Upon the Matter of Britain
Dec. 11th, 2014 05:27 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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deathtocapslockBy “matter,” of course, I mean earth. Land. Which is to say, geography.
You thought I meant something else?
I’ve been re-reading Whitehound’s series of essays “Location, Location,” relating Potterverse places to the real geography of Britain. She analyzes the London Underground maps and counts the number of stops in canon between Grimmauld Place to Harry’s hearing to figure out just where in London the Ministry is located, looks at the probable route Hagrid flew on Sirius’s motorbike the night he took Harry to the Dursleys, and so forth. If you like maps and speculation, you’ll thoroughly enjoy her work.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I thought I’d show my appreciation by adding some further (and further out) speculations on the geography of the Potterverse. Specifically, I’m interested in patterns of magical settlement.
I’ll start by summarizing several of Whitehound’s conclusions.
From canon we know there is exactly one all-magical village in the UK (Hogsmeade in Scotland, protected by Hogwarts Castle) and at least four long-time mixed ones: Upper Flagley, in Yorkshire; Tinworth, in Cornwall; Ottery St. Catchpole, “on the south coast of England,” and Godric’s Hollow, burial place to Ignotus Peverell, home at various times to Bagshots, Dumbledores, and Potters.
Whitehound hasn’t much to say about Upper Flagley, except that it implies a Lower Flagley and might well be both near Little Hangleton and in south Yorkshire. Tinworth, however, she’s able (by virtue of Shell Cottage’s sunrise over open water) to isolate to along the southern coast of Cornwall, most likely either a little southwest or a little east of Falmouth. Ottery St. Catchpole is in Devon on the river Otter, either in place of the real-life Otterton or a little up the river by Honiton, and the Chudley Cannons, named after the nearby Chudleigh, are Ron’s favorites because they’re his home team. Whitehound places Godric’s Hollow in north Somerset on the shore of the Bristol Channel (aka the Severn Sea), probably near Weston-Super-Mare.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the map of Britain, the Severn Sea is the body of water separating Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset from Wales. The Severn River opens into it at (more or less) Bristol, the major seaport. Meanwhile, the “West Country,” traditionally associated with ancient magic and/or Arthurian legend, comprises Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and usually also the counties of Gloucestershire (the county drained by the Severn and including its estuary; it borders on Wales, and contains the Forest of Dean and part of the Cotswolds) and Wiltshire (between Gloucestershire and Dorset, and containing the Salisbury Plain with Stonehenge, Avesbury, and several prehistoric chalk horses).
Oh, and Gloucestershire in the West Country also contains a certain small village near the Forest of Dean, just on the opposite bank of the Wye from the Welsh city and castle of Chepstow, about two miles from the Wye’s confluence with the Severn, between the villages of Sedbury and Woodcroft. Named Tutshill. Home of JKR as a girl; Sedbury is where Jo attended Wyedean School, where she was elected Head Girl, and where she had a Chemistry master she seems to have taken a dislike to (apparently the man had the nerve to expect her to work).
Tom’s Horcrux cave Whitehound places either in Wales, near Porth Clais (the best match for the physical description of those sheer black cliffs), or in Dorset, if we think the orphans were only on a day trip (Porth Clais was far enough that it would have been better as an overnighter) and will accept gray shale as appearing black to Harry.
Okay. I’m going to start by adding another magical residence to the West Country: Malfoy Manor, which canon says is in Wiltshire. Plus, of course, whatever satellites of the Malfoys may live near there—the junior Crabbe and Goyle really do come off a bit as hereditary minions, don’t they? But we needn’t insist on that.
But what I want to look at next is something I would never, on my own, have particularly considered. Except that one of Jana’s snide comments about (the lack of) Wizarding culture made me realize that damn near the WW’s only unifying cultural expression seems to be—shudder—a violent and pointless game.
(Hey, I’m American, and I grew up in a small town. I attended EVERY SINGLE ONE of our school team’s home football games, and I couldn’t then and cannot now tell you even one of the rules—though I remember some of the cheers. I can’t even tell you how many boys are on a team! One went, and rooted for The Team, and cheered when everyone else did, because that’s what one did. Later, when I lived in subcultures that threw “Superbowl Parties,” I attended. Sports as cultural unification, you betcha!)
So. Let’s consider the professional Quidditch teams in the U.K. League.
In particular, let’s consider the fact that each team—even the UK’s sole witches-only team—is associated with a specific place. And people have favorites. And in at least some cases (Ron) the favorite is the “local” team, even if it doesn’t bear the name of your own part-wizarding village.
Furthermore, the teams in the League have been playing—presumably, under a variant of the same name, and probably associated—officially at least—with the same city—since 1674. Fifteen years before Seclusion was imposed, and if you read the HPL’s Handbook of Quidditch, it’s obvious that imposing the Quidditch League was a necessary precursor.
Because the Council of Wizards had been screaming—excuse me, legislating—since the mid-fourteenth century that Quidditch must not be played within 50—no, 100! miles of a Muggle town, and their legislation clearly hadn’t succeeded in suppressing Quidditch-playing where Muggles might see. But restricting play to a league, and that League’s playing to within designated Muggle-proofed pitches, would.
With, of course, soon thereafter, amateurs playing pick-me-up games being held legally culpable if any breaches of the Statute of Secrecy resulted.
Only, see, if you have to narrow that passion for a sport down to the favored few professional teams that make up the new League, the new League really pretty much has to include teams that represent every major center of Wizarding population in the nation. To give every major group at least one team it can feel to be its own.
For example, 1674 was only mere score of years after Cromwell’s “pacification” of Ireland, and conversely, only thirty-three years after some patriots had executed some Ulster invaders (or some Catholic beasts had ravened among Protestant martyrs, take your pick). Imagine asking the Irish Catholics to root for a NORTHERN Irish team, or asking the righteous Ulstermen to support a Southern, Catholic, one. Just… no.
Hence, the Kenmare Kestrals AND the Ballyhoo Bats. The League was pretty much required to have two teams (at least) representing the island of Eire.
The magical population of London is a bit of a special case, since no team can play within a hundred miles of it anyhow. Not since 1368.
On the other hand, per the chocolate frog cards, Ignatia Wildsmith invented Floo Powder around the late twelve-hundreds. After the Floo network was developed, employment in the London Alleys (and in the Ministry when it was created, and in St. Mungo’s when it was moved from Hogwarts to London) was probably mostly commuter jobs for the middle and upper classes, as we saw with Arthur Weasley and Amos Diggory. Why raise your children in a stinking, constricted city, where you had to worry about Muggles seeing their accidental magic, if it was easy to raise them in the isolated countryside, and commute instantaneously to a day job? So, I think it likely that the development of the Floo network caused a Wizarding diaspora, with not many people who could afford daily Flooing (and very few of those with family) choosing to live in London full-time.
One wonders how the widespread—indeed, eventually apparently universal—adoption of this technology affected Wizarding culture.
Hmm. It was in the mid 1300’s—after Floo powder had been invented—that the Wizard’s Council felt able to demand that Quidditch be played only “away from Muggle towns.” Before then, perhaps this wouldn’t have been a “reasonable restriction.”
But even with Flooing being established well before the seventeenth century, I think we can assume that a lot of sports-mad wizards and witches rooted largely for their local Quidditch teams, and would have felt hard-done-by had their local been disbanded entirely rather than, say, merged with another.
Which means that an analysis of the distribution of Quidditch teams in 1674 should give us something of a snapshot of the distribution of witches and wizards in the U.K., in the decades immediately preceding Separation. We should gain at least some idea of the geographic locations of the wizards and witches whose descendents, three centuries later, could flaunt themselves as Purebloods.
We’ve already pointed out that London couldn’t have a truly local team—there’s that hundred-mile law passed way back in 1368.
However, Whitehound, analyzing possible Horcrux-cave locations, suggested Kemmeridge, Dorset (even though its cliffs were gray, not black) specifically because it was only around 100 miles from London, and thus (of all the possibilities) was the easiest day trip for Tom’s orphanage. Which, of course, makes the Wimbourne Wasps, based out of Wimborne Manor east of Kemmeridge, the Quidditch team (most) local to London.
What about Scotland? There are three Scottish teams, and not a one of them is in the Highlands. The Montrose Magpies are on the East Coast, in the Lowlands (culturally distinct, speaking Scots rather than Gaelic); the Pride of Portree is based in the (Gaelic) Hebrides, and the Wigtown Wanderers are based out of (Gaelic) Galloway, in the west, but south near the border with England.
Well, the Scottish Highlands had their own bloody and embarrassingly stupid sport, with a Gaelic name I can’t recall—finally banned by the Ministry in the late 1700’s, during the height of the Highland Clearances, so there probably weren’t many Highland Gaels with the heart or the time to try to organize a Highlands Quidditch team instead and try to shoehorn it into the League.
But that leaves Hogsmeade as an orphan. The only all-wizard village within the entire UK—surely it has its own Quidditch team? Not apparently, or at least not anymore.
(Of course, consider for a moment what the effect would be on students like Ron and Harry and Oliver, if a professional Quidditch team were forever practicing on the Hogwarts Pitch, or even doing so a half-mile away in Hogsmeade if only one could sneak away to watch them…. Hogwarts predates Quidditch fever, and I think the school eventually insisted that there not be an adult team TOO close—too distracting.)
But Whitehound’s analysis of the physical location of Hogwarts came up with TWO possible solutions to the problem: one in the Galloway Hills, one in the (north) West Highlands. The first better matched canon’s description of the local flora and linguistic evidence, but Whitehound decided provisionally on the second. Largely because she could see no reason, if Hogwarts were in Galloway, for the Hogwarts Express to have taken so very long to reach Hogsmeade Station as canon showed it did.
But we’ve independently come up with an explanation for that—yes, the Hogwarts “Express” would certainly have slowed to under 50 mph on the last stretch of its journey, if that was necessary to ensure the students arrive after dark, fasting, and disoriented. Given that, the Galloway Hills location might be given the preference. In which case the Wigtown Wanderers, a little downhill and easily accessible by broom, could be the Hogsmeade local team. Or, more probably, it became so in 1674 when the Hogsmeade local team was merged with them, probably after intensive lobbying of the then-Hogwarts head that was sick of the students’ Quidditch distraction. (Minerva, it need not be said, would have lobbied for the opposite….)
If you prefer the West Highlands location, however, you may apply the same argument to the Pride of Portree—that the Hogsmeade locals were assimilated into that team (since Skye would not be that far by broom, and no distance by Floo).
Well. We’ve got two teams for Ireland, north and south, three ringing Scotland (one for the Scots, one for the Gaels, and one for Hogsmeade), one in Dorset (London’s home team) and one in Devon (near Ottery St. Catchpole). Where are the other teams based?
One is in Cornwall, the Falmouth Falcons, near the Wizarding enclave of Tinworth. One is in North Wales, on the Irish Sea—Holywell, on (actually, off) the island of Anglesey. (The all-witch Harpies, no less—was it founded, in 1203, as a nunnery’s team?) Another is in South Wales, on the Severn estuary, the Caerphilly Catapults. Founded in 1402—during Owain Glyndwr’s eventually-unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of Wales from English hands. The last instantly-identifiable team is the Tutshill Tornados—we’ve already mentioned Tutshill, in the West Country on the Welsh border, in the Severn drainage basin near the Forest of Dean.
