Today is the anniversary of the St. Brice’s Day Massacre. And almost nothing with “Massacre” in its name is good even if it’s also named for a saint. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, for instance, is not a romantic event.

In case the details have faded, and they have, the massacre happened on November 13, 1002 (St. Brice’s, I mean, not St. Valentine’s) at the behest of the dreaded Aethelred the Unready. And it proves that a person can be both weak and vicious and also that the two in combination are even worse than either by itself.

Aethelred was, you may recall, about the worst monarch from the House of Wessex, who seems to have acceded to the throne due to his mother arranging the murder of his half-brother, Edward the Martyr, and once there was unreliable or even treacherous with his courtiers and ineffective in fighting the Danes, vacillating between paying them the Danegeld and battling them.

In 1002 he decided he’d had enough and ordered a massacre of we’re not quite sure who. Certainly not all the Danes in the British Isles; his oily writ did not extend to the Danelaw. Possibly some rather nasty mercenaries. They may have deserved to die, and the Danes had been raiding and pillaging in a most obnoxious manner for centuries.

So I don’t mind trying to get rid of them. I do rather mind sudden massacres although it may be, as Aethelred later claimed, that they’d been planning similar treachery themselves. But what I really mind is a cruel but feeble stroke that ends up, as this one did, provoking Sveyn Forkbeard to invade the next year, some say partly because his own sister was a victim of the massacre.

Sveyn came back repeatedly and not in a good way, invoking the massacre regularly although given the Danes’ general approach it may simply have been an excuse. But in the end he actually became king of England in 1013, only to die the next year, after which Aethelred was briefly restored, died in 1016 and after the tragic death of his son Edmund Ironside Canute (properly Knut, I suppose) became king.

The long and the short of it is that Aethelred was a sniveling, impulsive, cruel man, not even Machiavellian in the common sense of that word. He struck repeatedly but ineffectually, getting the worst of both worlds and earning opprobrium without being feared. So he’s an inspiring role model, but only for his superb illustration of antistatesmanship and his compelling example of what not to do.

By the way Brice himself was a 5th-century bishop of Tours who is no more responsible for it happening on his feast day than St. Valentine is for gangsters opening up on one another with machine guns.

November 12 marks the rather shabby beginnings of paid football in the United States when Walter “Pudge” Heffelfinger got a secret $500 “Game performance bonus” to take the field for the Alleghany Athletic Association. Roughly $13,200 in today’s money, it wouldn’t buy you a single play from today’s incredibly overpaid athletes.

Yes, overpaid. Remember the Hank Williams Jr. complaint from the 1970s that "the pitcher got a million dollars and the quarterback he got two”? Well, Colin Kaepernick, the guy who won’t kneel for the national anthem because America treats people like him so badly, signed a 6-year, $114 million dollar contract with the San Francisco 49ers. The details are complicated but essentially it’s $19 million a year or over $1 million per game.

Now there are on average around 160 plays per game. (I checked.) Taking out things like kickoffs, there are about 134 that involve a quarterback. But as two teams are playing, all things being equal, each QB will take 67 snaps. So Kaepernick gets paid very nearly $15,000 per snap.

OK, obviously he and all the others are paid for their time in practice and for the scarcity value of their talents if not their attitudes. But the same is true of Heffelfinger, who got a “bonus” for showing up and playing because he practised and was good. (In fact in the game in question, whose final score was 4-0, he scored the only touchdown on a recovered fumble; touchdowns were worth less in those days although dollars were worth more.)

The story is, as I said, a bit shabby. For one thing, Heffelfinger, who’d been an all-American guard at Yale, was paid “double expenses” during his earlier stint with the Chicago Athletic Association. And if you don’t think that’s pay, try telling your boss it’s OK to submit each receipt twice and see what happens. For another, the $500 arrangement was kept secret until it was unearthed in the 1960s so they were ashamed to be seen doing it but not ashamed to be doing it which is a rather characteristically human but not a dignified pose. (Incidentally the AAA paid another guy $250 to play along with Pudge the next week, against Washington & Jefferson College, but the team lost 8-0.)

