Chapter 9: The Material Conditions of American Exceptionalism: Part III

One can point to this or that accident of history, what if Alfred the Great had gotten pneumonia in those swamps, et cetera et cetera. History turns on absolute rolls of the dice sometimes. But the nazbol coalition of the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons meant they intended to work the land and earn a living after they got done conquering the natives. An ethically dubious lifestyle, granted, but a fairly common one in antiquity and not-so-antiquity too, and a fairly sustainable one besides. It's called England and not Nouvelle Normandie because nazbollery is more powerful, and more enduring, than liberalism. Alfred the Great may have been lucky, but his luck rested upon a fairly solid foundation of centuries of English cultivation of the land.

Both England and America also share in common their foundation upon a collapsed civilization. England was founded in the ruins of the unequivocally more culturally and technologically advanced Roman Britain. America was founded in the ruins of the unequivocally more socially and agriculturally advanced Mississippian civilization. The break in continuity with the preceding civilization, in both instances, permitted rapid economic advances in the newcoming one. Depopulation raised wages for the newcomers, dominated native populations had their labor exploited for a few centuries, gradually becoming less exploited as time went on, their earlier serf-like exploitation raising the wages of the newcomers and providing a higher floor the exploited would end up ascending to, in the case of Celtic Tiger Ireland or a couple Native tribes like the Crow who allied with America early and benefit from that alliance to this day.

Furthermore, the fallen civilizations' impact on the lands themselves provided a large benefit to the newcomers. Roman Britain's advanced network of roads, aqueducts, public baths, defensive works on the Pictish border, ports, and granaries represented centuries' worth of labor. This was labor the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons did not have to expend, labor that required knowledge they did not at first possess, and it was a boon that would not have been available to them had they decided to invade, say, Pictland or Ireland and dispossess the inhabitants there to found a homeland. Roman grandeur also provided these tribes with a target for their emulation, a goal to aspire to.

Similarly, no encomiendas arose on the American frontier to claim its food forests and plentiful game for a handful of bougies. Instead, it was the unconscious boon of the frontiersman. He had no idea why passenger pigeons blotted out the sun in such numbers, no conception that the food forests he clearcut were more useful than the grain monocultures he replaced them with, but so long as there were more of those food forests further west of his kin, he benefitted from the abundance of game they fed. Deer were so numerous that the hide of a male deer sold for a single dollar, only about a day's wage in colonial America (and far more expensive in England, where only the King or his guests even had a right to hunt them in the first place), and where we get the colloquialism "bucks" in reference to dollars. Famine is not reported in colonial America whatsoever after the Pilgrims were taught the rudiments of farming maize by the Natives, a fact that made it much easier on the lowest class of American settlers, and made it much easier for them to organize for their rights within bourgeois liberal democracy, and even to force the creation of bourgeois liberal democracy via the opportunistic Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia.

Though feudalistic systems did arise in the first days of the English conquest of Britain, it was swiftly undone. Linguistic evidence alone attests to this. Old English is almost purely Germanic words, although their much more numerous Celtic peasantry strung those words together with the logic of Brythonic Gaelic grammar, and a couple loanwords from Latin, to produce Middle English. The Gaelic grammatical substrate tells us of a Celtic working class doing their best to speak the language of their new masters, the Latin loanwords tell us it was a language of prestige to both Sassenach and Celt (as indeed it was, as the language of the Church), and the mostly-English body of words tells us that the Angles, Jutes, and Saxons ran the show. But Middle English was simply the codification of what had come before William of Normandy conquered the place and replaced the Anglo-Saxon bougies with his own set of French bougies.

Our modern English is just the codification of that system after those Francophone bougies finally lost their mother tongue and spoke English in court, a slow and gradual process that started with the Hundred Years' War making the French the national enemy of the English, and ended definitively with the rise of my ancestors the Stuarts to the English throne. James I (VI of Scotland) subsidized the King James Version of the Bible, and playwrights and poets like Shakespeare and Marlowe made English enough of a language of prestige that though the bougies of England still mostly spoke French, it was no longer their native language.

And what does our modern English language tell us of the days of the Norman Conquest? "Pig," the animal that English workers dealt with everyday, came from Old English. "Pork," the food that their Francophone aristocracy would have dined on regularly, came from French. Same with "cattle" and "beef" ("rosbif" is to this day still an anti-English slur in French). The person to whom the English peasant owed their loyalty was the "king," an English word. Bur anything pertaining to the king was almost certainly mediated by his Francophone court, and so it was "royal." Bakers sold the Anglophone peasantry a "loaf" of bread, a word that comes to us from the Old English "hlaf" (which is also where the immediate patron of the Anglophone serf got his title, as the "loaf ward," which eventually was shortened to "lord," English words all.) But when the Francophone aristocracy bought bread, they bought it in larger quantities than a single loaf; they bought a "dozen," a French word cognate with the Spanish doce, also meaning "twelve." I could continue, but suffice it to say that in every instance, things dealt with primarily by the working class during the Norman Conquest were referred to by their English names, while things dealt with primarily by the aristocracy during the Norman Conquest were referred to by their French names. The very last instance of this linguistic division having any political relevance was during the English Civil War, when the aristocratic supporters of Charles I were called "Cavaliers" (derived from the French word for "knight").

There is yet another substrate to middle and modern English, but because the Vikings did not maintain their hold on the Danelaw, words from Old Norse didn't make it into the class division of modern English. Words like "earl" exist, but are mostly outmoded even within the modern vestigal remnants of feudalism itself as they were made irrelevant after the Norman Conquest. Instead, the Old Norse legacy in Middle and modern English is almost more relevant than class markers: they gave the world's greatest seafaring empire its nautical terminology. "Island," "port," and "starboard" all come to us from Old Norse, because they had to sail across the North Sea to pillage England and conquer the Danelaw.

Continue reading Part IV