Love and the Courtesans of the Floating World - by Lesley Downer

February 13, 2019, 4:30 pm

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The time to see the Yoshiwara to the best advantage is just after nightfall, when the lamps are lighted. 

Algernon Mitford, 1871

Living only for the moment, giving all our time to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking sake, caressing each other, just drifting, drifting; never giving a care if we have no money, never sad in our hearts, only like a gourd bobbing up and down on the river’s current; that is what we call ukiyo - the Floating World.

Asai Ryoi, 1661

Tayu (Kyoto courtesan) playing a kokyu

Courtesan promenading in the Yoshiwara,  Utagawa Yoshitora (died 1880) 1859

In old Japan the man in search of love and romance knew exactly where to go - the pleasure quarters. There, so the saying went, the women all told their customers, ‘I’m crazy about you’, while the customers told their lovers, ‘I will marry you.’ Neither were to be believed.

The most famous pleasure quarters of all was the Yoshiwara. It offered far more than sex. For men it was like Las Vegas crossed with Hollywood, full of marvellous things to see and do, where you could play out your fantasies and where the normal rules of life did not apply. It was known as the Nightless City, because there the lights never went out. It was a sort of never never land, where a man could say and do pretty much anything he liked and start again with a clean slate the next day - a dream of romance with no strings attached.

Going to the Yoshiwara

Japan Dyke by Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)

The Yoshiwara was a good safe distance outside the great city of Edo, now Tokyo, well away from the everyday world of work and family. Pleasure seekers left at sunset, taking a boar’s tusk boat up the River Sumida along the eastern side of the city or going on foot or on horseback. Then they walked across the marshes along the Japan Dyke. From there you could make out the lights of the Yoshiwara glimmering enticingly in the distance like a fairy city, much as, so they say, you can see the neon of Las Vegas twinkling across the desert.

Finally they’d glimpse the Looking Back Willow and the crooked road that led down to the Yoshiwara - crooked to ensure that no one could see into that magical place from outside. They’d cross the Ditch of Black Teeth and arrive at the Great Gate and leave their swords with the gatekeeper. In front of them was the broad main street lined with latticed rooms where the lowest level of women sat like goods in a shop window, waiting to be chosen, like in the red light district in Amsterdam.

Latticed room in the Yoshiwara - Night Scene by Katsushika Oi (Hokusai's daughter) - before 1860

A Courtesan Parade

Then, if they were lucky and their timing was good, they’d hear the tootle of flutes, the thump of drums and the clanging of metal rings at the top of staffs. They’d see masked dancers cavorting and lantern-bearers advancing with measured tread as a huge procession of retainers, attendants and gorgeously-apparelled lower-level courtesans appeared, making its way very slowly along the street. The crowds would draw back, whispering. It could only be one of the oirans - the courtesans - on her way to a teahouse.

And finally they’d see her undulating along, a good head above her attendants on foot high wooden clogs. Resting her hands on the shoulders of two sturdy male attendants, she’d swing her foot out to one side and scrape the edge of her clog along the road, then bring it in front of her, then slowly, deliberately do the same with the other foot in the famous ‘figure of eight walk’, named not after our ‘eight’ but the Japanese ‘eight’ which is a bit like a circumflex. She performed the whole complex routine with her hips thrust forward, with ineffable coquetry, fully aware of her magnetic appeal. Her face was painted stark white, her teeth lacquered black, her lips bright red and she wore a vast ornate headdress, glittering with ornaments.

Courtesan procession from J.E. de Becker, History of the Yoshiwara Yukaku, 1905

For the crowds shoving to catch a glimpse of her it was like seeing a movie star on Oscars’ Night. But unlike a movie star her body was not on display. It was hidden under layer upon layer of lavishly embroidered kimonos, all wrapped around with a huge brocade obi. While other women and geisha too wore their obis tied at the back, the courtesan’s was tied at the front in an enormous knot, the message being that if a man was brave and rich and patient enough, he might - just might - get to untie it.

The only part of her body on view was her little bare feet in their clogs poking out from under her skirts. It was the most erotic sight. It sent a shiver down all the spectators’ spines.

Where a low class merchant might imagine himself a prince

Yoshiwara Matsubaya oiran.  The green brocade 'apron' is her obi.

But unless a man was incredibly rich, patient, good looking and lucky, that was the closest he’d get. The courtesan was to be seen, not touched. For her it was all performance, highly choreographed. She was an artiste justly proud of her artistry.

Like les grandes horizontales of Paris in the mid nineteenth century or the Venetian courtesans of the 16th century, Japanese courtesans were the most accomplished women of their day. The courtesan parading so grandly down the street hosted literary salons which the great writers of the day competed to attend. She was beautiful, witty, brilliant. She wrote poetry, painted and danced, was an adept of tea ceremony, conversed delightfully, and could talk knowledgeably about politics if the customer so desired. She had a lavish wardrobe of kimonos for every season and every occasion, paid for by wealthy admirers and occasionally laid out to view. And she was demanding and proud, she held court like a queen.

Such a woman does not come cheap. In fact some of the most famous courtesans never slept with anyone. It would have lowered her value were she to make herself too freely available.

'Completely out of his league ...' - customer with oiran

If a man was brash enough to want to spend the night with such a woman, he’d first need an introduction. If he was new to the district he would be turned away, no matter how rich, famous or well-connected he might be. He would have to go to the teahouse where he was a regular to book her, where he would be told he’d have to wait several days. He’d order food, drink, hire entertainers, then order food for the entertainers. All this cost money. Only a big spender, a generous man prepared to throw around his money would be worth her consideration.

Then the next day or the day after he might be able to meet her and sip sake with her and make an appointment to meet her again another day - if she so chose. The patient wooer could imagine he was a lovelorn Prince Genji exchanging poems with a beautiful princess and forget that in reality he was a despised merchant and she a sex worker. She would flatter and flirt, and, if the man ever got the chance to find out, he’d discover she was most likely brilliant in bed.

Oiran at the Yoshiwara Matsubaya

She was in fact completely out of his league, were it not for the fact he was paying vast amounts for it all. Money would buy this extraordinary woman, her smiles, her caresses, her swooning interest in everything he said. This gorgeous creature would persuade him he was brilliant, handsome, that she was madly in love with him. What man wouldn’t go for that?

Working women

Meanwhile the women of course were working. The courtesan’s job was to make the customer fall in love with her but to keep him at arm’s length so that he would visit more and more frequently and spend more and more money. Everything was there to enhance his pleasure. The pleasure quarters were where you went to find aphrodisiacs - charred newt, eel, lotus root, dried rings of sea slug to fit over the penis. Grilled viper was also an aphrodisiac, as was the toasted fin of the fugu, the famous blowfish whose liver, kidneys, ovaries and eyes are deadly poisonous. There was always a titillating link between sex and death.

Courtesans wrote beautiful love letters. Some would offer a lock of their hair or a finger nail as proof of her love. And when the customer left the pleasure quarters in the morning she would escort him to the gates and be ostentatiously wiping away tears as he turned at the Looking Back Willow to feast his eyes one last time.

Yoshiwara oiran surrounded by attendants 1910 - courtesy  University of Victoria, Canada, via Wikimedia Commons

For the women the difficult balance was between playing at love without ever falling in love. If they did fall in love it was invariably a disaster. It was always the wrong man, not the rich client who’d become her patron and support her but a son whose father had marriage plans for him and who would disinherit him if he disgraced the family by running away with a courtesan or, even worse, a young poor clerk. When that happened many couples decided that the only way out was to commit ‘love suicide’, to this day still considered the ultimate demonstration of love.

The Yoshiwara reached its height in the eighteenth century. By the early nineteenth century it was already becoming a little seedy. Geisha with their pared down chic replaced the overblown courtesans and the prohibition of prostitution in 1872 was the final blow. From having been a government sponsored pleasure quarters the Yoshiwara went underground and was taken over by yakuza gangsters. It’s still there, however. If you study a map of Tokyo you can make out the legendary Five Streets, beyond Asakusa in the north east of Tokyo, though the Yoshiwara is not actually named on the map. You can even go and visit.

My novel The Courtesan and the Samurai is set largely in the Yoshiwara of the mid nineteenth century. There’s also lots about geisha and courtesans in my Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World.

My latest novel, The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback.

For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Woodblock prints and old photograph courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Photographs mine.

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Women and the Railways in World War 2: an interview by Fay Bound Alberti

February 14, 2019, 4:00 pm

≫ Next: Marianne North at Kew - by Sue Purkiss

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Susan Major, pictured at York Railway Station

For this week’s blog I talked to Dr Susan Major, who has written a fabulous book about women working on the railways during World War 2. This book is important because although we know that women took on many traditional men’s roles during the war, very little has been published on women in the railways. Railways were a reserved occupation, so in theory men continued to work on the railways while their counterparts in other industries were sent off to war. In reality, the men working on the railways were often old and disabled. The issues confronted by women workers were those that existed in other activities:  economic, sexual, social and temporal, their lives being changed by the new habits and relationships brought by the war, as well as its ending. Susan’s book is a welcome addition to our understanding of the lives of working women in the Second World War, as well as its gender politics. 

About Susan Major

Susan Major completed a PhD with the Institute of Railway Studies & Transport History at the University of York in 2012. Drawing upon material from the National Railway Museum and the British Library, she focused on early railway excursions. Her book based on this research, Early Victorian Railway Excursions, was shortlisted for the Railways and Canal Historical Society Book of the Year Awards 2017. Her latest book, Female Railway Workers in World War II, was published by Pen & Sword in 2018. Susan was a programme consultant for the BBC series Railways: the Making of a Nation, taking part in the episode on leisure. She is retired and lives in York.

Fay: “So Susan, what drew you to the subject of women on the railways?” 

Susan: “Well I completed my doctorate, which later became a book, on Victorian railway excursions. Later, when doing some research about railway voices I discovered the National Archive of Railway Oral History at the Railway Museum, which contains many different  interviews with  people working on and associated with the railways. Quite a lot of this material has been digitised and indexed and transcribed. Among all the men recorded, there were some women and I realised that their voices had not really been listened to. And there were enough women talking about the wartime period, and about working in what were commonly perceived as ‘men’s jobs’, to form the basis of a book. And remember that even so-called ‘women’s’ jobs in those days, like working as a clerk, had been men’s jobs when in the railway context. And I wanted to know not only what everyday life was life for those women, but also how they were looked at by other people, by the companies who were employing the women as well as commentators in newspapers of the time.” 

Fay: “ Are there any particular women that stand out for you?Any stories that were especially memorable?” 

Susan: “There was a female porter at York station, when it was bombed in 1942. A train was also bombed on its way into the station, and these were terrible conditions to work in. The social conditions could be difficult too; she tells a story of a parcel foreman that the female workers had problems with and they sorted him out by giving him some chocolate, which happened to be laxative chocolate.”

(Pause for laughter!)

Fay: “What can you tell us about the kind of women in these roles, their age or class for instance?”

Susan: “Well it’s a very select sample, dependent on who was chosen to interview. And these women would all have been young at the time, because the older women would have died by the time the stories were recorded. And they described liking the companionship of other women, the responsibility, and, unlike factory, work the variable and different activities involved.”

Fay: “Were the women all unmarried? I’m thinking about other roles of the time, which had very strict union rules”.  

Susan: “Yes. If you got married you had to leave. Most of these women were aged between 16 and 22 and often they met a railway man and got married and that was the last we hear of them. By contrast the newspaper reports were keen to tell readers about those women who might have 12 children and still carried out a role. And there was a sense that a woman wasn’t quite acceptable in publicity unless she had some link to a railway man. Women were not treated as individuals in their own right.” 

Fay: “Were most of these women working class women?”

Susan: “not necessarily. Many were working class though there were also reports of quite posh women working on the railways. The ones that were interviewed were mainly ordinary women, who had a clear sense of their roles and their relationships with other women and you get a real sense of the culture of the workplace through the stories that they tell. Compared to other work, like factory work, the duties could be varied and interesting”.

Fay: “What do these interviews say about how it was to be a woman in a traditionally male environment?”

Susan: “There is some discussion about workplace harassment, much of which was taken for granted. For instance one of the accounts describes the experience of a typistThey had to go down and check their work with one of the men in the office. She said “And there were never enough chairs. So we used to share a chair with a man. And I think the feminists these days would be horrified. They'd probably be having all the men done for harassment. But we used to call it fun”

Fay: “Ah. So these women would have to sit on their boss's lap.” 

Susan: “Yes, or share the chair. And there are a lot of examples of that. And women would talk about how they worked all day while their male supervisors stood around talking about sport. And at the end of the working day the women would get ready to go home and the men would say “overtime now”. And the men got paid more for the overtime, while the women had often families to get home to.There was also this concept of the “railway family”, which other historians have written about. Employees were encouraged to think of the railway as a family, and there were magazines prompting this image. And there was a sense that you could only get a job in the railways if your father put you forward, for instance, and while that wasn’t necessarily so in practice, it was how people thought about the railways as paternalistic employers”. 

Fay: “After the war did these women get sent away from the jobs, as they did in other industries?” 

Susan: “They were dispensed with, yes. Although I’ve focused on women working, the last chapter of my book is called: “and then the men came back”, which draws attention to the way women workers were dismissed. One woman, a guard, was sent a letter thanking her for her service. Only it wasn’t sent to her but to her boss. She had to travel a long way on the train to get to his office after a long shift, where she was shown this piece of paper, which he then kept, before trekking all the way home again”. 

Fay: “Thank you for a fascinating introduction to the book, which one of our lucky readers will win”. 

Prize Question: 

What TWO jobs were women railway workers NOT allowed to undertake during World War Two?

1. Engine drivers 

2. Porters 

3. Switchboard operators

4. Firemen

5. Parcel workers 

6. Signal operators 

7. Manual labourers 

Please answer in the comments below. The lucky winner will be drawn at random. 

***

Since Susan was a founding member of the award-winning Clements Hall Local History Group in York, and remains very active in the local community, I couldn’t let her go before asking her about her book on Bishy Road, a bank of independent shops whose success has caught the eye of The Guardian and other national publications. 

Fay: “Before we finish I wonder if you could say something about your work on Bishy Road, which is another subject you have written about?” 

Susan: “When I started looking at the shops for a local history project, I was surprised that nobody had looked at their history. So I started with local directories, census records, and oral history accounts to build up a picture of their development over 150 years. And though the name “Bishy Road” is quite controversial for some people, who think it is disrespectful to the name “Bishopthorpe Road, the local shops, which are still mostly independent, are regarded quite affectionately by the people who live and work there.”

I particularly enjoyed the way Susan records the social history of York through the shops that populated Bishy Road. From Chinese laundries to Teddy Boy tailors, the history of the shops is a history of social, political and economic change of the country as a whole. Which is the best kind of local history!

Bishy Road 2018: A Shopping Street in Time is available at Waterstones

 www.fayboundalberti.com 

Marianne North at Kew - by Sue Purkiss

February 15, 2019, 7:00 pm

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I first came across Marianne North when I was doing the research for my children's book, Jack Fortune and the Search for the Hidden Valley. Jack is a boy who goes plant hunting in the Himalayas with his uncle at the end of the 18th century. It's an adventure story, but it's also about facing up to your fears, and about respect for tthe environment and for other cultures.

I wasn't able to get to the Himalayas, so I had to find gardens that would give me a sense of the kinds of vegetation found there. Also, Sir Joseph Banks, who had a great part to play in the early development of Kew, is a character in the book - so it made sense to visit Kew, take a turn round the tropical house and the alpine garden, and see if they had any useful books in the shop.

While I was in the shop, I noticed some rather beautiful postcards, with plants and flowers shown in detail in the foreground, and views of landscapes from all over the world in the background. The colours were jewel-like and brilliant, and I had seen nothing like them before. They were by Marianne North, and the originals were in a specially built gallery within the grounds of Kew.

