Lovely Lucca

October 15, 2018, 6:00 pm

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We have just returned from a few days in Lucca, a walled mediaeval city in Tuscany - and my post is due for tomorrow; so it's going to be something of an extended postcard! Looking out today at the wind and rain and banks of cloud, I certainly wish I was there again, enjoying the sunlit squares, the narrow streets, the beautiful city walls...

The narrow streets...

This is taken from on top of the wall - sadly, I don't have one of the wall itself.

 Those walls. Everyone I'd spoken to who'd been to Lucca had said that walking the wall was a must, and they were absolutely right. Lucca was a Roman town - the streets are still laid out in a Roman grid pattern, and it's easy to trace where the forum was, and the amphitheatre (more of that later). It was the Romans who built the wall, and it's testament to their extraordinary engineering skill. It's massive: a steep bank, wide enough on top for a road with a verge on either side, planted now with trees which last week provided welcome shade, though their leaves were starting to flutter down like gleaming copper pennies. There are numerous gates to allow access into the city, and people stroll, cycle and run on top, with the mountains on one side and the towers and domes of the city on the other. It was easy to imagine carriages rolling along, and ladies and gentlemen on horseback, exchanging greetings, making assignations...

San Martino

I'm not someone who's sensitive to ghostly presences. But just as on the wall I could imagine people from the 18th and 19th centuries, in the streets at night, quiet, lit by lamps which cast soft shadows, it was easy to sense the presence of earlier inhabitants: silk and velvet skirts sweeping the paving stones, smiles and laughter, secrets shared, promises made. We went to one museum which really helped to make that older time come to life: called the Palazzo Mansi, it was partly the house of wealthy merchants as it had been and still was, and partly the home of the city's art collection. One of the most extraordinary things there was this ceiling: centuries old, but the colours as fresh and light and clear as if it had been painted yesterday, instead of to celebrate a long-ago wedding. It was so cleverly done that it was really difficult to discern what was really three-dimensional ad what just gave the impression that it was. (A word of warning, though, if you ever go: mysteriously, you can only get into the museum at certain times of day, and it's not easy to spot. As a result, it's very uncrowded!)

I loved the vase of flowers, centre right.

There are of course lots of churches. The cathedral, San Martino, has a number of features which particularly intrigued me. One was this marble statue of Illaria del Caretto, who died in 1405 at the age of 26, after giving birth to her second child. She was the second wife of Paolo Guinigi, the Duke of Lucca - and not the last. This sarcophagus was commissioned by her husband, but she was laid to rest elsewhere, not inside it.

Isn't she lovely?

She's so beautiful, so young. Her husband was later deposed by the people as a tyrant. Quite unfairly, perhaps - apparently the Duke grieved greatly (though that didn't stop him remarrying soon after) - I was reminded of Browning's poem, My Last Duchess, which is an immensely skillful and chilling monologue by the Duke of Ferrara, during which he gradually, 'inadvertently' reveals that he had his wife killed out of jealousy. I gave commands/ Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands/ As if alive.

Another thing was this, which is carved on quite a small stone on the outside of the building. I thought it was a maze, but discovered on looking it up that it's a labyrinth. I was struck by the difference - that with a maze, you try to reach the centre: with a labyrinth, you try to get out. Not sure why that seems significant, but it does. I'd like to know more about the script chiselled into the stone on the right: mediaeval graffiti, or a commentary of some kind by the artist? It's quite difficult to see.

And this picture is specially for Mary Hoffman. She mentioned that she particularly liked the pillars of the churches in Lucca. I hadn't even noticed them, but because of her comment, I looked again, and saw these beautiful, intricate carvings.

There are so many other things I was going to write about, but this post is already quite long enough. So I'll end with a picture which isn't of Lucca at all. It's of Viareggio, where we spent a glorious day on the beach. (Unbelievably, only three days ago...) It's a long time since I saw Death In Venice, but it made me think of the scene at the beginning, where the protagonist first sees the beautiful boy with his family on the beach. Except that it wasn't in Venice, and fortunately, nobody died...

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PETERLOO - a place, a time and a film. By Penny Dolan

October 16, 2018, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Glass Town Wars and the Brontës - Celia Rees

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Some time ago, visiting Manchester for the first time, I “discovered” what seemed an impressive square. An enormous Victorian gothic building dominated the site but, even so, I did wonder why such a large expanse of rain-puddled pavement was – well, there.

 

My A-Z map book gave the name as St Peter’s Square; a small plaque on the wall informed me the area was once an open space known as St Peter’s Field where gatherings and public meetings had traditionally been held.

For a moment, I thought of similar places in London that I knew: Speaker’s Corner at Hyde Park, and a green space out at Hampstead and, opposite Wood Green Tube Station, Spouters Corner, a patch of tarmac where, at weekends,  speakers stood with their placards, promoting vegetarianism, the rights of workers or eastern philosophy, often accompanied by the Salvation Army band, preacher and rattling tins. Occasionally, if one was lucky, there might be a man with novelties in a suitcase, or a three-cup trickster or a half-naked escapologist . . .

However, I was now standing in Manchester, staring at a rather jokey-sounding word for the first time: Peterloo. Remembering, I feel ashamed of my  ignorance then because the incident was not amusing at all. Peterloo was a vicious attack on a public gathering of our own people on that very site. 

             

 

The year was 1819.  The date was the 16^th August. The sky was blue, the sun was shining and a large crowd of Manchester’s working people, dressed in their respectable Sunday best, had gathered in St Peter’s Field.  

It was an uncertain time, Although Napoleon was now defeated, the early nineteenth century so far had been a period of worrying unrest. In 1813, a few years before, the British Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, had been assassinated. The new manufactories had problems with machine-breakers, and the restrictive Corn Laws had brought widespread poverty, hardship and famine across the land.

The people wanted their grievances heard and they wanted representation, but for many the question was “How?” Parliament no longer reflected the distribution of the increased population and was mired in the scandal of the “Rotten Boroughs”, a situation where even men wealthy enough to have a vote had no Member of Parliament to represent their wishes.

The North suffered badly under this system. For example, the whole county of Lancashire, with its growing industrial towns and increased number of inhabitants, had only two MPs. At the other extreme, the one, single enfranchised voter living in the small, now-decayed borough of Old Sarum could elect two whole MPS’s to represent his views. Many felt this as a growing injustice.

All of this was why, on that sunny day in August, a mix of grievances and curiosity brought people from all around Manchester to St Peter’s Field. They wanted to hear the words of a well-known Radical orator, Henry Hunt, who the members of the Manchester Patriotic Union Society had invited to speak on the topic of parliamentary reform.

The local magistrates, wary of Hunt and what might become an unruly mob,, had arranged for soldiers to be in town. Clearly they wanted to be very sure there would be no civil unrest:  they had called up 4 squadrons (600 men) of the 15^th Hussars; several hundred Infantry; the Cheshire Yeoman Cavalry; a detachment of the Royal Horse Artillery, two six-pounder guns, the Manchester Yeoman and six hundred special constables.

William Hulton, the Chief Magistrate and others watched St Peters Field from the window of a nearby house. Although there was no trouble at all, the crowd kept growing. Finally, when Hulton estimated there were 50,000 attending, he sent his local officials and 400 special constables into the moving crowd to clear a wide path through to where Hunt would be speaking and then sent in soldiers to arrest Hunt. The inevitable happened: faced by a hostile, uncertain, milling crowd, the cavalry galloped in with raised sabres, attacking people as they tried to escape the onslaught. By the end of the day, eleven people were killed, including a baby-in-arms, around five hundred men and women were injured and maybe more who would not seek public aid for injuries for fear of further trouble.

As reports of the St Peter’s Field’s massacre spread, many radical thinkers wrote letters and articles condemning the slaughter and questioning the actions of the Magistrates and the military. It was during this furore that the name “Peterloo” was given to this incident: a mocking, bitterly satirical reference to the victorious cavalry charges during the Battle of Waterloo three years before.

However, constantly afraid of real civic revolution, the Government backed the actions of the Magistrates and cracked down on anyone involved in such groups. Soon, under Lord Liverpool, Parliament imposed what became known as the Six Acts.

As a result of these new laws:

-         training in arms and drilling was forbidden

-         the seizure of any arms was authorised

-         prosecutions were simplified

-         seditious assemblies were forbidden

-         blasphemous libels were punished

-         presses were restricted in what they could publish.

And so the battle for representation and suffrage continued, well into the twentieth century.

Peterloo, it seems to me, was an act of hope but it was not the victory that the people hoped for, not then. Yet it was not an insignificant event and, as I write this post, there are aspects of this story that feel far too relevant. (Even at a simple level, was one of those acts why the British people do not normally carry guns?)

This brings another question into my head. As my Manchester introduction demonstrated, “Peterloo” was not an event I had ever been taught about. My own, long-ago Social and Economic History course swept over this specific people’s gathering, losing it among tales of come-by-night Luddites, the machinery of Industrial Revolution and the various Factory Acts.

Puzzled, I asked friends with children at secondary school right now about this matter – thank you! -  but I am still not sure of the result.

Peterloois not, I think,  specifically included within National Curriculum Key Stage Three History topics (ie in lower secondary school classes, when history is compulsory). And then, post-Options, Peterloo may well depend on exam boards & teachers including the incident within their own particular syllabus. Is it ever raised in schools in a significant way now? If so do let me know.

It surely should and will, because Peterloo is about to be better known. Next year - 2019 - is the two hundredth anniversary of the massacre, so there should be plenty of commemorative events and media attention, particularly from the Guardian newspaper whose roots lie in that same radical Manchester ground. And, before that, on 3^rd November 2018, something else is happening too. 

The film-maker Mike Leigh will be releasing his long-awaited project:

 “PETERLOO”

Although the History Girls blog is about historical fiction, especially novels, I really needed to mention the film here.Why? Just so people will know it is out there.

The great big Christmas circus of films about to descend on multiplexes everywhere with Winter season blockbusters filling every screen from Fireworks Night through to New Year, so you may need to look very hard to find the far-less-festive bread of "Peterloo".

I suspect it is the kind of film that may well appear fleetingly, at “selected screens only” and am not sure how the general distribution will work out. There’s no evidence – yet - of Mike Leigh's film appearing at my local Odeon, but I have spotted that"Peterloo" is scheduled for a single noonday showing on Saturday 3^rd November at City Screen York. 

So, if you want to see Peterloo, and the interpretation that Mike Leigh brings to his film, start studying your arts cinema venues now. Here's the trailer:

After the event, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had been in Italy at the time, wrote his famous poem The Masque of Anarchy, which includes these lines, and unknowingly, a by-line for the film:

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number.

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you -

Ye are many – they are few.

Penny Dolan

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E

twitter@pennydolan1.

Glass Town Wars and the Brontës - Celia Rees

October 17, 2018, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: The Rich American, the Travelling Captain and a Phallic Quest By L.J. Trafford

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I've got a new book coming out on November 1st.

With any luck, I'll be asked to talk about it and will have to answer that most commonly asked of  questions: 'Where do your ideas come from?': I've been trying to remember. When was that first seed planted? What other ideas, experiences, added to it? Nourished it? Allowed it to grow out of and over all the other ideas that never got as far as becoming a book? 

I think I've found the 'first cause'. In the 1990s, I worked part time at a Further Education College in Coventry to supplement my meagre earnings from writing. I was teaching Wuthering Heights to a group of Malaysian students and as part of the course we went on a trip to The Brontë Parsonage and Museum in Haworth. I'd never been before and I was as excited as any of the students. I love visiting writers' houses and have written about it here before. Indeed, that post details some of the fascinating things owned by the Brontës and on display at the Parsonage, but that post was based on a much later visit. What intrigued me most that first time was the tiny little books that the Brontë siblings had written as children. 

In those days, you could buy facsimilies of the miniature books. I remember buying two of them but, of course, when I really wanted them, needed them, I couldn't find them anywhere. They elude me to this day. The little books contain the writing that they did as children and adolescents about the imaginary world that they created and peopled.  The world that they called Glass Town. 

A few years later, I was in Yorkshire again, visiting The Salts Mill Museum, outside Halifax, not  far from Haworth, There was a street market and on one of the stalls was a porcelain figure of a soldier, a Rifleman in a green uniform.

I can't really say why I was attracted to him, maybe I remembered something about Branwell Brontë being given a set of toy soldiers and that being the starting point for the stories the Brontë children began to make up, but I don't think it was anything as conscious as that. Maybe I just liked him and thought there was a story in him somewhere. Whatever the reason, I bought him and took him home and he lived on the shelf in my study while I got on with writing other things.

Charney Manor

Years later, I was at a Scattered Authors' Retreat at Charney Manor in Oxfordshire. Different people were discussing ideas for books and stories. Some History Girls, past and present, may have been there. One person described something she'd been thinking about for a book about the Brontēs. I remember thinking, I wouldn't do it like that. Time travel but not back to the Brontës in their Parsonage in Haworth but pitched into their fantasy world and it would be a boy, not a girl making this journey. But how? Why? What could happen next? I didn't have those answers yet. A few more years went by and I found the idea again, or it found me. Another retreat at Charney and I wanted to start something new. I remembered the Brontë idea and thought I might work on that while I was there, so I bought Christine Alexander's: The Brontës: Tales of Glass Town, Angria and Gondal to take with me.

