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THE ESSEX SERPENT by Sarah Perry. Adèle Geras

June 6, 2016, 5:30 pm
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This is the wonderful cover of a novel which I read as a plain black and white proof.  I was enchanted from the first page, carried away by a rich confection of many different elements. It's a historical novel. It has a fantastical/mythical strand.  It's about developments in medicine and social conditions in the 1890s. It unrolls a landscape before our eyes. Above all, it's about love: different kinds of love but most especially that between Cora, the heroine and  William, a married vicar of an Essex parish, father to children and husband to a woman suffering from tuberculosis. 

I recently sent a few questions to Sarah Perry and she very kindly agreed to  answer them, so here is  what  the writer herself has to say. I'll add a few words  at the end of her remarks about my experience of the novel. 




ME: Can you remember your first inkling/tingling feeling/vision  before you started to write the book or began researching it? What was the (hate to say inspiration) little seed of the idea that impelled you? 

SARAH: I can remember very clearly, which I suspect is quite rare! About 4 or 5 years ago I was in the car with my husband driving through Essex, and we passed a sign to the village of Henham-on-the-Mount. He asked if I knew about the Essex Serpent – and I didn’t! He’d been reading an old 1930s book called Companion Into Essex, which had a chapter devoted to the Serpent and various sightings of mysterious beasts in the county. It immediately set off my imagination – I remember planning – out loud! – the novel, and by time we got home I already had most of the characters in mind. 


ME: Can you tell us a bit about your process? Did you do all the reading before you started writing or as you went along? Are you a diligent writer or a lazy one? Are you fast or slow? Do you edit as you go? At the end? Do you plan out everything very carefully? 

SARAH: I do have a process of a kind though I don’t think it’s a very good one. After I had that initial idea I did absolutely nothing – no notes, no planning – for a good couple of years. But the whole time I was thinking and pondering, and letting the characters develop, and reading here and there in books about surgery and the history of Colchester. Then, when I felt that it was about to burst, so to speak, I sat down in February 2014 and began to write. I got up again nine months later with a first draft. 

I do plan – but in my head, largely. I am not one of those writers who has lots of wonderful notebooks and handwritten drafts. Once or twice I had a stab at a plan on sheets of paper – but then I just never looked at them again. I think I leave it to my mind to sift and sort – and although I’m sure I forget lots of things. I always think that if something is worth making it into the novel, I will remember it! However, I did draw a little map of the village of Aldwinter and posted it over my desk.

I tend not to do too much editing of the draft as I go – that would be horribly dispiriting. Instead I get to the end and then print it out, and read through, and make marks on the manuscript. 

However, this time I was working to a deadline as my marvellous agent was going on maternity leave and I wanted her to see it before she went – so I didn’t do much editing of that first draft until it was in the hands of my editor.

So I suppose I am both lazy and diligent! It is very typical of my writing and indeed my character to do very little for a long time, and then to work with grim determination for many hours every day, neglecting myself and my family and friends in the process, until it’s done. 

ME: Do you have someone who is with you from the beginning and shares the work or do you hide it till it's done? Are you good at taking editorial or other advice?

SARAH: I occasionally discuss a line or a paragraph with my husband – or I might read him a section I am concerned about – but generally I kept it entirely to myself until my agent saw it, and intend to do the same with my current novel in progress. I think (though I suspect I am not the best person to ask!) that I am good at taking editorial advice, for two reasons: firstly, an MA and PhD taught me many a hard lesson in humility, and secondly, I trust both my agent and my editor implicitly. I think of their editorial skills as being essentially sorcery: with both books they have this uncanny knack of knowing precisely what I am trying to achieve, and how to help me achieve it. More than once, there has been a little scene, or a sentence, which in my heart of hearts I have know full well doesn’t work, but have tried to slip past them.  Unfailingly, they spot it! 

ME:  I think of the book as a many- stranded plait. What pulls readers through it and unites all the strands, so to speak is the Serpent. We do want to know what/if/how it is. How important is the element of mystery and discovery in the book?

SARAH: Vitally important, I think. All my life I have been a devotee of detective fiction, and I think it has trained me in the importance of some degree of mystery in every book – something to keep the reader turning the pages. And I think most very great fiction is, in some way, a whodunit, or a whydunit, or a willtheydoit! In Great Expectations we want to know who Pip’s benefactor is, in Crime and Punishment we want to know if Raskolnikov will get away with it, and so on. I don’t think there necessarily has to be a very definite answer  - but ideally there will be a solution, and it will not be one the reader could have predicted – but once revealed, will make absolute sense, the novel having been read! I don’t think I have successfully pulled this off yet but it’s something I hope to achieve one day: a good mystery, with a totally satisfactory ending.


ME: Do you read any contemporary novelists? And if so, who do you admire?

SARAH: Speaking of mysteries and endings: one of my favourite contemporary novelists is Sophie Hannah. Her mysteries are masterpieces of corkscrew thinking: I read them with my mouth open in awe. I’ve spoken to her a couple of times about writing and one of the marvelous things is that you realise she is an expert in the craft, really understanding it in the way a great pianist understands musical theory. The great love of my life is Hilary Mantel – I realise this seems an obvious response, but (as I am fond of telling everyone at the drop of a hat) she has been my idol since long before Wolf Hall. I stand in awe of her intellect, her wit, her bravery in her writing, the majesty and beauty of her prose, and her great kindness. I long to meet her but absolutely cannot, as I would probably just burst into tears. Until recently there were two novelists whose books I’d buy in hardback the day of release: Mantel, and Terry Pratchett. I wept so hard when I heard he’d died that my husband heard it from downstairs and came running up to see what the matter was. AS Byatt once called him ‘The Dickens of the twentieth century” and I absolutely agree: he was a master storyteller, and had a wit like a razorblade, but was also fundamentally kind and compassionate - that's rare to come by, I think. 

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And so to my opinion of The Essex Serpent. 

We start with  a short, mysterious prologue in which we almost meet the eponymous Serpent. We are intrigued and spooked,  but on the first page, in the first sentence, Perry gives a nod to Dickens: "One o'clock on  a dreary day and the time ball dropped at Greenwich Observatory." We are once more in the real world.
The back cover of the novel lists the things you will find within it and I'm reproducing it because it sums up very well what readers will discover and enjoy. 




What this list can't tell you is how well Perry writes. She has found a language which is both plain and rich. Her descriptions of landscape bring the places she's describing to life in a way that takes you right into them. 

'The drizzle subsided and cleared the air, and without any sunlight breaking through the low white canopy the air flushed with colour. Everywhere reddish banks of last year's bracken glowed and above them gorse thickets burned with early blooms of yellow. "

Every character is so well described that you'd recognise them if they walked into the room. The love relationships are drawn with great sensitivity. We learn much about medical advances through the fascinating character of Dr Luke Garrett and about housing problems in London in the relationship between Martha, Cora's companion and maid and Luke's friend, Charles. Stella, the vicar's wife, is a very  unusual character who becomes more and more unhinged as the novel processes, partly because of the tuberculosis which ravages her body but maybe also partly because of something else... divine possession? 

And the Serpent? What's all that about? I am not going to tell you, but what  I will say is: the ending is most satisfactory. I can't give away important surprises that occur on the way to that conclusion, but there are losses and recoveries, visions and dreams,  arguments and debates. And everywhere love which is both destructive and creative, but in all events, unforeseeable. 

I reckon this book will be on many prize shortlists this coming year and if not, I will be very  put out. I loved it.   

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'Medieval Murder -Ten Handy Ways to Poison Your Spouse' by Karen Maitland

June 7, 2016, 4:30 pm
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Throughout the Middle Ages people were terrified of being poisoned and with good reason. Writing in 1470, Peter of Abano, identified 70 different substances that were deadly poisons, and this did not include the venomous animals or their body parts. Wealthy men employed tasters who would try every dish before their master ate it, even pressing their masters’ napkins to their lips before they were used, in case the cloth had been soaked in poison. With so many interesting lethal substances to choose from, who can blame them for being nervous. Here are ten poisons that they most feared -

Monkshood growing wild in Devon. Photographer: Tom Jolliffe
1. Monkshood or Aconite (Aconitum napellus) – This plant was originally called Odin’s helm or Tyr’s helm after the northern gods. It was also known as wolf’s bane. It was dedicated to Hecate, the moon goddess of the witches and together with deadly nightshade was one of the ingredients in the flying ointment, a powerful hallucinogen. It was such a lethal poison that growing it in Roman times was punishable by death. The juice was frequently used in warfare to poison the wells and the sources of drinking water of the enemy. It was favored by the lower classes as a means of dispatching troublesome spouses, or other family members. But the nobility preferred hemlock.


Hemlock
2. Hemlock (Conium maculatum) – known as devil’s blossom, bad man’s oatmeal, scabby hands or kex, it is in fact a member of the carrot family. It causes extreme dizziness, numbness then death. In Greek and Roman times one of the methods of execution was to force the condemned to drink hemlock and this is how Socrates died in prison. It is so much associated with witchcraft and the devil that the plant symbolizes death by poisoning.

3. Cantharides also known as Spanish Fly– is made from an emerald green blister beetle, Lytta vesicatoria. It was an early and powerful Viagra for both men and women, and often used to spike drinks, causing the victim to become highly sexual aroused. But too much could be fatal. The Marquis de Sade was tried for accidently killing prostitutes at an orgy, by feeding them aniseed-flavored Spanish fly pastels.

The favorite poison of the Medicis was Aqua toffana, a mixture of arsenic and Spanish fly and as little as four drops in water or wine could prove fatal. Aqua toffana had the convenience of being both undetectable in food and taking several hours to kill, giving the poisoner ample time to escape.

If death from Spanish fly was suspected, the victim’s organs were ground up in oil and smeared on the shaved skin of a rabbit. If the victim had died from Spanish Fly poisoning, the rabbit’s skin would blister.


Deadly Nightshade
 4. Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladonna) which Chaucer called dwale, was a well-known sleeping draught. It is believed to have been the poison added to the water-wells during the Parthian Wars which killed Marcus Antonius’ troops. According to folklore, in the 11th century the Scots who had signed a truce with Sueno the Dane, were able to take advantage of the truce to add the juice of Deadly Nightshade to the Danish army’s provisions. It didn’t kill the Danes, but made them so drowsy that the Scots were able to attack and slaughter them. Most modern historians now argue that this battle never took place, but it lingers on in legend.

 5. The Composition of Death– This was a poison recipe found in a medieval book of spells, known as Grand Grimoire. Those who wanted to prepare it were told to use a new, glazed pot and add – red copper, nitric acid, verdigris, arsenic, oak bark, rose water and black soot. It took a long time to prepare as you had to boil the mixture for about an hour after each new ingredient was added.

 6. Fly agaric (amanita muscaria) – a fungi with a red top studded with white spots that looks like the classic pixie toadstool. It first produces a sensation of being drunk, then delirium, with death usually occurring in twenty-four hours. Deadly fungi were popular poisons in the Middle Ages because they were so easy to obtain without anyone knowing, and simple to slice up and add to stews and soups. Fly agaric, steeped in milk was used to kill flies, so it was often found in homes and kitchens. It was only one of twenty-five poisonous fungi and the symptoms generally produced by consuming any of these deadly mushrooms or toadstools included stomach cramps, vomiting, diarrhoea, delirium and convulsions. In the Middle Ages, these symptoms could easily be mistaken for fevers such as dysentery or from eating bad meat, so many poisoners must have escaped justice if they used this poison.
Fly Agaric. Photographer - H.Krisp

 7. Pig’s Blood and Salvia– Normally fresh pig’s blood was harmless and used to make blood puddings, but the medieval Italian poisoners, who were experts in the art, had perfected a poison made by allowing a pig carcass to decompose then mixing its blood and saliva with arsenic to create an exquisite poison combining both the mineral poison and those toxins produced from putrefaction.