But we still have two Quidditch teams whose place names point to ambiguous referents. The Appleby Arrows might be named after any of three villages. One is in Lincolnshire, not far from the estuary of the Humber, and quite close to the border with Yorkshire. It’s a distinct possibility, especially as that might put it close to Upper Flagley. (And for those who want to consider such extra-canonical considerations as authorial intent, north Lincolnshire hosts an RAF exhibition team known as the “Red Arrows”. If JKR knew about it, that’s the sort of joke she might pull.)
The second is Appleby Magna, in Leicestershire, in the middle of England. It is, intriguingly, close to the old border between Mercia and the Danelaw. Borders are always interesting, so if the Arrows had been one of the first teams founded, I’d seriously consider it.
Only, it wasn’t. The Arrows are, in fact, the latest team in the League whose founding is specified in QttA—1612, a mere sixty-two years before the League was formed.
Which is extremely odd. If Appleby—where ever it may be located—had resisted Quidditch fever for half a millennium, why did it suddenly succumb? And when it did, how did it manage to make itself one of the top thirteen teams in the country in a mere sixty years, that it should make the cut and be kept when most of the amateur teams were dissolved?
How about, Appleby succumbed to Quidditch fever in 1612 because it was settled (by magical folk) in 1612? And the team became so good so fast because it was in fact an established team, relocated?
The refugees from that 1612 disaster in the Ribble Valley (where, essentially, a cat-fight between two families of witches on Pendle Hill escalated into the most lethal witch-hunt in England in centuries) had to go somewhere, after all.
And the third Appleby (since 1974 designated as Appleby-in-Westmorland) is in a remote area of what’s now called Cumbria. Just over a corner of the Pennines from Pendle Hill and (importantly) in a different County from Pendle and Samlesbury, and in a river valley draining (oriented, in all senses) in a completely different direction.
Any Muggle family fleeing trouble in the Ribble Valley would naturally head down the river to Preston and then turn north or south from there. To get to Appleby by that route, they’d have to take a ship north along the Irish Sea to the Firth of Solway, then a boat backtracking up the Eden River from Carlisle. By road, one might trudge over the Pennines towards Carlisle and branch off. Either way, a lengthy trip, and an expensive and difficult one, making Appleby an unlikely spot to choose for relocation. Or to look for refugees.
But as the crow flies—or the broom—Appleby is about eighty kilometers north and a touch west of Pendle; due north of Samlesbury. Any halfway decent flyer could scout out possible locations over the hills quite easily. Once a suitable place and a cover story were established, it would just be a matter of getting the Floo connected to bring in the family and possessions. Or transport everyone by broom, if the family is too poor for Floo powder. And then Confund the new neighbors a bit….
And best of all, if things went sour in the new place, one could simply fly north, following the Eden River to the Firth, cross it to Galloway, and find a refuge in Scotland in the Muggle-proof magical fortress there. Which would not be the first choice by any means, since the economic competition would be fiercely resented by the Hogsmeade locals, but it would be nice to have that option available, if the alternative were being smoked out like rats by the Muggles…. I rather feel that positioning their families with easy access to a place of ultimate refuge might have been a priority of the materfamiliae at that point.
Now, the Lincolnshire Appleby is also possible to imagine as a resettlement of the Ribble survivors—it’s not that far away either. But. That Appleby is significantly farther than the one in Westmoreland—about half again as far. In a car on a freeway, that wouldn’t be much (by Apparition or Floo, there would be no difference at all) but by many other modes of transport, including brooms over open country, the difference would be significant.
Worse, that Appleby is in the wrong direction for refugees looking for isolation. Flying through the Pennine Gap would first take one over the cities of Bradshaw and Leeds, then into country which is rural and secluded, sure, but less so than the Ribble Valley. Whereas relocating to the Eden Valley would have one flying north solely over mountains and moving from the relatively remote and inaccessible headwaters of one river basin to that of one even more so (Eden district is the least densely populated in England).
Oh, and if Upper Flagley were in the West Riding, it might be quite near—as the broom flies—to the Eden Valley.
So, yeah, I think the Appleby forming the Arrows in 1612 is probably the one in what’s now called Cumbria, just east of the Lakes District and not far from the border with west Scotland.
Oddly enough, the Lakes District was also one of the obvious choices for the earliest (1193) team, now called Puddlemere United. If you want to find somewhere in England with several Meres in close proximity, it’s the obvious place to look. However, the “Puddle” in the name weighed against that when I looked more closely. “Meres” are lakes, but the term is usually reserved for very shallow lakes. Windermere and the other Lake District “meres” are really ribbon lakes or tarns, and are far too deep to be fairly described as puddles.
So, where else in England would one find several meres in close proximity? Well, there’s a village called Mere in—Wiltshire. That sounded interesting, but the village is not described as having a mess of real meres nearby. Then there’s another village called Mere in Cheshire. Now, Cheshire is apparently pocked with kettle-hole meres. That sounded quite promising. Or then there’s the fen country—before it was drained (therefore certainly back in 1193), it would have had many shallow lakes and seasonal sheets of water. And we know that Norfolk at least fielded a referee in 1357….
But then I read about Ellesmere in Shropshire. A market town near Owestry notable for its close proximity to no fewer than nine meres—Blakemere, Kettlemere, Hanmer Mere, and Whitemere being among the other eight. Home of Ellesmere Castle, built by one Roger de Montgomerie (the Montgomery sisters were Hogwarts students mentioned in HBP 22). Given by Henry II to a … William Peverel. Later rebuilt by one John LeStrange.
I think we’ve found it. But what’s really interesting is that if these nine meres were the Puddles of Puddlemere United, then at the time the team was founded—1193, remember?—Ellesmere was, in fact, in the hands of the Welsh. The Welsh kingdom of Powys had managed to take back some of its old border lands in western Shropshire in 1140, and held onto this castle for about a century. And those meres themselves—some are now considered to lie in Shropshire, some across the border in Wales. So this team may have been founded as an all-Welsh team, and then become a mixed Welsh-English one, and that’s when it was given a rather disparaging nickname, subsequently adopted with pride.
Can we try to locate one last community associated with a famous magical family? Where did the Dumbledores live before Kendra moved them to Godric’s Hollow? Where is Mould-on-the-Wold? Well, wolds are high open limestone or chalk hills. There are well-known Wolds in Yorkshire and in Lincolnshire. But of course the Cotswolds are the most famous of the wolds. And in the Cotwolds, in Gloucestershire, in the Severn drainage basin about twenty miles from the Forest of Dean, there’s a hill called Dumbleton Hill with the village Dumbleton at its base. Oh, and by the way, the surname Dumble, by itself, is apparently the Anglicization of the original Norman name “Dunville” or “de Donville” (one of the towns from which William the Bastard drew some of his troops). You know, like the name Gaunt comes from the city Ghent (where “John of” was born).
(Of course we know Jo really got Bumblebore’s surname from bees, not from a hill not that far from where she lived as a teen. An amusing reflection on that is that “dumbledore” was a name for two different insects—the bumblebee and the cockchafer, a really quite nasty agricultural pest that spends most of its life doing subterranean damage—by the time it emerges and you can see it for what it is, it’s too late…..)
All right, back to the matter of Britain. We’ve tentatively located the thirteen teams throughout the U.K., and I’ve proposed that their geographic distribution should bear some rough relationship to the geographic distribution of the Wizarding population at the time of the League’s formation (1674).
So it’s curious that 2/3 of the Quidditch teams are in the Celtic countries fringing England proper, and if my reasoning is correct, ALL of the English ones are close to those borders—with the team for the London population, the Wimbourne Wasps, located in Dorset—which is still considered to be in “the West Country” long associated with old magic. Even if you try picking the furthest flung other locations for the two ambiguous teams, in fact, the best you can manage is, say, Norfolk for the “meres” team and either the Midlands or far north Lincolnshire for the Arrows.
Plus, of course, canon mentions that “mixed” community in Yorkshire (which may or may not be close to the Appleby of the Arrows).
But that’s an odd distribution. Does that really mean that the magical population was concentrated, in 1674 on the fringes of the United (supposedly) Kingdoms? That’s quite far from the overall (Muggle) population distribution.
Well—that would actually make sense. Britain’s history, after all, from pre-history through medieval times, was a history of repeated invasions, each overlaying the earlier ones with its own language and culture in the areas it took over. The English language is largely the language of the second-to-last wave—the Anglo-Saxons—(who formed the bulk of the population in the lowlands) overlaid with borrowings from the French of the new Norman overlords. And England was named for the Angles, while Britain was named—by the Romans—for the Celts who’d been the invaders before the Romans. The Picts were displaced by the Celts were conquered by the Romans, who withdrew and then the wild Saxons and Angles and Vikings started invading… and finally the last big one, the Norman Conquest. With each successful wave of raids and conquests, the earlier invaders (natives, to the newest wave, and by then probably to themselves) were pushed back into the wilder, more remote, mountainous, more defensible but less arable (and largely less desirable), corners of the country.
Indeed, consider the “matter of Britain”: the Arthurian cycle. It’s is the story of a Romanized Celtic king holding back the heathen Saxon conquest for a handful of golden years of civilization before the dark.
Moreover, the Arthurian tales came out of the west of England—Merlinus, or Merlin, is the Latinized and Norman gloss for old Myrddin Emrys, as Welsh a wizard as you could hope to find. Artos or Arturius was claimed to be a descendent of Macsen Wledig—Magnus Maximus, would-be Emperor of Rome—and to have been conceived in Tintagel on the Severn Sea, to have held as his chief stronghold (Camelot came later) Caerleon in south Wales, just up the river Usk from the Severn estuary, to have been buried—if Arthur IS buried, and not living still on the Isle of Glass—in Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset …. Oh, and Arthur’s original chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth? Monmouth is a Welsh town on the Wye. Haven’t I mentioned that river recently? “G of M” was a Normandized pen name; his name to his kinfolks was Gruffud ap Arthur.
Of course, some of the legends place King Arthur’s activity farther north. In Rheged, say, which is now the Galloway area of southwest Scotland.
So, yes, the magical heritage of Britain is strongly associated with its Celtic heritage, and even the Saxon and Norman late-comers (the Godrics and Rowenas, and later the Malfoys) found themselves making or retreating to strongholds in the Brittanie, not the English, corners of the island….
And that’s before the seventeenth century, on which more anon.
So it’s actually not unreasonable.
Especially when you consider how hard-pressed the Wizarding World must have felt, to contemplate Seclusion as its only viable option for survival.
In recent (before 1674) history, you’d have had a scattering of well-educated male “astrologists” and “alchemists” associating with nobles and the court (and then there are those rumors about Anne Boleyn, eh?).
But most witches and wizards had always been villagers (probably mostly illiterate, though it’s suggestive that by English law, witchcraft was one of the few crimes not eligible for benefit of clergy) living at slightly above their neighbors’ standard of living by bartering their magical services for their neighbor’s goods and services. Healing, mending, finding, love potions, good- and ill-wishing, maybe a bit of weatherworking… nothing very elaborate. Most were probably trained by their families—Hogwarts in those days was for the gentry, or for the very talented who were also either ambitious enough to scrounge enough money for a year or two of schooling, or who managed to attract a patron.
