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WILLIAM FRITH: THE PEOPLE'S PAINTER by Penny Dolan

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By the time this History Girls post appears, a major and comprehensive bicentennial exhibition - WILLIAM FRITH: THE PEOPLE'S PAINTER - will just have opened at the Mercer Gallery in Harrogate, North Yorkshire. The exhibition runs until the 29th of September 2019. 

By then, living locally, I'll have called in with my notebook and scribbled thoughts on his detailed paintings because William Powell Frith's great crowd scenes, full of colour and life, are an excellent, if sanitised, visual resource for any writer of Victorian historical fiction.

William Frith – Wikipedia
Frith was born in Aldfield, a small village close by the Fountains Abbey Estate in Yorkshire. His father was an inn-keeper in the popular spa of Harrogate and ambitious for his son.

In 1835, aged 16, Frith was sent to the Royal Academy School in London. This was followed by further study at Henry Sass's academy where he suffered the tedious art-teaching approaches of 1830's, established "The Clique", a small rebelious group that included Richard Dadd. Even so, by 1840, Frith was regularly exhibiting paintings of idealised historical scenes and building a reputation in London.
 
However, by 1851, Frith had grown weary of costume and  pageant and "determined to try his hand at modern life with all its drawbacks of unpicturesqueness of dress". 
 

It is that very, detailed "unpicturesqueness" which gives interest and charm to his work todaay.
Frith went to Ramsgate Sands to work on studies of the holiday makers and also to try, unsuccessfully, to make use of "Talbot-typing" or photography. 

Frith worked on the painting for a further two years in his studio; the overcrowded beach at Ramsgate became Life at the Seasideand was a huge success when he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1854.

(Life at the Seaside. Detail from the Victorian Web)
www.victorianweb.org

Ramsgate Sands by William Powell Frith, RA



More panoramas followed. His next masterpiece showed the throng at the carnival that was Derby Day.  The subject was well-chosen: the popular social event happened close to London and was widely attended by all layers of society, which in turn would add interest to the whole as well as offering Frith ideas for groups of characters.

He later recreated these small group scenes with models back in his studio, but he had also taken along the photographer Robert Howlett, instructing him to "take photographs from the roof of a cab of as many queer groups of figures as he could see", even though Frith, like many, kept quiet on his use ofphotographic images. After fifteen months hard work, Derby Day was ready and exhibited to much acclaim in 1858. 


Frith was a master in choosing his subjects: he took the railway, the great topic of the age for his next "modern" work, showing the busy arrivals and poignant departures on view at Paddington in The Railway Station,which was exhibited to great acclaim in 1862, just four years later. The large sweep of the painting, and the many small stories being played out within the whole, made Frith's work a great triumph: Ruskin praised the artist's "feat of organisation of all the details", although the details of railway travel had been rather tidied up in the painting.

File:Wedding of Albert Edward Prince of Wales and ...The success led to a highly profitable commission from a dealer to work on a series of three modern London Street scenes. Unfortunately, Frith had to put the wonderful idea on hold.

Queen Victoria invited Frith to paint The Marriage of the Prince of Wales in 1863, a request and honour that was impossible to refuse.

Despite what might have been thought the reward of the royal command, in truth Frith's aristocratic "models" proved far less easy to manage than his usual sitters, and the £3,000 fee he was granted was barely a third of what he has hoped for from his intended London series. Consequently, only a few early sketches exist for The Times of the Day, intended be Frith's own Hogarthian view of Victorian London.

Afterwards, he did complete a series of four paintings - The Road to Ruin - on the highly popular moral topic of the dangers of gambling, followed by a series of five pictures on the perils of Speculation, The Race for Wealth. Both subjects discreetly echoed scanadlous news stories of the time. He was certainly an artist with his finger on the nation's pulse.

Frith's last "modern" painting, Private View at the Royal Academy, showing the great and the good with what now seem like over-crowded walls of paintings behind them. It was exhibited in 1881. From then on, Frith returned to the familiar topics of his early paintings, and to smaller-scale works such as the birthday party of a four-year-old girl, titled Many Happy Returns of the Day which is still popular in card-shops today.

Frith was truly a people's artist. A known raconteur, and great friend of Charles Dickens, his work displays the same storytelling power: his canvasses are filled with characters from all levels of society, allowing Frith to reveal, rather slyly, the social tensions and complexities of his age. When his large paintings went on tour, rails were erected to keep the public back from the canvasses and extra staff brought in as protection. Furthermore, the mass-produced engravings of Frith's made him one of the most commercially-successful artists of the age, and copies of his works could be found hanging in parlours across the whole Victorian world. Frith, whose life was almost the same length as Queen Victoria's, even found the energy and time to write his own three-volume Autobiography before he dying in 1909.


William Powell Frith's "modern" Victorian scenes still have the power to attract, interest and nostalgically involve the viewer today and I am looking forward to seeing his work will be on display at the Mercer Gallery's bicentenary exhibition. 

I feel as if I half-know the crowds at Ramsgate, Paddington and Derby Day, who will certainly be there,  but I wonder who else I'll find when I go Victorian people-watching?

www.harrogate.gov.uk/museum


Penny Dolan


Thanks to the Mercer Gallery and to Christopher Wood's book on "Victorian Painting" for additional information and to the Victorian Web for the Life at the Seaside detail.

"William Frith: The People's Painter! by Jane Sellars MBE and Richard Green will be published to coincide with the Mercer Gallery exhibition.
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Bread and Roses - Celia Rees

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Lauren Laverne's guest on Desert Island Discs (BBC Radio 4) last week was Professor Monica McWilliams. In 1996, she helped to found, with Pearl Sagar and others, the Northern Ireland Women’s Cooperative. They came together, from different sides of the religious divide, to petition existing political parties to include women among the candidates for the Northern Ireland Forum that was being set up as part of the negotiations that would ultimately lead to the Good Friday Agreement. After receiving little or no response, they decided to form their own party, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition and they earned two places at the negotiating table. In 1998, when the Good Friday Agreement was finally signed, Monica McWilliams became one of the 3% of women who are signatories of any kind of international peace treaty. A shocking statistic and the measure of her achievement. Even more shocking was the account she gave of the ridicule, insults, humiliation and sheer misogyny that she and Pearl Sagar had to endure while inside the debating chamber and the intimidation and threats of violence they suffered outside it. 


joan Baez and Mimi Farina

One of her choices was Bread and Roses, sung by  Joan Baez and her sister, Mimi Farina. I first heard it sung by Judy Collins and it moved me to tears, as it did now.  This peerless anthem demands, not just sufferage, equal rights, justice, decent wages and working conditions but more than that. Not just bread, but roses, too. Not just food, but beauty, culture and leisure for ourselves and for our children.  

'Bread and roses' comes from a speech made by Helen Todd, a factory inspector and campaigner for women’s suffrage, in a  line demanding: "bread for all, and roses too".

"...woman is the mothering element in the world and her vote will go toward helping forward the time when life's Bread, which is home, shelter and security, and the Roses of life, music, education, nature and books, shall be the heritage of every child that is born in the country, in the government of which she has a voice,"

— Helen Todd, 1910.

Her words were turned into a poem by James Oppenheim in 1911 and the slogan was taken up by  women workers in the successful textile workers' strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, which became known as the Bread and Roses Strike.







Strikers, Lawrence Massachusetts


Bread and Roses

As we go marching, marching, in the beauty of the day
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses
For the people hear us singing, bread and roses, bread and roses.

As we come marching, marching, we battle too, for men,
For they are in the struggle and together we shall win.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes,
Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread, but give us roses.

As we come marching, marching, un-numbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient call for bread,
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew
Yes, it is bread we fight for, but we fight for roses, too.

As we go marching, marching, we're standing proud and tall.
The rising of the women means the rising of us all.
No more the drudge and idler, ten that toil where one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories, bread and roses, bread and roses.

A song by James Oppenheim

The words echo the cry heard through the centuries: from the women of Paris who led the march on Versailles demanding bread and forcing Louis XVI’s return to the city; the women who took up the same call for bread to feed their families, feed their children, and poured onto the streets of St Petersburg at the beginnings of the Russian Revolution.


The anthem was taken up by women who marched for suffrage, who led strikes and walk outs, camped out at Greenham Common, supported the striking miners. Women who have taken a leading or equal part in protests all over the world. Women who want something more than their male counterparts, something indefinable: beauty and the leisure to enjoy it, dignity, respect, what we would call quality of life. Not just food for the table, but food for the soul.

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

Representing Rome by L.J. Trafford

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 My post this month is inspired, in part, by a happening on a Roman Facebook group. A member had posted an Edwardian painting of a female Roman slave and this set off quite a debate. One poster had strong views, saying that Edwardian paintings depicting ancient Rome had no place on the group. We should study the primary sources on Roman slavery, not consider a painting painted 2000 years after the event. Which got me thinking about how Rome is represented, how different societies at different points in history have taken parts of ancient Roman life and depicted it.



That the times you live in influence how you see ancient Rome is illustrated by this jaw dropping sentence in Jerome Carcopino’s Daily Life in Ancient Rome:
 "The practical good sense of the Romans, no less than the fundamental humanity instinctive in their peasant hearts, had always keep them from showing cruelty towards their slaves. They had always treated their slaves with consideration." 

There’s also a chapter entitled “Feminism and Demoralization” . Which is quite a corker and contains such gems on women as:
 “Were not content to live their lives by their husband’s side but carried on another life without him at the price of betrayals and surrenders”.

And:

“If the Roman women showed reluctance to perform their maternal functions, they devoted themselves on the other hand, with a zeal that smacked of defiance, to all sorts of pursuits which in the days of the republic men had jealously reserved for themselves.” 


Jerome is very much of his time. Though, it should be added, a good read brimming with information.


Films

A search on Internet Movie Database for Ancient Rome set movies since 1950 brings up 47 titles. Here’s the top 20:

1. Gladiator (2000)
2. Caligula (1979)
3. Pompeii  (2014)
4. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
5. Spartacus (1960)
6. King Arthur (2004)
7. Ben-Hur (2016)
8. Life of Brian (1979)
9. Ben-Hur (1959)
10. Centurion (2010)
11. The Eagle (2011)
12. Cleopatra (1963)
13. History of the World: Part I (1981)
14. The Last Legion (2007)
15. Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra (2002)
16. The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
17. The Arena (1974)
18. Quo Vadis (1951)
19. Asterix and Obelix: Mansion of the Gods (2014)
20. Asterix at the Olympic Games (2008)

Caligula - even this acting talent can't save it.
The first thing to be noted about this list is, don’t bother watching Caligula. Really don’t. It’s terrible and all the naked bodies and soft porn content cannot lesson the impact of quite how bad it is. The second thing that’s noticeable is the religious aspect: The Passion of the Christ, Ben Hur (both versions), Life of Brian, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Quo Vadis are all about Rome’s contact with Christianity. Just outside the top twenty are The Robe and King of Kings which are similarly about Christianity.

Also noteworthy is the number of films that are predominantly about the Roman army: Centurion, The Eagle, The Last Legion, King Arthur. Maybe at a push Spartacus and Gladiator too, since both feature excellent battle scenes involving the Roman army.


The ending of Gladiator is a good example of what we, the viewers, find acceptable. Historically Commodus was at least 87% more odd than depicted by Joaquin Phoenix (see my post here for quite how odd he was) and he was strangled by a wrestler named Narcissus rather than killed in the arena by a hunky Gladiator. For a feature film both are acceptable changes in my view. Would audiences have sat through 2 plus hours of Joaquin Phoenix decapitating ostriches and mixing excrement in nice Derek Jacobi’s dinner? That Commodus is killed by Russell Crowe, whose journey we have followed throughout the film makes perfect narrative sense, given what’s gone before. 

Russell Crowe sadly demised, the writers whip out a happy ending with nice Derek Jacobi declaring Rome is now a Republic and there shall be no more emperors. Now this, obviously, is rubbish, Rome continued to be ruled by emperors for a good two centuries after Commodus’ death. But it is an ending palatable for the modern audience. Russell Crowe has created a democracy by his death. What actually happened was a bloody civil war and a new emperor installed in Rome. The writers have decided that the audience won’t accept another autocrat taking over as a happy ending. 



Books
Let us take a look at historical fiction set in Ancient Rome. Ploughing through the Waterstones best sellers in Historical Fiction, I found: Simon Scarrow, Ben Kane, Robert Harris, Anthony Riches, Lindsey Davis, Conn Iggudon, Robert Fabbri. Again there’s an emphasis here on the Roman army, alongside Harris’ political drama and Davis’ mysteries.


