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oldjim69last Wednesday at 1:17 PM2 repliesview on HN

Tough to know where to start. Pretty much every fact asserted in this piece is without any real evidence.

Starting at the end >This change occurred as a result of William the Conqueror’s defeat of Harold Godwinsson at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. As a result of this, William claimed that he had won the whole country by right of conquest. Every inch of land was to be his, and he would dispose of it as he thought fit.

>All land was thereafter owned by the crown. Perhaps in this can be found the seeds of the desire by the lords for the Magna Carta

This is simply not true that William claiming this was somehow new or novel. Lots of kings did this at the time. The Anglo-Saxons by Marc Morris illustrates this well.

Further, yes the dark ages were decentralized, but not at all because of the reasons in the piece. They were decentralized because the was an era of incredibly high friction. It took forever to get anywhere, to tell anything to anyone, to trade, to make deals, collaborate, to organize people. A bad harvest could wipe out a decade of hard labour building up a community. In that context there were just very few centriphical forces pulling things to the center.


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TSiegelast Wednesday at 3:13 PM

It's even worse than this. One of the articles main sources is a Hans-Hermann Hoppe, an Economics Professor, not a historian who is at best cherry picking scholarship from 1914. At worst a bigot who has a history of making ignorant racial and homophobic comments and has a dedicated section in wikipedia just to this. Even worse his anti democratic, neo-feudal beliefs were influential to clowns like Curtis Yarvin and Javier Millei

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neuroelectronlast Wednesday at 4:25 PM

This is the first I'm hearing about this.