And those rural village witches and hedge wizards, over the centuries, were probably slowly pushed to the edges, to outlying poor areas—as I suggested the surviving witches of the Ribble Valley fled even further north to escape persecution, as Jo said Hengist of Woodcroft chose to do.
Meanwhile the village witches’ and hedge wizards’ ill repute was reflecting negatively on the court magicians—excuse me, on those learned and venerable alchemists and astrologers, men of Philosophy, sirrah! Note that one effect of the Statute of Secrecy is that court and noble advisors could continue as they were, so long as they subsequently claimed to be basing their predictions and their potions on NATURAL Philosophy (Science), not on magic.
(Though, with magicians no longer messing randomly about with the experiments of natural philosophers trying to investigate cause and effect, Science soon took off so dramatically that the magicians couldn’t continue to follow it well enough to cloak themselves in its language. So they retired in pique to run their own little world.)
Beedle’s tale of the Hopping Pot is thus totally bogus. Such services as the neighbors expected of Mr. Selfish were HOW THE FAMILY HAD ALWAYS MADE ITS LIVING. And if Sonny Boy had inherited so much wealth that he felt no need to earn more, his benevolent daddy must have been a price-gouger indeed. That none of the villagers in the tale could do anything themselves about any of the problems they laid before him? It’s not that all Muggles are idiots completely helpless to solve the least problem ourselves, though that’s what any modern magical reader would take from the tale as told (aided, in Hermione’s case, by Albus’s condescending gloss, and in Harry’s case by Hagrid’s).
It’s not even that those specific villagers were so gormless.
It’s that the locals were too damned smart to approach that particular family of magician-extortionists until they’d exhausted all their options for solving the problem without magic.
Grr.
And the Hopping Pot? When Mr. Extortionist realized that his son was so unutterably lazy and stupid that he might try to live off his inherited ill-gotten gains, he knew the kid would eventually be LYNCHED by his neighbors if he wasn’t stirred off his butt to provide at least some of the ungracious, overpriced, last-resort help that Dad had. I mean, imagine KNOWING that the only reason your baby had ultimately died or that your family had lost its livelihood and would starve was that Mr. Lazy-and-Selfish couldn’t be arsed to help, no matter what you offered him? Can you say, “Call the witchfinders”?
But most of the village magic-users were more integrated with their neighbors (if uneasily so whenever the parish priest, or the local lord, started worrying about those screeds from Rome or London or Geneva that claimed that magic involved treating with the devil…).
Which meant that the imposition of Secrecy must have hit the peasant magic-users rather like, in our history, enclosures did the Muggle peasants.
Or like the Highland Clearances.
Well, no, the ancient witch families weren’t summarily exiled from their homes. As such. But all of a sudden they were banned from making their living in the way that from time immemorial these families always had—by bartering their magical services with their non-magical neighbors.
Riots? Uprisings? Half the countryside must have been up in arms!
Or, well, um. Not the countryside as such.
The village witches couldn’t appeal to their nonmagical neighbors for support, because witchcraft was by then illegal, and Christianity—both Catholic and Protestant—had started teaching that magic involved trafficking with the devil. Common people might continue to approach the local goodwife freely so long as the word magic need not be used, but say that word, and their support ended in suspicion and dismay. And the goodwives and hedge-wizards were largely isolated, their dealings mostly restricted to their Muggle neighbors and at best with one or two other local known-magical families.
Remember the point made in HBP? “The other side has magic too.” And the side that became the Ministry, the side of the Hogwarts-educated, of the wizards literate, erudite, educated in the law, the side that was making and enforcing the new legislation, was also the only side trained for centuries in anything resembling battle magic.
The peasants were mostly family-trained in the crafts that were useful in villages—as healers, menders, brewers, weather-weavers….
The resistors never stood a chance. Magic could track their magic-use, and they could be picked off one by one until resistance finally failed.
How long did it take? Was the creation of the Quidditch League, and the concomitant criminalization of any attempt to play “the wizard’s sport” outside the League’s auspices, the first salvo of the war against the commoners, which the Statute of Secrecy in 1689 (or 1692) finally codified in victory for the civilized, Hogwarts-trained wizards—and, of course, their European counterparts?
For that matter, when was Azkaban created, and the Dementors recruited (or created) as its guards? When did Wizarding Britain—or the rulers thereof—discover so very many felons (in a population that in OUR time is estimated as between three to ten thousand) as to justify creating and staffing an entire prison island to house those many, many magical miscreants who refused to obey the Wizarding World’s strictest law?
Against being open or truthful to us Muggles.
Look at the economics of the modern Wizarding World. Not a witch or wizard that we saw in canon was doing anything to create food or cloth or other nonmagical necessities. It’s entirely a service economy—but self-enclosed. They serve only each other. So what is the ultimate origin of the value symbolized by the Galleons circulated in Diagon Alley and Nocturne Alley and Hogsmeade and Gringotts and (one supposes) Zurich and…?
In the old days, witches and wizards lived by providing real (if not always strictly tangible) services to Muggles, and we paid them in goods and services, or in good honest coin that translated to real goods and services. We Muggles purchased a real (we hoped, and in a small community if the magic didn’t usually work, word would get around and the trade stopped) love philtre or fair-weather-for-harvest spell or healing draught for our child or our cow. And we paid with a loaf of bread, or with barley the witch could mill and bake into a loaf of bread, or with the milling for the sack of grain she already had, or with the coin with which she could buy one of those things.
Itinerate magic-workers could trade on credulity and hope for a time, but the sedentary village ones had to deliver at least some of what they promised (or threatened), or be utterly discredited. And even for the itinerates, it’s a lot of work to stay always just beyond the retribution of the disappointed and cheated…. Far easier and more profitable just to deliver, if one can.
It’s canon—Golpalott’s Third Law or such. Which, like Newton’s Laws of Physics (one wonders what Laws Newton established for Alchemy), was not legislation for How Things Ought to Be, but a severe and impartial description of How Things Are. A loaf of bread, real and nourishing, cannot by any means be conjured from thin air.
So if a magical person wants to eat, s/he can’t just wave a wand and dig in. S/he has to do something—non-magical—to create food. Grow it, say. Or find food and prepare it, magically or otherwise. Or do something—magical or otherwise—to persuade someone else—most likely, one of us—to share food that we ourselves have created or found.
But that direct conduit to the ultimate producers—to us, us Muggles—has been dammed since 1692. Rather, the major employer of the British Wizarding World is the Ministry, which must be parasitic upon us. And almost all of what the Ministry does is enforce Secrecy.
The Ministry pays its subordinate parasites, in effect, for incapacitating us from noticing and taking action against our leeches.
*
/righteous indignation
All right, there were two mitigating circumstances to the economic devastation wrought on the peasant magic-workers by the imposition of Secrecy. One was the exemption for family members. My grandmother lived most of her life in a village (or on a farm fourteen miles outside it) whose population was 400 in the 2010 census. The county seat (and largest nearby town) had 1000. She was one of fourteen children. If she’d been a witch, and allowed to exempt her siblings and their spouses and their children from Secrecy, that was about half the town and a fair proportion of the county right there. Heck, if I understand the Celtic clan systems (I don’t), some of the Welsh and Highland witches might have argued the right to be “out” to their entire clans!
Secondly, as the proto-Ministry wizards pointed out, very reasonably, to the surviving peasant magic-workers, they too were perfectly free to continue practicing magic, and even to make their living from practicing magic, as long as they didn’t call it that or do anything identifiable to their clients as such. If Nanny Ogg wanted to continue to be the local midwife and healer, fine. Of course, her success rate might drop precipitously, as she could no longer use charms to aid her more difficult cases…. Potions, however, were completely acceptable, as long as they were called herbal teas and prepared out of sight. Set yourself up as an apothecary, man, and call it science!
Just don’t get caught calling what you do magic, or being suspected of it. The witchfinders might not find you, but we assuredly will.
*
Okay, to return to geography and population.
Aside from the issue of witches and wizards living disproportionately on the edges of the United Kingdom, rather than following our (modern Muggle) population distribution and living mostly in the richer agriculture areas and cities, it also seems that a wholly disproportionate number of them are Britannic rather than English.
In modern times, England has a population of 53 million, Scotland about 5.2 million, Wales about 3, Northern Ireland about 1.8, the Republic of Ireland about 4.6, and Cornwall about ½ million. Add them all together, and the population of the Celtic countries (which is not, of course, all Celtic, any more than England houses purely descendents of the Angles) comes to about 15 million—less than one-third of the population of England proper. Yet they account for eight of the thirteen Quidditch teams. Less than one-quarter of the population accounts for two-thirds of the teams?
Well, okay, we can fudge a little. For the same reason Ireland HAS to have two teams, so too does Scotland—a Scots Lowland team and a Gaelic one, with the third team really primarily representing the Saxon community of Hogsmeade. And in 1674 not all teams allowed women to play, so the witches would have risen up in fury had the League not included at least one of the all-women teams, and the Harpies were the best. Meanwhile the Welsh wizards would similarly have revolted had Wales only been represented by the all-female Harpies, and of course Tinworth and the Cornish folk had to have a team.
So, all right. The eight teams located in Celtic countries all are reasonable.
But still, why only five (or six) for the English? There’s no obvious reason that I can see why the League HAD to have only thirteen slots. If the English magical population was about three times the Celtic, why not add a few more—or a lot more—teams for them? Why not keep that Norfolk team and a Sussex one to boot, let the Londoners choose which to root for? Why not teams in Cheshire and Lincoln and Yorkshire? The hundred-mile law meant all the locations had to be remote, but why weren’t more of them chosen?
Why wasn’t the English ethnic population screaming about being underrepresented in the League in 1674?
Well, because, of course, an ethnic majority is always a good sport about letting minorities be overrepresented in a quota system. In fact, it is invariably fair-minded about quotas that ensure dead-accurate representation of minorities in some privileged and restricted-entry system that it had previously regarded as its private bastion.
Just listen to Fox News to assure yourself of this fact.
So why weren’t the ethnic English magicals screaming for more teams, if they had three times the population of all those Jocks and Micks and Taffies combined?
If they did have three times the population.
Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe six teams for the English Quidditch fans (counting Wigtown or Portree for Hogsmeade) and seven for the Celts wasn’t a bad representation of the magical population distribution in 1674.
Magic runs in families, after all. In fact, according to Jo (now) a mageborn HAS to have some magical ancestor. So if you had one isolated village, say in Gwynedd, that had a magical family in 900, and another in Mercia that did not, then barring immigration, eight centuries later you’d be likely to find that that town in Wales still has some magical inhabitants, while that Leicestershire village will not.
People may form liaisons with damn near anyone, but most matches are made between people who are somewhat alike. However they define that to be. And in small villages, where there’s not that much emigration and immigration, matches are likely to be made generally among neighbors. So the Welsh witches, for instance, are probably most frequently marrying fellow Welshmen; or when they do marry English people, it’s probably usually into families that have moved nearby.
For example, to escape persecution elsewhere.
For that brings us back to that other question we raised earlier—about the apparent fact that the English magical population seems disproportionately weighted to the west of the island.
Start with the observation that a lot of places associated with magic in Britain are in the West Country and Wales, and that if it’s true that witches can feel and respond to “a place that has known magic,” they’d be drawn to old places of power. Does anyone really think it an accident that the rich Malfoys should acquire a Manor in Wiltshire, of all places, home of STONEHENGE, nor that the Dark Lord should take it over as one of his bases?
