On the night of September 27th 1066, a force somewhere north of 7000 men massed on the beaches of Normandy. The next day this horde descended upon the shores of England and began a campaign of democide to subdue the anglo-saxon populace and wipe out the anglo-saxon aristocracy. Many a people have suffered this fate. Why does our story begin here?
“[The] Domesday Book began to assume its reputation as an authority unparalleled in this worldly realm . . . the survey was commonly known by the native English as Domesday, that is, the Day of Judgement: for as the sentence of that strict and terrible last account cannot be evaded by any skillful subterfuge, so when this book is appealed to . . . its sentence cannot be quashed or set aside with impunity. That is why we have called the book ‘the Book of Judgement,’ not because it contains decisions on various difficult points, but because its decisions, like those of the Last Judgement, are unalterable.”
To bitcoiners this will be startlingly familiar. In 1086 William the Conqueror commissioned, for the primary purposes of taxation and the assertion of the Crown’s rights, the assessment of nearly all the property in his realm. The Domesday Book is a list of who had what property in England. The blockchain, like the Domesday Book is a list of who has what. William the Conqueror and his cohorts were able to transform the list of who had what by force:
“[I] hate and abominate the name of Norman, for I have always associated that name with the deflowering of helpless Englishwomen, the plundering of English homesteads, and the tearing out of poor Englishmen’s eyes. The sight of those edifices, now in ruins, but which were once the strongholds of plunder, violence, and lust, made me almost ashamed of being an Englishman, for they brought to my mind the indignities to which poor English blood has been subjected.”
“In the twenty-first year of the reign of King William there was now no prince of the ancient royal race living in England, and all the English were brought to a reluctant submission, so that it was a disgrace to be called an Englishman.”
“By 1086 the great survey of English assets, the Domesday Book, documented the results: only two out of fourteen hundred tenants-in-chief remained. Killed, dispossessed, or exiled, the ruling segment of the native political body had removed en masse.”
This has been the protocol by which, in the long arc of human history, much of all human property has changed hands. By stark contrast Bitcoin was created as a system of consensus and consensuality. Will Bitcoin succeed and be invulnerable to this type of attack?
What is clear is that once established, social orders, lists of who has what, are intransigent. A millennium later we still live on William’s blockchain:
“Take the Norman conquerors of England in 1066 as an example. The Domesday book of 1086 records surnames for many major landholders. Among the conquerors many of these surnames derive from their home estates in Normandy; names such as Baskerville, Darcy, and Talbot. If we examine lists of the students of Oxford and Cambridge Universities we find that Norman names are about 1500% ‘over represented’ in 1215, based on what we would expect of their population share of England. In 1500, Norman names are still over 400% over-represented at Oxbridge. In fact, if we look at Oxford students email directory, we see that Norman names are still 28% over represented in 2011, nearly 950 years after the battle of Hastings . . . Nine centuries of data suggest that there is very little effective policy that could affect an improvement in social mobility in human societies.”
In 1642 English Protestants rebelled against Charles I (a descendant of Ernulf de Hesdin, companion of William the Conqueror during the conquest and tenant-in-chief in ten counties by the time of the writing of the Domesday Book) and the largely Norman aristocracy ultimately committing regicide and abolishing the aristocratic House of Lords. The monarchy and House of Lords was reestablished just a decade later. Other revolutions fare similarly: the more things change, the more they stay the same.
The English Civil War sent Anglo-Saxons and Normans out in two waves to the ‘New World’.
“The ‘antithesis between the Puritan and the Cavalier’ was the substance as well as the symbol of ‘the utter incompatibility of the civilizations of the two sections.’ The differences between Puritan and Cavalier and, therefore, North and South, had become not simply a matter of region, class or culture but of race. When J. Quitman Moore listed ‘the five fundamental facts’ that distinguished ‘Southern civilization,’ he placed ‘the Norman race’ first ahead of ‘domestic servitude, agricultural occupation, tropical climate and staple production.’ Not only were the high-born Cavaliers of the South clearly superior to the Puritan commons of the North, but, so Moore claimed, ‘Among the races descended from the great Caucasian stock, the Norman is the august head and central representative power.’ Elsewhere, a distinguished gentleman of Alabama assured readers of the Southern Literary Messenger that the South had been settled and governed by ‘persons belonging to the blood and race of the royal family . . . a race distinguished in its earliest history for its warlike and fearless character, a race in all times since renowned for its gallantry, chivalry, gentleness and intellect.’
