Why the Egyptian and Tunisian Armies Didn’t Shoot, and Why the Libyan Army Did

The question is, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protesters, when the Libyan military did?

Someone IM'd me that question earlier today, in idle conversation.

There are few more embarrassing things that can happen to someone at my time of life (age 32) than suddenly to come out of a fugue and realize that your music playlist has run out of tunes, the tea's untouched but gone dead cold, your Firefox has about fifty open tabs, it's 11 PM and you somehow lost five hours out of your life.

Then you gaze blearily at your computer screen and realize that you've written a six-page analysis of a problem in response to a question a friend of yours IM'd you as a digression from a conversation about chemical vapor intrusion, muffins, and Pearl Jam.

Well, that's what happened to me, and this is the result.

The nations of the Middle East are shaking on their foundations these days. A dozen nations have seen massive public protests, Tunisia and Egypt have had long-term rulers displaced by popular discontent, and a third nation, Libya, is racked by a nascent civil war between the regime and its popular opposition.

One of the most singular features of the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions is the lack of military force. In the case of Egypt, the turning point in the protests was when the Egyptian military refused to take sides in the confrontation between the protestors and the Mubarak government, and indeed soon found itself refereeing between the two parties. In Tunisia, the turning point came when General Rachid Ammar, Chief of Staff of the Tunisian armed forces, refused a presidential order to fire on the crowds; within days the military had turned entirely against the Ben Ali government. In Libya, meanwhile, Muammar Gaddafi’s army showed no hesitation in attacking the protestors with aircraft and heavy artillery.

The question is, then, why did the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries refuse to take action against the protestors, when the Libyan military did? It is a complex question, and is directly tied to the sort of government a state has (one of several shades of authoritarianism), and the role of the military within that state.

The origins of this political and military idiom in the modern Middle East lie in the early 20^th Century. Most of the post-colonial nations of the Middle East, such as Syria, Libya, and Iraq, were essentially created by lines drawn across maps of the former Ottoman Empire between 1910 and 1920. As historians, political scientists, and others have noted on innumerable occasions, the colonial powers famously ignored historic affinities or local conditions when creating new kingdoms for their clients to rule—Jordan, for example, was created essentially as a job-well-done reward for a younger son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, T.E. Lawrence’s ally from the desert campaigns, and who ruled Arabia until he was displaced by the al-Saud tribe in 1924. The Sharif’s other son became the first king of Iraq.

The results were, in some cases, states that could never have naturally emerged as true nations—Iraq in particular is a Frankenstein, comprised of three former Ottoman provinces stitched together and including a Kurdish-dominated north, an ethnically-distinct Shi’ite south, and a Sunni Arab area around Baghdad, with a majority-Shi’ite population until recently ruled over by Sunni Arabs who belonged to the old pan-Arab nationalist Ba’ath party that emerged as a regional movement in the 1950s, an organization that many fundamentalist Muslim groups consider to be an abomination all of its own for its short-lived attempts at secularizing, socializing, and modernizing Arab society during the 1950s and 1960s.

Syria is perhaps less extreme and certainly less ethnically diverse, but originated in much the same manner. Syria is to this day dominated by the al-Assad family (the late Hafez and the ruling Bashar, pere et fils), whose tribe belongs to the minority Alawi branch of Islam that many Sunnis and Shi’ites consider to be heretical. The al-Assad regime is also the last remnant of the Ba’ath Party.

Under the circumstances—extreme poverty, sudden independence, domestic turmoil, endless economic troubles, the pressure-cooker political climate of the Cold War, and the decades-long vendetta of the Arab/Israeli conflict-- virtually all of the countries in the Middle East defaulted to autocratic authoritarian governments—despots, tyrants, and kings in all but name.

One of the characteristic features of autocratic authoritarian regimes in the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries is a direct control by the ruler of at least part of the nation’s military force. The last thing any tyrant wants is a locus of power or influence other than his own self, and a unified and professional military would be exactly that. More particularly, no ruler could stay on his throne if an independent military wanted him deposed.

In the military context, the result was that if a particular ruler, family, or political party wanted to keep control over a diverse and fractious population, it had to have at its disposal a private army—the inner circle-- that could be relied upon in situations for which the regular army might not be reliable. These situations could include managing riots, staving off military coups, crushing religious unrest, control over weapons of mass destruction, and the like.

Most of the dictatorships produced by the 20^th Century therefore divided their militaries up into a series parts, typically including a small, well-equipped elite (the inner circle) personally loyal to the dictator and often drawn from the same narrow tribal, ethnic, political, or religious group, and a larger ‘regular’ army (the outer circle) of comparatively poor quality and drawn from the general population. Like the Praetorian Guard of imperial Rome, the actual quality of the inner-circle units can, of course, range from competent fighting men to parade-ground paper tigers and palace poodles incapable of managing anything more than terrifying unarmed villagers.

Inner-circle units typically get better pay, better training, and better equipment, and frequently have much higher proportions of long-service professionals as compared to conscripts. In open warfare, such as the 1991 Gulf War, they are kept in reserve, hoarded like a poker player’s blue chips, avoiding casualties while ready either to exploit a victory or to protect the regime in case of defeat.

Domestic prestige is also a significant factor—inner-circle units typically have resonant titles such as the Presidential Guard, Republican Guard, Revolutionary Guard, or Special Forces to indicate their high status, and take pride of place in parades and public ceremonies. These inner-circle units are also often closely tied to a dictator’s cult of personality, which in cases such as Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi can reach delusions of grandeur on a messianic scale.

As a quick explanation of terminology, in Western parlance the term ‘special forces’ usually refers to elite commando-style units such as the American Delta Force or the British SAS. In Soviet-influenced forces such as the Iraqi and Libyan militaries, however, the term generally denotes elite inner-circle conventional military units that can be used for internal security and keeping control over less-dependable outer-circle units.

These elite units are usually closely tied to the regime’s secret police and intelligence organizations (whether they are the Gestapo, NKVD, or Mukhabarat), the better to perform their domestic repression roles. For example, consider the Third Reich’s SS organization, which included the Reich’s entire internal security apparatus as well as a military wing that operated in parallel with the regular German army, or the USSR’s ‘internal troops’ fielded by the NKVD during Stalin’s regime, who operated behind the Red Army units (proverbially with bayonets leveled to keep the soldiers marching forwards). In some cases, such as the Libyan and Iraqi armies, the inner-circle units had exclusive control over the arsenals and ammunition supplies, and disarmed their outer-circle counterparts before parades lest some soldier take a potshot at the dictator.

Inner-circle units are also usually tied directly to the what might be termed the dictator’s “royal family,” a sprawling organization that is equal parts tribe, political machine, and economic venture, in which ‘family’ members provide inner-circle military manpower and political support in exchange for a chance to share in the oil revenues or some other economic banquet. Examples include the al-Assad clan in Syria, Saddam Hussein’s sprawling affinity in Iraq, or Muammar Gaddafi’s Gaddafa tribe in Libya. Similar preferences for having members of the royal family or at least the royal tribe in command positions prevails in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain, Abu-Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, and Jordan.

It is no coincidence that all of the major military units garrisoned around Syria’s capitol, Damascus, are commanded by members of the Assad family, or that the elite Defense Companies that serve as bodyguards and political muscle for the regime are composed mostly of Alawi Muslims from the same district as the al-Assads. Most telling of all, when Hafez al-Assad leveled much of the Syrian city of Hama in 1982 in response to religious upheaval, the man he put in charge of the job was none other than his brother Rifaat al-Assad, head of the internal security forces. Sadly, Rifaat ultimately betrayed his brother’s trust with an attempted coup in 1983, and has spent the most of the subsequent years in genteel exile.

Egypt, by contrast, is relatively unusual in that the army (or at least, the officer class) is one of the more modern, egalitarian, and progressive elements in Egyptian society. There are no true inner-circle units, although the army is the tenth largest in the world. In addition, most of the officers in the upper echelons have attended the reputable Egyptian Military Academy, as well as college or professional schools in Europe or the United States. This background gave the officer class a different perspective on the role of the military in society, albeit one in which the military is loyal primarily to itself, rather than to the national leadership, and sees itself as a corrective mechanism for keeping the country on-track. In conjunction with the reluctance of conscripts to shoot civilians who may well be friends, neighbors, and relatives, this lack of an immediate connection to the Mubarak government, and the interest in reining in a government that fails or goes too far, is one of the reason the Egyptian army largely stayed out of the recent street unrest, forcing the Mubarak regime to depend on the police and hired thugs.

This was not always the case, however, as for many years the Egyptian military was virtually a caricature of the political army, rife with plots and coup attempts. Indeed modern Egypt’s history essentially began when a military cabal known as the Free Officers overthrew King Farouk in 1952 and installed first Muhammad Naguib and then Gamal Abdel Nasser as head of state. Nasser’s successor and Mubarak’s immediate predecessor, Anwar Sadat (himself one of the Free Officers), was assassinated by a similar military cabal composed of fundamentalist Muslim officers. The military’s shift away from it’s post-colonial and Soviet-influenced political role and into a western-style professional model is, ironically, one of the Mubarak government’s most significant achievements in Egypt’s domestic politics. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, an implicitly political committee of senior commanders, had not actually met for over thirty years before convening in January 2011 to temporarily assume power after the resignation of President Mubarak.

