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What's in a Letter by Julie Summers

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I’ve always been fascinated by communication. Not just in its literal form but in what it says about the human condition and how important it is to people to communicate and be communicated with. Throughout my many years of research into the history of the Second World War I have been struck by how much of a difference it made if people could talk to one another, if not face to face then by letter. In fact, sometimes it was enough just to write the letter, as it was in the case of one of the soldiers I wrote about who was a prisoner of the Japanese for 3 ½ years. In February 1942 he wrote to his wife: ‘I am a Prisoner of War.’ The letter goes on to describe the fall of Singapore and then he wrote the following:

'We are going to be linked together through the medium of pen and ink and pencil and paper as we always have been; we are going to continue to put our thoughts on paper. So long as I am able, I am going to write you at least one letter each week. One day you will read these letters … And know without doubt that you are with me … now and always.' 

Charles Steel wrote 182 letters to his wife, Louise, over the period of his captivity but he could only send them to her when he was finally freed in August 1945. He posted them from Rangoon in September and soon received his first letter from her expressing anxiety about how difficult it would be for them to reconnect after so much time apart. He replied: 

‘To hear you talking about cooking for the family is as balm to my soul. . . I am sure that we shall come together quite naturally because I see, quite clearly, a scene in our garden in forty years’ time. You will be reading these letters and I shall be gardening, and I shall come over to you with the loveliest rose I can find. As I pin it to your shawl, I can see you look up and hear you say, ‘Darling, what silly children we were to think that a mere war would alter our love for each other!’ And I shall kiss you, because I shall still love you . . .’


Charles and Louise Steel did indeed come together and were married for over forty years. Margaret, born after the war, is photographed here with them on holiday. 

Today we can communicate a hundred times a day in so many different ways: email, Twitter, Facebook and a dozen other ways I probably don’t know about because I was born into the generation that sent postcards from holiday and rang home once a week from school. In 1940, the postman delivered letters twice, even three times a day. Telegrams were for urgent news, both good and bad, and by the outbreak of war the telephone was becoming more widely used. 

But the bulk of wartime correspondence was by letter and the quantity prodigious. In the six years of war the army postal service handled thousands of millions of letters and parcels to and from conflict zones throughout the world. The army postal service was run by an impressive individual called Major James Drew who was over six feet tall and sported a fine handle-bar moustache. He was so successful in keeping the post flowing that he could guarantee next day delivery of letters in the aftermath of D-Day in June 1944 and parcels to arrive within three days. 

In every diary written during the war there are references to the arrival or non-arrival of the post. Crushing disappointment when nothing came, euphoria at the delivery of a letter from a loved one. And at home the post was just as eagerly awaited. ‘No letter from Jack this week’ or ‘I am sure you have written but I haven’t received any letters from you for a fortnight and I do so worry when I don’t hear from you.’ But ‘bliss oh bliss! Four letters in one day. I jumped into bed, pulled the covers up to my nose and breathed in your news.’ The value of postal communication and exchange of information between servicemen and women and their families is hard to overestimate. 

‘Letters for us stand for love, longing, light-heartedness and lyricism. Letters evoke passion, tenderness, amusement, sadness, rejoicing, surprise.’ These words were written by Diana Hopkinson. As a deaf woman she was particularly lonely without him. She and her husband corresponded for over five years, the words on paper giving meaning to her life without him. While she was stirring the jam or playing with the baby, washing her clothes or mending their shoes, the letters, full of love and passion, humour and tales of far-away places she would never visit but in her mind’s eye, filled her thoughts and kept her going throughout the war.

One very special set of letters came to my notice when I was writing the chapter in my book When the Children Came Home. This was correspondence between families separated by the Atlantic Ocean. In 1940 Sherborne School in Dorset sent 125 girls aged between six and sixteen to Branksome Hall School in Toronto. For some this was the opportunity of a lifetime, for others it was less happy as they missed their families, but for all it meant that the only form of communication was the letter. Sandra B had been a teenager when she arrived in Toronto. She wrote: ‘My family were most supportive. They had written twice a week. I had written home without constraint, and I felt that they had kept pace with the ways I was changing: they had both been to North America and were well travelled.’ Coming home, however, was difficult and she found that Britain had changed. Canada was where her heart was and she returned in 1947, marrying a Canadian boy the following year. She went on: ‘I consider myself Canadian, British Columbian, but my roots are still British. My mother, brother’s family, aunt, husband’s family are still there. In retrospect I feel I had the best of both worlds and was exceptionally lucky to come to Canada. Because of the age I came out, I do not feel that I was adversely affected; maybe my attitudes were already formed. I feel it made me more self reliant.’ Undoubtedly, in her mind, the ability to communicate openly with her parents had given her the courage to do what she felt was right for her.


Today we no longer communicate by letter. That is something that has changed in the last fifteen years and I rue it. Nothing gives me more pleasure than seeing an envelope with spidery writing plopping onto my doormat. It is almost bound to contain a story and I feel a tingle of excitement as I slit it open to see what little bit of life is going to be shared. Some years ago I received a letter which started: ‘My name is William Mortimer Drower and your grandfather was kind to me when I got into a spot of trouble in the camp gaol.’ That is a story I shall tell you next month. Please be patient. It is worth it…




Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen? by Alison Weir

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Our April guest is Alison Weir, a prolific historian and novelist. We welcome her warmly to The History Girls.



Alison Weir is the top-selling female historian (and the fifth best-selling historian overall) in the United Kingdom, and has sold over 2.7 million books worldwide. She has published seventeen history books, including The Six Wives of Henry VIII,The Princes in the Tower, Elizabeth the Queen,Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry VIII: King and Court,Katherine Swynford, The Lady in the Tower and Elizabeth of York. Alison has also published five historical novels, including Innocent Traitor and The Lady Elizabeth. Her latest biography is The Lost Tudor Princess, about Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. She is soon to publish Katherine of Aragon: The True Queen, the first in a series of novels about the wives of Henry VIII. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Life Patron of Historic Royal Palaces, and is married with two adult children. 
http://www.alisonweir.org.uk


Katherine of Aragon was the first of Henry VIII’s celebrated wives, but he was not her first husband. In 1501, at sixteen, she had been married to his elder brother, Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, who was nine months younger. The marriage lasted just six months, and the young couple shared a bed on only six or seven occasions, because Arthur was dying.

Katherine’s physician, Dr Alcaraz, later explained that she had emerged from her marriage a virgin because ‘the Prince had been denied the strength necessary to know a woman, as if he was a cold piece of stone, because he was in the final stages of phthisis [consumption]. [Alcaraz] said his limbs were weak and that he had never seen a man whose legs and other bits of his body were so thin.’ In this period tuberculosis was common and Dr Alcaraz would easily have recognised it, so his diagnosis is almost certainly reliable.

It has often been asserted that the traditional view of Arthur being sickly from birth is incorrect, but the historical evidence would appear to support it. Arthur had been a premature baby, born at eight months, and the accounts of the bishops of Winchester for 1486-7 show that his nursery household was established for at least the first six months of his life at Farnham, Surrey, not far from Winchester, where he was born. This was probably because he was weak and needed careful nursing until he was strong enough to be moved elsewhere.

There is no evidence to suggest that Arthur experienced the learning difficulties that can affect premature children, but new research, based on a study of a million births, shows that prematurity can have consequences into adulthood, and that such children have an increased risk of dying in late childhood compared with babies delivered at full term; in late childhood, boys in particular have a seven-fold increased risk of dying. That may not impact greatly on today’s low mortality rates, but it would have had serious implications five hundred years ago. Thus it is likely that Arthur had a lifetime risk of poor health because he was premature.

In the summer of 1500, his father, Henry VII, expressed concern about Arthur and Katherine living together, because of Arthur’s weak constitution. The King was then in favour of them consummating the marriage but living apart thereafter until Arthur was older. In 1497 Katherine’s brother, the Infante Juan, had died at nineteen – disastrously for the Spanish succession. The cause was perhaps tuberculosis, but it was generally held that over-indulgence in the marriage bed had proved fatal, which no doubt informed Henry VII’s decision.

Paul Workman, owned by the author 
(The above portrait, supposedly of Katherine during her first marraige, is now thought to be based on one of the first Mary Tudor, Henry Vlll's younger sister)

Katherine remained a widow for seven years, until Arthur’s brother succeeded to the throne as Henry VIII and married her. Some churchmen feared that the marriage was uncanonical and forbidden by Scripture. The Book of Leviticus warned: 'If a man shall take his brother's wife, it is an impurity: he hath uncovered his brother's nakedness; they shall be childless.' But Katherine’s duenna had been adamant that the couple had not had intercourse, and her mother, Queen Isabella had informed Henry VII that her daughter remained a virgin. The Pope had accordingly issued a dispensation for the marriage.

Years later, when it became clear that Katherine would never bear him a son, and he was pursuing Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII began to have doubts that his marriage was lawful. He had even discovered that, in the original Hebrew, Leviticus warned that a man would be without sons, rather than childless. But Katherine swore publicly that she had come to him ‘a true maid, without touch of man’, but he was determined to divorce her. To achieve that, he wrangled with an unaccommodating Pope for seven years, and in the process severed the English Church from Rome, establishing himself as Supreme Head of the Church of England and bringing about the Reformation. Through all this, Katherine remained adamant that she was the King’s true wife, and to defend her position she was prepared to endure exile from court, house arrest and separation from her beloved daughter, the future Mary I.

In 1533 Thomas Cranmer, Henry’s new Archbishop of Canterbury, declared the union of Henry and Katherine incestuous and unlawful, and confirmed Henry’s marriage to Anne Boleyn. Still Katherine refused to be called by any title other than queen, and she was vindicated in 1534, when, at long last, the Pope ruled that her marriage to Henry was valid. But it was too late. Henry refused to take her back. She died in 1536, signing herself to the last ‘Katherine the Queen’.


So was she the true Queen of England? The new evidence we now have shows that it is highly unlikely that her marriage to Arthur was consummated. That being the case, Henry had never gone so far as to ‘uncover his brother’s nakedness’.

Furthermore, there was a counterweight to Leviticus in the Book of Deuteronomy: ‘Where brethren dwell together, and one of them dieth without children, the wife of the deceased shall not marry to another; but his brother shall take her, and raise up seed to his brother.’ These conflicting texts were the subject of much debate at the time, but for all Henry’s arguments that Deueteronomy did not apply to Christians, passages in Genesis, Ruth and Matthew give weight to it, showing that it was customary in Biblical times, and seen as ordained by God, for a man to marry his brother’s childless widow. Even Joseph, the earthly father of Jesus, was the offspring of such a union.

This was not incompatible with the ban in Leviticus, which did not apply when the brother had died childless, as Arthur had; and this was understood by many theologians, notably Juan Luis Vives and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, two of Katherine’s great champions. Thus Henry’s argument was flawed, whether Katherine’s marriage to Arthur had been consummated or not.


