Empress-less :( By L.J. Trafford

August 18, 2018, 4:01 pm

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The five Julian-Claudian emperors that ruled Rome from 27BC to 68AD clocked up eight empresses between them. 

The chart shows the distribution. It reveals an anomaly.
Rome’s second Emperor Tiberius ruled with no Empress at all. This is quite noteworthy given he ruled for 23 years. Caligula managed two whole empresses in a reign of only 5 years.  So why did Tiberius not marry whilst Emperor? 

He was relatively late in years when he succeeded his stepfather Augustus at the age of 56 years old. Still that was no impediment Claudius married his fourth wife (and second empress) Agrippina aged 59. There was nothing to stop him marrying a much younger woman and producing heirs. But then Tiberius already had heirs aplenty; a son and grandson from his first marriage. Also he'd adopted his nephew Germanicus as his son. Germanicus had three sons of his own. 

This seemed ample enough successors. Any more might well cause the sort of infighting, back-stabbings and poisonings the Julio-Claudian family became famous for.  

Perhaps it was a strong attempt to not muddy the dynastic waters any further. 

However, I rather think not. I rather think Tiberius’ lack of an Empress was a decision born of his traumatic romantic history. 


Wife Number One 

Tiberius' first wife was Vipsania. She was the daughter of Emperor Augustus’ right hand man Agrippa.  They were married when she was likely a teenager and Tiberius was in his early 20s.

Tiberius

Evidently it was a happy marriage.  They had one son, Drusus and Vipsania was pregnant again when in 12 BC her father Agrippa died. 

This was to have devastating consequences beyond a daughter's natural grief. For Tiberius' stepfather, the Emperor Augustus,

ordered the couple to divorce.  This seems like an unnecessary cruelty of the emperor towards Vipsania and Tiberius.  She’d just lost her father and then her husband is forced to divorce her even though she is pregnant with his child. I could here make a valid point about how marriage for centuries was a contract between families, how love had very little if anything to do with it. Naturally with Agrippa dead the marriage between the families is void.  Tiberius was needed elsewhere.  

That’s the standard in the elite rungs of Roman society where marriages were made and dissolved based on changing circumstances. 

But actually this everyday tale has a very bitter sting to it. Tiberius obeyed his stepfather and divorced Vipsania, but it was with much reluctance. 

Hankies at the ready folks, this is what Suetonius has to say:   

But even after the divorce he regretted his separation from Vipsania, and the only time that he chanced to see her, he followed her with such an intent and tearful gaze that care was taken that she should never again come before his eyes.  

And he continued to regret it. As Emperor he maintained a vendetta against Gaius Asinius Gallus who Vipsania had been hastily remarried to. “He had hated him for years” As Tacitus neatly puts it. 
So who was the woman Tiberius was forced to divorce the wife he deeply loved for? 
She was Augustus’ daughter, Julia. 


 
Wife Number Two 

Julia was 28 years old and already a mother of 5 children. This was to be her third marriage.  At age

Tiberius' Stepfather the Emperor Augustus

14 she’d been married to her cousin Marcellus. He had died of a fever after only two years.
Her second marriage had been to Agrippa. Which meant that not only was Tiberius marrying his step sister, he was also marrying his former mother in law. It had to feel weird. 
The two had been raised together in the same household as Tiberius’ mother Livia was married to Julia’s father Augustus. Julia’s upbringing had been strict.

(Augustus) In bringing up his daughter and his granddaughters he even had them taught spinning and weaving, and he forbade them to say or do anything except openly and such as might be recorded in the household diary. He was most strict in keeping them from meeting strangers. 

Suetonius

It was hardly surprising given these restrictions that Julia might develop a rebellious streak.

One day she came into his presence in a somewhat risque costume, and though he said nothing, he was offended. The next day she changed her style and embraced her father, who was delighted by the respectability which she was affecting. Augustus, who the day before had concealed his distress, was now unable to conceal his pleasure. "How much more suitable", he remarked, "for a daughter of Augustus is this costume!" Julia did not fail to stand up for herself. "Today", she said, "I dressed to be looked at by my father, yesterday to be looked at by my husband."  

Macrobius

This rebellion went beyond a slightly low cut dress

When people who knew about her shocking behaviour said they were surprised that she who distributed her favours so wildly gave birth to sons who were so like Agrippa, she said, "I never take on a passenger unless the ship is full."  

Macrobius

Tiberius was well aware of Julia’s wild streak for he had been on the receiving end of one of her passes.

He disapproved of Julia's character, having perceived that she had a passion for him even during the lifetime of her former husband, as was in fact the general opinion.   

Suetonius

Presumably Tiberius did not take her up on her offer.

There is a strong hint of misogyny in descriptions of Julia’s life but the Julia that appears in Macrobius’ account is fun and witty and well read. He tells us:  Her kindness and gentleness and utter freedom from vindictiveness had won her immense popularity, 
However for all these good qualities she was an ill matched wife for Tiberius. Where she was sociable and friendly and fun, he was sullen, taciturn and introspective.  Suetonius says of Tiberius: 

 He strode along with his neck stiff and bent forward,usually with a stern countenance and for the most part in silence, never or very rarely conversing with his companion  

As a teenager he suffered badly from acne and in later years developed a skin complaint that caused weeping ulcers on his face.
Hardly a good fit for the fun loving sparkly, attractive Julia.

They did try to make it work though. They had a child together but when that child died their relationship completely broke down and Tiberius moved out.

 Julia might have made some sort of pass at him in their youth but she was as unhappy as he was with this marriage.  She was most probably relieved when Tiberius went off to Germany on campaign, leaving her in Rome. 

She had her freedom and she enjoyed it a lot.  Too much, for the stories regarding her behaviour get more and more extreme:

She had been accessible to scores of paramours, that in nocturnal revels she had roamed about the city, that the very forum and the rostrum, from which her father had proposed a law against adultery had been chosen by the daughter for her debaucheries.  

Sold her favours and sought the right to every indulgence with even an unknown paramour. 

Seneca

The emperor’s daughter selling her body to passing men in the Forum was a huge scandal not least because, as Seneca mentions above, her father had introduced a series of morality laws.

One of these, the Lex Iulia de Adulteriis Coercendis,  proscribed banishment for those caught in adultery. It also stated that husband’s (under certain circumstances) could kill their unfaithful wife. On the milder side the husband was compelled to divorce an adulterous wife.  
Julia was treading a very dangerous path as her antics became known to everyone in the city, bar her doting father Augustus. Tiberius was undoubtedly in full knowledge of what his wife was indulging in and it placed him in a terrible predicament.

The law of his own father-in-law stated he should divorce his unfaithful wife but that wife was the emperor’s daughter. It also cut into all that Roman society felt about marriage, husband’s should be able to control their wives. What did it say about Tiberius as a Roman man that he could not? The innuendos and gossip he faced must have been unbearable. 

So unbearable that Tiberius bailed:

At the flood-tide of success, though in the prime of life and health, he suddenly decided to go into retirement and to withdraw as far as possible from the centre of the stage. 

Suetonius

He told Augustus his retirement to the island of Rhodes was because Julia’s sons were now of age and he was no longer needed. That was the official version.  
Unofficially everybody (bar her doting father) knew the real reason. 

“From disgust at his wife, whom he dared neither accuse nor put away, though he could no longer endure her.”  Suetonius

Four years after Tiberius ‘ flight from public life Augustus was finally made aware of what had been public knowledge for some years.  The Emperor was devastated and Julia, as the law he’d introduced  dictated, was banished.   

 After Julia was banished, he denied her the use of wine and every form of luxury, and would not allow any man, bond or free, to come near her without his permission,   

Suetonius

In Tiberius’ absence Augustus divorced his daughter from his stepson. Tiberius eventually returned to Rome eight years after his exile. In 14 AD he succeeded his stepfather as Emperor.  

Single Once More

Tiberius was a man who held grudges, note his dislike of Vipsania's second husband. He certainly held a grudge against Julia and all that she had put him through. In later years Augustus had lessened the conditions of Julia’s banishment. Once emperor Tiberius increased them.
He had not forgotten.  He had not forgiven. 
It is hardly surprising after the abject failure, personal humiliation and misery of his second marriage that Tiberius did not seek a third even when he was Emperor and the choice would have been his alone.  

But there is also something else at work here. We have a long list of Julia’s lovers but from the moment the couple separated there are no named mistresses or favourite slaves or any paramour at all named for Tiberius.
In a society high on Imperial gossip this is so unusual as to be positively noteworthy.  That the emperor was apparently celibate from his early 30s is quite staggering particularly when you remember he lived in a palace that catered to the emperor’s every sexual whim.  

Unsurprisingly there is quite a lot of speculation by historians over this. Speculation it will remain because they are all theories born of an absence of information. But I can quite believe that Tiberius, as several historians have supposed, was sexually timid, perhaps impotent (maybe caused by the oppressive stress of public life) perhaps even indifferent to sex after his humiliation by Julia. 
However  our tale takes another twist when Tiberius took a second retirement to an island, this time to the island of Capri. 

During these years some quite unbelievably shocking sex stories become attached to his name.  


 
The Capri Years  

Capri. Photo by Radomil

In 26 AD having ruled for 12 years and at the age of 67, Tiberius left Rome for the island of Capri. He was never to return to the city. 
The reasons why he departed Rome are much to numerous and complex to cover in this short piece. The gist of it was that he was thoroughly fed up with politics and ruling. 
He remained on Capri for 11 years up to his death in 37AD. The citizens of Rome therefore did not set eyes on their emperor for over a decade. Hidden away on a small island is it any wonder stories were told as to what Tiberius was up to. It had to be something sinister for him to abandon his grand position didn’t it? 
Tacitus mentions secret vices. Suetonius helpfully records exactly what the gossips were saying. It is about as extreme as emperor gossip gets.  You have been warned: 

On retiring to Capri he devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated 

before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions.  

Its bedrooms were furnished with the most salacious paintings and  sculptures, 

as well as with an erotic library, in case a performer should need an illustration of what was required. Then in Capri's woods and groves he arranged a number of nooks of venery where boys and girls got up as Pans and nymphs solicited outside bowers and grottoes: people openly called this "the old goat's garden," punning on the island's name.  

He acquired a reputation for still grosser depravities that one can hardly bear to

 tell or be told, let alone believe. For example, he trained little boys (whom he termed minnows) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles; and unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction

Suetonius

What are we to make of this? Had Tiberius gone senile in his old age? Had his old humiliation by Julia and his loss of Vipsania been repressed and then spilled over into this strange explosion of depravity?  There is a suggestion in other sources that Tiberius had always possessed secret vices but that he had repressed these until he was away from the public eye. 

This seems all a little too convenient. Surely Tiberius would have shown some indication of perversion prior to retiring to Capri ? Yet as previously discussed we have absolutely nothing on Tiberius. Not even any normal sexual relations recorded. 
I am rather reminded of the emperor Domitian whose love of solitude was inexplicable to the public facing Romans. A story circulated that during these quiet periods he was in fact stabbing flies to death with his pen . Because he had to be up to something sinister, didn’t he? 
I would suggest similar forces are at play here. To abandon Rome, the city he ruled and to hide himself away was so odd to the Roman mind that stories were invented to explain the inexplicable. Given that Tiberius spent 11 years on Capri that gave ample time for these tales to be embellished and then further embellished until, as Suetonius notes, they could barely be believed. 



The End 

Tiberius died on Capri in 37AD entirely unloved and unmourned.
The people of Rome, deserted by their emperor declared “To the Tiber (river) with Tiberius”
He was succeeded as Emperor by a man who became the embodiment of vice and depravity, Caligula. He’d spent some time with Tiberius on Capri and the gossips claimed it was the old emperor who first led the impressionable Caligula into his demented perversions.
Which is a sad epithet for an emperor who had dedicated his entire life to both public and military service. Who left the treasury bursting with coinage. Who took over this newly created role of ‘emperor’ from Augustus and kept it going when it might so easily collapsed into the civil wars that Augustus had ended. A legacy that endured for 400 years.