One of the traditions at Charney is the Three Minute Read, when writers read from their work in progress. The proof of the writing is in the reading. The piece I wrote is now in Glass Town Wars, substantially unchanged. It gave me the How? and the Why? Boy in a coma.  Let's call him Tom. Best friend is a computer whizz (let's call him Milo) with the ultimate virtual gaming gizmo, a small, thin sheet of graphene small enough to fit in the ear. It allows you to actually live in the game. Only problem is, it's experimental. No-one knows where you'll be going, no-one knows how you'll get back...  

I knew where Tom would go. I knew he would go there as a soldier, a Rifleman in a green uniform, I knew he would meet Emily Brontë, or her persona in the Brontës fantasy world, but what would happen then? That was going to be the hard bit...

(To be continued...)

Glass Town Wars by Celia Rees is published by Pushkin Press, 1st November, 2018 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Rich American, the Travelling Captain and a Phallic Quest By L.J. Trafford

October 18, 2018, 4:01 pm

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It hangs in a glass case in dimmed lighting: a small phallus carved in white with wings

made from bronze.
The label informs me it comes from Pompeii and that such items were symbols of fertility and strength. I could easily churn out 2,000 words on the subject of phallic imagery and objects in ancient Rome. There’s a lot of them. But that’s not what I’m writing about this month. For my second thought after, “Wow that’s beautiful." Was “I wonder how it got here?”


I found I couldn’t shake that thought. Just how did a tiny phallic amulet from the lost city of Pompeii end up in a gallery on London’s Euston Road? I suspected there might be a story there.
I was right. It is quite a story. One involving an eccentric American millionaire, a dashing ex naval captain with a love of fast cars & hobnobbing with grandees, and a quite extraordinary collection.



The American

Henry Wellcome courtesy of the Wellcome Collection.

If there is a better example of the self made man than Henry Wellcome I've yet to find it. He began life in a wood cabin in the slowly forming United States of America, the son of a travelling preacher.
This was proper frontier country. Aged eight Henry's home town was attacked by the Sioux. The young boy assisted his uncle in caring for the wounded.

Aged 15 he created and marketed his own version of Invisible Ink. Aged 19 we find him at the Chicago School of Pharmacy. A promising and developing career as a salesman for a drug company was interrupted when his friend Silas Burroughs suggested Wellcome follow him to London. Burroughs had in mind a British pharmaceutical company, but run with American panache, drive and most importantly American style marketing.
Henry took the leap to London and in 1880 Burroughs, Wellcome and Co was founded.

To say Burroughs, Wellcome and Co was successful is a gross understatement.
Burrough’s sudden and untimely death in 1895 left Wellcome as sole proprietor and enormously wealthy. What to do with all this money piling up?

Well there was partying for a start.

Henry Wellcome in fancy dress. Courtesy of The Wellcome Collection

 


There was travel. 

Wellcome in Sudan. Courtesy of the Wellcome Collection

And then there was collecting.

Wellcome had a dream, a grand ambition with his collecting. It was to;

“Trace the history of the human body in sickness and in health throughout the whole broad sweep of history.”

He intended to create a museum called the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum (and succeeded, the WHMM opened in 1913) and set about acquiring the objects that would articulate this aim.

Gentleman collectors in the Victorian era were ten a half penny but the way Wellcome went about collecting was something entirely different: it was industrial.
Partly this was born of his innate curiosity. Partly his American drive that had taken him from a wood cabin in frontier country to a multi-millionaire living within the fashionable London set. But mostly it was driven by the huge resources he had at his disposal.

Reading about Wellcome’s collection is jaw dropping and ultimately a little dispiriting. How was I to find a record of my little phallus in this lot? To give you some idea of just how much Wellcome collected you need only know that they measured it by the ton.

There was 3 and a half tons of swords, five tons of photograph albums, 2 and half tons of guns and cannons and shields.
There were 110 cases of Graeco-Roman objects.
In all a million plus objects made up Wellcome’s collection. Somewhere in this million was my little phallus.

Though Henry Wellcome travelled extensively seeking objects for his museum (Much to the disgust of his wife Syrie “Ever since our marriage, the greater part of our time has been spent in places I detested collecting curios” - they later divorced) he did not take sole responsibility for acquiring objects for his museum. He did have a company to run after all, but also because he recognised that his presence at auctions was likely to push the price up of his desired object. To overcome this he was known to effect disguises, as he told a friend:

 “I usually put on very plain clothes. A top hat usually excites the cupidity of the dealer and the higher the hat the higher the price."

Alongside his own undercover missions he also employed a team of agents to travel the globe to find suitable objects for his museum. A bit of internet research brought me to one Captain Johnston Saint, one of Wellcome’s agents who undertook a tour of Europe on behalf of Wellcome. I wondered if he might be the man who purchased my little white phallus. I wondered how I might find out whether he was.


The Captain

Peter Johnston Saint. Courtesy of The Wellcome Collection

Peter Johnston Saint was born in 1886. He had served in both the Royal Flying Corp and the Indian Army. Well connected, (one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters was a childhood friend), he adored socialising, travel and fast cars.
He joined the, now named, Wellcome Institute in 1921 and had soon impressed Henry Wellcome. Within a very short time he was given the title of Foreign Secretary. The sole purpose of this role was to travel and buy up objects suitable for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. It was a job Johnston Saint was well suited to involving, as it did, much hobnobbing with Ambassadors, Cardinals, Directors of key museums and other such notables.
A friendly member of staff at the Wellcome Collection (thank you Ross!) pointed me towards the papers they hold on Peter Johnston Saint. There were letters to Henry Wellcome, reports on his activities as Foreign Secretary and (joy!) his travels diaries.
Somewhere in these diaries I might find my little white phallus. Hoping he had decent handwriting I began to read about Johnston Saint's trip to Italy.


Johnston Saint began his Italian quest on Saturday 19th January 1930:

“Arrived in Rome 8pm. Found thick snow here also, which I am told, is almost unheard of"

His diary is an interesting insight into how objects were sourced and brought for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum. Some of the work involves making contact with the right people. Such as on Monday 21st January when Johnston Saint meets with Cardinale Gasquet, the Prefect of the Vatican archives. The Cardinal is presented with a gift:

“The Cardinal was very interested in the research studies and medical history which we sent them through the foreign office and he says he has placed these at the Vatican library on behalf of the Duce (Mussolini).”

Johnston Saint also meets with the Ambassador and secures a letter of introduction to the Heads of Italian Museums. But alongside hobnobbing with Directors, Ambassadors and Cardinals, Johnston Saint spends a great deal of time browsing through the small shops of Rome:

“In a shop near Forum Romano I found some very interesting objects. Several very interesting Roman large surgical instruments…. A Greek pornographic vase in terra cotta in perfect condition…. A small bronze amphora and a Roman votive foot in bronze. Also a very curious object which may be an amulet or perhaps a form of pomander.

I purchased all the objects above for £21. The pornographic vase being worth half this sum.

I then visited the shop where I saw this collection of 99 phallic objects.”

I thought for a moment that within those 99 phallic objects might be my phallus but as Johnston Saint drily records:

 “The price asked is a very high one and I do not think the collection worth it”

He did not purchase them.

But later that same day he is to be found in further small establishments:

 “At another a shop I found a fine Roman lancet, a bronze stigel with unusual form of handle – a weight decorated pornographic subject and a Roman bronze probe. Price £4.”

To put this in some context the average annual wage in 1930 was £200 per year. Johnston Saint spent £25 in a single day and this compared to some days was a low amount. Later this same week he spends £64 on a single drawing. Henry Wellcome's pocket was swimming pool sized, however, as we have seen Johnston Saint is very much using his own judgement on artefacts. Several he rejects as inadequate or over priced but not:

"A huge terracotta Priapus from Pompeii"

Which he snaps up. Priapus is the Roman God of Fertility and is usually represented with a grossly oversized erect penis.

A Priapus from Pompeii. Not the one JS purchased. Attributed to Aaron Wolpert

It's not all buy, buy, buy though. Johnston Saint takes the time to visit the sites. A trip to the Vatican Library on Friday 25th January impresses him much:

 “This marvellous collection particularly rich in manuscripts,.. And housed in the most luxurious surroundings. What impressed me most was the excellent state of all the books and manuscripts... although the library consists of some 300,000 books there was sufficient room for 4 times that number”

The baths of Caracalla have him recording wistfully:

 “Their magnificence, their luxury and their marvellous efficiency are only one of the many wonders of ancient Rome.”

 Writing Roman based Historical Fiction I have visited Rome numerous times for research and I found it quite fascinating to read Johnston Saint describing the exact same sites I have visited only eighty years before.

What I found really special was his description of a day trip to the nearby Lake Nemi on Sunday 27th January

“I was anxious to see the Largo di Nemi, the Lake in the Alban hills which the Italian government are draining in order to recover the two Roman galleys which were sunk there in the time of Caligula. The level of the water in the lake has already been reduced by ten feet,exposing the small Roman habour….. The bad weather and the recent heavy falls of snow have more of less held up the work for the present.

..... I think when these galleys are recovered we might be able to get hold of something. At this moment it is not possible to do anything nor there anything to be found.”

Bad weather might have prevented the work that day but work did continue and these massive ships were eventually exposed.

The now lost pleasure barge of Caligula. Look at the man to the left to see the huge awesome scale of this boat.

Sadly they were destroyed during the second world war. All that is left of them is a few artefacts recovered and displayed in Rome’s National Museum and photographs that show the epic scale of these ships. They were truly awe inspiring and to think that Peter Johnston Saint was so close to seeing these epic pleasure barges revealed from the water!








On Tuesday 29th January Johnston Saint reveals that he is leaving for Naples. Would he visit Pompeii? Would he stumble across a certain small white phallus, and hopefully write down that he did? Or did the phallus not come from Pompeii at all? Was it maybe discovered in one of those small shops by the Forum selling phallic objects by the hundreds?
There was only one way to find out. I kept reading.....


Those letters of introduction obtained from the Ambassador come in handy now as they gain him access to the Director of the Naples Archaeological Museum and a very famous cabinet:

“I also inspected the Pornographic Cabinets which is ordinarily closed. Here they have many friezes and stuccos found in various houses in Pompeii - a collection of lamps, phallic objects.”

The Pornographic Cabinet of Naples Museum was where some of the most extreme (to Western eyes of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries) were housed. It contained, as Johnston Saint mentions, many phallic objects and imagery. As well as a truly stupendous statue of the God Pan having it away with a goat.

From Naples Museum's famous cabinet. Photo attributed Kim Traynor.

It’s probably worth me pointing out, if you hadn’t already gathered, that Wellcome was very much interested in acquiring erotic/sexual material. The Wellcome Historical Medical Museum contained 300 sexually themed Roman objects. They were very much in keeping with his ambition of a museum dedicated to human kind and biology.

Dr Jen Grove of Exeter University has written a very thorough account of the collecting of sexually themed materials in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is what she has to say about Wellcome’s collection:

“In the large, richly bound accession registers which the museum used to record acquisitions, a member of Wellcome’s staff entered the term 'PHA' next to each of these items. This stood for 'Phallic Worship' and this label would also be given, almost uniformly, to each of the hundreds of objects featuring phallic and other sexual imagery in Wellcome’s collection from across world history. This tells us that Wellcome was interested in an anthropological theory, first developed in the Enlightenment period, which looked for the origins of religion in the worship of procreation. “

He also collected images and objects outside of this sex/religion theme including materials dealing with the pleasure aspect of intercourse:

“Objects which seem to indicate an interest in sexual pleasure for its own sake include a collection of historical and cross-cultural sex aids.”

This was why Johnston Saint was dutifully examining and purchasing statues of Priapus and other phallic related materials. Although Johnston Saint cannot purchase anything from the pornographic cabinet he does buy an extensive range of photographs of the objects it contains.

One of Peter Johnston Saint's photographs from his 1930 trip to Rome. Image courtesy of Wellcome Collection

The next day on Thursday 31st January Johnston Saint is given a tour of Herculaneum. His mood is greatly different from the interest and excitement at securing his photographs from Pompeii. To see the theatre at Herculaneum he had to walk down through 60 feet of lava (this is still the case today).

“One proceeds down a tunnel to the excavated portion and it is here that one can realise to some degree what a tremendous catastrophe the eruption of 79AD was.”

He is deeply moved by what he sees. One description he gives is particularly poignant and evocative:

“In one of the bedrooms on the first floor I saw a lamp, a glass bottle, and other objects including the marble table on which these things stood exactly as they were in AD 79”

That afternoon after his tour of Herculaneum he’s taken to see a local Hotel Proprietor. The hotelier's estate borders the Pompeii site and he has excavated his own grounds and found some objects he wishes to show off (and sell).   The hotelier had the permission of the Italian Government to offer these objects for sale, but with 50% of the receipts going back to the government. A fact that does not please Johnston Saint, as he notes;

 “So naturally there were no great bargains to be picked up.”

