Footnotes on Friday

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Franking a letter: a Parliamentary privilege

Someone asked me the other day what it meant in Regency times when someone asked their host or the male head of their household to frank a letter for them.

A frank is just a mark or label applied to a letter that qualifies it to travel through the post and be delivered. When the postal service started, any money it made belonged to the Crown, so post related to Crown business went through the post for free. When, in 1764, the Crown gave the postal revenues to Parliament (or, rather, traded it for a favour), Parliament authorised free franking for Parliamentary business. Any member of parliament and a number of officials could mark (that is, frank) a letter to travel free.

So, strictly speaking, if you were a girl staying at a country estate and you wanted to write to your sister to tell her about the pretty ribbons you bought at the village market, your host should refuse to frank your letters. But nearly everyone abused the privilege. After 1784, the franks needed to have the franking lord’s signature, plus the place and date of franking written at the top, and Parliament set limits on the number of letters that could be franked, but the local postmaster was unlikely to count, and even more unlikely to growl at the local duke.

In 1795, Parliament passed an act that gave a cheap postage rate to the lower ranks of the army and the navy. They could send a letter that weighed less than a quarter ounce for one penny. Again, there were abuses, with officers giving their personal letters to a private soldier or ordinary sailor to post. Parliament was not amused. Even so, they kept it on. The penny rate made a huge difference to the men.

When the penny post came in, in 1840, Parliament stopped the practice of members of Parliament being able to frank letters to send them for free. They looked at the active servicemen rate, and decided to keep it. One officer, reporting to the enquiry, said how important cheap letters were to the men.

“I have observed that they take very great advantage of it and they appear to derive great gratification from it, and it benefits them in a variety of ways…” he said, and also “I believe that many of them learnt to write expressly for the purpose of writing their own letters.”

 

 

 

 

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A little medieval history to go with Promises Made at Midnight

Step back in time with Sherry Ewing

Thank you to Jude for featuring a little bit of research that occurred for my latest release, Promises Made at Midnight. This medieval/time travel romance is in my Knights of Berwyck, A Quest Through Time series although it can easily be read as a standalone novel.

How about a little history for the times?

Eleanor of Aquitaine and her younger sons

Early on in this book, we catch a glimpse of Ulrick’s confusion when Bridgette mentioned she was one of the Queen’s ladies in waiting. While she was thinking of the fair she had been attending and the Tudor Queen, Ulrick’s natural assumption was that of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. To get the full picture we need to go back a few years to the spring of 1173 when Henry II’s son by the same name was upset with his lack of power and encouraged to do something about it by his father’s enemies. The younger Henry then launched the Revolt of 1173-1174. He fled to Paris, devising evil against his father from every angle at the advice of the French King. He then secretly went into Aquitaine where his two brothers, Richard and Geoffrey, were currently living with their mother. He incited them to join him in his quest for power. Some say the queen may have sent her younger sons to France “to join with him against their father the king.”

Between the end of March and the beginning of May, Eleanor left Poitiers, but was arrested and sent to the king at Rouen. Her arrest wasn’t announced publicly. On July 8, 1174, Henry and Eleanor took a ship for England from Barfleur and as soon as they disembarked at Southampton, Eleanor was taken either to Winchester Castle or Sarum Castle and held there. For the next sixteen years she was imprisoned at various locations in England.

Jumping ahead to the year 1183 and we find young King Henry tried again to force his father to hand over some of his patrimony. In debt and refused control of Normandy, he tried to ambush his father at Limoges. He was joined by troops sent by his brother Geoffrey and Philip II of France. But Henry II’s troops besieged the town, forcing his son to flee. After wandering aimlessly through Aquitaine, Henry the Younger caught dysentery. On Saturday, June 11, 1183, the young king realized he was dying and was overcome with remorse for his sins. When his father’s ring was sent to him, he begged his father to show mercy to his mother, and all his companions would plead with Henry to set her free.

I thought it would be interesting to add this little bit of history into the story and having Dristan and his men being sent to France. Of course, I must admit, any time I can bring my characters back to Bamburgh Castle is always a joy to my heart. I do have a fondness for the place and can only hope that one day I may actually be able to stand in its shadows or walk its grounds!