Egypt’s Central Security Forces, a paramilitary force used for domestic security and similar roles, but unlike inner-circle units in other nations the CSF is comprised primarily of poorly-paid conscripts rather than favored praetorians, and had no direct ties to Mubarak. Mubarak increased the number of CSF personnel to 100,000 in the early 1980s in an attempt to balance the military’s influence at the time, but met with little success. One of the most significant episodes in military unrest under Mubarak’s rule was a 1986 mutiny by several thousand CSF troops in response to a rumor that their terms of conscript service were being extended.

Tunisia, like Egypt, has a professional and historically apolitical military that was not directly under the control of President Ben Ali’s regime. Unlike Egypt, however, the small (approximately 35,000-man) Tunisian military has never fought in a war, and has since the 1960s spent most of its time doing peacekeeping and humanitarian work.

If that is why the Egyptian and Tunisian militaries stayed out of the recent turmoil, consider the other extreme.

The late Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime was a rather extreme example of the cult of personality and extreme paranoia in military organization, but the Iraqi situation illustrates the inner circle/outer circle dichotomy. The “outer circle” Iraqi armed forces under Hussein’s regime included the Iraqi armed forces into the regular Iraqi army (draftees little better than cannon fodder), the more professional Republican Guard, and the Air Force, which was of a status approximately equal to the Republican Guard.

The ‘inner circle’ in 2003 included several corps of elite bodyguards and special forces, including the 12,000-man Special Republican Guard or ‘Golden Division.” Augmenting this in 2003 were the paramilitary Fedayeen Saddam organization mustering up to 30,000 men and an irregular corps of ‘foreign fighter’ volunteers and mercenaries.

Hussein’s inner-circle units drew heavily on manpower sources with a personal affinity to Hussein and his family, including the al-Tikriti tribe, the Ba’ath political party, and to a lesser extent the general Sunni Muslim population of central Iraq.

The several divisions of the Republican Guard had been an vaunted inner-circle unit, reporting directly to Hussein himself rather than to the army general staff. Following its near-destruction in the 1991 Gulf War, however, it lost most of its prestige and was essentially replaced at the dinner table by new, smaller elite units. A previous paramilitary organization, the Popular Army of Iraq, was essentially a Ba’ath party militia; it numbered over half a million men at its peak in the late 1970, but declined rapidly in prestige after it suffered heavy casualties during the Iran-Iraq war and was dissolved in 1991.

The fate of the Iraqi army during the 2003 invasion by the United States and its allies is well-known. The regular army and most of the Republican Guard disintegrated, the Air Force was destroyed on the ground, and most of the inner-circle units broke up and went underground to carry out guerilla attacks, as Iraq descended into an ethnic and religious civil war that lasted several years, with the US-led occupying forces caught in the middle while trying to restore order.

Libya did not suffer from the same ethnic, religious, and economic strains as Iraq—the country’s population is far smaller than Iraq’s, homogenously Sunni Muslim, and overwhelmingly concentrated in cities along the Mediterranean coast. While still poor by western standards, the Libyan GDP and standards of living are significantly better than those in Hussein’s Iraq. The principal ethnic tension is Gaddafi’s obsessive hatred of the Berber tribal groups, which is apparently not shared by the general population. Rather than any ethnic, or religious tensions, as were the case in Iraq, the primary driver behind the popular uprising against Gaddafi is an overwhelming disgust at the continuously erratic, corrupt, and tyrannical behavior of his regime. Gaddafi’s loyalists are drawn primarily from his own Gaddadfa tribe, other residents of the coastal Syrte district where most of the Gaddafa live, or other persons personally loyal to the regime.

Though Gaddafi spent lavishly on sponsoring foreign terrorist organizations, on attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and in acquiring vast quantities of conventional weapons from the USSR, his regime essentially starved the 50,000-strong regular military of men, money, ammunition, and equipment. Much of the equipment purchased from the USSR simply sat in warehouses unused, or was given away to militias and terrorist organization. The result was a poorly-motivated and underequipped force, half the strength of which were draftees, that failed on just about every occasion that it saw action, and which was quite literally decimated—suffering losses of up to 10% of its total manpower-- during the so-called “Toyota War” in Chad during the 1980s.

The Libyan Air Force was higher in prestige than the army until the late 1980s; Gaddafi spent lavishly on aircraft, and indeed the Air Force had far more aircraft than it had trained pilots or ground crew to operate them. When the humiliating defeats inflicted by the US during the Gulf of Sidra encounters and the 1986 Operation El Dorado Canyon made Libya a military laughingstock, however, Gaddafi appears to have essentially turned his back on the Air Force and let it decline.

The real muscle behind Gaddafi’s regime over the last forty years has been his intelligence and secret police organization, who usually exercised power by ‘disappearing’ or assassinating foreign or domestic critics rather than by brute force. Loyal inner-circle military units included the 3,000-strong Revolutionary Guard Corps drawn from Gaddafi’s own tribe, and the elite “Khamis Brigade” commanded by Gaddafi’s youngest son.

These inner-circle units are augmented by Gaddafi’s intelligence organization, his secret police, and the ‘Revolutionary Committees,’ which are in reality equal parts party brownshirts, local government councils, political commissars and paramilitary militia. The Revolutionary Committees also theoretically served as a leadership cadre for the People’s Militia, an unorganized force composed of anyone eligible for military service, but which existed largely on paper.

Gaddafi also maintains for his immediate personal protection a 40-strong “Amazonian Guard,” comprised entirely of handpicked women who allegedly must be virgins, as well as several other units of bodyguards. It is unclear as to whether Gaddafi had foreign mercenaries on the payroll in Libya before the outbreak of the ongoing revolt on February 15, but he certainly began importing as many as he could find as the revolt gained headway.

From 1972 to 1987, Gaddafi’s regime also maintained the Islamic Legion, a corps of foreign volunteers mostly from sub-Saharan Africa, the membership of which included Arab supremacists, soldiers of fortune, and migrant workers who had been dragooned into military service. This ‘foreign legion’ conducted a number of operations in Uganda, Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria, but was only deployed in strength in Chad, where it suffered a number of severe defeats and essentially disintegrated. Several leaders of the Janjaweed militias terrorizing the Sudan are veterans of Gaddafi’s Legion.

The actual state of affairs in Libya is confused. Some of Gaddafi’s troops willingly fired on the protestors at the outset of the February protests, and in fact the Libyan army has a long history of using violence on protestors. This time, however, many regular army units reportedly mutinied or disintegrated as the protests gained momentum and accelerated into open rebellion and civil war, leaving Gaddafi to throw open his arsenals to criminals, prisoners, and anyone willing to bear arms. The Air Force is essentially split—while much of the force has turned against the Gaddafi regime, including several pilots who flew to Malta or ditched in the Mediterranean rather than bomb the protestors, some squadrons appear to have remained loyal to the regime and continue to launch sporadic airstrikes.

In a stellar example of how something old can become new again, the examples of Iraq and Libya bear a close resemblance to the common state of affairs under the later Abbasid Caliphate (approximately 850-1258 CE). As the Abbasid caliphate’s central authority weakened after the death of the great Harun Al-Rashid, provincial lords attempted to increase their own power by acquiring corps of foreign soldiers to use as bodyguards and to keep restless populations and unreliable local troops in check.

These soldiers, variously referred to as mamluks, ghilman, or saqaliba, and their later cousins the Janissaries of the Ottoman Empire, were long considered to be more trustworthy than native troops. Many were also either technically slaves, owned by their lord, or mawla, free clients with specific reciprocal obligations to their lord, and as such considered part of his extended family, with all the social, political, and economic advantages that included. Without other tribal or familial attachments, they were expected to be more loyal to the ruler alone, and less prone to mutiny, treachery, and court intrigue.

These initially small units increased as their usefulness became clear—the Caliph al-Mu'tasim, second son of Harun al-Rashid, enlarged his mamluk units from a 4,000-man palace guard to a 70,000-strong private army during his reign. This was due in large part to Mu’tasim’s weakening control over the provincial emirs who had historically provided most of the Caliphate’s troops.

In the end, however, the mamluks’ loyalty to a specific ruler usually decreased as their numbers and prestige increased. The men who were supposed to be without faction became a faction of their own, and by the late 900s corps of mamluks were frequently capable of deposing a ruler and replacing him with one the erstwhile ‘bodyguards’ controlled. This situation devolved until much of the modern Middle East was ruled by dynasties of Turkish sultans whose ancestors had been bodyguards of an Arab lord, and a “Mamluk Sultanate” ruled Egypt for nearly three centuries until it was absorbed by the Ottoman Empire.

As of February 2011, there are no democracies in the Arab world. Tunisia and Egypt are on the road towards democracy, but they are not there yet. The protests continue in other countries, and Gaddafi is obviously on his last legs. The future is uncertain—while relatively moderate rulers such as King Abdullah of Jordan offer political concessions rather than sending in the army, it is hard to imagine Bashar al-Assad meeting his opponents with anything other than force, as his father and uncle did at Hama. If democracy is to emerge, however, the praetorians and secret police must be dispensed with.

A couple of book reviews

This is a short review of Susan Ronald’s The Pirate Queen: Queen Elizabeth I, Her Pirate Adventurers, and the Dawn of Empire, and John Nolan’s Sir John Norrys and the Elizabethan Military World. Since I have never mastered the ability to write anything short, I will throw in some additional observations.


The Pirate Queen is a generally enjoyable and accessible discussion of Elizabeth I and her pet “sea dogs”- Drake, Frobisher, Raleigh, and the like.


