4 ms·

St Scholastica Day Riot

138 points by brudgers 4y ago

christophilus 4y ago
Ah, for those halcyon days. They were simpler times.
jeron 4y ago
And we’ve had the Scholastic Book Faire every year since
- JoBrad 4y ago
  And Carfax.
  - petesergeant 4y ago
    Hard to move a 12th century church tower, no?
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      And if you do, it really hurts the resale value.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Town & gown strife goes way back. (I'd stumbled across the SSDR a few years back, it's a fascinating bit of academic & cultural history.)
duxup 4y ago
I struggle to follow / understand a lot of things in the past. We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. Heck even when we get history and information from the people at the time sometimes it is confusing. The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.
- baryphonic 4y ago
  > The English Civil War is completely confusing for me. That's interesting, because I see Cavaliers vs Roundheads as the prototypical debate about the nature of Western culture that we are still having today.
- tenpies 4y ago
  > We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. One of my favourite history series was HBO's Rome because it tackled this directly. Sure, you have all the important aristocratic characters, but you also have all the no-name soldiers, slaves, and Roman citizens. At one point, a legionnaire gets into a bar fight with some Romans. The next day, that same legionnaire is escorting Marc Anthony and they get attacked by an angry mob. Marc Anthony interprets it as an attack on himself, but the mob was actually just pissed at the one legionnaire from the bar fight the night before and forces the group to retreat. The whole thing is interpreted by the aristocrats as an attack by the Pompeiian mobs on tribune Marc Anthony. This in turn, prevented Marc Anthony from exercising his office, and the whole thing snow balls into Caesar being forced to cross the Rubicon. Entire history potentially made, because a legionnaire got into a bar fight. Now this is fiction, but it's incredible to think how many stories like this must exist outside of our records.
- zone411 4y ago
  The Pillars of the Earth and its follow-up by Ken Follet are fun (but long) fiction novels set in Medieval England, which help you envision living in that world. I'm not sure how accurate they are when it comes to people's general attitudes, though.
- narrator 4y ago
  One thing I've learned about the ancient world is it was hyper-violent. Some guys could come over the hill and kill everyone in a tribe for stupid reasons.
- eru 4y ago
  > I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. Yes, that's a big problem. That a big part of why finding Pompeii was important: the volcanic eruption preserved everything, including daily life and random graffiti. In a more general sense, that's also why archaeologists love digging up trash dumps. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden
chasil 4y ago
If forever the moment was to buy a fellow bar patron a drink, that was it.
ExMachina73 4y ago
I feel like there's a script for a movie here, no? Has this event been dramatized in anyway? Reads like "Gangs of New York (2002)."
- groestl 4y ago
  "according to those sympathetic to the university, de Chesterfield threw his wooden drinking vessel at de Croydon's head; those sympathetic to the townsfolk say the student beat him around the head with the pot." This is 6 centuries ago.. Amazing
akiselev 4y ago
> Around 30 townsfolk were killed, as were up to 63 members of the university. > Violent disagreements between townspeople and students had arisen several times previously, and 12 of the 29 coroners' courts held in Oxford between 1297 and 1322 concerned murders by students. The University of Cambridge was established in 1209 by scholars who left Oxford following the lynching of two students by the town's citizens. Man, college towns used to be so much more violent! I never knew about the connection between a saint and the word/concept of scholastics, nor that a university as notable as Cambridge was started because the locals lynched students. That's pretty cool, TIL! Edit: Sidenote, why does the graduation ceremony at Cambridge look like they're going to drown a witch? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown#/media/File:Punting_cam_gown.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown#/media/File:Punt...
- gigfkb 4y ago
  That is not a photo of the graduation ceremony. It shows a student punting. He is wearing the gown needed for the ceremony.
  - edgineer 4y ago
    I had to look up "punting." It means boating in a punt (which is a small boat).
    - spatulon 4y ago
      Importantly, the punt is propelled by having someone stand at the back and push a pole against the river bed. It's popular with students and tourists in both Oxford and Cambridge, although the two cities disagree over which end of a punt is the back.
- RRWagner 4y ago
  And why do we recognize graduates of higher education in the 21st century by making them wear clothes from 500 years ago?? I know "why" but somehow it would be more forward-looking if they were even wearing Starfleet uniforms.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
> The ... riot took place in ... 1355 ... complained about the quality of wine served to them in the Swindlestock Tavern > this was the site of the swindlestock tavern 1250–1709 (http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central/swindlestock_tavern.html http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central...) > swindler (n.) 1774 (https://www.etymonline.com/word/swindler https://www.etymonline.com/word/swindler) Hmmm
- defrost 4y ago