With my writer hat on, setting a fictional tale in the Roman army makes perfect sense. You can move your characters around to exotic locations, a set piece is at your fingertips with an easily inserted battle and your characters can be set against adversity, with drama created in their reactions. They make for a cracking read.

Walk into any bookshop and a book cover with the figure of a legionary/centurion/other rank of soldier staring off into the distance is shorthand for a story about ancient Rome. The army, legionaries and battles are what we like to read about ancient Rome.



Roman Concerns
As a member of many, many Roman history Facebook groups I can verify that the most posted subjects tend to be: favourite/least favourite emperors and generals/battles. What doesn’t feature anywhere is what is the best kind of dinner party. Which is odd because this is one of the primary concerns of the poet Martial and letter writer extraordinaire Pliny the Younger. Martial in particular frets about getting a dinner invitation at length: 
“I angle for your dinner invitations (oh the shame of doing it, but I do it!)”

 And:
“Our dinner invitations are one-sided: When I ask you, you usually come; yet you never ask me” 


And then when he receives one spends a lot of time slagging off the food, host, guests and entertainments:
“Why should I put up with your second-best menu when you invite me out?” 


It makes you wonder whether the world we depict of Rome would be recognisable to the ancient Romans themselves? Would they see their everyday concerns and experience represented?
Which brings me to another ancient Roman set film: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

Originally a stage musical by Stephen Sodheim this was made into a film in 1966 staring, among many marvellous actors: Michael Horden, Michael Crawford, Zero Mostel and Phil Silvers. What is interesting about A Funny Thing is that it is based on the plays of Plautus, which were written in the 2nd century BC. This is not a representation of Rome written two thousand years later: this is a play written by a Roman, about Romans, for an audience of Romans. Thus it gives us an insight into the actual concerns, worries, joys and humour of ancient Romans.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is a musical farce detailing the efforts of the slave, Pseudolus to set his young master up with the girl of his dreams, rescue said girl from the brothel next door and ensure she is not claimed by her solider fiancee who is on his way to claim her as his bride. As in any good farce there are endless complications, misunderstandings and great gags:

Hero: For us there will never be happiness.
Philia: We must learn to be happy without it.


Or the classic:

If I've told you once, I've told you a hundred times; do not fan the girls when they're wet! But you'll never learn, you'll be a eunuch all your life. 



What struck me the first time I saw A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, one dull Sunday afternoon when I was a teenager, was the representation of the Roman army. The first view of the Roman army is when they march behind their General Miles Gloriosus, as he belts out the song “My Bride”. They are pelted with cabbages and other missiles by the locals, and jeered at. To someone whose previous exposure to Roman history was one of great reverence for their army, this was quite revolutionary. 

A Roman comedy mask as would have been used in performances of Plautus
Mosaic with Comedy Mask (Old Slave); Villa in Centocelle/Rome (Italy); 2nd century AD
Att: Anagoria
 

Indeed the lyrics of My Bride poke fun of the soldier conqueror image:



Make haste! 
I have no time to waste: 
There are shrines 
I should be sacking, 
Ribs I should be cracking, 
Eyes to gouge and booty to divide. 
Bring me my bride!
And:

I, Miles Gloriosus, 

I, slaughterer of thousands, 
I, oppressor of the meek, 
Subduer of the weak, 
Degrader of the Greek, 
Destroyer of the Turk, 
Must hurry back to work. 


The braggart soldier is a stock character in Roman comedy. He boasts about his great courage and fighting, though we never know if these tales are true or not. Clearly he is a recognisable type to the audience, an audience which would contain a sizeable number of those who had served in the army or had relatives who were serving.

Other characters include Pseudolus, the wily slave, another stock character, who is the chief aid to his young master in his pursuit of love. Which is an interesting look at how the Romans viewed their slaves, not necessarily as beasts of burden (though Roman comedy is full of jokes about slaves being flogged) but as trusted confidants and helpers.

What is great about A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum is that it's not about big battles or big events or bigged up emperors, the like of which us modern audiences lap up. Like Martial's dinner party woes, the film is about small things; a boy who has fallen in love, a slave who is worried about displeasing his mistress, a henpecked husband with a stern wife, a boasting soldier. 
To my mind it is the most accurate depiction of Ancient Rome ever filmed.
Now, who wants to co-write a farce about a boastful soldier trying to obtain a hot dinner party invite with the help of his wily slave?


L.J. Trafford is the author of the four emperors series of books which are, of course, all about big battles, big events and bigged up emperors.


Mediaeval food, feast and famine by Carolyn Hughes

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In my novels of 14th century England, like many other writers, I try to include a good deal of description of medieval daily life. Clothing, housing, furniture and furnishings, artefacts and tools, working practices, medical practices and, of course, food, can all help to place characters in context, differentiate the life styles of people of diverse stations, and bring a sense of authenticity to the historical world one is creating.

In this post, I thought it might be interesting to review what I have learned so far about the food that medieval people ate, using a few descriptions from my own novels as evidence.

Daily bread

Breakfast
I have read that breakfast was a meal that few folk ate, but maybe that applied mostly to the better-off, who might rise late and weren’t required to expend much energy during their day. For them, waiting until dinnertime – at around midday or so – might not seem much of a hardship. But, for the peasant who spent his or her entire day in the fields, rising at dawn and setting off to work soon after, waiting four or five hours for a first bite to eat would surely make for an inefficient, ineffective and disgruntled worker. I feel sure that most labouring people, and tradesmen, would have broken their fast before they went to work, albeit if all they had was just a hunk of dry bread and a cup of weak ale.

Eleanor wrapped two thick cloaks about her shoulders as she sat down to eat her unappetising breakfast – the breakfast Hawisa always insisted that she ate. In truth, a small bowl of Hawisa’s flavourless but warming gruel would have been more welcome than the hard coarse bread, dry cheese and mug of cold ale set before her.”

Peasants breaking bread. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Dinner
Dinner was the main meal of the day. In religious houses, the time for the meal was originally “nones”, the ninth hour after sunrise, which, depending on the time of year, might be the middle of the afternoon (i.e. the equivalent of 3pm). But, again, working people couldn’t wait so long, so “noon”, and dinner, generally happened around midday (12pm).

For most people, this would be the (possibly only) hot meal of the day. For working people (assuming they ate at home), it would usually entail a pottage of some sort – essentially a stew or thickened soup – with vegetables, a little meat if available, and maybe some “extras” gathered (possibly illegally) from the fields and woods. It would be eaten with a lot of bread and ale.

Peasants might not eat meat every day but, if they had the space to rear hens and a pig or two, then they might have the occasional chicken, and more certainly pork, including the bacon they smoked by hanging a flitch where it would receive the fumes from the fire. My reading suggests that, while beef was eaten, lamb was less often on the menu, even of the wealthy, perhaps because sheep were raised principally for their wool. Eggs and fish would be available, the latter perhaps most commonly for coastal-dwelling peasants, for fish in the manor’s rivers in principle belonged to the lord and was not available to his tenants, unless they risked poaching it. 

Pork butcher. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/ 

Wealthier people might well also have some pottage, though the finest pottages might contain almond milk, or spices such as ginger and saffron. But they would perhaps also have some roasted meat, or a meaty stew – a brewet– which might also be rich and spicy. I imagine it was rare for peasant folk to have access to spices…

Apart from the vegetables in the pottage or stew, I have the impression that, if you were able to afford meat and good bread, separate vegetable dishes were not especially popular.

The quality of your bread was undoubtedly dependent on what you could afford. Wheat bread was the finest, white bread, with the bran removed, being the preserve of the wealthiest. Maslin was a mix of wheat and rye, perhaps much like our wholemeal bread. Much coarser and darker was bread made from barley, perhaps mixed with rye or flour made from dried peas, or at its worst mixed with chaff and waste from the bakery floor!

Desserts, of fruit, sweet pastry or some sort of milk-based pudding, might be an everyday aspect of the wealthy person’s table. I suppose peasants ate sweetmeats less often, but I assume they might have access to fruits of various kinds, including apples, pears, cherries and strawberries, all of which they could have grown in their gardens (though perhaps only the more prosperous amongst them would give space to growing fruit rather than the staples of onions, peas, beans and cabbage), together with what they could forage from the hedgerows.

Susanna was hurrying back along the narrow path from the vegetable plot to the house, bearing the last of the winter kale, which she intended to add to the beans and onions already in the pottage on the fire.”

<>

Alice…knew exactly where to find the best brambles, as well as a good source of hazelnuts, and, in autumn, where she’d the best chance of locating a few fungi to add savour to her pottage.”

<>

Scanning the remnants of the feast left scattered across the table, he grabbed a leg of cold capon, pierced some slices of roast meat with his knife, and tore a small maslin loaf in half.”

Chickens on a spit. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

Supper
Supper, I gather, was invariably something simple such as (yet more) bread, cheese and ale. Something cold was likely, especially in the non-summer months, when it would be getting dark by the time the workers reached home. That’s not to say that a stay-at-home housewife might not prepare a warming pottage for her family, if just with vegetables, rather than any meat.

Alice decided to make a little pottage for their supper: she added oatmeal to the pot, together with a few dried peas she’d already soaked and a scrap of the small piece of salted pork that remained, hung up in the storeroom. She stirred the pottage well, and waited for her sons to return.”


If supper in peasant homes was invariably modest, so it might be too in grander homes, even if the quality of the food was better…

Supper at Meonbridge manor was far more meagre than she had expected. Yet, what little was offered was of the highest quality: soft white wheaten bread, a little fresh butter and a delicious sheep’s cheese, both made in the manor dairy, and a bowl of cherries picked from the orchard – and a large flagon of rich Gascony wine.”


Brews
It is often assumed that everyone in the Middle Ages drank huge quantities of ale, downing mugsful at every meal. This assumption is based on the premise that water was a no-no, on the grounds that it was almost certainly polluted. But apparently this was by no means universally the case. Water was drunk, unless of course it was known to be unpalatable, which would be judged presumably from its smell and colour.

Having said all this, however, I must admit that most of my characters do seem to drink quite a lot of ale (or wine, depending on their social status)! The ale might be bought from an alewife, who might also run some form of ale-house or tavern, but many peasant housewives made their own ale. This home-brew had a relatively short “shelf-life”, and would be made often and in small batches. I have a number of references to people drinking spiced ale and spiced wine, both of which I have suggested were warmed, though I am not sure if this was invariably the case.

It seems that milk – cow’s, goat’s or sheep’s – was not generally consumed as a drink (except perhaps by children), but was more usually turned into butter and cheese, again often by the housewife.

Feasting
Feasts might occur at weddings, at Midsummer, at Christmas. I describe at least a couple, both provided to the tenants by the lord and lady of the manor.

The first is a Midsummer feast celebrated at the end of June in 1349, when the devastation caused by the Black Death is finally coming to an end in my fictional community, Meonbridge. This is not a period of famine, but the arrival of the plague had meant that fields weren’t ploughed and sown as they should have been, animals and vegetable gardens had been neglected, so food was not necessarily in plentiful supply. Many people were hungry. The lady of the manor did her very best, in difficult times, to provide a substantial feast for her suffering tenants.

Roasted meats glistened on their trenchers, and dozens of small roasted birds – woodcock perhaps, trapped in the local woods – were accompanied by spicy dipping sauces. There were pigeon pies as well as a rich venison brewet served with a creamy wheat and almond milk frumenty, pease pudding and a thin spicy mortrews. As well as the usual dark rye and barley bread, they all shared a few small maslin loaves that contained a little wheat flour – Sir Richard was probably the only one in Meonbridge who still had wheat from last year’s harvest, but at least he was sharing it with his tenants.

Excitement buzzed around the company as the dishes were presented, then near-silence descended as everyone fell upon the food and devoured what was, for many, the only substantial meal they’d had for several months.”

From the Luttrell Psalter. Public Domain via https://commons.wikimedia.org/

And here is a description of a Christmas feast…

…there were coneys in wine, and little pies of venison, a brewet of beef in a thick spicy sauce, and hens stuffed and roasted and glazed with green. A wonderfully rich blend of smells, spicy and savoury, vinegary and sweet, tingled in her nostrils, enticing her to eat...
It was hard to restrain her eagerness to try at once all the appetising dishes laid out around her, but she contented herself with sipping wine and nibbling at the little white wheaten loaves, as she waited for her turn to come to be offered a rabbit leg and a few slices of roasted chicken...

