Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Eating meat and starving men

March 27, 2013 – 11:09 pm

Notes from What It Means to be Human by Joanna Bourke

This is a fascinating read, as ever, from this Birkbeck historian, but I’ve no time for a full review so here’s just some interesting points…

“The great expansion in meat-eating in Britain and America only occurred after the 1860s… According to one estimate, meat consumption in Britain almost doubled between the 1860s and the 1890s, and had increased still further by 1914. .. in 1909, Americans consumed on average 51 kg of boneless trimmed meat each year…. by the late 1960s the average person was eating more than 70 kg of such meat a year — or the equivalent in animal flesh of his or her own body weight… Today, the average American consumes a staggering 125 kg of meat a year.” (p 278)

Historically of course what most people ate as meat varied widely. Bourke comes up with a fascinating list from early West Coast America: ” Teal, summer and mallard duck, plover, lark, robin, prairie grouse, quail, snipe, wild geese, swan, wild pigeon, while turkey, grey and white cranes, white and black tailed deer, antelope, beaver, black bear, hare, raccoon, opossum, grey black and fox squirrels and bison. If especially hungry, they might also tuck into the flesh of blackbirds, bluebirds, buzzards, crows, doves, dippers, Eagles, owls, hawks, mockingbirds, ravens, mice, gophers, prairie dogs, panthers, skunks, foxes, wildcats, coyotes, wolves or mustangs.” (p. 277)

Now of course, we’re down to cows, pigs and poultry – with a heavy stress on the last.

“At the turn-of-the-century, only around 10% of the world grain was fed to animals… In America today, around 60% of the grain is fed to animals. This shift is even more remarkable when it is noted that the animals being fed grain in 1900 were primarily those working in the field … As opposed to animals raised dissatisfied people’s carnivorous appetites.” (p278)

And in echoes of today … “A highly publicised incident of alleged cannibalism took place in Hampshire. at the Andover workhouse male paupers had been put to work crushing bones use as fertiliser. In 1845 a local farmer and member of the board of guardians discovered that the paupers was so hungry that they were fighting over the bones in order to eat them. To great consternation, it was revealed that some of the bones came from the local cemetery. The gruesome story caused uproar, forcing the government to institute a Parliamentary enquiry into what happened. The scandal was a godsend for people protesting against the stringent new Poor Law… The master … was accused of introducing increasingly harsh measures to prevent the workhouse from becoming overcrowded by the growing numbers of unemployed men and women. The English gentleman said every person in Britain was ” entitled to food – it is his inherent right, as much as the air he breathes but he is bound to burn it honestly. If we cannot employ him – if we cannot accept his Labour – or if he is incapable of work – still he is one of us, and must not be shut up to gnaw the bones of dead men. policy and Christianity teach us otherwise”. ” (p319)

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Notes from Cannabis Nation by James Mills

January 24, 2013 – 5:09 pm

p. 195 – in September 1999 the Green Party took a public position saying their policy was to allow public to grow for recreational and medicinal purposes. Plaid in 2001 promised to approve recreational use. …”the reshuffle of the Cabinet following the 2001 general election was to bring the issue to a head. it ushered in a period of intense activity where legislators and politicians attempted to assert themselves over the British compromise that had evolved since the 1960s where cannabis had been devolved into the hands of the courts and the police.” …
In 2008 possession of cannabis remained an arrestable offence and the police continued to be the key powerbrokers in matters related to the drug throughout the period. … it was police that made the policy: at each stage it was the police officer who was empowered to decide who was stopped, who was warned, who was cautioned, who was sent to court, and even how much cannabis constituted a serious offence.. the fate of the individuals depends not “on the will of Parliament, the conclusions of the scientists, or the interests of the user.”

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Some notes from Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order by Philip Coggan

January 24, 2013 – 5:05 pm

p. 31 ” In a Second World War debate on monetary systems, Lord Addison, a Labour peer, remarked that he was not convinced that ‘to dig gold out of the ground in South Africa and to bury it, refined in a cellar in the United States, in fact adds to the wealth of the world’.”

p. 58 “Industrial workers also required credit. A house in town, however humble, required furniture – bed, table and chairs. Few could afford the expense upfront… Cowperthwaite & Sons, a New York furniture retailer, was one of the first to adopt the practice. The Singer sewing-machine company took up the idea with enthusiasm later in the century. The idea of instalment plans was far from new … John Law sold shares in the Mississippi Company in instalment form. But a system based on regular payments was suited to an industrial age where workers received regular income. Instalment selling greatly widened the potential market for a retailer’s goods, and the financing charges more than offset any bad debts. … when they did default, buyers had usually made several payments, usually ensuring loss was limited.”