The legend of King Arthur

And thinking of my modern heroine and what story she might tell a child from twelfth century England had me researching the legendary King Arthur. I had to ensure this would have been something a child from this time period would have heard about. The historical basis for this king has been debated but I learned that an actual person had been talked about since the late 5th and 6th centuries. Legend or a real person… I always found this story fascinating and hope you enjoyed this tiny glimpse of it.

My castles are real places

The original medieval keep as it is today

As for Dunster Castle that became Ulrick’s home, I can’t begin to tell you why I chose this location. Let’s just say that Google Earth is this author’s best friend! The castle was a former motte and bailey castle, now a country house, located in the village of Dunster, Somerset, England. The castle lies on the top of a steep hill called the Tor, and has been fortified since the late Anglo-Saxon period. After the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century, William de Mohun constructed a timber castle on the site as part of the pacification of Somerset. A stone shell keep was built on the motte by the start of the 12th century, and the castle survived a siege during the early years of the Anarchy. At the end of the 14th century the de Mohuns sold the castle to the Luttrell family, who continued to occupy the property until the late 20th century. During the early medieval period the sea reached the base of the hill, close to the mouth of the River Avill, offering a natural defense and making the village an inland port.

After a series of failed relationships, Bridgette Harris would like a fresh start. If only she could escape her ex-boyfriend since they participate in the same renaissance fairs. While gazing at a granite statue of a handsome knight—her dream man—at one such fair, a mysterious elderly Scottish woman offers her a coin to toss into the fountain and make a wish. Bridgette can’t resist, but nothing prepares her to suddenly slip through time.

Sir Ulrick de Mohan does not have time for love. He is charged with training possible recruits to become worthy guardsmen for the Devil’s Dragon. The woman who magically appears out of thin air and falls into his arms must be one of those future ladies who continue to show up at Berwyck’s gate. But she can’t be for him.

Fate has brought two people together despite the centuries that should be keeping them apart. Will the growing love between them be enough to keep Bridgette in the past or will Time return her to where she should belong?

Books2Read: https://books2read.com/u/4Ap6xd

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The Development of Democracy: commerce, power, and oppression

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, the term democracy referred to a primitive and failed form of government used in ancient cultures. Popular government, their worldview held, would lead to conflict and turmoil. Every person would desire to be master over others and no one would want to obey.

Modern countries, so the argument went, needed to have an ordered system whereby some ruled and others obeyed, so that they could engage in foreign trade and defend their independence. Democracy was only fit for small communities hiding out in harsh places where they needed to be frugal, disciplined and hard-working to survive. But what worked for a city republic would not work for a country. Self-interest, love of money, and inequality was what allowed modern eighteenth century states to survive and prosper. But unbridled self-interest led to excess, which needed a monarch to contain it.

These philosophers didn’t want to give power to the multitude, but to correct their vices, instead. In this way, commerce could reign supreme, bringing wealth to those nations who succeeded in the marketplace.

One of the great debates of the century was whether commerce would channel aggression, or become another reason for aggression. Some argued that people would reject war in order to trade. Others that competition over trade would lead to war.

Even so, a number of influential thinkers were committed to the idea of a republic. They proposed that people could only be free if they were actively committed to and participated in public affairs. A monarch, even one that did not abuse his or her power, make the people unfree by definition. However, a republic would not work unless everyone was committed to the wellbeing of the community. Self-government required moral behaviour.

English and European philosophy are midwives to a new republic

The thinking of these philosophers influenced the American founding fathers.

The right to representation, political independence, separation of church and state, nationalism, slavery, the closure of the Western frontier, increased taxation, commercial restrictions, use of the military in civil unrest, individual freedoms, and judicial review were some of the salient issues that boiled up in the revolutionary cauldron of Britain’s American colonies. [https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/creating-the-united-states/revolution-of-the-mind.html]

They argued, it is true, about whether what they were creating was a democracy. It all depended on how you defined democracy. But there’s no doubt that the Declaration of Independence had many democratic features. It called for no taxation without representation. It denounced unearned titles. It demanded that all institutions were subjected the test of reason. And the final version of the Constitution isclearly envisaged what most of us would call a democracy.

