Are There No Workhouses?

Today, I read a thread on twitter likening workhouses to gulags. Quite aside from doing a grave disservice to the millions who died in actual gulags in Communist Russia, the person who wrote the thread seemed to have absolutely no idea how the workhouse system in England actually... worked. And then you have nobjockeys like that cartoon prick Rees-Mogg saying we should bring back workhouses, which is a terribly short sighted idea, which I will come back to in hot minute.

So, let me enlighten you, because the Victorian poor are, quite literally, my specialist subject.

The 1601 Act for the Relief of the Poor was designed to echo Protestant culture of taking care of the less fortunate that spread across Europe in the 16th century. Essentially, the people who could afford it gave money to the church, who kept it in a giant chest in the church (the 'community chest', see also: Monopoly) and handed it out to the deserving poor. This meant the church got to decide who was deserving - vagrants (meaning anyone who wasn't normally resident in the parish) got short shrift. Most places also later built a workhouse to house people who needed it. They were usually quite small. To give a couple of local examples: Werrington workhouse was one of the thatched cottages near the village post office, and the one in Empingham was the house called The Wilderness. Cities had correspondingly larger workhouses. People could only claim relief from their home parish, under something called 'settlement'. You could acquire settlement by being born in a parish, marrying a man born in another parish and then moving there, or by working for more than a full year in the same parish before applying. This is part of the reason people didn't move around much in ye olden times - they risked losing their settlement, and thus any right to relief. 

By the 1800s, parish relief rates, a local tax payable by landowners and freemen, were getting out of hand. The data showed massive regional variation in how much people paid, to support a massively variable poor population. Something needed to be done, and the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was introduced. This law was harsh, make no mistake. It was supposed to offer immediate incarceration in the workhouse to any able-bodied person approaching the parish for relief. It was meant to be a deterrent. New workhouses were built to consolidate all the small ones in the area: huge, prison-like edifices popped up in every registration district.  They usually included an infirmary, and separated inmates into men and women. The new workhouses were run by the Board of Guardians, which replaced the parish as the administrative unit. They usually comprised local government figures, a few doctors and perhaps some of the local clergy. The settlement rules remained in force, and the Board were quite happy to pay to send petitioners back to their home workhouse if they could not prove settlement. 

Theoretically, the Board were only supposed to offer the workhouse (or in-relief) to poor people, but they were never so rigid in practice. How could they have been? Following a poor harvest, entire agricultural communities would require workhouse beds. Even the largest workhouses couldn't accommodate everyone. So, they bent the rules and gave people out-relief, depending on need. This wasn't necessarily money - they could give out fuel, flour, potatoes. A great many old people remained in their homes until death thanks to out-relief. Should you engage in family history and discover someone living on 'parish relief', that is what it refers to. Sometimes, this relief was given in exchange for maintaining the roads. Widows were also commonly given out-relief, to prevent their children being taken into the workhouse. If a whole family sought help, it was not uncommon for the Guardians to admit the husband, and give the wife and children out-relief to keep them at home (and therefore, together). 

The humanity of the Guardians depended very much on the area and its needs, but I have found many more examples of benevolence than of cruelty. 

If you wanted relief, you had to go before the Guardians - the worst kind of job interview format you can think of. You had to demonstrate your right to settlement, your reasons for asking for help, and do so with enough humility to make them want to help you. 

If you ended up in the workhouse, it was dehumanising. You were issued with a uniform, separated from your spouse and children (if they came in with you), and expected to work. The idea was to make the workhouse so horrible that nobody would choose to go there, thus saving money. But the very SIZE of the new workhouses demonstrated that the government were under no illusions about how this was going to work. 

There were several food scandals in the early days of the workhouse, with people being fed starvation diets. These scandals were incredibly damaging to the reputation of the new Poor Law, mainly because the rich didn't want the blood of the poor on their hands. The Poor Law Board was implemented after the above scandal, to act as a sort of Care Quality Commission for workhouse safety. 

The Board of Guardians, and workhouses, also served several other functions that rarely get referenced in general discourse. They provided residential care for the disabled, saving them from life in an asylum. They provided maternity services for unmarried women and those too poor to afford even basic private maternity cover. They issued medical orders to allow the poor to get medicine for free from the dispensary, and hospital admissions. They took the fathers of illegitimate children to court for maintenance on behalf of the mothers. They designed and built the first children's homes, and developed formal foster care. Now, none of this was done for solely benevolent reasons (child maintenance, for example, stopped them having to fund illegitimate children) or to anything approaching a modern standard of good practice, but in an era before the welfare state, the Poor Law WAS the welfare state. 

In 1909, pensions were brought in for the first time for those who hadn't needed relief within the last five years. This was extended to universal provision in 1911, and marked the beginning of the slow end of workhouses. They still offered beds to tramps (read The Spike by George Orwell for a brilliant account of what being a tramp meant in those days), still offered maternity services for the unmarried (which was a source of immense shame in most areas), still offered inpatient care to disabled people, but essentially became hospitals. Peterborough workhouse morphed into Peterborough District Hospital over a number of years. Bourne workhouse became St Peter's Hospital, a residential home for disabled children and adults. The majority of remaining workhouses became Public Assistance Institutions in the 1930s, being subsumed into the NHS on inception, and most workhouse sites remain NHS-owned - one of Stamford's, for example, is an ambulance centre and residential service. Yes, affluent Stamford had two workhouses, housing 450 people, with a separate children's home. 

So why did they stop? Who decided workhouses were a bad idea, and why? For the same reason the government decide anything: cost. It is not cheap to maintain buildings designed to house hundreds of people. It is not cheap to hire the staff - all workhouses had a master, a matron (usually the master's wife) and various medical staff. Cleaning etc. was done by the inmates, but these inmates needed to be fed. After the workhouse scandals of the early Poor Law reform, they needed to be fed so they wouldn't die. It is much cheaper to keep people in their own shitty homes than to pay for them to be housed in government-run buildings, with accompanying government standards, however appalling those standards are from the modern perspective. 

And that remains the reason why reinstating workhouses would be a fucking terrible idea, morally, fiscally, practically. If you use  people who are currently in receipt of not-in-work benefits as your basic admission criteria, you have a minimum inmate population of eight hundred and ninety THOUSAND, not including spouses/children. So now you have to build workhouses to house those 890000 people, their partners and children, including adequate heating, electrics, food, water, medical care, ensuring the housing complies with individual access needs for the myriad disabled people. You have to pay for staff, and their training, and a Workhouse Quality Commission. Workhouses are not prisons - the inmates have done nothing wrong aside from not being in work - so you better have adequate facilities. The compensation market for wrongful practice would make an absolute fortune. 

Would that cost the government less than £70 per person per week? Would it fuck. Paying people their benefits directly absolves the government of responsibility if that person ends up in shit housing, with no electric, no medicine and no help. Put them in the workhouse, and the government better fucking deliver. 

Here endeth the lesson.

