Saturday, December 29, 2007

Cross-lot Walking


JOURNAL OF A CROSS-LOT WALKER
by John Hanson Mitchell

In November of 1853, Henry Thoreau went for a walk from Concord up to the town of Littleton to pay a visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother Bulkley, who was living with a family near the town center. Since he walked all the way, it is likely that Thoreau resorted to what he termed cross-lot walking, that is, he cut through farms and privately held woodlots without regard to property lines and avoided, as was his custom, roads much traveled by.

Although he does not give us the route, it is likely that he walked up from the center of Concord, crossed through the wild Estabrook Country and then perhaps followed the old Great Road for a mile or so. Just south of Nagog Pond, he probably left the road and circled up through the fields and woodlots on the western slopes of the pond bank, property which in those days, was owned by a fmaily named Tenant.

According to old maps, this area was open land in Henry's time, what the town called mowings, and since this whole territory had been owned outright by private individuals under English and American law since 1736, in order to get to his destination, Henry had to trespass, not an uncommon custom for him, one might even say a regular pastime.

This habit of cross-lot walking is a passion I share with Henry. The area south and west of Nagog Pond, which he passed through back in [date] is all wooded now, except for a small mowing just west of the Nagog Pond. Some years back, I learned that this same tract of land was the probable site of a seventeenth century village of Christianized Indians. These people, probably members of the local Pawtucket tribe, having spotted, as they believed, the arrival of a new and powerful deity in their land, converted to Christianity and as a result were granted some sixteen square miles at a place called Nashobah, about thirty-five miles west of Boston. Under the direction of John Eliot, the so-called Apostle to the Indians, the Christianized Indians set up a village of pole-frame houses and traditional wigwams, planted apple trees, cleared fields for agriculture, cut their hair, ceased dancing, and settled in to live like Englishmen.

According to the legislative powers of the General Court in Boston, the land, known as Nashobah Plantation, was granted to the Indians outright (never mind the deep irony of the fact that it was their land in the first place). Within the boundaries of the tract, the Indians owned their own houses and property and, with permission of the General Court, were permitted to buy or sell plots of land. But twenty-five years later during the King Philip's War, in what amounted to a prelude to the treatment of the Nissei at the outset of World War Two, the inhabitants of Nashobah were rounded up and sent to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where, over the succeeding winter, many of them succumbed.

After the war, a few of the survivors of this ordeal struggled back to the Nashobah area to live out their time. The last survivor was a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, who died, feeble and blind, in l736, under the care of two tradesmen from Concord named Ephraim and Elnathan Jones. By way of payment for her care, Sarah Doublet granted the Jones’ the rights to the five hundred acres that she had held, the last remnant of the sixteen square miles Nashobah Plantation.

That transfer marked the end of Indian land tenure in that part of the world and the beginning of the new era in land use history. Sara and her people would have held their land in common and would have made decisions as to its use communally, by consensus --- which, ironically, was a pattern that was not uncommon in England in the seventeenth century. But in the space of little more than fifty years this system of holding land in common would be subsumed by the concept of private property. Within another hundred years, this new system would oversweep the entire American continent and replace the idea of land held in common. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, new even to the conquering English and French.


This Sarah Doublet, the original "owner" of the tract under the English system, had black eyes and a lurid blue image of a bear tattooed on her left cheek. She would have tied her long black hair in a knot, fastened with a band of silver, and she dressed in a decorated moose skin skirt and buskins, with a blue shawl over her shoulders and a beaded blue cloth around her waist. Like all the women of her group, she probably wore thongs of moosehide around her ankles and in winter, and sometimes also summer, she greased her skin with bear fat to the keep the cold or the insects at bay. Periodically she would paint herself in blues and reds and don cloaks made of bird feathers or robes of furred mammal pelts, all hung about with heads and clawed feet, and the striped tails of raccoons and skunks, and the whole arrangement made fast with a belt made from the skin of milk snakes and copperheads. She fixed pendants of swan's down or shells in her pierced ears, placed a bird wing headdress in her hair, and strung herself with shell necklaces and ropes of wampum, and perhaps --- all this is conjecture --- an amulet at her breast, a winged thunderbird, or the carved image of A'pcinic, the horned water monster who lived in the depths of the pond below her village.