I'm not certain now whether I didn't go to see them because we were on the way out, or whether the gallery was closed for refurbishment - I think it was the latter. Anyway, I didn't go, but I did read up on Marianne, and found that she was a very resourceful Victorian lady, who when her father died and left her comfortably off, decided to devote the rest of her life to travelling to the most far-flung corners of the world in order to paint and study plants. She must have been an incredible character. She knew Sir Joseph Hooker, the director of Kew, and when she had accumulated hundreds of paintings, she offered to pay for a purpose-built gallery at Kew to house them. She oversaw the placing of the pictures, and this is the result: they're all very close together, and each one is stunning.

That first time, I bought a pack of postcards of her pictures. One of them is of number 270: Distant View of Kinchenjunga from Darjeeling. In the foreground luxuriant vegetation clothes a steep ravine, and in the distance are the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas. It's a beautiful picture. The mountains, framed by the foliage seem like an unattainable image of loveliness. I remembered this picture when I came to the point in the book where Jack's Uncle Edmund, having travelled thousands of miles to reach Hakkim, is told by the Maharaja that he will not be permitted to travel any further. Edmund glimpses this view, and Jack sees on his face a look of longing and despair that makes him determined to somehow overturn the Maharaja's decision, for the sake of his uncle: it's really a turning point in the book - the first time that Jack becomes properly aware of other people's needs and desires.

Well, so yesterday a friend suggested going to see the annual orchid festival at Kew, and I realised that here was my chance to visit the Marianne North Gallery and see it for myself. It was one of those warm, sunny days that you sometimes get in February: perfect. First we went to see the orchids. Apparently orchids grow on every continent, and each year, the festival focuses on a different region. This year it's Colombia, where scientists from Kew have a number of projects on the go. The colours were extraordinary, and there were quirky touches, like this lemur, and the hats perched on top of the cacti.

I don't think Marianne would have approved of the hats, but she would have loved the colours of the flowers.

After the orchids, we  went to look at the Hive, which is this intricate metal structure which mimics the complexity of a beehive. It shimmered beautifully in the sun, but I would love to see it at night, when the hundreds of tiny LED lights must make a glittering display.

And finally we arrived at the gallery. There is another gallery beside it now, which had exhibitions of botanical art, and we looked at this first. This picture of an ancient oak tree is one of a series of graphite drawings by Mark Frith, called A Legacy of Ancient Oaks. The photograph really doesn't do justice to the detail; they are huge, and exquisite, and utterly different from Marianne North's work, which we came to next.

I don't know of anywhere else where paintings are displayed in such a way as they are here. There are hundreds of them, all very close together: they're somehow not overwhelming, but of course you can't take them all in at one visit. I was searching for my special picture, the one of Kanchenjunga, and it took me a long time to find it. On the way I saw landscapes from South America, from Australia, from South America, from Malaysia - from all over the world. And I realised that they don't just show the plants. They show what the world was like in the second half of the 19th century: there are people there too, and the places they lived in. She saw so much, and she captured so much. 

Marianne North

Incidentally, if you look at the cover of Jack Fortune, you may see that there's a reference to Picture Number 270, just in the layout of the cover image. This pleases me very much!

A Tale of Time, Cakes and Travel, or how Bettys came to Harrogate, by Penny Dolan

February 16, 2019, 10:00 pm

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This is Harrogate, and a queue lines up under a glass shop-canopy that protects them from the brisk, damp Yorkshire weather.

These patient people are waiting for a table within Bettys Tea Rooms where, served by waitresses in starched pinnies, they intend to enjoy morning coffee, lunch, or afternoon tea in a genteel, well-heeled style. Meanwhile, at the shop counters, everyday customers can call in and buy bread, cakes or pastries, or a wide range of tea, coffee and chocolate confectionery.

Like The Stray, the stretch of open grassland that runs round part of Harrogate, Bettys is part of the local tourist industry that likes to offer an image of a stylish spa town, still flaunting the somewhat faded flag of its early twentieth century elegance.

Across the town centre, the antique shops and rare booksellers are few, the plate-glass store-fronts stand empty, the trendy restaurants have come and gone and the town hall has been sold off for luxury apartments so in some ways, Bettys represents a kind of permanence in Harrogate. This is, I feel, a suitable state of affairs as Bettys - the company – reaches its hundredth birthday this year.

Unlike poor Patisserie Valerie and her too-many premises, Bettys has always held tight to her Yorkshire roots and limited the number of its cafes. There are, even now, only six: on Parliament Street in Harrogate; at Harlow Carr Gardens, Harrogate: in Ilkley and in Northallerton; at Stonegate in York and also at St Helen’s Square in York, which boasts an interior inspired by the famous cruise liner, the Queen Mary.

As in all traditional stories, Bettys begins with a poor orphan child, born in 1885. though not in Yorkshire. 

Little Fritz Butzer, the son of a miller and master-baker, was born in Switzerland, His mother Ida died when he was an infant and not long after, fire destroyed his father Johann’s mill. Although his older sister was adopted by relatives, Fritz, only five-years-old, was sent back to the family village to be fostered.

He lived with a farmer who, despite promises, neglected the boy’s care and education and used him as a farm labourer. As soon as possible, Fritz left the farm and went to work as an assistant baker. Over the next years, he worked his way around Switzerland and then into France, learning about confectionery and the skills needed to be a chocolatier.

Even so, how - given his next move - can he have learned so much within what must have been about eleven years? Because, in 1907, at twenty-two, Fritz set off for England, unable to speak much of the language.

Unfortunately – or fortunately - on reaching London, he’d lost the paper giving the address of his destination. All he remembered – says the story - was that the place sounded like “Bratwurst”, a kind of sausage so Fritz was put on the train to Bradford. As an area of Bradford is still called Little Germany, this may not have been as random a suggestion as it sounds and, besides, many were seeking work in the industrial towns of the North. Fritz was employed by Bonnet and Sons, a Swiss confectioner in the city, but he was clearly an ambitious young man.

He moved on to the prosperous Yorkshire spa town of Harrogate, an “Inland Resort” that catered for a variety of visitors, who came to stay for health cures, rest and relaxation, shopping and entertainment and – of course – indulging in the best of food and drink. Originally, the annual visitors came as a diversion during the late-summer Yorkshire hunting season but, by the twentieth century, Harrogate was an upper-class destination all year round. The town’s most glittering season came in 1911, when it was visited by Queen Alexandra and various members of European and German royalty. Offering elegant hotels, prestigious musical performances inside the gilded Kursall, both Winter Gardens and Valley Gardens as a place for sociable promenades, Harrogate was a busy enough place for the enterprising young baker to make his mark.

Fritz married Claire Appleton, his landlady’s daughter, and before long had wisely changed his name to the more anglicised Frederick Belmont. In the summer of 1919, financed by his wife’s family, he set up the first Bettys bakery in Harrogate and in the 1920’s, but the tearooms he established were in Leeds and Bradford.

Then, in 1937, rather boldly, Frederick Belmont chose York for his new venture. It was already the home of three famous Quaker chocolate companies - Rowntrees, Terrys and Cravens – and site he chose was in the heart of the city, directly opposite the Terry’s cafe in St Helen’s Square.

The York Bettys flourished, and like all his other tearooms, would have prided itself on the quality of its offerings, the elegance of its catering, the impressiveness of its window displays, the superiority of its music and the luxury of the private reception rooms. Bettys was distinctive, and at at time when women could not meet away from home in pubs or bars, a valued female environment.

However, during WWII, Bettys in York took on a different character: a smart cocktail bar was installed upstairs and, away from the need for blackout, a bar down below the stairs. At that time, Yorkshire was home to many local air-bases and Bettys became popular with the bomber boys and the Canadian and American pilots. A framed mirror, where the airmen inscribed their names with a diamond pen, is still on show in the York tea-rooms. Not many of those boys would make a return visit to Bettys bar.

Nevertheless, throughout the war, Betty’s survived both bombs and the threat of army requisitioning. Did the supposed glamour of the local aircrews attracted the ire of the military? Or, behind the scenes, did the RAF high-ups defend Mr Belmont’s accounts of the number of meals he served, and the menus he simplified to fit rationing standards - and so keep their favourite Bettys bar open?

Eight years after the end of the war in Europe, Frederick Belmont died. His nephew, Victor Wild, took over as a managing director and oversaw the next decades. There were changes: although Bettys in Leeds became an espresso bar in the 1950’s, it did not survive the era of the mods and rockers and Bettys in Bradford closed too, bringing an end to the cafe in the industrial cities. It was followed by a time of expansion: in 1962, Wild heard that C.E.Taylors, the Yorkshire tea and coffee merchants, was for sale, Wild took action and Bettys became “Bettys and Taylors”. The Wild family remains involved in the company which, after trading for a century, flourishes online, through diversifying into Bettys Cookery School and cookbooks and publications, and, at an everyday commercial level, through the nationwide “Yorkshire Tea” and similar products.

Put together, the Bettys tale does read rather like a novel but there is rather a nice twist to the tale. When the new company was created, two establishments changed hands and brands. Over in Ilkley, the then-Taylor’s Tea Kiosk became another Bettys.

The other change was more significant: it fulfilled the dream Fritz Butzer had dreamed a hundred years before. The Imperial Cafe in Harrogate, which was then owned by Taylors, became a Bettys Tea Room, which is where, when a treat is needed, you can enjoy the most delicious cakes.

I must warn you that visiting Bettys is not at all cheap, but as a wise and rational friend once explained as we sat having a lovely, long and all too rare book chat. “Don’t think of the tea and scones as expensive. Just think of it as renting a table for a couple of hours.” And that, now and again, works for me.

As for the mysterious Betty? There are several ideas as to whom she might have been within the history section of Betty’s website - thank you for all the information -, but there’s also doubt as to whether she even existed. 

With Fritz’s own life-story being as full as this – an orphaned immigrant travelling through France, becoming a baker and confectioner on the journey and creating cafes up here in the North of England - maybe Betty doesn't really need a tale of her own, even for if this year is her hundredth birthday? 

Although it is very tempting to make another one up. . .  Once there was a young orphan girl . . ?

Nevertheless, HAPPY BIRTHDAY BETTYS,

and, additionally, 

in my mind,

all those neat waitresses and waiters in their black and white uniforms,

and the busy shop staff

and all the Bettys-behind-the-scenes bakers,

and the workers and packers in the Taylors factory

deserve a very, very loud cheer and more too.

Hope they will be having a great and grand party sometime this hundredth year too!

And in response to any pedantic queries about the missing apostrophe?

Bettys doesn’t have one.  Officially.

Penny Dolan

pennydolan1@twitter

When is Spring? In Celebration of Imbolc - Celia Rees

February 17, 2019, 4:30 pm

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St Brigid's Cross - Ancient Symbol of Imbolc

Today, I went out walking and marked the year's turning from darkness to light, from dormancy to life. 

8:05 15th February, 2019, Leamington Spa

We are not so far removed from our ancestors.  Until very recently we were all ruled by the eternal rhythms of sunset and sunrise.

Planet Earth at Night - wikipedia

Now, we have flooded the world with light. We love it so much that it is there 24 hours a day, you can even see it from Space. We are warned not to look at bright screens last thing at night because the brain simply won't know that it is time to sleep. Our love of light and dislike of darkness have changed the natural pattern of our lives, but still we feel it on our pulses, the turning of the year.

We still keep to the ancient calendar that is ruled by the sun. The winter solstice might have been christened Christmas but we are really celebrating the point when the sun begins its slow return. It's an act of faith more than anything. The mornings are still dark, night still comes early. The trees are bare and nothing is growing. Many of us feel 'down' at this time of year, depressed. The third Monday in January, has been designated Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year.  Electric lights are not enough, screens are not enough. We need the sun.

Then there is a day, often in late January or early February,  when the morning is lighter,  evening  comes later, the sun is brighter, stronger, there's a change in the air.  That's why I think we should re-instate the ancient Celtic Festival of Imbolc. It was traditionally celebrated on 1st of February, but the day was not exact, it could come a fortnight on either side of that date, depending on seasonal variations, the onset of lambing, the blooming of the blackthorn. It was adopted by the Christian church as St Brigid's Day, Brigid herself a christianised version of the Celtic goddess, Brigid. It is immediately followed by Candlemas on 2nd of February, a Christian festival associated with the Virgin Mary. Clues there as to its importance in the Pagan Wheel of the Year and its strong association with the Goddess. 

Imbolc and Candlemas have slipped from our calendar and our consciousness. The nearest date of note is Valentine's Day with its rampant commercialism, tawdry cards and heart shaped balloons. A time, supposedly, for lovers, but how many of us are? The traditional anonymity of the exchange of cards and tokens disappeared a long time ago and  for those of us who are not in a relationship for any number of reasons,Valentine's Day can eclipse Blue Monday as the most depressing day of the year. 

How much better to celebrate the coming of Spring. Not when it has already arrived on 21st March and the daffodils are everywhere, but when we can sense its approach in the lighter mornings and evenings and the drifts of snowdrops carpeting the bare ground. 

6:45 15th February, 2019 Leamington Spa

Snowdrops in Jephson Gardens

The Terminators By L.J. Trafford

February 18, 2019, 4:00 pm

≫ Next: The problem with historical fiction – Carolyn Hughes

≪ Previous: When is Spring? In Celebration of Imbolc - Celia Rees

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In a previous post I examined just how damn dangerous it is being a Roman emperor (click here).

You have a whoppingly high chance of an unnatural death and within that category you are far more likely to be deathed unnaturally by assassination than by any other way. 

 Given the high number of assassinations I thought it might be interesting to examine a few to see if they had anything in common, any key themes or motivations they all shared. I wanted to look at the how, the who and the why of the subject.

Then realising there are 24 emperors who met that end, I decided that we may need a bigger boat in the shape of a Part Two to this subject.

So welcome to Part One of The Terminators.


1) Julius Caesar

No piece on assassination in Ancient Rome is complete without looking at the most famous assassinations of all time; that of Julius Caesar. It’s so famous that it has become part of our cultural conversation. Phrases like “Et tu, Brutus?” and “Beware the Ides of March” are bandied around. That Shakespeare bloke write a play about it. Novelists continue to use it as the pivotal dramatic scene in their books. Who can blame them when it presents such epic themes.


The How
It was, as we all know, the Ides of March (aka 15th March 44 B.C.) Caesar had gone to the Senate House. The stage direction in the Shakespeare play is very to the point, several sharp points that is: 

CASCA first, then the other Conspirators and BRUTUS stab CAESAR 

Plutarch goes into far more detail:

Tullius tore Caesar's robe from his shoulders with both hands, and Casca, who stood behind him, drew his dagger and gave him the first stab, not a deep one, near the shoulder. Caesar caught the handle of the dagger and cried out loudly in Latin: "Impious Casca, what doest thou?" Then Casca, addressing his brother in Greek, bade him come to his aid.

And now Caesar had received many blows and was looking about and seeking to force his way through his assailants, when he saw Brutus setting upon him with drawn dagger. At this, he dropped the hand of Casca which he had seized, covered his head with his robe, and resigned himself to the dagger-strokes.

The conspirators, crowding eagerly about the body, and plying their many daggers, wounded one another, so that Brutus also got a wound in the hand as he sought to take part in the murder, and all were covered with blood. 

The assassination of Julius Caesar, painted by William Holmes Sullivan, c. 1888 {{PD-US}}

The Who 

There were in total sixty conspirators. Which is rather a lot of people to keep a secret this big. But keep it they did.
The two you will have heard of are Cassius and Brutus. But the others we have names for are: Quintus Ligarius, Basilus, Casca, Casca Longus, Decimus Brutus, Cimber, Trebonis, Cassius’ brother Longuinus, Parmensis, Caecilius, Ruga, Spurius, Naso, Aquila, Petronius, Turullius, Laebeo

The key thing to note here is that all of these men are of good families, they are men of high standing who’d held the highest positions in Roman society. Cassius for example was a war hero, a member of Marcus Crassus’ doomed invasion of Parthia. After Crassus and the best part of three legions were exterminated by the Parthians it was Cassius who led the survivors of the slaughter to safety and held the enemy off from over running Syria.

