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David Brooks (commentator)

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-born American conservative political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times. He has worked as a film critic for The Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly, in addition to working as a commentator on NPR and the PBS NewsHour.

Early life and education
Brooks was born in Toronto, Ontario, where his father was working on a PhD at the University of Toronto. He spent his early years in the Stuyvesant Town housing development in New York City with his brother, Daniel. His father taught English literature at New York University, while his mother studied nineteenth-century British history at Columbia University. Brooks was raised Jewish but rarely attended synagogue in his later adult life. As a young child, Brooks attended the Grace Church School, an independent Episcopal primary school in the East Village. When he was 12, his family moved to the Philadelphia Main Line, the affluent suburbs of Philadelphia. He graduated from Radnor High School in 1979. In 1983, Brooks graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in history. His senior thesis was on popular science writer Robert Ardrey.

As an undergraduate, Brooks frequently contributed reviews and satirical pieces to campus publications. His senior year, he wrote a spoof of the lifestyle of wealthy conservative William F. Buckley Jr., who was scheduled to speak at the university: "In the afternoons he is in the habit of going into crowded rooms and making everybody else feel inferior. The evenings are reserved for extended bouts of name-dropping." To his piece, Brooks appended the note: "Some would say I'm envious of Mr. Buckley. But if truth be known, I just want a job and have a peculiar way of asking. So how about it, Billy? Can you spare a dime?" When Buckley arrived to give his talk, he asked whether Brooks was in the lecture audience and offered him a job.

Early career
Upon graduation, Brooks became a police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago, a wire service owned jointly by the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun Times. He says that his experience on Chicago's crime beat had a conservatizing influence on him. In 1984, mindful of the offer he had received from Buckley, Brooks applied and was accepted as an intern at Buckley's National Review. According to Christopher Beam, the internship included an all-access pass to the affluent lifestyle that Brooks had previously mocked, including yachting expeditions, Bach concerts, dinners at Buckley's Park Avenue apartment and villa in Stamford, Connecticut, and a constant stream of writers, politicians, and celebrities.

"Brooks was an outsider in more ways than his relative inexperience. National Review was a Catholic magazine, and Brooks is not Catholic. Sam Tanenhaus later reported in The New Republic that Buckley might have eventually named Brooks his successor if it hadn't been for his being Jewish. 'If true, it would be upsetting,' Brooks says."

After his internship with Buckley ended, Brooks spent some time at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University and wrote movie reviews for The Washington Times.

Career
In 1986, Brooks was hired by The Wall Street Journal, where he worked first as an editor of the book review section. He also filled in for five months as a movie critic. From 1990 to 1994, the newspaper posted Brooks as an op-ed columnist to Brussels, where he covered Russia (making numerous trips to Moscow); the Middle East; South Africa; and European affairs. On his return, Brooks joined the neo-conservative Weekly Standard when it was launched in 1994. Two years later, he edited an anthology, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing.

In 2000, Brooks published a book of cultural commentary titled Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There to considerable acclaim. The book, a paean to consumerism, argued that the new managerial or "new upper class" represents a marriage between the liberal idealism of the 1960s and the self-interest of the 1980s.

According to a 2010 article in New York Magazine written by Christopher Beam, New York Times editorial-page editor Gail Collins called Brooks in 2003 and invited him to lunch.

"Collins was looking for a conservative to replace outgoing columnist William Safire, but one who understood how liberals think. 'I was looking for the kind of conservative writer that wouldn't make our readers shriek and throw the paper out the window,' says Collins. 'He was perfect.' Brooks started writing in September 2003. 'The first six months were miserable,' Brooks says. 'I'd never been hated on a mass scale before.'"One column written by Brooks in The New York Times, which dismissed the conviction of Scooter Libby as being "a farce" and having "no significance", was derided by political blogger Andrew Sullivan.

In 2004, Brooks' book On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense was published as a sequel to his 2000 best seller, Bobos in Paradise, but it was not as well received as its predecessor. Brooks is also the volume editor of The Best American Essays (publication date October 2, 2012), and authored The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character and Achievement. The book was excerpted in The New Yorker in January 2011 and received mixed reviews upon its full publication in March of that year. It sold well and reached #3 on the Publishers Weekly best-sellers list for non-fiction in April 2011.

Brooks was a visiting professor of public policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy, and taught an undergraduate seminar there in the fall of 2006. In 2013, he taught a course at Yale University on philosophical humility.

In 2012, Brooks was elected to the University of Chicago Board of Trustees. He also serves on the board of advisors for the University of Chicago Institute of Politics.

In 2019, Brooks gave a TED talk in Vancouver entitled 'The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – And a Better Way to Live'. TED curator Chris Anderson selected it as one of his favourite talks of 2019.

Political ideology
Ideologically, Brooks has been described as a moderate, a centrist, a conservative,    and a moderate conservative. Brooks has described himself as a "moderate", and said in a 2017 interview that "[one] of [his] callings is to represent a certain moderate Republican Whig political philosophy." In December 2021, he wrote that he placed himself "on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency—in the more promising soil of the moderate wing of the Democratic Party." Ottawa Citizen conservative commentator David Warren has identified Brooks as a "sophisticated pundit"; one of "those Republicans who want to 'engage with' the liberal agenda". When asked what he thinks of charges that he's "not a real conservative" or "squishy", Brooks has said that "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don't fit that agenda. But I do think that I'm part of a long-standing conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke ... and Alexander Hamilton." In fact, Brooks read Burke's work while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and "completely despised it", but "gradually over the next five to seven years ... came to agree with him". Brooks claims that "my visceral hatred was because he touched something I didn't like or know about myself." In September 2012, Brooks talked about being criticized from the conservative side, saying, "If it's from a loon, I don't mind it. I get a kick out of it. If it's Michelle Malkin attacking, I don't mind it." With respect to whether he was "the liberals' favorite conservative" Brooks said he "didn't care", stating: "I don't mind liberals praising me, but when it's the really partisan liberals, you get an avalanche of love, it's like uhhh, I gotta rethink this."

Brooks describes himself as beginning as a liberal before, as he put it, "coming to my senses." He recounts that a turning point in his thinking came while he was still an undergraduate, when he was selected to present the socialist point of view during a televised debate with Nobel laureate free-market economist Milton Friedman. As Brooks describes it, "[It] was essentially me making a point, and he making a two-sentence rebuttal which totally devastated my point. ... That didn't immediately turn me into a conservative, but..." On August 10, 2006, Brooks wrote a column for The New York Times titled "Party No. 3". The column imagined a moderate McCain-Lieberman Party in opposition to both major parties, which he perceived as both polarized and beholden to special interests.

