Backroom Errata

[Montmorency]

OK, so... what?

"There's always been a 1%"?

I don't like the application of the "1%" concept, which is just a slogan, but sure, whatever.

If by bad behaviour you mean "trolling" that's just slanderous.

I'm not trolling you, I'm reflecting you, I tried being polite and you ignored me, so now I'm deliberately being antagonistic because it's all you respond to. You don't value good manners or compassion, so I refuse to avail you of those things. It is a waste of my time.

There have been about two instances this year in which your thought process was so outrageously defective that I tried to unmistakably and compassionately impress on you the severity of your mistakes. I hoped you would take it to heart and check yourself. If from that you've learned only to double down and preemptively attack, well, fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice, won't get fooled again.

Formal title has never applied to many humans. In England only a few hundred people at any one time have ever held formal title, excepting baronets and knights. You're avoiding the core point here - in this case it's not about "networking" but about access to one specific person, a person who in all instances claimed decent from a pagan God, Woden. This was true for all Anglo-Saxon Kings from all seven kingdoms, excepting possibly the last, Harold II.

The way you speak makes it seems as though you think kings were the sole and unlimited sources of political power in pre-modern times. Who you knew and what you could do for each other has always been an organizing principle of complex societies.

Debatable - the globalised economy has had certain perverse effects on human society. The landed aristocracy held a strangle hold on the lives of all people prior to the French Revolution. It's difficult to quantify their wealth in today's terms, or the extent of their political power.

I don't know about Mansa Musa sprinkling gold here and there, but there was a coherent monetary framework in place in the 18th century. It's not debatable that there were relatively few megamillionaires and billionaires, adjusted for inflation, before the world wars and globalization.

Well, technically, modern history begins with the Renaissance, aka the Early Modern Period. The American South is certainly a fascinating culture, one which established a landed aristocracy and a slave-caste based on race whilst also managing to distinguish between that aristocracy and the mass of non-slaves. On the other hand, we have an untitled-aristocracy here too. When I visited the Trecarrell estate with my mother over the summer the owner, whom you would call a "country squire" was telling us about the time be managed to talk his way into Lambeth Palace library to see manuscripts relating to the manor house.

The important takeaway is that de facto hereditary class has been big throughout American history, it is cultivated and perpetuated through interrelationships among the elite as much as wealth per se, and wealth can always be obtained through mutual services and leveraging of prestige and privilege. As has been increasingly pointed out, even the entire American upper-middle-class looks ever more like a hereditary class in practice.

On the contrary, I understand it works differently outside the US. One is reminded of the rather amusing story of when Her Majesty visited Normandy in the 1960's, I believe it was then. The local peasants lined the streets, doffed their caps and shouted "Viva la Duchess!" to the considerable embarrassment of her French hosts.

You always return to your understanding of modern English class. Without even engaging on those terms, you should realize that the world is bigger than England.

Though separately I would be interested if you can find any other examples of French "peasants" cheering Queen Elizabeth. She visits Normandy frequently enough, after all, usually to commemorate WW2 events. Come to think of it, I wonder if that has any relevance...

The blogger's analogy was between the modern American who is disenfranchised but doesn't realise it because he votes and the churl imagined to be disenfranchised but doesn't realise it because he's better than a slave. Well, the churl did realise it, and he was still better off than the modern American.

A certain kind of modern American doesn't realize it because he has access to consumer choice, and to tribal opiates like god and guns.

If you want to say the churl was better off than a modern American or Englishman, that's a separate topic, and it will have to admit much more information than just class theory. I would agree only on some very narrow constructions. Such as I already mentioned, that on some measures of inequality the churl could have been closer to his lord than the modern analogues.To the extent that you reacted against any subtext that the modern American is 'declining' or 'degenerating' into churlhood, I was and am willing to accommodate that.

This ignores the point I referred to a while back, where the king owns all the land, so it's up to him if you're wealthy or not. This is true in early Anglo-Saxon society and later post-conquest. It's less true in late Anglo-Saxon society where landholding (as opposed to renting) has become much more prevalent but the central point stands. The only really practical way to get that wealthy that you have access by default is to get into the aristocracy because your ability to acquire land and wealth is dependent on the king or a powerful magnate.

