Kmflett's Blog

Easter traditions: the importance of ‘Tosspot’

Tosspot, a Medieval term for a drunkard, referenced by Shakespeare in the final passage of Twelfth Night, was an important figure in popular- that is non-religious- Easter traditions.

Easter saw versions of the Mystery Plays where St George slayed various enemies, while the figure of Tosspot laughed at them.

Another Easter tradition saw groups of less well-off usually younger men, collect money for the Easter feasts that ended Lent. They went from house to house and from village to village collecting funds. The figure who actually collected the money was Tosspot.

Easter is the most important of the Christian religious periods but it also has traditions which are rooted in very different popular pursuits.

Don’t expect to hear about these traditions from the self appointed guardians of British culture even if a discussion on Old Tosspot with Nigel Farage and others on GBNews would be highly appropriate

The Slave Trade, the Royal Family, Colston & the failure of ‘retain & explain’

The Guardian which has been looking at and taking action on the links between its founders and the slave trade has also been inquiring into the links between the Royal Family and the slave trade.

These are extensive but have featured little in Our Island Story. To his credit King Charles 111 has backed research into the links.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/06/how-prince-william-kensington-palace-home-is-linked-to-slavery

Edward Colston features in the Guardian’s research. He gave William 111 £1,000 shares in the Royal Africa Company in 1689 and the King became Governor of the Company.

William and Mary lived in Kensington Palace the home to many Royals down to the present day. The Guardian has found that there is no reference to William and the slave trade to be found on public tours of the building. One black figure formerly described as a servant but later recognised as a slave has been removed.

The Guardian’s research is revealing an important and hitherto obscure area of Our Island Story. It also reflects the problems that those who say such history should be recognised by retaining and explaining it. It has been retained. It has not been explained.

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 & the end of Maundy Thursday Royal feet washing

While not much is made of it there was a revolution in 1688 in England.

William and Mary came to the throne. In the seventeenth century religion was far more central to national life than it now is for many. William, Prince William of Orange, was a Dutch Calvinist.

On Maundy Thursday 7th April 1689 people had made their way to Hampton Court hoping to be touched by the King and have their feet washed as had been the tradition. It was of course interrupted during the Commonwealth from 1649-1660 as there was no King available to do it.

William however declined to do this. As often the history is complicated.

The decision to stop feet washing was in part political. William fairly obviously had not arrived on the throne via some kind of Divine Right of Kings but because he had been appointed by Parliament through a process of political revolution. Hence the idea that the monarch could somehow cure people by touching them didn’t fit. In this sense the change was progressive.

However William also disliked the idea of feet washing because it was regarded as ‘superstitious’ which was a code for Roman Catholic, underlining the discrimination against those who hold that faith which has been an abiding feature of official British life since the sixteenth century.

The tradition of course was not so easy to get rid of as all that and the debate about whether Royal feet washing on Maundy Thursday was appropriate continued well into the eighteenth century.

Beard Liberation Front

2nd April

Hirsute Campaigners warn on ‘excessive enthusiasm’ for Maundy Thursday traditions

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, which campaigns against beardism, irrational prejudice against the hirsute, has warned against excessive enthusiasm for Maundy Thursday traditions.

The campaigners say that while the day before Good Friday is traditionally associated with the distribution of the Maundy Money and the washing of feet it is also known as Shear Thursday.

This refers to those who had given up shaving for Lent, cutting off their beards as the period of abstinence ended.

The BLF says that while there is no objection to trimming and styling an organic Lenten beard on Maundy Thursday shaving it entirely suggests excessive enthusiasm and is to be avoided.

BLF organiser Keith Flett said, Spring is a time of growth and as we announce the winner of the Beard of Spring poll on Easter Saturday, Maundy Thursday is not the time for beard shaving

In 1848 Black Chartist Prisoners were kept in Prison hulks. In 2023 Asylum seekers are to be kept on barges

The Daily Mail amongst other hard right media outlets recently headlined that the Government plans to move asylum seekers from hotels to military bases and possibly a very large ‘barge’. This story turned out to be true. The Government plans to house 500 asylum seekers on a barge in Portland Dorset. Now Sunak has announced plans for two more barges

The main reason why asylum seekers are in hotels is because the Government has slowed down the process of application to a crawl. Most who apply are genuine and accepted- eventually.

Asylum seekers cannot be detained as prisoners are but in practice they have nowhere else to go as they can’t legally work.

The tradition of keeping people on barges or hulks as they were known dates back to at least 1776. The use of decommissioned ships was authorised by Parliament for two years in the wake of the US War of Independence.

As often with temporary measures the hulks were not that temporary and lasted for 80 years or so.

Conditions on them were appalling and prisons were built. One was at Millbank on the site of what is now that Tate Gallery. It was operational from 1818.

It was to Millbank that the black leader of London Chartism William Cuffay and others were despatched after a trial at the Old Bailey for their alleged part in a Chartist rising at Seven Dials in central London in August 1848.

Its not known if Cuffay was ever kept on a hulk. He and other Chartist prisoners were at some point despatched to Wakefield Gaol from where he wrote a letter in July 1849 prior to being transported to Tasmania.

However two other black men associated with Chartism David Anthony Duffy and Benjamin Prophett who had been held at Millbank for their supposed part in a riot after a Chartist meeting at Camberwell Green in March 1848, were transferred to the prison hulk York in December 1848.

The York had been built at Rotherhithe in 1807 and was decommissioned at Portsmouth in 1817. It became a prison hulk in 1820 and could hold 500 prisoners, again in appalling conditions. There was a riot on the York in 1848 but before the two above named Chartists moved there.

