This is the history of the kings of England from Henry II (although it actually starts with a sort of prologue explaining how Henry I's son was killed in the wreck of the White Ship and how this led to anarchy as Stephen and Matilda tussled to stalemate for supremacy) up to Richard II. The essential theme is that the Plantagenet kings were at their greatest when they ruled England as the embodiment of law and at their weakest and most corrupt when they subverted law for their own profits. Thus John (with Magna Carta), Henry III (with the early Parliaments of Simon de Montfort), Edward II (deposed by Roger Mortimer and Richard II (deposed by Henry Bolingbroke were all bad kings.
To be honest, this does not reflect well on royalty. For every good king (Henry II, Edward I although his wars bankrupted his son, Edward III until he went senile) there was at least one bad king.
Another perspective on this history which Dan Jones does not really explore is that this period was throughout a tussle between the barons and the king. At the start of the period the rules of inheritance were less obvious than they are now. Thus, of the Norman kings, William was a bastard, William Rufus was a second son (and Henry I his younger brother) and Stephen was elected King over Henry's daughter Matilda. And if the king could be chosen rather than merely born then he could be deposed.
And the big problem facing all these kings was how to finance the almost continual wars they had to fight. They needed to persuade people to pay tax. Much of the growth of parliamentary representation came because the barons and later the commons demanded concessions in return for their cash.
Another theme is the regular appeals of the Kings, especially when being crowned, to the pre-Norman past. Edward the Confessor was seen as a golden age and the new kings would regularly offer charters which referred to this Saxon past.
This book is a spirited romp through 246 years. At 600 pages it is just over 2 pages a year. It cannot be other than a skim of the surface. Thus it was not really the book for me because I have read much about this period (including biographies of Edward I, and Roger Mortimer and Dan Jones' own account of the Peasants' Revolt). It is also probably too long for a casual reader who merely wants the briefest overview to the subject. In some ways a book like this has been overtaken by wikipedia in which you can start with a story and pursue it according to your own interests. Nevertheless it is well written and enjoyable.
February 2014; 601 pages
Showing posts with label Jones. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jones. Show all posts
Wednesday, 19 February 2014
Monday, 3 June 2013
"The philosophical breakfast club" by Laura J Snyder
This is a 'group biography' of four young Cambridge men who started eating breakfast together and embarked upon a project to reform natural philosophy. In so doing they coined the term 'scientist' and re-established Baconian induction as a technique: there had been worrying recent moves to assert the primacy of deduction in Science which would have led to sterility. More specifically, these four were:
It is especially nice how the biography brings out the different personalities of these four men. Jones was often ill and prone to depression. Babbage was very irascible (in his later life he became obsessed with the noise that organ grinders made with the result that street urchins teased him by banging kettles whenever they saw him); he fought with everyone; his perfectionism meant that neither of the computers he designed were ever built. Whewell learned to use his fists as a poor boy at grammar school; later he rode horses 'hard' and was eventually killed by a truculent steed. Herschel was sweet-natured.
The insistence on induction (or rather, like Bacon, they believed that science should proceed not like a spider, who in an analogy with deduction, spins webs from a single thread, nor like an inductive any who piles up leaves, but like a honey bee who gathers nectar and then transform it to honey) led them to react against Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in which he tries to devise Economics from first principles, like Cartesian science or Euclidean geometry. They also recommended, following Bacon again, that scientists should seek out "crucial experiments that could definitively decide between two rival theories" (p114). Jones's analysis of Economics also refuted the population trap of Malthus.
A lot of what they did prepared the ground for Darwinian evolution (Whewell was very worried by the possibility that evolution would damage religion but when the Origin of Species was published he recognised the strength of its arguments and kept quiet unlike many less cautious contemporaries). For example, Babbage used a feedback mechanism on a working model of his Difference Engine to show to an audience that included Darwin how a mathematical rule could be automatically modified by the machine. He then suggested that by analogy the Creator could have designed the world such that species evolved rather than having to intervene whenever he wanted a new species.
Whewell also dabbled in architecture, explaining that the crucial feature of the Gothic style was not the pointed arch which had been suggested a priori but, through an inductive look at the evidence, that churches aimed for vertical spaces rather than horizontal spaces thus requiring mechanisms such as the pointed arch.
