The real first World War

 

                                      History is His Story

The Thirty Years War might be considered the First World War because all of Europe was involved.  It began with a failed movement for Bohemian independence.  Half the Bohemians were Moravian Protestants. Half were also nationalists but the two sides often disagreed.  Bohemia was very important for the ruling Hapsburg Empire because of its mineral wealth.  The extremely devout Catholic prince Ferdinand ascended to the Bohemian throne and made enemies of the Protestants and nationalists.  A mob 20,000 people stormed the palace.  Ferdinand wasn’t home.  They threw two deputies and the foreign secretary out of the castle window. Nobody was hurt because they landed in a dung pile (you wonder how the 3 Stooges got that routine?).  This famous Defenestration of Prague was hailed as a miracle by the Pope and rotten luck by the Protestants.  But the die was cast for independence.  German Protestants came to the aid of the rebels and lost repeatedly while Catholics from Spain, Flanders, and Austria-Hungary won the day.

            One by one, the German dukes and princes were defeated.  Finally their leader, Frederick of Palatinate was defeated when his commander deserted him.  The loss of civilian life was staggering.  To understand this, one has to understand that weapons had changed from swords and armor to muskets and pikes.  Handling a musket with a five-foot barrel was quite a skill, firing it from a tripod while the charge was set off by a match. Much practice was required in pike formations to protect gunners who took a long time to reload. Warfare was for professionals, but governments of the day had no way to tax, recruit, discipline and drill.  Mercenary armies arose, commanded by organizers who were loyal to the highest bidder.  Protestant Ernst von Mansfeld was such a man.  He was skilled at recruiting and keeping men fed and equipped.  His finance and organizational skills set him apart.  The soldiers were recruited from every country and had no national loyalty.  If not paid, they deserted; if not fed, they looted. Around each army was an enormous group of camp followers who were civilians—servants, wives, prostitutes, cooks.  Half a dozen children might be born among camp followers each week. So when Mansfeld deserted Frederick, this great marauding mob plus armies began to pillage Germany, where the battles happened.  1/3 the population of Germany starved or was killed by 1630.

            Bohemia was reclaimed under Hapsburg authority, Palatinate was divided by Catholic princes, but the armies continued fighting among each another. Another leader, Albrecht von Wallenstein, arose to ally with Catholic Ferdinand.  Like Mansfeld he had dubious titles but was an organizer with ambition. As he mopped up Lutheran Germany, however, Christian IV of Denmark became the Protestant leader of desperation. Meanwhile James I of England entered the fray re-hiring Mansfeld.  The two armies met at Desau on the Elbe River in 1626.  Mansfeld was totally defeated and fled. It looked like a united Catholic Germany and Scandinavia would soon occur under Hapsburg influence.  An edict for all people to become Catholic was decreed.  Then all of Europe awoke to the Hapsburg menace.  German princes of the Holy Roman Empire realized their sovereignty was in doubt.  Others realized their lands would be seized and their relatives slaughtered. Even the Pope expressed reservations at the Emperor’s power. The Bourbons of France were threatened by this too. Cardinal Richelieu, effective leader of France under Louis XIV, settled the Swedish-Polish war and hired the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, to champion the Protestants.  Adolphus was an odd hybrid—king of a small country but also a military organizer far beyond his time. His soldiers were issued uniforms and boots, wheel lock muskets, and he used a logistical crew like a modern army instead of camp followers.  His crack army of only 13,000 defeated much larger Catholic League armies, and soon other Germans joined him until he had 80,000 soldiers. The tide turned quickly and in one last battle in southern Germany at Lutzen, Wallenstein and Adolphus met.  Adolphus was killed in the battle but his army won.  The Emperor and the Protestants signed a peace treaty saving Protestantism in 1635.

            The final phase of the war included France who joined with Sweden and fought Austria, Spain and the Papal states.  The war was now political, not religious. By 1644, all the leaders who had begun the war had died and after a 4-year peace conference, the Treaty of Westphalia was signed in 1648, a compromising treaty. 

            What came of the long war?  Germans and others grew extremely religious-war weary, an attitude that continued into the 19^th century when many fled to American shores. As disillusionment with the strife became universal, Europeans became more agnostic, setting the stage for the Enlightenment and Deism. When Christians fail to see Christ in other Christians who differ in type, it leads to hollow, legalistic faith, seen in the Orthodoxy of the latter 17^th century. Hollow faith and agnosticism haunts Europe down to the present day.  The Dutch achieved final independence, but Germany was left left a chaotic collection of states.  Germany became a constant battleground through Napoleon’s era. France grew strong and Austria grew weaker. Kings needed taxes and began to claim divine right to rule, leading to later revolts and the demise of most monarchies.  Finally, a peace-loving king of Prussia arose and told his German peasants to plant potatoes, which invading armies couldn’t find, and thus save yourselves during the marauding wars.  The Germans have celebrated Frederick “the Great” ever since.  