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Σηκωματα, mensa ponderaria, mesures à grains… by Carolyn Hughes

August 19, 2018, 5:00 pm

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Ann Swinfen

I would like to pay tribute to Ann Swinfen, who died on the 4th August. 

Ann was a good friend to me and to many. She was a wonderful, much-loved writer of historical fiction, including the Oxford Medieval Mysteries and the Christoval Alvarez series. Her many readers will be sad that there can be no more stories about Nicholas Elyot or Christoval. But Ann also wrote fascinating, informative blog posts, here on The History Girls, as well as on her own blog, and she was very generous in the advice and support she gave to fledgling writers. I will miss dreadfully knowing that I could always ask for Ann's help, and receive a wise and practical response.

The 20th of the month used to be Ann’s day on The History Girls blog, until the time came when she felt she had to concentrate on her books, and she put my name forward to take her place.

So this post is dedicated to Ann.

<<>>

For today’s post, I thought I would again write about something different from my usual histories of the Meon Valley. We spend some time every year – and have done for the past thirty or so years – in south-east France, in the department of Drôme, which, if you don’t know it, runs from roughly south of Grenoble to roughly north of Avignon. The magnificent river Rhône flows the department’s entire length, with abundant vineyards in the valleys and on the hill sides, growing alongside cereals and fruit, olives and lavender, and the dramatic Vercors mountains rise to the east. It is a wonderful region, yet it is not well known and so is, for the most part, quite tourist-free.

To the west of the Rhône lies the department of Ardèche, another magnificent region with some wonderfully remote communities and many ancient villages. One such is Chalencon, a mediaeval stone village, perched on the Vernoux plateau, overlooking the valley of the Eyrieux.

Chalencon By JMO [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], from Wikimedia Commons

Chalencon is a village of narrow and winding cobbled streets, old houses and shops, and towers. There are cars but it’s very possible to take a photo excluding much (if not all) of modern life, giving you a good sense of how it might have felt hundreds of years ago, though it was undoubtedly not quite so clean and picturesque back then!

Chalencon's streets Photos © Author

   

The village apparently has Celtic origins, with the Celts building some sort of community on the promontory here sometime between the 9th and 4th centuries BC. Later, the Romans built an oppidum (a fortified town) on this site. Chalencon became a barony in the 10th century AD, and its most famous baroness was Diane of Poitiers, the mistress of Henry II.

So why am I telling you about Chalencon? It is not just because it is ancient and beautiful, even though it is. It is because it has the most remarkable mesures à grains, a public amenity for measuring grain, which played an important part in the development of trade and commerce by standardising grain measurement and deterring fraud. Chalencon’s mesures probably date from the 15th century, but are wonderfully well preserved.

In order to write this post, I thought I’d have a look online for other examples of such public measuring devices, expecting to find innumerable images to share. But, in truth, I have not found very many. I daresay many physical examples can be found throughout France and elsewhere, but perhaps no-one has thought to photograph them, or to post their photos online! 

However, I will share something of what I have learned…

In ancient Greece there existed measuring tables called σηκωματα or sekomata. I have found references to a few such sekomata, but one found on Naxos in the 19th century will serve as an example. The date of this table is not given in the literature I have read, but it is referred to as “Hellenistic”, putting it somewhere between 323 and 31 BC.

Sekoma from Naxos, now in the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Image from Documenting, measuring and integrating sekomata: An example from Naxos by Carla Cioffi,in Dialogues d’histoire ancienne, Année 2014, Suppl.12, pp. 41-56.

The stone table has six basins of different sizes, presumably conforming to some  standard capacities. The size of the small ones might suggest that they were mostly used to measure liquids rather than grain, but I don’t know if this was in fact the case. These six basins have a hole in the bottom, which was presumably plugged when the commodity was being added and then opened to allow it, once measured, to flow out. A depression between two of the basins (between d and e) seems to have been some sort of overflow system, though I am not clear how it worked.

Naturally, this sekoma would have been mounted horizontally and raised high enough off the ground to enable the out flow and collection of the measured commodity.

In Latin, the same sort of public measuring table is a mensaponderaria, a term apparently coined by Italian archaeologists in the 19th century. There is a very good example at Pompeii, located in the forum.

This is made of limestone and has five main basins, each with an outflow hole in the bottom, just like the sekoma in Naxos. The table was apparently modified in c20 BC to add four new measuring holes at the corners, though, again, I am not at all clear how they might have worked. But this information does at least help us to date the table to somewhere in the 1st century BC or earlier.

Mensa ponderaria, with inscription on the front. Photo © Michael Binns. September 2016. Original mensa is in Naples Archaeological Museum.

The inscription across the front of this mensa records the action of the local magistrates in charge of standardising the measures in Pompeii in accordance with those at Rome:

“Aulus Clodius Flaccus, son of Aulus, and Numerius Arcaeus Arellianus Caledus, son of Numerius, duumvirs with judicial power, saw to the standardisation of the measures in accordance with a decree of the town councillors.”

Moving into the Middle Ages, I have found an image of a mesure à grains in Caylus, southern France, which might date from the 14th century, as the halle in which it is situated apparently dates from that time. I understand that there may have been more several grain measures in Caylus’s halle, of different sizes. This one is, sadly, in poor condition. 

Grain measure in the halle of Caylus, Tarn-et-Garonne, France

And so to the grain mesures of Chalencon, which are in an exceptional state of preservation. There are three measuring basins of differing sizes carved from two blocks of granite.

Chalencon’s 15th century mesures à grains Photo © Author

The sizes of the basins are (according to a delightfully illustrated sign):

• Le sestier = about 83 litres
• L’emine = about 41 litres
• La quarte = about 20 litres

It seems that the Chalencon archaeologists are not certain of the mesures' date but believe them to be 15th century.

Somewhat differently arranged from the earlier examples, the basins’ flow holes are located on the side of the granite blocks, but the principle remains of closing them off when the basins were being filled, then opening them (the chutes appear to have little doors) to let the grain escape.

The illustrated sign shows how it was done:

© Medièval-Lyon / dessins: T. Guyon / Commune de Chalencon

The inscription in the illustration suggests (I think) that the basins were used to measure out both oats (avoine) and rye (seigle), both of which would be paid to the barony as rent (redevances = fees) for the land held from the baron by his/her tenants.

If anyone can shed any further light on these fascinating public measuring amenities, I would love to hear it!

Rough Music & Twitter by Imogen Robertson

August 20, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Hudibras and the Skimmington (1721-26) - William Hogarth

How different are we to our ancestors? I’ve had that debate with fellow authors and audiences a number of times since I started writing historical fiction and I think the answer is a great deal and very little. 

The way in which a woman like me, born in England to English parents in 1973, understands the world is going to be very different to the way in which a woman born in 1473 understood the world which surrounded her. Most obviously, aside from the discoveries and innovations of the last 500 years, I had access to the same education as my brothers, I had the legal rights necessary to set up an independent household and make my own decisions about children and marriage. I also, like many of my generation was brought up on the atheist end of agnostic. Of course the world looks very different to me. 

But I think our emotional lives are not very different to those of our ancestors. We still love, struggle, fear and celebrate, experience pain and pleasure. Even if the changing culture might alter how we express and share those emotions, personally I believe human nature in all its diversity and complexity which underlies those expressions hasn't altered much since we started pressing our hands onto the cave’s wall and leaving our mark there. 

Cave of Pettakere, Bantimurung district (kecamatan), South Sulawesi, Indonesia. Hand stencils estimated between 35,000–40,000 BP and Shoreditch Graffiti 2018

I was forcefully reminded on these debates reading Edward Palmer Thompson’s article on Rough Music (Folklore, Vol. 103, No. 1, 1992) the other day. Rough Music, (also know as charivari or skimmington inter alia) is the name given to the tradition, common throughout Western Europe from the Early Modern period onwards of publicly mocking a violator of societal norms. It often involved a parade, street theatre, rhymes, sometimes the burning of an effigy, and was always accompanied by a crowd, normally mixed, making an unholy row by hoots and hollers and the banging of pots and kettles. In early modern times, it seems it was mostly used to humiliate couples where the man was known as ‘hen-pecked’, though in the nineteenth century it was often used to humiliate men known to beat their wives or children. Adulterers, those of loose morals, or widows and widowers thought to have remarried too quickly were often also victims, as were those suspected it seems (peering though the bowdlerised and purposefully vague accounts) of being gay. Unfair trade practices could also be a justification. 

Deatil of Hudibras and the Skimmington (1721-26) - William Hogarth

The noise and pantomime could go on night after night and though some victims were taken from their houses and dunked in ditches or ponds, the aim was humiliation more than violence. People seemed to regard it as their right to punish a wrong-doer in this way. It was seen as a valid expression of community feeling, a punishment, a warning, a way of policing and reenforcing standards and expectations. At times it seems to have become a way of bullying the price of a drink out of the newly married. It was common for centuries and in Folklore (Vol 91, No 1 1988), you can even find an example from 1940. The writer’s lodger had a habit of undressing without closing the curtains and the locals showed their disapproval by standing outside the house, shouting and screaming and banging saucepans and kettles. 

Thanks to changes in the law and shifts in societal norms, a woman born in Darlington in 1973 has no reason to fear, or need the help of, rough music. The law is on my side, by and large. But now we find ourselves in an age where there is another sphere where the law seems unwilling or unable to reach, not the domestic space but a virtual one. 

Jon Ronson wrote a superb book in 2015 So You’ve been Publicly Shamed, expressing his uneasiness with the twitter mobs who seem to get such pleasure from finding someone to condemn and making a lot of noise about it. It’s well worth a read, and also interesting to look at in our post Brexit post Trump world. Ronson seems most concerned by a sort of left-leaning mob eager to condemn racism, or the sins of people like Jonah Lehrer. In other words, they were condemning crimes I would also also condemn. He though was discomforted by the self-congratulatory glee of some of these pile ons, and I find them discomforting too. Now a reenergised right wing search out remoaners, libs, feminists and snowflakes and though the targets are different, the glee looks familiar. 

Then of course there are the hate filled threats of violence so many, especially women, experience on twitter. I can’t help noting all those cases of women being punished for not accepting their husband’s authority in the history, and also note that even if rough music rarely involved direct physical violence, it threatened it with its effigies and rituals of shunning. Think of the photoshopped images passed out online and you'll see the equivalence. Many of the twitter users who are most foul in their abuse hide their identities, many don’t see the need. Some of those participating in rough music went masked, most did not. It was a an exercise in community bonding as well as a way to punish. The participants joined in to show they were moral, right-thinking people and, I’m sure, gained confidence and a sense of identity from looking right and left and seeing their friends around them, just as, I’m sure, many on twitter piling onto some celebrity or private individual for saying the wrong thing, do the same. 

E. P. Thomson wrote his article in 1992, those far off days when something like twitter was unimaginable. I had to keep reminding myself of that as I read these last lines of his article as they seem to resonate so strongly in 2018. This is a man who thinks he is writing about something which no longer happens, but it seems to me new technology has given us the opportunity to fall back on old ways. 

“… rough music could also be an excuse for a drunken orgy or for blackmail. It could legitimise the aggression of youths, and (if one may whisper it) youths are not always, in every historical context, protagonists of rationality or of change. I make the point strongly, arguing in a sense with part of myself, for I find much that attracts me in rough music. It is a property of a society in which justice is not wholly delegated or bureaucratised, but is enacted by and within the community. Where it is enacted upon an evident malefactor-some officious public figure or a brutal wife-beater one is tempted to lament the passing of the rites. But the victims were not all of this order. They might equally be some lonely sexual non-conformist, some Sue Bridehead and Jude Fawley living together out of holy wedlock. And the psychic terrorism which could be brought to bear upon them was truly terrifying: the flaring and lifelike effigies, with their ancient associations with heretic-burning and the maiming of images - the magical or daemonic suggestiveness of masking and of animal-guising--  the flaunting of obscenities-the driving out of evil spirits with noise.

