From The Road to Wigan Pier-

On the day when there was a full chamber-pot under the breakfast table I decided to leave.

Orwell, writing in 1935-1937 goes into great detail about distressed housing. Here is an insight.

I have noted ‘Landlord good’ or ‘Landlord bad’, because there is great variation in what the slum-dwellers say about their landlords.

I found – one might expect it, perhaps – that the small landlords are usually the worst. It goes against the grain to say this, but one can see why it should be so. Ideally, the worst type of slum landlord is a fat wicked man, preferably a bishop, who is drawing an immense income from extortionate rents. Actually, it is a poor old woman who has invested her life’s savings in three slum houses, inhabits one of them and tries to live on the rent of the other two – never, in consequence, having any money for repairs.

It’s always neglected repairs that do a handsome home in.

Liberals believe in kindness, humility, and considerateness. They like this statement, often attributed to Lincoln: “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” Liberals know that kindness, humility, and consid-erateness can be challenging to cultivate.

Personal size and mental sorrow have certainly no necessary proportions. A large bulky figure has as good a right to be in deep affliction, as the most graceful set of limbs in the world. But, fair or not fair, there are unbecoming conjunctions, which reason will patronize in vain,-which taste cannot tolerate, —which ridicule will seize.

A ‘bulky figure’…c’est amusant.

But it required more than an annual tour to administer and exert royal power throughout Scotland. The size and geography of the kingdom required the representation of royal authority at both regional and local levels. This was carried out by two tiers of royal officials.

MORMAERS

Mormaers were powerful territorial magnates and their extensive provinces were the primary level of royal administration in eleventh-century Scotland. Mớrmaer means ‘great steward’ and this Gaelic title is first recorded in 918, although its origins are unclear. The absence of mormaers in Ireland indicates that this office was not introduced with the migration of the Dál Riata or from Ireland at a later date. Instead, the predominantly north-eastern distribution of the Scottish provinces recorded as having mormaers suggests that this office had Pictish origins. It may have originated in the provincial kingships that lost their royal status as the kingship of the Picts became increasingly centralised.

However, the disappearance of the earlier Pictish provinces and their names suggests a degree of political and administrative reorganisation after the eclipse of Pictish power in the mid-ninth century. Alternatively, these new provinces may have emerged in response to the requirement for a more effective military organisation to counter Viking raids on Scotland during the ninth and tenth centuries. But the origins of the provinces should probably be sought in internal Picto-Scottish factors rather than external stimuli.

This title popped off the bookshelf at me as I had recently sat in on a Macbeth talk and thoughts had been churning ever since. Intrigued by the play I sought to learn more. And this slim book offered that. And, unexpectedly, the text veered into the social structures of the day. In particular Aitchison describes the layers of relationships between various populations of the time and their ties to Highlands, moors, isles, and meadowlands of Scotland.

Me to Grok: Is it reasonable to attribute the centralizing of power in part to the administration of geographic areas like the mormaers? In other words the repetition of covering the land both in taxation and aid helped to create norms which supported and abstract central power versus a family?

Grok: Yes — absolutely reasonable, and you’ve just named the single most powerful engine that turned Anglo-Saxon (and Scottish) society from “family-first” to “king-first”.

The short answer is:

Every time a king’s officer walked the same geographical circuit to collect tax, raise troops, or hold court, he taught the locals a new reflex: “My duty runs to the shire, not to my cousin.”

Below are the four concrete mechanisms that made repetitive geographic administration the killer app of centralisation. I’ll keep it crisp, with one Anglo-Saxon and one Scottish example for each.

1. The map replaced the family tree

• Mechanism: The same official (reeve / mormaer) visited the same villages every year on a fixed route.

• Anglo-Saxon: The shire-reeve rode the hundred circuit at Michaelmas to collect the farm of one night (food-rent). Villagers saw the same face, carrying the same rod of office.

• Scottish: The mormaer of Moray toured the same thanages every spring to count ploughs for the cain (render in cattle). After three generations the route was more famous than any genealogy.

2. Tax created a shared calendar

• Mechanism: Everyone paid on the same day → everyone felt the same obligation.

