Poetry Thursday 109 - Diversity in the blood

Aethelstan ascended the throne of Wessex in 924 AD. By 927 AD he had united small kingdoms into what we now know as England. 

Aethelstan 

First King  

 

Turns out Aethelstan was the man,  

with intelligence and a future vision,  

devised an ambitious plan,  

a land of Angles to be his creation.  

 

Mercians accepted Aethelstan at once,  

Wessex were slower to concur,  

in 925 agreed final acceptance,  

but Vikings unlikely to defer.  

 

So to Northumbria to tackle the Vikings,  

a thornier diplomatic process,  

involving less talk and more fightings,  

the Nordic tribes had Aethelstan in a vice.  

 

 

 Resolute, the would-be king,  

was determined to achieve his aim,  

the death of the ruling Northumbrian Viking,  

allowed him to fulfil his claim.  

 

The rulers in Scottish and Welsh land,  

agreed borders with our new king,  

and so was the birth of England,  

energy needed for maintaining.  

 

Aethelstan’s diplomacy was not over,  

looking to Europe for expansion,  

married off his sisters to uncover,  

allies to support more acquisition.  

 

So for almost 1100 years,  

from the moment of first inception,  

England has always been a diversity pioneer,  

with all the benefits of aggregation. 

©David L Atkinson September 2025 

God Bless 

Writing - Poets and Kings

Time I chatted with Charles III. 

Why Poets Terrify Kings

Power has always had an uneasy relationship with poetry. Armies can be drilled, laws can be enforced, but poetry slips through cracks where swords cannot reach. Kings understand this better than anyone. They fear poets not because poets command battalions, but because they command language — and language can make people see the world differently. A throne rests not only on armies but on belief. And belief is the poet’s battlefield.

When Percy Bysshe Shelley declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” he was not being sentimental. He was describing a power deeper than decree. Poets legislate by shaping the imagination of nations, by naming what people feel before they can speak it themselves. They turn private longings into public voices. Kings may give orders, but poets give meaning — and meaning can undo any order.

History leaves us plenty of examples. Osip Mandelstam’s single poem mocking Stalin was enough to seal his fate. One short stanza frightened a dictator who commanded millions of soldiers and secret police. Why? Because a poem can travel mouth to mouth, heart to heart, untraceable and indestructible.

Kings tremble before poets because poets remind us that no authority is final. Where power seeks permanence, poetry whispers of change. Where rulers demand obedience, poetry stirs the imagination toward freedom. To read a poem deeply is to glimpse another way of being, another horizon — and once a horizon is seen, it cannot be unseen.

Poetry terrifies kings because kings can kill the poet, but they cannot kill the poem. The words remain, carried in memory, whispered in secret, rediscovered by another generation. Power seeks to silence; poetry insists on speaking. And in the long span of history, it is the poem, not the decree, that endures.

God Bless

Writing - Nothing changes

 It is often stated that 'there's nothing new under the sun', and 'history repeats itself'! We are also advised to learn from the experiences that history tells us. I am reading a book about the Luddite rebellions of 1811/12. Even 200+ years ago, there were people concerned about the reasons for civil unrest. 

The events of 1811/1812 occurred mainly in the north, from Nottingham, Cheshire, Lancashire, to Yorkshire, and concerned the use of automated machinery in the cloth-producing industries. It began in the knitting factories and spread to cotton and wool processing. Workers were frightened of losing their jobs. There were several violent acts, mostly against the machinery, all over the area. The government at the time was weak and slow in responding to the problems and allowed things to ride without attention. There were underlying issues that sound familiar today. One of the major events that escalated the need for a response from the administration was the assassination of the prime minister Spencer Perceval on May 11th 1812. 

Spencer Perceval 

In fact, it seems that his killing was a mistake. The real target was the Home Secretary, Richard Ryder, was the intended target but the assassin, John Bellingham, became frustrated at the fact that Ryder wasn't in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament, and he shot Perceval instead. 

John Bellingham 

A chaplain from the Manchester area had concerns about the rifts in society and came up with the following. 

Canon Parkinson writing On the Present Condition of the Labouring Poor in Manchester, would later state, 

"There is no town in the world where the distance between the rich and the poor is so great, or the barrier between them so difficult to be crossed.... There is far less personal communication between the master cotton spinner and his workmen, between the calico printer and his blue handed boys, between the master tailor and his apprentices, than there is between the Duke of Wellington and the humblest labourer on his estate, or than there was between good old George the Third and the meanest errand-boy about his palace. I mention this not as a matter of blame, but I state it simply as a fact." 

Sound familiar?

The government sent the army to the north to manage the situation under Thomas Maitland. After just two days he reported back to Ryder.

Before the end of his second day in Manchester, Maitland was telling Ryder that the high price of food in relation to wages required very serious consideration. He gave some precise examples. Potatoes, now the most frequent food of the cotton worker, had risen from 7/6d to 18s a wholesale load. This had caused an increase in retail price to the worker such that, where once his penny would buy him 3lbs of potatoes, now it bought only 1lb.

Maitland carried on to say that if wages had increased to maintain a closer relationship with the owners' remuneration, there would have been no reason for the unrest. 

This is the exact same situation that pertains today, and more and more people are becoming unhappy about the worship of billionaires, and at the same time, the increase in the number of poor in rich western countries. 

God Bless