And then, as I mentioned, one village witch in Wales who bore a number of children might scatter her genes and her powers throughout her clan and her village and their associates. (And a wizard, of course, potentially even more so.)
Conversely, a rural village lacking a witch in 800 A.D. might well never acquire one.
But further, a village hosting a magical family in 1500 might not have one in 1692. Not if the witchfinders had swept through in the meantime. Any magical folk might have either been killed, or fled. As I’ve speculated the Quidditch-players of the Appleby Arrows might be the survivors who fled the Ribble Valley witch-hunt of 1612.
So. Let’s pause to look at the United Kingdom’s witch hunts. Which, like those in the rest of Europe, took place with most fervor in the 16th and 17th centuries. (The invention of printing and popular literacy allowed the spread of mass-produced sensationalist literature on witches and demonology, and popularized the view of witches, not as having some potential to DO evil, but as BEING evil. Think of the Malleus Maleficarum as, among other things, the Enquirer and Fox News of the day.) Indeed, the first English statute specifically making witchcraft itself a crime was enacted by Henry VIII in 1542. To be followed by one of Elizabeth’s in 1562, and another from James in 1604. In Scotland, 1543 and 1649 were the big years for passing new and more stringent laws.
And enforcing those laws? Killing witches? When and where were the laws against witches most stringently enforced?
In England, there were sporadic trials of a few people at a time. Then there were two well-publicized trials in Lancashire, northwest England—the Pendle witch trials of 1612 (previously mentioned), and the Lancaster trials of 1634.
But the biggest concentration of English witch hunts started in Essex and Suffolk, and spread throughout the Puritan Eastern Association during the time of the English Civil War. The rich agrarian eastern and southern countries. Where self-styled Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and his boss John Stearns were said, between 1644 and 1647, to have managed between them to be responsible for procuring the convictions and deaths of 60% of all “witches” executed as such during all of Christian English history.
Quite an accomplishment. 60% of a nation’s thousand-year total, within a three-year period. And those witch-finders were active in Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, spreading out like a cancer throughout the south and east and midlands of England.
Of course, the English persecution paled in comparison to Scotland’s, which started with a vengeance fifty years earlier than the English frenzy. “Vengeance” being the operative term—there’s nothing like an absolute monarch being convinced that he and his bride had been personally targeted for murder by Dark Magic to foster intolerance.
James presided personally over some of the Berwick witch trials in 1590, and supported the trials in 1597. But when the Kirk took over, though of course it wasn’t a fan of the Catholic king, it opposed witches as much as he had; the trials of 1628 and 1661 were as bad as James’s, while the witch-hunt of 1649 was apparently the bloodiest of all.
2000 capital trials in seven decades.
And, since I know you’re wondering, the Scottish witch-hunts apparently took place most vigorously along the southeast border—and also just across it, in northeast England (Northumberland)—Berwick, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Fife.
Montrose, in the far north corner of Angus, was just a bit north of the main action. And Galloway and the Isle of Skye were outside the areas where King and kirk conducted their worst inquisitions.
Back to my theme: the apparently disproportionate distribution of the magical population.
Between “places that had known magic” already being concentrated in the west, perhaps encouraging disproportionate settlement—the genes of the early witches thus being, perhaps not equally distributed among all populations—and then a series of Muggle pogroms throughout the seventeenth century which deliberately killed off (or drove off) magical folk, and which were centered in the southeast of both England and Scotland….
Well. It seems that a western bias should rather have been expected than exclaimed at.
Maybe it’s not unreasonable that half the SURVIVING magical folk, as of the imposition of Secrecy, lived in the western Celtic lands, and that many of the surviving English ones seem to have been western borderers.
One last point about the Quidditch teams—not one team in the League, not a one of them, is openly associated with a significant Wizarding community.
Think about that. Hogsmeade, Upper Flagley, Ottery St. Catchpole, Tinworth, Godric’s Hollow, may have been represented by nearby teams, but if so, not a one of the Quidditch teams is named for the community it represents.
If some witch hunter in 1675 found, say, a reference to the Chudley Cannons and descended upon Chudleigh to investigate, they’d find nothing. Which would give the inhabitants of nearby Ottery St. Catchpole both warning and time to evacuate. Or if some rival team were so vicious as to let Muggles do their murdering (we know that deliberate violence, up to actual death, is not unknown on the pitch) and murmured, say, that the Cornwall team was the Falmouth Falcons, the nearby Tinsworth community would have enough warning to fly or floo away.
Perhaps NONE of the city names associated with the League teams is more than vaguely “nearby.” (The “Appleby Arrows” team members actually living near Penrith or in the West Riding.) In which case the fact that the Hogsmeade team (or the London one) is not directly identified as such is a DESIGN FEATURE, not a bug. The locals know who to root for, but outsiders can’t be sure exactly where near Falmouth or Ballycastle or Montrose the nearby Wizarding community (or knot of families) actually lives.
Heck, I’ll back Whitehound for logical analysis over any twenty wizards; I bet that most outlander wizards and witches who haven’t been admitted into the secret can’t even narrow down which of the three Scotland teams might reasonably be the “local” for Hogsmeade! Where’s Hogwarts? Um, in Scotland. Somewhere.
Which takes us back to Hogwarts, and to the final problem. If, as of 1674-1692, the population of witches and wizards was unduly concentrated in the west of Britain, and indeed unduly Celtic compared to the modern Muggle population distribution (about 22%), then we should expect the modern Purebloods, at least, to reflect that.
Over half of the Quidditch slots in 1674 were given to the Celtic nations of the U.K. So if that did indeed reflect contemporary Wizarding demographics, we’d expect Celtic names to occur among the modern Purebloods at a rate entirely disproportionate to their prevalence in modern Muggle Britain. Specifically, to occur at a rate about double what we’d expect in a community randomly representing every ethnic group in modern Britain.
Only, they emphatically do not. Not at Hogwarts.
Among the known Pureblood students, we had Weasleys, Blacks, Prewetts, Lestranges, James Potter, Malfoys, Crouch, Diggory, Longbottom, Smith, Crabbe, MacMillan—aha, one! Whereas we should see many or lots.
Muggleborns in Harry’s time should bear the same mix of names (one assumes) as the general UK population. But Half-bloods should bear, partly Muggle names, partly Pureblood ones, depending on which parent married (or didn’t) “out.” So, again, half-bloods should carry disproportionately Celtic names, if their Pureblood forebears did.
I went through the HPL’s lists of Hogwarts students mentioned by name in canon. I found over a hundred verified names. Eleven seem Scots or Scots-Irish: McGonagall, Euan Abercrombie, Ernie MacMillan, Andrew Kirke, Demelza Robins, Cormac McLaggen, Natalie MacDonald, Eddie Carmichael, Urquhart, Montague, the Montgomery girls (which, as noted above, might also be Norman). Two were obviously Irish—Orla Quirke and Seamus Finnegan. Two have what might be Welsh surnames but strongly Anglo or Norman first names, and one has the reverse: Graham Pritchard, Roger Davies, and Owen Cauldwell. Two were emphatically Welsh; a Hufflepuff Quidditch player named Cadwallader, and one of Horace’s protégées (assumed therefore to have been his former student), Gwenog Jones. That’s 18 names out of over one hundred—not an unreasonable number given their representation in the modern U.K., a little low but not abnormally so, but absolutely not the over-representation we’d expect from my earlier arguments.
Moreover, the Scots and Welsh and Irish names we see are all MODERN forms. Jones, of course, is about as Welsh a name as you can get. Largely because about one-in-twenty Welshmen adopted it in the 1800’s when the government insisted they start using surnames rather than patronymics.
Indeed, surnames only started becoming generally used among common folk in England in about the thirteenth century, well after the founding of Hogwarts and the beginnings of a separate magical culture. Some rural folk, especially among the Welsh, didn’t adopt surnames until well into the modern era. Post seclusion. So I’d expect some of the old Pureblood families, as tradition-mad as they are, to have proudly retained the old naming conventions. Why not Gwenog ferch Gruffudd, and for that matter Rhys ap Dafydd rather than Roger Davies? Why not Orla ni Chadhain, and Seamus O Fionnagain? Or some such.
For that matter, if Gwenog Jones had old Welsh Pureblood connections, why should she have needed Sluggie’s patronage to win a try-out for the Holyhead Harpies, to be everlastingly grateful to him now…?
And of course we understand why Seamus has a modern ethnic Irish name; he’s a half-blood, and Finnegan is his Muggle father’s perfectly normal, perfectly modern surname.
Which may be the key. Those Anglicized Celtic names may represent mostly half-bloods and Muggleborns. With maybe a few Anglicized, and long-time English-speaking, Pureblood families.
Because, in fact, Wales and Ireland and Cornwall and Scotland, those ancient lands of magic, have been underrepresented at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry since its founding.
At its founding.
By two Saxons, a Dane, and an Iberian, passing on an originally-Continental tradition of magic. And forming ties eventually with other magical schools on the Continent.
Look at the courses offered. Hogwarts offers Ancient Runes, but not harping. Divination may be taught by a Cornishwoman, but it and she are treated as jokes. Whereas the original Myrddin was best known for being a prophet, not a wand-waver.
English wizards may use “Merlin” to cuss by, and they may name an honor (and maybe an actual Order) after him. But the English school does not teach the magic Myrddin used.
We may have a resolution of that long-standing conundrum: is Hogwarts the best school of magic in the U.K. (as Miss Granger’s reading led her to state), or the only one?
(Yeah, I know what Pottermore says, and Jo really shouldn’t embarrass herself like that. England rates and can support a magical school with a population of about 50 million, the rest of Europe has two schools to serve a population of ten times that, and entire rest of the WORLD gets by with eight schools to serve a population of over 5.5 billion? Puh-leaze, it is to laugh. The Indian subcontinent alone has more than eight schools, probably teaching several different ancient magical traditions.)
So. How about a compromise? Hogwarts is the only school for English-speakers. And also the best, according to them.
I mean, Wales and Ireland were renowned for preserving learning and civilization through the Dark Ages. Of course they already had their own centuries-old foundations for studying and teaching magic when those jumped-up offspring of invaders started that Hogwarts school in the tenth century!
But speakers of the hard tongue weren’t invited to these ancient centers of learning.
(Scotland I’m not so sure about—its reputation was, ah, a little different. I think they may have passed on their knowledge mostly by apprenticeships. Which may be why the Lothian witches were among those who got caught wholesale, when it seems that the Welsh and Irish ones were not.)
In fact, I shouldn’t wonder if the only time most of the truly British magical folk have anything to do with those English is to trounce them at Quidditch. Their primary ties are with each other, and perhaps to Lesser Britain—Brittany. (One wonders if the Celts are regretting the deal they cut with the Wizengamot that Anglophone U.K. Muggleborns should all be sent to Hogwarts whatever their geographic or ethnic origin. But at the time they made the deal, back when it was determined that Secrecy would necessitate that Muggleborns be identified and assimilated into Wizarding culture, there were scarcely any to worry about…)
You thought I meant something else?
