George Lyon and his sperm

 

I believe we all know people who have clearly chosen the wrong profession; doctors sickened by the sight of their patients, bartenders opposed to public intoxication and politicians with an unhealthy reverence for the truth. But it is hard to imagine a man who applied himself for so long to a profession for which he had less talent, whose career path was more pockmarked with failure, an individual with more of a supplementary destiny for disaster than Mr. George Lyon, from the little English village of Up Holland, Lancaster.  George called himself the “King of the Robbers”. But although George made his living as a thief, he was a natural born lover. He just never figured out how to make a living at it.

The village gets its name from the same source as the nation of the same name. In the middle ages a “holland’ was a bolt of cotton cloth, and during the 18th century the rolling hills and plains of Lancashire, in northwest England, were one of the world’s great cotton growing regions, along with the western section of what would become the Netherlands.

So wealthy did one cotton growing Lancashire family become that they took the name “de Holland”.

The de Hollands are known as an “ill-fated” family primarily because of Robert de Holland who established the village of Up Holland on a ridge, midway between the towns of Wigan and Skemersdale, in 1307. 

In a power play between the vacillating King Edward III and the bold and decisive Earl of Lancaster, Robert initially sided with Lancaster. But Edward unexpectedly acted decisively and Lancaster uncharacteristically dithered and so Robert switched sides just before the Battle of Boroughbridge, on March 16, 1322 - at which Lancaster was killed. The King won but he never fully trusted Robert again and had him thrown into jail. Robert stayed there until 1328 when somebody did the King a favor and chopped off Robert de Holland’s “ill-fated” head.

By the time George Lyon was born on a back street in Up Holland in 1761, the cotton plantations of Lancashire were feeding the birth of the industrial revolution. Initially weaving was a home business, where working families bought a hand loom on time for two pounds , usually from the same employer who bought the finished cloth from them. For the rest of his life, when asked to give a profession, George always said “Weaver”, but it is likely he worked at it only as a child, “…carding and spinning cotton… until I became of sufficient size and strength for my father to put me into a loom”, as William Radcliffe explained from his own life.

In the late eighteenth century there were as many as 75,000 hand loom weavers in Britain. Then in 1785 the Reverend Edmund Cartwright invented the power loom, which could be operated by children, and the income of weavers began to plummet.

But George Lyon was not qualified to claim he was the victim of economic displacement because he had already established a career as an inveterate thief. In 1786, at the age of 25, George was arrested for mugging a man on the Kings Highway in Wigan. This was a hanging offense, but instead of death, George was sentenced to be lugged, or “transported" , to the American colonies.

Perhaps as many as 50,000 convicts a year were shipped to America in chains, most being sold into indentured servitude for seven years. That would make convicts the single largest source of emigrants to America in the century leading up to the revolution. Mostly this heritage has been whitewashed out of the history books, but it does explain Doctor Samuel Johnson’s 1769 description of Americans as “…a race of convicts (who) ought to be content with anything we may allow them short of hanging.”

But although George was sentenced to seven years in the penal colony of America, there is no record he ever made it transoceanic. However, I am of the opinion that he did, and that at the end of his term George was forcibly returned to England as an undesirable, even in a convict nation, leaving a trail of his genes behind him.

In 1793 the officials of Up Holland were unpleasantly surprised to see George Lyon in the flesh, returned from exile and free as a bird. There had been expectations the reprobate would be scalped by a Red Indian or an offended husband or at least drowned at sea. 

The primary complaint does not seem to have been that George was a master criminal so much as a legendary local Lothario. He was married, but according to a May 1809 letter by Miss Ellen Weeton, “In two houses near together, there have been in each, a mother and daughter lying in (giving birth), nearly at the same time; and one man (the notorious George Lyon) reputed to be father to all four!”

Branded as a serial fornicator, George Lyon indisputably ever was. But his reputation as a highwayman rests on a single escapade, when he and two partners decided to hold up the mail coach which carried cash for the Maypole Colliery. One afternoon George and his two accomplices rendezvoused at the Bull’s Head Pub in Up Holland and drew attention to them selves. At an opportune moment they slipped out to the barn, mounted their rented horses and were waiting at the Tawd River Bridge as the mail coach bound for Liverpool approached.

The plan was for George to block the road and fire two shots to convince the coachman to stop. Then while George held his third flint lock pistol on the driver the accomplices would take the money box and rob the passengers. Unfortunately George had not taken the weather into account. It was raining heavily, and when George pulled the triggers, the hammers of his two pistols slammed onto wet powder. Unharmed the coachman whipped the horses around George and the coach wheels splashed him as it galloped past.

