The History Girls

I have really been enjoying finding out about the villages of Hampshire’s Meon Valley, in order to share something of their history, introduce a few of the people associated with them, and reveal some of the treasures held within their buildings. Even though I know the area very well, it has nonetheless been both an eye-opener and a delight to discover all the things I didn’t know.

Taken from a map of Hampshire by William J Blaeu, Amsterdam, 1645,

showing the cluster of villages in the upper reaches of the River Meon

But, today, I’m going to look at Droxford, one of the cluster of villages in the upper reaches of the River Meon.

The name Droxford is probably derived from ford and an old word ‘drocen’ meaning dry place. The settlement of Drokeneford was first mentioned in writing in the 9th century, when it was granted by Ecgberht (Egbert), King of Wessex, to Herefrith, the bishop of Winchester, “for the sustenance of the monks of Winchester”.

St Swithun of Winchester from the 10th century

Benedictional of St. Æthelwold,

illuminated manuscript in the British Library.

More than a hundred years later, StSwithun was adopted as patron of Winchester’s restored cathedral church. Swithun had been Bishop of Winchester from October 853 until he died sometime between 862 and 865. In 971, Swithun’s body was transferred from its original burial place to Bishop Æthelwold’s new church building and, according to contemporary writers, numerous miracles surrounded the move. We’ve seen images of these miracles before, in the church at Corhampton, where the painting at the top of the south wall is said to depict stories from his life. One of them is the miracle of the eggs, where Swithun is inspecting a bridge being built over the River Itchen and, in the crowd that has gathered, an old woman is jostled and her eggs fall from her basket. But the miracle-working Swithun simply puts the broken eggs back together.

In 939, the then king, Æthelstan, granted 17 hides of Droxford land to his half-sister Eadburh. (A hide, traditionally taken to be 120 acres or 49 hectares, was intended to represent the amount of land sufficient to support a household.) Eadburh may well have benefitted financially from her brother’s generosity but, of course, she might not have spent much, if any, time in Droxford. Nonetheless, her story is interesting.

It was said that Eadburh’s father, King Edward, the elder son of King Alfred, set his three-year-old daughter a test, to discover if she was destined to live in the world or in a house of religion. He asked his little girl to choose between a display of rings and bracelets, and another of a chalice and gospel book. Apparently, the toddler chose the religious items and, as a consequence, was given, at that tender age of three, to the Benedictine nunnery at St Mary’s Abbey, Winchester (called Nunnaminster), which had been founded by her grandmother, Ealhswith, Alfred’s wife. There Eadburh remained as a nun, dying probably before the age of forty. Quite why she became a saint I am not at all clear…

In the Domesday Book, Drocheneford was said to be “always in (the demesnes of) the Church”, and was still held by the bishop for the support of the Winchester monks. In 1284 the manor passed wholly to the bishop, the monks renouncing “all right and claim which they have or shall have in the said manor, for ever”.

Not an owner of Droxford, but one of its more famous (or, almost, infamous) sons, was John de Drokensford (1260s?-1329), said to have been the son of the local squire. An effigy of a lady in the south side of Droxford church has been supposed to be that of his mother. John was the Keeper of the Wardrobe to King Edward I, and accompanied the king on some of his Scottish campaigns.

Effigy of John de Drokensford in Wells Cathedral

John’s services to the king were rewarded with very many ecclesiastical preferments, including rector of Droxford. He appears to have had five residences in Surrey and Kent, as well as Hampshire. In 1309 John became bishop of Bath and Wells, at the instigation of King Edward II. And, as bishop, he made neither Bath nor Wells his headquarters, but moved about constantly, attended apparently by a large retinue, living at one or other of the sixteen or more episcopal manor houses. He was, like many of his fellow bishops, a worldly man, and not always as scrupulous as he might have been in his own dealings.

Droxford continued to be held by the bishop of Winchester until 1551, when the new bishop, John Poynet, surrendered the whole hundred of Waltham, including Droxford manor, to the crown, as part of an agreement to reduce the income of the Winchester see, to the benefit of the government. The demesne of Droxford passed to William Paulet, the 1st Marquess of Winchester (c. 1483/1485 – 1572). William started out as a Catholic, but was quickly “persuaded” to see things the way the king, Henry VIII, saw them. Following the dissolution of the monasteries, William found himself rewarded with former Church properties, such as those owned by the bishop of Winchester.

Paulet was a political manipulator who had a long and successful career, serving Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I. He was involved in the audience with the Pope to discuss Henry’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, and he became a close associate of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey and a friend of Thomas Cromwell.

William Paulet, 1st Marquess of Winchester, holding the white

staff as a symbol of the office of Lord High Treasurer.

1560s? National Portrait Gallery (London).

In 1535/36, he served as one of the judges at the trials of John Fisher, Sir Thomas More, and the alleged accomplices of Anne Boleyn. In 1547, he was an executor of the will of King Henry VIII. He was a political schemer and, in 1549, he supported the Earl of Warwick against the Duke of Somerset in their struggle for power in England during the minority of the child king, Edward VI. When Warwick succeeded, and became the new Lord President of the Council, he appointed William Paulet as Lord Treasurer. And when Warwick was created Duke of Northumberland in 1551, Paulet became the Marquess of Winchester and received Droxford, presumably as part of his reward!

It was said that Paulet and Northumberland “ruled the court” of the young king, as the two most prominent members of the Regency Council. William was still Lord Treasurer even after the death of Mary I in 1558, and continued in the service of Elizabeth I, although he must have been over seventy years of age. He retained his high positions, and was Speaker of the House of Lords in 1559 and 1566. Apparently, Queen Elizabeth once joked, “for, by my troth, if my lord treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England.”

As already mentioned, William found himself able to shift his religious affiliation in order to win the favour of his monarch. Under Henry, he had already renounced his Catholicism and embraced Protestantism and, under Edward VI, he went so far as to persecute Roman Catholics. But, on the accession of the Catholic Mary, he “reconverted” and proceeded to persecute his former Protestant allies, while, on Elizabeth’s succession, he changed tack once again. All in all, he changed religious tack five times. Once, when asked how he managed to survive so many storms, not only unhurt, but rising all the while, Paulet answered: “By being a willow, not an oak.”

As for Droxford, William lost it again in 1558, when Queen Mary restored it to the bishopric, and the bishops then retained it until the Civil War. Then, the Long Parliament found a purchaser for Droxford in a Mr. Francis Allen, who gave £7,675 13s. 7d. for it. But, at the Restoration in 1660, the bishops recovered their possessions, and Droxford remained attached to the lands of the Winchester see for the next two hundred years.

But what of other famous associations with Droxford? I will mention two.

Izaak Walton portrait by Jacob Huysmans,

c. 1672, National Portrait Gallery (London)

In the 17th century, the well-known fisherman and writer of The Compleat Angler, Izaak Walton, came to Droxford to fish in the River Meon, declaring it the best river in England for trout. His daughter Anne married William Hawkins, prebendary of Winchester Cathedral, who was instituted rector of Droxford in 1664, and held the office till his death in 1691.

Walton passed the last years of his life with his daughter and her husband, and a passage in his will says: “I also give unto my daughter all my books at Winchester and Droxford, and whatever in these two places are, or I can call mine.”

And the other famous man who spent a little time in Droxford was Sir Winston Churchill…

In 1903, a railway came to serve Droxford with the building of the Meon Valley Railway. In fact, although the station was called Droxford, it was actually sited almost in Soberton, at a little settlement called Brockbridge.

On the morning of 2nd June 1944, orders were telephoned along the length of the Meon Valley Railway that it was to be kept free of trains so that a special train could use the route without interruption. Troops surrounded Droxford railway station and its sidings, and the local post office was ordered to let no mail other than official business leave the village.

The special train stopped and parked up at Droxford station. In it were the prime minister of Britain, Sir Winston Churchill, and the South African prime minister, General Jan Smuts. The next day Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, arrived by car. On 4th June, Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, arrived from his nearby base at Southwick House, and they were joined by the prime ministers of Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia. They were there to discuss the D-Day invasion of France.

But, when the invasion was only days away, Charles de Gaulle, the Free French leader, had not yet been told of the Allies’ plans. The British cabinet was wary of communicating with the French government while they were in exile in Algeria, but also of a diplomatic incident if the invasion went ahead without French knowledge, so they decided to invite de Gaulle to come to England, to disclose the plans to him in person. When de Gaulle landed at RAF Northolt, he received a telegram from Churchill:

My dear General de Gaulle,
Welcome to these shores! Very great military events are about to take place. I should be glad if you could come to see me down here in my train, which is close to General Eisenhower’s Headquarters, bringing with you one or two of your party. General Eisenhower is looking forward to seeing you again and will explain to you the military position which is momentous and imminent. If you could be here by 1.30 p.m., I should be glad to give you déjeuner and we will then repair to General Eisenhower’s Headquarters. Let me have a telephone message early to know whether this is agreeable to you or not.

Although officially kept secret from local Droxford residents, it seems that Churchill had chosen the station as a secure base, because it was near the coast and to the Allied command centre at Southwick House. But there was some speculation that the site was also thought safe because it was overshadowed by beech trees, which obscured the view of the train, and because there was a deep cutting into which the train could be shunted if it came under attack.

Mackenzie King (PM Canada), Winston Churchill, Peter Fraser (PM New Zealand), Dwight Eisenhower,

Godfrey Huggins (PM Rhodesia) and Jan Smuts. Although this well-known photograph

is generally credited as having been taken at Droxford, in fact, it seems unlikely.

Anyway, at 6.58 pm on 5th June, Churchill’s train pulled out of Droxford station and returned to London. At 16 minutes past midnight the following morning, Allied troops attacked Pegasus Bridge and shortly thereafter the American airborne landings in Normandy began.

So this is a question for all the writers, agents and publishers out there. What is the state of the market for Historical Fiction at the moment?

A Scholar seated at a Table with Books - Rembrandt 1634

I do some reading for The Literary Consultancy when my own deadlines allow, and it’s a question I’m often asked. If I think the manuscript I’ve read is of publishable quality, I’ll say so, but that’s different to saying it will be published. And as to money? Might be two thousand, might be twenty, might be fifty, or one hundred thousand. Or one point five million.

Yes, that just happened. And that’s for a book about a book too (the writing and publishing of Dr Zhivago, We Were Never Here by Lara Prescott). I‘ve chatted to two publishers in the last year who said that writers writing about writing is a terrible idea. I have nodded sagely when they said it too. See, nobody know anything. That phrase by the way is the mantra repeated through William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’, which is brilliant and painful in equal measure.

I can say with certainty that there is plenty of excellent, crime, adventure, and literary historical fiction being published. Big names such as Wilbur Smith (full disclosure - I’ve been co-writing with Mr Smith), Alison Weir and Robert Harris, literary luminaries like Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst, master warmongers like Harry Sidebottom and Ben Kane, crime lords - S.D. Sykes, Rory Clements, stonking debuts - Stuart Turton, Imogen Hermes Gower and the consistently excellent Antonia Senior, Katherine Clements, Abir Mukherjee. And many, many more. So the talent is there and the publishers are making sure new books arrive on the shelves every week. An army of book bloggers support and promote the love of fiction and audio book sales are shooting up. So that’s all good.

The Hangover - Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec

I’ve also spent time with various writers sobbing into our pints about advances cut to the bone, shrinking foreign markets and the drop off in the sales of hardbacks. We’re not so much a literary elite, I’m afraid, as Del Boys on the 21st century Grub Street, trying to find alternative ways of making a living, publishing our work and fiercely staking out time to write the stories we want to write, all in the hopes that the next project we spend our blood and treasure on will be the one that breaks through and earns big, big enough to give us a chance to sit back and do more writing rather than ducking and diving. ‘This time next year, Rodney…’

We would all like to be able to spot trends and know in advance if a particular book is going to be a massive bestseller. (Ideally, before we write it). But in the end sales are in the lap of the Gods. And yes, I know, marketing spend and being named a lead title can be a huge boost, but we all know a superb book can fail to find readers even when a publisher blows the budget on it. We also know another book, universally rejected, can suddenly find a champion and snowball into a huge success. An author whose last book broke sales records sees the next one limp out into the daylight and then retreat, unremarked. It’s the cover, the subject, Brexit, the TV deal, the lack of a TV deal. We can always find reasons for the success or failure of any book after the fact. And we know (now) the moment everyone is in the pub saying that historical fiction is an impossible sell right now, and for God sake, don’t write about writers, is the moment someone lands a 1.5 million deal for doing just that. Nobody knows anything.

