David Statham 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

It has been revealed that the same Tennessee court which slapped Chud the Builder with a $1.25 million bond for a non fatal shooting handed a black man, Antwane Crenshaw, a measly $250,000 bond after he killed someone unprovoked.

In 1363, the English Parliament passed a law specifying, by social rank, how much meat you were allowed to eat. Read that sentence again. Parliament. Passed a law. About how much meat you were allowed to eat. Based on what class you were born into. The statute was 37 Edward III, c. 8. It declared that grooms and servants of lords, along with artisans and craftsmen, were permitted flesh or fish once a day. Once. The remainder of their food was to consist of milk, butter, cheese, and "other such victuals, according to their estate." The phrasing is the part to pay attention to. According to their estate. The implication that meat consumption was a property of your social position rather than a feature of being a human animal with a digestive system that ran on it. This was not a one-off. Edward II had issued a proclamation against the "outrageous and excessive multitude of meats and dishes" being consumed by the great men of the kingdom, which was followed by a series of regulations restricting what the lower orders could put on their tables. Edward III tried in 1336 to cap everyone at two courses per meal, two dishes per course. By 1363 the restriction was sharper and more specific. By the Tudor period the framework had matured into a full hierarchy: cardinals could be served nine dishes, dukes and earls seven, knights three, the rest of you whatever you could persuade to grow on the rocky strip of common still left unfenced. The Catholic Church layered another restriction on top. Meat was forbidden for roughly a third of the calendar year. Lent, every Friday, vigils before major feasts, Ember Days. During Lent dairy and eggs were also forbidden, which meant the peasant who had no meat anyway was now also denied the butter from his own cow. The fish on Friday rule alone created an entire economy: salt cod from the North Atlantic, herring barrels from the Baltic, a Hanseatic trading network built on the religious obligation to not eat meat on a specific day of the week. The justification was always moral. Excess. Gluttony. Spiritual purity. The danger of commoners adopting a diet inappropriate to their station. The mechanism was control. A medieval peasant who had unrestricted access to the protein and fat from a ruminant kept on common pasture was, within a generation, a peasant who was taller, stronger, and more independent than the system required him to be. The 1349 Statute of Labourers had already revealed what happened when working people were adequately fed. They demanded things. They withheld labour. They burned the Savoy Palace. The sumptuary laws were the corrective. The fasting calendar was the corrective. The Forest Laws preventing him from hunting the game on the land he lived next to were the corrective. Three different legal frameworks. Three different stated justifications. One actual outcome. The poor ate less meat. The rich ate more meat. The arrangement held for six hundred years. The current dietary guidelines telling you to eat less red meat are, structurally, the same instruction wearing a different coat. The coat is new. The instruction is medieval.

🚨 BREAKING: Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips has resigned from Keir Starmer's Government

🚨 BREAKING: Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips has resigned from Keir Starmer's Government

Which one would you choose to live in?

Gleadless Valley, Sheffield