Liberty Poles and Trees by Miranda Miller

October 24, 2016, 5:30 pm

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    Liberty poles sprouted all over Europe after the French Revolution. Until I found this watercolour by Goethe of the Liberty pole at the border of the Republic of Mainz in 1793, I was unable to visualise them. In their need to replace the religious and monarchical symbols they had just destroyed, the revolutionaries needed to find new symbols to inspire people. So they erected a tall wooden pole, usually a flagstaff, which is also of course related to a maypole as a traditional and rather obviously phallic symbol of fertility and celebration. A Phrygian cap was hung on the top of the pole and, in this example, there is also a tricolour ribbon.

   The Phrygian cap (in French, le bonnet Phrygian), was a soft, brimless, conical hat. It is sometimes called the red cap (le bonnet rouge) or liberty cap (bonnet de la Liberté). Its link with Phrygia in Minor Asia seems to be that Phrygia was a source of slaves who, if they were freed, wore their traditional headgear again. During the Roman Empire the Phrygian cap (in Latin, pileus) was worn on festive occasions such as the Saturnalia, and by former slaves who had been emancipated by their master and whose descendants were therefore considered citizens of the Empire. Immediately after the assassination of Julius Caesar the plotters went to meet a crowd of Romans at the Forum where they brandished a pole with a pileus on top of it to symbolize the liberation of the Roman people from the tyranny of Caesar. During the Enlightenment these Phrygian caps became a symbol of liberty.

   The French took this useful symbol directly from the American revolutionaries, who were inspired by the Liberty Tree, a famous elm tree that stood in Boston near Boston Common, In 1765, colonists in Boston staged the first act of defiance against the British government at the tree in the years before the American Revolution. As trees took years to grow Liberty poles were often erected in town squares in the years before and during the American Revolution. Tom Paine wrote a widely distributed poem in honour of these trees:

For freemen like brothers agree

With one spirit endued

They one friendship pursued

And their temple was liberty tree.

Liberty trees and poles were often destroyed by British authorities and then defiantly replanted.


   In the following decades Arbres de la Liberté became an international symbol of the French Revolution, the first being planted in 1790 by the pastor of a Vienne village. When General Berthier marched on Rome 1798 he established the short-lived Roman Republic, known by many Italians as La Repubblica per Ridere or the Ridiculous Republic. When the Pope protested he was deposed and taken to Valence where he died the following year, at 81. A liberty pole topped with a cap of liberty was planted in the Forum.

   Members of the Assemblies of Paris were obliged to wear a Liberty cap, which replaced the royal fleur-de-lis as a national symbol. However, Napoleon is said to have detested the Phrygian cap and after he proclaimed himself First Consul for Life the capped figure of Liberty was replaced by the less revolutionary helmeted Minerva. Liberty caps were then removed from all public monuments but reappeared as a potent symbol of rebellion during the Hundred Days in 1815, when Napoleon escaped from Elba, marched on Paris and seemed likely to seize power from Louis XV111.

   Of course one person’s liberty is another’s slavery; people suspected of being aristocrats or counter revolutionaries were often hanged on Liberty poles and trees. James Gillray, who has been called the father of the political cartoon, started as a radical but later supported Pitt’s reactionary government. In 1797 Canning arranged for Gillray to receive regular payments from the government as a reward for his attacks on the Whigs (William Cobbett claimed that Gillray had been granted a pension of £200 a year). In this brilliant satirical etching he shows us The Tree of Liberty, with the Devil Tempting John Bull.
   A serpent with the head of Charles James Fox, the leader of the Whigs, is wound around a tree (an oak, naturally). At the tip of the serpent’s tail, coiled round the upper branches, is a large cap of 'Liberté', decorated with tricolour cockade and ribbons. Serpent Fox is holding out a rotten apple inscribed 'Reform' to John Bull, who wears the Windsor uniform of blue coat with red collar and cuffs. The pockets of his coat and waistcoat bulge with round golden apples.

