Part Two: Habeas Corpus and the Peasant Origins of Western Democracy

to take it away from everyone? And I'm just actually not above making fun of certain people. I like, I guess I never really thought it was above making fun of certain people. I think when people are trying to eradicate you, that's like a nice thing you can do is only make fun of them. Yeah, I don't know.

in good faith, engage with them in good faith. I do believe in talking to people and figuring out our differences and shit, and some people are trying to kill us all and I'm being real nice if all I do is call them hard boiled eggs, you know. Yeah, some part one we talked about Stephen Miller and Trump administration talking about getting rid of the most basic right

in the concept of a legal system. And so we're talking about where that concept of a legal system came from English common law, which means we have to talk about England, which historically is not my favorite thing, but

sometimes it's kind of interesting. And it's interesting when you don't look at so and so begat so and so and then they built an army to fight so and so, but instead look about like what peasants were doing, and the fact that everyone started off not as colonial people, even the English, because they were called the British at the time. Okay, British history a long ass time ago, like BCE or whatever. Celtic people lived on the island. They weren't the first people to live there or whatever.

But we're going to start with them. The southern trunk of the island what's now England was a Celtic group of people known as the Britons. They spoke the Celtic language Brittonic. In forty three AD, Rome was like you're in the Empire now, and they called it Britannia and they held it until the early four hundreds. Usually when people talk about Rome leaving because people call the time afterwards the Dark Ages, which is a lie, and every historian will roll their eyes if you say the Dark Ages.

But I really like it because it's really metal sounding, but it's presented as this abandonment, right the Romans were busy elsewhere, they couldn't keep up the colony. Britannia fell into ruin in darkness, but at least one historian I've read a man named Tony Dyer who's pamphlet Anglo Saxon Democracy. We're actually going to talk about him and what he's up to these days at the very end of this episode. It's actually really interesting. He wrote a pamphlet called Anglo

Saxon Democracy about fifteen years ago. It's one of my main sources for this part of the story, and it presents a very different example of how even the Roman abandonment could have gone down in three eighty three. This is what I was saying earlier about I live in the past instead of the present. I'm like, I spent all day reading about three eighty three AD or whatever. I'm like, I don't know what's happening in the twenty first century. In three eighty three, Rome started pulling back

its troops because they were needed elsewhere. And then in the year four oh six, the quote unquote barbarians crossed the Rhine and started heading towards Rome. So by fourteen ten there's barely any troops left in Britannia. Basically, by fourteen ten, the Romano British, because they're no longer just the British. They've integrated with each other in various ways

over hundreds of years. They're like, get the fuck out of here, we can do this for ourselves, right, And there's this whole movement I hope to come back to on this show, mostly in Gaul what's now France, especially Brittany, the chunk of northwest France. That shit confused me for a million years. The fact that the Normans do get their name from Norway, but they're from France, and then

Britannia is part of France. It's just like it's fucking speaking of not having enough names, a bunch of people teamed up into massive peasant armies the bakude from a Gaulish word for fighters, and these were people who are tired of high taxes and low benefits basically like Rome coming and taking their money and not actually providing social services, because governments should provide social services. That's the exchange for taxes.

Committee literally is like you're a broke bitch. Cool.

not a lot of people writing shit down. But people are like, we don't like fucking giving roam our money and not getting anything back. And some of those people were enslaved who joined these peasant armies, and so they had an extra reason to hate the economic arrangement of the time that said, getting rid of Rome does not get rid of slavery. Slavery stays threat the entire story we're telling, it starts transitioning to more like surf, dumb

and stuff in the eleventh century. Anyway, people argue about the intentions of the Bakudai, who I don't know how to pronounce because it looks like a Latin thing, but it's actually from a Gaulish word, and I don't fucking understand Gaulish. But people try to argue and like slot them into various things. They're nationalists, they're the people who love France, and they're therefore probably fascist, but in a good way. According to that story, they're Marxists, they're Christians.

There's a lot of people, i'm sure, who are arguing that they're like anti civilization pagans, but in a good way. Whatever. They're peasant uprisings. I like them. I don't know what the fuck they're doing. They seem to have wanted to return to pre Roman traditional methods of cooperative land ownership, and it's quite likely that the British equivalent was part

of driving the Roman government off the island. And I'm going to say the Roman government because it doesn't seem to have been about driving the Roman ethnicity off the island, because modern conceptions about ethnic purity don't apply well to pre modern people. And I know probably a lot of right wing dick bags aren't listening to this show. But if you are and you romanticize, like ye old the Dark aged sword shit, you're just wrong if you then

turn it to Nazi shit. Is my argument. The Roman government's gone now the Romano British people remain, and that's when they start doing really cool shit. First they have to get by some accounts invaded by modern historical understandings they just get all ethnically and culturally mixed up. Is a combination of rating and migration from the Angles and the Saxons. The origin of the Anglo Saxons or these two Germanic groups. Another term that historians generally hate is Anglo Saxons.

