Sheela na gig: Warning - Explicit Content! - Celia Rees

November 7, 2019, 4:30 pm

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At the end of September I met my New Zealand friend, Ismay, in Bordeaux. With my husband as expert driver, we were about to embark on a long planned research trip, looking at Romanesque churches, searching for carvings of binaural mermaids and what are euphemistically known as exhibitionist figures.  

We were staying for a week in a gite adjacent to a chateau and surrounded by vineyards.  The chateau was a shell. During the war, it had served as temporary head quarters for the 2nd SS Panzer Division, Das Riech, infamous for their brutal massacre of the inhabitants of Oradour - sur - Glane.  During their time in the chateau, they had emptied the cellar and smashed every single item in a thousand piece collection of china. They had despoiled the place so thoroughly that the family did not return until 1989. 

We set out to explore the villages around, looking for Romanesque churches, on the hunt for bicaudal mermaids. I've written about bicaudals before on this blog, so I won't expand on them now. Suffice it to say that, much to our delight, we did find them, proudly displaying their two tails, on arches and corbels.

We were also looking for their sisters, female exhibitionist figures, also known as Sheela na gig. These figurative carvings of naked women boldly displaying themselves are found on churches and castles all over Europe, from Ireland (where they acquired their name) to Italy and Spain. 

12th Century Sheela na gig on Kilpeck Church, Herfordshire, England

 Male figures are often to be found close by displaying their genitals. 

Male figure from behind

There is disagreement among scholars about almost everything to do with the Sheela na gig and their continental counterparts. Their purpose, their origin, the etymology of the name itself are all hotly debated. The traditional view was that they were a warning against lust and the sins of the flesh, although it's hard to see them as in any way erotic. They were often placed above liminal spaces, windows and doorways, so they may have had some apotropaic function, to ward off evil, to guard and protect, perhaps specifically for the women of the community as they entered these portals for weddings, baptisms or churching after childbirth. They are also found in different cultures that have nothing to do with European Christianity. This is a Maori image from New Zealand.  

Maori carving from the marae at Waitangi

One of my favourite theories comes from Ireland and draws parallels between the sheela na gig and the ancient Irish myth of the goddess who granted kingship. She would appear to prospective candidates as the Loathly Lady, a hideous hag, rejected by all except the one true king. When he slept with her she transformed into a beautiful maiden who gave him his crown and blessed his reign.  

Sir Gawain and the Loathly Lady

We found what we were searching for in the small, ancient and isolated church of Monbos.  

Female Figure - Monbos Church

In the apse, at the far end of the small, dark church, were a number of pillars with carved and painted capitals. They showed foliage, vines and wheat ears, animals, hunting scenes, both male and female naked figures and a couple copulating. The effect was strongly pagan and seemed to me to confirm one of the other major theories relating to these figures: that they are pagan in origin and are to do with fertility.

?

Male Figure Monbos Church

There is no doubt that even to modern eyes they appear shockingly rude and seem to have no place in or on a religious building. Yet they have not been removed, they have survived the centuries, so they must have held importance for the people who gathered there to worship.  We can never know the true meaning of these images, or what belief lay behind their carving, or what was in the minds of those who worshipped in the churches where these figures display themselves. Did they really gaze up at them and reflect on the dangers of lust, the sins of the flesh and the prospect of eternal damnation? On the contrary, these figures look celebratory to me. Proud in their nakedness, shame-less, celebrating life and the natural abundance of field, vine and forest.

My belief that these images are essentially pagan and part of what might be an extremely ancient tradition was confirmed by a visit to the Musée d'Aquitaine in Bordeaux. Practically the first thing I saw there was the majestic and wonderful Venus of Laussel. An unassailable celebration of the feminine, she is approximately 25.000 years old. She is painted with red ochre and in her right hand she holds a crescent moon, marked with the thirteen lunar cycles. She has large breasts, ample hips and her left hand points to her vagina. She is an unambiguous celebration of the divine feminine and was found carved onto the wall of a rock shelter at Laussel in the Marquay area of the Dordogne, less than 50 miles from Monbos. 

The Venus of Laussel, Musée d'Aquitaine, Bordeaux, France

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Of Great Men by L.J. Trafford

November 17, 2019, 3:00 pm

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Rome being grand. Photo by Scott Rowland

Ancient Rome is awash with Great Men, particularly in the era of the Republic when Rome was conquering all in her path on her way to becoming a full blow empire.
So, I thought I would pay tribute to a couple of them.

Fabius Maximus 

Known for: 

• Being Warty
• Facing an army of flaming cows
• Trying not to fight Hannibal 

The 3rd century BCE brought Rome a series of stunning victories one after the other. As Rome picked off such islands as Sicily, Corsica and Sardinia, it was inevitable that this would bring them into conflict with the other power in the Mediterranean: Carthage. Rome faced off Carthage in three separate wars, known as The Punic Wars. But as in the case of most series, the second one was the best. Because it was the one with the elephants.
Yes, it’s this second Punic War that features Hannibal, his elephants and one of the worst defeats Rome ever suffered at the Battle of Cannae.


Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus was born in around 280 BCE. Verrucosus was a nickname meaning warty. Let us assume it was a cracker of a blemish given that Greek historian Plutarch felt the need to mention it 300 years later in his life of Fabius.
As was as having to carry around the name Warty, Fabius was also nicknamed Lambkin for his calm, gentle nature. Fabius Maximus might seem an unlikely man to face off Hannibal and his elephants but Italy was in somewhat of a panic after that ascent of the Alps and nothing else had worked so far, so why not give Warty Lambkin a go?

Fabius was given the title of dictator and handed the job of expelling the invading Carthaginians from Italy. If you’re expecting a series of fierce battles between man and elephant, think again, for Fabius’ tactics are rather unexpected; he decided to defeat Hannibal by not fighting him.

One can imagine the loaded silence that followed. The gaping jaws and shocked expressions as the general in charge of defending Rome from invasion announced that they would not engage the enemy in battle. Or as Plutarch puts it, 

“(they were) convinced that he was a nonentity who was utterly devoid of warlike spirit.” 

Ouch. 

The Man with the elephants, Hannibal.

However, a man who has spent his life being called Warty Lambkin has a thick skin by necessity and Fabius stuck to his plan. He had his army follow the enemy but stay that little bit too far away to be caught up with. His reasoning was the Hannibal’s invading force was not a large one and by the gods did his elephants need feeding. Fabius’ plan was to cut off supplies to the enemy and slowly wear them down, without actually fighting them.

We are told that Hannibal saw the shrewdness of this plan. He was alone in that one. Fabius’ own soldiers were soon raging against him. Not least after the Carthaginians went on a rampage destroying farm land. All except for Fabius’ own country estate which they cleverly left untouched. Unsurprisingly fingers began to point right at Warty Lambkin.

Matters did not improve for Fabius. At one point they had Hannibal’s army completely surrounded. This could have been decisive had the Romans not fallen for a terrible trick.

By cover of night the Carthaginians gathered up two thousand oxen. To their horns they fastened bundles of twigs and then set them alight. They then drove the cattle forward. To Fabius’ lurking Romans it looked uncannily like a massive torch holding army marching their direction. This became even more terrifying when the twigs burnt down to the oxen’s flesh, sending them wild and on the stampede. With the landscape rapidly catching fire the Romans were given sufficient light to see the rampaging, blazing bovine army heading their direction. I don’t think anyone can blame the Romans for legging it as fast as they could.

After the flaming cow debacle Fabius did manage to clock up some significant victories over Hannibal. Perhaps proof that his plan of depleting his forces had actually worked.

It was for this that Fabius gained yet another nickname Cunctator. Meaning the Delayer.



Cato the Elder 

Known For:

• Excessive lack of excess

For Romans Cato was the epitome of the Roman traditional virtues of self-restraint, resilience and hardness. Not that anyone, even in his own lifetime, wanted to emulate his example. For Cato took things to the extreme. 

The time of Romulus when things were harsh and Cato would certainly have approved Bronze statue of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf. In the Capitoline museum, Rome CC Wellcome Collection

He boasted that he never wore any item of clothing that cost over 100 drachma and that he never paid more than 1500 dramacha for a slave. When he inherited a patterned Babylonia rug he despised it’s luxury so much that he sold it off immediately. Though one wonders what he did with the money, perhaps he buried it or purposefully kept it on full display in his house to show his absolute restraint in not spending it.
He was heavily into farming but not the usual Patrician route of owning acres of land and letting the slaves work it. No Cato worked alongside his slaves in the same clothes they did in winter and in summer just in his underwear.


However, it was not enough for Cato to deny himself the pleasures of life. No, he wanted everyone else to as well. This was first inflicted on his household slaves who suffered various indignities and then in the education his son, which he undertook himself. He taught the young lad reading and writing and how to ride a horse. Which all sounds sensible until you get to the bit where Cato junior’s education included how to endure extreme heat and cold. As well as becoming such a good swimmer as to be able to cross a hazardess river. You have to wonder how many failed attempts the bedraggled boy suffered on route to his success.

Still Cato itched for his way of life to be taken up further beyond the perimeters of his land. So, he decided to stand for the post of Censor. The main role of the Censor was to make a census of all Roman citizens and review the ranks of the Senate. Essentially this was to ascertain the size of the army and the taxable population. But it also involved accessing the suitability of men for inclusion into the ranks of the Senate.
Nobody could pretend they did not know what Cato was going to do with this power. Part of his canvassing involved standing on the rostra and crying out:

 “that the city needed a thorough cleansing and insisted that if they were sensible the people of Rome would choose the most forceful doctor.” 

He declared that he would be:

 “cauterising the Hydra like diseases of luxury and effeminacy.” 

Roman surgical instruments possibly like those Cato had in mind to cauterise effeminacy  cc Wellcome Collection

The people of Rome decided they liked this, and duly elected him. Cato soon got to work expelling those he thought unsuitable from the ranks of the Senate for such crimes as daring to kiss their wives in broad daylight!

He then turned his attentions to the general population by increasing the value of such items as clothing, jewellery and utensils to raise more tax and discourage people from living a luxurious utensil heavy life.

Though this made him hugely unpopular with those wedded to their utensils, he was surprisingly popular with other slices of society. So much so they put up a statue dedicated to his censorship, the inscription read:

 “When the Roman constitution was in a state of collapse and decline he became censor and set it straight again by effective guidance, sound training and sensible instruction.” 

L.J Trafford is the author of the Four Emperors Series set in 69 AD.

At the edge of the world... by Carolyn Hughes

November 21, 2019, 4:30 pm

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In September, our family revisited a favourite holiday destination. We hadn’t been there for several years and were eager to return. It being autumn, the weather was mostly chilly, and rainy, but it didn’t dampen our enthusiasm. Indeed, that sort of weather, we always think, suits the landscape and, of course, without it, the flora of heather, oakwoods, ferns and abundant moss would not be there.

Anyway, the rain held off often enough and long enough to enable us to enjoy the beauty, the magnificence, of this relatively remote location. So, where were we? The far west coast of Scotland, in the region of Moidart, part of the Morar, Moidart and Ardnamurchan National Scenic Area, a remote area of islands, lochs, ancient woodlands and narrow winding roads, an hour’s drive to the west of the nearest town of any size, Fort William (population 10,500). Moidart is part of the area also known as the Rough Bounds, justifiably so, it might seem, for it is famous for its wildness and inaccessibility and remains very sparsely populated. It feels rather like being at the edge of the world...

And it is this very wildness and inaccessibility that is both part of the appeal for us coming here at all, and also a spur to my imagination.

The house we stay in, Dorlin, has history: it was once part of a much larger house that was demolished in the early 1960s. This larger house wasn’t especially old, having been built in the 19th century. Our “cottage” was a wing of the house, and may originally have been a chapel. It remained standing and was converted to the cottage that is now used for holiday lets.

Dorlin Cottage beneath Cruach nam Meann cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Stuart Wilding – geograph.org.uk/p/3679214 (The cottage is that lone building in the middle of the picture.)

There was an earlier house on this site, built in the late 18th century “in the Georgian style” by Aeneas R. Macdonald, a nephew of the estate’s owner, Alexander MacDonald, known as “Lochshiel”. Apparently Aeneas assumed he’d succeed to the estate and planned an extensive tenant clearance scheme. But he was thwarted when his plans came to the notice of Lochshiel’s family and the estate was sold from under him to James Hope Scott. Scott was married to Charlotte, a granddaughter of Sir Walter Scott. Apparently Scott proved a benevolent landlord and did much to improve the property, constructing roads, improving the dwellings of tenants and erecting a church and school and so on. Today Dorlin can be reached only by sea, or via a very narrow, winding road that runs alongside the lively Shiel River. One wonders what sort of access the property might have had in the mid 19th century?

After Charlotte’s death in 1858, Scott married Lady Victoria Fitzalan Howard, daughter of the 14th Duke of Norfolk, who was christened Victoria in honour of one of her godmothers, the Queen. It was now that Scott built the three-storey Dorlin House. The work was completed in 1864, exactly one hundred years before it was demolished. One is led to wonder at the lifestyle of these, one presumes urbane, people in such a remote, inaccessible region. For nearly six years a goddaughter of the monarch hosted parties for members of the aristocracy. I have always wondered at the heroic logistical efforts that these people’s servants must have had to make to supply all the provisions necessary to keep these grand house parties satisfied.

Dorlin House in 1964 cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Iain A Robertson – geograph.org.uk/p/3233457

The house changed hands a number of times over the next half century or so until, during World War Two, it was requisitioned by the Royal Navy and, as HMS Dorlin, was used for special boat and beach signal training, particularly for Royal Marine Commando units.

The history of Dorlin House is interesting, of course, but not – to me, at any rate – quite as fascinating as that of the building that lies in the tidal bay on the shores of which Dorlin stands.