Having failed as a highwayman George returned to his primary profession, and his hobby as a thief. But I believe it was the official outrage over George’s favorite leisure pursuit which prompted the government’s investment in a professional “thief taker” named John McDonald. By representing himself as a fence McDonald was able to buy stolen goods from George, paying for them with marked money. In October of 1814 George was arrested, and after a brief trial, on 8 April, 1815, he was sentenced to be hanged. The sentence was not unusual for the time. Of the 213 people hanged at Lancaster Castle between 1800 and 1865 only 20% had been convicted of murder. The rest had been sentenced for burglary, lying under oath, arson, or rustling cattle or sheep.

Judgment day for George was Saturday, 22 April 1815, in the hangman's corner of Lancaster Castle (above).  

At about noon, dressed in his best black suit and well shined jockey boots, George was led from the Drop Room by John Higgens, 'The Gentleman Jailer', and delivered into the hands the hangman.  A crowd of 5,000 witnessed as the noose was slipped around George's neck. The trap door was opened on the low platform. George dropped about three feet and then slowly strangled to death. As the Lancaster Gazette recorded, “After hanging the usual time (an hour) the bodies were taken down…and given to their friends for internment.” 

A huge crowd attended the funeral back in Up Holland, a large section of which included George's progeny.  George Lyon, king of the lovers, was dead at fifty-four. He was buried next to his mother, sharing a grave with his legal daughter, Nanny Lyons, and it is her name on the stone that caps their shared grave.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e4xSSaEq04
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lyon_(highwayman)

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SPERM DONORS

 

I don't much like what genetics has to say about being a male. My growing disappointment sharpened when I read a 2003 paper in the “American Journal of Human Genetics”, which uncovered an “unusual linkage” on the MSY (the Male-Specific region of the Y chromosome) of some 400 million current male residents of Asia. They all share a distinct thousand year old chemical inheritance from an ambitious, foul tempered, cut throat, sex crazed Mongol named Temujin, AKA Genghis Kahn. Among the Great Ruler's favorite past times was killing his enemies and then “to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.” Through serial rape, Temujin scattered more sperm around than Secretariat. Genghis Kahn's successful evolutionary strategy was to treat women as if they were horses, and to treat horses as disposable breeding stock 

About 5,000 years ago, when traders first appeared in ancient Mesopotamia selling equines, the Sumerians had to borrow words from the Hittites to describe the beasts - calling them “akk asca”, literally “mountain asses ”. And as anybody who keeps horses can tell you, horses ain't cheap. They eat a lot and require a lot of land to run around on. By about 2,100 B.C.E., rich and royal Sumerian speakers were breeding horses to pull their war chariots. Horses were worth their weight in bronze for men like 20- something Shulgi, who became King of Ur,  in 2069 B.C.E.

The first bronze weapons were developed by the Elam people, Shulgi's southern neighbors, who lived on the Iranian plateau. Elam was lucky because their copper ore was naturally contaminated with arsenic, and it was the contamination which turned soft copper into harder bronze. But bronze also ain't cheap. Melting copper requires almost 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees C), which means burning a lot of wood. And trying to make the best bronze required technicians, and experimentation. When the Sumerians replaced the arsenic with tin, they produced an even harder weapon, with which Shulgi could boast he “broke the weapons of the highlands over my knees, and in the south placed a yoke on the neck of Elam.”

Like a bronze age Donald Trump, the narcissist Shugli (above) described himself as “a horse of the highway that swishes its tail”. “Let me boast of what I have done!” And then he did. He claimed to be able to run a hundred miles, out fight, out quote, out cook and even out math everybody. “None of the nobles could write on clay as I could.” After he was dead his critics accused him of being “untruthful”. His claim to have defeated the Elam is instructive. Early in his reign, in 2065 B.C., he married his daughter to the governor of the Elam border town of Awan. Then when the locals overthrew his son-in-law in 2061 B.C., Shulgi crossed the border and sacked the town. But he did not linger, as Elam sent their own army to escort Shulgi home - thanks for the help, but really, Shulgi, don't do it again. And he did not, concentrating over the next forty years on expanding and defending his northern border. We read of no more boasts about beating the Elam. 

Curiously, our Temujin-want-a-be left no record of his sexual conquests. It was almost the only thing he didn't boast about. Maybe he was gay, or just sexually repressed, but Shulgi would not be a candidate for one of the three “fathers” of 64% of all living males in Europe. According to a 2015 study in the journal “Nature Communications”, a similar MSY mutation to the Asian G. Kahn one, indicates the first Euro Daddy Dearest was probably pater to the Vikings. About the same time a second Papa progenitor was spreading his sperm around the southern Atlantic coast of Europe, just before the last but not least forefather breeder-in-chief appeared in north-central Europe. And all four of these guys throwing their sperm around correspond to the local arrival of bronze, and the use of war horses in those regions.

