Following the defeat of their king, Harold Godwinson, by the ruthless and cruel William of Normandy, the English people had to endure seeing their thanes and earls dispossessed, their monasteries and churches pillaged, their women ravished and their crops burned, their lands given to thuggish Normans speaking a babble of bastardized French.
Worst of all, they lost their common laws and understandings, under which everyone had had a voice and all had rights under the law. Those rights weren't equal rights, to be sure: that came later. Anglo-Saxon England was on the right path, though, and law was understood to stand above brute power.
There were no castles in England before the Normans came. There was no need for them: the English got on sufficiently well with each other. Not perfectly well, but sufficiently well that the mighty had no need to wall themselves off from the humble.
It's a small consolation, although a melancholy one, to be reminded that the English of those days at least had the guts to resist the alien invasion. They lost the battle, but they had stood and fought. Contrast that with their descendants of today, "A sneaking poor Race, half begotten and Tame."
Eleven items! — go here to listen or download.
01m39s — A play for the Old Maid Vote. (Exploring the national psyche.)
08m16s — The horndog double standard. (What do women want?)
16m02s — The untouchable Clintons. (Let Virgil explain.)
22m44s — Trump vs. the GOP. (Dinner with the Bushes.)
30m53s — Debate and speech. (Our man on an upward trajectory.)
33m55s — Dylan’s Nobel Prize. (It may be my fault.)
37m39s — King Bhumibol, RIP. (He was the case forconstitutional monarchy.)
43m45s — The poll of all fears. (What scares us most?)
46m52s — My most trusted source. (Mad magazine does the election campaign.)
49m01s — England falls to barbarian horde. (1066 and all that.)
51m44s — Signoff. (Some cultural appropriation.)