I’ve been re-reading Whitehound’s series of essays “Location, Location,” relating Potterverse places to the real geography of Britain. She analyzes the London Underground maps and counts the number of stops in canon between Grimmauld Place to Harry’s hearing to figure out just where in London the Ministry is located, looks at the probable route Hagrid flew on Sirius’s motorbike the night he took Harry to the Dursleys, and so forth. If you like maps and speculation, you’ll thoroughly enjoy her work.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, I thought I’d show my appreciation by adding some further (and further out) speculations on the geography of the Potterverse. Specifically, I’m interested in patterns of magical settlement.
I’ll start by summarizing several of Whitehound’s conclusions.
From canon we know there is exactly one all-magical village in the UK (Hogsmeade in Scotland, protected by Hogwarts Castle) and at least four long-time mixed ones: Upper Flagley, in Yorkshire; Tinworth, in Cornwall; Ottery St. Catchpole, “on the south coast of England,” and Godric’s Hollow, burial place to Ignotus Peverell, home at various times to Bagshots, Dumbledores, and Potters.
Whitehound hasn’t much to say about Upper Flagley, except that it implies a Lower Flagley and might well be both near Little Hangleton and in south Yorkshire. Tinworth, however, she’s able (by virtue of Shell Cottage’s sunrise over open water) to isolate to along the southern coast of Cornwall, most likely either a little southwest or a little east of Falmouth. Ottery St. Catchpole is in Devon on the river Otter, either in place of the real-life Otterton or a little up the river by Honiton, and the Chudley Cannons, named after the nearby Chudleigh, are Ron’s favorites because they’re his home team. Whitehound places Godric’s Hollow in north Somerset on the shore of the Bristol Channel (aka the Severn Sea), probably near Weston-Super-Mare.
For those of you not intimately familiar with the map of Britain, the Severn Sea is the body of water separating Cornwall, Devon, and Somerset from Wales. The Severn River opens into it at (more or less) Bristol, the major seaport. Meanwhile, the “West Country,” traditionally associated with ancient magic and/or Arthurian legend, comprises Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, and usually also the counties of Gloucestershire (the county drained by the Severn and including its estuary; it borders on Wales, and contains the Forest of Dean and part of the Cotswolds) and Wiltshire (between Gloucestershire and Dorset, and containing the Salisbury Plain with Stonehenge, Avesbury, and several prehistoric chalk horses).
Oh, and Gloucestershire in the West Country also contains a certain small village near the Forest of Dean, just on the opposite bank of the Wye from the Welsh city and castle of Chepstow, about two miles from the Wye’s confluence with the Severn, between the villages of Sedbury and Woodcroft. Named Tutshill. Home of JKR as a girl; Sedbury is where Jo attended Wyedean School, where she was elected Head Girl, and where she had a Chemistry master she seems to have taken a dislike to (apparently the man had the nerve to expect her to work).
Tom’s Horcrux cave Whitehound places either in Wales, near Porth Clais (the best match for the physical description of those sheer black cliffs), or in Dorset, if we think the orphans were only on a day trip (Porth Clais was far enough that it would have been better as an overnighter) and will accept gray shale as appearing black to Harry.
Okay. I’m going to start by adding another magical residence to the West Country: Malfoy Manor, which canon says is in Wiltshire. Plus, of course, whatever satellites of the Malfoys may live near there—the junior Crabbe and Goyle really do come off a bit as hereditary minions, don’t they? But we needn’t insist on that.
But what I want to look at next is something I would never, on my own, have particularly considered. Except that one of Jana’s snide comments about (the lack of) Wizarding culture made me realize that damn near the WW’s only unifying cultural expression seems to be—shudder—a violent and pointless game.
(Hey, I’m American, and I grew up in a small town. I attended EVERY SINGLE ONE of our school team’s home football games, and I couldn’t then and cannot now tell you even one of the rules—though I remember some of the cheers. I can’t even tell you how many boys are on a team! One went, and rooted for The Team, and cheered when everyone else did, because that’s what one did. Later, when I lived in subcultures that threw “Superbowl Parties,” I attended. Sports as cultural unification, you betcha!)
So. Let’s consider the professional Quidditch teams in the U.K. League.
In particular, let’s consider the fact that each team—even the UK’s sole witches-only team—is associated with a specific place. And people have favorites. And in at least some cases (Ron) the favorite is the “local” team, even if it doesn’t bear the name of your own part-wizarding village.
Furthermore, the teams in the League have been playing—presumably, under a variant of the same name, and probably associated—officially at least—with the same city—since 1674. Fifteen years before Seclusion was imposed, and if you read the HPL’s Handbook of Quidditch, it’s obvious that imposing the Quidditch League was a necessary precursor.
Because the Council of Wizards had been screaming—excuse me, legislating—since the mid-fourteenth century that Quidditch must not be played within 50—no, 100! miles of a Muggle town, and their legislation clearly hadn’t succeeded in suppressing Quidditch-playing where Muggles might see. But restricting play to a league, and that League’s playing to within designated Muggle-proofed pitches, would.
With, of course, soon thereafter, amateurs playing pick-me-up games being held legally culpable if any breaches of the Statute of Secrecy resulted.
Only, see, if you have to narrow that passion for a sport down to the favored few professional teams that make up the new League, the new League really pretty much has to include teams that represent every major center of Wizarding population in the nation. To give every major group at least one team it can feel to be its own.
For example, 1674 was only mere score of years after Cromwell’s “pacification” of Ireland, and conversely, only thirty-three years after some patriots had executed some Ulster invaders (or some Catholic beasts had ravened among Protestant martyrs, take your pick). Imagine asking the Irish Catholics to root for a NORTHERN Irish team, or asking the righteous Ulstermen to support a Southern, Catholic, one. Just… no.
Hence, the Kenmare Kestrals AND the Ballyhoo Bats. The League was pretty much required to have two teams (at least) representing the island of Eire.
The magical population of London is a bit of a special case, since no team can play within a hundred miles of it anyhow. Not since 1368.
On the other hand, per the chocolate frog cards, Ignatia Wildsmith invented Floo Powder around the late twelve-hundreds. After the Floo network was developed, employment in the London Alleys (and in the Ministry when it was created, and in St. Mungo’s when it was moved from Hogwarts to London) was probably mostly commuter jobs for the middle and upper classes, as we saw with Arthur Weasley and Amos Diggory. Why raise your children in a stinking, constricted city, where you had to worry about Muggles seeing their accidental magic, if it was easy to raise them in the isolated countryside, and commute instantaneously to a day job? So, I think it likely that the development of the Floo network caused a Wizarding diaspora, with not many people who could afford daily Flooing (and very few of those with family) choosing to live in London full-time.
One wonders how the widespread—indeed, eventually apparently universal—adoption of this technology affected Wizarding culture.
Hmm. It was in the mid 1300’s—after Floo powder had been invented—that the Wizard’s Council felt able to demand that Quidditch be played only “away from Muggle towns.” Before then, perhaps this wouldn’t have been a “reasonable restriction.”
But even with Flooing being established well before the seventeenth century, I think we can assume that a lot of sports-mad wizards and witches rooted largely for their local Quidditch teams, and would have felt hard-done-by had their local been disbanded entirely rather than, say, merged with another.
Which means that an analysis of the distribution of Quidditch teams in 1674 should give us something of a snapshot of the distribution of witches and wizards in the U.K., in the decades immediately preceding Separation. We should gain at least some idea of the geographic locations of the wizards and witches whose descendents, three centuries later, could flaunt themselves as Purebloods.
We’ve already pointed out that London couldn’t have a truly local team—there’s that hundred-mile law passed way back in 1368.
However, Whitehound, analyzing possible Horcrux-cave locations, suggested Kemmeridge, Dorset (even though its cliffs were gray, not black) specifically because it was only around 100 miles from London, and thus (of all the possibilities) was the easiest day trip for Tom’s orphanage. Which, of course, makes the Wimbourne Wasps, based out of Wimborne Manor east of Kemmeridge, the Quidditch team (most) local to London.
What about Scotland? There are three Scottish teams, and not a one of them is in the Highlands. The Montrose Magpies are on the East Coast, in the Lowlands (culturally distinct, speaking Scots rather than Gaelic); the Pride of Portree is based in the (Gaelic) Hebrides, and the Wigtown Wanderers are based out of (Gaelic) Galloway, in the west, but south near the border with England.
Well, the Scottish Highlands had their own bloody and embarrassingly stupid sport, with a Gaelic name I can’t recall—finally banned by the Ministry in the late 1700’s, during the height of the Highland Clearances, so there probably weren’t many Highland Gaels with the heart or the time to try to organize a Highlands Quidditch team instead and try to shoehorn it into the League.
But that leaves Hogsmeade as an orphan. The only all-wizard village within the entire UK—surely it has its own Quidditch team? Not apparently, or at least not anymore.
(Of course, consider for a moment what the effect would be on students like Ron and Harry and Oliver, if a professional Quidditch team were forever practicing on the Hogwarts Pitch, or even doing so a half-mile away in Hogsmeade if only one could sneak away to watch them…. Hogwarts predates Quidditch fever, and I think the school eventually insisted that there not be an adult team TOO close—too distracting.)
But Whitehound’s analysis of the physical location of Hogwarts came up with TWO possible solutions to the problem: one in the Galloway Hills, one in the (north) West Highlands. The first better matched canon’s description of the local flora and linguistic evidence, but Whitehound decided provisionally on the second. Largely because she could see no reason, if Hogwarts were in Galloway, for the Hogwarts Express to have taken so very long to reach Hogsmeade Station as canon showed it did.
But we’ve independently come up with an explanation for that—yes, the Hogwarts “Express” would certainly have slowed to under 50 mph on the last stretch of its journey, if that was necessary to ensure the students arrive after dark, fasting, and disoriented. Given that, the Galloway Hills location might be given the preference. In which case the Wigtown Wanderers, a little downhill and easily accessible by broom, could be the Hogsmeade local team. Or, more probably, it became so in 1674 when the Hogsmeade local team was merged with them, probably after intensive lobbying of the then-Hogwarts head that was sick of the students’ Quidditch distraction. (Minerva, it need not be said, would have lobbied for the opposite….)
If you prefer the West Highlands location, however, you may apply the same argument to the Pride of Portree—that the Hogsmeade locals were assimilated into that team (since Skye would not be that far by broom, and no distance by Floo).
Well. We’ve got two teams for Ireland, north and south, three ringing Scotland (one for the Scots, one for the Gaels, and one for Hogsmeade), one in Dorset (London’s home team) and one in Devon (near Ottery St. Catchpole). Where are the other teams based?
One is in Cornwall, the Falmouth Falcons, near the Wizarding enclave of Tinworth. One is in North Wales, on the Irish Sea—Holywell, on (actually, off) the island of Anglesey. (The all-witch Harpies, no less—was it founded, in 1203, as a nunnery’s team?) Another is in South Wales, on the Severn estuary, the Caerphilly Catapults. Founded in 1402—during Owain Glyndwr’s eventually-unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of Wales from English hands. The last instantly-identifiable team is the Tutshill Tornados—we’ve already mentioned Tutshill, in the West Country on the Welsh border, in the Severn drainage basin near the Forest of Dean.