As the first dishes were being consumed, more followed, the most magnificent a whole roasted pig, its mouth stuffed with apples, borne in on a great platter, still hot and steaming, presented to Sir Richard, then placed on a serving table for carving into thick, succulent slices…

Some sweetmeats had been brought to the tables, for those who had had their fill of meat – dishes of pears in wine and plates of honey cakes, baked apples and sweet custard tarts.”


Both of these feast passages do rather give the impression of a modern banquet, with the “first course” consisting of savoury dishes, and the dessert course following on. In practice I understand that courses might contain a mix of dishes, both savoury and sweet, served and eaten together…

Food away from home
Of course not all meals were taken at home... If dinner was eaten at midday, I suspect that, for workers out in the fields, returning home from the fields would take too long, so they would take a “packed lunch” instead. In this extract, the miller is simply too busy to take a break for dinner...

Pa was too busy to eat his dinner at home, because tomorrow was Midsummer’s Eve, and he’d got his orders from the manor. And bread and pies for the whole village needed a lot of flour, and he was racing against time to grind it all.

So Ma wrapped a hunk of coarse bread, a lump of cheese and a flask of ale in a cloth, and bade Peter run to the mill and give the bundle to his father.”


But, as working people so often do today, some might go to the pub for dinner…

‘G’day to ye,’ said a stranger, tipping his hat to the men sitting outside Ellen Rolfe’s ale-house, drinking and munching on Ellen’s hot meat pies…

‘Pies good?’ he asked, sniffing the steam rising from the pastry crust Roger had just sliced into with his knife. Then he tipped his head towards the ale-house door. ‘I jus’ ordered one.’

Roger nodded, his mouth full of hot meat and gravy.

<>

We’re sitting in an alehouse near the market, spending some of the money on an early dinner of pies and cups of weak ale. …my pie[‘s] got meat in it as well as onions, though I have to chew and swallow hard to make all of it go down.”


It seems that, in my ale-houses, mostly pies were served! But not in all…

Some hours later, Thorkell and his brother were dining on stewed mutton and red wine in a grimy, noisy, smoke-filled inn near Andover, some thirty miles from Meonbridge. …the mutton was tough and gristly, and he tried to wash down the half-masticated lump with some of the foul wine. But he started to choke and tears came to his eyes. For a few moments he couldn’t breathe, and his face went red and sweaty, until Gunnar thumped him hard upon the back and the vile lump flew from Thorkell’s mouth and landed in the noisome rushes on the floor. Thorkell gulped more wine and, puffing out his cheeks with relief, wiped his sleeve across his eyes. Then both men threw back their heads and guffawed.”


Oh dear! That doesn’t sound much like “Good Pub Grub”…

Peasant meal. Aristotle, “Politiques et économiques”', France, 15th century. 
Paris, Biblioteque nationale, Département des manuscrits

During harvest-time, tenants were entitled to their dinner being provided for them in the fields by their lord. If the lord were generous, it could be something of a mini-feast.

Eleanor was certainly looking forward to a good long drink, for the day was warm and, despite the frequent small cups of weak ale handed round throughout the morning, her mouth was parched from the effort of her labours and the dust that rose constantly from the grain as she bundled the stalks together. The two women trudged across the field to where the food was laid out on huge trestles: a loaf apiece, great hunks of cheese, and even slices of roast meat, as well as enough barrels of ale to slake the thirst of a multitude.”


Exotic ingredients
I have already mentioned the use of spices. I assume that peasants rarely had access to any spices, because of their high cost. They were mostly the preserve of the wealthy, but it does seem that the use of spices of many kinds was very popular in medieval cuisine.

Here, although Eleanor isn’t “wealthy”, neither is she poor, and feels able to treat her cook to a little luxury…

Eleanor stood at the spicerer’s stall, breathing in the curious nose-tingling perfumes rising from the colourful sacks of seeds, barks and berries, and on the edge of a sneeze as pungent dust drifted from the peppercorns the merchant was scooping from a sack. She had always loved coming to the fair. Because it was held only once a year and lasted three days, it encouraged a few merchants to travel from much further afield.

…these foreign merchants sold mostly manufactured goods, which were often of much better quality, or more exotic, than anything the local merchants could offer – the finest woollen cloth, well-made pewter ware, and jewellery – and, sometimes, spices. A spicerer did not come every year to Meonbridge but, in the summer months, an employee of the spice merchant in Winchester would travel between a few Hampshire fairs, bringing cloves and cinnamon, and ginger and mace, as well as pepper. How delighted Eleanor was to find that the spicerer had this year chosen to come here.

She had already treated herself to a length of fine cloth for a new kirtle, and wanted to please Hawisa by buying a little spice and sugar for her to add to a pie or pudding. It could not be much, for she was not one of the wealthier sort, but Hawisa could make a little go a long way.”


The food of the poor
The poor, on the other hand – in my novels, these are the cottars, the labouring folk on the lowest rung of the social ladder – might struggle to provide their family even with the basics. Money was scarce, and they might have very little land to grow their own food.

Emma always knew exactly what she had available to feed her family: bread, of course, a few eggs, dried beans, a couple of onions, sometimes a scrap of bacon or a small piece of cheese when she or Ralph had earned a little extra. It was never much, and never in such quantity she’d not notice something going missing.”


She might have to make do with old vegetables, and be circumspect about how much she buys…

Emma nodded. ‘Four eggs, if you will, Alice, and d’you still have any leeks?’

Alice…held out two fat leeks... ‘Not many left,’ she said. ‘The leeks are rather old now, and you might want to remove the outer layers. Are these enough?’

Emma took one. ‘Just this.’ She’d keep as much of it as she could. She thought she saw a glimmer of understanding in Alice’s eyes. ‘And the eggs.’


At the same time, a woman such as Emma might well long for the opportunity to be a better provider for her children…

She knelt down by her meagre herbary with her weeding hook and fork. She’d learned from Alice long ago how to grow a few herbs, thyme and sage and marjoram, parsley, mint and clary, to add flavour to their simple food. She’d have liked to grow vegetables as well, onions and cabbages, but the plot just wasn’t big enough. She often thought with envy of Susanna’s croft, with not only space enough for vegetables of many kinds, and trees of apple, pear and cherry, as well as herbs, but also for a flock of fussy hens, and even a sty with two fat pigs.”


Food in the time of famine
In a time of famine, however, such as the period 1315-17, the increasing dearth of food might affect everyone. Even those who could grow their own would find their produce dwindling in the face of terrible weather and hopeless growing conditions. But, again, it would be the poor, with no resources, who would suffer most. 

I lift aside the piece of blanket covering my basket and show her the undersized onions and yellow-leaved cabbages. Taking out two onions and a small cabbage, Maud puts them in the pocket of her apron. Then she looks up at me, tears in her eyes. 

‘I can’t pay you, Agnes,’ she says, her voice the merest whisper. I feel a warmth rush to my face, remembering…Pa insisting I must always ask for something…

‘I’ll put them back,’ she says, but I shake my head.

‘No, Maud, keep them. Ma won’t mind.’

‘I’ll make a pottage. Maybe a few worms or grubs’ll make it tasty.’ She sniggers and, for an instant, she’s the cheerful Maud I remember. But the light’s gone entirely from her eyes. 

I give her a little smile. ‘Maybe.’

‘If they’re good enough for badgers,’ she says, ‘they’re good enough for us,’ and pats me on the arm.”


The hardships - and rewards - of war…
Even soldiers, fighting for the king, sometimes suffered from lack of food, when the king’s funds faltered. Yet, there were times too when they had more food than they could eat, when they plundered their enemy’s homes and farms in a brutal chevauchée

The Frenchmen don’t go quietly, but at least go with their lives. Though I can’t say they look grateful to be spared. Only once they’ve gone does Sir Henry order us to overrun their homes and gardens. We pile up our carts with whatever food they had: sacks of grain, remnants of smoked hams still hanging from the rafters, squawking hens and new-laid eggs, rounds of cheese and fresh-baked loaves of bread. We heave in flagons of ale and vats of milk. We tramp though their gardens, churning the soil to mire and ripping from the ground whatever’s growing there – beans, leeks, cabbages and turnips – and tearing fruit – apples, pears, medlars, quince – from their orchards. Then, throwing open the doors of barns and sties, we drive out those pigs and cattle we can butcher for our fires and slit the throats of those we can’t. When our carts are creaking under the weight of what we’ve gathered, we set light to whatever’s left – houses, barns, animals, trees. When it’s burning well we leave, to that night’s camp, to enjoy the fruits of our day’s work.




If you are interested in medieval cookery, although I haven’t tried out any of the recipes, this online cookbook (http://www.godecookery.com) offers authentic medieval recipes interpreted for modern use. Could be fun!


Feminine Power by Elisabeth Storrs

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The Vestal Virgins of Rome are famous. These six priestesses were entrusted with keeping alight the eternal flame of Vesta, the goddess of the hearth. The College of Vestals wielded great influence in matters of state but they were cloistered from society and denied the opportunity to marry and bear children until after they had served the order for thirty years. Apart from the Vestal Virgins, Roman women did not preside over religious ceremonies nor did they hold high office.

Roman vestal virgin and Etruscan priestess (or goddess Turan)

Historians contend that an Etruscan woman could hold the title of a high priestess called an ‘hatrencu’. It is believed such priestesses belonged to a sacred college devoted to a female cult dedicated to the fertility of families and marriage. Unlike the Vestals, however, they joined such an order as matrons rather than maidens sworn to an oath of chastity. This collegial link has been persuasively argued due to the findings within the Tomb of Inscriptions at the Etruscan city of Vulci.  There members of several families were buried within its six chambers. Extraordinarily, two of the ladies were not laid to rest beside their husbands and children which was usually the rule in Etruria for female burials in family tombs. Instead they lay in the company of women with different family names but bearing the same title of ‘hatrencu’.

Etruscan jewellery and noblewoman
The attire of a Vestal Virgin was unique. She wore distinctive robes, woollen headbands and a veil, and her hair was specially dressed in six braids. Votive statuettes have been found of Etruscan women wearing a peculiar garb believed to characterise those of a priestess as well. This consisted of a sleeved tunic reaching to her ankle boots. A heavy mantle with a tasselled triangular end hung over her back. Often her shawl-like cloak was pinned at the shoulder with a large brooch similar to those worn by male Etruscan soothsayers, and her hair was covered by a clinging veil placed low across the forehead and tied by a ribbon knotted at the back of her head.

In 1861 the German historian Bachofen propounded a theory that Etruscan society was a matriarchy where identity passed through the female line. His theories were extensively discussed in feminist circles in the 1970s with research undertaken into the cult of the great mother goddess. Indeed, the first deities to be mentioned in Etruscan inscriptions are Turan, the goddess of love and fertility, (better known as Venus or Aphrodite) together with Aritimi (Artemis) who was associated in Etruria with the Mistress of Animals, a goddess also worshipped in the Near East.

In support of his claim, Bachofen examined the legend of Tanaquil, a talented prophetess who became the queen of the first Etruscan king of Rome. She exercised tremendous influence and gave real meaning to the saying: ‘the power behind the throne.’ There was also support for his theory due to the existence of many lavish tombs dedicated to women with inscriptions acknowledging both male and female bloodlines. Compare this to a Roman woman who only bore her father’s name in feminine form, and who was not generally commemorated after death.

Ramtha Visnai & Arnth Tetnies
Present-day historians have discounted Bachofen’s theory because there are no inscriptions denoting Etruscan women as a monarch or chief magistrate. Nor is a man ever described as the ‘husband of’ a woman which would suggest the wife held a dominant role. However there was no separation between church and state in Etruscan society. Those who governed also fulfilled a religious role as a priest. Given this, the fact Etruscan women could be priestesses establishes the eminent role they played in that world. Accordingly, there may well be seeds of truth in the legend of Queen Tanaquil who was honoured as both a seer and an advisor to her royal husband. Indeed, the extensive treasure found in graves of Etruscan women points to the conclusion that the wives and daughters of the prominent elite were viewed as ‘princesses’.

One particular sarcophagus confirms the high rank held by women in Etruria. On its lid, an elderly man and woman lie beneath a mantle. Their intimate embrace not only portrays their devotion but also symbolises how the power of their union can ward off evil after death. Although the casket portrays both husband and wife, it only holds the body of the woman. She is simply described as Ramtha Visnai, wife of Arnth Tetnies.

