Category Archives: education

by | 24 September 2023 · 10:48 am

New Spy Network for Nadia

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 138-139:

The Securitate adapted to the new situation, deploying a new ‘network to influence, protect and defend gymnast Nadia Comăneci,’ as it is named in the archive documents, and simultaneously conducting surveillance and covert recording. As Géza Pozsár was no longer part of Nadia’s entourage, his reports from the first part of 1978 make only intermittent references to her. As a result, the secret police sought other solutions, and the measures they took starting from December 1977 entailed total monitoring: recording equipment in the gymnasts’ rooms at the 23 August National Sport Hotel, background checks on all the members of the team that had been assembled, talks ‘with a view to softening them up, in order to discover and prevent any action that might injure Nadia Comăneci’, alerting Section 5 of the Militia to provide additional security and protection measures in the area of the sports centre, and the instruction of the ‘three intelligence sources within the team of trainers and medics.’ Although Department One’s report gives us to understand that there were already three informers tasked with monitoring Nadia Comăneci, in reality the number seems to have been higher.

Even if the documents show that the trainers were kept under surveillance, it was also true that they had already collaborated with the secret police, albeit not all to the same extent. In February 1978, Iosif Hidi was an ‘operational connection’. He presented Captain Nicolae Ilie reports that he signed with his real name, followed by his title, ‘I.E.F.S. head’. Gheorghe Condovici was recruited as an informer in 1966 and was given the code name ‘Iosifescu Dragoş’ but in the archives it has not been possible to find any reports he may have written on Nadia, which suggests that for unknown reasons the Securitate did not use him as a source. But Atanasia Albu, alias ‘Monica’, was a secret police collaborator so devoted that the Securitate probably regarded her as more valuable even than Géza Pozsár.

Carmen Dumitru, who was esteemed by gymnasts and trainers alike for the skill with which she practiced as a physician, was an ‘official source’. She was not recruited as an informer by the usual procedure, but when information was required of her, she provided it. A specialist in cardiology and sports medicine, Carmen Dumitru treated members of a number of Romanian national squads, but the Securitate was interested in obtaining from her information about Nadia Comăneci’s evolving state of health in particular. In the same period, the Securitate also drew upon another informed, codenamed ‘Lili’, who was probably a nurse at the sports complex’s medical office, but whose identity remains unknown. From her reports it may be concluded that she was instructed to win Nadia’s confidence, and for a few months, she succeeded. Pianist Corneliu Grigore, who signed his reports under the pseudonym ‘Lazarovici Traian’, was recruited as an informer while doing his military service. Those who knew him describe him as a very good pianist, in love with what he did, a serious-minded and generous man, but overly timorous and lacking in courage. As an informer he filed only sporadic reports on the members of the national squad. As the intelligence machinery still included Nicolae Vieru and Mrs Mili – who continued their careers as informers ‘Vlad’ and ‘Lia Muri’ – the Securitate remained a presence in both Nadia’s professional and personal life.

The freedom Nadia hoped to enjoy in Bucharest was limited, as she was not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied or without giving her reasons and planned route in advance. Her daily schedule and trips were known in advance by Securitate officers. When she did manage to slip outside the sports complex without permission, the authorities would enter red alert. An army of Militia and Securitate officers would set out in search of her, while top officials from the Party and N.C.P.E.S. went to the 23 August Centre anxiously to wait for the officers to bring her back or for her to return by herself. It was said that in such situations, even the borders were closed, to prevent her being taken out of the country against her will in the event that she had been kidnapped. Nadia lived out her life in the sports complex, which, no matter how comfortable it might have been, was too small and suffocating a world for a curious, developing adolescent.

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by | 20 September 2023 · 6:58 am

Romania’s Minority Gymnasts

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 66-67, 69-70:

There was no law forbidding persons from Romania’s ethnic minorities from holding positions of responsibility, but it wasn’t encouraged. From 1952 onwards, Gheorghiu-Dej set about Romanianising the central apparatus of the Party, inspired by the anti-Semitic purges that had taken place in the Soviet Union, but it was Nicolae Ceauşescu who imposed an emphasis on nation and state in the political discourse. By 1975, the nationalist discourse was flourishing, promoted in various forms. The media and cultural outlets saturated the public with works that claimed that Romania was a cradle of civilisation, that the Romanian people had a heroic past stretching from Burebista to the emergence of the Communist Party, a discourse that went hand in hand with a reserved attitude towards minorities, which by now were referred to as ‘foreign elements’ and who were denied any significant part in the country’s history.

Therefore, in 1975, the Securitate was trying to gain a clear picture of the Oneşti staff and to recruit as many of them as possible, and each new informer that joined the network was pressured to write reports on his or her colleagues and the working atmosphere. The following year, by which time the number of agents had increased, and the volume of information had likewise burgeoned in consequence, it was as if the objectives on which the secret police thought they should concentrate also came into clearer focus, and the most important of these proved to be Béla Károlyi.

