Early England: Incubator for Empire

The Tragedy of the Captured Church

Before we trace how the machine migrated from Great Britain to the United States it’s necessary to describe its early development in rural England and its later flowering into an empire. We will identify the Church as the powerful influence that wound all through this development, but with a qualification. There is no example in history of a ruling party that chose a different path—not in the Reformation, not in the contemporary Traditionalist or Conservative movements, and not in the alternate economic system of BRICS. However, it must be said that in the Church’s case this capture takes on the character of profound tragedy. Early England became the incubator for the empire’s evolution to another lifeform.

However, there was during this period, 700-1746 AD, the promise of a movement that recognized the central threat and resisted it. The Stuart Kings represented this movement, beginning with James VI of Scotland and I of England. Unfortunately, they arrived too late and the machine rolled right over them.

The Universal Blindness of Empire-Minded Rulers

When the Roman Empire fell in 476 CE, the Church had been part of it for only about 150 years. But it didn’t return to the principles taught by the Rosh who walked among the people in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. Nor did it reconnect with its Jewish roots. It looked at the havoc caused by the Empire’s disintegration and the barbarian invasions and realized it possessed the sole receptacle of the Empire’s organizational power. It did not view the Empire’s infrastructure as a cage, although that’s exactly what it was. Its leaders saw a civilization in it, and they realized they alone had the knowledge and ability to restore it. Apparently, it never occurred to them or anyone since, that the Empire was the problem. Or that the kinship baseline has always been the only altrnative to the chaos of a fallen empire.

The Church Begins to Count its Wealth

To execute this restoration, the institutional Church embarked on a process of counting the properties and people of its domain. It was not a complicated task for these trained scribes, lawyers and business managers; they took the old Roman civil law concepts, crossed out “Emperor,” and wrote “Pope.” Then they converted the old imperial real-estate tax maps—the dioceses—into the jurisdictional maps of their bishops. But this was only the beginning.

The world would eventually pay dearly for this blasphemy against creation. The Church was in the process of committing a mechanical sin so ancient and spiritually toxic that centuries earlier, when King David ordered a nationwide census of Israel to quantify the raw muscle of the tribes, the scriptures record that it triggered an immediate, devastating plague upon the land. And yet, that is exactly what the post-Roman chanceries carried out on the English landscape beginning in 794 CE. The trigger was a king’s petition for absolution. In that year, King Offa needed absolution for a royal murder. So, he granted a compulsory tenth of all agricultural produce to the Church. King Offa’s extravagent gift started the Church-machine counting every piglet, sheaf of wheat, and acre of land.

The Sin of King David

2 Samuel 24 says God incited David to conduct a census of the land. However, in 1 Chronicles, it was Satan who rose up against Israel and incited David. But in both versions, David knew taking a census was wrong. According to 2 Samuel he seems to have deluded himself that it was God speaking to him. But in 1 Chronicles, he knowingly ordered his general to carry out Satan’s order. David shocked Joab, his general, when he gave him this order and Joab pleaded with the king.

“May the Lord increase his people a hundredfold! My lord king, are not all of them my lord’s subjects? Why does my lord seek to do this thing? Why should he bring guilt upon Israel?  (1 Chronicles 21: 3)

But David did not withdraw his order and the census continued for nine months and twenty days. Amost everyone was counted during this time  except Levi and Benjamin. They were spared being numbered because Joab was repulsed by the king’s order. David on the other hand, was oblivious to the position he was putting himself in. This oblivion lasted until God ‘stuck Israel’ and David was suddenly overcome by guilt.

David’s Sorrow and Punishment

Then David said to God, “I have sinned greatly in doing this thing, take away your servant’s guilt, for I have acted very foolishly.” (1 Chronicles 21: 8)

In response to David’s repentance, the Lord sent the Prophet Gad, who gave him a choice between three punishments: three years of famine; three months of fleeing your enemies with the sword of your foes at your back; of three days of the Lord’s own sword, a plague in the land, with the Lord’s destroying angel in every part of Israel. David chose the third.

Then David said to Gad, “I am in serious trouble. But let me fall into the hand of the Lord, whose mercy is very great, rather than into the hands of men.”

Therefore the Lord sent a plague upon Israel, and seventy thousand Israelites died.

God also sent an angel to Jerusalem to destroy it; but as the angel was on the point of destroying it, the Lord saw and changed his mind about the calamity, and said to the destroying angel, “Enough now! Stay your hand!”  The angel of the Lord was then standing by the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite. When David raised his eyes, he saw the angel of the Lord standing between earth and heaven, drawn sword in hand stretched out against Jerusalem. David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth fell face down, and David prayed to God: “Was it not I who ordered the census of the people? I am the one who sinned. I did this wicked thing. But these sheep, what have they done? O Lord, my God, strike me and my father’s family, but do not afflict your people with this plague! (1 Chronicles 21: 13-17)

David Sacrifices to Win the Safety of His People

The angel of the Lord commanded David to set up an altar on the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite. David and his four sons immediately went to the threshing floor where Ornan was threshing wheat and David told Ornan to sell him the site of the threshing floor so he could build an altar.