Further reading: 

The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700-1948, Lynn Hollen Lees

The Evolution of the British Welfare State: A History of Social Policy since the Industrial Revolution, Derek Fraser

The website www.workhouses.org offers a comprehensive catalogue of workhouses, children's homes and other institutions in England, often with pictures and maps.

Another Really Good Sandwich

Currently, I do not feel the urge to blog. My life is a nonstop whirl of work, because uni hate me and set the deadline for my dissertation proposal/sample chapter for the 9th January AND I HAVE TO POST THE FUCKING THING IN THE ACTUAL POST, so realistically, I need to finish it and post it by the 5th at the latest. I am, however, well proud of what I've got planned. Soph: Crime and Sexuality Historian at your service. I have a four month research break from January-May and then seven months of write up...and then, fuck knows. A job? Hold tight, NHS, I'm coming back to administrate you!

As well as work, I am trapped by the twin rock of grief and anxiety. Grief for my mum, whose loss lingers in every lit up window, in every Christmas card, in every present wrapped. Grief in every present I would have bought her. Grief in everything I want to phone and ask her ("Mum, are you sure this bloody pudding needs three hours steaming??"). Grief in everything I want to share with her, every nativity and every funny thing Alex (experiencing his third Christmas, but his first as a properly aware person) comes out with. 

And anxiety, because having a stupid fucking anxiety disorder which has MOSTLY gone away since The Worst Thing That Could Happen Happened And I Survived, rears its hideous and unwanted head at Christmas. "What if you all DIE ON CHRISTMAS EVE?" it whispers into my ear. "DID YOU LEAVE THE OVEN ON? WILL THE HOUSE BURN DOWN? I BET IT WILL". "YOU'LL VOMIT ALL OVER YOURSELF AND THE CHRISTMAS DINNER AND THE CHILDREN WILL HOWL AND YOU WILL REMEMBER THIS AS THE CHRISTMAS OF PUKE". I know it's irrational. It doesn't make it any easier to bear. My festive anxiety is not a new thing. As a seven(ish) year old, my parents had to take me to the emergency doctors on Christmas Eve because I was in such excruciating pain. It was just excitement. I used to puke every single Christmas Eve. The last time was when I was about 22. It's quite irrational. Thankfully, my endometriosis painkiller is also an anxiolytic, so at a push, I can eat them until I fall into a passive coma (*don't try this at home, kids*).

But this is all by the by. I came to give you a brilliant recipe for your leftover turkey, because I have always been revolted by the very fucking idea of cold turkey with a plate of bubble and squeak (sorry Dad). On Boxing Day, we don't have the older two boys, so I tend to breakfast on prosecco and REALLY EXPENSIVE bacon sandwiches like a luxuriant slattern. But you can't actually live on prosecco and bacon (and cheese) for the entire festive period (I KNOW, SO UNFAIR). 

This is an adapted form of the Vietnamese sandwich, Banh Mi, which I have bastardised from a recipe by Niki Segnit in the fabulous The Flavour Thesaurus. If you're carnivorous, you can probably assemble this sandwich from what you have on hand. And it is WORTH getting rice wine vinegar in just to make it, believe me. It needs a little work in advance, but not like Christmas dinner levels, and it's bright and refreshing in a sea of fat and carbs and fat. 

Sorry, no veggie/vegan alternative, but the pickled veg is bloody lovely in most things or indeed, on its own. 

You Will Need For About Four Sandwiches:

For The Pickle

A peeled carrot

An unpeeled cucumber

Rice wine vinegar

Salt

Sugar

For Assembly

Pâté - chicken liver for preference, but it's Christmas so whatever you've got. Nothing too spicy or herby though. 

Mayonnaise - Helmans is fine

Fish sauce (aka nam pla)

Soy sauce

Leftover turkey shredded into strips

Four short baguettes cut not-quite-in-half lengthways

Fresh coriander, but it's not essential

This is a recipe of two halves, so you need to plan it a tiny bit. 

First, pickle your veg, Cut your cucumber and carrot into matchstick pieces. I am crap at cutting them this fine, but you want them fairly thin because nobody wants to bite down on a fucking enormous piece of carrot in their sandwich. Take the seeds out of the cucumber as you chop it up, or the resulting pickle will be a wet seedy mess. Once they are cut, cover them in salt and leave them for ten to twenty minutes. I do this with them on a piece of kitchen roll in a colander in the sink, because the salt draws the moisture out and then it drains straight out into the plughole rather than sitting about, sludgily. When you think they've had long enough, rinse them, dry them and then put them in a bowl. Mix about four tablespoons of rice wine vinegar with a tablespoon of sugar and then pour if over the veg. Leave it in the fridge to marinate until you want it. I tend to do this in the morning if I'm eating in the evening but you can really do it any time in the 24 hours before you want to eat. This sounds a faff. It is not. 

And so to assembly. Drain the veg. Mix some mayonnaise with a dash of fish sauce and a dash of soy sauce - you don't want to make the mayo too runny. Then spread one cut side of the baguette with mayo. Spread the other side with pâté. Warm it through in the oven. Then stuff the baguette with drained veg and shredded turkey. Add fresh coriander.

EAT, GORGE, CONSUME! MAKE MERRY! 

At this rate, my first book will be Soph's Big Book Of Fucking Amazing Sandwiches.

Merry Christmas xxx

Cromer

A few weeks ago, I had to write about the rise of the leisure town in the nineteenth century. I wrote a 5000 word essay on Cromer, my most favourite resort in the world, and the place where we recently scattered my mum's ashes. I couldn't have written the essay without help from Mum's prodigious seaside library, and when I decided to do my MA, Mum was so excited about the idea of helping me with this essay. She couldn't help me in body, but she helped me in spirit.

When I finished the essay, I sent it to my dad to have a look and he said "I prefer your blogs". I know what he means - academic essays can rob all the joy out of a subject - so I decided to rewrite my essay for my dad's consumption, put the stuff I couldn't put in my actual essay, and put it on here. It only covers up to 1900, so you will have to go write your own essay for the Edwardian period. I got 82% for the 'proper' version.

A Brief History of Cromer as a Resort

Long ago, in the mists of time, Cromer was a prosperous market town, a little inland from the coast. It was almost the site of Edward IV's successful reinvasion to take the crown (again) from Henry VI, but he changed his mind and went up the coast to Ravenspur. But erosion took its toll. Shipden was swallowed by the sea in the thirteenth century, giving rise to certain legends, and it seems likely that part of the reason for Cromer's diminishing size across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that it kept falling in the sea. In 1724, Daniel Defore, then roaming the country and writing up the first travelogue of England, said that "Cromer is a market town close to the shoar [sic] of this dangerous coast. I know nothing it is famous for (besides it being thus the terror of the sailors) except good lobsters”. Not long after, seabathing became a popular health treatment for the wealthy of the age. All kinds of hydrotherapy were used by the rich - my favourite is the visitors to Matlock Bath who paid a princely sum to have buckets of cold water dumped on them from above - and seabathing was widely accessible, and had a royal pedigree - George III in his madness was a frequent visitor to Weymouth, and Brighton developed alongside as a favoured resort, being close to London.