However what the hotelier shows him is so impressive that he cannot hold back the bucks:

“I brought some interesting objects. The following are the details. Excavated at Pompeii 1927. A Roman bronze lancet, a bronze probe on spatula handle decorated, a fine pair of tweezers in bronze and two surgical needles both fine in bronze. Then a terra cotta figure of a woman which is very interesting anatomically”

Also he buys a votive leg and foot. And records one final item of purchase:

”A marble phallus about 4 inches long with bronze wings, a chain and ring for suspending – perfect -used against the evil eye.”

A marble phallus you say? 4 inches long? Bronze wings? And a chain for suspending?
A bit like this one then?

Miraculously I had found it! I had found my phallus! It had been excavated in 1927 by the proprietor of a hotel that stood on the Porta Marina gate into Pompeii. He met Peter Johnston Saint on Thursday 31st January 1930 and showed him his collection of artefacts. Johston Saint purchased several of these objects on behalf of Henry Wellcome, including the phallus.
And that folks, is how my little white phallus ended up in a gallery in London’s Euston Road!



Epilogue


For some reason I feel this piece needs an epilogue. So here it is.

Henry Wellcome and Peter Johnston Saint Courtesy of The Wellcome Collection

Henry Wellcome died in 1936. He left quite a legacy. Not just for his vast collection of curios (of which a very small slice can be viewed today in London’s Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection which stands on Euston Road) but also for science. His will set up a charity named The Wellcome Trust. He wanted the profits from his business to advance medical science.

The company Henry founded with Silas Burroughs went through several incarnations (including Glaxo Wellcome) before it was finally sold off and GlaxoSmithKline one of the largest pharma companies on the planet was formed. The money from this sale was ploughed into the charitable Wellcome Trust. Today the Wellcome Trust has assets worth £20 billion and in 2017 spent £1.1 billion advancing medical science.

And as for that small marble phallus? Well 700,000 people visit the Wellcome Collection each year and let’s assume absolutely all of them stare at that little white phallus and think firstly “Wow” and then secondly “I wonder how it got here?"


Further Reading

I'd highly recommend Frances Larson's "An Infinity of Things: How Henry Wellcome collected the World." if you are at all interested in Henry Wellcome and his mania for collecting. This book gave me much of the material for this article.
Special thanks also to Dr Jen Grove and Ross Macfarlane for their assistance.



L.J. Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors Series set in ancient Rome. She also runs the hashtag #phallusthursday on Twitter, which examines the use of  phallic imagery in ancient art and has a bit of a puerile snigger about it all. 

The Meon Valley Railway - friendly, pleasurable, beautiful by Carolyn Hughes

October 19, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Last month’s blog looked at the literary and historical associations of the route along which the Meon Valley Railway once ran, many of which associations referred to people and times well before the railway actually existed. This month, I am going to relate a little more about the railway itself, and the purposes it served during its brief half-century lifespan.

Route of the MVR, adapted from the map in R.A. Stone’s book,  The Meon Valley Railway, 1983, Kingfisher Railway Productions.

Agriculture and horticulture

As might be expected in such an agricultural region, a good deal of non-passenger traffic for the Meon Valley Railway (MVR) came from shipping farm produce. In this part of Hampshire, the produce included watercress, fruit (especially strawberries and apples), milk and cattle. The London & South Western Railway (LSWR) put on special market-day trains, with both passenger carriages and livestock cars, that allowed farmers to accompany their livestock. There were local “pick-up/set-down” goods services all along the line, which called at every station to deliver and pick up any waiting goods.

Watercress has been grown in Hampshire for centuries. The area’s geology, with its chalky downlands, cut by clear chalk streams, provides perfect growing conditions. Apparently, in the 1800s, working people often ate watercress sandwiches, collecting the wild leaves themselves from rivers and streams. Watercress had a reputation as a panacea for everything from lethargy to baldness, scurvy and even freckles. Its popularity led to watercress farms being established throughout Hampshire. It was grown in gravel beds over which ran a constant flow of water from the mineral-rich springs fed by rainwater leaching through the chalk.

The commercial viability of Hampshire watercress received a boost in 1865, when a new railway line was opened between Alton and Winchester, connecting at each end with the existing LSWR line. The new railway was called the Mid-Hants Railway, although in time it became known as the Watercress Line, because it transported so much Hampshire watercressto London’s Covent Garden Market. One of the line’s principal stations was at Alresford, which was essentially the “watercress capital” of Hampshire. But watercress was also grown in the Meon Valley, at Warnford – in beds that are still actively producing watercress – and, when the MVR was built, it connected with the Mid-Hants railway at Alton, providing a fast route to London for the Meon Valley watercress growers. The Watercress Line is now a heritage railway.

Watercress beds at Warnford Photo © Tony Grant / cc-by-sa 2.0

The lower half of the MVR line ran through an extensive market gardening area. Strawberry growing was a very important industry for the area during the late 1800s to mid 1900s. An area just north of the Solent, around Titchfield and Fareham, bounded by the rivers Meon and Hamble, proved ideal for strawberry growing, the rather poor stony soil suiting the shallow-rooted plants, and a warm prevailing wind from the Solent reducing the risk of frost in the critical flowering weeks. In 1889, a LSWR station was built at Swanwick, a little to the north-west of Titchfield, specially to serve the local strawberry industry. In the late 1800s, the area produced as many as 7,000 tons of strawberries each year. During the weeks of the strawberry harvest, Swanwick station became one of the busiest stations on the south coast with the box vans of the “strawberry special” trains heading off to Covent Garden and across the country. But, while Swanwick was perhaps the focal point for the transport of strawberries, “strawberry specials” were also run on the MVR, with whole trains of strawberries being loaded at Mislingford and Wickham.

In the mid 1800s, the owner of the manor of Wickham, which included an area of the Bere Forest, built a settlement of houses for his forestry tenants, each house having an acre of land, at a place that was then, and still is, called Hundred Acres. The tenants found that the area was very suitable for growing fruit, and in particular for the production of early strawberries, and a few years later strawberries began to be grown there commercially. Initially the fruit was taken to Fareham station, six miles away, for onward transport to the London market and elsewhere. But the viability of the enterprise improved even further when the MVR was opened with a station at Wickham, only two miles from Hundred Acres.

It was in the 1960s that competition from imported fruit began to drive many producers out of business, and by the 1980s strawberry-growing as an industry in Hampshire was essentially over.

Strawberry fields in Hampshire Photo © Enttauscht (cc-by-sa/2.0)

In the early days of the railway, all the MVR stations would have seen farmers bringing their milk in churns by horse and cart for despatch to the dairy at Portsea Island, in special milk vans attached to the normal passenger services. Livestock too travelled frequently on the line, to and from markets at Alton and Fareham. West Meon station was apparently the scene of the livestock of entire farms arriving by rail from such far away places as Cumberland and Northumberland, the farmers having hired special trains for the purpose. This must have been quite a sight!

Wartime use

With each outbreak of the two world wars, for the MVR, as for most railways, traffic increased, with the passage of troop trains bound for the docks and France. A box van was added to all MVR trains to cater for extra parcels and troops’ luggage.

In 1940, the MVR line received some attention from the German bombers. Droxford Station was hit and two railway workers' cottages were demolished. Bombs were dropped either side of the line at Soberton although they missed the track, but West Meon tunnel was also targeted and a stretch of track was damaged. Apparently, desperate telephone calls were made after this attack, in an attempt to stop the train coming down the line from Alton, and what might have been a serious accident was avoided. 

However, the MVR did have an important role in the Second World War. During the build-up to D-Day, men and equipment had to be moved to the south of England, and large numbers of tanks were moved by rail to Mislingford  goods yard, from where they were then dispersed to local lanes and fields for temporary storage. Mislingford was also the site of a temporary wooden platform to serve the large number of Canadian troops who were encamped in the Forest of Bere.

The remains of the Mislingford goods yard. Public domain.

I have mentioned this before, in a previous History Girls post, but I will repeat a little anecdote about Mislingford. The old loading gauge at Mislingford still stands (if nowadays much hidden by vegetation) on what is now the Meon Valley Railway trail (which follows the old railway from West Meon to Wickham), so you can pass by it as you walk the trail. I’m not really a particularly mystical person, but I have occasionally sensed a “something” at this spot… The ghosts perhaps of those D-Day soldiers disembarking from the trains? The clanking of those tanks being unloaded from the trains? There is actually a timber yard close by, so maybe it has only ever been the rumble of machinery and the sound of workmen’s voices that I’ve heard…? Or maybe not…

But the railway’s most famous wartime role came in June 1944, when the War Cabinet met Allied leaders in a special train parked at a heavily guarded Droxford station. When the train arrived, in it were just the British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, and the prime minister of South Africa, General Jan Smuts. Next day they were joined by Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, and Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, who arrived by car. And, the following day, the prime ministers of Canada, New Zealand, and Rhodesia came too, and Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, drove across from his nearby base at Southwick House. They were there to discuss the D-Day invasion.

Although the meeting was officially kept secret from Droxford residents, it seems that Churchill had chosen the station because it was near the coast and to the Allied command centre at Southwick. But there was also some speculation that the site was thought particularly secure because the train could be largely hidden by overshadowing beech trees, and there was a deep cutting into which it could be shunted if it came under attack.

Anyway, in the evening of the final day of their meeting, the 5th June, Churchill’s train pulled out of Droxford station and returned to London. And, shortly after midnight the following morning, Allied troops attacked Pegasus Bridge and, soon thereafter, the American airborne landings in Normandy began.

Droxford Railway Station in 1968 By Lamberhurst [cc-by-sa/4.0] from Wikimedia Commons

Decline and death of the railway

With all the early excitement and anticipation of what the MVR might bring to the region, and despite its obvious value to the local agricultural and horticultural community, the line never fulfilled its initial promise.

As early as the years following the First World War, there seemed to be little or no demand for passenger traffic. The hoped-for London through-traffic never materialised, and after only a few years the London to Gosport services were cut back. During the summer months, Sunday excursion trains to the sea ran down the line, originating from Ascot and Farnham, but, without sufficient normal, daily passenger traffic, the line never really prospered, becoming only a rural branch line and a Hampshire railway backwater. The tourist traffic to the resort area of Stokes Bay (near Gosport) also failed to grow, with steamers preferring the more established ports at Portsmouth and Southampton. From then on the MVR only handled regular traffic between Fareham and Alton, and it wasn’t long before it became clear that there was no need for a frequent train service. Cutbacks were already being made by 1922.

It does seem that insufficient effort was made to promote the railway's services, with cheap fares, convenient schedules and more publicity. But, as early as the 1920s, there was also increasing competition from road traffic, with more and more commercial vehicles making serious inroads into railway revenue by competing for the carriage of goods. This applied to all railways, not just the MVR: rail passenger travel, as well as freight traffic, declined everywhere. And all railways began to make cuts.

Yet there did remain a demand for the MVR from local farmers: sometime in the 1920s, the parishes of Corhampton and Meonstoke asked LSWR to provide a halt in Meonstoke to “assist the local farmers in the transport of milk etc to the towns”. The potential site of such a siding was marked by a short piece of rail set into the ground, but the siding was never built. However, though the section of rail remained in place until 1960, when it was discovered by a farmer cutting hay, and damaged his machinery. The rail was then presumably pulled up!

But the MVR was an early candidate for closure and, in 1955, passenger traffic was withdrawn completely and freight traffic reduced. Local people protested, but to no avail. However, when the National Farmers Union made a strong objection to the closure on the grounds that the line was much used during the busy sugar beet season, an enquiry was at least launched into their case. But the closure proceeded nonetheless.

And so, in February 1955, a mere 52 years after the MVR had opened, the Hampshire Chronicle reported its final day:

“On Saturday last, February 5th, the Meon Valley Railway closed, and the last public trains left Alton to travel “down” at 4.30pm and Fareham to do the “up” journey at 7.46pm.”

Passenger numbers rocketed in the final weeks of operation, as people took their final ride on the railway. That very last train was apparently full of people, many of them, the paper asserted, people who often “attended the last rites of dying railways”. Many local people also watched the train’s final journey from the fields beside the track and from the stations’ platforms.

This MVR closure was long before the “Beeching Axe” of the 1960s, when many well-used yet still “uneconomic” railways were closed. Although goods services did continue for a few more years on the MVR, with a once-a-day service from Fareham as far as Droxford, and a similar service from Alton as far as Farringdon, by 1968 both services had ended.

There does seem little doubt that, when the Meon Valley Railway was closed to passenger traffic, it had been shown quite clearly to be unsustainable as a passenger railway. Yet it was nonetheless held in some affection.

When, on 5th February, that final train arrived back at Alton station, the Hampshire Chronicle reported that:

“…the final obsequies are observed. The Meon Valley Railway – friendly, pleasurable, beautiful – had come to its end.” 

Trackbed of the Meon Valley Railway, Chawton, Hampshire, looking towards the south. Next stop along this line would have been the halt at Farringdon. cc-by-sa/2.0 © Peter Trimming /geograph.org.uk/p/1417985

For detailed information about the old railway in the Meon Valley, see The Meon Valley Railway by R.A. Stone, 1983, Kingfisher Railway Productions.

Historical Fiction and Historical Fantasy: A Question of Genres by Catherine Hokin

October 21, 2018, 10:00 pm

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This is a slightly different blog this month, a picking-all-your-brains exercise if you will. I've been asked to be the historical fiction voice in a discussion about the differences/overlaps and, who knows, clashing points between historical fiction and historical fantasy and I'd love your help. Actually I'm desperate.