 8. Toads– In the Middle Ages it was widely held but erroneous belief that the fluid excreted through the skin of a toad was poisonous. Indeed a rumour which circulated after his death suggested that King John had been murdered by a member of the Knights Templar or a friar who had squeezed a toad inside the king’s goblet. The fluid dried, creating an invisible coating inside the goblet, before the King unwitting added the wine to produce a lethal combination. In fact, King John probably died of dysentery, but such was the belief in poison conspiracies in those days, that the toad story was much more widely believed.
European Toad Bufo bufo. Photographer - Thomas Brown

 European toads do excrete two poisonous substances through the skin which have a numbing and mild hallucinogenic effect, though they are nowhere near as toxic as toads and frogs of South America.

 9. Bacterial poisoning– Although virus and bacteria were not understood in past centuries, they did recognise that decaying corpses gave off a ‘poison’ which could be lethal to the living, so throughout the centuries since ancient times, armies have frequently poisoned their enemy’s water supplies by dumping rotting corpses of animals or people into wells or rivers upstream of where the camped army was taking its drinking water. Caltrops, spiked metal balls designed to pierce the feet of horses and men, were often dipped in the fluids of rotting animal carcasses or festering wounds to poison the blood of any who stepped on them.

A ancient caltrop. Photographer: Gunnar Creutz

 10. Arsenic - No poisoner’s tool kit would be complete without arsenic. Although the symptoms of slow arsenic poisoning were not recognised until the 1700s, yellow arsenic trisulphide called orpiment was known as a medicine as early as 5th Century BCE and the alchemists believed it to be a key ingredient of the Philosopher’s Stone. Nero may have used yellow arsenic to murder his stepbrother, Britannicus, so as he could become Emperor of Rome. But it was in 8th Century that the Arabic alchemist, Jábir ibn Háyyan, became the first in Europe to produce white arsenic (arsenic trioxide) by roasting orpiment and inadvertently produced the poisoner’s dream, the first reliable and lethal poison that was odourless, tasteless and colourless and would work in powder, solution or gaseous form.

If all this talk of poisons is making you nervous, in my next blog I will let you into the secret of the favourite medieval antidotes.
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My Summer of Trees

June 8, 2016, 4:54 pm
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I am calling this summer My Summer of Trees

As a writer of historical fiction, I want to be specific and precise about the world my characters inhabit. At the moment I am working on a book set in Iron Age Britain, fifty years after the Romans arrived. As this book will partly take place in woods and forests, I need to know my trees. 

I love trees, but I'm not particularly good at identifying them. 

I can spot the exotic or exceptional ones – like palms, yuccas, weeping willows and the bright red-blossomed bottle-brush plant that used to grow in the garden of my childhood house in Bakersfield, California. 


When my family moved from Bakersfield to the Stanford campus I first encountered great groves of eucalyptus trees. Originally from the Australia, these were imported to suck up moisture from swampy ground. They are beautiful and distinctive, with their silver-green blade like leaves and their peeling bark scrolling away to show the smooth white flesh underneath. 

I learned to recognise magnolia trees with their fragrant waxy flowers. 


From the window of my parents' car I could easily spot oak trees, especially the evergreen California oaks that often stand sentinel on a golden hill. 

Laburnum, with its clusters of bright yellow flowers, I met when I first went up to Cambridge and stayed in Whitstead, the graduate house belonging to Newnham College, where Sylvia Plath once lived. 


And I will never forget the first time I came across wisteria. It was during my first trip to Athens, one May. I walked under an arbour in the National Gardens. It was like bathing in perfume. 

I can point to plane trees, those great urban survivors planted along the banks of the Seine, Tiber and Thames. Their giraffe-neck trunk splotches and spiky spherical seed-cases give them away. 


Silver birch I know, too: gentle and graceful trees with white trunks and trembling, heart-shaped leaves. There used to be one on the corner of busy York Road and Mendip Road in Wandsworth, not far from where I now live. It was a reminder of nature in an urban landscape. Sometimes I used to reach out my hand and touch it as I passed to give it a kind of affirmation. It was like a friend and it always cheered me up. 


A sliver birch blocked this building's sign
Then, one terrible day I walked by and they were cutting it down, because it partly blocked the sign of a storage warehouse. I grieved for that birch and still think of it every time I pass the corner where it used to stand. Sometimes I want to cry, a think I have not done for some people I have lost. So yes, I always recognise silver birches. 

But I have trouble identifying some of Britain’s oldest and most common species: lime, hazel, beech, field maple and sycamore. 

So now that I’m writing books set in Roman Britain, I have decided to learn the names of the trees that would have been here in the late first century. 


I've got my Tree Identifier app and my guide book. I have The Ancient Tree Hunt challenge and Kew Gardens. 


Sweet Chestnut planted in the early 1700s
Today at Kew I saw one of the oldest trees in the park, a Sweet Chestnut. Apparently the Romans introduced this species to Britain. 

Tomorrow I'm going to find Barney, the giant plane tree in Barnes.


Helen Forte's "Minimus" in a yew tree (taxus)
I've even got a small Latin-speaking mouse named Minimus to help me identify trees on a Pinterest board!

By the end of the summer I hope to be able to identify the native species in London's parks and garden squares, and at the very least the trees right outside my front door. 

Caroline Lawrence is working on The Archers of Isca, partly set in a Gloucestershire glade. 

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Spells, Pills & Plasters to Help a Lady Get Her Man – Michelle Lovric

June 9, 2016, 4:00 pm
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BAIT, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable.

The best kind is beauty.

Ambrose Bierce (1842−1914)
The Devil's Dictionary, 1911. 

Binding spells were probably the first bait deployed when beauty alone failed to attract the desired mate. In Renaissance Italy, binding spells could be cast, for a fee, by ‘wise women’ or undertaken by ordinary women with the right information.


For example, a woman who wanted to be sure of her man would burn the tips of olive branches and dip them in holy water, chanting: 'As I bind this wood with this cord, so may the phallus of my lover be bound to me.' Then she would take the branches to the garden outside the church and plant them in the ground, chanting: 'As this wood cannot grow green again, so may not the phallus of my lover be inclined to relations with any other woman.'

Women who required the undying fidelity of their men were advised to rub their entire bodies with holy oil before sexual congress with them. This formula had the added advantage of leaving the woman free and unbound; while her husband might not stray, she was able to engage her body and her feelings wherever she wished.

Another love-recipe involved the use of large sage leaves: the woman would write on them and give them to the object of her love, who, on eating them, would be overwhelmed with passion.

The lips of would-be lovers would be anointed with holy oil, and they had to make sure they stayed slick and slippery until the very moment of stealing a kiss from the person they longed to possess.

There were always ways to renew a man's lust for his wife. She had to place under the conjugal bed the blade of a plough, and the hoe and shovel used for burying at least one corpse. In another spell the wedding ring of a young virgin who had subsequently died was required: the affected man had to urinate through this ring and would soon find his powers miraculously restored.

Some notions of this kind were kept in manuals or even published. Illustrated below is a receipt (recipe) for a person to make her husband love her, from A Booke of Physicke, circa 1710.

 Vendors of quack love potions put on wonderful shows of intimate expertise at markets and country fairs, as you can see in this coloured lithograph by C. Voct after A. de Valentini. It shows Lablache, a flamboyant itinerant medicine vendor selling Mariol an aphrodisiac at a country fair. (Courtesy of Wellcome Images).

The marketing of sexual attraction really began in earnest with the age of printed advertising. Almost any product could be sold with the promise - or, even better, the hint - that it would bring the opposite sex flocking, panting and salivating.

 Lady quacks in London often specialized in beauty treatments that mined women’s insecurities about retaining the exclusive attention of their husbands. A ‘gentlewoman’ practising at the Haymarket could furnish her own proprietary nostrum at just a shilling a bottle, asserting: ‘God the author of all things, to make man in love with his wife in her state of innocency, he made her smooth, soft, delicate and fair to intice him; I therefore, that woman may be pleasing to their husbands, and that they might not be offended at their deformities and turn to others, do commend unto you the Virtue of an eminent and highly approved “Balsamick Essence”, with several other Incomparable Cosmeticks …’.

 Salves, pills and creams constituted the main tools of the trade, but other less likely inventions were also aimed at would-be lovers. One of my favourites in this department are the Oxien Active Sex Plasters, which promised post-coital glow, without the bother and mess of coitus.

The advertising pitch was this: ‘You may have heard of the woman who felt so nice she thought it was caused by walking on velvet. Oxien Sex Plasters make any one, man or woman, feel just too good and happy for anything …When one of these plasters is placed on the warm body, the nap to this downy-feeling fabric seems to generate that warmth of food nature that comes from the satisfied nerves when content reigns supreme.’

Oxien Active Sex Plasters were, according to the manufacturers, ‘delicate and soft as a kitten’s ear … not only soul-satisfying, but they are large and well-shaped.’

No wonder Oxien could warn, ‘You cannot afford to do without.’
Some love-pills were advertised with romantic imagery. Shedd’s Little Mandrake Pills, for example, used an image of a courting couple and a series of (terrible) jokes on the back of the trade cards as their pitch. An example:

 USE SHEDD’S LITTLE MANDRAKE PILLS
If cats howl in the back yard it is a sign that you do not love mewsick.

I came across a Victorian trade card advertising ‘Attraction Wafers’. The manufacturers boasted, ‘Quite a large majority of our most attractive ladies are indebted to the Attraction Wafers for enhancing their personal attractions. Strongly magnetic personal attractions and lovely complexions are the keystones of a lady’s success in life.’

Some quacks set themselves up as experts in fulfilling the romantic dreams of their women clients. Typical were the claims advertised in an 1880s poster for a ‘Professor Franklin, M.D’. The doctor described himself as an ‘Eminent Lecturer, intuitive veteran Physician of Body and Mind’ and mentioned some of his previous publications, ‘The Medical Counsellor’, ‘Art of Health and Beauty’, ‘Phreno-Medical Chart’, ‘Compass Tree and Book of Life’, ‘Science of Life and Mind’, ‘Oracles of Truth for Every Youth’.

His poster gave notice of a lecture ‘FOR LADIES ONLY. Subject: HEALTH and BEAUTY, WOMEN’S SPHERE and DUTY. Her gifts, qualities and capabilities, Signs and causes of Passions, Character and Diseases; the best means of prevention and cure, without drugs.’
The good doctor warned: ‘No lady should miss these best efforts of Franklin to please and instruct the fair. His extensive travel, great experiences, pre-eminent abilities have wonderfully fitted him for his work…’.

He concluded, ‘Every lady can learn how to perfect her form and features, mould the heart, rule in the domain of Love and make judicious rejections of friends and husband by the light of science. Every lady can treat herself without exposing her condition.’

Have things really changed so much? How much advertising uses the promise of sexual or romantic success, even between the lines? Next time you watch an advertisement on television, or see one in a magazine, can I suggest you ask yourself how often sex is dragged into the equation. And how often sexual insecurity is used as a hook for a purchase that is nothing to do with physical intimacy.


Michelle Lovric’s website

The image at the top of the page, courting couple sit by a tree and the man hands a flower to the woman. Engraving by C. de Pas, courtesy of Wellcome Images
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Cawdor Castle by Katherine Clements

June 10, 2016, 5:00 pm
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I’ve recently returned from a writing retreat in Scotland. For most of the trip I was stuck indoors behind a laptop, somewhere in the 17th century. But one glorious Sunday morning I decided to take the air. I needed some historical inspiration. I settled on a trip to Cawdor Castle.

Now, I’ve been there before, two years ago, but I wanted to go back. Given the abundance of both natural and historical beauties in the area (Braemar, Balmoral and Blair Athol Castles, Culloden Battlefield and the Cairngorm National Park, to name a few) why did I feel so drawn? I pondered this as I sped up the A9, but at first sight of the castle, I remembered why. 

Cawdor looks like a fairytale – the kind of place you’d find Cinderella scrubbing pots in the kitchens and Rapunzel spinning gold in the tower. It’s picturesque, intimate and brimming with personality. And it looks so very Scottish.


