Deconstructing the NY Times’s Magna Carta

Guest post by Roger Pilon

On the day we celebrate the 800^th anniversary of Magna Carta, leave it to the New York Times to feature a boxed op-ed on its editorial pages entitled “Stop Revering Magna Carta.” As the only bow to the occasion on those pages, one imagines that the editors could not be bothered even to write a house editorial on the subject

The piece is written by one Tom Ginsburg, professor of international law and political science at the University of Chicago, an institution with which I have some acquaintance.  As suggested by its title, this is a work of deconstruction. The Charter’s fame, you see, “rests on several myths.” Indeed, “like the Holy Grail,” Ginsburg concludes, “the myth of Magna Carta seems to matter more than the reality.” And well it should. After all, history rarely springs forth in principled perfection. At best it grows one fractured event at a time, each event gradually becoming the narrative mythology of a people.

Ginsburg begins his deconstruction by claiming that Magna Carta “wasn’t effective. In fact, it was a failure.” How so? Because King John repudiated the Charter shortly after he’d signed it, whereupon the barons sought to replace him, which he avoided by dying. But the next year, we’re told, John’s young son reissued the document. Far from a failure, then, it was reissued several more times over the 13^th century, culminating in the important 1297 version. Indeed, it was at that time, as the famed legal historian Edward S. Corwin wrote, well before the era of deconstruction, that the king was forced to call Parliament into existence to relieve his financial necessities. But Parliament’s subventions “were not to be had for the asking,” Corwin noted, “but were conditioned on the monarch’s pledge to maintain Magna Carta.” A failure? Hardly.

Yet another myth, Ginsburg writes, “is that the document was a ringing endorsement of liberty.” As evidence, he cites three of the Charter’s 61 chapters, each concerning matters peculiar to the time—for example, the removal of fish traps from the Thames. Yet as shown by Ginsburg’s colleague at the law school across the Midway, Professor Richard Helmholz, even that provision served in time to afford a basis for free navigation.

And therein lies that major fault of this piece. It’s a textbook example of missing the forest for the trees. To be sure, as Ginsburg writes, “Magna Carta was a result of an intra-elite struggle, in which the nobles were chiefly concerned with their own privileges.” But again, that’s how history often begins, sowing the seeds for future advances. As Corwin observed nearly a century ago, many of the Charter’s clauses were drawn in ways that did not confine their application to issues immediately at hand. Moreover, the barons realized early on that to maintain the Charter against the king, they had to get the cooperation of all classes and so too the participation of all classes in its benefits. Thus did the scope of its protections expand, much as with our own Constitution. And that’s why so many revere Magna Carta today.

---

Roger Pilon is the founder and director of Cato’s Center for Constitutional Studies, the publisher of the Cato Supreme Court Review, and an adjunct professor of government at Georgetown University.
This post first appeared at Cato at Liberty

What Led to the Magna Carta? War and Taxes

Rapacious royalty in the run-up to Runnymede
Guest post by Larry Reed

June 15, 2015, marks 800 years since a fateful day along the River Thames just twenty miles west of central London. It’s a good thing to note such anniversaries. They encourage us to discover things we should have learned or should never have forgotten.

It was on this date in 1215 that powerful nobles famously compelled the English monarch to sign and seal the Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter.”

Most people possess at least a vague sense that the event had something to do with human liberty, but it’s doubtful they know that it was provoked primarily by two brothers and two calamities.

The brothers were named Richard and John. The calamities were war and taxes.

It all started on September 3, 1189 — twenty-six years before that day at Runnymede. Richard “the Lionheart” was crowned King of England and spent almost all of the next ten years outside the country, crusading in the Middle East on behalf of an imaginary friend, and then battling in Normandy to hold on to England’s claim against lands in France.

His adventures didn’t come cheap.

In his first year on the throne, Richard imposed the “Saladin Tithe” and other exactions to help pay for his crusading — thus boosting the tax burden by nearly 50 percent. Heavy levies were dumped on land-owners even for permission to marry or to inherit wealth.

Then in 1192 as Richard was on his way home from Jerusalem, he was captured and held for ransom in Germany by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VI. The phrase, “a king’s ransom,” likely originates from the price Richard insisted his subjects fork over to free him.

