Push time a little onwards, last year I walked out Cobbett's
description of Leicester in the early 1800's: mud huts, in the
villages, that are now the middle-class suburbs, were what most people
actually lived in, unless they were squires or vicars.
2008/8/26 Robin Hamilton <[log in to unmask]>:
>> Rob
>>
>> in terms of the ramshackle Elizabethan economy Sidney was well off. I
>> regard him as a kind of Rupert Brooke, but a better writer.
>
> Depends who you compare him with -- better off than Ralegh, less moneyed
> than Surrey.
>
> So admittedly, we're ignoring 99.9% of the population. But what else is
> new? Compare the US and the UK today.
>
> There are damn few aristo writers of any merit -- seems to be a curse worse
> than having a Brummie accent. Most, like Chaucer and Wyatt and Greville,
> were middle-class apparachiks.
>
> Like Trollope, make your money in a respectable day job (Stevens? Eliot?)
> and write on the fly.
>
> Of the aristos, Sidney was easily the best.
>
> Surrey was a pathetic lame-brained loser.
>
> As for Grey Gowrie .... !!!
>
> R.
>
> (Oops -- forgot -- shame on me, as a True North Britain -- James IV, and
> _The Kingis Quair_.
>
> :-(((
>
> Charles d'Orleans was French, so we can forgive him.
>
> R2
>
>> As for proto-Calvinism, don't get me going on that, yes, the workers
>> should work harder, to pay for their masters' entertainments.
>
> Unusually for you, that seems to lack an 'istorical perspective.
>
> Think the Levellers
>
>> Some spare, but he didn't live in a mud hut, which was what most
>> people outside the cities really did.
>
> Who the hell was living (outside Wales) in a mud hut in the 1580s?
>
> Get real, matey. If you smelly English had been living in mud huts as late
> as then, you wouldn't have had the Great Fire of London.
>
> C3P0
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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