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St. Crispin's Day (25th. October)


br2975

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Yes today is St.Crispin's Day, 25th. October 2015.

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600th anniversary of the Welsh victory over the French at Agincourt (or as they have it Azincourt).

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I'm about to lift a glass to "those few, those happy few, those band of brothers" !

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How will you celebrate ?

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Brian R

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I wonder what he, HV, really said for what we 'hear' are the words of that bloke from the west midlands in a play wot he wrote (or one of his mates wrote).

I am ashamed to say I have never seen that Play, however I do hope a 'live' broadcast may come around our way as I would really love to hear the 'speech'.

Phillipe.

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I'm afraid I was still in bed, holding my manhood cheap.

So didn't make it to be one of the happy few.

 

Much prefer the KB version over LO.

".... and gentlemen in England now 'abed"

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Well, at least you are a gentleman Peter.

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Brian R

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I'm sure there's a joke in there about being abed, holding one's manhood.... Eeeewwwww.....

 

It might be remembered that Henry treated his army quite well, by the standards of the time, discharging sick men after Harfleur and returning them to England (partly to control desertion, partly to keep track of what was owed). The army itself was a curious beast, a sort of transition period from outright feudalism to a more modern form of contracted service. There is a possible reading of the passage about ".... each man ..... this day.... shall be my brother..." which suggests that Henry was negotiating with his captains - who, under chivalric practice could quite legitimately have voted him down and opted not to fight - by promising them special preference, "brother" being a very specific term in those days.

 

The principle of the French Army being the greatest army in Christendom in times of peace seems nothing new....

 

I'm all in favour of the French being handed a slapping periodically, it's no more than they deserve, but I've never read too much into tne Victorian obsession with the Hundred Years War. I'm sure Henry and his knights, men of their very different time, would have thought Sir Walter Scott et al, quite bonkers.

 

I'll raise a glass instead to Shakespeare's much misunderstood military hero, Sir John Falstaff. Falstaff is usually portrayed as a comic buffoon, but he deserves better; an old soldier, dependent on the odious Prince Hal (and Shakespeare doesn't actually portray the Prince favourably) for favour and patronage in recognition of Falstaff's service to his father. Eventually Harry discards Falstaff, for his own ends, and it's hard to feel sympathy with either.

 

His speech about "honour" sounds very modern - "for what is it? A word..... who hath it? He that died o'Wednesday.... Hath honour no skill in surgery, then?" - and he embodies the military braggart, the miles glorious, of the stage. He isn't a "nice" man, or a particularly creditable one, but he is a very credible one.

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Well my family were part of the 'Auld Alliance', and my mother's family were descended from Miles de Noyers, so we take a somewhat jaundiced view of the whole 'Prince Hal' thing.

 

Mind you as far as I can find out after Poitiers my ancestors thought, "Bu&&er this for a game of soldiers!", and went back to horse stealing and cattle rustling across the Border!

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I have absolutely no idea what my ancestors thought after Poitiers. Indeed I have no real idea how you might fasten upon any given individual as your particular ancestor, at such a remove in time.

 

My late grandfather saw most of his family killed in the trenches, or disappear at the hands of the Soviets and Nazis, plus a son killed in the 8th Army, which all tended to give him a rather jaundiced view of the more vocal elements among the Celtic fringe. You derided the English (by which he meant, British, recognising no differences) at your extreme risk in his presence. His view, charitably speaking, was that they had little, if any grip on life's wider realities. What he would have made of the near-idolisation of a totally inaccurate portrayal of a man as alien to us today as Prince Harry, by an Australian pretending to be an American pretending to be a Scot, I can only speculate.

 

Moving on, I've spent much of the last fifteen years or so working in tne Former Soviet Union, amongst people who have lived through profound and very rapid change, some of it pretty dire. I've worked with people who had sons the same age as mine, shot by Soviet troops on riot control, or killed in incomprehensible local wars which re-emerged from the mists of the past in tne ensuing chaos, or who served themselves as conscripts in an alien occupying army in a land they cared nothing about.

 

Seems to me that the Union has served us all pretty well for quite a long time, bringing order and prosperity to a region racked by centuries of violence and sporadic disorder. I've watched old enmities long since dormant, stoked by self-interested scoundrels and swivel-eyed zealots whose aims certainly don't include my best interests, these thirty years or more. Better men have gone to the gallows for less, within living memory.

 

Just my two-penn'orth, anyway

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It's being designed to run on track built to a scale that's used by the French, and other foreigners. You need an EM or P4 version to be truly British :jester:.

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Saints Crispin and Crispinian are the patron saints of cobblers, curriers, tanners, and leather workers. (Wikipedia).Perhaps having old shoes re-soled is the proper commemoration of the day?

There is a fair on that weekend held in Northampton, a town long associated with leather work and shoemaking.

 

Since the Saint in question appears to be among those long since relegated from the calendar by the Church, but venerated anyway, he is probably a good patron for a football team known as "The Cobblers", which is sometimes held to be a vernacular opinion on their performance. The rugby team are, of course, "The Saints" so you could go there, they celebrated the occasion this year by administering a drubbing to Newcastle

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