The latter study co-author, Dr. Chiara Batini, from the University of Leicester, explained the social-genetic implications. “We think that a social structure in which resources and power are more easily accessible to only some men may allow for a few paternal lineages to become very frequent in a short amount of time.” In other words, converging technologies created a few rich bronze age sires who controlled the sperm receptacles, i.e. women. Or, to the put this “jus primae noctis” in capitalistic terms, corporate management used unlimited secret political donations to create and protect tax loop holes for their bonuses, while preventing a raise in the minimum wage for the female workerss. Do you detect that my Irish is up?

In truth the rise of Genghis Kahn had nothing to do with his sexual productivity, that was just a by product of his personal indecency. But you can't argue with success. And the name “Temumin” means “iron worker”, which was the next great technological advance after the invention of bronze. It was iron weapons that were the strength of “Harold Tangled Hair”, who, not long after the founding of the Mongol Empire, swore not to cut his own ginger locks until he had conquered all of Norway - which “Harold Fair Hair” then did, followed by the large scale forced impregnation of many of the females living in in Norway.

Those Nordic tribes not wanting to carry Harold's genes around, scattered across the North Sea, looking for a safe haven, freedom, and easy loot and rape victims of their own. Their Celtic victims called them Vikings, or “Sea Rovers”, and they reached as far west as Iceland, Greenland and Newfoundland, and as far south as Normandy, Scotland and northern Ireland, where Niall Noigialallach (above) - in English “Neal of the Nine Hostages” - carved out his Kingdom of Tara.

For centuries scholars insisted King Neal was mythological. Then, in 2006, geneticists at Trinity College in Dublin found yet another MSY marker in 21% of males from north west Ireland - the core of Neal's “mythical” kingdom - and in 8% of Scottish males, just across the 20 mile wide North Channel of the Irish Sea, where Neal liked to do a little raping, er, raiding. Some 3 million Irish and Scottish men with two dozen family names are members of the “Ui Neil”, descendents of the clearly non-mythical “most fecund man in Irish history”, Neal of the Nine Hostages.

An Irish bishop would later describe pre-Viking Ireland as “Rich in goods, in silver, jewels, cloth and gold”, which may explain in part the island's attractiveness to the randy pagan, who could claim 12 “legitimate” children. And then there are what Irish schoolchildren are taught were the offspring of Neal's “romantic conquests”. Odd how rape becomes less vile when described by the rapists. Consider the treaty Neal reached with the Airgialla tribe, ( literally the "hostage-givers"). Rather than fight a bloody protracted conquest of the Airgialla's Sperrin Mountains, known for their dreary weather, Neal agreed to respect the borders in exchange for one hostage from each of their nine clans.  And it seems likely to me that maybe all of those hostages were women.

During one of his Scottish raids, legend says Neal captured a 16 year old Celtic boy of Roman heritage, and after transporting him back to Ireland, sold the young man into slavery. It was the kind of business the Vikings were famous for.  It seems Neal was just participating in Celtic and Viking tradition. For six years the captive labored as a stable boy, until finally escaping and stowing away on a ship back to Scotland. The young man returned to Ireland 10 years later as missionary, now named  Bishop Patrick, patron saint of Ireland.  Or so says the Catholic legend, which is at least as believable as the pagan ones. Legend also says that Neal, first High King of Ireland, died on one of his Scottish raids, murdered by his own son. Such was the barbarous tradition among the pagans (see Macbeth) , and the following Christian English Kings, (see Henry II and Richard I, Edward II, Richard III, etc, etc - basically anything by Shakespeare.)

But nowhere in any of these legends and history, does anyone get an opinion from the women. For that we are reduced to the next best thing – investigating the lives of living women. Sometime during their life time, 20% of all women will be raped, 1,300,000 American women each year,  according to the Centers for Disease Control. According to the F.B.I., 90% of all American murderers are male. And of all those murders/rapists, how many carry the MSY markers from a Daddy Dearest? Genetics is not only who we were and are, it is who we want to be. And I don't want to be that. Do you?

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CHRISTMAS TAKE TWO

 

I'll bet darn few of you know that this year Christmas comes on Thursday, 7 January.  This is good news if you don't think you can wait for Saturday, 25 December 2021. But at the moment I am  

speaking of that “second” Christmas, or the first one, the one 200 million Greek and Russian Orthodox Christians celebrate, 13 days after Catholics and Protestants make merry. Now, as to why there are two Christmases, well, that has to do with the way theology seems to have been invented specifically to start arguments. But let me start this argument at its beginning.