Although in the meantime he had achieved significant successes and had himself been recruited as an informer, Béla Károlyi became a target of systematic surveillance, for a number of reasons. His collaboration with the Securitate left a lot to be desired and it became increasingly obvious that he was going to be dropped as an agent. The Securitate officers in Oneşti and Bucharest, respectively Vasile Miriţă and Nicolae Ilie, didn’t like him, due to his arrogance and even defiance. Agent ‘Nelu’, who wrote a number of reports about Károlyi during this period, signalled that he was saving up money and intended ultimately not to return to the country from abroad. He informed the Securitate that Károlyi sometimes alluded to the fact that Hungarians were discriminated against in Romania and was in the habit of making tendentious remarks about national leaders. But above all else, he reported that Károlyi was abusive towards the gymnasts he trained.

…

At the beginning of 1976, the relationship between Károlyi and the Securitate deteriorated further, and he was accused of a number of faults, including ‘a nationalist-chauvinist position.’ …

During the Montréal Olympics, one of the Securitate officers in the Romanian delegation claimed that Károlyi ‘pressured Romanian judge Liţă Emilia, demanding that she ask the other judges in the uneven parallel bars brigade to award higher marks to a Hungarian gymnast so that she could win the silver medal instead of Teodora Ungureanu. I mention that Károlyi Béla exerted this pressure because he is friendly with the trainer of the Hungarian team, the gymnast in question being his wife. The Romanian judge categorically refused to do so, replying that Teodora Ungureanu was clearly superior to the Hungarian gymnast.’

The Securitate continued to make a great deal of the fact that the Károlyi’s were more Hungarian than Romanian and might even be secretly involved in what it termed ‘hostile actions’. In December 1977, by which time a surveillance file on ‘Katona’ [= Béla] had been opened, a study draw up by Department One stated that during his frequent trips abroad ‘he might be contacted and lured into disloyal actions by reactionary elements hostile to our country. To this can be added the fact that being a citizen of Hungarian nationality the target might be in the sights of hostile elements inside the country, as well as among reactionary Hungarian emigrants.’

Did Béla Károlyi harbour nationalist prejudices? Even if only privately, did he proclaim Hungarian superiority over Romanians? Károlyi was too pragmatic to be a ‘nationalist-chauvinist’, and we believe the Securitate’s accusation to have been ungrounded. Károlyi was enough of an opportunist to favour gymnastic talent regardless of ethnic background, and his preference for working with Hungarian gymnasts and trainers was only natural; any ethnic Romanian in Hungary would have done the same.

However, when the Károlyis later had serious conflicts with the Romanian Gymnastics Federation and frequently claimed they were marginalised because of their Hungarian ethnicity, such a position was also at odds with the truth. Ethnic insults were flung from both sides. During telephone calls recorded by the Securitate, Romanians whose relationship with the Károlyis was tense used to claim that Béla ignored all contrary opinions because he was a bozgor [an ethnic slur for a Hungarian], while in 1976 Béla was recorded stating his agreement with the opinion that ‘it’s still the Hungarians who have to do the Romanians’ jobs for them.’

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by | 18 September 2023 · 9:08 am

Romania’s Gymnastic Nest of Spies

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 58-59, 98-99:

At the beginning of the 1970s, when sporting achievement was barely getting underway in Oneşti, the secret police did not find it necessary to make any intelligence checks on the nucleus of teachers, trainers and gymnasts that was beginning to form. They had little reason to do so. The local authorities didn’t even pay very much attention to the disagreements that arose, given that Béla Károlyi was often at odds with the other technicians. It was thought to be only natural, as Károlyi was known to be both ambitious and difficult to get along with. Moreover, in a small town like Oneşti, it would have quickly come to light if the atmosphere within the squad was ‘unjust’, as they used to say.

Many of those who became informers were also members of the Communist Party. For this reason, they weren’t assigned ‘network’ files, as informers’ files were termed. After 1968, there weren’t any files at all on those Party members who collaborated with the secret police, since Nicolae Ceauşescu wanted the Party to control the Securitate, rather than the other way around. Whenever the Securitate was faced with an operational situation in which they needed the collaboration of a Party member, they had to request the permission of the local Party bosses. Once permission was granted, the person in question would assist the Securitate for a limited time period, but without undergoing the usual recruitment procedure and therefore without having a network file opened on him or her. Nevertheless, the names of informers and Communist Party collaborators were recorded in a separate database, which has yet to be located in the archives, and the Securitate officers were referred to in various ways: ‘official person’, ‘official liaison’, ‘operational liaison’, and sometimes ‘official source’ or simply ‘source’.

