George when news of Burgoyne's surrender in October of '77 reached the European courts:
Who in hell had Burgoyne surrendered to? Washington and the entire Continental Army--excepting the aforementioned Gen. Arnold and a handful of other officers in fancy coats--were in Philadelphia, withdrawing before the successful (but finally meaningless) siege of Gen. Howe.
The answer--inconceivable to the kind of European mind that ordered the band to play "The World Turned Upside Down" at Yorktown in 1781--was that Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne had surrendered an entire British army to the American militia, to nothing but a gang of New York and New England farmers.
Is there a "control sample" that tends to confirm my thesis for why commoners in America (and, to a lesser extent and until recently, places like Australia and Western Europe) managed to throw off the chains of feudal tyranny and become far more "free" in the centuries after 1500--with all the advantages of economic, scientific, and technological progress with which we're so familiar ... even if we've forgotten how they were won?
Yes, I think so. After toying with imported European firearms in the late 1500s, the shoguns of Japan banned the instruments entirely. In fact, under the decree of the shogun Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-1598), issued on the 8th day of the seventh month, Tensho 16, "The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues, and tends to foment uprisings."
So, artificially and in an almost ideally isolated experiment, while commoners gained increasing rights in direct proportion to their importance and strength on the battlefields of the rest of the world in the next 250 years, Japan remained (until Commodore Perry brought this experiment to a crashing close in 1853) one of the few places in the world where the peasant remained in absolute feudal subservience to the hereditary aristocracy, with their warhorses and their deadly steel and lacquered leather armor.
Because the people had no guns.
BUMP!
thanks for a great post!
see #3
Just one problem with this theory.
The Swiss, before significant development of firearms, and without the longbow, had at least equal success beating up on the knights, leading to a 200 year mercenary reign as the lords of the battlefield.
Solid infantry, with their pikes and halberds, were more than a match for European noble cavalry, as long as the infantry had semi-decent leadership. This, however, was due only to a peculiarity of western cavalry, which eschewed missile weapons completely for greater shock. The cataphracts of Byzantium or the Persian or Mamaluke heavy cavalry, all of which used the bow as well as the lance, would have just shot the Swiss pike squares to pieces, then rode down the remnants.
The Flemings and Scots, among others, had famous battles where infantry wiped out knightly armies, although those were most often based on peculiarities of terrain and on poor leadership among the opposition.
I would also suggest that a knight has a lot more in common with a tank than with a helicopter gunship.