IT WAS the imperial essayist Sir John Robert Seeley who said:

"History is past politics, and politics present history."

It's a bit mind-bending, yon, but nothing more than you'd expect from the author of Ecce Homo, a work, I should stress, that was in no way a futuristic biography of our own departed leader, the man Ecce Salmond.

I offer you this brief recce of the Ecce merely as a prelude to the following bombshell news: the poor received better treatment in Tudor times than they do today.

Now there's a bit of England-Britain disentangling to be done here, as the Tudors had nowt to do with us, other than occasionally destroying our towns and villages.

But you get the gist. And, as today we remain - voluntarily - a satellite of post-Tudor England, we suffer under the same yoke. We might want to treat the poor better. But we can't. Tough.

The author of this new claim about the poor is the historical writer Hilary Mantel, who told German newspaper Der Spiegel (tr: The Spiegel): "Even in the 16th century, Thomas Cromwell was trying to tell people that a thriving economy has casualties and that something must be done by the state for people out of work.

"Even back then, you saw the tide turning against this idea that poverty was a moral weakness."

The Mantel piece touches on a right important point: not everything in the past was worse. That goes for people too. There were people around in Roman times who were brainier than many people today. And, by the latter, I'm not just referring to the Labour Party in Scotland.

Obviously, it wasn't all good. I wouldn't have enjoyed waddling aboot in pantaloons. And there was nowhere to plug in your mobile phone.

However, at least they didn't put up with as much nonsense as we do, probably because they had face-to-face conversations. They got together and said: "This is ridiculous. I'm going to throw something." Today's peasants, on the other hand, just throw out bon mots on Twitter.

Probably just as well, I suppose. And at least today's poor are given money, even if it isn't enough to live on and comes accompanied by scorn.

Shortly before things got worse, we were told they could only get better. But as Sir John Robert Seeley would surely have said today: Aye, right.