The first successful calendar that we know of was adopted over 6,500 ago by the 18 amalgamated city-states we know as the Sumerians. Being farmers they started their year in the spring, with each of their months beginning with sunset on the night of the new moon. This lunar calendar proved so popular it was adopted with modifications by everybody, including a small group of highland Semitic sheep herders known to themselves as the Yehudi – modern English translation being “the Jews”.

The Jewish spring was marked by the birthing of their sheep, what they called the Pesach. Fourteen days into the first Hebrew month of Nisan, at the full moon, they drained the blood of one of their first born kids. The body was then burned, the rising smoke being offered up as a sacrifice to their god Elohim or Yahweh, to ensure he would keep them in milk, wool and lamb chops for the coming year. But, just about the same time as the invention of the calendar, the flocks of many of these Hebrews started dying.

Maybe it was disease and maybe a drought, but these Jewish bands were reduced to seeking work around the Egyptian settlements in the Nile river delta, where they were forced to exchange their Sumerian lunar calendar for an Egyptian solar one, and their mutton for bread. And the first Egyptian bread grain which ripened each spring, about the Nisan full moon, was barley. Now, barley doesn't rise well with yeast. This meant that every spring, when the stockpiles of wheat and rye grains ran short, the Jews were reduced to eating the hard, flat, unleavened bread. After leaving Egypt, or, as the religious fanatics described it, “escaping”, the spring Pesach was relabeled the Passover Festival.

Over the next  couple of millennial the Jews established a homeland called Israel, where they were  attacked by the Philistines, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Akkadians, the Hittites, and eventually the Romans. Every new conqueror forced the Hebrews to adopt some of their culture and calendar. 

And as is common with occupied people, the common folk dreamed of a messiah or Christ, who would save them from their oppressors, foreign and Jewish. Over time this produced a seemingly endless stream of messiah candidates. Most were loonies, and many could be bought off. But a few were idealistic and dangerous enough that the upper crust Jewish Pharisees felt forced to eliminate them. And it was because of those few that before we got two Christmases, we got two Pesach-es – later renamed Easter.

See, the Romans, who were occupying Israel in the first century, had just switched over to a combination solar and lunar calendar championed by Julius Caesar and enacted on The Kalend, or the first morning of the new month of January, 47 B.C.E.  By Roman law all debts and taxes were paid on the Kalend, including the Temple Tax the Jews paid so they would be excused from sacrificing to the Roman gods.

This Temple Tax was paid to the Roman Governor in the capital of Jerusalem, a city of between 60 and 70,000 people. During Passover, the city had to accommodate another 5 to 10,000 pilgrims in town to sacrifice at their temple. This produced a lot of taxable income for everybody, but with a crowd that large, you were guaranteed at least one Christ-wanna-be a year. 

Which is why, the Christian holy book could be very specific about the date when the most successful Christ, Jesus ben Joseph of Nazareth, was nailed to a cross. He was killed, theologians now figure, about 3:00pm on Friday in the 33^rd year of the common era,   or about 3 hours before the start of Passover that year.  Except killing this Christ only added to the Pharisse's problems.

These Christians kept insisting their dead guy was The Christ sent to reform Judaism which pissed off the Pharisee, who  saw no reason to reform a religion they were running.   Also reformers made the Romans nervous, which pissed off the Pharisee even more. A decade after Jesus' crucifixion, the Jewish King Agrippa beheaded the cult's new leader, the Apostle James. 

The next leader, also named James but called "The Just" to separate him from James the dead,  tried to avoid giving the Pharisee any reason to suppress the Christians by strictly obeying Mosaic law for 20 years. However, the Pharisee eventually decided to kill him anyway. So they threw him off the Temple roof. And when that didn't kill him, they had him beaten to death.

But there were other, even more disruptive zealots around, and in the year 66 C.E., bad Roman government and all these revolutionaries set off the First Jewish war, which lead to the Kitos War and then the Bar Kokhba revolt, which ended in 136 C.E. 

This 80 years of violence so pissed off the Romans they destroyed the temple, then burned and sacked Jerusalem, and then outlawed Judaism entirely. The only way for Christianity to survive was to form their own religion, adopting the Julian calendar and inventing a new theology as they went along.

As figured by Professor Rodney Stark, of Baylor College, devotees of Christianity surpassed the “symbolically weighty figure” of 100,000 worshipers attending a hundred or so churches about the year 200 C.E., or 70 years after the last Jewish revolt. And yet, already, their new theology was starting to encounter problems. 