Cimba had been the governor of Bithynia and Pontus.

Trebonius had served as Caesar’s legate in Gaul and held the governorship of Spain. Five months before taking part in the assassination Caesar had appointed him Consul, the highest position available.

Brutus was a close family friend to Caesar, his mother Servilia was Caesar’s long term mistress.

Decimus Brutus was even remembered in Caesar’s will.

Several of the conspirators had served with Caesar. Others had been on the wrong side of the recent civil war between Caesar and Pompey. Yet Caesar had forgiven them and appointed them to positions in government.

There’s a big question hanging in the air. Let’s answer it.



The Why
It’s the Why that makes Caesar’s assassination so interesting to the likes of Shakespeare and Robert Harris.
Caesar had returned to Rome the victor of the civil wars. He’d been given the title of Dictator. This was a position handed to others in the past, but on a purely temporary basis. Caesar had been made Dictator for life.
Rome had been ruled by Kings but the last of them, Tarquin had been cruel and tyrannical. He’d been killed by another Brutus, ancestor of our Brutus.
That Brutus had sworn that they would : “never tolerate Kings in Rome evermore, whether of that family of any other."  Livy.

Coin issued by Brutus two years after Caesar's murder

That killing had ushered in the Roman Republic, a system without kings where power was deliberately minimised and shared out so that no one man could overwhelm like Tarquin had.
The conspirators believed that Caesar wanted to make himself King and destroy the Republic. They aimed to get rid of him before he could do so. An anticipatory assassination to preserve the political system they had sworn to serve, to free the Roman people from a future tyranny.

It makes for good dramatic scenes as Brutus and co torment themselves with the terrible task they must complete to save Rome and her people from one man rule.


The Aftermath
With Caesar’s bloody corpse on the floor Brutus, himself saturated in blood, attempted to talk to the Senators present in the house. Unsurprisingly they are pretty freaked out by events and leg it. The conspirators then went to the Capitol Hill. They held up their bloody hands and daggers and declared liberty. Brutus began to make a speech.
And from that point on it all went wrong......

Because although Caesar might have annoyed at least 60 of the posh types of Rome, he was very popular with the people. They weren’t keen on him being murdered, particularly when Caesar’s will was read out and they heard that he’d left every person in Rome a sum of money. Also Caesar, as a successful all conquering general, was held in great esteem by the army too.

Moving down to the Forum for further appeals they faced an increasingly hostile crowd. So hostile they were forced to flee.
The people continued demonstrated their displeasure with Caesar’s death with enough vigour that in the end the conspirators were forced to flee Rome.

Caught up in ideals of their own noble torment they had totally misread the mood. They had assumed that they would be congratulated on their act, that it would be recognised as the great noble deed it was. They’d anticipated a tyranny and acted. But they’d never anticipated or even considered that there might be an opposition. Certainly they hadn’t considered an opposition that might be more eloquent than they were, in the shape of Mark Antony, who might actively seek to punish them for murdering his friend.
They soon found themselves hunted down by Antony and, another beneficiary of Caesar’s will, his great nephew Octavius. They were both fully intent on avenging Caesar. Brutus and Cassius were both killed at the Battle of Philippi.


Was the assassination a success? 
The motivating aim of the assassination of Julius Caesar was to prevent him making himself king and destroying the Republic.
What followed Caesar’s assassination were a series of civil wars that resulted in one man, Caesar’s great nephew Octavius ruling Rome under the name of Augustus and forming a dynasty. The Republic as it had been was over. Rome was now a monarchy in all but name.
So no, it was not a success. It was an utter failure, hastening what it sought to prevent.


2) Caligula

Julius Caesar was assassinated for what he might become in order to preserve the state. Our next assassination is lacking noble ideals. Rome’s third Emperor Caligula had ruled Rome for 3 years and 10 months when he was assassinated at the age of 29. This is an interesting one because the reign is so short. Caesar took decades to build up sufficient resentment to be offed. Caligula manages to really annoy in 3 years and 10 months. Which I think we should take a moment to appreciate.


Right appreciated.

The How 
Suetonius has the tale for us.:

On the ninth day before the Kalends of February at about the seventh hour he hesitated whether or not to get up for luncheon, since his stomach was still disordered from excess of food on the day before, but at length he came out at the persuasion of his friends. 

In the covered passage  through which he had to pass, some boys of good birth, who had been summoned from Asia to appear on the stage, were rehearsing their parts, and he stopped to watch and to encourage them; and had not the leader of the troop complained that he had a chill, he would have returned and had the performance given at once.  

From this point there are two versions of the story: some say that as he was talking with the boys, Chaerea came up behind, and gave him a deep cut in the neck, having first cried, "Take that," and that then the tribune Cornelius Sabinus, who was the other conspirator and faced Gaius, stabbed him in the breast. Others say that Sabinus, after getting rid of the crowd through centurions who were in the plot, asked for the watchword, as soldiers do, and that when Gaius gave him "Jupiter," he cried "So be it," and as Gaius looked around, he split his jawbone with a blow of his sword. 

As he lay upon the ground and with writhing limbs called out that he still lived, the others dispatched him with thirty wounds; for the general signal was "Strike again." Some even thrust their swords through his privates. 

It’s a bloody death isn’t it? Deliberately brutal – note the thrusting swords into his groin. 

Caligula really managed to piss people off, but who were they?


The Who 
Two are named by above, the Tribune Cornelius Sabinus and commander of the Guards, Cassius Chaera. Though you’d have thought the suspicious Romans wouldn’t have trusted a man named Cassius with their personal security. Suetonius says these two succeeded thanks “to the cooperation of the most powerful freedmen and the Guards’ Commanders” 

Bust of Caligula in the Louvre. Photo by Clio20

I smell a bit of palace intriguing and plotting. Cassius Dio has a little more detail:

“There were a good many, of   course, in the conspiracy and privy to what was being done, among them Callistus and the prefect.

Practically all his courtiers were won over, both on their own account and for the common good. And those who did not take part in the conspiracy did not reveal it when they knew of it, and were glad to see a plot formed against him.” 

Callistus was Caligula’s secretary. See here for an article I wrote examining his slippery life.
So pretty much everyone knew it was going to happen within Caligula’s inner circle. But nobody took any steps to stop it.


The Why
Caligula is the poster boy for the demented ruler. A young man utterly unsuited to ruling who gets steadily more demented, steadily more autocratic and steadily more cruel.
A couple of anecdotes will suffice to give a flavour of Caligula’s rule and why people might want him dead:

At Puteoli, at the dedication of the bridge that he contrived, as has been said, after inviting a number to come to him from the shore, on a sudden he had them all thrown overboard; and when some caught hold of the rudders of the ships, he pushed them off into the sea with boathooks and oars. 

Suetonius

He was no whit more respectful or mild towards the senate, allowing some who had held the highest offices to run in their togas for several miles beside his chariot and to wait on him at table, standing napkin in hand either at the head of his couch, or at his feet. 

Suetonius

If you really want to know more I’d recommend Mary Beard’s documentary for the BBC or alternatively the soft porn film Caligula starring Malcolm McDowell. It’s terrible in the sort of eye popping way Caligula’s court probably was. 

To recap Caligula was possibly mad, definitely cruel and getting rid of him was for the public good. But is that really the why of the situation? No, no its not.

Let us look at chief assassinator and aptly named Cassius.

Chaerea was an old-fashioned sort of man to begin with, and he had his own special cause for resentment. For Gaius was in the habit of calling him a wench, though he was the hardiest of men, and whenever it was Chaerea's turn to command the guard, would give him some such watchword as "Love" or "Venus” 

Cassius Dio

And here’s Suetonius:  

For Gaius used to taunt him, a man already well on in years, with voluptuousness and effeminacy by every form of insult. When he asked for the watchword Gaius would give him "Priapus" or "Venus," and when Chaerea had occasion to thank him for anything, he would hold out his hand to kiss, forming and moving it in an obscene fashion. 

There’s your why for you.
And a good life lesson. Never taunt or humiliate the man who is responsible for your personal safety. Oh and who carries a sword as part of his job



The Aftermath
The only people seemingly not in on the plot were Caligula’s German bodyguard. Who realising their epic job fail tried to make amends by a general massacre. First up were Cassius and Sabinus and their fellow dagger welders. Then some “inoffensive senators” as Suetonius puts it. RIP inoffensive senators.
Then random people, our sources don’t indicate whether they were offensive or not.

In the style of Caesar’s assassins Caligula’s murderers had given absolutely no thought to what happened next. Which I think underlines the personal nature of the assassination, this is not about politics or an unsuitable ruler. It’s about revenge.
Revenge doth not run a government and in the chaos that followed Caligula’s death there were two very different views of what should happen

The Senators rushed to the Senate House and declared the Republic should be restored and there no longer be emperors. Hadn’t Caligula’s rule showed in fully bloody horror the evil of a one man rule?

The Praetorian Guard had in the meantime found Caligula’s uncle Claudius hiding behind a curtain and made him Emperor. 

Proclaiming Claudius Emperor by Lawrence Alma-Tadema{{PD-US}}

 
Was it a success?
If Cassius’ aim was to inflict revenge and pain on the man who’d taunted him then yes it was an amazingly successful assassination.
Also for all those freedmen like Callistus who involved themselves in the plot they rid themselves of a demented boss.
The lesson from Caligula’s assassination is that if you set the bar low for the outcome of your plot, then you can consider it a wild success.



3) Domitian 96AD

Rome’s 11th Emperor fared much better than Caligula in clocking up 15 years of rule before annoying enough people to get killed. 

Statue of Domitian Photo by Steerpike

The How
In order to assassinate a ruler you need to get close to him. In Caesar’s case his killers knew his schedule and waited for the optimum time and place to get their daggers in. With Caligula it was his own Guards who assassinated him, so they were by his side anyway. In the case of Domitian the ‘how to get close’ part of the plot is really quite ingenious and thought out:

“To avoid suspicion, he wrapped up his left arm in woollen bandages for some days, pretending that he had injured it, and concealed in them a dagger. Then pretending to betray a conspiracy and for that reason being given an audience, he stabbed the emperor in the groin as he was reading a paper which the assassin handed him, and stood in a state of amazement. “ 

Suetonius

Element of surprise rating 8/10. Domitian really did not see this coming. Had the event ended there it would have been an incredibly neat affair. But Domitian wasn’t going quietly.

“The emperor grappled with Stephanus and bore him to the ground, where they struggled for a long time, Domitian trying now to wrest the dagger from his assailant's hands and now to gouge out his eyes with his lacerated fingers.” 

Suetonius

Ouchy. Several other conspirators then rushed in and helped finish Domitian off in a very messy way.
If you’re wondering how we know all this . Well there was a witness . One of the Imperial slaves, a young boy, was tending to the household shrine when it all kicked off.



The Who
The man who did the stabbing was Stephanus, a former steward of Domitian’s exiled niece.
But he was far from the only one involved. Helping him finish off Domitian were Clodianus, Maximus, Satur and a gladiator from the Imperial school. All of them were palace staff.

They were the do-ers but they weren’t the plotters. They were much higher up the Imperial ladder:
Parthenius, Domitian’s chamberlain
Sigerus, another chamberlain
And Entellus, head of petitions.


We know a little bit about Parthienus, for the poet Martial courts his influence in the hope of getting his poems before the Emperor.

ON A TOGA GIVEN HIM BY PARTHENIUS. 

This is that toga much celebrated in my little books, that toga so well known and loved by my readers. It was a present from Parthenius; a memorable present to his poet long ago; in it, while it was new, while it shone brilliantly with glistening wool, and while it was worthy the name of its giver, I walked proudly conspicuous as a Roman knight. 

Martial even writes a poem to celebrate the birthday of Parthienus’ infant son, Burrus.
So here we have three senior members of Domitian’s staff planning his murder and employing other members of the palace staff to enact it.
I think we need to know why.


The Why

Though a capable administrator Domitian had become increasingly paranoid. Though justifiably so given in 89AD a Roman General named Saturnius had initiated a revolt against him. That was fairly easily suppressed but it clearly left its mark on Domitian, not least in his party hosting, which had taken a turn towards macabre: 

Bust of Domitian Photo by Jastrow

He prepared a room that was pitch black on every side, ceiling, walls and floor, and had made ready bare couches of the same colour resting on the uncovered floor; then he invited in his guests alone at night without their attendants. 

And first he set beside each of them a slab shaped like a gravestone, bearing the guest's name and also a small lamp, such as hang in tombs. Next comely naked boys, likewise painted black, entered like phantoms, and after encircling the guests in an awe-inspiring dance took up their stations at their feet. 

After this all the things that are commonly offered at the sacrifices to departed spirits were likewise set before the guests, all of them black and in dishes of a similar colour. 

Cassius Dio

Yikes. Senators were executed, relatives exiled and a Vestal Virgin buried alive under Domitian’s increasingly paranoid rule: 

He used to say that the lot of princes was most unhappy, since when they discovered a conspiracy, no one believed them unless they had been killed. 

Suetonius

Domitian had a particularly bad relationship with the Senate. The writers Tacitus and Pliny the Younger both served in the Senate under Domitian and it’s clear from them just how frightening it was. Nobody knew when he might pick on them.
But, as we’ve seen, the blow when it came, came not from the persecuted Senators but rather his closest advisers. We are supplied with the reason: 

He had first banished and now slew Epaphroditus, Nero's freedman, accusing him of having failed to defend Nero; for he wished by the vengeance that he took on Nero's behalf to terrify his own freedmen long in advance, so that they should venture no similar deed. Yet it availed him naught, for he became the object of a conspiracy in the following year 

Cassius Dio

Epaphroditus was a freedman of Nero, who had accompanied the emperor on his final flight from Rome. As the soldiers had closed in on Nero, Epaphroditus had assisted him into suicide. This was 27 years before. That’s quite a statement. Clear as glass. And aimed directly at his own staff.
What we can conclude from their actions, particularly Parthienus the recipient of Martial’s kind poems, was that they saw it as a him or us scenario.
This is born out by this little tale:

He invited one of his stewards to his bed-chamber the day before crucifying him, made him sit beside him on his couch, and dismissed him in a secure and gay frame of mind, even deigning to send him a share of his dinner. 

Suetonius

The message was clear. It could be any of them. So they acted.


The Aftermath
Stephanus and the others who had physically attacked Domitian were instantly slain by the Guards.
There was undoubtedly a bit of chaos but the very same day that Domitian was murdered, Marcus Cocceius Nerva was proclaimed by the Senate as Emperor. Take a moment to take that in. THE VERY SAME DAY. 

Statue of Nerva Photo by Carole Raddato

Was it a Claudius behind the curtain scenario or something quite different? Nerva was 66 years old, an experienced feature of the government and very firmly loyal to the Flavian dynasty of which Domitian was the last. Had he been lined up before hand by Parthienus, Sigerus and Enntellus?

Cassius Dio says yes:

They discussed the matter with various men, and when none of them would accept it (for all were afraid of them, believing that they were testing their loyalty), they betook themselves to Nerva. For he was at once of the noblest birth and of a most amiable nature 

It would certainly explain the speed of the ascension.
Nerva ruled for 2 years, dying naturally at age 67. He became the first of what Edward Gibbon called the Five Good Emperors, an era of prosperity and peace.

So it was a success then? 

As with the other assassinations let us go back to the principle aim. The conspirators were motivated by fear for their lives from an increasingly paranoid boss.

That boss was removed. So a tick for that one.
However did it save their lives? Not Stephanus it didn’t. He was instantly killed. And the chief plotter Parthienus? He lasted incredibly until October the following year when the Praetorian Guard who’d been firm supporters of Domitian stormed the palace and insisted Nerva hand him over.
Domitian had been wildly popular with the army, mainly because he had massively increased their pay, so the question here is surely why did it take so long for them to revenge their emperor?

The answer is quite chilling: because they didn’t know Parthienus was involved. Remember he was the plotter, he didn’t actually take part in the killing. Domitian’s former Chamberlain spent a whole year knowing what he had done and no doubt wondering whether that would be uncovered. That’s got to be stressful. We have to wonder whether he was betrayed by someone on the inside, another palace employee letting the great secret slip?

