'To Milton'

By Oscar Wilde

MILTON! I think thy spirit hath passed away
From these white cliffs, and high-embattled towers;
This gorgeous fiery-coloured world of ours
Seems fallen into ashes dull and grey,
And the age changed unto a mimic play
Wherein we waste our else too-crowded hours:
For all our pomp and pageantry and powers
We are but fit to delve the common clay,
Seeing this little isle on which we stand,
This England, this sea-lion of the sea,
By ignorant demagogues is held in fee,
Who love her not: Dear God! is this the land
Which bare a triple empire in her hand
When Cromwell spake the word Democracy!

 

1745 The London Evening Post reported:

Last week a woman that keeps the Queen's Head ale-house at Kingston, in Surrey, was ordered by the court to be ducked for scolding, and was accordingly placed in the chair, and ducked in the river Thames, under Kingston bridge, in the presence of 2,000 or 3,000 people.

Chambers (Robert Chambers, [Ed.], The Book of Days: A miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar, etc, W & R Chambers, London, 1881 [1879 Edition is online and 1869 edition here with CD-ROM available; See also The English Year: A Personal Selection from Chambers' Book of Days]) writes:

According to verbal tradition, the punishment of the ducking-stool was inflicted at Kingston and other places at the beginning of the present [19^th] century. However, the 'stool' was but rarely used at this period; though it was extensively employed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Monsieur Misson, a Frenchman who travelled in England about the year 1700, wrote this description of the ducking-stool:

This method of punishing scolding women is funny enough. They fasten an arm-chair to the end of two strong beams, twelve or fifteen feet long, and parallel to each other. The chair hangs upon a sort of axle, on which it plays freely, so as always to remain in the horizontal position. The scold being well fastened to the chair, the two beams are placed, as near to the centre as possible, across a post on the water-side; and being lifted up behind, the chair, of course, drops into the cold element. The ducking is repeated according to the degree of shrewishness possessed by the patient, and generally has the effect of cooling her immoderate heat, at least for a time.

According to Blount, the ducking-stool, or cuck-stool was in use in the Saxon era, when it was named the scealjin. (Cuck-stool meant 'shit stool' because sometimes the victims would accidentally defecate with fear. The Australian idiom 'cack' derives from the same word.) The Cambridge stool was carved with devils laying hold of scolds. The Sandwich ducking-stool bore the motto:

Of members ye tonge is worst or beste
An yll tonge oft doth breede unreste.

We read in Blackstone's Commentaries:

A common scold may be indicted, and if convicted shall be sentenced to be placed in a certain engine of correction called the trebucket, castigatory, or ducking-stool.

The ducking-stool came to America and was used widely, though surprisingly less in the Puritan colonies than some others. In 1777, a ducking-school was ordered at the confluence of the Ohio and Monongahela rivers. As late as 1824, a scold of Philadelphia, USA was sentenced by the City of Philadelphia Court of Sessions to be ducked. However, the punishment was deemed obsolete and not inflicted. The last recorded case in England was of Sarah Leeke, in 1817.

DUCKING and CUCKING STOOLS, chairs used for the punishment of scolds, witches and prostitutes in bygone days. The two have been generally confused, but are quite distinct. The earlier, the Cucking-stool or Stool of Repentance, is of very ancient date, and was used by the Saxons, who called it the Scealding or Scolding Stool. It is mentioned in Domesday Book as in use at Chester, being called cathedra stercoris, a name which seems to confirm the first of the derivations suggested in the footnote below. Seated on this stool the woman, her head and feet bare, was publicly exposed at her door or paraded through the streets amidst the jeers of the crowd. The Cucking-stool was used for both sexes, and was specially the punishment for dishonest brewers and bakers. Its use in the case of scolding women declined on the introduction in the middle of the 16th century of the Scolds Bridle (see BRANKS), and it disappears on the introduction a little later of the Ducking-stool. The earliest record of the use of this latter is towards the beginning of the 17th century. It was a strongly made wooden armchair (the surviving specimens are of oak) in which the culprit was seated, an iron band being placed around her so that she should not fall out during her immersion. Usually the chair was fastened to a long wooden beam fixed as a seesaw on the edge of a pond or river. Sometimes, however, the Ducking-stool was not a fixture but was mounted on a pair of wooden wheels so that it could be wheeled through the streets, and at the river-edge was hung by a chain from the end of a beam. In sentencing a woman the magistrates ordered the number of duckings she should have. Yet another type of Ducking-stool was called a tumbrel. It was a chair on two wheels with two long shafts fixed to the axles. This was pushed into the pond and then the shafts released, thus tipping the chair up backwards. Sometimes the punishment proved fatal, the unfortunate woman dying of shock. Duckingstools were used in England as late as the beginning of the 15th century. The last recorded cases are those of a Mrs Ganble at Plymouth (1808); of Jenny Pipes, a notorious scold (1809), and Sarah Leeke (1817), both of Leominster. In the last case the water in the pond was so low that the victim was merely wheeled round the town in the chair.
Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911