The Real Doc Adams

  

German Lutherans are often characterized (sometimes in humor by Garrison Keillor) as people who just want to fit in.  Samuel J. Crumbine’s German Lutheran parents emigrated to Pennsylvania, where he was born in Emlenton in 1862.  As a young man he worked in Cincinnati as a prescripton clerk and then moved to Spearville, KS, operating a drug store (It’s a tiny town next to Dodge City but in 1870s Dodge was the tiny town compared to Spearville.)  He returned to Cincinnati and graduated from College of Medicine and Surgery in 1888.  He practiced in Dodge City and married Katherine Zuercher in 1890.  Does this sound fit-in ordinary?  But life in Dodge City in the 1880s was rough-and-tumble with trail drives.  And Dodge had an epidemic of tuberculosis.  Crumbine knew this was caused by germs that spread by hands and house flies.  Flies flocked around outhouses and the tuberculosis infested dung, then spread it to food and dishes. It was spread also by use of a common water dipper and bucket for drinking and common towels.  Doc began a newspaper crusade to raise awareness, printed fliers and talked to saloon owners. His articles tried to get people to install screens and shut up homes to keep out flies.  Nationwide, 150,000 people died of TB every year.  But Sam’s articles didn’t change the non-hygenic lifestyles much.    The legendary lawmen of Dodge City—Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, Luke Short and Bill Tilghman, were Doc Sam’s contemporaries. On one occasion, he helped Tilghman through pneumonia. The legendary lawman, later a US Marshall in Oklahoma, became one of the few to live to an old age (killed, serving in Cromwell).

            Crumbine’s campaign against TB did not go unnoticed. He was appointed to the State Board of Health in 1899 and became part-time secretary and executive officer of the board in 1904. Then in 1905 something interesting happened.  He got a visit from a Cub Scout leader who had fashioned a piece of screen to a yardstick.  It was dubbed the Fly Bat by the scouts and they had fun killing flies with it.  Still thinking about this invention, Crumbine attended a baseball game.  The game was a pitcher’s duel.  When one of the home team’s players got on 3^rd base the fans began to cheer for a sacrifice fly ball to the outfield.  Some guy behind Sam yelled, “Swat one!” Doc had a eureka moment.  He would promote the fly bats as “fly swatters” and he wrote another article entitled “Swat The Fly”.  It was a clean hit.  Evidently, people decided that killing flies was more effective than trying to keep insects at bay.  New tuberculosis cases fell by 80% in one year in the Dodge City area. Two years later, Crumbine quit his private practice to further his campaign.  He got brick factories in Coffeyville and Peru to print “Don’t Spit On Sidewalk” on their pavers sold to cities all over the country.  Posters showing Doc Sam’s mustachioed benevolent face with the slogan, “Ban the public drinking cup, out with the common roller towel, and swat the fly” gave him an international reputation.    Crumbine also warned against misleading labels on food and drugs. He authored Frontier Doctor: The Autobiography of a Pioneer on the Frontier of Public Health, which described his medical practice on the Kansas frontier in Dodge City.

            In 1911, during his tenure on the State Board of Health, Crumbine was appointed dean of the University of Kansas Medical School. He left Kansas in 1923 and moved to New York where he served as executive director of the American Child Health Association. After retirement in 1936 Crumbine moved to Long Island, New York, but returned to Kansas for speaking engagements on several occasions before his death, July 12, 1954. The Crumbine Award was established in 1955 in his memory and is awarded each year by the food and drug industry to encourage public health.

            But most of the general public today wouldn’t have know him, except that a certain TV Western, “Gunsmoke” used Crumbine’s life story and mustache to create a character known as Doc Adams played by Milburn Stone.