I found the most interesting part of the book to be the first few chapters, which present an incisive examination of the relationship between the queen and her adventurers.


Most of Elizabeth’s adventurers were younger sons or the peerage or gentry, men raised with expectations of a certain quality of life, but who would not ordinarily inherit the familial wealth to maintain it. They had to earn it, as in past centuries their ancestors had done by going off on Crusade, plundering foreign lands as mercenaries, or attempting to carve holdings out of the Irish chaos. Is for this reason that Elizabeth’s adventurers generally “were not the stuff of ordinary merchant stock…..men who thirsted for knowledge, had tremendous egos, were desperate to make their fortunes, had an acute business sense, and possessed more than a fair portion of intelligence and cunning.” (17)


As Ronald puts it:


“If a lucky adventurer had a cunning plan to find treasure that mitigated the risk to the crown, then royal patronage would not be far behind. However, before the queen would commit herself or her ships to dangerous and costly overseas expeditions, she demanded that her men put their own personal fortunes alongside hers at the realm’s disposal for most voyages seeking treasure.” (22)


Elizabeth managed, in a sense, to privatize her naval war against Spain by combining the twin incentives of plunder and royal favor. Royal favor could bring opportunities for plunder—command of a ship, army, or fleet, a government sinecure, or a position in Ireland-- and plunder itself could buy royal favor. After all, the Crown got a cut of every expedition’s profits, and the bigger the booty, the bigger her cut.


There was thus a very fine line between public service and private ambition, since the one could be the means to satisfying the other. This was by no means limited to the adventurers—even members of what passed for the regular civil service indulged in wanton corruption and considered it a prerequisite of the job. Competition for such gleanings of office was fierce, and spawned countless bitter rivalries that spilled over into national policy based on who was more popular at court at a given time—for example, stripping troops from Sir John Norreys’ army in Brittany and sending them to the Earl of Essex’s in Normandy (see below).


The remainder of the book consists primarily of potted histories of the various sea dogs’ adventures, ranging from bloody raids on all things Spanish to the more epic achievements—Drake’s three-year circumnavigation of the globe, Raleigh’s failed colonies at Roanoke, the Armada, and the like. Although most of them are interesting, particularly the less commonly-known ventures such as the “English Armada” of 1589, the sequential recounting of these leaves something to be desired, as after the fourth or fifth voyage to the Caribbean to plunder galleons, the narrative becomes rather repetitive.


For those with a view of early modern history that extends beyond PBS reruns, Elizabeth is not an easy monarch to like. Even by the admittedly low and Machiavellian standards of her time she was inconstant, capricious, paranoid, easily taken in by her favorites such as the Earl of Essex, vindictive, displayed an exasperating unwillingness to commit to anything that had the slightest risk to it, and had a favorite sport in bear-baiting. Her preferred method of raising money was to bypass Parliament whenever possible, by handing out land grants or monopolies on trade in certain goods to her favorites.


In short, she probably had more personality traits in common with her correspondent Ivan the Terrible of Muscovy than any of her other contemporaries. Granted, one can hardly blame her, given whose daughter she was (Henry VIII) and what her early life was like, with religious wars, interregnums, foreign intrigue, and the like. Miranda Richardson’s comically vicious portrayal of the monarch in a series of Blackadder is probably much closer to the mark than most people realize.


Ronald’s book does, however, help illustrate England’s position in the grand scheme of things. For all that Britannia ruled the waves (and much of the land bobbing amidst those waves) in later centuries, during the later 16th Century and most of the early 17th Century, the cluster of small kingdoms set on a clutch of islands in the North Atlantic comprised second or third-rate powers at best. Christendom as a whole was in turmoil, with religious wars wracking France and Germany, the Turk literally battering at the gates of Vienna, and the Catholic powers were lashing out on all sides. Great Britain was not an important theater, the egos of the English-speaking world notwithstanding. Even the Spanish Armada of 1588, probably one of the two defining events of the century for England and the English (the other being Henry VIII’s break with Rome) is generally misinterpreted. The purpose of the Enterprise against England was principally to stop the English from meddling in the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and her rebellious Dutch and Belgian subjects. By the time of the Armada battles in 1588, Elizabeth had been openly supplying troops to the Dutch for three years, and had been sending money for decades (Sir John Norreys had led an expedition of ‘volunteers’ to the Netherlands in 1577), and then had the effrontery to be upset when the Spanish launched an attack on her!


Now remember, the modern distinction between public and private business was still in its infancy in Elizabeth’s day. Her reign sat at the beginning of one of the great eras of disingenuousness in international politics, which lasted until the modern monarchical state was cemented into place during the early Enlightenment. Rulers could claim—sometimes even truthfully—that they couldn’t control their subjects, since the machinery of control was so primitive. It was entirely in keeping with the spirit of the times for Elizabeth to turn her sea dogs loose on Spain’s lands and commerce, in exchange for a cut of the take, while heatedly denying to Philip II’s ambassadors that she had any part of the business. It’s entirely possible she did the same thing in her famous ‘Golden Speech’ of 1601, in which she professed she had no idea how badly her favorites were abusing the commercial monopolies she had granted them.


Other rulers did the same thing—allowing border populations or ambitious ‘private citizens’ to wage a private or proxy war on a kingdom’s behalf, without the kingdom itself becoming involved. The Ottoman dynasty allowed its frontier freebooters free rein, and so on. A century’s worth of English and Scottish monarchs let the Border Reivers raid, kill, and burn at will—the West Riding of Yorkshire, site of so many Bronte novels, was formerly a thinly-populated wasteland in which every house was of necessity a fortress. Charles II let the English buccaneers of the Caribbean do whatever they wanted, so long as he wasn’t actually allied to Spain at the time. The Cossacks of the Ukraine, in their century long barroom brawl across the steppe, fought first for the Poles against the Russians, and later vice versa, and warred the whole time against the Ottomans and the Crimean Tatars (or put another way, the Cossacks sat in the middle and fought all their neighbors in turn),


It may sound laughable to modern ears to hear of a monarch protesting that he can’t control his own subjects, but this is largely because people today expect governments to be able to control people. The machinery of social control was very primitive in the Sixteenth Century—with a government numbering at most a thousand clerks, justices of the peace, courtiers, and so on, the best that Henry VII and Henry VIII had been able to do to keep public order was to forbid the nobility from keeping private armies, and that mostly by threatening them with charges of treason and the prospect of the royal army coming down on their heads. Likewise, much of what made the Spanish Inquisition seem so horrible to contemporary eyes was how unprecedented it was—it may not seem like much compared to the legal machinery of the 21st century, but for its time it was a terrifying panopticon.




Sir John Norreys and the Elizabethan Military World will be of less interest to the general reader, and will probably appeal more towards the historian (professional or amateur) or the military hobbyist, as it is one of the very few biographies of the Elizabethan fighting man. It is a fairly straightforward biography of one of Queen Elizabeth’s relatively small coterie of what might be termed professional soldiers, and one of the even smaller number of successful and competent ones.


Sir John Norreys was born in 1547 at Yattendon Castle in Berkshire, the son of gentry who were staunch partisans of Queen Elizabeth. His family’s connection to the Tudors was occasionally a little awkward, as his grandfather had been Anne Boleyn’s friend and possible lover, and had been executed for it.


Nolan’s account then follows Norreys’ life and career in a chronological sequence. Much of the narrative focuses on administrative matters—cities taken, raids made, skirmishes with the Spanish, Irish, or Catholic French. Nolan discusses Norreys’ problems with money, food, and logistics in such detail that these constant complaints become rather tiresome, but their discussion is important because they were a major feature of Norreys’ career.


The book opens like a novel, with the young John and his brother Henry as sideline observers of the 1567 Battle of St. Denis, a particularly bitter clash in the French Wars of Religion. Norreys then spent some months fighting as a gentleman volunteer in the Huguenot army, before seeking out opportunities in Ireland under his father’s command. In this capacity he was responsible for the notorious Rathlin Island massacre of 1575.


This abrupt change in styles of warfare—cavalry actions in France in 1571, brutal hack—and-stab raids in Ireland in 1573, siege warfare in the Low Countries in 1577, back to Ireland in 1584, the Low Countries again in 1585—were a good general introduction to extremely diverse styles of warfare, and probably a much broader education than most of his continental contemporaries got (aside from those who had fought the Turks).


Save for being a soldier rather than a sailor, Norreys is by background or lifestyle not out of place in the company of Drake, Frobisher, and the other Elizabethan adventurers as a combination swashbuckler and venture capitalist. “Black John” Norreys had a lifelong reputation as a hard man; both his superiors and his subordinates considered him to be stubborn, opinionated, and arrogant, and he was certainly prone to allowing or encouraging atrocities. Very unusually for men of his age and social station, Norreys never married. He was conspicuously religious, and was apparently a strict Protestant with, in Nolan’s evaluation, possible Calvinist leanings acquired during his time spent with the Huguenots and Dutch.


One of the more interesting aspects of Norreys’ career, to which Nolan devotes some well-deserved attention, is the Norreys family’s ‘affinity,’ or a loose association of family members, feudal retainers, employees, and other trusted comrades who worked together in various arenas over a period of decades. Norreys would use many of the same officers and petty-captains (the contemporary equivalent of the non-commissioned officer) in most of his campaigns, also endeavoring to keep a core of veteran common soldiers available. In some circumstances, such as the early 1590s, Norreys was desperate for the Queen to restore him to favor and give him a job so that he could keep his affinity together. Without the Exchequer footing the bill, Norreys’ affinity would have disintegrated as his followers and comrades had to move on to greener fields in order to keep body and soul and estate together.


