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Go Forth and Seek Glory
Reader Submission #2
Go Forth and Seek Glory
Excerpts from A History of the City of Birmingham – Declan Tatcher
Birmingham has its birth in the early days of the Norman Conquest, and was started by the Anglo-Norman dynasty of the "de Birmingham"s. They patronised the early settlements and saw it rise to a respectable number of around 2,000 by 1550. It would see explosive growth over time as we will discuss. Today Birmingham is the second largest city in England, and is only edged out of being the second biggest in Britannia by Dublin. Similarly to Dublin, which began as a pale for early English attempts to dominate the local Irish, Birmingham's origins are as a small settlement to help keep track of some of the furthest reaching Welsh raiders and as a former homeland of a minor tribe of the Anglo-Saxons. Thus it seems fitting in the course of English history of the theoretical underdogs proving themselves, with Wessex and the Danes and the English and the French and now Birmingham triumphing in terms of size over all its potential rivals to become such a large and great city. And this story starts with the end of the historic kingdom of Scotland, typically referred to as the Duchy of Caledon in modern parlance.
Following the “Celtic Campaigns” that saw the last of the Celtic peoples crushed in the isles, Birmingham became an asylum for them in the heart of England. Many moved to it due to the collapse in power of the local guilds and the lord family “de Birmingham”. These local residents would assimilate quickly but they would guarantee that the city came to rival both Dublin and London in terms of size, for a time Birmingham suffered under a dearth of royal funding due to being a hotbed of Reformist ideas in England but this would eventually peter out with time. More immigrants would come to Birmingham in the form of ultra-Catholic Bretons fleeing the chaos and attitudes of France in this time. The last group to be added to the Birmingham pot that were not of English extraction were the small number of Hausa people brought over by the Imperial Navy during the late 1700s and early 1800s. The English brand of Catholic puritanism saw them reject chattel slavery and seek to convert them to the true faith by freeing them of both their earthly and spiritual shackles. With most abandoning their traditional faiths and instead adopting Catholicism, they make up approximately 10% of Birmingham’s population. This was part of Charles the Only’s megalomaniac ideas of world domination by the British Puritanical faith with his well-known crazed speech of “Obey me subjects, Obey me world!”
Aside from internal and mild external immigration, Birmingham’s main growth came from the fact that it was the centre point of two canals being dug up. This was most interesting considering the mostly agrarian nature of Britannia meant that most of the pseudo-industrial workers would come to it as the sole arsenal of semi-modernity within the Empire. This saw the population soar to new heights and would help cement Birmingham and protect it from a clampdown from the Monarchy. Seeing the advantages to concentrating the impurity of technology and potential dissidents in one place Birmingham flourished as the capital of “Liberal Britain”. During the Great European War, Birmingham would become the “Factory of Righteousness” in the building of the new arms to supply the outdated army. This would further see it plaster itself as the face of the progress that needed to be made, but as with all things in Britannia it took an exceptional turn.
The Royal Council of Britannia decided that to prove the purity of their ideals and the superiority of Puritan doctrines over the Flammantian heresy that they would begin to expand the industrial attitudes of Birmingham to much of unified Merica. This “Catholic Industrialisation” would also be expanded to naval efforts with the Emerald Isle seeing Dublin and the more minor Belfast become the major naval hubs of the “new” Imperial Navy that sought to be able to contest themselves against the hated French. The Mayor of Birmingham, Harold Kernan, hated the French so much that when the Monarchy decided that mere technological parity was fine for Britannia, Kernan protested and demanded a continuation of this “Puritan Revolution” to see Britannia as above all others and to continue experimentation in line with the Puritan teachings until “every stain of their infected, corroding fingers will be sponged, purged and if need be blasted from the face of the earth”. Despite this action, his protests and pleas fell upon deaf ears and the Royal Council removed him from his mayoral position, Birmingham would go on but the Catholic and Puritan Industrialisation would stop.
(OOC : Hopefully this isn’t too overreaching, I though a city would be a fun way to express British flavour and stuff. The idea with the Industrialisation is that Britannia does a Tsarist Russia and reforms itself militarily and internally but nowhere near enough to actually be equal and thus they remain a weak power compared to the others despite their reforms.)
