Counter-Currents
Detail, George Vertue, King Edward I, 1734.
2,706 words
In many ways, America and Britain’s sociopolitical circumstances parallel those of the reigns of King John, King Henry III, and King Edward I, a period of 108 years. [1]
Jewish financial swindles and cultural corruption plagued England, as well as involvement in foreign quagmire wars in France, Sicily, and the Levant. Foreign advisors were also influencing the King. Some things aren’t as relevant. During this time, the political elite of England and France were all related by blood or marriage. Earls and barons had their own castles and private armies. Political disputes were settled by combat, although the defeated rebels were usually pardoned after paying a fine.
Additionally, French was the language of the Royal Court of England and the judicial courts. This was a legacy of the Norman conquest in 1066 under the leadership of William, Duke of Normandy. William was a cousin to Edward the Confessor and had a decent claim to the throne.
The Normans were descended from a group of Vikings who settled France. After a treaty with the French King, they ruled the Duchy of Normandy officially. The Norman Viking settlers adopted Christianity, intermarried with Breton and Gallo-French locals, and spoke French. From Wikipedia.
After the conquest, the Normans started to intermarry with the Saxon English by 1070. William the Conquer married one of his nieces to a Saxon earl, and the lower ranks of the Normans likewise married local Saxons. Not all was perfect — the Saxon elite that didn’t intermarry were utterly displaced, there was the Harrying of the North and several insurgencies, but after this died down, England ceased being constantly invaded by Vikings and a considerable degree of internal stability followed. It could be possible that the sense of fair play and the stiff upper lip the English pride themselves upon only appeared after the Norman conquest.
After the Conquest, England’s new Norman upper class still had large properties in France. Over time, they expanded their control over other parts of France. When King Henry II passed away, the English Crown controlled an empire that stretched from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees.
When Henry II died, his holdings included all of western France.
Henry II was followed by his son Richard the Lion Heart. King Richard I was mostly involved in foreign campaigns and intrigue, so he had little impact on domestic reform. Richard died of infection after being hit with a bolt from a crossbow in France. He was followed by King John, England’s worst king.
King John
England’s tax system was efficient for its time, stemming from paying the Danegeld during the Viking Age, but it was still pretty clunky. Revenues were counted on a large table with a checkerboard cloth, the exchequer. The officer in charge of revenues became known as the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Collecting the full tax was always an iffy proposition, so the King was required to raise money through truly coercive methods. No King was quite as coercive as John. His trick was to use his governmental network — sheriffs, judges, etc. — to fine or imprison persons of means to extract money from them. Needless to say, this tax policy was highly unpopular.
The Magna Carta
King John was very good at raising money, but poor judgement meant his efforts often ended in disaster. He probably killed his nephew with his own hands while drunk, he imprisoned and starved his enemies to death, he was sexually reckless, and he surrounded himself with foreign advisors and knights. This foreign entourage usually had a burning desire to use English force (and English blood and treasure) against their rivals in France and encouraged King John to be aggressive. Operations in France went badly.
English holdings in France before and after King John. From Wikipedia.
Meanwhile, Norman barons were more concerned with pursuing English interests in Great Britain than being taxed to death for Royalist wars in France and the crusade in the Eastern Mediterranean. In 1215, the barons revolted. To achieve peace, King John cut a deal with them and signed the Magna Carta. This codified what came to be known as the Rights of Englishmen.
The first version of the Magna Carta has sections that indicate there was a Jewish problem in England:
If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.
If a man dies owing money to Jews, his wife may have her dower and pay nothing towards the debt from it. If he leaves children that are under age, their needs may also be provided for on a scale appropriate to the size of his holding of lands. The debt is to be paid out of the residue, reserving the service due to his feudal lords. Debts owed to persons other than Jews are to be dealt with similarly.
England’s Jewish Problem
The Catholic Church banned Christians from lending money with interest, allowing Jews to occupy this lucrative economic niche. The Jews arrived in England after the Norman Conquest and quickly set up shop. The moneylending Jew Aaron of Lincoln (ca. 1125-1186) eventually became wealthier than the King.
