1
"There is little here on family structure or inheritance, but much on sick, sad, short lives. Fleming reveals a society of slow-growing, late-maturing, undernourished people who did not reach full height until well into their twenties, and thus where the numerical dominance of the young placed an even greater burden on the -- few -- full-bodied adults; where one attraction of nucleated villages might be the lord's mill, which met the needs of a society short of adult, full-bodied women; where the seaborne Viking lifestyle did not mean bloodthirsty excitement, but 'bad knees, arthritic shoulders, malformed arms and wrenched wrists'; where an eighth-century twenty-year-old woman died, well fed if not prosperous, horribly disfigured by leprosy, yet not, apparently, ostracized by her community. The town life that drives the book's overall story was an unhealthy, bug- and germ-infested environment, and the much-vaunted rise of the Old English state was supported by ritualized, horrific executions. The coin that enabled taxation, and the aggressive landlords who exploited the opportunities it provided, drove a society of ever deeper inequalities; the only time the stature of the population improved between 400 and 1070 was in the wake of the collapse of Roman power."
-- Pauline Stafford, "Good Teeth, Bad Knees." Review of Britain After Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400 to 1070, by Robin Fleming. TLS 25 March 2011: 13.
2
"At this time, Alabama has the lowest property taxes of any state in the nation. There was a recent increase that raised howls from large landowners, but the rates are still low. Property taxes could be elevated by one-third, and Alabama would remain at the bottom in the nation. Low property taxes translate into meager allocations for schools. The state is just beginning to recognize what this means. An editorial in the Montgomery newspaper told about a man from the state economic-development department who went to Cleveland to talk with a large industrial firm about relocating in Alabama. The official trotted out the glories of cheap labor and low taxes, lures that worked well in the not-so-distant past. The industrialists told the Alabamian that what they looked at most in areas they might move to was the educational system. In today's world, they need educated workers, not muscles. The old days are gone. If they just want low-cost labor, they can go to places overseas that even Alabama can't compete with. Company officials expressed disbelief at Alabama's taxes -- they even snickered. They asked how the schools could be funded with such ridiculous rates."
--Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, And Their Children After Them: The Legacy of "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men": James Agee, Walker Evans, and the Rise and Fall of Cotton in the South (1989; New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004) 150-51.
3
Maharidge and Williamson's "at this time" is 1986, when the writer and the photographer retraced the path that James Agee and Walker Evans had taken through rural Alabama fifty years earlier. Fleming and Stafford's time is more than a thousand years ago. Yet which epoch seems more like ours now -- Maharidge's and Williamson's era of school-centered equality or Fleming and Stafford's era of inequality and decline?
4
And a thousand years from now, what will the archaeologists learn from our own excavated bodies?