Cawdor is very much a home. Owned by the Campbell family, the current resident is the Dowager Countess Cawdor, who inherited it from her husband, the 6th Earl of Cawdor, in 1993. The death of the 6th Earl sparked a much-publicised family feud involving court battles and the publication of scandalous memoirs, but nothing of that unfortunate soap opera is evident to the visitor. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.

A friendly, knowledgeable guide tells me that the family uses all the rooms open to visitors. That’s evident in the clutter of family photos and knickknacks amid the impressive Restoration furniture and stunning Georgian portraits. The Countess collects art and an eclectic mix of paintings and sculpture grace the rooms and gardens. There’s a whole corridor dedicated to modern works and recent portraits sit next to 17th century ones. They should look out of place, but they don’t. The main rooms have the air of personal space – a TV in the corner, a pile of magazines – as if someone’s just left the room to fetch a cup of tea.


The Countess lives here all winter when the castle is closed to the public, my guide explains, and she comes back and forth throughout the summer. I ask if the castle is ever full of guests, imagining weekend shooting parties worthy of Downton Abbey. ‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘There’s another ten bedrooms you won’t see, and a fabulous bathroom. I’ve known it full up, all the fires blazing.’ 

‘But which rooms are hers?’ I ask. 

‘That room you’ve just been in, the one with the huge bed – that’s her bedroom’.

I’m not sure how I’d feel about having thousands of people traipsing passed my knicker drawer, there does seem something intrusive and voyeuristic about it, but I’m nosy (of course I am – I’m a writer!) and the longer I stay and chat the more fascinated I become by the practical detail of these people’s lives, almost more interesting than the history itself.


And what about the history? What of the infamous connection to Macbeth? 

‘There is none,’ my guide says, looking slightly bored of the question. ‘The castle was built 400 years after the real Macbeth lived. Shakespeare took liberties with the history.’

No surprises there.

Continuing the fairytale atmosphere, he then tells me about the mysterious thorn tree, around which the original tower house was built. Legend has it that the Thane of Cawdor, who had a small castle about a mile away, decided to build a new, stronger tower. Following instructions he received in a dream, he loaded a coffer of gold onto the back of a donkey and let it roam for a day – wherever the donkey lay to rest for the evening would be where the new castle would be sited. The donkey chose a holly tree and it’s around this tree that Cawdor Castle was built.

This story is told in the Thorn Tree Room, a dark, dank fortified space, complete with small hidden dungeon, where it’s explained that radiocarbon tests date the tree to 1372. The earliest documented date for the castle doesn’t appear until 1454 – a license to fortify, granted to the 6th Thane of Cawdor (or Calder as the name was originally spelt). So although this was certainly the Cawdor seat, it’s far too late for the 11th century Macbeth. 


The good humour of the staff is matched in the information available in each of the rooms. This isn’t a place with interactive displays and quizzes to entertain the kids, but it doesn’t need it. Slightly dated typed panels, filled with facts and scattered with informal quips are charming and fit the atmosphere perfectly. Of course, the whole estate is run as a commercial enterprise, and there’s the obligatory tearoom and gift shop, well stocked with tartan, but there’s nothing sterile or too corporate about it. I felt I’d been invited to snoop around a private home, one with 600 years of stories in its walls, and what could be more inspiring than that?

Cawdor Castle is open every day until 2nd October.

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The Triumph Tree and other wonders: by Antonia Senior

June 11, 2016, 10:00 pm
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Delight I'd find in an island breast,
on a rock's peak, 
that there I might often gaze 
at the sea's calm.

That I might see its heavy waves
over the brilliant sea
as it sings music to the Father
on its constant way
.....

Columba's Island Paradise (12th century)
Translated from the Gaelic in The Triumph Tree (Canongate) Edited by Thomas Owen Clancy.

We writers of historical fiction give voices to the people of the past. But we are unsatisfactory ventriloquists, burdened as we are by our own prejudices and assumptions. 

In the rush to speak for them, we sometimes forget that our ancestors had their own voices. The period and place that I wrote about in The Winter Isles - the twelfth century West coast of Scotland -  is poorly documented.  There are no newspapers, emails, record books, letters, lost scrolls, tax records, trade receipts, census records. There is precious little archaeology. There is, however, poetry. And what poetry it is!

I was utterly ignorant of these islands' pre-modern poetic tradition until I started researching The Winter Isles. In fact, the book would never have been written unless I had stumbled across another book - The Triumph Tree, edited by Thomas Owen Clancy. It is a collection of early Scottish poetry from 550AD to 1350 AD. There are 5 languages represented: Latin, Welsh, Gaelic, Old English and Norse. 


The linguistic tangle reflects the history: borders were not neatly drawn and identity was a thing in flux. As Clancy explains in his introduction to the book, most anthologies of Scottish poetry begin in the 14th century, with the beginnings in Scotland of the use of English in written form and its cousin, lowland Scots. 

Triumph Tree attempts to rectify this omission - but there are obvious problems of categorisation. What counts as Scotland in this period? Who wrote what, and when? Early Scottish culture laid emphasis on the oral tradition of poetry. Much is lost - but what has survived is wonderful. There are various strands - the Latin poetry of the church, the gaelic bardic tradition and the Norse sagas brought by Scotland's Viking invaders. 

The poem I have reproduced above is one that I found most useful in writing my own book. It is from a tradition of poetry surrounding the life and legacy of St Columba. St Columba, an Irishman, founded a monastery on Iona in 563 AD, and the tiny island off the coast of Mull became the centre for Celtic Christianity. Celtic Christianity is marked by beautiful hymns which are rooted in the poetry of landscape, and by a tradition of works by later poets imagining themselves to be Columba. Historical fiction poets, if you like. 

 A Celtic cross on Iona


One of the things I adore about Columba's Island Paradise is the sense of the writer's spirit. How alive he is! His character shines from the page. His humanity. His quiet joy in the small pleasures. 

The ending verses read:

That I might ponder on some book,
good for my soul;
a while kneeling for dear heaven,
a while at psalms.

A while cropping dulse from the rock,
a while fishing; 
a while giving food to the poor,
a while enclosed.

A while pondering the lord of heaven,
holy the purchase;
a while at work - not too taxing! -
it would be delightful.

In his concerns and occupations he is both recognisably like us and obviously dissimilar. It is this contradiction I attempt to express continually as a writer of historical characters: the tango between resonance and dissonance. The strong woman who is pre-feminist; the warrior who is preoccupied by Christ. Like the monk in Iona, I try to make my characters feel in familiarly human ways even as they think in unfamiliar grooves.

I particularly love that phrase - not too taxing!. It makes me think of afternoons spent in the garden, reading for books for research or review - not too taxing! yet good for the soul.

The Celtic hymns have a hypnotic power and rhythm. I am a resolute atheist - and yet I always seem to write about periods in which religion is paramount. I found reading the poetry of early Gaelic-speaking Christians invaluable for trying to approach the mindset of people who think so differently, and yet live and breathe and love just as we do.

My favourite was the Litany of the Trinity, ascribed to Mugron, the Abbot of Iona in 980 AD. It is a form of Gaelic devotional verse in which God or the Saints are invoked in an incantory way. It is very long, but here is a fragment:

Perfect God.
Merciful God.
Marvellous God.
God of the earth.
God of the fire.
God of the varied waters.
God of the rushing storm-tossed air.
God of the waves from the ocean's deep house.

This is a God who belongs in the waters now cruised by comfortable Calmac ferries. This is a God whose word is audible not inside a cathedral, but out on the white strand at Iona, with skuas wheeling overhead and a raging sea beyond. 

My husband is learning Scottish Gaelic, and our house is full of extraordinary modern Gaelic poetry which carries the spirit of the early writers: it is rooted in landscape, bold in form and utterly unembarrassed about being beautiful. 

I tried to borrow a little of this spirit in writing The Winter Isles. Perhaps I pulled it off, in places. But if I did, I owe all to The Triumph Tree, and the man 900 years ago who found delight in an island breast, watching the sea's calm.
 My gang and I finding delight in an Island's breast, watching the sea's calm...................





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ARE THE STUARTS THE NEW TUDORS? Elizabeth Fremantle

June 12, 2016, 10:00 pm
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I've been wondering if we have yet reached peak Tudor.

Henry VIII’s stinking, gangrenous leg has been endlessly speculated upon, every layer of Elizabeth I’s petticoats has been lifted and thoroughly searched beneath and Anne Boleyn’s execution has been read, learned and inwardly digested from all possible angles. There are even novels that speculate upon what might have been, had Anne and Henry produced a son. But still, doyenne of the period, Alison Weir, is bringing out a series of novels about each of Henry’s wives, Philippa Gregory, has returned from the Plantagenets to give us her version of Katherine Parr, I too have recently completed a Tudor Trilogy and, lest we forget, Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels have spawned an arts’ industry all of their own. Surely there is no stone left unturned on Henry’s marital mismanagement, but even so both the BBC and channel 5 are dishing up the six wives. It is not surprising then that Charlotte Higgins recently asked in the Guardian, Tudormania: Why can’t we get over it?

I have a hunch that when such questions begin to be asked about fads – like when people wonder
about why house prices have risen stratospherically high or why beards in Hoxton have begun to walk into rooms before their owners – it signals that their days are numbered. Interestingly two acclaimed Tudor biographers have lately turned to another equally dysfunctional family of royals: the Stuarts. Linda Porter will publish Royal Renegades, about the children of Charles I, in the autumn and Leanda de Lisle’s next book, The King’s Story, will unravel the enigma of Charles I himself. Also published this year are Andrea Zuvich’s, A year in the Life of Stuart Britain and Andrew Lacey’s, The Stuarts: A Very British Dynasty.

The Stuarts offer just as much in terms of drama as that of their Tudor cousins. The period was torn by dark sectarian troubles. The thwarted Gunpowder Plot was an event that – had it succeeded as intended, to wipe out the entire new dynasty – would have been as dramatic as the attack on the Twin Towers. It was a time of witch hunts, espionage, the exploration of the globe, a Queen who unceasingly promoted the dramatic arts and in James I, an openly homosexual king. James was a complex, flawed and unpopular individual whose son would be tried and executed in Cromwell’s revolution – a regicide that would irrevocably change the path of English history.


The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death this year, with all the celebratory exhibitions and seasons of plays, also shines a light on the early Stuart period. We tend to think of the bard as an Elizabethan but some of his greatest and most enduring work fell in the Jacobean period. Think of Macbeth, King Lear and The Tempest. James Shapiro’s recent, and brilliant, 1606, Shakespeare and The Year of Lear, argues that this year, early in James I’s reign, was the apotheosis of the playwright’s career. Drama holds up a mirror to the culture it comes from, and so Shakespeare’s late plays, with their moral complexity and ambitious reach, suggest the society that gave rise to them must be infinitely fascinating.

Indeed, Shakespeare wasn’t alone. The Jacobean period is characterized by a thriving of the literary arts. Even The Bible had its James I makeover and poets such as John Donne and Ben Johnson remain familiar today; women were finding their voice too and publishing for the first time. In 1611 poet, Aemilia Lanyer, published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a brilliant defense of Eve that sought to shake up received thinking about women’s position in the world. Women stepping outside the box so publically gave rise to an anxiety about the female sex, which was articulated by tragedians like Webster and Middleton who, along with Shakespeare, were producing some of the most bloodthirsty heroines in all of English literature, with Lady Macbeth as flag bearer.

The cultural flourishing that reached its zenith with the early Stuarts was abruptly suspended when Cromwell closed the playhouses. But it returned in force with the restoration of Charles II, the most charismatic of the Stuarts, whose reign saw actresses on the stage, and in the King’s bed, for the first time. A recent exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Samuel Pepys: Plague, Fire, Revolution thoroughly explored the events of the Restoration period as will Rebecca Rideal’s forthcoming book 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire.

