[…] they could let their eyes hover tenderly on the far-off white cliffs that so often had signalled to the embarrassed English a promise of safety.

[…] in Bracton's time, as in Glanvil's time, the churchdoor covenant might always be made to include the husband's future acquisitions as well as his present possessions. […] For wherever the husband had named at the churchdoor a definite piece of land as her dower, her claim became indefeasible; […]

I attribute it to successive campaigns of stupidification, not unrelated to actual machinations of the ruling class, shaped in a particular, post-60s way, but also not unrelated to Neil Postman's notion of “amusing ourselves to death” and Mark Crispin Miller's notion of big brother is you, watching (on the former, see the book of that tile; on the latter, see Boxed In: The Culture of TV).

This is a task dispatched to one of three assistants, from whom he demands formal, written apologies when they behave insubordinately.