   Diabolical Fox hisses, "nice Apple, Johnny! - nice Apple". Doughty reactionary John Bull replies: "Very nice N'apple indeed! - but my Pokets are all full of Pippins from off t'other Tree: & besides, I hates Medlars, they're so domn'd rotten! that I'se afraid they'll gie me the Guts-ach for all their vine looks!"

   The trunk of the tree is labelled 'Opposition' and its roots are: 'Envy', 'Ambition', 'Disappointment'. The main branches are 'Rights of Man' and 'Profligacy'. Each rotten apple or medlar has an inscription: 'Democracy.', 'Treason.', 'Slavery.', 'Atheism.', 'Blasphemy.', 'Plunder.', 'Murder.', 'Whig Club', 'Impiety', 'Revolution', 'Conspiracy', 'Corresponding Society', 'Deism', 'Age of Reason' (Paine's deistic book).In the background (right) is an oak in full leaf: its trunk is 'Justice', the roots 'Commons', 'King', 'Lords', the branches 'Laws' and 'Religion'. From it hangs a crown surrounded by 'pippins', some inscribed 'Freedom', 'Happiness', 'Security'. In another dazzling Gillray print, Promis’d Horrors of the French Invasion, Gillray shows William Pitt, the Prime Minister, tied to a liberty pole while Charles Fox flogs him. French troops march down St James’s Street and the palace is on fire.

   Liberty poles resurfaced In 1945, following the liberation of the Netherlands from Nazi occupation, when one was erected on Dam Square in Amsterdam. Marianne, the feminine representation of the French Republic, is sometimes shown wearing a Phrygian, or Liberty, cap, which has now become a rather chic pixie beret. Do any of you know of any more recent examples of liberty poles or trees?


                                                                 
                                                                

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France as my Inspiration, by Carol Drinkwater

October 25, 2016, 4:01 pm

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                                       The famous green boxes used by the Parisian bouquinistes

                                         They have been designated a World Heritage Site status

I am deep in work at present, lost in the brambly mire of editorial notes on my still untitled novel due for publication in 2017. As well, I am also preparing or rather allowing to gestate the novel I am about to begin writing. I am not a Plotter. I start with grainy images of characters and places. Once I have a first instinct about what these people, this particular character - usually a woman – wants, I begin to trail her, as it were. What period am I traversing? Where are we? What is at stake for HER? The questions are endless. It goes back to my drama school days when I was taught to build the inner life of my character, the role I was rehearsing. "Get to know everything about her".

Agents and publishers like material they can sell, they can establish you with. In my case, in one broad word, it is FRANCE.

My six memoirs set on our Olive Farm in the South of France became international best sellers. They established me, as it were, as one of those Brits who had upped sticks and moved abroad, to France. A rather simplified summation of the facts, but never mind.
My agent is happy that he can sell the combination of moi and France.

But no one wants to write the same book over and over so I am always looking for new approaches, different angles for stories. And this is great fun.

My latest novel, published this year, THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER, is set on a vineyard overlooking the Mediterranean somewhere not far from  Cannes or St Raphael. There are also several scenes set in Paris. But at the heart of the book, where its dark family secret lies, I take the reader back to the last days of the Algerian War of Independence in 1962. The fallout when war is in its dying throes. The people who are affected by the retreat. Sometimes the characters might be victims, sometimes perpetrators. Right at the core of THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER is a choice, a decision taken when no other direction seemed possible.

The research involved a trip to Algeria – an expansive, varied and very beautiful country with many layers of its own fascinating history. I was fortunate because I had recently returned from a four week trip there for research on a previous book, a travel book: THE OLIVE TREE.

So powerful were the images and history of the country that they stayed with me; they haunted me until I decided to use them for THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER. The story took root within me and would not go away until I wrote it. I think it’s a fair claim that this is a good situation for a writer. The emptiness of no inspiration and the silent question: what on earth am I going to write about next? is not what any of us wants.

