Thursday, September the 1st, 2005
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Last week I borrowed from the library Adam Nicolson's Power And Glory : Jacobean England And The Making Of The King James Bible. It's a splendid read, packed with nuggets of interest. At the moment, I'm at the point where Nicolson takes us back to the 1580s and the persecution of the Separatist puritans. (It was this lot, incidentally, who started the fad for naming their children after moral or holy qualities—Eschew-Evil, Sin-deny, Increased, Much-mercy, and, my favourite, Wrestling Brewster.) Many of the Separatists fled to Holland, but those who didn't ended up in prison. “One of them,” writes Nicolson, “the eighteen-year-old Roger Waters, was kept in irons for more than a year.”
Now this seems a savage punishment for questioning the basis of the Church of England, but it led me to think that, four hundred years later, it would have been a pretty lenient way of dealing with the poor lad's namesake. Writing Another Brick In The Wall, by itself, is probably worth at least five years in chains, and there are sundry other crimes to account for.