Common History

With an upcoming general election and rumblings about voter ID, electoral fraud, proportional representation and lower voting ages, I’ve been inspired to look at how the business of elections has changed and to understand how our Parliament evolved.    This vote from  Terry Pratchett's Dig seemed to me to be a good summation of recent elections. "When people are faced with lots of troubles and they don't know what to do, there's always someone ready to say anything, just to get some power,'" These days, anyone registered to vote ( https://www.gov.uk/vote-uk-election )   can choose any one of several candidates; they then vote by secret ballot for one MP to represent their constituency.     In the 21 st century, there are 650 parliamentary constituencies,   each one (roughly) having the same number of voters. The Parliament that is elected will then sit for up to five years. But it wasn’t always this way; early parliaments were only called at the rule...

  One of my favourite activities when planning a trip to a new area is to open up a map and look at the best routes and any places of interest. These days I’m likely to look at the best route to take, avoiding known bottlenecks, or with interesting places to stop along the way. Our ea rly forebears might not have had maps, but they too would have known about perils and points of interest on their journey, from the names of the places they would pass through.     A traveller in the early medieval period might be wary of passing through Shackerley (in Lancashire, near Preston). The name means robbers wood!   Sceacere – robber, ley – a clearing in woodland.   Conversely a name ending in “ford” such as   Guildford reveals a river crossing.   Sometimes a ford would be named for the river it crossed, sometimes for the animals that used it – Swinford - swine ford, but could also be descriptive of the crossing – Fulford   or foul ford. This brief pos...