Saxon from England probably isn't. They're probably just wrong. And I think that's funny because then the Wasps aren't actually wasps, and the Angles and the Saxons they start invading and settling a bunch of places. The Saxons actually started arriving

before Rome even left, but it wasn't quite colonization. They would settle somewhere and the culture would shift but not in a like you're part of the Roman Empire now it wasn't like haha, the Germanic Empire has expanded the same Germanic groups are similar ones like the Franks started showing up in gaul what's now frank Sorry France, but the France comes from the word Frank, right, the Franks gave their name to France, and therefore the name of

the French language. But interesting at least to me, and possibly that's that. What else? But I find this shit fucking fascinating. French itself, the language doesn't come from the Frankish Germanic language. French the language because it's a Romance language, right, whereas English is a Germanic language. French mixes Vulgar Latin with Gaulish in its roots.

In fact, many geneticists now agree that somewhere in the region of seventy percent of the genetic makeup of the population of England can be traced back to the Paleolithic period hunter gatherer population, basically meaning that these invasions added slightly to the genetic diversity but didn't wipe anyone out.

conquered not stolen people. Have you ever seen these? I don't know how much of your time you spend countering Nazi graffiti, but there's like stickers that Nazis put up that say conquered, not stolen with a picture of America, you know, and they're like, this is just the way

it is, this is our human animal nature. No, you're just fucking Nazis right, Like, there are examples of this happening throughout time, but there's so many examples of even like fucking Viking ass raiders who kill and slave and do all kinds of horrible shit, still not genociding people to replace them, but instead eventually cohabitating the area. No modern comparisons need to be drawn about any current geopolitical.

apologize to Francesca. Anyone named Francesca. You have a pretty cool name. You can be thrown into battle and cause chaos among the enemies, which is a neat thing to be able to do. Or you can wield a Francesca

as Francesca. You have so many options. Anyway, instead of actually being a period of there is warfare and shit, like it's not like peaceful happy times, but like you actually have a period that has the origins of a lot of the better parts of Western political structure, because when peasants and shit kick roam the fuck out, they return to what can be understood as a plan or tribal structure by and large, Specifically, to quote Tony Dyer again, quote it is probable, and a lot of the probables

around the seat. He provides tons of evidence and shit that I'm just not going to get into about like where there's mounds and forests and what has been abandoned and what hasn't or whatever. But there again, not a

lot of writing during this period. It is probable that following the end of the Roman occupation of Britain, the local population regained control of their own territories, returning to a form of governance based on kindred groups working with other kindred groups, and a relationship in which local people made local decisions whilst also contributing to a wider political territory.

And so the reason I'm calling it bottom up instead of just like purely decentralized is most decisions are happening at all local level, and some decisions are happening at a larger level. Just like No, yeah, I mean I would argue that we're kind of top down.

those books as much. But you get time and time again bottom up democratic assemblies, and no one ever talks about community assemblies, and then how they start federating with one another to make larger decisions. But this happens over and over again, and that's what they were doing in

Dark Age is Britain to greater or lesser degrees. And you can trace a direct path, and I'm going to over the next however long we're continue to record, you can trace a direct path from these local assemblies to the modern parliamentary system of Western democracy, and you would form kinship groups, and those groups would form larger groups. And specifically, these groups have a lot of what we talk about a lot on the show, the commons, the thing that gets stolen from us by the enclosure, which

is in this ye oldly dark Age. I'm gonna keep calling it the dark Ages. So every historian's already mad at me, But it's just like the nice period of Gothic spookytom and the sun never came out. Well yeah, I know, Well it was England. I've only been there a couple of times. And when I like Land, you just like move through a sea of clouds and then just like are like in the soup of England when you get there. Nearly all privately owned land and resources

were owned by an entire clan. There was like private ownership of land, but it was communal private ownership of land or potentially a whole village. But everything that wasn't privately owned was the commons. Places you could graze your sheep, woods, you could go hunt and gather wooden rivers to fishing. And importantly, this structure looks a lot like what both Celtic and Germanic groups would be familiar with going back

to at least the second millennium BC. So the Britons, the Angles, and the Saxons could all be like, ah, this just makes sense. We don't have a fucking empire over us anymore, so we go back to doing this thing. And this part matters to me because again, like anytime I read about like the idyllic folk past or whatever they literally get called folk, moot the organizations they have. I worry about the kind of shit that Nazis like romanticizing.

