See the Peasants' Revolt. Would this have been a good time to intervene in English history?
Time travelers join the peasants. Using futuristic weaponry, they stun the king and nobles, thus preventing a military showdown. Next, they help the peasants and town dwellers to organize a system of agricultural production and trade that both employs and feeds everyone and that also enables them to plan longer term without restoring the exploitative feudal order. The time travelers would have to be on their guard against Time Patrol counter-intervention - and that is the problem in the Time Patrol universe.
Our aim - I am imagining myself as one of the time travelers - would be in accordance with the aims of L Sprague de Camp's Martin Padway and of Poul Anderson's Stane, not of Anderson's Neldorians or Exaltationists: to divert history onto a better course. Stane had no protection against the Patrol since he was unaware of its existence.
20 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
At least you only talked about STUNNING the king and nobles, not killing them, something I appreciated (because of my dislike for using violence to settle disputes).
However, I am absolutely skeptical of what you wrote here: the time travelers "...help the peasants and town dwellers to organize a system of agricultural production and trade that both employs and feeds and that also enables them to plan longer term without restoring the exploitative feudal order." I am skeptical because HUMAN beings are so flawed, imperfect, prone to error, etc., that I simply don't believe any kind of "rational," or "planned" society is even possible or even desirable. MY view is that only systems incorporating free enterprise economics and the limited state (under whatever form) will come somewhat close to what you desire.
Isn't it better, more desirable, and REALISTIC to settle for what is POSSIBLE instead of an impossible "perfection"? That, after all, was Poul Anderson's own belief.
Sean
Sean,
Given the opportunity, I think that Martin Padway was right to do what he did, prevent the Dark Ages.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course! But what Martin Padway did was to introduce, systematically, ideas about free enterprise economics and the rule of law under a limited state. He made no attempts at an impossible "perfection."
Sean
Sean,
But I did not mention "perfection"!
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Apologies, then, for inserting a concept you did not use. I would plead, in extenuation, that people who planned "rational" societies, such as Rousseau's THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, looked like they are trying to set up a "perfect" society.
I get so frustrated with dreams about a "planned" or "rational" society because their advocates (not including you!) so often ignore how messy, chaotic, imperfect, irrational, etc., human beings are.
Sean
Note that the Peasant's Revolt in England was not a volcanic expression of millennialism and savagery, as the Jacquerie was in France.
The rebels had an organized leadership and a definite and rather moderate political program(*) with a set of realizable goals. Their leaders were local notables, the elite of village society, many veterans of the French wars, all of whom had a fairly good grasp on the details of politics and policy.
They used violence, but it was limited and directed at a specific set of targets -- monastic rental records, for example -- though there was a widespread hostility to urbanites.
They didn't want to burn the country down, but instead wanted a set of reforms.
There were no indiscriminate attacks on manors or the upper classes; in fact many of the local gentry sympathized with the revolt or some parts of it (the corruption of office at Court, for instance) and most of them simply locked their gates and sat the Revolt out, remaining neutral.
And while the Revolt failed in a political sense and was dispersed by the authorities, most of the changes the rebels wanted were implemented over the next generation.
(*) essentially lower and fairer taxes, the dismissal of certain court officials, an end to some remnants of serfdom (already a moribund institution in England), the reform of the judicial system, more career opportunities for those of humble birth, the generalization of the more favorable forms of land tenure, reform of the clergy, and so forth.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
While I have not read extensively on the Peasants Revolt, I agree it was nowhere as brutal and violent as the Jacquerie which had racked France some 20 years earlier. And that was largely because order had broken down in a war and strife torn nation demoralized by repeated defeats at English hands.
While I agree serfdom was fading away in England some remnants lingered as late as Elizabeth I's time and even longer in Scotland (where its very last remnants were abolished in 1790.
Sean
I thought that this was a period when a little extratemporal intervention might have tipped events in a beneficial direction rather than just increased the chaos.
Kaor, Paul!
Problem is, that people with PLANS, who think they know better what to do than anyone else, who ignore hard won knowledge and experience, always seem to end with their plans failing or having disastrous consequences or costs. And it's vastly worse when the men with plans use force and tyranny to impose their plans (e.g, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.). Two stories by Poul Anderson touching on this would be "No Truce With Kings" and "Details."
So I agree with Manse Everard when he thought to himself in one of Time Patrol stories that however sympathetic some of the fanatics with plans might be, they were so unlikely to succeed.
Sean
Sean,
It is possible to have a plan and:
to think you know better than some people but not necessarily everybody!;
not to ignore knowledge or experience but to base the plan on them;
not to use force or tyranny;
not to be fanatical;
to adjust the plan in the light of new experiences and challenges and the unpredictable.
Any major overhaul of society will need not just popular consent but also active mass participation - but there are times when society is falling apart and needs a major overhaul.
