Last night, I was reading “Sleeping Beauty” to my little girl. It seems a bad witch puts a curse on the royal baby such that before she turns 16, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. The book then says, as if it is a completely normal thing to do, that the King orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom to be destroyed.
We are supposed to believe that all the people willingly complied. I doubt it. Spinning might have been the only way for regular people to make cloth. The king’s order was nothing short of an act of despotism. All spinning wheels? Imagine that you are calmly spinning some cloth at home, perhaps to use, perhaps to sell, and some tax-paid minion from the castle up the street knocks on the door, says he must destroy a valuable piece of capital, and up in flames in goes.
House by house, an entire industry is destroyed. Why should the people in the kingdom put up with this? What if the witch had visited a working-class family and said the same thing? They wouldn’t have the luxury of ordering any kingdom-wide policy. They would just have to live with the curse.
But it turns out that this is typical short-sighted government policy. The bad witch later conjures up a spinning wheel out of thin air, on which the princess pricks her finger. Whoops, the king didn’t think of that.
Meanwhile 15 years with no domestic cloth went by. How many black-market spinning wheels had to be confiscated? How many would-be spinners languished in prison to carry out this despotic order from the king? The princess and the prince who later kisses her seem rather well dressed, so one wonders where they got these great clothes. Perhaps imported from China? Or did they just have the right connections? A royal loom perhaps?
Let’s hope the first action of the new prince is to apologize for the egregious attack on the capital markets made by his predecessor.