So, when I am inching towards that empty stage where, somewhere there, the next story is waiting to be told, I look about me in earnest, on the hunt as it were, for spoors, threads.

I make trips to brocantes– junk and antique stores - which in any case is a form of relaxation for me. I am searching for objects that might kickstart my imagination. I visit galleries and stare into paintings. I watch old movies.

A few weeks ago I drove to the edges of the Champagne region to visit a huge jumble yard; one I know quite well. It is so sprawling that usually I only stroll about the Art Deco or Art Nouveau sections or the garden furniture. But on this occasion I was trying to solve a writing problem and so just meandered about not really looking at anything. I found myself in the book section. This is a very fusty, dark room where lorry loads of books that have been collected from House Emptying expeditions are stacked in piles. There is no order to it; you just have to rummage. There I found in excellent condition a biography of Francois Truffaut, a director I greatly admire. It was a snip at 2 euros.

                                                           A bouquiniste's treasure trove

It took me back to an era of modern France that has always fascinated me. France in the late 60s and the 70s. An evocative period in which to set a novel. Last week, I was wandering the bouquiniste stalls in Paris and I spotted a rare black and white magazine hanging from a clothes peg on one of the stalls on the Left Bank. It was not a snip at 32 euros. Still, I couldn’t resist and bought it. It brought to life through pages of black and white photographs the period when Truffaut was making such films as Fahrenehit 451, Stolen Kisses ...

And so I have found a key, a door into my next novel.

Fascinatingly, an episode from my early past that I had completely forgotten until now was that in 1971 or 1972 I met Truffaut. He would have been about forty. He was in London casting, looking for the lead for the film that won him his Oscar for Best Foreign Film: La Nuit Americaine or Day for Night. I lost out to Jackie Bisset who was given the role. My French, Truffaut decided, was not sufficiently fluent.
And now here I am living in France, living my life in the French language, reading his biography in French. How life turns!

                                                           François Truffaut 1932 - 1984

Truffaut died at the age of fifty-two. Tragically young, but he has left behind him a body of masterpieces. He changed the direction of French cinema and his work acutely chronicles two generations of modern history.
He is buried in Montmartre.

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Your Last Paper Five Pound Note by Janie Hampton

October 26, 2016, 4:30 pm

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For the past fifteen years, all of us who live in Britain have looked at this woman many thousands of times. But within the next few months she will disappear from public view as paper notes are replaced with plastic ones.. Who is she? 

