Never speak improperly of women, for we and our fathers were all born of women.
A wife should honour and obey her husband, and serve him.
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(I was going to post just the first one but then I thought that’s a little onesided and added the second one too.)
Little book, commend me to all learners, and to the experienced, whom I pray to correct its faults.
“It is strange, that in so old a world of the same continuing system always repeating the same lesson, any one should be ignorant that the dissolute vices are the destroyers of personal health, comfort, character, and permanent influence.”
The temptation to value manners above morals, and pleasantness above honesty, is one that all of us have to guard against.
Reading and Writing might be taught, but Arithmetic not; the boys would be getting to know too much about wages, and that would be troublesome.
Still, the bad spelling and grammar of most of the letters up to that period, and the general ignorance of our upper classes were, says Professor Brewer, the reason why the whole government of the country was in the hands of ecclesiastics.
— Frederick James Furnivall: Early English Meals and Manners
So wait, Ye Olde English being mostly incomprehensible gibberish is because the people writing it were basically functionally illiterate, ha ha?
Also~ This is why literacy is important. For example, slave owners really didn’t want their slaves to learn how to read. Catching them with any sort of letters was punishable with whipping. So there’s probably a correlation between illiteracy and being ruled by others. But as always, people can make their own conclusions.
Though, it’s important to note that there’s also an important distinction between knowing how to read and understanding what you read. Unfortunately, the latter seems to be an increasingly lost art.
Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.
∞
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.’
∞
‘The proles are not human beings,’ he said carelessly.
∞
‘The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron — they’ll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be.’
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(The funny thing is, even if people did lose the ability to express something, they still wouldn’t lose the ability to feel it. So after thoughtcrime, you’d get “feelcrime”. And even if you scrubbed all the words in existence, people would just invent new ones. Or how d’you imagine those multitude of words came into existence in the first place?
Also, as I’ve said before, you can’t feel superior if you don’t keep people you consider inferior around~. The elite may think proles or muggles are dumb bovines who aren’t even human, but they need them more than proles will ever need the elite.)
It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones. Comrade Ogilvy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.
‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(Or the modern version: ‘who controls the tv controls everything and everyone’.)
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
It was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.
Rendered into English Prose for the use of those who cannot read the original
The man that had any property, was bereaved of it by violent guilds and violent moots. The man that had not, was starved with hunger.
∞
Now we will relate in part what happened in King Stephen’s time. In his reign the Jews of Norwich bought a Christian child before Easter, and tortured him after the same manner as our Lord was tortured; and on Long-Friday hanged him on a rood, in mockery of our Lord, and afterwards buried him.
∞
. . . but ever the more he gave them, the worse they were to him.
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(I wonder if that part about the jews of Norwich is true.)
The more men spake about right law, the more unlawfully they acted.
∞
If any churl lay with a woman against her will, he soon lost the limb that he played with.
∞
He made many deer-parks; and he established laws therewith; so that whosoever slew a hart, or a hind, should be deprived of his eyesight. As he forbade men to kill the harts, so also the boars; and he loved the tall deer as if he were their father. Likewise he decreed by the hares, that they should go free.
“The Voyages and the Slayings of the Danes.”
I really don’t know why I keep reading this, but it has the occasional interesting tidbit. Such as that Charles, king of the Franks, was slain by a boar. If you know how huge wild boars are, you wouldn’t be surprised. I thought Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin exaggerated their size because the proportions in the anime weren’t always exactly anatomically correct — for example, there is this one scene where a bear stomps three dogs to death at the same time with one paw, and we laughed a lot at this with my sister — but I guess not.
Also, this:
“And the same year after Easter, about the gang-days or before, appeared the star that men in book-Latin call “cometa”: some men say that in English it may be termed “hairy star”; for that there standeth off from it a long gleam of light, whilom on one side, whilom on each.”
Somehow I ended up reading this. I just finished part one: CE 1 – 748. (The Chronicle uses A.D. but we don’t abide by that.) It’s really boring and dry; so far it reads like “The Glorious Days of Slaying the Welsh and Britons,” by Saxons. The Chronicle divided the Welsh and the Britons into separate tribes but the Welsh say:
“They were the British people, and nobody ever heard the German name, “Wales,” which means a foreign land; or the word “Welsh,” which refers to foreigners, until men who were themselves outsiders came into Britain.”
So, you know, as usual, you can make of that what you will.
Anyhow, there was a lot of slaying of the Welsh since they landed on Britain at Vortigern’s invitation in 449 CE. As we learned from The Art of War and The Prince, leaving your national defence to mercenaries is never a good idea since the Saxons didn’t leave, they also invited everybody else along because:
“They described the worthlessness of the Britons, and the richness of the land.”
Curiously, the Jutes don’t get any other mention. Maybe they were peaceful.
When the Saxons weren’t busy slaying the Welsh, they were busy converting to christianity. Related:
And Ethelfrith led his army to Chester; where he slew an innumerable host of the Welsh; and so was fulfilled the prophecy of Augustine, wherein he saith “If the Welsh will not have peace with us, they shall perish at the hands of the Saxons.”
The Saxons also fought against each other quite a bit — maybe because they ran out of Welsh to kill?
The funniest names I encountered were: Esc (self-explanatory) and Geta which also means the Japanese clogs.
I feel bad for the Britons, honestly. First the Picts, then the Scots, then the Romans, then the Saxons, then the Angles and Jutes, then the Normans and who else. Evidently living on an island doesn’t help much.
And after all we should be the masters and not the slaves of our own rules.
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(Note, I haven’t read this book. Though it’s not so much a book as it’s a collection of poems in Latin. I just checked what it was about and this quote caught my attention.)
King Ethelred, the son of Edgar, was ruling England at that time. He was a good ruler, and was spending that winter in London. In those days, the language in England was the same as that spoken in Norway and Denmark, but there was a change of language when William the Bastard conquered England. Since William was of French descent, the French language was used in England from then on.
∞
‘It’s not a good idea to lend money to strangers,’ Gunnlaug replied.
With love and action
shall a man prevail in memory and song.
∞
A rising of land reached towards the sun
shining seacliffs steep rock-pillars
bound with shoresand.
∞
From dark water-death waves bore me up
weary of swimming—the sea lifted me
led me to shore in the land of Finns.
⋅ Nota Bene ⋅
(I decided to place this in the 8th century since that is what the introduction told me.)
Hiraeth 