Cromer, however, was not close to London or any other useful municipal centre. Norwich, the closest city, was a busy market and textile town. King's Lynn, further round the coast, was a very busy port full of important folk. What secured Cromer's fortune as a future resort was its local gentry. The gentry were the celebrities of the day - in Bath, famous guests were announced by a peal of bells, as much an attraction as the spring waters and balls. In North Norfolk, Holt was the place to be. It was almost entirely rebuilt in fashionable style after a fire gutted it in the eighteenth century, and the local gentry (of Felbrigg, Gunton, and Melton Constable) held horse races, balls and assemblies to provide the rich with something to do. Where else would they go to bathe in the sea than Cromer; splendidly placed on high cliffs, with plenty of shipping and beautiful scenery, and untouched by the burgeoning industrial revolution.

Now, we skip forward a little to 1800, when the first guidebook to Cromer was published. It was written by a surgeon named Bartell, who wanted to advertise the benefits of the town, possibly inspired by a 1799 piece in Gentleman's Magazine which waxed lyrical about Cromer's coast: "Had Neptune himself sent his azure chariot to receive [me], I scarce could been more awed, more softened, or more enchanted". Bartell wrote of its beauty, its lighthouse run by two women (there's a cracking story there somewhere), and the many country houses in the vicinity for those who wanted to go and peer through the windows of the aristocracy. He wrote of how you could hear the bells of Shipden church ring at high tide (most likely nonsense, although church rock undoubtedly remained an issue for shipping into the nineteenth century). He also wrote of its dearth of attractions, complaining that all it needed was one good inn for the rich to stay in, to catapult it to fame akin to Brighton. It was already hosting the rich for short seasons in leased houses, but there was no hotel, no bath house, no assembly room.¹ Cromer's population at the time was around 700 people.
Bartell's book worked. By 1815, Jane Austen was able to refer to Cromer as "the best of all the sea bathing places. A fine open sea [...] and very pure air" in Emma. This implies that the sort of people reading Jane Austen at the time knew where and what Cromer was. Cromer began to grow. Adverts such as this one began to appear, advertising large houses for sale in order to lease them out to holidaymakers:

Norfolk Chronicle 18th August 1827

^{A bath house was built on the seafront, as was an assembly room. These were both washed away in high seas in the 1830s, but the bath house was rebuilt soon after, and remains standing. In the 1820s, Lord Suffield of Gunton Park built himself a mansion on the cliff, changed his mind about twenty seconds later and sold the house to a developer. The developer cleared the site and built the first Hotel de Paris. This was not quite the grand structure we see today: it was small, white and two storeys high. Later, an extra storey was added on. Two other hotels (the Belle Vue and New Inn) flanked it. A little further along the cliff was built the Regency Hotel:}

Engraving from 1867. Prints Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum. Original available here

It is now called the Craft Burger Company. As far as I can tell, it is the oldest hotel still standing in more or less original form in Cromer.  The Red Lion was also an early hotel, but has been rebuilt at least twice. Tuckers Hotel was popular among upper class guests, and stood near the church on Tucker Street. In 1870, Gertrude Marion Gillow went swimming from Tucker's (not a sensible move in the choppy sea on that particular day) and was washed up drowned a few days later. She was the daughter of a Kentish farmer and there was a £5 reward for information before her body was found: about four months wages for a fisherman!

The people who visited resorts liked to have somewhere to walk. This was partly because sea air was healthy and free, but also because it gave an opportunity to be seen and to hobnob with other rich guests. Cromer had a jetty, 'well paved for walking', from 1822, in much the same place the pier now stands. It was washed away on numerous occasions, but always rebuilt as the centrepiece of the town. Although the pier in its current form wasn't built until 1901, the older jetties held concerts and firework displays and functioned as the formal pier does. Happy Valley, being considerably broader in the 19thC, was also a popular place to walk. At some point in the Victorian era, this walk was paved and supplied with porches to shelter in and view the sea. When it finally occurred to the great and good of Cromer to build sea defences, lest their lovely money-spinning hotels fall into the sea, they included a promenade for guests. This was initially built in the 1870s.

It wasn't enough to have hotels and walks to attract the wealthy. Cromer's status as fishing village turned good meant it lacked the amenities that people were beginning to take for granted: safe water, gas power, transport links, room for coaches. Part of Church Street was demolished in the 1870s to widen the road to allow for more traffic. There was a daily coach in the summer season, taking guests from Tucker's Hotel to Norwich railway station in time for the 11am train:

Norwich Mercury. 23rd June 1849.

In 1866, Ellen Buxton of the Quaker banking Buxtons described her first class railway carriage from London to Norwich as "most comfortable and beautifully fitted up. There was a table in the middle, two easy chairs, a sofa fixed to the wall at one side. There was also a little carriage opening out of this big one which we called the nursery, and there was a wash basin and place for the luggage". To then clonk down to Cromer in a horse drawn carriage would have been considerably less luxurious. In the 1850s, Lord Suffield had proposed a railway link to Norwich, with the idea of improving agriculture through faster transport. It took ages to get going, but Cromer High Station opened in 1877. Almost immediately, it started attracting far greater numbers of visitors than had been expected, requiring a platform extension. It didn't provide a very fast link to London - six hours - but was still a popular and luxurious way of getting to the sea. In 1887, Cromer Beach station opened on Cabbell land, and provided a much faster link to London and the Midlands. Indeed, this new station later eclipsed Cromer High, as it was not only faster, but there was no mile trip down to the town. Then, as now, the visitor to Cromer Beach station could walk straight down to the sea, and the development on the west cliff meant that lodging houses and hotels were immediately available.

Gas power and piped water were both introduced in the 1870s, under the guidance and on the land of the Cabbell family of Cromer Hall. The Cabbells had bought Cromer Hall in the 1820s and their influence was strong; as described above, they were instrumental in the opening of the Cromer Beach station and sold off a swathe of land to be developed into lodgings and hotels along the west cliff. This network of terraces, built in the 1880s and 1890s, still stand, in their original layout, although most of the hotels have gone. The Cliftonville is still there, but the ghastly Albany Flats have taken over the site of the former Grand Hotel and the Morrisons garage is on the site of the old Marlborough Hotel. A travesty, if you ask me.

