Aristocracy: The Remains of the Feudal Day

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

Why ‘Justice’ for this thread and not ‘Culture and Community’ or ‘History’? Because we are a Republic and an aristocracy should not have any recognised place in our political systems. A discussion of remaining aristocracy privileged not by merit but by birth alone should really be in a History forum but unfortunately is still a contemporary phenomenon, whether it is a Viscount inheriting from an Earl or Paris Hilton inheriting Dadddy’s tax lawyers.

The point of the thread is to ask why there are still people accorded privileges just because they were born in a lucky bed.

How is this relevant to today? Well we can all see the latest crisis at the very highest level with the island next door which has a constitutional monarchy, officially, but in fact has no agreed constitution beyond matters of trade and private property rights and is looking like it may not have a monarchy much longer either.

Touchy subject and not one on which I’d choose to vote. One of the rare occasions when I’d probably get a vote in the UK on any referendum on the matter but determined long ago that the monarchy in the UK is not merely a political construct but it is also very much a cultural issue and on that basis I am not well enough informed to be able to make a sensible vote one way or another.

My only duty as a Republican abroad and living in a constitutional monarchy is not to let my own country down by being disrespectful of another culture’s cultural constructs, deeply interwoven in Englishness and the perception of it. If the monarchy in England is to go or survive, I don’t feel I could decently vote on that subject. I don’t think any views I might hold would be overly welcome in my local pub and the subject has never arisen there as far as I know. But common courtesy and the need to exhibit civilised behaviour around things such as standing for another country’s anthem, not disrespecting the Thai royal family in Thailand means not disrespecting cultural traditions if I live in England either.

Relevance to today: Besides the issues in England we have Scotland. A huge percentage of the land of Scotland is in the hands of private landowners who have profited from the invasive barbarity of the Highland Clearances when many Scots were thrown off land they had known time out of mind by foreign aristocrats who had decided that sheep were more profitable than croft-farms.

There are still four Dukes today I believe who own much of the private land in Scotland, and much of it the most beautiful land. Scotland will need to deal with this issue as part of the independence debate lest they end up independent only via a sliver of lowlands.

The King of Spain is now King Emeritus of Spain and hiding out in Abu Dhabi, fearful of what is about to emerge from tax investigations and corruption investigations around money flowing in and out of the roual grave and favour accounts from dubious characters.

Royalty appears to be on the run. The last absolute dictator with the aspect of a crowned king is sitting in the visibly dwindling pond in Rome that is known as the Vatican and was arguably the world’s first feudal corporation merged with majesty in the form of a crowned head.

Aristocracy. By-word for eventual decrepitude and degeneracy or tourist attraction that should be repainted and promoted for tourism? Legal place to play out theatre around large non-liquid assets such as country houses and estates?

I think their day is visibly done.

 

[David]

How a small group of Eton / Oxbridge graduates runs the UK...from politics, to finance, to the media.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review

A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit is perceptive and full of surprises

www.google.ie

Good luck getting into the BBC or a comfortable City of London job when you've a non-RP accent, and a degree from a red brick university when there are others with a degree from Oxford and Cambridge looking for those very same positions. British society is a caste system in all but name and I'd like to think we in Ireland would move towards the Nordic model of equality rather than emulate the shitshow that is the UK model where the vast majority of positions of power and / or wealth automatically go toward a tiny elite - often with roots stretching back to the Medieval nobility.

I know I'd take a competent leader such as Sanna Marin any day of the week over some arsehole such as Boris Johnson who got to where they are not by what they know, but by who they know.

 

[roc_abilly]

... A huge percentage of the land of Scotland is in the hands of private landowners who have profited from the invasive barbarity of the Highland Clearances when many Scots were thrown off land they had known time out of mind by foreign aristocrats who had decided that sheep were more profitable than croft-farms...

This did not happen only in Scotland. It happened everywhere that capitalism ever came to.

Notoriously it happened to the English peasants as well, they were among the first it happened to, the infamous "enclosures" of the sixteenth century turning vast areas of English 'commons' land over to pasture for sheep for their wool.

At the same time forcing the peasants who used to work these lands to go to the new industrial towns to work in the factories processing this wool - as their previous forms of community, means of subsistence and economic organisation (small community and family based reciprocity, exchange and redistribution) were destroyed.