Even so, that marriage had created an affinity, or close kinship, between Katherine and Henry, which constituted an impediment to their marriage, by virtue of the fact that she had become his sister. This was why Henry claimed his marriage to her was incestuous. However, such an impediment was not seen as contravening divine law, so the Pope could very properly issue a dispensation. Henry challenged this, insisting that his marriage was prohibited under divine law, in Scripture rather than by canon law, but there were many precedents, and the King’s interpretation of Leviticus, as we have seen, did not stand up to close scrutiny. It was Henry who insisted that Leviticus applied to a marriage that had been consummated, erroneously concentrating the whole focus of the case on what had actually passed between Katherine and Arthur in their marriage bed.

The conclusion is inescapable: the grounds put forward by Henry VIII to secure an annulment were baseless and weak, the marriage was valid, and Katherine was the true Queen of England.



For excellent and much fuller discussions of Henry VIII’s annulment, see J. J. Scarisbrick’s Henry VIII (London, 1968) and Philip Campbell: The Canon Law of the Divorce Case (2009, www.medievalists.net/files/11010101.pdf)

 







April competition

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To win one of five copies of Alison Weir's new book, just answer this question in the Comments section below:

"Which of Henry VIII's wives would you most like to meet, and why?"

Then copy your answer to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk

Closing date: 7th May

We are afraid our competitions are open to UK Followers only.

History and The Greystones Press by Mary Hoffman

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Now that Shakespeare Month on the History Girls is over, some of you may be breathing a sigh of relief! But I'm going to crave your indulgence a little further. You see, on 23rd April, the big Shakespeare day, five titles came out with my new independent publishing house, The Greystones Press.

One of the titles, pictured above, was the reason we chose that date. You can read a bit more about that on the piece I wrote for Authors Electric, which by a nice bit of serendipity came out yesterday. Incidentally, I was very happy to write a guest blog for AE, as its creator, Susan Price, is one of our wonderful HG Reserves, and has written many "anytime posts" for me to bank and use when there is a crisis here.

On our launch list, four out of the five titles have an element of history in them. Shakespeare's Ghost is a YA novel with a paranormal twist but it is buttressed by an enormous amount of historical research. Just off the top of my head, this involved:
The Winter's Tale
The Tempest
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Much Ado about Nothing
The Globe theatre
The Blackfriars Theatre
The King's Men
King James and his family
Boy players in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre
Acting companies on tour
Elizabethan Fairy and folklore
The Rollwright Stones
Renaissance magic
The Shakespearean stage
Symptoms of the plague etc. etc.

Of course I knew the plays well already - not just those listed above. I wouldn't have tackled a novel about Shakespeare if I hadn't. But I had an early piece of luck about his indoor theatre at Blackfriars. A friend was able to put me in touch with one of the architects working on the Sam Wanamaker theatre at the Globe, who kindly answered all my questions, showed me plans and took me to see the building in progress. It was as close as a modern theatre could be to the no longer extant performing space in Blackfriars that enabled The King's Men to play in winter as well as summer.

Since then I have seen several productions in this gorgeous indoor theatre, including The Winter's Tale and The Tempest this year.

Another of the Greystones Press début titles is the reissue of a novel I originally wrote as YA but which we are now publishing with the subtitle and cover I always wanted:

It was because of David that the History Girls blog was born. The novel was coming out in July 2011 and I was doing a 30-stop blog tour. Then I began to wonder why there wasn't a blog mainly for historical fiction. Maybe there was; if so I couldn't find it.

Of course David required a lot of historical background research too: one of the things that attracted me to the subject was that we knew so much about Michelangelo's famous statue. We have the contract commissioning him to sculpt it, we know the date when his chisel made its first cut; we even have the minutes of the committee meeting which was called to decide where to place the finished "Giant" - a committee whose members included Leonardo da Vinci.

And in the middle there was a great big hole about who the model was or whether there even was one! That sort of situation is pure catnip to a writer of historical fiction and of course I had to learn everything I could about Michelangelo, Renaissance sculpture techniques, Florentine politics, the Medici family, Savonarola and many other things.

Our third title grew out of a blog. Not this one, though the author Katherine Langrish is a History Girl. She had created another blog, in 2009, called Seven Miles of Steel Thistles, with wonderful short essays on fairy and folk tales. I felt these deserved a wider and less ephemeral platform. So we asked Katherine if she would expand some of these posts into a full-length non-fiction book for adults.


It is proving enormously popular and we have already had to reprint, so I think our instincts were sound. Katherine herself had to do an enormous amount of research, which she writes a bit about here.

The fourth title, The Moon, by Jules Cashford had been published in hardback in 2003. It had taken me months to read because after a paragraph or two I had to put the book down and let the material percolate. Every page gave me ideas for books I'd like to write. The only other book I've read that gave me this sensation was Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.


So when we were offered the chance to re-issue this book in paperback, it was too tempting to refuse, even though we had said firmly that we were NOT going to publish illustrated books. It has the subtitle "Symbol of transformation" and, we think, a much better cover than the original. The breadth and depth of Jules' knowledge of myth, symbolism and imagery across a range of cultures makes the book a delight.

The brief of the Greystones Press is to publish adult and YA fiction and adult NF "in areas that interest us." These are art, music, literature, mythology, fairy stories and of course history. You can find out more about us at www.greystonespress.com

And in time I hope very much that some of the essays you have read here over the years might be expanded and combined into another book that The Greystones Press could publish.

Eliza Rose by Lucy Worsley - a review

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In our current competition, you can win a prize of Alison Weir's new book on Katherine of Aragon by choosing which of the six wives of Henry Vlll you'd like to meet and why.(Closing date 7th May). One of our Followers has already chosen the queen at the heart of historian Lucy Worsley's first novel for children, Eliza Rose: Katherine Howard.

We do witness the brief marriage with Anne of Cleves, as both Katherine and Eliza Rose herself, the invented first person narrator, serve as the queen's ladies-in-waiting before she is set aside and becomes Henry's "sister." So it is Katherine Howard, the teenaged fifth wife of the now bloated king,  who is at the centre of the novel and of a circle of young women brought up to a life at court.

Katherine Howard by Hans Holbein the Younger
Eliza Rose is Katherine's cousin - surprisingly her other more famous cousin, Anne Boleyn is not mentioned - and she comes from the impoverished noble family of Camperdownes. Eliza is the only child of the widowed Baron Stone and she lives in the crumbling Manor of Stoneton, knowing that she is the only one who can restore the family's fortunes by making a good marriage.

After a false start with a young nobleman, she is sent to her grandmother, the Duchess of Northumberland, at Trumpton Hall, where she meets a whole gaggle of young girls, including the "boldest and buxomest" Katherine.

At first there is no love lost between the cousins, but a grudging friendship forms when they go to serve Queen Anne. Still, there is always a hint of rivalry between them, beginning when they are both attracted to the Duchess's music master and Katherine is the one whose interest is reciprocated.

Later, when King Henry is on the marriage market again, Katherine and Eliza are seen to be vying for his attentions, though our heroine is doing it out of duty to her father's wishes, who wouldn't have minded if she became only the king's mistress. And again it's Katherine who triumphs, though that triumph is so pathetically short-lived.

Katherine's Coat of Arms
In her time at court, Eliza has found one young man she would really like to be with, Ned Barsby, but he is the bastard son of an Earl and a humble page to the king, so she constantly reminds herself that she must marry money.

And her cousin Katherine is not to be envied, having to share her bed with the gross king and his smelly leg ulcer. But her attempts to distract herself with romance and perhaps, according to this novel, become pregnant with a child that could be passed off as the king's were more dangerous than she realised.

The author wanted to counter-balance the "general consensus ... that [Katherine] was a ditzy airhead." And she written a very engaging and readable novel about friendship, rivalry and treachery - a kind of Tudor Mean Girls but with much higher stakes. But the sympathy that we feel for the invented narrator somewhat detracts from the amount we have left for the young queen.

And after all Eliza's exhortations to do her duty, she follows her heart in the end and we see no consequences.

Thornton Abbey Gatehouse, where Henry stayed with Katherine
Lucy Worsley is the Chief Curator at Historical Royal Palaces, a charity which includes the Tower of London and Hampton Court and is a specialist in Tudor history. But in the novel she deviates from the facts by combining three historical characters into one, as she told Francesca Wade in an interview in the Daily Telegraph.

The music master in the novel is Francis Manham, whereas the actual one, who gave evidence of sexual dalliance at Katherine's trial, was Henry Mannox. He escaped with his life and may or may not have married Katherine's stepmother (she certainly married a man of that name). Katherine's other lovers were Francis Dereham (before her marriage) and Thomas Culpeper (a distant cousin), who were both executed for adultery as was the young queen. I wish Lucy Worsley had added that information to her Epilogue: Why I Wrote this Book. I think writers of historical fiction owe that sort of thing to their readers, even if the intended audience is "eleven-year-old girls." In fact, especially so.


Mary Hoffman

The right to dig, by Vanora Bennett

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After 13 years in increasing despair at never getting to the top of my London borough’s apparently endless allotment waiting list, I applied to another London borough a few weeks ago and immediately – starting last Saturday – got a half-size allotment of five poles.

Half-size! That’s deceptive. My new smallholding is huge, at least the size of my house, surrounded by other plots of either twice or four times the size, and charming brambles and wildflowers and fruit trees in blossom in between (it is not quite in the perfect condition of the plot in the picture, by the way; I just borrowed that picture). Call me over-enthusiastic, but at the end of my first weekend, even if I ache a lot, my plot still seems an absolute paradise of fruit and veg and flowers and bees and fascinating sheds and delightfully Chekhovian characters and tea and bric-a-brac and happiness.

Which has all, naturally enough, made me wonder how it came about historically that a bunch of middle-class London characters such as my fellow allotment-farmers and me have been so blessed. Who gave the citizens of England the right to five or ten poles of land somewhere near where they live, for not much in the way of rent, and when, and why? Is it all just to give us a chance to out-Fearnley-Whittingstall Hugh and live poshly off the finest of fresh food without paying the supermarkets for it? Is it part of living in a democracy? Or is it something to do with being afraid of hunger - digging for victory in the Second World War - or an older right still, corresponding to older hungers? Was it once a way for the poor to feed themselves and ward off starvation, like the Russian dacha-and-allotment system that (sometimes) kept the Slavic version of the grim reaper away at tight times in the 20th century?

The answer, it seems, is that there are at least two allotment histories merged into one outcome, and all these sets of suppositions are true.

On the one hand, there was a long-running and serious story about alleviating poverty. The enclosures movement that saw peasants squeezed off common land as it was hedged and allocated to a single owner, making it unavailable for traditional shared farming, caused unrest through history and in particular sent crowds of the hungry poor into towns to kick-start the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. But the fightback on behalf of the dispossessed also eventually made it mandatory to make growing land available to the poor and displaced.