Nerva was given little choice in the matter, held at knife point by soldiers
Parthienus was handed over. He was executed in a particularly horrible way.

So no it did not save Parthienus’ life for long either. Though maybe if he hadn’t been betrayed we might never have known the man who brought Martial a toga was also behind an Emperor’s murder.


Here we end part one of The Terminators......

L.J. Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors series. Of which assassination and general massacres feature highly.

The problem with historical fiction – Carolyn Hughes

February 19, 2019, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: The Secret Garden: Ancient World Contraception by Elisabeth Storrs

≪ Previous: The Terminators By L.J. Trafford

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What “problem”, you might ask…

When I first embarked on writing historical fiction several years ago, I edged my way nervously into a genre that I felt instinctively I loved but was also terrified of making a complete hash of. In 2015, a year before I published my first historical novel, I had submitted my doctoral thesis, Authenticity and alterity: Evoking the fourteenth century in fiction. I most certainly did then – and essentially still do – suffer from “imposter syndrome” over my attempts to become an historical novelist. And some of the research that I’d engaged in for that PhD might easily have derailed me almost before I had properly begun. For I’d read more than a few opinions of historical fiction that made me wonder if the whole enterprise was a complete waste of time and effort!

For example:

• “Historical fiction can never be authentic”
• “Historical fiction is a lie”
• “Historical fiction invariably fails to portray the strangeness of the past”.

But, surely, that couldn’t all be true? Otherwise no one would want to read it, let alone write it! For those of you who haven’t come across such negative opinions before, let me explain…

“Historical fiction can never be authentic”

The nineteenth-century novelist Henry James famously disparaged historical fiction. It was not the practicalities of the past that James thought difficult to describe, but imagining with any degree of realism, or perhaps “naturalism”, the inner lives of those who lived in earlier times.

Henry James by John Singer Sargent. National Portrait Gallery. Public domain.

Yet isn’t imagining the inner lives of characters (historical or fictional) for readers to experience exactly what historical novelists attempt to do?

So, how does a writer make the characters of a novel set, for example, in the fourteenth century, seem to be of their time? I want the readers of my novels to feel they have been immersed in the mediaeval world, but without really noticing its “mediaevalness”. The latter might happen, for example, if they found themselves wondering if this or that thing or image or phrase or thought was “authentic”. To achieve an appropriate degree of authenticity, artefacts and environments must be, or at least seem to be, of their time, and noticeable anachronisms of fact or notion must be avoided, to save throwing the reader out of the illusion. Mindsets (the characters’ thought-world) must be convincing, and language, in narrative and dialogue, must reflect that thought-world, while not necessarily attempting to mimic the actual language of the period.

That all sounds fine in theory but how does it work in practice? James would presumably say it cannot ever work, that historical novelists and readers delude themselves in thinking the novels are in any way authentic. Yet writers surely do their very best to portray their characters and settings with authenticity. They undertake months or even years of research, in history books, in contemporary writings where they exist, and in art, and they use their intelligence and their imagination to transport, first, themselves, and then their readers into the inner lives of their historical characters.

Occasionally, an error of fact or understanding may slip through but, with the effort authors make, and with the eagerness of so many thousands of historical fiction devotees who happily allow themselves to suspend any disbelief in order to enjoy the story, the enterprise (of writing historical fiction) surely is not, as James implied, doomed to failure?

Though actually I think what is true of historical fiction may be true of any fiction... Historical fiction may not be able to fully convey the experiences of the past, but it is difficult for any type of fiction to wholly convey the experience of a character’s life, especially if that character, for example, commits murder, or blasts off into space to save the planet from a rogue asteroid, or perpetrates any number of actions beyond the experience of the average reader.

Although this is, of course, exactly what all novelists, historical or otherwise, attempt to do.

“Historical fiction is a lie”

In 2000, Richard Lee, the president of the Historical Novel Society, gave a talk to an audience of writers entitled ‘History is but a fable agreed upon: the problem of truth in history and fiction’.

The title alluded to a comment attributed to Napoleon, which suggested that history is a form of fiction, for its “truth” depends on who is telling the story: the written history of war differs depending on whether its author comes from the camp of the conqueror or that of the conquered.

Napoleon crosses the St. Bernard, by Jacques-Louis David, 1800. Public domain.

But isn’t it also true that, to some extent, the “facts” of history are continually changing, as the latest research inevitably reveals previously unknown information or offers new interpretations of historical truths?

Richard quoted a literary critic who, in a Telegraph book review that year, had said the

“historical novel has always been a literary form at war with itself. The very term, implying a fiction somehow grounded in fact – a lie with obscure obligations to the truth – is suggestive of the contradictions of the genre.”

Richard considered that this critic, and others, misunderstood the nature of historical fiction, for surely all fiction is a lie “somehow grounded in fact”. No one, he said, thinks that either Trainspotting or Bridget Jones’ Diary is true, but rather that “they were in some way drawn from life”. Historical fiction is no more a contradiction than any other form of art, all of which seeks “both accuracy and illusion”.

All fiction is an illusion created by the writer’s imagination. Yet historical, no less than contemporary, fiction must be sustained by a foundation of fact, creating a sense of “authenticity”, in order for readers to accept the illusion as temporary reality. Even fantasy fiction, science fiction and some forms of thriller, despite being illusion writ large, must be founded, if not on fact, at least on sufficient rationality or logic to sustain the illusion.

I found myself almost apoplectic with indignation when I read what that critic had written. He seemed to be implying that historical fiction was somehow “invalid” as a concept. Richard Lee’s comment rings true for me when he suggests that historical fiction, like all art, aims to achieve both accuracy, or perhaps authenticity, and illusion.

Illusion, not a lie.

Richard’s article is an interesting read. If you haven’t read it, it’s still available on the HNS website: https://historicalnovelsociety.org/guides/but-a-fable-agreed-upon-speech-by-richard-lee/.

“Historical fiction invariably fails to portray the strangeness of the past”

What is this “strangeness”? It refers to the very otherness of past times, those aspects of life, in particular mindsets and behaviours, which are unfamiliar or obscure to the modern reader. It will include differences in attitudes and beliefs but also, for an historical novel set in the mediaeval period, perhaps such things as superstition, religious charms, dreams, magic and spells, monsters and mediaeval art, strange ideas and seemingly fantastical happenings that today could be readily explained or dismissed – all of which were normal to people of the time. In other periods, the list might be a bit different, but would still include those things that make that period seem “other” to our own. 

Blemmye from Schedel's World History or Nuremberg Chronicle (1493). Public domain.

Strangeness is important in an historical novel, but must perhaps not overwhelm. As Jerome de Groot has said in his book The Historical Novel, by exploring the differences of the past compared to the present, historical fiction can make the past “authentically unfamiliar”, and yet still recognisable to modern readers.

The people we encounter on the pages of historical novels are of course familiar to us in many ways: they are mothers and fathers, farmers and carpenters, soldiers and merchants, people with families and concerns and feelings much like our own. But their environment, their habits, their attitudes and beliefs are mostly very different, and it is this dissimilarity, as well as the familiarity, that an historical novelist seeks to portray. Sarah Johnson, in Historical Fiction: A Guide to the Genre, described this as making “the unfamiliar seem familiar”, and the one must be as carefully managed as the other.

However, it is perhaps true that not all historical novelists are entirely successful at achieving this. I imagine we have all read novels that we thought didn’t seem quite “right” for the period, in particular where characters seemed to have far too modern a mindset – overly liberated women, unbelievably “new” men...

In Clio’s Children, a blog for historical novelists, the writer John Yeoman proposed an interesting split between types of historical fiction. One type, which he termed "heritage":

“depicts modern people, sensibilities and conflicts but…cloaks them expediently with props from history’s wardrobe: ruffs and farthingales, gibbets and jousts.”

But, by contrast, he said, serio-historical fiction:

“exposes the reader to a profound whiff of strangeness”.

Yeoman cited a number of novels where, in his view, strangeness could be found, including Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, and I would guess that most of us would agree that the world in Eco’s novel is decidedly “other”.

On the other hand, Yeoman said “we do not find [this strangeness] in Philippa Gregory”. He referred to The Other Boleyn Girl as “a sentimental blend of history and kitsch”, which does seem a bit harsh to me, but one must deduce that, for him, this novel falls into the “props” category. (I should perhaps add that Yeoman insisted that he was not implying any value judgement in defining these two types of historical novel, but was rather just illustrating the differences between them.)

So, to summarise, I have seen it written that:

• We living in the present can never fully understand the inner lives of people living in the past and therefore may not be able to portray their thoughts and voices with any degree of authenticity;
• Historical fiction is in itself a contradiction, lies pretending to be the truth;
• Some historical novels fail to reflect the strangeness of the past, dressing their characters in authentic-looking clothes but giving them modern sensibilities.

In general, I don’t believe that historical fiction does suffer from such “problems”. Indeed I similar problems might apply equally to many types of contemporary fiction. For example, in science fiction, thrillers, murder mysteries and fantasy, novelists attempt to portray all sorts of characters’ inner lives that neither they nor the reader could actually experience. All novels of whatever genre are essentially “untrue” – they are fiction! Even the need for strangeness is not confined to historical fiction, but is required in any novel portraying a world, in time or space, that is very different from readers’ usual experience. 

Having said all that, when I started writing, I certainly did have concerns about my own ability to produce an historical novel with sufficient authenticity and strangeness. Although I was reasonably confident about describing the practicalities of the past, I remained nervous that I might fail to portray my characters’ inner lives truthfully, that they might seem to be modern rather than people of their time, and that the world I was attempting to evoke might not be sufficiently “other”.

Whether I have succeeded or failed is for others to say, but I would be interested to hear thoughts from fellow historical fiction writers about their own experiences of portraying earlier times, and also from readers about whether or not they recognise any truth behind the “problems” I have discussed...

The Secret Garden: Ancient World Contraception by Elisabeth Storrs

February 20, 2019, 4:30 pm

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Etruscan woman holding a pomegranate

Childbirth is dangerous. The Western world often forgets this. The advances made in medicine and mothercraft to improve the mortality rates of both mother and babies have been remarkable but are now taken for granted. So too effective forms of contraception. Many forget that the development of the ‘Pill’ only occurred in the 1960s. And it can be argued that the introduction of reliable oral contraceptives gave impetus to the feminist movement as women were at last given the opportunity to plan their pregnancies as well as their careers.

Women of the ancient world did not have access to such sophisticated medicine; instead they relied on more humble ways to prevent falling pregnant. I was absorbed when researching the methods used in classical Greece, Rome and Etruria when writing my Tales of Ancient Rome series.

One of my protagonists is a young, innocent Roman girl who is married to an Etruscan man to seal a truce between two warring cities. She discovers her husband’s society offers independence, education and sexual freedom to women. Such freedoms, however, do not excuse her from the duty of bearing children.  In her quest to delay this destiny she learns that there were certain plants that offered a chance to avoid falling with child including a delicious fruit grown in her garden, and a mysterious plant from a distant land.

           

Prosperpine by Dante Gabriel Rosetti

Pomegranates were associated with the myth of Persephone (Roman Proserpina) and the vegetation cycle. Persephone was the child of Zeus, king of the gods, and Demeter, goddess of the harvest. When Hades, god of the Underworld, abducted Demeter’s daughter, the deity was so grief stricken she rendered the earth barren. Faced with a desolate world, the other gods pleaded for Zeus to intervene. He demanded Hades release Persephone whom he’d instructed not to eat while in the Underworld. Hades grudgingly agreed but before the maiden left his realm she ate some forbidden pomegranate seeds. For her disobedience, Persephone was ordered to return to live with Hades for three months of the year. And so, during winter, Demeter refused anything to grow until her daughter was once again returned in the spring.

           

In various ancient cultures, the pomegranate was seen as a symbol of fecundity. An Etruscan bride would offer a pomegranate to her groom during the wedding ceremony. However, the fruit was also considered useful for regulating menstrual flow. Accordingly the fruit was seen as holding the secret to both fertility and sterility.

           

Ancient physicians such as Hippocrates, Soranus and Dioscorides prescribed the seeds and rind of the pomegranate to prevent conception but details of the preparation or the quantities used are unknown. There is mention of the fruit being eaten while some sources state that the seed pulp was used on pessaries.

           

Did pomegranates work? Studies conducted during the 1970s and 80s on rats and guinea pigs revealed reduced fertility in females that had been fed the fruit. Furthermore, scientists discovered the pulp around the seed was most effective compared to the roots or the flesh. Accordingly, there may have been some efficacy to using pomegranate pulp in pessary form as was described in ancient sources although extrapolating the results of tests conducted on rats to human reproduction can be tricky.

Using pomegranates may have been haphazard as a means of prevention but there was another plant that clearly was considered as a viable contraceptive. The Romans called it ‘silphium’ while the Greeks knew it as ‘silphion’. 

Modern botanists have identified silphium as a member of the giant fennel (Ferula) family based on ancient descriptions, and pictures on coins and pottery. The plant was rare, growing in the dry climate of Cyrenaica in northern Africa (modern Libya). The pungent resin from silphium's stems and roots was known as laserpicium and was used as an additive which gave food a rich distinctive taste. It was also used to treat coughs, sore throats and fevers. Perfume was distilled from its blooms.

The crop became the main commodity of Cyrene (Shahhat, Libya) a city colonized by the Greeks in C7th BCE. These colonists had reluctantly migrated from the island of Thera, having been forced to draw lots. According to Theophrastus, a pupil of Aristotle, the settlers discovered the silphium plant which made them rich and their city famous. Demand across the ancient world for the plant bumped up its price leading the playwright Aristophanes to write in The Knights: “Don’t you remember when a stalk of silphium sold so cheap?”

           

Silphium stalk on Cyrene coin

The wealth brought from exporting silphium led Cyrene to recognize the importance of its prize export by stamping its coins with the distinctive symbol of the plant in a similar manner to Athens’ use of an owl. The design of one series of four drachma coins depicts a woman touching the plant with one hand while pointing to her womb with the other. Interestingly, there is also speculation as to a connection between the contours of silphium seeds and the traditional heart shape as silver coins from Cyrene from C6–5th BCE bear a similar design. The coat of arms of Italian Libya also bore an image of the plant indicating the importance of its history to the region even as recently as 1947.

           

There is a reference to the plant’s resin being applied to pessaries but silphium could also be taken orally. Soranus recommended women take about a chick pea’s size of silphium juice dissolved in water once a month. It is clear that he also considered it had abortive effects, as did Dioscorides.

           

The Roman poet, Catullus, advised his lover, Lesbia, in Carmen 7, that they could share as many kisses as there are grains of sand on the shores of ‘silphium producing Cyrene’ as follows:

You ask, my Lesbia, how many of your kisses
are enough and more than enough for me.
As big a number as the Libyan grains of sand
that lie at silphium producing Cyrene
between the oracle of Sultry Jupiter
and the sacred tomb of old Battus;
Or as many stars that see the secret love affairs of men,
when the night is silent.
So many kisses are enough
and more than enough for mad Catullus to kiss you,
these kisses which neither the inquisitive are able to count
nor an evil tongue bewitch.

           

Heart shaped silphium seed - Cyrene coin

Catullus’ endorsement of the plant to his lover was an assurance that their lovemaking could continue as long as silphium was obtainable. Unfortunately, at the time of the poet’s death in 54 BCE  stocks of the plant were dwindling with the Roman historian, Pliny the Elder, remarking during Nero’s reign in 37-68 CE “only a single stalk has been found there within our memory”. In effect, the plant was considered worth its weight in silver denarii or even gold. With its scarcity, a lucrative black market thrived.