King John died of dysentery just days after he took a disastrous shortcut with his treasury and retinue across a part of England called The Wash. When the tide came in, he lost some of his horses, men, and treasury. His son Henry, age nine, took the crown.
When Henry III was crowned King, the Baron’s Revolt was still ongoing. His crown was secured by an able assistant named William Marshal. Marshal re-issued the Magna Carta to gain the support of the revolting barons, but without the Jewish clauses. (Obviously, Jewish bribes and lobbying efforts had an impact upon the 1216 charter.)
Meanwhile, Jewish behavior was continuing to cause problems in England. There was a reaction to this. The Jews had arrived in England sometime after 1066. With the recent example of the Jewish problem in Postville, Iowa as a reference, it is likely that problems with the Jews probably started the moment the first one set foot in England, but it took 78 years for any sort of organized resistance on the part of the English to occur.
This materialized in the East Anglian town of Norwich. A twelve-year-old boy doing a job in the Jewish area of the town disappeared. He was presumed to have been killed in a Jewish ritual murder. A similar event occurred later, involving a boy named Hugh in Lincoln in 1255.
Today, these murders are presumed to be false accusations — “blood libel.”
The fact that Jews were England’s premier money lenders created a moral hazard for the King and his ministers. The King could tax the Jews easier than he could tax the landowners and other classes of England. When he needed money, the King could squeeze the Jews, who in turn would squeeze the English, from the barons down to the yeomen. On the occasions when the King cracked down on Jewish excesses, favored English nobility could acquire ownership of the debt and use that as an opportunity to dispossess their ethnic kin.
When King Henry III started to curb Jewish financial swindles, the wealthy English who purchased ownership of the debts proceeded to become swindlers themselves:
[T]here was nothing to stop an unscrupulous Christian speculator from demanding immediate repayment of the entire sum — repayment that, naturally, the unfortunate debtor would not be able to produce. This being the case, the speculator could simply foreclose on the debt and seize whatever lands had been put up as collateral. A modern analogy would be a bank suddenly deciding to sell its mortgages to an individual who refused to respect the repayment terms, and who began repossessing the properties on which the mortgages had been secured. [2]
The Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, brother-in-law to King Henry III, expelled the Jews from Leicester in 1231. When Edward I took the crown, he likewise continued to justly manage Jews for the benefit of his own people. He forbade Jews from practicing moneylending and encouraged them to become honest tradesmen and merchants. (They resisted this fiercely.)
In 1278, Edward I realized that if he wanted to improve trade, he needed to issue new coins. The problem was coin clipping. This is a form of white-collar crime where parts of a coin are chipped off and melted down into ingots that could be sold. The coins eventually become unusable. A sting operation focused on finding coin clippers netted hundreds of Jews, many of whom King Edward I later hanged.
After the coin clipping issue, Jews in England continued to behave badly. Finally, King Edward I ordered their removal in 1290:
The knights of the shire were so pleased at the prospect of being rid of the Jews that they had agreed to a generous grant of one-fifteenth of their goods. Its yield, a massive £116,000, was not only the biggest of the whole reign, but the single biggest tax collected in Britain during the entire Middle Ages. The Church was so delighted with the king’s pious performance that they voted a thank-you tax of their own in the autumn. Without doubt, the expulsion of the Jews was the most popular act Edward ever committed. [3]
That £116,000 turned out to be a great investment. The English gained control over their own finances. Part of the English-speaking world’s rise across the world is the ability to manage debt. With Englishmen lending money to other Englishmen, the laws evolved to be more just towards both creditors and debtors. Most importantly, English laws provide creditors a way to get their money back. Therefore, investing in the English-speaking world turns out to be a reasonable thing to do. Nations unable to get credit without Jews tend to have shaky financial systems. Spain, which didn’t expel its Jews until 1492, never developed a stock market until 1831 — long after it had ceased to be a global superpower.
Quagmire Wars and Foreign Advisors
An important, but unappreciated figure during this time was a monk named Matthew Paris. In one of his many books, he wrote the Latin phrase Anglis Anglia, or England for the English. Matthew Paris was the metapolitical genius of the Middle Ages. This concept deeply influenced the English barons.
