OSR: Siena's 6-Mile Hex

It's tempting to think of medieval cities as islands in a vast sea of farmland or wilderness. Look at a certain modern medieval-ish TV series. Cities sit in splendid isolation.

But in the real world, every medieval city had satellite towns within walking distance. Take Siena.

The red line covers (approximately) Siena's medieval walls. Red dots are towns or villages. Red diamonds are monasteries. The white outline is a standard 6-mile hex. I've covered how huge 6-mile hexes are before, but here's another example.

Thanks to the magic of Google Earth, you can even zoom in to see how far away, in 3D, those cities and towns are. The (slightly wonky digital) view from the top of Siena's Torre del Mangia shows dozens of sites in relation to the city's walls. Mercenary armies camped there. Rulers fled, monks plotted, bishops pronounced doom, fugitives hid, and rebellious factions raised banners.

[The annual festival of the Virgin Mary] fell on the 15th of August, the day of her assumption to the side of her Son. To evoke that wonderful festival is not only to set before our eyes in material form the strange fusion achieved by the medieval mind of the life terrestrial and the life spiritual, but also to realize one of those gay and colored spectacles for which the modern world has no equivalent, and which are like the moving page of some blithe and exquisite romance.

A general animation became apparent in the city as the middle of August drew near. The town crier, sounding his trumpet before him, passed through the streets announcing the programme for the festival; at the same time he made proclamation concerning the great fair of three days, which, with characteristic prudence and in keeping with the homely character of the celebration, the government did not hesitate to associate with the season of thanksgiving. On the eve of the looked-for day fell the opening public act. All the citizens from the age of eighteen to seventy, forming in procession according to parishes and under the leadership of the parish priests, marched to the cathedral. For the greater glory of Our Lady each celebrant carried in his hand a lighted taper, and before the citizens went the magistracy, attended by the carroccio or car of state, upon which were conspicuous the official offering of candle and banner. Thus before sundown of August 14th, Siena had renewed its vows to the goddess of its choice and love.

But the next day came a procession of another kind, one which swelled the hearts of the old burghers with patriotic felicity. The castles, villages, towns, and monasteries, conquered outright or subdued under the euphemistic name of an alliance, knocked, as it were, at the gates of the city, and in the person of the proprietors or of elected delegates proceeded in solemn state to the duomo to repeat the oath of allegiance to the victorious commune. A scene more splendid and, at the same time, more feudal cannot be imagined. The free town was a perpetual protest against the feudal system, but when the problem presented itself as to how the shattered elements of feudalism were to be organized under the new sovereignty, the city leaders chose a solution which proved they could not emancipate themselves from the domination of current legal forms. They simply assumed towards the nobles and corporations of the county [the contado] the familiar position of suzerain.

The morning of the fifteenth, therefore, saw the procession of Sienese vassals march to perform an annual act of homage. In that procession were the proud descendants of the ancient counts of the city, mitered abbots or their mandataries, the representatives of villages and towns; and in their hands they bore, in honour of the Virgin, each one a lighted candle. Through dense and exultant crowds they made their way up the marble steps of the cathedral until they stood within the portal, before the desk of a secretary of the commune. To the humble scrivener, seated before a solemn ledger, they consigned their offerings, all destined for the service of the Supreme Lady and consisting of candle-wax, or banners of brocade, or money, according to the articles of submission.

-Siena, Ferdinand Schevill

Siena had, for a time, a huge and prosperous contado. This gif shows the tumultuous and somewhat baffling expansion process. It would be impossible to map all these locations. Instead, I'm going to rely on robust generators and scribbled notes on existing maps. The major cities and walled towns will be detailed ahead of time. Small towns, villages, and castles will pop into existence as needed.

Side Note: Sometimes I get lazy when researching a topic and skim wikipedia to get my bearings. I really need to remember to check Italian wikipedia for this project. English wikipedia doesn't even mention that L'armata Brancaleone's dialogue is a mish-mashed italian/latin doggerel. Online translation services are so good these days (and wikipedia's articles are so dull) that you can usually find valuable information.

Anyway, here's the current renamed map for the pointcrawl.

The black square is 10x10 miles. Red lines are major roads. Travel times (in days, on horseback, in good weather) are in red.

EDIT. If you want a fun project...

Step 1: Ask yourself "how many castles can there be in a 6-mile hex?" 

Step 2: Download Google Earth Pro (free)

Step 3: Download and open this KML file. Backup.

Step 4: Go, "Oh, that's a lot of castles."
Step 5: You can use this hex grid overlay to put a section of 6-mile hexes on the map.

Using this hex grid overlay:

And that little region northwest of Siena isn't even a densely castled region!

