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THE HISTORICAL HOUSE SERIES....Redux. By Adèle Geras

December 6, 2012, 11:30 pm
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In 2004, which seems a very long time ago, even though it isn't really, three books were published by Usborne in the Historical House series. These were: LIZZIE'S WISH, 1857 by me,

POLLY'S MARCH 1919 by Linda Newbery
and JOSIE UNDER FIRE 1942 by Ann Turnbull.
In 2007, we followed these up with three others. Ann wrote MARY ANNE AND MISS MOZART 1764,
I wrote CECILY'S PORTRAIT 1895
and Linda's book was ANDIE'S MOON 1969.

The whole thing began with a conversation between Linda Newbery and Megan Larkin. Linda suggested that Megan might commission a series not unlike the A & C Black FLASHBACKS, but with girls as the main characters. FLASHBACKS did have a more boyish focus at that time. It was, Linda tells me, Megan's idea to link the stories through the idea of a house in London with a girl living in it at different periods of history.

I chose to write about the Victorian period and in particular I was interested in writing (even if only tangentially) about Florence Nightingale and the War in the Crimea. At that time, Linda had planted a walnut in a pot to give as a present to David Fickling. She told me about that, and I immediately saw that if I planted a tree in the first book (as it was at that time) then it could grow and flourish through the whole series. My second book, CECILY'S PORTRAIT is a direct sequel to LIZZIE'S WISH and Lizzie herself celebrates her fiftieth birthday in 1895 under the tree she planted in 1857.

Linda and Ann did most of the research work. They walked with Megan Larkin round Chelsea to find the right house. Ann's husband, Tim, made us some lovely floor plans and I was stupid enough to have thought that the back of the house was the front, until my mistake was pointed out to me. I just took advantage of all their hard work. At the beginning, before we'd written a word, we sent one another (and Megan) our synopses. Once we'd agreed that these were okay, we began to write. We swapped information. We showed one another our completed manuscripts. I added a chaise longue to my text which Ann and Linda had previously decided to have in theirs. Ann hid something in her 1764 book for Cecily to find in 1895...and so on. It was an entirely harmonious and pleasant experience, cooperative rather than collaborative.

Usborne couldn't have been more supportive. Megan was a perfect editor: helpful and intelligent. When the books came out, we were given a really spectacular launch, with Nicholas Tucker, in front of quite a large audience, talking to us about the series. This Historical House press conference, so to speak, was followed a really wonderful dinner. I'll never forget Nicholas's first question, because it really took us aback a little. He asked us why the main protagonist in each story was a girl. There wasn't a good answer to give except to say: that's what we decided to do, that was the brief and in any case, why shouldn't all the main protagonists be girls? Having a girl at the centre of each book throws, besides, a totally different light on historical events and one which isn't often explored. The fact that boys were not overlooked in the books also, I think, counted for something.

Usborne arranged many events for us. We spoke to schools and book groups, such as the Federation of Children's Book Groups. In those long-distant days, there wasn't any Twittering and blogging. Yes, O Best Beloved, back then publishers did a great deal of the hard work of promotion and made sure that the book was reviewed, talked about and known in the wider world.

The books were a success, I think. In any case, we were each asked to write another. Ann chose to go back before the first book, to 1764 in her story, which involved Mozart's sister, who came to perform in this country as a girl. Linda's book is about the Moon Landings, which counts as History, even though I remember it very well.

I feel quite unashamed in doing my bit, a few years down the line, to spread the word once more. Children grow up and other children take their place. It would be good if the new generation could enjoy these books now. Though I say it myself as shouldn't, I think this is an excellent series and it deserves to be read again and written about again. For my part, I loved writing my contributions to the set and I wouldn't mind doing the same sort of thing a second time. Thanks, Megan, and thanks to Linda and Ann too.

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A Peck of Poison by Karen Maitland

December 7, 2012, 7:00 pm
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It’s only when I have visitors or repairmen in my house and I see the expressions on their faces that I realize the contents of my bookshelves are not what most people would regard as ‘normal.’ I’ve been researching poisons for my current novel , so there are lots of books and papers on the uses of arsenic, hemlock and deadly venoms lying around. Strangely, many of my visitors have suddenly changed their minds about having that cup of tea or piece of cake.


But honestly, the history of poison is fascinating not least because it often involves the ever-fascinating three ‘R’s  – Romance, Royalty and Revenge. Take the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, that story makes even the Christmas Day soaps on TV look tame.



In the reign of James I, 14 year old Robert, Earl of Essex was married off to 13 year old Frances Howard, daughter of Earl of Suffolk. Robert was then sent abroad for a few years and married life only really began when he returned. But it was an unhappy union, for Frances loved the bright lights of court while he wanted the peace and quiet of the country.



The young countess, who was a great flirt, eventually fell in love with Robert Carr one of the handsome young men King James had introduced to his court. Frances was desperate for Carr to take notice of her, so persuaded a lady known as Mrs Turner to arrange secret meetings. (Mrs Turner was famous for having brought a yellow starch to England, to stiffen the fashionable ruffs of high-born women.) Mrs Turner helped Frances to meet Carr and even found a magician skilled in the black arts to make wax images which Frances could use to kill her husband and make Carr fall in love with her.

But a friend of Carr’s, Sir Thomas Overbury, was foolish enough to warn Carr to end the affair which, he said, would ruin Carr’s ambitions at court. Carr and Frances contrived to get King James to imprison Sir Thomas in the Tower. They then proceeded to send him gifts of food laced with a variety of poisons including silver nitrate, spiders, Spanish Fly and arsenic. When those failed to kill him quickly enough they added a corrosive substance to burn out his throat and stomach.  Thomas died and Frances divorced her husband, citing impotency, and married Carr, who King James made Earl of Somerset.



But the two years later the crime was exposed. The Earl and his wife were found guilty of murder, but they received a royal pardon. They did, in way, get punished, for their marriage fell apart and though they lived in the same house, they loathed each other so much, they went out of their way to ensure they never encountered each another, even by accident, which must have given the ghost of poor Sir Thomas some satisfaction.

Mrs Turner and the others who helped them, not being of noble birth, were hanged for their part in the conspiracy. But dear Mrs Turner, fashion conscious to the end, insisted on being hanged in her yellow starched ruff.


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Competition winners

December 8, 2012, 7:21 am
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We have four winners of copies of Blood Sisters in our November competition:

Derek Birks
Ruan Peat
Whisks
Linda

To get your prizes, please contact Katherine Josselyn: katherine.josselyn@harpercollins.co.uk with your land addresses.

Congratulations to our winners!
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Musings on the Ancient Roman Mindset

December 8, 2012, 4:20 pm
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by Caroline Lawrence

do I have an internal monologue?
Over the past dozen years I have been writing books for kids set in the Roman world of the first century CE.


I try to write books that children can identify with. They are partly historical fact, partly a filter through which kids can examine their own lives. If I showed ancient Rome the way it really was, would modern children find too alien to relate to? Would I find it too alien to write?


The more I immerse myself in that world, the more I wonder if we can ever know what it was really like. Sometimes I try to think outside the box and be as creative as I can. I try to think what would surprise me most if I really could transport back to first century Rome. Elsewhere, I’ve blogged about the surprising differences we might encounter in the physical world itself. But what about the Roman mindset? How did they think about the world?  


Here are a few laterally thought-up ideas about what might blind-side us if we really could go back to Ancient Rome.


1. No internal monologue.

How did Romans think about themselves? We know that most (literate) Romans only read out loud. To read silently, in your head, was considered strange. So did they have internal monologues in their heads? Did they have the same kind of constant self-commentary that we do?


2. No satellites.

Romans had no idea where they were on the map. The only map we have from the first century doesn’t even look like a map. The most educated might have had some idea, but even the great travellers like Julius Caesar and Strabo had not a tenth of the concept of the world that we do with our Google earth and desk globes. Most Romans probably never budged more than a few miles from where they were born and had no idea what lay beyond. That's why even Romans as intelligent as Pliny the Elder believed in bizarre races of men in far away places.


3. No Judeo-Christian mindset.

Even Richard Dawkins says "Oh, God!" There are concepts of charity and forgiveness so embedded in the fabric of our world after two thousand years that we don't even distinguish these concepts as Judeo-Christian. Yes, Romans had a concept of patronage which is like charity. But what other culture urges us to forgive our enemies? Even the concept that we have a "purpose" or a "journey" on earth is Judeo-Christian.


trying to read by candlelight will ruin your eyes
4. No artificial light.

Yes, they had candles, braziers and oil-lamps. But even urban-dwelling Romans would have been more attuned to the phases of the moon and length of the days than we are. This total dependence on the natural day must have affected the way they acted and behaved. We know from Virgil and other writers that Romans probably enjoyed the two stages of sleep (first sleep and second sleep divided by a natural waking for an hour or so) known to mankind before the invention of electricity. Life for a Roman would have been a succession of ever repeating seasons, the cycles of the year, until you die. There was no Judeo-Christian concept of a journey from childhood to old age, getting older and wiser as you age.


happy without chocolate or tea?
5. No chocolate.

Seriously. The Romans never knew the endorphin lift that a chocolate bar or mug of hot cocoa can give us. Nor did they have tea or coffee. Or tobacco or spirits. Their wine was most likely foul, full of so many nasty congeners that it would give drinkers like Mark Anthony a foul headache. What did they do for a fillip?


6. No mirrors or cameras.

Think how many reflective and reflecting surfaces we have in our lives. Mirrors, shop windows, cameras, CCTV cameras showing us walking past shops. Even the richest Roman with the smoothest silver mirror would not have had a clue what he or she really looked like. Would this lack of an intimate knowledge of their own physical appearance have affected the way they interacted with the world? How many of us "watch ourselves" entering a party or walking along a street? Did a Roman ever visually play mental scenarios beforehand? If so, what were they like? Was it from his or her POV? A bird's eye POV? A fluid POV?