After Eliot came, after she accepted Christianity, she would have ceased to wear bangles and sparkles and fanciful animal skins, would have cast aside her bird wing headdress and her swan's down earrings. She would have become modest, would have lowered her eyes, prayed, sung the strange descant chanting hymns that she and her people would sound out during services.

By the l650s, having translated the Bible into Algonquian, John Eliot and his associate, Daniel Gookins, set about establishing a series of villages wherein his converts, his "poor blind Indians" as he called them, could live in peace --- provided of course, they cut their hair and prayed to the proper God. They began in 1654 with a small congregation at Natick, just west of Boston, and by the late 1650s they had secured seven villages of Christian Indians, "praying towns" where Eliot’s "praying" Indians" could live in peace and harmony. One these tracts, a holding of some sixteen square miles was located northwest of present day Concord in a region of fertile uplands, and well-watered intervales. The actual village was located between two ponds wherein lay "manie good fishes and planting grounds".


This English idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, was actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The term originated in the English feudal system when all land belonged ultimately to the Crown. Those who lived on feudal lands were obliged to perform duties, such as military service or farm work or provide crops or meat to pay for the right to use the land. Land held with the fewest strings attached became known as fee simple. The idea of land as property did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone, you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it, you did not actually own the ground. But in the seventeenth century land came to be seen as an object of quantity, something that, in theory at least, could be sold.

By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land, pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf, began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private, outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This is the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly-held lands --- meadows, open fields, and forests --- were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.

In the new England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the English soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished. The Jones family who took over the Nashobah property after Sarah died would have assumed the property in its entirety in fee simple, and when they died, since they owned it outright, they could pass it along to their heirs.

By contrast, Sarah's people would have viewed the land as a common resource, controlled, but not owned by the Pawtucket people. Territory was defined, and periodically redefined by tribal members. Generally the boundary would have been a natural topographic feature such as a watershed, or in the case of Nashobah, the land between two ponds. The territory would have been under the somewhat loose control of a powerful figure, or sachem, a "king" as the English phrased it or even a "queen" a saunk. Among the Eastern Woodland people the social structure was a complex hierarchy which was not too far removed from the proto feudal system that existed in England before the coming of William the Conqueror. At the head of the group was the sachem and his wife, or wives. This man, the equivalent of the lord or earl in English culture, was in control of a certain territory, a tract of land which was defined by natural boundaries and comprehended by all those tribes and bands in the general area. Periodically, at a great council, the sachem or saunk would divide up his or her territory and assign certain areas to certain families for hunting, or fishing, or for agricultural use. No one owned any of this though, not even the sachem --- he or she merely controlled the rights of use, the usufruct of the region. In return the sachem was given a tribute each year by the people below him, a certain number of bushels of corn, for example.

Within this territory, or "kingdom", small bands, extended family groups, or tribes, had rights of use of a planting field or hunting grounds, fishing weirs, or berry picking areas. But they did not in any sense own the land in these areas, and after some years they would abandon "their" fields anyway and move on to another area. All this was somewhat ill-defined, so that any individual who wanted to collect sedges near someone else's fishing weir could do so. Anyone would wanted to dig groundnuts or collect bark near someone else's berry picking grounds could proceed. Furthermore, at certain times of year, in certain places, the controls were relaxed and people from various tribes would gather with other bands, usually around good fishing sites. For example, in Sarah's time, the falls of the Merrimack at what is now Lowell was under the control of the great sachem Passaconway (who, it is said, lived to be l07 years old and whose father was a bear). During the spring runs of anadromous fish, villages from all over the region would gather at the site to share the bounty. They all acknowledged a mutual right to use the site for a specific purpose, even though the falls were in the territory of Passsaconway.

In England in the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, life centered around the village. The village centered around the church, and the houses were clustered on either side of a central road that led to other villages of similar design. Beyond the cluster of housing lay the agricultural lands and beyond them, in certain areas at least, the greenwood or the wild heath which, by the seventeenth century had been much diminished from earlier times in English history when the dense forests of oak, beech, and ash covered the lands between the villages.