"As late as 1809, the magistrates sentenced Jenny Pipes, and she was strapped, screaming, into the chair to be paraded all round the town for eggs and rotten fruit to be shied at her and filthy ribaldry bawled by drunks and echoed by laughing children, then ducked and held, nearly upside down, in the effluent of the Kenwater before being raised high, spluttering for breath, quivering with cold, exposed to further insults.

"Jenny Pipes was a hero of free speech.

"Through her gasping and her tears she found her voice and spirit, and roundly cursed those cowardly magistrates, and the mayor and corporation who had endorsed the wicked ordeal she was subjected to.

"In her angry words they were defeated and shamed. The name of Jenny Pipes will live on in Herefordshire, held before us by the actual monstrous ducking stool, generously housed by the Priory authorities despite their embarrassment, being too large for the Leominster Museum, its rightful home as an important historical artefact, part of the essential history of Leominster."
Source: 'Barbaric torture of hero of free speech'

1749 The first official performance of Friederich Handel's Fireworks Music was abandoned due to the outbreak of fire.

1805 First Barbary War: United States Marines and Berbers attacked the Tripolitan city of Derna.

1810 Ludwig van Beethoven gave the world a romantic piece for piano, with the dedication, 'For Therese, as a remembrance'. Nowadays not a lot is known about Therese, though she was possibly Therese von Malfatti, the daughter of a Viennese medical doctor, and at the time the focus of Beethoven's affections. When the work was published in 1865, the discoverer of the piece, Ludwig Nohl, quite possibly mistranscribed the illegible title as 'Für Elise'.

Hear the tune at Google Video

1813 War of 1812: United States troops captured the capital of Ontario, York (present day Toronto, Ontario).

1825 USA: Welsh-born utopian socialist and social reformer Robert Owen set up the colony of New Harmony, Indiana.

1828 London's zoo opened in Regent's Park.

1840 The foundation stone for new Palace of Westminster, London, was laid by the wife of Sir Charles Barry.

1861 President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in some areas of the USA. It was extended throughout the nation on September 24, 1862, against anyone suspected of being a Southern sympathizer. Thanks to the government's new-found ability to imprison without charge, over the next four years some 18,000 'subversives' and peace activists were jailed without charges. In the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis also suspended habeas corpus and imposed martial law.

In America it was the first, but not the last time the age-old guarantee of human rights had been whittled away by the State. (In 1215, Magna Carta had promised, "No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land".

In the early 1870s, President Ulysses S Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine counties in South Carolina, as part of federal civil rights action against the Ku Klux Klan under the 1870 Force Act and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act. In 1942, the US Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Quirin that unlawful combatant saboteurs could be denied habeas corpus and tried by military commission. In 1996, following the Oklahoma City bombing, Congress passed, and President Bill Clinton signed into law, the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA), in which Section 101 set a statute of limitations of one year following conviction for prisoners to seek the writ.