Rough music belongs to a mode of life in which some part of the law belongs still to the community and is theirs to enforce. To this one may assent. It indicates modes of social self-control and the disciplining of certain kinds of violence and antisocial offence 

(insults to women, child abuse, wife-beating) which in today's cities may be breaking down. But, when we consider the societies which have been under our examination, one must add a rider. Because law belongs to people, and is not alienated, or delegated, it is not thereby made necessarily more 'nice' and tolerant, more cosy and folksy. It is only as nice and as tolerant as the prejudices and norms of the folk allow. Some forms of rough music disappeared from history in shadowy complicity with bigotry, jingoism and worse. In Sussex rough music was visited upon 'pro-Boers' including William Morris's close friend, Georgie Burne-Jones. In Bavaria the last manifestations of haberfeldtreiben were linked to mafia-like blackmail, anti-semitism and, in the final stage, to ascendant Nazism. For some of its victims, the coming of a distanced (if alienated) Law and a bureaucratised police must have been felt as a liberation from the tyranny of one’s ‘own’.

Next time you see a twitter storm whipping through your timeline, listen out for the sound of clattering pots and pans. Yes, we are very different. Yes, we are still the same.

www.imogenrobertson.com

@RobertsonImogen

Remembering The Battle of Bosworth by Catherine Hokin

August 21, 2018, 10:00 pm

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The first of these Welsh kings was Henry who defeated all the other kings at the Battle of Boswell and took away all their roses. After the battle the crown was found hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill. This is memorable as being the only occasion on which the crown has been found after a battle hanging up in a hawthorn tree at the top of the hill.

With thanks to 1066 and All That by Sellar and Yeatman



As Sellar and Yeatman put it in 1066 and All That - probably still my favourite historical book of all time which may explain a lot - History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. One of the things many people are pretty certain they can remember is the Wars of the Roses, which ended (or didn't but we'll get to that) 533 years ago today on the 22nd August 1485 with the Battle of Bosworth. History buffs or not, ask a sample of your friends about this time period and I guarantee they'll all have some sense of it. Whether it's the lost princes in the Tower, the ill-fittingly romantic name, Richard and his hunch-back, or his car-park discovery, the Wars of the Roses and its characters still resonate. They also inspire great passion. My father was a member of the Ricardian Society and a war-gamer whose sand-table battles (ask your parents) re-enacted every twist of that August day. As I said many times when my novel about Margaret of Anjou came out, he was so obsessed with the conflict that, as a child, I was fairly certain that it was still going on. And who can forget the Channel 4 documentary after the discovery of Richard III's body and Philippa Langley's face when she looked at that re-created head.

Bosworth Memorial

Perhaps one of the reasons the Battle of Bosworth still attracts such attention (apart from the fact that a king died) is that it still courts controversy. We have no eye-witness accounts - all our knowledge of the day's events is derived from documents written after the fact and under a regime with a need to remember history in its own particular way if it was going to have any kind of a future. Some sources in fact come even later - for example there was no real attempt to analyse the use, type and position of troops  for nearly another 200 years. The site itself has long been a matter of dispute - the stone marking the spot of Richard's death is at Ambion Hill, near Sutton Cheney in Leicestershire. In 2010, after a major archaeological project, the actual site of the battle was announced as being 3km away from the memorial. Part of the evidence which relocated the battle site were 22 pieces of lead shot, ranging from gunshot to grapefruit-sized canonballs. Not only did this discovery change the location, it also dispelled a myth that the armies fought each other with bows and arrows rather than firepower.

Stanley Coat of Arms

Controversies over the site are one thing but the issue of treachery - and that of Lord Stanley in particular - is quite another blood-boiler. Listen to my father and William Stanley made Attila the Hun sound like Winnie the Pooh. The version he subscribes to has the hitherto loyal Stanley turning his coat at the last minute, swooping his troops down the hill behind Richard in a shock move that ensured the king was butchered. That Stanley declared for Henry at the last minute is as certain as anything in this battle can be but the idea of the attack having no deeper roots than a self-serving decision on the day as been re-examined by historians such as David Hipshon. He cites Stanley's failure to support Richard not as a sudden change in loyalty but as coming out of a 20 year power-struggle in Lancashire; a personal score being settled in a bigger political arena. And I can already hear the cry - "tomaytoes/tomatoes: it's still treachery!"

Reconstructed head of Richard III

The site, the type of weapons used, who turned coat and who didn't: it all disappears into the mist when we get to what happened to Richard himself. Oh the ire it used to raise. The stories of his removal from the battlefield are told in a number of the chronicles which later reported the battle. According to Vergil, the body was ‘nakyd of all clothing, and layd uppon an horse bake with the armes and legges hanginge downe on both sides’, a scene the Crowland Chronicle described as a ‘miserable spectacle in good sooth’. His body was then taken back to Leicester, his head supposedly hitting the stones of Bow Bridge as it was carried across. Most accounts agree that the body was put on public display for two days at Greyfriars church. Some then have the corpse interred in a plain unmarked tomb inside the church, others talk about an alabaster tomb, with an effigy of Richard on top, being erected at a later date on the orders of Henry VII. If that ever existed it was lost, as was the King with the most commonly believed story having him tipped unceremoniously into the River Soar.

Leicester Council Sign

Except, of course, he wasn't. In 2012, an archaeological excavation discovered a battle-damaged skeleton in a Leicester City Council car park, believed to be the site once occupied by Greyfriars Priory Church. The body showed that the skeleton had 10 wounds, eight of them to the head, inflicted in battle and suggesting the soldier had lost his helmet. A blade had hacked away part of the rear of the skull. In 2013 DNA testing identified ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ the remains as those of Richard. The University of Leicester identified the skeleton as a result of radiocarbon dating, comparison with contemporary reports of his appearance, and comparison of his mitochondrial DNA with that of two matrilineal descendants of Richard’s eldest sister, Anne of York. So we had Richard but we didn't have an end to the arguing with both York and Leicester campaigning to host his remains - a battle Leicester's tourism department won.

Was 1485 the end of the Wars of the Roses? Not for Henry VII who lived under the shadow of pretenders and resurrected dead princes throughout his reign and probably never sat that comfortably on his throne. And, beyond a categorisation date of the here ends/here starts type, not for historians who still have so much of the battle left to pick over. And don't forget there's another controversy to come: the lost princes, one of history's ultimate cold cases. There's bones, they've never been tested and Philippa Langley is on the case...

Out and About: Reading history in buildings, by Leslie Wilson

August 22, 2018, 5:30 pm

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It began with this building, when I was in Reading doing some shopping. It was such a truly elaborate example of hideous Victoriana that I had to record it. When I was a kid, I was taught to despise Victorian buildings and the heavy over-ornamentation of this example reminds me why. You may admire it; who knows? It's listed, and I've seen it described online as a very fine building indeed.  If you zoom in you can see that it is the W.I. Palmer memorial building, and I think, though I may be wrong, that it was originally a temperance hall set up by the originally Quaker Palmers, of Huntley and Palmer biscuit factory fame. Huntley and Palmers, long since subsumed into multi-national capital, were the producers of award-winning biscuits sold all over the world, and major employers in Reading; their factory empire sprawled between the Kennet and the railway, both of which were used to bring in supplies. Reading's prosperity originally grew from its site on the two rivers, the Kennet and the Thames, and there were many depots on the Kennet docks, which stored the grain from medieval times onwards.

Here is one of the corn stores, just opposite where I catch my bus home.

 This pub is a good deal older than it looks at first glance, and for once the side gate was open so I was able to look down and see the old courtyard. It's not a posting inn, I think (we'll come to that later), but an example of how buildings can reveal themselves if you can look round a corner. It's in St Mary's Butts, where once the citizens of Reading came for their archery practice, and the site of the eponymous Minster Church, built in the local brick-flint style. Clay and flint are an essential part of the soil round here, along with chalk. Our immediate neighbours have an old clay pit in the bottom of their garden. However, the Minster Church is partly built with stones from Reading Abbey, post-Dissolution.

Detail of the wall of St Mary's

The Minster Church

Queen Victoria Jubilee Fountain  in St Mary's Butts. 'A typical Victorian amalgam of forms and conceits' says Historic England.

 Pavlov's Dog, where my daughters used to go in their teens, is a nice piece of Victorian mock-Tudor.

 Here are some more genuinely ancient buildings in St Mary's Butts. County Delicacies, a lovely deli with a beautiful cheese counter and a wonderful range of Italian pasta among many other delights, is sadly no longer to be found in the stripy building.

 This is St Mary's old Vicarage, I think, now a pub.

 Waterstones occupies the site of the old Broad Street Independent Chapel; a temple to reading, nowadays, in Reading.

 I have always really enjoyed these Venetian-style buildings on the street that leads from Broad Street to the butter market; appropriately, the left hand one used to be occupied by Nino's Italian restaurant, but this is, alas, no longer the case. They represent to me the positive side of Victoriana.

 Here is the negative side of modernity; a building whose perpetrators actually dared to name after the architect Sir John Soane. The reason for this is that opposite the building is a monument contributed to Reading by Soane, in the Butter Market. I think Soane would have turned in his grave both at the naming of the building (which looks as if it had been badly glued together and might collapse at any moment) and its proximity to his graceful pillar. However, I'm ashamed to say that at one stage, Reading actually plopped a very smelly public toilet slap right against the monument. I am in favour of having public conveniences, but they need to be properly sited.

 Here is Soane's monument, now happily freed from the smelly anklet of public 'convenience.'

 This is one of the ancient buildings in the Butter Market, near St Laurence's church, which is one of the three ancient churches of Reading, along with St Mary's and St Giles's. The half-timbered building used to house a martial arts shop, but it has been grubby and neglected for as long as I can remember, and I've lived her for 33 years. It's a great pity, as it is a piece of Reading's heritage.

 The George, however, where Dickens stayed, I believe, is well maintained. It dates from 1506. I was going over the country looking for examples of old posting inns, then met a friend in the coffee shop at the George and realised that there was a wonderful example right under my nose. Below you can see where the coaches used to draw in, and Mine Host would come bustling out to welcome the occupants of post-chaises and private carriages.

 The Victorian Town Hall is rather fine, I think, but often looks like a suitable location for some Gothic horror narrative. This part of it was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, who also designed the Natural History Museum in London. We have a Pugin building in Reading, too, but I shall talk about that one in a later blog. There's a link to more info about the Town Hall at the bottom, which is worth clicking on. There was once an extension with an onion spire on it, which clashed a bit with the rest, but I for one am rather sad that it was demolished, as I'm rather fond of onion spires.

 According to local legend, Queen Victoria insisted her statue face the station, so that she could imagine herself leaving Reading rather than arriving there. I would take this with a pinch of salt.

 This is a rather splendid piece of eighteenth century building in the Netherlands style, which I always look at with enormous pleasure.

 This is an ancient building in London Street, where the coaches used to drive on their way to the capital. It's at the corner of Church Street, which leads to the Quaker Meeting House, where I worship. You can see the false front which fails to hide the original, older building. In Church Street you can see many buildings which are much older inside than they look from the outside, and some of them have convenient side alleys where you can look at the half-timbering.

 It's a pity that the local graffiti artists have demonstrated their lack of talent here, but you can see what I mean. This is the side of what was once the London Street bookshop, and if I remember right, Reading's first lending library (commercial, not public)

Here is one of the timbers, close up.

This is the front of the building, which nowadays houses Reading International Support Centre. You can see how the later facade has masked the half-timbered original building, but the meeting rooms and offices inside show their ancient provenance in half-timbering and rather irregular floors. There is still a bookshop inside RISC, which has a good selection of international authors, and it's well worth visiting. Below is another example of an ancient house wrapped up in a more recent (though hardly modern) facade. Also the Great Expectations, once a meeting hall, and before that, on the same site, there was the old Quaker Meeting House where William Penn once worshipped. There is a plaque commemorating this inside the RISC centre next door. Dickens gave readings in this building, hence the 'Great Expectations' of the title.

 I'll be guiding you round Reading again; the Abbey is the next stop, and I hope to go into more detail. Reading may be less glamorous than Oxford, where I once lived, but it has had huge significance in national history, and Jane Austen went to school here...
http://www.berkshirehistory.com/businesses/huntley_palmer.htmlhttp://www.berkshirehistory.com/businesses/huntley_palmer.html

https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1113571 

https://www.readingtownhall.co.uk/explore-reading-history/our-building-history

My Favourite Research Books: An Occasional series by Elizabeth Chadwick

August 23, 2018, 4:30 pm

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I have a few thousand research books on my shelves.  All are treasured, but if I had to take just a handful with me to a desert island, which ones would I choose?