BUT

Rules are made to be broken, even the ‘nobody knows anything’ rule. I do believe no writer or publisher ever found fresh markets without being bold about what they write and publish. That doesn’t mean you have to live on soup in a bothy until your masterwork is complete, or hire the Natural History Museum for a launch party and buy advertising space on the side of a bus. It means we need to keep finding stories, places and times which ignite our passions and encourage new writers to do the same.

So this is what I'm saying to myself and anyone else who wants to listen at the moment: Be bloody minded. Don’t try and chase a market, write the story you can’t let go off even if it goes against the current shibboleths, and find a way to pay the mortgage round the edges if you have to. Be wise about your money on the occasions it does turn up.

Like, I spend my PLR income on negronis, but I think that is wise.

Triumph of Bacchus Diego Velazquez 1628

So I think the market for historical fiction is… there. That’s probably all we can ever say to anyone, and it might have to be good enough.

www.imogenrobertson.com

The Good Book - Federico Zandomeneghi 1897

Oh the joys of Midsummer: that part of the year when retailers begin to count down the shopping days to Christmas and those of us who live in Scotland wonder whether we can risk turning the heating off. Although we give it one name, the celebration actually comes in two stages. It starts with Solstice or the longest day (June 21st), associated with pagan festivities and then moves to Midsummer's Day itself (24th), one of the four Quarter Days in the UK legal calendar and also traditionally the Christian festival of St John. That means we are currently in a summer limbo - a little like the period between Christmas and New Year except with charred raw sausages rather than Quality Street and hopefully a prettier name. That last may mean nothing outside Scotland, suffice to say it's a biological term starting with p and ending in m and I'm sure you can work it out. Anyway, to badly paraphrase Dave Allen, whichever god goes with you, there's a celebration to be had.

Kupala Summer Solstice Festival, Russia

The summer solstice is the sun's most powerful day and has been celebrated for thousands of years with fires and and torch-lit processions. In ancient times, the fires, which included bonfires and flame deliberately set in motion such as burning wheels rolling down hillsides, were seen as a magical way of feeding the sun and strengthening its power. As Midsummer was perceived as one of those times in the calendar when the veil between mortal and spirit worlds lifted, fire was also important for warding off bad luck, stopping the evil spirits who might cross through, and encouraging prosperity in the year to come. Blazing gorse was carried round cattle to drive away disease and the most athletic revelers were encouraged to leap over high-burning fires. Supposedly, the highest jump predicted the height crops would reach in the new harvest season.

Rowan Tree: no go for witches

For pagans, the solstice also saw the Wheel of the Year coming to one of its most significant points: the Goddess, who took over the earth from the horned God at the beginning of spring, is now at the height of her power and fertility. Midsummer was traditionally therefore a time for gathering flowers and herbs with 'magical' properties. Gathering is one of the traditions which survived the religious reformations of the fifteenth century aimed at putting the feast of St John the Baptist more to the fore than church-threatening superstitions and, in parts of Wales at least, Midsummer Day is still called Gathering Day because of this practise. Whatever they told the priests about new trends in decorating and design, people continued to pick their plants and protect themselves, their homes and their cattle with evil-spirit repelling garlands. In a nice fusion of old and new, it was especially important to pick the yellow-herb St John's Wort, known as 'chase-devil' which would be hung above doors as a protective measure. Rowan was also thought to be powerful against witches and was added to bonfires or specifically burned on Midsummer's Day in a number of places, including Cumbria. Other plants to look out for around this date include Orpine, which is also known as 'Midsummer's Men' but be careful: if a piece is picked on Midsummer's Eve and wilts overnight, disappointment is certain for the one who picked it, and possibly also death. Send someone else if you have a hankering.

Mazey Day Cornwall

Like many old traditions, much of the rituals associated with Midsummer are no longer practised on a countrywide scale. Perhaps the best way to experience them nowadays is at Stonehenge or in Cornwall where the Federation of Old Cornwall Societies has revived some of the old celebrations. The annual festival of the Feast of St John the Baptist in Penzance lasts a week, beginning on the Friday closest to the 24th and concluding with a parade on Mazey Day and includes traditional bonfires set all along the coast. I also remember climbing Glastonbury Tor in a swirl of magical lights and music one Midsummer a few years ago and genuinely wish I could remember it more but that's another story.

Whatever you're celebrating this summer, be it Midsummer or Wimbledon or the World Cup or the ability to escape them all, you need something a bit more special than a washed-out barbecue. I have a wonderful old book called Catten Cakes and Lace which includes recipes for all the year's celebrations and for Midsummer they have a delightful creation called Queen Mab's Summer Pudding. If you really want to do the faery queen justice, bring out a different kind of Barbie, stick her in the finished creation and make the whipped cream into the ruffles on her skirt; just a thought...

6-8 slices stale white bread with crusts cut off
675g - blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries
2 tablespoons water
150g sugar

Line a 1 litre pudding bowl with slices of bread. Cut more if needed to completely cover the bottom and sides. Wash and prepare the fruit, add to a pan with the water and sugar. Boil gently until the sugar melts and juices run but don't let the fruit disintegrate. Spoon the fruit into the prepared dish, make a bread lid, put a small plate on top, weight it down and chill for 8 hours or more. Remove the weights, turn onto a plate, decorate with the cream and celebrate summer.

Burghausen, in Lower Bavaria, is officially, according to the Guinness Book of Records, Europe's longest, at 1,051.02 metres, ie, well over a kilometre, so walking the length of it would count as a reasonable constitutional, particularly after the steep climb up to the ramparts. As one of the largest intact medieval castles in the world, it dominates the eponymous (and very attractive) town. From 1255 onwards, it was the second seat of the Dukes of Lower Bavaria. We stayed in the town in July last year, in sizzling heat, in the old Post hotel, which backs onto the castle rock, and our room had a view of the castle.

This is not meant to be a discursive piece, rather (since it's getting into summer holiday time again) a stroll through the castle. If you want a panorama of the whole thing, look on wikipedia.

This very pretty garden is set on the exterior of the old gaol, part of which is called the 'Hexenturm' or 'witch tower.' I was hoping to get images to illustrate a piece about the great witch hunt, but in fact Burghausen was not one of the great witch-burning centres of Lower Bavaria. The 'witch tower' was simply the place where women were shut up. I believe the name was attached to it later, and you can make what you want of that connection, and why it was so named.
Next to the 'witch tower' is the 'torture tower' or 'Folterturm,' and that is definitely the right appellation. I'm not putting up photos of the instruments of torture, but there are still racks, scolds' bridles, Iron Maidens, and other horrible things on view in the museum here. It's a dreadful thought that torture is still very much a part of our modern world. However, here is the sign for the Folterturm museum. For the benefit of non-German speakers, the sign also tells you how to get to the snack bar and the entrance to the torture tower is through the souvenir shop. There is something slightly gruesome about this, I feel, torture as entertainment. Well, you get it at the Tower of London, too.

Folterturm

One of the corridors in the gaol.

Moving further along, you get to more cheerful parts of the castle; of course the Dukes wouldn't have wanted their dinner disturbed by screams, though no doubt they had no squeamishness about strolling along to visit an execution or even a bout of torture. Perhaps my scruples about torture as entertainment nowadays are over-sensitive, after all.

Here are the ducal quarters; unsurprisingly, the castle is in great demand for film locations.

What I liked best about the castle was this chapel, a little medieval gem. Interestingly, just as in England, medieval wall paintings were being rediscovered, which are just visible, I think, if you click on the picture. In England the disappearance of such frescos is usually blamed on the white-hot frenzy of religious reformers, and I commented on this to the room steward. Her response was: 'I believe they just went out of fashion.' Perhaps the fashion was less religiously motivated than the painting over of frescos in England, but it seems that might have happened even without the Reformation.

Walking down another steep path along the ramparts to go back to the town for lunch, we heard goats bleating, yet they were, frustratingly, never visible, . You could hear them from our bedroom, too. They are organic goats who are kept on the steep slopes because they eat tree and shrub seedlings, which, if they grew up, might destroy the structure of the castle mound. They move indoors for the winter.

The other thing I liked best about the castle was the old moat, part of which has become a swimming area. Particularly welcome when the temperature is over 30; it's so lovely to be able to swim among moorhens and ducks, to turn over on your back and enjoy the view of the longest castle high above you. As you can see from the photograph, the lido is among the outer ramparts, and you go through a curtain wall to get to them (there's a lovely garden, too).

There are some pictures that show the extent of the castle on this blog http://missionarystorrers.blogspot.com/2012/05/longest-castle-in-germany-burghausen.html http://missionarystorrers.blogspot.com/2012/05/longest-castle-in-germany-burghausen.html

http://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/burghaus.htm http://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/burghaus.htm

For the goats: https://www.innsalzach24.de/innsalzach/region-burghausen/burghausen-ort481637/burghausen-ziegen-grasen-nach-weidenabtrieb-burghaengen-woehrsee-altstadt-9851060.html https://www.innsalzach24.de/innsalzach/region-burghausen/burghausen-ort481637/burghausen-ziegen-grasen-nach-weidenabtrieb-burghaengen-woehrsee-altstadt-9851060.html

It's a couple of days past the Solstice as I'm writing this post. Where I live in the UK, the sun will rise at 4.40am and set at 9.35pm tonight although it won't be fully dark until around 10.45pm. That's gettting on for 18 hours of daylight. But at the other end of the equation in December, the dawn arrives circa 8am and sunset is before 4pm, giving us only 8 hours of daylight, and if the weather is murky, that time is swiftly curtailed.

I was thinking about this the other day and it led me to ponder upon the kind of lighting medieval people had at their disposal. Eight hundred years ago, how would I have lit my hours of darkness?

Since all cooking and heating relied on fires, ambient firelight would have provided a certain amount of light, but with dim parameters and not always useful. One of the reasons main meals were eaten early in the day in the Middle Ages was that trying to perform tasks in a kitchen without clear light was a hazard. Certainly in a castle kitchen there might be fires for heating water and cooking food, but the fire was at ground level and any preparation would have to be done on tables which would be cast into shadow, so in itself firelight, while providing warmth and cheer was only of background usefulness. Actually for kitchen work in dark circumstances, the most often used lighting appears to have been something called a cresset. This was a series of hollows in a stone block.

The hollows would be filled with oil or fat and a wick floated in them. The lamps would be placed on a flat surface or in a niche. There are frequent references to cresset lamps as items of kitchen equipment. Candles and candlesticks seem not to have been as popular in a kitchen environment but to have been used elsewhere.
Bartholomew the Englishman was of the opinion that there should be plenty of light from candles, prickets and torches when people were eating 'for it is a shame to sup in darkness and perilous also for flies and other filth.' I am reminded of my father-in-law on active service in North Africa in 1942. He said he always waited until after dark to eat his rations because then he wouldn't see the weevils!

For the present household and the less well off, lighting was provided by tallow candles and by rush lights. These were frequently home-made in the summer months by carefully peeling the long cylindrical pith of the juncus rush, and dragging it through molten animal fat. These, however, burned down quickly and could not be used for any length of time. They were better than nothing, but not ideal. People make use of local resources, and some communities living near the sea would make lamps out of a fish called a thornback. The fish was stuffed full of linen waste, compressed until the wick was saturated, and then actually burned as a candle. Two or three tied together in an iron holder made a torch. The phosphorescent light cast by rotting fish was sometimes used to light the way up the garden path...