Tom Gauld, The New Yorker 2016

Trying to get an historical novelist to pinpoint  the bit of this widespread genre we all write in can feel a bit like a trip to the pick and mix counter. As authors we want to sell our books so the temptation is to try and slot our work into as many sectors as possible - it's historical yes, but it's also got a crime and a bit of a romance and it's got these great sweeping themes of loss and guilt and... Booksellers and publishers also want to sell books (not necessarily the same ones as us but that's a different post). They, however, take the opposite approach, and want neat pigeonholes which signpost readers in a clear direction. To keep them happy, your historical crime-busting romance needs to pick one category and stay there.

The point is that the genre historical fiction covers, and doesn't cover (bear with me) a lot of ground. Obviously the story has to be set in the past but even that is open to interpretation - the period has to be fifty years ago or more according to the Historical Writers' Association but only thirty for the Historical Novel Society. However, even if a novel fits that criteria, it may not be counted as historical. Joanna Cannon'sThe Trouble With Goats and Sheep is set in the 1970s and therefore, by the HNS definition, is an historical novel. It wasn't marketed that way but to anyone under 35 it's evocation of the period would surely feel that way. So perhaps it's a question of perspective, or life lived. Author Emma Darwin has talked about a period passing out of adult living memory for it to be counted as historical. She also suggests we consider historical novels as being a marker of historical change, not in the sense of  there being different "haircuts and menus" but "hearts and minds." There is also the question of what "counts" in our examining of the past. For some commentators, historical novels must deal with real events and real people, with all the problems of privilege this brings. For others it is the previously unheard voices that need to be brought to light. 

The Daily Snooze

Add up all that and then throw the word literary into the mix and the whole thing gets even more complicated - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall was definitely historical but also, according to those who decide such things, definitely literary. A category Philippa Gregory's The Other Boleyn Girl, which was a huge commercial hit, would never find itself slotted into. And should we even care?

So, if defining historical fiction is complicated, what about historical fantasy? The accepted definition (yes, Wikipedia but I also asked some people who know) is the addition to an historically-based (and Earth-based) story of an element which comes from outside reality - vampires, werewolves, dragons and magic, that kind of thing. All very straightforward: something like Jane Eyre and Zombies is an obvious fit, as is Game of Thrones (let's not even talk about the people who don't believe that statement). But what about Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell? Or stories that cross into Arthurian myths or Celtic legends and relate them to actual events? Where do the boundaries start to blur? What about time-slip novels? Or novels set in a period when things we can now explain through science were considered as witchcraft or magic? If a medieval character firmly believes an illness or misfortune was caused by a demon and the novel follows this line of thought through, is that historical fantasy or historical realism? What about if your preacher sees angels? Or your healer sees ghosts? And where oh where do we put Lincoln in the Bardo? Real events, real people, contemporary texts quoted - and a whole cast of ghosts. Is that where we throw in the towel and just call it literary?

Readers, my head is exploding which I think puts me firmly into the fantasy genre. While I go off and harness a dragon, please send me your thoughts.

Voices Unearthed: Diane Purkiss's 'English Civil War.' Leslie Wilson

October 22, 2018, 5:30 pm

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  In my childhood, I went to historical novels if I wanted to find out about the lives of ordinary people: even Trevelyan's 'Social History of England,' which my father gave me when I was a young teenager, was rather too general in its narrative. I always wanted to get an idea of what life was like for ordinary people, not just for the generals, the nobles, or the King. Above all, I was interested in the lives of women. When I first started to write historical fiction, very few historians seemed interested in women's lives; they were peripheral to the main action.When I started to write about Nazi Germany, I did begin to get access to these, through diaries and journals and also covert reports from Social Democrats on life inside the Third Reich. But the lives of women in earlier times, when women were largely illiterate, were much harder to come at (though Alice Clark's The Working Life of Seventeenth Century Women was an invaluable resource.)

But here is a work of history, written by a distinguished scholar, as fascinating as any novel. Of late years, I've noticed that historians are beginning to go through 'unimportant' bits of detail, diaries, account books, wills, to resurrect the lives of women, and though there is still much we cannot get at, we are getting enough to give us a much better idea than we previously had. Diane Purkiss is writing in this tradition; though The English Civil War does also give us the voices of men, and she tells the stories of the King and Cromwell, Henrietta Maria and women of the aristocracy.

But in this book you also can hear  the common soldier , and ordinary, lower middle-class women whose voices were recorded because they became preachers in some of the Independent sects that grew during the ferment of this period, as well as those of the gentry are also heard. The book opens up the experience of a broad section of English society during the conflict.

As well as giving voice to the ordinary people (and examining the role starvation, which was widespread as the war dragged on, played in people's actions and reactions,) this book gives an in-depth, considered analysis of the causes and drivers of the conflict. Too many authors, for example, have described the religious issues of the times in the convenient portmanteau phrase: 'the Royalists were Anglicans, the Parliamentarians were Puritans'. In fact, many of the Parliamentarians were Anglicans, and Anglicanism in those days meant Calvinism, a theology nowadays more likely to be associated with Presbyterianism. The distinction between those who believed some humans were predestined for damnation, some for salvation, was far more complex than the Cavalier/Roundhead divide. This is important, because religion was a crucial part of people's lives in those days and needs to be understood.

Diane Purkiss also shows us the hideous anti-Catholic prejudice which meant many Catholics had their houses destroyed, were abused, attacked, and murdered. It was an atmosphere which reminded me of present-day Islamophobia, and gave an uneasy flavour of what might happen if it is nurtured, as it is at present. The mutilation of the Royalist camp followers after Naseby, who were considered to be whores and Irish Catholics (many of them were Anglican soldiers' wives), was what we would nowadays see as a horrific war crime. In addition, she tells the story of Matthew Hopkins's notorious Essex witchhunt, and makes a convincing case for the war's agency in the outbreak of a kind of witch prosecution otherwise absent from England.

What comes across, crucially, in this history, is that the protagonists of the Civil War didn't behave the way we would like them to; they were people of their own time. It's far too common for even historians to be partisan in writing about the conflict (and most of them taking the 'Cavalier' side). But what matters in the end is not who won, who had flowing locks and was romantic, who were people we'd like to identify with (none of them, once you really look at it). These people had ideas, many of which filled the ruling establishment with horror, which we would now view as mainstream or even old-fashioned, since few even of the Levellers and Ranters wanted women to have the vote. Indeed, some Ranters thought women had no souls (one was set to rights by George Fox, one of the first Quakers, an organisation that did give women the right to speak and continued that after the ferment of the wartime period had died down). But they had those ideas, and that was important. Yes, works of art were destroyed and images in churches were destroyed, but that was also part of their passionate belief in a religion that didn't rely on outward show.

As a Quaker, I can comprehend that, since I worship in a plain, unadorned room, mostly in silence, and the price of that precious worship was partly the destruction of statues in our cathedrals. Diane Purkiss says at the end of the book that she wouldn't exchange Milton's 'Paradise Lost' for the Rubens crucifixion that was destroyed during the war. 'Sometimes destruction is the price we pay for artistic breakthrough.' And spiritual, and political.

There is not enough written about the English Civil War. If you want to start reading about it, or want to revisit the period, this is the book to get going on. I wasn't able to put it down.

GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY - A brief history of the 'F' word by Elizabeth Chadwick.

October 23, 2018, 4:30 pm

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I belong to several historical forums and every few months, the subject of medieval swear words will arise and a discussion will begin about the origins of the word 'fuck' and when it became a swear word rather than a reproduction word.  I thought I would do a little investigating.

There are numerous theories as to the etymology of the word.  There is a false popular notion that it's an acronym for 'Fornicate Under  Consent of the King' (the instruction supposedly intended as a population booster) but it can be immediately be dismissed as a modern urban legend.  Acronyms were unknown in the Middle Ages.

Melissa Moher in her work 'Holy Shit: A brief history of swearing'  believes that the more prosaic answer is that 'Fuck' it is a word of Germanic origin.  It is related to similar in Dutch, German and Swedish, and means to 'strike' and to 'move back and forth.'  Very possibly why, once arriving into the English language, it became another name for the bird of prey the kestrel known also as a 'fuckwind.'

Mark Morton in his work 'The Lover's Tongue: A Merry Romp Through The Language Of Love and Sex'  tells the reader that the Norwegian 'fukka' means to copulate, as does the Swedish 'focca' and is closely related.

So basically 'fuck' begins its life as a straightforward word for copulation, born from a meaning of striking and moving back and forth, and entered the English language somewhere between the waves of Scandinavian invasion and 1310 (see below).  It wasn't a taboo or blasphemy word but a function word and nobody would have blenched at its use.  It's supposed first observation of use as a copulation word in popular history comes from the early 16th century and a poem by William Dunbar titled 'In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht.'  It's an amorous poem where the hero desires to have sex with his love, the heroine. 'his feiris he wald haif fukkit.'  Also from the early 16th century, David Lindsay, tutor to the future King James V of Scotland wrote a poem with the line 'A fukkand like ane furious Fornicatour - accusing his subject of 'fucking like a furious fornicator.'  In another work he also criticised the clergy who may 'fuck thair fill and be unmaryit.'

However, historian Paul Booth has recently found an instance of the word used in a copulatory context from the plea rolls of Edward II dated to 1310 and the mention of a certain felon named Roger 'Fuckbythenavele'.  The context is sexual, but quite what he was up to has not yet been sussed!  There is also a reference from 1475 from a work titled Flen Flyys, which has a line in mixed Latin and English 'fvccant vvivys of heli'  which translates as 'they fuck the wives of Ely.'

It would seem then that the word had found its way with a sexual meaning into the English language by the early 14th century as far as written evidence goes, but since the written word tends to follow the spoken in terms of timeline, it argues for earlier useage.

When did it change into a 'swear word' and travel beyond the basic verb meaning to copulate?

There is an ambiguous comment in a piece of marginalia in a manuscript of Cicero from 1528 where the scribe has written 'O d fuckin Abbot.'  However, we don't know whether it was a comment on the licentiousness of his abbot who was apparently not exactly known for his moral purity, or if it was an intensifier and comment of anger or irritation.  If the latter, then it's 300 years before other recorded instances of the word's use in such a context so needs to be interpreted with that in mind.

In the medieval period the worst thing you could do was to swear by God or his body parts.  That was true blasphemy and many a pastoral tale warned the blasphemer against swearing by the likes of God's eyes or legs. In effect it was dismembering, disrespecting and torturing Christ and would lead you into all sorts of after-life trouble.  Bodily functions on the other hand were just bodily functions as were intimate areas of the body.  Grape Street in London, once the haunt of prostitutes was known with a shrug as 'Gropecunte Lane.' The obscenity of body part mentions and the transformation of the 'F' word into one both embraced and shunned by society, had to wait until after the Reformation and the rise of Protestantism and secularisation.  The change in religious viewpoint also coincided with the rise of privacy.  The aristocracy and the middle classes had gradually developed homes with more private areas and private areas meant that more was hidden away and a certain delicacy and secrecy developed. Eductation played its part too and coarse words were seen as belonging to coarse people.  Sexuality and bodily functions gradually became the new obscene and religious expletives tumbled down the table of the worst thing you could say until they became the mild expletives and body parts and functions took their place.

Once the F work expanded into the area of the swearword while still retaining its old meaning, there was no stopping its career and proliferation of useage. It retained its meaning as a verb meaning to copulate (although never used in polite company) 'They fucked in the long grass.'  It became a noun. 'That was a fantastic fuck' and an adjective. 'You fucking bitch' (Mark Morton tells us this one turned up in the mid 19th century).  It's an interjection - 'Fuck!' (1929)  It's an adverb 'that's fucking marvellous' (useage dating to 1940's)  And it's an infix - 'abso-fucking-lutely (1920's). Other 'fuck' phrases in use today have a slightly longer history than you might think. 'Fucked up' meaning ruined dates to the 1930's. 'Fucked' with the same meaning can be traced to the late 18th century.  'Fuck you! dates to 1895 and Fuck off! as a command to the 1940's although the phrase was in use meaning to run away in the 1920's (as in 'let's fuck off out of here before we get into trouble.)
Bruce Willis's now famous quote in Die-Hard - (the words after the cowboy salute to Alan Rickman) dates to the 1920's.

It's still a taboo word in many circles and certainly not one for polite society, but it has expanded well into the mainstream and is so often used in daily street speech, and in films and books that it is becoming normalised.  Its use has spread far and wide but in consequence its power to shock is gradually diminishing, like water wearing away a stone.  When I was a child, anyone who used the word was far outside the pale, but now it''s eased through the door and into daily life. As Hugh Grant said in Four Weddings and a Funeral.  'Fuck, fuck, fuckity fuck.'

I do highly recommend the two books I've posted in the blog - they are hugely enlightening and entertaining and give much food for thought.

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Elizabeth Chadwick is an award winning internationally best selling author of historical fiction set in the Medieval period.