The last paper £5 note

She is Elizabeth Fry, the woman on the “back” of the £5 note. (The woman on the “front” is Queen Elizabeth II, who appears on all British sterling notes.) So why was she chosen?
Elizabeth Fry changed the lives of prisoners in the 19th century, in Britain and all over the world. Much is already known about her extraordinary humanitarian work , so I’ll tell you a bit about her early life.
Betsy, as she was known, was the daughter of devout Quakers from East Anglian banking families – her mother Kitty (1755-1794) was a Barclay; and her father John Gurney (1749-1809) was a partner in Gurney’s bank. Eventually the two banks married too.  Born in 1772, Betsy grew up the third of eleven children in Earlham Hall, a country house in Norfolk built over many centuries. It had 80 cupboards for ‘hide and seek’ and was set in beautiful park land - now the site of the University of East Anglia. There were at least two dozen indoor and outdoor staff, who were treated as part of the larger family.
The Gurneys of Earlham were known as ‘Gay Quakers’ – they loved to dance and sing, and they wore cloaks with colourful linings. Kitty believed in liberal and equal education so Betsy and her six sisters were taught French, Latin, Botany, History and Geography, as well as needlecraft and family economics. Drawing lessons were given by John Crome and John Sell Cotman, leading members of the Norwich School. As part of their social and moral education, Kitty would fill jugs with soup and march her children off to feed the local poor.
Unlike her rowdy siblings, her mother described her third daughter as ‘my dove-like Betsy, scarcely ever offends and is truly engaging’. Her sisters found her moody, self-absorbed and difficult. She resisted joining them in the North Sea at Cromer or duck-shooting on the Norfolk Broads. Following Quaker practice, the children were encouraged to write their true feelings, and faults, in daily journals – and then had to read them out to the family. Betsy was unsparingly honest about the sins of both herself, and her sisters. Her four younger sisters were often irritated by her goodness: ‘she does little kindnesses, even to those who ignore her.’
When she was only 37, Kitty died of erysipelas, a skin infection which is easily treated nowadays. The Gurney children were then aged between one and 16 years; Betsy was just 12. To keep them cheerful, their father would hire a blind fiddler on Saturday evenings who could not know that the sound of laughter and dancing came from Quakers. Despite being shy, Betsy had a beautiful singing voice and danced with grace. She observed in her journal that dancing made her flirt more and at 17 she wrote, ‘I must beware of being a flirt, it is an abominable character’. Much to the disapproval of the Plain Quakers, her father invited guests belonging to other Christian denominations, and encouraged his children to know about the world. Just as many of us boycotted South African wine to bring down apartheid, as early as 1800 the young Gurneys resisted eating sugar to try and end slavery.
On Sunday mornings, the family walked the three miles into Norwich for “Goats”, the Goat Lane Friends Meeting House. On the way there any child who lapsed from speaking French was fined a farthing. Quaker meetings lasted three or four hours, sometimes in complete silence. For children who loved riding, swimming in the river, dancing and drawing, this was an agony of self-sacrifice and they found  it “extremely dis” [disagreeable]. By the end they felt “thoroughly goatified” until they got home to Earlham for a “romp and a dance”. Their journals refer as often to dancing, as they do to their sins.

A watercolour of Betsy's Quaker cousins at Friends Meeting House, Gracechurch Street, London in 1778.  Twenty years later, Betsy would have been sitting on the left and William Savery speaking from this platform.  Note the speakers hat hanging above him.

One Sunday in February, 1798, the seven sisters were sitting in the front row at Goats. Betsy intended to spend the meeting contemplating the beauty of her new pair of purple boots with red laces. But she became transfixed by the speaker, an American Quaker called William Savery (1750-1804). ‘I had a feint light spread over my mind…it has caused me to feel a little religion,’ she wrote. Determined to hear Savery speak again, she asked her father to take her to London. During the week, she attended Drury Lane theatre, Covent Garden opera, saw performances of Hamlet and Bluebeard, went dancing, had her hair done, and finally on Sunday went to hear Savery again. Her life was never the same again. Much to her family’s annoyance, she gave up dancing and singing, wore only plain grey clothes, spoke quietly and determined to overcome her fear of the dark. She visited the sick and poor with clothes and food, started a Sunday school and became a Plain Quaker. Two years later she married a fellow Quaker, Joseph Fry (1777–1861) – whose family made their fortune in chocolate, although Joseph was an unsuccessful banker.

The 'Angel of Prisons' reading in Newgate Gaol.  The man on the left wearing spectacles is her brother-in-law Thomas Fowell Buxton MP. Painting by Jerry Barrett, 1816, on which £5 note is based.

The couple lived in London where in 1813 Betsy visited Newgate Prison. She was horrified by the filthy, overcrowded conditions of women, many imprisoned with their children. Five years later she became the first woman to present evidence to Parliament, which led to the MPs John Peel and  Thomas Fowell Buxton supporting the ‘Gaols Act of 1823’. She formed the “British Ladies' Society for Promoting the Reformation of Female Prisoners”, the first national women's organization in Britain; and campaigned against capital punishment. She established a "nightly shelter" in London for the homeless,and in towns all over Britain she organized volunteers to help the poor in their homes. After Betsy set up a college for nurses, Florence Nightingale took some of them to the war in the Crimea. Queen Victoria supported her work and the King of Prussia even joined her on a visit to Newgate Prison. Betsy visited over 100 convict ships before they set sail, giving each woman a ‘useful bag’ for her transportation. She wrote, “My mind is too much tossed by a variety of interests and duties — husband, children, household accounts, Meetings, the Church, near relations, friends, and Newgate....it is a little like being in the whirlwind and in the storm; may I not be hurt in it, but enabled quietly to perform that which ought to be done.”
Betsy died of a stroke aged 65 and was buried in Essex. There are many buildings named after her, including an 1849 women’s refuge in Hackney; part of the Home Office headquarters; and a school in Greensboro, North Carolina, USA. There are statues of her in Wormwood Scrubs Prison, East Ham Library, and the Old Bailey Court, London.

