England -- On the Road

 

England is comprised of small villages, a great countryside, and very dense cities where 51 percent of the people live. This is by design in order to preserve the country's rural environment. England is the size of Kentucky. On many of the green rural areas are black-faced sheep grazing in tree-lined pastures and enclosed by dry rock fences that divide the land into an asymmetrical patchwork of farms and pastures. (Those who build these rock fences are so adept at it that they only touch a rock once! This is a challenge especially as the wall must be built so it doesn't fall and so that water doesn't get in it to erode it.) The serenity is exactly what you'd expect if you read 19th and 20th century novels. A flock of geese flies overhead. Occasional streams wander through the land. Farm sheds and houses appear on the landscape. The rolling hills are products of the Ice Age, and England has seen to it to preserve them in all their beauty.

I would learn on this long-distance bus trip that covering ground is important so as to see how things are put together and how they relate to one another. While this whirlwind tour only scratched the surface or provided appetizers about key places in the UK and Ireland, I hope to return here some day and spend more time and see with more depth the spirit and soul of these beautiful lands.

Here are a couple places we passed that hold some familiar stories.

 

Coventry

A short distance north of Stratford-on-Avon is the town of Coventry. It has two important histories. During World War II, it was the place where a British team of mathematicians cracked the Enigma Code.  

The Enigma was a device used by the German military to encode strategic messages before and during World War II. Its cryptology was first broken by the Poles in the early 1930s. When Hitler's intentions of threatening England became apparent in 1939, the Poles shared their intelligence with the British who then set up a secret code-breaking group called "Ultra", under mathematician Alan M. Turing.

The Germans used the Enigma to send messages securely. The Polish mathematicians had worked out how to read Enigma messages, however, the Germans increased its security by changing the cipher system daily, which created innumerable code possibilities and made understanding the code even more difficult.

Turing played a key role in this, inventing a decoding machine known as "the Bombe", which helped to reduce the work of the code-breakers. From mid-1940, the British were able to read German Air Force signals to help overcome the Germans, save lives, and shorten the war by several years.

The other history that Coventry is famous for is Lady Godiva, an 11th century noblewoman who was married to Leofric, the powerful Earl of Mercia and Lord of Coventry. Leofric was a mean ruler and he seemed to delight in over-taxing his people. Lady Godiva pleaded with him to stop this practice, and Leofric quipped that he would lower taxes only if she rode naked on horseback through the center of town. 

So Lady Godiva did just that with only her long flowing hair to cover herself. Before leaving for her famous ride, however, she ordered the people of Coventry to remain inside their homes and not peek.  One man, named Tom, couldn’t resist looking, and thus we have called subsequent voyeurs “Peeping Toms”. After finishing this gesture, Lady Godiva demanded that her husband hold up his end of the bargain and reduce the people’s debts. And he did just that.

Although the truth of this story is doubtful, the historical Lady Godiva was known for her generosity to the church and her support in found a Benedictine monastery in Coventry.

Nottingham

Robin Hood was largely a myth, although this area produced many stories and legends about him. He was supposedly from the 12th century. What did exist here, were the forests that King John (reigned 1199-1216) hunted. King John is famous for signing the Magna Carta (1215), which provided the foundation of the British and American legal systems by limiting royal power and emphasizing the primacy of the law over all, including the monarchy. Another reality was that these forests teemed with outlaws like Robin Hood, which is how stories came to be. Maid Marion also did exist during this time.

 

 The Industrial Triangle -- Sheffield, Manchester, Leeds

This area made England what it was to become: an industrial giant in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the period of 1745-1850 things were changing in Europe. It was the age of revolutions where monarchies tumbled and new countries were being formed. The change and upheaval were tremendous and disorienting. A different kind of revolution, however, was fomenting in England:  the Industrial Revolution. Products now made by machine, most specifically, textiles from the wool of the country's sheep. 

What the machines replaced, however, were the craftsmen who had honed their skilled trades. Many rose up to resist the machines in Manchester in the first decade of the 19th century. They were known as Luddites, named after their symbolic hero, King Ludd (right). The Luddites opposed this new technology and went to the new factories to hammer away--literally--at the wooden frames making the textiles. They wanted to negotiate the changes the factories were presenting, but in fact, lost out to the machines.

Another outcome of the Industrial Revolution the the ending of the slave trade in 1833. The machines, in effect, replaced the slaves even though the slave trade had made a lot of money. Since they were no longer needed, England freed them, and the Royal Navy worked to stop ships participating in the slave trade. Steam power and the Spinning Jenny, which processed cotton faster than human labor changed everything. 

The Industrial Revolution attracted people living in rural to the cities where they obtained jobs in the factories. As there were fewer people producing food, and greater demand for food in the cities, an accompanying Agricultural Revolution evolved. New farm equipment was invented. In spite of the progress and wealth that came out of the Industrial Revolution, working conditions were so bad that Karl Marx and Frederic Engels worked to protest these injustices with a book titled: The Communist Manifesto. The book contends that a class struggle exists between the bourgeoisie, those who own the means of production, and the proletariat, those who labor for wages. The logic of capitalism dictates that the bourgeoisie will keep minimizing the wages of the proletariat until the proletariat has no choice but to revolt. Marx and Engels made their case by pointing out that workers were not only paid less than a living wage, but that the nature of their labor was brutal and harsh.  Communism was a political-economic theory that called for collective ownership over the means of production, e.g., factories and farms. 

Some of the legislation that came out of this period would change the political and social environment as well. Trade unions were organized, hospitals were founded, lending libraries were created, free schools were provided, the Suffragettes lobbied for women's rights. Work weeks were established as was the "working class". So-called "red brick universities" offered programs in science and engineering emerged as a contrast to the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge that schooled their elite, upper class students in mathematics, theology, and philosophy.

 

An Ecological Note

This area was also coal country, which helped to power the Industrial Revolution in Britain. Unfortunately, there was so much coal mining in the 19th and 20th centuries that the forests were stripped bare. In recent years, environmental concerns have seen the replanting of trees, the proliferation of wind turbines, and solar power have replaced coal-fired furnaces.

 

Resources

Andrew Speed, guide for CostSaver Travel Company

Enigma (includes an 8-minute video) -- https://www.britannica.com/topic/Enigma-German-code-device

 How Alan Turing Cracked the Enigma Code -- https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/how-alan-turing-cracked-the-enigma-code

Marks and Engels on the Communist Revolution -- https://study.com/learn/lesson/friedrich-engels-marx-manifesto-communism-revolution.html