Ernan McMullin

Readers will be saddened to hear of the death of Professor Ernan McMullin last weekend. I met him only once, at Cambridge last year, where he roundly criticised the continuity thesis (against the scientific revolution) I had put forward at the conference we were both speaking at. His work on Galileo is of the first importance and he was a lovely man even when he disagreed with you.

Michael Ruse has written an appreciation which is well worth a look.

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Richard Carrier and the Domesday Watermills

Richard Carrier is without doubt a courageous and relentlessly revisionist historian and his ideas are often interesting and provocative. Back in 2002 he argued in Free-thought Today that Adolf Hitler was ‘unmistakably a God fearing Christian’ [1] . Elsewhere he has claimed that the Ancient Greeks were on the brink of a scientific revolution before the 3rd century crisis erupted and that medieval intellectual culture achieved nothing of note in Science until the revival of pagan ‘scientific values’ during the Renaissance. His forthcoming book will argue that Jesus probably never existed based on the application of Bayesian probability theory to history [2].

Now Richard has looked at the evidence for widespread watermills in Domesday England and concluded that the claims made by historians are factually dubious.

Scholars of the Domesday book have claimed that all the mills listed within it’s pages (as 'molendinum' or 'molendini' or sometimes just 'mol') are all watermills and that there were something in the region of between 5,624 (Margaret Hodgen’s ‘Domesday Water Mills’ Antiquity 13 1939, p. 261-79) and 6,082 of them (H.C Darby’s ‘Domesday England’, p. 361).

By contrast Richard Carrier writes:

'Though this claim is repeated often, I’ve actually read the Domesday Book, and the scholarship on it: not a single watermill is ever mentioned in it. Scholars who study the book concede this. Only one word is used for “mill” and it is used of all mills of whatever type, including hand and donkey mills. Those “5,624” mills are thus not all watermills. We don’t in fact know what proportion of them actually are. The assumption is often made that when a mill’s tax is paid in eels, this indicates a watermill (as eels could be captured in its race), by which logic the number of watermills is claimed to have been close to 5,000, but since taxes are paid in eels even in towns without any mills at all, that assumption is clearly wrong. Eels just indicate a nearby stream or river. The mere fact of a nearby stream or river does not entail any of the local mills used that stream or river, much less that all of them did.'

'This is yet another example of how Christian apologists not only love to boost medieval Christianity with logical fallacies, but also by not checking the facts (even when they are suspicious: a watermill for every fifty families in 1086 AD England ought to have been downright suspicious), and instead just believing anything you read that makes medieval Christians sound clever .' [3] [4]

'See Finn's "guide" to the DB, pp. 60-61, describing their flawed methodology, although Finn simply trusts it, not noticing the fallacy it entails; in his earlier "introduction" to the DB, however, Finn concedes the data is flawed for these kinds of counts on pp. 187-90, but he doesn't realize what this entails; e.g. p. 188, a single hamlet, population 52, had "nine mills" of a total value of a single pound; these are counted as watermills by the Darby criterion, but clearly that is massively absurd, as they could not possibly have been anything of the kind; indeed, they are unlikely to have been anything more than hand mills. Similarly, Finn says Darby counts "winter mills" on the presumption that intermittent mills must be watermills, but that makes little sense: water would be low in winter, not high, so a watermill would only operate on a seasonal waterway in spring or summer, not winter; winter mills thus are more likely ordinary mills put into operation during the winter months because they were near grain storage facilities which would be left dormant during harvest seasons where grain could be ground closer to market, and the storehouses were being filled, not emptied.'

In a similar vein he writes:

Most taxed mills would have been donkey, ox, or man driven, not hand mills (or watermills). In other words, most mills had long been capstan mills (since Roman times at least). This is basic economic history. Saying no one in England had a capstan mill is like saying no one in America owns a truck.

Donkeys weren't taxed so far as I know (and if they were, they would not be taxed separately by job), and if driven by oxen (or horses) they would come from the standing stock of the manor, not singled out. So unless a manor has zero oxen and horses in its entire holdings, you can't reference which animals would have been doing which jobs (much less when) just from tax filings, and even if there were no oxen or horses, there would be donkeys, and of course a capstan mill can be and often was driven by people.