“The Revolution was in the minds of the people, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.”

John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, August 24, 1815

The French seek liberty, equality, and fraternity

In the eighteenth century, France was rapidly changing from a fundamentally agricultural society to a commercial empire with many overseas outposts. The population was increasing, and industrial production was rising. And the French Enlightenment was focused on transforming cultural, scientific and political thinking. Thinkers such as Helveetius, Dietrich, d’Holback, de Condillac, de la Metrie, and Rousseau explored different fields, but agreed that tradition was a bad guide to the future, that government and justice needed radical improvement, and that free-market economics was the way of the future.

Montesquieu, who admired the way in which the English king shared power with Parliament, wrote The Spirit of the Laws, a survey of political insititutions throughout the world. Rousseau’s seminal work was The Social Contract, speaks of empowerment through united with other public minded citizens. He argued that men are by nature free, and so should all have equal rights and should be able to participate in deciding the laws under which they live.

Scholars argue about whether the monarchs of the ancien regime chould have reformed enough to prevent the revolution. They agree, though, that tens of thousands of people formed by the writings of the Enlightenment weren’t prepared to tolerate being disempowered any longer. War, taxes, the widening gap between rich and poor, the intransigence of the various French Parlements, all contributed. In the end, the revolution came and swept away the ancien regime.

For a brief few years, before its own excesses, political infighting and outside threats made an Emperor look enhancing, France was a representative democracy. Perhaps only a third of all eligible men voted in the first election, but that was still more than any other country in the world at the time. Even after the monarchy was restored, the fight for liberty, equality and fraternity continued to fire the hearts of the French people, as it still does today.

Paine reintroduces democracy as a positive

Thomas Paine was first man in modern times to present democracy as a positive term. To do so, he redefined democracy. He suggested that, while direct democracy (where everyone voted on everything) was inconvenient, representative democracy (where everyone voted on the people who would decide everything) avoided the problems of both direct democracy and oligarchy or autocracy. His writing caught the attention of American intellectuals, and the modern view of democracy was born.

 

Sources:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/241861074_The_Idea_of_Democracy_and_the_Eighteenth_Century

http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/essays/before-1800/was-the-american-revolution-a-revolution/a-democratic-revolution.php

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/french-political-thought-from-montesquieu-to-tocqueville/political-thought-in-eighteenthcentury-france-the-invention-of-aristocratic-liberalism/A5DFA7F70E6C0AF2333CA9888448947E

https://www.britannica.com/place/France/The-causes-of-the-French-Revolution

Book post

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The Development of Democracy: government by the people

The Greek and Roman versions of democracy were not the only models of participatory government from which our own Western tradition draws. In Italy, after the fall of Rome, city states practiced a limited form of participatory democracy that included the election of temporary leaders. For the most part, only the nobility and large landowners could vote, though later wealthier merchants and skilled craftsmen demanded–and in some places received–voting rights. Later still, economic decline and other factors led to the rise of authoritarian monarchs and princes.

Meanwhile, in the far North, the Scandinavians practiced direct democracy at village and town level, with every free adult Norseman able to speak at the Ting, the assembly. Unusually, certain females could participate as well. If an issue could not be settled at the local level, it might be passed up to a higher level Ting, where representatives of a number of communities would rule on matters that affected an entire region or tribe. In 930 in Iceland, the first national assembly, the Althing, was established. It still continues today, one of the world’s longest serving Parliaments. Later, other Scandinavian countries, Switzerland and the Netherlands also established national representative assemblies.

In Ireland, the leaders of communities all had a voice in the Feis, the council of the King, until around 530.

Before the Magna Carta

Those of us raised in the English tradition of democracy are often told that it started with the Magna Carta. But before that came the Witan and the Moot. These were the government, legislative, and judicial assemblies of Anglo-Saxon Britain, and they were adopted, with changes, by the Normans. The Witan was called by the King and comprised the individuals he wanted to include. Their job was to advise the king. In theory, the king did not have to listen to their advice, but these were powerful men with troops behind them. The balancing act between king and council was underway, and would continue for centuries.