Back in England, Richard’s mother (Eleanor of Aquitaine) collaborated with her allies in government to collect the money.

Dan Jones in his 2014 book, Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter, writes:

Together, they worked Europe’s diplomatic channels, found hostages and ships when these were demanded by the king’s captors, levied a 25-percent tax on income and movables, requisitioned a whole year’s supply of wool from England’s Cistercian abbeys, and followed up Richard’s personal request for English churches to send ‘the whole of the gold and silver’ that they kept, which he promised to return on his release.

With the ransom paid, Richard returned to England. Within a matter of weeks, he took off for another five years of war in France until his death in 1199 from a battle wound. A Frenchman using a frying pan for a shield had fired a crossbow and hit Richard in the shoulder. Two weeks later, beset with gangrene, Richard departed this earth. Whatever reward awaited him, it wasn’t tax revenue.

The throne then passed to Richard’s brother John. Might we expect that John wisely refrained from the war and taxes that made Richard unpopular with many? No. In fact, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Almost immediately John made Richard seem like Good King . To describe him, Jones employs adjectives like “cruel,” “unpleasant,” “ruthless,” “slippery,” “faithless,” “lecherous,” “wicked,” “petty” and “interfering.”

He cites a contemporary of John’s, the writer Ralph of Coggeshall, who deplored John’s “small-minded viciousness” and his “childish habits of ridiculing his subjects and laughing at their misfortunes.” These were the days before monarchs had PR departments like Hillary’s to soften their rough edges. John even managed to get excommunicated by Pope Innocent III because he couldn’t keep his hands off the Church’s affairs or its money.

John picked up where Richard left off. Like his predecessor, he spent much of his reign making war in an attempt to regain land in France lost to the French. In For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, economic historian Charles Adams quotes an observer who wrote of the king in 1211: “With occasions of his wars he pilleth them with taxes and tallages unto the bare bones.”

When he needed horses or wagons or food for his troops, John often just seized the stuff from private owners. Anticipating Nancy “you have to pass it to find out what’s in it” Pelosi by eight centuries, John would sometimes bully subjects to meet his demands immediately in exchange for the promise that they would find out the terms of the seizure later.

Merchants were mercilessly and arbitrarily targeted for the cash they travelled with from town to town. When he needed a bridge built, he could and did resort to compulsory labour.

Bled dry by two buffoons in a row, the barons and dukes of England, with the support of just about everybody else, mustered the courage in 1215 to tell John where to get off.

Among the provisions of the Magna Carta they forced John to sign at Runnymede were these that stemmed from his (and Richard’s) wars and taxes:

No scutage (a tax paid in lieu of compulsory military service) or other aid is to be levied in our realm, except by the common counsel of our realm.(Clause 12).

The City of London shall have all its ancient liberties and free customs both on land and on water. Furthermore, we wish and grant that all other cities, boroughs, towns and ports shall have all their liberties and free customs.(Clause 13).

Neither town nor man shall be forced to build bridges over rivers, except those who are obliged to do so by custom and right. (Clause 23).

No constable or other royal official shall take corn or other movable goods from any man without immediate payment, unless the seller voluntarily offers postponement of this. (Clause 28).

No sheriff, royal official, or other person shall take horses or carts for transport from any free man without his consent. (Clause 30).

All merchants may enter or leave England unharmed and without fear, and may stay or travel within it, by land or water, for purposes of trade, free from all illegal exactions (“evil tolls” by at least one translation), in accordance with ancient and lawful customs. (Clause 41).

If anyone has been dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties or of his rights, without lawful judgment of his peers, it shall immediately be restored to him.(Clause 52).

Wherefore we wish and firmly command that the English Church shall be free and that men in our kingdom have and hold all such aforesaid liberties, rights and grants, well and in peace, freely and quietly, fully and completely, for themselves and their heirs, in all things and in all places, in perpetuity.(Clause 63).

A pivotal moment in the long blossoming of human liberties had occurred.

It would not be a straight, smooth experience. And God knows that John’s last conflict was hardly “the war to end all wars.” Wars and their attendant taxes, as well as endless encroachments and corruptions of both Kings and Parliaments, would in turn produce endless struggles for the restoration or expansion of liberty in this “sceptered isle.”