But we still have two Quidditch teams whose place names point to ambiguous referents. The Appleby Arrows might be named after any of three villages. One is in Lincolnshire, not far from the estuary of the Humber, and quite close to the border with Yorkshire. It’s a distinct possibility, especially as that might put it close to Upper Flagley. (And for those who want to consider such extra-canonical considerations as authorial intent, north Lincolnshire hosts an RAF exhibition team known as the “Red Arrows”. If JKR knew about it, that’s the sort of joke she might pull.)
The second is Appleby Magna, in Leicestershire, in the middle of England. It is, intriguingly, close to the old border between Mercia and the Danelaw. Borders are always interesting, so if the Arrows had been one of the first teams founded, I’d seriously consider it.
Only, it wasn’t. The Arrows are, in fact, the latest team in the League whose founding is specified in QttA—1612, a mere sixty-two years before the League was formed.
Which is extremely odd. If Appleby—where ever it may be located—had resisted Quidditch fever for half a millennium, why did it suddenly succumb? And when it did, how did it manage to make itself one of the top thirteen teams in the country in a mere sixty years, that it should make the cut and be kept when most of the amateur teams were dissolved?
How about, Appleby succumbed to Quidditch fever in 1612 because it was settled (by magical folk) in 1612? And the team became so good so fast because it was in fact an established team, relocated?
The refugees from that 1612 disaster in the Ribble Valley (where, essentially, a cat-fight between two families of witches on Pendle Hill escalated into the most lethal witch-hunt in England in centuries) had to go somewhere, after all.
And the third Appleby (since 1974 designated as Appleby-in-Westmorland) is in a remote area of what’s now called Cumbria. Just over a corner of the Pennines from Pendle Hill and (importantly) in a different County from Pendle and Samlesbury, and in a river valley draining (oriented, in all senses) in a completely different direction.
Any Muggle family fleeing trouble in the Ribble Valley would naturally head down the river to Preston and then turn north or south from there. To get to Appleby by that route, they’d have to take a ship north along the Irish Sea to the Firth of Solway, then a boat backtracking up the Eden River from Carlisle. By road, one might trudge over the Pennines towards Carlisle and branch off. Either way, a lengthy trip, and an expensive and difficult one, making Appleby an unlikely spot to choose for relocation. Or to look for refugees.
But as the crow flies—or the broom—Appleby is about eighty kilometers north and a touch west of Pendle; due north of Samlesbury. Any halfway decent flyer could scout out possible locations over the hills quite easily. Once a suitable place and a cover story were established, it would just be a matter of getting the Floo connected to bring in the family and possessions. Or transport everyone by broom, if the family is too poor for Floo powder. And then Confund the new neighbors a bit….
And best of all, if things went sour in the new place, one could simply fly north, following the Eden River to the Firth, cross it to Galloway, and find a refuge in Scotland in the Muggle-proof magical fortress there. Which would not be the first choice by any means, since the economic competition would be fiercely resented by the Hogsmeade locals, but it would be nice to have that option available, if the alternative were being smoked out like rats by the Muggles…. I rather feel that positioning their families with easy access to a place of ultimate refuge might have been a priority of the materfamiliae at that point.
Now, the Lincolnshire Appleby is also possible to imagine as a resettlement of the Ribble survivors—it’s not that far away either. But. That Appleby is significantly farther than the one in Westmoreland—about half again as far. In a car on a freeway, that wouldn’t be much (by Apparition or Floo, there would be no difference at all) but by many other modes of transport, including brooms over open country, the difference would be significant.
Worse, that Appleby is in the wrong direction for refugees looking for isolation. Flying through the Pennine Gap would first take one over the cities of Bradshaw and Leeds, then into country which is rural and secluded, sure, but less so than the Ribble Valley. Whereas relocating to the Eden Valley would have one flying north solely over mountains and moving from the relatively remote and inaccessible headwaters of one river basin to that of one even more so (Eden district is the least densely populated in England).
Oh, and if Upper Flagley were in the West Riding, it might be quite near—as the broom flies—to the Eden Valley.
So, yeah, I think the Appleby forming the Arrows in 1612 is probably the one in what’s now called Cumbria, just east of the Lakes District and not far from the border with west Scotland.
Oddly enough, the Lakes District was also one of the obvious choices for the earliest (1193) team, now called Puddlemere United. If you want to find somewhere in England with several Meres in close proximity, it’s the obvious place to look. However, the “Puddle” in the name weighed against that when I looked more closely. “Meres” are lakes, but the term is usually reserved for very shallow lakes. Windermere and the other Lake District “meres” are really ribbon lakes or tarns, and are far too deep to be fairly described as puddles.
So, where else in England would one find several meres in close proximity? Well, there’s a village called Mere in—Wiltshire. That sounded interesting, but the village is not described as having a mess of real meres nearby. Then there’s another village called Mere in Cheshire. Now, Cheshire is apparently pocked with kettle-hole meres. That sounded quite promising. Or then there’s the fen country—before it was drained (therefore certainly back in 1193), it would have had many shallow lakes and seasonal sheets of water. And we know that Norfolk at least fielded a referee in 1357….
But then I read about Ellesmere in Shropshire. A market town near Owestry notable for its close proximity to no fewer than nine meres—Blakemere, Kettlemere, Hanmer Mere, and Whitemere being among the other eight. Home of Ellesmere Castle, built by one Roger de Montgomerie (the Montgomery sisters were Hogwarts students mentioned in HBP 22). Given by Henry II to a … William Peverel. Later rebuilt by one John LeStrange.
I think we’ve found it. But what’s really interesting is that if these nine meres were the Puddles of Puddlemere United, then at the time the team was founded—1193, remember?—Ellesmere was, in fact, in the hands of the Welsh. The Welsh kingdom of Powys had managed to take back some of its old border lands in western Shropshire in 1140, and held onto this castle for about a century. And those meres themselves—some are now considered to lie in Shropshire, some across the border in Wales. So this team may have been founded as an all-Welsh team, and then become a mixed Welsh-English one, and that’s when it was given a rather disparaging nickname, subsequently adopted with pride.
Can we try to locate one last community associated with a famous magical family? Where did the Dumbledores live before Kendra moved them to Godric’s Hollow? Where is Mould-on-the-Wold? Well, wolds are high open limestone or chalk hills. There are well-known Wolds in Yorkshire and in Lincolnshire. But of course the Cotswolds are the most famous of the wolds. And in the Cotwolds, in Gloucestershire, in the Severn drainage basin about twenty miles from the Forest of Dean, there’s a hill called Dumbleton Hill with the village Dumbleton at its base. Oh, and by the way, the surname Dumble, by itself, is apparently the Anglicization of the original Norman name “Dunville” or “de Donville” (one of the towns from which William the Bastard drew some of his troops). You know, like the name Gaunt comes from the city Ghent (where “John of” was born).
(Of course we know Jo really got Bumblebore’s surname from bees, not from a hill not that far from where she lived as a teen. An amusing reflection on that is that “dumbledore” was a name for two different insects—the bumblebee and the cockchafer, a really quite nasty agricultural pest that spends most of its life doing subterranean damage—by the time it emerges and you can see it for what it is, it’s too late…..)
All right, back to the matter of Britain. We’ve tentatively located the thirteen teams throughout the U.K., and I’ve proposed that their geographic distribution should bear some rough relationship to the geographic distribution of the Wizarding population at the time of the League’s formation (1674).
So it’s curious that 2/3 of the Quidditch teams are in the Celtic countries fringing England proper, and if my reasoning is correct, ALL of the English ones are close to those borders—with the team for the London population, the Wimbourne Wasps, located in Dorset—which is still considered to be in “the West Country” long associated with old magic. Even if you try picking the furthest flung other locations for the two ambiguous teams, in fact, the best you can manage is, say, Norfolk for the “meres” team and either the Midlands or far north Lincolnshire for the Arrows.
Plus, of course, canon mentions that “mixed” community in Yorkshire (which may or may not be close to the Appleby of the Arrows).
But that’s an odd distribution. Does that really mean that the magical population was concentrated, in 1674 on the fringes of the United (supposedly) Kingdoms? That’s quite far from the overall (Muggle) population distribution.
Well—that would actually make sense. Britain’s history, after all, from pre-history through medieval times, was a history of repeated invasions, each overlaying the earlier ones with its own language and culture in the areas it took over. The English language is largely the language of the second-to-last wave—the Anglo-Saxons—(who formed the bulk of the population in the lowlands) overlaid with borrowings from the French of the new Norman overlords. And England was named for the Angles, while Britain was named—by the Romans—for the Celts who’d been the invaders before the Romans. The Picts were displaced by the Celts were conquered by the Romans, who withdrew and then the wild Saxons and Angles and Vikings started invading… and finally the last big one, the Norman Conquest. With each successful wave of raids and conquests, the earlier invaders (natives, to the newest wave, and by then probably to themselves) were pushed back into the wilder, more remote, mountainous, more defensible but less arable (and largely less desirable), corners of the country.
Indeed, consider the “matter of Britain”: the Arthurian cycle. It’s is the story of a Romanized Celtic king holding back the heathen Saxon conquest for a handful of golden years of civilization before the dark.
Moreover, the Arthurian tales came out of the west of England—Merlinus, or Merlin, is the Latinized and Norman gloss for old Myrddin Emrys, as Welsh a wizard as you could hope to find. Artos or Arturius was claimed to be a descendent of Macsen Wledig—Magnus Maximus, would-be Emperor of Rome—and to have been conceived in Tintagel on the Severn Sea, to have held as his chief stronghold (Camelot came later) Caerleon in south Wales, just up the river Usk from the Severn estuary, to have been buried—if Arthur IS buried, and not living still on the Isle of Glass—in Glastonbury Abbey in Somerset …. Oh, and Arthur’s original chronicler, Geoffrey of Monmouth? Monmouth is a Welsh town on the Wye. Haven’t I mentioned that river recently? “G of M” was a Normandized pen name; his name to his kinfolks was Gruffud ap Arthur.
Of course, some of the legends place King Arthur’s activity farther north. In Rheged, say, which is now the Galloway area of southwest Scotland.
So, yes, the magical heritage of Britain is strongly associated with its Celtic heritage, and even the Saxon and Norman late-comers (the Godrics and Rowenas, and later the Malfoys) found themselves making or retreating to strongholds in the Brittanie, not the English, corners of the island….
And that’s before the seventeenth century, on which more anon.
So it’s actually not unreasonable.
Especially when you consider how hard-pressed the Wizarding World must have felt, to contemplate Seclusion as its only viable option for survival.
In recent (before 1674) history, you’d have had a scattering of well-educated male “astrologists” and “alchemists” associating with nobles and the court (and then there are those rumors about Anne Boleyn, eh?).
But most witches and wizards had always been villagers (probably mostly illiterate, though it’s suggestive that by English law, witchcraft was one of the few crimes not eligible for benefit of clergy) living at slightly above their neighbors’ standard of living by bartering their magical services for their neighbor’s goods and services. Healing, mending, finding, love potions, good- and ill-wishing, maybe a bit of weatherworking… nothing very elaborate. Most were probably trained by their families—Hogwarts in those days was for the gentry, or for the very talented who were also either ambitious enough to scrounge enough money for a year or two of schooling, or who managed to attract a patron.
And those rural village witches and hedge wizards, over the centuries, were probably slowly pushed to the edges, to outlying poor areas—as I suggested the surviving witches of the Ribble Valley fled even further north to escape persecution, as Jo said Hengist of Woodcroft chose to do.