On one side of the sarcophagus is carved a scene of a procession believed to portray the journey of the couple to the afterlife. Attendants walk behind both husband and wife. Arnth’s carry symbols of his magistracy – a horn, ivory chair and rod; Ramtha’s servants carry libation vessels for mixing wine and water. These symbols are associated with priestesses who served the Etruscan wine god Fufluns (Greek Dionysus). The couple are depicted holding hands. Here is a coffin celebrating the life of a loving wife whose rank was as respected as her husband’s. And the scene also bears witness to Ramtha’s desire to meet her spouse as an equal after death. 

Procession to afterlife on Ramtha Visnai's casket

Perhaps the most impressive evidence of the respect afforded to Etruscan women is the fact they were worshipped as part of an ancestor cult. Seated on thrones, statues of both male and female heads of clans stand guard over those who have been entombed. These images give testament to the understanding that the soul of the deceased could turn into a deity who returned to watch over the living. In effect, a high ranked matron of a clan was not only a princess but also a goddess – an ultimate display of feminine power.

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tales of Ancient Rome saga, and the co-founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com
Images courtesy of Google Arts & Culture, Wikimedia, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard Art Museums

Wedding Lintels & Marriage Customs by Catherine Hokin

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 Marriage Lintel from 1610, Falkland
I have developed a couple of new obsessions since moving to Scotland six years ago, not all of which revolve around whisky. Moody looking castles are up there, as is the tooth-destroying confectionery known as Tablet, but the one currently leading the pack is hunting for marriage lintels.

A marriage lintel (also known as nuptial, marriage or lintel stone) is a carved inscription above the doorway of a house owned by a newly-married couple. They are a feature of the east coast of Scotland and date primarily from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries - the one pictured from 1610 is one of the best examples and commemorates the marriage of Nicol Moncrief, a servant of James VI. All feature the year of the wedding and the couple's initials and some also include pictorial details - there is a particularly lovely one on what is now known as the John Knox House on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, commemorating the marriage of goldsmith John Mossman to Mariotta Arries.

 Stone from 1801
The lintels serve as a record of a marriage and the joining together of two families, who were often aristocratic or monied. Lintels could be added to a building which was built specifically for the married couple, or were carved into a pre-existing lintel. They were always set over the main entrance and some also appear inside houses, above the most visible fireplace. Wherever they were placed, they were meant to be seen: perhaps we should think of them as an early form of social media - Mr and Mrs Smug-Married boasting about their updated status and their swanky new home. 

There is, unfortunately, little information about the lintel stones beyond what they symbolise - or little I can find. There's no list of the surviving stones (although Wikipedia cites some examples if you want to go hunting) and, as you can see in the third photo, many have become detached from their original position. 


The custom of marriage lintels had died out by the end of the nineteenth century, as have some of the other traditional Scottish practices. Grooms are no longer expected to carry a creel (a large basket) filled with stones around the village until their bride releases them from their burden with a kiss. Brides might still find themselves standing to the groom's left but hopefully no one is still doing it because the 
bride is the ‘warrior’s prize’ who the groom needs to hold with his left hand so he can fend off her family and other foes with his right. Similarly presenting swords from one family to the other as a sign of extended protection and acceptance isn't regarded as quite so crucial anymore.

 A quaich
Some customs do, however, continue. Although grooms aren't necessarily required to bring 'siller' (silver coins) to the ceremony anymore, a traditional wedding will still involve a scramble - throwing coins in the air for the children to collect. Wedding walks still take place, where the wedding party walk to the church preceded by a fiddler. Whether they have to turn around and start again if they meet a pig or a funeral as the rules once dictated is presumably a matter of choice these days, or very bad luck. Many couples still use a quaich, a two-handled 'loving cup' for the first toast to symbolise the joining of their lives. This tradition stems, as many of these practices do, from clan customs: the quaich was once used by two clans to celebrate a bond between them, with each leader sharing the whisky it contained. In a similar vein to sharing the quaich, some couples will still 'pin the tartan' - swapping rosettes to show that both husband and wife are accepted by the other's families. For anyone wanting to delve further, there are some excellent oral histories here, including blackening, the breaking of the bride-cake and betrothal customs. 

 The Goddess Juno
Where Scots have broken with custom is the wedding date. Traditionally the most popular auspicious month to marry was June - this was partly because the goddess Juno (for whom June is named) was the protector of women, particularly in marriage and childbearing. On a more practical note, others chose June in order to time conception so that births wouldn’t interfere with harvest work. Last year, however, the most popular month in Scotland was September - no doubt because this is the one month of the year when the weather is at its most predictable. A Scottish June bride needs a dress that co-ordinates with wellies, an umbrella and, this year at least, a winter coat! 

If you and yours are struggling to choose the right month for an upcoming ceremony, perhaps this poem might help. The message about May does seem rather clear...

Married when the year is new, he’ll be loving, kind and true.

When February birds do mate, you wed not dread your fate.

If you wed when March winds blow, joy and sorrow both you’ll know.

Marry in April when you can, joy for Maiden and for Man.

Marry in the month of May, and you’ll surely rue the day.

Marry when June roses grow, over land and sea you’ll go.

Those who in July do wed, must labour for their daily bread.

Whoever wed in August be, many a change is sure to see.

Marry in September’s shrine, your living will be rich and fine.

If in October you do marry, love will come but riches tarry.

If you wed in bleak November, only joys will come, remember.

When December snows fall fast, marry and true love will last.

–Anonymous

Which ever you go with, have the happiest day and, in the words of this Scottish blessing: May your blessings outnumber the thistles that grow and may troubles avoid you wherever you go. Now let's see if you can still recite that when the bills come in... 

A Victorian Scandal: The Peer and the Dancer by Judith Allnatt

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In 1851, the Spanish dancer Josefa Duran, known as ‘Pepita’ caught the eye of Lionel Sackville-West, a member of the British aristocracy (2nd Baron Sackville). She was slim and beautiful and was known for the airiness of her dancing, for her luxuriant, waist-length dark hair and for the kiss curls she wore on each cheek. She had what we would now call ‘celebrity status’ and young men were said to have plucked flowers from their own wives’ hair to cast them at her feet on the stage. 

Born in a Málaga slum to a barber father and a clothes-seller mother, Pepita’s background couldn’t be further from that of Lionel’s family, who owned Knole, one of the largest and most important of Britain’s Great Country Houses. They met a week or so after Lionel had seen her at the theatre; Lionel visited and they soon became ‘intimate’. A further obstacle to the lovers, beyond the chasm between their social classes, was that Pepita had in fact married another dancer, Juan Antonio de Oliva, only the previous year. They had separated swiftly in circumstances that Oliva maintained were ‘not honourable’ to Pepita and she had left Spain to tour abroad.
The Cartoon Gallery, Knole
Their relationship was intermittent in nature. As first attaché in Berlin, Lionel was able to visit Pepita in the cities and towns in which she was dancing but there were inevitably spells when they were apart. Pepita was certainly no angel; she appears to have had other liaisons with Prince Youssoupoff in Munich and Duke Maximilian Joseph in Bavaria. After Lionel and Pepita’s daughter Victoria was born, they separated for two years but Lionel returned to her after hearing that she was desperately ill. She had lost a baby and refused to say who the father was, but nonetheless they were reconciled.

In 1866, having given up dancing, Pepita had luxurious clothes, beautiful jewels and a house bought for her by Lionel in the French coastal town of Arcachon. Nonetheless, she was isolated by her situation. Unaccepted by society because she and Lionel were not married, she was unable to mix socially in Lionel’s circle. When they stayed in Paris, Pepita was reduced to tears because she was unable to go with Lionel to a fete in the Tuileries that he was visiting. His colleagues at the Foreign Office knew nothing of his liaison or the fact that he had children. He had never mentioned that part of his life. Now at Arcachon, her children were short of playmates as the children in the neighbouring villa had been told by their parents not to play with them. When entertaining, it was reported that no ‘ladies’ ever attended, that her guests were young men and that she drank. 

At Arcachon, the house was named ‘Villa Pepa’: a name that may show Pepita’s egocentricity or may reflect a sense of defiance at her exclusion and the desire to make a world separate from the stresses of the ‘society’ around her. The desire to create another ‘world’, is perhaps echoed later in the haven from the public sphere made by her grand daughter Vita Sackville-West and her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson, in their gardens at Sissinghurst.

What was the truth about Lionel and Pepita’s relationship? Were they ever married? It became important decades later because of question over who should inherit Knole. For years Lionel was steadfast in putting up objections to signing the register of his children’s births. Later, when pressed to do so by Pepita for the sake of her reputation, he signed for two of his children but later claimed that he had no memory of doing so. One of these was Pepita’s youngest living child – Henry – who was later to feel therefore that he had a claim to be Lionel’s true heir.

In Arcachon society there was gossip that her children had several different fathers including the Prince of Bavaria and Count Henri de Béon, alongside Lionel. One can see how these rumours might arise as Pepita appointed Henri de Béon as her superintendant at the villa and gave him a bedroom next to hers. Lionel seemed to know about Béon living there but didn’t send him packing. Whether this was because he held no suspicions or because he was extremely tolerant of his mistress’s amours is not clear.

At forty, Pepita gave birth to another son, Frederic, but both mother and baby survived only a few days. According to Vita’s account in her book ‘Pepita’, Lionel broke down at seeing Pepita and the baby laid out together. He blamed himself for her death, sobbing that he had killed her, presumably because he had fathered the child when Pepita was an older mother. As if fuelled by guilt, from that point on Lionel seemed to refer freely and publicly to Pepita as his wife; she is named as such in the funeral invitations, letters and in the notices in the local paper. Ironically, only in death did Pepita receive the acknowledgement of their relationship that she had craved through their many years together. She was buried, as Lionel’s wife, in the municipal cemetery above the town. Béon and his mother took care of the five children, supported financially by Lionel, who referred to him at the time as a ‘dear friend’.

The consequences of Lionel and Pepita’s unconventional liaison rumbled on decades after Pepita’s death. Lionel’s nephew (confusingly another Lionel) had inherited Knole in the absence of a ‘legitimate’ son. Henry brought a case that sought to prove that Pepita had been secretly married to Lionel, that he, Henry, had been registered as Lionel’s child and that he was therefore the male heir. The scandal caught the public imagination to the extent that a drama was shown, catchily named ‘The Marriages of Mayfair’ that was a thinly veiled reference to the Sackville-West affair. For Henry and the court case however, it was impossible to cast doubt on the legality of Pepita’s marriage to De Oliva, that had in fact continued throughout Pepita and Lionel’s affair. Henry lost the case and Knole continued in the hands of the accepted line of Sackville-Wests.

To find out more about the Sackville-Wests:  'The Disinherited' by Robert Sackville-West
 'Vita - the Life of Vita Sackville -West' by Victoria Glendinning

 Visit Knowle (National Trust)
 Visit beautiful Sissinghurst (National Trust)



AN INTERESTING FIND IN CHEPSTOW By Elizabeth Chadwick.

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Chepstow Castle from my hotel window.
Last week I was in Chepstow to give a talk on my specialist subject, the life of the great Medieval knight, magnate and regent, William Marshal.
Since it was an evening talk and I live three hours' away by train, I stayed overnight.  The organisers arranged for me to stay in The Woodfield Arms Hotel (formerly The Castle View) directly facing Chepstow Castle.

Arriving in my room which had all the facilities of an en suite a lovely comfortable bed, and indeed a view of the castle, I noticed a large, closed, dark-red striped curtain half way up the wall at the side of the bed, and underneath it, a photo frame with some information.  My photo is too small for the information to be read clearly, but it's about Piercefield House a Neo-Classical country house, now a ruin. Here's the Wikipedia article. Piercefield House   Why the information is there in the photo frame is because the curtains hide from the light, a fading but magnificent wall mural of Piercefield House painted in its Queen Anne heyday, and there for guests staying in this room to view.

What a fantastic bonus moment on my historical travels of otherwise medieval datelines!
information plaque

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Behind the red curtains = Piercefield House mural







.

R



Emanuel Swedenborg and William Blake by Miranda Miller

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    For years I’ve passed Swedenborg House in central London but haven’t dared to go in. The reason for my curiosity is because ever since adolescence I’ve loved the paintings, illustrated books and poetry of William Blake, who was influenced by Swedenborg’s ideas.




   So I was very pleased to be invited to a book launch in the Magic Lantern Room there by my friend Sally Kindberg a few weeks ago. Swedenborgianism bases its teachings on the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, who was born in Stockholm 1688. He was a polymath who had a brilliant career as a theologian , scientist,  inventor, philosopher  and mystic.