The reason the Cabbells built the West Cliff estate was primarily because of guests complaining bitterly that there was no room at the inn. When Clement Scott, he of Poppyland fame, arrived in Cromer in the early 1880s, he couldn't find anywhere to stay so wandered off to Overstrand looking for lodgings. As you do. In doing so, he discovered the church tower on the cliff, the Garden of Sleep, and weaved the mythology of Poppyland, so potent that it remained in advertising use for a good century after he wrote about it. So perhaps the lack of lodging was a good thing. Or perhaps it was simply overstated to discourage common visitors from coming to have a look. One thing that became abundantly obvious when researching Cromer is that its reality was a far cry from how it was advertised. Cromer was undoubtedly full every season, but the advertising was designed to underplay its attractions. One guidebook said "on undeveloped tastes, Cromer would be thrown away". In 1800, Bartell wrote pages on the art, the light, the beauty, while acknowledging there was nothing much to actually do. This was more or less true in 1800. However, when Clement Scott wrote eighty years later about there being "nothing to attract the fashionable young lady", he was LYING. Oh the lies Scott told! "We have no representative brass band, no rotunda on the pier head, no fashionable promenade, no evening dances, no assembly rooms, and very few opportunities for social intercourse". There was no brass band or rotunda, that's true enough, but there was a string quartet, regular concerts in the inns and on the jetty - even fireworks displays. There was at least one assembly room in 1880. The only possible conclusion to draw from these lies is that Scott was trying to put off the working class hordes that had begun to infiltrate Great Yarmouth and Hunstanton. THERE'S NOTHING HERE, PEONS, STAY BACK! A scant twenty pages later, he calls Great Yarmouth "a playground by the sea". Scott wanted to protect his little Cromer haven from the influx of Sheffield smiths that were already using Yarmouth as their preferred holiday destination.

Was he successful? Of course not. In every directory of businesses published in the 19th century, Cromer is described as a 'fashionable bathing resort'. The rich residents of Cromer - the Gurneys, the Buxtons and the Barclays all made their holiday homes here - were a clear indication to those in the know that this was no mere beautiful backwater. A look at the businesses listed in the directories back this up: no less than two piano warehouses in Cromer by 1892 were surely a sign of the upper class. The residents of Church Street doubled in number between 1851 and 1891, and a few fisherman aside, most were affluent and had servants. Almost every business also offered rooms or apartments to let - usually those above the shop. Holidaymakers were huge business. However, Cromer remained difficult to get to for those who could not afford the train fare, and maintained its exclusivity well into the Edwardian age.
Some of its poshness can be ascribed to the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. Edward VII made his home at Sandringham, about forty miles from Cromer, from the 1860s onward. He was a regular visitor to Cromer, and patronised the golf club from its inception in 1887. The Royal Links Hotel (long gone, alas) became the royal residence of choice when visiting. His sister, Princess Louise, and daughter Princess Victoria, were frequent guests.

And so, here endeth the tale of Cromer, before the pier was built, before the Seaside Special became the longest running end-of-the-pier show in the country, before Henry Blogg became a household name, before Winston Churchill summered in Overstrand. Before Paul Theroux had a chance to describe it as “very empty [with] a sort of atrophied charm, a high round-shouldered Edwardian look, red brick terraces and red brick hotels and the loudest seagulls in Norfolk”. From fishing village, to a town with a population of 3700 in 1901, Cromer blossomed throughout the nineteenth century because of its exclusivity, rich inhabitants and royal allure.

¹ A quick note: an assembly room was basically a space for hire, where you could hold balls, lectures, concerts etc, like a very posh community centre. They were usually owned by the local bigwigs and the events were accessible by subscription to keep the riff raff out. Coaching inns usually were built with an assembly room, to increase the profitability as well as to attract customers. Towns like Stamford had as many as three assembly rooms in the early 19thC.

"We Didn't Have Autism In My Day"

If you browse articles on autism, or follow any social media discussion on it, someone will show up and tell you that autism is new. This someone will usually be a 50+ bloke, who thinks it's all a load of old codswallop; poor parenting, too many chemicals in foods, vaccinations, labelling every kid who's a bit odd. Autism is new. Autism is a new invention that doesn't really exist, except in the Rain Man savant stereotype.

Autism isn't new. Autistic behaviours have been described in individuals going back at least 500 years. Just as epileptics were considered possessed by the devil, autistic people were considered soulless demons. Until relatively recently, disability was widely categorised as deaf, blind, crippled or imbecile/insane/feeble minded. Autistic people were broadly defined as mentally subnormal, where it obviously disabled them, and weird or criminally insane where it was less disabling. It was formally discovered and named almost simultaneously by Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner separately in 1938 (hence the confusion between Aspergers syndrome and Autism - they are the same disorder, described slightly differently by two people on different continents at the same time). Autism was initially thought to be the result of distant parenting, and was classified as "infant schizophrenia" until the 1980s. This idea of autism being the fault of parents, or a psychiatric disorder, still resonates in public discourse. But autism is not a psychiatric disorder, although it is usually grouped as a mental health condition - it is a pervasive developmental delay, pervasive because the person cannot 'grow out' of it. One significant change in the last twenty years has been a fine-tuning of diagnostic methods, which has enabled more subtle cases to be differentiated, diagnosed and helped. I know several adults who have discovered, sometimes to their great dismay, that they score highly on autistic diagnostic tests - the stereotype of the mute, asocial autistic person is not really accurate now. 

I read a comment from a man on twitter who said that there was nobody autistic at his school, and he was 37. I am five years younger than him and I went to a large primary school, and a large secondary school. There was at least four autistic people in my primary school yeargroup and many more in secondary school. Once you have an autistic person in your life, you begin to recognise the signs in others, but when you don't know the signs, you just think they're weird. The autistic people in this man's school would be the ones who were bullied, the ones nobody hung around with because they were strange or said the wrong things, the ones who never went to birthday parties, the ones who were regularly out of class, the ones who turned up for two terms and then disappeared. Jimmy's classmates know and broadly accept that he's different, but they don't necessarily know he's autistic - autism isn't a common word in an 8 year old's vocabulary. Autistic children are supported more obviously in mainstream schooling now, and there is far more help available if you qualify for it. 

But formerly, the only real option for autistic children was residential institutions. 

For those of us born in the last forty-ish years, institutions are a distant spectre. Huge Victorian asylums still stand in most towns, often converted into flats or hospitals, the residents broadly unaware of their history. But for our ancestors, institutions were a normal, if feared, part of life. If you had an obviously disabled child, you were encouraged to send it to an asylum as quickly as possible. Autism isn't usually apparent until toddlerhood at the earliest, but children were still sent away to residential hospitals. Parents were not encouraged to visit - a relative of mine was put into an asylum in early childhood because she had Downs syndrome, and lived forty miles from her parents. Her mother visited once a week until her death aged 13, in 1952. This is recent history. In the 1980s, the people who had lived in institutions for most of their lives began to be released as part of the Care in the Community Act. Many ended up in sheltered housing, having never been taught the skills to live independently. The issue with living in an institution is that you become institutionalised. Ironically, this rather suits autistic people, although it has the potential for horrific abuse. 

If Jimmy, my beloved eldest boy, had been born in 1949 instead of 2009, he would have been institutionalised by now. He would be living on the site of the old District hospital, in the vast Victorian workhouse and asylum complex that has been completely redeveloped. He would be considered dangerous and insane. 