This basic pattern, which varied from county to county and in fact was far more complex than this basic form, had its antecedents in feudalistic society and its step child, the manor house, which developed in the sixteenth century. The feudalistic system in England was refined and perfected (if those are the proper terms) with the arrival of William the Conqueror. In its most basic form, a village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by planting fields within a surround of pasture, and beyond this the wildwood. Under the feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety the underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders surrendered whatever rights of ownership they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their land, their source of livelihood.

By the time of William, the social system was well established. At the bottom of the were the serfs who actually belonged to other individuals and worked the land. Next up the line were the cottars or cottagers, who were responsible for small holdings, then the villeins who farmed as many as fifty acres or more. Above them were the thanes, who drew rents in kind from the villeins and who were in turn responsible to the earls or lords who were in turn responsible to the king.

In a typical feudal holding by the time of William, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech and ash. Some sixteen to twenty families would live in the village, about six cottars or so, maybe nine villeins, and the thane. All told there would have been about two hundred people in the town. The system worked communally. These families would have owned a number of plows between them, possibly as few as seven or eight, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fish ponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the edge of the village, was one long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today, flying over England, would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure. This great open field was ploughed in strips which were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. This pattern, known as a furlong --- a standard furrow's length--- came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley and peas, and were altered on a three year system of rotation allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each villein planted and harvested his own crop on a given amount of land, but it might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf --- essentially the equivalent of a slave --- you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land and the distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.

Surrounding the cultivated lands were the pasture lands where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but were not divided into lots. Beyond the pasture lands was the wildwood, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage and here also, up until the coming of William, they hunted deer and boar for their larder.

William, as Anglophiles to this day will attest, at once altered this primordial feudal system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon system was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Villeins, serfs, and cottars who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or worst of all, killing deer --- his deer mind you --- were severely punished. Their hands were cut off, their ears cropped, and in some instances, they were put to death. William's ruthless protection of his resources altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it was heavily used by the peasants. It was customary for them to pollard the trees of the woods and to allow swine to uproot native vegetation in their search for nuts and roots, for example. Removing the peasants from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the people of the region.

(There is an interesting, albeit tragic, contemporary twist to this in the recently privatized forests of Siberia. Formerly the state would drive out and sometimes even kill individuals attempting to exploit the state-controlled forests. Now it's up for grabs and one of its most important predatory inhabitants, the magnificent Siberian tiger, is on a swift path to extinction.)

Under William the Conqueror's feudalistic system, rents for lands were paid in kind, that is you supplied a certain amount of grain to the earl each year according to the amount of land you were using,. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, depending on your land holdings. You applied each year to renew your holding and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top, the serfs or cottars at the bottom, and various tenants and lords in the middle reaches --- from the Crown, all titles flow, as the phrase has it. The system was not just designed to control land of England. It was also a convenient way of raising an army. The lords owed allegiance to the king, and the villagers could pay their rents by military service. When the king called to raise an army, you joined. So did your lord.

All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims came to the new world and the old tenure system requiring payment in kind or in personal services faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company in what was called common socage, which is to say the rights of use of the land could be paid in rents, rather than knights' service to the King. Common socage was actually not an unknown form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England.


But even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter what king sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants would continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private property system even into our time. With advent of feudalism in much of Europe the allodially-held lands were placed under the protection of a powerful lord. But in England, and most especially in Kent, the allodial system was maintained even after William's time. As a result when the seventeenth century Puritans began taking over the Indian lands of New England, they understood perhaps better than any other invading culture of the Americas, the rights of Indian title to those lands which the Indians were cultivating.

Civil Wars, regicides, interregnums and the Puritan exodus to the New World notwithstanding, the seventeenth century was an active period in English history. Not long after the Great Migration to the Americas began, in 1660, Parliament passed a statute switching all existing tenures into common socage so that an annual rent could serve as payment for land and not personal service.

There was more to come though. At the beginning of December in 1664, while Sarah Doublet was living at Nashobah, two men at the upper end of Drury Lane in London were reported dead and two physcians and a surgeon were sent in to determine the cause. There had been rumors abroad that the dreaded plague had returned to Holland and the authorities wanted to make certain that it did not reach England. The physcians inspected the bodies and found "tokens" of the sickness upon the bodies of the dead. The case was dutifully reported to the parish clerk and the weekly bill of mortality printed the news the following week.