For in the bay is Eilean Tioram (“dry island”), a tiny island that becomes accessible on foot only for a few hours each day when the sea withdraws sufficiently to reveal a causeway. And on the island stands a ruined castle – Castle Tioram – that probably dates from the 13th century and, as the seat of the Clan Ranald, a branch of the Clan mac Donald, had a surprisingly important role in Highland history, given its extreme remoteness.

Castle Tioram from the Silver Walk cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Bob Jones – geograph.org.uk/p/2927242 (The cottage is along the beach over to the left of the photograph.)

The castle seems to have been built (or more likely extended) by Amie mac Ruari, a 14th century noblewoman, who was a sister of the Lord of Garmoran, a medieval lordship that included the areas of Moidart, Morar and Ardnamurchan, as well as the Small Isles. This lordship formed part of the Lordship of the Isles, a title of Scottish nobility with historical roots that go back beyond the kingdom of Scotland. Despite paying technical homage at times to kings of Norway, Ireland and Scotland, for the most part the Lords of the Isles remained independent and extremely powerful: at their height they were among the greatest landowners and most powerful lords in Britain after the kings of England and Scotland. Castle Tioram, for all its remoteness, was once the main residence of the lords of Garmoran and, subsequently, of the chiefs of the Clan Ranald.

Anyway, Amie was the wife of John of Islay, chief of the Clan Donald (mac Donald), and the (first?) Lord of the Isles. John was ambitious and, to cement his alliance with Robert, who would become king of Scotland, he divorced Amie and married Robert’s daughter, Margaret, disinheriting Amie’s children. Ranald, Amie’s son, having lost his claim to be the Lord of the Isles, founded the Clan Ranald, and had his residence at Castle Tioram.

The castle remained in the family’s possession until the 19th century, despite turbulent times and several declarations of forfeiture. Until the mid 16th century, the Clanranalds were intermittently involved in the struggle between the Crown and the Lordship of the Isles and later with the Jacobite uprisings. The history is undoubtedly colourful, with much fighting, sea battles and hints of piracy.

But one of the aspects of life in Castle Tioram that has always intrigued me hugely, much more so really than the warring, is how the rich and powerful in these incredibly remote regions managed to lead the richly provisioned lives they did. Throughout the years of its occupation, Castle Tioram was obviously a centre of power for the Clanranalds as well as a dwelling. Under the clan system, the chief would provide land and security for his people and bore his responsibility in exchange for their loyalty and military service. The clan expected their chief to be strong, fearless in battle but also generous. Hunting and feasting, and music, were important. And, just as with the parties held centuries later at Dorlin House, at a time when there were few but at least some roads, in the earlier centuries of Castle Tioram’s existence, all provisions presumably had to be brought either by sea or somehow overland…

Until the 19th century, the castle could only be approached overland by narrow, rough hill tracks passable only on foot or by sturdy highland ponies. The castle itself was almost certainly a hive of activity but somebody was making this possible: the clan chief obviously supplied the money but again it had to be an army of servants who would have had to source the provisions and have them delivered, taking into account the inevitable periods of highly inclement Highland weather…

Anyway, I would just like to round this piece off with a story from the 17th century, about Donald, the 13th of Clanranald, who lived for the most part at Castle Tioram, and whom local stories painted as a man of courage in battle but also as a man whose behaviour was autocratic and even savage and cruel. These stories were written down in the 19th century by a parish priest of Moidart, Charles MacDonald, in his book charting the history of the Clanranald clan, Moidart: Among the Clanranalds. And there is one story in particular that fired my storytelling imagination…

One of the tales became a well-known local tradition and illustrated the power and jurisdiction held by a chief over his clansmen. When a quantity of silver went missing, Donald suspected three castle servants, two men and one woman who, apparently, walked daily to their work at Tioram across the moor along one of those rough tracks, having set out from Kinlochmoidart, several miles away. Although he was unable to prove their guilt, Donald had the two men executed by hanging on the gallows hill south of the castle, and the woman was tied to one of the rocks in the estuary by her hair and allowed to drown in the rising tide. Execution of men by hanging and women by drowning was evidently used in more ancient times, so the story may in fact apply to a previous era, or indeed be quite untrue. However, Father MacDonald reported that a rock on the shore of Eilean Tioram was once known as the Rock of James’s Daughter, so maybe there was some truth in it…

Anyway, in the 19th century, when a path was being constructed around the Loch Moidart shore, a hoard of silver Elizabethan coins was discovered. The story of course then claimed that they were Donald’s missing coins, hidden on the path by the thieving servants as they made their way to work across the moor. But those coins were one hundred years old at the time of Donald’s loss, so maybe the conjecture was fanciful. But it made a good story, and in honour of the tale, the newly constructed path became known as “The Silver Walk”.

After Donald’s death in 1686, Castle Tioram lost its role as the Clanranald family residence, for his son Allan lived elsewhere. The castle was garrisoned by Government troops from 1692, because of Allan’s support for the Jacobite cause, and fell into disrepair. But, in September 1715, Allan retook the castle but then ordered it to be burnt down before he left for the battle of Sherriffmuir, to prevent it falling into his enemy’s hands. It is thought he had a premonition, for he died at Sherriffmuir. At any rate, it was the end of Castle Tioram as the seat of the Clanranalds, and the beginning of its decline into the rather romantic ruin it now is.

It is certainly a place that sparks a writer’s imagination: the remoteness and the beauty of course feed the soul’s desire for spiritual nourishment but it’s not hard, either, if you stand alone in the bay as the sun dips beneath the horizon throwing the castle into gloom, and the tide begins to ripple back again, to let tales of terror conjure up a quite different sort of spirit…

Castle Tioram from the Silver Walk cc-by-sa/2.0 – © Russel Wills – geograph.org.uk/p/1842658 (With the sea now covering where Donald’s poor serving woman was allegedly tied to a rock as the tide came rushing in…)

Son et Lumiere - Ancient Portents by Elisabeth Storrs

November 28, 2019, 4:30 pm

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To me a violent storm instils fascination and fear. After a long, sweltering day in Sydney, there is nothing quite as spectacular as a display of lightning bolts sparking on the horizon, or the sky being lit in startling intensity as the temperature cools, and the clouds darken. People scurry to gain cover as rain pelts down. Don’t shelter beneath a tree! Don’t stand on high ground! I love counting down the seconds between a lightning flash and the crack of thunder. That way I can tell how many kilometres away danger lies. And as the interval between sound and light narrows, I wait for the sonic collision and instinctively duck when the thunderclap booms even when in the safety of my home.

Sydney thunder storm

If we in the modern world find lightning bolts a visceral experience, how did the ancients view them? Greeks and Romans saw such powerful displays of nature as heralding divine disapproval or a portent for the future. However, the Etruscans of ancient Italy (who lived in the areas now known as Tuscany, Lazio and Umbria) were far more adept at deciphering the secrets of thunder and lightning. Their priests raised the art of prophecy to a science and recorded the tenets of their beliefs in a codex known as the Etrusca Disciplina. Sadly very little of Etruscan literature survives other than remnants of ritual text but we do have a Greek translation of an Etruscan brontoscopic calendar created by John the Lydian (born 490 CE) as set out in his book, De Ostentis (On Omens). The Etruscan version would probably have been presented on bronze or terracotta plaques. Individual priests who specialised in reading thunderbolts may well have transcribed the calendar onto linen books (libri lintei) for their personal use. These seers were known as ‘fulgurators’.

Organised into 12 lunar months commencing in June, the brontoscopic almanac functioned as a reference table to determine portents concerning the weather, crops, animals, war, government, social conflict and more. It contained a wealth of information about society, religion, agriculture and medicine. According to the calendar, thunder could forebode the common people would suffer trials of nature, threats of disease or famine, or be given the chance to rebel against powerful men.  Men’s preoccupation with the status of women was also evident. On one day thunder could signify that women were more sagacious than men whereas on another day it meant that women would be given greater control than appropriate to their nature! Fulgurators would consult the calendar to find the meaning of thunder according to the particular day of the year on which it occurred. For example, as this post is published on 29 November, you should be aware that: ‘If it thunders, it shall signify a year of well being.’ Here's hoping a thunder storm happens today.

Etruscan Tomb of the Augurs

Etruscan fulgurators could also prophesy the future based on lightning.  The type, colour, force and place at which lightning struck were all clues to interpret the will of the gods. Pliny and Seneca provided evidence the Etruscans believed nine gods had power to throw a thunderbolt (whereas the Romans believed only Jupiter, King of the Gods, could hurl one.) The Etruscan equivalent of Jupiter, known as Tinia, was able to use three types of bolts: the first was a benign warning; the second could do both harm and good; and third was completely destructive.

As the Etruscans believed the gods lived in different sectors of the heavens, a fulgurator could ascertain which divinity had thrown a thunderbolt by determining the direction from whence it came. Those deities of darker intent resided in the northwest, those who granted the greatest good fortune lived in the northeast. Etruscan prophets even had the ability to ‘call down lightning’ to provide proof that Nortia, the goddess of Fate, had agreed to defer a person’s or even a city’s destiny.

As you can guess, learning about the immense skills of Etruscan soothsayers fired my imagination when devising the story arc and sub-plots in my ‘A Tale of Ancient Rome’ trilogy. And despite professing I’m not superstitious, I’m always relieved when a storm front comes from the north-east.

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the A Tale of Ancient Rome saga, and the co-founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com  Images courtesy of Skira Colour Studio  and WikiMedia Commons Lobster1, CC BY-SA 3.0, 

From Sinister to Sweet: The Strange Tale of the Nutcracker by Catherine Hokin

December 5, 2019, 10:00 pm

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A deeply creepy inventor ‘uncle’, a seven-headed mouse, a little girl who tears her arm open on broken glass and a curse which traps first a queen and then a boy inside the misshapen body of a giant nutcracker: what better story to entertain your little ones with this Christmas? 

For the next few weeks theatre foyers will mill with children stickily clutching wands and toy soldiers and waiting to be inducted into the wonderful Christmas world of The Nutcracker, a ballet with far darker origins than their sugar plum fairy and sweetie-filled heads can possibly imagine.

The Nutcracker was first performed on the 18th December 1892 at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, set to music by Tchaikovsky. The book on which this ballet was based - Histoire d’une Casse-Noisette by Alexandre Dumas - was not, however, the original story. That first appeared in 1816, in ETA Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King. 

Hoffmann wrote a number of spooky stories that were set to music during the 19th century. One of these, The Sandman which is about about evil inventors who create a robotic girl, appears in the Offenbach opera, The Tales of Hoffmann and likely inspired the ballet Coppelia, in which a young man who falls in love with a life-size dancing doll. The original Hoffmann story, as outlined above, is a complex thing which blurs fantasy and reality. The rodents are cursed, the parents are oppressive and cruel and the little girl at the centre of the story runs away to her nightmare/dream world and does not return.

The Dumas version, which continues to form the basis of the ballet, simplified the plot and made the story rather more gentle. In this version, Clara rejects the fantasy world and wakes up happy and smiling under the Christmas tree, a Hollywood-style ending which was largely the reason for the ballet’s future success. And its success was very much in the future. In 1892, the unimpressed Russian critics called the choreography confusing, the libretto lopsided and the whole experience (according to the St Petersburg Gazette) “the most tedious thing I have ever seen.” After the first Russian Revolution in 1905, the ballet was dropped from the repertoire and, in a twist Hoffmann (and his fan Edgar Allen Poe) may have appreciated, its principal male lead, Sergei Legat, slit his throat.

Many of the Mariinsky dancers scattered across Europe in the early twentieth century and the ballet re-appeared, first in Budapest in 1927 and then in London in 1934. 

It took an American showman, however, to bring The Nutcracker fully back into the light. In 1940, Walt Disney used the entire Tchaikovsky score in Fantasia, bringing the music to a huge new audience. On Christmas Eve 1944 the San Francisco Ballet performed the first complete version of the ballet and in 1954 George Balanchine’s New York production turned the ballet into the classic Land of Snow and Kingdom of Sweets version we recognise today. Where America went, the rest of the world followed: more companies have performed The Nutcracker than any other ballet. In 2015 the Royal Ballet December production was beamed live to 2000 cinemas and, according to Daniel J Wakin of the New York Times, its holiday run “is generally the foundation of an American dance company”.

Why has The Nutcracker become so popular that even non-ballet fans, who would run a mile at a suggestion of an evening with Les Sylphides, are happy to be dragged along? 

Perhaps because it truly is family-friendly: it has parts for over 35 children; a pattern of short, highly-charged dances and watered-down cute mice and dancing toys. Perhaps because, in the words of Isabel McMeekan, founder of Everyday Ballet and a former dancer, it is“the eternal fantasy of Christmas come to life on stage…the girl, the guy, the dream, the magic tree that grows to 7 feet, the glittery snowflakes.” Or perhaps because it has proved so adaptable. As well as traditional outings, there have been hip-hop, LGBT and Jewish versions and, my own personal favourite, Matthew Bourne’s Dickensian orphanage with its pyjama-clad cupids and cast of very wicked sweets (check out the exceedingly sticky Knickerbocker Glory). 

And in that, I think, lies the ballet’s endurance – to paraphrase one supermarket’s ad: however you do Christmas, there’s a Nutcracker for you.

Shot at Dawn. By Judith Allnatt

December 12, 2019, 5:01 pm

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Private Henry Burden, a Northumberland Fusilier, was shot at 4 a.m. on 21st July 1915 having been found guilty of desertion. He was just seventeen years old.