It should be said from the outset that the most significant informers, recruited not only to carry out comprehensive surveillance in Oneşti, but also to gather information and engage in operations to influence and control Romanian gymnastics, were leading figures in the sport. Maria Simionescu, for example, ‘the first lady of Romanian gymnastics’, was also held in high esteem by the Securitate, proving to be a valuable collaborator under the code name ‘Lia Muri’. Likewise, Nicolae Vieru, the general secretary of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, in his sober and conscientious style, collaborated with the secret police right up to its final days, in December 1989, hiding behind the code name ‘Vlad’.

In the Securitate documents identified to date there are no details about the period when they became collaborators, how they were recruited, or whether or not they were subjected to pressure or blackmail. But ‘Vlad’ and ‘Lia Muri’ left deep traces. In the voluminous ‘Sport’ dossier their earliest reports and briefing notes date from 1974–75. Incontrovertible proof of their collaboration can be found in their personnel files, in which the officers of Department One record at an unstated date that they are ‘source / 161 NI’, which clearly demonstrates their status.

Nevertheless, thanks to Securitate officer Nicolae Ilie, who for many years was her liaison and sometimes annotated her reports, we know that in November 1974 Mili Simionescu was already a ’trustworthy person’ and had undergone a fresh recruitment process. At the time, Ilie noted, ‘Simionescu Maria is a Party member. She was the informer to our organs and was let go in 1973, when she became a p.m. [Party member] (…) Permission from the Party organs will be requested to use the aforementioned Simionescu Maria as a source to inform the Securitate organs.’ In February 1975, Ilie made a further note, at the end of one of his agent’s reports: ‘permission has been sought from the Party organs to make use of her,’ and by March she was a ‘candidate’. After which, she became a ‘source’.

As far as Nicolae Vieru is concerned, he seems to have broached his collaboration with the Securitate more cautiously, at least in the initial phase. It was only later, in the 1980s, that he agreed to a code name and ‘source’ status, as his first reports are signed in his own name and presented as professional documents. Undoubtedly, his recruitment to the network of informers was a major success, since Vieru, after his appointment as secretary general of the federation, became one of the most influential people in the sport, contributing to every major decision regulating gymnastics and lives of gymnasts and their trainers until the mid-2000s. Those who knew him sustain even today that his achievements were remarkable. The Securitate sometimes noted in their reports that he had ‘ascendency’, by which was meant he enjoyed authority and influence, that he was esteemed or feared by his colleagues, an assessment that was wholly accurate. If we look at Romanian gymnastics as one big family, then it might be said that Vieru was the paterfamilias, even if he was subordinate to a number of people with political backing who served in the management of the federation or on the National Council for Physical Education and Sport up until 1989. He was also influential internationally, not only because he was a member of the Executive Committee of the International Gymnastics Federation and deputy chairman of the organisation over the course of a number of mandates, but also, above all, because he managed to develop a significant circle of relations and because he had a good reputation with foreign partners, be they sportsmen, trainers, journalists, or businessmen representing global concerns.

…[UPDATE]

After the team’s glorious homecoming from Montréal, the Securitate intensified its surveillance measures, with Nadia becoming a top priority. The secret police drew up a family tree, identifying her parents’ relatives in order to examine their backgrounds, the family telephone was bugged, and friends of the family were also thoroughly checked. In the archive documents can even be found a diabolical plan on the part of the Bacău Securitate, mooted in November 1977, to monitor the relationship between Nadia Comăneci and Teodora Ungureanu: the Oneşti Securitate was ordered to recruit informers not only among the lycée’s teaching staff, but also among the gymnasts’ classmates, who were minors, aged just sixteen: ‘categorise and study the girls in the class in question, and select from among them those appropriate for inclusion in the network.’ While Béla and Marta Károlyi were under surveillance because they were deemed disloyal to Romania and abusive in their relationship with the gymnasts they trained, Nadia Comăneci and her parents were monitored to protect them from Károlyi’s actions and to prevent any reactions on their part that might have damaged the image of the Communist régime.

In the second half of 1976 Nadia Comăneci and Teodora Ungureanu began to make it more and more obvious that they wished to break off their relationship with their coaches. But Károlyi made no concessions to them as a means of defusing the situation. At the seaside, where he had obtained official permission to take the gymnasts on a short holiday, Károlyi tried to stamp out what ‘Nelu’ claims he viewed as a ‘star-like attitude’ and subjected the girls to the usual spartan schedule: ‘Very little food and limited physical training. (…) Gabor refused to follow this regimen and was kicked out of the team. The source found on the pupil a notebook in which she complained about the highly strict working regimen and in which she described the insulting words that Béla Károlyi addressed to the gymnasts before the Olympics, as well as the unkept promise to give them two weeks off after Montréal.’

