Backroom Errata

[Montmorency]

I'm going to sum up my response by simply saying, "Son, I ain't that stupid."

You really need to stop assuming otherwise, it's becoming beyond insulting.

The use of ellipsis in popular history is usually used to obfuscate. Remember, those quotes were excerpted and edited by the author, those probably don't represent an organic collection of quotes in their original context.

The point is, you don't know what the end of that last quote would be and there's nothing in the book to tell you. This is the problem with secondary sources.

Either the book is badly written or it's deliberately intended to mislead for some reason. Given that people there at the time, like my own grandfather, have always told me the American Army was incredibly racist even by 1940's standards the content doesn't interest me as much as the motives of the historian.

PVC, have you considered that writing nonsense and having me take the time to carefully address it may be insulting. You say:

1. The use of ellipsis in [non-fiction; this is not popular history anyhow] is usually used to obfuscate.
2. Because the writer placed an abbreviated quote alongside non-abbreviated quotes that all have the same effect of reinforcing your preexisting impression of the subject matter, you conclude the motives of the historian are questionable.

Anyone who has read or written any measure of non-fiction of any form or genre would laugh at the first assertion. On the second, I question how your motives could be anything other than malicious. Think about what you're doing, imputing potential, and therefore presumptive, dishonesty to an author for doing something universal, on a topic where you implicitly acknowledge there would be no paucity of honest representations to the same effect that the author produces.

It's especially galling when you on the Org make ostentatious demands for the most generous treatment regardless of your record. I will hold this against you.

To start with, churls were not "freemen" they were free men, and yes there is a fundamental difference between those two words. Secondly, churls or "ceorls" if you wish, were simply the free men who were not nobles, i.e. Thanes owing loyalty to an Earldorman or the King. To be a ceorl did not mean you were poor or lacking social or legal rights, it simply meant you were not a warrior by profession.

The above conforms with what I have read. None of that contradicts, however, the designation as "low-status." I could provide you with half a dozen academic sources that describe ceorls thus.

Moreover, the post I introduced was specifically based on the fact that ceorls were NOT lacking in social or legal rights. That was the point!!! Once again, your response is evidence that you either did not read what I posted or fundamentally misunderstood the plain language! Honestly you should be embarrassed.

Here, have a little read:

https://ahgray.wordpress.com/2013/11...ngs-to-slaves/

If you were not part of the aristocratic set, and let’s face it many of us will come under this next group, then you were a peasant worker known as a ceorl (churl). These were freemen

To start with, churls were not "freemen" they were free men, and yes there is a fundamental difference between those two words.

Doubtless you will now shift tack and argue that by churls the lecturer really meant geburs and even if they did not the analogy still stands if you substitute the geburs for the churls as a whole. To this I would respond, again, that Anglo-Saxon society didn't work like that. Anglo-Saxon society was less of a crab-pot trap than modern American society, I might even hazard that it was easier to escape Anglo-Saxon slavery than it is modern low-income "wage slavery" in the US. This is what I mean by "taking the wrong lesson" because the lesson is not that modern American society is like Anglo-Saxon society in that it has an underclass that perceives itself as free whilst being economically disenfranchised, the lesson is that modern US society is worse.

I was going to point this out, but saved it in a notepad in preparation for your reply. I think it serves my position better than you would like. This is hilarious. What I had written:

And don't respond by pointing out something tangential like churls having access to slave ownership that is today proscribed. That would suggest a different complication of the analogy, one from an unflattering direction that reinforces its insight: the level of inequality between a common churl and a king back then was in many ways less than that between a common modern citizen and one of the "masters of the universe."

See also:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The fact that there was not an elites-peasants dichotomy like some old historiography has it is beside the point. All societies are more complicated than that, including ours. That there was a certain continuity does not negate the reality that neither slave-owning, land-owning churls nor the modern middle class have the full substantive freedoms enjoyed by the upper class. What you could point out instead is that the churl analogy is unnecessary because this has always been true, everywhere that there have been complex economic structures.

I'm sorry, I'm not really into intellectual penis measuring but today is my birthday and I'm frankly a bit sick of putting up with your habit of talking down to people. You may recall last month or so saying you would not "presume" to lecture me on my field, but that's exactly what you're doing. Worse, you presume that my reading is faulty simply because you do not comprehend or agree with my point.

I'm going to be very blunt with you. I will not demand that someone prove themselves before I extend them the benefit of the doubt. But I will not infinitely allow someone the enjoyment of this benefit of the doubt when they demonstrate that they do not know what they are talking about or to what they are responding. You had something useful to contribute but your insistence on tangential circumlocutions that don't address the substance or merits of the printed text, even when offered opportunities to recalibrate, is irritating and I expect better. I refuse to make on your behalf the best arguments I perceive available to you - you should do that. Maybe my meaning is unclear. Allow me to steelman you as an example of what I think an appropriate way to problematize my contribution would have been:

The blogger you quote, while making an important point about the distinction between nominal and substantive rights and freedoms, falls prey to a common sort of popular impression of medieval social structures. He assumes that there has been an uncomplicated linear progress from Medieval times to the present and that the population under late capitalism is regressing in its means, living standards, and social relations to a caricature of the oppressed and immiserated peasant of the distant past. On the contrary, history is not necessarily an linear transformation from crushing aristocratic impunity to meritocratic liberal democracy. Social indicators shift in this or that direction varying by time and place. For example, the original Saxon migrants into the British isles were relatively hierarchically flat compared to the later development of more centralized and sophisticated monarchies in the region. The Anglo-Saxon churls' combination of duties and protections owed them from above as well as their own rights and statistical habits of ownership in slaves and land may in some relative terms leave them better off in their own social context than their modern analogues are in theirs, contradicting the writer's subtext of a uniform and universal improvement currently being jeopardized. When comparing past and present it is important to validate preconceptions that are misleading in specific aspects.

There, see? It's not difficult to make a contribution that comprehends, expands on and improves the prompt. Happy birthday. Here's your gift.

And here's a little something for Rory that he will like.


EDIT: I just wanted to bring to everyone's attention that the diagram in the spoiler has a special outfit for the representation of a rich man, but the representations of rich and poor women are identical. Hmm...