In a March 2007 article published in The New York Times titled "No U-Turns", Brooks explained that the Republican Party must distance itself from the minimal-government conservative principles that had arisen during the Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan eras. He claims that these core concepts had served their purposes and should no longer be embraced by Republicans in order to win elections. Alex Pareene commented that Brooks "has been trying for so long to imagine a sensible Republican Party into existence that he can't still think it's going to happen soon."

Iraq war
Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Brooks argued for American military intervention, echoing the belief of commentators and political figures that American and British forces would be welcomed as liberators. In 2005, Brooks wrote what columnist Jonathan Chait described as "a witheringly condescending" column portraying Senator Harry Reid as an "unhinged conspiracy theorist because he accused the [George W. Bush] administration of falsifying its Iraq intelligence." By 2008, five years into the war, Brooks maintained that the decision to go to war was correct, but that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had botched U.S. war efforts.

In 2015, Brooks wrote that "[f]rom the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment" made in 2003 by President George W. Bush and the majority of Americans who supported the war, including Brooks himself. Brooks wrote "many of us thought that, by taking down Saddam Hussein, we could end another evil empire, and gradually open up human development in Iraq and the Arab world. Has that happened? In 2004, I would have said yes. In 2006, I would have said no. In 2015, I say yes and no, but mostly no." Citing the Robb-Silberman report, Brooks rejected as a "fable" the idea that "intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war." Instead, Brooks viewed the war as a product of faulty intelligence, writing that "[t]he Iraq war error reminds us of the need for epistemological modesty."

Presidents elections and candidates
Brooks was long a supporter of John McCain; however, he disliked McCain's 2008 running mate, Sarah Palin, calling her a "cancer" on the Republican Party, and citing her as the reason he voted for Obama in the 2008 presidential election. He has referred to Palin as a "joke," unlikely ever to win the Republican nomination. But he later admitted during a C-SPAN interview that he had gone too far in his previous "cancer" comments about Palin, which he regretted, and simply stated he was not a fan of her values.

Brooks has frequently expressed admiration for President Barack Obama. In an August 2009, profile of Brooks, The New Republic describes his first encounter with Obama, in the spring of 2005: "Usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me...I remember distinctly an image of – we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I'm thinking, (a) he's going to be president and (b) he'll be a very good president." Brooks appreciates that Obama thinks "like a writer," explaining, "He's a very writerly personality, a little aloof, exasperated. He's calm. He's not addicted to people." Two days after Obama's second autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, hit bookstores, Brooks published a column in The New York Times, titled "Run, Barack, Run," urging the Chicago politician to run for president. However, in December 2011, during a C-SPAN interview, Brooks expressed a more tempered opinion of Obama's presidency, giving Obama only a "B−" and saying that Obama's chances of re-election would be less than 50–50 if elections were held at that time. He stated, "I don't think he's integrated himself with people in Washington as much as he should have." However, in a February 2016 New York Times op-ed, Brooks admitted that he missed Obama during the 2016 primary season, admiring the president's "integrity" and "humanity," among other characteristics.

In regard to the 2016 election, Brooks spoke in support of Hillary Clinton, applauding her ability to be "competent" and "normal" in comparison to her Republican counterpart, Donald Trump. In addition, Brooks noted that he believed Clinton would eventually be victorious in the election, as he foresaw that the general American public would become "sick of" Trump.

When discussing the political emergence of Trump, Brooks strongly critiqued the candidate, most notably by authoring a New York Times op-ed he titled "No, Not Trump, Not Ever." In this piece, Brooks attacked Trump by arguing he is "epically unprepared to be president" and by pointing out Trump's "steady obliviousness to accuracy."

On the August 9, 2019 episode of the PBS NewsHour, Brooks suggested Trump may be a sociopath.

Israel
Brooks has expressed admiration for Israel and has visited almost every year since 1991. He supported Israel during the 2014 Gaza War.

In writing for The New York Times in January 2010, Brooks described Israel as "an astonishing success story". He wrote that "Jews are a famously accomplished group," who, because they were "forced to give up farming in the Middle Ages ... have been living off their wits ever since". In Brooks' view, "Israel's technological success is the fruition of the Zionist dream. The country was not founded so stray settlers could sit among thousands of angry Palestinians in Hebron. It was founded so Jews would have a safe place to come together and create things for the world."

Social views
Brooks opposes what he sees as self-destructive behavior, such as the prevalence of teenage sex and divorce. His view is that "sex is more explicit everywhere barring real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious" by "waiting longer to have sex ... [and] having fewer partners". In 2007, Brooks stated that he sees the culture war as nearly over, because "today's young people ... seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right." As a result, he was optimistic about the United States' social stability, which he considered to be "in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair".

As early as 2003, Brooks wrote favorably of same-sex marriage, pointing out that marriage is a traditional conservative value. Rather than opposing it, he wrote: "We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity ... It's going to be up to conservatives to make the important, moral case for marriage, including gay marriage."

In 2015, Brooks issued his commentary on poverty reform in the United States. His op-ed in The New York Times titled "The Nature of Poverty" specifically followed the social uproar caused by the death of Freddie Gray, and concluded that federal spending is not the issue impeding the progress of poverty reforms, but rather that the impediments to upward mobility are "matters of social psychology". When discussing Gray in particular, Brooks claimed that Gray as a young man was "not on the path to upward mobility".

In 2020, Brooks wrote in The Atlantic, under the headline "The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake", that "recent signs suggest at least the possibility that a new family paradigm is emerging," suggesting that in the place of the "collapsed" nuclear one the "extended" family emerges, with "multigenerational living arrangements" that stretch even "across kinship lines." Brooks had already started in 2017 a project called "Weave", in order, as he described it, to "support and draw attention to people and organizations around the country who are building community" and to "repair [America]'s social fabric, which is badly frayed by distrust, division and exclusion."

Brooks also takes a moderate position on abortion, which he thinks should be legal, but with parental consent for minors, during the first four or five months, and illegal afterward, except in extremely rare circumstances.

He has expressed opposition to the legalization of marijuana, stating that use of the drug causes immoral behavior. Brooks relates that he smoked it in his youth but quit after a humiliating incident: Brooks smoked marijuana during lunch hour at school and felt embarrassed during a class presentation that afternoon in which he says he was incapable of intelligible speech.