p. 71 “The [gold] standard ‘worked’ in the sense of keeping prices stable. … outside times of war, long-term inflation did not exist in the British economy in the 18th and 19th centuries, although prices did fluctuate, usually in response to changes in the supply of food… In The Death of Inflation, Roger Boodle cites the cost of a Hackney carriage. In 1694, the same year the Bank of England was founded, the cost was set at one shilling a mile. Two centuries later, the rate was at the same level. In 1932, the average level of prices in Britain was slightly below what it had been in 1795, during the Napoleonic Wars. … Low inflation also meant low interest rates …. What the gold standard also helped to create was the first great era of globalisation. This was particularly true in Great Britain … Low yields on British government debts gilts caused the prosperous middle classes to buy bonds in Argentine railways in search of higher incomes (an early version of the ‘search for yield’ that would be seen in the current era).”

p. 74 “In a sense this was all a confidence trick. Britain’s gold reserves rarely exceeded £40 million, a figure that was only 3 per cent of the country’s total money supply … Had foreign creditors demanded the conversion of their claims into gold, Britain could not have met the bill… there were some hairy moments. When Baring Brothers, what was then called a merchant bank, came close to failure in 1890, the Bank of England had to borrow gold from France and Russia in the face of a run on its reserves… what kept the system going’ there was international cooperation between central banks.. Central bankers were generally of a similar class (the upper or creditor classes) … the Reichsbank in Germany borrowed money from Britain and France in 1898.. they did not compete for funds via interest rates; the level of rates in the big countries tended to move in tandem. … the gold standard was accompanied by general prosperity so countries were keen to see it last. Or, to qualify that statement, the leaders of those countries were keen to see it last … sound money has a price. Maintaining a sound currency often required a central banker to push up interest rates, or find some other way of restricting demand, when gold reserves were falling. The lack of democracy insulated politicians and central bankers from the anger of those thrown out of work in the resulting recessions.”
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Disappearing into late Rome

January 3, 2013 – 10:50 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome and the making of Christianity in the West, 350-550AD has been hovering around the middle of my to-read pile for some time. Fascinating topic, fascinating period, but 530 pages of text, 758 pages with all of the accoutrements, made it just a bit daunting. Perfect for the holidays though, and so gripping that I ripped through it in three rainy days.

This is a period of the history of the West of Rome that we’ve tended to regard as dark and mysterious, but Peter Brown reveals that there’s a huge amount known. By starting with a theological debate, which has ripples and echoes throughout Christian history, he’s create a frame that doesn’t particularly grab me personally, but it creates a logic for exploring all over the western empire, primarily through the lives of prominent Christian figures, but in the process shedding lot of lots of obscure but fascinating corners that usually barely get a mention.

One key theme running through it is the persistence of what the Romans called Amor civicus, as embodied in the endowment of improvements: “At Calama for instance (modern Guelma in Algeria, which stood at the head of the Seybouse valley on the edge of the plateau of Roman Numidia, Annia Aelia Restituta received no less than five statues, and one of her father, so as to render thanks for her exceptional liberality to her fellow citizens in adding stateliness to her home town.” (p64) This continues, Brown attests, with bounteous evidence, well into the fourth and fifth centuries, and was a cause of considerable angst to Christian leaders, who thought the money should have been going into the church. Even in 421 the nobles of a blackened Trier sought from the newly created emperor Constanitius II funds to celebrate his accession through circus games – this was what was though to hold the city together in tough times, not the prayers of saints. (p. 452)

Another concept that proved both persistent but also malleable was otium. “It had unmistakable aristocratic overtones. Symmachus [one of Brown’s key characters] and his friends enjoyed long periods of otium in the countryside outside Rome or in Campaniea. ‘Tired of the affairs of the city’, they liked to ‘tame their great minds in solitude’ on their estates. ‘Turning over the learned writings of the men of old’ in the well-watered gardens of their villas, they renewed their allegiance to the culture that was supposed to make them truly noble.” When Augustine was seeking to encourage his followers, he put forward a programme for such a period – of Christina writings and reflection, aiming to show it was “possible to enjoy, through contemplation, the supreme happiness of a life lived in the presence of God”. (p. 164)