It is reminder that the British Imperial State has a long history of disciplining and punishing those who are seen not to fit. All part of Britain’s Island Story.

Easter traditions, Jack O’Lent and riots

Jack O’Lent is Medieval to early Modern Eastern tradition in London and some other areas of the country.

On Ash Wednesday at the beginning of Lent a straw man was constructed of straw, rags and herring skins. It was stoned with attempts to destroy it during the weeks of Lent, the supposed motivation being discontent with the privations of Lent.

If it survived it was finally disposed of just before Easter to mark a period of feasting and celebration. It was also of course traditional that in Bristol in 1749 there were Jack O Lent riots over the imposition of toll roads.

Revolt is never far away with folk customs

Beard Liberation Front

5^th April

Beard of Spring. The final Beard Off vote

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has said that the final Beard Off vote for  Beard of Spring 2023 shortlist is now open with the winner revealed after an on-line vote on Easter Saturday.

Beard of Spring is the second of four seasonal awards that go towards the annual Beard of the Year vote in December.

The campaigners say that Foreign Secretary James Cleverley and backbench Tory MP Jonathan Gullis will not feature as they have failed to meet the criteria.

In the first Close Shave round Michael Sheen (55%) and Gary Lineker (31%) went through to the Beard Off Final. In the second Close Shave round Jeremy Corbyn (56%) and Olivier Giroud (25%) triumphed

The criteria are:

A beard worn during the season in the public eye

Presenting a positive image of the hirsute

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we’re expecting hairs to bristle in the final vote for this coveted seasonal accolade

Beard of Spring shortlist

Gary Lineker: defender of refugees

Steve Bell: Coronation chronicler

Harry Kane: top England goal scorer

Michael Sheen, refused to cross UCU picket line

Mikel Arteta, Manager of top Premiership football club

Olivier Giroud: top hair/beard combo

Jon Trickett MP, Engels lecture

Jeremy Corbyn MP, being himself

Beard Liberation Front

Media Release

5^th April

Contact BLF Organiser Keith Flett 07803 167266

Beard Liberation Front says its possible a banner was found in Corbyn’s LOTO Office in 2020

The Beard Liberation Front, the informal network of beard wearers, has reacted to a Guardian report(5^th April) that ‘revolutionary flags’ were found in the Leader of the Opposition’s office when Keir Starmer’s team took over from Jeremy Corbyn.

The BLF says its possible that one of the flags was a Beard Liberation Front banner. Jeremy Corbyn has been voted Parliamentary Beard of the Year more often than any other MP.

BLF Organiser Keith Flett said, we’re prepared to own up to the BLF banner but it will disappoint the clean shaven revisionists in Keir Starmer’s team to learn that we are not a revolutionary organisation

Guardian Report

Keir Starmer’s team had a few moments to reminisce about the past three years at their regular morning meeting on Tuesday, with one senior aide recalling when their winning leadership team first walked into the leader of the opposition’s office.

It had only just been vacated by Jeremy Corbyn’s team and in one room, there were assorted revolutionary flags including one from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. In the next room there was a large bin full to the brim with shredded documents spilling on to the floor. In Corbyn’s office was a sleeping bag. “You could not have pictured a more symbolic scene,” they said.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/apr/04/team-starmer-here-to-win-as-labour-sets-its-sights-on-a-may-2024-election

Marxism Today was the theoretical magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The Party dissolved with the end of the Soviet Union, although the Communist Party of Britain and the Morning Star continue.

In its last years Marxism Today became influential in the formation of the ideas of New Labour, although after the 1997 Election victory it published a one-off edition distancing itself somewhat from Blair.

The final issue in December 1991 contained brief thoughts from some of those in someway associated with MT, myself included as a letter writing critic.

I’m still a socialist and still writing letters. The legacy of MT is probably now somewhere in an ideological axis between Peter Mandelson and Keir Starmer, although its ideas, always arguable, were certainly at least more interesting than either man.

Does Keir Starmer understand The Great Moving Right Show

The late Stuart Hall published in Marxism Today in January 1979 just before Thatcher’s Election victory an analysis headed ‘The Great Moving Right Show’.

http://banmarchive.org.uk/collections/mt/index_frame.htm

Looking back the analysis was a decent one, at least posing questions about the appeal of right-wing politics

It was however reviled at the time by the left, myself included, and in a 2012 interview with the New Statesman, Hall touched on the reason why:

“There is a tiny kernel of truth in the assertion that [Marxism Today] created Blairism, in the sense that the ‘new times’ stuff was addressing the change of the whole terrain. But what we recommended was that you needed a project on the left of the same breadth and depth as Thatcherism. New Labour understood it as meaning that you needed the same project!”

We knew of course that Thatcherism was very right-wing. The real Great Moving Right Show for those of us on the left however meant people breaking not just from socialism but from social democracy to argue that Thatcher had a point. That in part, as Hall notes, was where New Labour came in.

The backdrop then as now was economic crisis, and the question of who pays for it and how.

Starmer seems to be falling into the same error that New Labour did at least in part. Claiming that Labour can be more efficient on stopping asylum seekers, in the moment, than the Tories, equivocating at best on Trans rights and criticising teachers for taking action on a well below inflation pay offer, instead of offering a counter project to the Tories industrial and culture wars, Starmer suggests an echo of them.

It was and is the politics of defeat and retreat. Unless the left is active, perhaps particularly now outside of Parliament in workplaces and communities, it can happen again..