← This Guy Sucked
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- [00:01]
A
Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description.
- [00:32]
B
Foreign.
- [00:45]
A
Welcome to this Guy Sucked, the show where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't lie about the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, certified hater. On this show, we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating on whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture. These guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Dr. Christina Waid, who is a beer historian, which is one of the coolest things I have been able to say on the pod thus far. She's the host of the Beer Ladies podcast and has written a book called Filthy A history of beer in Ireland that you can get now. And another one called the Delves in the draft lines. 1000 years of women in In Britain's beer history. Welcome to the show.
- [01:34]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [01:36]
A
People who are listening, you don't know this, but I had to record that like six times because I can't talk today. So apologies in advance. Christina, I feel like you must get asked all the time about your favorite beers. Like that must probably be like, that's the thing people are asking you about. Yes, yes, all the time. So I'm not going to ask you that. When you aren't drinking beer, what is your favorite beverage?
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B
Ooh, good question.
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A
You know what?
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B
I'm a bit of a gin girly. I like a nice gin and tonic.
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A
Okay. Very solid. So I've said this before on the podcast, but I worked in cocktail bars for like my whole masters, most of my Ph.D. and then in 2020 I was like, I'm gonna stop drinking. And so I don't drink anymore. But it's made me like much more interested in like experiencing like all kinds of non alcoholic beers. I've been hunting for an NA beer sponsor for months for the podcast and I'm convinced that we will have one eventually. So if you have an NA beer. Someone listening. If you have an NA beer company, just know I want you to sponsor my podcast. But I'm also really into NA liquors right now. Or NA spirit.
- [02:53]
B
Yes. Honestly, like non alcoholic gin is amazing.
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A
Yeah.
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B
It is so good in cocktails. We drink a lot of that. It's so nice.
- [03:02]
A
Yeah. And also I love at the moment I'm really into like a seed lip and tonic. Very, very good, very solid option. I'm sorry to be forcing you to talk about non alcoholic when we're about to spend the podcast talking about alcohol.
- [03:14]
B
No, I love, I, I drink a lot of non alcoholics and low alcoholic beverages because, you know, it's a work day and sometimes you want a nice drink but you don't want the alcohol that comes with it.
- [03:24]
A
Yeah. And I will say there's a moment right now where people are starting to realize that you can have things like mocktails or non alcoholic drinks that aren't just sweet and fruity like that aren't just sugary. And like that was one of the hardest things for me when I first switched was that I missed things that I loved before, like really bitter drinks. And I felt like that was just not an option for me as someone who wasn't drinking alcohol anymore. Like I missed things like aperitifs. Like it was just something that I felt like was really lacking in my life all of a sudden. And now there are all these companies making those, like making bitter alcoholic drinks. And I'm so here for it.
- [04:00]
B
Yeah.
- [04:00]
A
Now I feel like I'm not missing anything. Like there's nothing that I feel is genuinely like a flavor that I no longer get to have. Yeah, that's my take on that. My non historian take on this. We should probably talk about the thing we're actually here for. Who did you want to talk to me about today?
- [04:22]
B
So today we are going to talk about a person by the name of Barnaby Rich, an English army captain.
- [04:30]
A
Yeah, that's a lot of what you can find out about him, to be fair.
- [04:33]
B
Yeah.
- [04:33]
A
Sometimes I need to preface episodes to explain myself a little bit. And I think this is one of those. Barnaby Rich was incredibly difficult for me to research. And Christine and I talked about this before the episode for people listening because I was like, what the hell? This guy is so hard to find anything out about. But I found it hard to learn that much about him beyond just like a straightforward biography. So my sense is that this is going to be one of those episodes where we're talking about him, but we're also talking about how he contributes to a sort of broader phenomenon and will most likely be using him as kind of like, emblematic or totemic of that broader phenomenon. So for people listening, I think this is one of the fun episodes where it's about a guy, but it's really about a bigger thing than the guy, which I really, really like. I also want to that I think Barney B. Rich sounds like the name of, like, a cartoon landlord and not this guy.
- [05:29]
B
Yeah, he kind of sounds like a cartoon villain. Like, you can imagine him, like, maniacally rubbing his hands together.
- [05:34]
A
Yeah.
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B
And that would kind of fit who he is. So. So go with that.