Indeed, the undeniable widespread fact of capstan mills guarantees that they aren't being distinguished in the tax documents. As if the entire continent somehow forgot the existence of the most common bulk milling machine ever invented and had no capstan mills anywhere! That's why the numbers cannot refer to watermills, but to bulk millstones (period), regardless of motive source. So we have no reliable measure of how many watermills there were (and there definitely were not that many--because most of those numbers had to be capstan mills)…. And it is a scandal that these numbers for "mola" (millstones) are constantly being conflated as numbers of "watermills." This really needs to stop.

Why does any of this matter ?. Well if Carrier is right then numerous scholars – including the likes of Lynn White Jr, Reginald Lennard and W H G Armitage have cited an erroneous figure, one which has been used to justify the thesis that watermills were widespread throughout Anglo-Saxon England and that this represented a ‘far reaching cultural and technological change’.

Accordingly I got in contact via email with three of the leading experts on Ancient and Medieval milling; John Langdon, Professor in the Faculty of history and Classics at the University of Alberta and author of ‘Mills in the Medieval Economy 1300-1540’; Dr Adam Lucas of the Science and Technology Studies program at the University of Wollongong and author of ‘Wind Water, Work – ancient and Medieval Milling Technology’; and Richard Holt, Professor of History at the University of Tromso in Norway and author of ‘The Mills of Medieval England’. All of these cite the figure of 6,000 watermills in their writings on the subject and I decided to present them with Richard’s argument to see whether they would stand by their use of the figure and whether there would be any revision of the field.

I think it’s fair to say that their reaction was pretty negative……

To explain why will require adding a lengthy treatment to an already lengthy post but bear with me. On one point I agree with Richard. In 'Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds' Adam Lucas argued convincingly that the Classical era was more advanced in terms of the use of waterpower than previously thought and that this technology was widespread. It also points to Chinese innovations (watermilling was commonplace in China from the 10th century onwards) and milling in the Islamic world to argue against some of the stronger claims for Medieval exceptionalism that have been made (e.g Bloch – ‘Triumph and advent of the Watermill’). All the important innovations in industrial milling originated in earlier Islamic civilizations, ancient China and the Roman Empire. This would make it all the more surprising if there weren't similar developments in Anglo-Saxon England

Let’s look at the reasons for believing that all the mills mentioned in the Domesday Book are Watermills and not animal mills, windmills or hand mills as has been argued.

1) Geographical Spread

As the map on the right from Margaret Hodgson's article shows, the distribution of mills mentioned in the Domesday Book clearly follow water resources – not only that but they cluster on the tributaries of the three main waterways and in particular the smaller, shorter streams fringing the coastline of England. There are a few exceptional cases where the mills exist in places that are now un-watered but this has been identified as being due to the drying up of formally water filled valleys due to changes in rainfall [5]

The mills do not correspond to the more or less urban conglomerations of 11th century population as one might expect if they were animal mills for reasons I will explain shortly. Instead they are located in smaller rural communities and the headwaters of smaller watercourses. This becomes much clearer if you look at the regional surveys which were conducted by the historian H. C Darby and his team.

To take one example the map on the left shows the Domesday Mills in the county of Somerset – (this is from The Domesday Georgaphy of South West England). The mills are quite clearly associated with the rivers, and they are especially frequent along those rivers which flow through extensive areas of arable land, the Tone and tributaries, the Chew, the Frome, the Brue, the Parrett, the Isle etc etc.. Exactly what you would expect if they were watermills. The other regional surveys reach the same conclusions (for example the East Riding of Yorkshire in 'The Domesday Geography of Northern England)

2) Californication – What are the Winter Mills ?

When referring to the winter mills that appear to operate intermittently, Carrier writes ‘water [in England] would be low in winter, not high, so a watermill would only operate on a seasonal waterway in spring or summer, not winter’.

Unfortunately here, Carrier is projecting the Californian climate onto England. As anyone who hails from the UK knows the winters are usually cool, wet and windy and miserable with plentiful precipitation – so much so that flooding is quite frequent. This is certainly the case today and would have been the case in the 11th century.

By contrast, in California, heavy snows accumulate in the Sierra Nevada which create an annual reserve of water – this is then released in the spring and summer adding meltwater to the rain fed streamflow. To be fair – according to Richard Holt, Carrier is far from the first American to think Anglo-Saxon England had an identical climate to the United States. Another historian – Kealey argued that the streams in England would have been frozen in winter and therefore some of the alleged watermills were really windmills (he was from New England – the arctic wilderness I currently live in) It seems likely therefore that HC Darby was right and that the intermittent mills are in fact watermills that can only work when winter arrives and there is enough water in streams.