7. No zero.

How did Romans do mental maths? Could they even count beyond the number of fingers and toes doubled? They had no number zero. Did they have times tables?


8. No crayons.

We have dozens of different words for thousands of different shades and hues of colour. The Romans had far fewer and categorized them differently, more by tone and saturation, or by linking a colour to a natural object. Some linguists believe that the language we use determines how we perceive the world. Children in Western society have kindergartens full of crayons dividing the spectrum into bite-sized colours. The Romans didn’t. So did they even see the world differently? (See Mark Bradley's recent Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome for an academic consideration of Latin and Greek concepts of colour)


can you make music with that?
9. No music (as we know it).

Did Romans wake up with music in their heads the way we do? We hear so much music that it lodges in our brains. Also, we hear music played exactly the same way time after time, because we have recordings. Even if you lived in a Roman house where the mother sang all the time, every version would be slightly different. We don't really know what Roman music sounded like. Would we even call it music?


10. Division by gender not age. 

Today a woman can do almost anything a man can, thanks to the past two centuries of women’s rights. On the other hand, there are many things children can’t do that adults can. In Roman times it was the opposite, the division was not between child and adult but male and female. Romans did not have our concept of childhood as something to be protected. As soon as a girl reached puberty she could marry (the legal age in first century Rome was 12). As soon as a boy was physically able, he worked. Of course there were a few coming-of-age ceremonies, but the real division of responsibility and privilege in Roman times was marked by gender.

Those are a few random ideas tossed out on a cold Saturday afternoon in December. Some of them might be right, some of them might be crazy. But I still have this nagging thought that I'm missing something so basic and all-pervasive that it hasn't even occurred to me. Anybody?

Caroline Lawrence writes historical fiction for kids. www.carolinelawrence.com
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Hints for my Christmas Stocking – Michelle Lovric

December 9, 2012, 4:30 pm
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This blog is for any patron of the arts, well-wisher, vecchio amante danaroso letterario( ‘literary Sugardaddy’) or rich uncle wishing to curry favour with his favourite niece or anyone else waiting for some hints about what this particular History Girl would like in her Christmas stocking  ….
Just a couple of books, honestly, such as

 

Le Arti che vanno per via nella città di Venezia– 1753

The greasy fritter (holeless doughnut)
sellers on the streets of Venice
I’d translate this as Street Trades of the City of Venice, but really there is an element of art to it all, in the same sense that Venice herself may be described as a beautiful working puppet theatre on a grand scale. Le Arte is a collection of 60 etchings designed by the artist Gaetano Gherardo Zompini. Below each lively illustration is a rhymed triplet by Don Questini, parish priest of Santa Maria Mater Domini.

These depictions of the working class in Venice are lovely because they show professions that speak of the city’s picturesque past. I love the combinations of the trades such as
Conza Lavezzi (Tinker and Cat Gelder);
Inchiostro (Ink and Rat Poison Seller);
And the glimpses into Venetian appetites provided by specialists like the
Caraguoi (Snail Vendor);
Dolce de Vedeletto (Blood Pudding Seller);
Frittole (Fritter Maker);
One can see the ways Venetians enjoyed themselves in these professions:
Fitta Palchi (Keeper of Theatre Boxes);
Coro d'Orbi (Blind Musicians);
Mondo Novo (Peep Box Operator).
And of sadly lost jobs like the
Marmotina (Marmot Keeper);
Metti Massere (Maidservants' Agent)
This is a book to give pleasure for years … and OMI in New York just happen to have a lovely facsimile edition for just 1900 euros 

If it’s not too much to ask, I’d also like a work by Gaultier de Coste, Seigneur de la Calprenède, called Hymen’s Præludia: or Love’s Master-Piece. Being that So-much-Admired Romance, intituled, Cleopatra. In Twelve Parts. Written originally in the French, and now rendered into English, by Robert Loveday [and John Coles, James Webb and John Davies].


This dark, speckled jewel may be had for just 2000 of your finest English pounds from Blackwell’s Rare Books, a site well worth a wistful pre-Christmas browse.

I’d be overjoyed to find in my stocking a copy of Automata, by Alfred Chapuis, Edmond Droz and Alec Reid, Editions du Griffon, 1958. My next book, The Fate in the Box, is set in a fantasy Venice of 1783, when a shadowy slave army of Winder-Uppers is forced to keep the mechanical devices of the city ticking, and in researching it, I discovered many outrageous and hilarious devices that were fascinating the public before batteries were invented.

There’s a particularly fine version of Automata at Classic Rare Books, bound in full crimson morocco gilt, with crimson watered silk endpapers, and all edges gilt, with 18 full-page colour plates, and 488 monochrome illustrations and diagrams within the text.

It’s only £1000 and you can find it here 

I could not help being attracted to Thomas Boyle’s Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, (Hodder & Stoughton) a relative youngster with a 1990 publications date, and the very reasonable price of £20 at RFG Hollett & Son.

I’d love all three volumes of Wilkie Collins’s lesser-known masterpiece, Armadale (1866)about a bigamous, murderous, heartless opium-addicted redhead, Lydia Gwilt, and her many male victims, all of whom seem to sleepwalk into her cruel clutches, while the reader cries out ‘No! No! Just look at those serpentine coils of blood-red hair! Can't you see she's evil on legs?’ Haven’t seen an edition anywhere yet, outside of the London Library, but still hoping.

And, failing that, an amusing little volume by ‘Unknown’ from 1848: The Sinks of London Laid Open - A Pocket Companion for the Uninitiated, to Which is Added a Modern Flash Dictionary Containing all the Cant Words, Slang Terms, and Flash Phrases Now in Vogue, with a List of the Sixty Orders of Prime Coves.

Now if someone really wanted to push the boat out, how about an immensely covetable first edition of John Donne, published just two years after his death, with elegies and Juvenilia?

There’s just a bit of rebinding and spot of worm damage to the lower cover. I don’t want to tell you the price, because the value is beyond rubies for those of us whose adolescent passion for Donne has never slackened. Visit it anyway, just to imagine, at Peter Harrington.

Now, the bibliophile’s equivalent of Terry’s Chocolate Orange for the heel of the stocking?

For me, it would be The Jelly Book by Ralph Steadman (not to be confused with Don't Put Your Finger in the Jelly, Nelly! by Nick Sharratt). No, this is a proper History Girls’ jelly book, dealing with the natural and social history of jelly, explaining how it grows on trees, and is picked by kind people. At factories the good jelly is sorted from the bad (the bad jelly is use to stuff pillows and mattresses). Thereafter jelly’s progress up the social scale is pretty triumphant, all the way to the Mayor’s table, carried there between the horns of a cow who provides fresh cream on the spot. As I remember, the mayor’s favourite flavour is lemon …

There’s an American edition of The Jelly Book available at Eastman Books in Albany, Oregon, USA for around £30 including p&p. 

Would anyone else like to share their Christmas stocking list?
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The Town Waits, by Laurie Graham

December 11, 2012, 3:27 am
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When I was a little girl our Christmas cake, baked and iced by my mother according to an invariable schedule, was decorated with five little plaster figures, muffled up like carol singers. 'They're the Town Waits,' my Mum explained, but she could never tell me what they were doing or why.
This painting of the Leicester Town Waits by Henry Reynolds Steer is a real Victorian confection. The market cross, at the junction of High Cross Street and High Street, was gone by the 1830s. And the musicians, in their gorgeous livery? Well, one of them appears to be playing a viol, an unwieldy instrument for a strolling player. The Waits generally used wind instruments, a bit of percussion, and of course, their voices. Still, it is a lovely painting.

So what do we know about the Waits? Lots of towns had them. Their name was probably derived from a shawm-like instrument called a wayte-pipe. Their civic role is harder to trace precisely but there are some clues. When towns were still walled, with gates that closed at night, there was always a watch-keeper with a horn, to sound the alarm if danger approached or to signal the arrival of a VIP.

Then there were processions, so important in the Church year and also for a city's sense of grandeur and theatre. Eventually a small band of musicians were put on the payroll, to be on call. It was by no means a full time job but they were paid a retainer and given a uniform to wear. By the 16th century the Waits were doing more than processions. They were also calling the hours, particularly in the long dark nights between All Saints and Candlemas. 'Four o'clock and all's well.' It would have been a comforting thing to hear, though I imagine the occasional window must have been flung open in anger. 'Four o'clock and all was well till you woke me.'

The instruments used by the Waits had wonderful names: the cornamuse, the gemshorn, the rackett or pocket basson as it was sometimes called, the crumhorn, and a small goatskin drum called a naker. And the most portable instrument of all, the human voice, calling the hours and singing, as required.

The Leicester Waits were disbanded in 1947, the year I was born, so I never got to hear them. Their funding cut off in an act of post-war austerity, I suppose. But my mother's aunt remembered hearing them when she was a child, singing 'Past three o'clock' in the weeks before Christmas. There are many perfect recordings of this old carol, mainly sung by angelic choirboys, but I think this one best captures the sound of street music, and as it comes from the Chieftains' album Bells of Dublin and Dublin is where I now live, it seems doubly appropriate.

Now there is good news and bad. The bad news is that my mother's little plaster Waits figures have disappeared. Tossed out in some ruthless spring clean, no doubt. I would so love to have them. The good news is that Leicester reinstated its Town Waits in 2002, and the position is currently held by the Longslade Consort. I guess I'd better go back to my old home town to hear them.


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Anyone for snowballs? by H.M. Castor

December 11, 2012, 5:30 pm
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Detail from Allegory of Winter by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1285-1348)
[Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

Though financial paperwork would not usually be a favourite topic of mine, accounts made centuries ago can be fascinating. In the case of the Tudors – my current area of study – they can give us marvellous details of pageants, feasts, orders of clothing and equipment, and even the layout of rooms (“Made anew in the Queen’s dining chamber a great carrall window on the west side, with new leaning places, and a halpace [half-pace/half-step] underfoot, new made... A jakes made at the north end of the Queen's dining chamber” – this at the Tower of London in 1532, in preparation for Anne Boleyn's coronation) – and they can, in the case of a single person’s accounts, give us tantalising glimpses of what he (or she) got up to, and where.