Over the next month cases began to appear with more regularity in the different parishes: twelve in St. Giles by the tenth, twelve more by the twenty fourth. Seventeen cases in Saint Andrews between the third and the tenth of January, twenty-three more by the end of the month. Slowly, parish by parish, the number of cases mounted until by the end of June, 1665, as many as a thousand people were dying a month in some sections.

Finally, on September second in l666, a fire began in the crowded warrens of inner London and spread quickly among the small shops, churches, and livery halls. By the end of the day it was still spreading, and by the morning of the second day it had jumped deeper into the city. For four straight days and nights the conflagration raged through the maze of streets and shops, and when it ended, finally, it had destroyed an estimated 13,200 houses, some 87 churches, and 44 livery halls. The whole city lay in ruins, commercial centers and administrative buildings smoldering. But within a few days the plague numbers diminished and by the end of that autumn the disease had died out.

The ashes of the Great Fire had hardly cooled before two architects, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn appeared before King Charles ll with plans to rebuild London on a grand scale, based on contemporary town planning principles. London at the time was a hive of narrow streets and crowded wooden structures. Two of the major thoroughfares, Thames Street and Threadneedle Street were only eleven feet wide. The lanes, alleyways, and walks were lined with a multitude of houses that crowded one upon the other in such profusion that the inhabitants rarely saw the sun and lived ever in an "unwholesome" shadow. In order prevent this dangerous development pattern from reoccurring, after the Great Fire a series of acts were passed that established four house types and sizes, all to be built of brick and laid down with minimum safety requirements about party walls and overhanging jetties.

Anyone living here in the American wilds of Utah who proclaims grandly that his land is his to do with as he would still has to contend with the end result of the Great Fire of London. Like it or not, we live on top of the past, under the English system of common law, and these early English codes, organized to protect the safety of the people, were the prototypes of zoning acts and land use codes and were as much a part of the traditional roots of American land use law as the Fifth Amendment. One could argue that the Fire Building Acts were a curtailment of the rights of private property, (so much as they existed in the England of 1666) and so they may have been. But the end result of the meeting Wren and Evelyn with the King was not only the creation of the London that is so beloved by the international visitors of our time, but the beginning of zoning, which, as many still argue, was the end of freedom.


The meeting of a native American tribal people who lived by hunting and gathering and practiced swidden agriculture, as opposed to a culture such as the English which tended to fix itself in one place for centuries was the source of confusion and eventual conflict between the two groups. The understanding of land, of the universe even, of these two cultures was almost diametrically opposed. Within twenty-five years after the Puritans settled in Boston game began disappearing from those regions where the English dominated. Within thirty five years, there were serious squabbles between the two cultures, many of them over land, and within fifty years, in 1675, there was an outright war. Perhaps it was inevitable.



By the seventeenth century the English were beginning to believe that land could actually be owned as one would own a thing, although even in the freedom of the new world to which they had retreated there was still a strong concept of common land and public use of land. A purchase of Indian land for example did not necessarily mean that the Indians could not hunt or fish on that land, even though it was now "owned" by the English. Conflicts over hunting and fishing rights, over trespass and the like, came later in history, after the English had established agricultural lands. The Indians basically didn't get it. At Nashobah, for example, several of the laws of behavior had to do with protection of private property. Indians could not use, without permission, a Englishman's canoe. They were required to knock before entering a house, and of course, they were strictly forbidden to steal. All of which suggests that there was a lot of stealing and borrowing without asking, and a general lack of regard for boundaries and privacy.
Eliot's original documents granting the lands of Nashobah to the Christian Indians are a mere broad description of the place. But in l686, after the village was supposedly deserted, the General Court hired Samuel Danforth to actually survey the land. Mathematical surveying as we know it had came into use in the l620s when Edmund Gunter invented a chain 66 feet long divided into l00 links, each 7.92 inches long. Surveyors on the ground would lay marks at regular intervals called stations, and at the angles, points or corners. Danforth would have walked over the Nashobah tract with a team, carrying instruments known as rods, or poles, and Gunter's ringed surveyor's chain. Using these tools, he and his partner would have marked off the rough land from point to point, using wherever possible, enduring natural features such as large boulders or bodies of water, although they also used larger trees.