About this time, King Henry III received an offer from the Pope to take control of Sicily. The terms of the offer were about the same as a shifty fellow offering to sell a bridge in Brooklyn. Everyone but King Henry III himself realized this. This dubious operation prompted England’s barons, led by Simon de Montfort, to stage an armed protest. The barons went to the King, left their swords at the door, and petitioned him to turn away from the Sicily adventure and hire an English staff of advisors instead of a French/European staff. In other words, England for the English.
Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester.
To make a long story short, due to the controversy and the workings of the Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort became head of the first English parliament. This parliament was at odds with Henry III, and there was a battle in Sussex in which Henry and his son Edward I were captured. For a time, de Montfort had the upper hand and it appeared as though things would be stable, but a new conflict broke out between the Royalists and de Montfort. The latter was killed and his body mutilated.
When King Edward I came to the throne, he called for a parliament, but he worked hand-in-glove with that body. Edward I also engaged in some considerable metapolitics. He used the popularity of a book about King Arthur by a Welshman named Geoffrey of Monmouth called History of the Kings of Britain to give the English people more pride in their past. After an ugly rebellion in Wales, Edward I annexed the territory but kept many Welsh laws in effect in Wales.
Today, Wales effectively remains a vassal of England, but the language and culture survive. One of the most powerful British prime ministers, Lloyd George, was Welsh.
Unfortunately, King Edward I didn’t withdraw from France in a position of strength when he had the chance. The last part of France held by the English was Calais, which fell in 1558. The long retreat from France and the financial losses suffered by the English upper class brought about the Wars of the Roses, a disastrous civil war that ended the Plantagenet Dynasty.
Conclusion
Of the three Kings described, it is clear that Edward I was the best of them all. His best trait was surrounding himself with good people. He got outstanding engineers to build his castles in Wales, employed great lawyers and administrators, and recruited able knights and soldiers. He was able to defeat his worst enemies and make half-hearted enemies such as the Welsh his allies. Anyone who wishes to do well in life would be wise to follow Edward I’s personal example.
King Edward I’s most lasting effort was to align his government to meet the needs of the English. “For the first time since the Norman Conquest, England had a government that was perceived to be working in the interests of the majority of its subjects.” [4]
Edward I was persuaded to become such a king because he was partially forced to. If it wasn’t for the Baron’s Revolt, there would have been no Magna Carta. If it wasn’t for de Montfort, there would be no Parliament, and England would have continued to be burdened with foreign advisors to the King. The Magna Carta and a policy of Anglis Anglia didn’t fall out of the sky overnight. Persuasive, hard-thinking men like Matthew Paris developed a solid metapolitical agenda long before various crises came.
Today we face some similar issues. Economic problems in America and Britain exist, but they are more related to the problem of big tech, “free trade,” and woke capital than Jewish moneylenders. The modern Jewish problem is centered on Jewish crafting of a punitive immigration policy against white nations, Jewish support for quagmires in the Middle East, Jewish subversion of electoral processes, and Jewish cultural distortion through their control of Hollywood and the mainstream media. Furthermore, in Edward I’s time, no narrative in England claimed the Jews do no wrong as is the case today. Jewish opium peddlers hide behind the Holocaust narrative and the Anglo political elite just can’t do anything about it.
As far as avoiding foreign quagmires, the question is “Wales or France?” The answer comes down to race, culture, and cost. English operations in Wales turned out to be far less bloody and expensive than their operations in France. Wales had many supporters of King Edward I. Welsh legends — such as that of King Arthur — were appreciated by the English, but French heroes — like Joan of Arc — were the Other to the English. The French also attacked the English year after year.
Today, Americans and our kin across the Anglosphere should consider Wales or France, geopolitically speaking. If the population is not racially or culturally much different, deployments are likely worthwhile. If the situation is like that in France in the 1200s, it is probably best to cut the losses.
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Notes
[1] King Edward I wasn’t the first King of England named Edward. He was named after Edward the Confessor, the penultimate Saxon King of England. Edward the Confessor was a personal hero to King Henry III, Edward’s father.
[2] Mark Morris, A Great and Terrible King: Edward I and the Forging of Britain (New York: Pegasus Books, 2009), p. 87.
[3] Ibid., pp. 227-228.
[4] Ibid., p. 371.