Like many young men keen for adventure and caught up in the patriotic rush to war, he had lied about his age in order to join up. Once sent overseas, he lost friends at the Battle of Belwaarde Ridge, experienced nerve shattering barrages of shelling and was sent to a military hospital to recover. On the same afternoon that he was discharged, he was sent forward with his battalion to the front line. Burden left his post, he said, to visit a neighbouring battalion to see a friend who he had heard had lost a brother. Two days later he was arrested and two days after that he was tried by a court martial. He had a record of going absent without leave, which went against him and he had no one to defend him as those who could have spoken up for him had all been killed. He wasn't asked about his age and he didn't raise it. He was found guilty, not of the lesser charge of going AWOL, but of desertion, and condemned to death.

Photo credit: Harry Mitchell [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)]

In the British Army, discipline was harsh. The offences for which a soldier could be executed were many and various. They included: cowardice, casting away of arms, disobedience, striking an officer and desertion. Falling asleep on sentry duty could also carry the death penalty as it endangered a whole section of the line. Soldiers on duty at night stood with head and shoulders above the parapet, rather than using a periscope, so that they could get a good field of view. (There being less chance of being hit in the dark other than by a random shot). It was therefore very obvious, if a sentry slumped, that he had fallen asleep and those who did so were easily caught. Standing at their posts for hours, dealing with mind-numbing boredom and body-numbing cold, it was all to easy to be overtaken by exhaustion. Fear of the consequences resulted in the practice of using matchsticks to prop their eyes open.

Around 3,000 soldiers were executed for offences such as those listed. There is a strong sense of the authorities using the ultimate punishment to 'set an example', a stark warning to re-assert discipline. Before facing the firing squad, the soldier's General Service buttons were removed from his tunic as a mark of his shame. Blindfolded and manacled, he was led to a stake and a target such as an envelope was pinned to his chest. Often, the firing squad was chosen from the soldier's own unit, presumably to hammer home the lesson that breaches of discipline would not be tolerated. One can barely imagine the horror and mental anguish that this practice must have caused both the man and his comrades. Apparently, the traditional belief that one of the bullets used would be a blank so that each soldier was left with the moral let-out that his shot may not have been the lethal one, is actually untrue. The whole squad were, in fact, given live ammunition.

The man's disgrace often continued after death: there were relations who chose not to talk of the relative who had brought shame on the family and memorials in towns and villages that omitted their names. Not until the 21st Century, when it became clear that many of those found guilty had suffered what we now know as Post traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) , was there any attempt to give them a memorial.

At the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, this shift in understanding and attitude found expression. The memorial Shot at Dawn, by Andy de Comyn, consists of a larger-than-life sized statue of Henry Burden, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. Before him, the firing squad is represented by six juniper trees and behind him are an array of wooden stakes representing 309 other victims, each one individually named. These are the men who were posthumously pardoned by the British government in 2006. The pardons were granted not to imply blame for the officers who had acted in line with army regulations and without the understanding of PTSD that we now have, but in a spirit of mercy and in recognition of the battle trauma experienced by many, often very young men, and the suffering of their families. The Director of the Arboretum said that  "over 80 years of medical, psychological and sociological advantage (was) denied those who sat on the court-martial boards that passed sentence."

So, what of Henry Burden? As always, it is the small human details that suddenly pierce the heart. I think of his body taken down from the stake to be prepared for burial and the tattoos discovered upon it of "clasped hands" and "Love Lilly".  I am glad that his statue is placed at the eastern end of the arboretum where the sun's first rays strike.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon 1914

Angelica Kauffman by Miranda Miller

December 26, 2019, 5:00 pm

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   My eighth novel, Angelica, Paintress of Minds, will be published by Barbican Press in June. to coincide with an exhibition of her work at the Royal Academy.
   A few years ago I had the good fortune to be awarded a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at the Courtauld Institute, then housed in Somerset House. I became fascinated by the history of the building itself and by the story of the foundation of the Royal Academy there in 1768. In the library, deep in the basement, I found two excellent books: James Fenton’s School of Genius, a wonderful introduction to the eighteenth century art world in London, and Angelica Gooden’s biography of Angelica Kauffman, Miss Angel. Until then I only knew her paintings from visits to Kenwood House.
   Angelica’s mother was Swiss and her father, an unsuccessful painter, was Austrian. She grew up in her father’s studio and he soon realised that she was immensely talented. He used to ask her not to sign her paintings and would pass them off as his own. Other successful painters, including Artemisia Gentileschi and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun, were also the daughters of painters; without such a background it was very hard for women to acquire an artistic education. Angelica was a prodigy, as can be seen from this self portrait she did when she was thirteen.

   In addition to being a talented artist Angelica had a beautiful singing voice. This painting dramatizes the decision she had to make in her youth to choose between painting and singing. All her life she performed as a good amateur singer and played the harpsichord. The great classical scholar Winckelmann said of her, ‘she sings with our best virtuosi.”

   After establishing herself as a painter in Italy Angelica came to London in 1766, when she was twenty-five. She became so successful that a word was coined, Angelicamad. She painted Queen Charlotte and other members of the royal family and her work was reproduced in engravings, as cameos by Wedgwood, on teapots and on Worcester, Meissen and Derby porcelain. The new invention of transfer printing made these items much cheaper and she gained an international reputation. Her popularity had a price; male artists could do as they liked but ‘paintresses’ always had to be decorous or risk losing their aristocratic patrons. Angelica was under enormous pressure to behave as ‘Miss Angel,’ the affectionate name her friend Joshua Reynolds gave her. Astonishingly, she was so well liked and respected that she survived the potential scandal of her first bigamous marriage to a fake Count. 

    I stared at this painting by Zoffany of the life drawing class in Old Somerset House and was intrigued to see that portraits of Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser were on the wall, staring down at the proceedings like ancestors. Although they were both alive and founder members of the Royal Academy, as women they were not allowed to attend life drawing classes there because respectable ladies were not supposed to look at a naked man.
   After fifteen triumphant and lucrative years in London, Angelica was terrified (as a  Catholic) by the Gordon Riots and she decided to return to Italy with her second husband, Zucchi, a Venetian artist.
    I discovered that Angelica spent her last twenty-five years in Rome, a city where I lived in my twenties and which I love. 

 
    In my novel Angelica, as an old lady, is living in her house at the top of the Spanish steps. As she looks back on her life she is afraid of the new century which is destroying the world she knew and finds herself isolated because her husband and most of her friends have died or left Rome. She has a valuable art collection and expects the soldiers of Napoleon, who she detests, to arrive at any minute and loot it.
   In her studio, Angelica stares at her self portraits and relives her journey from a poor background to international fame. She draws us into her fascinating past through her self portraits and the portraits she has painted of her friends, including Antonio Canova, Germaine de Stael, Emma Hamilton and Goethe. This is a novel about a gifted and powerful woman with a kind heart. Like us, she lives at a time of bewildering change and fears the unknown future.
   Slowly, my interest developed into a passionate engagement with Angelica and the many interesting people she painted and befriended. Every time I encountered a new name - Reynolds, Canova, Goethe, Madame de Stael and many more - I had to stop writing my novel and read a book, or several books, about them. Thanks to a generous grant from the Authors’ Foundation I was able to return to Rome and also to visit Weimar to learn more about Goethe, with whom I believe she was unrequitedly in love.   This is the portrait she did of him, which Goethe disliked because he didn't think it made him look heroic enough.

   In order to make a successful career as an artist Angelica had to battle against powerful waves of misogyny. Those battles are still being fought; it was not until 1936 that another woman, Laura Knight, was elected as an RA. Finally, generations of talented women artists are beginning to be recognised. This is the right moment to rediscover Angelica Kauffman’s life and work.

Matisse, Cinema and the French Riviera, by Carol Drinkwater

January 2, 2020, 4:01 pm

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Sorry about the glare on the pictures' glass. I took these myself today while the sun was shining and I couldn't find an angle that blotted it out. The above are two of my many favourites of Henri Matisse's work. The first is from his Cut Outs and the second is a Still Life painting. Both are inspired by the colours, light and vegetation here on the Côte d'Azur.

I am fortunate to live in such a special corner of the world.

Back when the French Riviera was little more than olive groves and a series of fishing villages bobbing at the edge of the Mediterranean, some of Europe's leading artists were settling here or finding the means to sojourn here for months on end, to take advantage of our extraordinary light.

                                           View of country fields, outside Nice, Henri Matisse

Here, below, is a photograph of the 17th-century Genoese villa now reinvented as the Matisse Museum, which is in Cimiez, a once-upon-a-time bourgeois neighbourhood of Nice, inland up behind the coastal strip of the city. It houses a permanent Matisse exhibition as well as offering a range of other exhibitions throughout the year.
Henri Matisse lived in Cimiez at the Regina building from 1938 onwards. (He first arrived in Nice in 1917). He is buried with his wife in the cemetery of Monastère Notre Dame de Cimiez.  So, it is fitting that this grand property in Cimiez is dedicated to his work and life as an artist.

(A little aside here: The Regina building was constructed for Queen Victoria who adored the French Riviera and wintered in Nice between 1897 and 1899). In its heyday the Regina was considered one of the most glamorous buildings along this coast. Matisse lived in on the third floor.

Nice, as the capital of the French Riviera, has also been known as the Hollywood of France. Not only because it offers sunshine and palm trees but because it has been the location where several French cinema masterpieces were produced.

Entrance to La Victorine Studios.

In 1919, to compete with Paris as a major European filmmaking hub and to compete with Hollywood, a city also set on the coast and blessed with a sublime climate, the Victorine studios were conceived. These studios and the city of Nice have played an important role in French filmmaking. Since its inception, more than eight hundred films have been shot out of La Victorine. Amongst the stars who have worked here can be counted Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Bardot, Grace Kelly, Cary Grant,  David Niven, Michael Caine, Catherine Deneuve and Lauren Bacall, to name but a few. David Lean died at the Victorine during pre-production of his last and never-completed film, Nostromo.

During WWII, when France was partially occupied by the Germans, this area, because it was in the Free Zone, became even more attractive to filmmakers. Many of the artists who could not work freely under the scrutiny of the Nazis fled to the south. Here, they were at liberty to make films. After WWII, since 1946 when Cannes held its inaugural world-renowned film festival, this region has attracted many of the greatest names in world cinema.

Poster for the first Cannes Film festival

(I even auditioned myself for a film shot here. Day for Night or La Nuit Americaine directed by François Truffaut, meeting the great man in London.)

Les Enfants du Paradis, signed by Michel Carné, To Catch a Thief, directed by Alfred Hitchock, were both shot here during the studio's golden age.

From 1975 to 1983, while Nice was under the governance of the notoriously corrupt mayor, Jean Médicine, the studios began to fall into decline, or rather its reputation became muddied with stories of local corruption, Mafia interference, neglect. Mid-eighties, the studios were sold to actor Michael Douglas and his brother, Joel, who came away from the experience with little to show on their production belt. From thereon, the studios knew several proprietors but little glory. The place was used as the base for high-budget commercials shot here but not much was made that could be considered quality cinema. In 2017, rather than continue to watch this decline, the city of Nice bought the studios, returned to it its original name of 'Victorine' and this year celebrates its first centenary with an eye, we hope, to better times ahead.

It is not surprising, given a century and more of filmmakers and artists congregating along this coastline, that the work of one influenced the other. Famously, there have been exhibitions - an excellent one I went to at the Tate Modern in London charting the influences of Picasso and Matisse on one another's work. They lived a few kilometres from one another, were friends and friendly rivals.

We have this drawing above our bed. Picasso, 1952. 

I had at first mistaken it for a Matisse.

                                                 Henri Matisse

There have been many articles and books written, also exhibitions, such as the Matisse Picasso I saw at the Tate Modern in 2002, all concentrating on the influence the artists of the Côte d'Azur have had on one another. Or the influence this famous light we are bathed in down here on a daily basis even now in mid-winter, has had on so many of their works. However, I think the influence the septième art, the seventh art, cinema, has had on the French Riviera artists is a new angle.

La Nouvelle Vague of French cinema which included directors such as Truffaut, Rohmer, Godard, Jaques Demy, Agnes Varda (who died this year) cited Henri Matisse as one of the important influences of their work.

Matisse was an avid cinema-goer. Now, the city of Nice in a fascinating exhibition looks at how film images have influenced Henri Matisse and his work.

The exhibition, CINÉMATISSE, runs at the Musée Matisse until 5th January 2020.

Happy New Year to all our wonderful History Girls and Happy New Year to all our readers.

www.caroldrinkwater.com




   
Poster for the exhibition at the Massena Museum in Nice.
musee-matisse-nice.org

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Felicia Skene: writer & philanthropist by Janie Hampton

January 9, 2020, 4:20 pm

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Felicia Skene, left, with her niece Zoe Thomson, wife of the Archbishop of York, and her brother William Forbes Skene, Historiographer Royal of Scotland, in 1892.

When I moved to Oxford I rather disapproved of the hostel next door, with its Victorian attitude to young, single mothers. I was not surprised when our local vicar told me that it was run by the ‘Skene Moral Welfare Association’.  I then learned that the Skene in question was Felicia Mary Frances Skene, one of the most radical women in nineteenth century Oxford. I was even more amazed to discover that she was my grandfather’s great aunt, known in the family as ‘Fifi’. I wanted to know more.

Felicia Mary Frances Skene as a young woman

Her father James, was a wealthy Scottish lawyer and amateur artist whose engravings illustrated Walter Scott’s novels. Born in 1821, Fifi comforted Scott with fairy stories the night in 1825 when he lost everything. Roused by her cheerful spirit, he decided to fight bankruptcy and work through his debts. Scott wrote that Fifi’s parents ‘bring so much old-fashioned kindness and good humour with them that they must be always welcome guests.’ They were also enterprising and resourceful. 

Fifi’s father James Skene of Rubsilaw, 1775–1864,  with two of his grandchildren.

