I stumbled on this video yesterday. It came while I am working my way through one of the many novels about historical England by Ken Follett. These books, I assume, reflect accurately the various strata of English society (royalty, aristocracy, middle class, clergy, working class), and generally how each respective class above the masses abuses and exploits the strata below themselves, usually with full impunity.
This explanation (in the video) fills in the gaps, as it were, and makes it clear how the different classes came into being, what allowed (allows) them to maintain their status, and explains much of even contemporary English attitudes of working-class "Brits" toward their "betters."
Contrariwise, one looks at the French Revolution, which sought to destroy the hated aristocracy, and one understands the sometimes neurotic measures that the same class took in England to ensure that they didn't suffer the same fate. Indeed that class, the "landed gentry" or aristocracy, persists in England to this very day...a class of worthless sots who have lived almost like Royalty on the backs of the common folk literally for centuries, going back to the Battle of Hastings.
How prescient of our forebears to outlaw titles of nobility in the U.S. (See Article I, Section 9, clause 8)..."No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States..." As a result, "we" enjoy the ability to elevate ourselves to high levels on the social register, hindered only by the self-appointed faux aristocracy that often calls itself "Old Money." But WGAF about those people?
Good video. Worth your time if you have kept reading until now.