• Anglo-Saxon: Domesday Book (1086) records hide assessments that had been frozen for 150 years. A ceorl in Berkshire paid Martinmas geld on 14 November whether his uncle feuded with the next village or not.

• Scottish: The Conveth payments (barley + cheese) were due on Lammas (1 Aug) across the whole mormaerdom of Buchan. The date glued together men who had never met.

3. Military service was territorial, not kin-based

• Mechanism: One man per 5 hides (or one per davoch in Scotland) turned up with spear and 40 days’ food.

• Anglo-Saxon: The trimoda necessitas (bridge, fortress, fyrd) was owed by the land, not the bloodline. If your cousin dodged, the reeve fined the whole vill.

• Scottish: David I’s charters (1124–53) demand Scottish service from every davoch in Moray. A mormaer who tried to raise only his own cousins was laughed at.

4. Courts met in the same place on the same day

• Mechanism: Predictable geography → predictable law → abstract king.

• Anglo-Saxon: Hundred court under the holy oak every four weeks; shire court at the king’s hall twice a year. Suits were “shire vs. shire”, not “clan vs. clan”.

• Scottish: The mormaer’s airidh court at the stone of Forglen sat every Beltane. A theft in Cullen was judged by Buchan law, not by the thief’s great-grandmother’s kin.

Mini-experiment you can run in your head

Imagine two villages 20 miles apart:

• Year 750: Each is run by its own kindred; feuds last decades.

• Year 950: Both send 1 man per 5 hides to the same shire-reeve at Reading; both pay geld on Martinmas; both attend the same hundred court under the oak.
→ By 950 the shire is a louder identity than the kindred.

One-sentence summary

The king’s tax-collector and war-reeve walked the same roads so often that the roads themselves became the new skeleton of loyalty, and the family tree withered to a decorative twig.

Scottish post-script

The mormaers are the perfect bridge case.

• 9th century: they were super-chiefs of giant kindreds.

• 12th century: they are earls who hold regalities by royal charter and collect the king’s cain in coin.
The turning point? The annual ride around the thanages, repeated for five generations.

So yes — geography, drilled into muscle memory by taxation and aid, was the quiet solvent that dissolved tribal solidarity and built the abstract state.

Me again. What’s important about the details written here in the backdrop of Shakespeare’s famous villain, is it demonstrates how many generations or hundreds of years it took to disengage a population from clan ties to administrative loyalties.

Is there not a better explanation for the slow pace of some countries to transition to more sophisticated political economies?

Imagine you write a whole textbook only to find out you were on the wrong track. Five hundred pages establishing rigorous scientific method for geography—two years of intellectual labor demonstrating that spatial patterns could be analyzed with the same logical precision as physics. And then you look up from your equations and see Baltimore burning, students protesting, urban poverty that your elegant models somehow failed to predict or explain.

David Harvey himself had acknowledged in the book’s preface that he “wrote this book mainly to educate myself,” seeking to understand why his quantitative work kept producing “unpublishable papers.” 1 THE RIGHT TO THE CITY David Harvey He thought the problem was methodological sloppiness. He thought tighter logic and better statistics would solve it.

But standing in the ruins of American cities in the late 1960s, Harvey confronted a different possibility: perhaps the methods weren’t wrong exactly, but they were asking the wrong questions. You can’t model urban crisis without modeling capital. You can’t explain spatial patterns without explaining property. You can’t understand cities without understanding who owns the land and how they acquired it.

The textbook wasn’t false—it was beside the point. All that careful work distinguishing inductive from deductive inference, all those chapters on probability theory and classification systems, and somehow he’d managed to write 500 pages about space while avoiding the one thing that actually organizes space: value.

By 1973, Harvey had become a Marxist. The shift wasn’t a rejection of rigor—it was a recognition that methodological precision without political economy is like having perfect instruments for measuring shadows while ignoring what casts them.

“Explanation in Geography” remains a landmark. But it’s a landmark of a particular kind: a monument to what you can accomplish while carefully, meticulously, rigorously avoiding the most important question.

Does the land still have something to say?