So I want to point out again to my imaginary Nazi listeners made it this far.

traditional style of governance for their own area. But both Germanic and Celtic traditions have a bunch of laws saying that strangers are welcome to become members and like citizens and even nobility in any of these groups. So fuck you Nazus.

egalitarianism of this area. And there's this give and take between egalitarianism and a noble system that's like constantly happening.

But probably the answers that be really hot. Yeah, actually, okay, I know anthropology is really dangerous when you like compare one group to another, right, But in our episodes about the weird pirate utopias on Madagascar, it did talk about a lot of people becoming nobility not by showing up and being like haha, I'm in charge, but literally by showing up and being like I am now part of your organizational system and people being like, great, you're like

a weird foreigner. You're a noble now because you're interesting, you have different stories and shit. Yeah, and there's a lot of like chiefs marrying their daughters to foreigners and stuff like that, and so it might be through a similar way. But whenever you compare anthropologies, you're playing dangerous games. So a regional level above this hyper local level, which was the kingdom, which was not like England. Yet there's all these little kingdoms and there's general a king. I'm

not a big fan of kings. Historically, Tolkien would fucking love this shit and probably did. This is probably how he because he's like a weird anarcho monarchist, which is absolutely a contradiction in terms, but he's interesting in the strange guy. When you imagine a king of England, you're imagining wrong. When you imagine these folks at the beginning,

by the end of this era, you're thinking, right. There was a council of wise men, the Watan especially what you're running for, and they would meet at the witten Moot to advise the king and serve basically as the highest court in the kingdom, and most likely they met to elect the king. There's arguing among historians about whether or not kings during this era were elected directly by the Wittan, or the Wittan would get together to sign off on like yeah, yeah, the king's eldest son is

the heir as like a formality. But a tenth century abbot named Alfrick, which is a good name. It's got that ae at the beginning. Bring that back, don't. It's probably bad. It's everyone he probably wants to do. That is bad, but it's not boring. Alfrek wrote, quote, no man can make himself king, but the people has the choice to choose as king whom they please. But after he is consecrated as king, he then has dominion over the people and they cannot shake his yoke off their necks.

So the Witan, though, actually did depose at least two kings in the eighth century. They were like, no, you're not doing right, bias, you gotta go. The king in this period had a mandate from the people, and so there is a comparison that can be made to these early kings with a mandate from the people to a modern politician. That can't be made to a later king right only centuries later, as the Church gains more power, does the mandate explicitly come from heaven instead the earlier

kings were selected ostensibly. I'm sure that this was absolutely corrupt, and they're shitty kings everywhere. And I'm not defending monarchy, but the earlier kings were selected because people were like, we want someone to keep us safe and keep this whole place peaceful. We think this guy will do it. Over the centuries, as Tolkien predicted, power will corrupt people.

The kings will start amassing more and more power. In the earliest days of this, you don't actually owe the king anything unless he shows up, Like you just kind of most of the year, you're these autonomous villages doing your own autonomous thing, and then every now and then the king rolls through and he's like, hey, I'm the king, and people are like, huh, all right, I guess you're

in charge today. How long are you stay in You're gonna be here long And they're like, you know, they give him us taxes and shit, and it's like having really annoying in laws. Yeah, totally, the king is you're in laws. You can have some of our stuff and be in charge for a minute. I guess, because by and large, more of the power resided, even though there's the higher court. More power resided not with the wits and moot, but with the folk moot, the people's gathering,

the assembly. Basically these were at much smaller levels. I am unclear who could vote in these assemblies. The inference again not a lot of writing. The inference is that it was free men because there's slavery in this period, although most slavery in Britain during this period is not people in these villages owning people, but instead people in these villages getting stolen and sold. So hooray, and women

were likely allowed to be there but not vote. Is the best I can tell by comparing if it's analogous to an Icelandic thing that we do have more information about anyway, the other Germanic ones, these assemblies, they weren't called vocalots. They were called things, and that's where the word thing comes from. So if you're like, hey, you go into the thing, you're actually more accurate than if you're like, hey, can you hand me the thing? Because the thing was a gathering.