They can also, of course, be puzzling. One of my favourite examples – and one for which I haven’t yet found a satisfactory explanation (can anyone help?) – is amongst Anne Boleyn’s last purchases for her daughter, the future Elizabeth I, who was two and a half at the time:


20 Feb. [1536]: “A pair of pyrwykes” for my lady Princess, delivered to my lady mistress [i.e. Elizabeth's governess].


The word “pyrwykes” has been left in quotation marks, and without a footnote, in the transcript of these accounts, I assume because the (Victorian) editors could not explain it. Fascinatingly, pyrwykes or pilliwinks originally meant “thumbscrews” – an instrument of torture – which surely guarantees that, in its use here, it was a nickname… but for what? The late Eric Ives suggested finger-straighteners, but as far as I can tell that was simply a guess, and I cannot find further evidence elsewhere to help one way or another. Yes, Elizabeth I grew up to be very proud of her long fingers, but were unstraight fingers really a concern in aristocratic circles at the time? 


Thankfully, other information deriving from accounts is more straightforward. The personal accounts for Henry Courtenay, Earl of Devon, for example, for the early part of 1519 give details that are still vivid for us today. Courtenay was a first cousin of Henry VIII (their mothers had been sisters) and a great favourite of the King’s too, at least at this time. By 1519 Courtenay was, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells us, “one of the select band [amongst Henry’s friends] afforded daily livery and apartments within the royal household”. And thus his accounts give us a glimpse of what life in this innermost circle of the court involved.


4 Feb. For playing money in the Queen’s chamber, 40s.; at shuffleboard, 2s.


…the Queen at this time was Catherine of Aragon…


5 Mar. To a poor man at Greenwich, for helping to walk horses on the day my lord rode at the tilt at Eltham, 1d.


27 Feb. For eggs, bread, drink, and oranges in my lord of Burganye’s chamber for my lord when they were there masking before the King, 12d.


…though why it was Courtenay who paid for the food on this occasion I don’t know…


18 Feb. For costs of the King’s tennis court at Richmond when my lord played there with young Mr. Care, 2s. 8d.; to young Care for my lord’s losses at tennis, 8s.


My favourite entry, however, has to be this one:


25 Jan. To a lad at Charleton, for lending his cap to my lord when the King and his lords threw snowballs, 4d.


Henry VIII – king already for almost ten years – played snowballs! How very nearly might we not have known this, had not Courtenay borrowed that cap?


Would you have dared to hit the King (surely a sizeable target, even at this early point)? Courtenay had a good few years still to come of royal favour, though finally – after tangling with Thomas Cromwell – he was sent by Henry to the block. (Indeed, most of the King’s close buddies from this time – those who didn’t succumb to illness – eventually got the chop.)


But let’s focus on that earlier, happier image… the King and his friends laughing (I think we can safely imagine) in the snow. A lovely reminder that human beings – whoever they are, and in every age – have always had a great deal in common. Some wonderful portrayals of ancient games of snowballs, in paintings and frescoes, can be found here.


If it's wintertime wherever in the world you are, happy playing!

Giant snowball - Oxford, by Kamyar Adl
(Flickr) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons




H.M. Castor's novel VIII - a new take on the life of Henry VIII, for teenagers and adults - is currently on the longlists for the Carnegie Medal and the UKLA Book Award. It is published by Templar in the UK, by Penguin in Australia, and will be published in the US by Simon & Schuster in 2013.

H.M. Castor's website is here.
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21.12.12: The Mayan Apocalypse... or not... by Manda Scott

December 12, 2012, 2:33 pm
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Unless you live on Mars and even that without access to broadband, you’ll know that we’re nearing the End of the World.  Or at least, that there are people who are willing to tell you that the ancient Mayan prophecies predict some kind of cataclysm on the winter solstice of this year: 21/12/12 – or if you live in those parts of the world that don’t work in ascending date order, 12/21/12.
It’s not true, of course, very few Apocalyptic prophecies are, but the truth is far more interesting, and while it takes several large volumes to explain it in detail, I’ll do my best to paraphrase it for readers of History Girls.
 First we need to have a brief over view of the ancient Maya: the indigenous (probably – there may have been people before, but if so, they’re extinct) tribes of that part of central America that’s encompassed now by southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala and the Honduras.  From earliest records around 2600BC, the Maya grew into a large civilization with vast city-states, reaching a xenith around 900 AD, after which it suffered a rather sudden collapse – some say because they wrought havoc with the local ecosystems, but their culture was not sufficiently resilient to adapt to new food sources. (a scarily familiar concept).
Even in its diminished form, the Maya were still a culture of astonishingly intricate and beautiful art, and quite mind-bendingly outstanding mathematics, astronomy and astrology.   Not only had they defined the concept of zero long before it hit the west, they had a dual calendric system with which they had measured the length of a year to four decimal places: 365.2422 days .(Today, we define it as 365.242198 days – but it’s worth remembering that we only made the shift from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars in 1528, nine years after Hernan Cortez arrived and instigated the genocide of the natives – and the destruction of their culture.
Their two separate calendars were the relatively brief, ‘Short Count’ which measured in base 13 and was used to define the dates of rituals, births, harvests and the like, and the longer, base 20 ‘Long Count’ which measured lifespans. 
The ‘Short Count’ calendar was made up of the Tzolkin and the Haab.  The former merged 20 day names with 13 day numbers to defined a year of 260 days (which is the length of a human gestation).  Interlocking with this was ‘Haab’ which had a vague year of 18 solar months, each of 20 days, plus 5 ceremonial days in which evil deities would wreak havoc.  Together, the Tzolkin and the Haab united to form a calendar round of 18980 days, or roughly 52 years.
Longer periods of astronomical time were measured by the Long Count calendar which measured time in exponential units, again arranged largely in bases 13 and 20.  It’s the Long Count that gives us the world ages, so bear with me while I lay out the time frames.


1day= 1k’in

20 k’in  = 1 uinal

18 uinal = 1 tun (360 days)

20 tun = I katun (7,200 days)

20 katun = 1 baktun (144,000 days)

13 baktun = 1 ‘World Age’  = 1,872,000 days or 5, 125.36 years.
So we have units of time that are ‘World Ages’ measured in 5,125 years, more or less.
The Mayan civilization may have arisen in 2600BC, but they set their calendar so that the end of the current World Age would coincide with certain astronomic events, namely the point when the rising sun on the winter solstice appears to overlay that part of the galaxy we term the ‘Dark Rift’ – an apparent gap caused by interstellar dust and gas cloud.  The Maya called it Xibalbe be’ or the ‘Black Road’. 
In order to be able to predict this with accuracy, the Maya must have been able to calculate the precession of the equinoxes to a stunningly accurate degree – the entire transit of the winter solstice sun over the centre of the dark rift takes 36 years – so they Maya predicted that the mid-point of that cycle would be the winter solstice of 2012 – and in a civilization that was thriving around 600 – 700 AD in our calendar, they back-dated their own calendar so that it started in August 3114 BC – long before their own civilization had begun– in order that it might reach the point 13 baktun 4Ahau 3 Kankin – on 21/12/12.
We know they did this because, in spite of the Jesuit’s best efforts, a number of Mayan monuments remain and scholars have spent the best part of the twentieth century decoding them.  Almost everyone is agreed on the 3114 BC start date for the calendar and therefore the 21/12/12 end date – but nobody at all is sure exactly what the Maya imagined would happen now.
If we jettison into the realm of myth, we find that they believed there had been four previous world ages in which humanity had begun to flourish and that the human race had been largely obliterated at the end of each one as a consequence of a natural disaster  involving one of the four elements: fire or storm or earthquake or flood. Myth (or rather, rumour loosely based on myth) says that the fifth – and current World Age would be ended by the actions of humanity and this would be an end to the Large World Age of 25,772 years.
So the upshot is, that the ancient Maya were capable of calculating an astronomical event that occurred once every 25,000 years and that astronomical event is taking place now, more or less.
If you want to believe that humanity is about to destroy itself, there’s plenty of evidence gathering to support that thesis, from the war in Syria, to the government’s current infatuation with fracking for shale gas (who needs a clean water supply anyway?) to the – in my mind more likely – immanent arrival of the technological singularity in which we create the computer – or at least, the chip – that is capable of designing and building its own successor. At which point, we’ll be out of the loop as far as the evolution of intelligence goes. And if I were a super-intelligent silicone-based life form and I looked at the mess the bipedal organic, carbon-based life forms had made of the planet, I’d have no hesitation at all in wiping them (us) out at the earliest opportunity. And yes, I am planning to write the book based on this concept. If we're all still here to read it.
Happy Solstice, everyone!
Images are from the book 2012: Everything you wanted to know about the Apocalypse (written by me, images from Transworld, courtesy of the ever-wonderful Phil Lord)   There's one more to come, but I'm waiting for permission.
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The Black Count Catherine Johnson

December 13, 2012, 4:30 pm
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 I have been so thrilled by the Tom Reiss biography  The Black Count, that I had to write about it.



I always knew Alexandre Dumas the novelist, that's him above, was mixed race. I didn't know that his contemporaries, Balzac included, said dreadful things about him - jealousy about his sales I expect. But I never knew anything about his father.


When I was a kid I loved The Three Musketeers. Not the novel you understand, but the Saturday morning cartoon which featured on Banana Splits (alongside 'Size of an Elephant!' Shazam, if you remember) . I also loved the Count of Monte Cristo, again not the novels, have you seen how fat it is? (It is very hard to hold so I had to wait until I had an e reader) But I loved several films and radio plays. there is a rather super adaptation on now it is fab. BBC Radio 4.