Not all the proponents of the Puritan-Cavalier polarity as a matter of race were southerners. Unitarian clergyman John Gorham Palfrey turned the Southern version of the Puritan-Cavalier legend on its head, insisting that it was the ‘Roundhead founders of Massachusetts’ who represented the true ‘noble and gentle blood of England.’ The ‘Anglo-Saxon race’ that had settled the North was ‘farther advanced in civilization, more enterprising and persevering, with more science and art with more skill and capital’ while the southern Cavaliers were ‘poor gentlemen, broken tradesmen, rakes and libertines, footmen, and such others as were much fitter to spoil and ruin a Commonwealth than to help to raise or maintain one.’
At the the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘race’ and ‘nation’ were often used synonymously, and the belief that their ethnic ancestry was distinct from and superior to that of their Yankee antagonists led some upper-class southerners to speak interchangeably of themselves as both. A Virginian asserted in 1863 that ‘the Saxonized maw-worms creeping from the Mayflower . . . have [no] right to kinship with the whole-souled Norman British planters of a gallant race.’ From such sentiments it was not such great leap to a Louisianan’s insistence that the Civil War was ‘a war of Nationalities . . . a war of alien races . . . Cavalier and Roundhead no longer designate parties, but nations, whose separate foundations were laid on the Plymouth Rock and the banks of the James River.’”
Any student of American history should be familiar with the wrestling theses of North and South, slave power vs northern industry, the Great (three-fifths) compromise, et alia. But few will be able to trace them back to their roots in the Anglo-Norman conflict.
“By the 1830s writers eager to explain why the inhabitants of northern states and those of the southern states appeared to be so different in values and temperament had begun to seize on the idea that the people of the two regions were simply heirs to the dramatically different class, religious, cultural, and political traditions delineated by the English Civil War. The northern states were populated, so many believed, by the descendants of the middle-class Puritan ‘Roundheads’ who had routed the defenders of the monarchy, the aristocratic Cavaliers, supposedly of Norman descent, who had then settled in the southern states. Historian David Hackett Fischer has argued that the ‘cavalier thesis’ may have some validity for Virginia at least. Although some 75 percent of the colony’s immigrants consisted of indentured servants and landless whites, in the mid-seventeenth century it had served for a time as what one contemporary observer had called ‘the only city of refuge left of His Majesty’s Dominions . . . for distressed cavaliers.’ Some of these Royalist refugees had been recruited by Virginia’s governor William Berkeley, who favored them with political office and grants of large estates, thereby positioning them for places of political leadership and influence . . . by the Civil War, southern propagandists were assessing matter-of-factly that ‘this cavalier or Anglo-Norman element that had presided at the founding of the original Southern colonies entered largely into the new populations . . . mingling the refinement of the courtier with the energy of the pioneer.’ They also credited the ‘Cavalier element’ with ‘predominating in southern civilization and giving tone to southern society and character to southern politics.’”
It is no wonder that New England, in many ways founded as a refuge for those seeking freedom from the Norman yoke, was the source of the most virulent revolutionary sentiment. The subjugated anglo-saxons ultimately successful in escaping their Norman overlords in England, were replaced with black Africans in the ‘New World’. The subjugation of black peoples was done in many ways in the interest of maintaining the Norman status and way of life in the ‘New World’.
Indeed the slave-owning, horse-riding(cavalier), Virginian, first President of the United States, George Washington, descended from a Norman family, “whose loyalty was as old as the Conquest.” George Washington was drawn out of retirement by a revolt in Protestant New England, and a firmer central government was established with him at the head was established as a result. Virginia, the birthplace of presidents, and the place where indentured servitude evolved into chattel slavery was the Norman beachhead in the Americas.
“America was not conquered by William the Norman, nor its lands surrendered to him, or any of his successors…. It is time, therefore, for us to lay this matter before his majesty, and to declare that he has no right to grant lands of himself.”
— THOMAS JEFFERSON, A SUMMARY VIEW OF THE RIGHTS OF BRITISH AMERICA (1774)
“General Robert E. Lee comes of a family illustrious in both England and America . . . to those who have the curiosity or desire to know from whence came this Virginian it is proper to state that his ancestry may be clearly traced to the Norman Conquest.” The Founder of the Lee Family distinguished himself, fighting by the side of William the Conqueror, at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. The Civil War in America, like the American Revolution before it, and like the Civil War in England before it, was in many ways about breaking the Norman Yoke.
But nearly a millennium after the Norman Conquest we still live under and on its chain. Blacks remain an oppressed underclass in the United States:
The Americas are not unique: Lord George Curzon was appointed Viceroy of India and later Leader of the House of Lords where he served until his death in 1925. Curzon was a descendant of Geraline De Curzon, attendant of William the Conqueror.
“The very existence of a Norman like Curzon, still presiding over the enterprise of empire in the twentieth century, is a reminder that the Norman conquerors didn’t simply vanish mysteriously after a few centuries. This Curzon lineage is a classic example of historical continuity from the Conquest to recent times with no decisively mortal break in between. The House of Curzon survived the War of the Roses and the Black Plague. The House of Curzon survived the political disenfranchisement of the Puritan Revolution through the Royal Restoration of 1660. The House of Curzon survived the so-called ‘revolution’ of 1688 and modern ‘democracy’.”