   Here’s a drawing from his notebook (in 1714) of a flying machine. The pilot was supposed to sit in the middle and use paddles on the wing, like oars on a boat, to propel himself through the air. Swedenborg commented, “ The art of flying is hardly yet born. It will be perfected and some day people will fly up to the moon.” He studied anatomy  and physiology  and anticipated the neutron concept. He also believed that slavery should be abolished, observing that the inhabitants of the interior of Africa had preserved a direct intuition of God. As a result the first abolitionist society was founded by Swedenborgians in Sweden in 1779.


   When he was in his late fifties and living in London he had a vision of Christ,  who told him that he had been chosen to interpret the Scriptures and reform Christianity; he was to be given freedom to roam in the spirit world. He spent the remaining 28 years of his life writing about his adventures there and his conversations with angels, demons and spirits from, amongst other places,  Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, Saturn, Venus and the Moon.  His best known books are Heaven and Hell and TheHeavenly Doctrine, in which he claims that the teachings of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ have been revealed to him. Swedenborg has been described, intriguingly, as a “secret agent on earth and in heaven.” Swedenborg called his movement The New Jerusalem Church but it only became an  institution after his death. Blake commented, “It is so with Swedenborg; he shews the folly of churches & exposes hypocrites”


   Swedenborg died in London in 1772 – apparently on the precise day he had predicted. He had, and still has, many followers. It has been suggested that his ideas influenced Joseph Smith, the founder on Mormonism. Writers who were interested in his ideas include Conan Doyle, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry James, Immanuel Kant, Balzac, Helen Keller, August Strindberg, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and W. B. Yeats. Jorge Luis Borges called him “the most extraordinary man in recorded history.“ His unorthodox beliefs were a magnet for dissentors and intellectuals interested in radical politics which, in the late eighteenth century, were often linked to mysticism.



   William Blake is seen here in a portrait by Thomas Philips. In the bookshop on the ground floor of Swedenborg House books by and about Blake are prominently displayed. Alexander Gilchrist, Blake’s first biographer, wrote that “of all modern men, the engraver’s apprentice was to grow up likest to Emanuel Swedenborg.” Some scholars think that Blake came from a family of Swedenborgians and the Irish poet William Allingham imagined the fourteen-year-old Blake meeting the eighty-four-year-old Swedenborg on the streets of London.


   We know that Blake owned and annotated at least three of Swedenborg’s books and he mentions two others in such a way as to suggest that he read them. He and his wife Catherine attended the first General Conference of the New Jerusalem Church in 1789. Blake would have sympathised with the Conference’s endorsement of Swedenborg’s statement that the things seen by the visionary “are not fictions but were really seen and heard in a state in which I was broad awake.”  Like Blake, Swedenborgians had to defend themselves against charges of “enthusiasm” and madness. The Church that Blake visited was a development of the non-orthodox Theosophical Society which was established in 1783 by a printer with a Methodist background, Robert Hindmarsh. We know that a number of Blake’s friends and fellow artists were Swedenborgians and met in the Theosophical Society (in 1785 renamed as The British Society for the Propagation of the Doctrines of the New Church).


   In Blake’s epic poem Jerusalem he speaks of a “Jerusalem in every individual man, ” a very Swedenborgian idea. Both men had unconventional ideas about marriage and sexuality. In Visions ofthe Daughters of Albion Blake describes sexual violence, linking sexual liberation with human freedom. Oothoon rages at her lover Theotormon for his “hypocrite modesty.” She describes herself as “A virgin fill’d with virgin fancies”; in accordance with the ideal of the virtuous woman at the time, she is not allowed to express her true sexual desires. In a paradise on the coast of Africa similar to the one described by Swedenborg in his Plan, Oothoon describes a utopian future time of free love, when “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love!” can be “Free as the mountain wind”


   Many Swedenborgians shared another of Blake’s deepest concerns: opposition to slavery. In his long poem America Blake’s revolutionary spirit, Orc, is referred to as “the Image of God who dwells in the darkness of Africa.



    Later Blake seems to have turnied sharply against the Swedenborgians and satirized them in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” Blake began to mistrust the church's emphasis on the avoidance of sin and eventually accused Swedenborg of “Lies and priestcraft” while the New Jerusalem Church split into factions. Swedenborg's greatest error, according to Blake, lay in his failure to understand the real nature of evil.


   Blake saw Heaven and Hell not as real locations but as representations of the human heart. For him, angels represented conservative values whereas devils were rebels; Blake saw himself as a revolutionary devil and also used the concepts of Heaven and Hell in his own polemic against the materialistic philosophies of Locke, Bacon and Newton.

   Blake’s private mythology, which make many of his beautiful poems hard to follow, was certainly influenced by Swedenburg’s writings and I find this a helpful approach.







The Eiffel Tower celebrates 130 years, by Carol Drinkwater

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Sunrise seen from the Eiffel Tower

This year in France, our very own Iron Lady has reached her 130th birthday. Le Tour Eiffel. Receiving close to 7 million visitors a year, it is the most visited monument in the world, but like so many other artistic endeavours it was not an easy birth. The plan to build a 300 metre high, iron construction was conceived as part of the celebrations for the World Fair of 1889, exactly one hundred years after the French Revolution.



The idea, its concept was met with some enthusiasm and a great deal of anger, mockery and vitriol.
Many from the world of arts and letters, including Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas junior, Charles Gounod, began in 1886 to campaign against an iron construction. Such a monstrosity, they argued, would overshadow the capital's iconic monuments. Pamphlets and articles were published. These were known collectively as La Protestations des Artistes. Charles Garnier, the renowned architect who designed the Paris Opera House and had collaborated with Gustave Eiffel on the magnificent dome of the Observatoire in Nice, was also amongst them. Paul Verlaine described the design as a "belfry skeleton". Others were far less kind.

                Caricature of Gustave Eiffel published in 1887 at the time of "The Artists' Protest"

Gustave's response to the criticism was:
"Do you think it is for their artistic value that the pyramids have so powerfully struck the imagination of men? What are they, after all, but artificial mountains? [The aesthetic impact of the pyramids was found in] the immensity of the effort and the grandeur of the result. My tower will be the highest structure that has ever been built by men. Why should that which is admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?"

In spite of the vociferous objections, the drilling and digging work for the foundations began on 28th January 1887. Remarkably, the tower was completed on 31st March 1889. It was a feat of engineering genius. That same year, for the World Fair, two million people visited the tower rising proudly skywards from the Champs-de-Mars.

                                                                    18th July 1887

7th Dec 1887

26th Dec 1988

A journalist of the time, Emile Goudeau, describes visiting the site just before its completion in January 1889. His excitement is palpable:
"A thick cloud of tar and coal smoke seized the throat, and we were deafened by the din of metal screaming beneath the hammer. Over there they were still working on the bolts: workmen with their iron bludgeons, perched on a ledge just a few centimetres wide, took turns at striking the bolts (these in fact were the rivets). One could have taken them for blacksmiths contentedly beating out a rhythm on an anvil in some village forge, except that these smiths were not striking up and down vertically, but horizontally, and as with each blow came a shower of sparks, these black figures, appearing larger than life against the background of the open sky, looked as if they were reaping lightning bolts in the clouds."


The tenth Exposition Universelle was held in Paris from 15th May to 6th November 1889. It was for this occasion that the tower had been conceived and built. The Exposition stretched over 95 hectares filling the Champ-de-Mars, Trocadero Hill and the banks all the way to the Invalides esplanade. The Eiffel Tower, at that stage the tallest structure in the world, dominated all of it. Those who had written and railed against it were silenced. This work of engineering genius, this architectural masterpiece, was a huge success. It drew crowds from all over the world and was intended to remain in situ for twenty years. That was 130 years ago.

Le Figaro, the French daily newspaper, set up a writing press on its second floor from where it produced a special edition of the paper.


Another rather wonderful attraction proposed to the visiting public was 'Print and Send Your Letters by Balloon'. "Printed on the Eiffel Tower". The Figaro reported "the Tower's company is doing its utmost to increase the number of attractions in favour of its clientele. It has just decided to put up for sale, on all the Tower's floors, small balloons and cheap parachutes arranged in such a way that one can attach a letter to them. The sender's address will be left blank. We wish the Tower's parachutes the same success as its postcards."
So many book ideas come flying into my mind when I read this!
The Eiffel Tower also played an important role in the popularity of the postcard as a form of communication.

Here is an Eiffel Tower post card by Libonis. It is named after the famous engraver.


The oldest postmark stamped on an Eiffel Tower postcard is 21st August 1889.

This one above is dated October 1889. I have no idea of its value today.

It was a year of festivities for the fair, the Exposition. Thousands and thousands of visitors flooded the city, crowding into the fair, and the high spirits were contagious.  The tower was lit up every evening with hundreds of gas lamps. A tricolour beacon housed in the campanile sent out three signals: blue, white, and red. These illuminations could be seen all across Paris. A baker on stilts from the Landes region climbed the entire 347 steps that led to the first floor!

                                          Gustave Eiffel December 1832 - December 1923

Gustav Eiffel, born in Dijon, graduate of the École Centrale Paris, civil engineer, builder of many bridges and viaducts both in France and across the world, collaborator in the construction of the Statue of Liberty in New York, was the creator of the tower, the vision behind it. He kept his office on the very top floor. On that same level he received his second Légion d'Honneur (Knight and Officer) at the inauguration of the tower in 1889.

I am inspired by this man's story. His determination against all the odds, the criticism from many of the finest minds in the land, to build his tower, to see his vision through.

This year, if you are in Paris, even if you have visited the Eiffel Tower before, do pay it another few hours of your time. There are celebrations on every level, special restaurant offerings, walk its gardens and remember the man, the genius, who fought for its existence. You can even visit Gustave's office on the top floor where you will find the figure of him with the American inventor, Thomas Edison, who paid Gustave a visit there and offered him one of his own inventions, a phonograph.
An uplifting story relates how Gustave on 10th September 1889, spotting the composer Charles Gounod dining in one of the Eiffel Tower restaurants, invited him up to his high-altitude office to join him and some other guests for coffee. It was a moment of reconciliation because Gounod had been one of the loudest voices against the construction of the tower.

I have taken a fair amount of the information here from the official Eiffel Tower website, including photos. It is well worth scrolling through:

https://www.toureiffel.paris/en

www.caroldrinkwater.com

My latest novel is THE HOUSE ON THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF






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Greyhound Racing by Janie Hampton

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I had laid my bet on a shiny, black bitch called Millicent Magic. She had previously been beaten by Jet Stream Smurf and Boherduff Solas, and that night she ran against Boom Boom Love and Smoothappa Razor. Six sleek dogs stood quietly by their handlers in the dim light of a misty evening. A metal cage lay across the track and the dogs calmly stepped into the back. As a florescent rag zoomed past, the trap opened and whoom! The dogs bounded out, as on springs. Their long, powerful legs and flexible spines took them from 0 to 43 mph within six strides. They hurtled around the track, a blur of legs. One dog tripped and somersaulted across the sand. But he rolled upright and was soon only a few lengths behind the pack.
Image result for greyhound racing painting
18th century racing greyhound
Less than 30 seconds and 420 metres after they started, there was light applause as the winner flashed past the finishing line. The handlers walked their dogs back to the kennels; their half a minute’s work for the week was over.
My lovely Millicent Magic came last and I lost one pound. Was the trip to Swindon Greyhound Race Track worth a few seconds of excitement? For thousands of people in Britain, greyhound racing has been their world, their life: as trainers, owners, bookmakers, kennel hands and punters.
In 1926, greyhound racing was introduced from the USA to Manchester, England. Within a few weeks over 11,000 spectators attended each Belle Vue meeting and two years later there were 68 tracks around England. There was not much else for the working man to do, and it was a cheap night out.
Giclee Print: Hares and Graces by Harry Woolley Art Print : 24x18in

After a decline during the second world war, there was a post-war boom and 50,000 people regularly attended White City stadium in London. Working men had raced dogs for centuries, and this offered a night out with a bar and the promise of riches.One of them was East-ender Alan 'Ginger' Newman, born in London in 1940. I met him in a café and he told me how he had spent his life in the greyhound racing business as a tic-tac signer and bookmaker in all the 33 London dog tracks. ‘White City, Hackney Wick, Wimbledon, Wembley. Back then you could only bet legally on the track, and I knew all the bookies: ‘Fatty’ Sparks; Obie ‘The Chalk’ Dyer; Big Bertie Pearson; Harry ‘Erroll Flynn’ Saffron; and Tony ‘The Professional’ Morris. You’d always knew when Judah and his brother had lost. They would start screaming at each other. Then one of them would kick the other quite hard. The punters loved it.’
“Jock the Thief” was a regular at the Wimbledon track in the 1950s. ‘He always came with a big suitcase,’ remembers Newman. ‘It was stuffed with razors, shirts, silk ties, ladies stockings, scarves, perfume –things that were difficult to get. He sold them out of his suitcase at knock-down prices but nobody asked questions. By the time the races started he had sold the lot. He then proceeded to lose it all on the dogs. Next week, he was back, with another suitcase full.’