The intrigue of the Stuart century is endless, so it is unsurprising that fiction writers have also had their heads turned. A couple of years ago Rose Tremain revisited the eponymous anti-hero of her 1989 Booker shortlisted novel, Restoration with Merivel, a brilliantly funny and touching rendition of debauched Restoration society. Katherine Clement’s duo of novels, The Crimson Ribbon and The Silvered Heart, tell of women leading extraordinary lives during the chaos of the Civil War. Andrew Taylor’s latest thriller,The Ashes of London, is set in the aftermath of the Great Fire and I am working on a Stuart Quartet, with the first, The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart, who might have been England’s Stuart queen.

So prepare yourselves for the Stuarts: every bit as flawed, dysfunctional and fascinating as the Tudors.


Elizabeth Fremantle’s novel The Girl in the Glass Tower is published by Penguin 



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Isaac Campion by Janni Howker Catherine Johnson

June 13, 2016, 11:22 pm
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I was planning to write about something else this month, but you know how it is. I was going through the bookshelves looking for a book I'd thought I'd recognise by it's blue spine (when I found it, it was orange that's why I had to look all over the house for it) when I found my dog eared old copy of Isaac Campionby Janni Howker.

I stopped, flicked through it and an hour or so later got up, scratchy throated from holding back the tears and totally emotionally floored.

What a gem this little book is. Published in 1986 it's written - like True Grit - in the voice of an elderly person relating his childhood. It didn't win the Carnegie but I think it's one of the finest historical novels written for young people I have ever read.

Isaac Campion's story takes place in his childhood, only as far back as the early twentieth century but a complete and other world. A world where children - according to Isaac only invented after the Great War  -'are merely a damn nuisance and a  mouth to feed until you could do a day's work..'

The world evoked is one of  hardscrabble horse dealers, of the cruelty of men and the casual awfulness of death. This short book is, and for once this is not a cliche, coruscating in it's brilliance, it's utter simplicity and it's heat seeking narrative.

Sometimes I forget what a brilliant writer Janni Howker is. I am now going to make sure I read everything by her all over again this summer. I can't think of a better use of anybody's time.





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The Wrong Side of History?

June 14, 2016, 5:30 pm
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by Marie-Louise Jensen


My youngest son has taken his history A-level exam today. It's been fascinating being around him as he revises, as his module was British history and politics from 1951 to the Blair years. Apologies for the scary picture:

He's discussed with me the prime ministers I grew up with (and before - I'm not so very old!) in terms of how they're seen by history, Historians' evaluations, with the benefits of hindsight, on their relative successes and failures in office. How they managed domestic and foreign policy, war, crises and big decisions.
It's been a revelation to hear youngest son discussing men and women I saw on my television screen, heard on the radio, as historical figures and hear his views on what they did and didn't achieve.
Naturally, it's been difficult not to connect this with the history that's being made right now, and to wonder how that will be viewed by students on a A-level course in ten or twenty years time.

David Cameron, the man who wanted to be Prime Minister because he thought 'I'd be rather good at it,' (or words to that effect). How will he be judged by posterity for June 23rd 2016? What A-level essays will students write about him, taking the views of other historians into account and always remembering to achieve a balanced view?
He will undoubtedly be remembered as the man who successfully united and rebranded the Conservative Party after many years in the wilderness. A presentable PR man, he spoke and debated well and was plausible and convincing, they'll write. (Apart from his propensity for blushing, if they've seen footage of his early time in office.) Years of austerity will be evaluated - its effects on the economy as a whole and on individuals. The NHS, the BBC, the energy decisions and so on.
His gamble with the Scottish referendum will certainly come up. It was a risk that some will say paid off, as Scotland stayed within the United Kingdom and Labour lost their seats in Scotland as a result of being tainted by the Tory brand during the campaign. Two birds with one stone. However it didn't make the debate on independence go away - far from it.
And then Cameron gambled again, and this is the one that might put him on the wrong side of history. In offering an in-out referendum on the UK membership of the EU, Cameron is known to have been attempting to appease his backbenchers; to hold his party together, going into the next election. And so far so good. It worked, it even unexpectedly won them the next election, among other factors.
The problem was, he then had to make good on a promise he never expected to have to deliver on.
For the first time in his political career, the press are not supporting him. Has he lost his gamble? In two weeks time, we'll know, but it will take longer for the effects of the decision to unfold. If it should be an out vote, and, astonishingly, the polls are pointing to it, how will history remember David Cameron? The Prime Minister who took Britain out of Europe? The Prime Minister who presided over the break up of the union, not at the first referendum, but at the second? The Prime Minister who jeapordised Northern Ireland's fragile peace which predecessors Major and Blair worked so hard to achieve? The Prime Minister, even, who finally lost Gibraltar? Who caused an economic crash and a plummeting of the pound and the property market? Who began a long slow decline into isolation for England?
Image result for eu flag imagesNone of these things are what David Cameron wants to be remembered for. There's no doubt he passionately wants to stay in the EU, but this time, he has not succeeded in putting his arguments across without support from certain newspapers. No bacon-eating photos of the Leave Trio have so far been forthcoming. But whether he wants it or not, Cameron's name will be very firmly attached to whatever happens - a lucky escape or a disastrous exit. He gambled and won - or lost.


Is this the kind of analysis future A-level students will have to write? This would definitely only get a D grade, as it lacks close analysis and the opinions of historians. I'm fortunately not a history student - I just dabble. Future students will also be able to discuss, unlike me, whether the exit (if it happens) was a good or a bad thing for the UK in the long term. Something that we, on this side of this historic event, have no way of judging. When you're in the middle of history being made, it doesn't necessarily feel exciting. It can feel very, very frightening.
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Sisi - The People's Princess? By Sue Purkiss

June 15, 2016, 6:00 pm
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If you spend a few days in Vienna, as we just have, you will soon realise how important a figure the Emperor Franz Joseph was. His name is linked to many of the beautiful, gracious buildings, and the current layout of the city owes a great deal to him. He ruled for a very long time - from 1848, when he was just 18, to 1916. During his reign the city became a magnet for artists, writers, composers, and other creative people.

I had heard of him before we went there, but I knew very little about him - and still less about his wife, Princess of Elizabeth of Bavaria, always known as Sisi. I read a little about her in our excellent Dorling Kindersley guidebook; the Austrians adored her, it said, and believed that much of the Emperor's success was down to her influence. When she died in 1898 - pointlessly, almost accidentally murdered by an Italian anarchist in Geneva - the nation mourned.

But then we went to an exhibition about her in the Hofburg Palace, and it soon became clear that the truth about her was rather more complex - and far more sad.

A portrait of Sisi by Winterhalter

Sisi met Franz Joseph when she was only 15. His mother, Sophie, had decided that Sisi's elder sister, Helene, would be a good match for her son, so she ordered Helene's mother to bring her to meet him at a spa town, Bad Ischl. But Franz Joseph departed from the script; instead, he fell in love with Sisi, rhapsodising over her hair, her eyes, her skin, her charm. (Her hair was extraordinary. It was said to reach almost to her ankles. It took hours to dress every day - in later life, she had someone to read to her in Greek while it was being done, so the time wouldn't be wasted. Washing it, with a mixture of egg yolks and oil, took even longer.)

How could she refuse the hand of an emperor? Moreover, Franz Joseph was only 23; he was handsome and he adored her - as he continued to do throughout their marriage. At first, it seems they were happy. She tried to fulfill her duties as Empress. But she had enjoyed a free childhood, she'd been close to her brothers and sisters, she was thoughtful and sensitive and wrote poetry, she'd roamed free on her horse. She very quickly realised that her life now would be spent inside a gilded cage; she could have exquisite dresses, houses all over the place, her own personal train - she could have anything she wanted - except, perhaps, freedom.

One of Sisi's dresses in the exhibition - see how tiny the waist is!

She had four children, but only seems to have been close to the fourth one, Marie Valerie. Perhaps this was because they were taken away from her to be looked after by others; but it seems that it was by choice that she travelled almost constantly, always searching for something that she never found. She became obsessed with her beauty, dieting and wearing tightly laced stays to give her the shape she wanted. They have several of her dresses at the Hofburg, and the waist is tiny: you could almost encompass it with two hands. Determined to keep fit and lithe, to general astonishment she had wooden gym equipment in her rooms, and used it daily. She was a highly skilled and fearless rider; she was full of contradictions, exercising rigid control over her body through dieting and dress, yet risking it when she rode. Even when she and Franz Joseph were together at the Hofburg, she had a separate suite of rooms, though he was sometimes allowed to take breakfast with her. In her rooms she had pictures of her Bavarian family and of the poet, Heine, but very few of her husband or children. Franz Joseph's rooms on the other hand, were full of pictures of her; he had a large portrait of her in front of his desk, so that when he looked up from his work, there she was.

Sisi with her extraordinary hair loose. This was one of the portraits Franz Joseph kept close by him.

In 1889, their son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, committed suicide in a pact with his mistress, Marie Vetsera. Sisi was devastated, and afterwards wore only black.

In 1898, travelling as usual, she was in Geneva: unfortunately, she happened to be there at the same time as an Italian anarchist called Lucheni. He had intended to kill the pretender to the French Throne, the Duke of Savoy; but the Duke's travel plans had changed and Lucheni missed him. Then he read in the local paper that the Empress of Austria was in Geneva incognito. He just wanted to kill a sovereign; any one would do. He followed her, and stabbed her with a sharpened file. Because she was, as usual, tightly laced, the blood could not flow freely at first, and at first she walked on, not realising what had happened. But it was a fatal wound, and even her stays couldn't save her: she soon collapsed. When Franz Joseph was given the news, he said quietly that no-one would ever know how much he had loved her. He thought at first that she must have committed suicide, and Marie Valerie said that at last, her mother had got what she'd longed for.

Austria and Hungary - of which she was also Queen - mourned. The papers all over the world were full of the story. She quickly became venerated as a heroine, a woman who was said to have been close to the people, an angel. But, unlike another beautiful and tragic princess much closer to home, this does not seem to have been the case in reality. Her tragedy, it seems to me from the evidence of this exhibition (though who knows whether this version of the truth is the correct one?) was that once she had left the safe haven of her childhood, she was unable to be close to anyone. She suffered from depression and from a terrible loneliness and sense of pointlessness. She could have had anything she wanted, but none of it was enough. Her closest companion worried that she had no occupation; she had nothing to occupy her mind, apart from travel and poetry.

Was she so unhappy because she found her situation unbearably restrictive? Or was her mental state such that she would have been unhappy whatever her situation? Whichever is nearer to the truth, I find her story intriguing - and desperately sad.


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BEATRIX POTTER and the SAILING SQUIRRELS by Penny Dolan.

June 16, 2016, 10:00 pm
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There are a large number of characters in the manuscript I’m working on and I tend to differentiate them by giving each a certain quality, a shorthand for me while I’m working on the novel and eventually, and  by then more subtly, for the eleven year old reader. One character is, to me, rather squirrel-like: gingery hair, energetic, always alert for the one thing that matters to him, easily distracted by the new – and so on and so on – and all of which set today’s topic jangling in my mind: squirrels or, more particularly, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. And his new book cover.
 
This July, 150 years after Beatrix Potter's birth, Puffin Books are publishing five of the most popular books with re-designed covers, although I think that Puffin have retained the original illustrations inside.What? Immediately I was huffing and puffing because I usually dislike tampering with original illustrations. (Surely the delicacy of Sheppard’s work compared with that dreadful Disney Eeyore will prove my case?)

Born in London, Potter’s drawings celebrate the rural - the people, the animals and places she saw on holidays in Scotland and in the Lakes - and I feel the pictures are so much a part of the whole experience of those books. 
There is something Victorian in the quality of her observation, such a controlled passion for natural history. Her careful water-colours seem the female art form of the time, requiring no expansive canvasses, taking up not too much space, the skill entirely suitable for well-bred young ladies.

 Yet there is something quietly subversive about her work too. While one admires Potter’s art, knowledge and humour, there is no doubt that her delightfully marketable creatures live in a world that turns cruel in a trice. Death is ever present, whether from Mr McGregor to a cat sleeping casually in the background.