The actual boundary lines of the Indian lands at Nashobah are much discussed in the historical records, mainly because the various English towns began arguing as to which town laid claim to which section of the original tract after the village broke up in l675. The bounds continue to be argued over today among the mappers and boundary watchers who have an interest in this part of the world because it is believed to be part of the vast corridor of sacred Indian lands that run -- more or less --- from the valley of the Concord and Sudbury Rivers out to the singular peak of Mount Wachusetts. Generally, records agree that the Indian lands of Nashobah consisted of a square of four miles to a side, roughly, beginning at a point near the two ponds, and running west northwest for four miles, north for four miles, east, and then south to the original point.

All this, the larger territory of the village, is now developed into two or three towns, depending on whose markers and whose research or whose original deeds you are reading. At various points in history, and still today, Groton, Acton, parts of Ayer, and the nearly the whole town of Littleton laid claims to the original site. But most of the tract, it is now agreed, was in the town of Littleton, which was established in 1714.

By 1736 Sarah's tract was all in private hands and remained so until 1988. Then in l990, through a curious series of events and coincidences, the tract began a slow, legal evolution back into common land. Two elderly women donated some ninety acres of the original village holding to the local land trust, thus opening up one section of the old village site to the public. Then in the mid 90s another section of some 113 acres just to the west came up for development, and inspired a small group of people to rise up to save the land as open space. Then finally, the core of the place, the sacred geography of Sarah Doublet's final five hundred acre tract held by the old curmudgeon, came up for sale.


The fate of this last five hundred acres of Indian land now lies in the fickle hand of American land law. But if the past is in any way prelude, by rights it should go back into common land, as it was in Sarah Doublet's time, before the English came along with their curious ideas of holding land as property.

Winter Solstice, 2007

December 22:
Heavy snows after two storms

December 24:
Deer attack on garden. Virburnums, arbor vitae, mahonia, and hollies attacked. Stringing deer fencing.

December 28:
A warming rain. A flock of robins feeding on bittersweet.

Friday, December 28, 2007

Solar Origins of the Bullfight

The Sunday bullfight on Easter Day is said to be a command performance for Sevillian society. There are many mantillas in the old style, traditional spotted frilled dresses, much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and there is a restless air of excitement spinning through the stands. The majordomos always arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville corrida as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero fincas. Watermen pass around with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater with blood red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bull fight favorites, such as El Gato Montes. It’s all a civilized, polite and save for certain bloody rituals soon to follow a gentile celebration. But it has ancient roots, tinted with sacrifice, death and rebirth out of a cold earth.

On Easter Sunday, the crowd waits, the tension builds, the band plays on, and then into the center of the arena, the gladiators appear, dressed for the occasion in their bright, “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses and high-speared picadors, and the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades. The procession has all the elements of some high church ceremony.

Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a quiet tension settles over the crowd. A silence descends and waits in the air like a crouched cat. And then, suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, his great spearpoint horns swinging, his coat glistening coat and his bright hoofs gleaming.Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. Altar boys in the form of arena workers, or “wise monkeys” scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the heavy horsed picadors, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself appears,, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls. He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerina-like killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who by this time charges down on him again and again, head lowered to better hook his opponent.

Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros place colorful barbed darts in his shoulder, ducking and dodging his horns, as they do so. Then the horse-borne picador lances the bull’s neck muscles as he charges again and again into the sides of the padded horse, occasionally lifting it off its feet. And then finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape called the muleta. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until finally, standing side ways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest, shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.

The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The huge dark Minotaur, staggers, sways, and then collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon. And the crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and then exits, his work completed.

Little wonder that this primal rite has been the subject of much literature.

The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric, event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, I used to attend these rituals with an almost religious zeal. I was caught up, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and old primal gods and goddesses, and I perceived the bullfight in historical terms.

As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures to appease their sun good, this one was balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.