Meanwhile the village witches’ and hedge wizards’ ill repute was reflecting negatively on the court magicians—excuse me, on those learned and venerable alchemists and astrologers, men of Philosophy, sirrah! Note that one effect of the Statute of Secrecy is that court and noble advisors could continue as they were, so long as they subsequently claimed to be basing their predictions and their potions on NATURAL Philosophy (Science), not on magic.
(Though, with magicians no longer messing randomly about with the experiments of natural philosophers trying to investigate cause and effect, Science soon took off so dramatically that the magicians couldn’t continue to follow it well enough to cloak themselves in its language. So they retired in pique to run their own little world.)
Beedle’s tale of the Hopping Pot is thus totally bogus. Such services as the neighbors expected of Mr. Selfish were HOW THE FAMILY HAD ALWAYS MADE ITS LIVING. And if Sonny Boy had inherited so much wealth that he felt no need to earn more, his benevolent daddy must have been a price-gouger indeed. That none of the villagers in the tale could do anything themselves about any of the problems they laid before him? It’s not that all Muggles are idiots completely helpless to solve the least problem ourselves, though that’s what any modern magical reader would take from the tale as told (aided, in Hermione’s case, by Albus’s condescending gloss, and in Harry’s case by Hagrid’s).
It’s not even that those specific villagers were so gormless.
It’s that the locals were too damned smart to approach that particular family of magician-extortionists until they’d exhausted all their options for solving the problem without magic.
Grr.
And the Hopping Pot? When Mr. Extortionist realized that his son was so unutterably lazy and stupid that he might try to live off his inherited ill-gotten gains, he knew the kid would eventually be LYNCHED by his neighbors if he wasn’t stirred off his butt to provide at least some of the ungracious, overpriced, last-resort help that Dad had. I mean, imagine KNOWING that the only reason your baby had ultimately died or that your family had lost its livelihood and would starve was that Mr. Lazy-and-Selfish couldn’t be arsed to help, no matter what you offered him? Can you say, “Call the witchfinders”?
But most of the village magic-users were more integrated with their neighbors (if uneasily so whenever the parish priest, or the local lord, started worrying about those screeds from Rome or London or Geneva that claimed that magic involved treating with the devil…).
Which meant that the imposition of Secrecy must have hit the peasant magic-users rather like, in our history, enclosures did the Muggle peasants.
Or like the Highland Clearances.
Well, no, the ancient witch families weren’t summarily exiled from their homes. As such. But all of a sudden they were banned from making their living in the way that from time immemorial these families always had—by bartering their magical services with their non-magical neighbors.
Riots? Uprisings? Half the countryside must have been up in arms!
Or, well, um. Not the countryside as such.
The village witches couldn’t appeal to their nonmagical neighbors for support, because witchcraft was by then illegal, and Christianity—both Catholic and Protestant—had started teaching that magic involved trafficking with the devil. Common people might continue to approach the local goodwife freely so long as the word magic need not be used, but say that word, and their support ended in suspicion and dismay. And the goodwives and hedge-wizards were largely isolated, their dealings mostly restricted to their Muggle neighbors and at best with one or two other local known-magical families.
Remember the point made in HBP? “The other side has magic too.” And the side that became the Ministry, the side of the Hogwarts-educated, of the wizards literate, erudite, educated in the law, the side that was making and enforcing the new legislation, was also the only side trained for centuries in anything resembling battle magic.
The peasants were mostly family-trained in the crafts that were useful in villages—as healers, menders, brewers, weather-weavers….
The resistors never stood a chance. Magic could track their magic-use, and they could be picked off one by one until resistance finally failed.
How long did it take? Was the creation of the Quidditch League, and the concomitant criminalization of any attempt to play “the wizard’s sport” outside the League’s auspices, the first salvo of the war against the commoners, which the Statute of Secrecy in 1689 (or 1692) finally codified in victory for the civilized, Hogwarts-trained wizards—and, of course, their European counterparts?
For that matter, when was Azkaban created, and the Dementors recruited (or created) as its guards? When did Wizarding Britain—or the rulers thereof—discover so very many felons (in a population that in OUR time is estimated as between three to ten thousand) as to justify creating and staffing an entire prison island to house those many, many magical miscreants who refused to obey the Wizarding World’s strictest law?
Against being open or truthful to us Muggles.
Look at the economics of the modern Wizarding World. Not a witch or wizard that we saw in canon was doing anything to create food or cloth or other nonmagical necessities. It’s entirely a service economy—but self-enclosed. They serve only each other. So what is the ultimate origin of the value symbolized by the Galleons circulated in Diagon Alley and Nocturne Alley and Hogsmeade and Gringotts and (one supposes) Zurich and…?
In the old days, witches and wizards lived by providing real (if not always strictly tangible) services to Muggles, and we paid them in goods and services, or in good honest coin that translated to real goods and services. We Muggles purchased a real (we hoped, and in a small community if the magic didn’t usually work, word would get around and the trade stopped) love philtre or fair-weather-for-harvest spell or healing draught for our child or our cow. And we paid with a loaf of bread, or with barley the witch could mill and bake into a loaf of bread, or with the milling for the sack of grain she already had, or with the coin with which she could buy one of those things.
Itinerate magic-workers could trade on credulity and hope for a time, but the sedentary village ones had to deliver at least some of what they promised (or threatened), or be utterly discredited. And even for the itinerates, it’s a lot of work to stay always just beyond the retribution of the disappointed and cheated…. Far easier and more profitable just to deliver, if one can.
It’s canon—Golpalott’s Third Law or such. Which, like Newton’s Laws of Physics (one wonders what Laws Newton established for Alchemy), was not legislation for How Things Ought to Be, but a severe and impartial description of How Things Are. A loaf of bread, real and nourishing, cannot by any means be conjured from thin air.
So if a magical person wants to eat, s/he can’t just wave a wand and dig in. S/he has to do something—non-magical—to create food. Grow it, say. Or find food and prepare it, magically or otherwise. Or do something—magical or otherwise—to persuade someone else—most likely, one of us—to share food that we ourselves have created or found.
But that direct conduit to the ultimate producers—to us, us Muggles—has been dammed since 1692. Rather, the major employer of the British Wizarding World is the Ministry, which must be parasitic upon us. And almost all of what the Ministry does is enforce Secrecy.
The Ministry pays its subordinate parasites, in effect, for incapacitating us from noticing and taking action against our leeches.
*
/righteous indignation
All right, there were two mitigating circumstances to the economic devastation wrought on the peasant magic-workers by the imposition of Secrecy. One was the exemption for family members. My grandmother lived most of her life in a village (or on a farm fourteen miles outside it) whose population was 400 in the 2010 census. The county seat (and largest nearby town) had 1000. She was one of fourteen children. If she’d been a witch, and allowed to exempt her siblings and their spouses and their children from Secrecy, that was about half the town and a fair proportion of the county right there. Heck, if I understand the Celtic clan systems (I don’t), some of the Welsh and Highland witches might have argued the right to be “out” to their entire clans!
Secondly, as the proto-Ministry wizards pointed out, very reasonably, to the surviving peasant magic-workers, they too were perfectly free to continue practicing magic, and even to make their living from practicing magic, as long as they didn’t call it that or do anything identifiable to their clients as such. If Nanny Ogg wanted to continue to be the local midwife and healer, fine. Of course, her success rate might drop precipitously, as she could no longer use charms to aid her more difficult cases…. Potions, however, were completely acceptable, as long as they were called herbal teas and prepared out of sight. Set yourself up as an apothecary, man, and call it science!
Just don’t get caught calling what you do magic, or being suspected of it. The witchfinders might not find you, but we assuredly will.
*
Okay, to return to geography and population.
Aside from the issue of witches and wizards living disproportionately on the edges of the United Kingdom, rather than following our (modern Muggle) population distribution and living mostly in the richer agriculture areas and cities, it also seems that a wholly disproportionate number of them are Britannic rather than English.
In modern times, England has a population of 53 million, Scotland about 5.2 million, Wales about 3, Northern Ireland about 1.8, the Republic of Ireland about 4.6, and Cornwall about ½ million. Add them all together, and the population of the Celtic countries (which is not, of course, all Celtic, any more than England houses purely descendents of the Angles) comes to about 15 million—less than one-third of the population of England proper. Yet they account for eight of the thirteen Quidditch teams. Less than one-quarter of the population accounts for two-thirds of the teams?
Well, okay, we can fudge a little. For the same reason Ireland HAS to have two teams, so too does Scotland—a Scots Lowland team and a Gaelic one, with the third team really primarily representing the Saxon community of Hogsmeade. And in 1674 not all teams allowed women to play, so the witches would have risen up in fury had the League not included at least one of the all-women teams, and the Harpies were the best. Meanwhile the Welsh wizards would similarly have revolted had Wales only been represented by the all-female Harpies, and of course Tinworth and the Cornish folk had to have a team.
So, all right. The eight teams located in Celtic countries all are reasonable.
But still, why only five (or six) for the English? There’s no obvious reason that I can see why the League HAD to have only thirteen slots. If the English magical population was about three times the Celtic, why not add a few more—or a lot more—teams for them? Why not keep that Norfolk team and a Sussex one to boot, let the Londoners choose which to root for? Why not teams in Cheshire and Lincoln and Yorkshire? The hundred-mile law meant all the locations had to be remote, but why weren’t more of them chosen?
Why wasn’t the English ethnic population screaming about being underrepresented in the League in 1674?
Well, because, of course, an ethnic majority is always a good sport about letting minorities be overrepresented in a quota system. In fact, it is invariably fair-minded about quotas that ensure dead-accurate representation of minorities in some privileged and restricted-entry system that it had previously regarded as its private bastion.
Just listen to Fox News to assure yourself of this fact.
So why weren’t the ethnic English magicals screaming for more teams, if they had three times the population of all those Jocks and Micks and Taffies combined?
If they did have three times the population.
Maybe they didn’t.
Maybe six teams for the English Quidditch fans (counting Wigtown or Portree for Hogsmeade) and seven for the Celts wasn’t a bad representation of the magical population distribution in 1674.
Magic runs in families, after all. In fact, according to Jo (now) a mageborn HAS to have some magical ancestor. So if you had one isolated village, say in Gwynedd, that had a magical family in 900, and another in Mercia that did not, then barring immigration, eight centuries later you’d be likely to find that that town in Wales still has some magical inhabitants, while that Leicestershire village will not.
People may form liaisons with damn near anyone, but most matches are made between people who are somewhat alike. However they define that to be. And in small villages, where there’s not that much emigration and immigration, matches are likely to be made generally among neighbors. So the Welsh witches, for instance, are probably most frequently marrying fellow Welshmen; or when they do marry English people, it’s probably usually into families that have moved nearby.
For example, to escape persecution elsewhere.
For that brings us back to that other question we raised earlier—about the apparent fact that the English magical population seems disproportionately weighted to the west of the island.
Start with the observation that a lot of places associated with magic in Britain are in the West Country and Wales, and that if it’s true that witches can feel and respond to “a place that has known magic,” they’d be drawn to old places of power. Does anyone really think it an accident that the rich Malfoys should acquire a Manor in Wiltshire, of all places, home of STONEHENGE, nor that the Dark Lord should take it over as one of his bases?