OSR: Mercenary Pointcrawl in 14th Century Italy, Preliminary Notes

Italian history is... complicated.

They can't keep getting away with it!

The War of the League of Cambrai took place a century after the time period I'll be examining, but the story still works:

1. To curb the power of Venice, the Pope creates the anti-Venice League of Cambrai.
2. The League is initially successful. Venice is in full retreat.
3. The Pope concludes peace with the Venice. Venice privately decides to break the terms as soon as possible.
4. France, invited into Italy by the Pope, is gaining power rapidly, and threatens the Papal States. The Pope allies with Venice against France.
5.  The Pope creates the Holy League to combat French influence. Holy Roman Empire, Spain, etc. join.
6. France negotiates peace with Venice. They agree to split northern Italy in half.
7. The Pope, The Holy Roman Empire, etc. are aghast. Scotland, encouraged by France, declares war on England.
8. The war quietly decays into a tangle of treaties. A new war starts up four years later.

The 14th century isn't much better. Most popular historians just give up and give some variant of "everyone fought everyone else". Academic historians focus on one city or a brief period. Records are poor. Some wars happened on paper; some treaties were signed by one side only and later used to justify another conflict. Factionalism in the cities made rulers disarm their citizens and turn to mercenaries; fickle and untrustworthy mercenaries switched sides, refused to fight, and extorted enormous concessions from their masters.

The interrelationships of Venice, Genoa, Milan, Piedmont, Florence, and assorted despots and communes of northern Italy were constantly shifting. As soon as one power joined another against a third for that season’s advantage, all alliances and feuds changed partners as if in a trecento square dance. Venice feuded with Genoa, Milan played off one against the other and feuded with Florence and the several principalities of Piedmont, Florence feuded with its neighbors, Siena, Pisa, and Lucca, and formed various leagues against Milan; papal politics kept the whole mass quivering.

-A Distant Mirror, Tuchman

The hills are full of brigands and wild dogs. The roads are lined with ruins. Villages burn, towns are surrounded by mutinous troops, and mercenary armies arrive and depart with the seasons. Ambitious kings starve. Antipopes appear. Exiled nobles plot and write endless letters. The sons of peasants become the rulers of cities. The settled order of the world is overturned.

The Plan

I'm still waiting on a few books to arrive before I start putting together full historical posts. Unfortunately, real life moves faster than writing. I need something for Monday. The distant war has finally lured a foolish group of PCs into its all-consuming maw. Time to think fast and write faster.

Wait...

Step 1: Map

• Take Italy in ~1360. File off the serial numbers.
• Hexcrawl? Nah. Instead, points (fortified towns or cities), with random encounter tables that include villages, factions, etc. Let the encounter tables do the heavy lifting.
• Luckily, I've already got a decent pointcrawl map of Italy from 1100. 

The black square is 10 mile x 10 miles. Travel times are for individuals or merchants on horseback, not armies. Historical accuracy is extremely dubious. I'm trying to create a framework that can survive editing as I get my notes in order, not something that's perfect from day 1.

I anticipate the campaign will mostly take place in the north, with the not-Papal States intriguing from below and not-France from above. Genoa, Pisa, Milan, Bologna, Venice, Siena, and Florence.

Step 2: the PCS

• The standard GLOG hack I'm using works fine without any major changes, but there are lots of updates I'd like to make.
• How can a group of PCs form a lance? I've noted before that soldier, archer, page => fighter, wizard, thief. Are there alternate structures, especially if the group has few fighters but many spellcasters or thieves? Who will act as the captain?
• Camp followers and loathsome peasants abound. 
• Mission generator? "Fix this, scout that, deal with this wizard business, kidnap this person, etc." 
• Rather than paying taxes to a feudal lord, the PCs will (probably) end up working for a mercenary leader or a city. Turning over a percentage of their loot is inevitable, but getting the most out of their "taxes" is the fun part.
  

Step 3: Tabulate

I'll need to go through some relevant books and make some useful tables, like the Byzantine Table of Rulers.

Step 4: Consolidate

Put it all into a free PDF.

Osprey #155

Film References

Flesh+Blood (1985). One of the OSR-est films out there. Mercenaries rape, murder, and pillage their way through an unspecified fictional war. It's definitely got, err, HBO sensibilities, but it's got a lot of character. The greasy unnamed "Cardinal", the statue of St. Martin, the recurring characters and cunning schemes; it's full of useful content.

The Decameron (1971). A selection of stories from the Decameron, lightly edited and portrayed with untrained but enthusiastic actors. It's light, cheerful, bardy, colourful, and charming.