I loved the injustice, the wrongs righted the world turned upside down and set back again, the camaradie of the Musketeers - D'Artangnan - the movies with Michael York and Oliver Reed. And you know, you know what? I am there. I was there all along. I so wanted a frock like Milady's I so wanted to be able to ride like the musketeers, do that thing, you know, is it Athos? Porthos? (Sadly Aramis only conjures up over aftershaved boys from the early 70s) the one who can ride under a beam and pick the horse up with his thighs? I managed to grow my thighs to the right size but never figured the strength. Anyway, all their feats of derring do of flashing blades and the fight for right - you know where those stories came from? This guy. This guy on his horse, the 6ft flashing blade and Brigadier General of the French Army, who fought for Louis XVI, who fought at the heart of the revolutionary army, the guy who terrified Napoleon and led a post revolutionary France into the nineteenth century. the son of a Marquis and a slave - Alexandre Dumas.

His son the first writer - pere, do keep up, the grandson is the playwright, fils, was bought up mostly on tales of his dashing dad, the best horseman in the army, the best fighter, the most gentlemanly, all round hero Alexandre Dumas. Here is a painting of him on a horse. At 6ft tall the Egyptians, during the Napoleonic wars, assumed he was the leader. Even the most racist Franco Prussian nobility could not
argue with his skill with a sabre or in battle.

I cannot begin to tell you of this man's epic, storybook life. Even his early years on Saint Domingue, before his father - the Marquis - sold his Mother and siblings and pawned young Alexandre before sending for him and sending him to the swishest school for young gentlemen in France - are incredible.

The book, which I knew nothing about, was serialised recently - I thank you again BBC Radio 4 - and I was transfixed. I've only just begun to read the book myself and it is a humdinger of a tale, and also fabulous reference for my own dear Ezra McAdam, young surgeon, who is about to set foot in revolutionary France.

The attitude to colour in 18th century France is just as outlandish and twisted as it was here, where a man like Alexandre Dumas could be both a Count, yet not able to use the prefix 'Sir'. Where everyone was equal, except anyone with African blood. Alexandre Dumas flourished in the brief window of freedom the revolution offered, yet never once lost his humanity.  I am utterly and completely swept away by this lovely history. Can you see how much it means to me, a middle aged woman living in London, to discover this man? Why didn't I know about him already?

Thank you Tom Reiss and your wonderful book.


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The Turnspit Dog

December 14, 2012, 5:00 pm
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by Marie-Louise Jensen

Today, I'm staying only vaguely with my theme of Georgian Bath. I wanted to write something seasonal this month, about Christmases past. But the fashionable Georgians did not celebrate Christmas in Bath. The city was their summer holiday resort. At Christmas they were in their grand houses in the country, where the holding and attending of house parties was popular. Gifts were exchanged and the wealthy would have sat down to the traditional Christmas dinner of roast beef or goose.
In Bath, meanwhile, only the residents and the poor were left behind and there was little enough business for them with all the visitors gone. It was said of Bath that it was so quiet out of season that the only living being you would encounter in its streets was a turnspit dog.
An exaggeration, I'm sure. But it made me wonder how many of you have heard of the turnspit dog?

Before the days of automated spits and fan ovens, a way was needed to keep the meat turning on the spit. From earliest times, this was the task of the young or the lowliest kitchen servant. But by Georgian times, they had come up with a contraption to save even that labour. With the invention of a wheel in a cage, connected to the spit, a dog could perform the task.
I had seen one of these wheels years ago at No. 1 The Royal Crescent, Bath, in their wonderful kitchen museum. (The museum is currently closed for extension into the adjacent house but is wonderful and well worth a visit once it's reopened; the kitchen is my favourite!) I was rather horrified to hear that a dog used to be made to run in it to turn the meat. While I was researching Georgian Bath for The Girl in the Mask, I came across a number of mentions of the dog, apparently a special breed. (Pictues via Wikipedia.)
Considered to be a lowly and common breed, it is now extinct. But it had a long body, short legs and had to run for up to three hours to roast a large joint. In large establishments or inns, there would be two dogs to take turns. Apparently this is the source of the phrase "Every dog has his day".


Apparently they were fiercely protective of their days off and resented being made to work out of turn. Woe betide the cook who tried to force the issue! Unless he or she wanted a bite, they needed to be wary. In general, I'm not sure the dog had much of a life. I wonder if this is also where the Phrase "A dog's life" comes from?

In the winter, the dogs doubled as a foot warmer in church. One story from Bath tells how the Bishop of Gloucester mentioned that "Ezekiel saw the wheel..." and at the word 'wheel' all the foot-warmer dogs rushed for the door. I'll leave you to ponder whether they were running to do their duty or fleeing from it.


 
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'Just click your heels together three times...' by Sue Purkiss

December 16, 2012, 12:37 am
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So many things go to make a good book, don't they? Characters, dialogue, ideas, perfectly juxtaposed words, pacing, suspense, setting - and that's just a start. But what about films - what makes a great movie? A great director, a brilliant script, imaginative cinematography, a great story - the right stars, good music, fabulous camerawork - and would costume be up there on the list?

Up until a couple of weeks ago, when I went to see the exhibition of Hollywood Costume at the Victoria and Albert, I'm not sure it would have been up there. And yet, if you think of the Wizard of Oz - isn't Judy Garland, in that blue and white dress and the red sparkly shoes, one of the first pictures that comes to mind? And which is most familiar to you - the title The Seven Year Itch, or THAT dress?


Judy's dress is at the exhibition, as is Marilyn's. Batman, Spiderman and Catwoman lurk disquietingly above eye level. Meryl Streep is there, in the guise of Margaret Thatcher, Karen Blixen and Donna from Mama Mia. Sharon Stone crosses her legs as she gazes into the camera. Brad Pitt pops up all over the place. Harrison Ford unfurls his whip: Darth Vader looms and Ming the Merciless glowers. Elizabeth 1 stands proudly in all her regal splendour, as played by Bette Davis, Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett. Alfred Hitchcock's icy blondes, in their tailored suits and elegant court shoes, stagger beneath the onslaught of birds and knife-wielding shower freaks. Jack Sparrow swaggers in his raffishly romantic coat and enormous hat.

But it's not just a series of tableaux - far from it. There are commentaries from directors, designers and stars, and we begin to see that the costumes we eventually see on screen result from a network of discussions and input from all three. The shape of Indiana Jones' hat, for instance, was based on the design of authentic western stetsons - but the shape was altered to suit the shape of Harrison Ford's face, and the tilt of the brim changed so that his eyes would be visible to the camera. Darth Vader's iconic costume, on the other hand, developed from a root around in the props store; someone surfaced with an old gas mask, a steel German helmet and a voluminous cloak - and there you have it, a legend was born.

There was a sumptuous display of costumes from historical dramas. Elizabeth 1 featured strongly. From the 1939 film with Bette Davis, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, there was a gorgeously elaborate red velvet number. It was copied from a contemporary portrait; the designer was completely faithful to the original, and every detail was precisely rendered. Designers in more recent films have taken a slightly different route; they've done the research too, but they've allowed other factors to come into play; in Shakespeare in Love, for instance, there's an element of playfulness and fantasy, and in Elizabeth, starring Cate Blanchett (right), the costumes are used to accentuate the state of the character as she changes and develops. So they look authentic, and they tell us something about what's going on in her mind, but they are not exactly as Elizabeth would have known them.

Mostly, I was fascinated by this exhibition for its own sake - this is just a tiny glimpse of the treasures it has on offer, and it's staged most cleverly - but it did strike me that there was a relevance here to writing historical fiction. We often discuss and agonise over the issue of accuracy; we're on painful tenterhooks in case an anachronism sneaks underneath the radar. And of course for our own satisfaction and because we owe it to our readers, we're always going to strive for authenticity. But we are creating an artefact, which has many different aspects which work together to create a certain whole. What we create will never be a simulacrum of the past; it's a fiction, an illusion. So, I just wonder: maybe this is a touch heretical - but perhaps we shouldn't worry quite so much...?
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"There is no story here." Penny Dolan

December 16, 2012, 10:30 pm
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It was late November 2012. The Indian sun shone, breaking through the trees that sheltered the path.


The steps were too uneven for a good pace, assuming any of us could. Some had numbers written on them. 500 steps up and 500 steps down.

"The day of a thousand steps!" we joked..


 

Eventually we entered the ruined walls of Ajaigarh fort, clambered up more broken blocks, and entered the small door within what was left of a main gate.


   Set within the walls were old carvings.

Some, the most ancient, followed the curving rocks above a cool cave-well. 




    
Others, mostly fragments of decorative friezes, had been used to repair the tumbled walls.

 

The last steps led to a wide, open area.


Beside a remaining tower were a shrine with prayer flags, the caretaker’s carefully tended garden, a captured cannon and views over the walls to the land far below.





 Our guide led us on across the top of this hill plateau. Now it was mostly covered by tall teak trees and the ground was covered with their enormous stone-grey leaves. 

 We passed tumbled stones, ruined palaces edging what were once man-made lakes and warily balanced temples threatening to fall into deeper chaos.  We did not go inside.



 Eventually, we came to a small gateway where there was space to sit, shaded from the sun.

 

As we sat there, eating our picnic lunch, we chatted about the wonderful climb and the romantic ruins and the atmosphere.

I could not help thinking  of those  awful, resonant lines "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings . . ."



The site of this hill fort seemed to offer more than the carefully restored temples of Khujaraho not so far away. 
 
“More people should come and see this place,” we enthused, or something similar. There had been hints that a road might be built up the hill but it seemed uneconomical and unlikely.  Besides, it would spoil the atmosphere of the place.

