Thread by @Mssr_le_Baron

Who are the American elite, and where did they come from?
Allow me to explain with an infograph.
You deserve to know the truth. Few have ever spelled it out publicly.
We start from the beginning: 1066.

A multi-part thread.

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CONTENT AHEAD WARNING

In 1066, William the Bastard, soon to be known as the Conqueror, crossed the Channel and defeated both Harold Godwinson, the last Saxon king, and Harold Hardrada, the Nordic claimant. It was a bad year to be named Harold.

He made his followers the new rulers of this land, giving them estates and wealth, creating a new Norman ruling class.

After the rebellion of Earl Ralph, the last gasp of Anglo-Saxon power and identity, which they called the Breton Revolt, even though many Bretons were William’s followers and would remain so, William would purge the ruling class of Anglo-Saxons (Saxons which they called Bretons).

This was the birth of the American elite. The Norman Yoke.

Norman rule would be strongest in two areas: the old core of settlement, East Anglia and London, and the central manorial zone. Before we continue further, we have to talk about population divergence and self-selection.

Suppose you have a single origin population. Then, arbitrarily, you divide it into two new subgroups based on some lifestyle choice. Say, people who like red vs people who like blue. The new population averages for each subgroup will now be shifted far towards liking red or blue.

Not only that, regression to the mean does not mean regression to the population average, it means regression of phenotypes towards genotypes.

But because the selection of phenotypes is partly a manifestation of genotype and not purely environment, the genotype will be somewhat moved towards liking red or blue as well.

Animal breeding worked despite not knowing genotypes because genotypes are strongly correlated to phenotypes. Over time, selecting for phenotype will cause the genotype to converge towards the implied phenotype.

So what were the cultural selections that created Albion’s Seeds? We divide the British population post-Conquest into four selection groups that will eventually diverge into Albion’s seeds.

The first, and most numerically significant, are the core manorially-settled English. Core zone England is defined by rich but tough soil that must be plowed with labor-intensive methods.

Accordingly, survival meant developing a cooperative attitude towards fellow villagers, whose cooperation was needed to properly cultivate the soil. This “non-kin sharing” combined with WEIRD outmarriage patterns created a class of people who valued altruism towards the stranger.

At the same time, the rowdiest elements were gradually selected out. Proto-Cavalier Lords would hang the most criminal, so that the sociopathic would either be killed off, attain wealth through war or trade and join the Norman ruling class, or flee to the periphery.

And who lived on that rim? The Proto-Scots-Irish. On the rim, settlement followed the “hamlet” rather than “village” pattern. They were more isolated and dependent on individual farms or herding.

Villages were clumpings of a few hundred persons around a manor, with shared communal social space (but in England, not shared fields).
Hamlets were groupings of less than a dozen houses, often five or so, around a cul-de-sac or lane, isolated from other settlements.

This is the settlement design replicated, roughly, in American suburbia and ruralia. The walkable community is a modern village copy-pasted ad infinitum and the modern hamlet is a suburban cul-de-sac.

Finally, we have the Normans, which we will divide into the House of York and the House of Lancaster.

Much like in the later English Civil War, control of the central manorial zone was hotly contested, with Yorkist support coming from the fringe, but the pattern is much, much messier than the later English Civil War (which is also somewhat messy).

However, the process of divergence had begun. Broadly, we divide the Norman lords into two kinds of lordship: Manorial lordship and Enclosure lordship.

Manorial lordship was lordship over manorial villages, as in the core manorial region. This placed the Norman in the role of running a tightly knit village community, dispensing justice.

Also, as communalization progressed, the manorial villagers would become more helpless and easy to exploit by outsiders, necessitating the Manorial lord, the future Yorkist and Proto-Cavalier, to develop a wilder, more violent personality, as well as a disciplinarian streak.

Meanwhile, what we call the House of Lancaster is loosely correlated to the genetic development vector which becomes "Puritan". At this time, the sortings are necessarily *quite* weak. Indeed, the life of Alice “The Old Dragon” Chaucer, Duchess of Suffolk, should illustrate this.

The granddaughter of the famous author, she was related to the Lancasters by blood, but she would go from being a top supporter of the Lancaster cause to the Yorkist cause later in life, with her grandson Edmund taking up the Yorkist claim.

All these people are related, which will continue to hold in the later English Civil War and American Civil War.

So what is Enclosure lordship? English common land and enclosures are often misunderstood. When Russian scholars encountered English enclosure and commons, they assumed it was the same as Russian commons, which are genuinely common fields.