Because she had been keeping a diary recording his abuses and encouraged the other girls to insubordination, Károlyi had Georgeta Gabor removed from the squad. He did so in a dishonourable manner, claiming not only that she ‘instigated the girls not to work’ – making Nadia and Teodora give written statements in support of this – but also that ‘she admired those who left the country’ and ‘provided no moral guarantees regarding her behaviour abroad,’ which was hard to imagine in a fifteen-year-old who had spent almost all her life in a gym. For this reason, Gabor was placed in the situation of having to discuss the matter with a Militia officer but the Securitate knew the truth, as is apparent from a report filed by the Bacău County Inspectorate on 22 October 1976: ‘from investigations it transpired that the real reason was the discovery by Béla Károlyi of notebooks in which Gabor wrote down her impressions of daily training sessions and the position of the two trainers.’

Nadia kept a similar diary.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a biographical work so heavily dependent on secret police reports. It makes me wish I could see the Securitate reports about my Fulbright research year in Romania in 1983-84. I wonder what my code name was. I know we were watched very closely. So were my Chinese and East German classmates.

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by | 16 September 2023 · 6:51 am

Who First Discovered Nadia Comaneci?

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 29-30:

On 30 September 1976, after Miriţă and his colleagues finished their investigation, the head of the Securitate from Bacău and the heads of Department One of the Securitate in Bucharest received the report from Oneşti, from which, for the time being, we shall quote only the conclusions as to who discovered Nadia Comăneci and when, since the document stretches for eleven pages and includes ‘a number of unusual aspects’ relating to the lives and professional careers of the Károlyis:

We report the following:

In 1965, in Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej Municipality, under the supervision of teacher-trainer Duncan Marcel, a female gymnastics sports nucleus came into being, which operated within the Flame Sporting Association. Subsequently, at the beginning of 1966, gymnast Nadia Comăneci was selected by Duncan.

In the same period, husband and wife Maria and Gheorghe Simionescu, specialist teachers, were assigned to the Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej Municipality, who together with teacher Duncan Marcel made their contribution to training and laying the foundations of competition gymnastics.

The first competition gymnastics group began its activity in 1968 at the Flame Sporting Association, female gymnastics section, run by trainer Duncan Marcel until 1969, of which, among others, Nadia Comăneci and Georgeta Gabor were part.

Husband and wife Marta and Béla Károlyi were assigned to the Gheorghe Gheorghe-Dej Municipality during the course of 1968, respectively to the General Culture Lycée No. 1 and the Sports School.

In 1969, when the Female Gymnastics Lycée was established, teacher Marta Károlyi was selected and assigned to this school, where she took over the small group that had been trained by Duncan Marcel, and together with teacher Munteanu Valerică from Bucharest they worked with the group until 1972.

In 1972, when teacher Munteanu Valerică was recalled to the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, Károlyi Béla was appointed to replace him, having theretofore worked in the handball department of the local sports school. This competition gymnastics group, whose members included Nadia Comăneci, Teodora Ungureanu, Gabor Georgeta and others, was taken over with a view to continuation of training by the Károlyis under the supervision of federal gymnastics trainer Maria Simionescu and her husband Gheorghe Simionescu, who at the time was director of the lycée. This group, which included the best gymnasts, took part in national and international competitions, including the 1976 Montreal Olympics, Canada.

Duncan Marcel operated within the Municipality until 1969, when he left with his whole family, initially going to Galaţi, and at present he is in Israel (legal emigrant).

Husband and wife Maria and Gheorghe Simionescu are at present in Bucharest, the first a federal trainer and international gymnastics referee, and the second a gymnastics teacher at a lycée in Bucharest. Munteanu Valerică is also in Bucharest, teaching at a sports school.

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by | 15 September 2023 · 4:35 pm

Building Romania’s New Gymnastic Training Camp

From Nadia Comaneci and the Secret Police: A Cold War Escape, by Stejarel Olaru (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 21-22:

Taking inspiration from the methods of Soviet gymnastics, which at the time dominated the sport internationally, Maria Simionescu understood that a handful of trainers and just a few girls who loved gymnastics were not enough to win medals. What was needed was a new vision, as well as a team of devoted trainers, each of them specialising in a separate apparatus and willing constantly to better their achievements; a large number of gifted gymnasts, selected at an early age and enrolled in an intensive training programme; doctors; psychologists; physiotherapists; choreographers; musicians. In other words, an entire human infrastructure. But this was impossible to create without the physical infrastructure of a modern sports hall and a school to provide the young gymnasts with all the educational comfort they needed, without their parents feeling they had abandoned them far from home. It was a two-track enterprise. Trainers would be lured with the promise that the project would be up and running within the shortest possible time, while the investors would be eager to complete it in the shortest possible time given the great expectations of all those with a stake in its success.