Right now in Britain, we need allocation of resources to care for an aging population living longer. The number over 85 is apparently going to double. Of course, we will disagree on how to address this but the first step is to acknowledge the problem.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I have an emotional revulsion to politicians with "plans," esp. top down, bureaucratic, heavy handed, one size fits all plans. The most terrifying sentence in the English language is this: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." The classic Anglo/American view of government includes a strong strain of distrust for the state.
Any major "reform" should have as well not only broad based but also be based on the Burkean virtue of PRUDENCE, that it be based on realism a and hard headed view of what human beings actually are. And I'm skeptical of the kind of "mass participation" you desire, both because I don't think it will ever happen and because it is likely to provoke the rise of a counter movement almost as strong opposing what is desired.
Any state or society which is falling apart is more likely than not to find a strong man or dictator arising to restore some kind of order and predictability to life. If such state or society is lucky the dictator will be a reasonably able and decent man who manages to hold things together for a while. Or if the dictator is a man of rare genius and ability, he founds a new state with new institutions which governs reasonably well for generations, or even centuries. As we see Manuel Argos doing when he founded the Terran Empire.
As for the problem posed by really large numbers of elderly, some thoughts comes to mind. If life extending medicine and technology becomes so advanced that a man in his eighties has the strength, energy, and even appearance of a man in his forties, then we need to give thought to things like extending both the age of retirement and the age of eligibility for claiming tax paid old age benefits. That is the age of retirement may have to be advanced from, say, 66 to 86.
I must stress that no simple, easy, "basic" solution to any problem will be quickly found. As Poul Anderson had the viewpoint character saying at the very end of "The Fatal Fulfillment" (THE MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION, March 1970) about the problem that story focused on: "Right now, I'm content to know there are no basic answers--that we're muddling along, in our slow, left handed, wasteful, piecemeal, unimaginative human fashion--that, by God, I AM back in the real world!" An attitude I agree with!
Sean
Thank you, Sean. That is enough from us for other blog readers to think about.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Thanks! And I hope some of those readers will add their own comments here.
Sean
The English defeats of the French had immiserated the French peasants both directly and, more significantly, indirectly.
In the Medieval period, a captured nobleman had to be ransomed -- and paying his ransom was one of the feudal duties of his vassals.
The English captured a -lot- of French nobles (including the King, at one point) and they screwed them out of every penny they could.
The usual procedure was for the nobleman to borrow the money (from Italian and other bankers) and then pledge his revenues against the sum and interest payments. He'd be imprisoned until the payment (or at least the first installment) was made; and the severity of the imprisonment would increase if it didn't look like he was making a good-faith effort to pony up the cash.
Nobles could be blamed when foreigners plundered the countryside; it was their duty to protect their vassals, after all. But everyone understood that the fortunes of war were unpredictable, and nobody could say that the French nobles hadn't fought, even if not very effectively.
But putting the thumbscrews to the villagers to get a ransom was much more direct. Particularly if the collection was farmed out to the bankers, who employed routier mercenaries to hold the peasants upside down and shake 'em. The thumbscrews could be far more than metaphorical.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I love that word "immiserated"!
Yes, I have read about those exorbitant ransom demands of the English to their French prisoners (the higher in rank a POW was, the more burdensome his ransom became.
I had not known the exact practicalities of how ransoms were collected: from bankers, with the prisoner pledging his income as collateral. And the bankers then hiring mercenaries to extort payment from the borrower's tenants and peasants. Yes, it's easy to see how France fell into such chaos after King John II was captured by the English in 1356 after the Battle of Poitiers. It was impossible for France to pay the intolerable ransom, in both money and territory, that King John was forced to agree to. Or was he counting on France, now led by his son, the Dauphin Charles, to reject the treaty?
Sean
John was probably hedging his bets; if they paid, he got released (and if he was released before the whole sum was paid he could find some technicality to weasel out on the rest), and if they rejected it and fought effectively, he'd probably be swapped via diplomacy eventually. And a King's captivity would be comfortable in ways a minor lord's wouldn't necessarily be.
England was much smaller than France; England was roughly equivalent to a single French province, say Picardy or Normandy.
It was noted at the time that the standard of living (and expectations) of the English upper classes were revolutionized after this period -- French material culture at that level was considerably more advanced, and most of the manor-houses (and some ordinary farmhouses) ended up with French furniture and hangings and such, courtesy of the defeated.
The only reason England was able to fight France at all was that it was much more tightly centralized -- the English nobility were much more subject to Royal law than their French peers; they had no right of private warfare, for example, and the King's courts had jurisdiction over everyone in some instances. A strong English king could mobilize a far greater proportion of the country's smaller total resources. The same happened later, in the French Wars of the 1688-1815 period.