Criticisms
Critics have claimed that Brooks' writings on sociology promote stereotypes and present false claims as factual. In 2004, Sasha Issenberg, writing for Philadelphia magazine, fact-checked Bobos in Paradise, arguing that many of its comments about middle America were misleading or the exact reverse of the truth. He reported Brooks as insisting that the book was not intended to be factual but to report his impressions of what he believed an area to be like: "He laughed ... '[The book was] partially tongue-in-cheek'...I went through some of the other instances where he made declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being 'too pedantic,' of 'taking all of this too literally,' of 'taking a joke and distorting it.' 'That's totally unethical', he said." Brooks later said the article made him feel that "I suck...I can't remember what I said but my mother told me I was extremely stupid." In 2015, an opinion piece by David Zweig published in Salon claimed that Brooks had gotten "nearly every detail" wrong about a poll of high-school students.

Michael Kinsley argued that Brooks was guilty of "fearless generalizing ... Brooks does not let the sociology get in the way of the shtick, and he wields a mean shoehorn when he needs the theory to fit the joke". Writing for Gawker, which consistently criticized Brooks' work, opinion writer Tom Scocca argued that Brooks does not use facts and statistics to support his policy positions, noting "possibly that is because he perceives facts and statistics as an opportunity for dishonest people to work mischief". Furthermore, Annie Lowrey, in writing for the New York magazine, criticized Brooks' statistical methods when arguing his stance on political reform, claiming he used "some very tricksy, misleading math". Additionally, Sean Illing of Slate criticized the same article from Brooks, claiming he argued his point by framing his sources' arguments out of context and routinely making bold "half-right" assumptions regarding the controversial issue of poverty reform.

In 2016, James Taranto criticized Brooks' analysis of the U.S. Supreme Court case Dretke v. Haley, arguing that "Brooks's treatment of this case is either deliberately deceptive or recklessly ignorant". Law professor Ann Althouse also argued that Brooks "distorts rather grotesquely" by exaggerating the character of Texas solicitor general Ted Cruz who brought the case to the high court. Brooks was previously criticized by Lyle Denniston with regard to another case, arguing that he "scrambled the actual significance of what the Supreme Court has done".

In 2018, Brooks wrote an article in The New York Times about the generation gap between older and younger Democrats, in which he attributed young Democrats' radicalism to "the cultural Marxism that is now the lingua franca in the elite academy." Brooks was criticized by journalist Ari Paul, writing for progressive media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), who claimed that Brooks "rebrands cultural Marxism as mere political correctness, giving the Nazi-inspired phrase legitimacy for the American right. It is dropped in or quoted in other stories—some of them lighthearted, like the fashion cues of the alt-right—without describing how fringe this notion is. It's akin to letting conspiracy theories about chem trails or vaccines get unearned space in mainstream press." Ari Paul and Spencer Sunshine, an associate fellow at the Political Research Associates, argued that failure to highlight the nature of the Cultural Marxist conspiracy theory "has bitter consequences. 'It is legitimizing the use of that framework, and therefore it's coded antisemitism."

Sidney Awards
In 2004 Brooks created an award to honor the best political and cultural journalism of the year. Named for philosopher Sidney Hook and originally called "The Hookies", the honor was renamed "The Sidney Awards" in 2005. The awards are presented each December.

Personal life
Brooks met Jane Hughes, his first wife, while both attended the University of Chicago. She converted to Judaism and changed her given name to Sarah; they divorced in November 2013. Their eldest son served in the Israel Defense Forces, as Brooks shared in a September 2014 interview for Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

Brooks converted to Christianity over a period between 2013 and 2014.

Brooks married Anne Snyder in 2017; they met while he wrote The Road to Character and she was his research assistant.

Select bibliography

 * Editor, Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage, 1996) 0-6797-6654-5
 * Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) ISBN 0-684-85377-9
 * On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (And Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004) ISBN 0-7432-2738-7
 * The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011) ISBN 978-1-4000-6760-2
 * The Road to Character (Random House, 2015) ISBN 978-0-8129-9325-7
 * The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life (Random House, 2019) ISBN 978-0-8-1299-3264
 * How to Know a Person (Random House, 2023) ISBN 978-0-5932-3006-0

title: David Brooks (commentator)


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The Telegraph (Nashua, New Hampshire)

The Telegraph, for most of its existence known as the Nashua Telegraph, is a daily newspaper in Nashua, New Hampshire. It was founded as the Nashua Daily Telegraph in 1869, although a weekly version dates back to 1832. Through the 2000s it was the second-largest newspaper in the state in terms of daily print circulation, behind the New Hampshire Union Leader of Manchester.

In 2020 The Telegraph reduced its print run to Saturday only, when it produces a weekend edition under the Sunday Telegraph banner. In the announcement, the paper said it will continue to report news for its website every day.

After being family-owned for a century, The Telegraph was bought in the 1980s by Independent Publications of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, which owned several smaller daily and weekly newspapers around the United States as well as some other businesses. In 2005, the paper's owner bought the Cabinet Press, publisher of weekly newspapers based in nearby Milford, New Hampshire. In April 2013, it was bought by Ogden Newspapers of Wheeling, West Virginia.

1980 presidential primary debate
On February 23, 1980, the Telegraph received national attention during the New Hampshire presidential primary, when it hosted a Republican debate paid for by the campaign of former California Governor Ronald Reagan. During a discussion over which candidates should be allowed to participate, Telegraph editor Jon Breen (1935–2017), acting as moderator, ordered sound man Bob Molloy to shut off Reagan's microphone, which was met with shouts of protest from the audience; Molloy refused to comply. Mispronouncing his name, Reagan rebuked Breen saying, "I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!" [sic], which was cheered by the audience and applauded by most of his fellow opponents. The phrase entered the political lexicon and the publicity helped to boost Reagan's successful run for the presidency.

Reagan later recounted the incident as a "brief and seemingly small event, one lasting only a few seconds", that he said he thought, "helped take me to the White House". He continues:

"When the Nashua Telegraph offered to sponsor a debate between the two of us [Reagan and George H.W. Bush] on the Saturday evening preceding the election, we both accepted. Understandably, this brought howls from the other candidates. In protest, one of them, Senator Bob Dole, complained to the Federal Election Commission that by financing a debate between only two of the seven candidates, the newspaper was making an illegal contribution to the Bush and Reagan campaigns. The commission agreed with him, so my campaign offered to pay the full cost of the debate—a few thousand dollars—and they accepted. I thought it had been unfair to exclude the other candidates from the debate."

