We all know of the cloth stretched out on tenterhooks
Around Stroud and the five valleys:
Stroud Scarlet, Uley Blue, Berkeley Yellow,
Out there in the newly enclosed fields;
Gate and fence and hedge and notice board,
Where once the land was walked by custom
And ‘Its only bondage was the circling sky’;
Where the high walls of dark satanic mills
Enclose handloom weavers and spinners
In a new bondage of the ticking clock,
As the scarlet and yellow broadcloth
Crosses the Atlantic archipelago,
To reach the Iroquois in their circling sky,
In the so-called Age of Reason
When rationality was equated with private property,
And racial hierarchy with Enlightenment.
Here are two texts to illustrate this linkage
Between Stroud, its valleys, and the Iroquois:
The first from the Iroquois leader, Joseph Brant,
Where he contrasts his homelands with England:
‘We have no law but that written on the heart of every rational creature by … the great Spirit. We have no prisons – we have no pompous parade of courts – we have no robbery under the colour of law … Our sachems, and our warriors eat their own bread, and not the bread of wickedness … The palaces and prisons among you form a most dreadful contrast. Go to the former places, and you will see, perhaps, a most deformed piece of earth swelled with pride … your prisons – here description utterly fails! Liberty to a rational creature, as much exceeds property, as the light of the sun does that of the most twinkling star, but you put them on a level, to the everlasting disgrace of civilization.’
The second is from Uley in Gloucestershire from 1795,
Just eight years before Joseph Brant’s letter above:
‘O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.’
The third text to illustrate this linkage
Does not yet exist – it will be the result
Of your thoughts, dear reader,
On the nature of these connections
Between Gloucestershire and the Iroquois;
And your thoughts or writing
On the definition of civilisation;
And on the definition of progress;
And on the definition of freedom;
And on the definition of humanity;
And on the definition of the Anthropocene.
We leave that to you, dear reader;
But why not take a walk down to Walbridge;
Study the information board by the canal bridge;
Picture the Stroud scarlet out there in the fields behind you,
Picture the wars of conquest and of empire,
Picture Stroud scarlet cloth crossing the world,
See it circumscribing the circling sky;
Then gather your thoughts and words in bondage.
Personal Writings Inspired by a Reading of
Red Round Globe Hot Burning
Peter Linebaugh