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Crossing the Alps by Miranda Miller

October 24, 2018, 5:00 pm

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   While researching my current novel, which is set in 18th snd early 19th century Rome, I came across some interesting descriptions of how it was to cross the Alps before there were any railways. Crossing them on a train is still a memorable experience but our tourism is a very feeble experience compared to theirs. Most Grand Tourists had to cross the mountains to reach Italy, and a young man was not considered truly educated and civilised until he had experienced the wonders of Italian art and architecture.

   Crossing the Alps usually took eight days. There were no coach roads through the Alps until the end of the eighteenth century and so, to cross the Alps, your entire coach had to be disassembled and carried over the mountains on mule back. The Mount Cenis pass, on the route from Lyons to Turin, was the most travelled route into Italy during the heyday of the Grand Tour. Tourists were carried over the mountains by Swiss chairmen in a sort of open sedan chair.

  

     Miss Wilmot, one of the rare women to make the Grand Tour, reported that the Swiss chair carriers were happy men who burst into song as they approached Alpine villages. Some tourists had the thrill of sledding down a steep slope. When you reached Turin your carriage was reassembled. In 1775, “Mr. Greville drove his phaeton up the St. Gotthard, to every one’s amazement.”

   The mountains themselves inspired an awe that, perhaps, only mountaineers can know nowadays.The English journalist Joseph Addison described the Alps as this “awful and tremendous amphitheatre,” while the poet Thomas Gray said that Mt. Cenis carried “the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far.” One route was the St. Gotthard Pass and its “Valley of Trembling,” which gave the name tremolite to a mineral found in its granite walls.

   Scientists, as well as rich young men, were fascinated by the terrifying mountains. Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, an 18th century Swiss botanist and mineralogist who was a Fellow of the Royal Society of London, made nine journeys in the Alps. As well as recording the elevations of mountains he included several reports of dragon sightings in his Itinera Alpina (1723). Although Scheuchzer dismissed some of these tales as fabulous, he concluded that “from the accounts of Swiss dragons and their comparison with those of other lands...it is clear that such animals really do exist.”

   In the early 19th century the Romantics found mountains endlessly - well, romantic. In Book VI of The Prelude Wordsworth describes crossing the Simplon Pass on foot as a young man of twenty:




Imagination—here the Power so called

Through sad incompetence of human speech,

That awful Power rose from the mind’s abyss

Like an unfathered vapour that enwraps,
At once, some lonely traveller. I was lost;

Halted without an effort to break through;
But to my conscious soul I now can say—
“I recognise thy glory:” in such strength
Of usurpation, when the light of sense
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed
The invisible world,

   An invisible world, heroism, the sublime.... these ideas, even more than the physical danger and discomfort, caught the imagination of a whole generation. Schiller popularized the legend of a medieval Swiss hero, a freedom fighter of the mountains, in his play William Tell ( 1804).

   In his long poem Manfred Byron’s alter ego gazes in wonder at the Jungfrau and Eiger mountains:
“Heard avalanches falling every five minutes nearly – as if God was pelting the Devil down from Heaven with snow balls... clouds rose from the opposite valley curling up perpendicular precipices – like the foam of the Ocean of Hell during a Springtide.”

   Here is Manfred, looking particularly Byronic, about to be blown off the Jungfrau. Byron’s poem was later set to music by Tchaikovsky. Byron, like many passionate nature lovers, didn’t think much of his fellow human beings: “Switzerland is a curst selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants, and still less their English visitors,” he wrote to Thomas Moore in 1821.

   Napoleon planned to launch a surprise assault on the Austrian army and in May 1800 he and his army of more than 40,000 men spent five days crossing the St Bernard Pass. Napoleon’s military tactic was successful and resulted in his victory at Marengo.

   Here is David’s great propaganda portrait of a dashing young hero on a white stallion leading his army over the mountains. Napoleon did not actually lead his troops over the Alps at all but followed a couple of days after them, travelling on a narrow path on the back of an unpicturesque mule. Napoleon refused to sit for this portrait : “Nobody knows if the portraits of the great men resemble them, it is enough that their genius lives there.” One of David’s sons stood in for him, dressed up in the uniform Napoleon had worn at Marengo, perched on top of a ladder. Napoleon, acutely aware of the power of symbolism, insisted on an equestrian portrait.

   Like everybody else in Europe, Turner was fascinated by Napoleon. He had not yet been to Italy in 1812 when he painted Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps.

   Another great warrior, Hannibal, is leading his armies over the mountains to attack Italy. For Turner there were obvious connections between the two men,  also between the Punic War between Rome and Carthage and the Napoleonic wars that were then raging between Britain and France. He had seen David’s heroic painting of Napoleon during a visit to Paris in 1802.



   By 1818 Mr. B. Emery, of Charing Cross London, was organizing stagecoach tours of Switzerland. Hikers, mountaineers and honeymoon couples began to cross the Alps and it all became rather less sublime.

The Forgotten Summer, by Carol Drinkwater

October 25, 2018, 4:01 pm

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I am two novels along since I published THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER with Penguin in March 2016. For those who read my post last month you will know that my latest novel, THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF, to be published 16th May 2019, is set in Paris during the 1968 student riots, and from there the story unfolds.
https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305963/the-house-on-the-edge-of-the-cliff/9781405933346.html

Usually, when a book or any work of mine has been completed, I move on. Except for editorial or marketing purposes, I find it very difficult to revisit the material because I worry over how I might have improved it. THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER seems to be an exception. Not because I am pleased with my work but because there is such a richesse of material that I might have used, and might still use one day.
The story is set on a family-owned vineyard in the south of France. Within the family, there are secrets and factions. Jane, the English woman who moves into the family when she marries Luc, the French son of Clarisse, the widowed proprietor of the vineyard, only begins to discover how deep and dark are those secrets when a tragedy occurs. Clarisse, her mother-in-law, is a pied noir, a black foot, a French woman, an ex-colonialist, born and raised in Algeria. Her son Luc was also born there. They fled to France at the end of the Algerian war in the summer of 1962, soon after De Gaulle gave independence to Algeria. Once safely arrived in France, they set up home on the vineyard, which is where the main action of the novel takes place.

I must be honest and say that when I delivered the book to my agent and it went to auction there was a background seam within the story that I had not entirely dared to address. The shadows lurking from the Algerian past of two of the main characters were hinted at, but not followed through. It was only when Maxine Hitchcock, my editor at Michael Joseph, Penguin, acquired the book and sent through her notes to me that I was encouraged to face head on those shadows, the ghosts I was writing about.
Behind the beauty and seductive landscape of the South of France, there lies a a more lurid past, Luc and Clarisse's, set in French-ruled Algeria.

Why am I returning in my thoughts to THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER and that bloody period in French history?  President Emmanuel Macron has recently made a gesture that might go some way to healing this troubled past.

France's relationship to the country that was, for close to one hundred and fifty years, its unwilling colony, remains complex and unresolved. The French colonials who inhabited that large tract of northern Africa lived well at the expense of the Algerians.

In 1954, when the Algerian War of Independence, finally got under way, after many years of conflict, subordination and cruelty, France, not long after relinquishing all its claims to Indo-China, (its colonial territories in Southeast Asia including Vietnam) found itself yet again embroiled in an ugly and very costly war. This time on the southern side of the Mediterranean, the northern part of the continent of Africa.

To this day, the very mention of Algeria causes many French citizens to draw breath. The cruelties that took place before, during the eight-year war of independence and even after Charles de Gaulle had granted the country its independence, conjure up feelings of shame, confusion, even pain and anger for many French. For a mixture of reasons. It remains the past that most prefer not to visit and don't talk about. Algeria, and France's treatment of its Algerian citizens, had been brushed under the carpet for a half a century. As well, there is a large population in France, French citizens, who are descended from Algerians who were obliged to flee the land of their birth at the end of the independence war because they had fought with the French. Once victory had been assured, they were condemned as traitors back at home. The punishments meted out by the new Algerian regime were harsh; in many cases death sentences by lynch mobs. France offered refuge to these ex-soldiers and their families. De Gaulle took them in, promised them equality, pensions, education for their children etc. Much of those promises have never been fully honoured or are only now recognised as debts that are due. It has created appalling conditions and resentments for the fourth and fifth generation French-Algerians living, mostly, in the poorest suburbs in France. They feel disenfranchised, lost, lacking allegiance. It makes them prime candidates for recruitment by the likes of ISIS.
They are perceived as a French "problem". A result of the "troubles".

In 2012 on a state visit to Algeria, fifty years after the end of that war, President François Hollande acknowledged the appalling treatment of the Algerians during the 132-year occupation of their country and during the French-Algerian war. Hollande was the first to take this step, to admit to the brutalities that had taken place during the occupation and during the war. He did not, however, apologise.

François Hollande in Algiers in 2012

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/20/francois-hollande-algerian-suffering-french

Many Algerians and some French were disappointed by the fact that, although this was a very necessary and long overdue first step towards a new era, new relations, between the two nations, no apology was forthcoming. During the time I spent in Algeria when I was working on my non-fiction book, THE OLIVE ROUTE, I began to get a sense of the the damage done to Algerian people during all those years of oppression; it had rooted itself deeply. For example, many spoke to me about the lack of education opportunities for their children and, without schooling, the dearth of possibilities to rise within their own country's system, for them to have a voice.  As in South Africa and my own country of Ireland, when even one generation or two are given no opportunities to learn, to read, to engage, another form of poverty is created, an intellectual poverty, and that takes more than those one or two generations to re-enrich the system, to erase  the hatred and anger and frustration and replace those energies with more positive responses to oppression.

In THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER, Algeria and its occupation under the French, is not the central theme in the book, not by any means. It is more a shadow that hangs over the characters. One of the reasons I was hesitant about including this aspect of the material, of addressing it head-on, was because the French themselves have barely addressed it in their literature and cinema, although that is slowly changing. (Jean-Luc Godard attempted a film in 1960, but it was banned.) Also, because, as I have written above, it is an unresolved period in modern French history.

I have received many letters from readers who tell me they had known little if anything about this period of France's twentieth-century past. France in Vietnam is far more widely written about. Some readers have gone on to dig out material, to acquaint themselves more fully with that period. This pleases me greatly, as it would any writer. And the subject stays with me. Questions nag at me. I feel reasonably confident that, at some point, I will return to this subject, to write another book set in France, in Algeria. I don't know precisely what it will be, but there remains so much there yet to be mined.

It is an evolving story. Layers of history being peeled away to uncover what really lies beneath the surface. Fascinating for any writer.

Maurice Audin, tortured and murdered by the French State at the age of 25.

And so, when I read in the news several weeks ago ago that Emmanuel Macron (who was not even born at the time of the Algerian war) has gone a step further than Hollande, I felt that France might finally be making headway. Macron has offered up evidence to the torture and murder by the French state of one of their own citizens, Maurice Audin.
Audin was French, a journalist. But orders had been given to do whatever it took to crush the fight for Algeria's independence, to punish anyone who showed allegiance to the Algerian cause. Audin was a twenty-five-year-old mathematician, a communist, a reporter, and an ardent supporter of the Algerian Nationalists. Since his disappearance in 1957, more than half a century ago, Audin's family have searched and badgered to find out the truth about what really happened to the young man, who disappeared without trace. His widow, Josette, wrote letters every day, letter after letter, determined to root out the truth. The truth of Audin's ignominious end was buried and has remained out of reach until last month when Macron revealed the truth. He handed to the family an official document confirming that the French state had been directly responsible for the death of Audin.

I thought of this incident again last week after reading of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  The impenetrability of state lies and subterfuge.
The pain and angst for the victim's loved ones. The never knowing.

                Here is Macron in the presence of Michèle Audin, daughter of the late Maurice Audin. When this photograph was taken, they had both just left the home of 87-year-old Josette Audin, Maurice's widow, who has lived for sixty-one years without ever knowing what became of her young husband, the father of her three children. Michèle was three years old when her father went 'missing'.

It was a summer evening, 11th July 1957. French paratroopers burst into the apartment on the third floor of the block where the Audin family lived in Algiers. Maurice was dragged away and never seen or heard of again. Now, it has been admitted by Macron that he was tortured and murdered on instructions from the State. At the time, Josette was told that her husband 'had been shot while trying to escape'.
She never remarried. The fight for justice became her raison d'être. She wrote to every new president after his election begging for the truth.
Until Macron, every French president has preferred to avoid the brutalities of the war, never owning up to France's role in the executions of those who sympathised with the Algerian cause.

Shortly after he was elected, Macron contacted Josette to reassure her that he was willing to address the matter. The official statement from the Elysée Palace is the result. An end to the silence and denial. In this one instance.

But will Macron's gesture make any real difference at this late stage? I hope it will offer Audin's family the possibility of laying the horrors and concealed past to rest. I also believe that it is an important step in the process of healing between the French State, its citizens, Algeria and the Algerians who are residents in France. It will, I think, help move all parties towards a reconciliation with the nation's recent colonial history, its shameful past.

There is dignity is Macron's decision to come clean about this story. One story, I fear, of many.