3) H.C Darby’s Eel Tax

Carrier writes of HC Darby’s method -' The assumption is often made that when a mill’s tax is paid in eels, this indicates a watermill (as eels could be captured in its race), by which logic the number of watermills is claimed to have been close to 5,000, but since taxes are paid in eels even in towns without any mills at all, that assumption is clearly wrong. Eels just indicate a nearby stream or river.

As John Langdon has pointed out, here Richard Carrier misrepresents Darby’s method. ‘In truth Darby only noted that many of the ‘mills’ (molendina or molina) had their valuations sometimes expressed in numbers of eels (e.g., Domesday England, p. 270)'. Actually – as we saw in the ‘geographical spread’ section H C Darby spent much of his career with his team authoring multiple volumes of regional Domesday surveys. These specifically note where mills do not pay renders of eels – some render honey, salt, malt rye and grain.

Is a partial rent of eels evidence for a watermill? Not conclusive but I think an objective observer would have to agree it’s pretty good evidence – especially when viewed as part of a cumulative case. Another guide for example is that the value of many of the mills given in the Domesday Book are high, showing them as obviously powerful.

4) Lack of evidence for Animal Mills

As Richard Holt pointed out in his response to my email, ‘we have no reference to animal mills before the 12th century (and just one possible example of archaeological evidence at Cheddar)’. By contrast we have lots of evidence to watermills from the 8th century onwards. According to H C Darby (Domesday England p270) ‘the earliest reference to a water-mill in England comes from a document referring to Chart in Kent and dating from 762. References to watermills becomes relatively numerous after about 800 or so’.

Holt also pointed to later evidence saying that:

‘Manorial records are starting up in the 1120s, actually (Peterborough, Burton), and then it's a cascade after 1200. All the evidence then is for watermills (plus the new windmills after c.1185). Where one does comparisons with Domesday (I did it for Peterborough, Glastonbury, Ramsey, Ely, etc.) there is a clear correlation with DB - i.e., the watermills of 1125 /1189 /1221 etc. (proved to be watermills by contemporary accounts that detail repairs to water systems, etc) are in the same numbers on the same manors etc. as in 1086. One can trace an estate's mills through from 1086 to the 14th /15th century in lots of cases. Oh, and the manorial accounts, even the earliest, detail repairs to existing water systems and mills, not to new ones. So one can push the estate documentation back even further. But they DON'T detail work on animal mills, or mention rents from them'.

Related to this point, later evidence relating to milling in England comes from the hundred rolls of the late 1270s and (as noted above) from detailed estate surveys. Using this evidence Richard Holt in ‘The Mills of Medieval England’ and - focusing on the West Midlands - John Langdon in his article ‘Watermills and Windmills in the West Midlands’, used this data to calculate the number of watermills around 1300 as around 15,000. If the Domesday figure from 200 years earlier is wrong then this estimate looks decidedly odd.

Why would animal mills not be as prevalent as watermills in our sources? Holt suggests that perhaps one reason is the watermills – especially of the horizontal variety are:

‘relatively easy to build and operate. All European cultures build them in preference to animal mills which need an expensive animal - one finds animal mills in the context of castles, large noble households, urban bakers and brewers, etc. - all exceptions, all situations where people want effective milling right on the spot, and are willing to pay the cost of that.'

This is similar to what John Langdon states in ‘Mills in the Medieval Economy’ p125. According to him animal mills were useful for Lords in urban situations particularly when water power was not accessible. As Langdon argues on page 24 they are underrepresented in – for example manorial records – as they were more often attached to peasant holdings or subsumed in particular industries such as brewing. They were capable of filling a gap in milling in towns and cities where sources of energy were very stretched. This being the case, if they were the mills shown in the Domesday book we would expect them to be located in urban areas.......which, as we saw earlier, they aren’t.

5) What about hand mills and windmills?

Other culprits for the mills mentioned in the Domesday Book include hand-mills and watermills. The population of England at the time of the Domesday book is approximated at roughly 1,400,000 people in Hodgson’s article (She cites H de B Gibbins – Industry in England (1920). A handmill looks like this (see the pic on the right)

Assuming the figure given by Hodgson hasn’t been revised by later research 6,000 handmills in a population of 1.4 million is quite clearly laughably low.