It’s hard to believe there was a time when people played sports for the love of the game. And I don’t suggest that those who sacrifice time and effort to excel in this or in any other field should not be rewarded. Moreover, as sports careers tend to be short even without sudden serious injury they need to be paid over a decade the sum a normal person would earn over four or five. And yes, sports are popular. But modern sports are also lurid.

There are examples of sportsmanship and humility, to be sure. And not all of them are scripted by the team’s well-paid PR consultants. But frankly I feel that if these athletes were forced to scrape by on a million bucks a year they might actually show more appreciation and more of the old amateur spirit of good clean fun. Minus the bit about cash payments under the table, I mean.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. No, actually, don’t. I may have mentioned it before. But today is the day Henri I of England (not a typo; he was French) married Matilda of Scotland whose name was Edith (also not a typo but I can’t explain it).

Now Edith Matilda is a very interesting person in all kinds of ways, trilingually literate, pious, a patron of arts, and active in government on behalf of her often-absent husband in a marriage that seems to have been marked by genuine mutual devotion. Even though King Horny I also had roughly two dozen known illegitimate children.

Henry is interesting too, not least for having bumped off his miserable brother William II in a “hunting accident” after which he made a beeline for the royal treasury almost as though he had known it was going to happen. But I digress.

The thing that fascinates me about this marriage is that Matilda was the daughter of Saint Margaret of Scotland and Scottish king Macolm III (predictably killed in battle with the English on an ill-advised raid). And Margaret was the sister of Edgar Atheling and daughter of Edward the Exile, son of Edmund Ironside, last king but one in the House of Wessex (both Edmund and Edward the Confessor were sons of the wretched Aethelred the Unready, though by different mothers) that traced back to Alfred the Great and beyond.

It’s not just antiquarianism. It’s amazing that the Canadian monarchy to this day has its origins in the miraculously successful struggles against disorder in the darker part of the Dark Ages. And it’s a tribute to statesmanship that Henry, son of William the Conqueror, should have married into the House of Wessex for sound dynastic and political reasons, and wound up with a love match with a remarkable woman into the bargain.

It’s like something out of the Lord of the Rings. Which isn’t that surprising given Tolkien’s academic background in Anglo-Saxon literature. And it also comes out well despite enormous travails, including the death of Henri I’s only legitimate son and the civil war that erupted over efforts to keep his and Matilda’s daughter, also Matilda and confusingly Maude (stop it with the double names) and a former Holy Roman Empress, on the throne and with her the House of Wessex as well as of Normandy.

In the end Maude Matilda’s son by Geoffrey of Anjou, Matilda of Scotland’s grandson, became Henry II the Almost Great. And if he was succeeded by such wretched sons as Richard and John, well, nobody’s perfect. From them came other bummer kings like Henry III, and also excellent ones like Edward I. And a system that learned to curb the menace of bad rulers.

It’s a long and tangled tale, of course. And it’s hard to say how much it owes to the happy coincidence of statecraft and emotion in the marriage of Henri and Matilda. But it owes something, and it’s a happy something.

If you like state-created religions, you have reason to celebrate on November 10. Or rather Reason. Because it was on this date in 1793 that the French Revolutionary government tried to impose the Goddess of Reason on its populace, a violent wrenching of spiritual impulses out of their normal course that can only end horribly.

Well, not Goddess exactly. They had Goddesses of Reason in their November 10 Fête de la Raison, but to avoid idolatry they used attractive women. Which isn’t necessarily a direct appeal to reason to begin with and reminds us that Madison Avenue did not invent the “Here’s a pretty girl so buy our toothpaste” approach to public relations.

Evidently the Goddess of Reason in the initial Paris festival was played by the wife of Antoine-François Momoro, the guy who coined the phrase “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité ou la mort” of which the last part is often forgotten though not by its most enthusiastic practitioners. She evidently dressed “provocatively” and according to Thomas Carlisle “made one of the best Goddesses of Reason; though her teeth were a little defective”.