Barely a century after Magna Carta, the Scots would find themselves bludgeoned by England’s Edward I and his son Edward II. In 1320 Scottish nobles issued another critical document in the history of liberty, the Declaration of Arbroath.

They asserted, 456 years before the Americans in the Declaration of Independence, that it was the duty of the sovereign to rule by the consent of the governed, and the duty of the governed to get rid of him if he didn’t.

“It is not for honours or glory or wealth that we fight,” they announced, “but for freedom alone, which no good man gives up except with his life.”

Important principles were put in writing at Runnymede that generations have called upon ever since and from many places. They include the notions that the King ought to ask before he takes and that his subjects aren’t mere dirt he can blithely step on when he pleases.

Arguably, in the last century or so, the liberties of the British people have eroded substantially as money, power, and welfare statism have mushroomed in Westminster.

Maybe it’s time for another Magna Carta.

[Pic from Shutterstock]

---

Lawrence W. Reed

Lawrence W. (“Larry”) Reed became president of Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) in 2008 after serving as chairman of its board of trustees in the 1990s and both writing and speaking for FEE since the late 1970s. 
This post first appeared at FEE.

SUMMER SNIPPETS: ‘The Origins of the Common Law’

More interesting snippets from another of the books on my summer reading list—this time from The Origins of the Common Law by Arthur Hogue, one of the few books on what, to me, is a fascinating story on the origins of our modern civiilisation.

“[Common law in the Middle Ages was] simply the body of rules prescribing social conduct and justiciable in the royal courts of England … in competition with concurrent rules enforced in other courts. Save when a matter of freehold was at issue, Englishmen were not compelled to present their causes before the king’s courts … [however] by the end of the thirteenth century the common law had absorbed the business of its competitors [being primarily the local courts of the counties or boroughs, church courts, and baronial overlords’ courts] and may have borrowed heavily from them in the process of aggrandizement.”

“In the time before there was much parliamentary legislation, where would royal judges find the common law? An answer to this question leads directly to the writ system and the Register of Writs… George Spence has defined the original or originating, writ as ‘an order from the king under the Great Seal … commanding [the defendant] to appear in the king’s court at a certain day to answer the complaint. Every writ was founded no some principle of law … which gave the right on which the action was founded and the facts were stated with so much detail only as to bring the case within such principle of law. Each order, or writ, acquired a name…”

“The  entire formula of the writ Praecip quod reddat [the principal writ for the recovery of land in the King's court] can serve as an  illustration of an original royal writ…  Elements essential for any trial are either plainly stated or clearly implied… [The aggrieved man] actively seeks the aid of eth royal courts in the recovery of his property … he states the facts of the case … the defendant is ordered to obey the king’s command. If he refuses, a trial is set…  By implication, this writ reveals concern on the part of the king that men throughout the realm shall enjoy undisturbed possession of property to which they have a right and that to accomplish this purpose the royal authority will act, when called upon, through the royal Chancery, the sheriff, a royal agent, and the courts of justice.”

“During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the tendency was in England to create an appropriate write for the protection of every private right or interest recognized by the royal courts… [T]he writ system hardened and set in the fourteenth century. Thereafter a plaintiff might brood on the maxim, ‘No writ, no remedy.’”

“[There was] an extremely rapid increase in the number of writs during the thirteenth century—from thirty-nine writs in the treatise called Glanvill to four hundred and seventy-one about a hundred years later…”

“In England, the old forms of action have largely been abolished as the result of nineteenth-century legislation. And in most of the United States, there is usually but one action, called an action at law and equity. A knowledge of the old writs is still useful, however, for understanding common law principles… ‘The forms of action we have buried,’ write Maitland, ‘but they still rule us from their graves.’”

“Litigants were not compelled to seek the king’s justice [but defendants were compelled to meet it]; only in matters touching freehold did the Crown enjoy a monopoly over judicial business. But because English subjects gave then their business, gradually the medieval royal courts starved out, rather than crushed out, their competitors [so] by the end of the thirteenth century the royal courts were rapidly becoming courts of first instance for free men of the realm.”

“They provided the best justice available, for several reasons. First, the medieval jury … was preferable to older modes of trial such as ordeal … Second … royal jurists were superior to feudal lords and manorial bailiffs… Third, the incontestable validity of royal records was preferable to the records and fallible memories of suitors of local courts. Finally, decisions of the royal courts were enforced by an authority with wealth and power not to be challenged by any English subject…”

“Legal concepts now lusted about the phrases ‘rule of law’ and ‘due process’ trace back to [the Magna Carta and] the quarrel of King John with his baronage.”

