Friday 17 July 2020

Civil Disobedience,

rioting and many other mayhem's that I read about,


normally have some social injustice as their root cause, but seldom is it a complaint about wine or beer, and certainly not in a seat of learning like say Oxford, but it happened, above a 20th-century depiction of the St Scholastica Day Riot, England, 1907. Oxford History, it all started out I guess as a bit of a pub crawl, that turned into a pub brawl, and then things got nasty, from the article,


On 10 February 1355, the entire town was celebrating the feast day of Saint Scholastica. Some students were drinking at Swindlestock Tavern, when two of them complained about the quality of the wine served. The landlord and the tavern’s owner, who also happened to be Mayor of Oxford at the time, allegedly responded to their complaint with “stubborn and saucy language”; whereupon a student threw his drink on the owner’s face, followed by the empty wine jug that landed straight on the tavern owner’s head.

A fight erupted and other customers present in the tavern, both locals and students, joined in and soon the fight spilled out of the tavern and onto the streets. Somebody rang the bell at the town's church to summon assistance, and the students rang the bells of the University Church in response. When the Chancellor of the University tried to intervene, arrows were fired at him and he had to retreat.

the amazing thing about this is that the brawl went on for 7 days! the bad news, at the close of play the complaint about the wine left 90 people dead and untold numbers injured, who would have thought that a town like Oxford could be so rough? but it was then.


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