5 mathematical reasons there was voter fraud

 

Wisconsin had 91% turnout for the election, virtually impossible percentage.  This turnout exceeds Australia and Netherlands where voting is mandatory.  If you fail to vote in Australia, you get fined $100.  Inner city Milwaukee supposedly achieved 84% turnout.  Milwaukee built a 145,916 vote lead for Biden. Milwaukee and Cleveland are like sister cities.  Bot have similar populations and demographics, have an economy based on Great Lakes traffic.  But Cleveland had 51% turnout—about like most cities this size.  Almost all the too-big-to-believe turnouts occurred in the big cities of vote-contested states.  Madison,WI had almost 100% turnout.  Since virtually no one notifies their election board when they move, and most lists of registered voters consist of at least 15% deceased or relocated voters, I am at a loss to explain this. Maybe no one moves from lovely Madison or dies there—Workers Paradise, as Pravda used to say of the USSR.  There is no plausible explanation except voter fraud.

Boy, they must really love Joe Cool Biden in his shades in Pennsylvania. His performance, according to the vote numbers overwhelmed Obama, but just in a few places.  Could a candidate as feckless and confused as Biden really have massively outpaced the vote totals of a politician who boasted rock star appeal?

Well, 3 counties-- Chester, Cumberland, and Montgomery.  Sleepy Joe bested the Obama election performances by factors of 1.24-1.43 times. For Montgomery County, Obama won this swing county by 59,000 votes in his 2012 re-election. But in 2020, Biden won Montgomery County by a whopping 131,000 votes, more than twice the prior Obama margin. Joe Cool’s 2020 total vote in Montgomery is reported at 313,000, crushing Obama’s 233,000 take in 2012 – and population growth does not explain the gains, as the county only grew by 22,000 residents during those eight years. In almost every other county Biden's % is a few points behind Obama, but in just a few, he had inordinate popularity.

Simple explanation: someone tampered the vote.  But according to the all-knowing Chuck Schumer, there was NO voter fraud.  None, zip, nada, null set,zed.

Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell says that 450,000 Biden-only ballots were cast in the 4 swing states—MI, WI,PA and GA—in big batches arriving late at night.  But there were hotly contested Senate and House races in all those states.  Why would someone cast a Biden-only ballot and neglect the other races in a place like GA but not in OK? MI but not WY?  OK and WY had races where the R-Senator was hopelessly ahead.  In GA, Trump’s vote almost exactly reflects that of Sen. Perdue.  But in metro Atlanta, Biden managed to amass a lead of 95,000 votes, through mostly Biden-only voted ballots.  And re-count?  Well they separated the ballots from their envelopes.  We can't check identity.  Something is rotten in Denmark.

PA added unsolitcited mail-ins this year.  When states go to mail-ins they usually experience a 3% rejection rate since voters are not used to the new format.  In the NY Primary this spring the new format yielded 21% reject rate.  In 2016 PA had a 1% rejection rate of the old absentee ballot method that has gone on for years.  This year they had mail-ins and a .03% rejection rate.  Miracle of Miracles!  And it appears the origin of these ballots ( truly filled in with professional expertise) is the big blue counties where the number of ballots exceeds the number of registered voters.  Shazzam!

The Ds will argue that fraud was just a few mistaken characters and didn't do anything to affect the final result. Bullspit. Look at the metrics and ask if this makes sense. The cheaters are slick and get away with a lot. But some entity, state legislature or Supreme Court needs to put their foot down and demand an explanation or "we will declare a fraudulent election and demand a revote the traditional way with enormous checks on the process."

In the middle of Election night, WI and MI received 138,399 ballots in bundles that were 100% Biden votes. But studies have shown that 1 in 1000 or 500 votes is a mis-vote.  The voter pushed the wrong button or marked the wrong square by mistake and didn’t catch it.  But the 138,399 were entirely Biden votes.  Where are the 138 or so mis-votes? There will always be a few votes for the other candidate. It makes no statistical sense, unless there was a skilled person behind all 138,399.

So those are 5 metrics that are seriously violated by WI, MI, and PA (and perhaps GA) this year—turnout, inordinate counties,Biden-only votes, unusual rejection rates, no mis-votes.

WWBD What would Biden do?

 

While we await the election, think of changes from a Biden win.  Revoke USMCA?  It is a treaty passed by the US Senate and would require 2/3 to revoke.  Moreover it was ratified by Mexico and Canada who both agreed it was helpful to themselves, in other words a win/win/win agreement.  USMCA will remain in effect. 

            Second, the matter of admitting new states might admit Puerto Rico.  But Republicans are in favor there at this time.  DC statehood is unconstitutional—Art. 2, Section 8, paragraph 17—which give Congress full power of governance of the seat of government.  Any statehood would be challenged.  Of course Congress could take away the seat of government from DC and make it a state. A friend of mine suggests an alternative of Salina, Ks.  I snicker since I know the city very well and it actually would make some sense.  Central location. A decommissioned  AF base on the west side of town and it is the intersection of important interstate highways.  Moreover, today’s sky-high cost of living would be averted since west of Salina is Lincoln County, a vast grassland area of only 3000 citizens. Then too, a move would give the Feds a chance to downsize some departments seriously.  Ahem. 