Financial systems, debt, and the credit, and the credit infrastructure that comes with it, is in many ways and in many cases a socially acceptable mechanism for putting some on top and some on bottom. They provide the illusion of transaction & mobility(implying fairness), and they involve less blood upfront and directly on the hands of the uppers — but they preserve the tonicity all the same. If you account for worse medical outcomes and shorter lifespans among oppressed peoples, the blood is still there.
“Otherwise celebrated for making homeownership accessible to white people by guaranteeing their loans, the [Federal Housing Authority] explicitly refused to back loans to black people or even other people who lived near black people . . . ‘Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.’”
“Discrimination is in the DNA of American real estate. For most of the last century, lenders and brokers — including national realtor organizations — used race as a proxy for neighborhood value.”
The same holds true for nations. As outright imperialist rape and subjugation has become somewhat passé, it has been replaced with a global credit infrastructure that maintains the exploitative balance: force legitimized as finance. Haiti, after wresting its independence from France in 1804, was forced under threat of invasion to pay an indemnity of 150 million gold francs to its former imperial overlord, permanently altering the course and pace of the development of the Haitian nation. Haiti finally finished paying the debt in 1947. “Haiti was in effect forced to pay reparations for its freedom.” When Haiti finally demanded the money be returned in 2003, France sponsored a coup to overthrow its government.
“The moral debt that is owed is for having enslaved the blacks who were uprooted from Africa to transform every drop of their sweat and blood, and each parcel of land on Saint Domingue, into wealth for the imperial center. For this moral debt, Haiti does not seek compensation. We agree that it is irreparable. We leave it to be a stain on the civilized world.”
The Norman Yoke is but one striking example of a pattern common across human relations. It is not unique to any people and has more to do with ethos than ethnos.
Bitcoin is an opportunity to break from the chains of the past. It enables for the first time in human history the power of instant global person to person payments. It enables people to be their own bank. For the first time each person on the planet has the power to transmit value to whomever they choose, whenever they choose, for whatever purpose they choose within reach. But it’s important to understand that bitcoin has already failed. Bitcoin emerged first in the Anglosphere and people of privilege were the first able to access, understand, appreciate and harness its potential. Existing wealth and power are readily transferred into this new system.
In this half of the World, of all the places brought low by the Norman Yoke, by the weight of its chain, Pine Ridge, South Dakota is perhaps the trough: it has the shortest life expectancy in the United States.
“Sprawled over 2.8 million acres, the reservation is home to 40,000 members of the Oglala Lakota tribe, one of the poorest communities in America. An 80% unemployment rate forces half the population to live below the poverty line, scraping by on a per-capita income of less than $8,000 a year. The average adult will live 50 years — the shortest life expectancy in the United States . . .
Pine Ridge residents have long suffered exploitation and abuse, whether at the hands of the U.S. government — which they accuse of failing to uphold treaty obligations — or their own tribal administration, which is frequently accused of corruption. Today, the tribe is facing million-dollar budget cuts from the federal government, which will affect housing, education and health services. A sense of despair hangs over the reservation.”
Something interesting has emerged in Pine Ridge: Mazacoin is an alternative cryptocurrency, based on Bitcoin’s code, created by Payu Harris, a Cheyenne Lakota.
“I want to get my people educated and show them this is the next level of finance. Let’s make the rest of the world play catch up. Let’s be leaders and rebuild the economy on our terms. We’re not going to ask the federal government if we can do this. I refuse to ask them to do anything within my own borders. When you have children going hungry, it’s time to focus.”
“There hasn’t been a tribal nation that has declared its own currency and has mandated that that currency is used within its borders . . . it’s because of this pervasive, ever-present asserted dominion of the United States. They’ll try to shut us down, try to cite us with law violations.”
“I think cryptocurrencies could be the new buffalo . . . Once, it was everything for our survival. We used it for food, for clothes, for everything. It was our economy. I think MazaCoin could serve the same purpose.”
“We’ve gone through 100 years of imposed poverty. That’s the fight we’re having . . .what we’re trying to do with MazaCoin is just spark something to get us out of this cycle of victimhood.”
Perhaps from a place sown with despair, we may reap hope.
Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency movement represent an unprecedented opportunity for economic justice. They could also mean more of the same. The beauty though, is that Bitcoin’s Blockchain, and the blockchains that it spawns are chains of choice, of consensus and consent — not of force. They can, if we choose, be a break from the past, a jubilee of sorts. Bitcoin has failed, but it’s still the best chance we’ve got.