Candle stick fit for a queen. 12th century V&A

The aristocracy and the church opted for candles made from beeswax. These gave a clear burning light and a pleasant smell and were long-lasting. Although beeswax was locally available, there was never enough to satisfy demand in the big cities, and supplies were augmented from the forested less sparsely populated areas of Europe, such as Russia, Hungary and Bohemia. People in royal service were entitled to candles or remnants of them as one of the perks of their job. If John Marshal my hero of A Place Beyond Courage was eating outside the court he was entitled to a daily provision of one small wax candle and 24 candle ends. Royalty only burned fresh candles, and whatever stubs remained at the end of each day were cleared away and finished off in the departments of the household officials. If John was working in-house on a particular day he was entitled to an ample supply of candles all the time. John's ushers were entitled to 8 candle ends a day for their own use. Candles could be placed in candlesticks, wall mounted holders, ceiling suspended holders, or arranged on large multi-holder candle stands – whatever suited the purpose.

Candle holder that could be used either free standing
or on a wall bracket. Museum of London.

Ceramic lamps were another form of lighting. These look a bit like ice cream cones and are ubiquitous in medieval illustrations. They are frequently found in museum exhibits. Basically, they worked on the same principle as the cresset lamp and were often suspended by chains from the ceiling. There are references in the pipe rolls to the use of oil lamps. Queen Eleanor had 30 shillings and five pence worth of oil bought on the Surrey account to use in her lamps in 1176/1177. 'Et pro oleo ad lampadem regine xxxs, et v.d.' In 1159 that sum was greater but only by two pence. The second sum appears time and again throughout the reigns of Richard I and of John while she was still living. Were they for religious or personal use? The pipe rolls don't say.

Hanging lamp mid 13th century. Maciejowski Bible.

Norman ceramic oil lamp. Museum of London.

When one needed to carry a light about, lanterns proved useful, and there are many surviving examples in the archaeological and illustrative record.

Ceramic lantern from the the Poitou region

Torches were also used. But we don't know a great deal about them as they have not survived well in the archaeological record and it's an area that still requires more study.

Lantern from the mid 13thc Maciejowski Bible.

During the broad spread of the middle ages and in various circumstances, there were rules about lighting. George Duke of Clarence's household ordinances for December 1468 gives the detail that wood and candles should only be issued between 1 November and Good Friday at the rate of two shides (unit of measure - I don't know its meaning) and three white tallow candles to be shared between every two gentlemen of the household. At the monastery of Barnwell, the monks were forbidden to sit by a lamp in the dormitory to read, or to take candles to bed in order to do the same. We might think it was because of the fire hazard but no, it was because reading in bed was discouraged as at that time, reading aloud was the norm and would have kept everyone else awake, not to mention the disturbance of light.

The Wise and Foolish Virgins out and about with their full and empty lamps
15thc Carthusian Miscellany. British Library.

So basically it wasn't a world without light, but it was certainly one more deeply shadowed, more golden, more smokily scented (among other smells!) than ours. It could not be had for the flick of a switch but provision of light had to thought about and toiled over. What you never have you never miss, but 1000 years ago, the return of daylight as the northern hemisphere turned toward spring must have been a truly keen pleasure of life.

Sources used in this article.

Cooking and dining in mediaeval England by Peter Frears prospect books, 2008

Food in England by Dorothy Hartley published by Little, Brown.

The senses in late Medieval England by C.M. Wooglar Yale University press.

Constitutio Domus Regis: The establishment of the Royal Household edited and translated by the late Charles Johnson. Oxford Medieval Texts.

The Museum of London website. A page of ordinary ceramic lamps in the museum's collection

.......................................................................................................................................................

Elizabeth Chadwick is a multi award-winning bestselling author of historical fiction and a member of the Royal Historical Society. Her latest novel Templar Silks tells the story of what William Marshal did during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

Last month I spent a few days in a state of near bliss, drifting around Lake Como in boats and swimming in the clean waters, overlooked by the foothills of the alps, pretty ochre, pink and yellow villages, lovely gardens and the villas of billionaires. This lake, which Shelley wrote, "exceeds anything I ever beheld in beauty, with the exception of the Arbutus Islands in Killarney,” is also the place where the Second World War ended for Italians. As new right wing politicians come to power in Italy it feels urgent to consider this period. Whereas the last months of Hitler are a familiar story, the downfall of Mussolini is not so well known.

In the evenings I read Iris Origo’s War in Val d’Orcia, a reminder that Italy wasn’t always so peaceful. She kept this diary while she and her husband opened their house in Tuscany to refugees and partisans fighting the fascists. It’s a fascinating book because, like the characters in historical novels - like all of us - she doesn’t know what’s going to happen next. Here are a few extracts from Origo’s remarkable wartime diary:

Iris Origo

July 26th 1943. The long-expected news has come at last: Mussolini (who had been in power since 1922) has fallen. The news was given by radio last night but we did not hear it until this morning. Mussolini has resigned, The King has appointed Marshal Badoglio in his place and has himself taken over the command of the Army.

On July 28th, she writes that in Rome:” A great crowd of working people from all the outlying quarters surged into the city and made its way to the Quirinale (the Presidential Palace), …they broke into all the offices and club rooms of the Fascio, destroyed every bust and statue of Mussolini, set fire to (the offices of newspapers that had supported Mussolini)….Similar demonstrations took place in Milan, Turin, Bologna and Florence.”

As the news spread down a train that an armistice had been signed, ”flags and carpets were hanging from the windows; at Florence the great bell of the Bargello had been rung; people were weeping for joy and embracing each other. But after half an hour the rumour was contradicted and the excited and disappointed crowd had to be dispersed by the police.”

By December 23rd:” Of Mussolini no one now speaks and it is said that he himself, on being asked to make a speech on the wireless on October 28th, said: What can a dead man say to a nation of corpses?”

Mussolini was imprisoned at an hotel in Italy's Gran Sasso massif, high in the Apennines . On 12 September 1943 he was daringly rescued by SS troopers, who landed a dozen gliders on the mountain and overwhelmed Mussolini's captors. The SS leader, Otto Skorzeny, greeted Mussolini with "Duce, the Führer has sent me to set you free.” Mussolini replied, "I knew that my friend would not forsake me!"

Mussolini leaving the Hotel

Mussolini was then made leader of the Italian Social Republic usually known as the Republic of Salò, a German puppet state which lasted for nineteen months. Although he declared that Rome was its capital, the tiny state was in fact based in Salo, a small town on Lake Garda where Mussolini and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had their headquarters. They had nominal sovereignty in Northern and Central Italy but depended on German troops to maintain control. Only Germany and Japan gave them diplomatic recognition and there was no constitution or organised economy - Salo’s finances depended entirely on funding from Berlin.

On 25 April 1945 Mussolini's fascist republic collapsed. In Italy this day is known as Liberation Day. A general partisan uprising, together with the efforts of Allied forces, ousted the Germans from Italy.

Clara Petacchi, known as Claretta.

Mussolini had left both his wife, Rachele, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, behind in Milan. But Petacci could not live without her Duce and she joined him in Como. She was 33 and Mussolini was 63. As the allies got closer, she and Mussolini went into hiding in nearby Gardone Riviera at the Villa Fiordaliso (now a very expensive Relais & Chateaux hotel). Mussolini, La Petacci and other fleeing fascists were heading for the Swiss border at the northern end of Lake Como. Mussolini was wearing sunglasses and had disguised himself as a German corporal. In the village of Dongo Mussolini’s convoy ran into a roadblock manned by partisans, one of whom recognised Mussolini’s profile from the thousands of propaganda posters that had been plastered on walls all over Italy for the last twenty years.

On 28 April, two days before Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, the partisans shot Mussolini and Petacci in Giulino di Mezzegra, a tiny village in the mountains above Lake Como. Their corpses were driven to Milan and dumped in Piazzale Loreto. A huge angry crowd gathered to defile their corpses, which were strung upside down from the metal girders of a petrol station, beaten, shot at and hit with hammers.

This black cross marks the spot where Mussolini and Petacci were killed and in Dongo you can visit the End of WWII Museum. Mussolini was buried in an unmarked grave then, in 1946, his body was dug up and stolen by fascist supporters. Four months later it was recovered and hidden for the next eleven years. In 1957 his remains were allowed to be interred in the Mussolini family crypt in Predappio. His tomb has become a place of pilgrimage and every April the anniversary of his death is marked by neo-fascist rallies.

Since the war this official version of Mussolini's death has been questioned in Italy, rather like Kennedy’s assassination. Amongst the many conspiracy theories is one about Churchill: that he was desperate to get hold of letters from him that Mussolini was carrying in which Churchill is said to have made all sorts of embarrassing offers to keep Mussolini out of the war.

I was living in Italy in 1975 when Pasolini, the Marxist film director, poet and intellectual, made a film called Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom. Set in Fascist Italy in 1944, Pasolini’s film is based on the Marquis de Sade’s novel, 120 Days Of Sodom. I’ve never had the stomach to watch this film, which is still controversial and is banned in several countries (not that there is any point in banning a film in the age of the internet). Pasolini explores political corruption: four wealthy fascist libertines kidnap eighteen teenage boys and girls and subject them to four months of extreme violence, sadism, sexual and mental torture before finally killing them. Before the film was released Pasolini himself was murdered and I vividly remember the sensation this caused.

It has often been said that Berlusconi (one of several billionaires who now own magnificent villas on Lake Como) has modeled himself on Mussolini - with considerable success. It is impossible to spend much time in Italy without becoming aware that Mussolini is still an important figure. His granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini, is a member of the Italian Senate. She was elected for a party called The People of Freedom, launched by Berlusconi in 2007, which later became part of Forza Italia (this can be translated as ‘Let's Go, Italy’). Matteo Salvini, who is now Italy’s Interior Minister, was previously in coalition with Berlusconi. Salvini’s political allies include Steve Bannon, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen in France and Victor Orban in Hungary. A few weeks ago Salvini forced the Aquarius, an NGO ship carrying 600 migrants,to divert from Italy to Spain. The President of Italy’s Union of Jewish Communities, Noemi di Segni, said this was reminiscent of Mussolini’s fascist race laws. Salvini has called for a new census of Roma and for all non-Italian Roma to be expelled from the country.

The Kings Arms in Askrigg was the real name of the pub we used as The Drovers Arms in All Creatures Great and Small. I returned there seven years ago when I was writing a feature for the Mail on Sunday. I ordered a glass of red wine and sat alone, deep in reflection. In the days when it was the Drover's Arms, late 1930s to 1940s, it certainly wouldn't have served red wine by the glass!

I remember my very first bout of filming for the television series All Creatures Great and Small, it was autumn, late seventies. The three actors playing the leading roles of the vets in a Yorkshire practice had already been on location for a week or two. It was about then that I arrived in Richmond to complete the quartet of players. Although we didn't know it at the time, we were to continue working together very happily for many years. To celebrate our newly-bonded foursome, Robert Hardy, the wonderful late Robert Hardy, threw a dinner party at his hotel, the Punchbowl Inn, Swaledale. The hunting season had just opened and the grouse were delivered to the table almost fresh from the fields. I was a little horrified, partially because, during those years, I was a vegetarian.
Up until that time, I had been an impoverished actress living from job to job, praying a role would fall into my lap so that I could cover the next electricity or telephone bill. Robert Hardy's dinner party was lavish, certainly by my standards. I can see him now - (to his close friends, he was Tim, not Robert) - at the head of the table relishing every second of the evening, ordering this and that with gusto and taking great care to make sure that the wines were the ideal companions to each course. He called for two bottles of 'claret' to accompany the main plate. I think I can honestly say I had never heard of 'claret', or if I had, I could not have said which or what wine, or range of wines, it described. I would not have dreamed of asking because I was too awestruck by the company and the splendour of the occasion and because I thought it would be expected of me to know such details.

I have since learned that the notion of 'claret' is a very English one and refers to red Bordeaux wines. However, the origin of the word comes from the Latin, clarus, clear, and then pale. It was used originally to describe light wines, usually a pale red in colour or even yellow.

La Cité du Vin, Bordeaux's new museum dedicated to celebrating its most famous produce.

Bordeaux has come on leaps and bounds since those Middle Ages days of wine-making where the wine almost resembled a rosé. Bordeaux is now world famous for its full-bodied reds. It was the British who first used the word claret sometime in the 1700s to describe those dark red wines.