  You might want to look to the use of Swind and Swynde in English texts from the centuries before, eg: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_... which the OED gives as "To waste away, languish; to dwindle, decrease; to vanish, disappear." and then Swindle Stock would be the site of a place of punishment - stocks on which people are put to waste away and diminish. Of course, language being plastic, it might also be the pub in which farm workers drank after listening to the sound of Sycthes while cutting sheaves to Stuck (or Stock) (placed uprtight to air and dry); but that's a stretch. I drank with the harvesters, who sang me songs about rural life, such as—‘Sitting in the swale; and listening to the swindle of the flail, as it sounds dub-a-dub on the corn, from the neighbouring barn.’
  - throwaway4533 4y ago
    As with many other archaic words in English, I'm guessing that "Swind" and "Swynde" came from Scandinavia and Germany where they've kept their old meaning to this day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwinden#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwinden#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/svinde#Danish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/svinde#Danish A modern example is "oxygen depletion" or "hypoxia" in English/Latin which, in Danish, is called "iltsvind" ("ilt" = oxygen, "svind" = depletion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(environmental) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(environmental) https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iltsvind https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iltsvind It is indeed related to swindle/svindle/schwindeln but I don't know when the two words "diverged": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwindeln#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwindeln#German If you go back far enough, swind/svind/schwinden may also share a common ancestor with "dwindle": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/swindan%C4%85 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...
podgib 4y ago
I was a tour guide in Oxford while I was doing my PhD there. This was always my favourite story to tell. It's a part of history that is simultaneously so foreign and yet so relatable today.
shusaku 4y ago
> While the royal commission of inquiry was in place, John Gynwell, the Bishop of Lincoln, imposed an interdict on the townspeople, and banned all religious practices, including services (except on key feast days), burials and marriages; only baptisms of young children were allowed. That is quite an interesting tidbit
idontwantthis 4y ago
Reminds me of the "sacks" in Ananthem.
Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago
Things back in the day seemed to escalate quickly. If the local college kids here in upstate New York complained of the quality of the wine in my local tavern, I'd definitely... *checks notes* incite the local townsfolk to extrajudicialy kill 63 of their campus colleagues.
swapsCAPS 4y ago
Just. Wow. This has piqued my interest, is there any background information as to why this happened (so often)? There must have been underlying tentions, wondering what those were, but can imagine it's just lost to history
- pnut 4y ago
  The article explained it? Oxford scholars were literally above the law, and used their protected status to abuse and demean the townspeople, up to and including the mayor. After the riot, the king cracked down and reasserted the arrangement, which apparently continued in some forms for another 500 years.
- jonstewart 4y ago
  There's some important context that's also not covered by the Wikipedia article: the Black Death swept through Europe from 1347–1350. England's population declined by almost half and would not recover to the same level until the 1600s. As we've seen with covid, but just as a shadow, the population decline led to a huge labor shortage and high inflation. So, 1355 wasn't a happy time.
shaftoe444 4y ago
See also, https://thehistoryteamblog.wordpress.com/the-riots-of-1272/ https://thehistoryteamblog.wordpress.com/the-riots-of-1272/
DeathArrow 4y ago
One doesn't simply mess with one man's booze without consequences.
DubiousPusher 4y ago
The petty incitement of this immediately reminded me of The Straw Hat Riot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot It's hard for people today to understand just how sudden, frequent and destructive mass violence was in the past. Up to our very recent history. As recently as the 70s there were fairly regular riots in America that would make most of what you saw in 2020 look pretty pedestrian.
- joenot443 4y ago
  Pedestrian? Didn’t like 19 people die during the protests in 2020? I don’t see any deaths listed for the Straw Hat Riot, I don’t see any mention of lootings or arson either. On the other hand, I was in Seattle during the worst of the 2020 riots, I’d never seen such anger and destruction in my life.
  - heywhatupboys 4y ago
    This comment reeks of racism, I hadn't thought I would have to read these absurdist takes on HN. Would you write the same thing about the civil rights demonstrations?
    - joenot443 4y ago
      This comment reeks of low effort finger pointing, I hadn’t thought I would have to read these juvenile takes on HN. Would you feel the same way if 200 people had died? 2000? For the record, I have nothing but support for the cause they were protesting, policing in America is hugely broken and there are well-documented racial elements to that failure, but I don’t think I’m alone in wishing demonstrations themselves hadn’t been so destructive. Try making this comment again without using the R word. Are you of the opinion that the protests in Seattle are immune from criticism? I had a friend who closed her store after it was looted twice. Where does she fit into your distressingly simple model? I was living next to CHOP during the whole ordeal. If you don’t have on the ground experience, I genuinely don’t think your opinion is worth anything here, I’m sorry.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I remember reading an article that said, if the Inspector Morse Mysteries were reflecting real life, Oxford would be one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Maybe they were just a few centuries off...