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21 comments
The English are under foreign rule since 1066, and it at least. Because long before the so-called “Celtic” Druids were not Celtic at all, but Phoenician priests from Mediterranean region. And the Wicker Man’s ritual, well-known after the film with Nicholas Cage, is not other that the variation of sacrifice for the Moloch.
‘The Wicker Man’ was a 1973 British film starring Christopher Lee. One cannot account for low-brow remakes.
England for the English is a fine idea. Too bad they never practiced it but tried to make everything from Ireland to India for the English as well. Sucks to be them when the vultures come home to roost.
Great example of semantics.
A ruling caste of Norman-French conquerors that largely ruled and still rule, add on a Scottish Raj of internal colonisation and add a slippery Irish sidecar of colonists and administrators and string of German princes.
English Wut?
This is exactly what the cultural Marxists over here like to say. Disappointing to find it in Counter-Currents.
For a different reason and different goals. I’m saying it to point out that the ordinary Englishman gets blamed for policy he’s got little control over. I’m not suggesting it suggest English people don’t exist.
Imperialism always ends in multi-racialism and the erasure of the imperial race. It happened to the Romans, and it happened to the Brits, who modeled their empire on the Romans. There is no way to deny this or to sugarcoat it. The Brits and their empire (including offshoots like the US) are primarily (albeit not solely) responsible for the plight of the White race today.
The US and Canada were outposts of white and Anglo Saxon hegemony.
Their abject surrender to the brown tide is as inexplicable as it is distressing.
Good article – Monarchy is problematic. What a difference between a King Edward and a King John. Whether one is English or not (I am Irish) the consequences are negative all round with a bad King. The nationalism of the future is one of mutual respect between nations, especially European neighbours. We need to cherish each other’s wellbeing. I know the downfall of England will not be good for Ireland.
A noteworthy happening in the British Isles resulting from the Norman conquest was the phasing out of chattel slavery into the Norman feudal system. This should be highlighted more when mentioning the era. The peoples of the British Isles were mired in their backward enslaving of each other until the Norman systems of government made that unnecessary. The international trade in British Isle slaves by vikings no longer occurred as well.
I find it odd how little remarked upon this slavery situation is.
I agree with the sentiment at the 17:00 mark of this video about the benefits the Normans bestowed upon Ireland for instance:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJphT5iEV4
People should weigh the good the Normans brought to the British Isles along with the bad which one normally hears about. Your article here is a positive and would benefit from including this other benefit I bring up about the slavery situation.
The Norman abolition of slavery in England simply meant in practice that the new foreign King taxed all human trafficking. The precise wording of his ruling was that you can’t bring people in or out without his oversight. The flow of slaves was mainly. Into England and not out. The isotopes in the teeth of a lot of Anglo-Saxon graves suggests that young women were brought from Scandinavia to farmers in England to do low status work. Presumably to provide the property owning men with extra sex. England was intensively farmed and required huge numbers of Scandinavian slaves to keep the fields tilled. Slaves among the local men were almost all debtors and or the very stupid incompetents. Essentially wards of the courts. William disposessed Freeborn men. He murdered huge numbers of Thegns and Reeves. I say this as someone who can trace back ancestors to the Norman invasion force on the winning side.
The Normans did not technically “abolish” slavery – simply made it not worthwhile in their new system of government:
Here are a few informative references:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Britain#Norman_England
https://www.historyextra.com/period/norman/surprising-facts-william-conqueror-norman-conquest-harold-godwinson-battle-stamford-bridge-when-what/
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-history-of-slavery-in-England-Particularly-did-the-Normans-abolish-slavery-as-I-just-saw-claimed-to-my-surprise-on-a-documentary-and-if-so-when-was-it-reimplemented
The last link has some particularly interesting discussions about the matter.
With the nonsense spread around from the BLM and Antifa cretins, I think persons should be more aware of how widespread chattel slavery was and the processes by which it came out of favor in the British Isles and throughout Europe. The heads of people are too mixed up with racial issues over the whole slavery matter given the later transatlantic slave trade and the association of New World blacks with chattel slavery.