L'armata Brancaleone (1966). Another classic OSR film. The dialogue is straight out of a D&D session. The costumes are ludicrous.

Hard to Be a God (2013). The swirling chaos of this beautiful film covers the darker side of human existence. It's a difficult film. I might do a full Film Notes on it.

The Last Valley (1971). Wrong time period and region. Right attitude.

Final Notes

Don't worry. Magical Murder Mansion is done and waiting on print proofs. Magical Industrial Revolution is ticking along steadily.

Film Notes: Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (Fritz Lang, 1924)

One of the reasons I started a Patreon was to fund long-form unusual projects. This is a trial run. I'm not an expert on film studies, so don't expect deep analysis. This is still an elfgame blog.

Tears of Envy clued me in to the 2012 Master of Cinema Blu-ray release of Die Nibelungen. It's gorgeous. Someone's uploaded the whole thing to youtube here but the full blu-ray is definitely worth it: buttery smooth, tinted for easy viewing, stabilized, and with a wonderful crisp score. This post will include way too many screenshots, with enough resolution to see all the details. I've included a jump after Part 1. You've been warned.

Following the links in this article (and, in particular, this essay) should give you the appropriate background. This isn't Wagner's tale. I've got nothing against Wagner, though I have to take short breaks while listening to his operas (from five minutes to six months or more). Lang wrote his own version of the story with his own morals and his own code.

Part 1: Meet Our Hero

Isn't he gorgeous~. To quote Anna Russell, "And he's very young and he's very strong and he's very brave and he's very handsome and he's very stupid.  Just look at those shots though. All from the first 10 minutes of the film. It's 1924. The camera can't move, so every shot needs to be framed, and nobody framed like Fritz. Just look at the shadows! The smoke!

In fact, hair is a huge part of this film. Everything has texture. Take Mime, the master blacksmith to whom Siegfried is apprenticed. Apparently he's done well, because the first speech of the film is Mime wearily saying, "Ride home to Xanten, Siegfried, King Siegmund's son. Even I cannot each you any more!"

Mime and the rest of the mountain-men all walk like they're wearing concrete shoes. Siegfried floats. They're all hanging out eating fat carp and sharing stories like a bunch of dads after a long weekend when Siegfried, the hero, pets his shining white horse. He's about to ride home to Xanten when one of the mountain-dads starts talking about Worms on the Rhine, and the Kings of Burgundy who dwell there.

Look at that shot! It's the antithesis of a Disney castle. Blunt. Bold. Impossible. It's a sort of Valhalla. This is mythic history, not Gregory of Tours history, as described by a mountain dad. Siegfried's never heard of the Burgundians but he's entranced.

And for the first time we see the geometric armour and cloth that will dominate this film. Mountain-men and barbarians are half-clad rags and fur; the civilized Burgundians are fully draped in Carl Otto Czeschka full Vienna-Succession-Style robes.

Mountain dad also describes the beautiful and pious Princess Kriemhild. As tradition demands, Siegfried falls instantly in love (see Anna Russel's comment above). Siegfried says he'll set out for Worms and win Kriemhild. The mountain men are... skeptical. Just look at that collection of facial features.

Siegfried flies into a rage and shakes the route to Worms out of them. "Show me the way to Worms or you shall lose your life!" What a guy.

This tension between Siegfried as a heroic figure and Siegfried as a violent bully runs through the entire film. Was this deliberate? Was the beautiful but brutish hero meant as criticism of interwar culture or could “only a Teuton with a Teuton’s failure of tact” see the character as purely noble and inspiring?

Siegfried gives his aged master a last hearty teutonic slap on the back and rides off.

OSR: A General History of the Notorious Sea-Robber and Murderer Known as Handsome John

Here's a piratical rumour table (of sorts). It's a ramble overheard at a tavern or pieced together over the years. Is any of it true?

Handsome John?

It's a strange tale, laddie, a strange and twisted tale. Pass us a drink. Handsome John was a bosun in the Wexlish navy. He served in the wars and fought bravely but was terribly scarred by fire and shot.
       I heard he was born that way, and that the war just made him hard and cruel.
He turned mutineer and pirate. Killed his captain and officers, rallied the crew, and sailed under no flag. The navy caught him.
      Some say he was betrayed.
             I heard he tried to sack Portsham.
At his trial, he showed no remorse or fear. When sentence was passed he said only this. "My life is not yours to take."
     No no, I heard he said, "I will live longer than any of you. As long as free men sail the sea I cannot die."
            Liar. He said, "Why do you call me a criminal and condemn me to death? Because I killed butchers of men, because I chose to sail under my own orders instead of filling the pockets and dying at the command of fat lords and armchair admirals. Hang me then and be done with it! This world is full of wickedness."