I appreciate it to laugh. And these were trials based on evidence, and then everyone involved, everyone who had voting power at the thing, they would all vote on the verdict, and it wasn't like innocent or guilty, but instead, okay, what do we do with this situation?

or their family hole again if you killed someone or whatever. Right, and this oath that you've sworn. Both sides of your parents' family is also on the hook for it. So you do something bad, you get fined a ton of money. Not only are you on the hook for it, but so are like all your aunts and uncles and your parents, and so they're all mad as shit at you. And so that's kind of part of how it handles making people be better, is you don't want to drag your

entire family into this. Yeah, such oaths were not taken lightly. At the beginning of this Everyone's a Pagan. By the end of this, everyone's a Christian. Everyone involved takes oaths very seriously. To quote the historian hr Loin quote, a freeman in one of our early territorial kingdoms still bore the characteristics of a free member of a tribe. He was oath worthy and weapon worthy, a person of repute, possessed of a free kindred, and capable of playing a

full part in the army in the courts. Such a part involved much more active self help than would have been considered proper or seemly in a later age. He fulfilled his duties without an elaborate hierarchy or officialdom to sustain him and they actually started with the folk moots and then developed the Witten moot, the bigger one. Well actually I don't know if it's like physically bigger, but

the bigger region one. And this is the fucking origin of the idea of parliament for England, and therefore everywhere that England colonized and sent all of its good and bad ideas to people. Have it backwards. There wasn't autocracy, and then slowly people added layers of democracy. It was that they added layers of hierarchy to their democracy in an effort to make larger scale decisions, probably for good reasons, but power corrupts and sla The kings centralize their authority,

usually through the need to raise and maintain militaries. However, the power that has corrupted us is the power that could be available to you through purchasing the goods and services that support this show. Because that's how we all got where we are today, was doing whatever the next ad tells us to do. Hi, Margaret Kiljoy, here boy. The world sure is a mess right now?

Once again, that sah thche fuc k up. Because you can't talk yourself out of custody, but you can talk yourself into a conviction.

serious legal problems. The concept of not talking to cops does not provide legal advice, and the foregoing statements are for informational purposes only. If you have specific legal questions, consult an attorney.

read about things in books whenever possible. But then I like books have like just to tell you how the sausage is made of the historical research I do for the show, Dear Listener, the books will have the more in depth information and often the like more complicated takes, but because they're just literally older, like because I can't read a book that was written yesterday, I can. Yeah, no, I know it is because you're perfect, which is honestly impressive that you're able to do that.

fucking hard to google. I'm like, but why isn't there more readily available information about this thing that happened in one part of England and seven hundreds hyper fixations.

everything is named sure, you know, like Hampshire whatever. I don't know the names of the counties in England. With the rise of the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, shit started getting more formalized and more hierarchy was everywhere, and I don't know how to pronounce hierarchy. I apparently the king went from the person that all the wise people agree should probably be in charge of keeping the peace to kings are chosen by God to make Pagans

into Christians. And this is where the mandate of heaven comes in. And the job isn't Yeah, different fucking mandates. People don't talk about mandates enough. Like the idea of like being like we elected politician to do this thing on our behalf, you know, it is not we don't elect fucking kings. Well they did, but that also wasn't great, right we elect saying like, hey, we think you'll help to get universal health care. Please go do that, you know.

they started for the right reasons. Like, this is tiring and we're two months in and it's very fun and I've met so many cool people, and it's like one of the most fulfilling things I've ever done. But like, first off, you know, the country, the constitution are you know, legal systems should be dynamic and fluid, just like the world.

But also like doing this for a really long time, like a really long time and doing it right that has to be like emotionally exhausting, because like empathy is a muscle that you flex and when you're representing like five hundred and seven hundred thousand people, yeah, you got to flex it a lot.

the same thing. It's messy and it's worth using every tool and toolbox to try and make the world a better place. And so so kings mandate to heaven and the kings start meeting out more and metting out, I don't know, giving more shit to certain people. And they're like, oh, you can collect taxes in the following area and own the following chunk of everything, like the commons. It's not the commons now. You can keep it as the Commons if you want, but it's your shit, right folk land.