Arriving at the debate, Reagan found two seats prepared, one each for himself and for Bush on either side of Breen. The other candidates were confused, as was the audience.

"I decided I should explain to the crowd what the delay was all about and started to speak. As I did, an editor of the Nashua newspaper shouted to the sound man, 'Turn Mr. Reagan's microphone off.' Well, I didn't like that—we were paying the freight for the debate and he was acting as if his newspaper was still sponsoring it. I turned to him, with the microphone still on, and said the first thing that came to my mind: 'I am paying for this microphone, Mr. Green!' [sic] Well, for some reason my words hit the audience, whose emotions were already worked up, like a sledgehammer. The crowd roared and just went wild. I may have won the debate, the primary—and the nomination—right there."

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title: The Telegraph (Nashua, New Hampshire)


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William Cobbett

William Cobbett (9 March 1763 – 18 June 1835) was an English radical pamphleteer, journalist, politician, and farmer born in Farnham, Surrey. He was one of an agrarian faction seeking to reform Parliament, abolish "rotten boroughs", restrain foreign activity, and raise wages, with the goal of easing poverty among farm labourers and small land holders. Cobbett backed lower taxes, saving, reversing commons enclosures and returning to the gold standard. He opposed borough-mongers, sinecurists, bureaucratic "tax-eaters" and stockbrokers. His radicalism furthered the Reform Act 1832 and gained him one of two newly created seats in Parliament for the borough of Oldham. His polemics range from political reform to religion, including Catholic emancipation. His best known book is Rural Rides (1830, in print). He argued against Malthusianism, saying economic betterment could support global population growth.

Early life (1763–1791)
William Cobbett was born in Farnham, Surrey, on 9 March 1763, the third son of George Cobbett, a farmer and publican, and Anne Vincent. He was taught to read and write by his father and he started working from an early age. He later said: "I do not remember a time when I did not earn my living. My first occupation was driving small birds from the turnip seed, and the rooks from the peas." He worked as a farm labourer at Farnham Castle, and also worked briefly as a gardener in the King's garden at Kew. His rural upbringing gave him a lifelong love of gardening and hunting.

On 6 May 1783, he took a stage coach to London and spent eight or nine months as a clerk in the employ of a Mr. Holland at Gray's Inn. He joined the 54th (West Norfolk) Regiment of Foot in 1783. In his spare time, he improved his knowledge of English grammar. Between 1785 and 1791, Cobbett was stationed with his regiment in New Brunswick and sailed from Gravesend in Kent to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Cobbett was in Saint John, Fredericton and elsewhere in New Brunswick until September 1791, as he was promoted through the ranks to sergeant major, the most senior rank of non-commissioned officer.

Cobbett returned to Britain with his regiment, landing at Portsmouth on 3 November 1791. He obtained his discharge from the army on 19 December 1791. In Woolwich during February 1792, he married an American-born woman, Anne Reid (1774–1848), whom he had met while stationed at Fort Howe in Saint John. Their children were Anne (1795–1877), William (1798–1878), John (1800–1877), James Paul (1803–1881), Eleanor (1805–1900), and Susan (1807–1889). Their daughter Anne Cobbett was the author of several domestic books including The English Housekeeper: The Manual of Domestic Management.

Refuge in France and the United States (1792–1800)
Cobbett had developed an animosity towards some officers, suspecting them of corruption, and gathered evidence on the matter while in New Brunswick. His charges against them were ignored. He wrote The Soldier's Friend in 1792, in protest against the low pay and harsh treatment of enlisted men in the British army. Sensing that he was about to be indicted in retribution, he fled from Britain to France in March 1792 to avoid imprisonment. Cobbett had intended to stay a year to learn the French language, but due to the French Revolution and French Revolutionary Wars in progress, he sailed for the United States in September 1792.

In the spring of 1793, he settled in Philadelphia, then the provisional capital of the United States. Cobbett initially prospered by teaching English to Frenchmen and translating texts from French to English. He later claimed that he had become a political writer by accident: during an English lesson one of his French students read aloud from a New York newspaper the addresses of welcome that the Democrats had sent to Joseph Priestley upon his arrival in America, along with Priestley's replies. His student applauded the anti-British sentiments that were expressed, and he quarrelled with Cobbett, who then resolved to "write and publish a pamphlet in defence of my country." His Observations on the Emigration of Dr. Priestley, which was published anonymously in 1794, was a violent attack on Priestley.

In 1795, Cobbett wrote A Bone to Gnaw for the Democrats, which attacked the pro-French Democratic Party. He replied to his critics with A Kick for a Bite, which was his first work to be published under the pseudonym "Peter Porcupine"; a reviewer had compared him to a porcupine, which pleased him. He took the side of the Federalists, who were led by Alexander Hamilton, because they were friendlier to Britain than were the pro-French Democrats led by Thomas Jefferson.

In January 1796, he began writing a monthly tract, The Censor. It was discontinued after eight releases, and replaced by Porcupine's Gazette, a daily newspaper which ran from March 1797 until the end of 1799. Talleyrand, at the time a French spy in America, tried but failed to bribe Cobbett to join the French cause.

Cobbett opened a bookstore in Philadelphia in July 1796. Its shop-window displayed a large portrait of George III and its interior featured a huge painting of "Lord Howe's Decisive Victory over the French". This provocative display attracted considerable attention. He reprinted and published much of the extreme loyalist literature then current, including George Chalmers's hostile biography of Thomas Paine, as well as his own version, reproducing Chalmer's work interspersed with contemptuous comments.

After Spain entered into an alliance with France against Britain, Cobbett expressed his anger through further pamphleteering that was highly critical of Spanish King Charles IV, in Porcupine's Gazette. The Spanish foreign minister in Philadelphia asked the United States government to prosecute Cobbett for libel of the Spanish king. Cobbett was arrested on 18 November 1797. He was tried in the State Court of Pennsylvania by Chief Justice Thomas McKean (who was also the Spanish minister's father-in-law). Despite McKean's criticism of Cobbett in his summing up, the grand jury threw out case against him by a one-vote majority.