This would be one of them.  The moment my characters become involved in a Medieval medical situation, I reach for the Trotula to give me insights. 

Basically the Trotula is an ensemble of three works on women's medicine from  12th century Italy and reflects some of the theories, practices and medicines coming out of the Arabic world at that time.  As well as dealing with ailment specific to women, the Trotula also gives advice on child care and various interesting recipes for cosmetic beautification, one of which I used in my novel The Time of Singing.

But when she combs her hair, Let her have this powder. Take some dried roses, clove, nutmeg, watercress and galangal. Let all these, powdered, be mixed with rosewater. With this water let her sprinkle her hair and comb it with a comb dipped in the same water so that her hair will smell better. And let her make furrows in her hair and sprinkle on the above-mentioned powder and it will smell marvelously.

I also mentioned this one in passing, if the woman wishes to have  long black hair, Take a green lizard and having removed its head and tail, cook it in common oil. Anoint the head With this oil. It makes the hair long and black. I am quite tempted to try out the first one but I will leave the second for more adventurous souls!

This next one too is on my 'give it a miss for now.' list. For whitening the hair, catch as many bees as possible in a new pot and set it to burn, and grind with oil, And then anoint the head. 

Should you want white teeth:  The teeth are whitened thus. Take burnt white marble and burnt date pits and white natron, a red tile, salt and pumice. From all of these make a powder in which damp wool has been wrapped Enough fine linen cloth. Rub the teeth inside and out.  I don't know what my dentist would think of that one!

As a complexion aid: for widening the face and clarifying it: take the juice of pignut , and mix steer or cow marrow with it, and let them be ground, and in these ground things add powder of aloe, cuttlefish bone, white natron, and dove dung. Let all these be ground, and let there be made an ointment. With this ointment. The woman should anoint her face.

One might be horrified until one starts to ponder the ingredients used in modern cosmetics. I just looked up the ingredients on an anti-frizz serum for hair and so chosen because it has the least ingredients to type out but I could find. I had no intention of copying the mile long list from a bottle of body lotion! The frizz-ease contains: cyclopentasiloxane, dimethiconol, ethylhexyl, methoxycinnamate, liquid paraffin (I've anglicised it) hydrolised silk and algae extract. Who knows - the chemical compounds involved in lizard extremities Could well be hidden in there. Nothing really changes that much. Today fish scales are used in the manufacture of glitter nail polish and lipstick.

Much of the Trotula is concerned with discussions of women's ailments in relation to conception and childbirth. The treatments are often very different today being based on different medical beliefs - although basic common sense is often spoken. However, it is probably not a good idea to use the following advice when considering contraception. Take a male weasel and let its testicles be removed and let it be released alive. Let the woman carry these testicles with her in her bosom and let her tie them in goose skin or in another skin and she will not conceive.

Alternatively, if one wishes to conceive, one should take take the testicles of a male pig or wild boar and dry them and let a powder be made, and let the woman drink this with wine after the percolation of the menses. Then let her cohabit with her husband and she will conceive. 

Assuming this ploy is successful and conception occurs, there are certain signs to be watched for. In order to know whether a woman is carrying a male or a female, take water from a spring and let the woman extract two or three drops of blood or milk from her right side and let these be dropped into water. And if they fall to the bottom, she is carrying a male; if they float on top, a female. 

There are comments concerning the development of the embryo. In the first month. There is purgation of the blood, in the second there is expression of the blood and the body. In the third month, the fetus produces nails and hair. In the fourth month it begins to move and for that reason women are nauseated. In the fifth month the fetus takes on the likeness of its father or its mother. In the six month the nerves are constituted.In the seventh month the fetus solidifies its bones and nerves. In the eighth month, nature moves and the infant is made complete in the blessing of all its parts. In the ninth month. It proceeds from the darkness into the light. 

However, proceeding into the light can be a tricky business and everything doesn't go to plan Remedies suggested include having the expectant mother hold a magnet in her right hand. She should try drinking ivory shavings. Likewise, the white stuff which is found in the excrement of the hawk, given in a potion is good.

The Trotula understands the seriousness of a retained afterbirth and says haste must be madeTo reject it. Therefore let the sneezing be provoked, and let this be done with the mouth and nose closed. Alternatively, the woman should be made to vomit, again this would aid in bearing down. And emetic was to be made from the cinders of an ash tree mixed with 1 dram of powder of the seed of marshmallow.

The Trotula has some interesting things to say about the care of the newborn. It says its ears should be pressed immediately over and over again, so that milk does not enter them, or its nose when the child is nursing. The umbilical cord should be tied Three fingers from the belly, because according to the retention of the umbilical cord. the male member will be greater or smaller. The baby should be kept clean and all mucus secretion is wiped away. It shall be massaged all over and then bound in swaddling. If its belly and loins become too humid and oily, they should be left free to dry out. After breastfeeding, baby should be massaged. The next passage might also come from a modern childcare manual. 

There should be different kinds of pictures, cloths of diverse colours, and pearls placed in front of the child, and one should use nursery songs and simple words, neither rough nor harsh words should be used in singing in front of the child.

Other headings in the Trotula's medical section deal with Sterility on the part of the man  a cure for Worms of the ears, what to do about pain of the intestine and itching and excoriation of the pudenda. While many of the remedies make one thank heaven to be living in the 21st-century, The Trotula is a fascinating window on the world of medieval medicine and an invaluable reference work on my research shelf.  Highly recommended.

The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women's Medicine.  Edited by translated by Monica H. Green.  University of Pennsylvania Press 2001.  ISBN 978 0 8122 1806 4

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Elizabeth Chadwick is an internationally best selling author of historical fiction.  Her latest novel, Templar Silks, is the story of the Great William Marshal's pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 

London Nights by Miranda Miller

August 24, 2018, 5:30 pm

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   A visit to the London Museum always makes me feel much closer to the past. From some of the windows you can see London Wall, Roman walls with medieval additions. The vast excavations for Cross Rail are a great nuisance but they have uncovered unfamiliar corners of the City to be discovered as you walk to the museum, such as Salters’ Garden, the lovely sunken garden in the photo above. It’s laid out with areas of lawn, hedging, pergolas and fountains and the original Roman City wall forms its southern boundary. It belongs to the Worshipful Company of Salters - no, I didn’t know they existed, either, but they’ve been there for six hundred years.

   I was fascinated by London Nights, the exhibition of photographs that is currently at the London Museum. Most of the images are in black and white and made me think of Van Gogh, who considered night “more richly coloured than the day”.

   This exhibition is split into three sections and the first, London Illuminated, is the most impersonal, showing buildings lit up at night. Most of them are familiar but I was intrigued by the one above, showing a brilliantly lit fairy palace on a lake, with the caption White City. I only knew the White City as a rather grim area with a greyhound racing track and TV centre but it had an earlier incarnation: in 1908 forty acres of shining white buildings and waterways were built there for the Franco-British exhibition.

   This photograph shows a bird’s eye view of the site of the Exhibition, which was bigger than the Great Exhibition of 1851 although it is far less well known. With what we would now consider dubious taste, the most popular attractions were the two so-called "colonial villages" - an "Irish village" and a "Senegalese village", which were supposed to communicate the success of the British Empire (just before it started to disintegrate).

   This astonishingly confident event attracted 8 million visitors. The White City Stadium was then hastily built to be used as one of the venues for the 1908 Olympics, which were held in London after Rome dropped out at the last minute due to an eruption of Vesuvius. Another photo shows the long forgotten 1910 Congress Hall, a magnificent illuminated pagoda built for the Japan British Exhibition.

   The second section of the exhibition, Dark Matters, explores the more sinister and mysterious aspects of the night. I particularly liked a short film about a dog called Ella wandering alone on Essex Road at night. She encounters weird animals in the window of a shop called Get Stuffed, runs away from a dog catcher and meets a homeless man who offers to share his bottle with her.

Leicester Square from the series London, c.1909, Alvin Langdon Coburn
   

   This photograph of a gaslit Leicester Square is also hugely evocative. The rather sad area we know now was then the glamorous centre of London’s night life, with oyster rooms and theatres. Here is the Empire, before it became a cinema, and here also were the Alhambra, the Hippodrome and Daly’s. Edwardian sleaze was more stylish than ours and soldiers remembered the pleasures it once offered when they sang, Farewell Leicester Square.

                                          Liverpool Street Station Shelter, 1940 Bill Brandt


   This is one of Bill Brandt’s wonderful photos of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in the underground which, I think, are as memorable as Henry Moore’s shelter drawings. Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904, moved to Paris to work with Man Ray and came to England in 1930. He brilliantly documented English social life during the Depression and then recorded the effects of the war in London. He worked for both the Ministry of Information and the National Building Record. Many of his intensely atmospheric photographs were taken at night, without flash, during the city’s blackouts.

   There are also several photographs by Bert Hardy, another outstanding photographer of the period. He was a Londoner who worked his way up from a lab assistant to become a world famous photographer. His warm and compassionate photographs were published in Picture Post, which in its heyday sold nearly two million copies a week.

   The final section of the exhibition, Switch On Switch Off, shows a complex web of associations: work and play and people who work at night, including cleaners and sex workers.

                                                  Piccadilly at Night, Bob Collin

   This photo of young men clubbing in Piccadilly in 1960 seems very remote. Their faces look both callow and sinister, as if they are just as likely to be carrying knives as their grandsons. Suits and ties for a night out have disappeared and so has Swan and Edgar.

   In this last section I enjoyed listening to the rich dark songs of Schubert’s Winterreise on headphones while watching a short film called A Winter Journey. Filmed from the top of a bus at night, it takes us through corners of London that have already become history a few years later, like the Occupy camp in Finsbury Square. This exhibition left me with an exhilarating sense of being in a city that constantly reinvents itself and survives.

Nine Men by Ann Turnbull

August 25, 2018, 4:01 pm

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"I went down to the bottom of the mountains;
The earth with its bars was about me forever..."
(Jonah, 2.6)

Madeley is a former mining town, situated on the East Shropshire coalfield and, since the late 1960s, part of the extensive new town of Telford. There are many reminders of Madeley's industrial past, one of the most poignant being the graves of nine miners, killed in a pit accident in 1864, who lie side by side in the churchyard of the parish church of St Michael. The quote above is part of the inscription on their memorial stone.

The graves are plain, bearing only the initials of each man on their cast-iron covers. The memorial stone gives their names and ages:

   Edward Wallett, 52.
   Benjamin Davies, 35.
   John Tranter, 37.
   Joseph Maiden, 18.
   William Jarratt, 18.
   John Farr, 14.
   John Jones, 14.
   Francis Cookson, 13.
   William Onions, 12.

What shocked me most when I first read this list was how young most of the dead were. Even in 1864 they were regarded as children: the coroner's inquest record states that the victims were three men and six boys. Twenty-two years earlier the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act had prohibited children under eight from working underground. But even in 1864 it would have been quite normal for children to start work at twelve - and no doubt this made an essential contribution to the family income.

The Madeley Wood Company, who owned the mine, were considered to be good employers; they had never employed women underground and were local benefactors. But the shifts were long - twelve hours - and there were no extended breaks in the working day. The men would take it in turns to grab a quick bite to eat. The air they breathed was full of dust and most of them would eventually contract lung diseases. Life expectancy was short.

Madeley's many pits are now hidden under tree-covered mounds. The Brick Kiln Leasow pit at Madeley Wood was an ironstone pit, 220 metres deep. It stood near the top of the steep hill that leads down from Madeley into Ironbridge, and nearly all the miners lived within about half a mile of it. They were a tight-knit community and no doubt many of them were related. Certainly the oldest man on the shift, Edward Wallett, was the father of William Wallett, who was banksman on the day of the accident.

On Tuesday 27th September 1864 at 5.40 pm the shift had just ended and the men were coming up in the device known as 'the doubles' - loops of chain forming seats, with a heavy iron 'bonnet' above to protect them from any falling debris. This device was hooked on to the main chain which was drawn up by the engine at a signal from the 'hooker-on'. The hooker-on that day was Benjamin Davies, an experienced man who'd been doing the job for twenty years.