Go Forth and Seek Glory
Excerpts from A History of the City of Birmingham – Declan Tatcher
Birmingham has its birth in the early days of the Norman Conquest, and was started by the Anglo-Norman dynasty of the "de Birmingham"s. They patronised the early settlements and saw it rise to a respectable number of around 2,000 by 1550. It would see explosive growth over time as we will discuss. Today Birmingham is the second largest city in England, and is only edged out of being the second biggest in Britannia by Dublin. Similarly to Dublin, which began as a pale for early English attempts to dominate the local Irish, Birmingham's origins are as a small settlement to help keep track of some of the furthest reaching Welsh raiders and as a former homeland of a minor tribe of the Anglo-Saxons. Thus it seems fitting in the course of English history of the theoretical underdogs proving themselves, with Wessex and the Danes and the English and the French and now Birmingham triumphing in terms of size over all its potential rivals to become such a large and great city. And this story starts with the end of the historic kingdom of Scotland, typically referred to as the Duchy of Caledon in modern parlance.
Following the “Celtic Campaigns” that saw the last of the Celtic peoples crushed in the isles, Birmingham became an asylum for them in the heart of England. Many moved to it due to the collapse in power of the local guilds and the lord family “de Birmingham”. These local residents would assimilate quickly but they would guarantee that the city came to rival both Dublin and London in terms of size, for a time Birmingham suffered under a dearth of royal funding due to being a hotbed of Reformist ideas in England but this would eventually peter out with time. More immigrants would come to Birmingham in the form of ultra-Catholic Bretons fleeing the chaos and attitudes of France in this time. The last group to be added to the Birmingham pot that were not of English extraction were the small number of Hausa people brought over by the Imperial Navy during the late 1700s and early 1800s. The English brand of Catholic puritanism saw them reject chattel slavery and seek to convert them to the true faith by freeing them of both their earthly and spiritual shackles. With most abandoning their traditional faiths and instead adopting Catholicism, they make up approximately 10% of Birmingham’s population. This was part of Charles the Only’s megalomaniac ideas of world domination by the British Puritanical faith with his well-known crazed speech of “Obey me subjects, Obey me world!”
Aside from internal and mild external immigration, Birmingham’s main growth came from the fact that it was the centre point of two canals being dug up. This was most interesting considering the mostly agrarian nature of Britannia meant that most of the pseudo-industrial workers would come to it as the sole arsenal of semi-modernity within the Empire. This saw the population soar to new heights and would help cement Birmingham and protect it from a clampdown from the Monarchy. Seeing the advantages to concentrating the impurity of technology and potential dissidents in one place Birmingham flourished as the capital of “Liberal Britain”. During the Great European War, Birmingham would become the “Factory of Righteousness” in the building of the new arms to supply the outdated army. This would further see it plaster itself as the face of the progress that needed to be made, but as with all things in Britannia it took an exceptional turn.
The Royal Council of Britannia decided that to prove the purity of their ideals and the superiority of Puritan doctrines over the Flammantian heresy that they would begin to expand the industrial attitudes of Birmingham to much of unified Merica. This “Catholic Industrialisation” would also be expanded to naval efforts with the Emerald Isle seeing Dublin and the more minor Belfast become the major naval hubs of the “new” Imperial Navy that sought to be able to contest themselves against the hated French. The Mayor of Birmingham, Harold Kernan, hated the French so much that when the Monarchy decided that mere technological parity was fine for Britannia, Kernan protested and demanded a continuation of this “Puritan Revolution” to see Britannia as above all others and to continue experimentation in line with the Puritan teachings until “every stain of their infected, corroding fingers will be sponged, purged and if need be blasted from the face of the earth”. Despite this action, his protests and pleas fell upon deaf ears and the Royal Council removed him from his mayoral position, Birmingham would go on but the Catholic and Puritan Industrialisation would stop.
(OOC : Hopefully this isn’t too overreaching, I though a city would be a fun way to express British flavour and stuff. The idea with the Industrialisation is that Britannia does a Tsarist Russia and reforms itself militarily and internally but nowhere near enough to actually be equal and thus they remain a weak power compared to the others despite their reforms.)
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