52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

In an act of Parliament, she stated that everyone except for ‘maids, ladies, gentlewomen, noble personages, and every Lord, knight and gentleman of twenty marks land’ should have to wear on Sundays a ‘Cap of Wool knit, thicked and dressed in England, made within this Realm, and only dressed and finished by some of the Trade of Cappers, upon pain to forfeit for every Day of not wearing three Shillings four Pence’.7 Since they were already poor, this could mean prison for non-payment. Essentially, in the 16th century we had the literal fashion police,

Quick tip: It’s never a great sign on career day when they mention an occupation has its own type of cancer named after it.

Some historians believe this was the turning point where the Empire started to ease up on the senseless killing, bar from a few ‘oopsies’ (such as that time we systematically killed 11,000–90,000 people in Kenya). Whilst that’s probably not the case, it at least seems to have been the point when a lot of Indians loyal to the British abandoned the ‘loyal to the British’ part of their descriptors. The problem with shooting down a crowdful of peaceful protestors for showing support for anti-Empire leaders is you do sort of prove the leaders have a bit of a point about the Empire.

As well as feeling the need to ‘correct’ the natives’ ‘morals’ (an odd thing to want to do when you don’t exactly have the high ground as an invader ruling with massive cannons), we also introduced the laws to ‘protect’ ourselves and our soldiers and officials from being ‘corrupted’ by natives who might turn military camps into ‘replicas of Sodom and Gomorrah’19 whilst they were over there away from their wives. Essentially a big part of why homosexuality was outlawed in these countries was because we were worried we might like it.

amnesia Hitler is basically us Brits. Over the last few years, ranging anywhere from three to fifty, there’s been a trend of politicians and media and people on the street taking credit for the good bits we’ve done in history and conveniently forgetting about all the atrocities. Politicians who weren’t even close to being loaded into their fathers’ penises yet, let alone being fired into their mums, somehow manage to use the pronoun ‘we’ when talking about defeating Hitler.

In short, you can either be responsible for what our ancestors did or you can’t. You can’t just pick out the good bits and say ‘we did that bit’.

I know you want to say ‘but all these massacres are in the past’, and ‘we can’t be held responsible for what our ancestors did’, and that’s fine. But in that case you don’t get to say ‘we saved you in the war’ like it means anything unless you personally stormed the beach of Normandy as a sperm.