“Oh Lord, may I be directed what to do and what to leave undone.” Statue of Betsy in The Old Bailey,  the site of Newgate Prison, London.

There’s even a National Elizabeth Fry Week in Canada every May. Many thousands of people, mostly unknown to her, benefited from her humanitarian work. Nevertheless some people criticized Elizabeth Fry for neglecting her domestic duties - despite the fact that all but one of her eleven children reached adulthood. Sadly, this is a problem women still face today. So before you spend your last paper five pound note, think about this woman who changed the way we think about the homeless, prisons and slaves - and yet still managed to annoy her sisters!
Elizabeth Fry, née Gurney, 1780-1845.
Janie Hampton is descended from four of Elizabeth Fry’s Gurney siblings.
This blog uses her mother's book: 'Friends and Relations - three centuries of Quaker families', Verily Anderson, Hodder & Stoughton, 1980.

Simple Charm by Julie Summers

October 27, 2016, 4:00 pm

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This autumn I went to visit the National Trust's Nuffield Place, the home of William Morris, Lord Nuffield, from 1933 until his death thirty year later at the age of 85. William Morris was one of the wealthiest men in Britain and yet he lived frugally and privately with his wife who he met at a cycle club in Oxford before he was 20.

He started life mending bicycles and was himself a winning rider. His workshop was soon turned over to motor cycles and he designed by Morris Motor Cycle in about 1902. At this stage he moved into buildings in Longwall Street, Oxford, opposite Magdalen College, where he repaired bicycles, operated a taxi service and repaired and hired out cars. In 1912 he designed his first car, the bullnose Morris. His work was interrupted by the First World War but in 1919 he sold 400 cars and by 1925 he was selling 56,000.

At the height of his career he was reputed to be earning £2,000 per day (about the same in dollars given the woeful state of sterling at the moment!). When asked about his great wealth he replied 'Well, you can only wear one suit at at time.' What struck me about this lovely 1930s house was its modesty that reflected its owners'. No ostentatious decoration or chandaliers, no leathery portraits of ancient ancestors dragged up from a past that didn't truly exist, and no extravagant gold bath taps.

For me the most exciting discovery was that the cupboard in his bedroom was not full of clothes but was in fact a miniature workshop. It was a vignette into his life that I had not expected. Apparently he was a light sleeper and would often 'worry out'a problem in the night. I had a vision of him sitting in his pyjamas in front of his cupboard, allowing his mind to rest on the various objects in there that might provide an answer to his questions. Lord Nuffield was famous for his philanthropy. There are well-known foundations that bear his name, such as the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, which was established in 1931 or the Nuffield Foundation (1943) which he endowed with a capital sum of about £10,000,000 'to provide medical and social relief'. This grew out of his work in the 1920s and 1930s to help relieve the 'sick, crippled and the poor and to alleviate social injustice.' But what really interested me were the smaller donations made with aforethought and great generosity that would go almost unmentioned and at times almost unnoticed. On his 62nd birthday, on 10 October 1939, he put a cheque into a nurse's collecting box at the Mansion House. The logo on the poster she was holding read 'Give freely' to the Lord Mayor's Red Cross Fund. When the cheque was unfolded it was in the sum of £100,000 (about £4 million in 2016).