They sentenced him to hang. As a mutineer and pirate, for three days and nights he hung from the scaffold. But when the hangman came to cut him down, Handsome John wasn't dead!
     He hanged the hangman from his own scaffold. Killed the admiral who sentenced him and anyone who gave evidence. 
He vanished from Wexland. Appeared in the Merebaha Islands with his ship the Petition. Sailed for ten years, a true monster on the waves. They say he'd take his prey at night, by the light of a crescent moon. Sail right up, fire a warning shot, and force a surrender before the crew could get to their guns. He'd hang the officers and crew from the 'arms. No survivors, unless he wished to take on fresh crew.
        You could see the ships for miles. The birds, you see, feasting on the hanging bodies.
               And if he run out of rope, he used the guts of the crew.

Ten years he sailed. He sacked Longport and burned New Imbria to the ground. And then he died. His crew dispersed, his ship left as a memorial or sunk, his treasure lost.
       He died at the hands of his own quartermaster. Poison.
              No, it was Captain Louxbury who caught him. They fought a duel on the deck of the Petition as she burned. Louxbury took Handsome John's head and held it up for the crew to see.
                    But he didn't die! The head kept mouthing curses and rolling its eyes. Captain Louxbury locked it in a chest. They say it's in a monastery now on some lonesome island, where ten monks pray night and day to keep Handsome John's words from reaching the Devil.
                           Some say he's not dead at all.

What did he look like?

Horrible. That's the only word for it. He was broad and tall, stronger than any man I've seen. He could tear a coco-nut in half without straining or pick up a cannonball as you or I might pick up a walnut.
       A huge beard, burnt in places, patchy in others where scars met on his jaw. And two tiny blue  eyes, the purest blue, like the sea itself in some tranquil lagoon.
                He wore the noose that hung him 'round his neck always.
                        And he carried a burning sword. That's what they say, at least. A sword of fire.

His crew?

The scum of the earth. Convicts, exiles, madmen.
       I heard his crew weren't living men at all, but hanged men too, hanged men the Devil raised up to follow his servant.
             To join, a sailor needed to commit a murder in cold blood, take a woman by force, trample on a holy book, drain a pint of brandy, and fight another man for a position in the crew. They fought with daggers; the one who survived kept both.
And once you joined his crew your soul belonged to Handsome John. Not to God, not to the Devil, but to he, and only he could send you to your rest. 

His ship?

The Petition. An old slaver ship, low and broad.
       I heard it was a frigate from the last war that'd carried prisoners of war. The captain made sure they never reached their prison. "Illness claimed them", he'd say, though the decks ran with blood. 
              No, it was a slaver. When Handsome John took her he burned the slaves alive and caulked the hull with their ashes.

His treasure?

They say he buried it on the Island of Tears, not marked on any chart or map. Only Handsome John could tell someone how to find it.
     No, that wasn't it. If you had a tattoo made from the black sand of the island, you could always return. 
              The treasure's at the bottom of the sea and the Petition with it. Or else it was carried back to Wexland in secret.

OSR: The Biggest Aspidistra in the World V2

I've updated this old one-page dungeon with new photo-composite art. You can download the PDF here.

It's less of a dungeon and more of a social challenge. The real fun is a) getting three uncooperative people out of a tree and b) figuring out exciting new ways to make money from the situation.

OSR: Reasons to Visit Endon

General Reasons

Endon is the place to:

• Buy the latest fashions
.
• Buy the most potent weapons
.
• Meet the most elegant, refined, beautiful, seductive, poetic, educated, etc. people.
• Meet people from any part of the world.

• Sell magic items for the most money
.
• Get leads on the most profitable ventures.

Sean Andrew Murray

Classes

Alchemists/Artificers/Tinkerers

1. Your skills are in high demand in Endon.
2. Your obscure traditions might provide new insights.
3. Your projects could take an enormous leap forward by standing on Endon's shoulders.
4. A mentor, tutor, or ally has asked for a report on state-of-the art magical industry.

Barbarians/Warlords

1. Endon has the best swords.
2. If you play your cards right the people of Endon will treat you like a foreign prince.
3. It's a good idea to scout a city before you raise a horde and burn it to the ground.
4. All the comforts of the world can be bought in Endon.

Bards 

1. It's not just a city, it's the city! The Big Gryphon! The City That Sleeps With One Eye Open! If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
2. Your style of music might become fashionable.
3. Perhaps you could infiltrate the Monarch's social set and find a royal patron.
4. Enchanted instruments and music are underdeveloped in Endon.