Besides, those various garments – from Peter Rabbit’s famous blue coat to Mrs Tiggy-Winkle bustling around in her full finery –  always carry a hint of those popular if dreadful glass-cased stuffed-kitten tableaux that can still found in “museums” such as Blackgang Chine on the Isle of Wight. Curious images, indeed.

Potter went to the London Zoological Gardens to find a live model for the character of Old Brown, the owl, and she tried working from live red squirrel specimens for Squirrel Nutkin himself, complaining that:
“I bought two but they weren’t a pair and fought so frightfully that I had to get rid of the handsome and most savage one. The other squirrel is rather a nice little animal but half of one ear has been bitten off, which spoils his appearance.”

“The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” has a real setting too. “Owl Island,” where Nutkin so naughtily tempts fate, is St Hubert’s Island on Derwentwater, which leads me on to one very memorable image. Potter’s picture of the flotilla of squirrels, going across the water to gather nuts. 

Potter’s perspective seems to be take you across the gently bobbing water all the way to the forbidden wood but I’ve never seen that image without, for a moment, wondering about the truth of that journey.  


 Where did this “flotilla of squirrels ” idea come from?

Then one night, quite recently, and agitated about matters much more important than those uppity art-work covers – and who isn’t at the moment, to be frank?  – I began reading two books by Tove Jansson, best known her Moomin books.


 My three a.m. titles were both for adults, one is more of a memoir and one a collection of short stories. The first, A Summer Book, is all about a grandmother and granddaughter, spending summers on a small island off the Finnish coast. Their relationship changes as one summer follows another.

The second set, A Winter Book, is about an old woman living alone and independently on that tiny island. 

Together, these two short books give a simple but thoughtful glimpse into the life of a proudly independent artist.
 
However, as I began the short story called The Squirrel, Jansson’s words sprang out at me:



“One winter day in November, near sunrise, she saw a squirrel at the landing place. It was sitting motionless near the water, scarcely visible in the half-light, and she knew it was a real squirrel and she hadn’t seem a living thing for a long time. You can’t count gulls: they’re always leaving, they’re like the wind over waves and grass.
She tried to remember everything she knew about squirrels. The wind carries them on pieces of wood from island to island. And then the wind drops, she thought with a touch of cruelty. . .
Why do squirrels go sailing? Are they curious or just hungry? Are they brave? No. Just ordinary and stupid. . . .It was possible the squirrel might stay overnight. It was possible the squirrel might stay the whole winter.”
The squirrel cannot do nothing but stay, making its home in her woodpile. The whole story revolves around the relationship between the wild squirrel and the elderly islander, revealing how physically demanding her solitary island life is becoming. Then, towards the end of the story, she goes down to the jetty and finds:
“The squirrel had gone – there was no doubt there had been seven pieces of board, not six, all the exactly the same distance from the water: sixty five centimetres.”
The story concludes with a further twist that I won’t reveal. 

However, with my head already busy with young Nutkin’s flotilla, I felt that Jansson’s sailing squirrel seemed a remarkably serendipitous coincidence. I went searching and came back with other instances.
Back in 1774, in his “History of Animated Nature”, Oliver Goldsmith reported
“Nothing can be more true than that Lapland squirrels, when they meet lakes or rivers, cross them in an extraordinary fashion.
Perceiving the breadth of the water, they return, as if by common consent, into the neighbouring forest, each in quest of a piece of bark, which answers all the purposes of boats for wafting them over. When the whole company are fitted in this manner, they boldly commit their little fleet to the waves ; every squirrel sitting on its own piece of bark, and fanning the air with its tail, to drive the vessel to its desired port. In this orderly manner they set forward, and often cross lakes several miles broad.
But that is not all. It may be rough in the middle of the lake, and the result then is lamentable. There the slightest additional gust of wind oversets the little sailor and his vessel together. The whole navy, that, but a few minutes before, rode proudly and securely along, is now overturned, and a shipwreck of two or three thousand sail ensues. This, which is so unfortunate for the little animal, is generally the most lucky accident in the world for the Laplander on the shore; who gathers up the dead bodies as they are thrown in by the waves, eats the flesh, and sells the skins for about a shilling the dozen."
All of which is an even sadder squirrel fate than escaping from Old Brown without your fine, feathery tail.

However, I couldn’t help noticing that all these squirrel tales seem to come from Northern lands. Had these clever red squirrels inherited their legendary journeying skills from the busy squirrel Rataskor who, according to Norse Legend, runs up and down Yggdrasil the world tree, carrying messages between the Eagle at the top and the Niddhogg below, while gnawing cunningly and everlastingly as he goes? 



That’s the problem. Once a writing idea, like my squirrellish character, gets into your head,  there are stories about and around them everywhere.
 I’ll end with this moralistic piece, taken from the ”Emblems” of the poet Francis Quarles, written in 1634.
"The squirrel when she must goe seeke her food
 By making passage through the angry flood
And feares to be devoured by the streame
Thus helpes her weakness by a stratagem.
On blocks, or chips, which on the waves doe flote
She nimbly leaps : and making them her boats,
By helpe of winds, of current, and of tide
Is wafted over to the other side.
Thus, that which for the body proves unfit
Must often be acquired by the wit."

Happy sailing, Squirrel Nutkin!




Postscript: While writing this post, I came across a new CBBC cartoon series about Peter Rabbit and his friends. I can offer no comment as I haven't seen it yet. Oh, well.
Perhaps my irritated crossness comes because, in this modern world, when children live lives far more removed from the natural world, I resent the smoothing and softening of these once-realistic anthropomorphic images?

 Penny Dolan
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Lois Duncan - Celia Rees

June 17, 2016, 4:30 pm
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Rather like Catherine Johnson on the 14th, I was going to write about something else this month but then I heard that the American writer, Lois Duncan, had died.

Lois Duncan (April 28, 1934 - June 15, 2016)
Lois Duncan is one of my all time writing heroes. I owe her a very great debt. She changed my life. I first discovered her books when I was teaching in the 1980s. I was an English teacher in a comprehensive school. We were keen then (as now) to encourage our students to read. The younger ones weren't the problem. They often came to the school as avid readers. There were great books for them and great writers: Lucy Boston, Clive King, Penelope Lively, Penelope Farmer, Catherine Storr, Robert Westall, Philippa Pearce, Leon Garfield, Nina Bawden, Jill Paton Walsh, Bernard Ashley, Judith Kerr - the list really does go on and on. Every age is claimed as a Golden Age in Children's Fiction but this really was one. But for older readers, unlike now, not so much. There were honourable exceptions: William Mayne, Alan Garner, Jan Mark, Aidan Chambers and, as Catherine Johnson reminded us, Janni Howker (who never won the Carnegie Medal but that's by the by). Beyond this handful we were struggling and this was the age group that was turning away from reading.




We had money for classroom libraries and were allowed to go once a year to Books for Students to spend it. That is where I discovered a slew of American writers who could match their British counterparts in excellence and who were writing specifically for older teenagers. S.E. Hinton, Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier, Patricia Windsor, Judy Blume (of course)  and  Lois Duncan. We spent all our money in half an hour. I took the books home to read and I was riveted. These writers treated teenagers, and therefore their teen readers, like adults. Their books did not shy away from realities. They dealt with difficult issues: sex, bullying, violence, mental breakdown, death, sexuality, you name it, but the issues weren't the focus. These books were not patronising, they weren't preachy, they didn't set out to teach lessons; the 'issues' were part of the story, part of the complexity of teenage life. The writing was powerful, the structure as complex as any adult novel, but with teenagers at the centre of the action and, because the books were written for teenagers, they had a compelling narrative drive. These writers knew what they were doing and they knew their audience.



I was very impressed, so were my students. The books disappeared out of the book boxes like magic. Suddenly, their writing was full of shopping malls, parking lots and (American) football games. Some re-adjustment was called for. A moratorium for (by now dog eared) books to be returned and a discussion centring on their own lives. They didn't have to pretend to be American. Their lives were just as interesting. That's when someone asked the question: Why doesn't anyone write books like this but about us?

Why, indeed? I thought to myself.


At the time, I was reading a lot of thrillers, especially the fairly new feminist crime fiction writers: Val McDermid, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Sarah Dunant, often published by Virago or Women's Press. I really liked the idea of the female protagonist - tough, intelligent, resourceful  - and it was refreshing not to see women as perpetual victims. It seemed to me that these American writers, especially Lois Duncan and Patricia Windsor, were doing essentially the same thing but about a younger age group. Teens and women had a lot in common. They were often depicted as the victims of crime but were perceived to be relatively helpless. An adult (male) had to come to the rescue or act as avenger. These writers were turning all that on its head. In their books, women and teenagers were acting for themselves. I found the whole thing not just empowering but inspirational.

These books weren't whodunnits, they were whydunnits. They belonged to an emerging trend in crime fiction that went beyond solving the case to look into the complexities of motivation and explore the effect that violent death might have on all those involved. I'd always been uncomfortable with the 'bodies in the library' kind of crime fiction and was a big fan of writers, like P.D. James and Ruth Rendell, who were taking the genre beyond that. 

At about this time, a friend who worked at a different school in Coventry told me about a trip to an Outdoor Pursuits Centre in the wilds of Mid Wales. 'You will never believe what happened!' she started and launched into a story involving police hunting for a killer who had stabbed a teenage girl to death, hidden her body in a church vestry and was now heading for the house where my friend was going to stay, out in the middle of no-where, with 20 or so assorted teenagers. 'Hang on a minute,' I said. 'Do you mind if I write this down?'

That was the base story for my first novel Every Step You Take. Not long after that conversation, I gave up teaching to become a writer. I owe a great deal to Lois Duncan. If it hadn't been for her, I might never have discovered what I really wanted to do.




I've been writing for more than twenty years now. I joined a small select bunch of British writers who also wrote for teenagers: Janni Howker, Philip Pullman, Anne Cassidy, Peter Beere, David Belbin. I've watched the ranks of YA writers grow and swell. When I hear how 'new' it all is; how no-one ever wrote for teenagers; how no-one ever wrote about strong girl characters, I have to smile. We've been there, we've done that, even if we didn't get a Carnegie medal. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com
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History Books by Katherine Webb

June 18, 2016, 4:30 pm
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We History Girls represent a wide variety of historical writing, for a wide variety of readers. As a writer of historical fiction, I'm constantly striving to bring an era to life, to recreate it faithfully, and to show via my characters - ideally effortlessly - what life was like back then. However, the one thing no recently written historical book can do, no matter much I love them, is give me that shiver of excitement at reading a really old book - preferably one I've never heard of, found in a forgotten heap in a junk shop.

Take this for example:


I just found this at a village fete. It was read to me by my favourite primary school teacher when I was nine, when I'd just started having riding lessons and was so obsessed with ponies I couldn't think about much else. Out of all the books I read or was read as a child, it has stayed with me: the story of a magic land through the dark corner of a stable, where the ponies can talk and teach you to ride themselves. And, since Mrs Hamilton read it to us in instalments, it taught me a lot about finishing a chapter on a cliffhanger... It has that wonderful old book smell, created by the breakdown of the lignin and cellulose in the paper, mixed in with years of dust and mould, which conjures up the schoolrooms of the past - past lives, past eras. It's a relic, in other words; a piece of physical history quite magical in its own right. The book was published in 1937, and has been inscribed by its first author - Marjorie. It's one of those books that reveals exactly how a particular facet of life was at that time - in this case, riding and middle-class childhood just before the Second World War. I wonder what Marjorie's experience of the war was.


I'm so excited to read it again. It got me thinking about how important books written at the time in which I am setting one of my own novels are to me, in the research phase. Be they fact or fiction, they can tell you so much about patterns of speech and vocabulary, manners, society and the minutiae of daily life - things that might perhaps get left out of wider historical works on the era, written a long time afterwards. They are also, as a general rule, hugely entertaining to read. So, in no particular order, here are Five Fantastic Books that really embody England in the early twentieth century, which you might not have heard of, and which I highly recommend you pick up if you see in a box at a fete.




