January 9

1923


Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp's deathday - New Zealand's other Germaine Greer, though you probably know her without her surname. 

She once wrote, and it is a very dangerous thing for a writer to hold out such open invitations to posterity:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Before he fell out with her, D.H.Lawrence admired her, even adored her, and that is recommendation enough for me. They shared the T.B. too of course. Her last words would last forever, if they were inscribed on her gravestone:
"I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face."
She also went further, much further; through the rain to the illusion of sunshine:
The Storm

I ran to the forest for shelter,
Breathless, half sobbing;
I put my arms around a tree,
[‘round’ in the original: the added syllable is my correction]
Pillowed my head against the rough bark.
"Protect me," I said. "I am a lost child."
But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.
A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth;
It lashed the forest together.
A huge green wave thundered and burst over my head.
[sloppy, that line]
I prayed, implored, "Please take care of me!"
But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon me.
Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.
A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was drowning
[better without ‘that’]
In a bubbling cavern of space. I alone -
Smaller than the smallest fly - was alive and terrified.
Then for what reason I know not, I became triumphant.
"Well, kill me!" I cried and ran out into the open.
But the storm ceased: the sun spread his wings
And floated serene in the silver pool of the sky.
[dreadful cliché - the poem maimed
I put my hands over my face: I was blushing.                     
[but then redeemed]
And the trees swung together and delicately laughed.   
[by ‘delicately laughed’]




Amber pages


Marco Polo, traveller and ghost-memoirist (the book was actually written for him by Rustichello da Pisa), died yesterday in 1324. I would much rather put this on his birth date, but no one knows when that was, not even the year for certain, though the scholarly consensus has decided 1254; but as to an actual month, let alone an actual day... And anyway, the point about Marco Polo isn't the life so much as the journey, and this date most definitely marks the end of the journey, so let's go with it.

China Daily has an interesting article (click here) about the publication of his will, apparently "proving" what scholars have long questioned (click here), that he ever went to China in his life ... but Marco Polo is to travel literature what Shakespeare is to English drama - the man who couldn't possibly have done what he is said to have done, even though it's right there before our eyes, unneeding of proof. The Everyman Library edition of Marco Polo's travels - click here - for example, contains extensive footnotes, longer than the book itself, which could win an international award for the most insulting, patronising, condescending and defamatory footnotes ever written, a continuous argument against absolutely everything Polo claims to have seen, based on the editor's certainty that anything written in anybody else's book on the subject can be taken as veracious, even if it was written centuries after Polo had been and seen.



Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, born today in 1908. Apparently "The Second Sex" was suggested by her next-door neighbour Jean-Paul Sartre (for whom see April 15), and she thought it might be a good idea for a short article for a newspaper; until she started researching it, and it grew, not just into 2-volumes and over a thousand pages, but into the most important work in the feminist catalogue.*


Joan Chandos Baez, born today in 1941.


1969: The Concorde jetliner made its first test flight (Bristol). Or maybe not. The BBC History page insists it was March 2; elsewhere I have found January 19... clearly this needs more research...

* From my diary for March 2024, many years after I posted her birth-date:

Coming out of Moorfields eye hospital after my check-up had gone much better than I feared it might - all men are mortal, even if I am no longer in the prime of life - the drops they put in my eye for their scans had rendered any more reading or writing existentially impossible, but going for a long walk along the left bank of the canal absolutely essential. Force of circumstance - a fracas on a houseboat on the Angel side had caused one man a very easy death and spilled the blood of several others - sent me eastwards, towards Dalston and Hackney, along the north side of Shoreditch Park, and no it wasn't going to prove a huit clos, because this was not Sartre territory, though the two were inseparables. De Beauvoir town - I have no idea if she ever came to stay here - named for Simone's ancestor Richard de Beauvoir of Guernsey, who acquired Balmes House in the 1680s...

you can read the full tale of the family's continued ownership here, and the rest of my visit will be in Prashker's London when I finally get around to publishing it; oh, and I leave you to work out how many of her book-titles and key concepts I managed to squeeze like the juice of mandarins into that diary-paragraph in order to capture at least an overall image of her.