Maurice Audin was a young Frenchman who spoke out against his own government and openly reproached its inhuman behaviour towards its citizens. His open criticism cost him his life. Macron's admission of the facts of Audin's torture and death and the fact that France used torture as a means to its ends throughout the Algerian war came ahead of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, but as the world looks on in horror at the lies, the foul play, the mourning and grief Khashoggi's family is suffering, it makes this almost forgotten French story all the more poignant. Both men died under conditions no wild beast should be obliged to suffer. Audin's death is history to most, except to his family and, perhaps, French political historians.  However, the calculated murder of journalists, the treatment of those who speak out against a regime is, tragically, obviously not history, given the recent events in Istanbul.

Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, our right to criticise, to call to account those who govern on our behalf: this is what is at stake. Macron's willingness to admit to the state's guilt is, I believe, at this time, so important not only for the history of France but for all of us and the world we are living in.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

A Norfolk Wedding by Janie Hampton

October 26, 2018, 4:30 pm

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The Norfolk wedding of Rachel Gurney & Rosslyn Bruce, 1908

Just one hundred and ten years ago this month my grandmother, Rachel Gurney married Rosslyn Bruce at Northrepps in Norfolk. Rachel, aged 21, was the oldest daughter of untitled landed gentry, and Rosslyn, 37, the 7th child of a poor but well-connected vicar. Both of them were descended from 11th Century Norman invaders. They met after Rosslyn, the rector of a Nottingham parish, broke his leg out fox-hunting and was sent by his best friend, a socialist MP called Noel Buxton, to convalesce with Buxton’s cousins, the Gurneys of Northrepps.
Rosslyn and Rachel fell in love. But it was not always easy. When Rachel’s nerves became frayed during their wedding preparations, she wrote to Rosslyn, ‘You Bruces are quite unordinary in your huge amount of love. I have got mine in me, only I can’t show it like you do.’ Rosslyn replied offering ‘double thoughtfulness, in thoughtful devotion, in not being too outwardly devoted.’ Rachel replied, ‘You don’t understand a bit… because you haven’t always lived in the same house with the same mother all your life and you are not very young like me, and you know all about the great world and I don’t.’ 

The bridal carriage was pulled by two new horses called Bryant & May - because they were such a good match.

As Rachel and her brother Quintin trotted in the family carriage and pair through the village festooned with bunting, Quintin asked her, ‘I suppose you know the facts of life? Because I don’t.’

The year was 1908 and the Easter Daily Press reported: ‘Never before had the inhabitants seen so large a number of such beautifully appointed and powerful motor cars. Within the church, the pulpit was treated with chrysanthemums.’ 

'Miss Gurney's wedding, bridesmaids, page's and travelling costumes' in The Queen

Rachel’s wedding dress of white, silk satin was described by her mother Evelyn in the Parish Magazine: ‘made en princesse, with a Court train of satin, it was lined with masses of chiffon. Over a myrtle wreath was a veil of lovely old Brussells lace, which had been worn by her mother and grandmother. She carried a choice bouquet of lilies, carnations and stephanotis.’ Her seven adult bridesmaids, all sisters or cousins, wore huge hats swathed with tulle and their trailing bouquets were attached to shepherd’s crooks. The two page boys wore scarlet woolen Peter Pan suits, in homage to Rosslyn’s friend, James Barrie. Rosslyn’s uncle who was a Bishop, aided by three other related parsons, took the service. The 14th century flint church was packed.

The bridal party (the groom still limping) left the church under a crimson striped awning. Evelyn conveyed the scene: ‘Brilliantly coloured beech leaves were showered upon the bride from baskets carried by children of the Sunday school’ in new scarlet woolen cloaks. ‘Meantime the wedding bells were firing away and ringing a merry peal.’ An arch of evergreen had been erected over the road bearing the mottoes ‘Health and Happiness to the Bride and Bridegroom’ and ‘God Bless You Both’. At the entrance gate to the bride’s home, Northrepps Hall, was another one reading ‘Joy and Happiness to Both’ and 'Success to Bride and Bridegroom'. 

The evergreen arch leading to the bride's home, Northrepps Hall.

After a reception in a marquee in the walled garden, the couple left for a five-week honeymoon in Italy. Thomas Cook’s first-class train tickets to Lugano cost £30 for two.
A few days later the villagers were invited to tea in the marquee to look at the presents. They included a silver tea pot from the parish committee, a travelling clock from the church choir and silver sugar tongs from the Sunday school. Rosslyn gave Rachel an upright Bechstein piano; she gave him a watch and a shooting stick. Rachel’s mother gave her a trousseau costing £404 and 2 shillings, which included three riding habits, six pairs of hunting boots, and enough serge suits, cloaks, combinations (knickers) and flannel nightgowns to last her entire life. Mrs Carter, the coachman’s wife was paid a pound for marking bodices, linen and 96 pairs of stockings. I inherited one of the dozen hand-embroidered white lawn night-gowns and wore it while ‘lying-in’ after the birth of my babies.
As a child, I watched my granny gardening in one of the Sunday School’s scarlet woolen cloaks. Beside her front door was a myrtle bush grown from her wreath, which she claimed came from the bush at Osborne House grown from Queen Victoria’s wedding wreath.

Rachel's satin wedding shoes and gloves, on the Sunday School cloak.

Just 63 years later I was married in the same Norfolk church; and two months after that Rachel’s funeral was held there too. At both events, the packed congregation included three of Rachel’s bridesmaids, and we all sang ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’.

The completed Bruce family at Northrepps in 1920. Verily, Erroll, Rhalou, Lorema and Merlin.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Gang of Suspects Named in Kidnap Case

October 28, 2018, 11:03 am

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by Ruth Downie

STOLEN: VILBIA

HELP OF GODDESS SUMMONED

GUILTY PARTY THREATENED WITH BECOMING LIQUID AS WATER

The loss of Vilbia is the most famous cold case that’s come down to us from the Romano-British town of Aquae Sulis (modern Bath). The aggrieved party – whose name we don’t know – called up the goddess Sulis Minerva’s help by writing the suspects’ names on a thin sheet of lead, rolling it up and throwing it in the pool above her sacred hot spring. It wasn’t alone: well over a hundred other curses have been found buried in the silt and others may be hidden there still.

Most of the spidery letters on the scraps of lead are the work of victims asking Sulis Minerva to avenge a crime. Some name the suspects. Some don’t say what they did: presumably the goddess knew what Britivenda and Venibelia had been up to and could punish them accordingly.

Often, though, the victim had no idea who had wronged them. The curse on the modern reproduction below translates as “the name of the culprit who stole my bracelet…” There’s a space left, but no name in it.

When no likely evildoer could be identified, the aggrieved party often reminded the goddess to suspect everyone, “whether man or woman, slave or free.” Children could be in the frame too -“whether boy or girl” - and once, “whether pagan or Christian”.

Some victims offered Sulis Minerva a share of the stolen goods if they were recovered – a sort of ‘no win, no fee’ deal, with the suggestion that the hot property could be handed in anonymously at the temple.

A few of the lead sheets are blank. Others bear rows of squiggles, perhaps put there by people who knew what writing looked like but couldn’t actually do it. All but two seem to have been in different handwriting: some educated, some very clearly not. Writing backwards might have made the curse more powerful: it certainly made for more spelling mistakes. But no matter what was being written, the sight of a stylus waking the dull surface of the lead into a gleaming message for the goddess might have frightened the guilty party into repentance.

If the culprit didn’t co-operate, though, bad things lay in store. Docimedis, whose gloves had gone missing, demanded that the thief should lose his minds [sic] and his eyes. Anyone even remotely involved in the theft of Basilia’s silver ring was to be accursed in blood, eyes and every limb, or even have all his or her intestines eaten away.

Sometimes the thief’s whole family was cursed. And sometimes the curses were subtle enough to work on the conscience. Whoever stole Docilianus’s cloak was to be deprived of both sleep and children until the cloak was returned to the temple. Whether or not he [or she, slave or free] knew the exact wording of the curse, it’s not hard to imagine them lying awake in the night watches and wondering whether they would get a better night’s sleep tomorrow if they got up now and delivered the stolen goods to Sulis Minerva under cover of darkness.

Bath isn’t alone in having a fine collection of curses: they turn up all over the Roman empire. There are attempts to silence witnesses, to sabotage racehorses, and to crush business competitors and love rivals. Most of the Bath curses, though, seem to be about thefts from the bath-house, although one poor chap had his house burgled. The crimes must have been very annoying for the victims, but as a writer looking to set a murder mystery in Aquae Sulis, I have to say there wasn’t as much instant plot in them as I’d hoped.

Even the apparent kidnap of Vilbia might have been less dramatic than it seems. Roger Tomlin, the modern translator, points out that the word has never been found anywhere else. The stolen “vilbia” might simply be an inanimate object with a name that none of us now understands. But while Vilbia doesn’t provide a ready-made plot and cast of characters, the curses as a whole give a lively insight into a busy town and the everyday struggles of its people to thrive and survive. And perhaps of the wider divisions between them.

We know that Roman citizens lived in the town (some of their tombstones have turned up, proudly announcing the three-part names that show social superiority), but none of the curses has a citizen’s name on it. All the complainants and culprits seem to be either lower-class Latin-speakers or native Britons. That might be because, as Pliny put it, the Britons were enthusiastic practitioners of magic while all good Romans ought to look down their noses at it (yes, I am paraphrasing wildly here). It might also be because the poorer you were, the less chance you had of owning a slave who would guard your kit while you were bathing.

Even if you knew who’d done it, in the absence of a police force there wasn’t much you could do unless you had powerful friends or plenty of cash. At a guess, Arminia had neither. She knew exactly who’d made off with her two silver coins – it was Verecundinus, son of Terentius - but getting them back had to be left to the goddess. 

Did Verecundinus pay up? Or did he suffer the punishment of being unable to sit, lie down, walk or sleep? We don’t know. For us, at least, none of these cold cases is resolved. But people believed in the curses enough to carry on throwing them into the spring for over two hundred years. There might have been no police officers to investigate crime, but even while you slept, that lump of lead hidden under the steaming surface of Sulis Minerva’s waters could be working its revenge on your enemies. And that must have felt good.

Roger Tomlin’s work on the Aquae Sulis curses - from which much of this information is drawn - can be found in The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, Vol 2: The Finds from the Sacred Spring – Barry Cunliffe et al – OUCA Monograph no 16, 1988

Read more about the site at https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/

Ruth writes a series of crime novels featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. The latest is MEMENTO MORI, set in Aquae Sulis.

Going out on a limb with Cynthia Jefferies

October 28, 2018, 5:01 pm

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October's guest is Cynthia Jefferies, better known to some of us as Cindy, the name she used for her children's books.

Cynthia Jefferies is a long-established writer for children, whose work has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She was born in Gloucestershire and her love of history was encouraged by regular family outings to anything of interest, from great cathedrals to small museums. Having moved to Scotland and back to Stroud, she has always made time to write and her abiding interest in Restoration England has never left her. The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan is her first historical novel for adults.

Author's Website: www.cynthiajefferies.co.uk/

The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan…not a jolly book for children!

There I was, making a few notes about a new story for children. The protagonist would be a comic, rather hapless, gangly innkeeper, whose village had fallen on hard times, but I just couldn’t get the story to fly.

Many writers will recognise that moment when you realise your idea is a non starter. I came at it from several different directions, but no matter how I approached it, the poor fellow simply became sadder. He obviously wasn’t cut out to be the main character in a funny story for 9-12’s, but neither would he leave me alone.

He had recently returned to England from the continent after the Restoration and had every reason to feel distraught. Even so, it was quite a stretch to get from those faltering beginnings to researching C17th Prostheses, the teredo worm and early nurserymen. All of this was needed in the novel that grew out of that insistent character, but the research that took the most time and thought was the prosthesis, in the story that became The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan.

Science Museum, London

People have been making replacements for lost limbs with various success from the earliest times. There is the ancient Egyptian big toe, enabling the wearer to manage sandals, the unsavoury Italian who replaced his lost hand with a knife, and reputedly tightened the straps holding in on with his teeth. There is also the arm owned by Gotz von Berlichingen in the C16th. Actually he had two made, both of which are on display at Jagsthausen Castle. I haven’t managed to see them, but in the great hall at Cotehele, that wonderful National Trust property on the Tamar in Cornwall, there is another, similar metal hand and forearm. Its history isn’t known, but it attracts a huge amount of interest from visitors. So much so that a few years ago money was raised to make a replica, so that the workmanship could be explored more closely without damaging the original. It is a wonderful piece of engineering. The hand can be made to open or close into a fist by means of a lever at the wrist, and the thumb can close onto the fingers, making it a truly useful replacement hand.

It was exactly what one of my characters needed.

There can be little positive to be said about losing a limb. It has to be an extreme experience, performed in a modern hospital to save a life, or happening by accident or design, hundreds of years ago. Once a limb was lost, the question must have been the same in the C17th as it is now. How best to manage the situation, both emotionally and physically? As always, top of the range solutions cost money, lots of it, and the Cotehele hand must have been expensive, affirming status as well as practicality. Covered in skin coloured suede it must, at a cursory glance, have been almost indistinguishable from a real hand. Was that only to improve grip, or also to make the wearer feel happier with his appearance? What isn’t apparent with the Cotehele hand until you pick it up is its great weight. As far as you can get from Captain Hook or Edward Scissorhands, this hand doesn’t need attachments to become useful, or indeed to become a weapon.

