On Thursday I started a piece for Rye’s Own with the working title of The Ambassadors of Rye. I had my Coleridge Moment whilst in mid-flow when Martin Hutchings turned up unannounced to inspect his old boat. As I am considering making it his son David’s new boat once I no longer have any need of a cabin roof over my head in England I welcomed him aboard and invited him below for a cup of coffee...besides the guest is sacred.
However my good manners have consequences as I have now missed the deadline for the July issue of Rye’s Own. But to cut my losses I am minded to introduce the text of the article into next week’s blogs...so expect discussions of Locality & Interests, Structure & Behaviour and Property & Improperty. The current draft begins like this.
‘The Rye Town Region with its seven parishes and eleven thousand souls will one day have its own ambassadors. Diplomacy matters and a Town State like Rye does not need to be a Nation State with a seat in the United Nations before engaging in Foreign Affairs.’ At this point a geographer from the London School of Economics...in a book entitled Democratic Ideals and Reality written in 1906 but not published until after the Kaiser War in 1919...enters the fray with his remark that in politics the future would be Locality vs. Interests. And by this he meant Outside Interests.
It is going to be a busy next few days on the scribbling front. Last Wednesday’s blog was supposed to summarise my recent research into what was really going on when King John signed Magna Carta at Runnymede on 15th June 1215. I posted a few pieces about Magna Carta to the history folder on my Swedish website as far back as 1999. This week I copied the folder to my laptop and started adding new files to it.
First was a talk given by Lord Woolf The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales at Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey on 15 June 2005 entitled Magna Carta: a Precedent for Recent Constitutional Change in which he quotes Rudyard Kipling’s poem on Runneymede. I also found four small vignettes from Dr Mike Ibeji on The National Trust’s Runnymede website about the events leading up to Magna Carta, the gathering of the rebels, Magna Carta itself and the death of John. Then there is Shakespeare.
I have Shakespeare’s King John on the boat and have dipped into it now and again over the past year. As with all his history plays Shakespeare relied upon the second...1587...edition of Holinshed's Chronicles. But he also consulted the fourth edition of John Foxe's Book of Martyrs as well as using a Latin text called the Wakefield Chronicle and the Historia Maior of Matthew Paris for many of the minor plot details in the play.
There is also the interesting matter of an anonymous play called The Troublesome Raigne of Iohn King of England published in two parts in 1591. Some scholars reckon this is an important source of King John...Dover Wilson for instance suggests it is the sole source...but others reckon that Shakespeare's play was the source of The Troublesome Raigne. There is more to good writing than putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. There is good research too.
I was brought up on the edge of Oxleas Woods between Shooters Hill and Eltham Palace. The woods were planted by the English Navy to supply timber for the Naval Dockyards on the Thames at Chatham, Woolwich and Greenwich. My parents bought a house on Crookston Road named not because bankers lived there...as they do now...but because to the architects and carpenters of the English Navy the crooks on an oak tree were the most valuable part of the tree.
The strongest bent grown-wood sections are where the main branches of the oak meet the trunk of the tree. The ever-evolving glue technology may have beaten nature for the moment but nature has a way of having the last laugh so the jury is still out. During the latest Volvo Round the World Race boats for instance chunks started breaking away from the yachts’ hulls. These ocean racing yachts use the latest materials technology and such things should not happen.
The Royal Navy's forestry planning dealt in 200 year time frames. The trees I played in as a child were planted in the 1750s at the start of the canal-building age. As the Royal Navy had a policy of always having twice as much tonnage on the high seas as everybody else in the world combined...an amazingly arrogant ambition...they were doubtless none too chuffed when the pits, mines, canals and railways began putting demand on the country’s timber supplies.
The imperial myth may be best understood from the real histories of the Royal Navy and the City of London. Public policy from Samuel Pepys to the present day...or at least until the Wilson Labour Government started pulling back from East of Suez in the 1960s...cared little for the people of England but was designed to meet the strange needs of these two institutions and their subsidiary companies like the Bank of England and the East Indian Company.
Fear of the English Mob was the only effective restraining factor on the use and abuse of ordinary people before the likes of Charles Dickens and William Wilberforce began to insist on putting morality back into Political Economy in the nineteenth century. It is worth reflecting on this as local people everywhere develop their own local responses to globalisation and the use and abuse of local people for the strange benefits of a new gang of outside interests.