Point being, it was not "aristocracy" to blame, it was the business man who came to the ascendancy after the aristocracy, and his ideology of capitalism, part of which ideology required people to be deprived of the land that gave them subsistence, and their prior existing economic relations broken up, to make them dependent on wages, to create a "free" market for their labour.

 

[Mowl]

How a small group of Eton / Oxbridge graduates runs the UK...from politics, to finance, to the media.

Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK by Simon Kuper – review

A penetrating analysis of the connections that enabled an incestuous university network to dominate Westminster and give birth to Brexit is perceptive and full of surprises

www.google.ie

Good luck getting into the BBC or a comfortable City of London job when you've a non-RP accent, and a degree from a red brick university when there are others with a degree from Oxford and Cambridge looking for those very same positions. British society is a caste system in all but name and I'd like to think we in Ireland would move towards the Nordic model of equality rather than emulate the shitshow that is the UK model where the vast majority of positions of power and / or wealth automatically go toward a tiny elite - often with roots stretching back to the Medieval nobility.

I know I'd take a competent leader such as Sanna Marin any day of the week over some arsehole such as Boris Johnson who got to where they are not by what they know, but by who they know.

Sanna resigned from state politics earlier this month and has joined the Tony Blair Institute.

Watch Jambo hop all over that one.

 

[David]

This did not happen only in Scotland. It happened everywhere that capitalism ever came to.

Notoriously it happened to the English peasants as well, they were among the first it happened to, the infamous "enclosures" of the sixteenth century turning vast areas of English 'commons' land over to pasture for sheep for their wool.

At the same time forcing the peasants who used to work these lands to go to the new industrial towns to work in the factories processing this wool - as their previous forms of community, means of subsistence and economic organisation (small community and family based reciprocity, exchange and redistribution) were destroyed.

Point being, it was not "aristocracy" to blame, it was the business man who came to the ascendancy after the aristocracy, and his ideology of capitalism, part of which ideology required people to be deprived of the land that gave them subsistence, and their prior existing economic relations broken up, to make them dependent on wages, to create a "free" market for their labour.

Good points made above, though many of today's high-flying businessmen and politicians can trace their ancestry back to the feudal era. A good proportion of today's wealthiest capitalists in Britain more often than not can trace their lineage back to those very same landlords/ members of the gentry who booted smallholders and farm hands off of their lands to make way for sheep. The gentry had a good head start with the emergence of capitalism, most obviously through inherited wealth and the possession of vast tracts of land. The majority hadn't a penny to their name when the enclosure movement came about, aka. the ancestors of today's workforce/ renter class. It's essentially the same people pulling the strings, only under the guise of freedom and the protection of property rights.

Sanna resigned from state politics earlier this month and has joined the Tony Blair Institute.

Watch Jambo hop all over that one.

Sanna was a good leader. She must have been doing something right if she met the disapproval of the old farts and basement dwellers of Arsefield's. A beautiful woman too with great style and a bubbly / likeable personality. Certainly beats having grumpy old farts in charge as is the case in Ireland. The curmudgeons on Arsefield's want people like themselves in office, thinking attractive young ladies belong in strip clubs and/ or chained to the kitchen sink. Unfortunately were Sanna a TD in Ireland the begrudgers wouldn't be able to wait to get rid of her:

"Who does she think she is? She should be working as a secretary in the local council, leave the big important stuff to the boys who know what they're up to"

 

[roc_abilly]

Yes, true David, but it was done (rationalised) under a new ideology, the ideology of capitalism, not under the old feudalism. It was this new ideology of capitalism which enabled them to do what they did. They were not acting as aristocrats, they were acting as business men.

"... Enclosures have appropriately been called a revolution of the rich against the poor. The lords and nobles were upsetting the social order, breaking down ancient law and custom, sometimes by means of violence, often by pressure and intimidation. They were literally robbing the poor of their share in the common, tearing down the houses which, by the hitherto unbreakable force of custom, the poor had long regarded as theirs and their heirs'. The fabric of society was being disrupted; desolate villages and the ruins of human dwellings testified to the fierceness with which the revolution raged, endangering the defenses of the country, wasting its towns, decimating its population, turning its overburdened soil into dust, harassing its people and turning them from decent husbandmen into a mob of beggars and thieves. (Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time).

