Neighbour Richardson

[truepenny]

My 1984 analogy in the previous post was even more horrifyingly accurate than I realized.

An anecdote, also from Duffy:

In May 1535, ... the vicar of St Clement's, Cambridge, having had a few beers in the Pump tavern, called the King a despoiler of the Church. Sensing his companion's disapproval, the priest said, "Neighbour Richardson, there be no one here but you and I," but neighbour Richardson denounced him to the mayor all the same, and his words were duly reported to Cromwell.
(p. 385-6)

Now I'm wondering what the Henrician equivalent of Room 101 was.

(Oh, and in case anybody's confused, the Cromwell in question is Thomas, not Oliver. Oliver is one hundred years later and no relation. Thomas Cromwell was the Earl of Essex and secretary to both Cardinal Wolsey and Henry VIII (not concurrently). His downfall's coming, if you're hating him with a virulent green passion in 1534-5; he'll be executed in 1540, for botching the marriage with Anne of Cleves and generally being an asshole. Tudor politics are some scary shit, man.)

---
WORKS CITED
Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

"Cromwell, Thomas." The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 1932. 5th Ed. Ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1985

Comments

[renenet.livejournal.com]

Have I ever told you how much I adore you for the careful use of citation in your posts and the extreme geekiness of much of your content. Sometimes, like now, you're exactly my kind of geek. Other times you're, well, you're still exactly your kind of geek, but I have no personal entree into anything you're talking about. Doesn't matter. I read it anyway for the geekish buzz. Geeks for friends!

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Geeks for friends!
Accept no substitutes!

Glad you enjoy. I like knowing there are people out there who appreciate unreconstructed geekiness when they find it.

Cromwells

[oberstgreup.livejournal.com]

I believe there was a distaff relationship between the two famous Cromwells - Oliver's great-great-grandmother was Thomas' daughter, or something like that. His family had changed its name from Williams to Cromwell to honor Thomas' memory. Thomas wasn't as bad as all that, really; he was a creature of his times, in which politics was a brutal affair, and the country was better off with a repressive dictatorship than with the anarchy and uncontrolled violence that had raged through France and England a century before.

Your point about pre-industrial societies is a good one, but I don't know if Tudor England is the right place to look. That age was a watershed for modern governmental institutions, and if you look just a century before, much less eight or ten, the government's ability to perform this sort of systematic repression of ideas and expressions, and the complexity and sophistication of government in general, would have been orders of magnitude simpler. That's not to say that *life* would have been simpler, but the complexity might lie in very different areas. In seventh century England, getting a meal or a new pair of shoes, which is relatiely simple now and was not too hard in Tudor England, would have been an undertaking of some difficulty for a stranger, while navigating the law or government policy would seem absurdly simple in comparison to our own.

Re: Cromwells

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the more accurate Cromwellianism.

Politics is a snake pit. Doesn't matter what era you're talking about--Periclean Athens, Imperial Rome, Tudor England, Jacksonian America ... I always take history very personally when I'm reading it, and I find the Protestants of the early Reformation particularly unsympathetic. So the fact that I'm hating Cromwell at the moment is not really his fault. (Also, I keep thinking about all the art and architecture that was destroyed between 1535 and 1660 and it makes me want to scream.)

You're quite right that Tudor England is different in kind as well as in governmental structure from the sort of feudalism which gets egregiously over-simplified by fantasy writers. But it's also true that many of those same writers wouldn't know that, for exactly the same reasons that they write egregiously over-simplified feudalism in the first place. Um, my point with this is? I don't know. I guess both that you're right and that for me reading this passage was extremely helpful in clarifying my own thinking. It pinpointed for me the way in which most fantasy societies forfeit verisimilitude, although I'm not sure it's anything I can articulate. I don't think I've ever read a fantasy dystopia with the petty-minded despair that 1984 evokes (I'm actually not sure I've ever read a fantasy dystopia, period, but doubtless I'm forgetting something), but this anecdote makes it perfectly clear that such a thing could be done without anachronism. Various authors have been praised for "gritty realism" in their fantasies, but nobody's managed THIS. (Although sometimes Mervyn Peake comes close.)

What particularly struck me about this passage--the reason I posted it--was how redolent it is of McCarthyism and the kind of totalitarianism that Orwell saw creeping up on England in 1948. It's a reminder to me that the industrial revolution is not the root of all evil.

Also, I just find it CREEPY. Neighbour Richardson, there be no one here but you and I.

Re: Cromwells

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Yes, forget orcs and glowing red eyes, that's evil. Tolkien knew that, the Scouring of the Shire is a lot closer to that, specifically that, than anything else I can think of in fantasy.

Re: Cromwells

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes. Good point. Tolkien lets the hobbits defeat the Sharkeyites (because he's a reactionary pastoral idealist), but the Orwellian/Dickensian future is what they're defeating.

I didn't like "The Scouring of the Shire" as a child. I thought it was a disappointing and unnecessary way to end the book. And I couldn't appreciate the Juvenalian satire into which it was edging. But as an adult I enjoy and admire it very deeply precisely because it undercuts the epic heroism of the proceeding umpteen-hundred pages and points out that not all evil stomps around in an opera cloak and pointy mustaches; sometimes evil is just stupid little people like Sandyman, doing what they're told and not thinking beyond their own self-interest. And it strikes me both as terribly tragic and completely right that none of the Shire-hobbits can appreciate Frodo. Tolkien loves his hobbits, but he understands that they are parochial, ignorant, and small-minded. They have the defects of their virtues, and it makes sense that where Gandalf sees and protects the virtues, Saruman sees and exploits the defects.

Which is wandering far afield from the original point, but anyway.