Our guide sighed slightly. He shrugged. “There is no story here,” he answered, simply, and that was that..

Sometimes history has just too many layers.

 Penny Dolan


The ruined hill fort of Ajairgarh, once capital of a princely state, sits on a high plateau 25 km north of Panna, Madhya Pradesh. The ruined fort has some superb rock carvings, a few half-ruined temples and overhanging bastions that look out over a wide rural landscape.

 

The fort, with its strategically important site, has been captured and recaptured, built and destroyed. It has passed through the hands of many rulers, religions and dynasties,  including those of Rani Durgavati, the legendary fighting queen who tried to keep her kingdom safe for her young son, though it was not her main stronghold. 

Captured by the British in 1809, Ajairaigh was handed over to the local princely family whose deserted palace can be seen at the foot of the hill, and the fort was left to fall into ruins.




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Christmas Past - Celia Rees

December 17, 2012, 4:30 pm
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Christmas is a time of nostalgia, of looking back. It triggers memories of childhood, of the past, both recent and distant.  I was a child in the 1950s. It is odd to think that my own childhood is now history. 



I was talking to a friend recently about our shared passion for Rupert the Bear. Every year I would receive a Rupert Annual as part of my stocking (well, pillowcase to be accurate). It was just as much a stocking fixture as the tangerine wrapped in silver paper, the variety pack and the Compendium of Games with requisite number tiddlywinks and dice (last year's having become somewhat depleted). I loved Rupert and Christmas would not have been Christmas without him. It wasn't until I was much older that I thought about how very strange it was for a bear and his animal chums to be dressed in children's clothes from some undefined era and for them to wear shoes and have human hands (apart from Edward Trunk who has feet for hands and wears shoes - how did he tie his laces?). I knew that Rupert didn't live now, the clothes told me that much. He seemed to live in a lost rural idyll where it always snowed at Christmas and in the summer the beach was littered with star fish and there were dragons  and pagodas and all kinds of wonderful things, if you climbed high enough.



Rupert and his friends had the most exciting adventures and met the most exotic of creatures and I envied him. Even though I knew he wasn't real, part of me hoped he was and that, one day, I might meet elves and fairies and the beings that lived in his world. Rupert would now be regarded as fearfully unPC. There are golliwogs and natives with bones through their noses. What was unexceptional in a world that still clung to the remnants of Empire and unthinking assumptions of white superiority would be unacceptable now. Such things offer insights into time and place; insights into history.

As a child of the fifties, I was much freer to have adventures than children are now. I was talking to another friend (I told you that Christmas was a time for looking back) about the kinds of games we played and it was interesting to note how many were informed by history. I grew up in Warwickshire. We used to play out in the woods and fields, so we would play Robin Hood, Children of the New Forest, Ivanhoe, carrying home made swords and bows and arrows.  She lived by the sea, so her games involved playing pirates on old beached hulks and exploring caves and tunnels to discover evidence of smugglers. Reflecting on this, I realised how much my child's imagination was fired by history mediated through books, films and T.V.

I didn't write as a child. My creative imagination was developed and nurtured through playing games which could be very elaborate and go on for weeks, even months. I remember spending almost a year obsessed by Robin Hood. The games we played were porous. Robin Hood and his Merry Men could easily morph into Wyatt Earp or Jesse James but that didn't seem to matter. We didn't worry about strict factual accuracy. We were attracted to myth and romance. The West was just as much history as the Crusades. In an odd way they seemed to go together.

My lifelong interest in the past began with and was fostered by play and the child's imagination which, in turn, was fuelled by the stuff of a fifties childhood, including the rich mix of English Pastoral, folklore and fairytale that is Rupert.





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The Hierarchy of Hats and other scavengings: by Theresa Breslin

December 18, 2012, 4:51 pm
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At times I think of myself as being more of a scavenger than a writer.

Maybe scavenger isn’t quite the right word. When I checked the dictionary it told me that ‘to scavenge’ was to search for anything useable among discarded material. But some of what I take hasn’t really been discarded and I don’t even know if the stuff I collect will ever be useable. Although my hoard does contain physical objects I’m not expecting a call from the constabulary as the objects are usually stones or driftwood or similar. More often it’s an impression, a photograph, a snatch of dialogue, a nugget of information, a shared experience. I gather each item up on my travels for no definite reason other than I found it interesting - most recently in Siberia with the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference
 


The oldest part of Krasnoyarsk 
where a church was built  to look 
out over the vast and stunning  landscape,

                    
    The beauty of icons and imagery inside.




                                                         Sunset over the city 

                                              
              

                                 


In the local market birds peck seeds from hand made brooms and fish come ready frozen!.







And yes, there is a hierarchy of hats - from otter via mink, silver fox, racoon, red fox, rabbit to squirrel. 
( rats are kept for gloves!)  



I have no idea whether any of these will spark an idea, result in a story, or feed into a book yet to be born. But I do know that when I go to my hoard and pore over my treasures something will stir in that mysterious part of the brain wherein lies creativity.  

There’s another meaning for the verb ‘to scavenge’- to purify a molten metal by bubbling a suitable gas through it. The gas may be inert or may react…  

Take what you will from that as a metaphor.

Happy Holidays wherever you are!

More info: http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/   http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor
Twitter: @theresabreslin1 
Spy for the Queen of Scotsis nominated for the Carnegie Medal and an Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales illustrated by Kate Leiper is nominated for the Greenaway Medal.
In conjunction with the Citizens Theatre and South Lanarkshire schools the Divided City musical will be produced at Hamilton Town House Theatre in February 2013.     

TAGS / LABELS:  Theresa Breslin, EWWC, Krasnoyarsk, Siberia,
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'War and the Spirit of Christmas' by A L Berridge

December 19, 2012, 4:30 pm
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It’s hard trying to think about Christmas when you write about war. My characters may be fiction but the war they fought is not, and it feels rather heartless to abandon them up to their knees in trench-mud in order to put tinsel on a Christmas tree. 

'Sentinel of the Zouaves' by William Simpson - Crimea
And mud, of course, is the least they had to contend with. My current novel follows the Siege of Sevastopol in the Crimean War, where our troops spent the winter of 1854 huddled in rags in freezing trenches, without fire, without rest or proper medical care, and often even without food. I’d planned to blog about it here, but apart from the fact it's been done definitively in this brilliant post by our December guest Helen Rappaport, it just didn’t seem right to regale you with horrors at the height of the festive season. It’s as if war and Christmas simply don’t mix.

Yet actually they have a relationship we don’t often imagine. Christmas isn’t just about celebration – it’s a time for love and hope and thoughts of family, a time of yearning for peace. It’s a truism to say that the ‘spirit of Christmas’ isn’t found in the tinsel, but it can and has been found amid the horror of war.

If anything, that’s when it’s most important. It’s a beacon of hope at the turn of the year, a time to let go of the tragedy of the past and look forward to brighter times ahead. Midshipman Wood quotes a ‘senior Regimental officer’ on Christmas in the Crimea:

‘Standing that day on Green Hill… caused many reflections – sad and solemn retrospection for the brave men who slept the sleep of death around us; joyful and glorious perspective picturing to myself the ultimate fate of the formidable fortress... Such was Christmas Day 1854; yet to that hour the Division to which I belong had not received an ounce of meat a man for dinner – in fact dinner we had none.’

Only hope. The men in the WW1 trenches actually fared better for food, but before their eyes was still this same image of hope for the future. There’s a terrible poignancy for us in this famous army Christmas card where the year blazing gloriously on the horizon is – 1915:


It seems such a cheap thing now, a glib printed card to cheer the troops. Standard issue cards for the men to send home typically gave space only for a ‘To’ and ‘From’ section to be personalized. But who’s to say what they meant to the people receiving them – a positive proof that their son, their husband or brother, was alive and thinking of them at Christmas? And what would be our emotion if we received something as personal and precious as this?

Christmas card from unidentified British soldier 1916

Even the little things matter. Holly, mistletoe, a Christmas card, something ‘better than usual’ for dinner. The ‘trimmings’ can serve as a reminder of happier days, andboost a determination not to allow war to destroy a much-loved tradition. Soldiers foraged for mistletoe in the fields of Flanders, and army messes for over a century have given the ‘feast’ an air of saturnalia by having NCOs wait on the men, and officers on the NCOs.

Soldiers collecting mistletoe on the Flanders front
Even in the starving Crimea officers struggled to produce something ‘special’ for Christmas. The young Garnet Wolseley actually attempted to make a plum pudding out of figs, biscuit, and some ‘very rancid suet or grease’. He used a Russian round shot and a section of 13” shell as pestle and mortar to pulverise the biscuit into flour, mixed the whole lot into a ‘horrible looking mess’, and wrapped it in his own towel to cook over the fire. Unfortunately he and his friend were unexpectedly called to trench duty and decided to eat the pudding half raw – with the predictable result that by 10pm he imagined ‘I could feel, if not actually hear, each piece I had swallowed of that infernal pudding’ and had to be helped back to his tent bent double with pain.

Wolseley’s memoirs laugh at this recollection, but there’s one casual line in his description that made me sit up straight. He always makes light of the actual fighting, which at this time was pretty constant, but on Christmas Day he records with surprise that there was ‘no firing going on anywhere.’ None.

German Christmas card 1915
Perhaps he should have expected it, since Christmas is about the bond of humanity which anyone can share. While the British were sending home loving Christmas cards in WWI, so were the Germans - and the messages are all but identical. If the British wanted a quiet Christmas and a break from killing, then it's only natural that the Germans should too.

And famously in 1914 they had one. The Christmas Truce of 1914 is no myth, but a reality testified to by countless letters from the trenches all telling the same story. There was no official truce, no one big single event, but all along the lines were little pockets of quiet as British and Germans exchanged first words and then carols, then rose from the trenches to meet each other in No Man’s Land. 

