History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘History’
John Lynch, exiled to France by Cromwell’s men, lamented the way that Irish was being labelled as a language of sedition.
By 1495 and the reign of Henry VII, attempts to stamp out Irish language and culture in ‘The Pale’, the area of English governance in Ireland, had largely failed. And a good thing too, said Irish priest John Lynch, writing in 1662. Exiled in France thanks to Cromwell’s brutal rampage in Ireland, he decried the politicisation of language by ruling powers.
Lionel of Clarence, Edward III’s younger son, went to Ireland as his Lieutenant in order to stop English expats becoming like the Irish.
In 1366, Edward III’s son Lionel presided over a parliament in Kilkenny in Ireland. The issue was the Pale, the area around Dublin that was under English law, and disturbing reports that many Englishmen had so intermingled with the Irish beyond it that one could hardly tell them apart. Amongst several other Statutes, the English were strictly commanded to keep to their own language and customs.
William Cobbett was delighted with one young woman’s protest against Mr Pitt’s ingenious ways of raising money.
In 1784, the use of a horse for purposes other than farming was subjected to tax, one of Prime Minister William Pitt’s many ingenious tax-grabs. William Cobbett (who blamed the taxes on the national debt racked up by unnecessary wars) chuckled with delight nearly forty years later, when he stumbled across a farmer’s wife making a gentle protest.
Charles Darwin was on hand in 1836 to witness the catastrophic effects of a series of earthquakes in Chile.
On March 4th, 1836, HMS Beagle arrived at Talcahuano Bay by the city of Concepcion in Chile. With that instinct that marks out the hero (and the scientist) Captain Robert Fitz-Roy had sailed there as soon as he felt a series of earth tremors disturb his ship, anchored at nearby Mocha. Naturalist Charles Darwin was on board, and left us his impressions of the impact of the earthquake.
Thorold Rogers looks at how Governments have tried to make trade ‘fair’, and concludes that they would have been better ensuring it was free.
To Sir Francis Bacon, writing in 1625, it was self-evident that one man’s gain is always another man’s loss — that if Paul is doing well Peter must be doing correspondingly badly. He wanted Governments to step in and even things up, but Victorian economist Thorold Rogers warned that Bacon had fallen prey to a delusion which has nursed wars and corruption, but brought no justice.
Adam Smith contrasted the Government’s handling of the national economy with the way most families handled theirs.
By 1776, the long-standing policy of favouring British producers and blocking overseas competitors had raised prices, cost jobs, and only last year driven the American colonies to revolution. Adam Smith thought it both damaging and insulting, for the humblest tailor or cobbler could have told the Government that this was no way to run a budget.