Secondly, in a fairly separate strand of history, the middle classes prospering in towns as a result of the Industrial Revolution then clamoured for “city allotments” to do a bit of digging, but also to have a garden to relax and escape the confines of the city – partly because of a 19th-century obsession with gardening and partly as a show of wealth. These “posh” plots became known as “pleasure gardens” and often had brick summerhouses or follies. Families might even stay the night in their city allotments, which were surrounded by hedges or fences – but the plots didn’t survive the spread of Victorian villas with their own gardens later in the 19th century. Most were turned into “normal” allotments, or built on.

So it’s the other, more brutal story – the one of brutal eviction of peasants from the land – that really brought us the Paradise Regained of modern allotments, I’d say.

A 19th-century question: how little land does a peasant need to stop revolting?

The enclosure movement in the late 18th century helped shape modern Britain. Enormous swathes of the English countryside were enclosed and the new fences planted altered the look of the landscape for good. By the mid-19th century, most common land in Britain had been enclosed and a whole class of rural people dispossessed. Throughout this period, according to The Allotment Gardener, movements came into being to try and fight for some ground for the common labourer who was quietly losing his all. As early as 1649 protesters calling themselves the “Diggers” demanded the “right to dig”. A group of hungry men led by Gerrard Winstanley, they organised a mass trespass on waste land in St George’s Hill, Surrey, sowing it with vegetables and wheat. 



Winstanley was a cloth merchant whose business had been ruined in the Civil War; he had, in January of 1649, published The New Law of Righteousness in which he envisioned a just and harmonious society guided by spiritual regeneration through Christ. He explained his belief that the miseries of the world result from men turning from God, whom he equates with Reason, to satisfy greed and the pursuit of power. Poverty and inequality stem from the selfish buying and selling of land and property, and could be eradicated by communal living and an acceptance of the risen Christ, he wrote: "Was the Earth made to preserve a few covetous, proud men to live at ease, and for them to bag and barn up the treasures of the Earth from others, that these may beg or starve in a fruitful land; or was it made to preserve all her children?"

The New Law of Righteousness was published as the trial of King Charles I was drawing to a close. Four days later, the King was beheaded at Whitehall. England was declared a "Commonwealth and free state". In this revolutionary atmosphere, it seemed possible that all tyranny and oppression could finally be brought down and Winstanley's utopian vision become reality.

 

In April, to prove their point, Winstanley's Diggers started planting St George's Hill. 

Their idealism, it turned out, was misplaced. The new authorities didn't like it. A Kingston court indicted and fined them in July. 

By August, harassed off the land, they moved on. 

But the idea of a “right to dig” had taken hold.

The social unrest caused by the process of enclosure led to a number of private initiatives to provide the common man with land to grow and provide for himself. This was mainly driven by private land owners who commonly believed that not only would a small patch of land be worth more to their workers than an increase in salary, but that it also kept them away from the ale house, making them better workers. These sponsors didn’t want workers turning up too tired to work at their paid employment, however, so they wanted the size of the allotments provided to be restricted.

The age of legislating for social improvement was at hand. The General Enclosure Act in 1845 offered “field gardens” of up to a quarter-acre for the poor, but the Act was poorly framed and made little real difference. After an election in 1884 in which allotments were a political hot potato, in 1887 an Allotments Act was introduced, which made it possible for local authorities to acquire land for allotments and also made it compulsory for local authorities to provide allotments where there was demand for them. Local authorities resisted however, and this led to further Acts in 1894, and then finally the Smallholding and Allotments Act of 1907. This was the defining measure, still in place today, which forced councils to provide allotments where there was demand. Under it a local authority is obliged to provide allotments if there is demand from more than six people (unless, as with central London, there is insufficient space).

New century, new stimuli: veg gardening as a response to war and fear


Until now handing over land had seemed, to many in the governing classes, a where-will-it-all-end pandering to the demands of the greedy poor.

World War One changed that. With the German blockade biting and people worried about where their food would come from, the authorities stopped going slow and hastily tripled the number of plots available, which rose from half a million to one-and-a-half million by 1917 (this fell back below a million by 1929).

Enthusiasm hit another peak during the Second World War. All sorts of land was given out to allotment plots – even parkland and city gardens.


My father remembers the central garden of the square where he and I both grew up – St Peter’s Square in Hammersmith, west London - being turned over to vegetables during the War when he was a small boy. The picture on the left is of Hampstead Heath.

It was the age of the Dig for Victory campaign, with the government exhorting gardeners to grow, grow, grow and get the family along to help too.

The numbers of allotment holders shrank dramatically after the war ended. An era of ready-made food and Wonderbras, and the uncoolness of the flat-capped-old-man-gardener image, looked set to kill off forever the idea of it being fun growing your own veg. Yet every decade or so another TV programme would come along that would briefly send people rushing for an allotment again – “The Good Life,” in the Seventies, and then in our time almost anything by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.

21st-century hip


Think organic. Think the rise of green parties everywhere. It’s all reflected down at the allotments too. There are about 300,000 potholders in the UK today, and, according to the National Society for Allotment and Leisure Gardeners, there are another 100,000 on waiting lists. (No, make that 99,999 – this week I’m crossing myself off the waiting list I’ve been on for so long). The average age has shifted down several generations. I’m at the old end of my field, it seems. Many of the people I met were in their 30s and 40s: mums with children, young men with girlfriends ... like fresh-faced Katie and many others on YouTube.

My allotment field is a place of kindly advice and shared cups of tea, and cheerful internationalism too. Savvy immigrants from the gardening nations are all strongly represented here. There’s an Afghan guy growing an astonishing number of crops on his plot, just down from me; and a pair of Cypriot brothers who’ve had side-by-side plots for longer than anyone can remember on the other side of him. Below that, a double plot – 20 poles! Pretty much a farm, with three sheds and a greenhouse and more fruit trees than you can imagine – belongs to Svitlana, from Ukraine, who farms it with her sister and her sister’s small children. She kindly offered me tea and the use of one of her sheds to store my stuff. She keeps a nip of vodka and a couple of tins of sardines in hers, too, in case a party is needed.

I used to worry about what I’d do if a world-changing catastrophe hit - Brexit or Grexit or Donald Trump or a terrorist strike. Now I know, and it is strangely reassuring.

If all else failed, I’d still have the freedom to go to the place that Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers campaigned to be called into existence, all those centuries ago, and subsist by the sweat of my own brow; to exercise my “right to dig.”

Vanora Bennett's website

The Strange Paradox of the Fox-Hunting Poets - by Katherine Langrish

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John Masefield, 1912


Back in 1919 John Masefield published a long narrative poem called ‘Reynard the Fox’, neglected in this day and age not only because it’s all about the now controversial subject of fox-hunting but also because, as verse, the best you can say is that it’s workmanlike but often stiff.  It is, however, full of true emotion for the English countryside and was a best-seller in its day, probably because it conjured an already old-fashioned pastoral vision of England which was welcome after the horrors of the First World War. (Masefield was exempted from military service but worked as a hospital orderly in France in 1915.) Just so did Siegfried Sassoon seek retreat into his own ‘Weald of Youth’ in the character of his gauche young alter ego George Sherston, whose activities (‘Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’ 1928), compared with the slaughter of the trenches, must have seemed the harmless pastime of a lost Arcadia.  Even though Oscar Wilde, in ‘A Woman of No Importance’ 1893, apostrophised fox-hunting as ‘the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable’, his was an aesthete’s sneer at the English country gentleman rather than a plea for animal rights.  A century ago, almost no one felt any qualms at all about the ethics of hunting foxes.  

Masefield’s poem falls into two parts: the first from the point of view of the hunters and the second from that of the fox. This second half is the most readable today, although I recommend the entire poem to anyone with an interest in getting a feel for autres temps, autres moeurs. It’s fascinating that though there’s no hint of condemnation for the huntsmen – whom Masefield clearly regards as jolly good sports – nevertheless the poem expresses intense sympathy for the fox and identifies with his plight:

… They were nearer now, and they meant to kill.
They meant to run him until his blood
Clogged on his heart as his brush with mud,
Till his back bent up and his tongue hung flagging,
And his belly and brush were filthed from dragging,
Till he crouched stone-still, dead-beat and dirty
With nothing but teeth against the thirty…

What’s this about?  How can someone approve of fox-hunting, as Masefield did and Sassoon did – and yet write with such pity, such empathy for the victim?  And this is not the only fox in Masefield’s work. One of the most memorable characters in his children’s book ‘The Midnight Folk’ (1927) is the fox Rollicum Bitem, whom the young hero Kay overhears singing this excellent little ditty:

‘Oh pretty bunnies, let’s come for a stroll.’
                              ‘Oh no, no, no; you’re a fox.’
‘A fox, pretty dears; can’t you see I’m a mole?’
With a weaselly stoaty, snap at his throaty, Ho says Rollicum Bitem…

Despite his rabbiting propensities, Bitem is one of the ‘good’ characters, and Kay earns his friendship by saving him from the trap set by the wicked gamekeeper:

‘A trap?’ Bitem said; ‘and Keeper watching from a tree? I am very much obliged to you, Mr Kay.  I must be gone from here by the secret door. I’ll move off to my place Wicked Hill way.’

Of course Masefield’s fox is a hunter himself – as all foxes are – and this delightful children’s fantasy makes (excuse me) no bones about the fact: Bitem, in cahoots with Kay’s household cats, kills off most of the rabbits in the South Warren.  Many of Kay’s animal friends are predators, including Blinky the owl: the animals even use body parts while mapping out their hunt:

‘This hen’s head is the big yew. That rabbit-skin is the boggy patch; you know the place. Then here is where we got the partridge chicks. I’ll put this pheasant’s tail to mark the end of the South Warren…’

It’s a truism that societies which hunt their own meat – instead of, as most of the rest of us do, delegating the hard work and buying it ready packaged in a shop – feel a special respect for the animals they kill.  I understand how this could arise. If you can empathise with the prey, if you can imagine yourself inside the skin of a deer stepping through the forest or of a hare quivering in the long grass, you will be better able to predict its behaviour and this will lead to more successful hunts.  But empathy comes at a price.  Having stepped out of yourself and (at least partly) identified with the deer, you can’t escape imaginatively sharing its terror and pain, and you feel the need to make some recompense, some ritual gesture of respect to appease its spirit.

It’s not likely that any other predator on earth feels this way, but it explains why human hunters, right down to Masefield and Sassoon, express such fellow-feeling for their prey.  Hunter/hunted is a deeply ambiguous relationship. Rollicum Bitem and Nibbins the cat quite realistically feel no pity at all for the rabbits which they ‘clean out of’ the South Warren; nor is the child reader, such as my younger self, expected to be upset. (I wasn’t.) Yet if this were a story in which rabbits were the main characters, as in ‘Watership Down’, their fate would become of vital imaginative importance.  Our sympathy is directed, rarely universal.