Neither Abel Morgan, nor his father own this hand, but it is outrageous fortune that brings them into contact with it, and its owner. From a sad character who wouldn’t leave me alone, to an artificial hand and arm, researching this novel has certainly indulged the autodidact in me. A bullet extractor, liquefaction, rumfustian and a remembered pair of shoes: writing The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan has led me down some blind alleys and has also turned up some absolute gems.

For me, the journey has been fascinating. It has launched me into a new direction, writing historical fiction for adults. I had always planned to write for adults, but the success I had some years ago with series fiction for children pushed that plan to the back of my mind. Now, at last, thanks to the insistent character that wouldn’t leave me alone, I am following my original ambition, with a second C17th novel on the way. Will I ever write for children again? I have no idea, but when a character comes along and insists on being heard, it’s the job of a writer to listen. Where that can lead is anyone’s
guess!

The outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan is published by Allison and Busby in hardback on 22nd November 2018 at £19.99.

(This novel will be reviewed by Adèle Geras on 7th November)

Cabinet of Curiosities by Charlotte Wightwick: Manuscripts, Magical and Remarkable

October 29, 2018, 5:30 pm

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As its Halloween, it is almost obligatory that I should write about things that go bump in the night. This year, I’ve been enjoying my spooky fix via Sky’s Discovery of Witches– a TV series featuring witches, vampires and demons, based on the All Souls trilogy of books by Deborah Harkness. I first read – and greatly enjoyed - the books some years ago, and have to admit to rather mixed feelings about the TV series. The actors are generally great (although personally I’m not sure about all the casting choices!) and the cinematography and locations are beautiful. But, as is inevitable with any adaptation, they’ve had to leave things out, or at least not give them the prominence they receive in the novels.

In Harkness’ books, the Twilight-style romance is leavened with a real passion for history. The protagonist Diana has a non-magical career an academic historian, and her love for the subject – or rather, that of Harkness (herself a professional historian before she turned to novel-writing) really shines through. In particular, significant time and space within the novels is devoted to loving, meticulous descriptions of the illuminated manuscripts Diana studies (and which cause her such supernatural trouble – her discovery of a bewitched book kicks off the plot).

The only other place where I’ve read such bewitching (excuse the pun) yet accurate descriptions of medieval manuscripts is in Christopher de Hamel’s wonderful Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts (if you’ve not yet read it, it is worth getting your hands on the hardback version for the beauty and quality of the reproductions.) Taking one manuscript per century between the C6th and C16th, de Hamel walks his readers through what it is like to see, feel, touch and smell the reality of these rare and precious objects, as well as explaining the historical and social conditions in which they were created. It is accessible, scholarly and passionate; beautiful and illuminating all at once, as perfect and jewelled as the manuscripts he describes. 

So, my item for the Cabinet of Curiosities this month? Definitely a medieval manuscript. But I’m torn. My personal favourite from de Hamel’s book is the fourteenth century Hours of Jeanne de Navarre, with its stunning and intricate gothic illuminations. But I do wonder if I might be allowed Diana’s fictional, magical Book of Life, explaining through alchemical imagery the origins and destinies of vampires, witches, demons and humans?

Well, it is Halloween, when the veil between the mundane and the magical is supposedly at its thinnest, so maybe, just maybe…

October competition

October 30, 2018, 5:01 pm

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To win a copy of Cynthia Jefferies' The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan, just answer the question below in the Comments section:

"Which character from a book you enjoyed as a child would you like to see in adult fiction, written as an adult or a child?"

Then send a copy of your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk, so that we can contact you if you win.

Closing date 7th November

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

Good luck! 

 

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Four Queens and a Countess - Review by Mary Hoffman

October 31, 2018, 5:01 pm

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How to upstage a queen

Jill Armitage's previous book was about Arbella Stuart, a possible claimant to the throne of England when Elizabeth l died, and she does make a cameo appearance here. But the star of the show - and the "Countess" of the title is Bess of Hardwick, who was Arbella's grandmother.

I don't know if it's just that we know so much already about the Tudor queens and the Scottish thorn in Elizabeth's side but Bess would be a remarkable woman in any age. She was born in humble circumstances, the third child of a second son, a gentleman but only of minor gentry.

Elizabeth was always known as Bess, fortunately for us, or there would be two Elizabeths as well as two Marys in this book. Her first marriage was as a teenager, to a boy younger than herself, who died the following year. She never lived with Robert Barlow and is likely to have been a virgin widow. Nevertheless she had some claim on his property and spent a long time at law, trying to get anything out of his family.

Three years after Robert's death, Bess, still only around twenty years old, married Sir William Cavendish. They were married for ten years, until his death, during which time she bore him eight children, six of whom lived to be adults - a good record for the 16th century. Sir William had property in Derbyshire, including the Chatsworth Estates. (His heirs became the Dukes of Devonshire, who still own Chatsworth House. Andrew Cavendish was married to the famous "Debo," née Mitford, who made Chatsworth House what it is today. I think Bess would have approved of her.)

Bess of Hardwick in later life

When Sir William died, after ten years of marriage, Bess was responsible for his two surviving daughters from an earlier marriage as well as her own six children. By now Lady Cavendish was still only around thirty years old and good-looking and she attracted many suitors. So a couple of years later she married, for the third time, to Sir William St. Loe. He had two daughters by a previous marriage too but at his death, six years later, he left everything to Bess, cutting out his own children and his younger brother, who might well have poisoned him.

Bess was now a very wealthy woman, with an annual income worth millions in today's terms. She soon attracted another husband, her fourth and last, George Talbot, the Earl of Shrewsbury. Countess Shrewsbury's vast income was appropriated by her husband in the custom of the time. But she was now a significant person at court, being one of Queen Elizabeth's Ladies of the Bedchamber.

The Earl had seven children already and two of his sons married two of Bess's young daughters in the year of their parents' marriage. Whether the Earl and Countess's marriage would have been happy in the long term, we can't know but Jill Armitage makes it clear that it didn't stand a chance once they had visited on them a Royal house guest.

Mary, known as Queen of Scots, was billeted on them by her cousin Queen Elizabeth shortly after their marriage and remained with them, under virtual house arrest, for the next fifteen years. But they didn't stay in one place: they were constantly on the move from one of their homes to another. And Mary had an extensive entourage and was expensive to keep. And of course there were constant plots to release her, to topple or assassinate Elizabeth and put a Catholic queen on the throne again.

Mary, Queen of Scots

I have never understood the fascination with this Mary. At least, I do understand it but don't share it. She is supposed to have been very charismatic and charming but her actions are quite repellent. She and Bess, who would have been ten years or more older, a mature female confidante, who treated the imprisoned queen with kindness, used to sit together doing embroidery to pass the long days of Mary's imprisonment.

It would have been natural for the two women to have chatted and gossiped, to have exchanged confidences, as women friends do. But, according to Jill Armitage,  Mary used the rumours Bess unwisely passed on about the English queen's love life, to get her into trouble and put her out of favour.

And it seems she also used her charms on the ageing Earl, flirting with him and alienating him from his wife. Whether this is true or not, the Shrewsburys' marriage was on the rocks and they lived virtually apart for the ten years before his death. That was three years after Mary's execution at Fotheringhay Castle.

The Earl's death left Bess as Dowager Duchess of Shrewsbury and mother-in-law to the new Earl, Gilbert, who was married to her daughter, Mary. She was free to do as she liked for the first time for decades and what she liked was building projects. She was a shrewd business woman and always fought for her rights, from the day of her first husband's death. She was the second richest woman in England after the queen, enjoying income from the Barlow, Cavendish and St. Loe estates and a third of that from the Shresbury estates.

She also had a life interest in several properties, including land near her birthplace in Hardwick, where she set about building the new, now famous, Hardwick Hall. It had an unusual amount of glass for a late 16th century manor house and was much admired. Bess moved into Hardwick Hall around her seventieth birthday. She ordered a grand funeral monument for herself but lived until she was 81 in 1608, outliving Elizabeth and the other queens in this book.

Before Elizabeth, there was Lady Jane Grey, the "nine days queen" and then Mary Tudor, the first Monarch of England in her own right.

Lady Jane Grey - the Streatham portrait

 In any other context, Lady Jane would have been the heroine of this narrative. As I wrote in my story "Learn to Die" in the History Girls' anthology Daughters of Time (Templar 2014), she was not the helpless pawn she has sometimes been portrayed as, but a young woman of steely determination and unshakable Protestant faith. Bess of Hardwick was a friend of the family and Lady Jane was godmother to her second child, a daughter called Temperance, who sadly died in infancy.

Four years after this Lady Jane Grey was named as Edward Vl's heir and embarked on the disastrous course that led to her execution.

Because the people rejected her claim, albeit one sanctioned by the late boy king, and preferred Henry Vlll's daughter Mary.

This was a tricky time for Bess and her husband of the time, William Cavendish, who were both Protestants. But Queen Mary became godmother to their fifth child, a son called Charles. A shrewd choice in the circumstances.

Bess of Hardwick remains the real star of this book and I'd love to read a book just about her. She was one of the most remarkable women to emerge in Renaissance England and lived a life as eventful as any queen's.

Jill Armitage, author of Four Queens and a Countess

The Books We Read, by Gillian Polack

November 1, 2018, 5:24 pm

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This weekend reminded me that big events, especially tragic ones, can touch our lives and change our lives. When they appear in fiction, we have feelings about them. The reason I don’t read a lot of fiction set in Europe during World War II is because when I was six, I realised that a pile of corpses in a picture were not only human beings, but could well haveincluded cousins. I had to ask my parents about the pictures, even though I knew full well they’d not sugarcoat it and they said “Yes, that’s right,” and sat me down and talked me through the Holocaust and some of the things it meant for me. When I read Anne Frank’s diary as an early teen, I was ready.

Why did I ask my parents and not my parents’ friends, some of whom were far more up on history and would have been able to explain things more gently? Melbourne at that time had one of the highest number of Holocaust refugees in the world. I was taught not to ask any of my parents’ friends about their childhoods or about modern history. 

This is one of the historical events that changed my life, even though it happened before I was born. I knew from when I was a child that people would hate me because I was Jewish and that I had to be patient with them, because it was something they’d inherited without question and I was able to question. That it was my responsibility to handle the impossible. I don’t always handle it well, but that’s a different matter.

Today I found out how many parents of Jewish children are having to explain to their children this week, “It’s not safe.” This is what I was told and it hurts to hear any child having to endure it. I’ve heard it said to children whose parents endured the Vietnam War, the Cambodian… this is an aspect of most wars and of far too much bigotry. There are groups who are not respected and who are more likely to be targeted or to be casualties. There are some books, then, we can’t read because of how the shape of history affects us. Fiction is not neutral in our lives.

The hurt can help us find out what kind of approach the fiction writer takes to their work and help us work out of this is a book we should read or not. It can also tell us a lot about the writer and what sort of cultural baggage theycarry. 

My research project includes many components and one is to find out how Jews are depicted in historical fantasy. I started the Jewish element two years ago because I could see the rise in hate and I wanted to understand how our fiction could be part of a culture that supports hate. It was research I would have been doing in any case, but it’s slow because I keep taking a break from it. My research is emotionally tough. It tells me over and over, “Your parents were right – you’re not safe.” Not because the writers themselves are going to hurt me. I know many writers and they are good human beings. The problem is that one doesn't have to be a bad human being to unintentionally support the cultural narrative of those who do the hurting.

How does this work?

Let me say up front, that historical fiction is quite different in this to historical fantasy, but there’s overlap. Also, that there are different patterns entirely when the work is by a Jewish writer. Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, for instance, breaks the rules in a glorious way.

The first thing I discovered was that, for most historical fantasy, Jews are seldom allowed to be core characters. When there are central Jewish characters (CJ Sansom’s world, for instance) they do a certain amount of duty or suffer a certain amount before they’re allowed to come forward or they fit a set of stereotypes. Jews can be moneylenders or criminals or spies, for instance (Eric Flint’s work makes one of the great Jewish families subversive in this way). Secret power is given to Jews in fiction (unintentionally supporting the Jewish conspiracy fiction), but actual power is not.

What did this mean to me when the news about Squirrel Hill broke on Saturday? What does it mean to the parents of the children who are scared? It means that the vast majority of strong models (strong characters appearing across fiction ie not secondary characters only, not contained to a tony field) are within noels written by Jewish writers. Jewish readers do not see acceptance of who we actually are in historical fantasy. We see stereotypes. Sometimes they’re fascinating attempts to break stereotypes: Naomi Novik’s new novel about a moneylending family is this. But it fails on the safety test, because her idea of moneylending is so far removed from what I know about real lives in small towns. 

One of the powers of historical fiction (fantastical, realistic , somewhere in between or something else entirely) is that emotional link between events we know or that touch us and the reading we do. When bias emerges within story, however unintentionally, we, as writers, are reinforcing the situation that has parents telling their children, “Don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish – it’s not safe.”

This applies to all the core characters in fiction. Are there other minority groups who would have been there in that place at that time (England after the Crusades was not as white as most fiction depicts it)? Are there women? Are there people with disabilities? 

The question is not whether every single novel we read has characters that come from a range of backgrounds. The novel has to work as a novel and it ought to reflect the historical background.

