Tea at Trianon: The Charter of the Forest

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, March 4, 2020

The Charter of the Forest

From Medievalists:

The Norman definition of Forest extended beyond wooded areas and was used to describe any rural area that contained useful natural resources such as wood or peat, or where animals that provided game for sport and meat for aristocratic tables resided. These areas were often enclosed and became the exclusive property of the Angevin royal family. This state of affairs existed as a result of a perversion of the Norman forest laws that had been imported by William the Conqueror and applied to his new Kingdom of England in 1066.

Following the conqueror’s death in 1087, his son William II (1087-1100) had extended the ‘royal parks’, as the forests became known, and introduced harsh penalties for anyone who intruded upon his newly enclosed forests. Any person who was caught poaching the King’s deer or felling a tree for firewood could expect the amputation of a limb as a best-case scenario, and execution as another likely outcome. William II’s arrangement existed largely unaltered in the reigns of his successors and only increased under Richard I (1089-1099), who required all the resources he could muster for his persistent need to crusade. His brother John (1199-1216), continued this legacy out of a penchant for administering the King’s justice, an overriding desire to control the nations resources for his own gain, and a general need to operate out of extreme spite. (Read more.)