My Medieval Gal offers some thought-provoking remarks on yesterday’s column :

I highly recommend that you read Stephen Justice’s Writing and rebellion : England in 1381. Justice’s assertions include a) that many people on a higher social level than peasants supported the rising, and b) that the historians and legal clerks of the day sought to discount this fact by representing all the rebels as illiterate peasants, ignoring evidence that 1) many could read, and that 2) even those who could not, knew how legal documents worked, and sought to prove ancient rights with quite accurate descriptions of charters with gold and azure lettering which had probably dated from Saxon times, (and which post-Norman legal systems either couldn’t find or didn’t recognize–see also Richard Firth-Green’s A crisis of truth : literature and law in Ricardian England which blames the trauma of a post-Norman society largely on the transition from a troth-plight society to one based on legal documents).
In other words, “La Raza” types who want their children educated in Spanish are actually cutting themselves off from our document culture, and from yet another source of power.

Perhaps that’s what the Governor of California was trying to say the other day.