With the support of Valerian Ghineţ, the town’s mayor, and Andrei Erdely, the director of the Oneşti Industrial Constructions Trust, work on the gymnastics facility was completed at the end of 1967 and it was inaugurated in 1968. A year later, in September 1969, the Physical Education Lycée opened its doors. The school’s first headmaster was Gheorghe Simionescu, Mrs Mili’s husband. Mayor Ghineţ, who was also head of the local branch of the Romanian Communist Party, continued to be generous and allocated twenty-six one-room flats for gymnasts and five flats for the trainers who had settled in the town. The town council also provided the trainers with medical services – the gym had been built in the centre of town, next to the hospital – and meal tickets at the town’s best restaurant, where they had a room set aside specially for them, as well as other perks significant for the time. In Oneşti [renamed Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej from 1965 to 1990], a small town which, at the beginning of the 1950s, had only one P.E. teacher, Romania’s first experimental gymnastics school began its work in earnest. The rudimentary huts located in the town’s industrial district where the young gymnasts had once practised were now a thing of the past.

In the meantime, changes had taken place in Bucharest which had a positive influence on the development of the new sports centre in Oneşti. In July 1967 a national sports conference was held. It was decided that the Union of Physical Education and Sport should be replaced by a newly founded National Council for Physical Education and Sport, which was the nationwide body supervising development in the sector. At the same time, general meetings of all the federations were held and they adopted new statutes and, above all, new managers. Elena Poparad was elected chairwoman of the Romanian Gymnastics Federation, and Nicolae Vieru secretary general.

The political context was also changing at the time, including the aberrant propagandistic discourse that had surrounded sport. In the 1950s, at the beginning of the Cold War, the drive to develop sport for the masses was extolled, as well as the exceptional merits and superiority of athletes from the Communist bloc. The new sport, which followed Soviet training methods, was treated as infallible, based as it was on Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and it was polyvalent, simultaneously constructing socialism and fighting for peace and friendship between nations – sport and peace were inseparable notions, since only if there was world peace could sports competitions be held. On the other side of the sporting Iron Curtain were ‘imperialist’ athletes, trained to become ‘cannon fodder’ for the West’s armies. In the eyes of the Communist bloc, Western athletes were either opportunists out for their own personal gain, or they were ruthlessly exploited by their countries’ capitalist régimes.

In Romania, Communist propaganda was to use sport as a weapon in the decades that followed, particularly after notable sporting achievements started to be made in the 1960s. But the discourse also become more nuanced. Taking advantage of sporting achievements, the régime was able to promote itself both domestically and internationally, claiming that such successes were based on a new type of thinking developed by Romania’s communist system. Soviet sport was now no longer a model to be copied, but part of the competition.

As part of this wave of changes, the Oneşti centre acquired greater importance, but continued to be viewed with reserve from Bucharest, sooner as a one-off experiment. The experiment might be a success, but what if it failed? Who would take the responsibility? Moreover, there were already other clubs – some of them with a long tradition – which laid claim to gymnastics, such as Dinamo Bucharest. Dinamo was Romania’s strongest club, since it was part of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which meant its athletes had the privilege of being able to compete internationally. The heads of gymnastics in Bucharest therefore deemed a degree of caution appropriate, allowing the local authorities in Oneşti the satisfaction of providing the Flame club a large amount of support, as well as responsibility to match.

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by | 9 September 2023 · 2:57 pm

Roles of English Print Media in 1640s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 144-146:

The Protestation Oath [of allegiance to the King and Church of England] had now been printed and was being circulated around the country, and people in their thousands were swearing to it. Tonnage and Poundage [import/export duties] was soon abolished. So, too, was Star Chamber, the Councils of Wales and North, and the hated [ecclesiastical] court of High Commission. In the summer, Ship Money would be annulled, and knighthood fines declared illegal. Step by step, the apparatus of Charles’s Personal Rule was being picked apart.

Pamphlets were streaming off the presses, as an excited and literate capital tried to make sense of what had been happening down the road at Westminster. There are just over 600 surviving titles per year for the 1630s, and this figure had risen slightly, to 848 for 1640. In 1641, there are 2,042. It was an astonishing explosion of print. Henry Burton, who had experienced brutal censorship first-hand, recalled how ‘many mouths were stopped, many shut up’, but ‘Parliament hath opened their mouths…it has opened the prisons.’ Or, in the lavishly biblical allusion of another Puritan author, ‘the stone that made the stoppage of the well of Haran is now removed and the flocks of Laban may drink freely’. The works of Prynne, Burton, Leighton were now freely available.

Print helped bring a great flowering of new religious groups especially in and around London. In July, the Venetian ambassador reported drily that there seemed ‘as many religions as there were persons’. Even in the Parliamentary pulpit at St Margaret’s, in the small church under Westminster Abbey, radicals told of tearing down Babylon, building up Zion and the planting of a new heaven and a new earth. That summer, Burton declared that the Church of England had become anti-Christian, and advocated the creation of independent congregations, in which people gathered with no direction from above, to worship together as they pleased. Sometimes, so the reports went, groups met on the dark peripheries of the capital: Hackney Marsh and the hills around Hampstead and Highgate. Other congregations gathered in suburban houses, and by the end of the year there was even one led by the radical leather-seller Praisegod Barebone that met in his house on the Strand.