Christmas Truce 1914

Here, for instance, is Rifleman Reading in a letter to his wife in Chesham: ‘During the early part of the morning the Germans started singing and shouting, all in good English… At 4 p.m part of their Band played some Christmas carols and "God save the King", and "Home Sweet Home." You could guess our feelings. Later on in the day they came towards us, and our chaps went out to meet them... I shook hands with some of them, and they gave us cigarettes and cigars. We did not fire that day, and everything was so quiet that it seemed like a dream.’

Christmas Truce 1914

 Here’s another, from a soldier still unidentified:‘There must be something in the spirit of Christmas as today we are all on top of our trenches running about. Whereas other days we have to keep our heads well down…. Just before dinner I had the pleasure of shaking hands with several Germans: a party of them came 1/2way over to us so several of us went out to them… After exchanging autographs and them wishing us a Happy New Year we departed and came back and had our dinner.... We can hardly believe that we’ve been firing at them for the last week or two—it all seems so strange'

Strange indeed. These are wonderful stories, yet for me there’s still a desperate sadness about them because the truces were only temporary.  Here’s Captain J C Dunn of the Royal Welch Fusiliers describing how hostilities re-started on his section of the front:

'At 8.30 I fired three shots in the air and put up a flag with "Merry Christmas" on it, and I climbed on the parapet.  He [a German] put up a sheet with "Thank you" on it, and the German Captain appeared on the parapet.  We both bowed and saluted and got down into our respective trenches, and he fired two shots in the air, and the War was on again.'

'The Khaki Chums' - Cross marking the site of a Christmas Truce 1914

Back to war – but with everything even worse, because now they knew the men they fired at. The Christmas Truce is a beautiful thing, but for me it simply screams with the whole futility of war. Recognizing the bond of humanity was something kept only for that one day of Christmas – and soon not even then. The War Office discouraged ‘fraternization’, the officers were made to forbid it, and while isolated incidents occurred in both 1915 and 1916, by 1917 they had disappeared completely.

British Christmas card 1917
To the Powers That Be, Christmas has no place in war except to whip up hate against the enemy. Here’s an official  British Christmas card for 1917, and if you can see the spirit of Christmas in it that’s more than I can do. 

We’re no better now. The war in Afghanistan may feature different religions, but I can’t see anything Christian about this gleeful report in the Daily Mail of British troops attacking the Taliban on Christmas Day and marching back to base in Santa hats. 

I don’t blame the soldiers. They do their job, and it is politicians who dictate what that is and how it should be conducted. Yet when everything else is burnt away, the men who fight come closer to understanding the bond of humanity than politicians ever can. The Truce of 1914 began with ordinary soldiers, and for them it isn’t just for Christmas.

I saw this first in the Crimea. From the letters and diaries of ordinary men I’ve learned that there were truces for the burial of the dead, and on these occasions British and Russians talked and laughed together, sharing wine and tobacco and stories of home. I’ve learned that ‘friendly’ contests were arranged, and that a secret artillery duel was played out between the rival 68-pounders of a Russian and a British battery until the Russians signalled defeat. One even more extraordinary challenge was issued, and for several nights after the burial truce of March 1855 a Russian and a French officer met secretly near the Inkerman ruins in order to determine which of them was better – at chess. 

Soldiers at war don’t have to lose their humanity. Some reviewers scoffed at the scene in ‘The War Horse’ when the Germans help the Allies free a terrified horse from the barbed wire, but to me this seems perfectly plausible. Even in the Crimea such things happened. Midshipman Wood describes how a drunken Frenchman reeled crazily about between the lines singing the Marseillaise, but the Russians showed fellow-feeling and never fired. Another time two wounded British lay groaning in the open on the edge of the Left Attack, but the Russian sharpshooters raised a white flag to show they would hold their fire to allow their friends to bring them in. These are events in April and May 1855, but to me they show the spirit of Christmas. 

So does this. After the Battle of Inkerman in November 1854, Captain Clifford of the Rifle Brigade was passing wounded Russian prisoners when ‘a man among them ran up and called out to me, and pointed to his shoulder bound up. It was the poor fellow whose arm I had cut off yesterday. He laughed, and said ‘Buono, Johnny!’  I took his hand and shook it heartily, and the tears came in my eyes. I had not a shilling in my pocket, but had I had a bag of gold he should have had it.’

Watercolour by Captain Clifford
It’s only one moment of bonding in a whole war of savage stupidity, but it reminds me of Wilfred Owen’s haunting poem ‘Strange Meeting’, where a soldier is greeted in death by a man who tells him, ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend.’ It’s moving, uplifting, and utterly excoriating in what it says about the insanity of war.

So’s Christmas.  When I first read ‘A Christmas Carol’ I was puzzled by Scrooge’s line‘I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year’, because it seemed ridiculous to eat turkey every day and live in a house perpetually full of tinsel. Now I understand it better, and its truth is plainest in the tragedy of war. For just one day we should stop killing each other? For just one day we long for ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’? For just one day?

I hope we can do better. I doubt any international statesmen are reading this blog, but that won’t stop me wishing that politicians the world over would shut up and listen not just to the angels, but to the humanity of their own soldiers. The message doesn’t have to be confined to a particular religion; it doesn’t have to be confined to religion at all. But once we recognize and celebrate our shared humanity, then the spirit of Christmas will be everywhere and always, and the horrors of the Crimea and the WWI trenches can be left where they belong – in history.

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A.L. Berridge's website.
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Gifts by Imogen Robertson

December 20, 2012, 5:00 pm
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I hope you’ll all forgive a not very Christmasy posting this month from me. It is about gifts though, how they are passed on generation to generation and the stories they carry, so I hope that’s close enough. 

My mother was sorting out her jewellery recently and came across this moonstone necklace. Mum kindly passed it on to me and it’s been making me look a great deal more classy than usual at various  parties this season. Mum was sent it by her Aunt, Hope Wicksteed, in 1991 after thieves had stolen most of her jewelry and Hope thought the necklace might be some comfort. 

Hope was a poet, and secretary to Compton MacKenzie among many other things during her life. She was also, thank goodness, a great chronicler of family stories. She wrote a letter to go with the necklace explaining that its story started in Japan with Hope’s Aunt Jessie who lived in Tokyo for some years. She met a Somerset man out there and married, but went to Japan as a single woman to teach English before women could even vote in this country. 

This comes from Hope’s letter: “She (Aunt Jessie Slater, née Rorke) used to send parcels to us, and I knew the ‘Japanese smell’ so well that once when a parcel came while I was at school and they tried to keep it secret from me, I came into the sitting room and said “There’s been a parcel from Japan!” I don’t know what the smell was - sandalwood perhaps - but I could recognise it again even now.  One day on a visit she handed my mother an envelope with some stones in it, saying, “I don’t think they are of any value - they pick them up off the river-beds.” Mother took them to a lady who did artistic jewellery and she made them into a necklet which was given to me on my 21st.” 

Hope was born in 1908.

Reading that letter reminded me of other family treasures that must have made their way here in those parcels. One I remember vividly from childhood is a copy of a folk story ‘The Old Woman who Lost her Dumplings’. I used to spend ages looking at the beautiful woodcut illustrations while Gran was looking after me. The book was printed on crepe paper which felt like cloth, and though you can’t have the feel of reading it, you can see all the text and illustrations here. Mum says that certainly was a present from Aunt Jessie and was sent to my grandfather, Hope’s brother, when he was young enough to enjoy such things. 


Now I’ve started to wonder about these figures which found a home with me after my grandmother moved into sheltered housing. The house / watch tower like thing has ‘Wyeda’ stamped on the base, and there is a stamp on the base of the cheery ivory fellow too. If there are any scholars of such things out there, do let me know. 

Whether I’m right or wrong about where these things came from, I’m very glad I have them and the necklace. They make me think of the people who made them, who picked out the stones from the river bed, and of Jessie Slater shopping for trinkets to entertain her nephew and niece while they were growing up in those uncertain times on the other side of the world. 

Sometimes when we give people presents we give them stories and histories too and those can become as important as the objects themselves, perhaps that’s worth remembering when you are looking for last minute gifts! Now back to the festival season with my very best wishes to all the History Girls and our readers for a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year.


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HIPPOCRAS, by Jane Borodale

December 21, 2012, 5:12 pm
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The first day of the holidays, and in celebration of the winter feast I thought I'd look at recipes for hippocras - that stalwart festive cordial wine popular since medieval times.

Taking its name from the conical bag shaped like the Sleeve of Hippocrates (used by apothecaries, vintners or housewives) to strain the spice from the liquor, hippocras (hypocras, ipocras) was drunk at the end of a high-status feast to balance the humours, as a sweet and efficacious digestive and carminative. It could be made with red or white wine, sugar and cinnamon being the main constituents, and often a variety of other ingredients.


I’d be the first to admit that mulled wine made badly can be truly horrible (am thinking of the sour, mouthcurdling addition of a carton of orange juice, which is surely one of the most vile culinary perversions ever to be concocted, and which resulting clouded and sickly purple looks exactly like the colour of painters’ turpentine when the brushes have been rinsed too much in it, and probably tastes worse). But these recipes sounded like a beautiful aromatic treat, and after reading quite a few, I experimented, trying to be fairly accurate but according mostly to the ingredients already in my cupboard (no spikenard...).


Here’s an example: ‘To make powdered hippocras, take a quarter of very fine cinnamon selected by tasting it, and half a quarter of fine flour of cinnamon, an ounce of selected string ginger (gingembre de mesche), fine and white, and an ounce of grain [of paradise], a sixth of nutmegs and galingale together, and bray them all together. And when you would make your hippocras, take a good half ounce of this powder and two quarters of sugar and mix them with a quart of wine, by Paris measure.