'Precious Bane' by Mary Webb. published in 1924, tells the story of Prudence Sarn, a farmer's daughter in Shropshire at the turn of the twentieth century, and how she finds love with Kester, a weaver, in spite of her family's folly and her friends' disregard. Prudence's hare lip - her precious bane - and the superstitions of her neighbours shape her life, and Webb's (no relation!) observation and recreation of a working rural life that has now vanished is hypnotically beautiful.



'Child of the Twenties' by Frances Donaldson, a childhood memoir by the daughter of the renowned playwright Freddy Lonsdale, which describes her wildly varied upbringing and life, from the frenetic energy of the  Embassy Club in London after the Great War, to learning to fly down in Sussex, to experimental child rearing to farming cattle. So revealing about the opportunities that class, a little fame and marrying well could bring in the 1920s and 1930s, and written with real verve, insight and self-knowledge.



In a lot of my novels, herblore makes an appearance - I often write about rural life before the NHS, when most lower class people would have treated themselves with home remedies, or at best gone to somebody in their village who was known to be wise about such things. I find it endlessly fascinating, the things people used to be able to do with plants - and how that now correlates with modern science's findings on the active ingredients found therein. For example, there's an old bit of lore that hawthorn blossoms should never be brought into the house as they presaged a death in the family. We now know that hawthorn blossom contains a chemical called trimethylamine, which is one of the first chemicals produced when human tissue begins to decay. In the past, when bodies were laid at out home prior to burial, it would have been a scent people knew well.  I've no idea of the exact age of this book, but I would guess at 1930s. Was Gypsy Petulengro a real gypsy? Hmm, who knows. But I love the recipes collected here, and I have no doubt that many people who got hold of this book at the time would have given them a go. Here's one of my favourites - a good pill for a dog. Crucially, not the same as a pill for a good dog.


Originally published in 1921, this book by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle describes the sensational case of the Cottingley Fairies as it happened. The well-known set of photographs, taken in 1917 by youngsters Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, convinced Conan-Doyle, a keen spiritualist, that fairies did exist, and that by extension many of the tenets of spiritualism and theosophy were correct. It's so interesting to read Conan-Doyle's thoughts on this and various other fairy 'sightings', and his correspondence with renowned theosophist Edward Gardner, included here. The book was a huge help to me when I wrote 'The Unseen', about a fairy hoax in the Edwardian era - it gives such an insight into the power of people wanting to believe in something.



This last will be familiar to a lot of people - 'The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady' by Edith Holden, which, according to the back cover, has sold over two million copies worldwide. Written by Edith in 1906, before her untimely death at 39 in 1920. She drowned in the Thames at Kew, by all accounts trying to collect Chestnut tree buds. There must have been Chestnut trees that weren't so close to the water? In any case, this is less social history and more just lovely to read for its notes on the weather, and landscape and the change in season. The floweriness of the prose and poetry, whilst not to everybody's taste, for me captures an innocence that was lost from a lot of British life, and writing, after the Great War.

Now I'm off to read Silver Snaffles, whilst inhaling deeply...
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Discovering Medieval Oxford - by Ann Swinfen

June 19, 2016, 4:30 pm
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I fell in love with Oxford when I was nine years old.



My mother and I had arrived in England to spend some months with the English half of my family, and my uncle was driving us north to the Midlands. I think I probably fell asleep, but when he stopped to let us stretch our legs for a while in the dark, I stepped out of the car into a wide, tree-lined street – no, it was more than a street, a long triangle, disappearing into the distance. Under a sky of moon and stars, strange buildings stood out, crenellated, turreted, like something from a medieval tale. Then from all over the town, bells began to ring.

It was Oxford. St Giles. And it was midnight.

St Giles with St John's College

What an introduction! Later, when I was lucky enough to go there as a student, the love deepened. Of course, there were all the usual things – wonderful friends, punting on the river, picnicking while watching cricket in the Parks, parties, singing in the Bach Choir, acting, glamorous balls. And incidentally, falling in love and marrying. Well, yes, there were lectures and tutorials to be squeezed in as well.

Underneath it all, however, that first impression remained strong, and grew even stronger whenever I thought of all those who had inhabited the same streets through the centuries. I remember one particular occasion when I was walking alone down tiny
Magpie Lane
 in winter. Deep snow lay under foot. There was a single lamppost. In my memory it was one of the old gas ones, can that be right? One bar of gold light fell across the snow, and, in Merton chapel, someone was playing the organ. There wasn’t another soul to be seen. Yet I could feel all those people around me, especially those early scholars from the Middle Ages.

Magpie Lane

I’ve never believed in physical time travel, but there are certain spots in our lives when we make that emotional leap, and that was one of them for me. I wouldn’t claim I could see those medieval scholars, but I could certainly feel them.

It was inevitable, I suppose, that sooner or later I would have to write about medieval Oxford, and that is what I have been doing in recent months. However, I always love the research as well, and in this case it has been fascinating. First of all, my central character is a former student, now a bookseller, so I needed to know everything about book selling in the fourteenth century, parchment making, bookbinding. I made some curious discoveries.

Medieval Bookshop

It would be another century before the invention of printing replaced the handwritten book, but nevertheless booksellers did exist and in university towns they could be licensed to provide the peciae, sixteen-page extracts from essential texts. Students would hire and copy these, in order to have their own versions of the study texts, and the system provided booksellers (who were also stationers) with a regular income. The rental rates were controlled by the university. This was a wonderful and totally unexpected discovery. So that was how students acquired their textbooks in the fourteenth century!

Although the most luxurious decorated books were expensive, there was a brisk trade in secondhand books. Moreover, certain books were popular amongst the literate laity, such as books of hours and collections of traditional tales. This book ownership was more widespread than I had realised. There is even a recorded case of a vagrant stealing a book of hours belonging to a servant.

By this period paper had come into use, though parchment was the material of choice for the pages of books. Its production was demanding, but the liberal supply of flowing water all round Oxfordwas ideal for the purpose. And – glory be! – I discovered that out beyond the castle there was a BookbindersBridge!

Preparing Parchment

The university system had not yet taken on its later form, so that in 1353 (when my first story is set) undergraduate students were not admitted to the colleges. They lived in ‘halls’, or sometimes in town lodgings, and would only join a college if they proceeded to advanced study after completing the Trivium and Quadrivium. A hall was run by a Warden or Master, and there was a whole cluster of them in the northeast part of the walled town. Only one of these survives to this day, St Edmund Hall. Although in recent years it has become a full-blown college, it still proudly retains its title of ‘Hall’.

St Edmund Hall

However, the constant murderous fights between town and gown are well known. One of the earliest led to the flight of a group of scholars to the fens of Cambridgeshire to found Britain’s second university, but these bloody encounters continued into the fourteenth century with probably the worst occurring on St Scholastica’s Day in 1355, when there were so many deaths and injuries that the town (which had thought itself victorious) was severely penalised by the king. The fight started at the Swindlestock Tavern on Carfax, the central crossroads in Oxford. When I was a student, my bank stood on the spot (though it’s a different bank now).

All this trouble meant that the university decided that students needed to be better regulated and cared for. Merton began admitting undergraduates to college around the 1380s and other colleges followed suit, although official university halls continued to accommodate students as well.

The street plan of the walled town of Oxfordhas remained remarkably unchanged. Originally a fortified Saxon town, it was built around the crossroads of four streets: the High Street from the East Gate, Northgate Street from the North Gate, Fish Street from the South Gate, and Great Bailey (a post-Conquest name) originally from the West Gate, which was knocked down to make way for the Norman castle and replaced by a much smaller gate. All four streets met – and still meet – at Carfax.

Carfax

Three of these streets have changed their names. Fish Street is now St Aldate’s, Great Bailey is
Queen Street
, and Northgate has become the Cornmarket. The Guildhall was located in Fish Street, where the Town Hall now stands.

One of the best-known streets in Oxfordtoday is the Broad, lined with magnificent buildings. I found it entertaining to discover that it lies over or at least near the old stinking Canditch, which surrounded part of the town, lying outside the town wall. There are still bits of the wall to be found, if you search. For my fourteenth century inhabitants, it formed the boundary of the town proper, although already the town was beginning to spread beyond the wall.

Of course, the period I have chosen is immediately after the Black Death, known at the time as the Great Pestilence, or simply the Death, when anything from a third to half the population perished. The university was hit hard, but it survived. More than that, it took advantage of tumbling values to acquire large amounts of property in the town. After the Death, the warren of small cottages to the north of St-Peter-in-the-East had become more and more squalid, inhabited by criminals and the worst sort of prostitutes. It was recognised as a place of danger and disease, and the neighbours heaved a sigh of relief when it was cleared away to make room for NewCollege in 1379.

New College

From St Edmund Hall on High Street in the south, to Hart Hall, near the junction of
Catte Street
 with the wall at the small Smith Gate in the north, ran a winding lane known at
Hammer Hall Lane
, after one of the many halls in the area. Nowadays the northern part in known as
New College Lane
, the southern part as Queen’s Lane.

New College Lane & Hertford Bridge

Only a handful of colleges existed at the time, and not all are still extant. The survivors include Merton, Queen’s, Oriel, University, Exeter, and Balliol. Gloucesterbecame Worcester, Canterburywas replaced by ChristChurch, much of Durhamwas taken over by St. John’sCollege and Trinity. Gloucester and Durhamwere Benedictine foundations. Hart Hall has become HertfordCollege(my husband’s college – the one with the bridge). You will not find the Hospital of St John, next to the bridge over the Cherwell. It has vanished under MagdalenCollege.

Originally, of course, the university was established to train men in holy orders, although the growth of a secular ‘civil service’ required by the king and the law courts created a demand for more and more educated men outside the church. As well as the colleges, Oxford was surrounded by ecclesiastical institutions: the Augustinian Friary, the Carmelite Friary, the Franciscan Friary, the Dominican Friary, St Frideswide’s Priory, Rewley Abbey, Osney Abbey, and a little way north of the town, Godstow Abbey (a nunnery), where Henry II’s mistress, Fair Rosamund, was buried. All came to an end with the Dissolution, but in the fourteenth century they were still flourishing.

Even now the maze of waterways formed by the many branches of the Thamesand the Cherwell encompasses the town, and the water meadows, now as then, are at risk of flooding. All this water provided the driving power for at least five mills: Holywell, Blackfriars, Castle, and Trill, and across the water meadows to the east, King’s Mill.

Holywell Mill

A curious personal note. I wanted to use Holywell Mill in this first book. Something nagged at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t pin it down. I looked up a picture of the present Holywell Mill, built in 1888, architecturally in seventeenth-century style (no longer a working mill). The picture hit me like a thunderclap. As a first year student I cycled there once a week for a tutorial. My unpleasant fourteenth-century character, Miller Wooton, I’m glad to say, no longer lives there.


Ann Swinfen
http://www.annswinfen.com


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Casa Museu Medeiros e Almeida by Imogen Robertson

June 20, 2016, 4:40 pm
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My husband and I have just got back from Portugal. My mother-in-law lives in Porto but before we went to visit her, we spent a week in Lisbon. 

There is plenty of material for history blogs in that remarkable city and you’ll be hearing more over the next few posts, but I have to admit that the whole holiday was rather overshadowed by the coming Brexit vote. Lisbon is a town of travel, trade and immigration just as London is.  We revelled in it, and were miserable at the idea the concept of a smaller, walled country might triumph over the glories and complexities of connection in the UK.


If you go to Lisbon take the time to veer off the main tourist trail and visit Casa Museu Medeiros e Almeida. It’s an astonishing collection, all the more remarkable because several of the rooms remain those of a private house, just as the original collectors arranged them. 