The king owning all land is a legal fiction, not an intrinsic power dynamic. The land is not a magical organism that responds to divinely-vested authority. Kingship is not a unit of power.

A really good example of this in Early Modern times is Thomas Cromwell, a more enduring example is Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk. Brandon's father was a knight, Sir William, who was of sufficiently low standing that he was accused of raping a "gentlewoman" which isn't something that happens to genuinely noble people in late-medieval England as a rule. he got off. Cromwell, of course, was just a good lawyer who amassed fabulous wealth and titles under Henry VIII until he was offed by some actual aristocrats for basically being too common.

Without refreshing my memory I believe there were some other conflicts ongoing beyond umbrage at Cromwell being a commoner.

Speaking of rape, elites, and the South, here's a wonderful little story:

Wade Hampton II was one of the big names among the Southern elite of the antebellum period. Hampton had four daughters. I'm just going to post something from Wiki without further comment.

Hampton's sister-in-law Catherine Fitzsimmons, a shy girl, at age 17 married James Henry Hammond, making him a wealthy man with her large dowry. He eventually owned more than 20 square miles of property and hundreds of slaves through wealth gained by this marriage. The families saw each other socially because of this relationship.

In 1843 Hampton learned that Hammond had sexually abused his daughters (Hammond's nieces) as teenagers and accused him when he was still governor, although nothing was written publicly.[2][3] As rumors of Hammond's behavior spread, he was socially ostracized[4] and his political career was derailed for a decade.[3] But, he recovered sufficient political standing to be elected in 1856 by the South Carolina legislature as US senator from the state. The Hampton daughters' reputations were irrevocably tarnished. None of the daughters ever married.[3]

Hammond's Secret and Sacred Diaries (not published until 1989) reveal that his sexual appetites were varied. He described, without embarrassment, his "familiarities and dalliances"[1] over two years with four teenage nieces, daughters of his sister-in-law Ann Fitzsimmons and her husband Wade Hampton II.[1][11] He blamed his behavior on what he described as the seductiveness of the "extremely affectionate" young women.[1] The scandal "derailed his political career" for a decade to come after Wade Hampton III publicly accused him in 1843, when Hammond was governor.[12] He was "ostracized by polite society" for some time, but in the late 1850s, he was nonetheless elected by the state legislature as US senator.[13]

Hammond's damage to the girls was far-reaching. Their social prospects were destroyed. Considered to have tarnished social reputations by his behavior, none of the four ever married.[1]

Hammond was also known to have repeatedly raped two female slaves, one of whom may have been his own daughter. He raped the first slave, Sally Johnson, when she was 18 years old.[1] Such behavior was not uncommon among white men of power at the time; their mixed-race children were born into slavery and remained there unless the fathers took action to free them.[13] Later, Hammond raped Sally Johnson's daughter, Louisa, who was a year old baby when he bought her mother; the first rape apparently occurred when Louisa was 12; she also bore several of his children.

His wife left him for a few years, after he repeatedly raped the enslaved girl, taking their own children with her. She later returned to her husband.[1]

There is no meaningful comparison, that's the point.

If you think it's not insightful, that's fine. I offered you that. But it's not a false comparison.

We are not living in a post Anglo-Saxon society, we haven't been for centuries. We're living in a post-Roman society. Don't believe me, look up how votes for magistrates were conducted in the Roman Republic and compare it to the Primary process for selecting presidential candidates in the US, never mind the junk food (including pizza).

If there is a sense that Russia is "post-Soviet," that is not the sense in which any part of the world is "post-Roman." It's the height of banality to repeat the fact that Roman civilization has influenced subsequent civilizations.

Remember, this started because you asked for my opinion. My opinion is, and was, that the point being made by the blogger is banal and the comparison is misconstrued. Don't like that opinion? well, you'll remember not to ask in future, then, won't you?