St Scholastica Day Riot
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> Violent disagreements between townspeople and students had arisen several times previously, and 12 of the 29 coroners' courts held in Oxford between 1297 and 1322 concerned murders by students. The University of Cambridge was established in 1209 by scholars who left Oxford following the lynching of two students by the town's citizens.
Man, college towns used to be so much more violent!
I never knew about the connection between a saint and the word/concept of scholastics, nor that a university as notable as Cambridge was started because the locals lynched students. That's pretty cool, TIL!
Edit: Sidenote, why does the graduation ceremony at Cambridge look like they're going to drown a witch? [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown#/media/File:Punt...
> The gown also served as a social symbol, as it was impractical for physical manual work.
The gowns symbolize that graduates are now above physical manual labor and are destined for greater things (Starbucks barista)
Maybe ski gloves or a sling or maybe a respirator with sunglasses.
It's amazing, when you read the history, how much of today's discourse about the value of a university education, the conduct of students, and the antagonism between university faculty and intellectuals who exist outside the walls of the university is a replay of stuff that happened in the 14th century and every century in between.
Oxbridge are not called "the dreaming spires" for nothing; there's a timelessness to the place that all the antique surroundings and rituals accentuate. The 20th century has largely got rid of formalwear as an important concept, but (at least while I was there) the gown wasn't just for graduation, it was for formal dinners, which would be held on various occasions or up to several times a week in the larger colleges for the sake of having a nice dinner.
I was expecting they riot on diversity grounds, not for such prosaic reasons. Those ancient students were so little politically and morally evolved!
By 1988 this had diminished to resentful grumbling from Magdalene.
(I'm not sure if there's even a UK counterpart to "absurdly progressive US university that gets mentioned by conservative culture war campaigners" all the time?)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot
It's hard for people today to understand just how sudden, frequent and destructive mass violence was in the past. Up to our very recent history. As recently as the 70s there were fairly regular riots in America that would make most of what you saw in 2020 look pretty pedestrian.
I don’t see any deaths listed for the Straw Hat Riot, I don’t see any mention of lootings or arson either. On the other hand, I was in Seattle during the worst of the 2020 riots, I’d never seen such anger and destruction in my life.
Try making this comment again without using the R word. Are you of the opinion that the protests in Seattle are immune from criticism? I had a friend who closed her store after it was looted twice. Where does she fit into your distressingly simple model?
I was living next to CHOP during the whole ordeal. If you don’t have on the ground experience, I genuinely don’t think your opinion is worth anything here, I’m sorry.
> policing in America is hugely broken and there are well-documented racial elements to that failure,
vs
> it spread due to men wearing straw hats past the unofficial date that was deemed socially acceptable,
that made your comparison a bit triggering, and even if you did not mean it, not totally incomprehensible?
Those two also fail to compare in other dimensions, e.g. size, so not sure if worth it at all..
Regardless of how one feels about the motives or the methods, I think it's safe to say it was a fairly watershed moment for the US whose importance shouldn't be downplayed.
There is a narrative that developed about the 2020 protests that they were categorically different from the America's past because some of them spilled over into violent episodes. The talk was borderline existential regarding them as something new in American society. They were frequently unfavorably compared to the "peaceful" civil rights protests of the 60s.
But those protests were only peaceful in the small cherry-picked set that progressive historians and non-violence aligned activists have succeeded in turning into the canonical story of America. The civil rights movement in fact did have episodes of ambiguous violence. Critics at the time cited these incidents as reasons the protests should stop or wait. King references these critics directly in the Letter from the Birmingham Jail. It's barely buried history.
What's more, the protests occured amongst a back drop of constant deadly violence and struggle over all kinds of grievance and issues. Forget the risk of an antifa punching you in the jaw. There were people with deadly weapons, ready to do deadly violence or at least advocating it. From The Weather Underground to The Black Panthers to MOVE to biker gangs and on.
But the popular narrative wishes to ignor all this. How many times during 202 did I hear some boomer say, "look what we got done with civil rights without violence." But they have imbibed the Forest Gumpification of history. This myth is used to create an impossible standard, according to which, any incidental violence immediately discredits change.