I’d always laboured under the impression that hippocras was more-or-less the same as mulled wine. But rolling up my (unHippocratic) sleeves has reminded me of the need to keep properly looking afresh at the past. In short – I was really surprised. Not just by the flavour, (unexpectedly, utterly fabulous and unlike anything else I’d had before) but that some of the recipes were not heated at all, neither in the making, nor the serving. Some ingredients included milk or cream. (I can also report on the relative merits of warming the wine in a saucepan ‘on the fire’ or with a hot poker plunged into the vessel itself. In order to heat a quantity of liquor, you need an exceedingly hot poker. The hiss, bubble and spit of it going in is exciting, and the caramelising scent, but it was hard to get it actually hot. You though may have more luck.)


'Circe Mulling Wine', Gioacchino Assereto

The Goodman of Paris tells us that after dessert of fruit and compotes came the ‘departure from the table’ – hippocras and wafers called mestier. ‘…Waffurs to ete, ypocras to drynke with delite. Now this fest is fynysched, voyd the table quyte.’  (1393) In his suggested menus for dinner for a Meat Day for great lords and others, one sixth course was hippocras with wafers (rich batter cooked between hot iron moulds on a chafing dish, and sweetened with honey and rosewater), pears and comfits, medlars and peeled nuts. Another includes sugared flawns and larded milk, cooked pears and hippocras.


He also mentions the purchase of ready-made hippocras from the spicer, buying 3 quarts at 10s. the quart (which surely seems very expensive?) Lump sugar could also come from the spicer, grocer or mercer, or would have been bought, along with dried fruit and other items for the banquet course, at fairs such as Lenton. Hippocras is not, apparently, to be confused with piment or clary, which were similar but made with honey instead of sugar, but there are very many differing methods and quantities to be found, according to personal taste and availability of spices. Sugar itself was considered a spice, and to have medicinal qualities. Lower orders, perhaps yeoman farmers, merchants and the like may have used honey in its stead.


John Russell’s 15th-century Boke of Nurture gives a detailed, rhyming method for hippocras, you can read it here at Project Gutenberg.


'The Spice Shop', 1637, Paolo Antonio Barbieri
It wasn’t universally loved – William Harrison (1535-1593) gives it only a rather offhanded mention of ‘sundry sorts of artificial stuff, as hippocras and wormwood wine’. Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) is disapproving, saying that ‘overhot, compound, strong thick drinks,’ including ‘all those hot spiced strong drinks’ are to be neglected by those who suffer this malady, as ‘spices cause hot and head melancholy, and are for that cause forbidden by our physicians. Sweets turn into bile, they are obstructive.’ As a balancer of humours, whether it worked would clearly depend on your natural temperament; sanguine, melancholic, choleric or phlegmatic. I imagine this is also why it is a solely winter beverage, not drunk in the warm months of the year. The Goodman points out for a wedding feast in May, ‘apples and cheese without hippocras, because it is out of season.’

It is generally said to have fallen out of favour by the 18thcentury, though James Boswell notes in his diary on the 19 Jan 1763 that he ‘went into a little public house and drank some warm white wine with aromatic spices, pepper and cinnamon’.


In case you fancy trying it out too; to save you time I’ve converted the pottles and quarts and drams etc, into two recipes. Don’t baulk at the amount of sugar, it’s weird but it does work. This isn’t a drink to consume by the gallon – it’s a dessert. I didn’t adjust quantities for modern tastes, and am very glad I didn’t because these were delicious as they were, and it really felt like drinking a little bit of something from the otherworld. If you do try either of these, I’d love to know what you think:


red Hippocras (after the Goodman of Paris, 1393).
1 pint red wine

2 sticks of cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (about the size of man’s big toe)

7 cloves

4-5 cardamom pods

large pinch of mace

quarter of a nutmeg, freshly grated

7 oz caster sugar


Peel and chop ginger, break cinnamon into pieces and grind as finely as possible with other spices in pestle and mortar until small, then add sugar and grind until thoroughly combined. Add red wine and heat gently in a pan for about 5 min then remove from heat, strain through jelly bag or muslin and serve in tiny glasses. Sipped hot straightaway, it has an extraordinarily warming hit. Cold the following day, it’s pungent, with the consistency of green ginger wine, but a much more complex flavour.


white Hippocras (after Hannah Woolley, 1675).
1 pint white wine

2 fat sticks cinnamon

piece of fresh root ginger (just a little less than above)

3 cloves

4 peppercorns

half a nutmeg, freshly grated

4cm stem fresh rosemary

6 oz caster sugar

half pint of single cream


Grind spices as above, then add and grind sugar, then rosemary. Stir into white wine and leave to steep for 12 hours or overnight. (NB – the mixture is not heated.) Strain, then stir in cream before serving in aforementioned tiny glasses. This one really is quite unlike anything else I’ve ever tasted – perhaps like a rich, exotic lassi? Very fine and scrumptious. If I could only use one adjective to describe it, I would say it was exquisite.


And if you needed any more persuasion, for anyone already set to feel guilty about their levels of consumption over the next Twelve Days, hippocras may be your answer, at least according to Samuel Pepys who, on 29 Oct 1663, protests:

‘It being Lord Mayor’s Day… at noon I went forth, and by coach to Guildhall and there was admitted… and there wine was offered and they drunk, I only drinking some hypocras, which doth not break my vowe, it being, to the best of my present judgement, only a mixed compound drink, and not any wine.’ (My italics)


Your good health!

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Dormice and other Saturnalia Gifts

December 22, 2012, 10:48 pm
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by Caroline Lawrence

a dormouse?
Marcus Valerius Martialis (AKA Martial) is one of my favourite Roman poets. His acerbic, gossipy, sometimes shocking poems were a kind of ancient Sex in the City for the Flavian period in late first century Rome. He uses the f-word and the c-word plenty and warns his readers that they might be shocked.

Less daring were his epigrams. An epigram is a short poem, in Martial's case usually a poetic couplet, i.e. two lines. One of the customs of the Roman midwinter festival called Saturnalia was to compose an epigram to accompany a Saturnalia gift. Martial wrote a batch of these and published them in two papyrus scrolls which are numbered books 13 and 14 in his corpus and are given the names the Xenia (Greek for "guest gifts") and the Apophoreta, (Greek for "things to be taken away"). Although you could give gifts any time during the Saturnalia, a particular custom was to give your dinner guest a present to take away, hence the titles of those books.

(T.J. Leary's commentaries on the Xenia and the Apophoreta are full of information, but if you don't have a Classics library nearby or can't afford the scholarly price tags, you can access the Loeb version of Martial's epigrams free on the internet at sites such as this one.)

These poetic "gift tags" are often written from the point of view of the gift, almost like a riddle. Some are humorous, some straight-faced.  Some have literary or mythical allusions. But for me the appeal is the concrete. From them we know exactly what kinds of gifts people gave each other from the humblest (handful of nuts) to the most extravagant (a slave). This is the kind of detail about ancient Rome that I adore. It brings that world to life.

It is Martial who tells us that Romans ate stuffed dormice, a popular trope of all historical fiction set in ancient Rome. Here is the fifty-ninth epigram in book 13, which also show the format of these Saturnalia couplets: a title and two lines.

glires
tota mihi dormitur hiems et pinguior illo
tampore sum quo me nil nisi somnus alit.

DORMICE
I snooze the whole winter long and am fatter at that 
time, when nothing except sleep nourishes me. 

The joke here is that usually men and beasts grow thinner in the winter, when food is scarce, but the dormice are presumably fed so much that they enter a comatose state akin to hibernation.

The dormouse, glis glis, was a delicacy banned by the Emperor Claudius for being too extravagant. These mice were kept in special containers called gliraria and were fattened on beech nuts until they grew to the size of rats: 20 cm or 8 inches, not including the tail. They were then killed, stuffed, baked, glazed with honey and sprinkled with poppy-seed. Yum.

Here are some other gifts we know Romans gave to one another, thanks to Martial's wonderful Saturnalia epigrams.

pomegranates and other fruit
FOOD like pepper, beans, lentils, flour, barley, lettuces, asparagus, grapes, figs, pine nuts, jar of figs, jar of plums, smoked cheese, onions, sausages, box of olives, eggs, sucking pig, pomegranates, sow’s udder, chickens, early peaches, mushrooms, truffles, a hoop of little birds, ducks, ham, goose liver and Rhodian hardbake, (a kind of shortbread that might break your tooth.)

CONDIMENTS and CUTLERY People also gave each other condiments and wine, cutlery and cups. Garum (fish sauce), honey, mulsum (honeyed wine), raisin wine, retsina, Falernian wine, Surrentine wine and vinegar. Luxury tableware included antique cups, golden bowls, jewelled cups, arretine ware, glass cups, crystal cups and murrhine cups (a semi precious stone that gives flavour to wine). Other utensils mentioned by Martial are a strainer for snow, a flagon for snow, a drinking flask,  small table jugs, an earthenware jug, silver spoons, snail spoons, baskets and mushroom pots.

replica Roman gaming board and oil lamp
STATIONERY and FURNITURE were also popular gifts. Martial mentions wax tablets, ivory tablets, three leaved wax tablets, parchment tablets, small Vitellian tablets for love letters, ivory cashbox, dice, dice box, nuts (for gambling), gaming board, gaming pieces, case for writing materials, stylus case, bookcase, bundle of reed pens, oil lamp for the bedroom, candle, multi wicked lamp, wax taper, candelabrum, horn lantern, lantern made of a bladder, incense, smokeless wood, peacock-feather fly whisk, ox-tail fly-swat, place-keeper for scroll (like a bookmark), palm leaf broom, peacock couch, semicircular couch, citrus wood table, maple table, tablecloth, feather stuffing for a mattress, marsh reed stuffing for a mattress and hay for a mattress, if you are really strapped for sesterces.

sandals and pull toy (replica)
OBJECTS FOR GROOMING and BEAUTY - Martial mentions such gifts as a toothpick, an ear scoop, a hair pin of gold, combs, hair, wigs, hair dye, a parasol, a hair-cutting kit, a bath-set, a strigil, dentifrice (dentifricium) for polishing teeth, bean meal for folds in your stomach, opobalsam (a balsam type perfume for men), a breast band, a sponge, wool lined slippers, a horn oil flask, a medicine chest of ivory, an ivory back scratcher in the shape of a hand, unguent, a garland of roses, an earthenware chamberpot, rings, a ring case, a toga, a wrapper for after a workout, a broad-brimmed hat, a hooded cloak, a leather overcoat, a pilleum (freedman's hat), a girdle, an apron, a bath wrap, white wool, purple wool, amethyst wool, etc. Here's a poem about the gift of a red cloak:

SCARLET CLOAK Careful if you support the Blues or Greens at the races, this cloak might make you a traitor! XIV.131

replica Roman rag doll
THINGS FOR BOYS and GIRLS - a hunting knife, hunting spears, a belt and sword, a dagger, a small shield, a small hatchet, a feather-stuffed ball, a ball for trigon, dumbbells, a leather wrestling cap, a rattle, a parrot that says ‘Ave Caesar’, a ‘talking’ crow, a nightingale, an ivory cage, a lyre, a plectrum, a hoop, jewellery and of course SIGILLA: little clay or wooden figures.