I recently paid a visit to the city of Bordeaux. While there, Michel, my husband, and I decided to take the time to see its newly inaugurated museum, La Cité du Vin, where you can happily spend four or five hours learning the history of wine, its place in the world, its place in literature and the arts and round off your outing with a wine-tasting on the eight floor with stunning views over the city.

The building itself is well worth pausing over. As you can see from the photograph above, it sits between city and river and it is not conventional architecture. Its facade, made up of silk-screen printed glass panels and perforated, lacquered aluminium panels, gleams in the sunlight like a polished ducat, or a magical golden boot. In fact the architects, Anouk Legendre and Nicolas Desmazières, have attempted to create the movement of both wine splashing into a glass and the movement of the Garonne river which flows at the foot (the toe) of the building. They also claim they were inspired by and have attempted to capture the trunk of a gnarled wine plant.

Gnarled trunk of grape plant

Whether you see that or not, the edifice really is a dazzling sight and, like both wine and water, its appearance changes with the light, the time of day, the weather.

Sunset Red

Its interior is equally innovative and pleasing. It is exceptionally spacious. There is none of that cramped feeling frequently common in more conventional museums. In fact, at some moments this is more a Son et Lumière show. There is a wealth of material to learn and discover - plenty of areas where the information is highlighted with short animated sequences, which make it ideal for children. There are cinemas, one in-the-round which is visually so exciting.There are other areas where you can sit at a table as though in conversation with such luminaries as Voltaire and listen to him or many other historical greats give their opinions on the role of wine in their/our lives.

This area resembles giant wine bottles sliced in half.

Elsewhere, you can learn a little of what wine has meant to the Church, to Jewish communities, to the Holy Land, Egypt, to Europe's elite, and plenty more.

The Holy Land stop along the Cité un Vin journey took me back to a very special experience of my own when I was in the West Bank with a group of Israelis from Tel Aviv. We were planting olive saplings paid for and transported to the fields by my Israeli companions. We were there to replant several Palestinian groves that had been destroyed by the IDF and neighbouring Settlers. Someone at my side, a stranger, said to me as we stared into the sunny distance on that late February Saturday: "This land, as far as the eye can see, has been producing olive oil and wine for at least three thousand years."
Palestine was supplying wine to Egypt circa 3100 BC. In ancient times, Palestinian wines were consumed by everyone as a social experience and for alimentation and medicinal purposes.
The story of wine, I was thinking to myself, is possibly almost as old as that of olive oil.

When your Cité du Vin visit has been completed take the lift to the top floor where you will be offered a glass of wine. The choice is as wide as the world. I chose a crisp white Rioja from Spain. Michel took a sparkling white wine from Hungary. If you stroll with your glass out onto the terrace and take in the views of Bordeaux, here is what you will see:

or can you view this very short film ...
https://france3-regions.blog.francetvinfo.fr/cote-chateaux/2016/01/12/la-cite-du-vin-comme-vous-ne-lavez-jamais-vue.html

After our afternoon of discovery we took the exceedingly efficient new tramline from the Cité du Vin back to the heart of the fine old city of Bordeaux itself and ate dinner at a leafy restaurant just off the Place du Théâtre where we ordered a very fine bottle of Saint-Emilion, a highly regarded Bordeaux wine.
By the way, you can if you fancy take a half-day trip to the medieval village of Saint-Emilion, classified as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. There are several of the wine-producing villages in the region offering such tours.

Alain Juppé.

A word about Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux, who was Prime Minister of France from 1995 to 1997 during Jacques Chirac's presidential tenure. Bordeaux is a city reinventing itself for the 21st-century. Its poorer quarters are being refurbished; its waterside zones bursting into life. Juppé has transformed the city into a vibrant metropolis where inhabitants and tourists can easily interact. I was very impressed. In these days where, particularly in Britain, so many cuts are being made in the name of austerity, it was genuinely uplifting to walk about and discover a city that is working for its community, offering new opportunities and celebrating its very special history, both agricultural and urban.

I asked Michel if he knew what 'claret' was. Yes, of course, a general name used by the Brits to describe a long-redundant style of wine from this region. Well, there we are. I would have loved to have spent an afternoon at the Cité du Vin with Robert Hardy. He would have thoroughly enjoyed the experience, as did we.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

My mother Verily Anderson typing her next book
in 1956, watched by my father Donald.

I have always loved typewriters. Both my widowed mother and my older sister were full time writers, so I was brought up with the clickety clack of typewriters resonating through the house. It was the first sound I heard every morning when I woke. My mother used an old, black Remington with worn down keys. When I heard the bell ping frequently as she neared the end of a line, I knew her work was going well. My sister had a modern Olivetti, with a lighter sound than the solid Remington. She touch-typed, whereas my mother, despite publishing dozens of books, wrote with only four fingers in a jazzy, syncopated rhythm.

My grandfather, the Rev. Rosslyn Bruce,
with the typewriter he named ' Jane' c 1910.

As our mother’s Remington was the tool which fed us five children, we were not allowed to touch it. But I soon learned how to remove and replace the two sheets of ‘bank’ paper and carbon paper so that she didn’t notice. I had to work out the worn vowel keys and muzzle the bell, so that my mother, busy elsewhere in the house, did not hear. I still have the manuscript of my first book ‘The Year of Mr Goodbery’, written when I was 10, with its uneven lines and many typos. The rejection letter from Brockhampton Press was polite and encouraging.
I bought my first, very own typewriter in Portobello Road market when I was 12. It was a huge, office ‘Imperial’, that cost me 15 shillings (75p). I could barely lift it and the stall holder gave me an old shopping trolley to drag it home. Oh! the hours I toiled over the pangram, ‘Quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, trying to use all my fingers.

My 1915 Corona

My next typewriter was given to me when I was 15 by my mother’s publisher, Rupert Hart-Davis. It was made in 1915; a tiny, fold-up Corona ‘Personal Writing Machine’. The ribbon cartridges were no longer available, so I got inky fingers rewinding my mother’s old ribbons onto the tiny cartridge. When the ribbon became too faint to read, I used an old piece of carbon paper. There was no key for number 1 or 0, so I had to use a capital I or O; and for and exclamation mark , a full stop, backspace and then an apostrophe were required. Even though it had only three rows of letters, I loved it, and wrote my first published poem on it - about a kestrel.

My aim was to look like this efficient typist.

Typewriters took a long time to develop. More than 50 inventors worked independently over the years, each one adding details that eventually resulted in the successful machine. In 1714, Henry Mill obtained a British patent for ‘an artificial machine for impressing or transcribing of letters, one after another, as in writing, whereby all writing whatsoever may be engrossed in paper or parchment so neat and exact as not to be distinguished from print’. He recommended its use for public records as they could not be counterfeited. Several Italians in the 19th century invented versions including the

tacitipo – ‘quiet printing’ – and the Cembalo scrivano da scrivere a tasti - ‘scribe harpsichord for writing with keys'.

'Daily News' by Dona Nelson, oil on canvas, 1983.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, USA.

The first commercial typewriter was sold in 1873, with a QWERTY keyboard, on which the word ‘typewriter’ could be written using only the top row of keys. The typewriter soon became an indispensable tool for professional and legal writing and the QWERTY layout became standard, even though there is now no risk of the keys becoming entangled if the typing is too fast. By about 1910, all "manual" or "mechanical" typewriters were made with each key attached to a typebar with the corresponding letter moulded, in reverse, into its striking head.
The word typewriter originally meant a man who used a ‘typing machine’. Then by 1900 it was noticed that women could type too, and the status and pay soon dropped. However, being a typist became a respectable job for a nice girl before she wed. In 2005, Barbara Blackburn of Oregon beat the world record by typing 212 words per minute, with an average of 150 wpm over 50 minutes. However, she used a Dvorak keyboard, which has vowels on one side and consonants on the other, with the most frequently used letters in the middle.

London Transport poster featuring a lonely typewriter to encourage
Londoners to 'Go Out into the Country' by Graham Sutherland, 1938.

Mark Twain was the first writer to present a typed manuscript to his publisher, with ‘Life on the Mississippi’ in 1883. Ernest Hemingway wrote his books standing up in front of a Royal typewriter placed on a tall bookshelf, while J.R.R. Tolkien had no room in his attic-room for a desk so balanced his typewriter on his knees in bed. In 1951, Jack Kerouac typed his book ‘On the Road’ in two weeks, on a roll of paper 120 feet long so he didn’t have to keep changing the paper. Fellow author Truman Capote said, ‘That's not writing, it's typing.’ Two years later, Ray Bradbury wrote ‘Fahrenheit 451’ on a typewriter he had rented from the local library.

Typewriting technology changed very little in 100 years, and the last typewriter made in Britain was a 2012 ‘Brother’. Typewriters are still used in remote parts of Africa, the South Pacific and South America where there is no electricity, and in US prisons where computers are banned. In Romania under President Ceausescu, people with criminal convictions or those deemed to be ‘a danger to public order or to the security of the state’ were refused police approval to own a typewriter and it was forbidden to borrow, lend or repair typewriters without authorization.

Typewriter erasers were often attached to the machine with string.
Unlike pencil rubbers, they rubbed a hole in the page.

Many authors still use typewriters, believing they improve their work. The American Harlan Ellison claimed, ‘Art is not supposed to be easier!’ while Will Self has said, ‘the computer user does their thinking on the screen, and the non-computer user is compelled, because he or she has to retype a whole text, to do a lot more thinking in the head.’ Cormac McCarthy writes all his novels on an Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter. In 2009, he auctioned his 1963 Olivetti for charity at Christie’s for US$254,500 (£192,000); he then replaced it with an identical one for US$20 (£15).
The television series ‘Murder She Wrote’ opens with fictional sleuth Jessica Fletcher touch-typing a manuscript with a 1940s Royal KMM. Every well-used typewriter develops an individual ‘fingerprint’ or signature and typewritten evidence of crime first appeared in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘A Case of Identity’ in 1891.
Musical compositions using typewriters include Leroy Anderson’s 1950 The Typewriter for orchestra and typewriter; Dolly Parton's song ‘ Nine to Five’; and ABBA’s 1986 Musical ‘ Chess’. The satirical Boston Typewriter Orchestra has half-a-dozen percussionists playing typewriters under the slogan, ‘The revolution will be typewritten’.

French typists prefer to work naked, even on birthday cards.

My last typewriter, in 1985, was an unwieldly electric Smith Corona, with a Daisy wheel instead of type bars. It remembered the last 10 letters so that I could go back and correct typos with a roll of sticky tape which plucked the offending letters off the page. I thought that very clever. Within two years I had acquired an Apple computer, which suited my unreliable typing even better. There is a revival of interest in typewriters now among steam-punks and street poets. But they aren’t getting my 1915 Corona!

French cats are good at writing novels.

Last week I travelled back in time. My husband and I spent a night on Burgh Island, a tiny island just off the South Devon coast which contains a hotel, a pub and nothing else. It is an island only at high tide, since you can walk across the sand to it when the tide is low, which adds to its attractions. And the Burgh Island Hotel is a very special place indeed - a place where you really do feel you have slipped back in time to the 1930’s.

Burgh Island Hotel

Its history is fascinating. It began in the 1890s when the music hall star George H Chirgwin built a prefabricated wooden house on the island, which was used by guests for weekend parties.

In 1927 the filmmaker Archibald Nettlefold bought the island and built a more substantial hotel in the Art Deco style which was all the rage at the time. By the 1930s it had become one of the most popular hotels of its day, and improvements and further additions were made during the 1930s. These included the Captain’s Cabin, which was modelled on the captain’s cabin of HMS Ganges, the last British wooden flagship in the Royal Navy.

Inside the captain's cabin

The cabin from outside

In World War II the hotel was used as a recovery centre for wounded RAF personnel, probably because of Burgh Island’s convenient seaside location. At one point the hotel was actually hit by a bomb, thankfully with no loss of life, but the top two floors were damaged.

Although the bomb damage was subsequently repaired, the hotel became largely neglected after the war, and during the sixties many of its original features were brutally ripped out when it was converted into self-catering apartment accommodation.