Siegfried Sassoon, 1917

Here’s Sassoon, in character as little George Sherston, sitting on his pony and watching a fox come out of the covert:

Something rustled the dead leaves; not more than ten yards from where we stood, a small russet animal stole out on to the path and stopped for a photographic instant to take a look at us. It was the first time I had ever seen a fox, though I have seen a great many since – both alive and dead. By the time he had slipped out of sight again I had just begun to realize what it was that had looked at me with such human alertness. Why I should have behaved as I did I will not attempt to explain, but when Denis stood up in his stirrups and emitted a shrill “Huick-holler,” I felt spontaneously alarmed for the future of the fox. 

            “Don’t do that, they’ll catch him!” I exclaimed.

While the boy Denis is the complete little huntsman, young George is naïve and untaught. He openly sympathises with the animal – and is rebuked by his mentor, the groom Dixon: “Young Mr Milden won’t think much of you if you talk like that. He must have thought you a regular booby!”  Sassoon offers no comment other than George’s unhappiness: “My heart was full of misery.” But the text makes it clear it’s because of social embarrassment and the realisation he’s made a fool of himself, not because he's sorry for the fox. In real life Sassoon continued to hunt and to enjoy hunting. However, we might regard George’s desire to conform, to do what all the others do as – perhaps – a critique of the impulse which would later take him and so many of his contemporaries unquestioningly to war. 

Lord Dunsany, 1915


In a rather lovely book ‘The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’, 1950, the Irish writer and poet Lord Dunsany (eight years older than Sassoon, he too spent time in the trenches) tells how, compelled by a magical spell, the eponymous Colonel’s spirit transmigrates into the bodies of a great number of different animals. Living each life through till death, the Colonel is then immediately reincarnated as some other creature. Here he describes how, as a fox, he lay in wait for wild duck:

Getting one was very easy. One does it chiefly by patience. It is a thing we have not really got.  Not as I had it then. One may speak of having patience, but one only means in comparison with other men. One has not patience in comparison with a fox. I had patience as one has warmth and breath. I did not even wish for the ducks to hurry, any more than you hurry your breathing.  I waited in the beauty of the evening and knew they would come near in time. The colours changed in the sky, the glow faded, the big stars came out, and then all of them, and I needed nothing at all to solace my waiting, because it was part of the evening, as the evening was part of the rest.


I don’t know if you will understand me. It is hard to make myself clear to you. We are all outside that now. But then I was a part of it all, and I no more hurried than the Evening Star. The ducks began to give their comfortable quacking, not the kind that warns of any alarm. And then one of them swam close to me, close enough for me to spring. But I did not move.  I waited till its head was down in the water.  Then I sprang.


When I had got my duck I went away, and all the stars guided me…


As you might imagine of an Irish peer of his era, Dunsany was a keen fox-hunter.  He was also a campaigner for animal rights who argued against the ‘docking’ of dogs’ tails (there’s a deliberately upsetting bit in ‘The Strange Journeys of Colonel Polders’ in which the Colonel, as a spaniel, has his tail docked) and in later life he became chairman of the West Kent branch of the RSPCA.  Today it seems a paradox. How could a man who loved animals so dearly, and wished to protect them from cruelty, also hunt and kill them?  Yet Dunsany writes of each short animal life (dog, fox, pig, moth, antelope, butterfly, goose, snail… ) with the eye of a naturalist and the lyrical, empathetic prose of a poet. Each small life has – the Colonel learns – inestimable value.  And then each one dies. 
In Dunsany’s unsentimental insistence on that simple fact – the death, later or sooner, of every single individual living creature – perhaps we can resolve the paradox. Life, I think he is saying, is so much more important than death that death is almost irrelevant.   


Nature is not kind.  Wild animals either die quickly by natural predation or else by disease, starvation or cold.  Even Henry Williamson (of ‘Tarka the Otter’, 1927) joined the otter hounds of the Cheriton Hunt as he researched his now classic book, and far from criticizing the hunters, he socialized with them: he met his future wife in the process, proposing to her at the Hunt Ball of August 1924. Yet no one who reads his book can do otherwise than identify with the otter. In full, it’s entitled, ‘Tarka the Otter: His Joyful Water-Life and Death in the Country of the Two Rivers.’  It’s so ambiguous. Does that adjective ‘joyful’ extend to Tarka’s death too?

Henry Williamson, 1935

 
‘Reynard the Fox’ was written in 1919; ‘The Midnight Folk’ and 'Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man’ in 1927; ‘Tarka the Otter’ in 1928 - all in the decade after the War. I am not here to defend the position of these writers, but I think we can make the effort to comprehend them.  They knew a lot about death. They had seen enough of it.  I think instead they chose to rejoice in life – joyful, sensuous life – for as long as it might last.  





Picture credits:

Henry Williamson by Charles Tunnicliffe, c. 1935 (Wikipedia)
By Janet's Foss, by Bill Wild, 1905 - 1983, woodcut in author's possession, copyright Kirby Malham Parish Church, Yorkshire. 

The Voice of the Carnyx was Heard in the Land - Joan Lennon

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A few months ago, Mary Hoffman posted about The Celts: Art and Identity - a fabulous exhibition at the British Museum.  Luckily for me, the exhibition then headed north, to the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where I got the chance to see it.

Wow!

Mary's favourite piece was the silver Gundestrup cauldron and I agree it is absolutely spectacular - and so cleverly displayed - in the round, so that you can see all of the carved images, inside and out.  

 
(photograph of the cauldron in Berne by Rosemania - Wiki commons)

But what most caught my imagination was the carnyx - the Celtic horn.  You can see three of them being played on a detail from the cauldron -


(photograph by Bloodofox - Wiki commons)

These towering, beast-headed horns, braying out across ancient valleys and hills - just imagining the sound can raise the hairs on the back of your neck.  But you don't have to just imagine.  Musician John Kenny was part of a project to recreate the Deskford carnyx, with its "skull in bronze, with a soft palate, a throat, a jaw that moves and a tongue that moves on a leaf spring" (Celts: Secrets of the Carnyx).  And then, clearly fascinated, he composed a modern piece of music for the instrument, scored for 4 multi-tracked carnyces.  Have a listen - I love it!



Let me know what you think - and if you are within striking distance of Edinburgh, do go to the exhibition.  It's on until the 25th September and you can get all the details here.



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

Rational Dress by Lydia Syson

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Seven years before Emily Davison stepped out in front of the King's horse at Epsom for the cause of women's suffrage, this photograph of a group of Maori dress reformers was taken in in Waipawa, New Zealand. By 1906 women in New Zealand - and that meant Maori women too - had already had the vote for thirteen years.

How confidently these six young women stand and sit or lean, with legs astride or casually crossed.  How unabashed they are about meeting the camera's gaze.  At first glance, I thought they might be about to mount horses and go off riding, and I took the sheepskin for a straw bale. But their shoes don't look quite sturdy enough for stirrups.  If that is a stable, it looks empty.  These women are clearly wearing these splendid knickerbockers simply because the garments are comfortable and practical and rational.  What should we think about their bold, striped ties?  The watch chains? Their long, loose hair?  Those clasped hands?

I came across the picture while trying to find out about clothing in the nineteenth-century Pacific, and was immediately intrigued.  All I can tell you is that it was first published in the Weekly Press, a weekly edition of a Christchurch newspaper called The Press which had pages of photographs from around New Zealand and also overseas, and is titled (by the library, I think) and that it was taken by a man called William Golder in Waipawa.  My immediate instinct was to follow that up, and I identified him quickly enough as a Scottish settler-poet with an interest in photography.  And then I stopped myself. What was I doing, pursuing the man who took this picture, distracting myself from what I really care about - its anonymous subjects?   


Many thanks to Christchurch City Libraries - Ngā Kete Wānanga-o-Ōtautahi - for permission to use this photograph.  You can find out more about New Zealand's dress reform movement and see a picture of the famous 'knickerbocker wedding' here


www.lydiasyson.com


Me and The National Trust by Adèle Geras

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Recently, I visited Wimpole Hall in Cambridgeshire with Helen Craig (illustrator of the Angelina Ballerina books) and our friends, Anne and Philip Stott. The Stotts will be known to readers of my posts because ever since I began to write for The History Girls, they've taken me to wonderful stately homes and delightful parts of the country which  I've longed to visit and which would have been impossible for me to reach without a car of my own.





Wimpole Hall is a delightful place to visit.  It's the largest house in Cambridgshire. There's a farm and a garden  and very beautiful house to look round. The  Chichely family, the Harley family and the Bambridges have lived here. Captain George Bambridge was married to Elsie, the daughter of Rudyard Kipling. They were tenants to begin with, in 1922 but in 1938, they bought the house  with money Elsie inherited from her father. Royalties from Kipling's books paid for the refurbishment of the house. Over the centuries, other famous architects, such as Flitcroft and  Sir John Soane also added to the beauty of the house. 



When we visited in late April, the statues outside the front of the house were still shrouded for winter. The covers come off at the beginning of May, but I liked the look of them in their wrappings.





The entrance hall has a Latin greeting for  visitors, which would have pleased Caroline Lawrence and which pleased me, too. And it's this welcome which leads me to my real subject, which is the National Trust. 


The National Trust is an organisation I love. I enjoy going to visit their properties. I'm a fan of  their gift shops, and have bought lots of pretty postcards and fridge magnets and other assorted delights from them. At Greenway, in Devon, (Agatha Christie's house) I bought a straw sunhat. At Ickworth, I bought a metal duck made from old oil drums from Zimbabwe.  I am a student of their scones and I do a  'compare and contrast'exercise every time I order one: is it better than the last NT scone? I follow someone on Twitter called @NTScones, so I'm not alone in my interest.



(The View from one of the windows of Wimpole Hall)

But there's one thing I would like to moan about a little. It's not a serious moan...more of a niggle... and it's not enough to make me contact anyone at the National Trust. Also, before I begin moaning, I do know that the lovely people who welcome you to each place are instructed to go through the routine but nevertheless, it's wearing when they persist in trying to persuade you to become a member. 

(cushions provided for children to flop on. A very imaginative idea which is frowned upon by some  members of the NT, I believe. )

I explain that no, I do not belong to the NT because I don't drive. I have no car. I have never had a car,  and apart from visits with the Stotts or the Borsleys (friends  who are also kind enough to take me to splendid places) I never visit NT properties.


(I  love the colours of this room with its pink cupola)

And that ought to be the end of the matter, right? But it never is. They begin to produce more and more arguments in favour of joining: special discount prices, different benefits you get from membership etc.  I explain all over again that I'm quite happy to pay to get in to each house as I come to it ("But it's so much cheaper if you're a member...it all adds up!") but that does not deter them. They try again. Sometimes you have to go through about five whole minutes of near-argument before they will take your money and give you a visitor's ticket. So what I'd like to say to the  National Trust is: Ask people ONCE and then leave it. Don't try and pressure anyone. And please don't persist when it's clear that someone has no intention of joining the organisation. 