           

Ultimately silphium became extinct. Various theories include demand outstripping supply, or simply over-farming by the Romans after they gained governorship over the Greeks. However, Theophrastus wrote that silphium was peculiar in that it couldn’t be cultivated and only grew in a narrow band of land along dry mountainsides facing the Mediterranean Sea. Repeated attempts to farm the plant proved futile; instead it was harvested from the wild under strict rules. It has now been posited that the plant was either a hybrid with unpredictable generational outcomes, or similar to wild huckleberries. This fruit is native to the mountain slopes, forests and lake basins of North America. The berries are sensitive to soil chemistry so when grown from seed, bear no fruit.

           

Was silphium effective? It’s difficult to say when scientists possess no specimens upon which to test. However, another member of the fennel family, asafoetida, exists and can be successfully cultivated. It is used today to give Worcestershire sauce its characteristic flavour. Early testing of asafoetida and other Ferula species on rats proved notable anti-fertility effects. In 1963, it was established that asafoetida was effective as a contraceptive for humans. Given this, the popularity of silphium as a drug of choice in the ancient world can be given credence.

           

There was a veritable pharmacopia of other herbs and plants used by women of the ancient world: Queen Anne’s Lace (wild carrot), rue, myrrh, juniper and pennyroyal to name a few. Unfortunately most of these are also poisonous when taken in incorrect dosages.

           

Despite the folklore and science surrounding all these natural remedies, it is a sobering fact that the average life expectancy of females in the Iron Age was approximately 27-30 years. We will never know how many women avoided an unwanted pregnancy through use of herb, fruit or plant, nor how many mothers and children perished due to the use of toxic abortifacients. And even those who welcomed a baby quickening within them weren’t guaranteed a long life - the mortality rate for both maternal and infant deaths in childbirth was incredibly high. 

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tales of Ancient Rome saga. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com  

Images are courtesy of the MET project, Wikimedia Commons and

Expedition Magazine Vol. 34, Nos. 1-2, 1992. "The Coins from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Persephone." by T. V. Buttrey .

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How Fictional is your History? by Catherine Hokin

February 21, 2019, 10:30 pm

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We're having something of a surge in historical fiction films at the moment. You can lose yourself in the politics of medieval or Tudor Scotland with Outlaw KingandMary Queen of Scots, or the excesses of the eighteenth court with The Favourite. If the racial-tensions of 1960s America are more your thing, there's Green Bookor you can loop back round to politics with Vice - which I'm including here as it covers Dick Cheney's early life and therefore slips in past the 30 year HNS rule for classifying a work as historical fiction. A little tenuous perhaps but that is rather my point...

Robert the Bruce - Chris Pine would be preferable but not Netflix's wrath

What the above films share is the accusation that they all play fast and loose with the facts, and are guilty of providing what Simon Jenkins in the Guardian called “fake instant history.” Screen outings that, in other words, become received wisdom - what I am re-christening Braveheartmoments in honour of  the film dubbed the most historically inaccurate movie ever made. I'm not going to list all its errors here - there is a whole industry devoted to logging them - start with the small point that William Wallace was never called Braveheart (that was Bruce, and not in his lifetime) and the whole timeline is about 20 years out which really messes up a lot of marriages and deaths and you'll get the idea. Does it matter? Well yes - the last time I was at the Wallace memorial there was a full-size (thankfully cardboard) Mel Gibson waiting to greet the hoardes of visitors. To my mind this not only gives the film a legitimacy it doesn't deserve, it also necessitates a whole lot of de-bunking I'm not sure was widely available.

As I said in my review of Outlaw King (Historia Magazine, it's a bit ranty) I don’t mind a bit of cinematic embellishment if it enriches the story. Queen Anne didn't keep 17 bunnies in her bedroom to replace her lost children (rabbits being eaten not petted at the time) but that worked for me in The Favourite as a good visual shorthand for the depths of her loss. And no major historical events were harmed by their use. The Favouritedoes what many historical writers do - it found a story lurking round the facts (the competition between the two female favourites, the allegations around Anne of 'unnatural' preferences) and it wove something bigger. As Lucy Worsley said in the Guardian: "people at the time thought that Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough were [lovers] and this was a line of attack that was used by their political enemies, so that’s one thing...Another thing is that people were very much sharing beds the whole time; that was a standard way of sleeping. So who knows when they were and when they weren’t having sex? It’s all very difficult to define, isn’t it?” So difficult to define but plausible, not jaw-dropping in the way of Outlaw King (read the review) and not down-right dishonest as in the case of Mary Queen of Scots. 

Personally I don't mind about the accents in this film or others set in periods where dialect and accent are hard to be purist about. Whether it was French or Scottish or some hybrid, we don't really know which one Mary had and we don't know what either of those accents actually sounded like at the time. But I'm with Simon Schama regarding the two women meeting - “the whole drama of Elizabeth and Mary lay in the fact they never did meet”. Like Outlaw King, one of the key words you hit when you google this film is true. It's not: the two women meeting is a major distortion I've already had to explain to more people than I wanted to (or who wanted to hear it). To coin an overused and too-needed phrase: it's fake news. 

The criticisms over the other films mentioned above are different - perhaps because those portrayed in them or their families are still alive. Green Bookhas been condemned by the family of African American pianist Donald Shirley for what they see as a completely false portrayal ("a symphony of lies") and for them not being consulted, precisely for that reason. Vicehas been accused of being misleading, of fabricating events, of being shallow and being evasive with the truth over Cheney's portrayal - including by a large number of people with no reason to defend him at all.

Kirsten Dunst as Marie Antoinette

Things that were never historically done/said becoming not only popular belief but often the main thing we 'know' about a time/character is nothing new. The phrase let them eat cake was attached to a number of insensitive royals before it stuck to Marie-Antoinette and there's no contemporary account proving the accuracy/existence of Elizabeth I's famous Tilbury speech, although we're pretty sure Mary wasn't there. It is, however, a truism, if an annoying one that many people get their understanding of history from television and films, and likely also from novels. So where does a creative's responsibility lie?

Clearly no one wants to impose some kind of Stalinist censorship on film-makers or writers, who are also not exempt from these charges of being elastic with the truth. The recent condemnation of Heather Morris's best-seller The Tattooist of Auschwitzby the Auschwitz Memorial Research Centre as being a book which "contains numerous errors and information inconsistent with the facts, as well as exaggerations, misinterpretations and understatements” has not made comfortable reading. Or stopped it getting a sequel. Film-makers insist they are not reporting history but a version of it. As writers we are all looking for the story in the gap, and we are also not historians: we are writing fiction. We do, however, live in a time when real and fake news seem to blend seamlessly together and there are concerns about the level of critical thinking many people are exposed to. What then, if any, is our responsibility when we take readers into the past? Is it to make it clear (through notes or end-pieces) how much of a novel has been invented as Kate Atkinson does in Transcription, commenting that she has made one thing up for everything true? She then does then go on to prove how rooted in fact all the made-up stuff is and how it never distorts the truth it's based in. Or perhaps it's Stephanie Merritt's (who writes as SJ Parris) advice that holds true: "if you are going to play fast and loose with historical fact for the sake of a good story, you'd better have done your research thoroughly if you want readers to take you seriously; only then will you have the authority to depart from those facts."

For me, I like things simple and to do as I would be done by. Let writers and film-makers turn Jane Austen into a zombie slayer if they want, as long as they call it fantasy. Let them bring bunnies or tigers or whatever they like into the nursery, as long as its clearly a metaphor. But please don't mess with timelines or bring in ridiculously anachronistic behaviour or change the nature of history. That's a different kind of fiction entirely.

The Making of Silk - by Judith Allnatt

February 22, 2019, 5:00 pm

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Since the Yangshao period, 5,000 to 10,000 BC, silk has been prized for its feel, lustre and lightness and for its coolness in summer and warmth in winter. The value of the textile made the rearing of silk worms (sericulture) seem worthwhile, despite its many difficulties.

Silkworms are fed on fresh Mulberry leaves, so their expensive incubation indoors must be timed to coincide exactly with the opening of the trees' buds. This can never have been an easy matter as the Roman, Pliny, writes of the Mulberry tree, 'when it begins to put forth buds it dispatches the business in one night, and that with so much force, that their breaking forth may be evidently heard.'

The trees grow fast and furious, spreading out so that they are always wider than they are tall. They age quickly but when the limbs collapse the tree grows ‘on its knuckles’, sometimes rooting to form a new tree. In Rodmell, East Sussex a grove, apparently of thirty trees, is in fact only one.

In the early seventeenth century, to support the silk weaving industry and avoid the costs of importing bales of raw silk from Europe and the Far East, James 1st tried to establish silk farming in Britain, ordering ‘ten thousand mulberry plants’ to be distributed. The failure of his rather grandiose plan was probably due to the cool, moist English climate. In 1718 a patent was granted to one John Appletree, who made a plantation to feed silkworms in Chelsea Walled Park and farmed them using ‘a certain engine called the Egg Cheste’ to keep the eggs warm until hatching. Previous methods for smaller amounts of eggs were to stow them in a manure heap or to keep them in a pouch between one’s breasts.

Efforts to farm silkworms on a larger scale continued into the early nineteenth century with a little more success, encouraged by the fashion for lightweight gowns and much decoration.

A vast array of different silk ribbons were produced: Chine (painted), Damask (woven), Moire (clouded or watered), Loves (gauze –like), Velveteens, Scallop, Picots and Taffeties. In my novel, The Silk Factory, the rather villainous silk-master, Septimus Fowler, has his daughter wear a whole range of frills and furbelows so that she is a walking shopfront for his wares. The money-grabbing Fowler attempts to cut costs by farming his own silk worms, an ambition doomed by their proneness to disease.

The worms had to be kept in shallow trays, indoors, safe from birds and vermin but the resulting humid conditions could lead to 'pepper disease', which caused them to turn black and to stink. The floor of the shed, or ‘magnanerie’, would be sprinkled with lavender, rosemary, thyme, savory and penny royal, to keep it smelling sweet. The worms were also very sensitive to heavy thundery weather and this would sometimes stop them feeding. This led to superstitious attempts to save them, such as placing iron objects in the shed or carrying a live coal around to waft smoke  about and ‘calm’ them. When healthy, they ate vast quantities of foliage and the sound of their munching was likened to that of a monsoon falling on leaves.

When the worms grew restless and showed signs of wanting to make cocoons, stalks (preferably the ‘boughs of the seedstalk of turnip or asparagus') were placed in a fan shape to make a framework on to which they could crawl. Here, each worm secreted silk from two pairs of spinnerets below the mouth, moving its head to and fro around 150,000 times.

Rather brutally, the cocoons are dropped into boiling water to kill the moth inside as, if a moth is allowed to emerge, the threads of silk are cut and the cocoon is ruined. Only a few moths are kept for mating. The rest meet a grisly end, after which each cocoon is brushed to find the ends of the filament. Then, from a single cocoon, around a mile of raw silk is wound onto a reel and a yarn is made by combining several threads of silk. It takes around 5,500 silkworms to produce a kilogram of silk.

The fabric is still used as a luxury textile and is often chosen for wedding dresses. As Oscar de la Renta percipiently observed, 'silk does for the body what diamonds do for the hand'.  

My Monthly Random Read by Elizabeth Chadwick

February 23, 2019, 4:30 pm

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As a writer of historical fiction I have to be both wide-ranging and focused in when it comes to research.  The close focus is always what I absolutely need to know in order to write my novel. The books containing that information have a shelf to themselves at the start of each new project.  I'm moving into the thirteenth century for the new novel (announcement under wraps at the time of writing this blog) and this is currently the state of my shelf of 'must have' material with more to come.  Before that the shelf hosted books on Medieval Ireland when I was writing The Irish Princess, and before that, with works on the Medieval Middle East for Templar Silks.

The wider-ranging material is a looser melange of subjects connected with my chosen project.  I might suddenly need to know about dogs, or harness, or cloaks, or a particular custom on a certain feast day, which means trawling the internet and my broader medieval library of several thousand books.

That's two strands then.  The focused material that forms the outline on the canvas, and the wide-ranging one that takes the form of small but essential points of colour over the main painting.
But the wide-ranging strand has a sub-strand of its own  - the 'random palette'.  These are the colours I don't know will be useful until I read them.
I make it part of my routine around once a month to choose a book from my research library at my whim and read it just for fun/education/see what turns up and it's always a win-win situation.  Either I learn something new to add to my general knowledge base that might come in later, or I find another pod of colour to add to my current paint palette that would otherwise have lain undiscovered.

My random book at the moment is one of those and absolute fun and joy to read.  It has been around a while - first published in Britain in 2003.  As the title says (I love the cover), it's all about Sweets: A History of Temptation by Tim Richardson.

Basically it's a history of confectionary from pre-history to modern day that goes far behind the scenes and examines in depth our relationship with sweets - the technical, the social and the deeply emotional.
There are eleven chapters, all wittily or punnily titled, each containing a main theme and a 'lucky dip' the latter being the history of a particular confection.  Thus chapter 1 is headed 'Chocolate Money' and looks at the financing of the sweet industry - the big sweet fairs,  the state of the art Toblerone factory in Switzerland, the secrecy and espionage surrounding recipes. The growth of global brands.
 The 'lucky dip' section in chapter 1 traces the history of Turkish Delight. I was delighted to have it confirmed that William Marshal could have eaten this delicacy while on pilgrimage in the Holy Land. 
Further delving in ensuing chapters, informed me that William Marshal could also in his lifetime have eaten liquorice, marshmallow, (but wouldn't have enjoyed it as it was a sticky, medicinal gloop)  and enjoyed hard candy, comfits (a seed or a nut coated in layers of sugar) and marzipan.  With reference to the latter, there's an excellent discussion about how the name 'marzipan' came into being - and it wasn't because someone called Marzip invented in 1671 as one claim goes.  Others strands claim that it comes from the Latin phrase 'Marci panis' meaning 'St Mark's bread' which became the Italian 'marzapane', German 'marzipan' and English 'marchpane' and later 'marzipan.' But then it might be from the Latin 'Massapanis'  which was a small reliquary box for holding holy wafers - and perhaps you might put your almond and sugar confection in there and it would take on the name.  Or the Arabic 'mazaban' which came to refer to light wooden boxes used to transport commodities including sweets.   It might even have something to do with a sweetmeat of obscure origin called 'manus christi'

While trawling my medieval period, I also discovered that in 1288, the household of Edward I consumed 6,000lbs of sugar in that one single year.  Sugar had well and truly arrived, at least on the aristocratic scene. Henry VII and his grandaughter Elizabeth I were both described as having black teeth at the time of their deaths, due to too much sugar consumption during their lives and blackened teeth was seen as a failing of the English in general.

As with all things, the surface is often bland and smooth, but once you dive in and begin looking underneath, things become much more fascinating and complex.
The book has a light and amusing touch, but it doesn't shirk the darker sides of the story and there is a chapter on sugar fortunes built on the backs of slaves. 'Slavery truly is the skeleton on the back of the chocolate industry' Richardson writes in the chapter 'Bad Candy' and still continues today.  The 'Bad Candy' chapter also includes a discussion of dodgy additives and a cornucopia of interesting facts. Jelly babies weren't always called jelly babies for example. At one time they were marketed as 'unclaimed babies.' And of course candy cigarettes had to go, not to mention Freekee drops which resembled blood-stained syringes!

I am so glad that I picked this book from my shelf as my random read and I highly recommend it to others.  It's a magnificent rainbow pick'n'mix. I loved it.  And now I am off to buy a quarter of sherbet lemons!
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Elizabeth Chadwick is a bestselling author of historical fiction.  Her latest novel is Templar Silks, the story of the great William Marshal and his missing years on pilgrimage. www.elizabethchadwick.com

Reimagining the Iliad by Miranda Miller

February 24, 2019, 5:00 pm

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   I’ve just finished reading Pat Barker’s wonderful novel, The Silence of the Girls. She writes the familiar story in fresh new language, using contractions, and her characters say “yeah,” and “huh.” I’ve always thought that the main problem, when you’re writing historical (or mythological ) fiction is the dialogue. How did people speak in the thirteenth century BCE? We can’t possibly know. Her characters speak like people in a pub and it works beautifully. This is a long way from the nobleprissyspeak often imposed on the characters in historical fiction . Her matter of fact treatment of the gods also works very well; when Achilles meets his sea nymph mother Thetis on p. 298:”At first, she’s no more than a dark stain on the white gauze of mist, but then, as she wades towards him through the shallows, he catches the silvery gleam of her skin. He both longs for and dreads that moment, because every meeting now is a prolonged goodbye. He’s tired of this, he wants it to be over. He’s spent his entire life saturated in her tears. So when, at last, she disappears into a swelling wave, he’s secretly relieved.”