            Even crazier is the suggestion that US Virgin Islands be a state. Tiny population and area, Enormous debt. Or the proposed Micronesia.  In the middle of the islands, Chinese have seized a reef and put in a facility whose purpose would be to kill satellites and disrupt the Pacific in war.  We’d need to evict ‘em.  What’s more, most of Marshall Islanders I know are huge Trump fans. Art. 4 sect. 3 says you can’t merge two states nor split a state. So ideas like splitting CA into 5 states would be challenged constitutionally. 

Third item.  Article 3 governs the Judiciary Branch and explicitly says they have power over ALL judicial cases in the United States. What if someone brought suit against a SCOTUS packing?  The present court would then have jurisdiction and could argue and rule their own ideal concerning number of members.  And as I understand, many of the justices like 9 people—enough to sit around a table and hear everybody’s opinion yet diverse enough to provide majority opinions.  SCOTUS might just nix a court packing. And certainly it would provide a backlash among many citizens. 

Next is the idea of eliminating the Electoral College.  That takes a constitutional amendment of 2/3 of both houses of Congress and ¾ of the states.  But there are 13 states with less than 1.4 million people who get a lot of clout from the Electoral College.  Their dislike would make it almost impossible to repeal Art. 2, Sect. 1.  What about the notion of a bunch of states signing onto “whichever way the popular vote goes, our electors will support that candidate.” Won’t work.  Art. 1, Sect. 10 says no special compacts allowed between states.

Enough of this constitutional stuff. Could Biden resurrect Obamacare?  He’d need the votes to reinstate the individual mandate and penalties.  This is politically very unpopular and as of this writing it looks like a Senate which is closely split will happen this election. Re-enacting taxes on “Cadillac healthcare plans” would drive the unions into Republican arms.  How then could Obamacare be fully funded? Stop funding Medicaid expansion in 37 states and break them? This stuff gets real expensive and real ugly real fast.

Could they enact the massive tax Biden proposes?  Yes, but the political fallout would be bad. Look for everyone to get out their Tea Party signs again. What if he opens the borders and lets in a flood of illegal immigrants and gives them citizenship?  The Hispanics who worked hard to establish themselves will revolt.  So might the new conservative Afro-American movement.  Can he ban fracking? Yes, but directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing have both been common practice separately since the 1960s.  You could ban the drilling but that would nix all offshore platforms.  You could ban the hydraulic pressure fracturing but that would kill practically every revival of an old field in the country. And the idea of getting rid of fossil fuels is far-fetched.  Trying to make electric vehicles universal without market advantage might work for the rich, but the bottom quintile in income drive old iron.  Find out what they say if you raise gasoline prices to 5 bucks.

Can I be excused if I think a lot of this talk is hot air?  

The Trouble with polls

 

Polls this year seem to be at odds with observations.  Let me offer some insights about polls based on my experience as a campaign manager.  First, only about 1/3 of people will respond to a poll.  That’s not a problem as long as the poll manages to get a good sampling.  But what if one partisan group refuses much more often than the other? Then getting a good sample is very very hard.  That seems to be the case of R’s who don’t like pollsters.  Perhaps that is the perception that polls are conducted with bias for biased news organizations—to give the answer that media group wants.  Whatever the case, it is playing havoc with polls today.

            Secondly, in the past pollsters used land line telephones. With a copy of the county voting records in hand, a pollster could ask his questions and then assign a likelihood of voting based on that person’s voting history.  A respondent who had voted twice in the last 4 elections got a .5 weighting factor compared with someone who always votes.  But how can the people be polled accurately if they have cell phones or won’t identify themselves?  If no person or address corresponds to the person interviewed, the pollster cannot judge likelihood. 

            What happens if the respondent lies?  Trafalgar Group seems to have circumvented this somewhat by asking how that person sees their neighbors voting.  This can be telling if the voter is leery about answering correctly.

            Turnout is a huge factor in elections.  Only about 2/3 of all registered voters vote in a general election.  If one side turns out more of its base, that, not an overarching popularity may win. Base voters usually don’t split their vote and so there is more of a coattail effect in recent elections with a lot of partisanship.