Now that I've moaned, I can add photos of  some more treasures from Wimpole Hall. When we were there, the very  new lambs were gambolling about and we had a smashing time.  I have not posted photos of my scone,  but anyone who wants to can find it on my Twitter feed.  


(Raised silver embroidery on the Chancellor's Purse)

(A china tulip.)




(Staffordshire dogs of a spotty kind)



(Rudyard Kipling's daughter Elsie and Captain George Bambridge)  



And finally, the façade of Wimpole Hall.  Thank you,  National Trust, for looking after these beautiful properties in a way which lets us all enjoy them. 

'A Grave Story' by Karen Maitland

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Maggoty Johnson's grave.
Photographer: Peter Johnson
One night when I was child camping up on the moors on Dartmoor, I rolled out of the shelter in my sleep and woke up a few feet away to find myself lying against a grave, which I hadn’t noticed when we’d set up camp in the dark. It was a bit unnerving at the time, but I think that was the start of my fascination with gravestones and now as a writer, I often find inspiration for scenes and intriguing characters from inscriptions on graves in churchyards. But I am equally fascinated by the graves that lie on unconsecrated ground.

Near Beckhampton, in Wiltshire on the London to Bath road is a stone that marks the grave of a highwayman who was shot dead whilst trying to hold up the stagecoach. He was buried where he fell, face down. Face-down burial was common practice for the corpses of felons, not simply to punish them by giving their bodies a degrading burial, but also as a means of stopping their spirit rising from the grave to haunt the living.

Bodies of murderers or suicides were often buried at crossroads, and the bodies spun round several times by the corpse bearers before burial so the spirits of the dead would be disorientated and wouldn’t be able to find the road back to the village. For good measure the bodies might also be sprinkled with salt or had iron nails hammered into the feet to stop the corpse walking and some were even impaled with a wooden stick to fix them in the grave.

At Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, legend has it that one such stake, took root and grew into an elm tree, though it is more likely that a seed simply fell on the dug-over soil and sprouted. Nevertheless the tree was known as Maude’s elm, because it marked the grave of a young girl who never returned after being sent from Swindon to Cheltenham by her mother to deliver skeins of wool. The following day, she was found drowned in river, while on the bridge above lay the body of her uncle, Godfrey Bowen, a man with a wicked reputation. He was found shot through the heart by an arrow and died still clutching a piece of cloth ripped from Maude’s dress. The coroner decided Maude had committed suicide, so the unfortunate girl was buried at the crossroads. Many years later, in 1778, it was revealed that a man called Walter, a skilled archer, had shot the uncle when he saw him molesting the girl Walter secretly loved on the bridge. Maude had tried to flee, but had slipped, hit her head and drowned.


Jay's Grave, Dartmoor. Photographer: Fiona Avis

 Another tragic story lies behind a granite stone on Dartmoor at point where a road and track cross. It is known as Jay’s grave. Around 1790, a baby was delivered to the workhouse at Newton Abbot. She was given the name Mary Jay, an unkind name for ‘Jay’ meant prostitute. Once she was old enough to work she was sent as apprentice to Canna farm near Manaton. They called her ‘Kitty.’

But the farmer and his wife dismissed her when they discovered that she was pregnant, probably by their own son. Rather than return to the workhouse, she hanged herself in one of the barns at Canna. As a suicide, she was buried on the moors not far from Hound Tor Inn. But the strange thing is for over two hundred years fresh flowers or greenery have regularly appeared on her grave. Many people have kept watch, but no one ever sees who leaves them.
Close-up of Jay's Grave. Photographer: Smalljim

Flowers were also left on that highway man’s grave in Beckhampton, Wiltshire too, by travellers on their way to Tan Hill Fair, because they maintained he was an innocent man shot by the coach guards who thought they were being held up when he was simply trying to control his horse.

But not every burial in unconsecrated ground is a tragic story. Samuel Johnson, known as ‘Maggoty’ because of his pockmarked face was professional jester, singer and playwright born in 1691. When he died, aged 82, he was initially buried in the churchyard, but his friends had him removed as he had requested and reburied in woods, now known as Maggoty Johnson’s Woods, near Gawsworth, Cheshire. He had asked not to be left in the churchyard, because he particularly disliked a quarrelsome old woman who was buried there, and joked that on the Day of Resurrection she would pick a fight over his leg bones, claiming them to be hers. So he wanted to be buried safely away from her, so she couldn’t snatch them.

Burning Cernunnos at Butser

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by Caroline Lawrence
It was a chilly spring afternoon in the Iron Age village. Hundreds of men, women and children gathered near wattle and daub roundhouses with conical thatch roofs to eat, drink and listen to music. Most people were dressed as colourfully as the free range roosters. Some wore ivy or floral garlands. 



A so-called "mast beast"
Many had painted their faces. One man wore the richly embroidered robes of a Druid high priest and sipped a golden brew made of fermented malts and hops. A mast beast – a spooky creature comprised of horse’s skull on pole with a cloth covering – cavorted while her companion shrilled a flute.


Cernunnos the wickerman
As dusk approached, everyone made their way towards a hillock at the edge of the village with woods behind. On this rise towered a wickerman with a deer’s head; an effigy of the god Cernunnos. Despite its name, this figure was not made of wicker but rather of nine different types of wood. All afternoon, worshippers had been tying prayers to this fifty-foot high idol, waiting for the moment when it would be set alight and their prayers lifted to heaven by sparks and smoke.


Dave the priest
Now the crowd is contained behind a small fence with a gate. The people grow silent as a man with a long white hair and matching beard stands quietly in front of the effigy. Dressed in blood red and black garb, he is in charge of the great wickerman. His arms hang stiffly at his side and he breathes in, as if inhaling the spirit of the place.



‘Please!’ cries a latecomer to the ceremony, stretching his hand over the gate towards the priest. ‘I have a prayer to tie to the god.’ In his hand is a small roll tied with yarn.

‘I’m sorry,’ said the priest. ‘The gate is closed and that magic is closed.’ 


‘I can run up there very quickly,’ pleads the man. 

‘No,’ said the priest, with firmness and dignity. ‘That magic is closed.’ 

Earlier, the haunting strains of music filled the dusky hillside. Now as darkness gathers, a troupe of long-haired drummers come thumping through the crowd. The gate is opened for them. Banging their drums, they mount the little rise and take their places around the great woven statue.


face paint and garlands
At a signal from the priest, the drums fall silent. The priest turns to the crowd. ‘We are about to set the wicker man alight!’ he announces. ‘Today is the last day of winter. Tomorrow is the first day of summer. You women,’ he adds, ‘don’t forget to get up at dawn to wash your faces in the morning dew.

And now,’ he gestures, ‘will the chosen one come forward?’



8 year old lights the wickerman
Trembling with excitement and dread, an eight-year-old boy moves forward, urged on by his family. The priest hands the boy a torch and helps him light it in a small campfire. Then they mount the slope to the fifty foot high structure. Earlier, the priest had spread hay around the base of the wicker man. Now the boy touches his flaming torch to these feet of straw.

In his book called the Gallic Wars, Julius Caesar wrote, ‘Some tribes have colossal images made of wickerwork, the limbs of which they fill with living men…’ Caesar then employs one of its most horrific examples of the ablative absolute ‘with these having been set on fire (quibus succensis), the victims are burnt to death.’


One of the drummers watches the fire
There are no people or animals trapped in this Cernunnos, only the little prayers tied on earlier, before the ‘magic was closed’, but the crowd cheers as the flames take hold of the legs and lick up towards the torso. The long-haired drummers begin beating again. 

The crowd cheers, the drums throb, the effigy sends forth billowing plumes of smoke mixed with sparks. Now heat from the burning man lights the rapt faces of the watchers and warms the chilly night. 

It is the last day of April. 
The festival is Beltain. 
The year is 2016. 

The venue is Butser Ancient Farm in Hampshire and most of the people in the crowd have driven here in their cars. Some of them are ‘live Tweeting’ the ceremony, using the hashtag #standintheglow.


One of the smaller roundhouses at Butser
Butser Ancient Farm is a treasure box for historians and writers of historical fiction. It began in 1970 with a decision by the Council for British Archaeology to construct a working ancient farm where archaeologists and historians could test theories on how people lived in Iron Age times.


Outhouse and henhouse at Butser
Now on its third site at the charmingly-named Bascomb Copse it comprises five round houses of slightly different styles, animal pens for the heritage sheep, goats, pigs and chickens, a blacksmith’s shed, storage huts, a tiny thatched chicken coop, a visitor’s centre, a replica Roman villa and – my favourite structure – a wattle outhouse.


Hands on activities for children include a live dig, ancient writing and bashing chalk. Adult workshops are designed to access not just the Iron Age but also Stone Age, Roman and Saxon eras and include sessions on daubing, clunching, sweeping, thatching, wattling, felt-making, cave-painting, sword-making, flint knapping, ancient apothecary and even coracle-making.


Madeleine Alison & soapwort
Last September, my husband and I went on an Iron Age cookery course. We met one glorious sunny morning in a dim round house. A dozen of us sat on round log stools in a circle on the chalk floor around an open fire. Our tutor, Madeleine Alison, told us that she always begins her sessions by taking a moment to be silent and breathe. So we did. The peace was immense. Even the roundhouse seemed to hold its breath.



heritage sheep
We could hear birdsong and the breeze and the occasional baa of a sheep, strangely comforting. We washed our hands by rubbing them on soapwort and rinsing them in a wooden bucket of water. Later we shelled hazelnuts, made mackerel pâté oatcakes, baked caraway and poppyseed flatbread and simmered up a lambshank stew.


Programme for Beltain 2016
On Saturday 30 April we returned to Butser for the festival of Beltain. We travelled by train and taxi, arriving promptly at 4.30, even though the wickerman wouldn’t be burned until 9pm. Standing in the cheerful queue, you could buy lottery tickets to win a bronze axe or a chance to light the wickerman. (A family won the draw, and that was how the eight-year old boy got to light the effigy!)


While waiting for the fiery main event, visitors can listen to live music, eat food and visit various stalls and activities. You can weave a garland, have a go at blowing a trumpet made of horn and listen to Jonathon Huet tell a story by the crackling wood fire in one of the roundhouses.


Liz Barnes-Downing
Liz Barnes-Downing taught me how to make a Crosh Cuirn, a charm from the isle of Manx made by tying two twigs of rowan with a piece of fresh yarn. I twisted the yarn myself, taking the greasy wool and using a drop spindle in a clockwise motion. You are meant to hang it over your door to keep out the bad fairies. 

