First tidbit: Berkeley was NOT a Norman! In fact he (and at least one other leading family) were Saxon aristocrats and MAD about it, six centuries after the Conquest My private suspicion is that they may have introduced the regional Butthurt About Losing Wars folkway
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There are eight pages of Genesis-style begattings and accompanying family trees, I glossed over this but apparently every ruling family ended up cousins with everyone else within a hundred yearspic.twitter.com/mDVED7uRid
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anyway by their own word they're a damn Gang and I already hate thempic.twitter.com/B2YHGswty5
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Immigrants were 5:1 male and many of both sexes were kidnapped or otherwise dragged to Virginia against their will. There's a contemporaneous song warning young English maidens of the perils of being abducted to the colony
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Virginia did not sit back and allow Quaker infiltration, Quaker subversion, Quaker indoctrination, or the international Quaker conspipic.twitter.com/kCAbNUQa4k
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Author observes that Wessex and the surrounding areas (Sussex and Mercia in particular; also shoutout to Cedricing players) were old West Saxon rather than Danish or Norse kingdoms, and even after their formal emancipation had disproportionate and tightly-controlled serf pops
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This reminds one of some of the clever RDD econometric works identifying the lingering effect of haciendas in Latin America Definitely increases my belief in the durability of certain systems of exploitation across geography and time (by folkmemes?) Compare also Russian serfdom
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Wessex sounds like the Vendée of England. Diffuse rural population, woodlands, religious and social conservatism, deeply-ingrained royalism. Their treatment under the Protectorate (and their resistance to it) presages the Infernal Columns of Turreau.
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Getting into malaria. The author refers to reports that the inhabitants of the Tidewater were basically sick with malaria constantly and as a consequence quite generally "[sluggish, indolent, and idle]" as well as fucking cranky Makes me wonder about observed regional moods.
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You see claims about regional or national character in history. Lots are self-serving (eg la perfide Albion, the barbarous Hun, w/e) and obviously shouldn't apply uniformly to inhabitants, but I wonder if psychometric features apart from That One That I Dare Not Name . . .
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actually vary in distribution across populations and time, and have an effect on history. These don't need to be (and if I were to guess aren't) principally genetic, but often culturally and here, tantalizingly, pathogenically determined. Hm. Something something xenoestrogens
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"As we shall see . . . these new forms of slavery did not create the culture of Tidewater Virginia; that culture created slavery." This is a pretty profound claim on a first pass: institutions are downstream from culture. Heavy implications from this model.
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Section on linguistics is a delight and too long to summarize so I will just mention my favorite example: persistence of old Germanic pluralization by -en (a la "child" -> "children") in Gloucestershire to produce "wenchen"
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The cavaliers died like flies, author speculates this contributed to the relative strength of extended family ties in the Tidewater No discussion of influence from the emanations of the Chesapeake Bay Impact Object that still lies dreaming, beyond even death as we know itpic.twitter.com/0OWL0U0NBE
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"'Patriarchy' . . . was rarely employed by the Puritans, and some times actually condemned" plus ça change
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"Virginia and New England were alike in their ideas of universal marriage; both rejected the ideal of celibacy which was so strong in Catholic countries." welcome to AMERICA where everyone Has to Fuck here is your culturally-mandated Protestant gf
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Here's Lucy Parke Byrd who wanted to brand a slave girl with a hot iron for a minor fault She was stopped by her husband, almost hit him, then decided rather to deliver "an abundance of bad words" before trying to strangle herself Later he "rogered her by way of reconciliation"pic.twitter.com/z78ComGUNE
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Another miserable couple "rode in sullen silence through the Virginia countryside, until suddenly the colonel turned his carriage . . . straight into Chesapeake Bay." "Where are you going, Mr. Custis?" "To Hell, Madam." "Drive on. Any place is better than Arlington."
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"The journal which recorded [Richards' wife's fury about his infidelity] was normally kept in English, but when things went wrong Richards switched to French, and when they went very wrong he wrote in Italian" fellas I could read about Tidewater marital conflicts all day
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Here's Sarah Harrison Blair, who repeatedly refused to vow to obey her husband James at their marriage ceremony. "Dr. Blair finally agreed to take his chances and the wedding went forward without any promise of obedience. Their married life together proved to be deeply unhappy."pic.twitter.com/j3f4pFLjM2
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"At a rich planter's table as late as 1773, the northern tutor Philip Fithian was startled to hear an argument on the question of whether women had souls." no word any resulting consensus
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Oh cute. Unmarried mothers were whipped bloody in public. If she was a servant, she had to serve another term to compensate her master for time lost to pregnancy, even if he was the father.
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Wow, remember Lucy Byrd, with the iron? Her husband William is a D I C K. "With very mixed success he attempted to seduce relatives, neighbors, casual acquaintances, strangers, prostitutes, the wives of his best friends, and servants [whom he often raped]."pic.twitter.com/oAhSO17dM1
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His entire diary is just pages and pages of "I visited Mrs So-and-so, rogered her twice very well, neglected my prayers" "I met a very tall woman and rogered her three times" "rogered [Betty S-t-r-d] twice, for which God forgive me" literally his entire diary for years unreal
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"An old Tidewater folk saying in Prince George's County, Maryland, defined a virgin as a girl who could run faster than her uncle."
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"The founders of New England made rape a hanging crime. In the courts of Chesapeake it was sometimes punished less severely than petty theft." Tidewater trying real hard to make the Puritans look good
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Onto childrearing and character. Lots of Rules and Etiquette covering a basically barbaric spirit. Yet: George Washington read a translation of Seneca's dialogues, and Addison's Cato, and frequently quoted the latter.
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Lucy Parke Byrd, with the iron and the dick husband? Also had a crazy father, Col. Daniel Parke! Publicly challenged the governor of Maryland to a duel. Kidnapped a married woman from England as a concubine. When the local priest condemned him from the pulpit? DUEL.pic.twitter.com/LptCu4ZxAg
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