Autism is not a new disease, and the reason older people claim they didn't have it in their day is because it was hidden away, concealed behind huge walls and gates, in stigmatic buildings, buried under sedation and restraint. There should be no pride in claiming autism wasn't around in the good old days - it shows how invisible and suppressed disability was, and how uncomfortable it makes some people that it's now 'mainstream'. 

Me? Doing a Masters?

I think it's a fair shout to say I haven't had the best start to doing my MA.

I signed up on July 27th. On July 29th, my mum became critically ill. I debated whether to defer for a year. I debated whether to do it at all. The more I read about the course, the more I wanted to do it.

I've been interested in social history for ever. I've spent the last year working on family trees for me and my friends, and become intrigued by family structure particularly in rural areas. I've got a talent for creating narratives from primary evidence, for constructing strong arguments, for finding links that aren't immediate obvious and for holding vast stores of intricate genealogy in my head. Local history extends this into the landscape - who lived where? Why did they live there? What did they do? What did they earn? How were they linked? How does this compare to other areas? It's a natural step up from family research and it appeals to my soul.
Then there's my mum. Mum loved social history. She was fascinated by the rise of leisure time in the Victorian era, and the link to the railway network and how resorts were created to supply demand. Having experienced the stigma of being a single mother in the sticks, illegitimacy interested her. Coming from a big family, and having one herself, she read about other big families. She encouraged me. We would talk about history more than almost anything, monologuing at each other on the phone for hours. When I did the preliminary tests for getting on the MA, one of the questions was on the rise of Blackpool. Mum was a bubbling torrent of information on it when I told her. I am devastated that she's not here to talk to about it all anymore. She didn't want me to do the MA when I first discussed it with her, way back in June. She thought I should go directly into writing (my eventual aim) so she could read it. But I didn't feel qualified to write about it without a single history qualification to my name.

So, I decided to do it anyway. My start date was 1st October, by which point my mum was nearing her end. I worked hard but sparingly. It is terribly difficult to focus when the person you need most is dying. You think about little else. You worry. You want to be with them. You don't particularly want to be reading about tiny Highland communities in 1780. Or doing anything really. It's hard. But I did it.
Then she died. She died and I had a deadline. I postponed the deadline, but I still knew it was coming. Everything I had studied before fell to fog. And since she died, every time I read something she would have loved to know about, I feel a stab. It's not fair.

So I wrote my essay. I struggled a bit, just to get my thoughts in order (complicated by having a general anaesthetic a few days before) and then to write it, to use a whole new system of referencing, and to write about something I've not really done before. There is a lot of crossover between modern history and sociology, but they require different styles, and the essay was theoretical. I got it in. I got 63%, which is far more than I hoped for. It was not easy to write, but I found my style and voice much faster than I ever have before.

Now I'm looking to my next essay, getting to grips with the vast amount of potential literature on offer, and having to decide for myself what is and isn't relevant. Before I began this, some mansplaining dick told me that there was 'lots of reading' involved in an MA. I was pissed off because...well duh, but it's the quality of reading that counts. History perhaps generates the most written material of any subject, and some of it is diabolical quality, and some of it is absolutely essential, and some of it is absolutely essentially and like wading through treacle. And you have to decide what's good. I am currently sitting with no less than six relevant books, another two on the laptop to work through, countless potential journal articles that might be useful. I might only use one paragraph from each book, but I need to find it. Your undergrad is SPOON-FED to you in comparison to this.
And I daresay for those who go on to do a PhD, a masters is equally spoon-fed.

I love writing history. I love writing, full stop, but history is a particular pleasure. Telling the story of people who lived long ago, who never hoped to be historically relevant, who did nothing to immortalise themselves. That's a privilege. Finding their stories, hidden in the records, and understanding their context. That's my favourite thing. Reading ancient newspapers is much better for the soul than reading facebook. I don't know if I can actually making a living doing this - probably not, the world is awash with historians and you have to be pretty fucking ace to get published - but even if I can't, I will try. I will try for my mum. I will try for myself.

Fascism

Yes, I said it. Fascism. Not the alt-right. What the fuck does that mean? The alternative to what? It's not an alternative to standard conservative right-wing politics, it is going further than it. It is fascism. I wish we could ctrl-alt-del that term out of existence. People dislike the term fascism, you see. For some reason, can't think why, it reminds people of Hitler, and no political movement likes to be associated with Hitler even when he should be their idol. Hitler is so internationally reviled across the West that identifying with him is a bit of a faux pas. So, they call themselves the alt-right, and they act all affronted when you call them fascists, or snerk about Godwin's Law, and somehow they go on.

The greatest divisions in society are religion, ethnicity, and perhaps most importantly, class. Everyone likes to think they are a slightly higher class than they are, to give them a comfortable feeling of superiority. This can manifest in many different ways - from doing the odd shop at Marks and Spencer,  to trying to get children into the better schools, to judging single parents, to generally hating immigrant workers. Fascism loves it. Fascism wants everyone in their place, and holds a hand out to the aggrieved and lacking in social mobility, and it says "This is all their fault". They can be the poor, the sick, the foreign, those of different faith. This is what Hitler excelled at - he told Germany that it's severe economic distress was not caused by poor government and war reparations, but by Jews, disabled people and gypsies. Switch out Jews for Muslims and gypsies for Eastern Europeans, and doesn't that sound familiar to UKIP and others rhetoric?

We have struggled economically as a nation since the banking collapses of 2009 onward, although our economy is one of the strongest in the world. We bailed out the foolish banks with public money. Ever since, we have been suffering under austerity budgets that cut and cut and cut. It is not the rich who particularly feel the brunt of this, because they are protected both by status and wealth. It is the Average Joe. It is you. It is me.
The NHS, an institution founded on socialism and the need to reward a ravaged nation with security, has been cut and cut and cut since the banking collapse. The Conservative government are destroying it, on purpose, because it is absolutely contrary to their ideology. But the news stories are about requiring passports at point of treatment to prevent health tourism. The people believe that the NHS is failing because of overdemand, not underbudgeting. The people believe that it is immigrants taking the NHS away, not a concentrated effort by the incumbent government to rid themselves of an outdated, unwieldy and expensive edifice. And 'the people' buy into this, because they aren't immigrants. They might go to the doctors every time they have a sniffle. They might have four months worth of unused medication in a cupboard for a rainy day. They might go to A+E after yet another punch up on a Friday night. But it's those damn immigrants ruining the NHS.
By the same logic, that idiot woman on Question Time who voted Conservative and was shocked when her benefits were cut. Surely only OTHER PEOPLE will suffer from cuts? The undeserving poor? The foreign? Not...normal people? Not, to quote the government's favourite phrase, hardworking people? Our government has no issue with insidiously implicating that the Others are to blame for all its problems, be they the chronically sick, the chronically underemployed. Muslims, immigrants or refugees.

And so fascism extends its greasy paw across Europe and the USA, promising results where centrist governments have not been seen as a success. Fascism promises that the immigrants and the Muslims will be dealt with, and the common man will rise again, and our country will be great again. Doesn't matter which country, they all promise the same thing: Take Our Country Back. Make America Great Again. Au Nom Du Peuple. Österreich Zuerst. Ein Reich, Ein Volk, Ein Führer.