My favourite donation he made is even less well-known than the Red Cross cheque. During the five and a half years of the Second World War he donated sanitary towels to the women's forces. This was the most thoughtful thing I could think of and I was deeply touched by his concern for the comfort and reassurance of a steady supply of these vitals items, known by the recipients as 'Nuffield's Nifties'. You really couldn't make it up. William Morris, Lord Nuffield, gave away £30,000,000 (or over £2 billion in today's money) over the course of his life. He will remain the most famous of British philanthropists for all time but for me he will be the modest millionaire who knew enough about the real world to know what was really needed.

The girlie side of history by Sarah Gristwood

October 28, 2016, 4:01 pm

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Our October guest is Sarah Gristwood, who - as well as being a well-respected historian -  is a History Girl Reserve, one of that splendid band of writers who give us "anytime posts" that can be used when one of our regulars needs to take a break for a month.

Sarah has written two bestselling Tudor biographies, Arbella: England’s Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester; and the eighteenth century story Perdita: Royal Mistress, Writer, Romantic which was selected as Radio 4 Book of the Week.  In  2012 she brought out a new  book – Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Her latest title is  Game of Queens, about the chains of women and power running through the sixteenth century.

Shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing, Sarah is a Fellow of the RSA, and an Honororary Patron of Historic Royal Palaces.
sarahgristwood.com

Sarah Gristwood by Oliver Edwards

 

The name of the group demands it, really. The History Girls . . , and what I’d call the girlie moments from my particular chunk of history! When, in a publicity meeting for my new book, Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe I offered a list of top ten girlie moments, the women got it instantly. My male commissioning editor was too nice to say anything. But I swear his eyes roamed around the room, hoping the cricket scores would materialise on the walls and sweep him spiritually away.

Where to start, chronologically? The sixteenth century saw an explosion of female rule. Large swathes of Europe were under the hand of a reigning queen or a female regent - mothers and daughter, mentors and proteges. Game of Queens traces the passage of power from Isabella of Castile to her daughter Katherine of Aragon, and on to Katherine’s daughter Mary Tudor. From the French regent Anne de Beaujeu to Louise of Savoy, through Louise’s daughter Marguerite of Navarre to her own daughter Jeanne d’Albret, as well as to Marguerite’s admirer Anne Boleyn and finally to Elizabeth Tudor.

Anne de Beaujeu, regent of France, wrote a manual of instruction for powerful women. Lessons for My Daughter. One piece of advice was not to pay too much attention to clothes - ‘Past 40, no finery can make the wrinkles on your face disappear’. Perhaps Margaret Tudor should have read it. When her brother Henry VIII sent her the present of some wonderful dresses, Margaret was in such pain from sciatica she couldn’t even bear to be turned in bed. But she still made her attendants hold up the dresses so she could see them, every day.

And there was, after all, a serious point here. Clothing was an important signifier of rank. Margaret - widowed when her brother’s armies killed her husband, James of Scotland - had now been forced to flee that country. She wasn’t being treated as a queen any longer - but the dresses made her seem queenly.

While Henry VIII was looking for a new bride, after beheading Anne Boleyn, his eye lit on Marie de Guise. He said that they should get on together, because they were both ‘large in person’. ‘I may be large in person’, she retorted, ‘but I have a little neck!’ Christina of Denmark, similarly honoured, said that if only she had two heads, one of them would be at the English king’s disposal. Sometimes girl power means talking sassy.

And it’s something, after all, to be allowed to be girlie. In the early part of the sixteenth century, the heyday of what I see as the Age of Queens, Margaret of Austria not only ran the Netherlands during the minority of her nephew, the future Charles V, she was at the very heart of European diplomacy. Margaret ‘is the most important person in Christendom, since she acts as mediator in almost all the negotiations between the princes’, wrote her one-time father-in-law Ferdinand of Aragon, flatteringly.