   When mythology and the supernatural intrude on the human, for instance when Hector’s corpse is miraculously preserved, you believe Barker’s unsentimental voice. On p. 314: Cassandra “was a virgin priestess of Apollo, who’d once kissed her to give her the gift of true prophecy, and then, when she still refused to have sex with him, spat in her mouth to ensure her prophecies would never be believed.” Historical novels, even more than other kinds of novels, are the victims of changing fashion. Scott, for example, captivated all of Europe in his lifetime but I find him unreadable now. In Barker’s world women are clever and subtle as they watch the loud, boorish men showing off. Women are prizes, things, who are passed on to men of their own caste. Briseis, her memorable central character, is a woman most of Barker’s readers can identify with - a survivor, brave and kind and pragmatic as she watches the war. She sees other women kill themselves to preserve their honour and thinks that she would rather go on living. The men around her like to repeat the adage,“Silence becomes a woman.”





   

   Shakespeare’s ancient men, on the other hand, never stop talking. While I was reading Pat Barker’s terrific novel I watched a dvd of Jonathan Miller’s 1981 production of Troilus and Cressida. Achilles, Patroclus, Agamemnon, Cassandra, Odysseus, Priam, Paris and Helen all appear in both the novel and the play. Shakespeare, after all, was already at least fourteen centuries away from the Trojan War. Naturally, they speak a rich allusive Elizabethan English and, in this production, wear 16th century costumes. Shakespeare’s original audience would have been as familiar with Homer and the Greek gods as most people are now with the character of Eastenders, so he didn’t have to explain what was going on. There are many long speeches which could be boring but which, in Miller’s witty and intelligent production, come to life. The actors have the house style of RSC actors of that period, seeming to think the words before they burst spontaneously from their lips. Charles Gray, who later had great success playing James Bond villains, is a magnificently lecherous Pandarus as he manipulates the lovers. His niece Cressida (Suzanne Burden) would now be seen as the young victim of abuse rather than as a conniving faithless woman. Like the women in Barker’s novel, she is passed on as a prize and has no control over her own destiny. She is dragged off, kicking and screaming, from her Trojan lover to the Greek camp, heartbroken - but, like Barker’s Briseis, she wants to survive in a brutal world where women are powerless.

   Like Briseis, Cressida sees through the posturing and heroics of the men and when Alexander says of Ajax: “They say he is a very man per se and stands alone,” Cressida replies cynically,“ So do all men, unless th' are drunk, sick, or have no legs.”

   The  camp, almost Round the Horn style of Pandarus and the transsexual venomous slave Thirsites - the thing that audiences forty years ago would have found daring and even shocking - now seems rather dated; why make such a fuss about being gay? Achilles and Patroclus appear with their arms wrapped around each other, sexually obsessed with each other, whereas in Pat Barker’s more subtle interpretation they are foster brothers and soul mates whose love may once have been sexual but who have in some way become one another. In Shakespeare’s play, “The great Achilles, whom opinion crowns The sinew and the forehead of our host, Having his ear full of his airy frame, grows dainty of his worth, and in his tent Lies mocking our designs. With him Patroclus Upon a lazy bed the livelong day.”

This is David's painting of Paris and Helen.   In both the novel and the play Helen is represented as a bit of an airhead, too narcissistic to understand her own destructive power.


   How magnificent these stories are,   a  goldmine for every new generation of writers. Inevitably the new life they are given breathes the air of the period. But they DO breathe, their vitality is astonishing and they make most other stories look very feeble. European civilisation won’t die while they still inspire us.

Paris 68 and a world of today, by Carol Drinkwater

February 25, 2019, 4:01 pm

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Forgive the blatant self-promotion of this post, but I am very excited. Here is the front cover for my new novel to be published on 16th May. It has been described as "Carol Drinkwater's epic story of enduring love and betrayal, from Paris in the sixties to the present day."

I am delighted that it is to be published in May, although if I had been a little quicker with the research followed up by the writing, it would have been published last year, 2018, which was the fiftieth anniversary of Paris '68.

Instead, we are 51 years on from that extraordinary spring. A spring that saw 6,000 students locked out from their Paris universities and taking to the streets, the entire country coming to a standstill due to 10 million striking workers who forced the closure of factories all across the land, transport at a standstill, and the flight of President de Gaulle albeit for just a couple of days before his return to clamp down and put an end to the voices of so many.
Today, historians see Paris '68 as the jolt that pushed France into the twentieth century.

I was just beginning drama school in London in 1968. My interest in politics was, I must confess it, zilch. British politics seemed remote enough but French and world politics were far beyond my circles of interest. However, like many of my generation the War in Vietnam, American involvement in it, the burning of draft cards, had drawn my attention. If I were a student now and Paris was happening now, I would like to think that I would get involved. 

Soyez realistes, demandez l'impossible. 'Be realistic, ask for the impossible.' This was daubed on the wall of one of the Paris bridges.

'Run free, comrade, we've left the old world behind'. Scrawled across one of the walls of the Sorbonne buildings.

My novel is, after a fashion, my way of redressing that lack of interest on my part of fifty years ago. 

Grace, my protagonist, is sixteen in 1968. She dreams of becoming an actress - which she achieves rather successfully - and is awaiting her studies at a London drama school. She decides to spend a few months in Paris. The city of cinema, of Truffaut, Godard, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati, and many others. Jeanne Moreau, Fanny Ardant, such actresses are her idols. On her first day in Paris, she meets a young English student who is studying at the Sorbonne, Peter. Peter is far more politically aware and active than the young Grace and he draws her into his world. She becomes involved in the demonstrations which lead to civil unrest. She fights along with the students, building barricades and spending late nights in cafés and bistros where for the first time in her life she is presented with choices. How to live? What are her values? What is worth fighting for? Freedom of speech, independence, the sexual revolution. Women's rights.

A generation in revolt. 

Sleeping on a friend's floor somewhere on the Left Bank.

She rubs shoulders with Daniel Cohn-Bendit who was one of the leaders of Mai '68. Today, Cohn-Bendit, known back then as Dany le Rouge for his hair colouring not his politics is a member of the European Parliament and Germany's Green Party.

                                          Daniel Cohn-Bendit, today and as a young revolutionary

Abortion and homosexuality had both been legalised in Britain in 1967/early 68.
In France, the legalisation of abortion for up a pregnancy of up to ten weeks did not pass until 1975 and was finally made law in 1979whereas  same sex relations were decriminalised in France in 1791.

The '68 sections of the novel, which spans fifty years up to the present day, offered me the opportunity to research and then bring to life on paper the struggles and the dreams of those young. The Sixties was a very special decade in modern history. Television had arrived into our homes, or those of us in the western world who had the means to acquire or, in my family's case, rent a television set. The daily news was in our living rooms. Vietnam, the death of young soldiers - the same age as I was back then - was played out before my eyes on the small screen. War was there in front of me in black and white or, for some, in colour. The United Kingdom was doing its best to be accepted into the new European Economic Community, founded in 1957.

Music became a potent force for change. As a post-war baby, by the Sixties, I had pocket money and a little bit of earning power  (cleaning the houses of the well-heeled for one shilling an hour!) and could buy records. Eps, LPs, singles. The Beatles and the Stones dominated the British charts but there was also Janis Joplin, The Doors, Bob Marley, an endless choice of now legendary musicians.

The Woodstock Festival was one summer away. Hair, the American Tribal Love-Rock musical, which I saw in London brought nudity and pot-smoking to the West End stage. Quel shock!
In the UK the original production starred Oliver Tobias and Marsha Hunt.

Here's a link to Hair: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_BgFSy0M4E

We didn't have the internet, we didn't have emails or Smartphones but we were becoming connected to other like-minded young, and even to those who did not share our points of view. Grace steps out of her comfort zone when she steps off the train in Paris. Over the course of one summer, she falls in love - a head over heels kind of reckless teenage love that provokes a devastating accident and leaves its dark shadow on her life. She tries drugs, she demonstrates, she loses her virginity. She makes friends. Until that point in her young life, her family and her small town surroundings are all that she has experienced. The idea of changing the world is a notion she has heard about in songs, on the television. Her summer in Paris changes all that and by the time she returns to London to begin drama school, her life has changed forever. 

I hope you will read and enjoy THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF 

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Michelle Obama by Janie Hampton

February 26, 2019, 4:30 pm

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Sometimes you just know that you are witnessing history: when Kennedy was shot; the first human stepping onto the moon; or when Margaret Thatcher became the first female British prime minister. At other times, history creeps up on you, such as the invention of the internet, or Twiggy getting a damehood for being the face of the 1960s.
I'm not sure whether Michelle Obama crept up on me or exploded into my consciousness. But her autobiography makes it clear that her extraordinary life has been one of determination and immaculate planning. She can’t have known that she would find herself living in the White House, but it sure took some hard graft to get there. If she had not backed her husband so resolutely, it's unlikely there would have been an African-American President of the United States in 2008.
When ‘Becoming’ was published last year, the headlines were all about Michelle’s miscarriage, her daughters born by IVF, and the marriage guidance counselling. ‘How tedious,’ I thought. ‘These are such stereotypical women's issues. Isn’t she a clever feminist, fighting for our rights to be equal?’ But having read the book, I now see it was just typical journalism, and we all know that most journalists don't bother to read a whole book, especially one that is 428 pages long.

Happy First Family

I'm really glad I have read this, all of it. I feel as if I have witnessed history as it unfurls. Michelle Obama comes over as an extraordinary woman, even if this is her own version of her life. She was born into a poor but loving and hardworking African-American family on the rough side of Chicago. Her great great grandparents were slaves; her parents were unable to get the education they deserved. Michelle Robinson grew up knowing that as a female of colour, she had to put in the extra mile, if not ten miles, to get anywhere. She did, and then met Barack Obama who had similar ethics and aspirations. They fell in love slowly, which meant she wasn’t blind to his annoyances. (Most of which are the traits of a super-human angel, such as no interest in material things, a total focus on the job or person, and an indifference to his own good looks.)
She is honest, not just about the difficulties in getting pregnant, but also her resistance to politics and her husband's desire to be president. She made huge personal sacrifices, but refused to give up being a good parent, and managed to raise two sensible daughters under the relentless glare of the media.
Michelle is no non-speaking fashion model, like the current First Lady of the US. As soon as the first presidential election was won, she said to herself, ‘How can I use this unique platform for the greatest good?’ But she had to navigate what was, and was not, acceptable for a FLOTUS to do. She looked at previous First Ladies and decided that she didn’t want to arrange flowers, but nor did she want to be seen to be involved in her husband's political work, as Hilary Clinton had. So she concentrated on childhood nutrition, families of servicemen, and inspiring under-privileged young people to do better. Following her visit to a girls’ state school in London the girls were so affected that their grades and university admissions noticeably improved.

The First Lady of the United States at home.

It is fascinating to learn what it feels like to live in the lap of luxury in the White House, but never be allowed to open the bullet-proof bedroom windows; to have an army of domestic staff, but still have to pay for whatever food that they have chosen to cook for you.By travelling inside a plane with Michelle as she zig zagged around the nation, I started to understand the bizarre system of elections in the USA. When she nearly has a breakdown from the exhausting regime, she gave herself ‘Me Time’, by getting up at dawn and going to the gym! There were times when I thought, ‘This woman is too perfect, a worker, wife and mother.’ But then she admits to her failures, doubts and the problem of juggling all those lives. That’s a theme that makes this book part of the history of women. Michelle Obama's life is unusual, but it is also typical of the late 20th and early 21st century. It’s one we can all identify with: how can we have it all, and not collapse in a heap?

Michelle Robinson Obama by Amy Sherald, 2018. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian INstitute, USA

I was surprised not just by the message of this book, but by its style too. It is beautifully written, and copy-edited to a T. Apart from the odd reference to US television programmes that I'd never heard of, I never stumbled over a sentence, or got bored of a topic. I don't believe that a highly trained lawyer such as Michelle can write in her own voice so fluently without help. She thanks ‘an incredibly gifted team of collaborators’ in the acknowledgments, and I can picture experienced ghost writers sitting with her and a tape recorder, quizzing her for the details that bring her story to life. What were you wearing that day? What was the weather like? How did you feel inside? It is all there, and makes the book and her life readable, and believable. For once, I’m grateful to ghostwriters. They have enhanced her story, and made it feel more real than she probably could. (Apologies, Michelle, if you wrote every word yourself! You are even more talented than I imagined.)
I predict that the compelling life of Michelle Obama will be retold in many a school history lesson about ‘Great and Inspiring Women of the 21st Century’. Read this candid and powerful book now, and be ready to tell your grand-daughters all about her. She will inspire them that anything is possible: they don’t need special talents, just plain old-fashioned perseverance.

Women on the campaign trail Copyright Charlie Neibergall Associated Press

‘Becoming’ by Michelle Obama, published by Penguin Viking, 2018.

www.janiehampton.co.uk

Fifty Shades of Beige - by Ruth Downie

February 27, 2019, 5:00 pm

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One of the first things the budding fiction writer discovers is that, left to their own devices, characters will spend a lot of time standing around talking in the kitchen.

I don’t suggest they should be hanging off cliffs instead, but if they’re doing nothing but talk, their dialogue has to be of stellar quality to hold the reader’s attention. For those of us who aren’t Harold Pinter or Shakespeare, it’s helpful to give them something to do. Preferably something useful, because that’s another thing about fictional people – they never eat properly, look after their children or earn a living unless the writer makes them get on with it.

Obviously characters can’t be so burdened by the daily struggle that they have no time to fall in love or investigate murders or whatever the purpose of their existence might be. They do, though, need to be anchored in some way to the reality of the world around them. At least, mine do. All of which set me to wondering: what did ordinary people in the Roman Empire actually do all day?

It turns out that for very many women, life must have involved a great deal of this:

In order for families to be clothed, either somebody had to grow flax, or wool had to be coaxed from being sheep-shaped to being roughly the shape of a human. So in the interests of research, I purchased the drop spindle you see above, found some wool and got to work.

Several years on, Downie Towers is home to many bags stuffed with potential. Or, as Longsuffering Husband sees it, with wool in various half-finished stages of processing, along with a faint but all-pervading whiff of rural life.

Imagine his joy now that a new development has begun. From the limited evidence we have of ancient textiles, it’s clear that our ancestors loved to wear colour. Most of the samples that survive have turned dingy brown, but here's a 'before and after' photo from Vindolanda, on Hadrian's Wall.

Here are more of the glorious colours that can be produced by the use of natural dyes. They were on display alongside the Battle of Fulford tapestry, of which more in a moment:

Even our own garden, it turns out, is full of materials that can be used to turn the pallid contents of the wool-bags into a splendid riot of colour. Well, in theory. Below are some of the actual results. They've been tactfully described by a visitor as “pastel”. Evidently dyeing, like spinning and—my next project—weaving, is a complex skill as well as an art. 

So, what did I learn from this attempt to give my fictional characters something useful to do?

• Nobody knows exactly what those Romano-Britons were making anyway. Precious scraps of fabric have been recovered here, but next to no textile garments (there is a very short woollen cape/hood from Orkney). Most of the few pictures that survive are on tombstones, so they're hardly likely to show people wearing their everyday working clothes.

• Wool and linen were the go-to fabrics of the day. The average Briton might dream of cotton and silk and even gold thread, but they'd be unlikely to wear them.

• Even for highly-skilled workers, the simplest of garments would have taken a very long time to create. Here's a video of the amazing amount of work that was involved in recreating one dress found in Denmark.