Whewell also introduced the concept of consilience. For Whewell, what made Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation so strong was not just that it had predictive ability (for example in predicting the existence of Neptune), although that was important, but that it unified a number of diverse fields, in Newton's terms terrestrial dynamics and celestial dynamics. After Whewell's death one of his students, a lad called James Clerk Maxwell, unified Optics and Electromagnetism in an even greater act of consilience. This section leads to a bit of a howler when Snyder states that Maxwell calculated the speed of electromagnetic radiation to be 310,740,000 miles per second when she means metres per second!
This review gives a small flavour of the many fields that these great but rather too little known scientists illuminated.
This is a fantastic book, incredibly readable and so interesting. June 2013; 368 pages
- William Whewell, a carpenter's son who become Master of Trinity, originated the natural Sciences tripos (in the process inventing the subject of History and Philosophy of Science), and founded the British Association
- Richard Jones, who did pioneering work in Economics
- Charles Babbage who invented the computer
- John Herschel who followed his father William as an astronomer, discovering nebulae, and worked with Fox Talbot on the invention of photography.
It is especially nice how the biography brings out the different personalities of these four men. Jones was often ill and prone to depression. Babbage was very irascible (in his later life he became obsessed with the noise that organ grinders made with the result that street urchins teased him by banging kettles whenever they saw him); he fought with everyone; his perfectionism meant that neither of the computers he designed were ever built. Whewell learned to use his fists as a poor boy at grammar school; later he rode horses 'hard' and was eventually killed by a truculent steed. Herschel was sweet-natured.
The insistence on induction (or rather, like Bacon, they believed that science should proceed not like a spider, who in an analogy with deduction, spins webs from a single thread, nor like an inductive any who piles up leaves, but like a honey bee who gathers nectar and then transform it to honey) led them to react against Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy in which he tries to devise Economics from first principles, like Cartesian science or Euclidean geometry. They also recommended, following Bacon again, that scientists should seek out "crucial experiments that could definitively decide between two rival theories" (p114). Jones's analysis of Economics also refuted the population trap of Malthus.
A lot of what they did prepared the ground for Darwinian evolution (Whewell was very worried by the possibility that evolution would damage religion but when the Origin of Species was published he recognised the strength of its arguments and kept quiet unlike many less cautious contemporaries). For example, Babbage used a feedback mechanism on a working model of his Difference Engine to show to an audience that included Darwin how a mathematical rule could be automatically modified by the machine. He then suggested that by analogy the Creator could have designed the world such that species evolved rather than having to intervene whenever he wanted a new species.
Whewell also dabbled in architecture, explaining that the crucial feature of the Gothic style was not the pointed arch which had been suggested a priori but, through an inductive look at the evidence, that churches aimed for vertical spaces rather than horizontal spaces thus requiring mechanisms such as the pointed arch.
Whewell also introduced the concept of consilience. For Whewell, what made Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation so strong was not just that it had predictive ability (for example in predicting the existence of Neptune), although that was important, but that it unified a number of diverse fields, in Newton's terms terrestrial dynamics and celestial dynamics. After Whewell's death one of his students, a lad called James Clerk Maxwell, unified Optics and Electromagnetism in an even greater act of consilience. This section leads to a bit of a howler when Snyder states that Maxwell calculated the speed of electromagnetic radiation to be 310,740,000 miles per second when she means metres per second!
This review gives a small flavour of the many fields that these great but rather too little known scientists illuminated.
This is a fantastic book, incredibly readable and so interesting. June 2013; 368 pages
More works on the history of science and scientific biographies can be found here.
Friday, 2 April 2010
"Summer of Blood" by Dan Jones
This is the history of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
Richard II was the son of the Black Prince and only a boy when his grandfather Edward III dies and he came to the throne. The country was facing bankruptcy as the Hundred Years War dragged on (the French were raiding the South coast and the Scots were raiding the north of England) and government was haphazard and dominated by John of Gaunt, the young king's uncle. The social order had been seriously weakened by the Black Death; labour was scarce but the law forbade labourers from charging too much for their services whilst compelling them to work. During a parliament in Northampton (when King Richard stayed at a manor in nearby Moulton) a poll tax was declared: even the poorest labourers had to pay. The scene was set for rebellion.