But English manors, while communal, do not have shared land. Rather, the land is held individually but plowed communally. The genuine shared land is the “waste” land, which refers to lands that are not farmland, such as woodland, pasture, or marsh.

The tragedy of the English commons is overgrazing of shared pasture, and the solution to this tragedy is for the Cavalier to hang everyone who defects until they genetically are predisposed to cooperate.

But in East Anglia and other lands, the “waste land” actually comprised a substantial amount of the manor’s potential economic output. Accordingly, a lord in such Enclosure lands must capture this value somehow, as the traditional manor doesn’t produce enough income.

The solution is to enclose the commons in such manors as private property belonging to the lord and create a business selling the products. The tenants would now be working for the lord in a business-like fashion.

These tenants, the Marshmen of the Fens, or Swamp English, were more similar to the Proto-Scots-Irish in temperament.

Along with the Quakers, some would eventually follow the Puritans to America as servants, though they are mostly literal Anglo-Saxon in DNA, being the heaviest Anglo invasion impact zone, while the Puritans, are to this day, heavily Norman.

Let’s zoom in on one of the conflicts in the War of the Roses: the struggle over Lynn, also called King’s Lynn. King’s Lynn was contested between the House of York and House of Lancaster.

The local House of Lancaster supported the Lancaster claimant (recall, elites can credibly support either claimant as a blood relative) because they believed he would lower trade barriers to Prussia, a key trade partner for the businesses in Lynn.

This is because the economics of the region necessitated more international trade to export local products. This led to a battle over the town’s government, a lawsuit that lasted many, many years, and an escalation to violence.

The Puritans and Cavaliers were latent in the House of York and House of Lancaster. On one side, you had proto-merchant lords who held town citizenships fighting over trade barriers, and on the other, an alliance of low townsmen and rurals.

And by the 17th century, tensions had risen again. War would again come to England. Who were the Cavaliers and the Puritans? The standard myth is that the Puritans were middle class Anglo-Saxons and the Cavaliers were Norman aristocrats.

This is not true and is largely a product of politically motivated distortions and propaganda, both contemporary to the period and later when the English Civil War was revisited as the cause of the American Civil War by Reconstruction-era historians.

Historians have studied the Cavaliers and Puritans and quantified them in databases. The difference between the wealth of the Cavaliers and Puritans is not statistically significant.

Originally, the conflict was between the “Country” faction, which was asserting its right to gentlemanly autonomy, and the “Court” faction, which received royal patronage.

Those who engaged in trade or professions were more Parliamentary, but still predominately of noble blood (which accounts for classification differences between Brunton and Keeler).

Indeed, here is an example of someone who was such a fencesitter that he said God would divide him down the middle. And so it came to be - a cannonball sliced him in half.

The lines are clear in retrospect, abstractly, especially since the conflict became so zealous. But they weren’t going in! You have to understand both sides as Norman aristocrats and gentry, a broadly related ethne, and that Roundheads *didn't want to execute the King* at first.

So what made Cavalierism and Puritanism?

Before the war, both sides were messy patronage and kin networks you could easily switch between. However the pressure of the conflict itself hardened both the religious/political divides that were already latent, waiting to manifest.

On the material level, the manorial core zone of England was divided between King and Parliament. Lords sided with both, you could be in Royalist territory in one village and Parliament’s the next, and people would even flip flop sides.

Nationally, there was a slight lean towards Parliament among elites, contributing to their final victory. Lords on the fringe were far more Royalist, not for ideological reasons, but because their people wanted autonomy, such that Royalism was part ideology, part particularism.

Also, Oxford was a strong center of Royalist support because of direct royal patronage, the Stuart court being established there. Let’s overlay the map of enclosures over English Civil War support. Enclosure areas were far more likely to support Parliament.

This is because centuries of trade had made their leaders into merchants, with the Puritan mercantile attitude evolving as an adaptation to enclosure economics, such that areas economically integrated with London and global trade were far more likely to support Parliament.

Another cause of Puritanism? The Tudor Parliament was controlled by patronage networks which Elizabeth used to govern. The Stuarts had trouble asserting their will over Parliament’s networks.

Which is to say, Parliamentary lords had received patronage for supporting the winning side. And the Tudors had inherited the claim of Lancaster. Such families were far more likely to support Parliament.

Which is to say: The House of Lancaster had substantially become the Parliamentary cause and the House of York the Royalists.