And then, as I mentioned, one village witch in Wales who bore a number of children might scatter her genes and her powers throughout her clan and her village and their associates. (And a wizard, of course, potentially even more so.)
Conversely, a rural village lacking a witch in 800 A.D. might well never acquire one.
But further, a village hosting a magical family in 1500 might not have one in 1692. Not if the witchfinders had swept through in the meantime. Any magical folk might have either been killed, or fled. As I’ve speculated the Quidditch-players of the Appleby Arrows might be the survivors who fled the Ribble Valley witch-hunt of 1612.
So. Let’s pause to look at the United Kingdom’s witch hunts. Which, like those in the rest of Europe, took place with most fervor in the 16th and 17th centuries. (The invention of printing and popular literacy allowed the spread of mass-produced sensationalist literature on witches and demonology, and popularized the view of witches, not as having some potential to DO evil, but as BEING evil. Think of the Malleus Maleficarum as, among other things, the Enquirer and Fox News of the day.) Indeed, the first English statute specifically making witchcraft itself a crime was enacted by Henry VIII in 1542. To be followed by one of Elizabeth’s in 1562, and another from James in 1604. In Scotland, 1543 and 1649 were the big years for passing new and more stringent laws.
And enforcing those laws? Killing witches? When and where were the laws against witches most stringently enforced?
In England, there were sporadic trials of a few people at a time. Then there were two well-publicized trials in Lancashire, northwest England—the Pendle witch trials of 1612 (previously mentioned), and the Lancaster trials of 1634.
But the biggest concentration of English witch hunts started in Essex and Suffolk, and spread throughout the Puritan Eastern Association during the time of the English Civil War. The rich agrarian eastern and southern countries. Where self-styled Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins and his boss John Stearns were said, between 1644 and 1647, to have managed between them to be responsible for procuring the convictions and deaths of 60% of all “witches” executed as such during all of Christian English history.
Quite an accomplishment. 60% of a nation’s thousand-year total, within a three-year period. And those witch-finders were active in Suffolk, Essex, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, spreading out like a cancer throughout the south and east and midlands of England.
Of course, the English persecution paled in comparison to Scotland’s, which started with a vengeance fifty years earlier than the English frenzy. “Vengeance” being the operative term—there’s nothing like an absolute monarch being convinced that he and his bride had been personally targeted for murder by Dark Magic to foster intolerance.
James presided personally over some of the Berwick witch trials in 1590, and supported the trials in 1597. But when the Kirk took over, though of course it wasn’t a fan of the Catholic king, it opposed witches as much as he had; the trials of 1628 and 1661 were as bad as James’s, while the witch-hunt of 1649 was apparently the bloodiest of all.
2000 capital trials in seven decades.
And, since I know you’re wondering, the Scottish witch-hunts apparently took place most vigorously along the southeast border—and also just across it, in northeast England (Northumberland)—Berwick, Edinburgh, Newcastle, Fife.
Montrose, in the far north corner of Angus, was just a bit north of the main action. And Galloway and the Isle of Skye were outside the areas where King and kirk conducted their worst inquisitions.
Back to my theme: the apparently disproportionate distribution of the magical population.
Between “places that had known magic” already being concentrated in the west, perhaps encouraging disproportionate settlement—the genes of the early witches thus being, perhaps not equally distributed among all populations—and then a series of Muggle pogroms throughout the seventeenth century which deliberately killed off (or drove off) magical folk, and which were centered in the southeast of both England and Scotland….
Well. It seems that a western bias should rather have been expected than exclaimed at.
Maybe it’s not unreasonable that half the SURVIVING magical folk, as of the imposition of Secrecy, lived in the western Celtic lands, and that many of the surviving English ones seem to have been western borderers.
One last point about the Quidditch teams—not one team in the League, not a one of them, is openly associated with a significant Wizarding community.
Think about that. Hogsmeade, Upper Flagley, Ottery St. Catchpole, Tinworth, Godric’s Hollow, may have been represented by nearby teams, but if so, not a one of the Quidditch teams is named for the community it represents.
If some witch hunter in 1675 found, say, a reference to the Chudley Cannons and descended upon Chudleigh to investigate, they’d find nothing. Which would give the inhabitants of nearby Ottery St. Catchpole both warning and time to evacuate. Or if some rival team were so vicious as to let Muggles do their murdering (we know that deliberate violence, up to actual death, is not unknown on the pitch) and murmured, say, that the Cornwall team was the Falmouth Falcons, the nearby Tinsworth community would have enough warning to fly or floo away.
Perhaps NONE of the city names associated with the League teams is more than vaguely “nearby.” (The “Appleby Arrows” team members actually living near Penrith or in the West Riding.) In which case the fact that the Hogsmeade team (or the London one) is not directly identified as such is a DESIGN FEATURE, not a bug. The locals know who to root for, but outsiders can’t be sure exactly where near Falmouth or Ballycastle or Montrose the nearby Wizarding community (or knot of families) actually lives.
Heck, I’ll back Whitehound for logical analysis over any twenty wizards; I bet that most outlander wizards and witches who haven’t been admitted into the secret can’t even narrow down which of the three Scotland teams might reasonably be the “local” for Hogsmeade! Where’s Hogwarts? Um, in Scotland. Somewhere.
Which takes us back to Hogwarts, and to the final problem. If, as of 1674-1692, the population of witches and wizards was unduly concentrated in the west of Britain, and indeed unduly Celtic compared to the modern Muggle population distribution (about 22%), then we should expect the modern Purebloods, at least, to reflect that.
Over half of the Quidditch slots in 1674 were given to the Celtic nations of the U.K. So if that did indeed reflect contemporary Wizarding demographics, we’d expect Celtic names to occur among the modern Purebloods at a rate entirely disproportionate to their prevalence in modern Muggle Britain. Specifically, to occur at a rate about double what we’d expect in a community randomly representing every ethnic group in modern Britain.
Only, they emphatically do not. Not at Hogwarts.
Among the known Pureblood students, we had Weasleys, Blacks, Prewetts, Lestranges, James Potter, Malfoys, Crouch, Diggory, Longbottom, Smith, Crabbe, MacMillan—aha, one! Whereas we should see many or lots.
Muggleborns in Harry’s time should bear the same mix of names (one assumes) as the general UK population. But Half-bloods should bear, partly Muggle names, partly Pureblood ones, depending on which parent married (or didn’t) “out.” So, again, half-bloods should carry disproportionately Celtic names, if their Pureblood forebears did.
I went through the HPL’s lists of Hogwarts students mentioned by name in canon. I found over a hundred verified names. Eleven seem Scots or Scots-Irish: McGonagall, Euan Abercrombie, Ernie MacMillan, Andrew Kirke, Demelza Robins, Cormac McLaggen, Natalie MacDonald, Eddie Carmichael, Urquhart, Montague, the Montgomery girls (which, as noted above, might also be Norman). Two were obviously Irish—Orla Quirke and Seamus Finnegan. Two have what might be Welsh surnames but strongly Anglo or Norman first names, and one has the reverse: Graham Pritchard, Roger Davies, and Owen Cauldwell. Two were emphatically Welsh; a Hufflepuff Quidditch player named Cadwallader, and one of Horace’s protégées (assumed therefore to have been his former student), Gwenog Jones. That’s 18 names out of over one hundred—not an unreasonable number given their representation in the modern U.K., a little low but not abnormally so, but absolutely not the over-representation we’d expect from my earlier arguments.
Moreover, the Scots and Welsh and Irish names we see are all MODERN forms. Jones, of course, is about as Welsh a name as you can get. Largely because about one-in-twenty Welshmen adopted it in the 1800’s when the government insisted they start using surnames rather than patronymics.
Indeed, surnames only started becoming generally used among common folk in England in about the thirteenth century, well after the founding of Hogwarts and the beginnings of a separate magical culture. Some rural folk, especially among the Welsh, didn’t adopt surnames until well into the modern era. Post seclusion. So I’d expect some of the old Pureblood families, as tradition-mad as they are, to have proudly retained the old naming conventions. Why not Gwenog ferch Gruffudd, and for that matter Rhys ap Dafydd rather than Roger Davies? Why not Orla ni Chadhain, and Seamus O Fionnagain? Or some such.
For that matter, if Gwenog Jones had old Welsh Pureblood connections, why should she have needed Sluggie’s patronage to win a try-out for the Holyhead Harpies, to be everlastingly grateful to him now…?
And of course we understand why Seamus has a modern ethnic Irish name; he’s a half-blood, and Finnegan is his Muggle father’s perfectly normal, perfectly modern surname.
Which may be the key. Those Anglicized Celtic names may represent mostly half-bloods and Muggleborns. With maybe a few Anglicized, and long-time English-speaking, Pureblood families.
Because, in fact, Wales and Ireland and Cornwall and Scotland, those ancient lands of magic, have been underrepresented at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry since its founding.
At its founding.
By two Saxons, a Dane, and an Iberian, passing on an originally-Continental tradition of magic. And forming ties eventually with other magical schools on the Continent.
Look at the courses offered. Hogwarts offers Ancient Runes, but not harping. Divination may be taught by a Cornishwoman, but it and she are treated as jokes. Whereas the original Myrddin was best known for being a prophet, not a wand-waver.
English wizards may use “Merlin” to cuss by, and they may name an honor (and maybe an actual Order) after him. But the English school does not teach the magic Myrddin used.
We may have a resolution of that long-standing conundrum: is Hogwarts the best school of magic in the U.K. (as Miss Granger’s reading led her to state), or the only one?
(Yeah, I know what Pottermore says, and Jo really shouldn’t embarrass herself like that. England rates and can support a magical school with a population of about 50 million, the rest of Europe has two schools to serve a population of ten times that, and entire rest of the WORLD gets by with eight schools to serve a population of over 5.5 billion? Puh-leaze, it is to laugh. The Indian subcontinent alone has more than eight schools, probably teaching several different ancient magical traditions.)
So. How about a compromise? Hogwarts is the only school for English-speakers. And also the best, according to them.
I mean, Wales and Ireland were renowned for preserving learning and civilization through the Dark Ages. Of course they already had their own centuries-old foundations for studying and teaching magic when those jumped-up offspring of invaders started that Hogwarts school in the tenth century!
But speakers of the hard tongue weren’t invited to these ancient centers of learning.
(Scotland I’m not so sure about—its reputation was, ah, a little different. I think they may have passed on their knowledge mostly by apprenticeships. Which may be why the Lothian witches were among those who got caught wholesale, when it seems that the Welsh and Irish ones were not.)
In fact, I shouldn’t wonder if the only time most of the truly British magical folk have anything to do with those English is to trounce them at Quidditch. Their primary ties are with each other, and perhaps to Lesser Britain—Brittany. (One wonders if the Celts are regretting the deal they cut with the Wizengamot that Anglophone U.K. Muggleborns should all be sent to Hogwarts whatever their geographic or ethnic origin. But at the time they made the deal, back when it was determined that Secrecy would necessitate that Muggleborns be identified and assimilated into Wizarding culture, there were scarcely any to worry about…)
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Date: 2014-12-12 02:04 am (UTC)Thanks...
Date: 2014-12-12 07:02 pm (UTC)Map Nerds
Date: 2014-12-12 11:12 pm (UTC)Map Nerds of the World unite!
Re: Map Nerds
Date: 2014-12-13 01:38 am (UTC)