The ruler’s time-honoured method for quelling revolt is bread and circuses. In a peaceful democracy, our leaders eschew such bluntness, preferring chatter about “raising the standard of living”.
The idea that a ruler raises a standard in this way is fairly recent, much more recent than the act by which a ruler when going to war “raises the standard”.
On 22 August 1642, King Charles I raised his standard in Nottingham, taking England into civil war. The process was the erection of a mast upon which a flag was raised. Indeed, the expression raising the standard in this sense is a compression. The pole was, quite literally, something to “stand hard” on and it was the flag or banner which was subsequently raised.
A standard has not always been a flag. A standard of medieval times might be a cart or wagon containing heraldic and religious items from the warring city, drawn to battle and vigorously defended.
It was this type of standard that King Stephen of England protected from King David I of Scotland on 22 August 1138 in what is usually called… the Battle of the Standard.
A common date for the break between medieval and modern is 22 August 1485, the Battle of Bosworth Field. In it, King Richard slew Henry Tudor’s standard bearer while the legend goes that Richard’s own standard bearer held his aloft even as the bearer’s legs were hewn.
According to Captain Cook’s journal, 22 August 1770 found him atop of what is now known as Possession Island, where he:
… now once more hoisted English Coulers and in the Name of His Majesty King George the Third took possession of the whole Eastern Coast from the above Latitude down to this place by the name of New South Wales…
In recent years, there has been speculation that Cook, having already landed a number of times on the east coast of what is now Australia, exercised a rewrite while laying over in Batavia on the way home.
In August 1980, Deng Xiao Ping raised a standard which has both comforted and troubled the west ever since, giving a speech called “On the Reform of the System of Party and State Leadership”. Deng was born on 22 August 1904.
Standards change… and change back. Baby boomers will recall a Soviet hammer and sickle. During the USSR’s disintegration and immediately upon a failed coup, the Supreme Council of the RSFSR decreed on 22 August 1991:
Until the establishment of a special law of the new state symbols of the Russian Federation, consider the historical flag of Russia – a panel of equal horizontal white, azure, scarlet stripes – the official National flag of the Russian Federation.
That flag, with some tweak, remains the standard.