I said this to a group of writers last year and one said, “I’m writing about Richard I – I can keep it white and male and able-bodied because that was who he was and who he mixed with.” A novel about the private life of Richard I may have Jewish characters and someone he knew may well have been murdered at his coronation – that’s within the boundaries of likelihood. A friend of his might have damaged themselves due to archery (for archery is hard on the body and too much archery can hurt. There would certainly be women in his life, too. Just because Richard and his bet friends wee white and male and able-bodied doesn't mean that every single person he mixed with was the same.

Leaving out all these people is a choice the author makes. 

Did Richard ever meet anyone with dark skin? How could he not, when he went to the Middle East on crusade? He was in a place where there was big international trade: not everyone was White European and not everyone was Christian. 

Authors choose what we want in our fiction and those choices reflect who we are. Because of that picture when I was six, I try to include major characters who are Jewish in over half my novels. I want people reading my fiction to know that those people who have told me (as some have), “The only good Jew is a dead Jew” are creating their own fiction, and that there are other stories one can tell.

That’s the thing. It’s not the choices made for a specific book that create our culture. It’s how all the books in a culture fit together. It’s not having everyone from a single background in one or two novels, it’s applying those restrictions to all novels. It's how all the books we read create material which we use to interpret our own lives.

There’s a link between the narrowness of the depiction of characters from a minority background and how that minority is treated in real life. Fagin was based on a real person. Ikey Solomon was depicted as a quite different person in fiction to what he was in real life. Dickens used stereotypes to create Fagin and every time “Oliver!” is shown around me, I can hear the questions and the tensions ramp up a notch.

Writer choices are critical components in how we experience culture and how we interpret our worlds and live our lives.

I didn’t intend to write a polemic. I feel as if I ought to apologise. Maybe I should do something one step better than an apology, though.

If you have favourite historical fantasy that has key characters who aren’t villains from any of those backgrounds (minority religion, minority race, women, has disabilities or mental health problems) please write a comment here telling us about them or send me a note through twitter of Facebook. If the list becomes long enough (I can dream!) I’ll chase down more detail and share it with you all. Let me start the ball rolling with one of my favourite fiction characters: Benjamin January, in a series about him by Barbara Hambly.

Agnes Richter: The Seamstress Who Stitched Her Life Story Onto Her Jacket. By Anna Mazzola

November 3, 2018, 1:00 am

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Some months ago, the brilliant @WomensArt1 account tweeted an image of a small linen jacket embroidered all over with lettering. They explained it had been created by a woman forced into an  asylum in the 1800s, who had stitched her life story onto her clothing. It seemed an extraordinary item, so I determined to find out more about the jacket and the woman who created it.

A Victorian Seamstress

The woman was Agnes Emma Richter, born in March 1844 near Dresden, Germany, and who made her living as a seamstress. In 1893, police admitted Agnes to a local mental institution because of complaints from her neighbours. It seems she told them that people were plotting to steal her money and she ‘believed her life to be in danger’. This led to a diagnosis of paranoia. Increasingly angry and ‘non-compliant’ with her incarceration, she was transferred in 1895 to Hubertusberg Psychiatric Institution near Dresden.

The admitting physician described Agnes as a ‘poorly-nourished pale woman with very animated eyes and facial expression who looks old for her years.’ On admission, Agnes would have been stripped of her possessions, dressed in the uniform of the institution, and forced to submit to its rituals. It was perhaps in an attempt to retain her identity and her memories that she began to sew lines of writing into the linen jacket she was given.

‘I plunge headlong into disaster’

The lines of overlapping red, yellow, blue, orange and white threaded text are almost impossible to read. Many were sewn on the inside of the jacket and have worn away with use. In some places the thread has unravelled. However, several phrases have been deciphered, including ‘I am not big’, ‘I wish to read’, ‘my jacket’, ‘my brother,’ 'no cherries', ‘I am in Hubertusburg’ and ‘I plunge headlong into disaster’. Her hospital number, 583m, appears repeatedly. It is clear that Agnes wore the jacket, as it bears marks of use, including sweat stains. It also has a darted back, which may be an alteration for what her recovered files described as a deformity.

Rediscovery 

Agnes remained in the asylum for the rest of her life, dying there in July 1918. Her words, however, live on. Her jacket was rediscovered in 1980 during an exhibition of the Prinzhorn Collection in Germany. The jacket had been part of the collection of Hans Prinzhorn, an art historian with a particular interest in madness and creativity. Agnes’ jacket is now an iconic piece in the Prinzhorn Collection at Heidelberg, stored in a glass case, with a tag that reads simply, ‘Hand sewn jacket, Agnes Richter, circa 1895.’


Further reading: 

Gail A Hornstein, Agnes's Jacket: A Psychologist's Search for the Meanings of Madness. Rodale Press, Incorporated

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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction and Gothic fiction. Her first novel, The Unseeing, is about a Victorian seamstress convicted of aiding a murder. 

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

The Elf-Mounds of Ireland... (3) by Katherine Langrish

November 3, 2018, 11:00 pm

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The Corlea Trackway

Not so many elf-mounds this time, though there is a connection to Brú na Bóinne/Newgrange. This post is about an elf-labour undertaken by Midir, 'king of the elf-mounds of Ireland’. (If you missed them, my first two posts about Irish Elf-mounds are here and here.)

In his fascinating, closely argued book ‘In Search of the Irish Dreamtime’ (Thames and Hudson, 2016) archaeologist and linguist J P Mallory examines the suggestion that Irish mythological cycles preserve some memories and practices of the Irish Bronze or Iron Ages. He concludes (spoiler alert!) that there is little or no evidence for this - and that early medieval clerks mostly back-projected legends on to these highly visible, mysterious monuments. Newgrange, for example, appears in the Tochmarc Étaine (The Wooing of Étaine) as the palace of Oengus foster-son of Midir, ‘king of the elf-mounds of Ireland’, but of course the mound was never any kind of palace.

There is however one suggestive detail. Midir, this prince of the Sidhe, comes to Bru na Bóinne to ask his foster-son for a gift, and Oengus offers him the most beautiful woman in Ireland, Étain, for his wife. The story soon becomes very complicated: Midir’s original wife Fúamnachis understandably jealous. She transforms Étain into a purple, singing fly which lives for a thousand years before falling into a cup of wine, where it is swallowed by another woman who subsequently gives birth to Étain Mk II.  (The accidental swallowing of small living things - insects or worms or  even grains of wheat - causing pregnancy and birth or rebirth, is a recurrent theme in Celtic mythology.) The reborn Étain is then married to Eochaid king of Tara, and the immortal Midir, still in love with her, has to perform a number of what might well be termed Herculean tasks in order to win  permission from Eochaid to embrace her. One of these tasks is to build a causeway over a bog called Móin Lamraige which no one had ever been able to cross.

 ¶7] Then Eochaid commanded his steward to watch the effort they put forth in making the causeway. The steward went into the bog. It seemed to him as though all the men in the world from sunrise to sunset had come to the bog. They all made one mound of their clothes, and Midir went up on that mound. Into the bottom of the causeway they kept putting a forest with its trunks and roots, Midir standing and urging on the host on every side. One would think that below him all the men of the world were raising a tumult.

¶8] After that, clay and gravel and stones are placed upon the bog. Now until that night the men of Ireland used to put the strain on the foreheads of oxen, (but) it was seen that the folk of the elfmounds were putting it on their shoulders. Eochaid did the same, hence he is called Eochaid Airem - or ploughman - for he was the first of the men of Ireland to put a yoke upon the necks of oxen. And these were the words that were on the lips of the host as they were making the causeway: ‘Put in hand, throw in hand, excellent oxen, in the hours after sundown; overhard is the exaction; none knoweth whose is the gain, whose the loss, from the causeway over Móin Lámraige.’ There had been no better causeway in the world, had not a watch been set on them. … Thereafter the steward came to Eochaid and brings tidings of the vast work he had witnessed, and he said there was not on the ridge of the world a magic power that surpassed it. 

The Wooing of Etain, tr online at https://celt.ucc.ie//published/T300012/index.html

This legendary causeway is similar to the great Iron Age timber causeway running out into Corlea Bog which was discovered in the 1980s during mechanical peat excavation. The timbers were dated by dendrochonology to 148 BC, and the construction took no longer than a single year. The causeway ended at a small island and is thought to have been made for a ritual purpose: it's estimated to have used the wood of 300 oak trees and must have generated up to a thousand wagonloads. Maybe the Sidhe were involved... However as JP Mallory points out, “The bog swallowed up the trackway soon after it was constructed." This means that no one "a thousand years later .. could generate a contemporary account of its construction.” And he therefore concludes that “it would be churlish not to accept … the argument that that the tale does retain remembrance that once a magnificent road had been built to cross a specific bog.”

Oh, you might like to know that the love story of Étain and Midir ends happily - for them, if not for poor King Eochaid. When Midir finally succeeds in holding Etain in his arms, the two of them fly up through the rooflight in the shape of two white swans.

Picture credits

The Corlea Trackway in County Longford, Ireland, 2009 (I assume a reconstruction):   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corlea_Trackway

Midir and Etain flying up out of Eochaid's hall: “The Frenzied Prince, Being Heroic Stories of Ancient Ireland” 1943. Illustration by Willy Pogány

Infamy again - Michelle Lovric

November 4, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Venice is taking a small stand against all the Disneyfication, cruisification and forgetting of the last decade. A small piece of her history is … we hope … about to be restored to her: a column of infamy.

I have written previously of my own long campaign to restore this fascinating and important relic of Venice’s early modern history. Not many cities have seven hundredth anniversaries. But Venice has: that of the conspiracy of Baiamonte Tiepolo in 1310, an event that led to the formation of the game-changing Council of Ten, which ruled Venice for the next four-and-a-half centuries.

In my innocence, thought it would be an excellent idea to resurrect that column for the 2010 anniversary. Venice’s bureaucracy disagreed. Now, where I failed eight years ago, others have at last succeeded.

Almost. In two senses.

The restored column is a replica. It’s taken over five years to produce and get permission to put it in the campo of Sant’Agostin, the place where the original column stood as a warning to anyone else who might think of murdering the Doge and setting up a new kind of state.

The original column has not been lost. It still languishes in the ‘deposito lapidario’ of the Palazzo Ducale, and for reasons best known to themselves, the Venetian Musei Civici are keeping it down there. They have at last included the column in their online register of  works. Catalogue entry Cl. XXV n. 0984 includes two photographs. This is certainly an advance on the tragicomical vacuum of information I found when I was hunting for the column all those years ago.

Nor is the replica column returning to the site of the original. For years, that spot has been marked by a dirty, broken and hardly explicit stone slab (above), making it seem as if the city were ashamed of what it had – or what it had lost – in the column of infamy.

The replica column is to be placed closer to the centre of the campo, near the well-head.

the wellhead in Campo Sant'Agostin

This drawing shows how the column was damaged by a supporter of Baiamonte Tiepolo some years after the original conspiracy

Frustrated by lack of access to the real column, I commissioned this atmospheric painting of it by Kaitlin McDonough

The Soprintendenza dei Beni Culturali has finally approved the new sculpture. However, apart from that intervention, it appears that the re-erection of the column is an entirely citizen-generated and privately funded exercise.

Venice is indebted to Andrea Bizio Gradenigo and the Societa’ di Mutuo Soccorso Carpentieri e Calafati. The work has been executed by the sculptor Riccardo Gatti with the help of Lorenzo Gersich, a student at the liceo artistico at Santo Spirito. The project is sponsored by a travel agent, Albatravel. To celebrate properly, the campo of Sant’Agostin was to a full cleaning at the hands of the Associazione Masegni e Nizoleti. All credit to everyone involved. And the column was supposed to be put in place on the anniversary of the conspiracy, which famously took place on Saint Vito’s day, June 15th, in 1310. It would have made an enormous difference to those of us who care about Venetian history and the column to let that happen.

Unfortunately, to the very last minute, Venetian bureaucrats seem to have shown a Irish-style begrudgery towards this column that their indifference finally could not keep hidden. I should not have been surprised. Despite all the best-laid plans of the above-mentioned citizens, bureaucratic delays have meant that the replica has still not reached the Campo Sant-Agostin.

Added to the bureaucracratic imbroglio there was apparently a Comune architect or engineer who was poorly and some other functionary who went on holiday at a crucial moment. I'm sure I wish them a speedy recovery and a lovely break respectively.

For the last six months, I have been hoping to bring news of the column’s placement. And hoping. And waiting. And fuming.

Meanwhile … back at the London loft … Some time ago, in this place, I wrote a very emotional post about the demolition of a Victorian tier gate belonging to the charming building that was once ‘Mr Roots Horse Hospital’. Now known as Blows Yard, it nestles by London’s Borough Market. The unpunished amputation of the column was a clear sign to me, and many people who wrote in, that something is not well, conservation-wise, in the Borough of Southwark.

Ever since then, the site has been shrouded in hoarding. The hoarding has recently come off, revealing that the mate of the lamented column has also been done away with too.

Michelle Lovric's website
For those of you looking forward to Joan Lennon's latest piece, normally scheduled for the 5th of the month - she will post on the 10th, and this special post is well worth waiting for!