In the Gazette, he serially denounced Benjamin Franklin Bache, publisher of the Jeffersonian paper, the Aurora. Cobbett suggested that the "stubborn sans culotte" should be treated "as we would a TURK, a JEW, a JACOBIN or a DOG". He directed the same invective against Bache's successor, William Duane and his growing circle of United Irish émigrés, describing them as men "animated by the same infamous principles, and actuated by that same thirst for blood and plunder, which had reduced France to a vast human slaughter-house". In May 1798, he began publishing accounts of a Conspiracy, Formed by the United Irishmen, With the Evident Intention of Aiding the Tyrants of France In Subverting the Government of the United States. Convening in Philadelphia's African Free School, and admitting, together with "all those who have suffered in the cause of freedom", free blacks, the Irish republicans had formed a society dedicated to the proposition (to which each member attested) that "a free form of government, and uncontrouled [sic] opinion on all subjects, [are] the common rights of all the human species". Against the backdrop of America's Quasi War with French and of the Haitian Revolution (then still under the flag of the French Republic), for Cobbett, this was sufficient proof of an intention to organise slave revolts and "thus involve the whole country in rebellion and bloodshed".

Cobbett also campaigned against physician and abolitionist Benjamin Rush, whose advocacy of bleeding during the yellow fever epidemic may have caused many deaths. Rush won a libel suit against Cobbett. Cobbett never fully paid the $8,000 judgement, but instead fled to New York and during 1800 via Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Falmouth, Cornwall.

The British government was grateful to Cobbett for supporting Britain's interests in America: the Duke of Kent hailed him as "this great British patriot"; the British representative in America, Robert Liston, offered him a "great pecuniary reward" (which he turned down), and the Secretary at War, William Windham, said that Cobbett deserved a statue of gold for the services he had rendered to Britain in America.

Return to England and The Political Register (1800–1810)
Cobbett's American writings were reprinted in Britain, with John Wright acting as his agent. In August 1800, Windham invited Cobbett to dinner with the Prime Minister, William Pitt, and contributors to the Anti-Jacobin, including George Canning. Pitt's government offered Cobbett the editorship of a government newspaper, but he chose to remain independent. His own paper, The Porcupine, bearing the motto "Fear God, Honour the King", started on 30 October 1800, but without success, and he sold his interest in it in 1801. Less than a month later, he started the Political Register, a newspaper that appeared almost every week from January 1802 until 1835, the year of Cobbett's death. Windham and French Laurence had suggested the idea of a weekly newspaper to Cobbett and Windham raised the money to fund it by private subscription.

When the British government signed a preliminary peace agreement with France in October 1801, Cobbett emerged as one of its foremost opponents, and in the pages of The Porcupine and in his Letters to Lord Hawkesbury, he denounced the agreement as humiliating to Britain and advantageous to France. When news of the ratification arrived on 10 October, Cobbett refused to illuminate the windows of his house in celebration and it was attacked by a mob, which smashed all the windows. When the Peace of Amiens was signed in March 1802, Cobbett again refused to illuminate his windows and the Royal Horse Guards had to protect his house from the mob.

War broke out again between Britain and France in May 1803 and Napoleon planned to invade England, assembling the Grande Armée at Boulogne. In June, The Morning Post appealed to all newspapers to print articles for "the purpose of arousing the people to the defence of the country". Cobbett immediately began a pamphlet, Important Considerations for the People of the Kingdom, warning the country of the consequences of a French invasion. Cobbett declined an offer of payment from the government and his pamphlet was published anonymously in July. The Prime Minister, Henry Addington, ordered copies to be sent to every parish in England and it had an immediate effect on public opinion.

Cobbett formed a close friendship with Windham, who became his patron and shared his anti-Jacobinism and his love of rural and athletic sports. The Evangelical movement was campaigning to reform the sports and recreations of the common people, intending to replace bull-baiting, boxing, singlestick, wrestling and racing with Sunday Schools and psalm singing. Cobbett in the Register criticised the Evangelicals' hostility to rural and athletic sports, "which string the nerves and strengthen the frame, which excite an emulation in deeds of hardihood and valour, and which imperceptibly instill honour, generosity, and a love of glory. Men thus formed are pupils unfit for the puritanical school; therefore it was, that the sect were incessantly labouring to eradicate, fibre by fibre, the last poor remains of English manners." Cobbett supported Windham in opposing attempts in the House of Commons to introduce bills against boxing and bull-baiting; he wrote to Windham that the bill "goes to the rearing of puritanism into a system."

Although initially staunchly anti-Jacobin, by 1804 Cobbett was questioning the policies of the Pitt government, especially the immense national debt and profligate use of sinecures, which Cobbett believed were ruining the country and increasing class antagonism.

Cobbett lived in Botley, Hampshire from 1805, farming and raising his family, initially at Botley House near Botley Mills, and then, from 1812, in a smaller house at Botley Hill.

By 1807, he was endorsing reformers such as Francis Burdett and John Cartwright.

Cobbett published the Complete Collection of State Trials between 1804 and 1812 and amassed accounts of parliamentary debates from 1066 onwards, but financial difficulties obliged him to sell his shares in it to T. C. Hansard in 1812. This unofficial record of parliamentary proceedings later became known officially as Hansard.

Cobbett intended to campaign for Parliament in Honiton in 1806, but was persuaded by Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald to let him campaign in his stead. Both men campaigned together but failed, having refused to bribe voters by "buying" votes. This situation encouraged his opposition to rotten boroughs and belief in parliamentary reform.

Prison (1810–1812)
Cobbett was found guilty of treasonous libel on 15 June 1810, after objecting in The Register to the flogging at Ely, Cambridgeshire of local militiamen by Hanoverians. During his two years' incarceration at Newgate Prison, he wrote the pamphlet Paper Against Gold, warning of the dangers of paper money, and many essays and letters. On his release, a dinner in his honour in London was attended by 600 people and directed by Sir Francis Burdett, who like Cobbett was a strong advocate of parliamentary reform.

"Two-Penny Trash" (1812–1817)
By 1815 the tax on newspapers had reached four pence a copy. As few people could afford to pay six or seven pence for a daily newspaper, the tax restricted the circulation of most journals to those with fairly high incomes. Cobbett could sell only about a thousand copies a week. Nonetheless, he began criticising William Wilberforce for endorsing the Corn Laws, for his personal wealth and opposition to bull and bear-baiting, and particularly for his approval of "the fat and lazy and laughing and singing negroes".