“From the beginning the Great Charter [i.e., the Magna Carta] was an expression of the law which the king and his judges and other officials were not permitted to ignore.”

“The opinion expressed in the slogan, ‘No taxation without representation,’ has been read into Chapter 12 [of the Charter], which says, ‘No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our kingdom except by the common council of the kingdom…”

“If one had to choose a chapter from al the Magna Carta to express the spirit and the principal idea embodied in all the Charter, it would be Chapter 39 of the 1215 version: ‘No free man shall be taken or imprisoned or dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way destroyed, now will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the legal judgement of his peers or by the law of the land.’ …

“In effect, each confirmation of the Charter became a solemn assurance to the realm that the king would act with a regard for eth welfare of all subjects.  It was an assurance, moreover, that the king would act according to established procedure: in short, the king, like all his subjects, was under the law.”

“In 1258 the barons … went much further in their demands than the baronial faction that forced Magna Carta from King John … [insisting] upon an elective council of fifteen men, a standing council who would meet three times a year with another group of twelve elected barons. In these three annual “parliaments” [the word 'Parliament' came from the 'parley' or talks which the King had with larger groups of advisers] the twelve elected representatives of the commonality and the fifteen elected councillors were ‘to treat the wants of the king and his kingdom.’”

“[T]he principle of Magna Carta was [further] confirmed in 1298, 1299, 1300 and 1301.  And every confirmation  reinforced the view that the Great Charter of Liberties was part of the common law of England.”

“The growth of the common law in the thirteenth century represents in large part the definition of established customs.  In the form of writs, judicial decisions, treatises, royal ordinances, and parliamentary statutes, the common law emerged into explicit written form and formal procedure… Controversies occasionally forced a definition of the law and frequently resulted in written statement on well-kept records…”

“The basic elements in any civil action [in the courts of Angevin England to 1307 were these.] First, the aggrieved person must take the initiative… [he] must do more than grumble… Second, the court must act through appropriate officers to bring  [the accused] before the court to answer the charges of … the plaintiff. Next … the plaintiff and the defendant must be encouraged to formulate precisely the issues between them…  Then follows the trial … [in which] the  judge or judges apply the appropriate rules of law to the facts and reach a judgement… Finally, there must be the execution, or enforcement …
“The purpose of the verbal, combative procedure outlined here is the settlement of a dispute which might explode into violence if it were not channelled through a court [c.f. the continuing grievances and utu that plagued Maori inter-tribal life in later centuries].
“The law of medieval England was not much influenced by Christian doctrines of the duty of forgiveness and turning the other cheek. It assumed that a deliberate wrong would be resented … it assumed the desire for vengeance was natural and proper… [and from Anglo-Saxon times on, the system] was expected to quench vengeance and prevent a long chain of killing, woundings and injuries.”

“In his coronation oath the medieval king assumed a three-fold responsibility: 1) the protection of the Church, 20 the preservation of the peace, and 3) the administration of justice.  Preservation of the peace was both a duty and a right of the king.”

“The king in medieval England accepted a general responsibility to maintain the laws of the realm and to render the justice impartially to rich a poor alike… The sovereignty, or supremacy, of law was recognised not only in England but throughout the Latin Christendom during the Middle Ages.  The German scholar Fritz Kern has observed, ‘Not only the law of the realm but laws of property were considered laws which the king could not curtail on his own initiative alone.’ A political theory supporting absolute monarchy did not emerge in the Middle Ages…”

“Blackstone in the eighteenth century makes the royal judges of the common-law courts the depositaries of the laws.  Presumably their long experience and studies enable them to determine the validity of general customs known throughout the realm, and their decisions consequently are the most authoritative evidence about customs included in the common law.  These decisions, having been recorded and preserved, are available for consultation in difficult cases… 
    “On all matters of general custom the royal judges assumed the power to recognise what was good custom … Blackstone provided in his Commentaries on the laws of England a clear account of tests which customs should meet before they were admitted to have the force of law… Above all, he makes clear that not all customs are good customs and that the courts will permit litigants to rely on customs only when those customs meet certain criteria such as antiquity and continuity.
    “Professor Theodore Plucknet reminds us [in 1949] that for Azo, the civilian jurist, ten or twenty years was ‘a long custom,’ thirty years a ‘very long’ custom, and forty years an ‘age-old’ custom.  But in any period good custom is spoken of as ancient.’”