After Symmachus, Ausonius is one of the next key characters in Through the Eye of the Needle. “His family nursed a claim to ancient nobility that had been lost a century before in the civil wars of Gaul of the 260s. Ausonius’s grandfather had come to Aquitaine as a refugee from Autun … In reality, he and his family were little more than local landowners and town councillors who had risen by their talents. … One suspects that Valentinian I looked on favor on Ausonius in part so as to establish a comfortable relationship with Bordeaux and with Ausonius’s pupils, the landowners of Aquitaine. [How the empire had come down in the world.] In 379 he even became consul for the year. The old professor (now in his mid-sixties) was put on display. He was dressed in the same set of heavy, gold-stitched consular robes that had once been worn by none other than the emperor Constantius II.” (p. 188)

Otium gives him the chance to explore in a poem his “little family estate” – one of the most precise pictures we have from antiquity of what wealth was. Sounds pretty pleasant really – about 650 acres, of which 430 were woodland, a source of timber plus pitch for ships and wine amphorae, 124 for the plough, 100 for vineyards and 50 for meadows. Its warehouses could hold two years’ store of food. It was an account of what he saw as modestly appropriate wealth – which would have brough in around 1,000 solidi a year. (p. 191)

As both those sets of details of show, this is no dry theological tome; Brown is seeking to present a complete, detailed picture of his characters’ lives and those of their contemporaries. Not a time machine, but almost as close as we are likely to get.

 

Brown also drops in an occasional fascinating comparison with Confucian China coming to terms with the arrival of Buddhism. He compares the 4th-century empire, with Christian taking hold, to “that of the Chinese mandarins …. An official of the Ming empire reported that the Buddhists in his province had shown great zeal for building bridges. This was a public venture of which any traditional Chinese gentleman was bound to approve. But the official learned that the Buddhists were building bridges for entirely the wrong reasons. They were acting on the belief that they would gain personal karmic merit in another existence by contributing to the building of such a bridge…. The mandarin was shocked…. ‘This is all contrary to the spirit of good works!'” (p. 90) And this dry note: “it is an observed fact that other-worldly religions … often manage to become very rich very soon. As Chinese observers noted … there was a lot of wealth to be gotten from fo-shih – “Buddha business”. (p. 523)

He’s also exploring big themes, such as the rise of the villa in Roman life. He doesn’t deny that these often show, and were designed to flaunt, great wealth, but he denies the certainty of this wealth and that there was a “lost middle” between their inhabitants and the poor. Country wealth was never independent of the cities and the government, he says. “Aquitaine was a rich agrarian region, which furnished supplies to the Rhine frontier … even if not all of its members had made their way to Trier to become courtiers as Ausonius had done. (p. 196)” Rich villas only appear, Brown adds, “in regions that served as corridors of empire”. This was the last flowering of a belle epoque he says – “the moment that the Roman state and its fiscal energy began to wobble, as a result of civil wars and barbarian invasions … many villas survived as economic centres. They served as places for storage and processing wine and oil. But they became faceless. Their owners left no strong impression on them. For they no longer served as the blazons of new wealth.” (p. 197) (McMansions anyone?)

As things fall apart, the need to hold on to a labour force happy to run when it gets a chance is another persistent theme. “The bishops who gathered at the council of Macon in 585 declared that slaves who had been manumitted on the estates of the church … could not be reenslaved…But … old Roman law had insisted that freed slaves should continue to render obsequiuum – personal service to their masters. This law was maintained with particular vigor in the church.” (p. 499)

Brown’s also big on trying to get into the heads of the ancient world, rather than accepting later, sometimes lazy, understandings. So, he says, the frequent complaints about religious ascetics, such as Priscillian, (an interesting character who welcomed women followers as the equal of men – bound to get him into trouble) were not for the same reasons that shocks us – not the self-mortification, the denial or marriage or the abandonment of social duties, but the fact that such ascetics built close links with wealthy donors. He quotes the pagan emperor Julian “They are men … who by making small sacrifices … gain much … from all sources … levying tribute on specious pretenses which they call ‘alms’.” (p. 214)

And he says the idea that wealth came from the Christian God was late in arriving. Around 400AD Paulinus of Nola was still trying to assert this, clearly against the view that wealth came through family, wealth came from nature, or the bounty of the emperor. But it could remain theirs so long as they followed the will of God. (p. 238)