When the men were about halfway up, the engine man felt the winding chain go slack. He knew at once that the miners had fallen to their deaths. Moments later the doubles, the men, the iron bonnet and the great chain crashed through the layers of thick planks at the bottom of the shaft into four metres of sump water. The thunderous sound brought miners and local people rushing to the scene.

The mutilated bodies were brought up and taken down the hill to the George and Dragon pub, close to where many of the miners lived - and desperate relatives had to be kept outside the room until the bodies had been washed and laid out.

No clear cause was ever found for the accident. The hook and chain were intact, so it was assumed that the hooker-on had somehow failed to properly connect the hook to the chain, and that the hook had slipped out halfway up. Nine men, rather than the permitted maximum of eight, were in the doubles that day. Whether this could have been a factor was unclear. A verdict of accidental death was returned.

This was not an unusual accident - a similar one occurred a few miles away eight years later, when a triple-link chain broke - but it made a deep impression on the community not only because of the large number of miners lost, but because so many were children. One of the dead, 13 year old Francis Cookson, lived in a house only yards from the one where, in the 1980s, my own 13 year old son was able to look forward to a very different future. The Victorians made great strides in child protection and improved working conditions, but one of the most shocking aspects of this story is not the employment of children - my mother started work at 14 - but the long working day, which was still accepted as normal, even for such arduous work. Change comes slowly, and is often hard won.

   This pit pony sculpture is by local artist Gerry Foxall.



We thank Ann Turnbull for this post. Carol Drinkwater will be back next month.

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Julie Summers'"Our Univited Guests" by Janie Hampton

August 26, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Trainee agents on the rope bridge across the muddy River Cam  at Audley End, Essex. ©Polish Underground Movement

Oxford writer Julie Summers has written another extraordinary book about the realities of life in Britain during the Second World War. ‘Our Uninvited Guests’ focuses on the people who had to leave their homes and start new lives in places where Hitler's Blitz could not reach them. Oxfordshire coped with over 37,000 evacuees moved from more vulnerable areas of southern England. Nobody then had heard the rumour that Hitler would never bomb Oxford, when Blenheim Palace, about 12 miles up the road from Oxford, was colonised by schoolboys.
When in September 1939, Malvern College in Worcestershire was requisitioned for civil servants, the private school was moved into Blenheim Palace. They brought with them 55 van loads of books, iron bedsteads and musical instruments, including 20 pianos. The laundry was converted into physics and biology laboratories, while the riding school became the gymnasium. The windows of all 187 rooms had to be blacked out so that no chink of light could be seen by the Luftwaffe. The boys slept in the state rooms where valuable artworks were covered with board to protect them from stray darts and ink bombs.

Items transported from Malvern College, Worcestershire to Blenheim Palace,  Oxford shire, included twenty pianos and 400 beds. © Country Life

Pregnant women from the East End of London were evacuated to Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire to give birth to their babies. Still a splendid house, it had been the home of Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria’s favourite British Prime Minister. Lady Melbourne had decorated the principal rooms for her lover, the future George IV. Mothers recovering from childbirth slept in hospital beds in the lavish surroundings of the Prince Regent’s suite, stripped of its red and gold pagoda double bed, but not its beautiful Chinese wallpaper. The new born babies were bathed next to the wine cellar in the basement.

In Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire, mothers recover from childbirth in the Prince  Regent’s suite, decorated in early 19th century Chinese wallpaper.  © Imperial War Museum

Summers toured round England and Scotland, finding out the role of Britain's stately homes and country houses. Using extensive research and interviews, she describes in rich detail, life in some of Britain’s greatest country houses which were occupied by people who would otherwise never have seen such opulent surroundings. People from all walks of life often found the splendour and opulence at odds with their needs. The Rothschilds’ magnificent French chateau-inspired Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, housed one hundred children under the age of five evacuated from London. They ate lobster, rabbit curry, and Woolton Pie - a vegetable recipe named after the Minister of Food, Lord Woolton. Over in Warwickshire, Lord Bearsted moved his bank ‘Samuel & Co’ from London to his country home Upton House. There his 23 employees were provided with wellington boots and ate rook pie.
Coleshill House in Oxfordshire was a 17th Century mansion with no heating, no electricity and water pumped by hand. Recruits to the ‘Auxillary Units’ – a secret band of saboteurs preparing for invasion by Germans - lived in the stables. They each received a crash course in unarmed combat, petrol bombs, booby traps and explosives to attack the invading army’s supplies and transport. At night they roamed the surrounding countryside to practice this art of ungentlemanly guerrilla warfare. Over 600 underground operation bases were constructed all over England for the stay-behind saboteurs to attack from behind. Their whereabouts was top secret. Had there been in invasion in 1940, the life expectancy of saboteurs was estimated to be about 15 days.

Operation bases for saboteurs were constructed underground and their locations kept top secret.

‘Our Uninvited Guests’ captures the spirit of upheaval when thousands of houses were requisitioned by the government for the armed forces, secret services and government offices as well as vulnerable children, the sick and the elderly, all of whom needed to be housed safely, or secretly. In Essex, Polish special agents were trained in the grounds of Audley End House, a royal palace in the 17th century. In the old nursery and the extensive woods, they learned the skills needed to make their way back into occupied Europe and carry out sabotage and subterfuge.
I have to confess that Summers and I are friends: we go on regular walks with our dogs on the Thames towpath. We support each other in the trials and tribulations of writing social history – the excitement of new discoveries; the brain exhaustion of writing it into a readable book; and the joy of publication. Our books cover similar periods in European history, so we often share ideas and swap contacts. Once we went to interview the same person together - an elderly woman who was both a WWII evacuee (Julie’s interest) and a Brownie Guide (mine). It was fascinating to witness how we extracted quite different stories from the same person. But I’m not the only person who has enjoyed this book, which has been well reviewed. Craig Brown wrote in The Mail On Sunday, 'Julie Summers has an amazing instinct for unearthing good stories and telling quotes.''Summers is a good and knowledgeable writer…powerful, emotional stuff' stated The Independent newspaper, while BBC History Magazine said the books is 'A poignant, lingering account. ' 

A student midwife bathes a new born baby next to the wine cellar at Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. © Imperial War Museum

 Summers is a former History Girl blogger, and her most well-known book is ‘Jambusters’ a history of the Women’s Institute during the Second World War. This inspired the ITV television series ‘Home Fires’ which ran for two exciting seasons. Sadly, we were all left wondering who had died in the final scene of a plane crashing into a house. We had to content ourselves with the knowledge that the people inside were fictional, and not the real members of a rural Women’s Institute. Summers’ latest thought-provoking and evocative narrative captures a crucial period in the social history of Britain.

‘Our Uninvited Guests- the Secret lives of Britain’s country houses 1939-45',

 published by Simon & Schuster, 2018. 

                 Janie Hampton            Julie Summers

The Lady in the Tower by Lynne Benton

August 27, 2018, 6:30 pm

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In 1503 Walter Hungerford III was born at Heytesbury, Wiltshire, the only child of Sir Edward Hungerford of Farleigh Hungerford, Somerset, and his first wife, Jane Zouche.  They lived in his family home, Farleigh Castle in Wiltshire, which I was lucky enough to visit recently.  And it was there that I learnt the story of the Lady in the Tower.

The remains of Farleigh Castle today

Walter was nineteen when his father died in 1522, and soon afterwards became squire to Henry VIII.  He married three times, but prospered only after his third marriage in 1532 to Elizabeth, daughter of John Hussey, first Baron Hussey of Sleaford.  Walter was keen for advancement, so he asked his father-in-law to recommend him to Henry VIII’s rising minister Sir Thomas Cromwell.  This Hussey did, and subsequently let it be known that Walter would like to become Sheriff of Wiltshire, a desire which was gratified in 1533.  Walter became Cromwell’s agent in the Farleigh area, a service which bore fruit in 1536 when he was created the first (and last) Lord Hungerford of Heytesbury.  Thus far his third marriage had served him well.

The Hungerford coat of arms

However, by that time his father-in-law, John Hussey, had fallen out of favour at court, so in punishment Lord Walter began to persecute his unfortunate wife Elizabeth.  His treatment of her was remarkable for its brutality.  He locked her in a tower at Farleigh Castle

The tower probably used for her incarceration

and kept her there for four years, during which time his chaplain, William Bird, brought her food and drink.  However, she didn't trust Bird, and in around 1539 she wrote an appeal for protection to Cromwell, saying that she was “continually locked in one of my Lord’s towers in his castle … these three or four years past … under the custody of my Lord’s chaplain, which has once or twice heretofore poisoned me.”  She claimed that she was often reduced to drinking her own urine, and that without the charity of “poor women of the country” who “brought me to my great window, in the night, such meat and drink as they had”, she would have starved to death.  Apparently they rigged up a basket and pulley system through a window in the tower, and provided her with food and drink.  This may have been the window they used.

The window in the tower

It is not known whether Cromwell ordered Elizabeth’s release on receipt of her letter, but by that time Henry VIII was becoming increasingly worried about uprisings in the country protesting about his break with the Roman Catholic Church and the Dissolution of the Monasteries.  For this reason Thomas Cromwell, the King’s Chief minister, also fell out of favour. 

Sir Thomas Cromwell

Unsurprisingly it was not long before the king also caught up with Cromwell’s protégé, Lord Walter, and in 1540 he accused Walter, together with William Bird, of sympathising with the so-called “Pilgrims of Grace”, a popular uprising that had begun in Yorkshire in 1536 and was spreading.  The members were protesting not only about Henry’s split from Rome and the Dissolution of the Monasteries, but also about Thomas Cromwell’s policies and other political, social and economic grievances. 

On 28^th July 1540 both Lord Walter Hungerford and Sir Thomas Cromwell were beheaded on Tower Hill: Cromwell for treason and Lord Walter for treason, witchcraft and the then capital crime of homosexuality.  Contemporaries noted that Lord Walter had gone mad by the time of his execution, ‘for he seemed so unquiet, that many judged him rather in a frenzy than otherwise.’

After her husband’s death Elizabeth was finally released from the tower.  She survived, and subsequently married Sir Robert Throgmorton, with whom she had five daughters.  She died peacefully in 1554.

website: www.lynnebenton.comwww.lynnebenton.com

latest book: "Danger at Hadrian's Wall"

The Spanish Riding School by Vanessa Harbour

August 28, 2018, 4:01 pm

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Our guest for August is Vanessa Harbour, author of the début novel for young readers, Flight, which deals with the rescue of a troop of Lipizzaner horses from the Nazis and their arduous journey to where the famous Riding School was based during WW2.

Vanessa Harbour is a  writer and academic who loves words and believes in living life to the full regardless of what life throws at her. In particular, she likes to weave her words into stories for children and young adults, providing moments of hope in a difficult world. When she was growing up she wanted to be either a doctor or writer. Now she is a Doctor of Creative Writing so has the best of both worlds. She is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Winchester. She is also Academic and Diversity Consultant/Editor at the Golden Egg Academy. Flight is her first novel which is her tribute to her parents who both served during WW2.


As a child I was about passionate horses. I read everything I could about them. All the fiction and lots of non-fiction too. Anything I could find I would read. It was in the non-fiction where I first started to hear about the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and the magical dancing horses. I was fascinated by them. In 1974, I was lucky enough to go and see them perform live at Wembley Arena. It was an awe-inspiring performance. I was convinced I would be able to do that too. The poor dog went through hell as I made him try and perform the same exercises.

At that stage I never thought much about the history of the school I just focused on the horses and how beautiful they were. It was only much later, on one August Bank Holiday when I was trying to think of a story that I started asking questions about what had happened to the Spanish Riding School during the Second World War. Their history began to unfold in front of me. My story focuses on a particular moment in its history, but the Spanish Riding School had been in existence for a lot longer than that.