I point to The Straw Hats because the are the most blatant tell to the law that America has a 'peaceful' past. That people are now somehow more unreasonable, easily triggered to violence and with thinner justification for their demands.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_u...
> this was the site of the swindlestock tavern 1250–1709 (http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central...)
> swindler (n.) 1774 (https://www.etymonline.com/word/swindler)
Hmmm
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_...
which the OED gives as
"To waste away, languish; to dwindle, decrease; to vanish, disappear."
and then Swindle Stock would be the site of a place of punishment - stocks on which people are put to waste away and diminish.
Of course, language being plastic, it might also be the pub in which farm workers drank after listening to the sound of Sycthes while cutting sheaves to Stuck (or Stock) (placed uprtight to air and dry); but that's a stretch.
I drank with the harvesters, who sang me songs about rural life, such as—‘Sitting in the swale; and listening to the swindle of the flail, as it sounds dub-a-dub on the corn, from the neighbouring barn.’
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwinden#German
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/svinde#Danish
A modern example is "oxygen depletion" or "hypoxia" in English/Latin which, in Danish, is called "iltsvind" ("ilt" = oxygen, "svind" = depletion):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(environmental)
https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iltsvind
It is indeed related to swindle/svindle/schwindeln but I don't know when the two words "diverged": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwindeln#German
If you go back far enough, swind/svind/schwinden may also share a common ancestor with "dwindle": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
As I can no longer edit my comment above I should mention that the original text by Bede was written by him in Latin circa AD 731, but the O.E.D. references version translated in early | middle English by other authors in the centuries that followed.
It's from one of those that the OED quotes the first written use of Swind | Swynde in <cough> "English" </cough>.
( not so much a language as a kitchen sink full of dregs )
We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking.
Heck even when we get history and information from the people at the time sometimes it is confusing. The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.
That's interesting, because I see Cavaliers vs Roundheads as the prototypical debate about the nature of Western culture that we are still having today.
One of my favourite history series was HBO's Rome because it tackled this directly.
Sure, you have all the important aristocratic characters, but you also have all the no-name soldiers, slaves, and Roman citizens.
At one point, a legionnaire gets into a bar fight with some Romans. The next day, that same legionnaire is escorting Marc Anthony and they get attacked by an angry mob. Marc Anthony interprets it as an attack on himself, but the mob was actually just pissed at the one legionnaire from the bar fight the night before and forces the group to retreat.
The whole thing is interpreted by the aristocrats as an attack by the Pompeiian mobs on tribune Marc Anthony. This in turn, prevented Marc Anthony from exercising his office, and the whole thing snow balls into Caesar being forced to cross the Rubicon.
Entire history potentially made, because a legionnaire got into a bar fight. Now this is fiction, but it's incredible to think how many stories like this must exist outside of our records.
Yes, that's a big problem. That a big part of why finding Pompeii was important: the volcanic eruption preserved everything, including daily life and random graffiti.
In a more general sense, that's also why archaeologists love digging up trash dumps. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
> Montaillou examines the lives and beliefs of the population of Montaillou, a small village in the Pyrenees with only around 250 inhabitants, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. It is largely based on the Fournier Register, a set of records from the Inquisition which investigated and attempted to suppress the spread of Catharism in the Ariège region from 1318 to 1325, during the reigns of Philip V "the Tall" and Charles IV "the Fair".
This is 6 centuries ago.. Amazing
That is quite an interesting tidbit
If the local college kids here in upstate New York complained of the quality of the wine in my local tavern, I'd definitely... *checks notes* incite the local townsfolk to extrajudicialy kill 63 of their campus colleagues.
Maybe they were just a few centuries off...
(I'd stumbled across the SSDR a few years back, it's a fascinating bit of academic & cultural history.)
Oxford scholars were literally above the law, and used their protected status to abuse and demean the townspeople, up to and including the mayor.
After the riot, the king cracked down and reasserted the arrangement, which apparently continued in some forms for another 500 years.