In the year 189 C.E., Rome, received a new bishop, or elder of this new quasi-Jewish church. We know him only by the name of Victor, and that he came from North Africa -  perhaps he was a Berber. We can assume Victor was devout, but we know he also was combative and arrogant. First, he had started calling himself “the Pope”. And secondly, was the way he tried to handle the Quarterdecimani debate.

In plain English, it was “The 14” - as in the 14^th day of Nissan, i.e. the date of Passover. Less than fifty years after the death of Jesus, Polycarp, the Bishop of Smyrna, reminded his fellow Christians that the Paesch was a life giving festival well before it became Passover. 

This made 16 Nisson - the second day after Passover – the perfect day to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Which meant the common folk still had to know when Passover started. And Polycarp had been personally trained by the Apostle John, who had personally known both the living and the resurrected Jesus.  So, he ought to know when Jesus died and rose from the dead.

But Victor and most western Bishops wanted to disconnect Christianity from Passover. That meant converting Jesus ben Joseph into a gentile, like the majority of the new Christian recruits. This was why the Sabbath was moved from the Jewish Friday at sunset and all day Saturday – the end of the week – to Sunday – the beginning of the week. And by using the Julian calendar, with which most gentiles were familiar, they could reenact the mystical Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday, every year. And that was something the “floating” Jewish Passover, which could come on any day of the week, could not do.

So far, settling such theological issues had followed the example of the Pauline Epistles. The bishops exchanged letters arguing their case, until they were close to agreement. They then held conferences, called synods, which endorsed the new dogma. But bishops still within the Byzantine Empire, who spoke and read Greek, felt as qualified to determine dogma as the upstart Latin speakers from Rome. 

But Pope Victor now abruptly warned that any Christians who did not sever the direct connection between Passover and Easter would be excommunicated - thrown out of the church and denied Jesus' forgiveness.

Immediately a missive arrived from the proud Bishop of Ephesus. This was a large, wealthy city, so when Bishop Polycrates spoke, other Christians paid attention. He reminded Victor that many respected church leaders celebrated Easter on 16 Nisson, like, “...Philip, one of the twelve apostles....(and) John, who was both a witness and a teacher...and Polycarp in Smyrna...” and the seven bishops in his own family. Polycrates warned Victor. “ I...am not frighted by terrifying words.”

Another dissent arrived from the Bishop of Lyon, France. Irenaeus was a Greek who had a strong record opposing “Judaizing” the new faith, which gave him street cred in this argument. Irenaeus cautioned Victor against asserting dominance, because that might start a civil war within the Church. Finally, Victor backed down. 

So,  for the next 800 years, everybody agreed to disagree on the date for Easter and about the power of one Bishop, whatever he called himself, to dictate to other Bishops. The eastern church read their liturgy in Greek, the Romans in Latin. And this divided church survived the fall of the western Roman empire and the rise of Islam, until 1053 C.E., when another hot head was elevated to Pope.

In that year, “Pope” Leo IX went nuclear on a small group of Greek Orthodox churches in southern Italy. Leo ordered them to either “conform” to the Latin system or close their doors. 

In Constantinople, the Ecumenical Patriarch, head of the local churches, Micheal I Cerularius, retaliated by dropping the same bomb on the Latin churches in his city.

The following year, 1054, Cardinal Humbert, led a Papal delegation to Constantinople to insist that Micheal reopen the Latin churches and acknowledge Leo IV as the supreme leader of the “Catholic”, meaning unified, church.

Oddly enough, Micheal said no.  Whereupon, everybody in sight excommunicated everybody else in sight. This exchange of “Ex” bombs escalated until it widened into the Great Schism, which has divided Christianity ever since. The two sides stopped talking to each other. The Latin churches continue to celebrate Easter on the first Sunday after the Paesch full moon, while the Greek Churches mark Christ's rising three days after Passover, whatever the day of the week.

A final bit of confusion was added in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII introduced a new and refined calendar, which cut that year by 10 days. Initially it was recognized only in Catholic states. Protestant Britain did not make the switch until 1752, by which time the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars had grown to 11 days. Russian did not accept the change until the revolution, in 1918, by which time the shift was 13 days. They were followed later by most secular governments

But the Greek Orthodox Church, still pissed off about the Great Schism, have remained on the Julian calendar. Which is why we have two Easters, and why the Eastern Orthodox Christmas comes on  25 December, Julian Calendar, but actually falls on 6 January, under the Gregorian calendar – 13 days later. Which gives us two Christmases.

The Jews, of course, have stubbornly stuck to their own clock, insisting the year 2021 is actually the year 5781. And that....is a story for another time.

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