Sparre, Wikimedia Commons

During the Renaissance, in 1572, Maximilian II had a ‘Spanish Riding Hall’ built for his valuable ‘Iberian Freight’ which I imagine to be is his Iberian horses. He had a menagerie of many other animals too. This description was believed to be the first mention of the ‘Spanish’ connection. The hall was part of the Stallburg within the complex of the Hofburg in Michaelerplatz. Various Emperors and fires had an impact, but it was Karl VI who employed the architect Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach to build the current riding hall between 1729 and 1735. (He and his father had already been responsible for a lot of the buildings in Vienna) The Winter Riding Hall, as it is called, is very glamorous, it is painted all ivory and the only colour comes from a portrait of Karl VI which, even today, the riders doff their bi-corn hats at as they come in. It has very large windows and huge crystal chandeliers.

The horses are treated royally on the site, housed in roomy stables. Even these are decorated with stucco decorations and are always kept spotless clean. There are amazing archways from the stables leading out to a courtyard. These archways were bricked in at one point to keep the artworks safe but were re-opened in 1945.

By Ricardalovesmonuments Wikimedia

 The hall itself was not just used for displays by the horses. Balls, masquerades and music festivals have been held there. For example, it was seen as a temple of music when Ludwig van Beethoven conducted a mass concert with more than 1000 singers and musicians in 1814. During the Hungarian revolution the new Austrian parliament was held there for its first session on July 22nd, 1848.

It is known that horses at the Spanish Riding School are always the elegant Lipizzaners. Renowned for being pure white and highly intelligent. They are not born white though. They will be black or brown depending which bloodline they have descended from. As they grow up the colour changes, almost fades, until they become pure white. If you look through the fur you will still see that the skin is either brown or black. Very rarely they don’t change, and they are believed to be very lucky. The Lipizzaners initially started in the 16th Century with blood stock from Arabs, Barbary and Iberian horses. It was strengthened and increased until the 18th century when the breed were well and truly established. The Sire’s bloodline can be traced back to one of six stallions: Pluto, Conversano, Neapolitano, Favory, Maestoso and Siglavy. Every horse, even now, is given a brand that includes the initial of the one stallion’s bloodline out of the six they have come from. The stud was later moved to Piber and remains there.

Isiwal/Wikimedia Commons

At the Spanish Riding School, they display the fine art of riding, but this is also not new. Xenophon, a pupil of Socrates in ancient times, compiled rules for riders in about 400BC. This was called On Equitation and is still valid today. During the Italian Renaissance the art was revived, in particular, in Naples by the nobleman Federigo Grisone, known as “The Father of the art of Equitation” who in 1552 wrote Ordini di Cavalcare. However, his methods were rather reliant on force. His training was not about art. It was about being aware of the horse and being able to control the horse because above all he was about creating a horse that could be used on the battle field. In France, the art of horsemanship in the 1600s progressed until an instructor by the name of François Robichon de la Guérinière, who rejected the idea of force, wrote L’École de Cavalerie, which was illustrated by Charles Parrocel. This is still used today by the Spanish Riding School as a guiding principle. Exercises carried out by the stallions such as Haute École and Airs Above Ground are based on both Xenophon’s and Guérinière’s work.

The period that I focus on in my novel, Flight, is during the time when Alois Podhajsky is the director of the Spanish Riding School. Major Podhajsky took over in 1939. He had previously won a bronze medal for dressage in the 1936 Olympics. Remaining as director until 1964. He also wrote several books about riding and the rules of riding. During the war he did his best to protect the horses. This included trying to protect them when Hitler decided to try and create a ‘perfect war horse’ in Hostau using the mares from Piber. The Nazis did not particularly like his interference with their breeding plans. The School itself managed to avoid destruction in the bombing of Vienna but by the March of 1945, Director Podhajsky had managed to negotiate to get the stallions out to safety at St Martin. Where they stayed in exile until 1955.

Author's own photo

It was while staying in St Martin that they performed in front of the US Army’s General Patton, who then agreed to keep the Spanish Riding School safe. In his memoir he states that:

"It struck me rather strange that, in the midst of a world at war, some twenty young and middle-aged men in great physical condition…had spent their entire time teaching a group of horses to wiggle their butts…it is probably wrong to permit any highly developed art, no matter how fatuous, to perish from the earth… To me the high-schooling of horses is certainly more interesting than either painting or music."*

Some have suggested that the performance, or exhibition as General Patton called it, enabled Operation Cowboy, but others say it was going ahead anyway. It is my understanding that there is no documentation to corroborate this suggestion, and he certainly doesn’t mention it in his memoir. Operation Cowboy is the code name for the mission to rescue the mares and some prisoners of war from Hostau in Czechoslovakia. It is something I am currently researching and perhaps worthy of another blog post at a different time. I find it a fascinating period and still find many new elements and intriguing story lines.

Flight published by Firefly August 2018

www.vanessaharbour.co.uk

Twitter @VanessaHarbour

*Patton G. S. War as I Knew it (New York: Houghton Miffin Company, 1995 [1947]) P.328

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick - Ministerial 'Red Boxes'

August 29, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Tomorrow is a big day for me. After nearly 18 years, it will be my last day as a civil servant. I’ve spent most of that time advising ministers on their policy ideas and helping turn them from ideas to reality – it’s been a job that I’ve (mostly) loved, although it can be demanding, exhilarating and frustrating in equal measure.

But what does that mean for the Cabinet of Curiosities, I hear you ask? Well, the object I’d like to include this month is a symbol of my time as a civil servant: the ministerial Red Box.

Ministerial 'Red Box', made by Barrow, Hepburn & Gale

The Red Box is exactly that: every minister in government has one (or rather several, to allow for times when one is in transit): bright red ‘boxes’ – essentially oversized briefcases. The outside is red leather with a gold crest and lettering, lined with darker leather. They’re made from wood and lead (depending on who you believe, so that they would sink if thrown overboard from a ship in time of war and/ or to stop them from being x-rayed) and so weigh a ton. (They are also sturdy enough, in contravention of many health and safety rules I’m sure, to be used as a handy step-stool for vertically-challenged civil servants needing to get something off the top shelf.)

The idea of a ‘despatch box’ (as they are officially known) apparently goes back at least to Queen Elizabeth I, and the same company has been making them for the government since the eighteenth century. There seems to be a debate about whether the red colour again came from Elizabeth I’s reign, or as a result of Prince Albert’s preference, but it is clear that the ‘red box’ has a long and distinguished pedigree. They’re used to transport sensitive papers securely (you can get less obvious black ones if a minister needs discretion e.g. if they are travelling by public transport). The most famous one is Gladstone’s, which the Chancellor has traditionally held up on Budget day before the assembled press – although the original is now too fragile to come out each year.

Gladstone's famous red box, held up outside HM Treasury  by many a Chancellor on Budget Day. Source: Wikimedia Commons

But for a civil servant, ‘The Box’ is a concept as well as a physical object. When submitting papers to a minister, the ‘box time’ is all-important. ‘When does the box go’ means ‘what’s my deadline for getting this to you?’ Sometimes it is just that – a euphemism for ‘deadline’ and no more. But often it still is a reality. Papers really do get put in ‘The Box’, and once it is gone, that’s that. On Fridays, the Box can be sent to the Minister’s home address by post (there are special arrangements with the post office to make sure they’re secure). Alternatively, The Box leaves with the Minister, or can be taken to


 wherever she/ he is. Of course, the most urgent things can now be sent by secure email, but for routine work, The Box remains all-important.

‘The Box’ is therefore also something that the Minister ‘does’. It is their homework, the decisions that need making, the papers that have to be read, between one day and the next. Whatever your views on individual politicians, most ministers work incredibly hard; long hours in the office and in Parliament, and then home with a box full of papers to look at overnight. I’ve seen official papers come back covered in curry (‘I didn’t get home until after 10 so I got a takeaway and ate while I was working’) and jammy handprints (‘I was doing the box at breakfast and the five-year old got hold of it, sorry’).

And of course, it also means that ‘The Box comes back’. Decisions – sometimes partially obscured by curry or jam – are typically handwritten across the papers, and private secretaries diligently decode their ministers’ handwriting and email out to the relevant officials in the wider department for them to be taken forward.

It’s a system which may seem a little old-fashioned, but it works. There’s evidence that people take in more information when they read on paper, rather than on screen (see for instance https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/reading-paper-screens/) – so it makes sense to me that The Box should stay to help ministers make the best decisions they can.

They’re decisions that I won’t be as directly involved in, in the future. It is something I’m both sad about and relieved by – I will no longer be clock watching, wondering if I’ll make the box deadline or not, ruled by the tyranny of when a briefcase will leave the building - but nor will I have the undoubted privilege of helping ministers to make decisions which impact us all.

Goodbye to Whitehall - the gift traditionally given to departing Private Secretaries, signed by the Ministers  you worked directly for. Mine - from earlier in my  career - includes the Rt Hon (now Lord) Alistair Darling

August Competition

August 30, 2018, 4:01 pm

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To win a copy of Vanessa Harbour's Flight, just answer the following question in the comments below:

"Vanessa found out about Operation Cowboy by accident. What has been the most surprising/intriguing piece of historical research you’ve found out when you least expected it?"

Then copy your answer to me at maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk so I can contact you if you win.

Closing date: September 7th

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

The history books that made me by Mary Hoffman

August 31, 2018, 4:01 pm

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(I have adapted the Guardian's weekly Review section template for this short post,* making it refer just to History books and historical fiction.)


The history book I am currently reading

This is a bit of a cheat, as I've just finished it! It is odd for me to consider it as history, since I remember the scandal and the trial very well. But, like the rest of the country, I was gripped this summer by the TV series based on the book, with stellar acting by Hugh Grant, Ben Wishaw, Alex Jennings, Adrian Scarborough and the whole ensemble. And of course the cation takes place in the '60s and '70s. So, taking the 25-30 years or one generation back, as a criterion for what makes history or historical fiction, this fits.

It was like reading a thriller. The closest parallel I can think of it All the President's Men by Woodward and Bernstein or, further back, An Officer and a Gentleman by Robert Harris. It has the same forensic level of detail, without losing a bit of the tension.

The history book I wish I'd written

I can't be the only one, surely, although I am aware some consider it a "Marmite" book. Some people had trouble with the pronouns; others with the apparent re-habilitation of Thomas Cromwell and the corresponding dip in that side of the scales carrying the reputation of Thomas More, still basking in the light of A Man for All Seasons. But I think the achievement of taking one of the most famous periods of English history and making something fresh and new of it is quite staggering. I have read it and Bring up the Bodies three times, and seen both the plays and te TV series twice. I don't think I shall ever tire of it. And of course there is no way I could have written it.

The history book that had the greatest influence on me

I first became interested in later Plantagenet history because of Michael Boyd's History Cycles at the RSC in Stratford and saw each production twice, the second time over a long weekend (very long - all eight plays from Thursday to Sunday). I acted a part in scenes from Henry Vl Part two when I was school and am old enough to have enjoyed John Barton's Wars of the Roses adaptation for televison. (Though we got the DVDs of that recently and they have not worn well).

But, much as I enjoyed Michael Boyd's use of The Courtyard theatre in Stratford and performances by Jonathan Slinger, Clive Wood, Katy Stephens and Maureen Beattie, I was confused by some of the action. Then I found this book by the late John Julius Norwich and all was made clear. It sets out what happens in each of plays and has an accompanying chapter on the historical facts for the same period. Sorted.


The history book I think is most overrated

I know, I know! You are going to hate me. Two of my best friends and everyone else in my book group and the whole Management Committee of the Society of Authors love this work of historical fiction.

But I found the heroine just so annoyingly passive. She does what everyone else wants her to. She has no agency. "But that's how things were for young women in that period," my friends protest. I don't buy it. The heroine very nearly commits bigamy out of sheer inertia.


The history book I think is most underrated.

Anything by Ann Swinfen. Ann's recent and sudden death was a terrible shock to us here on the History Girls. Her books had found their audience though she was not yet well known generally. The Testament of Mariam was the first book she self-published after her previous traditional publishers did not what to take it and the first book of hers she generously gave me.

Ann was a superb writer and I could not understand why she wasn't a household name. She was also very prolific, with several series on the go. I hope her work lives on, as it should.


My earliest history reading memory

I had a big sister seven years older than me, whose reading choices I would copy and whose books I would borrow. She loved Georgette Heyer's Regency romances and the first one I read was Devil's Cub, which is actually a sequel to These Old Shades, which I caught up with later.

