Quietly Observing

As the centuries rolled by, the early Eldridges, of whom we know next to nothing, observed quietly, as in an early theocratic version of a European Union, agreements and alliances were struck and led to some striking initiatives, including the Crusades, set up specifically to liberate the Middle East from its own inhabitants in the name of God. These crusaders had their moments, but by the time the great medieval orders disbanded, Jerusalem and its surrounding lands were still firmly in the hands of the Arab Muslims, who had stubbornly resisted the claims of the Western Europeans to their lands. In between, the ever-zealous Crusaders initiated pogroms against the Jews of central Europe, and succeeded eventually in so debilitating their supposed ally, the Byzantine Empire that the Ottoman Turks were able to transit seamlessly through Anatolia and eventually capture Constantinople in 1453.   

All in all, this early experiment in European unity did not work out particularly well, and was marked from the outset by disputes between its leaders, each of whom had their own national and territorial ambitions, which tended to take priority over what were supposed to be the actual aims of the exercise.  Also using pan-European religious objectives as their pretext, the Knights Templars meanwhile succeeded in laying down a business model that bears a striking resemblance to today’s multinational corporations and international banking operations, often richer and more powerful than the nation states in which they operate and dangerously unaccountable for their actions. The powers of the day observed this with alarm and resorted to a religious pretext to destroy the Templars, and sequester their wealth. Highly imaginative and richly embroidered accusations of heresy, accompanied by a myriad of creatively manufactured instruments of torture, exquisite in their inventiveness, extracted the necessary confessions. And that was the end of the Templars.




Eventually, it was just so much easier if one really keenly wished to kill or be killed for a cause to cut out the travelling and indulge the habit nearer to home. The European powers turned on each other, disremembered their common origins and belief systems and and invested their energies instead in territorial warfare, and the development of nationalist rhetorics to accompany it. And in the process, the descendants of Eldred the Terrible transformed themselves into an archetypal English family, rooted in the Home Counties, and once Henry VIII had effectively nationalised the Church, making their way in the world as Anglicans, loyal to the monarch of the day and to the Church of England.