One of Hilaire Belloc’s achievements was to add a new type to the popular concept of the Roman Catholic…one much more in the Irish than the Continental tradition…which is ironic given the Irish roots of Bernard Shaw’s Puritanism.
Before Belloc the Roman Catholic was synonymous with the Jesuit with its image of a sinister silent indoor figure in black forever intriguing against anyone and everything English.
This image lives on in much of the European debate…in part because it has lost none of its relevance…both on the side of the Europhiles who approve of the type and of the Eurosceptics who fear the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in all things English.
Hilaire Belloc showed the English the other side of the Roman Catholic coin…the burly man singing, shouting, arguing and drinking beer in the open air. His comic verses…particularly The Bad Child’s Book of Beasts and More Beasts for Worse Children have encouraged adults and children from five generations to share laughter together.
Another irony is that the best book to read about the Roman Catholic Conspiracy behind the European Superstate is by a gentleman who goes by the name of Laughland. What would William of Salisbury have made of all this?
William of Salisbury left me with two manuscripts in the spring of 1988. The first was his Letter to King Charles III which I assumed was never sent…being more by way of an introduction to the second manuscript…the Programme of Governance. This second manuscript was in two parts headed National Programme and Local Programme.
In his letter William of Salisbury established a 5-year timeframe for the transfer of power from Central Government to Real Local Government in England…although there is a sense of universality.
have caused adults and children from five generations to roar with shared laughter.have caused adults and children from five generations to roar with shared laughter.
At the end of five years Central Government would cease to exist. So the National Programme provides marching orders for The Five Transition Years. Afterwards the governance of these Offshore Islands would be within the framework of the Local Programme.
William of Salisbury’s Local Programme consisted of eight points…clauses would be too grand a term as the plan was condensed into just One Hundred Words.
After each of the eight points William of Salisbury had written cryptically ‘see paper’…but failed to provide any hints as to whether such papers existed and if they did where they might be found.
I have concluded that his intention was for me to write these eight papers…something that I started in 2001 with a paper for the first Radical Consultation entitled The Wealth of Counties. Here are the eight points.
1. Right to the Seven Securities of Old Age;
2. Right to Celebrate at solstices & equinoxes;
3. Master Cowmen, Master Shepherds and Master Woodmen responsible to their guilds for the Welfare of Cows and Sheep and the Management of Woodlands in Rural Parishes;
4. Utilities Board to deliver Village and Urban Parish Self-Sufficiency in Water, Sewage, Rubbish, Heating and Electricity;
5. Bailiwick Bonds as the mechanism for Local Savings;
6. Agrarian Justice as the mechanism for Social Security;
7. Tithing…days per household per year…to meet Community, Harvest and Militia Duties;
8. Undwelled Farmland to be allotted to Foreigners.
This was all very fine…but for me just a trifle eerie.
Three dozen of my journals are in Jempson’s Store on the Old Winchelsea Road. Some notes scribbled in the back of one of them are entitled The Seven Securities of Old Age…not even my daughter has seen them. The complete essay had been worked out and could be written from them. Yet here was the name cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury. Coincidence of Synchronicity?
Bailiwick Bonds are also something I have mentioned to just a few very close associates like Chris Wright. The name will be found in these blogs as a chapter heading for England’s Economic Politics for a New Century. But what I have written has yet to be placed in the Public Domain. Coincidence or Syncronicity?
To the best of my knowledge I am the only modern Political Theorist to have noticed that Tom Paine’s Agrarian Justice offers an alternative approach to funding a Welfare State…through Inheritance Taxes. But at least England’s Landed Property has been available for downloading from the internet for a couple of years. Nonetheless here was the idea cropping up in a 1988 parchment from William of Salisbury. Coincidence of Synchronicity?
One of my Cocktail Party Pieces…both here in Rye and in Sweden…is the origin of the name of the neighbouring parish of Rye Foreign. It goes back to the European Religious Wars of the sixteenth centuries when Catholics and Calvinists were slaughtering each other at every opportunity.
During one of these European Massacres a wave of Flemish Weavers landed as refugees along the Suffolk and Kent Coasts…my mother’s Land family among them. Rye was an important port town at the time. Many families landed here or came here from Faversham, Tenterden and Canterbury.
The Rye Town Fathers had the good sense to see the economic potential of these migrants and determined to make them welcome. They did so by ceding a number of acres of unoccupied land on the outskirts of their parish a day’s walk from the town. Here the Dutch Huguenots set up shop. Local Rye-ers referred to this collection of Huguenot Households as Rye Foreign.
This type of creative approach Sweden, Ireland and England…the only members of the European Union who have yet to close their doors to economic migrants from elsewhere in Europe...might consider for the 21st century.