Furthermore according to John Langdon in ‘Mills in the Medieval Economy’ (p24) handmills were not usually included at all in most records ‘since they were not considered to be sufficiently important to act as commercial enterprises, as watermills, windmills and (occasionally) horse-mills were’. However, despite being overshadowed Langdon speculates that they may have accounted for as much as 20% of grain milled in 1300.

Nevertheless recall that Richard Carrier argued that the nine mills found in a single hamlet were 'unlikely to have been anything more than hand mills'. It seems strange that the Domesday surveyors would have bothered to document nine hand mills of negligible tax value - not impossible but decidedly unlikely. However an Anglo-Saxon pound was worth 20 shillings meaning the 9 mills had an average value of 2.22 shillings. About right for a small watermill but pretty high for a hand mill given that 2.2 shillings would have been equal to 26.4 pennies (a penny could buy you a quarter of a sheep’s carcass in 1130 (see Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome (2010), Allen Lane, p310 - H/T Mr Tolkein)

Windmills specifically driven by wind first appear in Europe in documents dating from the 1180s. According to Darby (Domesday England p270) ‘the first mention of a windmill does not appear until 1191 in a document relating to the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds’. So it is safe to say the mills in Domesday are not Windmills either.

Final Count

While John Langdon categorically rejected Carrier’s insights, he did agree that the area could do with some rethinking. For example ‘multiple mills on a manor may have been referring to sets of millstones on a manor rather than to separate water mill sites - that is, a single mill site on a river might have operated two or more sets of millstones’. This means that the final count is something of a conjecture. Nethertheless Langdon thinks that Darby’s estimate of 6,082 watermills is the more authoritative yet especially when you consider that many mills to the far north were not reported in the Domesday survey.

Overall the experts I consulted concluded that – whilst the evidence isn’t conclusive – you can safely say beyond reasonable doubt that the Domesday mills are in fact watermills. If Carrier wants to argue against decades of scholarship and dozens of historians and archaeologists then he needs to bring more to the table.

For my part there is something humorous about the Anglo-Saxon England Carrier has concocted – one in which toothless, god fearing peasants run expensive and underpowered capstan mills for their milling while standing mere yards away from abundant fast flowing rivers. Must have been quite the ‘doh’ moment when they finally figured it out.

[1] Though Goebbels oddly seems to have mistaken it, - writing in his diary ‘the Fuhrer is deeply religious but entirely anti-Christian. He regards Christianity as a symptom of decay. Rightly so. It is a branch of the Jewish race.' December 28, 1939

[2] His skepticism arises from the fact that 'P(H/B) = as low as .51 or as high as 0.70 P(~H/B) = as high as 0.49 or as low as 0.30 P(E/H&B) = as low as 0.20 (model A) or as high as 0.80 (model B) P(E/~H&B) = as low as either 0.15 or 0.19 (on model A) or as high as either 0.70 or 0.79 (on model B) [Note that for those unfamiliar with Bayes, P(H/B) and P(~H/B) must always sum to 1, but P(E/H&B) and P(E/~H&B) do not have to sum to 1] P(H/E&B) = P(H/B) x P(E/H&B) / [P(H/B) x P(E/H&B)] + [P(~H/B) x P(E/~H&B)] Therefore, best case scenario for ~H: P(H/E&B) = 0.51 x 0.20 / (0.51 x 0.20) + (0.49 x 0.19) = 0.102 / 0.102 + 0.0931 = 0.102 / 0.1951 = 0.523 (rounding up) That would constitute mythicism being slightly more likely than historicism'.

[3] On this point – Archeologists could find a combined blast furnace / astrolabe with dual steam turbines and heat seeking crossbows which had originated in Medieval England and it still wouldn't have any bearing on the truth or falsity of Christianity as far as I can see.

[4] 6,000 mills divided among an estimated 1,400,000 comes out at 1 mill per every 233 persons. This isn't particularly unlikely given that many would have been pretty simple, consisting of a wheel laying horizontally in the water. This would have turned on a shaft fixed to a stone in the bed of a river. The upper end of the shaft would then have passed through the lower end of two quern like grinding stones and the mill wheel, the shaft and the upper stone turned together. The whole structure would have been extremely small and adapted for use on a minor stream or rivulet.