Once legal betting shops opened in 1961, track attendances declined. New clientele were attracted by modern restaurants up in the stands. Roger Moore was starring in The Saint when he took Bette Davis to White City greyhound stadium. ‘She loved it,’ wrote Moore. ‘The idea of being able to dine, place bets and watch races every fifteen minutes from our table was like manna from heaven to Bette. Everybody was so pre-occupied with looking at their racing forms, eating and placing bets that they never paid much attention to us.’ It was one place where humans were not the stars.‘Dogs don’t need much training,’ trainer Gilly Hepden told me. ‘You breed them, feed them, groom them, love them and then say “Go!”’ The dogs walk daily on a lead, and once a week they run 350 metres. ‘They don’t need stamina, they need explosive energy,’ said Daryl Porter, a trainer for over 50 years. His dogs eat cornflakes for breakfast, beef and tripe for lunch and vegetable soup for supper. ‘They know when it’s race day. As soon as they get a racing breakfast, they start to get excited. They may look calm standing on the track ready to race, but their hearts are pounding away. A dog won’t race unless it wants to, they just do it because they love it.’
'Running in field', painting by Charles Hampton. 
The dogs are placed in categories from A1 to A10 and so unlike horses, there is little possibility of a surprise outsider winning. There are six dogs in each race, matched as equally as possible. Dogs are remarkably consistent in their form and eyebrows are raised if a dog runs one third of a second out of its normal speed. The owner keeps the prize money which ranges from £35 to £100,000 for the English Greyhound Derby. A Derby winner can then earn £1,000 a pop in stud fees. So there’s a gamble in the owning too.Winston Churchill described greyhound racing as ‘animated roulette’, the dogs were simply running machines on which to bet, and the business had a reputation for cruelty. But now all tracks employ qualified vets who inspect every greyhound before racing. Dogs start racing at about 16 months and are usually retired by six years. Greyhounds make ideal pets for retired or lazy people as they only need a 10-minute daily walk and sleep up to 18 hours a day. ‘They are loveable, calm couch potatoes,’ said Steve Simmon, owner of retired greyhounds. ‘Easy-going and good with children.’
‘In the old days,’ said Gilly Hepden, ‘rich people raced horses and poor people had dogs. Now dogs are owned by all types.’ A greyhound costs anything from £500 up to £40,000 and then £50 a week to train. ‘You never make your money back, that isn’t the idea. People do it for the love of dogs, and the other people who love dogs.’

Just 21 tracks are open now – the land is often worth more for housing. Over 8,000 people attended the last night of racing at Walthamstow, near London, in 2008. Oxford stadium closed in 2012; and Wimbledon in 2017. Swindon track probably wouldn’t survive without speedway and its indoor market and car-boot sales. However, people in Britain still bet over £2 billion a year on the dogs and owning a greyhound has become so cool even Jools Holland and Brad Pitt do it. Lord Hesketh ran a greyhound track at Towcester for a few years, and told me, ‘British greyhound racing is known the world over for its integrity. People trust that the races are fair and the welfare is good.’
The author with Dylan, a rescue greyhound-cross, or lurcher.
The Retired Greyhound Trust rehomes nearly 4,000 dogs a year,
funded by a levy from bookmakers.
Back at Swindon dog track, I turned my attention to the next race. For one night I was Bette Davis and Mr Hampton was my Roger Moore.

Greyhound Board of Great Britain
Retired Greyhound Trust
Swindon Greyhound Track
www.janiehampton.co.uk

A version of this article originally appeared in The Oldie magazine.


Rooted out, destroyed and abolished? From the Inquisition to a cosy English Bed and Breakfast. By Ruth Downie

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“These poisonous growths in the church of God must be torn up by the roots lest they spread themselves further.” - Pope Urban VIII 

Mary Ward’s idea for a female religious order inspired by the Jesuits was not popular in Rome. It wasn’t popular in her native England either, since this was the reign of the very firmly Protestant Elizabeth I. The Gunpowder Plot was still within living memory, and two of Mary’s uncles had been amongst the plotters. They're shown in the engraving below: John and Christopher Wright, second and fourth from the left. Suspicion of Roman Catholics was rife. This was an age of secret Masses: of underground priests, of spies, tortures and executions.

Engraving of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot

Mary originally escaped the turmoil in England by joining a convent in St Omer, but found herself dissatisfied with the cloistered life that was demanded of women devoted to the church. She was convinced that God wanted her to do more.

“There is no such difference between men and women,” she wrote, “that women may not do great things.”

Returning to London, she established an undercover group of women who offered education, encouragement and practical support to persecuted Roman Catholics both in and out of prison. Confident that God wanted her to create an order of women who were free to travel and do his will wherever they went, she and a small group of sisters walked the 1,500 miles to Rome to seek the Pope’s approval. Here’s a replica of the hat she wore for the journey:

Wide-brimmed black hatUnfortunately Mary was not skilled in church politics, and the church was not skilled in communication. Not realising that the long silence from the Pope meant ‘no’, she went ahead, setting up groups of “Jesuitesses” who ran schools and communities in several European cities. Upon hearing rumours that the Church did not approve and that her groups were being disbanded, she wrote urging her colleagues in Trier, Cologne and Liege to ignore any orders of suppression given by the local church authorities. She was certain the Pope could not have authorised any such order.

The letter was more naïve than heretical, but the damage was done. This was disobedience, and disobedience had to be dealt with. The Inquisition was called in, and Mary was imprisoned while the church decided what should be done with her.

Mary seems to have been remarkably longsuffering in her imprisonment. But while she co-operated with the authorities on the surface, she also kept up a secret correspondence with her friends on the outside. As every schoolchild knows, but apparently Mary’s guardians didn’t, lemon juice dries invisible but can be revealed by warming the paper.

In the end she was not convicted of heresy, but neither was she fully freed. Her groups of “Jesuitesses” were ordered to be broken up and banned forever. As Urban VIII put it in his Papal Bull of 1631, they had been guilty of wandering about at will, “and under the guise of promoting the salvation of souls, have been accustomed to attempt and to employ themselves at many other works which are most unsuited to their weaker sex and character, to female modesty and particularly to maidenly reserve.” Furthermore they persisted in such activities, and were “not ashamed”.

Mary died with her life’s work apparently in ruins. However - some of the communities she founded managed to hang on by the skin of their teeth. Obviously they were not allowed to acknowledge her as their founder, and lest anyone should confuse them with the banned Jesuitesses they were known as the “English Virgins”.

Georgian-fronted brick building.
The Bar Convent
With no official support they were desperately poor, so it was a great relief to the group in York when Thomas Gascoigne, a member of the local Catholic gentry, declared, “We must have a school for our daughters” and put up £450 to fund it. Mother Frances Bedingfield, acting in the true spirit of Mary Ward with the lemon juice, purchased a building under a false name, and thus established the first convent in England since Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.

The Bar Convent is still there: just around the corner from York station and close to the city walls. The sisters who live there belong to an order now called the Congregation of Jesus - which is, to be honest, much better than either “Jesuitesses” or “English virgins”. They and their predecessors ran the school for 299 years, surviving the suspicious searches of officials, a rampaging mob (St Michael was apparently instrumental in seeing them off) and the threat of prosecution for non-attendance at Holy Communion in the local Anglican church. (The case failed when it turned out that the vicar hadn’t bothered to hold a service on the day in question.)

Ornate chapel with white and gold decorationThe convent has given sanctuary to refugees fleeing the French Revolution, to Belgian children and convalescing soldiers in the First World War, and to Bosnian children during the Balkan conflict.
It has also provided a discreet place of worship for Roman Catholics unwilling to surrender to the Church of England. The chapel, built in the 1760’s, is invisible from the outside of the building. I can vouch for the fact that its eight exits (in case a quick escape was needed) are very confusing to outsiders, and in case no escape was possible, it is also equipped with a “priest’s hole” which I never found.

The convent has now survived the departure of the school, which moved elsewhere in the 1980’s. Seeking a new purpose for the building that would allow it to cover its costs, the Congregation of Jesus hit upon hospitality - and this is where people like me come in.

The Bar Convent now offers a Bed and Breakfast refuge for visitors to the beautiful but exhausting city of York. It’s a peaceful haven with enclosed gardens, a stunning glass-roofed Victorian courtyard, a guests’ kitchen, a teashop, and a museum that’s well worth a visit. I stayed there earlier this month for the York Roman Festival and have already booked again for next year.

Dining area with spectacular Victorian tiled floor
The Victorian glazed courtyard dining area
As for Mary Ward - the orders she established were finally allowed to acknowledge her as founder in 1909. A hundred years later, Pope Benedict XVI published a decree recognising her “heroic virtue”. She is, apparently, on the path to sainthood.

Finally, Mary Ward’s time has come.





 


 
Sources -
Bar Convent Heritage Centre website 
Bar Convent information leaflet 

Mary Ward - Under the Shadow of the Inquisition, by M. Immolata Wetter 
The History of the Bar Convent by Sister Gregory IBVM, 
Mary Ward by Sr Gregory Kirkus CJ

Ruth Downie writes murder mysteries set in Roman Britain - find out more at www.ruthdownie.com

Eboracum Roman Festival is a splendid weekend for anyone interested in anything remotely Roman. Ruth's account of it is here. The next one will be held in York on 29-31 May 2020. If you want to stay at the convent, book now!









Finding the Story from the Research by Helen Peters

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Our June guest is Helen Peters.
Helen Peters grew up on an old-fashioned farm in Sussex, surrounded by family, animals and mud. She spent most of her childhood reading stories and putting on plays in a tumbledown shed that she and her friends turned into a theatre. After university, she became an English and Drama teacher. Helen lives with her husband and children in London, and she can hardly believe that she now gets to call herself a writer.

Anna at War started in a different way from any of my previous books. I had just finished Evie’s Ghost, a timeslip story about a modern girl who goes to stay in an old house and finds herself taken back to 1814, when my editor asked if I would like to write another historical novel. So I found myself in the interesting and slightly daunting position of being able to choose any period of history, anywhere in the world.

While I was wondering what and when to write about, I started rereading Anne Frank’s diary, in preparation for teaching autobiographical writing to my Year 7 English class. I hadn’t read the book since I was a teenager, and I was astounded by it all over again. The vividness of Anne’s writing and her courage and resilience really struck me, and I began to think about writing a story about a girl’s experience in World War 2.

At around the same time, two women in their nineties separately contacted my husband, who is the head teacher of a boarding school in Brighton. They both wanted to thank the school that, eighty years ago, had taken them in as Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe. One of them remembered how her father, as he put her on the train, had cut off her plaits, thinking that if she could pass as a boy she might be safer on the journey. “I travelled all the way to England,” she said, “with my pigtails in my pockets.” The other talked about the ‘remarkable’ concern shown by the headmistress for ‘the terrorised young innocent girl who arrived in Brighton’. She wrote: ‘The British were so magnanimous to welcome us foreigners… truly showing a phenomenal humanity.’

This sentence really struck me, at a time when so much media coverage seems to dehumanise refugees. These stories cemented my desire to write about a girl who comes to England as a refugee from Nazi Germany. But I was very anxious about doing this. What right did I have, as a non-Jewish Englishwoman who has never experienced persecution, to write about the horrors of being a Jewish child in Nazi Germany?

The obvious solution seemed to be to write the story from the point of view of an English girl who befriends a refugee girl at her boarding school. This was the idea I had in mind when I began to research the Kindertransport, the coordinated rescue effort that brought ten thousand unaccompanied children from Nazi-occupied Europe to England between December 1938 and August 1939.



I knew very little about the Kindertransport before I began my research, so I started by watching documentaries and reading introductions to the subject. Once I had an overview, I started devouring autobiographies and memoirs of Kindertransportees.

While I was researching, I was also trying to find my story. I knew I wanted the two girls, Anna and Molly, to become friends, and I knew I wanted them to have some sort of adventure together, but I wasn’t sure what.