Now bad teeth fall a little short of Olympus. But technically the Cult of Reason was in any case atheistic. Or worse. In fact the Cult of Reason worshiped a supposedly divine being. But that being was man.

Well, not man exactly. Not man as he was, grubby, superstitious, prone to emotions and infuriating to self-appointed elites through history. Man as he would be if perfected by achieving Truth and Liberty through Reason. Or, if he proved recalcitrant, by removing his head with its troublesome brain.

It is ironic that a government would seek to impose rationality through coercion given that if the whole thing were even remotely reasonable, it ought to have proceeded successfully by persuasion. And it is also ironic that worshiping man is not reasonable if you have anything resembling powers of observation, nor is supposing that man is secretly something utterly different and far better than he is.

Nor even more fundamentally is thinking that pure reason can sustain anything resembling a desire to live or to act. Almost all the greatest minds who have considered the matter, a category that excludes virtually every French Revolutionary I might add, have concluded that there is something we are made for, something inherent in the nature of man, toward which can guide us but is not itself reason and is somehow more primordial. Mr. Spock would have had no logical reason to get out of bed and behave with benign honour all day.

Undeterred by such reasoning, or influenced by reasoning of any kind at all, French radicals proceeded to desecrate churches including dismantling the altar at Notre Dame in Paris and replacing it with an altar to Liberty and carving “To Philosophy” over the doors, and insisting that all cemetery gates should read only “Death is an eternal sleep”. Which is, again, not something a great many very rational people ever believed, let alone felt should be stuffed down people’s throats rather than poured into their ears. Nor are altars or cathedrals “reasonable” if you are insisting there is no deity.

It gets worse. The system soon found its own actual god, in the form of “le peuple”. So the ultimate irony is that a system that began by worshipping man ended by sacrificing him bloodily to a collective “man” that was a Moloch devouring individuals in defiance of Truth, Liberty or Reason.

You know it’s bad when Robespierre steps into rein in your excesses, which he did on May 7 1794 with his Cult of the Supreme Being, a kind of decaffeinated religion with an actual God who’s just this kind of mist that never bothers or judges you. But even Robespierre realized that without a lawgiver there can be no law, in the moral as in the political sphere. So the Cult of Reason was out-reasoned by Robespierre barely two months before the guillotine perfected him on July 28 of that same year.

The French Revolution featured noble sentiments shouted from the rooftops and rivers of blood pouring down the sewer. Exactly the sort of situation Montaigne described with his aphorism “Between ourselves, there are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”

When man begins by worshiping himself he infallibly ends by slaughtering himself, the collectivity elevated then immolated in a blazing pyre of unreason whose fuel is reason itself cut off, dried out and set ablaze by passions rendered uncontrollable precisely by denying their existence.

On November 9 of 1799 Napoleon overthrew the Directory and established the Consulate. It was a huge improvement because instead of a five-man executive and a chaotic legislature you had a feeble legislature and a three-man executive and Napoleon was the man. Well, it was a huge improvement if you were Napoleon.

It’s called the Coup of Brumaire because in those days the French still had the new months the radical excesses of the Revolution had foisted upon them. It’s never a good thing when they start renaming months, even if “Foggy” is kind of a funny name for a month. And the result was a typically foggy French political arrangement.

The legislature had one chamber that could discuss bills but not vote on them, one that could vote but not talk, and one that could do both but was secretly part of the executive and was appointed by it. So the executive was pretty much all powerful. And within it, guess who was in charge. Right. The guy who staged the coup partly because at age 30 he was too young to be a Director under the old system.

I find the whole thing unfair because the Directory had itself gotten rid of the infamous Committee of Public Safety, ended the reign of terror by executing a few of its leading advocates including the egregious Robespierre, and tried to restore sanity to economic policy including ending the hyperinflation idiocy of the assignats. If ever a French government did not deserve to be overthrown, and frankly it’s a short list, it’s the Directory.