Or in other words, look at the damn flower.

The other aspect is political. King Charles was pushing the limits of English constitutional governance, to put it politely.

He was attempting to govern without the consent of Parliament, which was not inherently a disloyal entity, but had strengthened under the Tudors to channel and guide the energies of their elites by fixing their concerns.

Before the conflict erupted, people had rediscovered work purporting to be a study of Anglo-Saxon law. In reality, it was merely a recounting of the state of London law at the time mixed with made up legal sentiments and the Magna Carta, which was also reproduced.

This cobbled together mess was the work of a Medieval fishmonger, who had simply vibed out a work without any basis in fact. But it inflamed sentiments.

The Puritans wanted to restore the ancient rights and freedoms of the Anglo-Saxons, as described in “Anglo-Saxon” law, which was really Norman tradition and how the Norman Yoke had actually worked and which they even had in living judicial memory!

But henceforth, the cause of liberty would be known as Anglo-Saxonism for centuries to come. Meanwhile, the Cavaliers styled themselves as Normans imposing a Norman Yoke in response.

But in reality, this was a set of legal innovations imported from the Continent with no basis in either Anglo-Saxon or Norman tradition. It was literally just Catholic thought, possibly from his wife.

So the Puritan Anglo-Saxons (Normans (House of Lancaster)) opposed the Cavalier Normans (Also Normans (House of York)) to defend Anglo-Saxon liberties (Actual Norman Legal Tradition) against the Norman Yoke (Continental Catholicism).

The Proto-Scots-Irish, which was both literal Scotland and the fringes in general, fought to protect their autonomy.

Above all, they wanted freedom and the right to live their own way.

And Quakerism was born then. It started as “Leveller” or “Digger” ideology, and spread especially well among the rank-and-file soldiers of Parliament. Levellerism believed in the material equality of all men and the abolishing of all rank and difference.

The digger movement originated in the south of England, but it was crushed by Parliament and then shifted towards Pacifism, becoming Quakerism.

Quakerism was present in all classes, but somewhat more among the middle class, especially weavers. Quakers were the most lib 2% of England in the 17th century. The seed of Quakerism was the ultimate fruition of centuries of manorial selection for sharing-is-caring egalitarians.

To the extent the English Civil War was about a bourgeois uprising against the aristocracy (it mostly wasn’t), it was the Quaker-weavers disputing Parliament’s authority. And they lost. Total Parliament victory. In the long run, Parliamentarians got everything they wanted.

The Manorial ultra-egalitarian ethos was then taken by demobilizing radicals, the new Quaker prophets, to the rocky peripheral lands in North England, away from repression.

There, on the rocky peripheries of the Midlands, lived a clannish population similar to the Scots-Irish. This created a hybrid population in between ultra-egalitarianism and a clannish biological substrate. Hicklibbification.

And there we leave England, and America’s English cousins.

We follow not the English, but their diaspora.

What matters to us about each faction of combatants is their dreams.

The Puritan Dream: Perfect meritocracy on Earth, where God’s Elect would demonstrate their superiority. The blessings of Providence. Natural Aristocracy in full bloom, with the poor as weeds in God’s Garden, to quote Cotton Mather. A Congregational-Party-State. A City on a Hill.

The Cavalier Dream: A society of order, an island fortress. An absolutist bureaucratic state. Law enforced by mechanical hands, labor done by subservient bodies. Steel, flesh, and gunpowder, and at the top, the race of Lords. Megacity One. Robocop. And the trains ran on time.

The Quaker Dream: A society made equal. A paradise on earth, where resources were in infinite abundance and peace reigns among a brotherhood of all men. Kumbaya and bongos on the village green. And everyone was a hecking decent human being.

And the Scots-Irish, a people on the fringe. A dream not yet articulated, more of a yearning or an urge. Buffeted by the winds of fate, a dream driving them to the margins of England, then the Lowlands of Scotland, then the borders of Ireland. Ever onto the next frontier.

A wish, born of a whisper, of a home where they would not have to fight to live, a world where they would not be forced into rich men’s wars, where they could escape the lash of the Cavalier revenuer and the cruel logic of the Puritan’s ledger.

A white picket fence, a 4 bedroom ranch, 3 beautiful kids, and a golden retriever playing on the lawn. A name of their own and a home of their own.

In time, they would call them Americans, and their dream the American Dream.

And so Albion’s seeds were sown.

Coming up next: The Newport Consensus, the Civil War, and the Fate of the Old South.

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