And of course, according to the rules I set for this blog, there should have been a cartoon of a traffic light to indicate the follow-up to the asterisk at the end of her first entry. But "De Beauvoir Town is a low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) and is characterised by an almost complete lack of traffic lights within the residential grid. Traffic is primarily managed through traffic calming measures like bollards and modal filters, rather than traffic lights." And conservation green for this paragraph as well. I think Simone would have applauded it unhesitantly.
You can find David Prashker at:


Copyright © 2018/2024 David Prashker
All rights reserved
The Argaman Press


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February 6

"Bootsteps on the Camps"
2018


From the world's media:

Polish President Andrzej Duda signed Poland's controversial new Holocaust bill late Tuesday ahead of it being assessed by the country's Constitutional Tribunal.

The law would make it illegal to accuse the nation of complicity in crimes committed by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust.

The bill, which passed with 57 votes to 23 (with two abstentions) early Thursday morning, also bans the use of terms such as "Polish death camps" in relation to camps such as Auschwitz, which were located in Nazi-occupied Poland.

The legislation criminalizes any mention of Poles “being responsible or complicit in the Nazi crimes committed by the Third German Reich.” The harshest penalties are reserved for those who refer to Nazi-era concentration camps such as Auschwitz as “Polish death camps.”




Scenario 1

You are sitting on a bus minding your own business, and a man comes over to you and tells you to move, you can't sit here, there are rules about where you can sit, and you are breaking them. What do you do?

a) You move - this I call "passive complicity"*

b) You take the man's advice and become the advocate to the other "rule-breakers", encouraging them to move as well, helping them to do so - this I call "collaboration in one's own victimhood".

c) You say "My name is Rosa Parks and I ain't moving" - this the whole world calls heroism, and quite rightly, because it is also the most personally dangerous.


* The theme of "passive complicity" can also be found under 1961 on the January 11 page. The Rosa Parks story is told on February 4, and especially December 1.


Scenario 2

You are sitting in your stibl in Praszka, and a man in a black uniform with swastika armbands tells you to move, you are being deported to the Lodz Ghetto. What do you do?

a) You get on the train ("passive complicity")

b) You become a senior member of the Judenrat, like my great-great uncle Bernard (Boruch) Praszkier*, and help out with the organisation and running of the ghetto ("collaboration in your own victimhood")

c) It’s Warsaw not Lodz, and you become a senior member of Lochamei ha Getaot, leading the Zionist Youth group, like my cousin Jakub Praszkier, who died in the Uprising (the "Rosa Parks" option)


* You can read his story in full in my collection of "Tall Tales & Short Stories"; click here to purchase a copy; or in brief on April 19


Always three options for the victims.

But what about the perpetrators?


Scenario 3

A gang of youths approaches you in the school playground, their leader making clear he wants your lunch.

Phase a: You give him your lunch. And the next day. And the next... ("passive complicity")

Phase b: By the fourth day he is telling you what he wants for lunch and you are getting your mother to shop accordingly, while spending what little pocket money you have on a secret second lunch which you eat in the toilet during lessons so that nobody will know ("collaborating in your own victimhood")

Phase c: The gang-leader no longer wants your lunch; he wants your obedience, and for you to do his dirty work for him. And the dirty work in question is that kid over there's lunch from now on, and you to ensure he gets it. So you go over to the kid, and you tell him to hand over his lunch, and he takes option 3, the Rosa Parks resistance-refusal option. But the gang are watching, so you slap him. He starts to run, so you trip him. You drag him upright and punch him, hard in the stomach. The gang are smiling approvingly. You take his lunch from him and head back to the gang, but in the moment of reaching into his bag everything changed: the gang has vanished, and what is standing there is the school Principal, the teacher on duty in the playground, and two student witnesses. They have the whole thing filmed on CCTV. The police and your parents are being summoned. Expect to be suspended, at the very least. You did what you did. Forced or unforced, you did what you did ("Polish death camps")





On March 26th 1963, the American world featherweight boxing champion Davey Moore died from injuries sustained in a fight. Bob Dylan lamented his death in a ballad, which I have borrowed to offer my own lament to the Polish President and Parliament:

Listen to Dylan singing "Who Killed Davey Moore" here
Or read his original lyric here
The full text of the original of "Cock Robin" can be found at the end of this blog-page


"Who Killed Six Million Jews - I guess it must have been Cock Robin"


Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not I, says the ex-Nazi
Don’t point your finger at me
They made me join the Hitler Youth
That’s the Gott-in-Himmel truth
They made me learn to shoot a gun
They’d have shot me if I tried to run
It’s too bad what happened to the Jews
But me or them, I had to choose
It wasn’t me who had the Fall
You can’t blame me at all
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
I guess it must have been Cock Robin

Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not us, say the Catholics
We only carry out Holy Writ
Easter Sunday, pogrom time
But this comes down from God on high
You killed Jesus, you must pay
That’s what the Holy Scriptures say
Get in your ghettoes, may you rot
You and Judas Iscariot
You’re the ones who had the Fall
So you can’t blame us at all
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
I guess it must have been Cock Robin

Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not me, says the Parliamentarian
With his new-passed law code in his hand
You look at my country all askance
You forget about the Resistance
And there were Poles who rescued Jews -
Well not that many, that is true -
But in their name, our dignity
We’re decent Poles, we’re not Nazis
It wasn’t us who built the camps
Who set the fire in those eternal lamps
We’re doing this to heal our pain
And to redeem our good people’s name
It wasn’t us who made the Fall
You can’t blame us at all
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
I guess it must have been Cock Robin

Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not us, says the President
Signing the Law of National Innocence
We were bullied just like you
This was what they made us do
Our pride, our honour, all of it, lost
Making us host the Holocaust
It wasn’t us who built the ramps
You can’t call them Polish Death Camps
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
I guess it must have been Cock Robin

Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not me, says the retired camp chief
Whose questioning was rather brief
Who never went to Nuremburg
To get what surely he deserved
Just doing my job, you stupid fools
Obeying orders, following rules
And the dead in the camps weren’t only Jews
And we had heroes, martyrs too
The western front murdered my dad
And my brother died at Stalingrad
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
I guess it must have been Cock Robin

Who Killed Six Million Jews?
Not me? asks the man in the street
Ashamed of his grandparents’ defeat
Ashamed in the world to be a Pole
With all that trauma in his soul
I need redemption, I need cure
But this law’s not what I’m looking for
Let’s face up, let’s admit,
We chose to do the things we did
Passive complicity, that’s the phrase
And it can never be erased
Truth and Reconciliation - that’s our need
Accept the facts, make that our creed
Accept that what we did was wrong
Deal with it, and then move on
Who Killed Six Million Jews?
We did, that’s who. We did.
illustration courtesy of Carolyn Trant and Parvenu Press

"Who killed Cock Robin?" "I," said the Sparrow,
"With my bow and arrow, I killed Cock Robin."
"Who saw him die?" "I," said the Fly,
"With my little eye, I saw him die."
"Who caught his blood?" "I," said the Fish,
"With my little dish, I caught his blood."
"Who'll make the shroud?" "I," said the Beetle,
"With my thread and needle, I'll make the shroud."
"Who'll dig his grave?" "I," said the Owl,
"With my pick and shovel, I'll dig his grave."
"Who'll be the parson?" "I," said the Rook,
"With my little book, I'll be the parson."
"Who'll be the clerk?" "I," said the Lark,
"If it's not in the dark, I'll be the clerk."
"Who'll carry the link?" "I," said the Linnet,
"I'll fetch it in a minute, I'll carry the link."
"Who'll be chief mourner?" "I," said the Dove,
"I mourn for my love, I'll be chief mourner."
"Who'll carry the coffin?" "I," said the Kite,
"If it's not through the night, I'll carry the coffin."
"Who'll bear the pall? "We," said the Wren,
"Both the cock and the hen, we'll bear the pall."
"Who'll sing a psalm?" "I," said the Thrush,
"As she sat on a bush, I'll sing a psalm."
"Who'll toll the bell?" "I," said the bull,
"Because I can pull, I'll toll the bell."
All the birds of the air fell a-sighing and a-sobbing,
When they heard the bell toll for poor Cock Robin.




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June 15

1215, 1381, 1990

1215
Magna Carta, the Great Charter, signed with the royal seal today in 1215 by King John Lackland, though actually there would be several more versions, revisions, amendments, in the decade that followed - nearly a third of the text was deleted or substantially rewritten - and the final and definitive version, the one that endured into history, the one still theoretically on the statute book in the United Kingdom to this day, though actually all but three of its sixty-three clauses have been repealed, really belongs to John's successor, his son (just 9 years old when his father died), King Henry III (r. 1216–72), who issued his final version on February 11th 1225.