In 1816 Cobbett began publishing the Political Register as a pamphlet. It now sold for only two pence and soon had a circulation of 40,000. Critics termed it "two-penny trash", a phrase Cobbett adopted. It became the main newspaper read by the working class. Radical campaigner Samuel Bamford later wrote:

"At this time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in the manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible. He directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings—misgovernment; and to its proper corrective—parliamentary reform."

This made Cobbett a dangerous man. In 1817, he became aware that the government was planning to arrest him for sedition. With the government intending to suspend habeas corpus, and fearing arrest for his arguably seditious writings, Cobbett again fled to the United States. On Wednesday 27 March 1817, he embarked at Liverpool for New York on the ship Importer, with D. Ogden as master, accompanied by his two eldest sons, William and John.

Refuge in the United States (1817–1819)
Cobbett lived for two years on a farm on Long Island, where he wrote Grammar of the English Language. With help from William Benbow, a friend in London, he continued to issue the Political Register. He also wrote The American Gardener (1821), one of the earliest horticultural books published in the United States.

Cobbett observed alcohol-drinking habits in the United States. He stated in 1819, "Americans preserve their gravity and quietness and good-humour even in their drink." He believed it would be "far better for them to be as noisy and quarrelsome as the English drunkards; for then the odiousness of the vice would be more visible, and the vice itself might become less frequent."

A plan to return to England with the remains of the British-American radical pamphleteer and revolutionary Thomas Paine (who had died in 1809) resulted in the ultimate loss of the remains. The plan was to disinter Paine's remains from his New Rochelle, New York farm for a heroic reburial on his native soil, but the bones were still among Cobbett's effects when he died 16 years later. There is no confirmed story of what happened to them after that, although claims to parts of the body have been made down the years, including his skull and right hand.

Cobbett arrived back in Britain at Liverpool by ship in November 1819.

Later life (1819–1835)
Cobbett's arrival came soon after the Peterloo Massacre. He joined with other radicals in attacks on the government and was charged with libel three times in the next couple of years.

In 1820, he campaigned for Parliament in Coventry, but finished last in the poll. That year he also founded a plant nursery at Kensington, where he grew many North American trees, such as the black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), and with his son, a variety of maize he called "Cobbett's corn". This was a dwarf strain found in a French cottage garden, which turned out to grow well in England's shorter summer. To help sell the strain, he issued a book entitled A Treatise on Cobbett's Corn (1828). Meanwhile, he also wrote his popular Cottage Economy (1822), which taught cottagers some skills necessary for self-sufficiency, such as bread-making, beer-brewing and livestock farming.

Advocacy for the English poor and working-class
Not content to let information be brought to him for his newspaper, Cobbett did his own journalistic work – especially on his repeated theme of the plight of rural Englishmen. He began riding about the country observing events in towns and villages. Rural Rides, a work for which Cobbett is still known, appeared first in serial form in the Political Register from 1822 to 1826, and then in book form in 1830. While writing it, Cobbett also produced The Woodlands (1825), a book on silviculture.

In the first supplement to the Political Register, Cobbett had defended the slave trade as necessary to British commerce. After the Slave Trade Act 1807 prohibited slave trade, Cobbett wrote in the Register that "there is not a reflecting man in the kingdom that cares one straw about it." In the Register for 30 August 1823, Cobbett published his Letter to William Wilberforce, an answer to Wilberforce's Appeal to the Religion, Justice and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies. Here, he attacked Wilberforce's support for the Combination Act, which prohibited trade unions among British workers, and said: "Never have you done one single act, in favour of those labourers, but many and many an act you have done against them." The Letter to Wilberforce was widely distributed in working class areas and gave an impetus to the Combination Act's repeal in 1824.

Cobbett contrasted the Evangelical reformers' campaign for the abolition of black slavery with their support for the "factory slavery" of British workers. He argued that black slaves were better fed, clothed and housed than British workers, and were better treated by their masters. He wrote: "Will not the care, will not the anxiety of a really humane Englishman be directed towards the Whites, instead of towards the Blacks, until, at any rate, the situation of the former be made to be as good as that of the latter?" In 1833, Cobbett voted for the abolition of slavery but in the Register he was still contrasting Parliament's concern for black slaves with their indifference to the sufferings of British "factory slaves".

Catholic emancipation
Although not a Catholic, Cobbett at this time also advocated the cause of Catholic Emancipation. Between 1824 and 1826, he published his History of the Protestant Reformation, a broadside against the traditional Protestant historical narrative of the reformation, stressing the lengthy and often bloody persecutions of Catholics in Britain and Ireland. Catholics were still forbidden at that time to enter certain professions or become members of Parliament. Although the law was no longer enforced, it was officially still a crime to attend Mass or build a Catholic church. Although Wilberforce also worked and spoke against discrimination against Catholics, Cobbett resumed his strident opposition to the noted reformer, particularly after Wilberforce in 1823 published his Appeal in Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies. Wilberforce, long suffering from ill health, retired the next year.

In 1829, Cobbett published Advice To Young Men, in which he criticised An Essay on the Principle of Population by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. That year he also published The English Gardener, which he later updated and expanded. This book has been compared favourably with other contemporary garden tomes, such as John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopædia of Gardening.

Cobbett continued to publish controversial content in his Weekly Political Register and was charged in July 1831 with seditious libel for a pamphlet entitled Rural War, endorsing the Captain Swing Riots, in which rioters were smashing farm machinery and burning haystacks. Cobbett successfully conducted his own defence.

Member of Parliament
Cobbett still sought to be elected to the House of Commons. He was defeated in Preston in 1826 and in Manchester in 1832, but after the passage of the Reform Act 1832, Cobbett won the seat of Oldham.

In Parliament, Cobbett concentrated his energies on attacking corruption in government and the 1834 Poor Law. He believed that the poor had a right to a share in the community's wealth and that the Old Poor Law was the last remaining right that English workers possessed, and which set them apart from other countries which had no such provision. Because the New Poor Law deprived the people of this right to relief, Cobbett believed that the social contract was broken and that therefore the duty of allegiance was dissolved. A week before his death, he wrote to a friend: "[B]efore the passing of the Poor-Law Bill, I wished to avoid [a] convulsive termination. I now do not wish it to be avoided."

During later life, Thomas Macaulay, a fellow MP, remarked that Cobbett's faculties were impaired by age. From 1831 until his death, Cobbett managed a farm named Ash in the village of Normandy, Surrey, a few miles from his birthplace at Farnham. Cobbett died there after a brief illness in June 1835 and was buried in the churchyard of St Andrew's Church, Farnham.

