Officers of the Earl of Derby's Household 1391-3

Those who accompanied him on the journeys arc indicated by the asterisk; Levnthorpe went to Calais in 1390

Thomas Herdwyk, clerk, auditor of accounts of Derby's officers and servants [He was also auditor to John of Gaunt's officers.]
Thomas de Wombewell, auditor and "supervisor terrarum domini in Anglia".
Simon Bache, clerk, treasurer of the household (sometimes called Symkyn Bache).
Robert Hatfield, esquire, controller of the household.
John Levnthorpe (Lewn- or Leunthorpe), receiver-general.
*Peter Bucton, knight, steward.
William Loveney, clerk of the great wardrobe.
*John Dyndon, valet of the wardrobe.
*Hugh de Waterton, knight, chamberlain.
*Richard de Kyngeston (or Kyngston), archdeacon of Hereford, treasurer for war.
*Robert de Waterton, esquire, master of the horse or marshal (marescallus)
*Hugh Herle, chaplain and confessor.
*(John) Derby le herald.
*William Pomfreit, clerk, chief clerk of the kitchen.
*John Payne, esquire, botiller.
*John Bounton, armourer.
*William Hauer, clerk of the lord.
Sir John, almoner.

Kyngeston, Richard, and Lucy Toulmin Smith. 1894. Expeditions to Prussia and the Holy Land made by Henry earl of Derby (afterwards King Henry IV.) in the years 1390-1 and 1392-3. Being the accounts kept by his treasurer during two years. [Westminster]: Printed for the Camden society.

This is a fascinating picture of a noble household away from home, although, of course, an unusually wealthy one: Henry was heir to the richest duchy in England and The Man Who Would Be King.

We can see the division of responsibility in accounting. The steward kept his own account of spending on victuals and other consumables, and the chamberlain tracked gifts and gratuities. The treasurer for war tracked everything else and put the big picture together.

Henry spent little out of his own hand. Sometimes he gave alms and oblations personally, but he frequently delegated that to others, particularly his chaplain. He once bought a horse personally, probably to insure he got one to his liking. He also spent money on gaming. He drew on his steward when he wanted cash for gaming, but also promiscuously on his other officers, including the clerk of the kitchen at one point.

Being a Great Nation of Immigrants is Actually Great

Chief Petty Officer USN, Jagdeep Sidhu, speaks four different languages including Urdu. As a result the crew of the dhow Al Mulahi, captured by Somali pirates, could call for help from the U.S.S Kidd and be understood in a language the pirates could not.

I am proud of my nation and immigrants like CPO Sidhu. They strengthen us. We need more men like him.

Ron Paul's Strategic Ignorance

Ron Paul on Lincoln and the Civil War:

No, I don’t think he was one of our greatest presidents. I mean, he was determined to fight a bloody civil war, which many have argued could have been avoided. For 1/100 the cost of the war, plus 600 thousand lives, enough money would have been available to buy up all the slaves and free them.

This is untrue. The market value of all the slaves in the US was about $3 billion, about the government spending on the war on both sides. Paul underestimates the cost of compensated emancipation by two orders of magnitude. Death and destruction was on top of the government spending, so on narrowly utilitarian grounds, compensated emancipation would have been a better choice. Taxing the citizens to bribe the slave owners to stop owning their fellow humans is morally troubling, however, and should be especially so for a libertarian like Paul, who makes a fetish of personal liberty, except when inconvenient to the policies he prefers.

Lincoln, in our universe, was an advocate for compensated emancipation. He signed it into law in the District of Columbia. He tried to get the slave states to accept it, but they refused.

And then there is the inconvenient truth that before Lincoln even took office slave states declared themselves independent, seized Federal property, and fired on an unarmed Federally chartered ship trying to sail to Fort Sumter.

Once Lincoln was in office, they bombarded Fort Sumter and took it by force. Even if we accept the unlimited right of states to secede for any reason that seems good to them, including preserving the right of some people to own other people, which I do not, this was at best an act of war, since Fort Sumter did not exist until the Federal government created it, on top of an artificial island the Federal Government also created by importing it in pieces from New England.

So surely we must assign some moral agency to the Confederate side in the conflict.

I take this at best at evidence that Ron Paul is extraordinarily careless in accepting false claims that support conclusions he thinks are convenient to the outcomes he prefers.

I don't know what is in his heart, but his position is exactly the one I would take if I was a libertarian that was cynically pandering to southern Paleoconservatives in hopes they would join my coalition.