 A paragraph built of sentences with qualifications! Ah yes, deliberately - whereas (as the lawyers say) Magna Carta is the founding statement of Democracy and Liberty in England; whereas (in the other sense of that word), in the eight hundred years that have followed, very little has happened with it but more, and then still more qualifications, limitations, proscriptions.


Illuminated replica, circa 1300

Sixty-three clauses in the original document, of which one of the survivors defends the rights and liberties of what was then a very different English Church, and another confirms the somewhat meaningless "liberties and customs" of London and several other towns. The third survivor, Clause 39, is the one that probably mattered most then, and definitely still does today, though it needs to be seen in context to be fully grasped. It granted to "free men" the right to justice and a fair trial; a principle that would be enshrined in the American Bill of Rights (1791), as well as many other constitutional documents around the world, culminating in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, and the European Convention on Human Rights of 1950. It states, in full, that:
"No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice."
Context, however, is essential. No definition is given of "free men", but these were feudal times, when the majority of the people (about 96% of them in fact) were either unfree rural peasants, known as "villeins", who could only seek justice through the Baronial courts of their own lords, or town-dwellers, who came under the authority of the ecclesiastical courts, or those of the king himself. Only those who had completed a full apprenticeship in a town or city Guild could be counted as "free men", and even then only within the vicinity of that Guild. Magna Carta was thus a "Baron's Charter", not a "People's Charter".
Issued for the 800th anniversary in 2015

 Of the sixty clauses that have not survived, most dealt with specific Baronial grievances regarding the ownership of land, the regulation of the justice system, and medieval taxes that have no modern equivalent (such interesting options for future Chancellors as "scutage" and "socage" - the former money paid by a vassail to his lord in lieu of military service; the latter a tenure of land by means of rent or non-military service). Others demanded the removal of fish weirs from the Thames, the Medway and throughout England; the dismissal of several named royal servants; the standardisation of various weights and measures; and all manner of other activities of the sort that politicians can always find use for when their vote is needed or a continuing coalition depends on them. So it was conceded by the much-bullied king that no taxes could be demanded without the "general consent of the realm" - again meaning the leading Barons and the Churchmen - while re-establishing several privileges that had been lost, while linking fines to the severity of the offence so as not to threaten an individual's livelihood. Of the lost items that we should regret, it confirmed that a widow could not be forced to remarry against her wishes.

All of this is the what; but what of the why?

Bear in mind that there had never been a national sovereign until William of Normandy conquered the Saxon kingdom in the central south of Britain in 1066, and then expanded it every whichway, taking the Jute and Frisian and Angle kingdoms in the south-east, then the Cymry (Welsh), the Viking north, the lands of the Picts and the Scots, finally that of the Eirish, whence his sobriquet "the Conqueror". His son William Rufus was thus the first authentically national monarch to inherit a kingdom, after which Henry I, the civil war involving Stephen and Mathilda, Henry II who barely set foot in the realm but ruled it as an absentee landlord from Poitiers, and his son Richard I likewise - Richard only once set foot in England, for ten days in 1190, for his coronation, and he spoke not a single word of Aenglish. By the time Richard went on Crusade and left his brother John in charge, and in a form of charge that left him immune from such few laws as there were, the Barons (most of them Franco-Normans who likewise knew no Aenglish, but who owned all the land and had no great interest in servility to an absentee landlord, and no wish to be involved in wars in France - especially when John lost the Battle of Bouvines in 1214), the Barons decided that enough was not, for themselves at least, enough. They wanted more, and now was the time to get it.

Now, because there was also the little matter of the church. The Pope had appointed Stephen Langton as Archbishop of Canterbury; John had rejected the appointment; the Pope had issued an "interdict", prohibiting people in England from receiving the sacraments, excommunicating John; John had no choice but to formally surrender his kingdom to the Pope, which he did in 1213, shortly before going to war in France. However bad a bad king, better a bad king than a distant Pope. Now had arrived.

Langton had the support of several Barons, who called for a meeting with John, Langton himself, and the Papal Legate who had just arrived from Rome. The aim at this stage was to have John affirm the Charter of Henry I, a pre-Magna Carta if you like, in which Henry had promised "to abolish all the evil customs by which the kingdom of England has been unjustly oppressed". John refused. The Barons responded by renouncing their oaths of allegiance to him, appointing Robert fitz Walter as their leader, and marching on, indeed capturing London. Now John was powerless politically, militarily and spiritually. Negotiation at Runnymede was simply a matter of the terms of his surrender.