Clerics/Exorcists//Mystics

1. You received a divine apocalyptic vision. The details were fuzzy but Endon was definitely involved.
2. Endon is largely without faith. You could make many converts.
3. Holy books have a lot to say about cities that aspire to godlike powers. Someone ought to warn them.
4. A senior religious figure from your order was invited to participate in an ecumenical debate on necromancy. You were sent instead.

Druids 

1. The balance between nature and civilization has gone to hell, to put it mildly. Endon is to blame. You're sure it will all end in tears.
2. The unhappy spirits of rare animals are drifting across the land. How did they get here?
3. Some wizards dug up your order's ancient standings stones and carted them away to use as magic-resistant gravel. Get revenge.
4. If there's one place a new kind of urban druid could emerge, it's Endon.

Fighters 

1. Endon's army is notoriously professional. Joining them, even on paper, would enhance your reputation.
2. For a price, wizards in Endon will forge custom weapons of awe-inspiring power.
3. A local ruler, worried about a rising power, asked you to send reports on Endon's progress.
4. It's never too early to work on a comfortable genteel retirement.

Monks

1. Where better to test your detachment from material wealth than the wealthiest city in the world?
2. Some eccentric wizards believe the human body is capable of unconscious spellcasting. 
3. Endon is twisting the hidden fabric of fate. Something momentous will happen here.
4. Your order has ancient and powerful enemies. Could they be hiding in Endon?

Paladins

1. Something is wrong with the system. Endon prospers; her people suffer. Right wrongs.
2. You received direct divine orders. Something will happen in Endon. Not right away, but soon. Stand by for further instructions.
3. Powers in opposition to your faith seek to use Endon's prosperity for their own purposes. Thwart them. 
4. Charity goes far in Endon, yet Endon's power could raise the living standards of the whole world.

Rangers 

1. Rare animals and their handlers are fashionable in Endon.
2. Your quarry hides in the most turbulent city in the world. 
3. If you need a very specific kind of weapon or poison, Endon can supply it.
4. The spells you learn are rarely studied or industrialized. Perhaps there's an opportunity to revolutionize a field.

Sorcerers

1. Paltry wizards and bookworm mages have no idea what true power is. You can show them.
2. Endon's industries are slowly drawing raw magic out of the rest of the world and dumping it into the local environment. Sorcerers feel it first. 
3. The air in Endon is saturated with raw magic. Your abilities may be enhanced.
4. You are a living and stable magic battery. You can find employment anywhere.

Thieves/Rogues/Assassins

1. There's a lot to steal in the richest city in the world.
2. Assassinations are unfashionable in Endon but someone will always want someone dead.
3. Using the minor magic items Endon produces in unexpected ways could make someone very wealthy.
4. It's a good idea to make contact with potential buyers before you raid a tomb or dungeon.

Warlocks

1. You are drawn to power; Endon is very powerful. Any need can be satisfied.
2. Many desperate or ambitious souls in Endon can resist anything but temptation.
3. Your patron may want to nudge Endon towards a spectacular end or steer it away from an unripe apocalypse.
4. If you regret your pact, the key to breaking it may lie in Endon.

Wizards/Magic-Users

The reasons should be obvious, but just in case:

1. Study at Loxdon College, now the most famous magic university in the world.
2. Learn peerless spells, breed new ones, or conduct magic experiments.
3. Develop entirely new magical industries.
4. Become famous or infamous.

Book Notes: The Proud Tower

Endon, the city-state at the core of Magical Industrial Revolution, is designed to be dropped into generic medieval-ish settings without too much disruption. There are no far-flung colonies and ancient historical facts to contend with. It's very focused. I've left out colonialism, state religion, adjacent ancient and integrated kingdoms, and many more things in order to focus on magic, industry, and the heart of the city.

The Proud Tower, Barbara W. Tuchman's collection of essays on the world before the Great War, is an excellent book. The essays are brilliant, self-contained, and endlessly re-readable. As a book it's less coherent than A Distant Mirror or The Guns of August, but it's full of wonderful details and insights. You can it online here. For the purposes of D&D I'm going to stick to selections from chapters 1 and 7.

One of Tuchman's gifts is sketching a person or event from a few well-chosen details or anecdotes, and the aristocrats of Great Britain provided endless material.

The last government in the Western world to possess all the attributes of aristocracy in working condition took office in England in June of 1895. Great Britain was at the zenith of empire when the Conservatives won the General Election of that year, and the Cabinet they formed was her superb and resplendent image. Its members represented the greater landowners of the country who had been accustomed to govern for generations. As its superior citizens they felt they owed a duty to the State to guard its interests and manage its affairs. They governed from duty, heritage and habit—and, as they saw it, from right.