            To check their prediction, pollsters often conduct polls of people right after they have voted.  But here, the trouble seems to be that many folks are particularly elusive about sharing who they voted for right after casting a vote—voting in secret is a well-guarded right!  These Exit Polls have been wrong in about half of recent elections.

            There are indirect polling measures that can give a predictive picture.  If an incumbent is at 47% approval or above, they are likely to be re-elected.  But if approval falls below, to 43 or 44%, they are likely to lose; 50% they are sure to win.  Evidently about 3% of people will say, “I don’t approve of this guy, but I’ll still vote for him.”  An incumbent is a known quantity.  If he polls low approval or in the low 40s against a challenger, that says that even though there may be a lot of undecideds, the one thing they have decided is that they aren’t going to vote for the guy they are saddled with now. In the old days the Right Track/Wrong Track polling told a similar story but has become unreliable.  Evangelicals will answer that the country is on the wrong track even if their guy is the incumbent.  They are reacting to the general moral malaise, not the candidate.

            Independents are somewhat enigmatic.  They vote only half the time as partisans.  They consist of many differing types of attitudes.  At least 20% are “hidden partisans”—people who hide the fact that they are, say, Democrats, in the midst of their Republican friends to claim superiority in open-mindedness.  Or their father is a harsh man who wouldn’t stomach them registering with the other party. Other Indies have a weird stew of issues.  Some have a premier issue that neither party addresses, like cockfighting or feral hogs.  Some have R ideas about fiscal budget balancing with D ideas about social issues.  They are people without a party.  Some are anti-political and simply refuse to listen until the last minute.  Hence Independents don’t vote all the time.

            So this year?  Clearly there are a lot of Trump voters who won’t talk to a pollster and maybe not even their overbearing friends.  Trump needs to get his approvals up over 47%, however.  Turnout?  That’s a big unknown. 

            One final note that belies the usual media message that the polls are tightening as we approach election day.  It’s B.S.  By October 1 all but 3% of people have determined who they are going to vote for.  By one week away, it’s only 1% of people still truly undecided.  The reason the media says piously that polls are tightening is to to squeeze more ad money out of the candidates.  They make an enormous haul during election season and they are pumping everybody dry, to make a few more bucks, and pollster play along with the game by making it seem like polls are tighter.

Game on!

What baseball player spoke to larger crowds than he played for?  Billy Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa in 1862.  His father fought in the Civil War and died without ever seeing Billy.  His mother, destitute, sent Billy to an orphanage along with his brother. Billy made it through high school and went to Marshalltown where he played on the state champion baseball team there.  The Chicago White Sox saw his skills and signed him in 1883. 

            One Sunday, Billy and his pals went to a bar in Chicago and got drunk.  He sat down on a curb and heard a Gospel band across the street playing songs he remembered his mother singing long ago in their little shack.  He began to sob.  One of the band members saw his tears and invited him to a Mission downtown.  Sunday staggered to his feet and told his teammates, “I’m going to Jesus Christ.  We’ve come to a parting of our ways.”  They all laughed except one friend who knew the story of his life and he encouraged Billy to go. And there at the Mission, Billy found his Lord, Savior and Friend.  The next day when he got to the ballpark, he was surprised to see his friends supporting what he had done.

            He joined a Presbyterian church and became a regular Bible Study attendee at the local YMCA. He married the sister of the equipment manager and batboy of the White Sox.  A decade later, he retired and began to work for the Y. J. Wilber Chapman, a traveling evangelist hired him as advance man.  A few years later, Chapman stopped traveling and began to hold evangelistic services in Garner, Iowa. Billy filled in and became acclaimed, getting many invitations to guest preach.  Soon he was doing evangelical revivals and other events.  As word of his thunderous preaching spread, he ventured from Iowa to the Midwest to the East Coast.  At the end of each service, Billy did a version of the altar call, asking people who wanted to become believers to come forward and commit their lives to Christ.  For 40 years he preached almost daily, to an estimated 100 million people.  In one crusade in New York City, he had 98,264 people who came forward “on the sawdust trail to the cross” as he called it. Hundreds of thousands put their faith in Jesus Christ because of his crusades.  In the audience was a young man who was also named Billy, Billy Graham.  15 years after Sunday, Graham began his crusades, which had a striking resemblance to those of Billy Sunday—rousing gospel music and choirs, a sermon that went straight to the heart and asked for a response in faith, and a call to come forward and commit to Jesus Christ.