“[In conclusion], it is important to note the persistence and force in the modern world of some ideas which men of the Middle Ages incorporated in the common law of England.
    “Foremost among these if the idea of the supremacy of law … This idea implies that there are limits to the power of ruling.  The rule of law was difficult to apply against medieval kings with absolutist policies … The rule of law is difficult to apply now in the face of modern ideas of sovereignty which admit no limitation on the power of ruling… What is required in the twentieth [and twenty-first] century is a much wider understanding of legal rights, how they have been gained, how they may be lost.
    “A second idea … touches … the doctrine of judicial precedents…  [Common law] demanded  justices learned in the law of the realm[[and decisions of prior courts]. In the Middle Ages common-law court decisions were recorded, and on special occasions the record was consulted, but for several centuries the common law lived more in the minds of its judges and practitioners than in plea rolls and reports.  The law of the Middle Ages was largely judge-made, and whenever it was changed by deliberate action of the king’s council or by Parliament, judges participated in the change.  It is an essential part of the common-law system that its principles are derived from decisions in actual cases in which, of course, judges play the principal part.
    “A third important legacy of the medieval law to the modern law is the writ system… English lawyers could afford the luxury of throwing away the old forms of action only after the principles within those forms had become embedded in the law [only to be thrown away all too often by subsequent Attorneys General].  After men have learned what constitutes a debt recoverable in the court [for example], a writ of Debt is unnecessary … Modern courts [too] now recognise a leaseholder is entitled to enjoy the full term of the lease and to recover the both the lease and damages if he is ejected from the leased property.  But the leaseholder’s remedies were not taken for granted in the Middle Ages. They were acquired slowly in the form of actions associated with writs.  The full catalogue of writs known as the Register of Writs was the framework of common law.  When in the present, a lawyer decides that his client has a good cause of action which the courts will recognise, he is drawing, more often that he may realise, on the medieval definition of that cause of action in one of the many form writs.”

“The rule of law, the development of law by means of judicial precedents, the use of the jury to determine the material facts of the case, and the definition of numerous causes of action [based on right]—these form the principal and valuable legacy of the medieval law to the modern law.”

A Complete Hiftory of Man According to Hif Divers Delightf. Part One: 'You Smell of Goat'

by Peter Cresswell

A brief history of the world based on several things that really matter . . .

“ ‘Tis better to be a good liver than to have one.”
Tom Waits

    Man’s recorded history begins on the plains. When wildebeest and wild beasts roamed the plains thousands of years ago, early man roamed with them ... and often provided them with a good meal.
    Life for early man for most of those thousands of years was just as Thomas Hobbes described it :  nasty, brutish and short. The battle for survival was a daily challenge; the threat of imminent oblivion all that drove men forward; Hunting and gathering whatever could be scavenged the only way to fend off starvation.  In such a primitive struggle, man’s mind was of little use :  native cunning and primitive tool-making were highly valued; long-range thinking was not.
    A successful hunt was all such creatures had to celebrate:  a high point in such an existence would be to roast another wild beast over an open fire. For a brief moment in their short and brutal lives their bellies would be full, their bodies warm, and their thoughts could (at last!) roam to higher things.
    They had bought themselves time to think. What great realisations did they come to? After much skull-sweat they concluded that , in the immortal words of Tom Waits, 'twere better to be a good liver than to have one.  On such nights, and over the course of those thousands of year of struggle, there was one thought, one goal, that drove these men forwards:  the idea of beer!
    That’s right. Beer. The first step away from the caves and that precarious existence of the hunter-gather came with the cultivation in Mesopotamia of grains and cereals. With this important step man had begun thinking long-range; he had begun to plan ahead … a season … then a year … then several years in advance. Rather than roaming far and wide for whatever he could find, he could instead settle down, build a house, raise a family, have a beer, start a civilisation.
    The planting and harvesting of grains and cereals represented the arrival on this earth of man the-rational-animal; and for the first time it could be clearly seen that man’s mind was his chief tool of survival. Man had put his mind to work, and for the first time flourishing replaced survival.
    And what was all that grain and all those cereals for? Why, for beer of course! And bread. If bread was the staff of life, then beer was its inspiration. With bread came sustenance; with beer came civilisation. If the symbol of that first phase of primitive human development was a wild beast gnawing on the roasted limb of another wild beast, then the mark of the next was several pitchers of beer, and happy people consuming them.
    Beer was the first example of men expending precious time and effort producing something not just for survival, but for their own pleasure!
    And with the time bought by cultivation, men could now devise stories to entertain themselves while drinking beer. And curiously, many of these tales involved stories of extensive imbibition and getting seriously bladdered. How times have changed.
    The first of man’s great stories-and the very birth of literature--is ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh,’ a tale describing the evolution of man from the primitive to the cultured. This perhaps the first of man ‘s great creation myths, and also the first recorded instance of a great drinking songs. 
    So if civilisation began with beer, then literature began with a drinking song. (Sounds like a good story to me. ) In the epic we hear tell of the whore sent by Gilgamesh to the savage Enkidu, who teaches him what it is to be human. “She [gave Enkidu] bread to eat, because that’s what humans do, and beer to drink, because that’s what civilised people do”:[1]

