QI: The Book of General Ignorance - the Noticeably Stouter Edition (48 page)

Not a lot.

According to the official website of the British monarchy, www.royal.gov.uk:

‘
…
after his name is announced, the knight-elect kneels on a knighting-stool in front of The Queen who then lays the sword blade on the knight’s right and then left shoulder. After he has been dubbed, the new knight stands up (contrary to popular belief, the words ‘Arise, Sir —’ are not used), and The Queen then invests the knight with the insignia of the Order to which he has been appointed (a star or badge, depending on the Order). By tradition, clergy receiving a knighthood are not dubbed, as the use of a sword is thought inappropriate for their calling.’

The actual meaning of the English word
accolade
is ‘the
salutation on the bestowal of knighthood’. It comes from Latin
ad,
‘to’, and
collum,
‘neck’ – hence, ‘an embrace round the neck’.

There also used to be a ceremony associated with the removal of a knighthood: degradation. The last public degradation was in 1621, when Sir Francis Mitchell was found guilty of ‘grievous exactions’ and had his spurs broken and thrown away, his belt cut and his sword broken over his head. Finally, he was pronounced to be ‘no longer a Knight but Knave’.

Unlike Lord Kagan (jailed for theft in 1980), Baron Archer of Weston-super-Mare was never knighted and so hasn’t faced degradation following his own ‘grievous exactions’. He keeps his peerage but has inspired reforms – so far not carried out – that will make it impossible for a convicted criminal to serve in the House of Lords.

In the first place, they don’t. And, even if they did (despite what you may have heard) it has nothing to do with sucking up to the king.

The first problem is that no one can agree which king this might have been: Ferdinand I, Charles I, Philip II are all regularly cited, but the only Spanish king who is recorded as having a lisp is Pedro of Castile (1334–69). What’s more, the
man who alleged he had a lisp was López de Ayalla, who can hardly be counted as a reliable source, since he became chancellor under Pedro’s bastard brother, eventual usurper and murderer, Henry of Trastamara. As well as saying, he ‘lisped a little’ (
‘ceceaba un poco’
), Ayalla invented the slur that he was known as ‘Pedro the Cruel’. In fact, Pedro was very popular among merchants and tradesmen, and unusually tolerant of the Jews. Geoffrey Chaucer met him in his professional capacity as a diplomat, and admired him a great deal. In
The
Canterbury Tales
, he called him the ‘Glory of Spain’.

The second problem is that the so-called ‘Castilian lisp’ only began to develop in the sixteenth century, 200 years after Pedro died.

Technically, a lisp is a mispronunciation of the ‘s’ sound. No normal Spanish speaker does this – España itself has an ‘s’ in it. The issue revolves around the pronunciation of ‘z’ and ‘c’ (when it comes before an ‘i’ or an ‘e’).

There are three options open to Spanish speakers. In most of Spain, particularly Castile, the ‘th’ sound is used and this is distinguished clearly from the ‘s’ sound. So,
casa
is pronounced ‘carsa’ and
caza
is ‘cartha’. The second option is called
ceceo
(pronounced ‘theth-ayo’), in which both words are pronounced ‘cartha’. This ‘double-lisp’ is only found in southern parts of Andalusia and is considered extremely bumpkinish. The final option is
seseo
(pronounced ‘sesayo’), in which both the words are pronounced ‘carsa’. Basques and Catalans, for whom Soanish is a second language, tend to use this option and it is the pronunciation used in the Canary Islands and throughout Latin America. The reason for this is that
seseo
is also used in the area around Seville, the city that held the monopoly on trade with the New World, and the port from whence most explorers and emigrants left for the Americas.

But these aren’t strict rules. Pronunciation evolves and changes all the time as result of social pressures, such as the
need to be understood, or the desire to fit in. One researcher noted that a native of the northern city of Zaragoza managed four different pronunciations of the city’s name in the space of a few minutes.

Alfred the Great’s grandson.

King Aethelstan (924–39) was the first true King of all England. His grandfather, Alfred the Great, was only King of Wessex, even though he did refer to himself rather optimistically as ‘King of the English’.

When Alfred came to the throne, England was still made up of five separate kingdoms. During Alfred’s life, Cornwall came under his control but Mercia, Northumbria and East Anglia fell to Viking invaders.

After a period hiding in the Somerset levels (where he
didn’t
burn any cakes), Alfred fought back against the Danes, eventually restoring his old kingdom. But in the treaty he made following his defeat of the Viking warlord Guthrum at Edington in 878, he chose to give half the country (everything east of a line from London to Chester) to the enemy. This was known as the Danelaw. In return, Guthrum agreed to convert to Christianity.

Alfred was keen to ensure that any future Scandinavian raiders wouldn’t find it quite so easy and set about creating a network of defended towns to protect his territory.