For most of the twetieth century, it was believed that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early 20th century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with the bull worship and part of the ritual associated with this veneration involved a dangerous dance of death in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed this ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and the famous labyrinth at Knossos.
Of all the labyrinths and mazes of the ancient world, the most famous, and the one that has lent its name to many maze traditions, was the Minoan labyrinth at Knossos on Crete. The structure may have existed in some form as early as 2000 BC, and there is some indication that the Cretans may have borrowed the idea of a vast, internal, citylike maze from the earlier Egyptian labyrinth at Crocodilopolis at Lake Moeris. The Cretan maze was essentially a complex of winding paths deep in the interior chambers of the walled city. Here the Minoans practiced the sport of bull leaping, which was an important aspect of the Minoan bull cults of the period. Young men and women would dodge or leap over the horns of a charging bull as a part of one ceremony. The bull or, Taurus, of King Minos, is the origin of the story of the terrible Minotaur, who lurked in the depths of the maze. The word labyrinth is derived from this palace; Labrys is a double headed ax, and the interior rooms where the bull cult ceremonies would take place was called the House of the Double Axes. Here captives were trained for the dangerous bull leaping sport that gave rise to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.

According to the Greek myth, the maze at Knossos was designed by the craftsman Daedalus. It was an elaborate and complex series of paths, and once you got inside, you could not get out without a guide. In the center, lived the Minotaur, a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull, or vice versa in some versions. In either form he had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The Minotaur was the unfortunate offspring of the wife of Minos the King of Crete, Pasiphae, who, in one of those sweet revenges so common in Greek mythology, was tricked by Poseidon into coupling with a white bull.

The son of King Minos had been murdered by the Athenians and as retribution for this crime, every nine years, Minos decreed that a tribute of seven young men and seven maids must be sent to Knossos for sacrifice. The young people were then sent into the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus to be eaten by the Minotaur. The King of Athens at this time was Aegeus, whose son was the hero, Theseus. Early in his heroic career Theseus offered to join the troop of young people sent off to Knossos and vowed to slay the monster and put an end to the tribute. Over his father’s objections, he sailed off, but before leaving Athens, Theseus told his father that when the ship returned, if he had been victorious, he would hoist a white sail. If he had lost, his crew would raise a black sail.

During the review of the sacrificial victims before the king at Knossos, Theseus was spotted by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, and the two fell in love. Ariadne gave Theseus a sword and a ball of thread, and on the appointed day of the tribute, Theseus attached the thread to the entrance and entered into complex pathways of the labyrinth, working his way deeper and deeper through the dark hallways, spinning out the thread behind him. At the center of the maze he encountered the Minotaur and a great fight ensued. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back out to the entrance and then fled Crete, taking Ariadne with him.

The story has the sad ending of many of these mythological tales, however. Instructed by a dream, Theseus deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos and sailed for home. But as he entered the harbor, he forgot his promise to signal and sailed in with the black sail raised, the traditional color of the sails of Greek vessels. His distraught father, believing his son dead, threw himself from a cliff, thus giving his name to the Aegean Sea.

There was more to come, though. The enraged Minos had Daedalus and his son, Icarus, imprisoned in his own labyrinth. Here, the ingenious Daedalus constructed wings with feathers and wax and the two flew off to freedom. But, even though he had been warned not to fly too high --- or too low --- the ecstatic young Icarus, with typical teenage exuberance, soared ever higher and came too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the wings together, and he crashed into the sea and drowned.

Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the newest argument, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray is that the bull images on the palace of Knossos have to do with the sun and are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter, confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.

According to MacGillvray, the configuration of stars described on the walls would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Eygypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. Furthermore, the recurring image in the Cretan art of two rising steep peaks which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull were a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivary argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is actually a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and which, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillavray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles represents the equality of day and night.

Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.

Whatever the origins, the tradition of bull leaping, as did so many Cretan customs, spread from Knosos and was adopted by other European cultures. During the eight centuries of the Spanish War of the Reconquest (711-1492 A.D.), the knights, Moors and Christians, weary of killing one another, would occasionally allow themselves a respite; but in order to avoid boredom, and also to release their pugnacious instincts, they would compete in hunting the wildlife that still existed on the Iberian lands. Deer and other equally docile animals were easy prey, and while a cornered bear or boar would occasionally put up a fight, it was never a challenge for such valiant knights. However, the scenario changed every time they faced the Iberian bull.