After the Conquest, the king appointed a permanent council, but would add to it from time to time on particular issues.

The Moot was the assembly at county or shire level.

The ‘shire moot’ was attended by the local lords and bishops, the sheriff, and most importantly, four representatives of each village. After the Conquest, this meeting became known as the County Court and it introduced the idea of representative government at the local level. (parliament.uk ~ Origins of Parliament)

In time, these two types of council would become the two Houses of Parliament: the House of Lords, the Council of the monarch, and the House of Commons, representatives of the shires and counties.

So what did the Magna Carta have to do with democracy?

The issue was taxes. The King wanted to pay for his war in France. His barons were not happy. They rebelled, and the Magna Carta was the charter in which the King agreed he was not above the law. The Magna Carta established the law as something separate to the will of the monarch. This is the fundamental principle on which Western democracy is based–that the leader of a country is bound by its laws, though that principle was not the issue for most of the barons. They just wanted to make certain that the king could not impose ruinous taxes without the consent of his council.

John signed the charter, and then repudiated it. Many of the barons went over to Louis of France. Then John died, and the advisers to the nine-year-old King Henry III coaxed the barons back to fealty to Henry by reinstating the Magna Carta. But the time Henry was an adult, had been confirmed many times, and was will known throughout England.

Four clauses of the 63 in the Magna Carta remain law today, and clauses 39 and 40 are particularly relevant to democracy.

“No free man shall be seized, imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, exiled or ruined in any way, nor in any way proceeded against, except by the lawful judgement of his peers and the law of the land.

“To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.” (parliament.uk ~ Origins of Parliament)

Representative government. Sort of.

Since the agreement was that the king needed his council to raise taxes, Henry began to call the council together more and more often. Parliament was the name given to the meeting of this council. In return to agreeing with the taxes, the barons asked for reforms, including the right to choose the king’s ministers, and have the king follow their advice.

When Edward, Henry’s son, became king, he began calling the representatives from around the country together more often. And he didn’t just summon the barons. Several times, he also summoned two representatives from each county, and two from each city or town. His successors went on waging war and raising taxes, and the assemblies kept on bargaining for something in return. From 1327, every English Parliament has included Lords, Commons, and the Monarch.

The seventeenth century in England

The English Civil War in the seventeenth century was also a fight between the unelected King and the Parliament. Again, it was mostly about taxes. Parliament won and executed the king, having convicted him of treason. Twelve years later, Parliament welcomed back his son to take the throne. Before the end of the century, in 1788, came the so-called Glorious Revolution. Parliament was dissolved by the king, who decided to rule on his own. So they decided to pass the crown to one of his daughters and her husband.  William of Orange entered the country and won the throne without a shot being fired, but first he and his wife Mary agreed to a bill of rights that would mean Parliament and those who held power in the land could not again be removed by the king. Those rights?

The main purpose of the act was unequivocally to declare illegal various practices of James II. Among such practices proscribed were the royal prerogative of dispensing with the law in certain cases, the complete suspension of laws without the consent of Parliament, and the levying of taxes and the maintenance of a standing army in peacetime without specific parliamentary authorization. A number of clauses sought to eliminate royal interference in parliamentary matters, stressing that elections must be free and that members must have complete freedom of speech. Certain forms of interference in the course of justice were also proscribed. The act also dealt with the proximate succession to the throne, settling it on Mary’s heirs, then on those of her sister, afterward Queen Anne, and then on those of William, provided they were Protestants. [https://www.britannica.com/topic/Bill-of-Rights-British-history]

The theory of democracy

In the seventeenth century, John Locke built on the ideas of Aristotle and others to come up with a theory of the legitimacy of government. He held that government represents a social contract between the ruler and those ruled. He did not state a preference for democracy, oligarchy, or autocracy, but he did state that, if the ruler failed to meet his side of the social contract, the people had a right to rebel.

For all Power given with trust for the attaining an end, being limited by that end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected, or opposed, the trust must necessarily be forfeited, and the Power devolve into the hands of those that gave it, who may place it anew where they shall think best for their safety and security.

