As I was listening to Melvyn Bragg talking about the Gettysburg Address the other morning on R4 I was reminded of Richard II at Smithfield in 1381.\u00a0 What’s the connection you might ask?\u00a0 Well, the opposition to the freeing of slaves in the southern states of America was based essentially on the cotton producers not wanting to lose their source of free labour.\u00a0 Pay your workers?\u00a0 Lose your profit.\u00a0 Similarly in England six hundred years earlier the bonded labourers who surged into London on that June day during Corpus Christ week in what was later named The Peasants’ Revolt were also a valuable free labour force to the landed nobility of\u00a0 medieval England.\u00a0 Pay the serfs to till your land, loose your profit.\u00a0 Extraordinary, isn’t it, how greed can make people treat others as less than human, as mere commercial units with no human rights.\u00a0 When the monastics claimed that the love of money is the root of all evil they were right in the fourteenth century and they were right in the nineteenth.\u00a0 And what about today?\u00a0 Are things so different?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As I was listening to Melvyn Bragg talking about the Gettysburg Address the other morning on R4 I was reminded of Richard II at Smithfield in 1381.\u00a0 What’s the connection you might ask?\u00a0 Well, the opposition to the freeing of slaves in the southern states of America was based essentially on the cotton producers not wanting to lose their source of free labour.\u00a0 Pay your workers?\u00a0 Lose your profit.\u00a0 Similarly in England six hundred years earlier the bonded labourers who surged into London on that June day during Corpus Christ week in what was later named The Peasants’ Revolt were<\/p>\n[Read More...]<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":547,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543\/revisions\/547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cassandraclark.co.uk\/casscb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}