Walls are lined with French painted panelling, crazed mid-19th century furniture vies for the attention with two headed enamelled peacocks and the golden shell baby carriage of the son of the Duke of Wellington. There’s an entire room devoted to watches and clocks from rock crystal extravaganzas to pocket watches shaped like cherries and apparently conservative looking pocket watches which contain little pockets of clockwork porn within them. 

They speak of culture and ideas, of wit and pleasure crossing great expanses of space and time before settling in this beautiful cool house in a Lisbon side-street.  


I hope I’ll be celebrating our decision to remain in Europe next month, a decision to remain an outward looking people who wish to share and celebrate. For now, apologies for the short post and fingers crossed.

www.imogenrobertson.com
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Medieval Masterchef by Catherine Hokin

June 22, 2016, 1:00 am
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As I mentioned in my last blog, I am currently spending a considerable amount of time in the fourteenth century. This has allowed me to indulge a number of obsessions, including the entymology of words and, my real love, food and the development of our culinary heritage.

These two things are very inter-connected. The arrival of the Norman French in the years post the Conquest brought many of our current words into use - in this context, curfew is particularly relevant coming as it does from the signal to bank the hearth fires at the end of the day and stemming from the Latin coverir (to cover) and feu (fire). It also heralded the start of a real explosion in culinary learning as eleventh century Michel Roux Juniors arrived to educate the palates of the English upper classes - I live in hope that there was an equivalent Monica Galetti terrifying young cooks from beneath her wimple.

The Forme of Cury c.1390
The interest in the culinary arts achieved its peak in the reign of Richard II and has come down to us in the form of a wonderful manuscript known as The Forme of Cury, with cury being the Middle English word for cookery.

This manuscript is not just a description of meals enjoyed, it is an instructional text: a series of recipes, 196 in total, put together in a parchment scroll by King Richard's cooks so that other cooks could learn their trade. Some of the recipes are for everyday use ('common meats for the household as they should be made, craftily and wholesomely') and some are for feasts. All are fascinating for the glimpses they give us of the incredible range of ingredients available to medieval cooks in wealthy households, the customs surrounding eating and the links drawn between food and other important contemporary disciplines - the introduction says that the work was given 'the approval and consent of the masters of medicine and of philosophy'who served at Richard's court.

 Medieval Feast
Everday meats and pottages are one thing, it is the feasts that fascinate me. The recipes are full of wonderful ingredients from olive oil and spices such as caraway and cardamom to more exotic food that even the most hipster twenty-first century restaurant would blanch (pun intended) at - cranes, curlews, herons and even seals and porpoises. Many of the dishes served required a huge array of techniques to prepare them, separating them out from the far less complex roast meats which had dominated in earlier times. By the end of the fourteenth century, meat would be presented in a wide variety of fashions: mortrews was a type of meatloaf with a base of minced pork and chicken which was boiled and then thickened with bread, spices and eggs and often served with a broth; raysols also used minced meat as the main ingredient (in this case pigs livers), with the addition of cheese and a saffron crust. The list of techniques for tackling meat alone read like something Jamie Oliver might employ with words such as stamp, meddle, smite and seethe littering the recipes. When you think about some of the centrepieces these kitchens produced - such as the cockatrice formed from the front of a capon and the back of a piglet stitched together or the peacocks brought to the table with their bodies and feathers reformed - you have to marvel at their ingenuity.

A Peacock Centrepiece
It wasn't just the savoury courses that were astounding. Many of us have heard of the sugar subtleties that heralded each course or acted as warners that the banquet was about to begin. I (perhaps because I am married to an American who was brought up with this tradition rather than the custard approach I knew) am fascinated by the brightly-coloured jellies which were used to encase everything from fish to fruit, which in turn were often gilded. Kate Colquhoun in her wonderful book Taste lists some of the colouring ingredients from blood and bark (reds and purples) through heliotrope (blue), almonds (white) and mint to the glorious and highly-prized saffron. A sea of heraldry for the table.

Feasts were an important part of the medieval calendar and we are currently in the middle of one of the key celebrations: Midsummer. Midsummer was the culmination of the spring festivals that heralded fertility, the hopes of a good harvest and the solstice. Its dates have shifted slightly: astronomically the longest day falls on the 20th/21st June but the 1752 calendar alignments fixed the date on June 24th, the Feast of John the Baptist. Whatever the date, Midsummer Eve has traditionally been celebrated with bonfires (originally burning animal bones, hence the name), cooking and decorating with flowers and herbs to entice the fairies and of course, food.

Lots of Midsummer recipes involve fruit and vegetables but I honestly think a celebration is not a celebration without cake. So, here is a recipe for fourteenth century Bryndons - small cakes in a sauce of wine, fruit and nuts -which I think captures the ingredients and the array of techniques our medieval cooks would have employed, even on small dishes. There is a a modern translation of the recipe at a wonderful website called A Boke of Gode Cookery. I really hope to see someone have a go at these on the Bake-Off, I feel Mary Berry would approve.

 Bryndons - admittedly not my attempt
Boil wine, honey, sandalwood, cloves, saffron, mace, cloves, minced dates, pine nuts, currants and a splash of vinegar. Add ground figs that have been boiled in wine and strained. Make thin cakes out of flour, saffron, sugar and water. Slice these thinly and fry in oil. Serve the cakes in a shallow dish, arranged on the boiled and cooled syrup, which should be runny and not stiff.

Accept star baker.

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The Patriot Game; nationalism versus humanity, by Leslie Wilson

June 22, 2016, 4:30 pm
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German revolutionaries (Wikimedia Commons)






Nationalism in its modern form was born in 1848, the Year of Revolutions, and it was a very different animal from what it was to become. It was about liberalism, not economic liberalism, but liberty, equality, and fraternity. The setting-up of nation states was seen as an alternative to the old, feudal states; they were to be just, have democratic constitutions, and royal and aristocratic dominance would be abolished.

German nationalism was born at a time when young, idealistic people were mobilised to fight against Napoleon, with the promise of a constitutional state. This last was important, because Napoleon, though a warmongering imperialist, did introduce constitutions and rights in the German states that he conquered, and these were attractive to intelligent, reform-hungry bourgeois people. In 1848, the revolutionaries were angry because the reforms had not been implemented by the victors of Waterloo. Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington, were pretty ruthless reactionaries and they clamped down on the middle and lower classes. The same ideas spread to Slav peoples who felt their own languages and cultures were being suppressed by Russian and Austrian overlords.

But there's a serious problem with nationalism; first that it tags itself all too easily to ethnicity, or what is perceived as being the 'natural' ethnic population of any given place. You don't see neighbours any longer, just 'that German' or 'that Fleming' or 'that Serb', 'that Croat', who lives down your street and who, you can too easily end up thinking, should be packed off to a 'home' they've never lived in, because they don't belong in your newly-formed nation. Secondly, it too easily morphs into a belief that your nation is not only superior to other nations, and has more rights, but also that it must not be questioned, for fear of being unpatriotic.

When my grandfather was arraigned by the Nazis in 1933, he was accused of 'lack of national feeling,' and when that happened to him and countless others, the metamorphosis from liberal, democratic nationalism to something hideous and criminal was complete. My grandfather did love his country; loved it enough to want justice and a decent standard of living for its workers (he was a Social Democrat), but he didn't trust the Nazis to deliver that. They didn't, of course. Twelve years of Nazi rule left Germany in a far worse state than it was in after the Wall Street crash, when Hitler's popularity began to rise.
photo: Imperial War Museum


Fast-forward to the present, especially the past few weeks, when 'I want my country back' has become the cry of people who've been taught, by a press propaganda campaign that Hitler might envy, that incomers and refugees are the root of all their problems. I'm not saying that the problems aren't real (though I'd find other people responsible for housing shortages, health service queues, and low wages), nor am I without sympathy for anyone who finds their neighbourhood has changed completely with the arrival of people they can't chat to. In some cases, however, UKIP is really strong in areas where the immigrant population consists of the local Chinese takeaway proprietors. Nigel Farage's poster, depicting a queue of refugees (who were not coming to Britain, incidentally); untrue stories, lapped up, about of millions of Turks heading here; people convinced that the proportion of migrants in their town is 80% when it is actually 10% or less; all these are manifestations of a nationalism which too easily fastens on foreigners and different races for someone to fear and blame.

Nationalism peddles the idea of a homogeneous, ethnically white Britain where everyone speaks the same language. Leaving aside the fact that I find some regional accents difficult to understand, and that there are actual language differences in different parts of the country: (going for a dander, dog-daisies, bargeing a bucketful, anyone know what these things are?), Britain (even England with the cross of the Syrian St George on its flag) has never been homogeneous. Brythons, Celts, Saxons (who confusingly came from Denmark along with the Angles and the Jutes), Normans (also of Viking origin), are our mixed ancestry, along with Africans from Elizabethan times onwards,Jews, Huguenots, Chinese, Indians, because we went and took over their country, are all a part of the mix, along with smaller inputs derived from intermarriage (like me). I don't claim this as a comprehensive list.

Nationalism ignores this reality. Nationalism demands that we put our own country first, in defiance of humanity and international cooperation; that we refrain from facing unpleasant facts about our country's abusive and exploitative actions and glorify them instead, so we can be 'proud of our heritage.'
Do these really trump everything?


But if your loved child committed a murder, or a rape, is it right to glorify those crimes because you love them and want to be proud of them? Is it right to feel you must even encourage them to commit crimes, because otherwise you'd be disloyal? My generation in Germany, post-war, decided that the best way of loving their country was to face up to the horrors of the past, and try to make sure it never happened again. It caused intergenerational conflict; the older generation felt personally attacked and condemned (my mother did when I tried to understand what had happened), but it had to be done, and Germany nowadays attracts respect for that openness.

Actually, the world has been interconnected for thousands of years. Mediterranean peoples sailed to Britain to get tin to make bronze. The west has been trading with China, along the silk road, since Roman times or earlier. International cooperation has been far more important than wars. Even the Norse settlers were far more likely to be traders who came peaceably than Viking raiders who massacred the locals. But then, war makes a better drama than peace, and so it's easy to downplay the fact that the benefits of cooperation will keep the peace for years and years, pushing the idea that peace is only obtained at gunpoint.

Today is a day that will, as Marie-Louise Jensen pointed out last week, make history, and what history it makes is yet to be seen. But if we listen to the siren call of nationalism and believe that we can cut ourselves off from the opportunities the European Union offers, and become 'Great Britain' again, I fear we are fooling ourselves. If leaving the EU leads to economic decline, then the forces of right-wing nationalism are likely to exploit the anger of the poor and mushroom up, as they did in Germany in the early 30s. That led to the complete inversion of all the values I personally treasure; humanity, compassion, openness. Last Thursday, a young woman who had lived her life in the service of those values was murdered by a man who shouted 'Britain first!' and referred to her as a traitor. The BNP are the only party who are contesting her seat: they are determined to profit by the murder. Putin, Le Pen, and other reactionaries are desperate for Brexit; it's just what they want.
www.kremlin.ru.

I believe that extreme nationalism, with its filthy twin, murderous racism, are like opportunistic viruses, lurking within the body politic. Economic weakness, like bodily weakness, give them the chance to proliferate and thrive, taking over healthy cells.

I love my country; it's my home, though I am not a nationalist. Without glossing over its faults, or the limitations of its democratic system, I value it hugely and want it to remain a mainly decent place to live. I want to see it participating within the EU to tackle the enormous challenges that face us in the twenty-first century, seeking, as Jo Cox did, to spread humanity and justice among the peoples of the earth.




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THE DEALER AND THE ADDICT by Elizabeth Chadwick

June 23, 2016, 4:30 pm
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I'm not quite sure how I came to be on their list of users, but however they found me, they ended up targeting me, and I am now a hopeless addict.  The moment one of their occasional catalogs drops through my letterbox, I'm there, filled with anxious anticipation at the fix to come and knowing that I shall have to consume it as fast as I can because to reap the ultimate reward I have to do the deal before anyone else gets to it  - and there are many of us out there.

So who are these nefarious people encouraging and feeding my habit?