- [05:38]
A
And when you read the things which we will be quoting some of this. I wrote down some direct quotes from him. When we read some of the things, you're like, yeah, this guy is like a villain. Like, this is a villainous person, basically. So, like, in my head, he looks like Mr. Monopoly, which I know is not true, but whatever. So he is born in, we think, 1540. 1542, somewhere in there. Ish. And you're right, he's an English author and a soldier in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. He dies in 1617, but not before writing a bunch of crazy stuff right at the end of his life, which I think, you know, it is maybe a little bit aspirational other than the things he writes are evil. But the idea that you're like, you know, I've only got a few years left to go. I might as well put some more work out is why not? Can you tell me about his, like, early life or what he does before we. He gets to the thing that we're really going to be talking about.
- [06:36]
B
Right. So the kind of focus that I think is really important or some context is really important, is he was an English army captain in the colonization of Ulster. And so for people who aren't familiar at all with what that means, there's a long history of English colonization in Ireland.
- [06:54]
A
Sure.
- [06:54]
B
800 years of oppression, which I cannot in any way shape or form sum up in a little bit of a soundbite. But let's talk about the circumstances with which Barnaby was active in ulster. In the 16th century, England basically engaged in a recolonisation of Ireland because the original colonizers, many of them had become, I guess the quote is more Irish than the Irish themselves. That's a bit. Not quite true. But a lot of them did intermarry with Irish families. They were Catholic.
- [07:28]
A
Perish the thought.
- [07:29]
B
Yeah. So in the 16th century, England was like, okay, we need to recolonize. So they invaded. And part of what they did is they took all of this land from Irish Catholic landowners and gave it to Protestant settlers from England and Scotland. And so up in Ulster, which is in the north of Ireland, they had the. Well, it was other places, but particularly in Ulster, they had these Protestant, Scottish and English settlers come and take, you know, they had this land that it was originally held by Catholics. And this was a huge campaign to the point where I believe scholars have argued that by the time the famine or the Great Hunger hit In the 19th century, only 5% of land is held by Irish Catholics. So this was a huge, huge, widespread campaign over a very long period of time. And that's sort of where Barnaby was working with part of this. So we can already gather that he has a lot of bias to be engaging in this sort of vicious colonization. And I think that's a really important aspect of his identity that you need to sort of understand to sort of place him within. And also, you know, you said Claire, and I think this is really important that he's, he's emblematic of the idea of the time. And I think it's really important to kind of see, okay, yeah, he is a colonizer and he is probably spouting rhetoric that other people who engaged in this colonization believed.
- [09:00]
A
Yeah, I mean, one of the things I found useful while researching him, which again as I said, there's like, it's. He's kind of hard to research on a sort of broad public sense. Like as a historian. Sure, if you are looking like in an archive, you can research him a lot more. He's a lot easier to interact with, but like just googling him is a little bit harder. One of the things I found useful is thinking of him like not as a guy who is like in his own rights, the person who matters here, but that he is an example of a person and of a style of thinking that several or a lot of people around him held and whose thoughts he agreed with and helped to shape in some way. But it's not like he has this long term legacy where everyone's like, ah, yes, and Barnaby Rich, my, my most hated man. Because he doesn't. His impact is not like a singular individual impact the way that some other people we've, we've talked about have had.
- [09:55]
B
No.
- [09:55]
A
That being said, he does have a really important relationship to your research, which I find, I think is cool and interesting as a thing that a lot of people who work on and around his time period would not actually. Like. He's not actually that useful for a lot of people other than to be like, okay, he's an example of a style of thinking or of a train of thought. One of the things I think is also interesting is he goes to colonize Ireland and Ulster and whatever, and then he just decides to stay afterwards. So part of this is that he decides to stay and live the rest of his life in Dublin, Right? Yeah. And one would think for someone who has, I would say, a level of antipathy for Ireland, an odd choice. Like an odd decision.
- [10:44]
B
It's definitely an odd choice. And as we'll get into, he speaks with an authority on the people of Ireland that he simply does not possess. But he's certainly the kind of person that isn't the one to let the facts get in the way of a good story, as it were. But you have to imagine, like, he's coming into Dublin as a total outsider, and then he's writing. Well, we'll see some pretty horrible things about Dubliners. And, you know, the mind boggles a bit as to why he thought that that would. It's just. Why would you do that? I am new in town. You all suck.