Add in that the English developed better weapons technology and better organization in their wars against the Welsh, Scots and Irish, who were outside the feudal core of Europe and required different methods. France didn't have land frontiers with any country that was not organized much the same way it was, but England was a "marcher" state on the fringes of civilization as the period thought of such things.
English knights didn't expect to fight battles in ritualized combat on horseback against their social peers the way French knights still did, as if it was all a larger-scale version of a tournament -- they fought to win, and to kill(*), by any means to hand, and England simply wasn't rich enough to field armies composed mainly of men-at-arms, so they'd long since been used to fighting alongside men from all social ranks and with a mix of weapons. It wasn't at all uncommon for men of humble birth to be knighted on the field by English kings and leaders for service rendered; Sir John Hawkwood had been apprenticed to a tailor before he enlisted as a longbowman, and was probably knighted by the Black Prince after Potiers. Sir Robert Knolles (jocularly known to his men as "The Old Brigand") was another grim, able butcher of that ilk. This sort of thing was virtually unknown in France.
And England had a more consolidated sense of national identity than France, particularly as the aristocracy had become English-speaking again and thought of themselves as English in this period. English people had a strong feeling of their own separate existence, and of their common language and political history, right down to the peasantry.
Even so, they were fighting well out of their weight class in taking on France, and the very fact that the less numerous and poorer English continually beat the snot out of the French aroused French national feeling too, culminating in Joan of Arc, and forced the French monarchy to become more capable.
There's nothing like having a particular breed of foreigner continually humiliating your armies, burning down the village, stealing everything not nailed down and molesting the womenfolk to get people thinking. Once France learned to mobilize, its greater size and wealth and population were bound to tell.
(*) note that when Henry V ordered all the prisoners killed at Agincourt, he was obeyed without hesitation, despite the sacrifice of wealth this represented. You didn't catch English armies throwing battles because the noble cavalry insisted on charging on their own account, either, which happened to the French more than once.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you. This is probably your most detailed historical comment yet.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I second Paul's comment! And what you said about repeated French defeats at English hands reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville's THE OLD REGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. More specifically, Tocqueville's analysis of how, beginning with Charles V, the French kings slowly pulled their country together and began mobilizing the far greater resources of France to finally defeat England.
Sean
Most wars are settled by battering attrition, especially if fought within the same culture/interaction zone; there are exceptions, but that's the way to bet. It's easier for a bigger power to get better at using its resources than for a smaller one to acquire more territory and people.
So even if the smaller power has a military edge, it has to win quickly, before the bigger opponent(s) learns the tricks of the trade, which means it has little or no margin for error... and war is a comedy/tragedy of errors. Being bigger gives you a chance to recover from mistakes.
Prussia repeatedly brought this feat off for a long time, culminating in the German Wars of Unification in the 1860's-1870's, turning what was originally a small, marginal state on the edge of Germany into a superpower.
This involved building up qualitatively superior armed forces, a willingness strike with merciless unprovoked aggression when a fleeting opportunity arose, and a tradition of reckless high-stakes all-or-nothing strategic gambles.
The problem was that this mind-set got carried over into the institutional culture of the new German state that Prussia built, especially its military; and the military tended to forget how this had succeeded only when coupled with careful diplomacy to isolate opponents and with an equally careful husbanding of resources through State policy in between struggles -- even Frederick the Great spent far more time encouraging immigration and draining swamps and building up a financial reserve than partitioning Poland or seizing Silesia.
And also how close to disaster Prussia had come several times, especially in the Seven Years War, when Frederick the Great faced a coalition of France, Austria and Russia determined to destroy him -- he kept winning battles, but Prussia was being bled white because he couldn't knock his opponents out -- they were too big. He was only rescued when there was a change of monarch in Russia and the new Czar was a demented Frederick fanboy who insisted on dropping out of the war.
This became known as the "Miracle of the House of Brandenberg"; it's not really a good idea to base your long-term policy on "and then we'll be rescued by a miracle".
Germany tried the same Prussian approach twice in the World Wars in attempting to achieve European hegemony, and lost both times -- though it was a disconcertingly close-run thing in each case.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree with your analysis of Prussian/German history and Prussia only succeeded as much as she did by ALSO being cautious. I think Otto von Bismarck seems to have understood that a policy of calculated recklessness was not likely to work after the wars humbling Austria and France and unifying Germany. Bismarck apparently thought enough was enough and Germany would be wise to be content with what had been gained by 1871. The Iron Chancellor had not even wanted to annex Alsace/Lorraine (because that would have made France an implacably vengeful enemy)!
I have hear of that "Miracle of the House of Brandenburg," of a desperate Frederick II being saved at almost his literally last gasp by the death of his fierce enemy Empress Elizabeth of Russia. Not wise for a nation to base its hopes on such random chances!
Sean
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