It worked. By his grandson’s reign, Wessex’s control of England was complete. At the battle of Brunanburh in 937, Aethelstan defeated the Kings of Scotland, Strathclyde and Dublin to establish the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England.

No one is sure where ‘Brunanburh’ is: Tinsley Wood near Sheffield seems the best guess.

The last King of ‘England’ – that is, the last King to rule England and nothing else – was Harold Godwinson or Harold II. William, his successor, was already Duke of Normandy, and the English crown controlled substantial portions of France until Calais was finally surrendered in 1558.

Many things, not all of them nice, but absolutely nobody called him ‘William’.

‘William’ is an English invention, one of the unforeseen consequences of the Conquest. It was the product of a collision between Norman French, which had no ‘W’ and Anglo-Saxon, which had a ‘W’ but no equivalent name. The Conqueror’s Norman French companions would have called him ‘Guillaume’ and written it in Latin, Guillelmus (as it appears on his tomb in Caen). The English compromise – they had to call the new boss something – was to pronounce and spell his name with a Germanic ‘W’ – Willelm. You can see the shiny new name (complete with W) on the Bayeux tapestry, completed ten years later.

What is astonishing is that, in less than fifty years, William, a name that in 1066 had never been used anywhere in the world, became the most popular boy’s name in England. By the year 1230, an estimated one in seven Englishmen was called William. The top fourteen names in England, in fact, were all Norman and accounted for three-quarters of all names recorded.

Despite the brutal harrying of the North, the murder or expulsion of almost the entire Saxon ruling class and the imposition of the so-called Norman yoke, the English people seemed quite happy to identify themselves with their oppressors. So, out went Aelfwine, Earconbert, Hengist, Swidhelm and Yffi and in came John, Hugo, Richard and Robert, which must be counted as something to thank the Normans for
…

Though the Conqueror was illegitimate, and nicknamed Guillaume le Bâtard in French, the Saxons wouldn’t have called him a bastard (the word comes from the French
bâtard
, another Norman import unknown in England before the Conquest). They would have called him a
cifesboren
or a
hornungsunu
, both of which roughly translate as ‘son of a whore’.

William remained one of the top ten boys’ names in Britain until the 1950s, where it went into a decline only to re-emerge in 2004, probably as a result of the popularity of Prince William. The royal connection still seems to matter. William was the eighth most popular boy’s name in 2007 and Harry the fifth (Charles, however, has fallen to 52 and Philip languishes at 270).

Neither Tony or Gordon make the top 100; David is currently in at 64; but the William the Conqueror Prize for fastest climber is Jayden, the thirty-second most popular boy’s name in the UK in 2007, up from 68 in 2006. That’s 2,548 new Jaydens, all of them, it seems, inspired by the naming of Britney Spears’s youngest son, born in September 2006.

Essentially, it was Scotland v. Scotland.

There were more Scots in the army that defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1746 than there were in his own army.

As well as three battalions of Lowland Scots, the Hanoverian army under General Cumberland included a well-trained battalion of Highland Scots from Clan Munro, a big contingent of the Highland Clan Campbell’s militia, and a large number of Highland foot soldiers from Clans MacKay, Ross, Gunn and Grant, fighting under English officers.

Three-quarters of the Jacobite army were Highlanders, the rest were Lowland Scots, with a small contingent of troops from France and Ireland. Jacobite mythology has reinterpreted the battle as a Scotland versus England affair, but it was, for the most part, Scotland versus Scotland.

The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 started with some early success for the Highlanders at the battle of Prestonpans, near Edinburgh, followed by an invasion of England which took them as far as Derby. With the bulk of the British army fighting the French in Flanders, this caused a panic in London, and contingency plans to evacuate the King to Hanover were drawn up.

But the Jacobites failed to recruit supporters in England, and the planned French invasion was postponed. Despite a brilliantly executed retreat by Lord George Murray, the army that entered the field of battle at Culloden were starving, exhausted by weeks of marching, and poorly armed. Only a quarter of them had swords.

They fought bravely, but in just over an hour 1,250 of them lay dead. The Hanoverian army lost just fifty-two men. The Duke of Cumberland – known to Scots as ‘the Butcher’ ever since – executed all the prisoners and wounded on the battlefield, and rode into Inverness waving his bloody sword.

More than 3,000 Jacobite sympathisers were arrested in the aftermath, most of them being imprisoned or transported to the colonies. One in twenty were selected at random for ‘show’ executions. The Highland way of life never recovered. The Clan system was destroyed and the wearing of Highland dress made illegal.

Modern Jacobites still maintain that the true line of succession to the British throne runs through the Stuarts and their descendants. They acclaim Duke Franz of Bavaria as Francis II, King of England, Scotland, France and Ireland. He keeps a dignified silence on the issue.