The Prime Minister was a Marquess and lineal descendant of the father and son who had been chief ministers to Queen Elizabeth and James I. The Secretary for War was another Marquess who traced his inferior title of Baron back to the year 1181, whose great-grandfather had been Prime Minister under George III and whose grandfather had served in six cabinets under three reigns. The Lord President of the Council was a Duke who owned 186,000 acres in eleven counties, whose ancestors had served in government since the Fourteenth Century, who had himself served thirty-four years in the House of Commons and three times refused to be Prime Minister. The Secretary for India was the son of another Duke whose family seat was received in 1315 by grant from Robert the Bruce and who had four sons serving in Parliament at the same time. The President of the Local Government Board was a pre-eminent country squire who had a Duke for brother-in-law, a Marquess for son-in-law, an ancestor who had been Lord Mayor of London in the reign of Charles II, and who had himself been a Member of Parliament for twenty-seven years. The Lord Chancellor bore a family name brought to England by a Norman follower of William the Conqueror and maintained thereafter over eight centuries without a title. The Lord Lieutenant for Ireland was an Earl, a grandnephew of the Duke of Wellington and a hereditary trustee of the British Museum. The Cabinet also included a Viscount, three Barons and two Baronets. Of its six commoners, one was a director of the Bank of England, one was a squire whose family had represented the same county in Parliament since the Sixteenth Century, one—who acted as Leader of the House of Commons—was the Prime Minister’s nephew and inheritor of a Scottish fortune of £4,000,000, and one, a notable and disturbing cuckoo in the nest, was a Birmingham manufacturer widely regarded as the most successful man in England.

Besides riches, rank, broad acres and ancient lineage, the new Government also possessed, to the regret of the Liberal Opposition and in the words of one of them, “an almost embarrassing wealth of talent and capacity.” Secure in authority, resting comfortably on their electoral majority in the House of Commons and on a permanent majority in the House of Lords, of whom four-fifths were Conservatives, they were in a position, admitted the same opponent, “of unassailable strength.”

[...]

Lord Salisbury was both the epitome of his class and uncharacteristic of it—except insofar as the freedom to be different was a class characteristic. He was six feet four inches tall, and as a young man had been thin, ungainly, stooping and shortsighted, with hair unusually black for an Englishman. Now sixty-five, his youthful lankiness had turned to bulk, his shoulders had grown massive and more stooped than ever, and his heavy bald head with full curly gray beard rested on them as if weighted down. Melancholy, intensely intellectual, subject to sleepwalking and fits of depression which he called “nerve storms,” caustic, tactless, absent-minded, bored by society and fond of solitude, with a penetrating, skeptical, questioning mind, he had been called the Hamlet of English politics. He was above the conventions and refused to live in Downing Street. His devotion was to religion, his interest in science. In his own home he attended private chapel every morning before breakfast, and had fitted up a chemical laboratory where he conducted solitary experiments. He harnessed the river at Hatfield for an electric power plant on his estate and strung up along the old beams of his home one of England’s first electric light systems, at which his family threw cushions when the wires sparked and sputtered while they went on talking and arguing, a customary occupation of the Cecils.

Lord Salisbury cared nothing for sport and little for people. His aloofness was enhanced by shortsightedness so intense that he once failed to recognize a member of his own Cabinet, and once, his own butler. At the close of the Boer War he picked up a signed photograph of King Edward and, gazing at it pensively, remarked, “Poor Buller [referring to the Commander-in-Chief at the start of the war], what a mess he made of it.” On another occasion he was seen in prolonged military conversation with a minor peer under the impression that he was talking to Field Marshal Lord Roberts.

[...]His acquaintance with games was confined to tennis, but when elderly he invented his own form of exercise, which consisted in riding a tricycle through St. James’s Park in the early mornings or along paths cemented for the purpose in the park of his estate at Hatfield. Wearing for the occasion a kind of sombrero hat and a short sleeveless cloak with a hole in the middle in which he resembled a monk, he would be accompanied by a young coachman to push him up the hills. At the downhill slopes, the young man would be told to “jump on behind,” and the Prime Minister, with the coachman’s hands on his shoulders, would roll away, cloak flying and pedals whirring.

[...]