Fortunately by the end of the 20^thcentury when the island was sold again, the new owners realised what had been lost and decided to restore the hotel to its former glory. They painstakingly searched for and installed replacement Art Deco furniture and fittings, so that by the first decade of this century the hotel had regained its reputation and was now recognised as a perfect example of one of the great hotels of the era. Inside the hotel everything is in the Art Deco style, so that you truly feel you have slipped back in time. Today the Burgh Island Hotel is a Grade II listed building, and one of the prime examples of Art Deco style in Europe.

Ceiling of the cocktail lounge

The reception desk

In its heyday it became the favourite haunt of many famous people, including Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson, Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Amy Johnson, Winston Churchill and Nancy Cunard, but one of its most famous visitors was Agatha Christie, who stayed on the island many times and set two of her books there. This is the Beach House where she stayed.

The Beach House

“Evil Under the Sun” was written and set on the island (in 2001 a TV version, starring David Suchet as Poirot, was actually filmed there) and so was “And Then There were None” (though in the latter book Christie “moved” the island further out to sea so it really could be cut off!)

Today most of the rooms in the hotel are named after its former illustrious guests.

The key to our room!

Today’s guests are not required to come dressed in 30s costume, though 30s-style bathing costumes are available for hire should anyone feel brave enough to venture into the Mermaid Pool immediately below the hotel (filled every day from the sea, so very cold!) in full view of all the other guests. However, at the weekly Dinner Dances the advice given is that “it is impossible to be overdressed”, which is an invitation not to be taken lightly! Most people really took it to heart.

We could only afford to stay there for one night – but that night was truly one to remember.

www.lynnebenton,com

Our June guest is Sara Sheridan:

Author photo by Bethany Grace

Sara Sheridan writes the popular 1950s Mirabelle Bevan Murder Mysteries as well as historical novels set 1820-1845. She occasionally also writes commercial non-fiction including last year, a companion book to ITV’s Victoria. Fascinated by female history, in 2016 she founded REEKperfume to challenge beauty industry norms and memorialize forgotten women. She is currently writing a Female Atlas of Scotland.
www.sarasheridan.com

www.reekperfume.comwww.reekperfume.com

Welcome Sara to the History Girls!

Where are the Women?

At the end of last year I visited Val McDermid’s brilliant light installation ‘treasure hunt’ around Edinburgh as part of the city’s legendary Hogmanay festival. Val highlighted the city’s literary history though not the one generally promoted by the tourist industry – she chose to focus on inspirational stories of writing success – female successes. Edinburgh has a long tradition of writers and Sir Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson head a band of worthies constantly touted to the public but the city’s women enjoyed writing success just as much as the men. Stevenson’s second cousin, DE Stevenson, sold 7 million copies of her light novels at the turn of the century. Scott declared the city’s Susan Ferrier a better novelist than he was (a comment which incensed Jane Austen.)

Susan Ferrier

Then of course, there is Muriel Spark whose centenary is being celebrated this year and whose decades-long, glittering literary career up until this point, has scarcely been included in the city’s honour role of writers. There are more – Catherine Sinclair, a phenomenally successful, Victorian, children’s writer, for example – consigned to history.

D.E. Stevenson

This isn’t a new story and certainly isn’t a phenomenon confined to the writing industry. Across the UK only 15% of statues represent women and most of these are in memory of Queen Victoria. This stretches into the archive with female material often lost because it simply wasn’t thought important enough to preserve either by the principal’s family or by archivists and historians. From early in my writing career I was fascinated by the whispers I found of women among the papers and every historical novel I’ve written is in some measure an attempt to commemorate our female history whether I do that using real characters or fictional ones.

Over the last couple of years I decided to extend my commemoration activities and I co-founded a perfume company, REEK. We sell two scents – one dedicated to the memory of the Jacobite women and one to the witches - and we have more planned for next year. We also run a feminist blog, Bitches Unite, highlighting female history, talking to activists and campaigners and providing a platform to challenge beauty industry norms. The big question is why are so many campaigns fronted by young, size 6-8 white women? This is a question for our times and is something we don’t do at REEK. We feature a wide variety of women - our oldest model is in her 80s - and every picture we take remains unretouched. Our bitches, we always say, are beautiful just as they are. As a result in its first year REEK has been featured in Vogue, Harpers Bazaar, Elle and Grazia – many of the larger fashion magazines. But the core question we’re asking largely remains unanswered. I figure as we continue to knock at that door, at least we’re making everyone smell good and reminding them of phenomenal women from the past. We shouldn’t forget our sheroes. We shouldn’t be forgotten ourselves.

Meantime in my writing life, I continue to find female stories that fascinate me. Working in the archive is like mining – sometimes you turn up a diamond. The women of WW2 provide many sparkling moments. When I started to write the Mirabelle Bevan Mysteries I knew about Florence Szabo and some of the more famous resistance fighters. As time has gone on I’ve discovered more – not only the everyday heroism of the women left behind but also the shocking fact that our gender is seldom commemorated on war memorials. This seems particularly awful to me. While men killed even in training feature, female nurses and doctors are not included even though they gave their lives in the services of our country, often at or near the front. I like to think that the stories I write don’t scream this kind of sentiment but say ‘come down here – here’s a great story – oh, look, a post-modern feminist dilemma. Well, we’re here now.’ Still, the function of story is to promote imaginative thought, to entertain, to question and like many historical novelists I’m fascinated by where we come from. Especially if we can use it as a signpost to change where we are going.

To win a copy of Sara Sheridan's latest novel (see yesterday's guest post), just answer the following question in the Comments section below. Then copy your answer to me at maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so that I can get in touch with you if you win.

"Who are your favourite WW2I heroines?"

Closing date: 7th July

We are sorry that our competitions are open to UK Followers only

At the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester (till 16th September, then 2nd October to 9th December at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge) "Virginia Woolf: an exhibition inspired by her writings.

Full disclosure: I am not a big fan of Virginia Woolf. The books of hers I like most are Orlando and Flush, which are not considered the best. Oh and everyone likes Mrs Dalloway, which really is rather fine. But I don't think I will ever read The Waves again.

Still, I liked the idea of artworks inspired by her writings and all by women. My mother-in-law had two pen and ink drawings by Laura Knight (who was almost her contemporary) in her bedroom, so I was interested to see more of her work, which is among the better art in this very uneven exhibition. It is Knight's The Dark Pool that is featured on the poster, showing a young women in a red dress blown about by the wind, standing on a boulder looking down at a rock pool, which might or might not be on a beach in Cornwall.

Dame Laura Knight

As you might expect, the star is Virginia's older sister Vanessa Bell and her portrait of Virginia was was my favourite piece (though could you say that was "inspired by her writings"?). I am hampered by copyright here and can't show you what I saw.

Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell as children

The story of the two sisters has been told many times. Both their parents, Leslie Stephen and Julia Chadwick, had children from their first marriages when, as bereaved spouses they married and had four more. Vanessa and Virginia were the oldest, followed by two brothers. For the first thirteen years of Virginia's life, until her mother died, she spent every summer in St. Ives, in Talland House, with a view of the Godrevy Lighthouse. She wrote in 1939 in "A Sketch of the Past," of this childhood memory of lying in bed in the nursery:

Hearing the waves breaking, one, two, one, two, and sending a splash of water over the beach, and then breaking one, two, one, two, behind a yellow blind.

It's quoted at the beginning of a very good essay by the curator of the exhibition, Laura Smith, in Pallant House's magazine for May to October.

The holidays ceased with Julia's death and it was ten years later, after their father died, before Virginia and Vanessa returned to St. Ives. But you can see how much those long Cornish summers had on both their lives' work. Virginia described it as "the best beginning conceivable."

I wanted to see that lighthouse, waves on the beach and all but the closest you get (apart from the Laura Knight) is Frances Hodgkins'Wings over Water (1930) and Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's Rocks, St. Mary's Scilly Isles (1953). Perhaps I am just too literal.

If Virginia Woolf gave women one undying concept it is that of "A Room of One's Own," symbolising financial independence and intellectual freedom. As Laura Clark says, "the room becomes a metaphor for autonomy and choice within patriarchal limits, a sort of reclamation of the room's function to contain. Landscape, however, becomes a metaphor for freedom and power beyond existing culture."

Hence, landscape seen through the window of a room combines both these important concepts. The only flaw with this beguiling theory is that many, many male painters use the same image.

Some of the women artists in this exhibition are associated with dominant males, unlikely Woolf herself.

Dora Carrington

Carrington is for ever associated with her passion for Lytton Strachey. In spite of her affairs with both men and women and her marriage to Ralph Partridge, Strachey was the love of her life and she shot herself two months after his death, feeling there was no further point to her life.

Carrington and Strachey at Ham Spray

She was at least known by Woolf and other members of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf writing of her in her diary: "She is odd from her mixture of impulse & self consciousness. I wonder sometimes what she’s at: so eager to please, conciliatory, restless, & active.... [B]ut she is such a bustling eager creature, so red & solid, & at the same time inquisitive, that one can’t help liking her."

It's hard exactly to see how Carrington was "inspired" by Virginia Woolf's writings.

Another woman artist overshadowed by a man is Gwen John, in her case, her much-admired younger brother Augustus.

Gwen John Self-portrait (1902)

It wasn't Augustus' fault: he acknowledged her greater talent and said that in time she would be valued more highly than him. But in their lifetimes her work was seen as "quiet" (I can hear women, particularly women writers, sighing).

So, if Virginia Woolf were alive today and visited this exhibition, would she recognise any of her ideas? She would certainly know some of the names though other later artists shown include Ithell Colquoun, Gluck and Romaine Brooks. But she was a very stringent critic of others' work and a perfectionist about her own. And there is a lot of very inferior stuff in this exhibition.

As I was writing this post, an email came from the Management Committee of the Society of Authors, embargoed till the next day, which is now past, so I can tell you all about it. You have probably all read it in the press by now anyway.

It was the results of the latest ALCS survey on authors' earnings. It was not a well-designed questionnaire, as I can attest, having filled it in myself, but the results show that such earnings have dropped from £11K in 2013, at the time of the last survey, to £10,500 per annum. In 2005 it was £12,500. To tease this out, average earnings are down by 42% on 2005 and 15% on 2013. It is well below the minimum wage.

Only 13.7% of writers can now make a living from this and no other work. And women get 75% less than men who write.

So how many of us can afford that room of our own in which to write freely without financial worry about how to pay for it? What would Virginia say? It's all very well being inspired by her writing but where does that get us if we don't have the freedom to act upon our ideas?

(All photos Wikimedia Commons)

PS: If your views of Virginia Woolf are not TOO respectful, may I recommend my friend Sue Limb's sublimely funny radio 4 series Gloomsbury?

It's a very cold winter in Canberra. I ate lemonade fruit tonight and pretended it wasn't cold, but outside right now, it's zero degrees. It's easy to think about ghosts in the dark season and about being haunted.

Some winters are haunted in a good way. A collection of my short stories was released in June and the new edition of my time travel novel will be out in just two weeks. This means I’m haunted by how my writing has changed over four decades. That’s not what I’m going to talk about here. This is because there’s an even more interesting change that has happened to my writing and it’s one that’s a lot more interesting to people in this corner of the internet: how I use history in my fiction has changed.

In my heart of hearts I am an historian. I will always be one.

When I was a child, I didn’t bring history together with fiction the way I do now. They were two equally important parts of my life, but quite distinct. I built a wall between them in fat, and kept building whenever I noticed one from the vantagepoint of the other. This began to change when I was an undergraduate, because I became an ethnohistorian and historiographer. This means my most important sources for my history werefiction. I used fiction to interpret the period and place a story was written. In fact, for my undergraduate thesis, I used the Old French chanson de geste to get some insight into how people described history in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. My history back then was challenging and theoretical.

My fiction back then was either straight literary (the story I won a prize for was about how an actor acted) or pure science fictional. Examples of both of these were included in my new collection and they made me wonder “Why wasn’t I writing historical short stories?”

Sherwood Smith, in her introduction to Mountains of the Mind, gave me the answer. My fiction is generally very tight character-based narrative. And it’s much harder for a cultural historian to stay in the head of someone not from their vicinity. The very nature of my research until a few years ago kept me at arm’s length. I knew that I couldn’t think like someone from twelfth century France, so I didn’t write much fiction using the Middle Ages even though I was not only a medieval historian, but one to whom other writers came for help. My specialisation was a two-edged sword.