James Skene believed that travel was the best form of education, and so led his family  on a grand tour around Europe. Fifi was taught the piano in France by Liszt, whom she described as ‘a wild-looking, long-haired excitable man’. Between 1838 and 1845 the family lived in Athens where Fifi sang with the Greek royal family. During an expedition on  horseback across the Marathon plain, she spent the night in a shack with Albanian peasants and their pigs. At the age of twenty-four she brought her young nieces aged ten and eleven (one of them my great grandmother Janie) home from Athens by ship and train via Constantinople. Arriving in England she wrote her first book Wayfaring Sketches among the Turks and Christians, first in French and then in English.  Her observations of conditions in slave markets, galley- ships and an Ottoman Pasha’s harem made it a bestseller.

The Skene method of education obviously worked. Her older brother James Henry married a Greek aristocrat and became a British Consul to Aleppo.  Fifi’s brother George was Professor of Law at the University of  Edinburgh and Sheriff of Glasgow, and another brother William became the Historiographer Royal of Scotland, writing the first academic history from Scotland’s point of view. One of her sisters married the Swedish ambassador to Washington, Berlin and Paris, and the other married a Greek aristocrat – the brother of her sister-in-law.

Fifi settled in Oxford, where her social views were considered overly progressive, especially for a woman. Her 1866 novel Hidden Depths was an exposure of prostitution in Oxford inspired by the injustices she had witnessed in the prison and women’s reformatories. The Athenaeum criticised her writing as ‘unrepresentative of society’, The London Review disapproved of the message and Mudie’s Library considered the subject-matter altogether too provocative. The Lesters: A Family Record warned readers of the dangers of alcohol but was denounced by Saturday Review as being ‘cheap melodramatic horror’ and ‘almost beneath criticism’ while Academy dismissed the novel  as 'dull and destined for failure'.   

Despite many offers, the auburn-haired and boisterous Fifi was far too busy to bother with marriage. She didn’t want to belong to a man and preferred to carve out her own life as a writer and philanthropist. Fluent in both French and Greek, and possessing a photographic memory, she published more than twenty books under the pseudonyms of Oxonesis, Francis Scougal and Erskine Moir.  Her interest in the high-church ‘Oxford Movement’, inspired a theological work The Divine Master, which ran to eleven editions.  She wrote for Blackwood’s,  Cornhill and Macmillan's Magazines, Quiver, Temple Bar and Good Words,  which had  a circulation of 100,000 and featured contributions by Thomas Hardy and Anthony Trollope. 

Fifi’s 1865 anonymous pamphlet, ‘Penitentiaries and Reformatories’ on the humiliation of ‘fallen women’ whom society ‘sought to hide its blackest curse under a veil of mock prudery. . . because their sin was unfit to be named in the polite society that received with open arms the very men on whom they sinned’. (University of Indiana's Victorian Women Writers Project)

Fifi was a deeply religious and principled woman and used the income from her books and articles to finance her philanthropic work. Her biographer, Edith Rickards, wrote in 1902 that ‘it was her rule throughout her long life never to spend on herself what she gained from her writings, partly from her natural love of giving, partly from an old-fashioned idea that it was an undignified thing for a lady to earn money for her own personal advantage.’

'The Skene Arms', left, in St Michael’s Street, Oxford.

For most of her life, Fifi lived in St Michael’s Street in the centre of Oxford. It’s nickname was ‘The Street of Seven Deadly Sins’.  Her home was known as ‘The Skene Arms’, because it was always open to beggars, clergymen, prostitutes, politicians and students.   In her Cornhill Magazine article ‘Ethics of the Tramp’ she wrote that like her parrots, men of the road should roam free and never be incarcerated. She braved the wrath of local pimps and drunken husbands by finding refuge for women fleeing prostitution and domestic violence.

Fifi, Tatters and Rev. Algernon Barrington Simeon, the first Warden of St Edward’s School, whom she nursed though diphtheria, 1875.

After years of impromptu visits to Oxford Prison accompanied by Tatters, her Skye terrier, Fifi became England’s first official female Prison Visitor. She insisted on complete confidentiality and demanded that male and female prisoners be housed separately, for the protection of the women. On their release, she gave prisoners a hearty breakfast and a reference for employment. She even organised marriages to legitimatize the children of ‘fallen women’. Independently of any political movement, she fought for prisons to be used for rehabilitation; for the abolition of capital punishment; and for the decriminalization of suicide. She also campaigned against female inequality, animal vivisection and religious intolerance. When the Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, asked her advice on the new theory of evolution, she told him that Darwin’s discovery was true, and compatible with Christianity. 

Fifi helped found St Edward’s School for the sons of poor clergymen and dug the first sod of earth for its new buildings in North Oxford. With Dr Henry Acland, Fifi trained nurses to deal with cholera and smallpox outbreaks in Oxford. But when she offered her nurses to Florence Nightingale for the war in the  Crimea, all but three were turned down for being ‘too working class.’

Fifi, 1821-1899, in old age.

Fifi died of bronchitis in 1899 and was buried in St Thomas Church, near Oxford railway station.  A century later the assets of the Skene Moral Welfare Association were redistributed among Oxford’s social housing associations. In old age, Fifi had said of herself, ‘I am like the Martyr’s Memorial – everybody knows me and no-one is interested me.’  Beyond Oxford, she has largely been forgotten, but in 2002 a blue plaque was erected outside her home, now a hostel for single men.  The plaque describes Fifi as ‘Prison reformer and friend of the poor’ but there is no mention of her literary achievements.

At times I have felt that my own career, which is split between writing popular history books and  international development, confuses people. Great Aunt Fifi demonstrated that a woman can have as many different careers as she likes.

 Some of her titles: Wayfaring sketches among the Greeks and Turks, and on the shores of the Danube by a seven years resident in Greece, 1849. The Isles of Greece, and other poems, 1843. Use and Abuse,  a tale, 1849. The Inheritance of Evil or, The Consequence of marrying a deceased wife’s sister, 1849. The Tutor's Ward, 1851.  The Divine Master, 1852. S. Alban’s, or, the Prisoners of Hope, 1853.  Hidden Depths ,1866. Still and Deep, 1875. Memoir of Alexander, Bishop of Brechin, 1876. Raymond, 1876.  Life of Alexander Lycurgus: archbishop of the Cyclades, 1877. 

More than Conqueror , 1878. The Shadow of the Holy Week, 1883. A Strange Inheritance, 1886. The Lesters: a Family Record, 1887. Through the Shadows: a Test of the Truth, 1888. Awakened. A tale in nine chapters, 1888. Dewdrops: selections from writings of the saints,1888. Scenes from a Silent World, or, Prisons and their Inmates, 1889.

www.janiehampton.co.uk 

A very long way from Rome - by Ruth Downie

January 16, 2020, 5:00 pm

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If there’s a museum around, I’m usually to be found in the Roman section. But Roman sections are hard to come by in Hong Kong, where a recent visit forced me out of the comfort zone to discover the treasures beyond. Here are a few favourites.

The Time Ball Tower

This is set in a complex of Victorian buildings now renovated for modern use and collectively known as “1881 Heritage”

 If you know what a Time Ball does and why (and they’ve been around since 1829) then skip the next section. If you share my former bafflement, read on.

There’s a clue in the location: the Time Ball Tower is set on a hilltop that would have been visible to most of the ships in the busy Hong Kong Harbour below. And that’s the point. In order to navigate longitude, a ship’s captain needed to know exactly what the time was, and until the mid 18th century, timepieces were notoriously unreliable at sea. If you haven’t read “Longitude”, Dava Sobel’s account of how the inventor John Harrison solved that particular problem, then I thoroughly recommend it. But even Harrison’s marvellous marine chronometer would only work if it was set to the right time in the first place.

For many years ships visiting Hong Kong would set the time by the sound of a noon-day cannon. Well, maybe not by the sound. Because as anyone who’s watched distant fireworks will know, sound doesn’t travel as fast as light. The noise of the cannon could take up to three vital seconds to reach the far ends of the harbour, so what the sailors actually did was watch for the puff of smoke. A more accurate signal, but worryingly ethereal.

It was a British naval officer who invented the visual clue of the time-ball: a huge metal ball to be hoisted up a pole and then dropped at a precise time for all to see. Hong Kong adopted the idea in 1884 and the ball fell daily at 1.00 pm sharp, as determined by the nearby observatory.


Thus it was with great anticipation that Husband and I rushed over to the refurbished tower at 12.55pm, only to wait… and wait… and wait, until our mobile phones told us the moment had long passed. What we didn’t register until later was the day. The original time ball did not fall on Sundays or public holidays, and this was a Sunday. Time and tide might wait for no man, but the sychronising of timepieces evidently does.


 
The Odometer

Hong Kong Maritime Museum is always a treat, and they currently have an exhibition on map-making. Fundamental to making a decent map is being able to measure distances. While the Romans seem to have had some sort of wheeled vehicle with cogs that dropped pebbles through holes, the Chinese approach was far more stylish.

Here’s a replica of a machine in use during the Han dynasty (206BC-220AD). After a set distance the little men on top bang their drum. Much more fun than pebbles in a box, no?

Fishing-net weights

These are from the Hong Kong Museum of History and were in use in Neolithic times. Such a clever and simple idea. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I’ve never seen anything like them before.











The Rat Bin

The story of these grim but highly practical objects is told in the Hong Kong Museum of Medical Sciences.

In 1894 Hong Kong was ravaged by plague. In the fight against the spread of disease, numbered bins were placed on lampposts all over the city for the collection of dead rats in disinfecting carbolic acid. Bins were emptied twice a day and each creature was marked with the number of the bin it had come from before being inspected. Any signs of plague infection in the rats gave the authorities a head start in surveying the local area for human cases.

(Incidentally, the bacterium responsible for plague was first discovered in Hong Kong during this outbreak. It’s named Yersina Pestis after one of its identifiers - Alexandre Yersin.)



St Paul’s, and a few St Nicholases

On a more cheerful note: some major cultural fusion in nearby Macau.

In the background: the stunning façade of St Paul’s. It’s all that remains of a church and college built in the 17th century by exiled Japanese Christians and Chinese craftsmen in a Portuguese-controlled territory under the direction of an Italian Jesuit. In the foreground: heralding a very twenty-first century Christmas.








 

Something familiar


And finally - there wasn’t a total absence of Romans.

These familiar-looking glass vessels (now in the Maritime Museum) arrived sometime between the second and ninth century, presumably via a trade route. And to demonstrate that the travel wasn’t all one way, recent work on Roman-era cemeteries in London and Somerset suggests that some of the occupants had origins in East Asia.

I wonder what their favourite British finds would have been?


Ruth Downie writes a series of murder mysteries set mostly in Roman Britain, and featuring Roman army medic Ruso and his British partner, Tilla. To find out more, visit www.ruthdownie.com

Glimpses of Singapore's Past by Ann Turnbull

January 23, 2020, 4:01 pm

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My first visit to Singapore, in October 2013, was in response to a family emergency. We stayed in Chinatown, near the General Hospital. The streets there are lined with shophouses whose upper storeys overhang the shop fronts below, creating a covered walkway. These paths, known as the 'five-foot ways', provide much-needed shade and also shelter from the rain.

We saw street sculptures depicting older times and many interesting old houses.

There were plenty of young people around, with children and babies - but I also noticed older people, and was struck by how many of them had bandy legs.

"It's rickets," I was told, "caused by lack of food in childhood. Singapore suffered terribly during the war."

Of course. These people were the children of the late 1930s. Much later, I found out more about World War II in Singapore.

In January 1942 Singapore - then a British colony - came under relentless air attack from Japan. Hundreds of people died, and huge areas of the city were reduced to rubble. By 15th February Singapore had fallen. The next day Japanese soldiers marched into the city. After the war, there was a feeling among people in Singapore that the British had deserted them - and in retrospect it does seem that, had the British mounted a counter-attack at the critical moment, they might have prevailed.

The Chinese community remembers the horror of the Sook Ching - the 'purge through cleansing' - a mass screening and purge of Chinese men aged between 18 and 50 who had supported the war effort in China. About 50,000 men were loaded into lorries, taken to Changi or Sentosa, and shot. There must have been huge numbers of fatherless families left behind. Food was scarce, and people trapped in the city struggled to find anything to eat or anywhere to shelter. It's no wonder that those who are left still carry the scars.

When the British returned in 1945, Singapore was in ruins and its people were struggling to survive. 'People's Restaurants' were set up to provide affordable food, and the city was slowly rebuilt. But the housing shortage persisted for many years.

We were told we should visit the Chinatown Heritage Centre in Pagoda Street - a small museum in a converted shophouse. On entering, we found ourselves in a reconstruction of a tailor's workshop.

There were sewing machines, pattern books and order books on display. A baby's cradle swung from a hook in the ceiling. The tailor ran a successful business, but he and his family and apprentices lived very frugally in the rented premises and worked from around 8am till 9pm.

Upstairs, on the first floor, we were astonished - shocked - to see that all the space except a narrow access corridor had been divided up into cubicles measuring 8' x 8'. These spaces were rented out by the landlord as living accommodation. At night even the corridor was let to labourers who had nowhere else to sleep. There was a single kitchen and toilet shared by more than forty people.

Unlike the kitchen (which must have been impossible to keep clean) the cubicles were made as homely and neat as the inhabitants could manage. Their few personal possessions, photographs and good luck charms were given space; their bowls and spoons and baskets were kept clean; there were children's toys, and a few items of clothing on hooks.

The first cubicle - almost filled by a workbench that doubled as a bed - was home to a carpenter and his pregnant wife; in the next were a hawker, her husband and their children; then four Samsui women (these were female construction workers); a clog-maker and his family; a factory worker with six children. There was even a physician and his family; he ran his practice from here, attending mainly to the very poor whom he could not bring himself to charge.