But we only have to look at the example of 1930s Germany and Italy to know what happens when Fascists are democratically elected. Democracy goes down the pan. The poor stay poor. The rich stay rich. Civil rights are eroded or dispensed with altogether. Immigrants 'disappear', but this does not magically improve working lives. Religious dissent is not tolerated, regardless of what religion is adopted nationally. The only way out of poverty is through military service. Class is not eradicated, but entrenched even further. There is no social mobility.

It vexes me when the lower social classes adopt fascism as a cause. I can understand it among the wealthy - after all, fascism was very popular in Britain prior to the outbreak of World War II, primarily because the rich missed their servants and didn't like all these upstarts being independent. But the lower social classes, and that's the majority of my readership, are deluding themselves if they think that going further right will benefit them in the slightest. Balls to the alt-right. Balls to fascism. Recognise it. Shun it.

Postgrad

I had a strange sense of instability and loss when I finished my degree. I'd had this idea for quite a while that IF I did well, I would do a masters. But when I actually did well, I felt completely different. A masters felt suddenly terrifying and enormous.I didn't feel clever enough to do one. I didn't feel I possessed the right skills to switch to history after four years of mainly sociology and biology. I emailed the OU to ask them what preparatory work they would advise. They actually advise a bridging course, held by Oxford University online, which costs the princely sum of £2500. I knew I couldn't afford that, and I told them so. I did, however, buy all the set texts from it in a bid to teach myself.

After some time, I received an email telling me to run through a pre-assessment to see if I had any of the right skills and broad knowledge, and to buy the main set text from the previous year to go through.

I did the pre-assessment, not expecting to do well. I got 98%.

The next step was funding the thing. As previously mentioned, my BSc cost me £5, but fortunately the government are allowing postgraduate student loans for masters courses starting this September onwards. I applied online - a very simply process, provided you know how much money you want - and then thought about how I was going to pay for the first module since I won't get any loan money until my first instalment in October but you have to pay for your modules up front.

My first idea was to put it on a credit card, but no credit card company will lend me that much cash (£3800) in one go, so I thought about a loan. The lowest APR I could get was 10%, so I looked into OUSBA loans. These are loans from the OU that you pay back over the course of your module at a fixed APR of 5%. It is, unless you can afford to pay up front, a really good way to pay for modules even with a student loan. You apply through the OU, at the same time as registering for a module. It's a swift, online process and you usually get a decision immediately.


I was accepted onto the masters course last Friday, when all hell broke loose with(in) my mummy, and I will blog about that soon. I don't even know if I want to do it now, with everything else going on, but at the same time, studying has been my lifeline, my structure and my main distraction over much other stuff over the last few years. And I know Mum wants me to get to writing my great body of historical work, so I'm doing it for her now as much as myself.

An Englishman's Home Is His Castle

The British are constantly harking back to a nostalgic time of yore. Do other nations do this, by the way? Do tell.

My own parents tell me how much better it was in the sixties, despite being tiny children at the time. My grandparents tell me it's not like the old days, as their grandparents told them. I'm sure, if I knew anyone who was an adult in the 1940s, I would be told how RUDDY MARVELLOUS the war was, what with it's unpredictable air raids, and death, and nothing much to eat, and before that, the first world war, merrily decimating the men of the country. As a nation, we look back. We live on a tide of nostalgia, having whole conversations based around Things We Watched On TV As Children (Poddington Peas and The Family Ness) and Sweets You Can't Get Anymore. Our TV programmes show us how life used to be, and we watch them in droves, on the internet, apparently forgetting that golden era of barely fifteen years ago when the internet came through the phone and your mum could pick the phone up, shout at you to get off the internet and you could...hear it in the modem. Ah, the olden days! 

Perhaps, since the dawn of broadband, life is changing more rapidly than ever. I can do my shopping on the internet and a person brings it to my house and it's kinda magical. If I want to know anything, I can go and google it rather than traipsing to the library (which probably doesn't exist any more) to look it up in the Encyclopedia Britannica. If I don't see a friend for six months, it's easier than ever to find out what they're doing and keep in touch. But sometimes, it's a terrible thing. 

We are a nostalgic country. There's nothing we like more than a 1940s tea party, or a medieval re-enactment. The prevailing theme of the Leave campaign was to make Britain great again, to put the great back in Great Britain, to go back to some mythic perfect age where we were self sufficient.

I'm not sure this golden age ever existed, nevermind that we can get back to it. We have always, as a nation, struggled a bit with being tiny. We've been trading with the middle and far east for thousands of years, invaded regularly by anyone who fancied a go, from the Romans onward. William the Conqueror basically annexed us, and we were part of France. Then we had a shot at turning the tables and running France as an annexe of us. This didn't work because Henry V died, sparking the War of the Roses. We played politics in Europe for a while, and then discovered that we were Quite Good at sailing (as you'd expect from an island nation) and started colonising the world, largely in an effort to take over places before Spain and France did. Competitive colonisation! Fun for all the family!

And so the Empire was born, and it got bigger and bigger until we ruled vast swathes of the world. But then the buggers started wanting independence. First the US, then slowly, everywhere else, often after huge and difficult internal struggles. We still have a few foreign territories (notably Gibraltar and the Falklands) but generally, we are back to being a little island on the Western edge of Europe.

Alas then that we haven't lost this colonial mentality, which was borne from feudalism. How dare all these immigrants come here when we used to govern them? How dare they be all free and able to travel here? Feudalism, in which you are owned or at least tied to a landowner, working in exchange for protection, allegedly died in the late medieval era, although I think there are modern parallels. We kid ourselves that we have a special relationship with the US because we MADE them, when really it's because we are a useful military link to Europe. We shun the rest of Europe in favour of the US because we never managed to colonise it and thus, it is different. They don't speak our language. They kiss each other a lot. 

England itself (with Scotland and Wales) is like a castle, with the channel tunnel being a drawbridge to Europe and Border Force being a portcullis. In the olden days, we built ties to other nations through dynastic marriage. It was politically awkward for France to invade us if our king was married to their king's daughter or sister, not that this stopped us invading them. European empires came and went and were reshaped often, but it wasn't until after World War 2 that we realised dynastic marriage, keeping ourselves to ourselves, and politeness alone weren't going to stop another war.

