Protection and Control

Two examples of how safety may come at the cost of freedom

The Tower of London: Controlling England for Nearly a Millennium

I’ve often thought of protecting and controlling as different (almost diametrically opposed) verbs, but there is more overlap than we tend to acknowledge. Parenting makes this abundantly clear. I protect my child by limiting her access to electrical sockets, preventing her from running into the street, circumscribing her activities in all manner of ways in the name of safety. This is true for adults and communities as well: secret service protection inevitably limits the president’s manner of travel, while communities with high police presence live under greater scrutiny and control, as the price of additional protection. This is the mafia logic, too: the threat that you purchase “protection” from may come from the so-called protectors themselves.

So why were castles built? According to The Castle at War in Medieval England and Wales, they proliferated following the Norman conquest of England, beginning with the Tower of London (to control that population center) and proceeding through sites throughout the North of England during his horrific “Harrying of the North” in the late 1060s. The Battle of Hastings gets the attention, but the act of conquest continued for years. The proliferation of castles under William was not (primarily) aimed at protecting towns from outside invaders, but rather intended to quash a potentially restive population. From a literary perspective, I wish the book spent a little more time on the details. The 400-year scope (from William up through the War of the Roses) makes a rapid pace necessary, but a lot of sentences take the form “William attacked such and such in 104X, and then he was defeated at this battle, and then he did this next thing.” It’s a quick read as such things go, but there were lengthy sections where I felt like I hadn’t actually retained much, other than a generalized sense of castles popping up in various places and fighting all over a given geography. There were a few notable anecdotes: poor prince Gruffud of Wales had a life defined by captivity. He was a hostage of King John as a boy (released in 1215 under the Magna Carta), as an adult he was imprisoned by his father from 1228-1231, then captured by his brother, and finally, in 1241 handed over to King Henry III of England, who kept him in the tower of London. In 1244, having had enough of this, he decided to make his escape. He tied a rope out of sheets and tapestries, but he had grown too heavy for it and fell to his death.
Perhaps even more harrowing, in 1304, Edward II was fighting the Scots, and besieged the castle of Stirling. He rejected the town’s surrender, refusing to let anyone leave until he had the opportunity to demonstrate his trebuchet, “War Wolf,” which destroyed the gatehouse. It’s impossible to know Edward’s motivations for this act: was it the equivalent of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, intended to prevent future resistance through its demonstration? Was it simple sadism, revenge upon the defenders for having not surrendered immediately? Regardless, during the “demonstration” the walls of the castle must have felt more imprisoning than protecting for its inhabitants.

As at the national level, so too at the local. Alan Macfarlane’s The Justice and the Mare’s Ale is a case study of sorts, examining the criminal activities of the Smorthwait brothers (William and Henry) in the northwestern corner of England (the town of Kirkby Lonsdale, in particular) in the 17^th century as evidence of the level (and type) of criminality common in the era. William Smorthwait, rather than a hardened career criminal, was in fact appointed High Constable for the ward in 1678, when he refused to hand over the country’s money to his successor. Not content with this act of embezzlement, Smorthwait led a band to rob a house, stealing “43 pounds in silver, three silver spoons, a pair of shoes, a pair of silver weights, and a pewter bottle.” At one level, this seems brazen and shocking: a (relatively) well-to-do gentleman in his thirties, associated with the local justice system, suddenly turns to violent crime! On the other hand, he had apparently been a “coin-clipper” for nearly a decade, shaving silver off of coins to sell on the bullion markets. While non-violent, this was considered a treasonous act, as it undermined the credibility and authority of the state. Smorthwait threatened potential witnesses, and was acquitted in his first trial for coin-clipping, in 1683. At this point, he seems to have felt invincible, allegedly saying that he could raise as many men as the eponymous justice, Daniel Fleming, and turning to highway robbery, pickpocketing, and animal theft. Eventually, in 1684, William and Henry were convicted and hanged. While not exceptionally violent (Macfarlane contrasts the Smorthwaits’ exploits with other researchers’ depictions of violence in China and Sicily to argue that Kirkby Lonsdale was generally less violent than other peasant societies), they threatened others with death, left one of their victims with injuries that laid him up for three weeks, and can’t have thought that their actions were benign. Macfarlane cites the lack of mob retribution on the Smorthwaits as an example of a low level of underlying violence in the society, but less favorably, it might indicate a societal acceptance of a certain level of criminality as part and parcel of life (particularly with respect to folk of some local prominence, like the Smorthwaits).

The identity of a “protector” can easily morph into generalized authority, making the protector feel entitled to control the protected individual(s), and justifying increasing control as “for the others’ sake.” I don’t think that’s inevitable, however: it is possible for protectors to self-regulate, limiting one’s own control of others to situations where the danger reaches a critical threshold. As parents, hopefully this is the journey: we allow our children increasing freedom over time, despite the increase in risk to them, for the sake of their development and independence. But there’s not a direct causal relationship to this tension: a tightly controlled economy (or child) isn’t necessarily safer than a less-regulated one. So when offered apparently greater protection, we ought to ask the follow-up question of how much control we would need to cede for it, and what recourse we might have if the purported protector themselves becomes the threat.

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