It was while looking at these people's homes that I noticed, among the pictures pinned to the walls, some images that I recognised: British women with perms and frilly aprons and dazzling smiles - 1950s women. These were the advertisements I remembered from my own childhood. It was only then that I realised how recent all this was.

Chinese immigrants had been coming to Singapore in search of a better life for a hundred years or more. They were known as the 'Sinkeh' - 'newcomers' - and were often drawn by stories of rags to riches.

Most of them were ripped off by existing residents within days of their arrival and left penniless. One man, quoted in the background history display at the museum, said that when he saw coolies, pitch-black with coal dust, at work on the quay, he knew he had come to a hard place. Unless a man had a trade he would become an indentured labourer.

Singapore became a republic in 1965. Although Malay is the national language, in practice everyone speaks English because that is the language of business. Most of the inhabitants are Chinese, and Hokkien Chinese is also widely spoken. The Peranakan community are the descendants of Chinese traders, held up in the Malacca Straits by the trade winds for months at a time, who married local women. Indians have also lived in Singapore since the 19th century, and Little India is a thriving area. The city is full of temples, mosques and churches, reflecting the various communities.

On a second visit as tourists in 2018 we saw and enjoyed all the beautiful gardens, indoor shopping malls, museums and galleries. Having found out about the people's struggle to rebuild and recover since the 1960s, I was more than ever impressed and astonished by Singapore's success.

Contrary to what is implied by the name Singapore (which means Lion City), there have never been any lions in Singapore!

The Defynnog Yew, a remarkable tree! by Katherine Langrish

January 30, 2020, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: The Best Historical Fiction for LGBT History Month - chosen by Anna Mazzola

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One day in March this year,on a weekend in the Brecon Beacons, we stopped at the little church of St Cynog in the village of Defynnog to visit what some people claim may be the oldest yew tree in Europe - around 5000 years old! Whether this date is accurate is disputed - but experts agree it's very old indeed, at least 2000 to 3000 years.

We pushed through the lych gate and went up the path through the graveyard. There were venerable yews a-plenty - you can see one in the photo below -  but the one we were after is on the far side of the church - a church it of course predates by centuries, if not millennia.

St Cynog's has been here since the 11th century and may be older, though most of the structure is now 15th century. (The story of Cynog can be found at this link.) In the porch is a 5th century pillar stone carved with Latin and Ogham inscriptions commemorating 'Rugniatis son of Vendonius'. The yew was there before him, too.

And here it is. When you get near you can see it has two trunks and so looks like two trees, but DNA testing (I never knew you could DNA test trees) by Roslin Forestry research confirmed the two trunks are identical. Two trunks, a single tree. Moreover they found that the tree is 'monoecious', both male and female.

I bought a pamphlet in the church which put forward a number of theories about the yew (some mutually exclusive): that it was planted long ago to honour a tribal chief; that it could have been an accidental or natural germination; that it was been grown from a cutting taken from another sacred tree far away or even abroad; that it was a sacred tree which symbolised the axis mundi... clearly, nobody really knows. In the Middle Ages apparently it may have been a special meeting place, and the centre of Cantref Mawr, the Hundred of Defynnog. The best guess is that the church was built here because of the tree; the tree itself was sacred. And now it shelters the Christian graveyard.

The tree is so huge I couldn't get a close-up of more than parts of it. Here's me, glancing down at our dog Polly who was taking a great interest in the clefts and hollows of the two vast trunks...

One rare and interesting characteristic of the Defynnog Yew is that it produces 'golden boughs' - sprays of leaves with a blanched, yellow colour, very striking against the usual dark foliage. Was this so from the beginning, and is it what made the tree so very special?

I was also interested by the green fur of yew leaves covering parts of the trunk like a cloak.

The church pamphlet goes on to claim that Wales has the largest collection of ancient Yews on earth and that many were 'brought here as cuttings, branches or staffs from the Holy Land or Egypt, which were then planted in remote places so that their survival would be ensured, well into the future.' If so (no evidence is given in support for this practice and I have to say I'm a bit dubious - why in remote places? why not in established church yards? would a staff really root?) such cuttings would also post-date this particular yew. The church guide also makes the claim that the modern graveyard was once a neolithic burial site, which I would be happy to believe if - again - any evidence or reference were provided. It may be so...

In his book 'Superstitions of the British Isles'  Steve Roud says no one really knows why yew trees are so often grown in graveyards. "Accident can be ruled out, and a deliberate policy presumed, and there are numerous stories which are told to explain this." He investigates some - that yew wood was used for making bows, so it was ordered that yew trees should be planted in every churchyard - that because yews are poisonous, they were planted in churchyards where cattle could not reach them - and concludes there is no real evidence for any of them and though there was clearly "a traditional connection between yews and death or mourning in medieval times in Britain, its exact nature has yet to be discovered."

Robert Graves, in 'The White Goddess' has (characteristically) a lot more to say about the yew - that it's one of the Five Magical Trees of Ireland and the fifth letter (I fo Idho) in the Tree Alphabet, that it's "the death-tree in all European countries, sacred to Hecate in Greece and Rome", that in Ireland wine barrels were made of yew-wood so it was known as "the coffin of the vine", that yew stakes were driven through the corpses of the fated Irish lovers Naoise and Deirdre to keep them apart but that "the stakes sprouted and became trees whose tops eventually embraced over Armagh Cathedral," that "In Brittany it is said that churchyard yews will spread a root to the mouth of each corpse..."

Axis mundi, tree of death, tree of eternity, all of those things? Well... Yews are evergreen and sombre, lit with the little red berries of which the flesh is tasteless and the seed is poisonous, and they live practically for ever...

Maybe that's how it all began.



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



Katherine left us a few precious posts before she stopped being a History Girl. We are very happy to use one today as it was Gillian Polack's turn and she has had to leave her home in Australia and relocate because of the air quality from the bushfires, Gillian will be back later this year but thanks, Katherine!

The Best Historical Fiction for LGBT History Month - chosen by Anna Mazzola

February 6, 2020, 10:30 pm

≫ Next: Creative Non-Fiction, into the Past - Joan Lennon

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February is LGBT History Month in the UK and therefore an excuse to pull together my favourite historical fiction novels that explore gender and sexuality throughout the ages.

THE SONG OF ACHILLES BY MADELINE MILLER

An exquisitely-written reimagining of The Iliad, told from the point of view of Patroclus, Achilles’s lover. An entirely fresh take on the Trojan War and its heroes by the author of that other extraordinary novel, Circe.

AS MEAT LOVES SALT BY MARIA McCANN

McGann’s thrilling and erotic debut is a tale of obsession and murder set during the violence of the English Civil War. Dark, complex and unflinching. Everyone should read McCann’s novels immediately.

DAYS WITHOUT END BY SEBASTIAN BARRY

Set in the 1850s and ’60s, during the wars the U.S. fought against the Sioux and the Yurok, and the Civil War, this is a stunning and deeply moving story of two soldiers—an Irish immigrant, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole.

THE SEALED LETTER BY EMMA DONOGHUE

The Sealed Letter explores the story of a divorce trial that scandalised mid-Victorian London, focussing on the reluctant involvement of Emily Faithful and her relationship with the seemingly less-than-faithful half of the marriage, Helen Smith Codrington. An intriguing and cleverly-written mystery.

FINGERSMITH BY SARAH WATERS

Really I could have included most of Sarah Waters’ books here, but Fingersmith remains my favourite: a glorious mystery and love truly with a truly gripping plot.
Also featuring a wonderful cast of villainous characters, brilliant use of 19th century slang (‘Pigeon, my arse!’) and the best twist in the business.

REGENERATION BY PAT BARKER

The Regeneration trilogy is an incredible fictionalized account of the relationship between army psychiatrist Dr Rivers and a group of interconnected patients, including Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It blends brilliantly the horrors of war with gay life in Edwardian England and the newly emerging science of psychology.

THE COLOUR PURPLE WALKER

An epic and heart-breaking tale of perseverance as well as an exploration of race, gender, family, and sexuality in 1930s Georgia. The novel is, among many other things, a story of love between women.

MUSSOLINI’S ISLAND

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating and beautifully written novel.

And coming soon...

Do also look out for Neil Blackmore's The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle, sauntering your way in April 2020: a dark and funny romp through the Grand Tour - The Favourite meets the Talented Mr Ripley in 18th century Europe.


_____________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of dark historical fiction. 

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

Creative Non-Fiction, into the Past - Joan Lennon

February 13, 2020, 4:30 pm

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I'm a History Girl.  I'm an advocate of fiction as a way into the past.  And non-fiction as a way into the past.  Then, in-between them, there's creative non-fiction.  When asked - which doesn't happen a great deal - what creative non-fiction is, I tend to flounder, usually ending up with something like "It's, um, factual, but, er, written up pretty.  Er."  Online definitions are more elegant, but the comment by critic Chris Anderson that it is a genre "currently defined by its lack of established conventions" is very much on the money.

I think maybe we know it when we read it.  I certainly knew it when I read Linda Cracknell's The Beat of the Heart Stones.  In this tiny, beautiful book, there is a conversation, between the present and the past, between a walker and a wall.  The Dyke was built up the side of Schiehallion in the late 18th century, and in The Beat, the writer begins to climb the mountain, following along the path of the wall.  More quickly than you'd think, the idea that the dyke can speak becomes completely believable.  Here is a snippet of their conversation:

So they used whatever was close by?  Here's a block of quartz, the glitter of mica schist.  Here a seaweed green section, here bare grey.

What the Earth spits out.  Would you want to heave it far across the hills? ...

It was weans and women and tinkers hauled these rocks - left them in a rickle each side of the line, within reach of the hands that built my long slow uphill spine.

Whose hands?

One craftsman each side.  Raising two inward-leaning walls that kissed just before they were capped.  Think of the men as you walk ...

They saw at a glance how one stone would nudge and slide against another, the shape and ache of a gap ...

They made it a rule - never pick up a stone more than once.  Assess them where they lie.

The author's line drawings of the wall climb across the pages and intermingle with the words.  For me, it was a way in to the past that wasn't fiction or non-fiction, but both.  

The book ends with a question, as the present overtakes the past.  I wanted it to be longer, except it is the perfect length.

Schiehallion (1083 metres), viewed across the River Tay 

(wiki commons)

P.S. This little gem of a book, and Linda Cracknell's other fiction, non-fiction and creative non-fiction can be bought here.


P.P.S.  A short distance from the Dyke, the slopes of Schiehallion had also been the site of Maskelyn's Observatory.  "The Schiehallion Experiment" of 1774 aimed to estimate the weight of the earth.  (In the process, it also gave us what became known as contour lines.)  You can watch a short video here that describes the basics of what happened, before the whole thing came to a dramatic end.  As Wikipedia tells us,

"During a drunken party to celebrate the end of the surveying, the northern observatory was accidentally burned to the ground, taking with it a fiddle belonging to Duncan Robertson, a junior member of the surveying team. In gratitude for the entertainment Robertson's playing had provided Maskelyne during the four months of astronomical observations, he compensated him by replacing the lost violin with a Stradivarius."

But that's a bit of creative non-fiction for another day.


P.P.P.S. When you read this, I will be in the middle of a month's writing residency on Fair Isle.  I think I will be working on historical narrative poetry, but who knows?  Maybe I'll be busily engaged in historical creative non-fiction.  Time will tell ...




Joan Lennon's blog.
Silver Skin.

'No News but Flu': The Spanish Flu Pandemic, 1918 by Sheena Wilkinson

February 20, 2020, 8:30 pm

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In real life I’m the world’s most squeamish person. Cough beside me on public transport and I guarantee we won’t be companions for long. But for some reason I can cope with almost anything on the page, which came in very handy when, several years ago, I decided to set a novel, The Greater Malady,  during the 1918/19 influenza pandemic.  

Why the fascination with the so-called Spanish Flu? It grew out of my long-held obsession with World War One, whose ending overlapped with the flu, perhaps one reason why this crisis – the single worst demographic disaster of the 20 century – has been comparatively overlooked. Again and again I consulted histories of the period, to find the pandemic passed over in a paragraph or two. Yet it killed at least 50 million people worldwide, and its after-effects were felt for years by many survivors. 

Despite the name, it didn’t start in Spain, nor was Spain affected more than anywhere else.  Theories disagree as to whether it began in China or India, or possibly in America, where it attacked thousands of soldiers in training camps. Germans called it ‘Tommy flu’ at first, and the English called it ‘German flu’. But Spain was neutral in World War One and therefore not bound by the same reporting restrictions as the fighting powers. When morale was already so low after four years of war, the last thing governments could afford was people panicking about infection.

And at first there seemed no need to panic. The flu came in three waves, and the first one, in spring 1918, seemed no worse than the usual seasonal flu.  But by the autumn, doctors were horrified and puzzled by this illness, described in The Lancet as ‘flu, but not as we know it.’ As well as the common symptoms of fever, cough, and severe aches, many people were stricken by
dysenteric and haemorrhagic symptoms, with many choking to death on their own blood as their lungs disintegrated. The characteristic marks of cyanosis turned the faces of oxygen-starved sufferers dark blue, which led to its being called the blue flu, or the black flu. It resembled and was sometimes referred to as ‘plague’, and it killed many more people than the Black Death, but it was ‘only’ flu nonetheless. It could strike so suddenly that many people got up feeling perfectly well, only to collapse and die by nightfall. 

It infected 1/3 of world’s population, about 500 million, with a death toll of 10-20% depending on conditions. Unlike most infections, it killed the young and fit disproportionately. The death toll of c.50 million is probably a conservative one, as people often died of after-effects, related complications etc. From about 1920 war memorials started to go up in towns and villages round the world, but there are no memorials to the flu dead. It’s hard to imagine the scale – but think of how difficult it would be for life to go on with one in three people ill. Life did go on, by and large, in a population hardened by years of war, but even so, there are widespread reports of coffins piled up in the streets, the dead lying unburied, and children starving to death because their parents were lying dead in their beds. On one day in October 1918, at the height of the second wave, sixty people dropped dead in the street in London alone. 