The commons started to become bookland, private land. It basically made lots of little kings, people who could go and take shit from the peasants and tell them what to do. This is the rise of the nobility, which was the king taking a direct note out of the Catholic Church's book. This land allocation wasn't under control of local councils. So the enclosure of the commons, which later led to capitalism,

was the death of this period of democracy. And to me that's an important point because most tellings of the story of democracy in Western Europe talk about it starting with the rich people. And I want to say capitalism was the death of democracy or the thing later built to capitalism. And for anyone who's listening, when I say capitalism, I don't mean the idea of buying and selling everything. We don't live in a binary world where you either

of the fucking USSR or the USA. Capitalism whatever, capitalism is a specific economic system, and it can be questioned. The legal system becomes much more strictly formalized. Common law basically means law that's built up by precedent rather than the legislation. Legislation starts becoming more common and instead of compensating victims, criminal justice moved to become more punitive. Suddenly

way more shit had the death penalty. I did while like, I was like reading this glowing thing about Anglo Saxon democracy, and I was like, was this the downside here? And so I read a lot more about slavery. And one of the things that could happen is if you owe someone a lot of money, you basically saw yourself and the like ostensibly non punitive system led to sometimes the

punitive thing of people being owned by people. And yeah, all the people who have been given all this fucking land and the right to tax people, the nobles in the church got wealthy as shit. The next nail in the folk coffin was the Viking invasions of the nine hundreds, which led to a massive restructuring of England to support

the military to defend against the raiders. To quote Tony Dyer again quote, the peasant's status began to change from that of a free farmer to that of a subject tenant with significant ongoing obligations of rent and service to his lord. And then the final nail didn't come from within England, though England was clearly moving in a more autocratic direction with its monarchy. The final nail was the

Norman conquest of ten sixty six. Normandy is part of the northwest of France and in the tenth century some Vikings settled there and then christianized, and then in ten sixty six a fuck ton of them invaded England, the Normans, and they were successful and brutal, and they built pasty.

but like conquer the economy. There's a book called the Domesday Book, and it's an eleventh century record book of like taxes and shit. It's just like who owns what, and essentially everyone with money was Norman not English, like basically like I think ninety percent of landed people were the Norman invaders. They close a lot of the commons, they enforced the law brutally, and it's Norman rule that becomes the baseline authoritarianism that people, largely rich people, begin

to rebel against. And so the rich didn't event democracy, they claimed it from the peasantry. That's my thesis, and that when people one writes it wasn't for the first time, it was drawing on something older, something ancient. So when we demand habeas corpus. When we demand that we have a fair system of justice and democracy, we are drawing on something that has existed all over the fucking world that literally predates civilization. And I promise I'll tell you

about this guy, Tony Dyer. Oh yeah, I haven't had any named like cool people this whole fucking episode the historian. I was like, what's this guy up to now? And so I googled them, and there's a fair number of people named Tony Dyer. But his pamphlet was put out by the Bristol Radical Pamphleteers or something like that, And so I was searching Tony Dyer Bristol and I found that he is a Green Party politician who is currently in charge of the city of Bristol, a city of

half a million people. He's not the mayor because the city got rid of the position of mayor. He is the leader of the city council. Now that there is no mayor, the entire city council makes decisions instead.

But the Green led city council there has been focusing on removing car infrastructure, improving walking and cycling infrastructure. Some of the interview questions I found with him people being like why do you hate cars? I like my car, you know, and his answers are like, well, actually, you know, we save lives this way and it's better and whatever, and like hey, you're.

every all over the world. There's people who have democratic traditions that they're drawing on right, and some of them are similar to this and some of them aren't. But unfortunately England then went on to you know, famously draw random lines across the map that caused a huge chunk of all the conflicts that are happening today.

It's just it's really fascinating to see how people handle things, and especially in a system where you're not constantly living under fear of having your life ruined by one thing or another, whether that's Stephen Miller coming to arrest you for having darker skin, or you know, crushing debt or whatever else it may be. It's just really interesting to see how different communities can work together and create these systems. And I seriously had no idea about any of those.

I haven't seen anyone attacking wildly on the internet randomly at all times.

as many lives as we can along the way. So if you've got a few bucks to spare, consider chipping in at Catfreillinois dot com. And if you have some skills or I've thought, why don't politicians do this? Like we want to get creative, we want to get weird. So come volunteer, hang out on the discord and as always, listened to this podcast.

the enemy. What I try to do is be like, is this person trying to enact systems that kill me and or everyone that I care about and or other people that I've never met that still shouldn't get murdered. And if the answer is no, they're probably not my enemy, and I probably want I'm in conflict with them, rather than trying to find all the ways that they're wrong, try to find common ground.