[5] According to Hodgson this study is - G M Myer – Early Water Mills in relation to changes in rainfall in east Kent – Quaterley Journal of the Royal Meterological Association (1927 LIII 407-19)

References

Margaret Hodgen’s ‘Domesday Water Mills’ Antiquity 13 1939

H.C Darby’s ‘Domesday England'

H.C Darby 'The Domesday Geography of South-West England'

John Langdon - ‘Mills in the Medieval Economy 1300-1540’

John Langdon - ‘Watermills and Windmills in the West Midlands’

Adam Lucas ' Wind Water Work, Ancient and Medieval Milling Technology'

Adam Lucas - Industrial Milling in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds: A Survey of the Evidence for an Industrial Revolution in Medieval Europe

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More infantisation

Infantilise seems to be a mot de jour. In this yesterday’s Times, Libby Purves used this very word in an excellent article about whether unmarried couples living together should have legal rights. Due to the Times pay wall, you can’t read it online, but I left my copy on the 8:50 to Charing Cross yesterday and it is probably still there if anyone wants to grab it.

The article followed an intervention by the president of the family division of the British courts, Sir Nicholas Wall, saying that when co-habitees break up, a judge should rule on how property is split between them. Now, my opinion of Sir Nicholas was already in the nuclear bunker below the basement due to his support for continued secrecy in the family courts and several dreadful decisions in adoption cases. I was pleased to note that former Justice Minister Jack Straw shared my opinion and tried, unsuccessfully, to block Sir Nicholas’s appointment to the presidency of the family division.

Sir Nicholas now wants the law to decide what happens when unmarried couples split up. Family lawyers think this is a splendid idea but, of course, they will pick up fats fees as a result. This seems to me to be a classic case of the state sticking its nose in where it has no business. If unmarried couples want to come to a legal arrangement, that should be up to them. Presently, such an arrangement is available. It is called ‘marriage’ and is even available to gay couples (albeit under a different name). Where children are involved, it is quite right that the law steps in to protect their interests when their parents split up. But in the case where a couple move in together, as many do, and then split up a couple of years later without having any children, the arrangement should be private. Another layer of legal bureaucracy is the last thing we need.

The difficulty raised by supporters of Sir Nicholas’s plan is the case of vulnerable women who are allegedly being thrown out onto the street when their lovers tire of them. They also note that people often don’t think through what they are doing. They might move in together, expecting that the arrangement will be for life and thus make no provision for if it doesn’t work out. The law, in other words, must protect people from themselves.

But even if this really is happening, should a law be brought in that applies to all couples when they break up? Surely, as Libby Purves noted in her Times article, people must learn to take responsibility for themselves. A law such as that proposed by Sir Nicholas would further “infantilise” us, in Libby Purves’ words. Whatever the good intentions behind the suggestion, it would have insidious the consequence of making us less responsible for our own actions.

Also, I fear that claiming women are not capable of taking that responsibility is chauvinistic. I am all in favour of ensuring people are aware that what happens when they split up is up to them. It might even be a good idea to make clear that the fabled concept of “common law marriage” does not actually exist. If you want to stay in your partner’s home when they die, you should get that in writing and into their will. And if you want a share of the house you are both living in, that should be documented too. The law should not, in my opinion, step in when people fail to take these elementary precautions.

And just for the record, this is nothing to do with safeguarding the sanctity of marriage. This straw man is regularly erected by proponents of Sir Nicholas’s idea, but is the least of my problems with it. It is a bad idea in its own right and another fine example of how the road to a nanny state is paved with good intentions.

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A Millenia-old Scientific Prediction

Let me ask two distinct questions: first, Did the universe begin to exist? and second, Does the universe have a cause? Since there are two conditions we are dealing with we can put the possible combinations of these conditions into four possible positions one could hold:

1. The universe began and it has a cause.
2. The universe didn't begin and it has a cause.
3. The universe began and it doesn't have a cause.
4. The universe didn't begin and it doesn't have a cause.

In theistic religions, 1 has been the most common option. But it should be noted that there were still some who held 2, that the universe, despite not having a beginning, still has a cause (such as Aristotle, Averroes, and the Latin Averroists). There is a good reason for this: simply showing the universe had no beginning is not sufficient to show that it has no cause; many forms of the cosmological argument argue from the premise of an infinitely-old universe.

Historically, the response of atheists was to accept 4, that the universe has neither a beginning nor a cause. Prior to the advent of Big Bang cosmology, position 3 was empty; at least I've never heard of anyone who accepted it, and the calls in the academic literature to find anyone who fits into it have gone unanswered. And yet it seems to be the position that atheists are driven to today. Of course, the fact that it has not been accepted historically does not mean that it is not a viable position to hold, but it surely gives us food for thought.

