presumably the guardian thinks its the fault of the tories and mail thinks its the fault of foriegners and melanie phillips thinks its the fault of the bbc and computer games. i have absolutely no intention of adding my voice to the storm of bullshit and anyway i wouldn't be able to make myself heard if i did
the life and opinions of Andrew Rilstone
Not perhaps the most insightful thing written on the events of the other week but I can certainly emphasise with the sentiment. Inevitably, we all have our reassuring narratives to explain the causes of the riots.
I've seen a few things written on Facebook by both friends and friends of friends which I've had to restrain myself from responding to. It's not that I don't have my own prejudices about what's happened and the causes of what's happened. I just didn't want to get into pointless arguments. So many people on all sides have already made up their minds, and it's rare I think that much good will come from engaging with strangers on the internet, even if I can think of what seem like perfectly reasonable rebuttals of their positions.
Of course, I did mentally write a few responses.
I don't like violence. I'm a middle-class white person with a privileged education who was raised by parents who strongly discouraged any displays of violence in their sons (we were even forbidden toy guns). Which might explain why I've been attracted to so much violent entertainment over the years (although that's also partly the way I think our popular culture has gone, for better or worse). Still, most of the people involved in the rioting are probably the sort of person I'd cross the road to avoid. The sort of person I'm glad I don't have to be around in my daily life. But still, I won't demonise them and I have a lot of sympathy for the anger about social iniquity which is clearly part of the reason behind the trouble, whatever some on the right would like to claim in dismissing this as simply criminality or mindlessness. For sure, that must be a part of it. But it doesn't wholly explain it, and I don't know where you'd draw the line between criminality and all the other, equally plausible reasons.
I think my strongest, most overwhelming feeling was just how little surprise I felt. I read somewhere that both the TUC and Nick Clegg had predicted potential trouble in reaction to the government's current policies, so I know I wasn't alone. It just felt very predictable, even if the actual causes of the riots and their spreading to other cities include a multitude of factors beyond the economic. Which isn't to defend it, just to acknowledge that these things don't happen in a political and cultural vacuum.
I think what underpins my antipathy with so much of the rhetoric expressed by politicians and commentators is the almost wilfull ignorance and refusal to even try to place events in context. They don't know their history. Of course they don't! David Barker, Emeritus Professor at Leeds put this very succinctly in a letter published by the Guardian:
For many years I taught a final-year undergraduate course on the uprisings of the peasants and artisans that swept across large parts of 17th-century France. Buildings were attacked, their contents pillaged, crops destroyed and occasionally a perceived oppressor was killed. Had my students explained it all by simply invoking feral criminality they would have failed.
My own academic research is a slightly different period, England in the late 16th, early 17th centuries, but I'd made exactly the same association before I came across David Parker's letter (helpfully quoted on Facebook by several friends). A point I've come across in my reading seems to be that incidences of social disorder and rioting in early modern society were an instinctive form of protest on the part of the powerless, a means to articulate their grievances and even to 'negotiate' with their social superiors. Perhaps it's easier to make such a judgement when the events are centuries in the past. Or perhaps it's that the distance more easily enable them to be placed in context. I don't really imagine that early modern rioting was any less violent than what we saw this last week. There's no reason to suppose it wouldn't have been worse. And attacks on property and looting has probably always been a part of it.
What's also always been present is people who want to demonise those who threaten the social hierarchy. I'm thinking here particularly about a ballad I've written about in the chapter I'm currently engaged with. It appears in a collection called 'Strange Histories', written by the Weaver and ballad author Thomas Deloney. The earliest extant text is from 1602, although there's reason to believe there was an earlier edition. Personally I would favour the early to mid 1590s as the likely dating of its first publication, but that inevitably remains personal speculation.
I think many people who don't study the period in any great depth forget not only how violent that time was (as any time before the invention of a modern police force must have been) but also how politically and economically troubled the period of the 1590s was. The period when Shakespeare was first establishing himself as a writer of note and when so many classics of English Literature were being written. An aging queen, inflation, poor harvests, an increase in the numbers of the poor, popular discontent about the presence of so many foreigners in the country. I often think the 1590s must have been a pretty hellish time to be alive in England. So what if the greatest dramatist English literature has seen was producing great works for the stage if you couldn't find enough to eat?
The ballad I have in mind, whenever it was actually written, is a history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Most of the details are derived from Holinshed's Chronicle of English history. It's probably easiest to show what I want to say if I just quote a bit from my chapter in progress:
The rebels are repeatedly represented in unflattering terms. Just over half of the ballad is taken up with describing the violence of the rebels in terms which explicitly condemn them. They are “rude disordered franticke men” (52) responsible for releasing prisoners (22-24, 61-65), intimidating priests (53-54), murdering such figures of authority as the Lord Chauncelor and the Lord High Treasurer (45-7), burning lawyers’ books (33-4), destroying records (58-60) and attacking property. Attributing the motivation of the rebels to ‘envie, malice, and dispighte’ the ballad precludes the possibility that there could be any justice to their complaints. Their rebellion is stigmatized as a violent affront to social hierarchy and monarchical authority.
Excuse the academic language. Hopefully quoting myself doesn't appear too self indulgent. It's my blog after all! The numbers are line references, and I've also taken out a quotation. It's not describing an early modern riot of course, it was history for Deloney and the audience for whom he was writing, but it was probably written at a time when there were riots occurring. It wasn't easy to write about contemporary political events at this time. Deloney actually got into trouble in 1596 over a ballad he'd authored for precisely those reasons. So it's about a historical event but it could also be read as a response to contemporary political events.
As far as I can tell, the actual details the ballad records aren't inaccurate. This was a violent revolt. Which is precisely the problem with so much of the rhetoric which has surrounded recent events. It's always easier to demonise people than to try and understand them. You could take Deloney's rhetoric out of this ballad, modernise the spelling, and would it look that different what what many are saying about the looters? It's not just that riots are always violent, that their causes are always rooted in a complex political, cultural and economic context. It's also that there's always someone around who will demonise the rioters, even if it's more than a century after the events occurred.
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