I mocked myself about it. One of my short stories “Horrible Historians” is me laughing at my incapacity to break past the historian’s responsibility to not get too close to their subject.

Langue[dot]doc 1305was a sea-change for me*. I didn’t just create time travellers going back to my period: I finally sorted out how to get inside someone’s mind without breaking faith with my historian self. I also explored how other writers worked with history, and began to understand so many things about the wall I'd built for myself.

If I had a wall between my history and my fiction and if I was dismantling that wall, this novel was a volcano. It could erupt at any time and destroy a lot of things I loved. It didn’t. There were moments when I was researching and I had to write it in a particular way to deal with what we know about the past and what we cannot know about the past and the fact that a good novel makes the past real to readers regardless of how much we actually know and how little we can know. But those moments didn’t result in any volcanic action.

Ever since it first came out, I’ve been waiting for fellow-historians to say “This is all so very wrong” or for fellow fiction writers to say, “Shame you can’t write a good novel.” Neither has happened. Either they like it (and tell me so) or they’re politely quiet. I haven’t had to breathe in fumes of outrage. There may be a volcano, but if there is, it hasn’t even breathed gas.

This led, as night leads to day, to a change in my research. I wanted to know why we don’t get enough historical novels that have this placid effect on historians. What it is in our culture that helps us (as writers) choose what we put in our fiction? What do we put in our fiction without even thinking about it, by default? That’s what I’m working on now, and it’s illuminating. I’m writing more and more history into my fiction as I learn which choices come from where and what they actually do.

What this means is that I’m still a cultural historian, still an historiographer and still an ethno-historian. I’m partly a specialist in the Middle Ages and partly a specialist in narrative.

It turns out that my fiction and history were always linked. I just didn’t know what the links looked like and now they’ve morphed into something quite visible. Now that I can see them, I’m using a lot more history in my fiction. I finally understand what I’m doing, you see.

What am I doing this month? History in France. It’s time for a research trip so that I can write a new novel that uses history in fiction. I want to push these ideas a bit further.

*It’ll be out again on 17 July. Let me give you the new cover, to rejoice in its re-release.

Missing children make headlines: Madeleine McCann, Ben Needham, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Mary Boyle. They also line our bookshelves: The Girl in the Red Coat; What She Knew; Local Girl, Missing; Then She Was Gone.

While we often think of the preoccupation with lost children as being a modern phenomenon, it is in fact an age-old fear, one that is reflected in the lost and abandoned children in fairy tales and myths – Persephone, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, The Snow Queen.

Here I look at some of the infamous cases of missing children throughout history, focussing on cases that remain unsolved or shrouded in mystery.

1.The Lost Children of Hamelin

1592 painting of Pied Piper copied from the glass window of Marktkirche in Hamelin

Many of us remember the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. Few are aware that the legend came from a true story, one that is one recorded on the walls of a 16th century building in Hamelin now called The House of the Piper: ‘In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul, the 26th of June, 130 children born in Hamelin were seduced by a piper, dressed in all kinds of colours, and lost at the calvary near the koppen.’

The earliest mention of the Pied Piper, in the 1300s, was on a stained-glass window in the Church of Hamelin, which showed a man dressed in colourful clothing leading away a line of children. The earliest written record is from the town chronicles in an entry from 1384 which states: ‘It is 100 years since our children left.’

Although much research has been conducted over the years, there is no agreed explanation as to what happened to the children. Some believe they died of natural causes, were drowned in the nearby river, or were killed in a landslide, with the Pied Piper representing the figure of death. Others say the children may have died of the Black Plague (though the Black Plague didn’t reach Germany until later) or that the story represents mass emigration. Maria J. Pérez Cuervo explores the various theories in her excellent blog piece here.

What is clear is that there were no rats in the original story. They were first added into the story in a 16th century version, and are absent from earlier accounts.

2.The Princes in the Tower

Edward V of England and Richard of Shrewsbury were 12 and 9 when their uncle, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, had them locked up in the Tower of London in 1483. This was supposedly in preparation for Edward's forthcoming coronation as king. However, they were taken into the ‘inner apartments of the Tower’ and then were seen less and less frequently. In July 1483 an attempt to rescue them failed. Then they disappeared altogether.

Richard took the throne himself, becoming Richard III, and many believed he had the princes killed in order to secure his hold on the throne. Certainly that was the complexion Shakespeare put on the story. But there are many other potential murderers including Henry Stafford, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, or Henry VII. Some have suggested that the princes survived. In 1487, Lambert Simnel initially claimed to be Richard, Duke of York. From 1491 until his capture in 1497, Perkin Warbeck claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, having supposedly escaped to Flanders.

In 1674, workmen at the Tower dug up a wooden box containing two small human skeletons. King Charles II had the bones buried in Westminster Abbey, where they remain, untested. In 1789, workmen carrying out repairs in St. George's Chapel, Windsor, rediscovered and accidentally broke into the vault of Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth Woodville (the parents of the lost princes) discovering a small adjoining vault. This vault was found to contain the coffins of two unidentified children. However, no inspection or examination was carried out and the tomb was resealed. The fate of the princes remains unknown.

3. Virginia Dare and the Lost Colony

Virginia Dare was born in 1587, the first English child born in the New World. Her family was part of a group of 120 Englishmen and women who settled on Roanoke Island, off the coast of what is now Dare County, North Carolina. A few days after Virginia was born, her grandfather, Governor John White, left for England to obtain more provisions. When he finally returned three years later, Virginia and the entire colony had vanished. Only one clue remained: the word ‘CROATAN’ had been carved on one of the settlement's posts, leading many to believe that the Croatan tribe had kidnapped or killed the settlers.

Governor White and his men continued to search but never found any trace of Virginia or the other settlers. Roanoke Island became known as the Lost Colony.

4. The West Ham Vanishings

During the 1880s and 1890s a series of children and young adults disappeared from the East End of London. The first to vanish was Mary Seward, 14. The second was Eliza Carter, 12, who was reported to have been terrified of a man, or of returning home. The blue dress she had been wearing was recovered from West Ham Park, all of the buttons sliced off, but she was never seen again. The third to disappear was her friend, Clara Sutton. The fourth was Amelia Jeffs, 15, who lived on the same street as Mary Seward. However, Amelia, or “Millie” was found, violated and strangled.

In a 2016 book, Rivals of the Ripper, author Dr Jan Bondeson put forward the theory that a builder named Joseph Roberts, a key suspect in the murder of Amelia Jeffs, was responsible for both the West Ham vanishings and another series of horrible crimes against young girls in Walthamstow in the 1890s.

Others have suggested that, given reports of several strange individuals, including women, in the West Ham vanishings, the abductors may have been human traffickers. No one, however, was ever convicted, and most of the girls were never found. The story was partly the inspiration for my novel, The Story Keeper.

5. The Strange Case of Bobby Dunbar

Four year old Bobby Dunbar went missing on a family fishing trip to Swayze Lake, Louisiana, in 1910. After an eight-month nationwide search, investigators believed that they had found the child in Mississippi, in the hands of man called William Cantwell Walters. Dunbar's parents immediately claimed the boy as their missing son. However, both Walters and a woman named Julia Anderson insisted that the boy was in fact Anderson's son. Julia Anderson could not afford a lawyer and had three children out of wedlock, making her an unworthy witness in the eyes of the court, and they eventually found for the Dunbars. Percy and Lessie Dunbar retained custody of the child, who lived out the remainder of his life as Bobby Dunbar.

However, in 2004, DNA profiling established that the boy found with Walters and ‘returned’ to the Dunbars as Bobby had not been a blood relative of the Dunbar family. The fate of the actual Bobby Dunbar remains unknown.

6. Walter Collins: ‘The Changeling’

Nine-year-old Walter Collins was abducted from his home in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles, in 1928. His disappearance received nationwide attention and the LAPD came under increasing public pressure to solve the case.

Five months after the disappearance, a boy claiming to be Walter was found in DeKalb, Illinois and the police organised a public reunion. However, at the reunion, Christine stated that the boy was not her son. Despite the fact that dental records proved the boy was not Walter, the police had Christine Collins committed to a psychiatric hospital for her refusal to say that the child was her son. Only after the boy admitted he was Arthur Hutchins Jr., a runaway from Illinois, did the police release Christine. She went on to win a lawsuit against Captain Jones of LAPD, but he refused to pay up.

Walter Collins, left
Arthur Hutchins Jr, right

Walter was later determined to have been murdered by Gordon Stewart Northcott in what was known as the Wineville Chicken Coop Murders. However, Northcott repeatedly changed his account, and seemed not to know what Walter had been wearing, or the colour of his eyes, leading Christine to believe that her son was still alive. He was never found.

The story formed the basis of the 2008 film Changeling.

7. The Sodder Children of 1945

On Christmas Eve, 1945, a fire destroyed the Sodder home in West Virginia. George Sodder, his wife Jennie, and four of their children escaped. However, the bodies of five other children – Maurice, 14; Martha 12; Louis, 9; Jennie, 8; and Betty, 5 – were never found. No remains were located in the ashes the morning after the fire.

Throughout their lives, the Sodders believed that the five children had survived. They disputed the fire department's finding that the blaze was electrical. They believed that they had been the victims of arson, leading to theories that the children had been taken by the Sicilian Mafia, perhaps in retaliation for George's criticism of Mussolini and the Fascist government of his native Italy. There were various alleged sightings of the children, including a woman who claimed to have seen the missing children peering from a passing car while the fire was still raging, and another woman who said she had seen the children a month after the fire ‘accompanied by two women and two men, all of Italian extraction’.

The Sodder family converted the site of the razed house into a memorial garden to their lost children. Until the late 1980s a billboard remained at the site showing pictures of the five dark-eyed children and offering a reward for information. The Sodder’s one surviving daughter, along with their grandchildren, have continued to publicize the case and to search for answers. See Karen Abbott’s fascinating piece in the Smithsonian for more.

8. The Beaumont Children: Australia’s Lost Family

At 10am on January 26, 1966, Nancy Beaumont kissed her three children - Jane, 9, Arnna, 7, and Grant, 4 – before they boarded the bus for a short trip to Glenelg beach near Adelaide. She never saw them again.

Witnesses confirmed the children had made it to the beach and reported seeing them with a ‘tall, blonde, thin-faced’ man in his mid-30s. The last known sighting of the children was at 3pm, when they were seen by a postman they knew, walking up the main road in the general direction of their home. They were holding hands and smiling. They were alone.

The search for the children attracted wide media attention, with various suspects, hoaxes, and theories emerging over the years, and still making headlines over 50 years on.

Neither the children nor any of the items they were carrying have ever been found. For many years, their parents, Jim and Nancy Beaumont, remained at their Somerton Park home, hoping that the children would return. However, they later divorced and are now living separately, away from the public gaze. They still believe that their children may be alive.

9. Megumi Yokata: Kidnapped by North Korea

In November 1977, 13-year-old Megumi Yokota went missing while walking home from her school in Niigata on the Sea of Japan coast. Twenty years later, her family were told she had been kidnapped by North Korean agents. In 2002, North Korea confirmed that it had operated an abduction program, stealing people from Japan and forcing them to teach Japanese language and culture to Pyongyang agents.

Five of the kidnapped were released. However, North Korea claimed that another seven abductees had died of illness or in accidents, and that four others had never entered the country. They said that Megumi had committed suicide in 1994, and been cremated.

However, according to Japanese officials, DNA testing on the cremated remains that were sent to the Yokota family showed that they did not belong to Megumi. Further, her death certificate appears to have been falsified.

To this day, her family, and those of the other abductees, are fighting for answers.

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, will be published on 26 July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot stalking in my chamber…

I’ve always loved Thomas Wyatt’s poetry, so I was delighted a couple of years ago to come across Nicola Shulman’s wonderful account of his life and poems, ‘Graven with Diamonds: The Many Lives of Thomas Wyatt, Courtier, Poet, Assassin, Spy’ (Short Books, 2011). I meant to review it then, but was distracted by other things. Having just read it for the second time with as much thrilled admiration as before, I feel impelled to tell you all about it. You have to read this book!