Achieving this level of ignorance doesn't come naturally. It requires Paul to stuff his fingers in his ears every time he encounters an inconvenient truth, and shout LALALALA until it goes away. Congenial false claims, conversely, are seized on with joy, clutched to his breast and nurtured with unquestioning love.

Harald by David Friedman

Harald is fantasy novel by David Friedman. The title character is from the Vales, a society very loosely modeled on saga-era Iceland. Harald speaks very, very tersely. Here's a sample:

"Dawn to noon, say a six hour ride. What holds that close?"

I wrote this about it in the rec.arts.sf.composition Usenet group in 2005:

"Free land, the Vales. No king, no subjects. Not even for sentences."

Possibly Harald is influenced by the Valish institution of wordgild.
Having long ago decided that most conversation imposes a negative
externality on the listener, they charge a per-word fee to listen to
what you have to say, a custom that encourages brevity. Harald's
contemporary, the famous farmer Bored Njal, was known for his
willingness to listen patiently to his neighbors' problems, and ended
up owning most of the district.

Another Look at Steven Pinker's Data

Quodlibeta casts doubts on some supposed facts cited by Steven Pinker, with good reason. My own suspicion is that the claim that the Crusades murdered a million people is probably grossly inflated and based on a naive acceptance of the figures mentioned by contemporary chroniclers.

The Crusaders perpetrated a century of genocides that murdered a million people, equivalent as a proportion of the world’s population at the time to the Nazi holocaust.

One of the first things you must learn about history that the large numbers in medieval and ancient chronicles rarely correspond to the literal truth. "100,000 men" doesn't mean that the chronicler actually had access to an actual count: it just means that it was a very large army. And almost always, the large numbers are inflated.

Since there were nine numbered Crusades in just under 200 years, a million deaths would require over 100,000 murders per Crusade.

This is profoundly unlikely.

Even if we assume that half the dead were civilians, this requires the average Crusade to consist of an army of 40,000 strong fighting to the death and an opposing army of the same size suffering 25% dead.

But our best evidence is that the armies were much smaller and less willing to die.

And the Crusades stretched over seven generations, so the denominator is seven generations of lives, not one.

Also, although there were atrocities, I do not think the Crusades were as a whole genocidal in intent.

I can't shake the impression that Pinker doesn't like religion much, and is at best careless in his examination of evidence that supports his bias.

The Propertarian Problem

For the extreme libertarian, ethics are simple. Here’s an excerpt from The Philosophy of Liberty, by Ken Schoolland:

“A product of your life and liberty is your property. Property is the fruit of your labor, the product of your time, energy, and talents. It is that part of nature that you turn to valuable use. And it is the property of others that is given to you by voluntary exchange and mutual consent.”

But in the real world, we immediately run into complications. Schoolland seems to be following Murray Rothbard’s Ethics of Liberty.

The most important complication is that the product of your time, energy and talents doesn't depend on those inputs alone. It also depends on the society in which you function, the public goods allocated to you by law and custom, and the share of nature likewise assigned you as a private good by the society in which you live.

For example, as an individual adult US citizen of median time, energy and talents you might expect an annual individual income of something above $28,000. Cast away on Robinson Crusoe's desert island, the same time, energy and talents might earn you the equivalent of $500 a year in goats and cocoanuts.

Which is why the number of people that want to live in the United States is much greater than the number the current citizens allow.

My Favorite Posts of 2011

Household Economy of a Banneret and a Squire
The Household of Alice de Bryene
Medieval Gloves and Mittens
Lance Construction
Hardened Leather Armor
The Incandescent Hypocrisy of Mike Griffin
Locating Eyelets on Full Length Hose
More on the Ironically Named Chivalry Bookshelf
The Pavilion of Heraclius
Taxonomy of Tents
How Much Did Medieval Women Care About Deeds of Arms?
Important Things to Remember About History

When Intellectual Property is Theft

Will Wilkinson nails it.

On a related note, what would be entering the public domain today if pre-1976 copyright law was still in effect?

Extreme Coursing

The rocket propelled rabbit of Joanes or Giovanni de Fontana, ca. 1420. Extreme coursing is best observed from the blockhouse.

This is the same fertile mind that proposed a pyrotechnic mitre and crosier.

For some reason, people think I'm pulling their leg when I tell them about this stuff.

Why Double Entry Bookeeping Matters

The Athenians accused the ten treasurers of the Delian League of embezzlement. Each in turn was tried, found guilty and executed until only one was left. At that point the missing money was found to be an accounting error.