BORROWED WISDOM

 It's amazing the things you can discover while looking for other things.  A friend piqued my interest in the history of the King James Bible.   It was fairly simple.  

King James VI of Scotland inherited the throne of the King of England in 1603 and became King James I.  He's the dude who commissioned the translation on behalf of the Church of England, the Anglicans, to end all translations of the Bible.  A lot of scholars, working for the government, spent a lot of time to reach their final translation.  

So much for that.  The better story is that James hated the English because of how they treated his mother, Mary Queen of Scots.  They threw her in jail for 18 years and then chopped off her head.  That would make me angry, too.  Mary was charged with fomenting a plot to assassinate, Queen Elizabeth I.

So, to get back at the English, when he ascended to the throne as King of England, he ordered all retail establishments to display a picture of a Red Lion on their storefronts.  The red lion was the symbol of Scotland.  He did it to remind the English, every day, that a Scot was now their King.    

Anyhow, the Red Lion picture on pubs has stuck.  It was a great name for a pub.  By count, their are now 512 Red Lion pubs in England.  (That's down from over 600 at one time.)  That must cause some confusion among the frequenters.  

No, that's not the end of the story.  The English, and their propensity for imbibing lager and the like, are a country full of pubs but with relatively few names.  I don't know how they do it or why they can't think of new ones.  In addition to the 512 Red Lion Pubs in merry old England, there are 474 Crown Pubs, 401 Royal Oak Pubs and 299 White Hart Pubs.  Can you believe it?

It's a good thing we revolted from a country with so little imagination.