Déjà Vu All Over Again: Evil May Day
In the spring of 1517, working class Londoners were suffering from the effects of an economic downturn, caused in part by an expensive war against France and in part by a hard winter. Artisans and merchants alike complained that foreigners enjoyed unfair advantages that allowed them to take work and trade away from Englishmen.
The foreign population was small, perhaps two percent of the city, but highly visible. Many lived in special enclaves, known as liberties, that were outside the jurisdiction of the city government. (Not an unusual situation. British merchants would later enjoy similar arrangements in Ottoman Turkey, China, and South Asia.)
In mid-April, a businessman named John Lincoln convinced a priest to address the issue in his Easter sermon. Dr. Bell’s sermon was about uprising rather than resurrection. Declaring that foreigners “eat the bread from poor fatherless children”, he urged Englishmen to defend themselves against foreign incursions.
The uprising took place on May 1, a holiday that was celebrated in the countryside with bonfires and maypoles and in London with drunken revelry. Grievances and alcohol are a dangerous combination. An ill-conceived attempt to impose a curfew on the traditional carousing, erupted into violence against the foreign community. Roughly a thousand young men, mostly poor laborers and apprentices rampaged through the parts of London where foreign craftsmen plied their trade, looting shops and destroying buildings. (Shoe shops were a particular target, thanks to a ruling by King Henry VIII that allowed foreign shoemakers to make shoes in styles that native Londoners were forbidden to manufacture.) Over the course of four or five hours, the rioters damaged property and left many injured. The only good news was that no one died.
The city’s government had not been able to stop the riot, but it was quick to tack retribution against the rioters. More than 300 people were arrested and charged with treason.* John Lincoln and thirteen others were hung, drawn and quartered, including a number of prepubescent boys. The balance of those arrested were pardoned after the queen, Catherine of Aragon, went on her knees to beg Henry to show them mercy.
Evil May Day was a small, pointless, ugly event, ending with a gaudy royal set piece. The only immediate impact was the issuance of new rules surrounding the celebration of May Day.** Nothing much changed for London’s artisans–or its foreign residents for that matter–as a result of the riot. In fact, smaller-scale conflicts related to the presence of foreigners in the city grew more frequent over the course of the century as European Protestants took refuge in England during the Protestant Reformation.*** (An unintended consequence of Henry’s dramatic break with the Catholic Church.)
*On the grounds that they had broken the King’s peace.
**Because that was obviously the most important issue.
***Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the church door only a few months after Evil May Day.
From the Archives: A Love Letter to Independent Bookstories
In the United States, the last Saturday of April is Independent Bookstore Day–a nationwide party for book lovers. (If you’re reading this the day it comes out, that’s tomorrow.) If you’re lucky enough to have an independent bookstore near you, stop by and show them some love. Me? I’ll be traveling back from a speaking gig in Oklahoma City. I guess I’ll just have to celebrate a day late.
I’ve never seldom, met a bookstore (or book-selling venue) I didn’t like. I will happily browse through a big box store, a used bookstore, or the odd shelf of books in a flea market stall. In a strange town or foreign city, a bookstore visit will always make me happy, even if most of the books are in a language I can’t read. I’ve never come away from a library sale without an armload, or in the case of the Hyde Park-Kenwood Community Conference annual book sale, several canvas bags full.* But independent book stores have a special place in my heart.
Heritage Books in Springfield, Missouri, was my first bookstore crush. It was a small store in a strip mall within walking of my house. In retrospect I realize that the selection was both small and eccentric, but at the time it seemed as bounteous as the Strand Bookstore in New York, which boasts eighteen miles of books. In some ways both the smallness and the eccentricity were to my benefit as a novice book buyer. On those rare occasions when I had some money to spend on a book, I gave in to the delights of serendipity, finding books I didn’t know existed.
Today I live in Chicago, which is home to fabulous independent bookstores. Once again, I’m lucky enough to live within walking distance of my favorite stores: the very academic Seminary Coop Bookstore and its more commercial sibling, 57th Street Books. I browse. I chat about books with booksellers. I eavesdrop on the bookish conversation of others. I check to see if my own books are on the shelves. I check to see if my friends’ books are on the shelves. I attend an occasional reading when the stars are in alignment. I resist the temptation to buy books I don’t need, because at this point I already own several hundred books I have not yet read. And I give in to the temptation to buy more books because with bookstores it’s a case of use them or lose them.
*Held each year on the weekend around Columbus Day. It’s a dangerous event. See you there?
The Longest Day
As I’ve mentioned before, My Own True Love and I are traveling to Normandy in May on a tour led by the National World War II Museum. The focus of the trip is D-Day–something I know about in only the broadest of terms. Which means I decided to read up, because that is what I do. The museum helpfully included a list of suggested reading: ten serious works of military history written by respected historians and journalists, ranging in scope from a comprehensive history of the war from the American and British perspective drawing largely on first hand accounts to the story of a group of men from one small town in Virginia who died at Omaha Beach.* Overwhelmed by the choices, I identified the ones we already owned (and by we, I mean My Own True Love) and then picked one at random.
The book gods smiled on me. Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day proved to be just the kind of military history I like. In the foreword Ryan claims the book is “not a military history. It is the story of people: the men of the Allied forces, the enemy they fought, and the civilians who were caught up in the bloody confusion of D Day.” Ryan manages the paradoxical task of portraying the sense of confusion with utter clarity. Instead of telling the story from the viewpoint of a omniscient narrator who can see the invasion as a whole, he moves from one powerful vignette to another, replicating the isolation of each unit on the battlefield. He moves from tragedy to comedy and back. His enlisted men are as vivid as his generals. He not only made me care about members of the invading force, he made me feel sympathy for lower-level German officers unable to respond to the invasion because of bad decisions made higher up the chair of command. (Quite a hat trick.) My only complaint with the book is that it made me cry on public transportation.
Will The Longest Day help me follow the course of the invasion as we walk the beaches in Normandy? Maybe not. But it certainly helped me understand the battle in human terms. And that is, after all, one of the reasons I read history.
*Here’s the list for anyone looking to add to your To-Be-Read shelf:
Stephen Ambrose. Band of Brothers.
Stephen Ambrose. D-Day: June 6, 1944
Stephen Ambrose. Pegasus Bridge**
Rick Atkinson. The Guns at Last Light: the War in Western Europe, 1944-1945
Tom Brokaw. The Greatest Generation
Robert M. Citino. The German Way of War
John Keegan. Six Armies in Normandy
Alex Kershaw. The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice.
Donald L. Miller. The Story of World War II
Cornelius Ryan. The Longest Day
It’s an impressive list, but I must admit it made me wonder if there are any books about D-Day written by women. A quick Google search gave me an impressive number of hits, all with notation “missing: women“–which sums things up on many levels. If anyone knows of an example, please let me know.
**In case you hadn’t caught on, Dr. Ambrose was one of the founders of the museum.