A stubby Pickwickian figure with short legs, red cheeks, white tufts of hair over his ears and a humorous expression, Lord Halsbury, despite his genial manner, was a hard opponent, implacable at the bar, with a relentless memory. He wore a frock coat, a square-topped derby hat, a “true blue” Tory tie and, according to a younger member of the Upper House, “invariably objected on principle to all change.” Owing to meagre family finances, he had been educated at home by his father, a barrister and editor of a high Tory daily paper, the Standard, who gave him lessons in Greek, Latin and Hebrew until 4 A.M. and was so upright that he refused an offer from the Duke of Newcastle, an admirer of his paper, to put his three sons through Oxford.

[...]
 
Spencer Compton Cavendish, eighth Duke of Devonshire, [was] probably the only man in England both secure enough and careless enough to forget an engagement with his sovereign. Edward VII, having informed the Duke that he proposed to dine quietly with him at Devonshire House on a certain day, duly arrived, to the consternation of the household, for the Duke was not at home and had to be hurriedly retrieved from the Turf Club.

[...]

...all year the house was open to the public, who tramped through the halls in thousands. The Duke liked to watch them, and thinking his face as unknown to them as theirs to him, would stand, unconscious of being recognized, “wondering why the housemaid who acted as guide and the whole party had suddenly stood still and were staring at him.” Though racehorses were more to him than books, he once astonished his librarian who was showing him his own first edition of Paradise Lost by sitting down and reading it aloud from the first line with simple pleasure, until the Duchess came in and, poking the Duke with her parasol, remarked, “If he reads poetry he will never go for his walk.”

[...]

He liked old baggy, casual clothes, never took the slightest trouble with his guests, deliberately ignored those who might prove tiresome, and once, when a speaker in the House of Lords was declaiming on “the greatest moments in life,” the Duke opened his eyes long enough to remark to his neighbor, “My greatest moment was when my pig won first prize at Skipton Fair.”
[...]
Arthur Balfour, prince of the Cecil line, nephew of the Prime Minister and his political heir apparent, artist of debate and idol of Society, was the paragon of his party and its official Leader in the House of Commons. He was forty-seven in 1895 and, when his uncle retired in 1902, was to succeed him as Prime Minister. Over six feet tall, he had blue eyes, waving brown hair and moustache, and a soft, bland face that might have seemed vulnerable if it had not been smoothed to an external serenity. His expression was gentle, his figure willowy, his manner nonchalant, but there remained a mystery in his face. No one could tell what banked fires burned behind it or whether they burned or even if they existed. Rarely seen to sit upright, he reclined in indolent attitudes as close to the horizontal as possible, “as if to discover,” wrote Punch’s parliamentary correspondent, “how nearly he could sit on his shoulder blades.”

[...]

Balfour was careless of facts, unsafe with figures, and memory was not his strong point, but he surmounted this weakness by a technique that never failed to amuse the House. When dealing with a complicated bill he would take care to be flanked by a knowledgeable minister such as the Home Secretary or Attorney-General, and if he floundered over details his colleague could whisper a correction. As described by Sir Henry Lucy, parliamentary correspondent of Punch, Mr. Balfour would pause, regard the colleague with a friendly glance tinged with gentle admonition, and say, “Exactly.” At the next mistake and whispered correction, he would repeat the performance with a sterner note in his “Exactly,” conveying the impression that there was a limit to toleration in these matters and the colleague could be forgiven once but he really must not go on blundering.

[...]

One of Lord Salisbury’s nephews, Cecil Balfour, disappeared to Australia, over an affair of a forged check, and died there, it was said, of drink.

"Remittance Men" were reasonably common in the history of the region where I grew up, inspiring tall tales, speculation, and endless mirth. A few went on perilous expeditions and maintained legendary unflappable calm in the worst possible conditions. More games should include options for remittance men.

Horses, too, are often overlooked.

[...]

Owning a stud and breeding racehorses required an ample fortune. When Lord Rosebery, having married a Rothschild, won the Derby while Prime Minister in 1894, he received a telegram from Chauncey Depew in America, “Only heaven left.” Depew’s telegram proved an underestimate, for Rosebery won the Derby twice more, in 1895 and 1905. The Prince of Wales won it in 1896 with his great lengthy bay Persimmon, bred at his own stud, again in 1900 with Persimmon’s brother Diamond Jubilee, and a third time, as King, in 1909 with Minoru. As the first such victory by a reigning monarch, it was Epsom’s greatest day. When the purple, scarlet and gold of the royal colors came to the front at Tattenham Corner the crowd roared; when Minoru neck and neck with his rival battled it out at a furious pace along the rails they went mad with excitement and wept with delight when he won by a head. They broke through the ropes, patted the King on the back, wrung his hand, and “even policemen were waving their helmets and cheering themselves hoarse.”

It was said of Mr. Knox, private chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, that he wore boots and spurs under his cassock and surplice and “thought of horses even in the pulpit.” The Duke’s family could always tell by the speed of morning prayers if Mr. Knox were hunting that day or not.

