All the foul-mouthed effing and blinding by Andrew Mitchell did not worry the copper, only his use of the word ‘pleb’. Quite right too: who could be more plebeian than Mr Mitchell?
If we can trust accounts of early Roman history when kings ruled Rome (traditional dates 753-509 bc), plebs was contrasted with patricii simply because patricians came from those clans that had supplied the kings with his circle of advisers, while the plebs had not.
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