Brown explores both the continuity of the period, and its shocks. So he finds that while Ausonius’s contemporary and friend Paulinus had renounced his wealth in the 390s, as late as the late 6th century a descendant of his brother, Leontius, the last of the line and bishop of Bordeaux, had refurbished his ancestor’s villa at Preignac, and lying back on the traditional Roman stibadium couch, was still referring back to Ausonius’s poetry. (p. 218)

He also looks at the various ways in which individuals came to terms with the collapsing of the empire. Prosper went for the irrelevance of the state: “his Augustinianism convinced him that nothing in the past contributed to what happened in the present, just as nothing – no social advantage, no cultural gift, no ascetic labour – could precede the workings of grace in the individual heart.” (p. 430) More practically, the super-rich noble families, with estates spread across the empire, could no longer control them, they had to settle down to one local region, one area where they could exert personal control – and so it was that the church, which hadn’t really got that rich in form terms, came to be one of the richest forces going. And families husbanded their recourses by dedicating girls to the church as forced nuns, to save on dowries, and boys pushed into the clergy, renouncing their family wealth, which didn’t please the church, which hoped they’d bring it with them. (p. 439)

There’s lots of fascinating women in this period – Brown explores in some detail the great widow Melaniia the elder, who supported the Nicene cause. “She arrived in Alexandria with a shop loaded with gold and silver to help the monks of the Nile Delta, whose lay support had been cut off by the repressive measures of the pro-Arian emperor Valens. Going on to Palestine, she helped feed 3,000 Egyptian monks in exile.” (p. 261) And many more… read more »

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“Come on, Nell, what shall we have Goodwife Bird and you fall out for a few babbling words?”

January 2, 2013 – 5:57 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Since Laura Gowing’s Domestic Dangers, there’s been something of a surge of books exploring women’s “ordinary” life in early modern England through court records, of which City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in early Modern London by Eleanor Hubbard is one of the latest.

That’s a demonstration of just how a rich a source these records are; the material can be approached from many different directions – whether to study the (alleged) deviance for which the court hearing took place, or to understand the assumptions about “proper” or “ordinary” behaviour that lay behind them. The latter approach is that taken by Hubbard on the London consistory (religious) court records between 1570 and 1640, with due notice of the fact that the ordinary life, of a maidservant, wife, widow or daughter of course would never appear before the courts.

The date limits are set by the records – when they become fairly regular, to when they fall apart before the Civil War. Hubbard also adds in other records and recent research to provide as complete as possible a picture of the life-cycle of a London woman – arriving around age 12-14 from the countryside, going into service, getting married around 24-26, then quite likely widowed and running a household after around 15 years, possibly for many years, or, more likely, remarrying.

The cases fall into two main groups – defamation charges relating to claims falling under ecclesiastical sway – mostly sexual, and those affirming and dissolving marriages (not divorce as we understand it, but “separation from bed and board”, the right to live apart). Usually men claimed adultery, women cruelty.

Hubbard tells us that the defamation cases mainly come from the poorer end of the “middling sort” – “they were not too dignified to wash their dirty laundry in public, but could afford to at least pay the fees to begin a case”. Those involved in marriage cases were richer individuals – the cases were expensive to prosecute and at stake were often portions or alimony of some size.

This is very much an academic monograph, but for its breed a very readable, jargon-light one – entirely of interest to the general reader who wants to get under the skin of early modern London. It would make a great source for anyone wanting to collect real life detail or minor characters for historical fiction.

So we learn that the wages for maidservants were usually around 30 shillings a year – but the quality of food and lodgings, and the wealth of the family, might matter more – with gifts and tips from visitors, the possibility of a little casual theft, and the chance of gifts or legacies. So around the middle there’s Elizabeth Chatfield, the wife of a tailor, who in 1613 reported that she paid her servant Anne Clare 40 shillings a year “beside her vails which are ordinarily worth 20 shillings per annum”. (p. 35)

Hubbard notes, interestingly, that maids would typically have moved quite a lot around London – so by the time they married they’d probably have a pretty good “map” of the city in their head. Partly, Hubbard says, this was because poaching a neighbour’s maid was bad form, partly because they were always on the trawl for marriage opportunities. She notes that in 1572 Elizabeth Doughty, 30, broke her contract with her existing family to move to the household of William Brown, a middle-aged tailor with neither wife nor children. After a few months she married him. (p. 36)
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Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

December 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
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