 Why was it so bad?  I’m not an epidemiologist or scientist, but people in 1918 were often living in close quarters, in filthy trenches, army camps, and at home in factories and overcrowded housing conditions.  There was a great deal of movement of troops and support personnel. Think of how often today we get sick after travelling. On the home front, there were food shortages, low morale, and crucially a severe shortage of doctors and nurses, 50% of medical personnel on military service. Nobody was equipped to deal with a pandemic on this scale. 

Why isn’t it better known? I’ve described it as a horror story but we choose to remember other horrors – indeed remembering horror is important in helping us not to repeat the mistakes of the past. But this was horrific in a different way from war, and maybe people were scared to remember it because they knew how powerless they were to prevent its happening again. The medical profession had made improvements in public health and infection control in the 19^th and early 20^th C, and the war led to great strides in wound treatment, mental health, brain surgery, cosmetic surgery etc. Powerlessness against flu doesn’t fit that narrative of medical progress and confidence, and it was accepted that there was very little doctors could actually do. Nursing -- and luck -- played the greatest role. 

Another narrative it doesn’t sit easily with is that of heroism, so important at the time. While death in battle could be seen – however grim the reality – as noble and sacrificial, death from a disease was simply bad luck. It’s also very hard to romanticize – the symptoms were so disgusting. And maybe, after over four years of the most terrible war, people simply couldn’t bear any more horror. 

We know now that, like most influenza pandemics, the 1918 flu lasted for about a year and then petered out, but those living through it had a great deal of uncertainty. What exactly was it? When would it end? Would they get it? Would they die? Was it in fact the end of the world? Was God punishing humanity for the devastation of the war? These are the questions people were almost afraid to ask at the time. They must have felt like they were living through a medieval plague, and who wants that to mess up the sense of 20^th century modernity?

Funnily enough – I didn’t think it funny at the time – The Greater Malady, which I spent two years writing, was never sold. Clearly the publishing world did not share my fascination with this pandemic. But when I wrote Star by Star, set at the end of World War One, I knew that the flu would be a central issue in the book, and all that disgusting, horrific research would come in very handy. And in my forthcoming novel, Hope against Hope, set in 1921, the heroine’s family has also been bereaved by flu, not because I was being lazy and repetitive but because, a hundred years ago, with one third of the world’s population affected, there can have been very few families immune. 

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The Rajah Quilt and I....by Adèle Geras

February 27, 2020, 5:30 pm

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There will be very little by way of illustration in this post. I am unsure of what's in copyright and what's not, so unless I'm quite certain of  not contravening any laws, I'm going to leave this piece with no pictures of the very thing I'm writing about: The Rajah Quilt.  Below is a photograph of the cover of a  book I have, published by National Gallery of Australia and given to me by Carolyn Ferguson, of whom more later.... 

In 2009, I visited an exhibition called QUILTS at the V&A in London. Among the many astonishing and beautiful pieces of patchwork, there was one that particularly caught my attention. This was a coverlet made by some of the transported female convicts on the ship Rajah, which set off from London in April, 1841 bound for van Diemen's Land (modern Tasmania).  I stood in front of it for a long time, amazed at its beauty and struck by its interesting  history.

On this voyage, the convicts were accompanied by Kezia Hayter, a young woman of 23, who was a relative of George Hayter, one of Queen Victoria's court painters. She had been helping the Ladies of the Prison Committee to make life for women prisoners in London's gaols more bearable and she was appointed as a Matron to accompany the women on the Rajah and help them acquire  needleworking skills which would come in  useful in their new lives on the other side of the world. 

I realised, as soon as I left the V&A, that one day I would write about this story: the voyage and the making of the patchwork.  

More than a decade later, in early 2021, a novel by me (provisionally called CONVICTION) will be published simultaneously by Michael Joseph in UK and Berkley in the USA. It will, however, not appear under my name but under my pseudonym: Hope Adams.

I have three reasons for adopting a pseudonym for this book. The first is: it's not the sort of book I have ever written before (a historical novel for adults, inspired by a real event) Secondly, Hope Adams is the name I used to submit the book to publishers. I didn't want anyone who read it at that stage to be influenced one way or another by knowing about my other books.  And thirdly, it feels right to have a new name for what has been a kind of reinvention of the sort of book I write. I chose Hope because I was living in hope all the time I was writing the book over the last few years, and Adams because it's at the beginning of the alphabet and because, unlike Geras, you don't  have to tell people how to pronounce it. The pseudonym is not a secret. I've already done events under that name, and I will be putting up tweets from and about Hope Adams' progress and the publication of the novel on Twitter. 

Between 2009 and 2017, I thought about the book and picked it up and put it down from time to time. In 2010 we moved from Manchester to Cambridge. I wrote two novels Cover Your Eyes and Love or Nearest Offer (pub Quercus pbk) which could be described as 'women's fiction.'

In 2018, I wrote the first 20,000 words or so of what became Conviction. I submitted it to an agent (Nelle Andrew) under my pseudonym and felt very lucky that she offered to represent me. 

A lot of hard rewriting then followed and in early 2019, the novel was bought in a two- book deal. This is a link to the  piece about it in the Bookseller: 

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/michael-joseph-snaps-devastating-debut-inspired-convict-ship-1175156?utm_source=Adestra&utm_medium=email&utm_term=&utm_content=&utm_campaign=Morning%20Briefing%20-%20280120

I was much relieved to see this appear, because almost from my first sight of the Rajah Quilt, I've been worried that someone might beat me to it, and write a novel about this historical event before my own book appeared.  My next novel, which I hope to be writing this year, is inspired by the  work of the  Scottish artist, Phoebe Anna Traquair.

I said I would mention Carolyn Ferguson again. When we moved to Cambridge, I met her again after not seeing her for several decades. We were at school together but had lost touch entirely. Then she emailed me and it was a happy coincidence that we'd both ended up in Cambridge. But even better....and ever so slightly spookier...Carolyn is not only a gifted quilter herself but also an expert on 19th century textiles who has written quite extensively about ... the Rajah Quilt. I felt as though I'd been gifted a cross between a wonderful resource and a special guiding light for the novel: someone who was as struck with Kezia Hayter's achievements as I was. I cannot overstate what a  great help to me she's been. If the book has any historical authenticity, it's thanks to Carolyn.

I've not said much about what happens in the story, apart from the one fact we know: that the patchwork coverlet was made. I've  is constructed a fictional narrative around what is known about this very well-documented voyage. I hope that readers will enjoy the book and give Hope Adams  a welcome when she appears in the shops next year. 

'The Cure for Every Plague and Poison' by Karen Maitland

March 5, 2020, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: How to read a painting of the plague - Michelle Lovric

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The Apothecary (circa 1752) Artist: Pietro Longhi (1701-1785)

Of all the dangers that daily surrounded our ancestors the one that seem to strike dread into the hearts of the upper classes was the fear of being poisoned, and throughout history the search for a universal antidote against poison obsessed them as much the search for gold, the alchemist's stone or the Holy Grail.

Legend has it that the first universal antidote, known as Mithridate, was invented by Mithridates VI, King of Pontus (NE Turkey), who reigned from 120BCE, enthroned when he was just thirteen. He was terrified of being assassinated by poisoning, as other members of his family had been, and attempted to create an antidote to all poisons and venoms, as well as to the ‘systemic poisons’ which developed inside the body and were thought to be the cause of illness.

He first experimented with a number of single ingredients as antidotes to individual poisons by trying them out on condemned criminals. Then combined all the effective substances into one antidote, to produce a universal prophylactic against poisons and plagues, which he consumed daily. He believed that the interaction between the blended ingredients as they matured resulted in far greater healing properties than consuming any of the individual antidotes alone. Legend has it that it proved so effective that when, in 63BCE, he eventually tried to commit suicide using poison to avoid the humiliation of being taken prisoner, the poison had no effect and he was forced to ask his bodyguard to stab him.

Image on a coin of Mithridate VI

His records fell into the hands of the Roman conquerors of Pontus and Roman medici began to use them. Mithridate contained opium, myrrh, saffron, ginger, cinnamon and honey, along with some forty other ingredients including many herbs, roasted copper, sea squills and beaver castoreum. Andromachus, Nero's physician, is said to have removed some ingredients such as lizard from Mithridates’ concoction and added others, particularly viper's flesh. He called his new recipe ‘Galene’, ‘tranquillity’. Galene became known as ‘theriac’. Andromachus ‘improved’ upon mithridate by bringing the total number of ingredients to sixty-four.

Theriac took at least forty days to make and was supposed to be left for twelve years to mature, though the Emperor Marcus Aurelius apparently couldn’t wait that long and consumed after it had matured for only two months without any harm.

Sea Squills or Sea Onion (Drimia maritima) Photo: Zeynel Cebeci

Theriac was usually swallowed with wine or dragon water (distilled from dragon-wort, polygonum bistorta, also known as Snake-weed or Bistort), but could instead be rubbed on the skin or eyes, which was advised particularly when being administered to babies and young children. It was used to treat malaria and also a plaster to heal venomous stings or bites. The 11th century Saxon leech book of Bald claims that in 9th century, Abel the Patriarch of Jerusalem sent theriac to King Alfred the Great and the book also includes a recipe for theriac.

The writings of the Greek and Roman physicians and alchemists re-emerged in Italy via Islamic scholars, who introduced them to the great medical universities such a Salerno. By 12th century, theriac was being produced in Venice and exported all over Europe. In England, it was called ‘Venetian treacle’, treacle being a corruption of theriac. It was used widely in Europe in the Middle Ages in an attempt to ward off or cure the Black Death.

Dragon-wort (Polygonum bistorta) Photo: Muriel Bendel

But the cities of Bologna, Constantinople (Istanbul), Cairo, Genoa, Padua and Milan also competed to produce the best theriac from their own recipes and such was its value and importance that theriac was prepared in public with elaborate ceremony, so that potential customers could be assured that all the ingredients claimed to be in it had been added. If it failed to cure, the apothecary who had made it was held responsible for not having prepared it correctly and could be punished by the authorities.

‘Mummy’ made from ground-up human corpses mummified in Ancient Egypt was added to many theriac recipes during the Middle Ages, as that too had come to be regarded as a universal panacea and the tombs of Middle East were ransacked by Syrian merchants to keep up with the demand. When these became scarce, merchants and apothecaries were forced to use modern cadavers. The herbalist, John Parkinson, (1567-1650) maintained that the best mummy was obtained from bodies embalmed in the Egyptian manner, but Oswald Croll (1580-1609) recommended making mummy from hanged felons, preferably of ruddy complexion and around 24 years old.

Egyptian Mummy - Louvre Museum Photo: Dada

In London in July 1586, during the reign of Elizabeth I, the Master and Wardens of Grocers Hall discovered ‘Jeane Triacle’ (Genoa treacle) being sold, which they found to be

‘unwholesome, being compounded by certain rude and unskilful men.’

As a result, they petitioned that the recipe for theriac’s proper manufacture should be kept on record at Grocer’s Hall and preparation of this treacle in London was entrusted to only one of their members, William Besse, an apothecary. He had the monopoly for the whole of London and seven miles around. This attempt at regulation by the Grocer’s guild had the effect of stimulating a flourishing illicit trade in unlicensed mithridate and theriac, and a great many more ‘unwholesome’ treacles were sold behind the backs of authorities. Human nature never changes, nor does our ending search for the wonder drugs which will cure all.

'The Village Apothecary' (who keeps his face masked) Artist: David Tenier the Younger (1610-1690)

How to read a painting of the plague - Michelle Lovric

March 12, 2020, 5:30 pm

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Today I should be flying from London to Venice. But obviously I won't be. And even if I could get there, I would be confined to my home, required to fill out a form if I wanted to cross the city to see my friends. I could not go to the library or to see an exhibition. I could not go to my local bar for a cappuccino. A Venetian friend told me yesterday morning, 'It's as if we've all been sent to jail.' 

I wish I was on my way, though. I'd love to see Venice without the crowds and most of all without the cruise ships: restored thereby to the beauty of a Canaletto painting. Without the cruise ships, the air of Venice must be safer to breathe, paradoxically, than it has been ever since the cruise ship blight fell on the city.

So, yes, beauty, but at what cost? 

Northern Italy is now paralysed not just by the corona virus but by fear of the corona virus.

This is not a new condition for la Serenissima. She is a city to some extent shaped by epidemics. As the crossroads and crucible of trade for centuries, Venice was also the place to which all major diseases eventually made a pilgrimage.

Plague, of course, was the sickness that terrified Venice above all others. When the disease struck in April 1464, the senate decreed that prayers should be said continuously in all the convents, monasteries and churches – for the plague was seen as a divine scourge. Two major plague outbreaks, in 1575 and 1630, killed off between a quarter and a third of the population each time. In 1575, one in two Venetians fell sick.

Historically, Venetians liked to portray their city as healthy in body and spirit. So it was a matter of scrupulous record that plague always arrived from the outside. The 1630 plague was said to have been imported via an ambassador of the Duke of Mantua when he was staying on the island of San Clemente. The ambassador seems to have contaminated a carpenter from Dorsoduro who happened to be working on San Clemente. That carpenter’s family were the first Venetian victims of this incarnation of the disease, one of the worst visitations on the city. (I noted this week that a Veneto politician has been keeping up the xenophobe blame tradition by asserting that corona virus was caused by Chinese people eating live mice. He himself is eating humble pie now, fortunately, and perhaps choking on it.)

