The highest order of chivalry in Britain is named after a piece of underwear and a very good line
The Star and Garter on Poland Street is listed at one to ten pounds a head, holds a 4.3 from five hundred and ninety-three people, and it is named after the highest order of chivalry in this country.
Which is named after a piece of a woman’s underwear.
The story
Edward III, at a ball, around 1348.
The Countess of Salisbury is dancing, and her garter falls off – which in the fourteenth century is a genuinely mortifying thing to happen, because a garter is what holds a stocking up and it is not an outer garment.
The court laughs.
And the King picks it up, ties it round his own leg, and says: Honi soit qui mal y pense.
Shame on him who thinks evil of it.
And then he founded an order
The Most Noble Order of the Garter. It is the senior order of chivalry in Britain and it is one of the oldest in the world, and it has twenty-four members plus the sovereign.
Its motto is that sentence. Its emblem is a garter.
And the motto is on the Royal Arms – it is on the coins, it is above the lion and the unicorn, it is on the passport, and it is in every courtroom in England.
Honi soit qui mal y pense. On the arms of the United Kingdom, permanently, because a king made a joke about a stocking.
Whether it happened
Almost certainly not, and we have to say so.
The story does not appear in any contemporary source. It surfaces about two centuries later, and historians have been sceptical about it for a very long time.
The likelier explanation is political: that the garter was a badge, that Edward was asserting a claim to the French throne, and that the motto is a warning to anybody who questioned that claim – shame on him who thinks ill of it.
Which is duller, and which is almost certainly true, and which is exactly what we have found in five hundred and eighty-two articles.
The truth is administrative. The legend involves a woman’s underwear. The legend wins, and it wins so completely that it is now on the money.
The cheap room, one last time
One to ten pounds a head, in Soho.
That is the fifth we have found across five postcodes and four hundred and seventy venues – and we have said this in every single district, and we will say it again here.
Soho runs on people who cannot afford Soho. The theatre crews, the kitchen staff, the bar backs, the cleaners.
They have to drink somewhere.
Verdict
Cheap, honest, and named after an order of chivalry founded on a piece of gossip.
Go, and drink in it. That is not a recommendation. It is a request.
The Garter itself
Twenty-four members, plus the sovereign and the Prince of Wales, and it is entirely in the monarch’s personal gift – which makes it one of the very few honours in Britain that no politician can influence.
Which is why it matters. Every other honour goes through a committee. The Garter is a personal decision.
And the installation still happens, every June, at Windsor – the knights process in blue velvet robes and enormous plumed hats, on foot, in public, and it looks completely absurd, and it has been done that way since the fourteenth century.
The Prat’s constitutional desk regards the annual sight of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom watching several dozen elderly people walk down a hill in fancy dress as the single most reassuring event in the British calendar.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
The thing about London is it’s spent three hundred years being satirised and somehow we’re not bored of it yet.