This beautiful and awe-inspiring beast, with its unique noble bravery would, when provoked, rather die fighting than flee - in essence, transforming the hunt into an avid exchange in which the bravest warriors could bring to light their courage. Perhaps a nobleman with an entrepreneurial spirit thought about capturing several of these horned beasts, taking them to the village, and recreating the thrill of the hunt so that the knights could demonstrate their skill and win the admiration of their subjects. Thus, in a remote corner of Medieval Spain, the beginning of what today is the national Spanish spectacle of bullfighting was created.

The first historic bullfight, or corrida, took place in Vera Logro, in 1133, in honor of the coronation of king Alfonso VIII. From that point on, history is full of instances in which kings organized corridas to commemorate important events and to entertain their guests. After the Spanish War of the Reconquest, the celebration of corridas expanded throughout Spain and became the outlet where the noblemen demonstrated the zeal that allowed them to defeat the Moors. Even the Emperor Charles I in Valladolid in 1527, and later King Philip IV took part in the lancing of bulls in the bullfighting arenas.

The spectacle is still with us today, in dimished form. But generally speaking the ancient pagan roots are forgotten or overlooked. Better not to consider the fact that in Catholic Spain, the most important of Christian of holy days is celebrated by the ritualistic killing of a bull in order the assure the smooth workings of the cosmos.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

The Death of Mr. Smith

The Death of Mr. Smith

Just for the record it should be said that Mr Smith was not the warm, chatty local shopkeeper whom all the people loved. This Mr Smith was polite, but laconic; he would answer your questions in monosyllables, with typical Yankee reserve. He dressed everyday in a hound’s-tooth coat, a pressed white shirt and an out-of-fashion tie from the 1950s, and he wore steel rimmed glasses perched at the end on his thin nose.

Nor was the fare that Mr Smith sold in his little general store anything remarkable: canned food, dry cereals, milk and eggs, and candy, and in spite of the fact that the town was known for its orchards, dairy, and produce farms, not a single item that was grown locally. The shop was cool, under lit, and had dusty wooden floors worn down by a hundred years of use. Also always open. Everyday, even Christmas and Sundays, Mr Smith was there, with his minimalist greetings and his thank very much and goodbye. Try as you might, you could not get any gossip from Mr Smith.

The town in those days seemed to be characterized by eccentric shop-keepers, Across the street from Mr Smith there was a hardware store that never, at least not in the time that I lived there, opened its doors to the public. Its shelves were lined with dusty screwdrivers, saws, hammers, and various cans of motor oil, glue, and paint. And if you shaded your eyes and looked in through the plate glass window, just inside the entrance, in front of the aisles, you could see a new 1950s Pen Yan motor boat, its fresh varnish gleaming in the half light, its brass fittings polished. The story was that the store had been kept by two brothers. When one of them died, some ten years earlier, the living brother closed the shop and maintained it just as it had been when his brother died.

There was a country store in the town that still sold penny candy, and there was an ice cream stand associated with one of the dairy farms that drew people all the way from Boston, some thirty-five distant. People came to the town in summer for the ice-cream and the corn and pumpkins from the five working farm stands. They came in autumn for apples; they came in winter to ski, and in spring they came to look at the flowering orchards and watch the horses that were pastured there.

Given this diversity of foodstuffs and entertainments you would think Mr Smith would have given up years ago. But in fact children regularly stopped in to buy candy from Mr Smith, and the locals were forever stopping in to get things they had forgotten to pick up at the main grocery store in the town, which kept normal nine to five hours and closed on Sundays. Mr Smith was the only show in town after hours. ---nine in the morning to nine at night behind his counter in his hounds-tooth coat and his pressed shirt.

All this was long ago, forty years ago. Around that time a highway came through the community, and rammed through two of the best working farms and an orchard. A couple of new gas stations opened near the interchange, and then one day a sign appeared in the window of Mr Smith’s store. “Closed due to illness”.

Not long after that, either from an obituary in the local paper, or maybe just gossip, I learned that Mr Smith had died.

The shop closed permanently. The building remained empty for a year or so. Traffic increased on the highway. A chain convenience store came into the town, which stayed open from seven to eleven.. The grocery store expanded. A chain hardware store opened Two farm stands closed. Three new banks opened, one of them an international corporation. A multinational computer company constructed a plant in one of the local pear orchards, and then one day a sign for a lawyers office appeared in the window of Mr Smith ‘s former store. And nowadays, over in the burying ground on the west side of town, Mr Smith lies in his grave, still silent.

