A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (the red fox clan .TXT) 📕

dispute between a noble or gentleman and a person of lower degree, the king’s leanings and sympathies were for the former class always, whether he suspected it or not.  It was impossible that this should be otherwise.  The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions are known and conceded, the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.  This has a harsh sound, and yet should not be offensive to any—even to the noble himself—unless the fact itself be an offense:  for the statement simply formulates a fact. The repulsive feature of slavery is the thing , not its name.  One needs but to hear an aristocrat speak of the classes that are below him to recognize—and in but indifferently modified measure—the very air and tone of the actual slaveholder; and behind these are the slaveholder’s spirit, the slaveholder’s blunted feeling. They are the result of the same cause in both cases:  the possessor’s old and inbred custom of regarding himself as a superior being. The king’s judgments wrought frequent injustices, but it was merely the fault of his training, his natural and unalterable sympathies. He was as unfitted for a judgeship as would be the average mother for the position of milk-distributor to starving children in famine-time; her own children would fare a shade better than the rest.

One very curious case came before the king.  A young girl, an orphan, who had a considerable estate, married a fine young fellow who had nothing.  The girl’s property was within a seigniory held by the Church.  The bishop of the diocese, an arrogant scion of the great nobility, claimed the girl’s estate on the ground that she had married privately, and thus had cheated the Church out of one of its rights as lord of the seigniory—the one heretofore referred to as le droit du seigneur.  The penalty of refusal or avoidance was confiscation.  The girl’s defense was, that the lordship of the seigniory was vested in the bishop, and the particular right here involved was not transferable, but must be exercised by the lord himself or stand vacated; and that an older law, of the Church itself, strictly barred the bishop from exercising it.  It was a very odd case, indeed.

It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion House.  A person who had not taken the Sacrament according to the Anglican rite could not stand as a candidate for sheriff of London.  Thus Dissenters were ineligible; they could not run if asked, they could not serve if elected. The aldermen, who without any question were Yankees in disguise, hit upon this neat device:  they passed a by-law imposing a fine of L400 upon any one who should refuse to be a candidate for sheriff, and a fine of L600 upon any person who, after being elected sheriff, refused to serve.  Then they went to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected L15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in the earth.

The girl’s case seemed strong to me; the bishop’s case was just as strong.  I did not see how the king was going to get out of this hole.  But he got out.  I append his decision:

“Truly I find small difficulty here, the matter being even a child’s affair for simpleness.  An the young bride had conveyed notice, as in duty bound, to her feudal lord and proper master and protector the bishop, she had suffered no loss, for the said bishop could have got a dispensation making him, for temporary conveniency, eligible to the exercise of his said right, and thus would she have kept all she had.  Whereas, failing in her first duty, she hath by that failure failed in all; for whoso, clinging to a rope, severeth it above his hands, must fall; it being no defense to claim that the rest of the rope is sound, neither any deliverance from his peril, as he shall find.  Pardy, the woman’s case is rotten at the source.  It is the decree of the court that she forfeit to the said lord bishop all her goods, even to the last farthing that she doth possess, and be thereto mulcted in the costs.  Next!”