[...]

In their luxurious and lavish world, self-indulgence was the natural law. Notable eccentrics like the nocturnal Duke of Portland and bad-tempered autocrats like Sir George Sitwell and Sir William Eden were merely representatives of their class in whom the habit of having their own way had gone to extremes. But for the majority it was easy to be agreeable when everything was done to keep them in comfort and ease and to make life for the great and wealthy as uninterruptedly pleasant as possible.

"Nocturnal" doesn't come close to describing the Duke of Portland. He stripped all the furniture from his ancestral home, painted the walls a specific shade of pink, constructed an enormous underground labyrinth (refusing to speak to or acknowledge the builders), kept a chicken roasting at all hours, fled from visitors and guests, and... well, just read the wiki article.

Sir George Sitwell traveled with an enormous medicine case full of mislabeled cures. He kept seven studies full of disorganized notes, invented all sorts of slightly baffling and unpopular things, and loathed being contradicted. He was so overbearing that his children invented a mythical yacht and pretended to take long sea voyages to avoid his near-daily letters.

Sir William Eden appears to have merely been cantankerous, irritable, and depressive.

Chapter 7 covers the start of an era outside the scope of Magical Industrial Revolution. The facts below are similar but the need to act on them hasn't reached the halls of power.

Investigations and reports appearing all at once after 1900 made harshly visible the fact and the consequences of extreme inequality in possession of material goods. ...Evidence accumulated that the richest country in the world rested on a foundation of one-third of its population living “in chronic poverty, unable to satisfy the primal needs of animal life.” Chiozza Money showed that economic inequality was particularly wide in England. In France, whose population was about the same, there were twice as many small estates between £500 and £10,000 as in England, but in the United Kingdom three times as many large estates over £50,000 and four times as many over £250,000 as in France.

The investigators produced the facts: sleep, diet, sanitation, privacy, even respiratory air, were inadequate for basic human needs. Professor Huxley had calculated that 800 cubic feet of air space per person was the ideal. Even the Poor House provided 300. In the slums people lived three to a bedroom of 700 cubic feet or, with children, eight and nine in a space of 1,200 cubic feet. Vermin lived with them, a piece of paper on the floor served as a toilet, fish on Sundays was the weekly protein for a family of eight, at two and a half ounces per portion. Children were stunted and pale, with rotting teeth, and if they went to school, sat dully at their desks or fell asleep. Ignorance and apathy as much as ill health were poverty’s product; the slums were sloughs of wasted lives. Overcrowding in country villages was often as bad. In an Oxfordshire cottage a family of eight slept in two beds with a pair of thin blankets among them, in a Yorkshire cottage husband and wife and five daughters shared two beds and an attic floor, in Somerset a mother and three children slept in one room, five children of both sexes up to the age of nineteen in another.
For unskilled and unorganized labour, working conditions matched the slums. At the Shawfield Chemical Works in Glasgow in 1897, year of the Diamond Jubilee, workmen received 3d. or 4d. an hour for a twelve-hour day, seven days a week, spent amid poisonous vapors without a lunch-hour rest. They ate lunch standing at the furnaces and if they took Sunday off were fined the next day’s wages. Lord Overtoun, owner of the Works, a philanthropist who gave £10,000 a year to charity, was a leading member of the Sunday Observance and Sunday Rest Societies. In other industries workers could be arrested for taking a day off without permission. If they applied for it, the request could be refused; if they took it anyway they could be, and often were, hauled off to a day in gaol. Skilled workers organized in England’s craft unions, the oldest in Europe, were better off. Numbering about one-fifth of all adult male workers, a larger proportion than in any other country, they had their own insurance and pension systems backed by large funds and they benefited from lower prices in their own cooperatives. Nevertheless, vis-à-vis capital, they were still on the defensive and the dark persistent presence of unemployment at their backs made them vulnerable.
England’s economy since 1900 had recovered from the depression of the nineties and was on the whole prosperous, active and expanding. Shippers and shipbuilders, bankers and millowners were busy, coal mines were operating to capacity, and although in chemical, electrical and other new industries the British were not as enterprising as some foreign competitors, most businesses, despite ups and downs, were doing well. Yet the gap in distribution of profits was growing not less but greater. While the rich lived at an acme of luxury and leisure, the purchasing power of wages was falling and human material deteriorating. The minimum height for recruits for the British Army was lowered from five feet three inches in 1883 to five feet in 1900.

Something was wrong with the system. Somehow the great mechanical and material achievements of the recent past had twisted society out of shape.