As a young teenager I was madly in love with Dominic de Vidal and I suppose this cover serves me right. I read a coverless hardback, brown I think. I haven't returned to Heyer but I am always happy to discover how much other writers really enjoy her.


The history book I would give as a gift

Again, I read this very young and it is of course a novel. But it's what convinced a lot of people to believe that Richard lll was much maligned, a victim of Tudor propaganda. I don't believe that now. I am not a Ricardian myself, although very much a Yorkist. But it's a clever book and very engaging.

The history book I'd like to be remembered for

Well, until I manage to write my own Plantagenet trilogy!

This is the story of Ned Lamberty, an orphan who join's The King's Men at the beginning of the 17th century. He starts with women's roles, as a boy player but at the beginning of my novel his voice is breaking. He is seventeen, but puberty came later then and it's not outside the range of normal for 1610.

Ned is being driven mad by glimpses of a woman in green. Is she real? Is she just another boy player in costume? Or is she from another world?

Ned has a great reverence for "the Poet," the best maker of plays in the company, and discovers that Shakespeare has had his own experiences of the supernatural.

It's a version of the Tam Lin story and I was very pleased with it.






*Shorter than usual this month, as I had a bit of an accident in London, falling on a South Kensington pavement and cutting my face and sustaining other injuries. I've had to spend time dealing with the consequences

Fighting bad months with metaphor - by Gillian Polack

September 1, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Some months are created to try us and my August was one of those months. Early on, I knew precisely what I was going to write for History Girls for September. I don’t remember what the topic was any more, but I remember being struck by its lucidity and clarity and logic. Then August struck.

One of the happenings that caused me to forget my absolutely superb plan for this post was a simple burglary. Over 1200 of my books were stolen. Much fiction, some reference, over a hundred cookbooks and several boxes of scholarly history are on the market somewhere, crying to the world to give them an equally loved home. This created such a neat metaphor for how we see the past and why historical fiction is such a wonderful thing. 

It wasn’t the theft alone that created the metaphor. Let me be honest, the theft alone caused me the gnash my teeth and tear out my hair and to forget to eat on one day and to overeat the next. I settled myself down by (in between dealing with all the other events life through at me in August) looking at pictures.

Those pictures explain everything. Maybe. Let me talk about them. 

Think of a marsh. No people. Constant currents pulling at the verges and constant changes to everything. A marsh is stable largely because of its instability. What we see of it is that microsecond only, and the next microsecond we might see something else and the next day, that glimpse we had of overgrown weed might have been dragged somewhere else and the bank it was next to may have crumbled entirely. Or not. Here, have a picture of a microsecond:

If we add people to the marsh, things change. A boat goes down the same path, time after time and so that path is more likely to remain and more likely to actually be upkept. 

Someone sees a crumbling edge and forcibly restrains it. It lasts longer. You can look at it from a boat and say, “I know what this is.”  That bit of the marsh has a story.

The next time you look off to the side on your boat trip, you add the presence of humans to what you see and you read that landscape differently.

Some people do more than reinforce banks or prevent crumble. Some people take that ground they’ve kept stable and build on it. That bit of the marsh has a story we can all understand.

If the marsh is the past, then historians and archaeologists and scientists are the one who make it possible for us to see it for more than the microsecond we move through it. They reinforce banks and make paths for boats and even build the boats. 

Without historical fiction, though, a large percentage of those looking at the past will find tables of data or scholarly interpretation of important documents...but won't see much from them. For some of us, these things are boats through water and commentaries and we can see and understand. Others, however, understand and enjoy more when they’re shown a boat, ushered onto it, and told stories about the surroundings. 

Even on the boat, there are different types of stories for different types of readers. Some like historical fiction that’s as close as it can be to the discoveries and interpretations made by historians. Others want invented names and life dreams given to the houses they can see from the boat.

 

The bottom line is that historians and historical fiction writers might act as if we are at odds, but in cultural terms, we work together. Our memories of the past aren’t wild marsh; they’re formed and contain stories. 

Let me admit, it’s a bad metaphor. But it was a bad month. The pictures I took at the Hortillonages (marsh once, but an important part of the history of Amiens for so very long) will hopefully make up for it.

---

Before They Were Pink: The Twisted History of the Unicorn - By Anna Mazzola

September 3, 2018, 12:00 am

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These days, unicorns are everywhere: furry unicorns, flashing unicorns, unicorns on t-shirts, unicorns on pants. My four-year-old daughter has even changed her middle name to ‘Unicorn’, having decided she didn’t much like Elizabeth.

Once, however, unicorns were extremely rare, and greatly feared.

A very fierce animal

In what is probably the first written account of the unicorn, Cestias of Cnidus, writing in 398 BC, described the beast as ‘exceedingly swift and powerful so that no creature, neither the horse nor any other, can overtake it.’

Pliny the Elder later spoke of ‘a very fierce animal’ which 'makes a deep lowing noise, and has a single black horn, which projects from the middle of its forehead. This animal, they say, cannot be taken alive.’

The beast's terrifying nature was confirmed in 4th century translations of the Bible which interpreted the word ‘re’em’ to mean unicorn: ‘God brought him forth out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn: he shall eat up the nations his enemies, and shall break their bones, and pierce them through with his arrows.’ (Numbers 24:8)

This idea was still going strong in the 6th century, when Cosmas Indicopleustes, a merchant of Alexandria, reported: ‘it is impossible to take this ferocious beast alive; and all its strength lies in its horn. When it finds itself pursued and in danger of capture, it throws itself from a precipice, and turns so aptly in falling, that it receives all the shock upon the horn, and so escapes safe and sound’.

Catching unicorns

Of course, as we all know, unicorns can in fact be captured. You just need to find a nearby virgin to throw before them. This idea came from the ancient Greek bestiary known as the Physiologus, in which a unicorn sees a maiden, lays its head on her lap and falls promptly asleep.

In the Middle Ages, the unicorn and virgin were used to portray Christ's relationship with the Virgin Mary, the hunt for the unicorn becoming an allegory of the Passion. The unicorn and maiden also became emblems of courtly love and appear on many tapestries and paintings from the period. The unicorn was firmly established in European lore.

The one-horned beast was also a part of Eastern tradition as the kirin (Japan), or qilin (China), which was said to appear with the arrival or death of a sage or illustrious ruler.

Twisted History

The full history of the unicorn is tortuous and confused. As Chris Lavers says in The Natural History of the Unicorn, ‘Many have tried to track the unicorn’s progress, and a few have glimpsed madness along the way.’

The myth of the unicorn may have come from sightings of antelope or deer who had lost a horn, or been born with only one, or from sightings of the Indian rhinoceros or Arabian oryx.

Whatever the origin of the legend, it led to a mania for unicorn horns (alicorns), which, it was said, could be used to detect poison. Pieces of horn were turned into goblets, knife handles and amulets, while smaller pieces were used to test food and wine. Alicorns became the prized possessions of monarchs. Henry VIII had his filed down and used as an antidote for poison. Queen Elizabeth I kept hers with the crown jewels. Danish rulers were crowned on a throne said to be constructed entirely from unicorn horns, but which, disappointingly, is in fact made from narwhal tusks.

Ground alicorn was ascribed a wide range of medicinal properties and was used for treatment of rubella, measles, fevers, pains and leprosy. It was an aphrodisiac, it purified water, neutralised poisons, fought off the plague and could be used to test the virginity of young girls.

Fabricating unicorns

By 1600 the narwhal was known to be the real source of ‘unicorn’ horns. That, however, was far from being the end of fake unicorns.

In 1663, Otto Von Guericke claimed to have reconstructed the skeleton of a unicorn, found in Germany's Harz Mountains. Many were convinced of its authenticity, despite the fact that it had only two legs, and had actually been constructed from the fossil bones of a woolly rhinoceros, a mammoth, and of course a narwhal. False alicorn powder, made from the tusks of narwhals or horns of various animals, was still being sold in Europe as medicine as late as 1741.

In the 1930s, Dr. W. Franklin Dove, a University of Maine professor, artificially fused the horn buds of a calf together to prove that unicorns could, at least in theory, exist.

Fifty years later, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus told the world that a unicorn called Lancelot had ‘wandered up to a tent’ when the show arrived in Houston. They duly assigned him a caretaker, a dancer named Heather Harris, and took him on a unicorn tour. In fact, Lancelot was just a white goat whose horns had been fused together by his original owner, self-professed wizard Oberon Zell.

Still going strong 

In recent years, pink glittery unicorns have proliferated, on TV programmes, pencil cases, birthday cards and dressing gowns. As Alice Fisher put it in the Guardian, ‘Unicorns no longer have to be lured from magical forests by pure maidens, you can buy one in two clicks off Asos.’

The real animal remains as elusive as ever, but there are those that still believe. In the past few years, people claim to have glimpsed unicorns in Canada, Korea and Caithness. Talk of a 'Unicorn Safari' in Scotland has so far come to nothing. I'm still holding out hope.

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Although her kids want her to write a children's book about unicorns.

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

The Elf-Mounds of Ireland... (1) by Katherine Langrish

September 3, 2018, 10:00 pm

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Back in June this year we visited a friend in Ireland and since he lives way up in Co. Donegal we broke the journey by staying a couple of nights in the Boyne Valley, home to some of the most impressive Neolithic monuments anywhere in the world. Brug na Boinne, also known as Newgrange, and its companion mounds of Knowth and Dowth are stupendous megalithic passage graves dating to around 3,300 BC and hundreds of years older than the earliest Egyptian pyramid.


We struck lucky in the B&B which we’d found in anxious flurry at the last minute after discovering the one we thought we’d chosen had double-booked. For it turned out to be a beautiful old house with lovely views next door to the great mound of Dowth: and I mean right next door – the mound towered up over the garden fence; we could go out before breakfast or last thing in the evening with Polly and walk around it and over it and have it completely to ourselves. Dowth, or Dubad, is not a tourist site like its companion tombs, Knowth and Newgrange. No shuttle buses visit it. There’s a huge crater in the centre, the result of the local landlord blasting a hole in it with dynamite sometime in the 19th century. If he hoped to find treasure, he was disappointed. But the mound was so massive and so well built that even the explosion did not damage either of the two passage graves deep within. Here's one of the two entrances, with Polly nosing around to give it scale: in the foreground is one of the huge carved sill-stones which rim the perimeter of the mound. This one is carved in spirals.

Another view of the sill-stone:

You can't go in; there's a locked iron gate. I tried to take a picture through it, and maybe you can just  make out the passage running back into the mound towards the inner chamber.

We walked over and all around the mound. One of the great kerb-stones is carved with seven suns; the picture I took didn't come out too well, but there's a lovely Youtube timelapse of it taken during a winter sunrise by Anthony Murphy of the blog Mythical Ireland:

And of course there’s a legend about the place. The story goes like this. In the time of a king whose name was Bressal Bó-dibad a plague struck all the cattle of Ireland till there were only eight left, a bull and seven cows. (The second part of the king’s name means ‘lacking in cattle.) So Bressal Bó-dibad decided to build a tower ‘like the Tower of Nimrod’, so that he could pass into heaven. (What he intended to do there is unclear; perhaps challenge God to restore his cattle?) Men from all over Ireland came to help him build the tower - the mound – but only if the work could be completed in a single day. So the king’s sister “told him that she would stay the sun's course in the vault of heaven, so that they might have an endless day to accomplish their task”. She worked her magic and the sun halted in mid sky, as it did for Aaron and Moses. But Bressal Bó-dibad followed his sister and committed incest with her (the suggestion is that he forced her); her spell was undone, darkness fell and the men of Ireland abandoned their work. Then the king’s sister said: 'Dubad (darkness) shall be the name of this place for ever.' If that doesn’t give you a shiver, I don’t know what will. And then to find the stone with the seven suns, half buried in the grasses… well...

(Read more about the legend and the mound at Anthony Murphy’s blog Mythical Ireland, here: http://blog.mythicalireland.com/2016/06/dowth-and-story-of-hunger-ancient.html)

Headaches in History by Joan Lennon

September 4, 2018, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

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I think I can safely say, without any scientific back-up, that as long as people have had heads, they have had headaches.  Not to mention headache cures.