A lady selling faience told me which minerals add colour her faience beads, an early form of glass famous in Egypt but also known in Iron Age Britain. 

A man selling flint arrowheads and blades told me how his dad would come home from military manoeuvres on Dartmoor with pieces of flint and how he would spend hours chipping flint blades in his back garden. (Imagine a child doing that today!)


Beck Olja AKA birch oil is good against ticks & bugs
Guy the Bushcraft Guy’ presided over a display of Iron Age food and let me sniff pungent Birch Oil, which will keep away ticks. I could smell the distinctive creosote smell of it as we gathered to watch the burning man, the highlight of the evening.
After the burning man had become a smouldering framework, you could go up to the Roman villa, where the Hampshire Astronomical Group had set out telescopes, and gaze at the stars. However, most people were ready to go home. Everyone was given a flaming torch and I watched a line of lights move up the curve of a black hill, gold against the peacock blue sky of almost-night. The taxi that would take us to Petersfield station was waiting by the side of the road and we gratefully stepped into its warmth and light to return to the 21st century. But we will return to Butser Ancient Farm!



Caroline Lawrence is writing a series of books set in Roman Britain. The Roman Quests: Escape from Rome, is out now. The Archers of Isca is coming in October 2016.




Doing the salami and swallowing the toad - Michelle Lovric

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Every language is most alive in its idioms, and none more so than Italian, where everyday expressions are rich in colourful metaphor and hilarious visual images. Most of my novels are populated by Italian characters whom I write in English. All of us writing in this way face the same problem: how to convey the perfume of Italian-ness without silly pastiche. Similarly, when I write Irish characters, I have to rein in the 'Hong-Kong Paddy' of begorrahs and their kin and look for something deeper: the rhythm, the redundancy, the exaggeration that lends Irish English its charm.

With my Venetian protagonists, one of my tricks is to use Italian expressions literally translated into English, so that it makes sense, but hovers in the outlying region of sense ... that debatable land where you often find the poetry.

Below are some examples of the kind of expression that I like to use to show that my English-speaking Italian  characters are not at all English.

The expressions are shown in the original Italian and then in literal English translation, with an explanation of the actual meaning or the English equivalent expression underneath. The middle line is the one my characters use.


Sono contento/a come una Pasqua.
I am happy as an Easter.
I’m happy as can be.

Dormo tra due guanciali.
I sleep between two pillows.
I’ve got no worries.

Ho un culo bestiale!
I’ve got a beastly ass!
I’m a lucky guy!

Sono andato/a in brodo di giuggiole.
I went into the Jujube soup.
I went into raptures.

Mi sono mangiato il fegato.
I ate my own liver.
I kicked myself.




Fa venire il latte alle ginocchia.
He'll makes milk come out of your knee.
He’s a real bore.

Spirito di patata.
The spirit of a potato.
No sense of humour.

Vende solo fumo..
He’s/She’s only selling smoke.
He’s/She’s talking big.

Sono incavolato/a …
I have thrown myself in the cabbages …
I’ve really lost it …

Io me ne faccio un baffo!
I don’t do a whisker!
I don’t give a damn!

Sei un bugiardo della Madonna.
You could lie for the Madonna.
You are one hell of a liar.

Non fare il salame!
Don’t do the salami!
Don’t act like an idiot!

Non ha sale in zucca.
He doesn’t have salt in the pumpkin.
He’s not very intelligent.

Sei uno scarpone.
You are a big shoe.
You are a dead loss.

Ti salta subito la mosca al naso.
The fly really jumps out of your nose
You have a quick temper.


Fai di ogni mosca un elefante.
You make an elephant out of every fly.
Your make mountains out of molehills.

Ho una bella cotta per quella ragazza.
I have a beautiful cooked thing for that girl.
I have a crush on that girl.

Ho una scuffia per lui.
I’ve capsized over him
I’ve really fallen for him.

Lui mi fa sangue.
He makes blood in me.
He turns me on.

Voglio fare l’amore in tutte le salse.
I want to make love in all the sauces.
I want to make love every which way.

Sei come il cacio sui maccheroni.
You are the cheese on the macaroni.
You are the cat’s whiskers.



Faceva la santarellina
She did the little saint.
Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.

Mi mordo le mani.
I bite my own hands.
I’m really sorry.

Non so più a che santo votarmi.
I don’t know which saint to pray to.
I don’t know which way to turn.

Ha mangiato la foglia.
He has eaten the leaf.
He’s onto us.

Lui mi ha preso in castagna.
He’s got me in the chestnut.
He caught me in the act.

Vado a lume di naso.
I am going by the light of my nose.
I’m hanging on by the seat of my pants


Doveva essere un spettacolo bello,
ma eravano solo quattro gatti.
It was supposed to be a great show,
but there were only four cats there.

It was supposed to be great show. but only a few people showed up
 
Mi sono cacciato in un ginepraio.
I have thrown myself in a juniper bush.
I’m really in a fix.



E costato troppo poco; deve essere farina del diavolo.
It cost too little. It must be the flour of the devil.
It didn’t cost enough: it must be stolen goods.

Sono rimasto con un pugno di mosche.
I was left with a blow-fly’s punch in the nose.
I was left empty-handed.

The images on this blog come from spreads I designed with Lisa Pentreath and Ornella Tarantola as a book proposal. We thought that visual aids would help settle the expressions into the brain. We all got too busy doing other things, which was a shame.

Here were the alternative covers





I am sure other History Girls and visitors to this site have similar useful expressions from other languages they speak and write. Do share!

Michelle Lovric's website



Peaky Blinders: Fact or Fiction? by Katherine Clements

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Peaky Blinders returned to our screens last week. One of the most critically acclaimed dramas in recent years, the show has amassed an army of loyal fans, including many who would never usually watch a period piece.

For anyone unfamiliar with the show, the story follows the fortunes of the Shelby family, and in particular, the head of the Peaky Blinders gang, Tommy Shelby, a veteran of the First World War, who seeks to legitimise his illegal gambling operation by taking over racetrack bookmaking pitches in the years following the war. Set in Small Heath, Birmingham in the 1920s, it's visually stunning and packed with brilliant performances. It’s been a hit in the UK, and due to a distribution deal with Netflix, is gaining fans across the globe.

The cast of Peaky Blinders


I recently interviewed Peaky Blinders creator and writer, Steven Knight, for Historia magazine (you can read the full interview here). I asked him about his inspiration for the series. He told me that the seed came from stories his parents told him about growing up in Small Heath in the 1920s. The Peaky Blinders that we’ve come to know – Tommy Shelby and his charismatic family – are a fiction, but they’re based on stories from Knight’s own family background, something he clearly holds dear. But how much is fact and how much is fiction?

According to Carl Chinn, a Birmingham native and Professor of Birmingham Community History at Birmingham University, the real Peaky Blinder gang came to prominence in the 1890s. The first written record is found in newspaper reports of a brutal attack on a young man after an evening spent in a local pub. The incident was reported in the Birmingham press with no mention of the Peaky Blinders but national newspapers picked it up. Soon after, one London paper received a letter claiming that the Peaky Blinder gang of Small Heath was responsible.

But this Victorian gang was a far cry from the organised mob depicted on our screens. They were typical of the street gang culture that arose in industrial centres in the 19th century, such as the Manchester Scuttlers and the penny mobs in Glasgow. The Birmingham gangs were known as ‘Sloggers’; violent young men scraping a living through robbery and threats who fought with sharpened belt buckles and iron bars. The Peaky Blinders were one of several street gangs that took their lead from the Sloggers. They were feared and they were lawless, known for their distinctive sartorial style of bell-bottomed trousers and silk scarves.

But what of the razorblades sewn into caps? No evidence, says Chinn. He claims that the name simply came from the fashion for young men in industrial towns to wear flat caps, rather than the bowlers of the previous generation.

Members of the real Peaky Blinders from West Midlands Police Museum

Historian David Cross, curator of the West Midlands Police Museum, disagrees. Based on the museum's collection of photographs and court records Cross says, 'They used their hats with razor blades sewn in to rob people. That's what a Peaky Blinder was. When they hit someone or head butted someone on the nose while wearing one, it would cause their victim temporary blindness.'

So is this an urban legend? Or is it rooted in truth?

The Peaky Blinders terrorised Birmingham throughout the 1890s but their reign came to an end as the century turned. Chinn thinks this was largely due to increased policing and stricter sentencing under the tenure of Police Chief, Sir Charles Haughton Rafter, who came to Birmingham in 1899. Rafter was from Belfast, and was recommended for the post as 'skilled in the preservation or restoration of peace in troubled districts where party feeling runs high'. Rafter expanded the police force, recruiting men from Ireland to swell the ranks and was one of the first to employ women. Was he there to put down the Peaky Blinders or to suppress radical political groups? Whatever the case, it's tempting to assume that Knight has used Rafter as jumping off point for the wonderfully malevolent Inspector Campbell, as played by Sam Neill.

Rafter’s policies worked and the Peaky Blinders were suppressed – historical references to them seem to disappear in the early 1900s – but that wasn’t the end of the story. New gangs emerged in the pre-war years, namely the Brummagem Boys, a gang of thieves and pickpockets who targeted racetracks and football matches, frequently resorting to violent tactics when their victims wouldn’t play ball.

One man eventually emerged as leader of this gang and fans of the show will recognise his name: Billy Kimber. Kimber was depicted as Tommy Shelby’s cockney nemesis in series one but in reality he was Birmingham born and bred and head of the Birmingham gang; a charismatic man who, by the early 1920s, had risen to become one of the most powerful mob bosses in the country. He’s the closest real life counterpart to Tommy Shelby.

Billy Kimber

Kimber rose to prominence through organised crime, running racecourse rackets. Legislation had made gambling illegal except at racetracks. Attendance at races was booming and punters were ripe for the picking. With roots in Birmingham’s illegal gambling operations, this was natural territory for Kimber to make his mark. With a willing army of men under his command, he soon did. In 1922 a police report declared that the Birmingham Gang was 'mostly made up of convicted thieves of the worst type', who had convictions from 'assaulting the police to housebreaking and from wounding to manslaughter'. Kimber used all manner of violent tactics to control the tracks in the North and Midlands and even attempted to take tracks from rival gangs in the South.

But with power and ambition came opposition. Bitter war broke out between the Birmingham gang and London’s power players. Here we encounter another name that will be familiar with Peaky Blinder fans: Darby Sabini.

The real Darby Sabini was a far cry from the slick, sharp-suited character portrayed with unhinged menace by Noah Taylor in series two. Hailing from Clerkenwell’s Italian quarter, Sabini had a rough upbringing. He began his career as a boxer and runner for local bookmakers who were reliant on protection rackets run by gangs to prevent robberies and avoid arrest. Heavily involved in this world, Sabini's influence increased in 1920, following a fracas with local London rivals the Elephant Gang (so called because they hailed from Elephant and Castle). Sabini floored the gang leader, breaking his jaw with a single punch, his previous occupation clearly coming in handy. Soon after he was running his racecourse racket out of The Griffin Pub on Clerkenwell Road. 

