Oppression  Part 3.

 We know it's getting better now, thank goodness. We are not oppressed much. We shan't need a revolution like France and Russia.  There are no great country houses now with servants numbered in the hundreds, and ‘tied’ cottages for ten miles in any direction. At best the Lord and Lady may live in a part of it with half a dozen staff.  What a change, it's been slow but another hundred and fifty years will probably see it all levelled out.  That's a long time but not as long as 'oppression' has been in force.  To go back a thousand years domestic oppression was getting under way.  Look at the Domesday Book, Lords and Earls and Manors were in their early stages, and the hoi polloi were given very unattractive names, like serfs and villeins,  and were oppressed because there were landowners then.  These landowners had not yet enclosed the commons but they had their eye on them and made the serfs work for them one day a week. I bet these emerging underclass often wished they were hunter gatherers again, eating salmon, and nobody owning anywhere.

During the last millenium, nearly every country had a King or Queen. That must therefore be the natural progression of civilisation and in terms of keeping the country safe and governed, fair enough, but why it invariably happened that they cultivated their blue blood to such an extent that they regarded everyone except their mates as scum simply to be used, I don't know.

The King couldn't be everywhere to remind everyone all the time how great he was, and how scummy you were. He couldn't put down every uppity woodcutter personally, so in return for allegiance he gave chunks of Great Britain and the people it contained to his esteemed circle.  They could be esteemed for many reasons. When you've got the whole country it's easy to give someone Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh for telling you a dirty joke at Hampton Court.

At home in the nineteenth century at the great houses, housemaids could sip laudanum in their attic rooms after another fourteen hour day and reflect on their good fortune.  Like the Widow who kept the empire in her palm with affectations of benevolent difficulty, the Great Lords had the dreadful misconception that they were good for the people they owned.  The Lord had such a rent-roll he must have found it difficult to spend it. He managed it somehow and the lavishness of great houses is gawped at now by descendants of the tweeny, with no thought of the mean degradation that servants suffered.  Imagine it now, I'm sure there are some sycophants left in service at stately piles and ‘The London House’ but none of them have to do it.  Our mien towards the titled rich is now of a different cast. We have houses ourselves now, independence, and if Lord High Nosebridge came round there would be no bowing and scraping. We now know it means nothing much, they are ‘elevated’ by accident of birth. They may think they can still have special treatment (without paying for it). We know they can’t. We don't live in their cottages any more and if a Lordship came to our house, or pushed in our queue in Tesco’s, the said Lordship can, with equanimity,  be told to Fxxx Off, just like anyone else.