SIGILLUM of a HUNCHBACK – I think Prometheus was drunk when he made hunchbacks from the earth, he was fooling around with Saturnalian clay. XIV.182

 clay mask from Lipari, Sicily
LUXURY GOODS - If you were really rich, you could give opulent gifts of silver, gold, jewels, animals and - in an age of slavery - even people. Martial composes epigrams for a gold statue of Victory, various figures in Corinthian bronze, paintings of different mythological characters, a clay theatrical mask, Minerva in silver, Homer in parchment notebooks, Virgil, Livy or Cicero on parchment, works by poets such as Propertius, Ovid, Lucan and Catullus – (scrolls were luxury items in those days) - a hawk, dwarf mules, a Gallic lapdog, a greyhound, a monkey, a wrestler, a dancing girl, a scribe, an idiot, a cook, a confectioner, and a dwarf!

DWARF - If you only saw his head, you would think he was Hector; if you saw him standing up, you’d think he was Astyanax. XIV.212

That epigram was the inspiration for the bad guy in my tenth Roman Mystery, The Colossus of Rhodes. But I have used Martial for inspiration throughout the eighteen books of my Roman Mysteries series, copies of which would make perfect apophoreta for children aged 8 and up!

YO SATURNALIA!

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A MERRY CHRISTMAS, ONE AND ALL!

December 24, 2012, 2:25 am
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BY ESSIE FOX 


Santa Claus by Essie Fox


Before taking up writing novels I worked as a commercial illustrator, often selling to greetings cards companies, and the Santa Claus shown above was one of my favourite Christmas designs.


Even in those days I took inspiration from the Victorians - such as in the use of a border of 'scraps'. However, before Queen Victoria's reign there were no commercial Christmas cards – that tradition only really beginning after the introduction of the Penny Post, when Sir Henry Cole had the bright idea of printing up thousands of images which were sold in his London art shop and priced at one shilling each. What an industry that enterprise began!


Sir Henry Cole's first commercial Christmas card



As far as my own jolly gentleman would have been concerned, well, hardly anyone in England then would even have known his name. And yet by 1870 almost every child would recognise the sleigh that was drawn by reindeer, and the stockings full of precious gifts - if only an orange or apple to eat - as a present from Father Christmas.

Illustration by John Leech from Dickens' A Christmas Carol


The two names - Santa Claus and Father Christmas - have now become interchangeable, but their origins are quite different. Father Christmas, on whom Dickens based his Christmas Present was derived from an old English midwinter festival when Sir Christmas, Old Father Christmas, or Old Winter was depicted as wearing green; a sign of fertility and the coming spring. Hence homes were often decorated with mistletoe, holly and ivy. But this visitor did not bring his hosts gifts or climb down their narrow chimneys. He wandered about from home to home, feasting with the families and bringing everyone good cheer; as celebrated in this medieval carol:-


'Goday, goday, my lord Sire Christemas, goday!
Goday, Sire Christemas, our king,
For ev’ry man, both old and ying,
Is glad and blithe of your coming;
Goday!' 


The image of Christmas Present with which we are more familiar now is that of Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas, who 'arrived' in America in the seventeenth century when Dutch settlers imported their own Sinter Klass. And it was in America, in 1822, that Clement Clare Moore wrote a poem for his children which went on to have such a remarkable and enduring influence:-




'He was dressed all in fur from his head to his foot,
And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he looked like a peddler just opening his sack.
His eyes how they twinkled! His dimpled how merry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry;
His droll little mouth was drawn up in a bow,
And the beard on his chin was as white as the snow.
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath.
He had a broad face, and a little round belly
That shook when he laughed like a bowl fully of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, - a right jolly old elf –
And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself.'



A Visit from Saint Nicholas (now more popularly known as The Night Before Christmas) described the old man’s appearance in detail - and this is what children today will know. His image and 'traditions' are beautifully illustrated in the woodblock print below. Published in 1866 in Harper’s Weekly magazine, it was created by Thomas Nast, and based on personal memories from his own happy childhood in Germany.

Santa and His Works by Thomas Nast


MERRY CHRISTMAS!

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PLAING, DANSINK & SINGIN OFF FYLTHY KARRELLS by Eleanor Updale

December 24, 2012, 5:30 pm
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Merry Christmas everybody!  

Scottish Presbyterians having a good time - From The llustrated London News 1855
When I was young, my mother told me that I was very lucky to live in England because the people of Scotland had no fun at Christmas: for them it was just another day.  According to my mother, they kept their celebration for the New Year, and that festivalwas no match for our orgy of food and garish plastic the week before.  Years later, I married a Scotsman and found out how wrong she'd been.  As children, hundreds of miles apart, we had simultaneously twiddled the knobs of our new Etch-a-Sketch machines and wondered at the technical ingenuity of The Magic Robot as we scoffed mince pies in a sea of torn wrapping paper on Christmas morning. 

The image of the dour Scottish Christmas goes back a long way, and a little light is shed on it by an exhibition of documents I visited the other day  in the wonderful Robert Adam rotunda of Register House in Edinburgh.


 'Exhibition' is rather a fancy word for the tiny display, which takes up  a single glass case, but I want to share its charming selection of Christmas vignettes with you.


John Knox's statue in Edinburgh
First, to those drab times: which of course are associated with John Knox and his ferocious followers, who, in the 1550s and 60s, prefigured Cromwell and the English Puritans with their attacks on Christmas celebrations for their 'popish' and pagan associations. 

 Quite how much success they had in suppressing the festivities is unclear.  One of the documents in the exhibition shows how, in December 1574, St Nicholas Kirk Session in Aberdeen admonished fourteen women for plaing, dansink & singin off fylthy karrells on youll day. 
So, as so often, the official line on how people should behave and what people actually did were rather different.

A letter from 1694 shows that, more than a hundred years after Knox;s death, the Church of Scotland's opposition to Yuletide celebrations was both persistent and flouted.  Alexander, Lord Montgomery wrote to Sir William Cunningham of Cunninghamehead:

I am to have some friends with me the morrow to keep Crisinmass and if you will doe me the favour to make up the number you shall be most welcome and I hope to eate ane gouse that day will give little offence to presbritray however you may if you please lay the blem upon me

The exhibition jumps forward to the twentieth century with  a marriage register open on Christmas Day 1936 to show the entry for the wedding of Jean Christmas McCormack to Gilbert Reid. The label suggests that many Scots were married on Christmas Day because it was one of the few days in the year that they didn't have to work.  
[I find that a little hard to understand, as Scotland has far more local holidays than England, and if all the shops and restaurants were open on 25th December (as I'm told they were) who was serving in them? But we'll let that one go for now]. 

The sign below the marriage entry notes that. since 1855, when civil registration began in Scotland, seventeen people with the first or middle name 'Christmas' appear in the Scottish registers of births, marriages or deaths.  Many of them were born on 25th December.  Two of them had the surname 'Carol'.

A little digression:
Christmas Humphreys

Older readers of this blog may remember the controversial lawyer, Christmas Humphreys, who led for the Crown in many famous murder trials, including the Evans/Chrisite, Ruth Ellis and Bently cases and went on to become a controversially lenient judge.  Despite his name, he was also one of the UK's most prominent Buddhists.


But back to the Register House documents.  They show that 'Christmas' is also a surname.  Since 1855, forty-five babies have been born into 'Christmas' families in Scotland.

The Statutory Registers include 1,538 children with the first or middle name 'Angel', 2,207 called 'Noel', 328 named 'Star', 2,515 named 'Gabriel', and 28,726 named 'Carol'.  One boy, born in 1901, was given the middle name'Bethlehem'.

The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch

So despite the cliched image of the repressed Scottish Presbyterian - most touchingly reinforced in the breach by a picture many of us will have received on Christmas cards this year - it seems that Christmas in Scotland has never been the cheerless day that I was led to expect.  Even in the late sixteenth century, a Kirk Session was complaining about playing cards and dice, masked dancing with bells, selling  yule loaves, cross dressing and 'extraordinary drinking'. 

I hope your family, like mine, is keeping those traditions going today, though you may want to draw the line at singin off fylthy karrells in front of the children.

Here's to a wonderful New Year for the History Girls and all who read the blog.

www.eleanorupdale.com.



PS: Many thanks to all who have been in touch about the eye trouble I mentioned in my last blog here.  The good news is that, at least on electronic devices, reading is becoming a pleasure again.  I downloaded Great Expectations to re-read before seeing the new film, only to discover that I had never actually read it in the first place, and that - as you all know - it is one of the best books in the world!



Please look out for my new book, The Last Minute, published on January 3rd.

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