The most important difference is that while the sea dogs represented Elizabeth’s successes, Norreys’ career is often a list of her failures. Norreys was perpetually starved of resources, harassed and micromanaged by the government in London, accused of peculation and embezzlement, and generally prevented from doing anything worthwhile on the Continent because the Crown so dreaded the possibility of defeat that it dared not take a chance on victory. After his successful assault on a fortress at Arnhem and the Battle of Aarschot in 1585 earned him a thinly-veiled rebuke from the Queen for taking what the Queen saw as too much of a gamble. Within months after this victory, however, Norreys’ little army of raw recruits had virtually disintegrated due to lack of food, pay, and the like.


Norreys was also the chap saddled with the miserable task of preparing a land defense against the Spanish Armada. This was Norreys’ apogee, as he was given command of the largest land army England had assembled since the 1540s, and the largest before the outbreak of the Civil War. Ultimately it was all for naught, as the Armada was defeated at sea, without any Spanish forces landing in England


For all the national trauma the 1588 invasion scare had brought, Elizabeth’s government was quick to revert to its old miserly and vacillating ways. While on campaign in Brittany, which was to prove a pointless exercise, Norreys and his men went for long periods without receiving food, pay, or even ammunition, and had to resort to living off the land like their ancestors did during the Hundred Years’ War. At the same time, Lord Burghley’s government and the Queen herself spared no effort in sending a tide of nagging ‘suggestions’ to Norreys.


In the years after the Armada crisis, this miserly and crippling attitude towards the Queen’s wars was exacerbated by Lord Burghley, who succeeded Norreys’ erstwhile patron Lord Walsingham as the Queen’s Principal Secretary in 1590. Largely as a result of the shocking expense incurred by the Armada crisis, Burghley rather foolishly attempted to run the war against Spain on a strictly limited budget. The result was that if the bills came to more than Burghley wanted to spend, he simply let them go into arrears, sometimes for years and sometimes ad infinitum. Several once-promising campaigns in Brittany, the Low Countries, and Normandy thus quickly ground to a halt for lack of money and supplies, and Norreys’ older brother Henry was warned during Henry’s defense of Ostend, that excessive spending on fortifications would come out of his paycheck.


Between the two of them, these books give the reader a decent inside look into the Elizabethan world, government, and military. I’m going to go watch The Young Ones now.

Deep Thoughts on Deep Time

Deep Thoughts On Deep Time


Ten thousand years is a very long time. It’s so long a time, in human terms, that it’s hard to convey just how long a time it is. It’s a hundred centuries. Probably five hundred generations.

A thousand years ago, the Norman conquest of England wouldn’t happen for another half-century. The Byzantine Empire and the Abbasid Caliphate were going concerns.

Ten thousand years is five times the length of time since Augustus Caesar and Jesus walked the earth. The Second Temple still stood in Jerusalem. Some of the Dead Sea Scrolls hadn’t been written yet.

Ten thousand years is four times as long as the length of time since the Buddha achieved enlightenment. Classical Greek and Roman civilization lay in the future, and the mightiest empire on the planet was Achaemenid Persia.

Ten thousand years is about twice as long as the length of time since groups of bronze-armed Sumerians skirmished on the banks of the Euphrates, having probably not even domesticated the horse yet.

Ten thousand years ago, saber-toothed tigers and mammoths walked the earth in North America. Glaciers were retreating from large chunks of what is now settled land at the end of the Younger Dryas cold period.

In fact, the entire history of civilization, written and unwritten, is far less than 10,000 years old. Agriculture in the Middle East began only slightly more than ten millennia ago, in the Neolithic Period. The first cities of any measurable size date from about 3,000 BCE.

With the exception of a sprinkling of Paleolithic and Neolithic hand tools and other artifacts such as stone arrowheads, virtually nothing man-made is more than 5,000 years old.

If ten thousand years is a span of time longer than the duration of civilization itself, why, then, would someone want to design a clock that would keep time for ten millennia? Supercomputer engineer Danny Hillis and the Long Now Foundation have done exactly that, conceiving the Clock of the Long Now in 1986. The first of the working prototypes struck twice at midnight on New Year’s Eve, 1999. The Foundation describes itself thus:

The Long Now Foundation, was established in 01996* to develop the Clock and Library projects, as well as to become the seed of a very long term cultural institution. The Long Now Foundation hopes to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. We hope to creatively foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years.

Hillis, for his part, simply said “I want to build a clock that ticks once a year. The century hand advances once every one hundred years, and the cuckoo comes out on the millennium. I want the cuckoo to come out every millennium for the next 10,000 years. If I hurry I should finish the clock in time to see the cuckoo come out for the first time.”

The term “Long Now” was itself coined by musician and producer Brian Eno in 1978, in the context of the differences in the perception of the duration of a ‘now’ between Europe and New York, with ‘now’ being a span of time of variable length, rather than an instantaneous point. As he described it:

The incident stuck in my mind. How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of ‘where I live’ as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn’t lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realized that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.

I noticed that this very local attitude to space in New York paralleled a similarly limited attitude to time. Everything was exciting, fast, current, and temporary. Enormous buildings came and went, careers rose and crashed in weeks. You rarely got the feeling that anyone had the time to think two years ahead, let alone ten or a hundred. Everyone seemed to be ‘passing through’. It was undeniably lively, but the downside was that it seemed selfish, irresponsible and randomly dangerous. I came to think of this as "The Short Now", and this suggested the possibility of its opposite - "The Long Now".

The Foundation in turn has high hopes for the Clock of the Long Now as a teaching instrument:

Such a clock, if sufficiently impressive and well engineered, would embody deep time for people. It should be charismatic to visit, interesting to think about, and famous enough to become iconic in the public discourse. Ideally, it would do for thinking about time what the photographs of Earth from space have done for thinking about the environment. Such icons reframe the way people think.

This is a particularly ambitious piece of pedagogy, but one of the little-remembered sparks that lit the fuse on the modern environmental movement was the photographs of the Earth taken by the Apollo flights in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The photographs’ importance was that they made the Earth look small and delicate, in sharp contrast to the longstanding attitude of a world big enough for anything.

If you consider that during the whole of recorded human history, the Clock of the Long Now would have ticked a mere five thousand times and the millenarian cuckoo would have popped out only four or five times, that will give you an impression of the time-scale involved in the project. The last time the cuckoo popped out before the year 2000 would have been in the early medieval period. Consider the differences between the world of 1000 CE, with stone castles, Vikings, feudalism and peasantry, and the year 2000, with cheap consumer electronics, aircraft carriers, and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Designing and building a machine that has to function over a period of time that is almost beyond real human comprehension is understandably quite the challenge. The Beverly Clock, maintained by the Physics Department of the University of Otago in New Zealand, hasn’t been wound since 1864 and functions off of atmospheric pressure, but it still requires repairs, and the advent of central climate control in the departmental buildings nearly caused the clock to run down altogether.

Together with the Long Now Foundation, Hillis’ engineering priorities included the following principles:

• Longevity: The clock should be accurate even after 10,000 years, and must not contain valuable parts (such as jewels, expensive metals, or special alloys) that might be looted.

• Maintainability: Future generations should be able to keep the clock working, if necessary, with nothing more advanced than Bronze Age tools and materials.

• Transparency: The clock should be understandable without stopping or disassembling it; no functionality should be opaque.

• Evolvability: It should be possible to improve the clock over time.

• Scalability: To ensure that the final large clock will work properly, smaller prototypes must be built and tested.

The resulting clock was, perhaps ironically in this era of microprocessors and atomic technology, a clicking, ticking brass machine that, although idiosyncratic and innovative, would probably have made perfect sense to a natural philosopher from three centuries ago, such as Robert Hooke, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, or Christiaan Huygens. In fact, some of the clock’s calculation elements owe a particular debt to Leibniz’s seventeenth-century work in binary mathematics.

Some of the reasoning in the clock’s design is obvious—the clock couldn’t depend on an external power supply, such as electricity, since electricity may not be available someday. Nor could it even depend on regular, intensive human maintenance, since mechanical skills can be lost. Three centuries from now, the world could be in a post-nuclear dark age, with a vastly-reduced population having abandoned cities for subsistence farming. Some technology, such as measurement of atomic decay, was too recondite for most people to understand and therefore not viable for the long term—you probably wouldn’t have a nuclear physicist around to fix the thing if it broke.





































The first prototype, currently on display in London.

The full-scale clock, which will likely be the size of a house if not larger, is intended to be constructed in a bunker on top of Mount Washington, Nevada, in the middle of Great Basin National Park. Not only must the clock’s design account for ‘normal’ problems such as mechanical wear and tear, corrosion, or inaccuracy (imagine having to cope, not with leap years, but with leap centuries), but due to the chronological scale of the project it must also consider phenomena with much longer cycles, such as the precession of the angle of the Earth’s axis, changes in the length of day due to changes in the speed of the planet’s rotation, global warming and cooling cycles, and changes in the tidal forces exerted by the Moon. On these timescales, even relatively stable materials such as brass or gold can fail—if you leave a pure lead brick sitting atop a pure gold brick for a few thousand years, eventually microscopic but unstoppable forces such as Brownian motion and molecular diffusion will percolate lead atoms clean through to the other side of the gold brick, and will ultimately weld the two masses together. Granted, this will take millennia if not longer, but that is the sort of time-scale the Long Now Foundation is working with—this is mankind’s first try at wading into deep time.