The violent clashes between racetrack gangs depicted in the series are based on fact. The early 1920s saw rival gangs staking claims over pitches, operating forced protection rackets and bribing police. The Sabini gang were notorious for using cutthroat razors as a weapon of intimidation. Newspaper archives are littered with reports of gruesome attacks. Perhaps this is where the association with the razorblade originates?

Sabini also teamed up with some of Kimber’s rivals, among them the Jewish gangs based in London’s East End. In 1921 Kimber was attacked and shot during a pre-arranged meeting with Sabini, the gunman supposedly one Alfred Solomons. Though Kimber survived the gunshot wound, Solomons stood trial but was acquitted when all the witnesses mysterious retracted their statements.

The TV version of Alfie Solomons depicts him as the Jewish boss (another unnerving performance from Tom Hardy here) but that’s not quite the truth. Solomons, along with his brother Harry, was certainly active in the Jewish underworld and was no stranger to violence, but he wasn’t the man in charge. He crops up in the records a few times, associated with gang related crimes. In 1924 he was accused of murdering a man at the Eden Social Club. Fans will remember that the Eden Club was the name of the ostentatious London venue that serves as the site of territorial warfare between the Shelbys and Sabini in series two. The real club was reported in The Times as a rather less glamorous ‘two storey premises above a motor garage’. 

Slums on Garrison Lane, home of the fictional Shelby family.

So what should a student of history take from Peaky Blinders? If we look at the historical record, the real Peaky Blinder gang had waned by the 1920s. It’s doubtful that they ever used razorblades as weapons. But they were part of a longer history of street gang culture, the 19th century Slogger gangs that emerged from the slum areas of Birmingham and a forerunner of the powerful Birmingham Gang under Billy Kimber. 

And what about the stuff that didn’t make it into the history books? What about those stories that so fascinated a young lad from Birmingham? Knight says: ‘my dad’s uncle was from a family called the Sheldons – which in fiction became the Shelbys – they were bookmakers and were known to him and everyone else in the area as Peaky Blinders … I started doing research into the racetrack gangs and how they operated … the things that I’d heard from my parents differ from what’s been written, and I believe my parents. When you hear real history, you know it’s the truth.’

It doesn’t take much digging to find the real stories behind the extraordinary characters that Knight has created – this post only touches the surface. Knight has done his research, taken characters and ideas from history and made them into something entirely new. What is clear is that the series is a labour of love, and Knight takes pains to be respectful to the history of working class Birmingham, its people and its gangs. After all, it’s his history too. 

As a piece of storytelling it’s a masterful example of having fun with history. Against the backdrop of Birmingham's gangs, Knight weaves in numerous story lines based on real political events. Knight describes ‘the history stuff’ as ‘nails in the wall – if you put one or two nails in then you can hang what you want on it. But the nails have got to be there.’ It’s a brave approach that will have the purists gnashing their teeth, but at the end of the day I have to agree – when it comes to drama, it’s the story that matters, and this one has me on the edge of my seat.

No post today

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Owing entirely to the incompetence of blog founder Mary Hoffman, there is no new blogpost today.

Normal service will be renewed tomorrow.

Apologies

WHO IS THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER ? Elizabeth Fremantle

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Arbella as a girl
In advance of the publication of my new novel I thought I'd introduce my extraordinary protagonist, Lady Arbella Stuart.

Through her great grandmother Margaret Tudor, and as the nice of Mary Queen of Scots, Arbella had a strong claim to the English crown and was raised in the belief that she would be the heir of Elizabeth I.

In the final years of Elizabeth's long reign there was much covert political jostling to establish who would eventually take the throne. But the fear of being usurped meant that the ageing Queen refused to publicly name her successor. The nearest she came to doing so was to say of Arbella, 'One day she will be even as I am.'

Arbella's position as presumed, though unofficial heir, made her a potential focus for Catholic plots. Though she was raised a Protestant the prevailing fear was that she might be kidnapped and encouraged to convert whilst still young so the plotters could then launch a coup to place her on the throne as a Catholic puppet queen. For this reason she spent her youth in virtual imprisonment, cloistered away at the magnificent Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire under the strict rule of her ambitious grandmother Bess of Hardwick.

Hardwick Hall

However the political climate changed irrevocably in the last year of Elizabeth's reign and it was Arbella's cousin James who eventually succeeded, leaving Arbella in political limbo. She was released from Hardwick and called to court but her royal blood made her at best a valuable bargaining chip on the royal marriage market or, at worst, a dangerous pretender to the throne. But Arbella refused to be held a fugitive at her cousin's court and made a courageous bid for freedom at great personal cost.

Arbella later in life
A remarkable, highly intelligent and complex woman, yet headstrong and deeply flawed, Arbella with her poignant and profound desire for freedom, fascinated me from the moment I first read about her. She was a prolific letter writer so it was easy to engage with her authentic voice and thereby build a sense of how she might become a character in The Girl in the Glass Tower.

In my novel I have claimed poetic license and woven Arbella's story through with that of the poet Aemilia Lanyer. Lanier was another extraordinary woman of the period, remarkable for being the first English female published poet. 

Possibly Aemilia Lanyer
Lanyer is sometimes cited as a candidate for Shakespeare's 'Dark Lady' but as I found no hard evidence for this I have not included it in the book. At age 18 she became the mistress of the Queen's cousin henry Hudson who was forty years her senior and thereby had an entry to court circles. Her groundbreaking, project was a long poem in defence of Eve and other misunderstood women and as a tragically misunderstood woman herself, Arbella fits well into Lanyer's scheme. 

The actual link between the women is tenuous but Lanyer addressed a poem to Arbella and they may well have known one another at court. But it seemed to me apt to place these two women side by side in The Girl in the Glass Tower as their stories chime together.


READ AN EXTRACT ON THIS LINK

Tap. Tap. Tap on the window.
Something, someone wanting to be heard. Waiting to be free.
​Tudor England. The word treason is on everyone's lips. Arbella Stuart, niece to Mary Queen of Scots and presumed successor to Elizabeth I, has spent her youth behind the towering windows of Hardwick Hall. Her isolation should mean protection – but those close to the crown are never safe.

Aemilia Lanyer – writer and poetess – enjoys an independence denied to Arbella. Their paths should never cross. But when Arbella enlists Aemilia's help in a bid for freedom, she risks more than her own future. Ensnared in another woman's desperate schemes , Aemilia must tread carefully or share her terrible fate...

​The Girl in the Glass Tower brilliantly explores what it means to be born a woman in a man's world, where destiny is strictly controlled and the smallest choices may save – or destroy – us.
The Girl in the Glass Tower will be published by Michael Joseph on June 2nd

For those interested in reading more about Arbella's life Sarah Gristwood's excellent biography, Arbella: England's Lost Queen, is a must.

This Orient Isle by Jerry Brotton Review Catherine Johnson

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Just last week that wonderful, massive, all encompassing metropolis, London, elected its new mayor. Sadiq Khan is (quite a lot) younger than me but we do share some experiences. We're both the children of immigrants who grew up to know that London, a city that accepts all comers, is ours. He grew up a Muslim, attending mosque in Tooting,  South London, where people worshipped in a language that was not English. Just as I attended chapel in Finsbury Park, North London, listening to services in Welsh.

Khan's success has been celebrated as London's first Muslim mayor. To most Londoners that's something, rightly I think, to be proud of. To others, (I made the mistake of listening to a Radio 4 phone in over the weekend) it's the end of civilisation as we know it.

London has always been a city that soaked up the driven, the hungry, the ambitious, the terrified and the desperate for hundreds and hundreds of years.

And this lovely book is very timely indeed, even though it details events of  nearly five hundred years ago.

Jerry Brotton is a Professor at Queen Mary University of London. He has written a marvellous and very readable book, a little window on a tiny period in history, the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. It details the links made by Elizabeth the First's court to the Ottoman Empire and the Morrocan Kingdom. For reasons of trade initially - the Persian silks and Turkish carpets, and Elizabeth's favourite, Moroccan sugar - and equally importantly the possibility of making an alliance against Catholic Spain and the Holy Roman Empire.
The 'Rainbow' portrait of Elizabeth I by Marcus Gheeraerts the younger c 1600 shows the queen dresses in Turkish and Oriental silks and jewels
For a brief while late Tudor Britain fell in love with all things oriental. Elizabeth and Sultan Murad III exchanged diplomatic gifts and letters, Elizabeth was keen for little England to be recognised as a power of almost equal standing to Spain. And on London's streets the massive Ottoman Empire was a source of fascination as well as fear.

The Levant Company - a forerunner of the East India Company - sent traders to Persia and to Aleppo. The British court sent an envoy to Constantinople. (Un)Gentleman adventurers the Sherley brothers, boasted and lied and roistered their way round the Persian courts.

Of course prisoners were captured too and sold into slavery all around the Mediterranean. And some, most shockingly  'turned Turk' and converted to Islam. In 1577 a Norfolk merchant, Samson Rowlie was captured by the Turks and after  castration became Hassan Aga, Chief Eunuch and Treasurer of Algiers.

The Tudor stage was inspired too, and characters from the south and east peopled various plays. Not only Shakespeare's Othello written soon after the visit by the Moroccan ambassador al-Annuri, but Tamburlaine by Marlowe and a host of other now forgotten productions.  Moors and Turks and Persians crop up in many writings of the era by lesser known names and plays, now long forgotten.

But the relationship cooled and in 1601 Elizabeth issued an edict, just before the Moroccan ambassador made ready to leave. In this edict she complains of a great number of negroes and blackamoors which (as she is informed) are carried into this realm since the trouble between her highness and the King of Spain...'

As today, economic difficulties - bad harvests, lack of cash - made new and visible immigrants unwanted guests.  In her edict she said 'these kind of people shall be with all speed avoided and discharged out of this her majesty's realm'

She appointed a merchant to ship us all out, but of course it didn't happen. London was, as then, a world city. It was already far too late for sloppy attempts to pull up the drawbridge. Britain was already looking out to the East, and soon to the West as well. And travel, trade and ideas always go both ways.

Brotton's book is a great read and illuminates the impact of the Muslim world on late Tudor Britain, through trade and culture. I can't recommend it enough.

One more thing. Brotton talks about an unfinished play, a co-written piece by Shakespeare and other writers in 1603/4. It was called Sir Thomas More,  and was a dramatisation of the life of the famous Tudor Councillor.

Shakespeare wrote scene six himself, it's in his handwriting apparently, and in it there's  a powerful speech in which Sir Thomas takes to task London shopkeepers and citizens who have been attacking aliens and strangers and refugees in the May Day riots of 1517. The locals blame these people for taking their jobs. It's a wonderful illustration of how absolutely nothing changes.