Religious enthusiasts from humble backgrounds, so-called ‘mechanic’ preachers, were giving sermons in public. One of Henry Burton’s followers, Katherine Chidley, scandalised readers by arguing that true ministers could be ‘tailors, felt-makers, button-makers, tent-makers, shepherds or ploughmen’. The press made the most of it all, and in the journalists’ insatiable desire for sensation, they contributed to a wider sense that old certainties were collapsing. While many stories about weird and worrisome radicals were undoubtedly written for laughs, more nervous readers still trembled at the lurid horror. There were reports of naked Adamites, of Anabaptists and Brownists, even Muslims and ‘Bacchanalian’ pagans, not to mention those worshipping the planetary deities of Saturn and Jupiter. One tract laughed at a mechanic preacher who spoke ‘like a Lancashire bagpipe’ so (fortunately) ‘the people could scarce understand any word’. Another delighted and horrified its readers in equal measure with its cast of concocted female radicals: ‘Agnes Anabaptist, Kate Catabaptist, Frank [< Frances] Footbaptist, Penelope Punk, Merald Makebate, Ruth Rakehell, Tabitha Tattle, Pru Prattle, and that poor silly, simple, senseless, sinless, shameless, naked wretch, Alice the Adamite’.

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by | 2 September 2023 · 1:20 pm

Forcing English Church Decorum, 1630s

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 103-104:

[T]he most significant of [King] Charles [I]’s campaigns to bring order to his English realm was in the field of religion. Charles was personally devout, but religion was also intertwined with his wider project for social order. Charles wanted ‘peace and quiet’ in his Church just as he did in society as a whole. He wanted a ministry that was ‘peaceable, orderly, and conformable’, and subjects who would ‘demean themselves with all Christian reverence and devout obedience’. He didn’t want debate. Predestination, in particular, shouldn’t be ‘meddled withal’, since it was ‘too high for the people’s understanding’. His own preference was for a rich liturgy, with strong emphasis on the ‘beauty of holiness’ so beloved of the ceremonialists. Critically, these were not to be days of latitude. Direction from the top, from the king, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the rest of the episcopacy, were to be followed. The Book of Common Prayer and the canons of 1604 were to be enforced in full. Parishioners would stand for the Creed and the Gloria Patri, kneel at the sacrament and bow at the name of Jesus. Those who, like Londoner and aspiring poet John Milton, preferred a ‘homely and yeomanly religion’ without a ‘deluge of ceremonies’, were deeply worried.

Charles promoted ceremonialists and Arminians. By the middle of the 1630s, Charles had created what was effectively an anti-Calvinist church establishment, particularly among his bishops, and not least when Richard Neile became Archbishop of York in 1631 and William Laud, finally, was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 on the death of Abbot. The losers were men like John Williams, the Calvinist Bishop of Lincoln and sometime Lord Keeper. He fell out with Laud, was pursued in the courts and found himself fined by Star Chamber and imprisoned in the Tower.

The Church itself was suffering under long-standing economic problems, partly caused by inflation. Most visible were its crumbling buildings: indeed, much of Charles’s campaign for the beauty of holiness was really about stamping out the ugliness of neglect. The great London cathedral of St Paul’s was a case in point. Its spire had fallen down after a fire in 1561, and it was so overgrown with stalls and hawkers that it resembled a marketplace as much as a house of God. So unlike a church was it that one old Warwickshire farmer who was visiting London accidentally (‘in a beastly manner’) defiled St Paul’s ‘with his excrements’. He claimed that he did this ‘merely through ignorance & necessity being not able to go any further through his weakness & age’, and he found his explanation was accepted and was let off with a fine.

Charles and Laud’s aim was to bring back order and dignity to the Church. It was a programme that had real rationale, though some ministers took it to extremes, such as an Essex vicar who refused communion to menstruating women or those who had had sex the previous night, all in the name of decorum.

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by | 24 August 2023 · 9:23 am

Rise of the English Yeomanry

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 35-37:

The yeomanry (not to be confused with the military uses of the term) were a class of affluent countryfolk with good farms and decent landholdings, but below the level of the gentry. They had a reputation for honesty, plain-speaking and credit. ‘The yeoman wears russet clothes, but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket’, it was said. He was the ‘main man’ on juries and though he seldom went far, ‘his credit stretches further than his travel’. The yeomanry thought of themselves, not completely without good reason, as the backbone of rural society.

In previous peasant uprisings, like those of Wat Tyler (1381), Jack Cade (1450) and Robert Kett (1549), many yeomen had joined forces with their poorer neighbours to oppose the very rich. But this group was now becoming very prosperous. Yeomen were able to benefit from the rising prices, rising land values and falling wages that came with population growth. In other words, they did well out of exactly the things that were harming their poorer neighbours like John Reynolds. Between the mid-sixteenth century and the second quarter of the seventeenth, yeomen saw their wealth rise fourteenfold. They were rebuilding their houses and investing in their farms, thousands of which still survive today.