Parliamentary career
During his lifetime Cobbett campaigned for parliament five times, of which four attempts were unsuccessful:
 * 1806 Honiton
 * 1820 Coventry
 * 1826 Preston
 * 1832 Manchester

In 1832 he was elected as a member for Oldham.

Legacy
Cobbett is considered to have begun as an inherently conservative journalist. He was angered by the corrupt British political establishment, and became increasingly radical and sympathetic to antigovernment and democratic ideals. He provided a panegyric extolling rural England during the Industrial Revolution, which he was not in sympathy with. Cobbett wished England would return to the rural England of the 1760s, in which he had been born.

Unlike fellow radical Thomas Paine, Cobbett was not an internationalist cosmopolitan and did not endorse a republican Britain. He boasted that he was not a "citizen of world.... It is quite enough for me to think about what is best for England, Scotland and Ireland." Possessing a national identity, he often criticised rival countries and warned them that they should not "swagger about and be saucy to England." He said his identification with the Church of England was due in part because it "bears the name of my country." Among historical biographers, Ian Dyck claimed that Cobbett endorsed "the eighteenth-century Country Party platform"; Edward Tangye Lean described him as "an archaic English Tory". His writing style was parodied by Horace and James Smith in their collection, Rejected Addresses (1812).

Cobbett has been praised by thinkers of various political persuasions, such as Matthew Arnold, Karl Marx, G. K. Chesterton, A. J. P. Taylor, Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson and Michael Foot.

A story by Cobbett issued in 1807 popularized the term "red herring", to mean a distraction from an important issue.

Cobbett's sons were trained as barristers and founded a partnership in Manchester named Cobbetts in his honour. The firm dissolved in 2013. His second son John Morgan Cobbett (1800–1877) followed him into politics and like his father became MP for Oldham.

Cobbett's birthplace, a public house in Farnham once named The Jolly Farmer, has been renamed The William Cobbett. The Brooklyn-based history band Piñataland performed a song about William Cobbett's quest to rebury Thomas Paine entitled "An American Man". An equestrian statue of Cobbett was being planned for a site in Farnham in 2009, which already has the William Cobbett Primary School named in his honour.

After Cobbett's death, Benjamin Tilly, who had served Cobbett as companion, secretary and factotum, initiated the Cobbett Club. Members sent petitions to Parliament demanding radical reform and produced radical pamphlets and leaflets to keep Cobbett's politics alive. Some of these are still available in libraries. The William Cobbett Society, based in Farnham, produces a yearly edition of 'Cobbett's New Register', and celebrates Cobbett's life, works and spirit in various activities, including an annual Rural Ride and lecture.

Works

 * , as "Peter Porcupine", reprinted at London in 1797
 * , with Thomas Bayly Howell
 * A Year's Residence in the United States of America London. 1818-19 [1828]
 * , with Juan Enrique Sievrac
 * Emigrant's Guide: In Ten Letters, Addressed to the Tax-Payers of England, London 1829
 * , with Juan Enrique Sievrac
 * Emigrant's Guide: In Ten Letters, Addressed to the Tax-Payers of England, London 1829
 * , with Juan Enrique Sievrac
 * Emigrant's Guide: In Ten Letters, Addressed to the Tax-Payers of England, London 1829
 * , with Juan Enrique Sievrac
 * Emigrant's Guide: In Ten Letters, Addressed to the Tax-Payers of England, London 1829
 * Emigrant's Guide: In Ten Letters, Addressed to the Tax-Payers of England, London 1829

title: William Cobbett


text:
Silbury Hill

Silbury Hill is a prehistoric artificial chalk mound near Avebury in the English county of Wiltshire. It is part of the Stonehenge, Avebury and Associated Sites UNESCO World Heritage Site. At 39.3 m high, the hill is the tallest prehistoric man-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world; it is similar in volume to contemporary Egyptian pyramids. The site is in the care of English Heritage.

Silbury Hill is part of the complex of Neolithic monuments around Avebury, which includes the Avebury Ring and West Kennet Long Barrow. Its original purpose is still debated. Several other important Neolithic monuments in Wiltshire, including the large henges at Marden and Stonehenge, may be culturally or functionally related to Avebury and Silbury.

Structure
Composed mainly of chalk and clay excavated from the surrounding area, the mound stands 39.3 m high and covers about 2 ha. The hill was constructed in several stages between c. 2400~2300 and displays immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that it took 18 million man-hours, equivalent to 500 men working for 15 years to deposit and shape 248000 m3 of earth and fill. Euan MacKie asserts that no simple late Neolithic tribal structure as usually imagined could have sustained this and similar projects, and envisages an authoritarian theocratic power elite with broad-ranging control across southern Britain.

The base of the hill is circular and 167 m in diameter. The summit is flat-topped and 30 m in diameter. A smaller mound was constructed first, and in a later phase much enlarged. The initial structures at the base of the hill were perfectly circular: surveying reveals that the centre of the flat top and the centre of the cone that describes the hill lie within a metre of one another. There are indications that the top originally had a rounded profile, but this was flattened in the medieval period to provide a base for a building, perhaps with a defensive purpose.

The first clear evidence of construction, dated to around 2400, consisted of a gravel core with a revetting kerb of stakes and sarsen boulders. Alternate layers of chalk rubble and earth were placed on top of this: the second phase involved heaping further chalk on top of the core, using material excavated from a series of surrounding ditches which were progressively refilled then recut several metres further out. The step surrounding the summit dates from this phase of construction, either as a precaution against slippage, or as the remnants of a spiral path ascending from the base, used to raise materials during construction, and later as a processional route.

Silbury Hill was originally entirely white since it had a chalk (limestone) exterior, and the surrounding ditch may have been regularly filled with water from underground springs.

17th, 18th, and 19th centuries
The site was first illustrated by Aubrey, the 17th-century antiquarian, whose notes, in the form of his Monumenta Britannica, were published between 1680–1682. Later, Stukeley wrote that a skeleton and bridle had been discovered during tree planting on the summit in 1723. In October 1776, a team of Cornish miners overseen by the Duke of Northumberland and Colonel Edward Drax sank a vertical shaft from the top. Brian Edwards argues that Drax and his friends—all members of Mrs. Millers' poetry set in Batheaston—were interested in Silbury Hill, because they thought it paralleled the Greek legends of Apollo killing Python, the monstrous snake that lived in the Caves of Parnassus. In 1849, a tunnel was dug horizontally from the edge into the centre. In 1867, the Wiltshire Archaeological and Natural History Society excavated the east side of the hill to see if traces of the Roman road were underneath it. No traces were found, and later excavations south of the hill located the road in fields to the south, making a pronounced swerve to avoid the base of the hill. This was conclusive proof that the hill was there before the road—but the hill provided an alignment sight-line for the road.