Next, we’ll see how Locke’s ideas and those of other philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century played out in the eighteenth century, in the American and then the French revolution.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/topic/democracy

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/08/countries-are-the-worlds-oldest-democracies/

Roots of Western Democracy

Click to access bbm%3A978-3-642-20904-8%2F1.pdf

https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/originsofparliament/birthofparliament/overview/origins/

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The Development of Democracy: Part 1—the Ancient World

The Regency era I write about was on the cusp of major changes in democracy, as it was for industrialisation, criminal justice and law enforcement, the class system, global politics, scientific discovery, medicine, transportation, and many other aspects of how people lived. They had not yet achieved anything like a representative democracy in the modern sense of the term—that is, that government comprises people who have been elected by citizens to represent them. Indeed, apart from a lot of talking during the early years of the French revolution (universal male suffrage was proclaimed in France in 1789, but cancelled after one election), few countries adopted the idea till the second half of the nineteenth century. Extending the vote to women took even longer.

I’ve been giving my characters forward-thinking views on political reform, because I can’t quite bear to make a hero or a heroine out of someone who admires the system they had back then. That, in turn, has led me to look at just what that system was and how and why it changed.

At the same time, the British Commonwealth, of which New Zealand is part, has been celebrating the 70th Jubilee of one of the longest reigning monarchs the world has ever had. Some are using the opportunity to ask whether monarchy as an institution has met its use by date. It seems to me the difference between monarchy and republic is not nearly as significant as the question about who makes the decision about who makes and enforces the rules by which a society was governed.

Today, I want to lay a foundation to the discussion by looking back to the ancient world.

Democracy came first

Studies of hunter-gatherer societies today show them to be hierarchical but egalitarian. Despite differences in climate, culture and history, their government structures are similar across the globe. They operate in kinship groups, with wider connections according to exchange information, goods, and non-related mates.

Those with the most skill and experience become the informal leaders of the group, so who was in charge would depend on the task being performed. Every adult member of the band involved in a task has right to express an opinion, so there might be a split across gender lines, with women discussing women’s activities, and men discussing men’s activities.

Co-operation was key for human societies before settled agriculture, and every member of the band mattered to its survival.

Priest-kings and citizens assemblies

With the development of wide-spread agriculture, two forms of government emerged. One was autocratic. The other was at least proto-democratic.

Priest-kings with ultimate authority very likely came with wide-spread agriculture. A central authority needed to organise the large-scale activities that agriculture bought. Secure places to store grain and soldiers to protect it from inside larceny or outside invasion. Irrigation works to take water to the fields and road works to bring the grain to storage. Someone had to be in charge. Religion, military power, and political power combined to concentrate the power in the hands of a single elite.

Such a system ran the risk that an incompetent leader and his cronies might believe their own public relations rather than their advisors. History is cluttered with societal-collapses because of poor decision-making from the top. At best, the priest-king would lose his place through assassination, coup, or revolution. I am still tickled by the pragmatic approach of ancient Chinese political philosophy. The Emperor ruled by the mandate of Heaven. That mandate could be removed. How did the Emperor know the mandate had been removed? Someone succeeded in deposing him.

On the other hand, not all such kings ruled with absolute power. We have evidence of citizens’ assemblies as early as four and a half thousand years ago. In Syria-Mesopotamia at the time, many towns and cities–and even countrysides–had citizens’ assemblies who might rule alone on local issues. On wider state issues, similar groups advised the ruler or even had the right to ratify major decisions taken by the ruler.

We know this because documents include the titles ‘Chief of the Assembly’ and ‘Herald of the Assembly’. The myth of Gilgamesh says that the hero was unable to go to war without the approval of the people.

“… having failed to obtain the approval of the council elders, he then went to the council of young men.”

We have no idea who decided the membership of the citizens assemblies, or how much influence they had. (Certainly, Gilgamesh just moved on to ask someone else in order to get his way.) But it was, at least, a starting point.

Greece and Rome

The city states of Greece borrowed their popular assemblies from Syria-Mesopotamia. In Athens, between 508 and 260 before the common era, male citizens met every 10 days to debate and decide laws. Athenian women, slaves, and resident aliens did not get to vote.

