Professor Hails The Great British Hoodie
THE Telegraph’s Laura Clout brings us: “’Hoodies’ were the scourge of Medieval London.’”
Ms Clout’s name should resonate with Telegraph readers who hanker for the days when Great Britain was great and you could walk down the great British road and give teenagers a great British clout about the head.
Hoodies, we learn, “are the symbol of today’s disaffected youth”. That’s not much of symbol for such a vibrant part of the UK’s social scene. What about a wagging finger, a pit bull terrier with fur dyed and shaved to resemble Burberry check, or a fat joint holding its pregnant tum-tum with one open club-stamped hand dangling the keys to a new council house and the other clutching an OAP’s scalp.
Clout says the “hoodie-wearing yob is not just a modern problem”.
Indeed. This item should come with a trendy historian alert. Listen up, kidz. That hood you’re wearing is soooo old fashioned, it’s positively Medieval.
Professor Robert Bartlett, “an expert on the Middle Ages” on account of his being 900 years old, says hooded tops were also the “garment of choice for 12th-century juvenile delinquents”. Yeah, not jeans or spandex G-strings. Who knew?
Says the Prof: “A surviving 12th-century Latin manuscript refers disapprovingly to ‘Potatrix Anglia’ – ‘England the drunken’.”
In other words, it’s traditional to wear a hood, get pissed out of your skull and smash the place up.
All hail the great British hoodie…
Posted: 8th, April 2008 | In: Broadsheets Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