• After all this effort, clothes must have been valuable, and fabric used and re-used. This sock from Vindolanda seems to have started life as something else:

• Doing detailed work in lamplight must have been a terrible strain on the eyes. I guess that's why modern re-enactors often place weaving looms near wide-open doors to let the light in. That would be fine in the summer, but in winter, weavers must have faced a tricky compromise between being able to see what they were doing and having fingers that were warm enough to do it. 

Loom at Butser Ancient Farm. Don't block the light!

• Knitting as we know it was not a thing in Roman Britain, nor anywhere else at the time, but...

• Nalbinding – using a needle to create rows of knots – makes the cosiest socks ever. No wonder the Vikings and their ancestors used it. I’m not aware of any evidence for nalbinding in Roman Britain (if you are, please get in touch!) but that’s not to say it didn’t happen. Troops from many parts of the Empire served in Britannia and there must have been sharing of skills.

• The easiest way to get a wool garment of the colour you really really want is to really really want cream and brown.

• British children might have been running around in stripy socks like this one in the Ashmolean museum, but since wool doesn't survive well in our climate, we're unlikely to find out. Someone ‘knitted’ this on one needle (don’t ask me how!*) in Egypt in about AD 300-400. I like to think they enjoyed choosing those colours. For anyone who wants to join in, click here for some ideas on ways to recreate it.   *LATER - Big thanks to Catherine Stallybrass who's confirmed that this too is Nalbinding - see comments below.    

• The main thing I've learned from all this is enormous respect for the skills of our ancestors, and for the modern craftspeople who keep those skills alive.

Beautiful and practical: woollen braid created by Catherine Stallybrass

Part of a wonderful modern tapestry showing the Battle of Fulford

The Fulford Tapestry is a fantastic project that began in 2000. You can see the whole of the finished tapestry, and how it was made, at their website.

Meanwhile back at Downie Towers,the best that can be said is that we’re well on the way to producing Fifty Shades of Beige.

There is a strange pleasure in doing something like this even though the end product rarely lives up to the early vision. Because the past is not only brought alive by reading words, visiting places and seeing exhibitions. Sometimes we make connections across time by doing. 

Ruth Downie writes murder mysteries featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner Tilla, who is unfortunately far less interested in woolwork than her author.
Find out more at www.ruthdownie.com

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My Mother's War, Part 2 by Susan Price

February 28, 2019, 4:01 pm

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My mother was nine when the Second World War began and often told me stories of her childhood. I’ve blogged about some of them before here.

The stories made her family’s casual attitude to air-raids very clear. They never used their air-raid shelter, never had black-out curtains and went to bed in their house and slept while the bombs fell and the anti-aircraft guns fired. My mother wandered the streets with a friend during daylight raids, giving marks out of ten to gardens.

One story I particularly liked to hear Mum tell was about the day my uncle Richard, without warning, broke this pattern and said, “Don’t go to bed tonight, our Mother. They’re going to drop a bomb on we tonight.”

You can sort of see why the dog went yampy

He prophesied thus as he sat on a straight chair in the crowded kitchen, with the dog sitting between his legs. (The dog that he used to ‘drive yampy’ by putting on his Home Guard’s gas-mask and staring at it.)

The rest of the family took exactly no notice at all. My mother went to school. Her mother and older sisters went to work. Her brothers went to work — including Sam, the oldest brother who had been profoundly deaf all his life. He worked in a steel-rolling mill, where he and the other men, in steel tipped clogs, used tongs to fling lengths of white-hot steel along steel plated floors. Being deaf in that environment may have been an advantage.

That evening, when the family met again, they found Richard still insisting that a bomb was going to fall on them that night. He urged them not to go to bed but to sit up with him, waiting for the coming bomb. They laughed at him and told him he was daft as a brush.

My mother was sent to bed as usual. (She shared a large bed with her mother and two sisters while the brothers shared a bed in the other bedroom.) She never told me that she was worried by her brother’s words but perhaps she was.

Downstairs, Uncle Richard continued to plead with the rest of the family to stay up. His anxiety sent the dog yampy again. (And with a large table, a range, all the chairs, the sink, a sideboard and six people all crammed into one small kitchen, a dog going yampy is a serious inconvenience.) Nevertheless, one by one the rest of his family trooped off to bed. There’d been raids before. Nothing had happened — at least, not to them. They weren’t going to get all of a tizz about another raid. Perhaps they felt, as so many of us do, that ‘it’ will never happen to them.

Uncle Richard stayed in the kitchen, alone except for the dog, waiting, bearing witness. In the early hours a bomb fell on the house two doors away from them and utterly demolished it, killing everyone inside and leaving nothing but a crater. The explosion smashed every window in the street and left a crack across my grandmother’s bedroom ceiling that used to be pointed out to me, decades later, when I shared that bed with her.

My grandmother, her three daughters and her youngest son William all came crashing down the narrow wooden stairs to join Richard and the (yet again) yampy dog. They rushed out into the street. All the other neighbours were pouring from their houses too. My mother was a little skimpy on what happened then. Did people dig in the ruins? Did they wait for the emergency services? I've no idea.

Mum did remember a crowd of people in her kitchen, drinking tea and asking Richard, “How did you know?”

“I just knowed,” he said.

At his usual time for getting up, deaf Uncle Sam came downstairs and was surprised to find everyone there. They yelled at him, “Didn’t you hear the bomb fall in the night? The bomb, Sam! Just like Dick said! A bomb fell! Didn’t you hear it?”

“Oh, that,” Samuel said. “I thought that was Dick hanging his trousers on the bed-rail.”

The telling of the story was not complete until I’d heard that line.

Mum said that in the days after, swarms of children came from other streets to view the bomb crater because they’d heard that you ‘could see the brains’ of the people who’d died in the houses. Mum went herself to scramble around the wreckage.

There was also a little craze that went like this. You got hold of a small tin with a lid, the kind that pastilles or loose tobacco was sold in. You cut a hole in the bottom of the tin so that you could hold it in your hand while having one of your fingers inside the can, through the hole. You surrounded your finger with cotton-wool, to hide the hole. Then you splashed your finger and cotton wool generously with red ink, red food colouring, red paint or whatever red you had. You went up to unsuspecting people and said, “Look at what I found at the bombed house.” Taking off the lid of the can with a flourish, you showed them an apparently bloodied and severed finger. If someone leaned in for a closer look, the bloody finger suddenly wagged at them. This often went down very well, as you can imagine.

I’ll end with a tale from the other side of my family. My Grandad Price wasn’t called up for WWII, as he was too old and also, as a skilled brick-maker, in a reserved occupation. But he had several younger brothers and one of them, Arthur, went to war. He was posted to the East and captured. The family were left wondering what had happened to him. None of them were great letter writers.

Years passed. Hiroshima happened. The war in the East ended. Even then, they had no idea what had happened to Arthur. And then, a telegram — Arthur was coming home! The family gathered at the matriarch’s home to greet Arthur when he arrived.

He finally did, in his de-mob suit, with his kit-bag, looking thin and exhausted. He was seated in their midst. And my aunt, then a little girl of ten, planted herself in front of him, held out her hand and said, “What have you brought me back, Uncle Arthur?” (It was an unbreakable rule, then, that if you went away on holiday you ‘brought something back’ for friends and family.)

Arthur blinked, reached into his kit-bag, rummaged about and brought out an orange, which he placed in my aunt’s hand. And she was well pleased, an orange being a great rareity. (She told me this story herself. She’s over eighty now.)

And where had Arthur been on holiday? Oh, he’d been having a bit of a gap year, helping to build a railway between Thailand and Burma.

 



Susan Price is the award winning writer of The Ghost Drum and The Sterkarm Handshake. 

Find out more at her website.

We are grateful to Sue Price for this reserve post. Mary Hoffman hopes to be back on 1st April.

Novelists and their sources - by Gillian Polack

March 1, 2019, 7:24 pm

≫ Next: The Best Witch Historical Fiction – by Anna Mazzola

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Today I want to explore primary sources. Let me be honest: every day I want to explore primary sources. Today, however, I have a special reason. I’m in the middle of an online chat with some of my writer-friends about making a choice about what a character is going to do in a novel. The novel is set in the nineteenth century (and it’s not mine, so I can’t share more details, I’m afraid) and the character has done something that requires deep secrecy or they will lose everything.

Something that I always return to is that the type of secret a character will have depends very much on the nature of the historical novel rather than the nature of the history. If the novel is Gothic, there might be a child out of wedlock or an imprisoned wife. If the novel is historical fantasy, then the secret is likely to be hidden magic or a family heirloom that could destroy the world or that proves the character is royalty. If it’s historical fiction, then the secret is likely to be something that has been demonstrated as a secret in history as we know it. The character might be Giulia Tofana and the revelation would then be that she had poisoned an extraordinary number of people, for Tofana was possibly the seventeenth century’s most notorious professional poisoner.

The type of novel helps decide the type of secret. That’s a key part of how we tell our stories: finding the right example for the tale we’re telling. When you’re reading a fine novel and you stop and blink and think “That can’t be right” one of the reasons might be that the secret was perfect for another novel, but not for this one.

One of the aspects of historical fiction that I love most is that all these secrets can call on primary sources. Our actual past is complex enough and rich enough so that choosing the right sources can give the perfect secret for a character. The best historical novelists often have an almost uncanny knack for matching up story with source material. (Some of the best have an uncanny knack for inventing an entirely false past that feels perfectly real, but that’s another subject.)

The historian in me has a lot of primary sources on the shelf. I selected three volumes pretty randomly (if I’d seen my copy of Mary, Queen of Scots' trial record, I’d have selected less randomly, but it’s currently hiding from me). I want to introduce you to these three sets of sources and talk about how they might be used in historical fiction. As I said, today is a day for exploring primary sources. This whole article is an excuse for me to play with books, which is one of my favourite, favourite things in life. The reason for this isn’t because I am desperately intellectual. Some days things go wrong and today has been one of them, so this is me sharing comfort food with people who will appreciate it.

The first volume is The Letters of JRR Tolkien. The cover was viciously attacked by silverfish years ago, so it has a false air of antiquity. It’s a modern edition of a modern writer.

What do I need to know about it as a writer? 

Firstly, it’s an edition of selected letters. This means that the editor, Humphrey Carpenter, is presenting us with his view of Tolkien using Tolkien’s own words. Volumes of selected letters for some other writers on my shelves are very selected indeed. So much has been edited out that the person is a shadow of themselves. The first thing I did when I read this book, many years ago, was ask myself how much was Tolkien and how much was Carpenter’s view.

If I were writing a novel about Tolkien, this would be a critical question. These letters explain Tolkien’s interests and his writing style. They’re full of insightful thoughts and self-disparaging wit.

If I were using the letters to give glorious colour to an historical novel set in England’s literary scene in the middle of the twentieth century, then it’s easier. Tolkien’s letters are full of his participation in that world and illustrate it beautifully. 

If I were writing historical fantasy based on anything other than the quite specific world Tolkien inhabited, these letters would be no use at all.

The type of novels we write governs the way we use sources.

Let me go back in time. 

The wonderful thing about going back in time is one reaches a moment when one doesn’t have to seek permission to use a writer’s words directly. Their writing still has to be acknowledged: to claim the words as one’s own is still plagiarism, but it doesn’t break copyright law. This is why some writers use many, many words from Shakespeare’s plays in novels about Shakespeare. It’s an easy way to get colour. It’s not always a wise way to get colour. I’ve pointed out elsewhere that using the very clearly metred lines Shakespeare uses in his plays can totally foul up dialogue when Shakespeare is speaking them as part of ordinary conversation.

Some of Tolkien’s letters may give a hint of his speech. Others are purely formal. 

My next volume is Ethel Turner’s diaries. Turner (1872-1958) is best-known for the  novel Seven Little Australians (published 1894), and she was a very popular novelist of her time. Ethel Turner’s diaries were written in her private voice, and are more likely to reflect some aspects of her actual speech. In some conversations, it would be possible to reflect her actual words. It’s still not a good practice, for her words are from  a different time and place and carry a different shape to the words of a novelist in the twenty-first century. 

What I’m saying is that another reason we, as readers, might be jolted out of a perfectly good book is because something inside us is noting that change of voice when the writer has used the words of someone else without making it clear. If there is a paragraph added as “Bob read in Ethel Turner’s diary…” and then the words from that diary are quoted, that’s less likely to jolt the historically-aware reader.

Apart from helping a writer understand the voice of a character, what use are the diaries? So very many uses… They’re one of the best sources around for bringing everyday life to the reader. Letters can be good (I love the Paston letters specifically for the moment when Margaret Paston demands a tub of treacle – that demand brings all the Pastons into everyday life) but a good diary shows what the writer did that they felt worthy of comment. 

It might be waking up with a headache, or it might be writing down a secret. It might be hints as to family relationships.  Opening Turner’s diaries at random, I find that, on 26 June 1893, that someone said “a very wicked word, and I overheard’. She went through his denial and his excuses and then declaimed that the child was being ruined. This is immediately followed (in the same paragraph!) by a note about her newest publication.

One small day, and one small diary entry and it reaches out to us. This is why diaries are so handy for historical fiction writers who can use them (not all cultures and not all time periods have diaries): a good diary can make the everyday in a novel vibrant. 

I love diaries and letters so much that I have four shelves of them. They give me time with fascinating people. That’s the gift they give fiction writers who use them cleverly, too.

Alas, I’m a Medievalist, and very few diaries exist for the Middle Ages. In fact, most written sources are quite different for the Middle Ages. The random primary source I pulled down from a shelf (do not ask how many shelves I have of Medieval material, for it’s embarrassing) was Pipe Roll 45, of John I, or, to be more precise, The Great Roll of the Pipe for the First Year of the Reign of King John, Michaelmas 1199. This is one of my actual favourite books. In my perfect world I own many more volumes of pipe rolls. In my imperfect world I have wonderful friends, one of whom gave me this volume.

This volume was published in the year that Tolkien let his friend CS Lewis read The Hobbit for the first time and when Ethel Turner had her sixty-first birthday. It was over seven hundred years after John’s administration was documented in the Pipe Rolls.

It takes a lot of work to write fun stories of daily life from this kind of document. First, knowing Latin helps. Second, knowing the sort of documents copied into these rolls is essential. They’re not casual documents: they’re part of governance. 

Understanding the rules and the background means that a lot of cool stuff can be obtained to write fiction about or to use to bring a place and time to life… but it’s hard work. I was going to do what I did with Ethel Turner’s diaries and open this volume at a random place and give you a cool quote, but the pipe rolls are not written the way diaries are. They’re full of abbreviations and formulae. Names are there, easy to read (Hugo Bardulf, Galfridi f. Petri, Willelmus de Stuteuill) but they are the Latin forms and if you shouted that out to the street only some of the owners of the name would recognise themselves. The language of formal record and the language of every didn’t overlap the way they do, say, for modern England: they were entirely different languages. 

The writer needs to know more about what actually happened in England under John’s rule to effectively use a pipe roll. These rolls were not made to be read alone. They work alongside other documents. This gives writers handy approaches, for used alongside chronicles of the early part of John’s reign and the reasons for some of the entries springs out and gives novelists tools to illustrate disturbances and unrest or to give the actual names of those who might have met with John during his month in England that year.

Not all primary sources are easy for writers to use, and this is an excellent example. Where these are the critical sources for a place or time (as the pipe rolls are for John’s reign) then novelists depend more on the work of historians to make sense of it.

This brings us full circle, for the choice the novelist makes of which historian to use will depend very much on the story they want to tell.

The Best Witch Historical Fiction – by Anna Mazzola

March 2, 2019, 4:42 pm

≫ Next: "The King Must Die" - by Katherine Langrish

≪ Previous: Novelists and their sources - by Gillian Polack

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Witches are, in the perhaps unfortunate words of Grazia magazine, ‘hot right now’, both on screen and in books. Stacey Halls’ The Familiars is spending its third week in The Times bestselling fiction list, Laura Bates’ YA debut, The Burning, is making waves, and A Discovery of Witches is now an international bestseller and a TV series.