Apart from plague, Venice was also subject to typhus, smallpox and cholera epidemics. Every ten years or so, sickness crippled the city. Sometimes, cruelly, two diseases arrived at once. Typhus and the plague were often twinned in the winter months. So it’s hard to write historical novels set in Venice without having your plots being contaminated by one illness or the other. Thus far, I’ve kept the plague fairly peripheral in my books, partly because it’s been done before and partly because the mechanics of the Venetian health measures were so detailed that they are laborious to explain and therefore somewhat fatal to novelistic pace. (Some things, like pageantry, are almost impossible to keep alive in words). However, I’ve needed to get closer to Venetian plague over the last couple of years when devising medical history tours of Venice for London’s Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, founded by Royal Charter in 1617 to promote the healing arts. (To this day, 85 percent of members are professionals in medical fields).

During last year’s visit, the Apothecaries were lucky enough to catch the end of Tintoretto’s 500th birthday party, magnificently celebrated in the Palazzo Ducale, the Accademia, various churches. The Scuola Medica at SS Giovanni e Paolo – always on our itineraries – hosted an excellent exhibition entitled Art, Faith and Medicine in Tintoretto’s Venice, which was also recorded in a superb book of essays by the same name (see left).

I saw the exhibition several times. From the first, I was captivated by a painting I’d never seen before. It’s by Domenico, son of the more famous Jacopo Robusti Tintoretto. Although Domenico’s work is generally decried as more workmanlike and of less combustible genius than his father’s, I think that this particular painting touches on greatness because of the simple pathos of its storytelling. You can read it like a book. And that's what I propose to do in this post.

Below is the painting, reproduced courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu).

The emotional message and story arc are very clear. Yet there is also so much going on here in the detail. Even its title is a short story in itself: Venice supplicating the Virgin Mary to intercede with Christ for the Cessation of the Plague, 1630–31.

This painting was commissioned for the congregation members at San Francesco della Vigna in Castello. Incidentally, at this church, the apothecary-priests made Four Thieves Vinegar, which they promoted as a cure for the plague. The apothecary shop there was so popular that the priests had to construct a separate entrance so that the customers did not disturb the prayers of the religious order. 

The striking central banner (above) reads: “Pray for me, I pray to your son for health, with the highest pity give aid to us against this cruel wound that devours us – placate His wrath, ceasing our sighs.” This banner separates the composition into two parts. Below, we see Venice personified, as usual, in a blonde, beautiful woman. She holds her arms open, showing both her considerable bosom (another Venetian trope) and her utter vulnerability. 

At her side is the lion of Venice’s patron saint, the healer Mark. The lion’s darkened face is contorted with grief. 

Above, in the heavens, the figure of Venezia finds her counterpoint in that of the Madonna, who in turn begs God to intercede on Venice’s behalf to close the ‘cruel wound’ of the plague. The city’s wound is of course spiritual and physical – she is haemorrhaging citizens; moreover, the plague manifests in the wounds known as buboes.

This painting shows also the practical side of mass death. Venice was supremely organised during episodes of plagues. Rules were laid down by the Magistrato alla Sanità and they worked all the way to street level. When it came to carrying away the dead, only licensed bearers, known as pizzegamorti, were allowed to handle the corpses. And so the painting fades to a miserable brown in the background behind the feminine personification of Venezia. Here you see the pizzegamorti at work, wearing their distinctive tunics marked with long red crosses. 

One of the essays in the exhibition's book explains how this painting developed. The modello or sketch (above) portrayed sprawled and splayed corpses piled up in the foreground. The final version replaced that grim sight with images of two female donors, whose beautiful faces (one of which is seen at left) show signs of graceful grief, echoing that of their patron saint. The essay theorizes that perhaps the donors had something to do with the sanitizing of the art.

Indeed other painters did not scruple to or were not prevented from showing the harrowing details of Venice in the grip of plague, as in this painting by Antonio Zanchi from the Scuola di San Rocco (courtesy of the Web Gallery of Art (https://www.wga.hu). It shows bodies being unloaded into boats and scenes of graphic distress and chaos that echo contemporary written accounts of the disaster.

The exhibition revealed that the words on the central banner of the Tintoretto painting were also adopted in litanies composed by Claudio Monteverdi who was the musical director of the Basilica San Marco in 1630, the time of this plague.

Paintings invoking Christ and the Madonna to intercede against disease were thought to have health-giving qualities. They were carried around the plague-plagued streets to sanitize them while such litanies were chanted by the priests. A miracle-working painting, the Madonna Nicopeia (looted from Constantinople in 1204) was borne around the piazza of San Marco in times of severe plague. It’s likely that Domenico Tintoretto’s painting was also paraded around the parish of San Francesco della Vigna. The shape and size of the painting makes this easy to imagine.

At that same time, the year of Domenico Tintoretto’s important painting, the city promised to build a votive church and establish a procession if the Madonna would intervene to save them from the plague.

The church of Santa Maria della Salute (Our Lady of Good Health) was the result. And in 1575, a similar prayer, this time to Christ the Redeemer, had already led to the construction of the church of the Redentore, or Redeemer on Giudecca. The festival of the Redentore is still celebrated today every July with a votive bridge for processions built in front of the church and massive fireworks at night.

When planning for the Apothecary tour last year, I was very excited at the prospect of showing them both the exhibition and the Domenico Tintoretto painting. So imagine my despair when I discovered that the Londoners would arrive in Venice one day after the closing of the exhibition. I couldn’t quite bear to deprive them of this painting. So I began to speak to people I know, working my way through a series of Venetian ‘no’s’ until I was directed by the eminent art historian Patricia Fortini Brown to Melissa Conn, the on-the-ground director of Save Venice, where she has thirty years’ experience overseeing the works of this American charity devoted to the restoration of buildings, monuments, manuscripts and more in the city. You can see Melissa here, talking about the restoration of Carpaccio’s Saint Ursula Cycle, also explaining modern philosophies and techniques of art conservation.

Save Venice had funded the Art, Faith and Medicine exhibition and the scholarship that was put into an excellent collection of essays that accompanied the show, as well as restoring sixteen Tintoretto works in Venice. To my enormous relief, Melissa agreed to open the exhibition privately, two days after its official closure so that the London Apothecaries could witness the plague painting for themselves, the day before we set off in a boat to see for ourselves the mist-shrouded lazzaretto islands in the lagoon that once housed those afflicted with the plague or suspected of it.

Melissa not only arranged for us to see the painting, but accompanied us. As Managing Curator of the exhibition, not to mention a noted art historian, she was a font of wonderful insights into this picture, some of which I have recorded above.

So did this votive painting have effect? The 1630/1 plague did indeed dwindle. The sighs of the city ceased. Life returned to normal, for a while. 

In our current difficulties, it does not appear that anyone is commissioning any art, votive or otherwise, to represent a hope of redemption from the corona virus. If someone did so, I wonder what it would look like? A collage of selfies? An internet meme? So far I have seen a photo of a cake cooked in the shape of the virus and a few not-very-funny cartoons to do with a brand of beer.

And even if there were a meme that caught this moment and the world’s anxiety with any accuracy, would it have the staying power, profundity and beauty of Domenico Tintoretto’s painting? 

And is this because we no longer join faith, art and medicine as Venetians did in Tintoretto's day?

Perhaps.

The churches of the Veneto are now closed by corona virus, along with the bars and shops. However, there's one parish priest on the Venetian mainland who has found a way to revive the trinity of faith, art and medicine.

Don Andrea Vena with his 'furgoncino dai fideli'

A video here shows Don Andrea Vena travelling around Bibione with a statue of the Madonna in a van, broadcasting prayers for all those affected by the virus, including the worried tourists. A modern priest, Don Andrea posts his itineraries on Facebook and keeps in touch with his parishioners that way too. Father Andrea pauses in front of cross-roads, shops and also the homes of the elderly, so they may be brought out to hear his comforting corona virus invocation to the Madonna, patron saint of Bibione. (Picture courtesy of Veneto Vox).

'Forte!' observes a man in the video, as Father Andrea finishes his prayer. 'Just great!'

Michelle Lovric’s website

Save Venice’s website

Culture and Society at Lullingstone Roman Villa by Caroline K. Mackenzie

March 19, 2020, 5:01 pm

≫ Next: The Woodward Tomb - Katherine Langrish

≪ Previous: How to read a painting of the plague - Michelle Lovric

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Caroline K. Mackenzie with her book, Culture and Society at Lullingstone Roman Villa. © Archaeopress.

Many of us have had our first introduction to Roman life through a visit, perhaps as a child, to one of the well-preserved villa sites in the UK. Here, Caroline Mackenzie tells us the background to her thorough survey of life at Lullingstone. (Caroline is joining us as a History Girl and this is her first post for us).

2019 was a rather special year for Lullingstone Roman Villa - it marked the 70th anniversary of the commencement of the excavations. The first clues as to the existence of a Roman site in the vicinity of Lullingstone in the Darent Valley, Kent had been recorded in about 1750 when the fence around Lullingstone deer park was being renewed and diggers of the post holes struck a mosaic. However, it was not until 1939 that an archaeological survey undertaken by Ernest Greenfield and Edwyn Birchenough of the Darent Valley Archaeological Research Group concentrated on the Roman finds and that the remarkable story of the discovery of Lullingstone Roman Villa properly began.

The Second World War halted the 1939 survey which had to be put on hold until 1947 when the archaeological team was joined by Lieutenant-Colonel Meates, recently retired from the Royal Artillery and by this time resident in the gatehouse at Lullingstone Castle. Excavations formally commenced in 1949 and these revealed the remains of a Roman villa which boasted much evidence of a luxurious lifestyle: mosaics, sculpture, wall-painting, a hypocaust and baths. By 1955, Meates had become leader of the excavations and he oversaw them until their completion in 1961, documenting the finds in a series of publications.

The excavation team included numerous volunteers, some of them still schoolchildren, who dedicated much time and effort to uncovering the site. Many of these volunteers, now in their 70s and 80s, returned to the villa in July last year to celebrate the anniversary at a special reunion. I was fortunate to be invited to meet them and their families and it was fascinating hearing their stories.

Caroline K. Mackenzie presenting her research at Lullingstone Roman Villa, July 2019.  © Claire Lowe Photography.

I, too, visited the villa as a schoolchild. By this time the excavations had been completed and the site was being managed (as it is today) by English Heritage. I was inspired by the beauty of the mosaics and enthralled by the thought that this had been someone’s home over 1,500 years ago. I became fascinated by the Greeks and Romans and went on to study Classics at university. Many years later, and after a career as a solicitor, I visited Lullingstone again. Within months I had become a Classics teacher at a local school in Sevenoaks. I believe Lullingstone may have had some influence on this decision!

A few years later, when I began studying for an MA in Classical Art and Archaeology at King’s College London, the choice of topic for my dissertation was obvious. I lived near Lullingstone and visited it often, and I wanted to learn more about its history. I decided to focus on two main aspects: first, the villa within its landscape setting and the role of topography in the owner’s self-representation; second, the choice and use of mosaics in the fourth century villa and how the patron presented his cultural identity and status through pavements. Two modern television programmes sprung to mind: Location, Location, Location and Grand Designs! I started to wonder whether modern criteria for choosing a home have changed much from Roman times.

In assessing the landscape setting, I realised I would need to explore the vicinity of the villa on foot. This was an approach first adopted by Tilley in his innovative 1994 book. I also wanted to research the ancillary buildings which included a circular shrine, a temple-mausoleum and a granary. I used the experience of exploring the area to examine the relative prominence of the villa and its ancillary buildings; for example, were they highly visible in the landscape? I also considered how the architects combined the setting with the layout of the villa to create a conspicuous display of the owner’s standing and worth.

Lullingstone Villa in its landscape in the later fourth century AD (illustration by Peter Urmston). © Historic England Archive.

By way of comparison, I decided to examine some other Romano-British villas. I had recently visited the Isle of Wight and the magnificent site of Brading Roman Villa. Themes such as the four seasons in Brading’s stunning mosaic provided direct comparisons for Lullingstone and helped me to answer questions such as what might have been represented in the part of Lullingstone’s mosaic which had been accidentally dug up in the 1700s. Chedworth Roman Villa, now managed by the National Trust, provided a particularly interesting case study in the context of its landscape setting.

In addition to Lullingstone’s central room which boasts the seasons mosaic framing Bellerophon killing the Chimaera, the adjacent apsidal dining room is celebrated for its mosaic of Europa riding the bull. The Europa mosaic is accompanied by a Latin inscription and in this context, I studied Classical literature in other Romano-British villas to see if Lullingstone is what we would expect or whether it is exceptional.

In this blog, I shall set out the main themes of the book and hope you will be inspired to learn more!

Landscape setting

Wall-paintings from Lullingstone now on display at the British Museum indicated that Christian worship had taken place in the villa. The evidence of religion has been exploited and applied to the mosaics in the adjacent rooms. However, I interpreted the evidence in other ways and asked questions based instead on the use of space, landscape setting and architectural context of the mosaics. Wallace-Hadrill’s work in Pompeii and Herculaneum focused on the use of domestic space and the public and private spheres of a home.[1] Scott subsequently applied a similar concept to the interior space of Romano-British villas and extended it by placing more emphasis on the landscape setting.[2] I applied Scott’s methods to examine how Lullingstone’s inhabitants used domestic space to assert their status and cultural identity. A key example for Scott was that, by alluding to knowledge of Graeco-Roman culture, owners expressed their paideia: their appreciation of literature, philosophy and mythology enjoyed by the Roman élite.[3] In my research, I examined the practices of the inhabitants primarily during the late third and fourth centuries AD and how they adopted Roman culture in their domestic space.