I started to write the story from Molly’s point of view but, after writing a few terrible scenes, I realised two things. Firstly, every time I tried to set a scene in a 1930s boarding school, my writing instantly descended into cliché and my characters became appalling cartoonish stereotypes. My knowledge of pre-war boarding schools is entirely gleaned from Enid Blyton and Angela Brazil. If I were going to write about one, I would need to do a lot more research.

I didn’t do this research, because the second thing I discovered was that I was far more interested in Anna’s story than Molly’s. So I tentatively started to write some scenes from Anna’s point of view.

Many of the Kindertransportees vividly remembered their journey to England by train and boat, and many of their memories were very similar, so I began by writing about Anna’s journey, which was very closely based on these memories.

I was particularly taken by the recollections of Emmy Mogilensky, who was fifteen when she travelled to England. Emmy’s train was about to leave the station when a wicker basket was shoved into her compartment. She opened the basket to find twin babies inside. There were bottles and nappies in the basket, but no documentation, so the babies had obviously not been officially registered for the Kindertransport. Emmy looked after them on the journey and refused to allow them to be taken to an orphanage in Holland, thus unknowingly saving their lives. Mrs Mogilensky died in 2017, but luckily she gave a detailed interview to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Oral History Archive, which is freely available online. Her story was the main inspiration for Anna’s journey.

Many children also had vivid memories of the horrors of Kristallnacht, when their houses and flats were smashed up by Nazi storm troopers and their fathers were arrested and taken to concentration camps. I wrote scenes set on Kristallnacht, too. At this point, I wasn’t sure whether I would tell the story chronologically, or whether the book would open at the point where Anna and Molly meet, and Anna’s journey to England would be told in flashbacks. I decided not to fret about the structure, but just to write individual scenes, trusting that the right sequence would become obvious once I had finished the first draft. I’d never written a draft in this way before, and it felt very freeing.

I still hadn’t decided what adventure Anna and Molly would have together. But then, as I was researching details of children’s lives in wartime rural England, I discovered the fascinating BBC People’s War website, which contains written accounts by people from all over the UK of their lives during World War Two. I searched under ‘Children’ and found a piece called ‘When the Army Came to Stay’, by a woman called Pamela Hoath, who was the chauffeur’s daughter on a large Kent estate when the whole estate was taken over by the army. There was great excitement when the residents heard that Field Marshall Montgomery was coming to live in the Dower House, to oversee the training of the troops.


I also discovered online a facsimile of If The Invader Comes, a leaflet that was sent to every household in Britain in June 1940. The leaflet is written as a series of statements, instructions and orders, including such instructions as ‘Do Not Give Any German Anything.’

This leaflet and Pamela Hoath’s memories gave me the final piece of my story. Anna would be fostered by Molly’s family. Molly would be the daughter of the carpenter on a large country estate in Kent that is suddenly taken over by the army. So Anna, who has travelled all the way from Frankfurt to apparent safety in England, suddenly finds herself surrounded by soldiers again, at the very time when ‘enemy aliens’ are being sent to internment camps and the whole country has been warned not to trust a German. When she and Molly discover a strange man in their barn, Anna will have to use all her courage, resilience and ingenuity to face the challenges ahead.








June Competition

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To win a copy of Helen Peters' Anna at War, just answer the following question in the Comment section:

"Towards the end of Anna at War, Anna has a very dramatic encounter with Winston Churchill. If you had the chance to meet any famous historical figure, who would you choose and why?"

Then copy your answers in an email to this address: maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

Closing date 7th July

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

Good luck!

The Warlow Experiment review by Mary Hoffman

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It's not often you get a Press Release for a book, with a quotation from Hilary Mantel. Here it is in full:
"Alix Nathan cuts against cliché, against the received version, against cosiness. She leaves her reader restless, curious, wanting more. She is an original, with a virtuoso touch."

Alix Nathan author photo by Jan Klos
Having read Nathan's adult novel, The Warlow Experiment, I wouldn't disagree, though I do have some reservations, which I'll get to later.

The starting point for the book was a snippet Nathan found in which Herbert Powyss advertised, in 1793, for someone to live solitarily underground for seven years, without human contact, in return for £50 a year for life.

A tame hermit wasn't a rarity in the eighteenth century but this was not a request for some sort of human ornament to a formal garden. It was a scientific experiment. Alix Nathan takes that advertisement and runs with it. History doesn't relate what actually happened but the novelist fleshes out the situation, the character of Herbert Powyss, John Warlow, who takes up the offer, his wife, Powyss' servants and the relations between them all.

A German "garden hermit" in the 18th century

 As she tells it, the only person to apply for the "job" is John Warlow, a labourer with a wife and several children, some living, some dead. He must agree, as the original ad stated, not to cut his hair or fingernails and toenails for the full seven years. His meals are sent down to him on a dumb waiter and he gets the same food as Powyss. His bodily waste is sent back up in the same dumb waiter; the details are not for the squeamish.

The apartment created for the experiment in the cellar is comfortable, well-furnished, with books Warlow can scarcely read and a chamber organ he certainly can't play. He has a comfortable bed, plenty of candles and fuel for his fire, tobacco as needed and a laundry service for his clothes.

The bath has only a cold water feed but, as Warlow barely washes, this is hardly a problem. 

It is clear that Powyss was expecting a very different subject to respond to his offer. One of the tasks for the confined man is to keep a journal; another to keep the clock wound every eight days. Both tasks prove equally impossible for Warlow.

Powyss, a single man in possession of a fortune but with no inclination to marry, lives in a big house, where he is obsessed with having a paper published by the Royal Society, of which he is an enthusiastic member. his passion is gardening. He collects seeds and other specimens, like many another eighteenth century amateur botanist.

But the incarceration of John Warlow is going to be the subject of his projected paper: Investigation into the Resilience of the Human Mind Without Society.

It is clear from the beginning that the concept of the experiment does not allow for the individual response of the subject: Warlow gradually deteriorates over four years from even the degree of civilisation he had at the beginning. He has literally nothing to do; at least nothing he is capable of doing. In such a situation, the book suggests, a man with gradually run mad and destroy his surroundings.

Meanwhile, up in the rest of the house, Powyss sees Hannah Warlow once a week to give her money for herself and the children. He becomes attracted to her and she to him. And his degeneration parallels that of the man living in the cellar.

The servants are curious about Warlow and one of them, Abraham Price, the gardener, is a follower of Tom Paine, who feels the immured man is being deprived of his rights. As a result of a chain of events, it is Price who releases Warlow ahead of time, a liberation which leads to violence, madness  and deaths.

And here is where my reservations lie. Nathan's novel is an experiment in itself, a forensic study of the effect on solitude on a human being, which pre-empts whatever Powyss might have written in his paper. And every human relationship in the story ends tragically. It is this lack of redemption or any kind of hope which made the book for me something short of great.





Reading historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

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The interesting papers of colonial Australia have to wait a bit for my life is suddenly full of the relationship between fiction and history. I’m teaching it, in fact, and am embedded in reading things I already knew and rethinking them. That’s what I love about the history end. There is always rethinking. This is why it’s possible to read twenty different novels on the exact same subject and, if they’re all good novels with thought behind them, discover twenty ways of reading that part of the past.



For today, then, I thought I’d give you a list of five things (only five out of hundreds, so you can expand the list until you run out of thoughts) that help make the history in a particular novel thoughtful and unique. Another way of saying it is five reasons why many people enjoy the history in historical fiction.



1.        A good novel gives a voice to the past. That voice isn’t a still, small voice speaking to the soul, that voice is the novel itself. 




2.        A good novel can make us feel as if we’re walking down the street or eating a meal with the characters. Or even that we are one of the characters. That use of telling detail in an historical novel reminds us that we use five senses every day and that people in history, likewise, walked down streets and ate meals. It reminds us in a visceral way: we live in that moment at that moment in our reading.




3.        A good novel shows us what our current culture or what someone else’s culture thinks of a place and of a time and of people. I’ve just read a book that changes Judaism to make a Jewish character fit into the novel in a way that suits the writer: this is a reminder that the past may be immutable but the way we see it is ever-changing. The relationship between the fiction and the history is negotiated by the writer for us, for readers. That negotiation shows us a lot about the writer, but also about the culture the writer takes for granted. It’s a snapshot of two moments in time and is absolutely beautiful.




4.        A good novel also negotiates between scholarly history and the reader. Before the novel is written, while the novel is being written and often even while the novel is being edited, there is a conversation between the writer and between researchers. One of my favourite moments in this is when the writer asks a book about King John’s household what evidence there is for something they want to put in the book. “None” says the book. “Do I invent this,” the writer then has to ask, “Or do I find another way to tell this part of the story?”




5.        A good novel makes us forget all the negotiations and all the invention and the fact that it’s a one-off depiction of a place and time. It may drag us in or it may pull us in gently or it may lure us, but it gets us in and it says to us, “This is real.”

‘Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years’ - Review by Katherine Langrish

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I want to sing the praises of an absolutely wonderful book: ‘Women’s Work, The First 20,000 Years: Women, Cloth and Society in EarlyTimes,’ by Elizabeth Wayland Barber (Norton, 1998). It’s about the long, long history and prehistory of spinning, weaving and designing textiles – work which, right up until the Industrial Revolution, was almost always done by women. 

Wayland Barber is an expert in prehistoric textiles. Her interest in the subject began in childhood as her mother loved to weave and sew and she grew up ‘constantly aware of the form, color and texture of cloth’.  Studying Classical and Bronze Age Mediterranean archeology at college, she began to notice patterns on pots and frescoes that ‘looked as if they had been copied from typical weaving patterns. But when I suggested this idea to archeologists, they responded that nobody could have known how to weave such complicated textiles so early.’

Undaunted, Wayland Barber decided to look into the data for early weaving technologies. Expecting to write a small article, she rapidly realised this was going to be a huge subject; the article eventually became a 450 page book: ‘Prehistoric Textiles’, Princeton 1991. ‘Along the way I kept running across wonderful bits of information about the women – virtually always women – who produced these textiles and about the values that different societies put on the products and their makers.’ Women’s Work is as much about the women, the makers of the cloth themselves, as it is about the textiles they created.





An experienced weaver herself, Wayland was able to experimentally replicate some of the earliest textiles we know of, like the woollen plaids from between 1200 and 8oo BCE  preserved in the Hallstadt salt mines in Austria. The salt ‘preserved the handsome green and brown colors as well as the cloth itself … and it looked for all the world like a simple plaid twill from some Scottish kilt. … Twill, like tweed, comes from the word twoand refers to a distinctive method of pattern weaving in which the threads are paired.’  Attempting to replicate the weave provided all kinds of insights into the methods used for the original. It took many hours for her and her sister to string the warp threads on to the loom one at a time: only once the long warp threads have all been strung can you can begin to weave in the lateral weft: weft means literally ‘that which has been woven’. Wayland Barber notes: ‘that is where a helper really speeds the work: a friend to receive and fasten the other end of each long warp thread, saving all the time and energy of walking back and forth, back and forth, from one end of the loom to the other’:

We know, for example, that women sometimes helped each other with their weaving projects … because we sometimes find the wefts in ancient cloth crossed in the middle of the textile. This can only have been caused by two people handing spools of weft back and forth to each other as they wove simultaneously on different parts of the same cloth.

With her knowledge of the practicalities of textile work, Wayland Barber is able to shed light on the ways women have worked down the millenia, and the enduring persistence of techniques, traditions and even patterns. In her chapter ‘The String Revolution’ she makes the – once you think about it – blindingly obvious yet revelatory observation that you can do almost nothing without string. Forty thousand years ago, very likely even earlier, ‘while others were painting caves or knapping fancy flints, some genius hit upon the principle of twisting handfuls of little weak fibers together into long, strong thread.’

With string you can tie things together, make bundles, knot it into fishing nets and construct snares. You can string beads, stitch hides to make clothing, tents, coracles or bags to carry things in; you can string a bow. Sinew will work for some of those things, or strips of rawhide, but string is much better. And with string, or thread, you can weave cloth. The String Revolution may be co-eval with, or even predate the Stone Age: but string rots, so the evidence is hard to find. 

Lespugue Venus


Or is it? Wayland Barber points to the occurrence of bone needles in the Upper Paleolithic, 26,000 to 20,000 years ago, and of burials with shell beads. The Lespugne ‘Venus’ – a carved bone figurine of a woman dated c. 20,000 years BCE, wears a string skirt: a fringe of long cords hanging from a hip girdle; the sculptor has even carved the twists in the fibres. 