138 points by brudgers 4y ago

christophilus 4y ago

Ah, for those halcyon days. They were simpler times.

jeron 4y ago

And we’ve had the Scholastic Book Faire every year since

JoBrad 4y ago
And Carfax.
- petesergeant 4y ago
  Hard to move a 12th century church tower, no?
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    And if you do, it really hurts the resale value.

dredmorbius 4y ago

Town & gown strife goes way back. (I'd stumbled across the SSDR a few years back, it's a fascinating bit of academic & cultural history.)

duxup 4y ago

I struggle to follow / understand a lot of things in the past. We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. Heck even when we get history and information from the people at the time sometimes it is confusing. The English Civil War is completely confusing for me.

baryphonic 4y ago
> The English Civil War is completely confusing for me. That's interesting, because I see Cavaliers vs Roundheads as the prototypical debate about the nature of Western culture that we are still having today.
tenpies 4y ago
> We get history that understandably is written by the more educated from those times. I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. One of my favourite history series was HBO's Rome because it tackled this directly. Sure, you have all the important aristocratic characters, but you also have all the no-name soldiers, slaves, and Roman citizens. At one point, a legionnaire gets into a bar fight with some Romans. The next day, that same legionnaire is escorting Marc Anthony and they get attacked by an angry mob. Marc Anthony interprets it as an attack on himself, but the mob was actually just pissed at the one legionnaire from the bar fight the night before and forces the group to retreat. The whole thing is interpreted by the aristocrats as an attack by the Pompeiian mobs on tribune Marc Anthony. This in turn, prevented Marc Anthony from exercising his office, and the whole thing snow balls into Caesar being forced to cross the Rubicon. Entire history potentially made, because a legionnaire got into a bar fight. Now this is fiction, but it's incredible to think how many stories like this must exist outside of our records.
zone411 4y ago
The Pillars of the Earth and its follow-up by Ken Follet are fun (but long) fiction novels set in Medieval England, which help you envision living in that world. I'm not sure how accurate they are when it comes to people's general attitudes, though.
narrator 4y ago
One thing I've learned about the ancient world is it was hyper-violent. Some guys could come over the hill and kill everyone in a tribe for stupid reasons.
eru 4y ago
> I really don't know that we know what the local rando citizens thought or were thinking. Yes, that's a big problem. That a big part of why finding Pompeii was important: the volcanic eruption preserved everything, including daily life and random graffiti. In a more general sense, that's also why archaeologists love digging up trash dumps. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midden

chasil 4y ago

If forever the moment was to buy a fellow bar patron a drink, that was it.

ExMachina73 4y ago

I feel like there's a script for a movie here, no? Has this event been dramatized in anyway? Reads like "Gangs of New York (2002)."

groestl 4y ago
"according to those sympathetic to the university, de Chesterfield threw his wooden drinking vessel at de Croydon's head; those sympathetic to the townsfolk say the student beat him around the head with the pot." This is 6 centuries ago.. Amazing

akiselev 4y ago

> Around 30 townsfolk were killed, as were up to 63 members of the university. > Violent disagreements between townspeople and students had arisen several times previously, and 12 of the 29 coroners' courts held in Oxford between 1297 and 1322 concerned murders by students. The University of Cambridge was established in 1209 by scholars who left Oxford following the lynching of two students by the town's citizens. Man, college towns used to be so much more violent! I never knew about the connection between a saint and the word/concept of scholastics, nor that a university as notable as Cambridge was started because the locals lynched students. That's pretty cool, TIL! Edit: Sidenote, why does the graduation ceremony at Cambridge look like they're going to drown a witch? [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown#/media/File:Punting_cam_gown.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Town_and_gown#/media/File:Punt...

gigfkb 4y ago
That is not a photo of the graduation ceremony. It shows a student punting. He is wearing the gown needed for the ceremony.
- edgineer 4y ago
  I had to look up "punting." It means boating in a punt (which is a small boat).
  - spatulon 4y ago
    Importantly, the punt is propelled by having someone stand at the back and push a pole against the river bed. It's popular with students and tourists in both Oxford and Cambridge, although the two cities disagree over which end of a punt is the back.
RRWagner 4y ago
And why do we recognize graduates of higher education in the 21st century by making them wear clothes from 500 years ago?? I know "why" but somehow it would be more forward-looking if they were even wearing Starfleet uniforms.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