Of course, in theory, England remained a strictly hierarchical society, with a ‘great chain of being’ from the king down through the 60 or so temporal lords, the rest of the nobility, the roughly 15,000 members of landowning gentry (accounting, with their families, for about 2 per cent of the population, but owning 50 per cent of the land), to the farmers, tradespeople and labourers who made up the rest of society. This had never been entirely static, but the changes of the sixteenth century were notably destabilising. The rise of the yeomanry was part of a more general improvement in the position of those in the middle of the hierarchy, whom historians call the ‘middling sort’. This included many small-town traders and manufacturers – like, say, Shakespeare’s father John, who died in 1601, a prosperous glovemaker at Stratford, living in the impressive rebuilt timbered town house on Henry Street.

Shakespeare himself would ascend from his ‘middling’ background and, as he became rich later in life through landholding, grain trading and a successful literary career, would purchase the coat of arms that allowed him to present as a gentleman. In this, he was like many members of the rising middle sort, buying their way into the next rung of the landed class. Indeed, many of gentry were doing very well, too. On average, their wealth increased sevenfold between about the 1550s and 1620s. Like the yeomen, they were able benefit from rising food and land prices.

These newly wealthy classes enjoyed richer lives. They bought more consumer goods, invested in businesses and farms and rebuilt their houses. Curtains, chimneys, glass windows, furniture and fashionable clothes all became markers of the newfound status of the gentry and middling sort. Reading and book ownership became much more common. Spurred by this growing wealth and by the ballooning of the population of London, ready markets developed for almanacs, pamphlets, polemics, plays, penny ballads, true crime, foreign treatises and books about everything from how to run an efficient farm to how to play chess, or even how to be a dutiful wife. Most of all, there was a torrent of books about faith: how to be a good Protestant, and on the finer points of the liturgy, not to mention Bibles, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, England’s Book of Common Prayer and catechisms.

There were more schools now than ever before, and more children of the gentry and yeomanry attended Oxford and Cambridge or the Inns of Court. The Inns, in which young men learned the basics of the legal trade, were in fact more socially prestigious than the universities. And London offered just as much of a lively student experience as old Oxford and Cambridge. Students at the Inns could sample the delights of the City, its drinking holes and theatres.

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by | 19 August 2023 · 6:17 am

Rise of Nationalism in the Danish Empire

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 272-274:

It appears that distinctive Norwegian and German (Holstein) identities can be traced during this period. Furthermore, an unmistakable Danish identity arose in the second half of the eighteenth century. The government in Copenhagen at the time of Frederik V was, as before, dominated by many foreign-born who had entered the service of the Danish king. The majority of the members of the King’s Council as well as the heads of the administration and at the court were born outside the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, especially in Germany. Often they did not speak Danish at all. This internationally oriented aristocratic elite, which formed the leadership of the state, pursued an ambitious and cosmopolitan cultural policy. This included convening foreign-born cultural personalities to hold illustrious positions in Denmark (i.e. the educator Basedow and the poet Klopstock). Furthermore, it awarded civilian and military posts as well as business privileges to foreign-born protégés. This international orientation had been the case for a long time, but it was increasingly perceived by the growing middle class, especially in Copenhagen, as an omission and oversight of local talent. The middle class was growing, and as it became more involved in foreign trade, it gained increased weight in society during the flourishing trade period, particularly in opposition to the great aristocratic landowners. After the middle of the eighteenth century, the middle class began to cultivate the Danish language, culture, and history as a protest against the internationally oriented aristocratic state leadership. The German-born Struensee, who in his short reign from 1770 to 1772 introduced radical reforms, which, however, had been ill-prepared and revealed his lack of knowledge of Danish conditions and traditions, just as his relationship with Queen Caroline Mathilde had aroused public indignation. His actions further fueled the development of nationalism. Unlike Struensee, his successors, Frederik V’s Dowager Queen Juliana Maria, her son, the king’s half-brother, Prince Frederick and her closely connected statesman, Ove Høegh-Guldberg, understood that they had to appeal to public opinion and to win the favor of the frustrated urban middle class.