Coming in March, 2008

Saturday, December 22, 2007

How the Common Came to Pass



Winter 2006-2007





In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about…where the lawns ended in the orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky… from Stuart Little by E.B. White




Stuart Little would have loved the little rural towns between Connecticut and the Canadian border. Back roads in this section of New England still exhibit remnants of the old English version of the town common—a central green, a meeting house or church at one end, and a surround of high white clapboard structures on the other three sides, with pastures and forests beyond. Just the sort of place E.B. White’s wandering mouse hero enjoyed.

The vernacular settlement pattern known as the common is—or more accurately was—an excellent model of community conservation of green space, an example of mutually accepted preservation without debate or vote. The common was once a cultural fact of life, it was what you did if you wanted to lay out a village, and it was an ideal that still endures in the American psyche. The image appears everywhere, from Christmas cards to ads touting wholesome family life.
The archetype of this idealized town has its roots deeply planted in English history, but in North America it is unique to New England. In its most basic form, the English village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by cultivated fields and pasturelands, with a forest beyond. Under the old feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety of his underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves from the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders in this system surrendered whatever rights they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their croplands, the source of their livelihood.
In a typical feudal holding, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech, ash, and holly. About sixteen to twenty families would be living in the village—all told around 200 people. The system worked communally. The families would have owned a number of plows between them, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fishponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the border of the village, consisted of one, long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today in England would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure.
This great open field cultivation was ploughed in strips that were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. The design, known as a furlong—a standard furrow's length (220 yards)—came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley, and peas, and were altered on a three-year system of rotation, allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each family planted and harvested its own crop on a given section of land, although the strip a family cultivated might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf—essentially the equivalent of a slave—you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land. The distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.
In addition to the great fields, each family would have maintained, close to their house, a small privately cultivated plot for a garden, and a yard for hens and geese and a few fruit trees.
Surrounding the cultivated fields of grain were the pasturelands, where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven out to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but not divided into lots.
Beyond the pasturelands was the forest, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage, and here also they hunted rabbits, deer, and boar for their larder. This so-called waestland, or wilderness, was the dark forest of European myth and folktale. It was the known domain of goblins and witches and hideous imaginary creatures, as well as all-too-real escaped criminals and robbers, such as Robin Hood. It was, in effect, the opposite of the comfortable, managed, public space of the common.
In 1066, William the Conqueror, as Anglophiles will attest, at once altered this primordial village system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon structure was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Locals who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or, worst of all, killing deer—his deer mind you—were severely punished. William’s ruthless protection of “his resources” altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it had been heavily used by the peasants. In fact, excluding people from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the local peasantry.
In the time of William, rents for lands were paid in-kind. That is, you supplied a certain amount of grain to the lord of the vill each year according to the amount of land you were using. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, or military service. You applied each year to renew your holding, and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top; the serfs, or cottars, at the bottom; and various tenants and thanes, villeins, earls, and lords in the middle and upper reaches. “From the Crown, all titles flow,” as the phrase had it.
All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to North America. By this time, in the mid-1600s, the old tenure system requiring payment in-kind or in personal services had faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company common socage, which meant that the rights of use of the land could be paid in rent rather than grains or firewood, or knights’ service to the King.
Common socage was actually not an unusual form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England. Even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter which king or queen sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants could continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private-property system even into our time. It was from this concept that the idea of the common began to erode.
This idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say, as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, is actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The idea of land as property, something you own, as you would a book or a piece of furniture, did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone; you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it. You did not actually own the ground.
By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land—pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf—began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This was the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly held lands—meadows, open fields, and forests—were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.
Here in New England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the colonial soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished in the wide-open spaces of the New World. Within a few decades of settlement, in communities such as Plymouth and Sudbury, the great fields and the pasturelands, and even the wild forest beyond, switched from common land to private holdings.
Nevertheless, the primordial idea of a public green space, a commonly held tract of land at the heart of the village, has endured. And although sadly diminished, the old town commons can still be found by anyone willing to shun the superhighways and poke around a little on back roads.
As one of the characters tells Stuart Little, “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel too fast.”