> The ... riot took place in ... 1355 ... complained about the quality of wine served to them in the Swindlestock Tavern > this was the site of the swindlestock tavern 1250–1709 (http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central/swindlestock_tavern.html http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/inscriptions/central...) > swindler (n.) 1774 (https://www.etymonline.com/word/swindler https://www.etymonline.com/word/swindler) Hmmm

defrost 4y ago
You might want to look to the use of Swind and Swynde in English texts from the centuries before, eg: Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_English_People https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_History_of_the_... which the OED gives as "To waste away, languish; to dwindle, decrease; to vanish, disappear." and then Swindle Stock would be the site of a place of punishment - stocks on which people are put to waste away and diminish. Of course, language being plastic, it might also be the pub in which farm workers drank after listening to the sound of Sycthes while cutting sheaves to Stuck (or Stock) (placed uprtight to air and dry); but that's a stretch. I drank with the harvesters, who sang me songs about rural life, such as—‘Sitting in the swale; and listening to the swindle of the flail, as it sounds dub-a-dub on the corn, from the neighbouring barn.’
- throwaway4533 4y ago
  As with many other archaic words in English, I'm guessing that "Swind" and "Swynde" came from Scandinavia and Germany where they've kept their old meaning to this day: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwinden#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwinden#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/svinde#Danish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/svinde#Danish A modern example is "oxygen depletion" or "hypoxia" in English/Latin which, in Danish, is called "iltsvind" ("ilt" = oxygen, "svind" = depletion): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(environmental) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypoxia_(environmental) https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iltsvind https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iltsvind It is indeed related to swindle/svindle/schwindeln but I don't know when the two words "diverged": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwindeln#German https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schwindeln#German If you go back far enough, swind/svind/schwinden may also share a common ancestor with "dwindle": https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic/swindan%C4%85 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Germanic...

podgib 4y ago

I was a tour guide in Oxford while I was doing my PhD there. This was always my favourite story to tell. It's a part of history that is simultaneously so foreign and yet so relatable today.

shusaku 4y ago

> While the royal commission of inquiry was in place, John Gynwell, the Bishop of Lincoln, imposed an interdict on the townspeople, and banned all religious practices, including services (except on key feast days), burials and marriages; only baptisms of young children were allowed. That is quite an interesting tidbit

idontwantthis 4y ago

Reminds me of the "sacks" in Ananthem.

Simon_O_Rourke 4y ago

Things back in the day seemed to escalate quickly. If the local college kids here in upstate New York complained of the quality of the wine in my local tavern, I'd definitely... *checks notes* incite the local townsfolk to extrajudicialy kill 63 of their campus colleagues.

swapsCAPS 4y ago

Just. Wow. This has piqued my interest, is there any background information as to why this happened (so often)? There must have been underlying tentions, wondering what those were, but can imagine it's just lost to history

pnut 4y ago
The article explained it? Oxford scholars were literally above the law, and used their protected status to abuse and demean the townspeople, up to and including the mayor. After the riot, the king cracked down and reasserted the arrangement, which apparently continued in some forms for another 500 years.
jonstewart 4y ago
There's some important context that's also not covered by the Wikipedia article: the Black Death swept through Europe from 1347–1350. England's population declined by almost half and would not recover to the same level until the 1600s. As we've seen with covid, but just as a shadow, the population decline led to a huge labor shortage and high inflation. So, 1355 wasn't a happy time.

shaftoe444 4y ago

See also, https://thehistoryteamblog.wordpress.com/the-riots-of-1272/ https://thehistoryteamblog.wordpress.com/the-riots-of-1272/

DeathArrow 4y ago

One doesn't simply mess with one man's booze without consequences.

DubiousPusher 4y ago

The petty incitement of this immediately reminded me of The Straw Hat Riot. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_Hat_Riot It's hard for people today to understand just how sudden, frequent and destructive mass violence was in the past. Up to our very recent history. As recently as the 70s there were fairly regular riots in America that would make most of what you saw in 2020 look pretty pedestrian.

joenot443 4y ago
Pedestrian? Didn’t like 19 people die during the protests in 2020? I don’t see any deaths listed for the Straw Hat Riot, I don’t see any mention of lootings or arson either. On the other hand, I was in Seattle during the worst of the 2020 riots, I’d never seen such anger and destruction in my life.
- heywhatupboys 4y ago
  This comment reeks of racism, I hadn't thought I would have to read these absurdist takes on HN. Would you write the same thing about the civil rights demonstrations?
  - joenot443 4y ago
    This comment reeks of low effort finger pointing, I hadn’t thought I would have to read these juvenile takes on HN. Would you feel the same way if 200 people had died? 2000? For the record, I have nothing but support for the cause they were protesting, policing in America is hugely broken and there are well-documented racial elements to that failure, but I don’t think I’m alone in wishing demonstrations themselves hadn’t been so destructive. Try making this comment again without using the R word. Are you of the opinion that the protests in Seattle are immune from criticism? I had a friend who closed her store after it was looted twice. Where does she fit into your distressingly simple model? I was living next to CHOP during the whole ordeal. If you don’t have on the ground experience, I genuinely don’t think your opinion is worth anything here, I’m sorry.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I remember reading an article that said, if the Inspector Morse Mysteries were reflecting real life, Oxford would be one of the most dangerous places on Earth. Maybe they were just a few centuries off...