            A friend of mine accompanied Dr. Graham at Kansas State University briefly when he had a crusade in Manhattan (1973?).  He  asked, “Dr. Graham, if you could not preach to enormous crowds like you do, what would you do in a little local church?”  He nodded thoughtfully and replied.  “I would find someone else who believed and spend a lot of time together spurring each other on in faith, for six months.  Then we would split and each find another or witness to another, and do the same thing all over again.  Just keep multiplying and as Billy Sunday said, ‘Game on!’” 

Bede

 

Were it not for one book by a monk whom we know only by his nickname, British history would be almost unknown from about 500 to 750 AD.  That was when illiterate barbarians overran the isle, city life almost vanished, and paganism re-established.  The man’s short name was Bede or Bedae, Saxon for ‘commander’.  When he wrote the 5-volume Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 730, he put a brief autobiography in the last chapter. 

            Bede was born on the monastery lands of Monkwearmouth—at the mouths of the Wear and Tyne rivers in Northumberland (far north England)—about 672. His parents put him in the monastery at age 7 where he grew to be the most learned scholar in Europe. In 686, a plague broke out and the monastery was moved to nearby Jarrow.  All the senior priests died.  But Bede, age 14 and his teacher, Ceolfrith, had memorized the liturgy until it could be taught to new monks. Consequently he was awarded the office of deacon, then priest  several years before normal. He wrote 60 books and was a premier translator who made Old English versions of texts of early church fathers from Latin and Greek that helped his fellow monks. He worked out the date for Easter, wrote theology and farming practice, mathematics, and Codex Laudianus (recopied book of Acts in Latin by Bede) which is in the museum at Oxford. He also is an unnamed copier of Codex Amiatinus, the earliest-surviving complete manuscript of the Latin Vulgate Bible (in Florence, Italy).

            So how did Bede fill in English history? “In 409,” he wrote, “the Romans ceased to rule Britain.” They abandoned the province—too far away, not enough troops.  Primitive and pagan Scottish Picts and Irish Celts began to attack the Bretons, now 3 centuries peaceful.  In alarm, Breton leader Vortigern, 449, invited Jutes (from today’s Denmark), Saxons (Elbe River area), and Angles (Schleswig) to help repel the warlike Celts.  Word went back quickly to the German coast that Britain was free for the taking. For a century and a half the Teutonic invaders swarmed in, fought often, until a combined group defeated the Brits at Deorham, 577.  Eventually many Celts fled to the mountains of Wales, Cornwall and across the Channel to Britanny. Unlike the barbarian invasion on the continent, there was little assimilation.  The Germans divided the island.  Jutes were a small group that established Kent (extreme SE England just across from Calais).  Angles formed 3 kingdoms—Northumberland (just south of Scotish border), Mercia (Midlands), and East Anglia (SE).  Saxons had 3 more—Wessex, Essex, and Sussex. Essex surrounds the lower Thames River and included the Roman fort of London. Since it was one of the few cities left, British became known as ‘Saxons’. “Bede”(his nickname) is Saxon, not Northumbrian, and he wrote in Old English which is close to the Frisian-Saxon dialect of German. The Heptarchy, as the 7 kingdoms were called (finally united in 829), was first pagan with German-Norse gods and culture with little experience in agriculture. Bede recounts successions of the kings, wars, and expansion of Christianity as well as telling about the barbarian way of life turned Christian. This differed from the continent because there was little left of Roman Law or methods. Amazingly,1500 years later, many royal titles still reference the Heptarchy.  Harry was Duke of Sussex. There’ll always be an England.

            Re-evangelism started over a century after the Heptarchy with Augustine of Canterbury (599) converting Kent and ended with Wilfrid converting the last of the Saxons about the time of the plague.  It took 87 years and was advanced primarily out of Canterbury on the SE coast and Northumbrians who had been early converts in the north. Irish monasteries and Rome generously provided the texts for the monastery where Bede was educated and worked.  That is how he became such a scholar in such a distant place.

            The man Bede never mentions is Arthur. That comes from a somewhat fanciful history-sermon of St. Gildas, a Welsh monk about 546.  It is thought he may have made up the Celtic character “to break the heathen and uphold the Christ”.  Was there a real Arthur or not? If there was, he was not king of all England nor living in a Camelot palace, but a Celtic warlord from the 500s when they lived in huts, amid recurrent famine. This brings up a salient point.  Bede was, as best we can test, very accurate-- unusual for ancient historians who wrote fibs to laud their kings and heroes. “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free,” said Jesus of the gospel.  Christians have ever since loved truth and made it the standard for good investigation.  Humble Bede was given an added title of ‘Venerable’ a century after he lived.