There’s one humorous aspect to this whole business. Beyond the fact that French politics is almost always funny as well as alternatively infuriating and tragic. And that’s the thought of two other guys agreeing to form a triumvirate with Napoleon Bonaparte and having no idea they were patsies. It’s been done before, including with Julius and Augustus Caesar. And maybe the others were formidable characters too and it’s only with hindsight that their fate seems predictable. But here’s a challenge: Name either of Napoleon’s other consuls.

I can’t either. But I Googled and they are, or briefly were, Jean Jacques Régis de Cambacérès, 1st Duke of Parma, and Charles-François Lebrun, duc de Plaisance. And perhaps neither was quite the chump he seemed, as Cambacérès wrote the Code Napoleon (not a good thing, but an impressive career achievement) and lived until 1824 and died peacefully, having outlasted Napoleon himself, while Lebrun later became “Arch-Treasurer” under the Empire which is a pretty cool title, and also lived until 1824.

Still, you’d have to be some kind of sucker to have Napoleon say “Hey, let’s share power” and go “Yeah, sure, sounds good to me.”

You know what would be a great, original, sure-fire idea? A massive infrastructure program to stimulate the economy. Like the one the US just inaugurated on November 8. Of 1933.

That’s right. The Civil Works Administration, an early serving of New Deal alphabet soup that aimed to create millions of jobs, spend hundreds of millions of dollars a month, and build or fix roads, sewer pipes, schools, playgrounds and, something you don’t see today, a quarter of a million outhouses.

That’s right. The U.S. government got into the business of building kaibos for the helpless populace. But hey, jobs jobs jobs, right? And of course it worked. The U.S. government lurched into action when the Great Depression hit, raising taxes, restricting trade, deliberately reducing production of both agricultural and industrial products to increase prosperity (the AAA and NRA particularly), meddling everywhere, insulting businessmen and by golly, the economy recovered in just a decade.

It was, some quibbled, the longest depression in American history precisely because the government decided to wallop the economy at the worst imaginable moment and adopted a long and politically very successful strategy of continuing the floggings until morale improved. But let us not be small-minded.

To this day, every politician faced with a downturn wants to be Franklin Roosevelt. And they hype their plans to spend money we don’t have on infrastructure we didn’t want until the slump hit. And the longer it goes on, the longer the slumps last and the more disappointing the performance of the economy.

I guess we better do it again, huh?

A dictionary is one of those things you just have to have in your house. Unless you have, say, the Internet. But even if you don’t, I expect you haven’t got a Catholicon.

If your response at this point is something along the lines of “Well, no, I’m not Catholic” then you need an encyclopedia. Or, again, for those under 100, the Internet. I’d sure hate to be an encyclopedia salesman these days and I never wanted to be one anyway.

The point is, if you do look up Catholicon in something big enough to have a listing, like your telephone, you will discover that it is the first ever French dictionary, and called the Catholicon because “Katholikon” in Greek, or “Καθολικόν” if you prefer, means “universal”. But it is also, and even primarily, the first ever Breton dictionary. And as it was published on November 5 of 1499, having been written by a Breton priest in 1464, it also has its 6,000 entries in Latin.

That you don’t have to Google. Or French, which you might even speak. But Breton?

Yes. Breton. Or Brezhoneg as it evidently calls itself. It was once pretty big news in Brittany, which is of course not in Britain. It is in France, part of an older Celtic pattern of settlement under which Breton itself is a Brythonic language, which I know thanks to the Interwebs is a family that includes the almost vanished Cornish, semi-vibrant Welsh and extinct Cumbric and was actually brought from Britain to Armorica (sort of Brittany plus much of Normandy) during the Dark Ages when people were fleeing, rampaging or doing both at once over much of that region. And while French eventually became the dominant language in France, unsurprisingly in retrospect but something of a struggle and a government project for quite a while, languages like Breton were big news, as were the “langue d'oc” group, distinct from the langue d’oïl” family because they said oc not oui for yes).