This splashing around the edges of the bottomless pool is more of an adventure than is generally understood. The concept of how old the world really is—about 4.5 billion years by most estimates—was one of the biggest psychological shocks the post-Roman Western mind ever experienced, easily on par with the heliocentric solar system. In fact, this concept of “deep time” or “geologic time” is one of the physical sciences’ most profound impacts on the fields of philosophy, literature, religion, and other arts and sciences in the developed world.

John Playfair, a 18th-century Scottish mathematician and natural philosopher remarked on a 1788 visit to a geologic feature known as an angular unconformity at Siccar Point in Scotland that "the mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.” James Hutton, a colleague of Playfair’s who while working as a geologist and engineer developed the concept of geologic time, was vilified by many religious leaders as an atheist and heretic for challenging the Judeo-Christian creation narrative of the Biblical Book of Genesis.

Prior to the articulation of geologic time in the public sphere during the Nineteenth Century, the common understanding in the Western world, as well as in the Islamic world and most of the other civilizations, was essentially what would now be termed “Young-Earth Creationism,” a closed-system cosmos, about six thousand years old, that was created at a specific moment. James Ussher, a seventeenth-century Archbishop of Armagh, actually spent several years of his life attempting to calculate the exact age of the Earth based on a Biblical chronology, eventually producing in 1656 what he believed to be a precise result: the night of October 22, 4004 BCE. Although the most famous such scriptural exegete, Archbishop Ussher was by no means the only one. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 BC. It is likely no coincidence that these ‘creation’ dates roughly coincide with the beginnings of settled civilization in the Middle East and other areas.

Other civilizations, such as the Mayan and some Hindu cultures, articulated a nonlinear, cyclical and metacyclical concept of time, such as that presented by the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar’s sequence of repeating worlds (the Fourth World being the present, created in 3114 BCE) and the cosmic Hindu concept of yugas, multi-billion year epochs that are days in the life of the godhead Brahman.

The unthinkably ancient now seemed entirely possible, an eerie bottomless abyss of time that made the known span of human history seem less than a flyspeck on an elephant’s back. Since culture abhors a vacuum, the human mind went to work to fill in the blanks. The sciences produced the new disciplines of paleontology and evolutionary biology. Theologians reevaluated the nature of sacred theology, weighing doctrines of inerrancy against geologic evidence. Popular writers such as H.P Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard explored the newfound past as a setting for stories; Lovecraft gave Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones their origins in the Precambrian, and Howard created a sprawling timescale to serve as a stage for Kull of Atlantis (supposedly 20,000 BCE) and Conan the Barbarian.

Given civilization’s history of repeated rises and falls, expansions and contractions, it should be no surprise that the concept of building or preserving something for the future. It is no coincidence at all that “built to last” is a sincere if wistful compliment.

The preservation of ancient knowledge through catastrophe is also a recurrent theme in history and fiction, particularly science fiction dealing with post-apocalyptic themes; three examples would be Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Liebowitz, published in 1960, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, published during the 1940s and 1950s, and Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, published in 2008. In each case, a small elite struggles to preserve something for the ages, whether it is fragments of religion and knowledge in a post-nuclear wasteland, advanced technology from a mathematically-modeled collapse of civilization, or a way of life amid the gnawing chaos of human nature. Real-world historical precedents for this phenomenon include the preservation of Christianity by monastic communities during the western European Dark Ages, and the survival of elements of Roman civilization in the Byzantine empire.

If the Clock of the Long Now seems a strange and almost quixotic attempt to create a lasting monument for mankind, consider the Church of Spiritual Technology’s massive Trementina Base in New Mexico. The facility is less secret than most of Scientology’s inner workings—the ABC Network’s news program 20/20 was given a guided tour in 1998.

The goal of the project is simple—to provide an indestructible safe storage place for the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the science fiction author and founder of the Scientology movement (who died in 1986), to which Scientologists can return for guidance from other galaxies in the future, according the predictions of Scientology’s peculiar doctrines.

The Church of Spiritual Technology, a multimillion-dollar nonprofit that maintains and licenses the archives of L. Ron Hubbard’s writings and other leavings, has spent the last twenty years engaged in a quarter-billion dollar effort to preserve Hubbard’s writings for all time, including etching text onto stainless-steel plates, which are then placed in titanium canisters, wrapped in Kevlar, and stored hundreds of feet underground in a bunker carved out of solid rock in a New Mexico mesa, behind a series of four doors supposedly proof against nuclear weapons. Audio recordings of Hubbard’s speeches are recorded onto various media, including pure gold compact discs and steel records playable on a solar-powered record player. One only hopes that they didn’t pick HD-DVD over Blu-Ray.

Compared to the 10,000 year design period of the Clock of the Long Now, Trementina’s projected thousand-year lifespan is trifling, but it should survive well enough unless the Internet-based group known as Anonymous, which has a record of mocking Scientology, inaugurates a corps of combat engineers.

On the other side of the coin, for all that humans feel the urge to preserve things for the ages, humans are generally aware of the ultimate futility of that urge. Consider Shelley’s Ozymandias, written in 1818 during the first flush of the archaeological exploration and plundering of Egypt. The poem, allegedly based on an Egyptian inscription referenced by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus, reads

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

The inescapable message is that however mighty Ozymandias was, how flourishing his civilization, and how eternal his works were meant to be, within a few thousand years of the statue’s construction the vicissitudes of time and fate had all but wiped him and his away, leaving nothing for the future but a broken statue.

Another essential question is whether or not human artifacts, however well engineered and carefully built, can last for millennia on end. Most of the infrastructure built by Rome was in ruins within one or two centuries of the collapse of the western half of the Roman Empire in the late 400s, victims in equal measure of willful destruction, the elements, neglect, and the corrosive effect of local villagers pillaging building stone.

Even assuming an absence of malicious or accidental damage, such as the Goths pulling down Rome’s aqueducts, under the onslaught of the elements, the laws of physics and Earth’s climate are ultimately destructive. The Great Pyramid of Giza is less than 5,000 years old, and even though it is of relatively simple construction—few manmade things are more durable than a massive solid stone block on flat ground—but the pyramid is certainly the worse for wear after centuries of sandstorms.

The mechanical death-traps which beset the fictional Indiana Jones, for example, are essentially impossible. Assume that whatever civilization built the temple from which he escaped at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark were exceptionally capable engineers within the technologies available, and that they could actually build a clockwork mechanism that would shoot arrows, open and close doorways, and roll massive stone balls at whoever sets off the trap. Wood rots. Moss and vegetation grow, spreading roots and tendrils into available crevices. Stone cracks and spalls into gravel, which jams things in place. Rainwater or groundwater carry silt into mechanisms. Metal rusts or buckles under loads. Vermin build nests in gearboxes. Rather than Indy’s epic escape in a hail of dust and arrows, it’s more likely that his theft of the golden idol would have triggered nothing more than a loud crunching and snapping noise as the machinery self-destructed, if it even got that far.

The concept of the ‘design period’ is an essential one in any field of engineering, as well as many associated disciplines and other fields such as real-estate development. The heart of the matter is that a good design, whether it be for a computer, building, machine, or sewer system, must take into account not only the needs of the present, but carefully-considered assumptions about future needs, as well as careful selection of building materials, construction methods, capacities, and other requirements. For example, the sewer system of metropolitan London, designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette in the 1850s, so thoroughly considered the potential for urban population growth that it could even accommodate the vast sanitary output of a skyscraper-studded 21st-century metropolis, and most of the system remains in service over 150 years after construction, having been augmented and expanded but never replaced. The infamous ‘click wheel’ iPod of 2004, by contrast, so consistently failed within 18 months of purchase that the United Kingdom’s Office of Fair Trading investigated the product as an instance of unlawful intentional design-to-fail.

Sometimes unforeseen changes in technology or other considerations render the design assumptions invalid, or at least less valid. For example, the architects of a school building constructed in 1920 could well have foreseen population growth, but could not have been expected to factor into their design technologies such as the Internet and the current mania for computers in the classroom. Likewise, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the destitute state of its successor entities virtually obliterated any budgets for maintenance on the USSR’s once-mighty railroad network. The net result is that many outlying communities in Siberia and the former Soviet Far East, which depended on the railroads for communications, became so isolated that they had to be abandoned.

Bearing the above in mind—the difficulty in engineering for deep time, or even for a millennia or two, there naturally arises the question of ‘why bother?” In a world of constant cost/benefit analyses, a project such as the Clock of the Long Now or Trementina Base, absent other considerations such as the need to hedge one’s bets on a future survival of Scientology or the goal of educating people on truly long-term thinking, generally looks pointless to the outside eye. Scientology gambles that there will still be Scientologists in the future, but the Long Now Foundation is wagering that there will still be humans interested in clocks around in 10,000 years. Both assume that things will not get so bad that, for example, the plates on which L. Ron Hubbard’s books are recorded haven’t been chipped up into arrowheads, and the pawls of the clock broken down for use in crossbows.

It is entirely possible that a massively-dispersed, decentralized and somewhat viral entity, such as Christianity, Freemasonry, Anonymous, the scientific method, or Linux, may survive in the long term better than a single engineered edifice such as the Clock of the Long Now or Trementina Base.