The Normans did indeed transplant the Saxon slave system and turned many of the old rulers into a lower status to themselves. But the system they implemented throughout the British Isles was serfdom – not chattel slavery (human trafficking as you call it). Their overthrow of the Saxon hierarchy (indeed brutal in a few select instances as you mention – but not overall as commonly propagandized) was an advancement for the common peoples of the British Isles over the Saxon’s more base and unsophisticated system of government – and even moreso for the even worse systems of government of the Isles such as in Ireland.
Slavery -> sefdom -> mercantilism -> today’s situation.
My surname “Blake” is of course a Norman surname – said to have originated with Richard Caddell when he invaded Ireland as a Norman. So I guess we have similar family histories. But you are wrong about slavery under the Normans. They had no wat or need of it. Chattel slavery went away under them in the British Isles (and elsewhere – such as Southern Italy).
Land owners in Sussex next to Battle. One of the first grants of land by the Duke.
Calm down! The Jews that William brought over were slave traders from Rouen. As soon as the English needed an infinite labour source in the colonies slavery was brought back ASAP.
Slavery really only ended with the Industrial Revolution and then only in the sense that we used stored energy in the coal mines then oil to power things humans and animals would run otherwise.
The Norman’s were absolute assholes. It’s only when you start to get to Edward I that sonething good happens and only after the Black Death a return to something like Freedom.
A comment section is no place for a discussion and so this will be the last comment from me.
You are mixed up about the efficacy of slavery in an economy or society. “Assholes”, as you say, are those who don’t understand that. The Normans DID understand that and so were not the “assholes” in this particular instance. The “assholes” were the Saxons and others who simple-mindedly went the chattel slavery route from their lack of sophistication in economic and societal matters.
The imposition of the Normans benefited the British Isles (and elsewhere) in obviating the need for the simple-minded and backward and brutish chattel slavery systems that they supplanted. Without the Normans the “Anglis Anglia” of this article would have had significant portions of the population as chattel slaves. And for those who would’ve been in that situation, Norman rule is obviously preferable to those simple-minded Saxons.
They were less “assholes” as the ones before them in their advancement of the brutish societies they supplanted. And they ended up integrating with the peoples of those societies for the most part – blending the old with the new. Hence something such as the English language of the majority ended up remaining the people’s language.
Normans as “assholes” is simple-minded. They advanced the simple-minded societies they conquered out of their backwardness! : )
They?
I should have said the 16:00 mark of that video. The Norman benefits to Ireland are brought up around the 16:00 mark of that video I linked – no the 17:00 mark.
An interesting series of novels that I ran across this year is the Buckmaster Trilogy by Paul Kingsnorth. Beast, the first novel, written in a pidgen Old English hybrid which takes a bit to get used to, is about the life of a free yeoman soon to be a displaced renegade following the Norman conquest. Kingsnorth has written some essays which address what it means to be English from a traditional perspective. His ideas are extremely critical of modernity yet aren’t specifically racial. Blackest of black pills ( it’s February) with some silver linings. Worth reading.
Darn it. The first novel which I mentioned is The Wake.
As well:
“England is become the residence of foreigners and the property of strangers…they prey upon the riches and vitals of England; nor is there any hope of a termination of this misery.” -William of Malmesbury, 1125
History seems to be one big echo sometimes. Noticeable patterns that keep repeating. Working to terminate miseries is better than doing nothing.
It seems wrong for me to remain silent on this, but the above “controversies” do not warrant my wind.
The Normans did many things effectively, and one outstanding and consistent thing was assimilating — to the point of disappearance — into the peoples conquered. (Note: Normans did not conquer Wales, but conquered England in a day.)
I’ll bite.
Nah, Edward the Confessor was essentially a Norman. He was bringing in Norman’s into his chancery. The Norman’s tended to be given Marcher lordships on the border with Wales and were not especially effective. There are two or three failed Norman’ s in the preconquest annals who embarrassed themselves. Harold subdued Wales very nicely with a mixture of amphibious raids and some land incursions. The Norman conquest fucked up the colonisation that Harold started. Not until Edward I do you get the sheep shaggers under the English boot.
The Norman’s didn’t vanish by any means. The names still stick out like sore thumbs in the peerages. Even the French military is dominated by families in Normandy to this day.
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