What makes it so different, besides being a detailed and knowledgeable biography, is Shulman’s fascinating interrogation of Wyatt’s lyrics. It is not a literary investigation, not an analysis of howhe wrote. Rather,

This is a book about the uses of Wyatt’s love poetry; why he wrote. … At Henry’s [Henry VIII’s] court, Sir Thomas Wyatt and his poems were the hub and centre … and if we run the story of Wyatt’s life and times behind his lyrics, they – these apparently slight, unaddressed, undated, unadorned songs – will show us that they had more uses than we might imagine. Not all of their uses are evident to us now. Some of them would have been hidden even to Wyatt, at the outset. When Wyatt began to write poems he could not have guessed into what strange service they would be pressed by the changing times. To see their changing purpose is the purpose of this book.

Wyatt was a courtier, but what was a courtier? Shulman recreates for us the Tudor court of the 1520s and 30s with its formalities, its hierarchies, its dependence on chivalric games and lavish spectacles to ‘fill the new and potentially dangerous longueurs of peacetime’, its love of pastime (‘Pastime and good company/I love and shall until I die’, Henry VIII wrote) and above all, its youth. Aged only 21, Wyatt was one of fifteen esquires who challenged Henry – himself still in his early thirties – at the elaborate Christmas Joust at Greenwich in 1525. After the outdoor martial entertainments, the company would proceed indoors to be entertained with ‘diversions and amusements’ on the fashionable theme of courtly love. Lyric poetry was an integral part of this.

The primary social purpose of courtly love lyrics [was] that they and all the activity they generated were a way of dealing with sexual frustrations at court. In emulation of Francis I’s practices, attractive women were more and more visible at Henry’s court, and yet no more sexually available to the many young men in attendance than they had been before. Women were aloof, and men continually supplicated for favours that must not, under the rules of the system, ever come. The lyric operated in the gap between hope and expectation.

Wyatt’s poems circulated in what amounted to a private Facebook group ‘intended for a closed, incestuous coterie consisting of the most precocious and sophisticated men and women of the court’, and Shulman vividly recreates the context outside of which these poems lose much of their point.

Help me to seek, for I lost it there,

And if that ye have found it, ye that be here,

And seek to convey it secretly,

Handle it soft and treat it tenderly

Or else it will plain [complain] and then appair [be damaged].

This riddling rondeau about something Wyatt has lost, which of course in the last verse turns out to be his heart, seems yawnworthy enough – but, Shulman asks, what if what’s happening here is an actual, physical game?

What if ‘mine heart’ is also an actual object, a heart-shaped envelope made of cloth with a balloon, or squeaking thing inside? Now the poem comes to life. Under that construction, the otherwise mystifying lines ‘Handle it soft and treat it tenderly/Or else it will plain and then appair’, make sudden sense: if you are rough with it, it will pop or squeal, and go flat.

Now we can imagine groups of giggling young people dashing about trying to smuggle an inflated heart from one room to another: a lost world in which a poem beginning ‘Comfort thyself, my woeful heart’ and includes lines such as, ‘Alas I find thee faint and weak,’ may conjure a vision of Wyatt making everyone laugh as he holds up a bladdered heart and makes it squeak. As Shulman says,

It casts new light on a tiny Holbein drawing where a young couple in elegant dress are shown with a cup and a large heart.

It wasn’t all sheer fun. Gossip and jealousy and spite must also have run rife through the court. Courtly love was an elaborate pretence; all the same, some young people probably really were in love – and in danger of losing their reputations.

Take heed betime lest ye be spied,

Your loving eyes you cannot hide,

At last the truth will sure be tried,

Therefore take heed!

For some there be of crafty kind

Though ye show no part of your mind,

Surely their eyes ye cannot blind,

Therefore take heed!

A poem like this could have been an uncomfortable thing to encounter, passed around and recited, as malicious smiles and sideways glances picked out the blushing subjects. Wyatt’s carefulness to name no names, the apparent anonymity and deliberate ambiguity of his verse, was as much a protection for himself as it was for others. He left it possible for himself always to protest innocence.

For what I sung or spake

Men did my songs mistake.

There was a fine line to be trodden between amusing people, and making enemies – a line which, once Anne Boleyn was queen, became a matter of life and death.

Shulman argues convincingly that Thomas Wyatt had, once, been in love with Anne Boleyn. In a sonnet written long after Anne’s disgrace and death, Wyatt declares himself to be in love again, this time with a blonde woman, someone very different from ‘Brunet that set my wealth [my well-being] in such a roar.’

‘Brunet’ is Anne Boleyn. There can be very little doubt about this, because Wyatt originally wrote,

Her that did set our country in a roar.

Then he thought better of it and amended the line in his own handwriting. In place of the too-explicit reference he put one word, ‘Brunet’ – just enough to invoke Anne, but only to those people at court who knew both that Wyatt was the author of this poem and that he had once pursued Anne Boleyn.

Unpicking the ambiguities of Wyatt’s verse to reveal the secret life of the court, Shulman shows how the elegant game of courtly love, played by young courtiers to unwritten rules which everyone understood, was ripped into coloured shreds by Thomas Cromwell. Flirting with the queen and her ladies had been de rigeur, la politesse, the correct behaviour for a courtier who wished to shine. (And it was later to be revived by Anne’s daughter Elizabeth, for her own political purposes, once she became queen.)

Cromwell … knew perfectly well how the courtly bargain worked in the case of a queen: amorous protestations were paid in, and favours paid out in grants, offices and promotions, not sex.

Choosing, deliberately, to interpret all those courtly flirtations literally and legalistically, Cromwell brought Anne and her coterie to the block – and Wyatt to the Tower, though he escaped deeper involvement because Cromwell rather liked him, and there were enough other victims. And yet Wyatt wasn’t silenced. Shulman shows again and again how, for those who knew how to read his ever-ambiguous lyrics, Wyatt speaks out – candidly, boldly, sometimes in anguish – about the tragic and dangerous events in which he found himself embroiled. To all fans of Thomas Wyatt, as well as to all lovers of poetry and history, I recommend this brilliant and fascinating book.

Picture credits

Courtly couple, Hans Holbein the Younger, Kunstmuseum, Basle, wikimedia commons

Sir Thomas Wyatt, Hans Holbein the Younger, Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

Anne Boleyn, artist unknown, National Portrait Gallery London, wikimedia commons

Thomas Cromwell, 1st Earl of Essex, Hans Holbein the Younger, Frick Collection, public domain

My whole life, I have known this phrase:

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows!"

It was one of those sayings that every family accumulates and uses, sometimes without any idea why. I had never heard the radio dramas that my parents were quoting from, but then my niece, who is a source of many links to historical back alleys, put me on to an article in USA Today titled "The web's best kept secret? Free classic radio dramas" and I realised The Shadow could become more than just a catch phrase for me.

The Shadow started life in Detective Story Magazine* which ran for 1,057 issues between 1915 and 1949. Then it moved on to the airwaves in 1930 and stayed there until 1954. Archive.org has a fabulous selection of episodes, complete with atmospheric crackling. Organ music* punctuates the stories with melodramatic gusto, and the ads ... you really want to hear the ads! If you weren't sure before listening to these dramas that "The weed of crime bears bitter fruit", by the end you certainly will be.

Nov. 1930

Promotional photograph for the CBS Radio series The Detective Story Hour, the program that introduced The Shadow to radio audiences. The character was initially played by James La Curto.

The always understated Orson Welles,

voice of The Shadow from Sept. 1937 to Oct. 1938

I am not researching a novel set in the first half of the twentieth century, neither am I planning on writing any crime fiction any time soon. But I do have some long flights coming up this summer, and will be packing The Shadow downloads in my carry-on. Bwah-ha-ha-ha ...

P.S. Of course The Shadow was not the only radio drama from the time. More delights can be found on Archive.org and Relic Radio. Enjoy!

* The opening music is in fact an excerpt from Saint-Saens'Le Rouet d'Omphale.

** Some Detective Story Magazine trivia - Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle both contributed to the magazine, and the philosopher Wittgenstein was part of the readership.

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Walking Mountain.

I’m at the Scattered Authors retreat this week, in lovely Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, a History Girl’s paradise. On Monday night I took part in a very enjoyable bookish version of Desert Island Discs, where castaways had to choose three books – a ‘classic’, a contemporary book and a ‘wild card’. It struck me, when it came time to think about my monthly post, that my choices all said a great deal about my love of history, though when I chose the books it was with no conscious awareness of that. So here they are for you, with some historical musings, and with thanks to Mary Hoffman (fellow panellist) for the idea!

1. Classic Children’s Book – Ballet Shoes, Noel Streatfeild, 1936.

I love Ballet Shoesfor its mix of grit and romance, for its three very different heroines, for the nuanced adult characters and the 1930s London setting. I first read it as a child in the 1970s, and knew immediately, when I read about the Fossils’ having to ‘save the penny and walk’, that I was in ‘the olden days’. At that age I wouldn’t have known exactly when in the olden days, because I don’t think I would have had the nous to check the date of first publication, but it didn’t matter. It was a world of nursery teas, omnibuses and genteel poverty. A world where your frock needed to match your knickers. Later I knew that this was the 1930s, and understood how shortly that inter-war period was to come to an end.

Ballet Shoes, of course, is not a historical novel – Noel Streatfeild was writing about her contemporary world, which was forty years in the past when I first read it, and eighty years ago now. My second choice was very different:

2. Contemporary Book – A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson, 2014

This is one of the best novels I have ever read, and is broadly historical – broad in that sense that its story encompasses about a century. It is, I suppose, a kind of family saga, except that suggests something much more conventional. A God in Ruins is structurally unconventional, moving backwards and forwards in time, and there is a conceit at its heart which I would not dream of spoiling for you which asks questions about the very nature of history and existence. Once again, as always, I loved the small material details, but unlike Noel Streatfeild, Kate Atkinson is looking back, particularly to the years around the Second World War.

Which leads neatly to my third choice:

3. Wild Card – When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, Judith Kerr, 197X

This is a very different kind of novel. It is historical – Judith Kerr was writing in the seventies about the thirties, but it is also based firmly on her own personal history. As in Ballet Shoes, we are in difficult circumstances, but here too the children are largely protected by heroic adults, in this case their parents. Once again, material things matter and help to bring the world to life – Anna having the right kind of pinafore for her French school, buying a pencil, travelling to Switzerland by train.

I thought I had chosen these books randomly. And, yes, on a different day I might have chosen three others. Only now do I see the links between them: they all write about a similar period, in very different ways. Between them I think they contain everything I love as a reader of fiction set in the past, and everything I strive for as a writer of historical fiction.

So – what would your Desert Island books be, and what might they say about you as a History Girl?

It's been three days since the 4th of July and it's only a few weeks till POTUS arrives in the UK, so I felt it was appropriate to put a USA - themed post up today. First things first and I'm writing it in BOLD type because it's the main thing I want to say: I love America. I've loved America since I was a very small child, going with my aunt to the main post office in Jerusalem to pick up parcels her sisters had sent from New York. These were full of treasures and ever since, I've thought of America as a cross between a cornucopia and a paradise. This love continued as I grew up, fuelled by Hollywood, which was a dominant influence on me in my childhood and which furnished my imagination in ways I can't even begin to describe. I love the landscapes and cityscapes (as shown in thousands of movies) I love the music, particularly Country and Western, and rock 'n roll but more than anything else, musicals, which have been the soundtrack of my life. I became enchanted with the literature, from my first reading of Little Women. It was my favourite book in 1952 and it still is in many ways. Since then, there have been passions for F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe, and more modern US writers than you can shake a stick at: Anne Tyler, Philip Roth, Elizabeth Strout, Nora Ephron....the shining names go on and on. The USA is also a vibrant democracy, and has an admirable press. I won't even begin to write about the Golden Age of the Box Set. American television is now the home of some of the very best drama ever. Readers will no doubt be able to add much else.