Almost all the Venus figures are completely naked, but a few others wear clothing. … A few… wear simple bands or sashes, but the Venus of Gagarino sports a string skirt: a shorter, tidier version that her French sister, and this time hanging only in the front, but covering just as little.  (p55)

Venus of Gagarino 


Wayland Barber provides examples of women wearing the string skirt ‘here and there in the same broad geographical area through the next twenty thousand years [my italics], and even around 1300 BCE, some actual string skirts [are] preserved or partially preserved for us in the archeological record’ including on the bodies of young women found in log coffins of the Bronze Age, such as the one from Egtved, Denmark,now in the National Museum of Copenhagen, dated to 1400 BCE


 
Egtved girl's skirt: detail
It's quite a sophisticated garment: the cords it is formed from were woven into a narrow belt at the top, which ‘wrapped around twice and slung low on the hips’ and was fastened with a knotted cord. Near the bottom of the skirt the cords are held in place by a lateral spacing cord ‘to keep them in order’, and below that are ‘looped into an ornamental row of knots,’ which Wayland Barber says give the bottom edge of the skirt heaviness and swing, like a beaded fringe. Frankly, it sounds a lot of fun to wear! But it wouldn’t keep you warm or preserve ‘modesty’:


Not only do the skirts hide nothing of importance, … if anything, they attract the eye precisely to the specifically female sexual areas by framing them, presenting them, or playing peekaboo with them. […]  Our best guess is that string skirts indicated something about the childbearing ability or readiness of the woman, perhaps simply that she was of childbearing age … [or]… was in some sense “available” as a bride.  (p59)

Wayland Barber goes on to examine the ‘girdle of Aphrodite’ from the Greek myths, described by Homer in the Iliad as a ‘girdle fashioned with a hundred tassels’ which confers the gift of irresistable sexual attraction on the wearer. It’s worn constantly by Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, but when she lends it to Zeus’s wife Hera, Zeus forgets everything in his desire for his wife. Could this be the archetypal string skirt? Wayland Barber points to various south central and eastern European folk costumes: fringed aprons which women would put on at their betrothal and weddings. 


This Romanian apron above decorated with diamond lozenges symbolising fertility. 

In Mordvins, east of Moscow and west of the Urals, well into the 20thcentury a girl would ‘don a long black string apron at the time of her betrothal. Hanging only in the back, like that of the Venus of Lespugue, but wider, it marked her as a wife’. Similar aprons were worn by women in Serbia, Romania, Macedonia and Greece; in the Argolid the garment was known as a zostra. It could be up to 12 feet long with a deep fringe, worn by women who wished to conceive and laid on the stomachs of those undergoing a difficult labour. Wayland Barber writes charmingly of her experience in trying on a Macedonian girdle owned by a friend:  

The front part consisted of a short woven apron with a piece appliqued onto it which exactly framed the pubic bone underneath. Below this hung a weighty fringe nearly double the length of the solid part. We tied it on to me and began to wrestle with the other half, a girdle perhaps twelve feet long, woven with white and black threads in opposite directions and terminating in a great fiery cascade of red fringe at either end. 

The belt wrapped around about six times and then looped through itself to form ‘a solid mass of apron and fringe in the back … so heavy it swung with a life of its own’. The black and white photo in the book, of the sash of girdle in question, does not reproduce very well, but the Macedonian girdle pictured below it, belonging to the British Museum, is clearly similar. The fringe is made of flame-red goat hair.





That was the greatest surprise of all: the independent life of what now enveloped me. I danced around the room from one mirror to the next, fascinated by the way the heavy fringes moved … I felt exhilarated, powerful; I wanted to make them swish and jump. My friend laughed and admitted that it made her feel the same way. …For days afterward I pondered the unexpected strength of the experience.

A sense of powerfulness? Is that part of the symbolism of the skirt? The ability to create new life must surely have been viewed as a form of ultimate power. Exhilaration in wearing it? Was that, too, part of the reason why this garment lasted for twenty thousand years? 

As well as spinning and weaving, the book considers the making and decorating of pottery, basket making, and the designing and creating of clothing, all women’s traditional work down the ages – and examines some of the many myths and fairytales in which spinning and weaving play a part. ‘Women’s Work’ really is an extraordinary and inspiring book. I must have read it two or three times by now, and it provides so many wonderful glimpses into the past and the lives and activities of our distant mothers and grandmothers that I’m certain I shall returning to it again. 

Visit Katherine's website at www.katherinelangrish.co.uk
and her blog at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

Picture credits:

Hallstadt twill cloth from blogger Hibernaatiopesake 
Lespugue Venus: backview: Leroi-Gourhan A., 1982: Prähistorische Kunst - Die Ursprünge der Kunst in Europa, Herder-Verlag, Freiburg, 5. Auflage 1982
Egtved girl's clothes and coffin: National Museum of Denmark 
Egtved girl's skirt, detail: National Museum of Denmark
Macedonian sash with fringe of flame-red goat hair, late 19th C, British Museum  

Log Driver's Waltz - Joan Lennon

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The Log Driver's Waltz was one of a series of short films made by the Canadian Film Board to use as "interstitial programming" - in other words, to tuck in between other TV programmes to make the scheduling work.  The song was written by Wade Hemsworth in the sixties, the animation was made in 1979, and both became well-loved favourites.



The lyrics are:

If you ask any girl from the parish around
What pleases her most from her head to her toes
She’ll say I’m not sure that it’s business of yours
But I do like to waltz with the log driver

For he goes birling* down and down white water
That’s where the log driver learns to step lightly
Yes, birling down and down white water
The log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely

When the drive’s nearly over I like to go down
And watch all the lads as they work on the river
I know that come evening they’ll be in the town
And we all like to waltz with the log driver

For he goes birling down and down white water
That’s where the log driver learns to step lightly
Yes, birling down and down white water
The log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely

To please both my parents, I’ve had to give way
And dance with the doctors and merchants and lawyers
Their manners are fine, but their feet are of clay
And there’s none with the style of my log driver

For he goes birling down and down white water
That’s where the log driver learns to step lightly
Yes, birling down and down white water
The log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely

Now I’ve had my chances with all sorts of men
But none as so fine as my lad on the river
So when the drive’s over, if he asks me again
I think I will marry my log driver

For he goes birling down and down white water
That’s where the log driver learns to step lightly
Yes, birling down and down white water
The log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely
Birling down and down white water
The log driver’s waltz pleases girls completely


*birl - a good old Scottish word for twirl or spin.  Birling is now the name of log-rolling as a so-called "heritage sport".

The Canadian Film Board also did documentary films, such as this one about logging in Quebec in the 1950s, which was narrated and sung by Hemsworth.  In amongst being appalled at the sheer scale of the tree felling and the far too enthusiastic use of dynamite, it is still possible to be impressed by the men's physical courage, stamina and agility.


(If you just want to watch some fancy footwork, scroll to 14:12 - 15:30 and 19:41 - 21:14 - including the opening shots from the Log Driver's Waltz!)


P.S.  Thanks to my dad, I grew up watching Canadian Film Board films - see my post from way back in 2014: A Chairy Tale


Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

Pennies From Heaven -- A Historical Fiction Workshop

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As readers of this blog may know, I love ephemera. I also hate clutter, so my bits and pieces have to work hard to justify their continued existence in my house and life. This week, a box of photos, coins and – well, junk, I suppose, had a trip to Charney Manor in Oxfordshire, to earn their keep doing what they do best – as writing prompts in a historical fiction workshop for the Scattered Authors Society(which numbers some History Girls in its membership!)

Charney Manor

I called the workshop Pennies From Heaven. The premise was simple. Every participant – all published writers for young people, some experienced in historical fiction, others not – was invited to choose a photo from a selection. These photos are a motley crew. Some are of my own family and ancestors, others discarded by a friend, some picked up in junk shops, at least one sent to me by a fellow writer because she thought I’d like it. At this point I can’t tell for certain which are which – they have all become simply themselves. The young man in uniform ready to go to World War One? A great-great uncle perhaps, or maybe not. The girl with the pronounced chin and carefully-waved hair? My granny had several pictures of her but I have no idea who she was.
My motley crew of characters 

 

It doesn’t matter. In the workshop, in the imaginations of the writers, they all became characters, assigned a rough period in history according to the clues of clothes and hairstyles. After a series of prompts, all the writers felt they were getting to know their character, and I was careful not to say who the people ‘really’ were, even when I knew their identity, at least until afterwards. The boy in the picture with my eight-year-old father in 1954 must have been a pal, but now he’s Billy, and he’s got a whole new backstory (and, in fact, a future – ‘his’ writer got so into Billy’s story that she’s got a new book idea!) The young woman with Aunt Annie, dressed in boys’ clothes? I’d always assumed it was Gran, dressed up for a Sunday School play or something, but now I look more closely, inspired by the writer who’s chosen the picture, and I don’t think it’s Gran at all, which makes me wonder anew about my spinster aunt. 



Then I gave them all money, just one coin, from the right period -- this is what gives the workshop its name. I asked them to write down one fact they were confident about from the year the coin was minted, and one thing they thought was contemporary but might need to check. Then it was on with the story – because what mattered about this particular coin was its impact on their character.  Holding and smelling the old coins, letting them jingle, feeling their weight, imagining their character earning, finding, spending or losing them seemed gave the writers a deeper sense of character and period. And not getting too hung up on the historical facts was a reminder that details can always be checked later, and that character and story are at the heart of the writing. 

Often, as historical writers, we can get so bogged down in facts and research that we can forget about having fun. 


Finally I invited the writers to come and choose an object for their character. The objects are all small and valueless but everyone found something of interest – a lipstick with an ingeniously attached tiny mirror; a huge key; a tiny notebook; a lace doily; a savings book. Again, the writers wrote ferociously as the imagined a scene involving their character and one of the objects.




I’ve done this workshop, or variations of it, often. But this one felt special. Possibly because everyone was already a writer, so they tended to produce really interesting material. Possibly because, as we were all staying at Charney together, I heard some lovely follow-up: at least two writers are embarking on whole new books inspired by the workshop! 
Who is the girl in trousers?


But as I packed away the dog-eared photos, the coins, and the junk in my suitcase, I also reflected on how happy I was to be able to use them in this way, to let them live again in someone’s imagination. 


And in a couple of years, let's hope, you'll be able to read about them in at least two new books!

WELSH LANDSCAPES. Part 1. Parys Mountain. by Adèle Geras

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In the 18th and early 19th century, copper was used to  sheath the hulls of wooden ships (copper bottomed) and in 1768, a local miner called Roland Puw was present as a great mass of copper was discovered, close to the surface at Parys Mountain. He was rewarded for this find with a bottle of  brandy and a rent-free cottage for life.

I was visiting my friends Bob and Ewa on Anglesey a short while ago, and they were the most wonderful hosts and tourist guides. We visited Parys Mountain and I couldn't get over the strangeness of the landscape. The stones and dust on the path to the main excavation hole were yellow and brown and red and you could see pimpernels growing among the rocks. This photograph shows most clearly the colours of the landscape and the rather Grand Canyon look of the place.



This is the path we took.....


And this picture shows the workings of the mine when it was at its height.  It's hard to believe that the hole you can see was dug out of the mountain by men armed only with picks, shovels and gunpowder. A notice nearby tells us that what we're seeing is only a small proportion of what's there.....below the surface lie many caverns and miles of tunnels which are not worked because copper is no longer used as it was and besides, other countries can provide the world's markets much more cheaply. 

In 1990, Anglesey Mining plc sank a 300 m deep shaft and discovered ore resources of more than 6 million tonnes, beneath and separate from the old workings but low metal prices have stopped the further development of an important UK source of zinc and copper. (this I have taken from the very informative notices up at Parys Mountain.) 

Parys Mountain was a great source of inspiration for a wonderful local artist called Kyffin Williams (www.kyffinwilliams.info)   This picture shows almost the same view as my first photograph.



I hadn't visited this part of the country before. I know Cardiff from staying with my aunt during school holidays, but Anglesey and Snowdonia were a revelation. If this landscape reminds you of the drier parts of the USA, then only a few miles down the road is South Stack, home to seabirds and on the day we visited, a vision in sparkling blue and white. I saw a puffin bobbing about on the water, but that was through a telescope and I didn't get a photo.  Still the view from the window was beautiful. 



Next month, I'll write about our visit to Snowdonia and what I discovered about a material I hadn't given much thought to before. SLATE.   Do not take your garden chippings for granted! 
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