The EU was born through the EEC (itself the result of many post-war treaties), which aimed to unify Western Europe and provide a single market, partly in opposition to the Eastern bloc. The EU allows the member states to trade with each other without having to broker individual deals for each country, and without any need to organise complicated treaties pledging allegiance or military support.
The Conservatives, they fucking hate this sort of thing domestically. They believe in market liberalism, which encourages markets to develop 'naturally' (i.e driving prices up as high as possible, see the housing market). However, because our imports are almost twice the value of our exports, it has worked well for us within the EU, particularly as we don't trade with the euro which gave us a bit of an economic boost. Being part of the EU meant we had to allow in EU citizens, but unlike the rest of Europe who are part of the Schengen Agreement, our borders have been closed, aside from the Irish land border. The drawbridge will not open unless you have the right documentation or some means of illegally getting round it. I have been reading the right wing newspapers from around the time the Channel Tunnel opened. Not one refers to immigrants, to refugees or asylum seekers. The greatest fear was of fire risk and the ferries going out of business. Truly, we lived in less fascist times then. Can you imagine if they said they were building a bridge to France now?

We are a strange bunch. An Englishman's home is his castle, and our greatest aspiration in life is to own a home. Seriously, all anyone bloody cares about is the price of houses. Can they afford one? Will they have to live with their parents until they're 54? Will they have to sell their own children into slavery so they can have a three bed semi in a reputable area? We have one of the lowest home ownership rates in Europe, and yet obsess about it endlessly, as though it is the be all and end all. Renting is seen as a type of serfdom, despite 42% of the nation doing it, and landlords live up to their lordly names as renters' rights are eroded. Our adulthood is now marked by our financial success in home ownership. I have a theory that everyone in Britain has an enormous superiority complex, a desperate urge to climb not the housing ladder, but the social ladder, and that this is a cultural memory of feudalism and later Victorian values. To own a home, to own land, to be the lord of one's own manor, is very important to Britain, and this extends to the borders of our country.
Why else the rampant xenophobia that accompanied the leave campaign, and in fact all political discourse recently? Even Labour got in on it at the last election. There seemed to be a belief (at least before the referendum) that leaving the EU would stop all immigration, and all the immigrants would leave and we would be left with all the British people. I spoke to someone a couple of weeks ago who thought that, if we left the EU, the Pakistani population of the city would leave. Quite aside from the fact that a massive proportion of them were BORN HERE, what brand of special idiot do you have to be to think PAKISTAN is in the EU?

Immigration is an odd issue for the British. We are a nation of immigrants. Italian, French, German and Danish blood is AWASH in our veins, and that's just the white population. The very idea of indigenous Brits is ridiculous, yet according to the media, we fear this invasion of immigrants and the dilution of Great British Blood as much as anything. I suppose it comes from being repeatedly invaded A THOUSAND YEARS AGO. The last successful invasion of Britain was 950 years ago, and by a man who lived less than 50 miles from the British coast. The Second World War was effectively propelled by a terror of The Hun turning up in Dover and having his way with all the housewives, but the irony is that prior to the outbreak of the war, many richer Brits thought fascism was a fucking marvellous idea and longed for a return to Tudor values. The Daily Mail was a massive advocate of fascism, Mosley and Hitler, not because they wanted to kill all the Jews (although, partly) but because they wanted the poor to know their place and the rich to prosper. The general disruption to class society after World War One really pissed off a lot of people, and the idea of no democracy clearly appealed. It was only after World War Two that a lot of British institutions were founded, such as the NHS, in acknowledgement that you can't expect people to go off and die in droves in return for no social security. Now the same people who would have been ruthlessly oppressed if fascism had 'won' in the 1930s and 1940s want it to come back for much the same reasons as Hitler did. Too many foreigners, a hope for a better economy, a hope to make the country great again. I'm not trying to invoke Godwin's law, but the current political and social discourse is not dissimilar to Germany in 1932. The difference is that they were being crippled by war reparations and their money was so worthless, it had to be carted around in wheelbarrows. I'm fairly sure our country is massively overreacting in comparison.

Our nation, or at least parts of our nation, resist change. Diversity is a dirty word for the predominantly white British parts of our isles, where it is the least in evidence. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE OLD DAYS WHEN EVERYONE SPOKE ENGLISH?? they cry. I don't think it's existed since the second world war, but this is an unpopular viewpoint. I live in a railway city that was singled out for a documentary about immigration as a terrible thing, but nobody mentions the large Italian population, settled in the 1950s to work at the brickworks. Nobody looks twice at all the Italian surnames, or the ladies speaking Italian on the bus. There's a strong British Pakistani community, founded in the 1960s, with Ugandan Muslim refugees following about a decade later. Recently, there's been a lot more movement from Eastern Europe into the city, which is widely reported as a Good Thing economically, but a bad thing by the BBC. The only time I've ever been remotely pissed off by Teh Forruns is when some drunk Polish lads decided to play an electric organ in the middle of the street when I was trying to get my kids to sleep. How bothered you are by the ethnic makeup of your home depends a lot on what you expect from it. If you expect to hear nothing but English and see nowt but a sea of white, northern European flesh, you might be disappointed. If you prefer to judge people by their character rather than their ability to speak English in conversation with their friends, you might be happier.
The ubiquity of news sources make it much easier to view immigration as a terrible societal evil knocking on your door. Nevermind the front page of the Daily Express, you can't even log in to facebook without a news strip telling you what hateful thing Katie Hopkins has said this time. Twitter in the last week has been like a 24/7 apocalyptic news channel. Every single second of the collapse of government has been detailed in real time, with nobody taking a step back to look at the wider picture and put things into context. Honestly, if your only experience of Britain was through the eyes of twitter and facebook, you would probably think we had literally fallen to bits. I was really ill during the referendum, and simply being stuck in bed with my phone for company made everything feel like AWFUL DEATH. There is a loss of perspective with constant rolling news.

And I think it is rolling news and social media that has made this referendum, the result and the emerging chaos feel so much more personal. Yes, it has endless repercussions for the whole world. Yes, everything has gone to shit, but everything has gone to shit with alarming regularity since humans started living in large groups. We tend to forget that, as a nation. We romanticise our failures (Dunkirk, The Charge of the Light Brigade) or whitewash them entirely. Social media and the internet has allowed us to hold our leaders to account better, because the internet never forgets and it gives the common folk a voice with the potential to be heard by millions. It has also allowed us unprecedented access to information, allowing us to research anything that takes our fancy. But it means that there is a note, not so much of pessimism, but awful DOOM about this result. It means that in the build up, you couldn't move for someone's viewpoint on whether to leave or remain.  It means that Racist Rob from Rugby's view was given an equal standpoint with Sensible Sue from Staines'. It made it intensely difficult to sort through the rhetoric and lies and find any grain of truth. It was information overload, and it remains so.

In the old days, there was no internet. You believed what the BBC and the papers told you about current affairs, or you just didn't know until someone wrote a tell all book years later. Now we have the ability to educate ourselves, and ignorance really isn't an excuse anymore, and yet in its way it is too much. We can no longer draw up the drawbridge on the rest of the world. The portcullis won't keep them out even if Theresa May herself starts prowling the borders, breathing fire. The rest of the world is in our computers, our phones, our tablets. On our bedside table, in our hand as we fall asleep and wake up, winking at us from the corner of the screen as we work. The world has changed since 1975 and we can never go back. 