Several other recent novels feature witchcraft including Caroline Lea’s superb The Glass Girl (set against the backdrop of the 17th-century Icelandic witch trials) and E.C. Fremantle’s brilliant thriller The Poison Bed. “‘Witch,” says one of her characters. “That’s what happens to women who don’t do as they’re told.”  Each novel uses witchcraft to highlight the misogyny and fear of women’s sexuality that remain relevant today, together with the terrible power of false accusations. As Willow Winsham says in her fascinating book Accused: British Witches Throughout History, ‘if anyone could be a witch, then literally everyone was suspect.’

A coven of other witch books are due out in the coming months including Katie Lowe’s haunting debut, The Furies, Carla by Laura Legge, Her Kind by Niamh Boyce and Witchery by Juliet Diaz, which will explain ‘how to connect with the power of your inner witch’. There is, it seems, something potent in the air.

Here, I list some of my favourite witch-based historical novels, followed by several others that have been strongly recommended.

1 Corrag, Susan Fletcher 

It is 1692 and Corrag, a wild young girl from the mountains of Scotland, has been condemned to death for her role in the Glencoe Masscare, accused of witchcraft and murder. In her filthy cell she is visited by Charles Leslie, a young Irishman with his own motives for questioning her.

As Corrag begins to tell her story, an unlikely friendship develops between them that will change both their lives. Compelling, atmospheric and exquisitely written.

2 The Witchfinder's Sister, Beth Underdown

Beth Underdown’s clever debut is a historical thriller based on the life of the 1640’s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins. Alice, Matthew’s fictional sister, is forced to return to her childhood town of Manningtree where she becomes entangled in her brother’s crazed pursuit of what he believes to be justice. Underdown brilliantly weaves fact with fiction to illustrate the disturbing paranoia and obsession behind the Essex witch hunts.

3 The King's Witch, Tracy Borman 

Historian Tracy Borman’s debut novel tells the fascinating story of Frances Gorges, a healer who is dragged to the court of James I, a man who has already condemned many for treason and witchcraft. There she becomes enmeshed in a world of intrigue and betrayal - and at great risk from the twisted machinations of Lord Cecil, the King's first minister.

The follow-up, The Devil’s Slave, is out June.

4 The Vanishing Witch, Karen Maitland

In Lincoln during the reign of Richard II, Caitlin, a dark-haired widow arrives in John of Gaunt's city with her two beautiful children. At first, Caitlin is considered a godsend, helping merchant Robert of Bassingham care for his sick wife. But when Robert's wife, and then others, die seemingly unnatural deaths, the accusations of witchcraft commence. Masterful storytelling.

5. The Familiars – Stacey Halls

17-year-old Fleetwood Shuttleworth, desperate to survive her latest pregnancy, crosses paths with Alice Gray, a mysterious young woman who agrees to become her midwife. When Alice is accused as part of the Lancashire witch trials, Fleetwood takes huge risks to try to save her – and her own unborn baby. But is Alice all that she seems?

Fast-faced, twisty and immense fun.

6. The Witch of Blackbird Pond – Elizabeth George Speare 

In 1687 orphan Kit Tyler arrives as a stranger in colonial Connecticut and feels entirely out of place. When she forms a friendship with a Quaker woman called Hannah Tupper, believed by the colonists to be a witch, Kit is forced to choose between love and a sense of duty. Old, but gold.

7 Circe, Madeline Miller 

In this epic and magnificently written novel, Miller retells the story of the mythological witch Circe. Increasingly isolated by her immortal family, Circe turns to humans for friendship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.

We follow Circe from the halls of Helios to exile on the remote island of Aiaia, where she learns to harness her power.

8. Witch Child, Celia Rees

In 1659, after 14-year-old Mary sees her healer grandmother hanged for witchcraft, she escapes to Massachusetts Bay Colony with the help of an unknown woman. Through Mary's journal, we learn of how, though Mary hopes to make a new life among the pilgrims, she, like her grandmother, quickly finds herself the victim of ignorance and prejudice, and once more she faces important choices to ensure her survival. A powerful read for all ages.

Witchy 'To be Read' Pile 

A host of other witch and witchcraft-related books have been recommended to me and I set out here a few of those which are going on my towering ‘to be read’ pile:

Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks. In 1666 villagers turn to sorcery, herb lore, and witch-hunting.

The Daylight Gate, in which Jeanette Winterson creates another view of the Pendle Witch Trials.

Lolly Willowes, Sylvia Townsend-Warner’s first novel about a young woman who believes she has sold her soul to the devil in return for freedom from her tiresome family (fair enough).

Widdershins by Helen Steadman, based on events from the Newcastle Witch Trials of 1650.

The Magpie Tree by Katherine Stansfield, exploring the relationship between witchcraft and foreigners in 1840s Cornwall.

Witches Trinity by Erika Mailman, set in Germany in 1507 when a visiting friar suggests that witchcraft is to blame for the failing crops and famine.

The Witches of Eileanan by Kate Forsyth, a historical fantasy trilogy in which the young Isabeau leads a horde of persecuted witches.

The Witches of New York by Ami McKay, a mystery set in Manhattan in 1880.

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent, set in Salem in 1692.


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Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime and Gothic fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, is a tale of superstition, dark folklore and missing girls on the Isle of Skye.

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

"The King Must Die" - by Katherine Langrish

March 3, 2019, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: Medieval Women's Clothes and the Luttrell Psalter - Joan Lennon

≪ Previous: The Best Witch Historical Fiction – by Anna Mazzola

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I can’t have been more than fourteen when, exploring the adult shelves in my local public library, I picked up a book called ‘The King Must Die’ – intriguing title! – opened it, and read the first paragraph:

The Citadel of Troizen, where the Palace stands, was built by giants before anyone remembers. But the Palace was built by my great-grandfather. At sunrise, if you look at it from Kalauria across the strait, the columns grow fire-red and the walls are golden. It shines bright against the dark woods on the mountainside.

I knew at once this was my sort of book.

The books we read and love in childhood often leave a lasting impression, but those we discover while navigating the awkward transition into adult life may be equally important. I remember how it felt to venture out of the children’s section of the library and wander among the labyrinthine adult stacks. So many books, so many unknown names! Uncharted waters, random landfalls. How do you choose? A title catches your eye, a spine. You pull it out, flick it open, read a little. It speaks to you or it doesn’t: often it doesn’t. You push it back, try again. It’s a little like starting up a conversation with a stranger at a party. Who is this person? Are they interesting? Dull? Dangerous? Will I fall in love? Will I find a friend? Will I run away? 

What I'd found and loved in children’s fiction was story, colour, richness, strength. At fourteen I wasn’t interested in reading about bored married couples having affairs or making brittle conversation at cocktail parties, I wanted books that opened magic casements on the foam of perilous seas – and ‘The King Must Die’ gave all of that, along with just enough of a gilding of sex and violence to make it flatteringly and unmistakeably not a book for children.  

Told in the first person, with all the immediacy of connection that provides, it is the coming-of-age story of the hero Theseus as he discovers his heritage, overcomes the robbers of the Isthmus, marries the Queen of Eleusis after killing the Year-King, takes his place as heir to King Aegeus of Athens, offers himself as one of the twelve captives paid as yearly tribute to Crete, becomes a bull dancer in the Palace of Knossos and lover of the Princess Ariadne, conquers the Minotaur and returns home to find himself King – his father having thrown himself from a cliff in grief at seeing his son’s ship approaching without the white sail that would have proclaimed Theseus still lived. It’s a wonderful mixture of myth, prehistory, and what was then pretty much up-to-date archeology, and it totally blew me away.

‘The King Must Die’ owes much to ‘The Golden Bough’, especially Chapter 24, ‘The Killing of the Divine King’ with its subdivisions of ‘Kings killed when strength fails’ and ‘Kings killed at end of fixed term’. It gave me a lasting interest in Mycenean Greece and Minoan Crete. In the novel,  Theseus’s Aegean world is divided between the older religion of the great Mother, and the Sky Gods of the Hellenes. A king is the shepherd of his people, dedicated to the god, and must give his life as and when that god demands it. But Theseus rejects the fixed term reign of the Kings of Eleusis in favour of a personal dedication: he has grown up believing himself in a son/father relationship with Poseidon: he will die for his people when Poseidon asks it of him, not in mere accordance with some custom. 

Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos: Heraklion Museum

The most memorable parts of the book are those set in Crete itself, in the great palace of Knossos, where Theseus inspires the twelve girls and boys he has accompanied from Athens, who elect him their leader, to become an elite team of bulldancers: the Cranes. Renault wonderfully suggests the camaraderie and febrile tension of the bull-dancers’ quarters and training ground, where a great bull-dancer has the charisma and status of a Rudolf Nureyev or a prince. Here Theseus, still only a greenhorn, is given advice by the leading bull-dancer:

“Don’t know your odds yet?” he said. “You must keep your wits about you here. What is your name?” I told him all our names and asked his own. He said, “In the Bull Court, they call me the Corinthian.”

“Why?” I asked. “Are you the only one from Corinth?” He answered lightly, “I am now.”

I understood then his flourish and his load of jewels, and why when he talked no one broke in. Once, far away, I had wanted to be a warrior; to be a king. Now it was forgotten; only one ambition burned in me. No one I have told this to at home has understood it, not even Pirithoos, my nearest friend. As the saying is, only those the snake has bitten can tell each other how it feels. 

The Bull Leaper, an ivory figurine from the palace of Knossos

Whether or not life as a bull-dancer was truly anything like this, it's clear from the surviving artwork that the bull dance must have been a spectacular sight and the atheletes were risking their lives. Renault’s version is vividly convincing, and her Theseus is an attractive hero, light-footed, ambitious, quick to learn. 

The Great Court was empty under the moon. Tier upon tier rose the pillared balconlies, dimly glowing. Lamps flickered behind curtains of eastern stuff. The pots of lilies and of flowering lemon trees shed a sweet, heavy scent. A cat slipped from shadow to shadow, and a Cretan who looked as if his errand were the same. Then all was silent. The great horns upon the roof-coping reared up as if they would gore the stars. 

I stretched out my hands palm downward, and held them over the earth. “Father Poseidon, Horse Father, Lord of Bulls. I am in your hand, whenever you call me. That is agreed between us. But as you have owned me, give me this one thing first. Make me a bull-leaper."

This is lovely, atmospheric scene-painting, although as my friend and fellow History Girl Adèle Geras once pointed out to me,  Renault is wrong about the lemon trees: citrus fruit originated in Asia and did not arrive in the eastern Mediterranean until about the 5-4th century BCE.  So those flowering fruit trees might instead have been pomegranates.

But Renault is right about so much else, the horns on the roof-coping 'goring the stars', for instance. This photo of a clay model in the Heraklion Museum shows just how the great, stylised horns were set along the parapets of the palace roofs. I travelled to Crete for the first time in June 2018, and of course we went to Knossos, making sure to get there early in the morning before the crowds arrived. It was wonderful; and though criticism has been levelled at Arthur Evans’ reconstructions, I feel you’d have to be a real purist not to appreciate the way he’s given the visitor a living sense of the beauty and elegance of this magnificent palace. After all, the site is huge: there are still ruins a-plenty.

Here I am standing in front of a reconstructed part of the palace: behind the red pillars is part of another fresco depicting a huge bull with gilded horns.

Just recently in a second-hand bookshop I picked up a little book called ‘Myth or Legend?’ It's a book of the texts of twelve broadcasts given by the BBC in 1953/4:

Various speakers were to examine well-known stories like that of the Golden Bough, or Minos and the Minotaur, or King Arthur, and decide, in the light of modern historical and archeological knowledge, whether there were any truth in them. 

The one entitled ‘Theseus and the Minotaur’ was written and delivered by Charles Seltman (1886-1957) a Fellow of Queens College Cambridge and an art historian and numismatist who specialised in early Attic coins and wrote a number of books on Greek art and history. His short essay reads like a crib-sheet for ‘The King Must Die’, and I feel sure Mary Renault must have heard or read it, perhaps even been inspired by it to write her own book, which was published just two or three years later in 1958. For after a brief resume of the myth, Seltman moves on to the various discoveries at Knossos, calling particular attention to three points or items. First, to a number Cretan seal-stones carrying ‘an engraved picture of a man with a bull-mask covering his head … who may be enacting a religious dance or ceremony’. (Renault makes wonderful use of this.) Second, to the frescoes of bull-dancers in which ‘athletic youths and girls acted as Toreros and Toreras’:

Here surely is the explanation of the strange fable about the annual tribute exacted from Athens of seven youths and seven girls destined for ‘the bull of Minos’. They were not given as fodder to a monster, but trained to disport themselves in the bull-ring at Knossos to make a Cretan holiday.

Thirdly, Seltman points out, the rich palace and city of Knossos had no walls. ‘At a time when residences and townships in every other Mediterranean land or island were heavily fortified, those of Crete alone remained open and undefended.’ King Minos, in other words, ruled the waves, and might well have been capable of enforcing some kind of a tribute. When Knossos was destroyed by earthquake and fire, perhaps some subject king (Theseus himself?) from the mainland saw his chance to rebel.Seltman concludes with a passage which has surely influenced Mary Renault's book:

As witness for the suddenness of the destruction, we have only to observe what has been called the most dramatic room on any ancient site – the Throne Room – where, between painted griffins on the walls, the Throne of Minos still stands.

When this room was first revealed by the spades of the excavators, overturned jars and ritual vessels testified to confusion and panic, as if the King himself had felt obliged to perform or suffer some final secret rite for the salvation of his people. Those ancient seal-stones suggest that at times a man might hve a ritual bull-mask over his face and head. Did the King, in these final moments, wear such a mask? Was it a king disguised as a Minotaur whom Theseus slew? 

Throne Room, Knossos

Renault writes:

I saw before me a rite scrambled up out of fear and wreck: priests and priestesses in their daily clothes with some rag or scrap as symbol of sacred raiment; rich pedestals bearing lamps of common clay … The white throne of Minos stood empty between its gryphons. The daggled crowd faced the other way, to the sunken earth court…

Down in the court a man was standing, naked down from the neck; broad-bodied, thick-legged, thatched with black hair on chest and groin and shins … His trunk glistened with the chrism a shaking old man and woman smeared on him with half-palsied hands. From the neck down he was man, and base; above the neck he was beast, and noble. Calm and lordly, long-horned and curly-browed, the splendid bull-mask of Daidalos gazed out through the sorry huddle with its grave crystal eyes. 

Definitely, one to read again.

Bull's head rhyton or libation vase

Picture credits

Bull-leaping fresco from Knossos; Heraklion Museum: photo by Zde - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,
The Bull Leaper, ivory figurine from the palace of Knossos: photo by Wolfgang Moroder.
Clay shrine with bull horns: photo by David Gahan
Knossos: walls: photo by David Gahan
Katherine Langrish at Knossos: photo by David Gahan
Throne Room, Knossos: photo by David Gahan
Bull's head rhyton or libation vase, Heraklion Museum, wikimedia commons

Medieval Women's Clothes and the Luttrell Psalter - Joan Lennon

March 4, 2019, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: History where there isn't by Sheena Wilkinson

≪ Previous: "The King Must Die" - by Katherine Langrish

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Commissioned by Sir Geoffrey Luttrell (1276-1345), the Luttrell Psalter includes, as well as the Psalms, a calendar, canticles, the Mass, an antiphon for the dead - and a wealth of decorations and illustrations.  At least five artists worked on these, one in particular specialising in rural and domestic scenes. 

a sheep pen (wiki commons)

a dining scene (wiki commons)

playing a game in a (very windy) garden (wiki commons)

It is fascinating to see how this resource has been used to reconstruct medieval clothing, as shown in the video below: 

A snippet of a plainsong transcribed from the Luttrell Psalter can be heard in the background of the clothes video, and performed here:

The Luttrell Psalter is currently held in the British Library.

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
The Wickit Chronicles. (my medieval adventure series for 8-12 year olds)