The revolt seems to have started in Essex around Brentwood or possibly Fobbing where poll tax collectors were said to have looked up a young girl's skirts to see if she was a virgin (and thus exempt from paying). But the unrest soon spread to Kent; Abel Ker lead the rioters to sieze Rochester Castle and march on Maidstone; at Maidstone Wat Tyler took charge. Inspired by the Lollard preacher John Ball the Kentishmen marched on London. H
ere they confronted the boy King Richard on three separate occasions: first at Rotherhithe where he refused to get out of his barge. After this the rebels stormed across London Bridge (the Londoners let the drawbridge down), destroyed the Savoy Palace and beseiged the Tower.
Then Richard rode to Mile End where the Essex rebels had encamped to talk to them in the hope of providing a diversion so that the most hated people in the Tower could escape. This failed but at Mile End he was presented with a charter requesting that all men should become free (ie not bound serfs), that there should be a land rent limit and that no one should be required to work. He granted this, and then said they could catch and punish traitors.
They spilled across London "catching traitors". They entered the Tower (some one let the drawbridge down) and killed the Treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Henry of Derby, later Henry IV, was saved by being hidden by a guard. One man was dragged from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey and killed. There was rioting and looting.
Finally Richard met the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler rode out to meet him; the Mayor of London accused Wat of insulting the King by his coarse manners and stabbed him. The boy King then took charge, riding out to the stunned commoners and leading them away from Smithfield while the Mayor and his men found enough armed men to force the Kentishmen to leave London.
The rebellion continued across Britain for a fortnight, largely in the South East (including Cambridge, St Albans and Huntingdon) but as far afield as Bridgwater and York. John Ball fled north, writing letters as he went, until he was captured at Coventry. One of his letters mentions Piers the Plowman!
This book was an absolutely gripping read.
April 2010; 211 pages
Richard II was the son of the Black Prince and only a boy when his grandfather Edward III dies and he came to the throne. The country was facing bankruptcy as the Hundred Years War dragged on (the French were raiding the South coast and the Scots were raiding the north of England) and government was haphazard and dominated by John of Gaunt, the young king's uncle. The social order had been seriously weakened by the Black Death; labour was scarce but the law forbade labourers from charging too much for their services whilst compelling them to work. During a parliament in Northampton (when King Richard stayed at a manor in nearby Moulton) a poll tax was declared: even the poorest labourers had to pay. The scene was set for rebellion.
The revolt seems to have started in Essex around Brentwood or possibly Fobbing where poll tax collectors were said to have looked up a young girl's skirts to see if she was a virgin (and thus exempt from paying). But the unrest soon spread to Kent; Abel Ker lead the rioters to sieze Rochester Castle and march on Maidstone; at Maidstone Wat Tyler took charge. Inspired by the Lollard preacher John Ball the Kentishmen marched on London. H
ere they confronted the boy King Richard on three separate occasions: first at Rotherhithe where he refused to get out of his barge. After this the rebels stormed across London Bridge (the Londoners let the drawbridge down), destroyed the Savoy Palace and beseiged the Tower.
Then Richard rode to Mile End where the Essex rebels had encamped to talk to them in the hope of providing a diversion so that the most hated people in the Tower could escape. This failed but at Mile End he was presented with a charter requesting that all men should become free (ie not bound serfs), that there should be a land rent limit and that no one should be required to work. He granted this, and then said they could catch and punish traitors.
They spilled across London "catching traitors". They entered the Tower (some one let the drawbridge down) and killed the Treasurer and the Archbishop of Canterbury; Henry of Derby, later Henry IV, was saved by being hidden by a guard. One man was dragged from sanctuary at Westminster Abbey and killed. There was rioting and looting.
Finally Richard met the rebels at Smithfield. Wat Tyler rode out to meet him; the Mayor of London accused Wat of insulting the King by his coarse manners and stabbed him. The boy King then took charge, riding out to the stunned commoners and leading them away from Smithfield while the Mayor and his men found enough armed men to force the Kentishmen to leave London.
The rebellion continued across Britain for a fortnight, largely in the South East (including Cambridge, St Albans and Huntingdon) but as far afield as Bridgwater and York. John Ball fled north, writing letters as he went, until he was captured at Coventry. One of his letters mentions Piers the Plowman!
This book was an absolutely gripping read.
April 2010; 211 pages
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