The Greeks called this demokratia—a form rule by the people. Apparently, women were not people, a view shared by the entire Western world until suprisingly recently.

That aside, the Greeks also introduced trial before elected juries, public vetting of officials, freedom to speak in public, voting by lot, and the ability to expel people from the assembly by popular vote. All important elements of later democracies.

The Greek political systems ended as other have, throughout history. By invasion. Repeated invasions made Greece part of the Roman Empire,

Rome followed the same principle of assemblies from 509 BCE until the Roman Republic ended in 27 BCE with the appointment of the first Roman Emperor.

In the Roman Republic, the patricians—the wealthy aristocracy—were initially the only people who could vote and hold offices. The assembly they elected was called the Senate, and it was an advisory body to those assemblies that actually made the rules. However, over 200 years, the plebians gained the right to elect their own kind to the Concilium Plebis, which regulated the plebians.

Several other assemblies made the laws for specific parts of Roman society. All of them were strongly influenced by the Senate.

Under the emperors, power shifted from representative democracy to imperial authority. Even so, the assemblies continued their governing roles, though the Emperor became the final authority.

Throughout that time, to be elected or appointed to one of the assemblies, a person needed to be male, free, and a citizen of Rome.

Next week, the long gestation of Western democracy

Sources

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hunter-Gatherers_and_Play

https://www.google.co.nz/books/edition/Sumer_and_the_Sumerians/eX8y3yW04n4C? pg 30

https://doi.org/10.2307/595104

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/romes-transition-republic-empire

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Tripped up by things we know

I’m serious about my research. I prefer well researched historical romance myself, and I try to research the details in my own romances to make sure I get them right. The problem is, I often don’t know what I don’t know. If I’m fortunate, I’ll find out before I finish the book, and can edit accordingly. Or rewrite, even, as when I discovered that my receivers of smuggled goods would almost certainly not be arrested if they simply paid the duty, with perhaps a thank you bonus to the customs officials.

I hate it when I don’t notice until I’ve published the book and found a reader who winces. No, my hero could not buy flowers from a shop in the early 1800s in Bath. Flowers at that time were sold from barrows. Actual shops devoted to selling flowers had not yet made an appearance even in Paris, where they apparently started.

I took flower shops for granted and didn’t trouble to look them up.

On the other hand, several times, I’ve had readers with a little knowledge who have lambasted me for getting wrong something I have exactly right. Anglican clerics with parishes did directly receive the tithes paid by their parishioners.  Cleanliness in surgery and in sick rooms was a natural part of Arabic medicine, and also commonly practiced in the British navy and by doctors trained in Scotland. While upper class women were expected not to engage in work for income, the crafter families of England taught their crafts to their daughters, who continued to work alongside their husbands if they married someone in the same craft.

So when I bump into a small fact in other people’s writing that I know to be wrong, such as the Regency lady in a recent novel I read who offered a visitor a choice between Chinese or Indian tea, I note the historical discrepancy and move on.  In this particular case, I’m certain of my facts. The British stole tea from China in the early 1820s. The early experimental plantings didn’t translate into commercial production until the 1850s. But often, I’ve checked a fact that appears wrong to me and discovered that I am the one who is wrong. Lesson learned, and thank you, author.

And even if I’m right, I’m not going to scoff at the author in a review.  How rude! And what an invitation for the powers of balance to strike me next time I include a detail that I didn’t know I didn’t know.

 

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Calculating sea journeys

I was trying to work out the length of a sea journey from the borderlands with Scotland on the east coast to near Bristol in the west, and I came across a modern sailing distance calculator, which was just the thing. It allows you to plot your course, and then tells you the nautical miles. From there, it’s a simple (hah!) matter of working out the likely speed of your craft, taking into account the season (and therefore the weather and the prevailing winds and currents), the likelihood of pirates and storms, and any time in port along the way. And there you have it.

You’re welcome.

https://plainsailing.com/sailing-distance-calculator

See also my other posts on this perennial topic:
Average travelling times in the Regency
Travel times from port to port in the Mediterranean in the Regency