Where History Is Annoying

I love history. It is a weekly regret that I didn't do a history degree, although I have done a history module. I'm seriously considering doing either an MA or a postgrad certificate in history next year, depending on funding/grades/confidence. In the mean time, I am voraciously reading primary sources and history books. I think the census, for example, is one of the most beautiful resources our country has, particularly the 1881. God I love the 1881. This makes me strange, allegedly. I also have a penchant for royal history and biography, chiefly because the sources are such good quality. 

But there are a few things that really HACK ME OFF. I'm a total amateur, and may be entirely wrong, but bear with me here.

1. Ye is NOT A FUCKING WORD.

There were extra letters in the Old English alphabet. One of them was thorn, which was shaped like this: Þ. Thorn was pronounced 'th', like in thick and they and THE. In Middle English, which was pronounced very similarly to modern English, despite looking like gibberish, thorn was retained in some dialects, and on into early modern English. However, it began to be written more like a y than a Þ. It looked like this (apologies for teeny tiny picture)

Doesn't that look just like a y? WELL IT BLOODY ISN'T and the amount of times PROPER HISTORIANS translate it as ye instead of the makes my BLOOD BOIL.

So think on, Ye Olde Tea Shoppe.

2. Life Expectancy Is Unrelated to Biological Ageing

In 1900, the average life expectancy of a man was 50. In the middle ages, it was around 35. For women, it was a little less. Some people have taken this information and conflated it to mean that a 35 year old man in 1500 was absolutely WITHERED with age. This is bollocks. A natural lifespan, without accident, severe illness or birth defect, has always been around 65-70. Modern medicine, better midwifery, and improved living conditions means our present life expectancy is around 81.

The biggest factor in the difference between life expectancy and natural lifespan is infant mortality. When you have one in five babies dying in infancy, that drags the life expectancy right down. When you add to that the very high childbirth mortality (one in ten) for women, and then the lack of safe working conditions, monotonous and vitamin-strapped diets, no antibiotics, frequent battles, poor heating and inadequate medical care after injury, it's not surprising a lot of people died in their prime. But plenty of them did not. Edward III lived to be 64 in 1377. His mother lived to 62. These were impressive ages for the time, but mainly because of the vast amount of things that could kill you then. 

3. Fertility and Childbirth Were As Complex Then As Now

I recently read a biography of Isabella of France that stated that she had no more children because she was too old at 34. NO. WRONG. The same book (by Alison Weird) makes the assumption that Isabella and her husband, the much derided Edward II, had infrequent sex because Isabella only had four known children. Fertility, as many women know, is a capricious beast. In my opinion, Isabella was not a terrifically fertile woman who is known to have suffered a slow recovery from the birth of her last child. It is far more likely that she suffered some sort of birth injury that compromised her fertility than she went through the menopause at 28. Fertility is linked to living circumstances - menarche happens earlier in well-nourished women, and menopause a little later - and the menopause certainly didn't happen nearly two decades earlier in the middle ages. Isabella's daughter in law Phillippa had her last child in her 40s, as did Eleanor of Aquitane (who lived to the exceedingly ripe age of 81, in the twelfth century), Eleanor of Castile, and Elizabeth Woodville. Except where women were widowed, infertile, or died young, this seems to be the rule rather than exception. 

No, you've got PMT. 

Magna Carta

Today marks 800 years since the signing of the first iteration of Magna Carta. This event is being celebrated by the Queen and the government David Cameron has promised that our British Bill of Rights (proposed to replace the European Convention on Human Rights, for some insane reason) will safeguard the legacy of Magna Carta. Let us hope he means it will safeguard the legacy of statute law and human rights, rather than Magna Carta, because a very brief overview of the MC's content shows that it's hardly the sterling and quintessentially English work of freedom we are being led to believe.

So, 1215, Bad King John has pissed off his barons. Bad King John was always pissing off someone, but the barons had come to expect certain privilege and honour over the last century or so of Norman rule. So, the barons insisted on having a charter to maintain their baronly rights. King John, needing the support of his barons to properly run the country, gave them their historic charter at Runnymede.
It lasted literally two months.
We are celebrating a charter that meant so much to the people that made it that they all ignored their side of the bargain, and went to war two months later. We may as well celebrate the 2011 riots in several hundred years time, for all the difference it made to anything. Only King John's death, from dysentry caught in King's Lynn, just over a year later put an end to this vicious civil war.
Magna Carta was reissued in 1216, and again in revised form in 1217. In 1225, it was issued as a propaganda exercise by Henry II to get some taxation approved, and finally in 1297, it became part of statute law. We are a bit premature with the celebrations, to be honest.

Now, society in 13th century England was not exactly hot on fairness or equality. Individuals were either owned in a type of indentured slavery called serfdom, or beholden to their immediate superiors for food, land and work. At the top of the hierarchy was the king, and just underneath him were the barons. The barons held an enormous amount of power. And Magna Carta was all about THEIR rights. If David Cameron's Bill of British Rights only gives rights to those sitting in the Houses of Parliament, then it will be very similar to the original Magna Carta.

As it is, three clauses of Magna Carta remain in statute law. One of them is the freedom of the English church. Another is the freedom of London. Then there is the law of due process and forbidding the sale, delay or denial of justice. I would argue the erosion of legal aid under the last government has pretty much broken that particular statute, but I'm no lawyer.
Some of the clauses of Magna Carta simply make no sense in the modern world. I don't think any knights need a knight's fief in this day and age, or that Jewish moneylenders need to be regulated more than other moneylenders. I don't think it would be fair for barons to set the level of fine placed on another baron for law breaking, and I'm fairly sure castle guards are now employed through the army rather than from a pool of knights. We don't generally have horses and carts to relinquish to royal officials when demanded, or timber.
Some clauses were repealed bizarrely recently, like the clause forbidding fish weirs, repealed in 1969. Barons were permitted to take responsibility for monastries in the absence of an abbot until 1847. Men could not be arrested or tried on the testimony of a woman until 1863 (unless her husband had been murdered).

In short, Magna Carta is no template for fair society or law, unless you're a 13th century baron. Compare it to the tenets of the European Convention on Human Rights, which protects the right to life (including preventing forseeable death), and the right to equality,  prohibits torture, prohibits slavery, protects individual liberty and security, provides the right to free trial, protects individuals from being tried for offences that have become illegal since committed, protects the individual right to privacy and family life, and protects freedom of thought and expression. It also protects the right to form trade unions, to marry freely, and for countries to derogate these rights in times of war. Magna Carta promises none of this, the vast majority of it is no longer statute law, and as a document, was never legally enforceable. Hence, war.

I can see why we're making a big deal out of Magna Carta. It's a form of living history and tradition that British people thrive upon. However, to act like it has any bearing whatsoever on modern law or living ignores the centuries of change that have fallen since, in favour of a sycophantic romanticised daydream.

We all like to think we would have been lords, ladies, knights and barons in the olden days of chivalric lore, but if you're reading this, believe me you would have been little more than a serf. And Magna Carta was not written for the likes of us.