Ultimately, the claims that the universe began or that it did not amount to scientific predictions. The claim that it did have a beginning has been empirically verified by contemporary cosmology, and the claim that it did not has been empirically disconfirmed. And historically, the first category consists solely of theists, while the second category consists mostly of nontheists with a few theists. However, while theists argued for the universe's beginning, they did not think refuting this would refute theism -- in other words, while their prediction that the universe began could be falsified, their theism could not be (at least not by this factor). Atheists, however, gave no such indication: if you refuted the universe's eternality, then you would refute atheism, since it was accepted by all parties that if the universe began, it must have a cause. So the atheists' prediction was falsifiable, and by the same lights, so was atheism.

The problem, again, is that the atheists' prediction has been falsified. Thus, it would seem that atheism has been falsified. Yet atheists often claim to base their views on science and accuse theists of ignoring science. Surely this is backwards. Theists and atheists alike made a scientific prediction, the theists have had their prediction substantiated and the atheists have had their prediction refuted. In order to salvage their position, atheists have had to embrace a position that never occurred to anyone because it rejects the principle of causality. They have had to redefine their position so that it is no longer disproven by science. Again, this does not amount to a refutation of atheism, but if the tables were turned, do you think theists would be given the benefit of doubt?

(cross-posted at Agent Intellect)

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Infantilising citizens

Reflecting on the way forward in Egypt, Robert Fisk writes in the Independent today:

The problem was that under the autocrats – Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak and whomever Washington blesses next – the Egyptian people skipped two generations of maturity. For the first essential task of a dictator is to "infantilise" his people, to transform them into political six-year-olds, obedient to a patriarchal headmaster. They will be given fake newspapers, fake elections, fake ministers and lots of false promises.

Fisk is right, of course. Which is not usually something you can say about him. When governments become all pervasive, citizens no longer have to take any sort of responsibility. In a dictatorship, everything is the leader's responsibility and he paints himself as the father of the country. People become like children. They can whinge, and frequently do, but if they misbehave they get smacked or worse.

Sadly, though, almost all governments have this effect on people, even though, in a democracy, it is to a much lesser degree. The more government there is, the more people cease to take responsibility. When something goes wrong, we complain about our rulers but seem strangely unwilling to do things for ourselves. The present Conservative-led government is having trouble selling its idea for free-schools, localism and less bureaucracy for this very reason. It turns out that there are always plenty of people who have done very nicely attached to the teat of the state.

Of course, it is widely accepted that governments infantilise their citizens, which is from where we get the phrase "the nanny state". But many of the left think this is a good thing. Alain de Botton, the pop-philosopher, defends a paternalistic state on the BBC's website. It all sounds terribly reasonable but what he is really saying is that we all need a bit of dictatorship to defend us from ourselves. I doubt Hosni Mubarak would disagree.

UPDATE: My post above implies that Alain de Botton is arguing for dictatorship. Of course he isn't, and I'm sure he would not. The linked article is well worth a read and a rather more considered response than the one I gave it.

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Censorship in the Guardian

Antisemitism is never funny, but the reaction of the left-leaning Guardian newspaper to racism by the left is quite amusing.

Yesterday, various student groups and unions protested against the government's increase in university tuition fees. These protests were less marred by violence than on previous occasions, but at one point the crowd insulted the president of the National Union of Students, Aaron Porter. Porter is a moderate who has publicly criticised some of the violent and extreme protests, well aware that they damage the cause.

As the Guardian reports he was abused when he was due to make a speech and had to be escorted away by the police. The Telegraph reports that the crowds jeered him as a "Tory Jew", a common enough insult from the far-left and one repudiated by some of the other protesters. The Guardian quotes the crowd as calling Porter "a Tory too".

I doubt that the Guardian is deliberately lying. But, it seems to typify the inability of many on the left to accept that the "student" protesters contain some extremely insalubrious elements.

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The Educational Culture Wars

There is a brutal culture war in British education.

On the left are the educational establishment wedded to outdated dogmas about child-centred teaching and government control. They are led by the National Union of Teachers (appropriately abbreviated to NUT) and Fiona Millar, partner of Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alistair Campbell. Unfortunately, these forces of reaction also include the Catholic Church. They all want to keep English schools exactly as they are, except for spending billions on shiny new buildings and paying teachers more, no matter how good or bad they are at their job. In effect, they want to keep poor children ignorant and underachieving.