Immediately after coming to power, they made Danish the administrative language for Denmark and Norway rather than German, and the following year Danish was made the command language in the army and in 1775 Danish was made a formal subject in the grammar schools. The crown jewel of their efforts was the Naturalization Act of 1776, which stated that only those who were born within the Danish king’s kingdoms and countries, i.e. the empire, could in the future hold public offices. This law seems to have been met with spontaneous enthusiasm in Copenhagen and other cities across the country. How should this Danish identity be interpreted? The question is whether the Danish-German national antagonisms that tore apart the entire Danish state in the nineteenth century can be traced as far back as the eighteenth century. Perhaps in the eighteenth century it was first and foremost a matter of contradictions between an aristocratic and internationally oriented upper class and a more domestically oriented bourgeoisie (middle class), whose importance in social and economic was growing. Germans made up approximately a fifth of the capital’s population, a representation of the fact that Copenhagen was the center of the entire empire and not just the kingdom of Denmark. Yet, the Naturalization Act was not aimed against these people since it was applying to everyone in the empire and was aimed at foreign-born, in practice Germans, but—significantly—not at German-speaking Danish citizens from the duchies or Copenhagen. In 1790, however, a heated debate unfolded: the so-called “German feud.” The German-speaking fellow citizens and their alleged dominant position were conceptualized as a threat. The feud, however, ceased again, presumably because other problems on the political agenda took precedence, such as agricultural reforms. These national identities ultimately led to the dissolution of the empire, but the question is whether secession from the empire was an idea that originated in the eighteenth century or, whether the dispute at that point solely concerned the distribution of rights, duties, burdens, and privileges between the various nationalities within a perennial empire. There was not necessarily anyone at the time who thought nor desired that these schisms would eventually lead to dissolution, although in hindsight it may certainly seem the case. The development towards an identification with those whose nationality, language, culture, and country one shares, rather than identification by status and as a subject in a particular territory under a particular prince, and where the language was secondary, was an expression of the unitary state. Here, as in the conglomerate state, the empire was not held together by the subjects’ duty of obedience to their prince, but by the loyalty of the citizens to their fatherland, state, and nationality (Feldbæk 1992).

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by | 18 August 2023 · 6:09 am

Iceland’s Dark 18th Century

From The Rise and Fall of the Danish Empire, by Michael Bregnsbo and Kurt Villads Jensen (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), Kindle pp. 260-262:

While the eighteenth century in Denmark and Norway was considered a period of peace, progress and prosperity as reflected in expressions such as “the flourishing trade period” in Danish history and “the golden age” in Norwegian history, Iceland’s eighteenth century became a dark time. All land in Iceland was owned either by the crown, the church, or an elite mainly consisting of civil servants leasing it to the peasants: in other words, an agricultural system that did not differ much from that known in the Kingdom of Denmark. The country was characterized by social and occupational stagnation, which the trade monopoly that Iceland was subject to greatly contributed. When Bishop Ludvig Harboe 1741–1745 resided on the island, attributes of the unitary state were increasingly introduced. His work led i.e. efforts to increase the population’s literacy, but also with increased social control, i.e. restrictions on people’s right to move. But by the middle of the eighteenth century, factories were set up by Icelandic initiative, but with financial and other support from the royal power in Copenhagen, to promote Iceland’s economic and social development. These were mainly wool processing factories. However, there were many initial difficulties: deliveries did not occur, deficits necessitated large subsidies from Copenhagen, until the factories were for a time transferred to a private trading company headquartered in Copenhagen, before taken over by the state. Nevertheless, this initiative was of great importance for the modernization of Icelandic society. A factory was built near Reykjavik, and around this a settlement grew, which in 1786, when it had approx. 300 inhabitants, received a municipal charter. Iceland had thus gained its first city. The central government in Copenhagen intervened again in the early 1770s and sought to secure the social and legal rights of the peasant population vis-à-vis Iceland’s elite landowners. It was also a result of these efforts that in 1774 the state took over the monopoly of trade from a private company. 12 years later in 1786, the monopoly was abolished, trade was now free, but admittedly only to the king’s subjects. But between 1774 and 1786 something terrible also happened in Iceland. In 1783, the island was hit by a volcanic eruption that has been characterized as “one of the largest volcanic eruptions in recent millennia of Earth’s history.” (Thorsteinsson 1985, 190). Large areas were flooded by lava, toxic ash rained down over most of the island and the sky was covered with volcanic mists. All this, together with violent earthquakes, destroyed the vegetation and thus Iceland’s agriculture in the following years. It is estimated that approx. 20% of the population died as a result of these natural disasters, and a smallpox epidemic in 1785 deepened the crisis. All the previous decades’ attempts to commercially develop Iceland were now in ruins. It was in that context that the trade monopoly was abolished. The following decades saw the sale of land to tenant farmers, an action that was also done in the Kingdom of Denmark. This, too, can be seen as an attempt to bring the social and occupational structures within the Danish empire closer together, although there were undeniably large differences and the basic conditions were highly disparate. The old Althing (unicameral legislature in Iceland) was moved from the historic Tingvellir to Reykjavik in 1798, and in the year 1800 the Althing was abolished in favor of a national court and judicially trained judges. Thereby, a century-old institution had been erased. Both the move and the abolition two years later were justified with practicalities. Reykjavik was considered easier to reach than Tingvellir, and the replacement with a national court can be seen as an expression of bureaucratization and another attempt to streamline the systems throughout the different parts of the empire. Iceland in the eighteenth century came to witness first-hand the intrusive unitary state, but compared to other parts of the empire there were hardly other places where the opportunity for growth of the unitary state was greater.

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