They are specialist second hand and antiquarian book dealers Bennet & Kerr Books who operate out of a warehouse at the end of a farmyard in the Oxfordshire village of Steventon.
Edmund Bennet and Andrew Kerr, the business owners have known each other for five decades and in September will have been in business for 34 years.  Their company began in their houses with a stock of inherited books and two manual typewriters,  but success required expansion.  Having outgrown the garage built to hold more of their collection, they acquired the warehouse at Steventon in 1992 which currently houses a stock of around 7,000 books.

Members of the Association of Antiquarian Booksellers and The Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association (members must adhere to a code of professional conduct), they often handle specialist collections from the estates of established historians.  Norman Davis for example, Kathleen Major, Norman Scarfe, Derek Brewer, Margaret Aston, Barbara Reynolds.

Bennet & Kerr are a delight to do business with - which also helps to fuel my addiction.  My queries and orders are dealt with promptly and efficiently.  They know me when I phone through my order - I'm not sure whether it is Mr Bennet or Mr. Kerr who answers, but he is always knowledgeable and charming.  The books generally take about a week to arrive and are packed with meticulous care.  There's a layer of tissue, then newspaper, then card, and bubble wrap, and all neatly executed. The books are valued as the precious objects they are, no matter their condition and their price.  A book costing £5 will receive the same meticulous attention as one costings thousands.  I would recommend Bennett and Kerr to anyone interested in the broad spread of the Middle Ages.  However, if you go looking then beware, because you will become an addict too.  You have been warned!


You can click on the picture to enlarge. 


Regarding the books themselves, here is a selection of what I have acquired from them  - by no means the whole.  They might have a warehouse for their existing stocks, but I wonder how many warehouses worth they have sold to their addicts customers!

One of my more recent purchases is this one - a history of the Temple Church published in 1907. (see star mark in the above catalogue). I was touched to see this dedication on the flyleaf from its original purchaser to his wife.  I haven't been able to decipher the entirety, but the sentiments are clear.


'To my darling wife with the first of our extra profits at...? Joiner Street perhaps?


A few more of my eclectic purchases (the tip of the iceberg)  from Bennett and Kerr.  I've posed them on one of my bookshelves.



Another part of the addiction is that one never knows quite what one is going to find when browsing the catalogue.  For example I came across a one of its kind bound university thesis from 1971 on the history of hats complete with sketches and photographs made by the author.  It perhaps only has a limited use in my medieval research - although a use nevertheless, but it give me warmth and joy to have this work on my shelf that is clearly someone's passion as well as their study towards a degree. 










For anyone who wishes to feed their addiction, here is Bennet & Kerr's website. Bennett & Kerr


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History of Bedlam by Miranda Miller

June 25, 2016, 4:52 am
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   While I was writing my Bedlam Trilogy (which will be published as one volume next year by Peter Owen), I became fascinated by the history of the hospital before the nineteenth century, the period I was writing about.

   In 1247 The Priory of St Mary of Bethlem, Bishopsgate was founded and stood where Liverpool Street Station is now. It was to provide a fundraising base for the Church of St Mary of Bethlehem in Palestine and from the 1330s it is referred to as a hospital. The first references to Bethlem housing insane patients date from the early fifteenth century and it is therefore the oldest psychiatric hospital in Europe that is still being used. Henry V111 seized the hospital as an ‘alien priory’ and it became both ‘royal’ and a City institution (until the NHS took it over in 1948), The Royal Bethlem Hospital, jointly administered with Bridewell, a former palace that became a prison. Of course, definitions of madness change constantly and people suffering from dementia, post natal depression and learning disabilities would probably have been inmates.

   The hospital’s history is inextricably involved with the history of London and the word Bedlam would have begun as a Londoners’ contraction (like "innit"). Recurring scandals about the treatment of the inmates soon gave the word its association with chaos and pandemonium. The hospital was near two London playhouses, The Curtain and The Theatre, and it has been suggested that Shakespeare may have visited it to observe madness. Jacobean plays, including The Honest Whore, The Duchess of Malfi, Bartholomew Fair and The Changeling, all refer to it as a place of horror. In the late seventeenth century one of the most famous inmates was Lady Eleanor Audley, who published her Strange and Wonderful Prophecies and sat on the Bishop of Litchfield’s throne to declare herself Primate and Metropolitan. She should now, perhaps, be considered something of a feminist hero, as the first woman bishop. Oliver Cromwell’s gigantic porter, Daniel, was also a prophet and owned a bible that was said to be a present from Nell Gwyne. People used to gather outside the hospital beneath his window to listen to his preaching.


   After the Fire of London the hospital was rebuilt at Moorfields (where Finsbury Circus is now), in an elegant, spacious building designed by Robert Hooke, a friend of Wren’s. An anonymous poet wrote that:
So Brave, so Sweet does it appear,
Makes one Half-Madde to be a Lodger there.

   The galleries of the new building attracted many visitors, some of whom teased and provoked the inmates, and this was allowed until the late eighteenth century. In 1728 Dr James Monro was appointed as physician, the first of a dynasty of ‘mad-doctors’ - four generations of Monros - who ran the hospital until 1853. His son,Dr John Monro, wrote that “madness is a distemper of such a nature, that very little of real use can be said concerning it.” Alexander Cruden, a writer who was briefly incarcerated in Bedlam in the eighteenth century, said bitterly of the physicians there: "but is there so great Merit and Dexterity in being a mad Doctor? The common Prescriptions of a Bethlemitical Doctor are a Purge and a Vomit, and a Vomit and a Purge over again, and sometimes a Bleeding, which is no great mystery". Jonathan Swift, who was a Governor of the hospital, suggests in his Tale of a Tub (1704) that Bedlam is the best place to recruit the nation's politicians since the inmates could not be any more insane than the men in power.

   This is the terrifying image of Bedlam that we all know: 

   It is, of course, the final scene of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress (1735), sales of which raised funds for the hospital. The fashionably dressed women have come to the asylum as a social occasion, to be entertained by the bizarre antics of the inmates. Around Tom Rakewell a tailor, a musician, an astronomer and an archbishop are suffering from various delusions. One man thinks he is a king but is naked, carrying a straw crown and sceptre.

   In 1786 Margaret Nicholson, convinced she was the rightful heir to the throne, made a rather feeble attempt to assassinate George 111 with a blunt knife:
   The king, whose own experience of madness had made him compassionate, said: ‘take care of the woman - do not hurt her, for she is mad.’ A few years later James Tilly Matthews was confined to the hospital on the grounds of his very complex paranoid delusions. In fact, he might have been a spy or double agent actually persecuted by Lord Liverpool’s government ( for more about this amazing story see a fascinating book by Mike Jay: The Air Loom Gang: The Strange and True Story of James Tilly Matthews and His Visionary Madness).

   By the end of the eighteenth century the once palatial building was collapsing so that ‘not one of the floors are level, nor any of the walls upright.’ The hospital had to be demolished and in 1815 moved to St George’s Fields, then in Surrey but now in Lambeth, where the Imperial War Museum is. Anyone interested in the history of the hospital should visit a wonderful new museum, The Bethlem Museum of the Mind, which is in Beckenham, Kent.




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Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, by Carol Drinkwater

June 25, 2016, 4:01 pm
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Many of my colleagues are writing glorious posts inspired by recent holidays. How envious I feel as I stay locked to my desk, moving inexorably towards my upcoming deadline. However, I did make a short trip to Krakow two weeks ago, for five days, taking all my work with me. I wrote all day in our lovely hotel room and then about 4pm I allowed myself out to revisit the city.

My husband, Michel, was on the jury for the Krakow Documentary Film Festival and I tagged along because it is a city I remember from two decades back. I first visited Poland months after the Berlin Wall had come down.

Of course, my first observation was how dramatically the city has changed. My first visit was, as all my trips have been, for work. I was filming there. In fact, I have been employed as an actress in Poland on several occasions. I have also taken the role of director of English dubbing on a couple of films, written the screenplay for a six-part film series partially shot in Poland, and, more recently, I have returned as an author on a book tour. Over the years, I have been a sporadic witness to its evolution.

When I first went to Poland it was, as I said, after the Wall had come down. Communism was still visible everywhere, of course. There were few foreigners except business folk. It was a time for enterprise, for overseas companies to step in and offer their wares or stake a claim in the opportunities for new business. It was grey. The streets were grey. The citizens, poor. There was little to buy in the shops. Many of their windows were bare with possibly one object on display. There was a subdued, vanquished, sense of national identity because the dominant identity was Communism. I observed certain overseas visitors treat the Poles badly, as the underdog but most were keen to express their enthusiasm at finally being offered the opportunity to collaborate, to create a mix of experience and skills.


Krzysztof Kieslowski 



In my sphere, I was exceedingly fortunate. I was given many opportunities to work with brilliant filmmakers. The Polish people have a marvellous history of cinema, and one of the finest film schools in the world is in Lodz. Roman Polanski, Krzysztof Kieslowski (there was a small retrospective in his honour at this year's doc festival because, incredibly, 2016 is the 20th anniversary of his death), Jerzy Skolomowski (who I worked with in 1976 on The Shout which was honoured at Cannes), Andrzej Wajda,  Krzysztof Zanussi, who was the president of the jury when I was part of the team at the Monaco TV festival some years ago, and a remarkable lady I have never met, Agnieszka Holland. These directors amongst many others have given Polish cinema a fine reputation internationally, and an exceptional body of work.


                                                                 Agnieszka Holland

I had little opportunity for sightseeing this time, revisiting places I had been to years ago. I did go to the castle again and to light candles for my recently-departed mother at the cathedral, and I did make a special trip to see Leonardo da Vinci's Lady With an Ermine, which I had not seen before. It is magnificent and I was humbled to stand before such a work. I felt profoundly grateful for the opportunity to be there in that room in the company of such a masterpiece even if I had to share the moment with many Asian and European tourists. I left the castle and wandered down into the old town where tourists were seated in every restaurant and every bar, none of which had existed a decade or two ago. There were the inevitable lager louts behaving badly, getting drunk loudly, sloshing pints everywhere, making the most of cheap beer, having flown in off the cheap flights. I sighed at the sight of them, and I then I remembered what my driver had said on the way into town from the airport. "Life is good for us now. We have every nationality visiting us here, enjoying our food, our culture, our way of life, our art. We can afford to eat better and we can travel too. For those of us who remember Communism, this is a real step forward, a liberation. And our children can travel anywhere throughout Europe, experience new horizons, learn languages. The world has expanded." 
His words seemed more poignant than ever at this time. Communism is Poland's past. Europe is its present and its future. Borders have been removed; diversity is celebrated; free trade and access to elsewhere is the norm now.



Since I wrote this post on Wednesday 22nd June, Great Britain has been to the polls.  52% of British voters, as the world knows, put their cross in the box 'Leave', to leave the European Union. I cannot describe the overwhelming sadness I felt when the outcome was announced. Britain is choosing a new, more independent, more isolated path and for the moment the decision has caused a financial free fall. I fear for the uncertainty that lies ahead, which will probably include the splintering of the United Kingdom.

This afternoon as I visited various shops and made stops here and there in the south of France where I live, while talking to traders, it became clear that 27 states are moving forward, shocked by the UK's vote. The European Union was built out of the rubble of two world wars. It has ensured peace across Europe for half a century. It has laid down the basis for humanitarian values. It has made a historical shift in how the individual entities, countries, perceive and interact with one another.
For all its faults, I believe in Europe, in working together; the exchange of ideas and cultures.  Immersion not estrangement.
The loss of the UK is  a sorrow for one and all. This was a united journey, sometimes bumpy, but one that contained a united vision. It still does, except tragically, Britain has gone.
We cannot yet see the full impact of this split. I pray that we who remain in Europe can work together to overcome the loss of such an important member and move forward as an entity, redoubling our efforts towards solidarity and open-mindedness. Now more than ever, with so many parts of the world in turmoil, we need unity not disparity.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

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