On the right are teachers like Katharine Birbalsingh, scandalously sacked from her job for speaking out against the establishment and Toby Young, who is trying to set up a free school offering a rigorous education to all local children in Acton. He’s better known as the real person whose memoir was adapted for the film How to Lose Friends and Alienate People starring Simon Pegg.

Just how urgent the problem is for children from underprivileged backgrounds is illustrated by stark statistics. According to government figures, just 45 of children entitled to free school meals in 2002/3 (the standard measure of children from poor backgrounds and about 80,000 in total) got places at Oxford and Cambridge when they progressed in 2006/7. Other figures from the Sutton Trust found that only 130 such children got Oxbridge places over the three years to 2007. To put that in perspective, some top private schools manage to get 80 or so children into Oxbridge every year. Even allowing for genetic factors, this suggests that state education fails the most gifted of the needy.

But there is hope. Mossbourne Academy in Hackney, one of London’s poorest boroughs, got ten pupils offers to Cambridge last year. Mossbourne is an independent school run within the state system with the freedom to hire good teachers (and fire bad ones); impose a strict disciplinary ethos and challenge pupils with a demanding syllabus. No wonder the left hate it. They like to pretend that it has achieved its success through covert selection of the brightest local pupils, a charge for which there is no evidence whatsoever. Mossbourne Academy shows why defeating the NUT, Fiona Millar and the other educational reactionaries is a vital battle for increasing social mobility in the UK. It also shows what is possible once bureaucratic shackles are cut, discipline asserted and children are allowed to reach their potential.

Some on the political right believe that the problems started with the abolition of grammar schools. Under this system, which has been phased out since the 1960s but is still in force in certain parts of the country, children take an exam at age 11. If they pass, they go to an academic grammar school. If they fail (or didn’t pass with a high enough mark, using the current argot), they went to a ‘vocational’ secondary modern or comprehensive school. The system worked well for gifted poor children for whom grammar schools were a ticket to the middle classes. However, they failed late developers and children on the middle rungs on attainment. But ultimately, they were abolished because the existing middle classes got apoplectic if their children failed the eleven plus exam. Nonetheless, the combination of comprehensive schools and so-called liberal education policies has been a disaster for gifted children of parents who cannot afford to pay private school fees. Let us hope that Michael Gove, the Conservative education minister, with his strategy of freeing schools from bureaucrats and facing down the educational establishment, can repair some of the damage.

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The Latest on Galileo

Last year saw two new biographies about Galileo by the heavy-hitting professors David Wooton and John Heilbron. I briefly mentioned them in an article I did for Standpoint magazine and the Times Literary Supplement has a more in-depth review (although the reviewer seems ignorant of early modern cosmology with his comments about how Galileo downgraded rather than upgraded the position of the earth).

Heilbron’s book, Galileo, is the more academic and traditional. He tends to underplay Galileo’s scientific achievements while noting that he had many other skills. The style is also rather stilted (Heilbron doesn’t seem to write easy books). He also indulges in post-modern nostrums such as imagined conversations between Galileo and his alter ego. I fear specialists will have to read this but others may find it heavy-going.

I found Wootton’s Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, both more enjoyable and more interesting. Wootton’s last book Bad Medicine: Doctors Doing Harm since Hippocrates, is a masterpiece and although his Galileo never quite reaches those heights, there is plenty of food for thought. Wootton is also an excellent writer who makes reading his revisionism a pleasure.

Most controversially, Wootton thinks Galileo was not a Christian, despite his protestations of loyalty to the Catholic Church. The evidence for this is rather thin and depends partly on a conspiracy theory. Wootton says that those of Galileo’s papers that incriminated him as a heretic were destroyed by his biographers keen to protect his name.

More interestingly, Wootton sides with Arthur Koestler in proclaiming Galileo the author of his own downfall (despite giving Koestler and indeed Feyerabend a kicking earlier in the book). As Wootton notes in his concluding chapter:

Galileo overstated overstated his own achievements in the Dialogue and thus provoked the Church into condemning him. This view, which presents Galileo as an overreacher, seems to me essentially correct… The clash, when it came, was not between an impersonal institution, the universal Church, on one hand and a dedicated scientist on the other. Rather it was a falling out between friends, a just punishment, a betrayal. Galileo was indeed a heretic, but worse (for heresy was much more common than historians have realised), he was disloyal and ungrateful. In the world of Counter Reformation Italy, heresy often went unpunished; disloyalty and ingratitude, on the other hand, were never tolerated.