- [11:18]
A
Yeah, basically, he writes a bunch of other stuff, too. And we're talking. I mean, you and I will spend the rest of this talking about some things he writes later. But, like, the. Some of the things he's actually more famous for are, like, other things he's written before that. He writes something called Rich, His Farewell to military profession in 1581, which is like a collection of eight stories that have commentary. There's, like, fictional things. It's weird, because he does this thing that now authors are scared of doing, which is he switches back and forth between writing fiction and writing nonfiction and writing, like, these very obvious polemics. Basically, like, he's all over the shop a little bit in terms of what he feels like he has authority to write, but that's also emblematic of his time period. So. Hey. Yeah, One of the things he writes, Apollonius and Scylla is one of the sources for Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. But he says, and this goes to some other stuff people on the show have done. He says it's his story that he invented, but it's actually a story he stole from someone else that then is pretending he made up. And then Shakespeare is like, no, I made this. But it's actually a story he stole from someone else that then is pretending he made up. And then Shakespeare is like, no, I Made this. So. Hey, and there's another. He has another story in that collection that he says he made up, but was actually has the plot of a different play that had been published also. So he's a little loosey goosey with the truth on these things. Surprise, surprise, I would say. Can you tell me what your. What we can. We can have a list, but what's your, like, primary beef with Barnaby Rich? So.
- [13:13]
B
So my primary beef with Barnaby Rich is his, like, absolute hatred of alewives and female brewers in 17th century Dublin in particular. So to kind of give you an example, I'm going to read a quote to just kind of set the stage. So, yeah, like, as I said, Barnaby moves to Dublin. And so in 1610 he writes this new description of Ireland, which is this horrific accounting of all the things he thinks are wrong with the Irish people, including cannibalism and heretical beliefs.
- [13:47]
A
Classic.
- [13:47]
B
Yes. He goes on this very long winded rant about the alewives in Dublin. And I'm going to quote you what he says now. He says, quote, I will speak only of the riff raff, the most filthy queens that are known to be in the country. Parentheses. I mean those housewives. But do you. Selling of drink in Dublin or elsewhere? And parentheses, commonly called tavern keepers, but indeed filthy and beastly alehouse keepers. I will not meddle with their honesties. They earn all manner of their life and living to be detested and abhorred. So, yeah, you know, tell us how you really feel, Barnaby. Right.
- [14:25]
A
I just can't imagine seeing a woman in a tavern and being like, we can't have this.
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B
I hate you.
- [14:33]
A
Beastly. Using the term filthy and beastly.
- [14:36]
B
Yeah, I mean, he has, he has some serious, serious beef with them. And like, it wasn't just this paragraph, which, you know, he has a lot of things to say. So he tells us that basically the entire economy of Dublin is built on selling ale, is what he tells us. And then he says that every householder's wife, every housewife fancies herself to be this brewer. And so that there are all these women that are brewing all of this ale and they're terrible, they're, you know, they're beastly, they're filthy, they're dishonest. He accuses them of, you know, cheating their customers. He tells us that malt, which is the basis of making ale, if you aren't familiar, you take barley and you turn it into malt and then you use that with which to brew. So he tells us that malt is half the price in Dublin than it is in London, but they charge two times the amount for ale in Dublin than it is in London. So he says this is a big ripoff. And then he basically accuses them of ripping off the English in particular. And yeah, he just kind of goes on and on and on and on and on about all this. Now, you know, when we look at. Which we'll get into, we can look at some of the primary sources from the day and kind of see, okay, where is Barnaby exaggerating and is there any truth in this? But he just says, just he's incredibly misogynistic. Yeah, incredibly misogynistic. I'm just. Yeah, just horrible person, to be honest.
- [16:02]
A
Like just. Just a mean person. The book pamphlet saying this is taken from, which you mentioned, called A New Description of Ireland. He writes it in 1610. And I'm going to tell you, I mean, you know this, but people listening don't know this. It is fucking wild. This pamphlet is bananas to read. I found it on the Internet Archive. Shout out to the Internet Archive. And by God, did I read all 121 pages of it. Because I was so shaken by what I encountered within the first two pages. Yeah, because I was like, what? This man hates the Irish. Like he is choosing to live his life in Dublin and he hates everyone around him and the thing he's doing. And again, does not have to be there. I wrote down a bunch of quotes from the book because I thought it was just so wild. So I've got a few selections for you as well. Alas, poor Ireland, what safety may be hoped for thee that are still so addicted to disobedience, to contempt, to sedition, to rebellion, that thy wounds are no sooner closed up, but thou thyself goest about to open them again. He also calls the Irish naturally inclined to cruelty again. This is a dude who has just spent his life killing them and supplanting them, removing them from their homes. And he's like, the real problem is that the Irish are just naturally cruel and we, the English, are not. Question mark. Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon Exclusive episode. To subscribe and listen to it in full, head over to patreon.com this guy sucked.