These were written first into the Articles of the Barons, then proclaimed as the "Charter of Liberties" - the name Magna Carta would be bestowed later - at Runnymede on June 15th 1215, sealed with the Great Seal rather than signed with the royal signature. Four days later the Barons restated their oaths of allegiance, Stephen Langton took up his post officially at Canterbury, and the royal clerks prepared copies for national distribution, four of which can still be seen, one in Lincoln Cathedral, one in Salisbury Cathedral, and two at the British Library.

     The Barons (officially "The Sureties for the Enforcement"): William d'Aubigny, Lord of Belvoir Castle, Roger Bigod, Earl of Norfolk and Suffolk, Hugh Bigod, Heir to the Earldoms of Norfolk and Suffolk, Henry de Bohun, Earl of Hereford, Richard de Clare, Earl of Hertford, Gilbert de Clare, heir to the earldom of Hertford, John FitzRobert, Lord of Warkworth Castle, Robert FitzWalter de Clare, Lord of Dunmow Castle, William de Fortibus, Earl of Albemarle, William Hardel, Mayor of the City of London, William de Huntingfield, Sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, John de Lacy, Lord of Pontefract Castle, William de Lanvallei, Lord of Standway Castle,  William Malet, Sheriff of Somerset and Dorset, Geoffrey de Mandeville, Earl of Essex and Gloucester, William Marshall Jr, heir to the earldom of Pembroke, Roger de Montbegon, Lord of Hornby Castle, Lancashire Richard de Montfichet, Baron of Stanstead, William de Mowbray, Lord of Axholme Castle, Richard de Percy,  Baron, Saire/Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester, Robert de Ros, Lord of Hamlake Castle, Geoffrey de Saye, Baron, Robert de Vere, heir to the earldom of Oxford,  Eustace de Vesci, Lord of Alnwick Castle

     The Witnesses: Bishops: Stephen Langton, Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal of the Holy Roman Church, Henry de Loundres, Archbishop of Dublin; E., Bishop of London, Jocelin of Wells, Bishop of Bath and Wells; Peter des Roches, Bishop of Winchester; Hugh de Wells, Bishop of Lincoln; Herbert Poore (aka "Robert"), Bishop of Salisbury; W., Bishop of Rochester; Walter de Gray, Bishop of Worcester; Geoffrey de Burgo, Bishop of Ely; Hugh de Mapenor, Bishop of Hereford; Richard Poore, Bishop of Chichester (brother of Herbert/Robert above);  W., Bishop of Exeter; Llywelyn the Great. Also the other Welsh Princes: Master Pandulff, subdeacon and member of the Papal Household; Brother Aymeric, Master of the Knights Templar in England; Alexander II of Scotland


Now that he had sufficient power again, John immediately sent envoys to Rome to have the Charter annulled; to which the Barons responded by refusing to give up London until it was fully enforced. The Pope, somewhat surprisingly, took John's side, issuing a Papal Bull on August 24th of that year, which declared the Charter "null and void of all validity for ever", and described it as "illegal, unjust, harmful to royal rights and shameful to the English people", which is not a description you will find on the current UK government's website (click here), nor among the statements of Lord Denning, the senior lawyer in the UK in the latter years of the 20th century, who called it "the greatest constitutional document of all time – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot".

The outcome of the Pope's support for John was the resumption of what from the outset had effectively been a civil war. The King used the scutage levy to raise a mercenary army, and invited Prince Louis, the French Dauphin, to join him in exchange for a promise that he would inherit the throne of England. Louis duly invaded England early the following year, but withdrew when John died of dysentery in October 1216, too early in the invasion for the promise to be fulfillable. Magna Carta might well have gone to the grave with him, but his 9 year old son Henry, now King Henry III, looked at the power of the Barons and his own prospects for the future, and agreed the issue of a slightly revised version that November - a coronation gift to those he needed to placate. Further revisions in the reissue of the following year, and very many more in the 1225 edition, by which time he was 18, in charge, in control, and intent on staying so. It was this version which Edward I reaffirmed in 1297 (click here).