1890s advertisement for Bromo-Seltzer,

demonstrating just how you good you'll feel 

after it cures your headache

(wiki commons)

For example, in the 10th century, Ali ibn Isa al-Kahhal recommended tying a dead mole to your head.  In the 12th century, Cordobian physician Moses Maimonides advised sufferers to immerse themselves in a warm, sweet bath, using honey for preference.  In 1608, A Closet for Ladies and Gentlewomen suggested making a paste of house leek and "stamped" earthworms, and applying it to the temples.

The Head ache by George Cruickshank 1819 

(wiki commons)

Electric eels, willow bark, rose oil, hot irons, wearing a clay crocodile  on your head (an Egyptian remedy from around 1500 BCE), trepanation, feverfew tea, opium and vinegar solutions, the St Denis method*, a kiss**, patience*** - all have been proposed and practised, with varying degrees of success.

History Girls have arcane expertise spanning the centuries.  What headache remedies have you come across in your research rambles?  And have you ever tried them??? 

*detail from west facade of Notre-Dame Cathedral 

of St Denis

(Wiki Loves Monuments)

**The Headache by Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

My head doth ache,
O Sappho! take
     Thy fillet,
And bind the pain,
Or bring some bane
     To kill it.

But less that part
Than my poor heart
     Now is sick;
One kiss from thee
Will counsel be
     And physic.


***If you can live up to around bus pass age, there's a reasonable chance they'll just go away of their own accord.  At least that's what happened to me.   



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

Born In 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

September 5, 2018, 8:30 pm

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Last month my family celebrated two big birthdays. On 11 August I took my parents out to dinner on what would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 1997 but a centenary seemed momentous and one of the things my mother and I have both inherited from her is the love of getting dressed up for a ‘wee race out’.

Granny at 50

I’ve been so busy this year thinking of 1918 as the centenary of women’s suffrage, the end of WW1 and the Spanish Flu, that I hadn’t really thought about its being Granny’s centenary too, and it was good to stop and reflect on it, and on what it meant to be born in that year, in that place. Granny (Elizabeth Rea Pleasants, née Hamilton, always known as Rea) was born and lived her whole life in Downpatrick, the county town of Down, where St Patrick is buried. When she was three, Ireland was partitioned and Down became part of the new Northern Ireland. She came of age as the Second World War broke out, and when she was 51, she saw Northern Ireland plunge into its own bloody war. She never let go of calling the Republican of Ireland the Free State, but in other ways she was the most modern of women. 

Like my other gran, Gran W, Granny P. lived through a great deal of history. Sometimes I wished I’d asked her more about it. But she was so busy, always rushing about. She lived in the moment, not the past. She had neither the time nor the patience to sit down and talk to a small girl about the olden days. But she took me to mass and to bingo. She slipped me embarrassingly generous amounts of money when she had it, which was not always because she was ridiculously generous to many people. The first pound note I ever held in my hand was a ninth birthday present from Granny P.

Downpatrick, 1920s, shortly after partition

1980, I'm 12; she's 62

She sang in the local operatic society and passed on to me her good, strong voice. Mummy remembers always being mortified that her own mummy sang so loudly at mass. After Vatican II she became the first woman lay reader in her local church. In the early 60s she adopted three children, two of them mixed race, an unusual undertaking in a small Northern Irish town. Whereas Gran W was a good plain traditional cook, and much given to baking, sewing, knitting and housekeeping, Granny P experimented with spaghetti and curry as far back as the fifties, but often my quiet granda did the cooking, as Granny was off to a whist drive. Gran W wore a frock and an overall, Granny P wore lipstick and trousers and a fake fur, and kept her hair jet back until well into old age.

I was born in 1968, the third of seventeen grandchildren. So yes, that’s the other big birthday we’ve been celebrating. I compare my granny at 50 to me, and my life to hers. At 50 she was very much the matriarch, whereas I’m single and childfree. Granny was bright, talented, and independent-spirited, but growing up in the twenties and thirties as a young Catholic girl in Northern Ireland, her expectations were marriage, church and family. She was very active in those areas, marrying at 21, but she also found time to work outside the house. She was in the Fire Service during the war, and even left home to work as a children’s nanny as a widow in her late sixties. She wouldn’t have had any thoughts of higher education but when I went off to university in 1987 she handed me £50, more money than I'd  ever had in my life, and typical of her generosity. 

Me at 50 -- not so different from Granny P after all

She was very much of her time, and yet stood against it. When I do anything especially outré my mother will say, Granny the second! I always take it as a compliment. 

Sibylle Kreutzberger - a life in gardening, by Linda Newbery (guest)

September 6, 2018, 4:00 pm

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Mention Sissinghurst to anyone remotely interested in gardening and the name Vita Sackville-West will come to mind. Visitors admiring the White Garden, the Nuttery, the Lime Walk and other famous Sissinghurst features may not realise, though, how much this world-renowned garden owes to two other significant plantswomen, Sibylle Kreutzberger and Pamela Schwerdt, joint head gardeners there from 1959 to 1990.

The pair became friends while training at Waterperry Horticultural School in Oxfordshire towards the end of the war, under the tutorship of another notable woman gardener, Beatrix Havergal, who was principal there. Having done some gardening work at her boarding school, Sibylle had been thinking of enrolling for a horticultural diploma at Studley when a family friend enthused about Miss Havergal. Waterperry was not at that time open to the public, but Beatrix Havergal occasionally gave demonstrations on topics such as pruning and how to make the best of a kitchen garden. For Sibylle, one of the attractions was that the clothes list for the course included two pairs of gumboots and a mackintosh - not a cap and gown, as at Studley: “It sounded like my kind of place.”

Beatrix Havergal at Waterperry, photographed by Cecil Beaton

In the late forties, with rationing still in force, growing fruit and vegetables at home was still important and the emphasis at Waterperry was on practicalities and produce, students there learning mainly through experience. Fruit and vegetables, as well as feeding the residents, were sold weekly at Oxford’s Covered Market. Fruit bushes and trees were sold in their thousands, packaged in straw and sent by road and rail. After completing her diploma, Sibylle stayed on, by request, for another eighteen months in the small scale vegetable department. After briefly working at Reading University in the Agricultural Botany department and then at an alpine nursery, she returned to Waterperry to do some lecturing to students and to run the Herbaceous Nursery.

By 1959, she and Pamela Schwerdt, who had stayed on as teacher during Sibylle's absence, were planning a project together. Feeling that life at Waterperry was “like being at school forever”, they aimed to establish their own nursery, but with no money or land their first challenge was to find a suitable and affordable site. They placed an advertisement in The Times personal column, asking if anyone might lease or lend them a plot of two acres or so. At the same time Pam wrote to Vita Sackville-West, who was at that time the Observer’s gardening correspondent. Vita replied suggesting that they try Wye College, in Kent, also mentioning that she needed a head gardener for Sissinghurst. Pam said firmly that there were two of them, and Vita invited them to visit.

Vita Sackville-West, painted in 1918 by William Strang

As it wasn’t what they were looking for, Pam and Sibylle didn’t immediately jump at the chance; in fact Sibylle says now that she wasn’t sure who was interviewing who. But replies to their Times advertisement hadn’t produced any suitable offers, and they decided to accept. Vita, Sibylle says, was ‘rather tickled’ by the idea of employing two young women at a time when female gardeners were rare. Sibylle recalls that in those early days visitors would stare at them in astonishment.

They lived on site in a cottage opposite the oasthouses and worked immensely long hours, returning to the garden or to paperwork after their evening meal. The garden was labour-intensive, on heavy Wealden clay where all the digging and cultivation was done by hand; there were no machines other than mowers. Later, these were supplemented by a small tractor, electric sprayers and hedge-cutters. The appointment of Pam and Sibylle brought the number of gardeners up to six; as time went by these were generally college-trained, and among those beginning their careers at Sissinghurst were several who went on to become head gardeners at National Trust properties.

Sibylle at work

Pam and Sibylle rarely took days off, their weekends being taken up with glasshouse duties and displaying plants for sale outside the gate. For this they used a yellow cart painted with pictures of Sissinghurst, formerly pulled by the resident donkey, Abdul. Fish boxes, painted yellow to match the cart, were used as staging for a pyramid of plants arranged to tempt visitors.

At the time they took up their employment, Vita Sackville-West (known to Sibylle and Pam as Lady Nicholson) was 67, and in variable health. She was often in the tower room she used for writing: “even the family weren’t allowed in there.” Thursdays would be “Observer day”, when she would shut herself away to write her gardening column. It’s rather unfair, Sibylle considers, that Vita generally receives sole credit for Sissinghurst. In the early days her husband Harold was fully involved with the planning; though at home only at weekends he attended RHS shows in London, bought plants and contributed ideas. He and Vita wrote letters to each other every day to discuss progress and planting.

The garden had already been open to the public for twenty years, but in a low-key way – from dawn to dusk, visitors could put their shilling in an honesty box. Vita’s style of gardening was romantic and blowsy but not aimed at providing interest throughout the season, and like many gardens Sissinghurst’s main period of flowering was in late spring and early summer, with not much of interest after July. Among the changes made by Pam and Sibylle was the extension of interest well into late summer and autumn, through the use of later-flowering perennials not hardy in this country but treated here as annuals and biennials: diascias, argyranthemum, penstemons and tender salvias. Besides that, the ever-increasing numbers of visitors – especially after Vita’s death and the taking over of the garden by National Trust – imposed its own pressures. Paths were subject to heavy wear and lawns damaged by tramping feet. Measures taken included the placing of prickly plants at the junctions of paths, to deter visitors from cutting corners and walking on the beds.

But Sibylle and Pam were doing far more than simply maintaining the work done by Vita. Their dedication, flair and skill were rewarded by the Royal Horticultural Society in 1980 when they were made Associates of Honour, and in 2006 they were given the society's highest honour, the Victoria Medal. “I can’t think what we did to deserve it,” Sibylle says now. Others disagree. The designer, plantsman and writer Dan Pearson is among those who give them a large part of the credit for Sissinghurst’s enduring status as an iconic garden:

“When the National Trust took over in 1967, five years after Vita’s death, an inevitable tightening up eventually saw the garden reach extraordinary horticultural heights in the hands of Pam Schwerdt and Sibylle Kreutzberger who worked with Vita from 1959 until she died, but went on to make the garden their own during their 30 year tenure as joint head gardeners. Pam and Sibylle’s prowess with plants was a large part of what brought visitors to Sissinghurst in their droves in the 1970’s and ’80’s, securing its place as one of the most influential gardens in the world.” (Dig Delve, Dan Pearson’s weekly blog.)

Sibylle (left) and Pam in their own Gloucestershire garden

In 1990 Pam and Sibylle left Sissinghurst to buy a home and make a garden of their own, settling near Stow-on-the-Wold in a new wing of a 17th century farmhouse with a three-quarter acre plot that had been a field. Pam died in 2009, and the house and garden were sold to appreciative new owners who welcome visitors under the National Gardens Scheme. Still fit and active at 87, Sibylle now lives in an Oxfordshire retirement village where most of the residents are unaware of her achievements and the high regard in which she’s held in the gardening world. They may, however, see her wielding a spade and fork in the community plot where she grows flowers and herbs.

The current head gardener at Sissinghurst, Troy Scott-Smith, has embarked with the National Trust – and Dan Pearson as consultant - on a project to revitalize (or reVita-lise) the garden from its present formality to something more like Vita’s vision. It is, Dan Pearson writes, “a means of recapturing the potent sense of place that Vita Sackville-West celebrated in her writing … a garden inextricably linked to the buildings it surrounded and, in turn, the Kentish farmland and countryside that swept up to its walls.” Sibylle was invited to an initial meeting, and as she’s the only person to have worked directly with Vita Sackville-West her contribution must have been invaluable. 

When I asked Sibylle what had been most satisfying about her work at Sissinghurst, I expected her to refer to a particularly impressive planting or the opportunity to make her mark on a world-famous garden. Her reply was far simpler:

“I like being outside by myself. And I like digging.”