Shakespeare, in the voice of More, tells the crowd to reject xenophobia. He asks the crowd what they would do if they were refugees -

Say now the king,
As he is clement if th'offender mourn,
Should come too short of your great trespass
As but to banish you:whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error, 
Should give you harbour? Go you to France or Flanders,
To any German province, Spain or Portugal,
Nay anywhere that not adheres to England:
Why, you must needs be strangers. Would you be pleased
To find a nation of such barbarous temper
That, breaking out in hideous violence,
Would not afford you an abode on earth,
Whet their detested knives against your throats,
Spurn you like dogs, and like as if that God
Owed not or made not you, nor that the elements
Were not all appropriate to your comforts
But chartered unto them?What would you think
To be thus used?This is the strangers' case
And this your mountainish inhumanity.


Catherine Johnson
Her latest book is The Curious Tale of The Lady Caraboo and is shortlisted for the YA Book Prize

Belated Shakespeare Musings

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

I'm a month late with my Shakespeare post. Forgive me! It wasn't my turn to post in April, but initially I thought it was, so I wrote this.

I was extremely fortunate, growing up. I had a mother who loved the theatre and we lived near enough to London to get to the London theatres, which were, in those days, not so unaffordable for ordinary people.

My first experience of Shakespeare was on the stage - where he is best enjoyed. I was around ten and was taken to see a Comedy of Errors. I don't think I understood much, but enough to laugh, and I remember a young Judi Dench parading the stage very clearly. 
I then saw A Midsummer Night's Dream, where again, I didn't catch much but loved the experience of being in the theatre, Bottom's antics made me laugh and I remember loving all the happy pairings at the end (it's the romantic in me - it started young!)

But the stand-out Shakespeare memory was the Macbeth production I was taken to around a year later at the Young Vic in London with Judi Dench and Ian McKellan, neither of whom were remotely as well known then as now. 
It was a small, intimate staging and venue and breathtakingly powerful. I had no trouble understanding this and I think it gave me a life-long love of both Shakespeare and the theatre generally. And I think that when I came to study Shakespeare in school, I was immunised against hating or finding him difficult. Because....Macbeth. It was so real to me. It was also the first play we read in school.
The production I saw was filmed and is excellent:




I'd encourage any parent who wants their children to appreciate Shakespeare to take them off to see a good production or two before they come across him in school. Standby tickets will do fine!

I've seen so much fabulous and not-quite-so-fabulous Shakespeare since, including King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream with Kenneth Brannagh and Emma Thompson - outstanding - and Lennie Henry's Othello - interesting - and Tim Piggott-Smith in Julius Ceasar - the whole production was rather dull. Derek Jacobi as Malvolio in Twefth Night - such comic timing! 

Another unexpected performance was A Midsummer Night's Dream where the actors switched between English and various Indian languages, and some very rude stuff was done with a butternut squash. Trust me to remember that bit.

Shakespeare is so many things. But if he can possibly be enjoyed in the theatre, he should be. My ambition now is to attend a performance at the Globe. But I doubt that performance of Macbeth will ever be beaten.

The Girl in the Glass Tower, by Elizabth Fremantle

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I wasn't absolutely sure where I was at the beginning of Elizabeth Fremantle's latest book, The Girl in
the Glass Tower. It sounds as if the narrator is looking back on her life - but who is she? Where is she? How old is she?

    'Tap, tap, tap...
    Something, someone tapping, wants to be heard, to escape.
    It is a subtle and prolonged species of torture, this noise, reminding me of the impossibility of freedom.
    I am the pane in in the window overlooking the courtyard; I am cracked in two places but still manage to hold my form...'

A little later, she remembers 'another tower'. It's a clue; is she in the Tower of London? We aren't told. Instead, she takes us back to her childhood at Chatsworth; she's nine years old. She has stolen a pair of boy's breeches from the laundry; she takes off her cumbersome skirt, puts them on, and goes for a ride - astride, not side-saddle. The sense of freedom is intoxicating. And after all, isn't her grandmother always telling her she should have been a boy?

Later, she sneaks a visit to her aunt, Mary of Scotland, who is a prisoner in the care of her grandmother's husband. This is the only time she will see this dangerous woman, this threat to the throne, who gives her a present which she will keep for the rest of her life, among her small hoard of possessions; it is an agnus dei, a religious emblem.

When I began to read the book, I felt confused, not quite sure which time frame I was in. I see now that the first chapter prefigures many of the important themes of the book: for this is the story of Arbella Stuart - who has become a footnote in the history of the late sixteenth/early seventeenth centuries, but who was at one time a very possible candidate to succeed Elizabeth I as Queen. She was a cousin of James Stuart, King of Scotland, and the great-great-granddaughter of Henry VI. Her grandmother was the formidable Bess of Hardwick, who rose from relatively humble origins, by means of astute marriages and considerable skill in business,  to become one of the wealthiest people in England, and a close friend of Queen Elizabeth. After the death of Arbella's parents, Bess took charge of Arbella, in the hope of manoeuvering her onto the throne. When James became King, putting an end to such ambitions, Bess cooled towards her granddaughter.

Arbella herself was not particularly interested in becoming Queen. She was a pawn, at the mercy of the powerful people around her. Elizabeth Fremantle suggests that very early on, she found a way to regain some control over her own body by refusing food. This, she reasoned, would stop her developing as a woman, and what use would she be in the dynastic market place then? But this didn't stop others from using her as a figurehead in their schemes to restore England to Catholicism; hers was a precarious existence.

There is another heroine in this novel: Aemilia Lanyer, who was a poet and the one-time mistress of Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain (and patron of the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the company of players to which Shakespeare belonged. She shares the narration, and it's evident that at some time, her life will cross with that or Arbella - though it's not clear for some time in what way this will happen. She, too, is a woman at risk; in the end, she is more fortunate than poor Arbella.


Hardwick House, in Derbyshire, was Bess's great achievement and pride, and it is the setting for
much of the novel. I stayed in a house on the estate there a few years ago (I don't have aristocratic
connections - it was rented from the National Trust!) and became fascinated by Bess and her ambition. Her initial can be seen in stone at the top of the house, which stands proudly on a hill, its famous windows glittering and visible from a considerable distance. I became aware of Arbella's story there - but not of the detail: and I'm very glad that Elizabeth Fremantle has reclaimed her life and handed it on the future. It's a sad and moving tale, and she tells it beautifully. If, during that uncomfortable time when Elizabeth refused to name her successor and everyone around her was manouvering for position, things had fallen out just a little differently, Arbella could have been the ruler of England. I'm not sure she would have made a very good one - but then neither did James, or his unfortunate son Charles.


ELECTRIC WRITING by Penny Dolan

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Right now, I am trying to work out how to write a particular scene in a piece of “Victorian” junior fiction. The scene involves electricity, but how can I make that dramatic enough for modern children? Do they think of electricity as the dangerous and unreliable presence in the home I once knew, even if that was not quite as far back as the nineteenth century?

The Victorians were familiar with the concept of electricity. My battered 1862 Chambers Encyclopaedia has eleven pages on the subject, stating that:
“Electricity, the name used in connection with an extensive and important class of phenomena, and usually denoting either the unknown cause of the phenomena or the science that treats of them. Most of the phenomena in question fall under the three chief heads of Frictional Electricity, Galvanism and Magneto-Electricity.” 
 Scientists, earlier but especially in the eighteenth century, had already advanced electrical knowledge. 
By 1818, Mary Shelley’s fictional Frankenstein could use an un-named scientific “power” to bring his creature to life but, in practice, electricity was mostly for creating interesting and spectacular effects. Yet by 1862, with Victoria on the throne, the encyclopaedia describes the harnessing of this new power with early electrical clocks, magnets, telegraphy, electro-motive machines, batteries and the phenomena of electric light:
“somewhat approaching the light of the sun in purity and splendour. Its intensity is such as to prevent the eyes from examining the particulars of its production”.

Electricity was a fascinating force indeed: throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, it caused  the “War of the Currents” in the States, a battle between the Edison Electric Light Company who advocated Direct Current (or DC) and the Westinghouse system who promulgated AC or Alternating Current. One of the heroes - and a casualty of this battle of forces was the Serbian scientist Nikola Tesla - or Nikolai Tesler - whose story is told in highly dramatic style in this American video.

Meanwhile, a century later and my parents were warning me of the dangers of electricity along with the peril of unlit gas and blazing embers setting hearthrugs ablaze, alarms I remembered when I saw a particular John Bull magazine cover recently. Such covers depicted aspects of British life in the fifties, echoing the sunny everyday-American-life illustrations of Norman Rockwell. (I am wondering how soon the illustrations might stage an ironic resurgence in mock Ladybird books style.) 




The particular “electric” cover that I saw depicted a woman in a pre-Kath-Kidston pinny. She was smiling at her manly husband as he crouched under the stairs, knowingly and smugly mending a blown fuse. What joy! Her happy housewifery could now resume! 

However, that perfect image merely reminded me how unreliable electricity could be around the home back then, despite all the “clean and modern” publicity. Fuses often blew, plunging homes into darkness, needing to be repaired with pliable grey fuse-wire rather than with the simple click of a switch of today. Torches, candles, matches and the fuse repair kit were always at hand, ready for the next sudden blackout. Fuses were not the only things that caused problems: many homes still had gas and electricity meters that needed constant feeding with cash. The prudent kept a tin of coins topped up for such emergencies while the less prudent rummaged around in their purses - and all in the dark!

Even when connected to the grid, there was far less access to electric power. Ironing was often managed by plugging into the ceiling light’s double socket: one held the light bulb while the other plug branched off at an angle for the iron's plug, which meant that the flex dangled down by the shoulder of the person ironing. Homes had one or two single two-pin electric wall socket in each downstairs room and the “flex” that led to electrical devices consisted of two or three twisted rubber wires covered by a layer of braided cotton. Not only did the low-grade rubber coverings perish and damage quite easily but overloaded sockets would send out the warning aroma of singeing plastic. Electricity was definitely a thing to be wary about, back in the mid-twentieth century.

Electricity seems so much safer and more reliable now – unless, perhaps, you have been living in a flood plain - and the smooth modern cabling, wall sockets and plugs of today are items to be glad about. Usually the power stays on, cabling is discreet and safe and my grandchildren comfortably use all manner of electrical devices. Of course, they have learned about electricity and batteries at home and in primary school and have been taught never to poke about in sockets or do similar stupid things. Thankfully, for them, at the moment and in this country, electricity is usually not an erratic, wayward force.

Which leads me back to my niggling fret: will the drama of my intended Victorian “electric” scene carry any power at all for the modern young reader here in Britain? Wish me luck with the writing. 

Penny Dolan

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