In favor of seeking a measure of longevity through one’s creations or the preservation of knowledge, however, remember this—our world was profoundly shaped by the Irish monks and Greek bureaucrats who preserved what western Europe lost after the fall of Rome, and we at least know who the pharaoh Khufu was (if not much about him) because his pyramid survived.

Cursing

Imagine my shock—SHOCK!!!—when I found out this morning that my boss had decided to take an unscheduled vacation to Florida or somewhere. Now granted, I was out sick at the end of last week and wasn't there to be told myself, but he apparently only told one person, and that was on Friday at closing time. About all I can say is that it's totally in keeping with his usual degree of foresight and consideration (which is to say, virtually none at all).

Oh, it made me want to cuss. Now, keep in mind that I'm at home with most profanity—the F-bomb doesn't even make me blush, most of the time, and I'm more likely to bellow "pull the stick shift out of your ass, you bald-headed little chickenfucker" at someone whose driving offends me. There is, however, a distinct difference between profanity and cursing. Profanity is the act of turning the air blue to assuage one's own internal torments, be they physical or spiritual. American profanity is poor stuff, as is the case with most of what's made in the US these days (Miller 'beer,' for example)—monotonous, weak, and composed mostly of a few basic elements. We use the F-word in the same way that most of our food is made out of high-fructose corn syrup. Read some food labels—that stuff is in EVERYTHING.

It's good to get some variety into things—Arabic is a great language for profanity, especially since there's so many parts of a sick camel to which someone can be compared. French isn't bad either, although for some strange reason they have a practice of taking holy items in vain—if you ever hear a Quebecois bellowing "tabernac!," rest assured that it is NOT a pleasant thing that has happened to him. Possibly the all-time winner for French profanity comes from General Ducrot during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War—when the good general realized that the army he was with was stuck in a valley with the Kaiser's pointy-helmeted legions on all the surrounding hills, he uttered the famous line "Nous sommes dans un pot de chambre et nous y serons emmerdes!" (Roughly—"We are in a chamber pot and we are about to be shit upon.")

Cursing is different—it's when you actively express the hope that something bad will happen to someone, and who knows? They may even deserve it.

When it comes to cursing, I must bow to one of the all-time masters. Gavin Dunbar sat as Archbishop of Glasgow, Scotland, from 1524 to 1547, (and was also Chancellor of Scotland from 1528-1543). His March 31, 1524 'Monition of Cursing,' sometimes also (wrongly) referred to as the Curse of Carlisle, is the longest and most detailed blast of invective of which I am aware. George MacDonald Fraser described him as 'among the great cursers of all time.' I see no reason to disagree with Mr. Fraser.

Archbishop Dunbar was most emphatically not a nice man, and we should not be surprised—after all, he was appointed by the second Pope Clement VII (long story), one of the Medici popes, and the pope who later made his own son Alessandro de Medici Duke of Tuscany. Keep in mind too that the good archbishop and his flock dwelt in 16^th-century Scotland, the country where the word for 'fun' --"creac"-- also meant 'heavily-armed cattle-stealing expedition.' For his own part, the Archbishop bludgeoned a rival cleric (David Cardinal Beacon, Archbishop of St. Andrew's) into the hospital on at least one occasion. He also spent a great deal of time persecuting Protestants—burning seven of them at the stake in 1539 alone, including a Franciscan friar-- and one botched burning in 1528 that, due to wet firewood, took six hours to make the end of Patrick Hamilton. Incidentally, the Scottish Church split with the Papacy in 1560 and quickly evolved into a Protestant establishment in its own right.

The subjects of the great spleen-venting of 1524 were the 'Border Reivers,' who were a loose array of 200 or so clans who lived in a roughly 40-mile deep swath along either side of the old Anglo-Scottish border (running roughly from Berwick to Carlisle). From about 1450 to about 1610, the rugged and thinly-populated border country was basically a no-man's-land between the more civilized areas of northern England and Lowland Scotland. If you lived within twenty miles of the border and wanted to wake up alive in the morning, you had best live in a tower house, a sort of dwelling that was really a two-story miniature fortress with no openings on the ground floor, and a narrow stairway or ladder to get in through the door on the second floor. Even then, you would have wanted to sleep with a sharp sword near to hand, and somebody on watch. By comparison, this is when most of the rest of Europe's country folk had given up on living in castles.

These 'borderers' were a poor, violent and frequently treacherous lot who made a living mostly through stealing things from each other, or from anyone else who happened across their path. They were also very fond of feuds, arson, kidnapping, extortion (coining the term 'blackmail') and preemptive revenge (where you kill the other guy first, just in case he might think about killing you someday). In short, reiving; 'reive" is a Scots word for stealing, sometimes anglicized as 'reaver', meaning a thief, thug, or criminal.

In short, the Borderers were rather like the Scottish Highlanders, but without as much of the Victorian-era historical romanticization. Sir Walter Scott's 19^th-century portrayal of the Highlander cattle-rustler Rob Roy MacGregor took root in the popular mind and eventually saw a movie made about him starring Liam Neeson, but Walter "Auld Wat" Scott of Harden, one of the nastiest of the border chieftains, never attracted the same attention.

Map of the Border Country, from www.theborderers.org

"Auld Wat of Harden," by Tom Scott, RSA

National loyalties were a minor thing for most Borderers, though—they were English when it was convenient, and Scottish when that was convenient, and if things got too hot for them in one kingdom they stayed with their kinfolk on the other side of the border until it was safe to go home. Since most of the March Wardens appointed by the English and Scottish kings were drawn from the Borderer families, and they in turn used their own clansmen as law-enforcement muscle, you can imagine just how seriously law and order was taken.

A note for any amateur genealogists out there—if your family is Scottish or English and includes names such as Armstrong, Bell, Cecil, Crozier, Douglas, Elliott, Fenwick, Buckley (also Buccleuch), Forster, Home, Howard, Irvine, Johnstone, Kerr, Maxwell, Nixon, Robson, Scott, Storey, Tait, Hume, Shaftoe, Heron, Watson or Graham, you may have some Reiver ancestors. Please note—these weren't just common bandits. The Howards, Douglases, Grahams, Homes/Humes, and some others were major aristocratic families with branches on either side of the border. The Homes and Howards did a thorough—but not too thorough-- job of beating each others' heads in at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, even though (or perhaps because) there were some of each family on each side.

The thumbnail history of the Monition is this—the years leading up to 1524 had been pretty violent ones on the border, even by Border standards. The machinations of Henry VIII and several years of open warfare between England and Scotland certainly didn't help matters. Reiver bands numbering up to a thousand men were ranging as far north as Edinburgh and Glasgow and as far south as York, burning, looting, and killing, and running off all the livestock they could find, including loot from Church property. Nobody was safe- in one infamous incident, a gang of borderers stole the Bishop of Carlisle's pet fish and held it for ransom—and then killed it after the bishop paid. The new Archbishop of Glasgow, whose archdiocese included most of the Border country, had grown up with the ceaseless border-skirmishing and decided to put the fear of God—or at least the fear of the Archbishop of Glasgow—into the Borderers, or at least those Borderers who were not too busy ransoming fish or murdering each other to listen. Archbishop Dunbar wrote up an absolutely epic monition—a formal order or warning by a bishop or archbishop to refrain from doing something—in the form of a curse, which he then commanded all the clerics under his remit to read from the pulpit and in other public places. The curse is generally thought to have applied particularly to 77 Border clans, but the exact source of that idea is unclear.

Did it work? It's hard to say. In any case, the Borderers kept going for another ninety-odd years or so, until James the First and Sixth became king of both England and Scotland (1602) and decided to stamp out the giant running sore in the middle of his domains. Many of them were rounded up and shipped to Northern Ireland, which through most of the 17^th Century served as Britain's dumping-ground for surplus people with short tempers and long swords.

It's worth pointing out that some of the particulars of Archbishop Dunbar's curse—the denial of the Holy Sacraments (except for baptism of infants), the voiding of all obligations by innocent people to Borderers, and the ban on good Christians from having business with Borderers, were both legitimate aspects of medieval and Renaissance-era canon law and church practice, commonly referred to as the Interdict. The Interdict was similar to excommunication, effectively a cutting-off of service by the Church in a specified area or with regards to a specific cleric or layman, analogous to the electrical company turning out the lights for nonpayment of bills; no Masses celebrated, no confessions or penance, no Eucharist, no weddings, no shriving of the dying, none of the essential 'smells and bells' that made late-medieval, pre-Reformation life navigable. All of this happened, of course, at the peril of the offender's soul, since to be denied the sacraments essentially meant a short trip to hell, so it was a very blunt way of saying 'behave or else.' Pope Innocent III once kept the entire Kingdom of England under the Interdict for eight years (1208-1215), due to a fight with King John (of Robin Hood fame) over who should be the next Archbishop of Canterbury, and only eased off when he started worrying that the English would give up on Christianity altogether if they went too long without being exposed to it. From the churchman's perspective, this monition was very serious business indeed.