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

The Goose and the Common (1821)

The Goose and the Common​

Authors unknown - a number of versions©1700s

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose


The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine


The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law


The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back

[Seventeenth century protest against English enclosures]

 

[roc_abilly]

Nice poem, Lumpy. The goose is a great bird. They are a creature wilder than most. And right around now in fact the great flocks of geese are returning for the winter, it is probably my favourite event of the year.

I begin going out every late evening with the dog around this time of year to see if I can catch them coming in. The huge flocks, the honking, the beating of the wings, and the wheeling around and around in the sky, doing a dance to a drumbeat that we humans can't hear, is one of the greatest things.

And yes, when out with the geese these last few years I have regularly been thinking about the ever onwards march of another type of "enclosures", the coming mass factory wind farms, that are heedless to the geese, that are being presently constructed under a wildly different "drumbeat".

A million times over I side with the geese on this one. Again. As it still goes on, what you might justifiably call "enclosures" still, and going on under the very same logic, and rationales, as always.

 

[Mowl]

There's a wildlife sanctuary just east of the estuary which I can see from my lounge window. The estuary is home to a large pack of geese who recently had their babies and who live permanently along the waterside. One of my favourite things at this time of the year is the veritable symphony of dozens upon dozens of geese flying overhead at sunset every evening. Usually around the 1830/1930 period, they fly back to their usual perch after allowing the tide from the River Vantaa wash them a kilometer or so downstream to the south.

When they fly over, the noise is a white-out of squawks and screeches, and they cast a shadow beneath themselves as they return to their babies with full bellies to feed them by regurgitating the goodies collected when floating along.

It signals the last direct sunlight over Arabia and the oncoming night when they all gather together and huddle up real close for warmth while they sleep.



The adult geese are enormous, a wing-span of at least a meter wide. By the time we're feeling the winter start to bite, they fly away to the south and we don't see them again until the springtime, when the babies come back fully grown. Big Sky is one of my favourite natural treats. From any of my south facing windows, the vast wide open views are amazing at any time of year. But around now we have the chorus of the geese, swallows surfing the updrafts in the many courtyards, the tits and thrushes, crows, pigeons, and many more - all cruising the evening sunset gusts of warm air rising from the ground up.

I can sit back with a spliff and watch them having fun, majestic sweeps downwards turn to an upward swoop as they whizz around each other screeching in sheer joy. It's awesome. Just one of those geese could feed a large family for a few days if one was so inclined - but they're protected, so nobody bothers them, only to feed them some old bread crumbs and watch them feed their young.

It's awesome to live here - the construction factored in the local wildlife. All of the land beneath me was reclaimed from swamps and wasteland, and only twenty five years ago was under water. This is why the Lammassaari island reserve is so filled with life.

 

[roc_abilly]

Ah Mowl, so you are a fan of the geese too.

I find them otherworldly. When I go to see them it is typically dark and windswept, there is never anybody else there, and they go right over my head.

There is just a faint red light in the sky, and they are imprinted against that, and the sound is tumultuous.

Although I have never had the chance, apparently they are very good eating, I learned only recently that it used to always be a goose that was eaten at celebrations, or on special Sundays, in this country.

I think there are tame geese and wild geese though. I suspect it was geese from the farmyard were eaten rather than the wild goose.

 

[Mowl]

Lovely shot of the estuary nearby just posted to the Arabian alue site on social media of the wild geese taking flight about ten minutes ago.

I can still hear the screeching and cackling - but they're miles away yet.



When they come back, they'll come right over the top of my block - it's my favourite moment of the evening too. The entire length of my three windows filled with their shadows and noise. Wonderful. Magical. Timeless.

I'll keep my phone handy and try to get a shot from the lounge when they do a fly-by.

​

​

 

[Lumpy Von Talbot]

Ah Mowl, so you are a fan of the geese too.

I find them otherworldly. When I go to see them it is typically dark and windswept, there is never anybody else there, and they go right over my head.

There is just a faint red light in the sky, and they are imprinted against that, and the sound is tumultuous.

Although I have never had the chance, apparently they are very good eating, I learned only recently that it used to always be a goose that was eaten at celebrations, or on special Sundays, in this country.

I think there are tame geese and wild geese though. I suspect it was geese from the farmyard were eaten rather than the wild goose.

True. The eating of turkeys instead of goose for christmas is an american tradition imported from there. Used to always be goose in the European christmas tradition. If a bird could be afforded at all.