Ornan offered to freely give King David everything he needed; the threshing floor, wood, the oxen for offerings and the wheat for the grain offering. But David answered that he couldn’t take what belongs to someone else for the Lord or make offerings that had cost him nothing. He would only buy these things in a proper sale at full price.

David gave Ornan 600 shekels of gold. Then he built an altar and sacrificed burnt offerings and communion offerings. When the sacrifice was ready, he called upon the Lord, who answered him by sending fire down from heaven upon the altar for burnt offerings.

Then the Lord gave orders to the angel to return his sword to its sheath. (1 Chronicles 21: 27)

The temple was born on the literal ruins of this site, the exact spot where the paper cage had to be violently broken by a physical sacrifice.

The Church’s Census Mania In England

In the history of England, this very script was repeated across a six-hundred-year arc. The spiritual origin of what became a paper cage of measurement, standardization and control officially began in 794 CE under King Offa of Mercia, as mentioned above.

Nearly three centuries later, William the Conqueror would take Offa’s early accounting software and upgrade it into an iron cell with the Domesday Book of 1086, freezing the entirety of the living creation into a permanent, taxable real-estate spreadsheet. No one knew it at the time but they were creating a blueprint that would eventually breed the Whig financial syndicate. In time this syndicate would behead King Charles I and liquidate the remaining kinship baseline of the clans. But that was still far in the future. In the meantime, something more devastating was lurking in the Church’s future.

Plague

There had been many expansions of the census since King Offa, but it finally ended with a nation-wide data audit in 1291. This audit was requested by the King and Pope Nicholas IV to calculate a top-down papal tax. Their ledger was perfected by 1348, the year the Black Death hit England. It wiped out between 45% and 50% of the population in less than two years.

And the Church’s woes didn’t end there. Following the Black Death, from 1348 to 1381, the people of England rebelled against their masters. Labor was suddenly in short supply so the way was open for the peasants and farmers to demand higher wages and the abolition of the old feudal registries that bound them to the landlord’s property.

In 1381 when the central government tried to put a tax on the entire country to pay for its wars, the country exploded in the Peasants’ Revolt. The people marched straight to London and burned the tax rolls, the legal deeds, and the written registries. They explicitly targeted the Archbishop of Canterbury (the chief manager of the paper cage) and dragged him to Tower Hill to be beheaded.

War

Next, the elite Norman families began turning on each other. The Wars of the Roses were the result of centuries of resentment toward the system put in place by William the Conqueror as well the Church’s meddling with English kings. This fight never did reach a conclusion; it was forcefully ended when Henry VII took control of the country, but the resentment continued to simmer.

Once in control, Henry VII went directly to the Pope for his blessing; it wasn’t hard to get at this point. But he spent the rest of his reign fighting off rivals. When Henry VIII came to the throne, he was terrified that the war could start again at any time. This was the main cause of his focus on getting an heir. He didn’t become a bloody tyrant until after a near-death head injury at a jousting match. He was never the same. Four months later, he beheaded Ann Boleyn followed by executing his subjects and confiscating the Church’s monasteries.

Henry was not able to keep all of the land he stole from the monasteries; he needed money to pay for his wars. So he sold much of it to merchant speculators who cleared the residents off the land and fenced it in. This is how the new gentry were created. This is the class of people who staffed the court of Queen Elizabeth I.

The descendants of the gentry grew their wealth until 1688. In that year they were wealthy enough to banish the king and the Church altogether. Then they proceeded to invent a parliamentary government to protect and manage their wealth.

The Kinship Baseline Pushes Back

The last time this system was truly under threat was during the 1745 Rising, which was the last attempt of the Stuart Kings to recalibrate the machine. The elementary version of the machine had been built with their help, but by 1603, when James VI of Scotland became James I of England, they were horified by its development.

When the Stuart line inherited this broken, hyper-commercialized landscape in 1603, they immediately recognized the cold sterility of the spreadsheet, and it was King James I of England who launched the first royal counterattack. He used the crown’s prerogative to prosecute the landlords who were keeping the true owners out of their lands, and issued the Book of Sports in 1618. This was an effort to legally protect the common folk’s right to their traditional, horizontal community customs. It was necessary because the merchant Puritans had been intent on restricting these customs.

When James’ son, Charles I, took the wheel in 1625, he refused to call Parliament for eleven years. He did this so he could use the royal courts to block the gentry’s predatory Enclosure Acts. Unfortunately, the software of the paper cage was already too deeply entrenched. The lawyers and landlords funded a civil war. They completely overran the traditional canopy, and in 1649, they publicly chopped Charles’s head off. This was all to ensure their real-estate spreadsheets could rule supreme.” This is the system that migrated to the United States.

Prince Charles Edward Stuart, his Jacobite allies, and the Highland clans led the last stand of the human baseline against a metastasized machine.