His characterisation of the liberal Catholic school of Galileo studies (of which I am surely a member) is also illuminating. He says that we think Galileo was a better theologian than the Inquisition (because he correctly showed in his Letter to Grand Duchess Christina that scientific questions do not have to impinge on the faith). But we also think that the inquisition was made up of better scientists than Galileo (because they could see that Galileo had no proof that the earth moved when he thought that he did). While this is put rather bluntly, I must plead guilty as charged. And not even Wootton’s entertaining book has convinced me otherwise.

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The 'Sid Meier's Civilization' school of History

Those with long memories will recall Richard Carrier's post back in January 2010 with the provocative title 'Flynn's Pile of Boners'. Unfortunately a lot of it seemed to rest on the assumption that if an invention originates in a particular culture then they get to claim sole ownership of it on the scoreboard of history (I don't know where this idea came from - perhaps the computer game 'Sid Meier's Civilization'). So, following this logic, the appearance of mechanical clocks powered by water in the ancient world thereby negates Medieval advances in clock making - 3 points to Rome, zero points to the dumb Medievals who end up with the Dan Quayle award.

To see how silly this idea is, one only has to look at the example of gunpowder. Now gunpowder is indisputably a Chinese invention and was used to develop a range of military technologies that eventually spread to the Arab and Medieval European world. However the gunpowder revolution - the event which revolutionised warfare and transformed the world - took place in Europe in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth century. Before then hand cannons were of largely psychological use and as a general rule gunpowder weapons were not very effective. Descriptions of battles indicate they were more of an annoyance than a deadly menace.

The real revolution where gunpowder became a war transforming weapon took place in France in the fifteenth century. The key advance was a new technique of manufacturing gunpowder, a process known as Corning first attested in 1429. This turned the powder into granular form and greatly strengthened it's power and performance. It could be more accurately measured and stored without the powder separating. When a flame touched the powder it would explode about 30% more efficiently as the fire moved from grain to grain. Furthermore the new style of powder could propel a bullet or a cannon ball with much greater force and guns became the lethal weapon they have been ever since.

Because of increased recoil, the old way of holding a handgun with two hands in front of the chest was no longer practical. The Europeans solved this problem by developing the Arqubus (crooked stock) where the stock was bent down at an angle and could be nestled in the shoulder of the firer. This absorbed the shock and meant the soldier could sight down the barrel. This configuration was so effective it has not really changed in 500 years. The second innovation was the matchlock which allowed the weapon to be gripped firmly when fired.

Corned gunpowder also allowed the development of more effective cannon. Long thin cannons were needed which could still fire a projectile. This was greatly facilitated by the high quality of European metallurgy in the fifteenth century. It was the experience the Europeans had in making church bells particularly which allowed them to develop this technology.

Once the weapons made possible by corned gunpowder became established they had a dramatic effect on European warfare. It took a while because - although an arquebus could fire through armor - so could a longbow or a crossbow. Both weapons competed for several decades but the arquebus would win out due to it's ease of use and psychological effect. Cannons with stronger yet longer barrels were now enough to destroy city walls and castles. This was brought home in 1453 when a huge cannon was cast for the Ottoman army by a Hungarian gunsmith and was able to breach the walls of Constantinople. During the French invasion of Italy in 1496 castle walls were destroyed in a matter of hours. Cannons were now small enough to go on a ship but powerful enough to cause serious damage. Galleons were developed which could deliver broadsides and this created a revolutionary type of naval warfare.

The point of this is to demonstrate that when assessing the history of an invention we shouldn't merely look at it's earliest documented appearance but also key stages in it's development and it's take-up by different civilizations.

Anyhow the reason I bring the post up is that I just checked back after some months and it appears the comments are still going over a year after it was first put up - mainly due to a bitter dispute between Richard and one Steve Kellmeyer. It's worth a read for a bit of amusement. I'm still due to post on the idea that the figure given for Domesday Mills is a wild over-estimate prompted by Christian Apologists seeking to aggrandize for Medieval Christianity - something that came as a bit of a surprise to the expert in Medieval Milling I emailed.

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Hmmm

For your perusal:
Keith Parsons, "No Creator Need Apply: A Reply to Roy Abraham Varghese".
Paul Herrick, "Job Opening: Creator of the Universe—A Reply to Keith Parsons".
Via Victor Reppert.
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