One of the pronounced, so to speak, features of the modern world is a standardization of language along with everything else. And it’s easy to lament the vanishing of quaint things like Cumbric provided you yourself speak, say, English. But it is striking that as recently as 1950 there were around 1 million Breton speakers, some 2% of the French population. And yet today the number is perhaps 200,000, though Wikipedia chirpily notes that “the number of children attending bilingual classes has risen 33% between 2006 and 2012 to 14,709” as though it were on the verge of a major comeback.

It’s not. I’d say Latin has a better chance. (And yes, I’d back such a project without, frankly, having much to contribute to it.) But it is odd to see a language go from first in the first dictionary to what was that again in that fairly brief period, by historical standards, in which you didn’t have to explain to young people what a “dictionary” was.

Today, Nov. 4, is the anniversary of the 1576 “Spanish Fury” in Antwerp, one of those incidents that casts humanity in a truly dreadful light especially when it comes to public affairs.

Humans are an odd mix of the trite, the appalling and the uplifting. In the midst of darkness they can find light. But they can also create darkness on such a scale that there is no shortage of plausible characterizations of history along the lines of Herbert Spencer’s “history is little more than the Newgate calendar of nations.” The Newgate Calendar was, in case you don’t own a copy, an 18th and 19th century lurid set of stories about people who wound up being executed for having been brutal and dissolute, subtitled The Malefactors’ Bloody Register, and was third only to the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress on the list of books the average British home would contain in those days). Thus Hegel called history a butcher’s block wile British historian of Parliament Lewis Namier claimed that “History is made up of juggernauts, revolting to human feeling in their blindness, supremely humorous in their stupidity.” Yet it is hard even to find much humour in the conduct of Imperial Spain, especially in this incident.

The “Spanish Fury” begins with the Eighty Years’ War, which already sounds bad and is. It was a revolt by Spain’s “Seventeen Provinces” (what would later become more or less the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, plus parts of France) against Spanish imperial rule that was as brutal and intransigent as it was bad and unsuitable to these particular regions. And it is already easy to denounce the kind of dynastic politics that would turn the Burgundian Netherlands into the Hapsburg Netherlands and then, in the 16th century, transfer them to Spain with which they had very little in common.

Then you get the Spanish unwillingness to accept the inhabitants’ manifest desire not to be ruled from Madrid, contrasting grimly with their willingness to shed blood over nearly a century to keep it. Which failed.

Indeed, the “Spanish Fury” itself was both counterproductive in preserving Spanish rule and the result of incompetent Spanish rule. It was carried out by troops who were actually mutinying because they hadn’t been paid. By the government of Spain, mind you, not the people of Antwerp. Madrid was as usual bankrupt despite, or perhaps because of, the vast flow of silver from its New World colonies that let it pursue grandiose geopolitical plans without the necessity of governing well at home or abroad.

The mutinous troops rampaged for three days, murdering, raping, looting and burning, killing some 7,000 people and permanently damaging Antwerp, leading to Amsterdam’s rise to the leading city of the region. And this ghastly episode also reinforced negative views of Spain abroad and gave further credence to anti-Spanish propaganda including from Britain, what has been denounced as “La Leyenda Negra” by Spanish historians. But it was by no means all legend. Indeed, this was just one of many “Spanish Furies” in the area over more than a decade.

In the end, these outbursts only increased the determination of the Seventeen Provinces to achieve independence from this tyrannical, bloodthirsty and inept regime, which Spain resisted violently until 1648 when the conclusion of the even more appalling Thirty Years’ War secured the independence of the Dutch Republic though the “Spanish Netherlands” were kept by Spain until 1714 when they went back to the Austrian Hapsburgs.

The whole episode is unbelievably violent, coarse, stupid and persistent. And sadly it’s the sort of thing people do all too often, especially in public affairs.