M&D Wicks's Black Anonymity/Insanity: Crimes by the Stronger against the Weaker

[alice malice]

In Thompson's _Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act_, he
includes a brief story of Richard Norton, the Warden of the Forest of
Bere.

Here in Peter Linebaugh's article in Mute he is described as one who
"wished to ‘put an end to these arabs and banditti.’ The commoner
belonged to a ‘sordid race.’

Peter Linebaugh notes that "The commoner was compared to the Indian,
to the savage, to the buccaneer, and to the Arab."

But what Thompson describes is how Norton, who left his estate to the
poor, was slandered and rules insane so that his properites and monies
would not go to the poor.

After 1705, when he stood down, Norton seems to have virtually retired
from public life, except for his wardenship of the Forest of South
Bere, which had involved him in a dispute over perquisites with the
Earl of Scarbrough in 1704–5. In 1712 an Act was obtained for
transferring to new trustees certain estates originally placed in
Norton’s trust under the marriage settlement of his friend Henley, who
was now dead. Although this may have been a matter of convenience, it
may also have reflected a certain anxiety about Norton’s mental
condition. Two years later he drew up a will in which he left the
revenues of his estates, then estimated at £6,000 a year, with £60,000
in ready money, to be formed into a fund for the use of the ‘poor,
hungry, thirsty, naked strangers, sick, wounded and prisoners to the
end of the world’. He appointed Parliament to be his executors, and in
the event that Parliament declined the trust, it was to devolve upon
the archbishops and bishops. After Norton’s death on 10 Dec. 1732 the
will was set aside on the grounds of his insanity.

http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1690-1715/member/norton-richard-ii-1666-1732


http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/charters-liberty-black-face-and-white-face-race-slavery-and-commons


What matters is that the vagabond madmen, the act of driving
them away, their departure and embarkation do not assume their
entire significance on the plane of social utility or security. Other
meanings much closer to rite are certainly present; and we can still
discern some traces of them. Thus access to churches was denied to
madmen, although ecclesiastical law did not deny them the use of
the sacraments. The Church takes no action against a priest who
goes mad; but in Nuremberg in 1421 a mad priest was expelled with
particular solemnity, as if the impurity was multiplied by the sacred
nature of his person, and the city put on its budget the money given
him as a viaticum. It happened that certain madmen were publicly
whipped, and in the course of a kind of a game they were chased in
a mock race and driven out of the city with quarterstaff blows. So
many signs that the expulsion of madmen had become one of a
number of ritual exiles.

Thus we better understand the curious implication assigned to the
navigation of madmen and the prestige attending it. On the one
hand, we must not minimize its incontestable practical
effectiveness: to hand a madman over to sailors was to be
permanently sure he would not be prowling beneath the city walls; it
made sure that he would go far away; it
made him a prisoner of his own departure. But water adds to this the
dark mass of its own values; it carries off, but it does more: it
purifies. Navigation delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on
water, each of us is in the hands of his own destiny; every
embarkation is, potentially, the last. It is for the other world that the
madman sets sail in his fools' boat; it is from the other world that he
comes when he disembarks. The madman's voyage is at once a
rigorous division and an absolute Passage. In one sense, it simply
develops, across a half-real, half-imaginary geography, the
madman's liminal position on the horizon of medieval concern — a
position symbolized and made real at the same time by the
madman's privilege of being confined within the city gates: his
exclusion must enclose him; if he cannot and must not have another
prison than the threshold itself, he is kept at the point of passage. He
is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly
symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own
day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible
fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.

Water and navigation certainly play this role. Confined on the
ship, from which there is no escape, the madman is delivered to the
river with its thousand arms, the sea with its thousand roads, to that
great uncertainty external to everything. He is a prisoner in the
midst of what is the freest, the openest of routes: bound fast at the
infinite crossroads. He is the Passenger par excellence: that is, the
prisoner of the passage. And the land he will come to is unknown —
as is, once he disembarks, the land from which he comes. He has his
truth and his homeland only in that fruitless expanse between two
countries that cannot belong to him. Is it this ritual and these values
which are at the origin of the long imaginary relationship that can be
traced through the whole of Western culture? Or is it, conversely, this
relationship that, from time immemorial, has called into being and
established the rite of embarkation? One thing at least is certain:
water and madness have long been linked in the dreams of European
man.

http://archive.org/stream/MichelFoucaultMadnessAndCivilization/Michel%20Foucault%20-%20Madness%20and%20Civilization_djvu.txt
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l