‘Drink beer the custom of the land.’
Beer he drank – seven goblets.
His spirit was loosened.
He became hilarious [don’t we all!].
His heart was glad and his face shone.

    Enkidu drank beer, became hilarious, became glad – and in doing so became human.
    The Mesopotamians had their own popular drinking song. A rather odd one, suggesting that Mesopotamian lager louts liked rather fancied dressing up:

Sweet beer is in the Buninu barrel.
Cup-bearer, waiter-waitress, servants and brewer gather around.
When I have abundance of beer,
I feel great. I feel wonderful.
By the beer, I am happy.
My heart is full of joy, my liver is full of luck.
When I am full of gladness, my liver wears the dress befitting a queen.

    The only think left to add is a hiccup. And a belch. And to wonder what sort of visions the Mesopotamian liver was conjuring up!

    African myth includes an early version of the story of Pandora’s Box: in this version at the bottom of the empty casket is found, not hope exactly, but a gourd of beer. ‘Forget the afterlife and redemption by the gods,’ this story seems to say: ‘be happy with your lot, because to you is given beer.’  So beer puts the gods in their proper place for the first time:  Where primitive men would fearfully seek to propitiate the cruel and fickle gods for one more day of a brutal existence, civilised men instead called on their gods to assist in the tricky processes of cultivation and fermentation.
    It is thus no accident that religion quickly associated itself with beer: to this day, beer recipes from Belgian monks are still highly prized. Even the murderous Aztecs were not found wanting: if you weren’t completely cunted at Aztec religious rites your head became forfeit to the priests.
    The message seemed to be that as drunkenness was a gift from the gods, it must be so honoured. Now there’s a religious morality you can subscribe to!

    So beer built civilisation: it was what were getting civilised for.  The Sumerians, the Aztecs, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Romans, the Teutons … all took the happy accident of fermentation and with it made their crops last longer and their short lives better. Beer was good.  Beer was popular. Beer was the reason we were here.  The Egyptians for example used up to forty percent of their harvests to make beer. Bousa (or bouza) as one type was called (yes, it’s true!) was the staple of the Egyptian diet; the pyramids were paid for with another type known as kash.
    Clearly, the urge to go out to work to earn drinking vouchers and spend them down the boozer is a long-established mark of civilisation.
    In this way life was made much better for the next few thousands of years, which was important since for many other reasons life – outside beer and its associated revels – was still shit.
Aside from a few brief, glorious years in Ancient Greece -- in which philosophy, art and science were very soberly invented -- getting mothered was the only reliable pleasure to be had across most of the Dark Ages and in most of the world. To understand Europe for most of this time, think Nebraska on a slow weekend – you had the choice of either church or beer. The best you could say was that most monks were good brewers!
    In fact, much of the Dark Ages might well be explained by the fact that most of the people for most of the time were munted.  And who wouldn’t want to be. In an age when the water was disgusting and food was once again scarce and difficult to keep fresh, beer had become the chief source of daily nutrients. The average Northern European, every man, women and child, drank three litres of beer a day – and this is real beer we’re talking about, not today’s girly muck, with much higher alcohol content than the lolly-water of Messrs Budweiser and Miller. (Nordics were even harder: the daily ration for Finnish soldiers was the equivalent of forty cans of strong beer. No wonder the Vikings were fearless)

