Not So Bad Ancestors

[The subsidized apartment building I live in is called The Union Hotel. It's run by DESC, Seattle's Downtown Emergency Service Center. All the residents have been homeless. I write a column for the monthly building newsletter. The column is called Out of My Mind. I'm posting them here, because I can. This is the first one after a 3 month hiatus, due to Shelby our manager having a baby girl. -- wes]

My last name is Browning and I've been aware for a long time that the "Brown" part of it came from the Normans -- a fact that, when I first learned it, gave me no pleasure at all. It was as if I learned my ancestors were slave-owners, or the Taliban. What does history have to say about the Normans? Well, they spoke French, badly. They all were named Brun or Bill, Rollo or Roland. In the mid 11th century their Duke Billy got it into his head he was the King of England, so he decided to conquer it, sort of like Hitler woke up one morning and decided to be King of Poland. As a result all of us who speak English now speak French badly, as when we say beef instead of boeuf.

Aside from that, the Normans are mainly famous for their crummy rule of England. The Sheriff of Nottingham was a crummy Norman. Robin Hood's band of Merry Men were not, whatever Robin Hood was. So basically, all my life I have thought of my Norman ancestors as the guys you boo at in the movies.

Then Saturday I read in the Seattle Times that the Island of Sark, in the English Channel, still retains mostly Norman law and custom and that one of these laws is the law of "Clameur de haro." I looked it up and sure enough, it's a real law established by none other than Rollo "the Viking" Jarl of Ortney (855-931), Founder of the Normans, and it means "Cry of distress," and the law goes like this:

Say someone's messing with you. In front of them and a witness, you first get down on one knee, like you're really humble. Then you say "Haro! Haro! Haro! À l'aide, mon Prince, on me fait tort," which means "Hey! Hey! Hey! Help me, Prince, I'm being messed with." Then you say the Lord's Prayer in bad French.

The result is they have to stop their messing with you until the courts straighten it out! Is that cool or what?

The lesson I take from all this is that no matter how crummy you think your ancestors, or your loud drunken neighbors, or clog dancers, are, you could still find out something cool about them before you're sixty.