The Monition went down as one of those odd little footnotes to history that I love so much, and it's recently become something of a pop-culture curiosity in Scotland and northern England. The term "The Curse of Carlisle" came about in large part because the city council of Carlisle decided that for the millennium celebrations, it was worth making a nod to this interesting bit of the region's history. The city then commissioned a local artist to carve the text of the curse –- all 1,000-plus words—into a spherical granite boulder which would be displayed as a monument. Christian groups objected, particularly after it became known that the artist had elected to carve the stone so that you have to walk widdershins (counterclockwise) around the stone in order to read it—Church groups claimed that it was a pagan stunt, as well as objecting because the curse's text supposedly included Biblical references (allegedly Philippians, Chapter 4 Verse 6) in a context which certain parties viewed as blasphemous. Here's a novel thought-- if you want to read English from left to right on a round thing, you'd have to walk counterclockwise around it anyways. Human nature being what it is, the 'cursing stone' was subsequently blamed for bringing bad luck to the city, including an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease, a flood, various crimes, rising unemployment, a major fire, and worst of all, the local football team, Carlisle United, being dropped down a league.

Anyways, on to the Monition itself! The original text is directly below, in 16^th-century Scots and obtained from G. M. Fraser's history of the border country, titled The Steel Bonnets, and my own transliteration is below that. I don't want to hear any whining from people at work about how easy it is to do history—just you try and make sense of this! The past was a different country, and languages were different then too. For one thing, spelling and punctuation were definitely optional, and you don't even want to know about penmanship.

Original 1524 version:

"Gude folks, heir at my Archibischop of Glasgwis letters under his round sele, direct to me or any uther chapellane, makand mensioun, with greit regrait, how hevy he beris the pietous, lamentabill, and dolorous complaint that pass our all realme and commis to his eris, be oppin voce and fame, how our souverane lordis trew liegis, men, wiffis and barnys, bocht and redeimit be the precious blude of our Salviour Jhesu Crist, and levand in his lawis, are saikleslie part murdrist, part slayne, brynt, heryit, spulziet and reft, oppinly on day licht and under silens of the nicht, and thair takis and landis laid waist, and thair self banyst therfra, als wele kirklandis as utheris, be commoun tratouris, ravaris, theiffis, dulleand in the south part of this realme, sic as Tevidale, Esdale, Liddisdale, Ewisdale, Nedisdale, and Annandereaill; quhilis hes bene diverse ways persewit and punist be the temperale swerd and our Soverane Lordis auctorite, and dredis nocht the samyn.

And thairfoir my said Lord Archbischop of Glasgw hes thocht expedient to strike thame with the terribill swerd of halykirk, quhilk thai may nocht lang endur and resist; and has chargeit me, or any uther chapellane, to denounce, declair and proclame thaim oppinly and generalie cursit, at this market-croce, and all utheris public places.

Hairfor throw the auctorite of Almichty God, the Fader of hevin, his Son, our Saviour, Jhesu Crist, and of the Halygaist; throw the auctorite of the Blissit Virgin Sanct Mary, Sanct Michael, Sanct Gabriell, and all the angellis; Sanct John the Baptist, and all the haly patriarkis and prophets; Sanct Peter, Sanct Paull, Sanct Andro, and all haly appostillis; Sanct Stephin, Sanct Laurence, and all haly mertheris; Sanct Gile, Sanct Martyn, and all haly confessouris; Sanct Anne, Sanct Katherin, and all haly virginis and matronis; and of all the sanctis and haly company of hevin; be the auctorite of our Haly Fader the Paip and his cardinalis, aned of my said Lord Archibischop of Glasgw, be the avise and assistance of my lordis, archibischop, bischopis, abbotis, priouris, and utheris prelatis and minesteris of halykirk.

I denounce, proclamis, and declaris all and sindry the committaris of the said saikles murthris, slauchteris, brinying, heirchippes, reiffis, thiftis and spulezeis, oppinly apon day licht and under silence ofnicht, alswele within temporale landis as kirklandis; togither with thair partakeris, assitaris, supplearis, wittandlie resettaris of thair personis, the gudes reft and stollen be thaim, art or part thereof, and their counsalouris and defendouris, of thair evil dedis generalie CURSIT, waryit, aggregeite, and reaggregeite, with the GREIT CURSING.

I curse their heid and all the haris of thair heid; I curse thair face, thair ene, thair mouth, thair neise, thair tongue, thair teeth, thair crag, thair shoulderis, thair breist, thair hert, thair stomok, thair bak, thair wame, thair armes, thais leggis, thair handis, thair feit, and everilk part of thair body, frae the top of their heid to the soill of thair feet, befoir and behind, within and without.

I curse thaim gangand, and I curse them rydand; I curse thaim standand, and I curse thaim sittand; I curse thaim etand, I curse thaim drinkand; I curse thaim walkand, I curse thaim sleepand; I curse thaim risand, I curse thaim lyand; I curse thaim at hame, I curse thaim fra hame; I curse thaim within the house, I curse thaim without the house; I curse thair wiffis, thair barnis, and thair servandis participand with thaim in their deides. I way thair cornys, thair catales, thair woll, thair scheip, thjair horse, thair swyne, thair geise, thair hennes, and all thair quyk gude. I wary their hallis, thair chalmeris, thair kechingis, thair stanillis, thair barnys, thair biris, thair bernyardis, thair cailyardis thair plewis, thair harrowis, and the gudis and housis that is necessair for their sustentatioun and weilfair.

All the malesouns and waresouns that ever gat warldlie creatur sen the begynnyng of the world to this hour mot licht on thaim. The maledictioun of God, that lichtit apon Lucifer and all his fallowis, that strak thaim frae the hie hevin to the deip hell, mot licht apon thaimr. The fire and the swerd that stoppit Adam far the yettis of Paradise, mot stop thaim frae the gloire of Hevin. quhill thai forbere and mak amendis. The malesound that lichtit on cursit Cayein, quhen his slew his bruther just Abell saiklessly, mot licth on thaim for the saikles slauchter that thai commit dailie. The maledictioun that lichtit apon all the warlde, man and beist, and all that ever tuk life, quhen all was drownit be the flude of Noye, except Noye and his ark, mot licht apon thame and drouned thame, man and beist, and mak this realm cummirless of thame for thair wicked synnyes. The thunnour and fireflauchtis that set doun as rane apon the cities of Zodoma and Gomora, with all the landis about, and brynt thame for thair vile sunnys, mot rane apon thame, and birne thaim for oppin synnis. Tha malesoun and confusion that lichtit on the Gigantis for thair oppressioun and pride, biggand the tour of Bablloun, mot confound thaim and all thair werkis, for thair opppin reiffs and oppressioun. All the plagis that fell apon Pharao and his pepill of Egipt, thair landis, cornse, and cataill, mot fall apon thaim, thair takkis, rowmys and stedingis, cornys and beistis. The watter of Tweid and utheris watteris quhair thair ride mot droun thaim, as the Reid Say drownit King Pharoao and his pepil of Egipt, sersewing Godis pepill of Israell. The erd mot oppin, riffe and cleiff, and swelly thaim quyk to hell, as it swellyt cursit Dathan and Abiron, that genestude Moeses and the command of God. The wyld fyre that byrnt Thore and his fallowis to the nowmer of twa hundredth and fyty, and utheris 14000 and 7000 at anys, usurpand aganis Moyses and Aaron, servandis of God, not suddanely birne and consume thaim dailie genestandand the commandis of God and halykirk. The malediction that lichtit suddanely upon fair Absalon, rydant contrair his fader, King David, servand of God, throw the wod, quhen the branchis of ane tre fred him of his horse and hangit him be the hair, mot lie apon thaain trew Scottis men, and hang thaim siclike tha all the warld may se. The Maledictioun that lichtit apon Olifernus, lieutenant to Nabogodonooser, makand weair and heirchippis apon trew cristin men, the maledictioun that lichtit apon Judas, Pylot, Herod and the Jowis that chucifyit Our Lord, and all the plagis and trublis that lichtit on the citte of Jherusalme thairfor, and upon Simon Magus for his symony, bludy Nero, cusit Ditius Makcensisu, Olibruis, Julianus Apostita and the laiff of the cruell tirrannis that slew and murthirit Crits haly servandis, mot licth apon thame for thair cruel tiranny and murthirdome of cristin pepill.

And all the vengeance that evir was takin sen the warlde began for oppin synnys, and all the plagis and pestilence that ever fell on man or beist, mot fall on thaim for thair oppin reiff, saiklesse slauchter and schedding of innocent blude. I disserver and pairtis thaim fra the kirk of God, and deliveris thaim quyk to the devill of hell, as the Apostill Sanct Paull deliverit Corinthion. I interdite the places thay cum in fra divine service, minitracioun of the sacramentis of halykirk, except the sacrament of baptissing allenerlie; and forbiddis all kirkmen to schriffe or absolbe thim of theire synnys, quhill they be firs abolyeit of this cursing.

I forbid all cristin man or woman till have ony company with thaime, etand, drynkand, spekand, prayand, lyand, gangand, standand, or in any uther deid doand, under the paine of deidly syn. I discharge all bandis, actis, contractis, athis and obligatiounis made to them by ony persounis, outher of lawte, kyndenes or manrent, salang as thai susteined this cursing, sub that na man be bundin to thaim, and that this be bundin till all men. I tak fra thame and cryis douned all the gude dedis that ever thai did or sall do, quhill thai rise froae this cursing. I declare thaim partles of of all matynys, messis, evinsangis, dirigeis or utheris prayeris, on buke or beid; of all pilgrimagis and almouse deids done or to be done in halykirk or be cristin pepill, enduring this cursing.