    If you’re at all interested in history then, try drinking three litres of Tennents Super or Carlsberg Elephant beer every day and see how you feel, and then think about that when you study European history because that’s what most Europeans were filling up their history with:

Almost everything had some liquor in it, especially medicines. Anything not deliberately fermented went off in the summer heat.  In winter, beer froze, causing the alcohol to separate into high-proof liquor… To make matters worse, the main non-alcoholic source of nutrition, bread, is now believed to have been plagued with the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, the base ingredient for LSD. Drunk doctors, tipsy politicians, hung-over generals: the plague, famine and war. Add a pope on acid and medieval Christianity begins to make a whole lot of sense.[2]

    How seriously did Europeans take their drinking?  Here’s one measure: The Eskimos have twenty-three words to describe snow, but the English language has over one thousand to describe getting hammered.[3] Little wonder. Being bollocksed in fact explains much English history, as for most of their history the English spent most of their time getting trolleyed. After encountering the arseholed Ancient Britons, Julius Caesar (more used to the pleasures of the grape than the hops), asked in an ode :

Who made you and from what?
By the true Bacchus I know you not.
He smells of nectar
But you smell of goat.

    High praise indeed!
   It wasn’t just the Britons yore who were getting trollied either. King Harold’s much later fall at the Battle of Hastings (on that famous date of 1066) was ascribed by twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury to the fact that the boys were still hung-over from celebrating an earlier victory over the Vikings. Echoing the much later charge of the Light Brigade (and the more recent invasions of England’s Barmy Army and its football hooligans), Malmesbury describes the English fighting “more with rashness and precipitate fury than with military skill.”  
    Even Queen Elizabeth I indulged, supping her beer soup at breakfast and washing it down with a quart of the warm flat stuff - 'an excellent wash' she called it. When she visited Hatfield House her off-sider the Earl of Leicester hastily wrote to Lord Burleigh, "There is not one drop of good drink or here there. We were fain to send to London and Kenilworth and divers other places where ale was: her own beer was so strong as there was no man able to drink it." [4]
    The Scots (or the Picts as they used to called themselves) were even more serious about getting gewgawed: they made their beer one part malt to two parts heather. The heather, it turns out, contains a natural hallucinogen called fogg, which is somewhat descriptive and explains something about the Scottish enthusiasm for their beer today -- including the Tennents Super of today - and very much about their tactics in battle.
    Arseholed they may have been for most of their history, but it was from the drunken shambolic British that we got the idea of liberty. Common law and the Magna Carta were early English makeshifts, just the sort of Heath Robinsonisms you’d put together when drunk.  It was a good start, but we had to endure half-a-millennia more before the ideas embodied within these could be properly developed and applied. 
    What kicked off their proper development was a saviour from the East: in the twelfth-century European scholars began learning from their Muslim counterparts about the great thinkers forgotten in the European Dark Ages.  The rebirth of those great thinkers was so powerful it kicked off the Renaissance—which, naturally, was enough to kick off another round of celebrations.
    Through the centuries of hangovers What Europe really need was to wake up. It needed another drink. And in the seventeenth-century Europeans learnt from Islam of another wonder, and this special wonder helped to kick off the Enlightenment …
    And for knowledge of that pleasure and what came of it you will have to wait for Part Two.

    To be continued . . .

---

[1] Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer, Pete Brown; Macmillan, 2003
[2] The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History, Stewart Lee Allen; Soho Press, 2000.
[3] Yes, it’s true! The fabulous and afore-referenced Man Walks into a Pub includes nearly 250 of these words, and author Pete Brown points out that there are a further 800-odd such words and phrases to be found in Jonathan Green’s Dictionary of Slang. As Brown comments: “It is clearly the work of an insane genius. Just so you know, the only other words that come close to having as many different slang terms as drunkenness are bonking, jobbies, wabs, the front bottom and the old chap. In itself this says more about our culture than most books could ever hope to.”
[4] ibid