President George W Bush's November 13, 2001, Presidential Military Order gave the President of the United States the power to detain suspects, suspected of connection to terrorists or terrorism as an unlawful combatant. Critics complained that a person could be held indefinitely without charges being filed, without a court hearing, and without entitlement to a legal consultant, and that the officials implementing the commissions would be making up the rules as they went along. Many legal and constitutional scholars contended that these provisions were in direct opposition to habeas corpus and the United States Bill of Rights. On January 17, 2007, Bush's Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, asserted in Senate testimony that while habeas corpus is "one of our most cherished rights", the United States Constitution does not expressly guarantee habeas rights to United States residents or citizens.

"If a person was being held by someone else they (or someone on their behalf) could seek a writ of habeas corpus. When issued, the writ required the jailer (or whoever was detaining the person) to come to court and explain why they were holding the person. If the answer to the writ was a lawful justification, the writ was discharged. Otherwise the court would order the person's release."
Source: Julian Burnside on habeas corpus

1861 American Civil War: West Virginia seceded from Virginia.

1865 The steamboat Sultana, carrying 2,300 passengers, exploded and sank in the Mississippi River, killing 1,700, most of whom were Union survivors of the Andersonville Prison.

1869 Australia: The electric telegraph submarine cable from Melbourne to Tasmania was opened.

1882 Death of Ralph Waldo Emerson (b. 1803), American essayist. He is buried in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery close to Henry David Thoreau and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

1894 France: Trial of the 21-year-old French anarchist, Emile Henry, for bombing the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare on February 12, 1894, and blowing up the Bons-enfants police station on November 8, 1892. Henry proudly acknowledged his actions, reading a declaration in which he analyzed a corrupt society and called for further revolt. The jury found no extenuating circumstances and didn't go easy on him. He died under the guillotine on May 21 in the same year.

Early progressives in the Book of Days    CounterCulture Wiki

1909 Sultan of Turkey Abdul Hamid II was overthrown, and was succeeded by his brother, Murat V.

1916 USA: Dr Ben Reitman (anarchist Emma Goldman's lover) was arrested in New York for distributing pamphlets on birth control.

1932 Imperial Airways began an air service from London to Cape Town.

1932 Hart Crane, American author, committed suicide by jumping overboard from a ship en route from Mexico.

1937 The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco was completed.

1937 America's first social security payment was made.

1939 The British government announced that it would set up a ministry of supply and reintroduce conscription.

1941 World War II: German troops entered Athens.

1950 Apartheid: In South Africa, the Group Areas Act was passed formally segregating races.

1950 Britain recognised the state of Israel.

1957 Italy: Situationist International (1957 - '72) founding conference, at Cosio di Arroscia. The SI is often attributed as being one of the key ideological catalysts for the May 1968 revolution centred around Paris.

The founding conference was composed of eight men and women from different European countries. Some founders of the SI came from radical art groups that emerged around 1950 but were still little known: COBRA, called after the magazine of a northern-European (Copenhagen - Brussels - Amsterdam) group of experimental artists and members from the Lettrist International in Paris.

In the 10-plus years of its existence, the Situationist International had about 70 members; some of them were Guy Debord, Michéle Bernstein, Christopher Gray, Jaqueline de Jong, Asger Jorn, Dieter Kunzelmann, Guiseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Alexander Trocci and Raoul Vaneigem.

The Situationist International

Spectacle is a slogan, used by a Paris based group known as Situationists, to describe capitalism, the state, the whole shooting match. Owing as much to the Surrealists and Dada as Marx and Bakunin, the Situationists' starting point was that the original working class movement had been crushed, by the Bourgeoisie in the West and by the Bolsheviks in the East; working class organizations, such as Trade Unions and Leftist political parties had sold out to World Capitalism; and furthermore, capitalism could now appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely, in the form of harmless ideologies to be used against the working class which they were supposed to represent. "A science of situations is to be created, which will borrow elements from psychology, statistics, urbanism and ethics. These elements have to run together to an absolutely new conclusion: the conscious creation of situations."

There are numerous sites of interest, but Ken Knabb's Bureau of Public Secrets is the best beginning place, with numerous personal pieces, as well as collecting articles and materials of the SI – all well organized and accessible, with new materials added frequently:

Nothingness.org also has a nice collection of core material, Situationist International

The Mital site provides a quick useful overview and introduction to the SI, with some contextual material.

Source: The Daily Bleed