Tuesday, December 09, 2008

What good has ever come from Leicestershire?

Inspired by a posting of mine, Stumbling and Mumbling lets rip.

Top blogging.

And top commenting from Nick Cohen.

3 comments:

  1. Parliamentary Democracy ? I don't think so. De Montfort was the son of a Frenchman and only inherited the Earldom of Leicester from his maternal grandmother. He spent a lot of time in France, some in the Holy Land, some in Italy and called the first elected parliament after the Battle of Lewes. I don't think he visited Leicester much. Aristocrats often have little connection with their titular locations. For example, I wonder how often Baroness Barker has visited Anagach in the highlands.

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  2. The English language ? Again, not a claim that can be uniquely tied to Leicester. Norse influenced Old English right across the Danelaw, although the elimination of case-endings and the corresponding constraint on word order appears to have developed more strongly after the Norman Conquest. Thanks for drawing my attention to this. I had no idea about it until I started to investigate Stumbling and Mumbling's dubious claims. Rather than challenge all of them, I will simply point out that Alastair Campbell went to school in Leicester. So do we claim that "Spin" comes from Leicester ?

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  3. The title is presumably a allusion to John 1:46?

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