20th century
Flinders Petrie investigated the hill after the First World War. From 1968 to 1970 professor Richard J. C. Atkinson undertook work at Silbury which was broadcast on BBC Television. This excavation revealed most of the environmental evidence about the site, including the remains of winged ants which indicate that Silbury was begun in an August. Atkinson dug numerous trenches at the site and reopened the 1849 tunnel, where he found material suggesting a Neolithic date, although none of his radiocarbon dates are considered reliable by modern standards. He argued that the hill was constructed in steps, each tier being filled in with packed chalk and then smoothed off or weathered into a slope. Atkinson reported the C-14 date for the base layer of turf and decayed material indicated a corrected date for the commencement of Silbury was close to 2750.

21st century
After heavy rains in May 2002, a collapse of the 1776 excavation shaft caused a hole to form in the top of the hill. English Heritage undertook a seismic survey of the hill to identify the damage caused by earlier excavations and determine the hill's stability. Repairs were undertaken, but the site remained closed to the public. As part of this remedial work, English Heritage, with help from AC Archaeology, excavated two further small trenches at the summit. Neil Adam from AC Archaeology made the important discovery of an antler fragment, the first from a secure archaeological context at the site. A radiocarbon date of c. 2490–2340 dates the second phase of the mound convincingly to the Late Neolithic.

In March 2007, English Heritage announced that a Roman village had been found at the foot of Silbury Hill. It contained regularly laid out streets and houses.

In May 2007, contractors Skanska, under the overall direction of English Heritage, began a major programme of stabilisation, filling the tunnels and shafts from previous investigations with hundreds of tonnes of chalk. At the same time a new archaeological survey was conducted using modern equipment and techniques. The work finished in early 2008; a "significant" new understanding of the monument's construction and history had been obtained.

In 2010, letters written by Edward Drax concerning the 1776 excavation were found in the British Library. He describes a "perpendicular cavity" 40 ft deep and 6 in wide. As wood fragments—thought to be oak—have been found, it has been suggested that this may have held an oak tree or a "totem pole".

Comparable sites
Following the 2007–2008 works, archaeologists investigated whether Silbury Hill was the only such mound built by the people of the time, or if there might be other comparable mounds that have not been recognised as prehistoric. A strong candidate was felt to be the Marlborough Mound, in the grounds of Marlborough College, 8.3 km east of Silbury Hill, further down the River Kennet. The mound is 18 m high, less than half the height of Silbury. There are archaeological and documentary indications that the Marlborough Mound had been used for medieval fortifications known as Marlborough Castle, and it had been identified as a Norman motte. A team of archaeologists, led by Jim Leary, analysed core samples from two 10 cm diameter boreholes. Charcoal from immediately below the mound was from around 2500, making it a close contemporary of Silbury.

Another contender, but which had been all but levelled in the 19th century, was at Marden Henge, 10 km south of Silbury. Known as Hatfield Barrow, a surviving fragment of what may have been a 15 m high mound also gave construction dates to the mid-3rd millennium.

The Round Mound Project to investigate other likely mounds began in 2015, and from 154 potential sites across England, 20 were selected for core sampling and detailed surveying. By late 2017, 14 had produced results confirming that they were built immediately after the Norman invasion of 1066. Three were shown to be later medieval mounds and one was from Saxon times, so may be a burial mound. Only one, Skipsea Castle mound in East Yorkshire, was found to be prehistoric, but dating to 800–400, during the British Iron Age. On the basis of this survey, it would appear that Neolithic mound-building was restricted to the upper Kennet and Avon valleys, and that nothing extant elsewhere in Britain comes close as a comparison to Silbury Hill.

Artifacts
Few prehistoric artifacts have been found on Silbury Hill: at its core there is only clay, flints, turf, moss, topsoil, gravel, freshwater shells, mistletoe, oak, hazel, sarsen stones, ox bones, and antler tines. Roman and medieval items have been found on and around the site since the nineteenth century.

Purpose

The exact purpose of the hill is unknown, though various suggestions have been put forward.

Folklore
According to legend, Silbury is the last resting place of a King Sil, represented in a life-size gold statue and sitting on a golden horse. A local legend noted in 1913 states that the Devil was carrying a bag of soil to drop on the citizens of Marlborough, but he was stopped by the priests of nearby Avebury. In 1861 it was reported that hundreds of people from Kennet, Avebury, Overton, and the neighbouring villages thronged Silbury Hill every Palm Sunday.

Other suggestions
John C. Barret asserts that any ritual at Silbury Hill would have involved physically raising a few individuals far above the level of everyone else, where they would have been visible for miles around and from several other monuments in the area. This would possibly indicate an elite group, perhaps a priesthood, powerfully displaying their authority.

Michael Dames has put forward a composite theory of seasonal rituals, in an attempt to explain the purpose of Silbury Hill and its associated sites (West Kennet Long Barrow, the Avebury henge, The Sanctuary and Windmill Hill), from which the summit of Silbury Hill is visible.

Paul Devereux observes that Silbury and its surrounding monuments appear to have been designed with a system of inter-related sightlines, focusing on the step several metres below the summit. From various surrounding barrows and from Avebury, the step aligns with hills on the horizon behind Silbury, or with the hills in front of Silbury, leaving only the topmost part visible. In the latter case, Devereux hypothesises that ripe cereal crops grown on the intervening hill would perfectly cover the upper portion of Silbury, with the top of the corn and the top of Silbury coinciding.

Jim Leary and David Field (2010) conclude that the mound's purpose cannot be known, and the multiple and overlapping construction phases – almost continuous remodelling – suggest there was no blueprint and that the process of building was probably the most important thing of all: perhaps the process was more important than the hill.

Site of Special Scientific Interest
The hill's vegetation is species-rich chalk grassland, dominated by upright brome and false oat-grass, but with many species characteristic of this habitat, including a strong population of the rare knapweed broomrape. In 1965 and 1986 the entire hill – in all 2.3 ha – was notified as a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Other references

title: Silbury Hill