So it was quite appropriate that on a recent visit to Bath, the first place I wanted to see was the American Museum. This is the only museum outside the USA to be dedicated to the decorative arts. It overlooks the Limply Stoke Valley and above you can see the terrace of the café which shows the magnificent view.

Helen Craig and I were very lucky on the day we visited because, (see above) the oldest known patchwork quilt made in England was still on display. It's going to be put away soon to preserve it, and won't be seen again till 2028 so I was thrilled to see it. My photo is most inadequate but you can read about it and see a better image if you follow the link on the website.

My main reason for wanting to visit the Museum, I have to confess, is my passion for patchwork. My book, Apricots at Midnight: stories from the quilt (1977) was about a woman who had a patchwork coverlet on her spare bed and told stories inspired by different patches that she'd used to make it. I'm fascinated by this art: domestic, practical and capable of such beauty and of being so different when different people make it. Patchwork is often [sewn communally, with a group of women sitting together, and that's one of the reasons I like it so much.

One of the things that struck me as we looked at the many quilts (brilliantly displayed)

was the enormous variety of patterns, materials, and imaginations of the people who made them. In the quilt shown above the photo of the room, the pattern is very reminiscent of Matisse's paper cut-outs. There were Matisse - like patterns in quite a few of the quilts.

Above is a detail from a quilt made from silk ties. There are quilts from the Thirties, instantly identifiable as being of their time. Kaffe Fassett has a quilt here, made up of images of hatboxes, in vibrant, light colours.

The effect of the whole collection is overwhelming and I do recommend a visit if patchwork is your thing.

There is much more here than the patchworks, however. Furniture, Native American Art, silver, crockery and cutlery, rooms set up as they would have been during certain historical periods, and many, many beautiful works of naive art. Below is a portrait of a nineteenth century girl called Emma Thompson, and it's one of the few portraits signed by the gorgeously-named Sturtevant J. Hamblen. The Hamblens were sign painters. I love this portrait.

There is one room set up as if in a Shaker house, complete with chairs hanging up on the walls to save space. My favourite objects were the ones shown below: a sewing box, and a truly lovely bonnet. The Shaker style has been influential on modern furnishings and I find it most beautiful: simple and elegant and using natural materials.

So that's the American Museum....a terrific place to go to if you're in Bath. It has, appropriately enough, (see upcoming Presidential visit) not forgotten MONSTERS and FOOLS. Below are two photos. The top one depicts many different monsters, and is full of wonders. Below that is the World, depicted as a Fool's Head. Some of the Latin words on the Map have been translated and read:

The number of fools is infinite. That's about right, but I'm more interested in beauty and the best of humanity and there's still plenty of that both in the USA and in this Museum.

Review of 'BLACK DOG FOLKLORE' by Mark Norman

I have long been captivated by the legends and folklore surrounding the spectral creature, the ‘black dog’, ever since some years ago in Nigeria when I was saved from being hacked to death with machetes by the appearance of a large black dog who protected me. I think that dog was real, at least he felt wonderfully warm and solid, though his sudden appearance at that terrifying moment certainly seemed miraculous.

But my fascination with the black dog legends goes back even before that when, as a small child, I huddled under the bedclothes, listening to the 'Hound of the Baskervilles' on a tiny radio, when I was supposed to be asleep. Since my new medieval thriller, 'A Gathering of Ghosts', is set on Dartmoor, how could I write about that wild landscape without mentioning the huge black whisht hounds with glowing eyes that hunt the moors, terrorising anyone foolish enough to find themselves on the lonely tracks after dark.

'Illustration from 'The Hound of the Baskervilles'

in The Strand Magazine, August 1901

So, in the light of this, I was delighted recently to discover a brilliant book called ‘BLACK DOG FOLKLORE’ by Mark Norman, who is leading folklore expert and researcher. This book is not merely a collection of legends. It is a scholarly, but immensely readable investigation into the origins of these tales though out history, how they are linked and how they have evolved to influence the way modern sightings are reported. The book also explores the symbolism of the black dog from ancient times and across many cultures.

Mark Norman has divided his book up into the different types of Black Dog in legend, delving into the possible explanations behind the particular black dog encounters. This includes the ghosts of black dogs which curiously in England often seem to be associated with the Civil War; dogs which are significant to certain families, appearing in the coats of arms or which have haunted the family through different generations; the protective black dogs which appear at times of danger to help lone humans; the terrifying shucks, padfoots and barguests with glowing eyes, which in legend are sometimes shape-shifting creatures. The author suggests the name shuck probably stems from the Anglo-Saxon Sceocca meaning ‘devil.’

'The Fiendish Black Dog

Artist: Vasilios Markousis, 2015

Then there are the legends of dogs that guard treasure or haunt certain roads or bridges. In many cultures around the world a dog appears as a guardian of the underworld, an ancient mythology which finds its way into tales such as Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale 'The Tinder Box', where the treasure rooms beneath a tree are guarded by three dogs, the first with eyes as big as teacups, the next with eyes as big as waterwheels and the third as big as round towers.

One of the earliest records of the spectral dogs in England comes from a late version of the Anglo Saxon Chronicle written after the Norman Conquest in 1154, which describes a sighting of what seems to be the ‘wild hunt’ in which the witnesses reported seeing huge huntsmen riding black horses or black he-goats accompanied by hounds that were ‘black, big-eyed and loathsome.’ By the twentieth century, people are reporting seeing these spectral dogs with ‘eyes as big as saucers’ or ‘dinner plates’.

Artist: Spettro84, 2008

One of the most compelling chapters is the one about ‘Church Grims’ and death. The author points out that in many cultures dogs are linked with death omens, not least because they seem to have an uncanny ability to sense when a loved member of the family is dying and will start to howl. In Islam, for example, they are said to be able to see Azrael, the Angel of Death, approaching.

1577, An account of the Black Dog

that appeared in Bungay, Suffolk

This book covers much more than simply the legends of black dogs. The author examines many aspects of folk customs involving dogs, including the practise of burying dogs in the foundations of buildings to protect them, which is found as far back as the 13th century BCE in Greece, and the custom of burying a dog in a newly opened graveyard. I have found reports of this continuing right up until the 19th century in England, the explanation being given by then was that the spirit of the first creature buried there would be compelled to protect the graveyard, so not wanting to condemn any person in the village to that fate, a dog was put in the ground first.

The author of this book also debunks several black dog myths. When I first moved to Devon, I longed to live the village called Black Dog, wrongly assuming that was haunted by one of these supernatural hounds, but it appears that place names should be treated with caution, because though there are legends of the black dog in the surrounding area, old maps record the village as Black Boy. Nothing to do with the hound.

Like many people, I was familiar with the legend of the foul monstrous dog that was supposed to haunt the Newgate prison, but it seems there were never any actual sightings of this dog and the whole fiction was based on a pamphlet of 1638 with that title which was actually denouncing the prison conditions. A poem, written in 1596, by Luke Hutton, who had been a prisoner in the infamous prison used the phrase as a symbol for the despair felt by the prisoners. Interesting then that Winston Churchill should adopt the term ‘black dog’ to refer to his own bouts of dark depression.

From the pamphlet 'The Discovery of a London Monster

Called the black dog of Newgate. 1638

Finally, if you want to discover if there has ever been a record of a ghostly black dog where you are staying, the book ends with a comprehensive listing of the black dog sightings in Britain, Ireland and the Channel Islands. It’s always worth checking before you go for that romantic midnight stroll!

'Black Dog Folklore' by Mark Norman is published by Troy Books, 2016.

Karen Maitland's new medieval thriller, ‘A Gathering of Ghosts’ is published by Headline, September 2018.

by Caroline Lawrence

I have been obsessed with the ancient Graeco-Roman world for over forty years. I studied Greek and Latin at Berkeley and later at Cambridge. I have been writing books set in the Classical world for nearly twenty years. But the more I learn about the ancients, the less I feel I understand them.

An exhibition called Roman Dead currently on at the Museum of London Docklands presents ancient skeletons of the buried and ashes of the cremated. There are tombstones, urns and personal objects buried with the dead. It may sound gruesome, but it’s utterly fascinating. The contents of graves from Roman London show us how much we still have to learn about the ancient Romans.

Here are just five of many displays that intrigue me.

1. Why such a big sarcophagus?

This is the star piece of the show. Found a year ago (in June 2017) at a site on Harper Road in Southwark, this massive box is made of limestone imported from Lincolnshire and weighs two and a half tons. Why put a body inside such a heavy stone box? To stop her spirit from haunting the living? To keep robbers from taking her jewellery? Or to stop grave robbers from doing something even worse? As dozens of surviving curse tablets show, many Romans believed in magic. In a recent blog post, Roman magic expert Adam Parker notes that witches used parts of dead bodies for their spells. So maybe this was a way of keeping the witches or sorcerers out of her grave, i.e. of protecting the dead from the living rather than vice versa. Is that what’s going on here? Is this massive sarcophagus designed to protect the body from misuse or robbery? If so, it didn’t work. The top had been pushed aside and part of her arm is missing. Creepily, the partial skeleton of a baby was found with her skeleton. Was it originally buried with the woman? Or did it fall into the sarcophagus when it was robbed?

2. Why is her skull on her pelvis?

From a grave at Hooper Street near Tower Hamlets, we have the complete skeleton of a woman aged between 36-45. She was buried in a wooden coffin on a bed of chalk powder. Some time after she was buried, when she had started to decompose, someone dug her up again, removed the top of her skull and it placed above her pelvis. Then the coffin was reburied and rocks were piled on top. Among the rocks was a copper-alloy key. Was the key part of the reburial? Or accidentally dropped? Why was she buried on a bed of chalk? But most importantly, why was the top part of her skull placed over her pelvis?! Maybe the newly positioned skull, rocks and key (along with a ceremony we can’t guess at) were designed to stop the woman’s spirit from haunting those still above earth. Romans thought the womb was the seat of uncanny power.

3. Why is the lucky amulet under a jug?

Also found at the Hooper Street excavations was a young woman in a coffin with jet jewellery. Whitby Jet is not a precious stone but rather ancient fossilised wood from the Jurassic era. When you rub it against wool it produces a static charge that can move hair and other small particles without touching theme. Romans didn’t know about static and believed jet to be a magical substance that could keep away evil. Romans also believed that you could do harm to someone just by looking at them a certain way, hence amulets with staring faces like that of Medusa to ‘reflect back the evil eye’. So a jet medallion of Medusa’s face will be doubly protective. So far so good. But why was this jet medallion hidden under a small ceramic flagon? What is going on here? In addition, her other items of jet jewellery were not on her but near her. Is this magic?

4. Why a lion?

In 1876, Victorian workmen found the remains of a semi-circular tower in the Roman Wall at Bishopsgate, near where the Gherkin stands today. These bastions were built in the 4th century using material from earlier Roman structures. Among the rubble used to build the tower was a stone lion devouring a stag. The stone is imported limestone from the South Cotswolds (London has no local stone) and was carved in the round, so perhaps stood atop a mausoleum. Why a lion? The museum label says the lion stands for the power of death, but I’m not buying it. Why pay a fortune for an expensive carved sculpture made of imported stone just to state the obvious? Could the lion be a warning to people or spirits who might want to do harm to the grave? If the lion is on MY grave, then it’s MY lion. That would be worth paying for. This lion devouring his prey reminds me of the ivory leopard handle of another Roman girl’s folding knife. This is MY knife and therefore MY leopard. Watch out!

5. Why a pinecone?

From Great Dover Street, Southwark comes a pinecone made of imported French limestone (shown in the picture above along with the lion). Similar pieces have been found on military sites from the North of England. Ever since I first noticed pinecones for sale in Sicily, I have wondered what they signified in the Graeco-Roman world. Actual pine cones and kernels were found on the site of London’s Mithraeum and also at Londinium’s amphitheatre, as well as at a cremation burial. It is thought that pinecones were burned as incense, perhaps to attract good deities and/or repel evil spirits. At the Roman Dead exhibition, the label suggests they were associated with the god Attis, who represented rebirth and resurrection. Was the pinecone the pagan equivalent of the Christian cross?

All these mysterious objects remind us that although the Romans were like us in many ways, in others they were very different.

Roman Dead is on until the end of October 2018. I strongly urge you to see it.