And, finally, I condemn thaim perpetualie to the deip pit of hell, the remain with Lucifer and all his fallowis, and thair bodeis to the gallows of the Burrow Mure, first to be hangit, syne revin and ruggit with doggis, swyne, and utheris wyld beists, abhominable to all the warld. And their candillis gangis frae your sicht, ast mot their saulis gang fra the visage of God, and thair gude faim fra the warld, quhill thai forbeir thair oppin synnys foirsaidis and ryse frae this terribill cursing, and mak satisfaction and pennance."

Lurkers' Version:

"Good folks, here are my Archbishop of Glasgow's letters under his round seal, [which] direct me or any other chaplain to make mention, with great regret, how heavy he bears the piteous, lamentable, and dolorous complaint that pass our all realm and comes to his ears, be open voice and fame, how our sovereign lord's [meaning the King of Scotland] true subjects, men, wives and children, bought and redeemed be the precious blood of our Savior Jesus Christ, and living by his laws, are pointlessly murdered, slain, burnt, hurt, despoiled and robbed, openly by daylight and under silence of the night, and their belongings and lands laid waste, and their selves driven there from, on church lands as well as others, by common traitors, reavers, and thieves dwelling in the south part of this realm, such as Teviotdale, Eskdale, Liddsdale, Ewisdale, Nithsdale, and Annanderdale; who have been in diverse ways pursued and punished by the temporal [worldly] sword and our Sovereign Lord's authority, and dread not the same.

And therefore my said Lord Archbishop of Glasgow has thought it expedient to strike them with the terrible sword of Holy Church, which they may not long endure and resist; and has charged me, or any other chaplain, to denounce, declare and proclaim them openly and generally cursed, at this market-cross, and all other public places.

Therefore, through the authority of Almighty God, the Father of Heaven, his Son, our Savior, Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Ghost; through the authority of the of the Blessed Virgin Saint Mary, Saint Michael, Saint Gabriel, and all the angels; Saint John the Baptist and all the holy patriarchs and prophets; Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Andrew [the patron saint of Scotland], and all holy apostles; Saint Stephen, Saint Lawrence, and all holy martyrs; Saint Giles, Saint Martin, and all holy confessors; Saint Anne, Saint Katherine, and all holy virgins and matrons; and of all the saintly and holy company of Heaven; by the authority of our Holy Father the Pope and his cardinals, and of my said Lord Archbishop of Glasgow, with the advice and assistance of my lords, archbishop, bishops, abbots, priors, and other prelates and ministers of the Holy Church:

I denounce, proclaim, and declare all and sundry the committers of the said pointless murders, slaughters, burnings, cattle-stealings, reavings, thefts and despoliations, openly by daylight and under silence of night, as well within temporal lands as on Church lands; together with their partakers, assistors, suppliers, knowing receivers of their persons, the goods reaved and stolen by them, art or part thereof, and their counselors and defenders, of their evil deeds generally CURSED, separately, aggregate, and reaggragate, with the GREAT CURSING.

"I curse their head and all the hairs of their head; I curse their face, their mind, their mouth, their nose, their tongue, their teeth, their forehead, their shoulders, their breast, their heart, their stomach, their back, their womb, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their body, from the top of their head to the soles of their feet, before and behind, within and without."

"I curse them going and I curse them riding; I curse them standing and I curse them sitting; I curse them eating and I curse them drinking; I curse them rising, and I curse them lying; I curse them at home, I curse them away from home, I curse them within the house, I curse them outside of the house. I curse their wives, their children, and their servants who participate in their deeds. I curse their grain, their cattle, their wool, their sheep, their horses, their swine, their geese, their hens, and all their livestock. I curse their halls, their chambers, their kitchens, their stanchions, their barns, their cowsheds, their barnyards, their cabbage patches, their plows, their harrows, and the goods and houses that are necessary for their sustenance and welfare."

"May all the malevolent wishes and curses ever known, from the beginning of the world to this hour, light on them. May the malediction of God, that fell upon Lucifer and all his fellows, that cast them from the high Heaven to the deep hell, light upon them."

"May the fire and the sword that barred Adam from the gates of Paradise stop them from the glory of Heaven until they forebear and make amends."

"May the evil that fell upon cursed Cain, when he slew his brother Abel without cause, fall on them for the needless slaughter that they commit daily."

"May the malediction that fell upon all the world, man and beast, and all that ever took life, when all were drowned by the flood of Noah, except Noah and his ark, fall upon them and drown them, man and beast, and make this realm free of them, for their wicked sins."

"May the thunder and lightning which rained down upon Sodom and Gomorrah and all the lands surrounding them, and burned them for their vile sins, rain down upon them and burn them for their open sins. May the evil and confusion that fell on the Giants for their oppression and pride in building the Tower of Babylon, confound them and all their works, for their open callous disregard and oppression."

"May all the plagues that fell upon Pharaoh and his people of Egypt, their lands, crops and cattle, fall upon them, their equipment, their places, their lands, their crops and livestock."

"May the waters of the Tweed and other waters which they use drown them as the Red Sea drowned King Pharaoh and the people of Egypt, preserving God's people of Israel."

"May the earth open, split and cleave, and swallow them straight to hell, as it swallowed cursed Dathan and Abiron, who disobeyed Moses and the command of God."

"May the wild fire that reduced Thore (?) and his followers to two hundred and fifty in number, and others from 14,000 to 7,000 for usurping against Moses and Aaron, the servants of God, suddenly burn and consume them daily, for opposing the commands of God and Holy Church."

"May the malediction that suddenly fell upon fair Absalom, riding through the wood against his father, King David, when the branches of a tree knocked him from his horse and hanged him by the hair, fall upon these untrue Scotsmen and hang them the same way, that all the world may see."

"May the malediction that fell upon Nebuchadnezzar's lieutenant, Holofernes, making war and savagery upon true Christian men; the malediction that fell upon Judas, Pilate, Herod, and the Jews that crucified Our Lord; and all the plagues and troubles that fell on the city of Jerusalem therefore, and upon Simon Magus for his treachery, bloody Nero, Ditius Magcensius, Olibrius, Julian the Apostate, and the rest of the cruel tyrants who slew and murdered Christ's holy servants, fall upon them for their cruel tyranny and murder of Christian people."

"And may all the vengeance that ever was taken since the world began, for open sins, and all the plagues and pestilence that ever fell on man or beast, fall on them for their openly evil ways, senseless slaughter and shedding of innocent blood."

"I sever and part them from the church of God, and deliver them immediately to the devil of hell, as the Apostle Paul delivered Corinth. I bar the entrance of all places they come to, for divine service and ministration of the sacraments of holy church, except the sacrament of infant baptism only; and I forbid all churchmen to hear their confession or to absolve them of their sins, until they are first humbled by this curse."

"I forbid all Christian men or women to have any company with them, eating, drinking, speaking, praying, lying, going, standing, or in any other deed-doing, under the pain of deadly sin."

"I discharge all bonds, acts, contracts, oaths, made to them by any persons, out of loyalty, kindness, or personal duty, so long as they sustain this cursing, by which no man will be bound to them, and this will be binding on all men."

"I take from them and cast down all the good deeds that ever they did, or shall do, until they rise from this cursing."

"I declare them excluded from all matins, masses, evening prayers, funerals or other prayers, on book or bead (rosary); of all pilgrimages and alms deeds done, or to be done in holy church or be Christian people, while this curse is in effect."

"And, finally, I condemn them perpetually to the deep pit of hell, there to remain with Lucifer and all his fellows, and their bodies to the gallows of Borough moor [the place of execution], first to be hanged, then ripped and torn by dogs, swine, and other wild beasts, abominable to all the world. And their candle [light of their life, a euphemism for soul] goes from your sight, so may their souls go from the face of God, and their good reputation from the world, until they forebear their open sins, aforesaid, and rise from this terrible cursing and make satisfaction and penance."

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*Whew.*

About all I can say is that it's good to hear the church really speaking out on the social issues that matter to the common man.

Yes, I'm cribbing from Blackadder again. I admit it. Ironically enough, one of Archbishop Dunbar's predecessors was named Robert Blackadder. The following exchange is from Blackadder II, Money, between Edmund Blackadder and the Baby-Eating Bishop of Bath and Wells, who could have been Archbishop Dunbar's drinking buddy:

Edmund: You enjoy your work, don't you?

Bishop: Bits of it, yeah.

Edmund: The violent bits.

Bishop: Yes. (begins massaging Edmund's shoulders) You see, I am a colossal pervert. No form of sexual depravity is too low for me. Animal, vegetable or mineral -- I'll do anything to anything.

Edmund: Fine words for a Bishop. It's nice to hear the Church speaking out for a change on social issues.

Bishop: Have you got the money?

Edmund: Nope.

Bishop: Good. I hate it when people pay up. Say your prayers, Blackadder. (holds out the red-hot poker) IT'S POKER TIME!!!

Edmund: Fine. (closes the book and sets it down, then stands) Are you ever concerned that people might find you out?

Bishop: No. No, no, I kill, I maim, I fornicate, but as far as my flock is concerned my only vice is a little tipple before Evensong. (Baldrick hands him a drink) Oh, thank you.

(drinks) BEND OVER, BLACKADDER!

[Edmund complies]

Bishop: THIS IS WHERE YOU GET-- (staggers backward, choking) DRUGGED, BY GOD!

Edmund: No, by Baldrick, actually… but the effect is much the same.