Lullingstone Roman villa is in the Darent Valley in west Kent. It sits on a terrace cut into the hillside 55m west of the west bank of the river Darent, whose valley cuts through the North Downs, and was around 20 miles from Londinium (London). Lullingstone was a favourable site because of its access to varied resources and agricultural riches.

In total there are around sixty known/suspected villas in Kent, most of which are in north Kent. Lullingstone was therefore part of an intensively exploited and agriculturally rich landscape. The Darent Valley villas probably supplied food and other agricultural produce to London and provided residences for the London elites.

A symbolic dimension of the owner’s appropriation of the landscape and its resources was the establishment of a cult room apparently relating to water deities complete with a niched wall-painting of three water-nymphs. This was created c. AD 180, contemporaneous with the baths, and demonstrated the owners’ reverence for water. It was located at the northeast of the villa, where the slope had been excavated to create what is known as the ‘Deep Room’.[4] The niche was later blocked up and could have easily escaped the excavators’ notice but, in a twist of fate, the site flooded mid-excavations and dislodged the plaster concealing the water-nymphs.[5] The villa-owner who created the water cult room might have seen this as a sign!

Reconstruction of ‘Deep Room’ shown at underground level, c. AD 380 (illustration by Peter Dunn/Richard Lea). © Historic England Archive.

Visitors today may appreciate the tranquil setting and the view from the villa. While modern subjective assessments of ‘a lovely setting’ must be qualified, we know from Roman authors that observers then were sensitive to the aesthetics of views and this is not just a modern phenomenon (Ausonius: Moselle; Pliny the Younger: Epistulae 2.17).

Modern view of Darent Valley, taken from modern road approaching the Villa. © Caroline K. Mackenzie.

In c. AD 100 a circular building was constructed on a prepared terrace 24.4.m northwest of the villa. A flint and mortar construction with a thatched roof but no windows, it is thought to have been used for cult purposes until c. AD 180. The slope is steep and the elevated shrine must have made an imposing statement.[6]

It is believed to have fallen into ruin following disuse in the third century. However, the terrace on which it stood was extended to receive a temple-mausoleum in AD 300. This stood prominently around 6m above the ground to the west of the villa[7] and exemplifies skilful use of the hill-slope to create monumentality and visibility. The building took the form of a 12.2m square Romano-Celtic temple.[8] Beneath this was a tomb chamber with two lead coffins and various grave goods. We do not know the identity of the couple buried but it may be the villa-owner and his wife, and the temple-mausoleum seems to have been created for this double burial.

The date of construction of the temple-mausoleum coincides with a major refurbishment to the villa and its surroundings, all of which demonstrated the wealth and aspirations of the owner. The bath complex had been rebuilt and extended in around AD 280 and in AD 293-297 a large granary was constructed to the northeast of the villa,[9] a statement of agricultural prowess. The temple-mausoleum was a necessary part of the refurbishment for a villa-owner who wanted to make his mark on the landscape, in death as in life.

The large granary would have complemented the architecture and positioning of the villa. The granary may also exemplify ‘the conspicuous display of agricultural production, processing and storage’. Taylor argues convincingly for more detailed studies of entire rural settlements and not just domestic buildings, the latter which attract scholarly analysis due to the existence of their mosaics, hypocausts and baths.[10]

The use of landscape to create immediate impact on visitors was used to similar effect in the villa at Great Witcombe in the Coln Valley, which was built into a steep hillside with the main part of the complex highest up ensuring that the most important visitors and household members were, quite literally, placed above everyone else.

Chedworth Roman Villa merited a more detailed discussion in my book: its landscape setting and display of wealth and status provide significant comparisons with Lullingstone. Chedworth Roman Villa was constructed in a small steep-sided valley of the river Coln, Gloucestershire.[11] Visitors to the late fourth century villa would have been struck by its impressive stature in its landscape setting.

The mosaics at Lullingstone

The central room at Lullingstone was a part of the villa which had been in use in every phase of its occupation but in c. AD 330-60[12] it was given a face-lift with the instalment of a lavish mosaic. It depicted Bellerophon mounted on the winged horse Pegasus and killing the Chimaera. Surrounded by a cushion shaped guilloche, this part of the mosaic also contained four dolphins and two shell-type objects. Around the guilloche was a plain, square border, the four corners of which each contained a roundel depicting one of the four seasons, represented by female busts.

Detail: Bellerophon on Pegasus, spearing the Chimaera. c. AD 330-60. © Historic England Archive.

The location and size of this room suggest that it served as an audience chamber, like the atrium in Italian villas, where the aristocrat held his morning salutatio (greeting) by his clients. The British equivalent might have been the farm workers coming to the villa to receive instructions for the day, or tenants coming to pay their rent.[13]

Detail: Summer. c. AD 330-60. © Historic England Archive.

Seasons were a popular mosaic choice in Roman Britain (c.f. Brading and Littlecote) and the rest of empire. In my book, I discuss several possible interpretations of the seasons including them reflecting the liberality of the owner;[14] this might be exactly the message the Lullingstone patron had in mind, at a time when he was investing finances in his property.

Bellerophon could represent a heroic model for the patron’s own hunting exploits[15] and an allusion to power.[16] It was comprehensible to most viewers familiar with Homer’s Iliad in which the story was first told (6.155-202). The Homeric reference therefore reflects Lullingstone’s owner’s classical learning, a message consistently conveyed in all the mosaics he chose.

The apsidal room at Lullingstone was added as part of the overall embellishment of the villa c. AD 330-60.[17] A 23cm high step led from the audience chamber to the apse’s entrance, providing a natural extension to the space used for receiving clients and entertaining guests.[18]

Reconstruction of Lullingstone’s audience chamber and apse. c. AD 330-60 (illustration by Peter Dunn). © Historic England Archive.

Reconstruction of Lullingstone's apsidal dining room with stibadium c. AD 330-60 (illustration by Peter Dunn). © Historic England Archive.

The figure scene in the apse portrays Europa riding on a bull (Jupiter in disguise) over the sea, accompanied by two cupids with a Latin inscription above. The allusion is to Book 1 (50) of Virgil’s Aeneid and plays on the story of Juno’s anger at her husband Jupiter’s infidelity. Ovid’s Metamorphoses 2.846-75 recounts Jupiter’s transformation into a bull to trick and seduce Europa. As with Bellerophon, the overriding message that the owner wanted to convey was his paideia, his wealth and, by the inscription, his wit.

Europa mosaic. c. AD 330-60. © Historic England Archive.

Concluding thoughts

My book sets out to demonstrate how the ensemble of the architecture, the mosaics and the exterior space worked to persuade visitors of the owner’s wealth and status. This included his right and ability to tame the landscape. The choices of mosaics provide compelling evidence of a traditional Classical education and sophisticated knowledge of Virgil and Ovid. The inscription is a remarkable paradigm of paideia. The Lullingstone owner acted out his role as a powerful and influential individual, displaying his cultural identity and status. We are fortunate that the landscape which served the owner’s purposes in Roman times has also performed a service for us in the years since, by washing soil and debris downhill and thus preserving much of the villa and its mosaics for us to explore 1,600 years later.

Acknowledgements

First, thank you to Mary Hoffman and all the History Girls for inviting me to join their blog and also to Caroline Lawrence for introducing me to the History Girls. Sincere thanks to Dr. John Pearce at King’s College London for his invaluable help and guidance during my research of Lullingstone Roman Villa and for his supervision and all his support during my MA in Classical Art & Archaeology. Thank you also to all the following: Historic England for permission to use their images; Dr. Will Wootton and Dr. Zena Kamash; Friends of Brading Roman Villa, David Reeves, Bob Pitt and Jasmine Wroath; Kent Archaeological Society and Dr. Gerald Cramp; DROP (Discover Roman Otford Project), Kevin Fromings and Gary Bennett; Rod Shelton; and Rob Sherratt. Last but certainly not least, thank you to everyone at Archaeopress and in particular to Dr. David Davison, Ben Heaney, Patrick Harris and Dan Stott.

Scale model of Lullingstone Roman Villa. © Rod Shelton.

Caroline K. Mackenzie is a writer, tutor and lecturer.

Her first book Culture and Society at Lullingstone Roman Villa is available direct from Archaeopress (free PDF included with the purchase of the printed edition) or from Amazon.co.uk; Blackwell's; Book Depository; and Waterstones.

 

[1] Wallace-Hadrill 1988: 52-55.

[2] Scott 2000.

[3] Scott 2000: 126-8.

[4] Meates 1955: 59.

[5] Meates 1979: 17 and 33.

[6] Meates 1979: 119.

[7] Meates 1979: 17.

[8] Meates 1979: 122.

[9] Meates 1955: 114.

[10] Taylor 2011: 180.

[11] Esmonde Cleary 2013: 14.

[12] Meates 1979: 84.

[13] Ellis 1995: 166.

[14] Ellis 1995: 175.

[15] Ling 1997: 278-9.

[16] Ellis 1995: 175.

[17] Meates 1979: 73.

[18] Barrett 1978: 310.

The Woodward Tomb - Katherine Langrish

March 28, 2020, 11:21 am

≫ Next: Charcoal Burning - our woodland heritage

≪ Previous: Culture and Society at Lullingstone Roman Villa by Caroline K. Mackenzie

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In steadfast Hopes of a happy Resurrection here lyes
WILLIAM WOODWARD

Eldest son of THOMAS WOODWARD Citizen and

Carpenter of London and ALICE his wife. A youth adorn’d

with most Excellent Endowments of mind and in all

Arts even above the common reach of his years most

Expert.

His Parents hope and only Pride and Joy

Whom with the highest duty he allways honour’d

And with great Resignation to the will of Heaven

in the sixteenth year of his age dyed April the 2^nd, An Dom

MDCCXXV

Him GOD to Man had of a Pattern given

Not giv’n but Lent and took him back to Heaven

So reads a touching inscription on the side of a table tomb in our local Oxfordshire churchyard, the grave of a boy of 15 who died in 1725. The tomb is a listed monument, protected under law – and last year it had to be restored, as the domed roof of the vault beneath it was in danger of collapsing. And so for a brief week the tomb was cordoned off with black and yellow tape, workmen arrived, and daylight shone in upon the two burials beneath – young William and an older man, now only bones, their coffins having disintegrated. One of the workmen told me that William had a broken leg; was that what caused the poor boy’s death? 

On the west end of the tomb is another inscription, less personal. Beneath two death’s heads, one in profile:

Death is the utmost

Bound of Life

And crossed bones under it. 

But why was the boy buried here, and what was his father, that master carpenter and Citizen of London, doing in a tiny Berkshire village? (For back then the village was in Berkshire, before the boundary changes.) Now the local history group (Hanney History Group) has done a wonderful job of researching the Woodward family via the parish registers and other records. It seems there was ‘a whole dynasty’ of Woodwards in the village, carpenters by trade, who may well have sent sons to London to be apprenticed in the big city: for Thomas and Richard Woodward – who may have been brothers and were, respectively, a carpenter, and a painter employed in the London parish of St Sepulchre – are named as inheriting property in Hanney. In 1723, Thomas Woodward, Carpenter, was helping build properties in one of the first speculative street developments, in Marylebone. The writer continues:

It seems likely that Thomas Woodward who erected the monument to his young son of 15 wanted to mark his roots and bring his precious child back to Hanney. He also wanted to perhaps show how he had prospered. To be a Citizen of London was no mean achievement. It also meant that he had become a rich man, probably no longer a ‘hands-on’ carpenter. A Thomas Woodward was buried in Hanney in 1747 and may be the father of William – perhaps the other occupant of the grave? The grave seemed set up for three people, but could have held double that number. No records of the burial of Alice, his mother, exist for Hanney.

Now, twenty miles north of here stands Blenheim Palace, built between 1705 and 1722 – intended as the gift of a grateful nation for Marlborough’s victory at the Battle of Blenheim. 

The architect was Sir John Vanbrugh, chosen personally by the Duke of Marlborough but greatly disliked by his Duchess, Sarah Churchill – a lady of character and determination and, famously, Queen Anne’s bosom friend. Sarah didn’t like Vanbrugh’s Baroque design. She herself had wanted Sir Christopher Wren, and she also suspected that he would be very expensive. She was right. Who was to pay for the palace was never satisfactorily worked out between Duke, Queen and Parliament, and all payments ceased when the Queen finally broke off relations with her erstwhile best friend. The Marlboroughs fled to the continent, returning only after Anne’s death in 1714. Building work then resumed with the Duke footing the bill – but altercations soon followed when he suffered a stroke in 1717, and Sarah took charge. Vanbrugh decamped in a rage as she fired his picked master-masons and carpenters and hired her own craftsmen at lower rates. The palace was finally completed in 1722.

 

And scattered around this part of Oxfordshire there still stand a number of splendid gentlemen’s houses of similar but slightly later date, built in the Baroque style of Blenheim itself, statements of wealth and fashion. These benefited from the skills of some of those master craftsmen who had flooded into the region to build Blenheim and were now looking about for other work. One of these houses is in West Hanney, overlooking the church and churchyard where 15 year old William Woodward, son of Thomas Woodward – Citizen and Carpenter of London – was laid to rest. The boy died in 1725, two years before West Hanney House was completed. 

And so I wonder if there is a chance that Thomas Woodward, with his local family contacts, had been employed at some time between 1716 and 1722 on the construction of Blenheim Palace – or perhaps after 1723, that of West Hanney House? Could that have been what brought him and his family out of London and back to his roots? There’s probably no way we shall ever know, but it seems possible. Certainly the grieving father was rich enough to pay for his son William’s sumptuous monument… a monument which has just cost the parish council the best part of £16,000 to repair.

Picture credits:

Photos of the Woodward Tomb - Katherine Langrish

Blenheim Palace, wikimedia commons, gailf548 from New York State, USA  

Sarah Churchill, wikimedia commons