So it wasn't a desire to see morality enshrined in law that brought about Magna Carta, and it wasn't the freedom of the individual either. Indeed, it wasn't really a Charter at all - it was an interim peace treaty in an ongoing power-struggle between a king and his Barons. 

You can read the full document by clicking here.


1381

The "free men", as noted above, did not include 96% of the people, all of whom were vassails, serfs, servants, conscripts, or simply the generality of "peasants", literally owned by the crown or the barons or the church, with no legal rights of any kind, even in matters of rape or theft or murder. They could take a complaint to their liege and master, and maybe there would be redress, and maybe there wouldn't. Even when the House of Commons was added to the House of Lords, on January 20th 1265, it was the second chamber, the Lords the first, and for the next several hundred years, until the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1868, the Barons would pretty much determine who got a seat, and how they sat on it.

There was, however, one moment when the peasants rose up in revolt, to demand their rights as something like free men. In 1380, the fourteen year old Richard II was persuaded to impose a four pence poll tax on all "lay people", to fund a war in France, the third such tax in just four years, and unlike "free people", the term included all the peasantry, for whom four pence was provision for their family for many days. The consequence was rebellion. Armed with little more than axes and sickles, the folk of Kent elected Jack Strawe and Walter Tylere (Wat Tyler in most modern renditions) as their leaders, and fifty thousand of them marched on London. They took Canterbury on June 10th, the Savoy Palace, home of the king's senior advisor John of Ghent, on June 13th, and this morning, June 15th 1381, they were rewarded with a summit meeting, leadership with leadership, the King choosing Smithfield - or in those days Smethfield, the Saxon way of describing a "smooth field" - as the venue: East Smithfield in fact, not the one still flourishing just outside the Barbican of the city wall, between the Aldersgate and the Charterhouse, but the long gone one, right by the Tower of London, at what was then called Little Tower Hill.

Opportunities of this kind don't come very often, and "Scargill" Tylere and Jack Strawe (the modern one, coming up later on this page, spells it without that final "e") pushed their luck as far as they hoped to get away with: not only did they insist that the poll tax be rescinded, but they wanted the abolition of serfdom, the right to buy and sell in the market place, and not just the confiscation of all church lands, but their redistribution on egalitarian lines - Trotsky and Che Guevara would have been proud of them, and no doubt given them signed copies of the Comunist Manifesto.

The king might even have agreed to these demands; at one point he mounted his horse and offered to lead the next stage of the march. But, like Korach and Avi-Hu and Dotan, frustrated at the time it was taking Moses on the mountain, others in the ranks had broken them, freeing the radical priest John Ball from prison, engaging in fisticuffs, then knives. The rioting even affected the negotiators at Smethfield, William Walworth, the mayor of London, landing a blow that wounded Wat Tylere, after which one of the King's squires stabbed him in the guts. His comrades took him across the city to St Bartholomew’s Hospital for treatment, but Walworth simply sent the city guards to drag him out again, and had him beheaded. Ball and Strawe were captured shortly afterwards, and subjected, without trial, to the ritual of hanging, drawing and quartering. The "Peasant's Revolt" as historians fondly remember it, was over, and had achieved, not counting spilled blood, absolutely nothing.



1990

Nor would anything like it be seen on the streets of Britain again, for six hundred years; and when it did happen again, it was for precisely the same reason - the imposition of a poll tax, which the "free men and women of Britain" (which by then was most of us) simply would not accept. Historians will tell you that Margaret Thatcher resigned because her John of Ghent, the Chancellor Geoffrey Howe, broke ranks, and took the rest of the Cabinet with him. But that was the end of the process, in November 1990. The beginning of the end was eight months earlier, on March 31, when not fifty but two hundred and fifty thousand marched, and not just from Kent but from across the British Isles, and not just peasants but the middle classes too; they gathered at Kennington Park, just outside the modern city boundaries at Lambeth, and marched on Trafalgar Square. This time the Poll Tax was defeated.


Four last observations, based on clever-clever comments emailed to me by readers:

 i) No, June 15th was not a significant date in the Thatcher case, but I have included the piece here as an addendum to the 1381 piece; with a link to March 31

 ii) I have no idea if Future Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was on the 1990 march

 iii) No, this is not why we call them "Straw Polls"
iv) Yes, it really is very strange that the modern Labour Party should have its national headquarters on, of all street-names, Walworth Road.

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