Margaret of Austria

The childless Margaret was called ‘the great mother of Europe’ - but by the time she was succeeded as Regent of the Netherlands by her niece Mary of Hungary, ambassadors were reporting gleefully that Mary was ‘a little mannish’, and that everyone knew she wouldn’t have children - she was far too sporty. When Mary in turn was succeeded by her niece, Margaret of Parma, there was much talk of her moustache . . . After all in a woman in power couldn’t be entirely a woman, could she?

It was Mary Queen of Scots who liked actually actually to dress up in men’s clothes and go roistering around the Edinburgh streets with her ladies. (There was always the joke that the best way to end the troubles between Scotland and England would be for Mary and Elizabeth I to marry.) Her own minister would describe Elizabeth as ‘more than a man - and in truth sometimes less than a woman’. But how’s this for a girlie scene? - in that stereotyping, cat fight kind of way. When Mary sent Sir James Melville on a diplomatic mission to Elizabeth, the Tudor queen kept pressing him as to whether she or Mary were the taller, the better dancer, the prettier. Mary was the fairest queen in all Scotland and Elizabeth in all England, answered Melville - diplomatically.

It all depends, after all, what we mean by ‘girlie’. In 1572 when Catherine de Medici and Jeanne d’Albret met to negotiate the marriage that was supposed to end France’s Wars of Religion, they broke off their discussions for a day’s shopping round the Paris boutiques, disguised as ordinary bourgeoises. Or so it was reported, anyway . . . Were the men who reported it trying to point up their womanly weakness, or did they understand that this could be a real bonding ritual? (‘As woman to woman, make her mad, while remaining calm yourself’, one negotiator on the Catholic side had urged Catherine de Medici.)

When Mary of Hungary heard about the execution of Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII’s hasty marriage to Jane Seymour, she declared that she had to be glad, in a way. Anne had been a Francophile, and thus no friend to Mary’s Habsburg family. But, all the same, Mary wrote ‘It is to be hoped, if one can hope anything from such a man [as Henry], that if this one bores him he will find a better way of getting rid of her. I believe that most women would not appreciate it very much if this kind of habit becomes general. And although I have no inclination to expose myself to dangers of this kind, I do after all belong to the female sex. . .’ It was an expression of sisterhood, even if the term is of today.

Because I’d say this was a sisterhood - at least in that earlier part of the century, before religious differences tore Europe apart, and fractured bonds A band of powerful women, of sisters, who recognised both their own bonds as female, and their ability to exercise power in a specifically feminine way.

Louise of Savoy

In 1529 Margaret of Austria, the Habsburg emperor’s aunt, and her former playmate Louise of Savoy (now mother to the French king François) met to negotiate the ‘Ladies’ Peace’ of Cambrai. War between France and the Habsburgs was the curse of the century, but the women agreed they could probably do something about it, if their men would only stay out of the way. The men would be concerned about their honour, as Margaret put it tactfully. ‘On the other hand, how easy for ladies… to concur in some endeavours for warding off the general ruin of Christendom, and to make the first advance in such an undertaking!’

This idea - of women coming together in the interests of peace - would recur through the sixteenth century and beyond. Perhaps no others would achieve the success of Margaret or Louise . . . But perhaps, too, this is what we ought to mean by ‘girlie.'

Cabinet of Curiosities by Mary Hoffman

October 29, 2016, 4:01 pm

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We have a "Cabinet of curiosities" post on the 30th of each month that has 31 days, i.e. seven months in every year. Usually one of our number writes about an object she possesses, perhaps something handed down through the family and carrying a host of personal associations. Some of them are objects of obscure historical significance.

Others are simply items seen in a collection of a museum or gallery and just blatantly lusted after.

Today I want to write about the objects I assemble around me when ever I start writing a new book. Of course the main thing is other books - all my research materials kept in a plastic crate under the coffee table in my study, where I can easily reach anything I need. I'm not precious about notebooks - though I do like a beautiful notebook. I am happy to write my research notes on an ordinary reporter's notebook, spiral bound at the top. And especially now I have found Scrivener, I can faff around to my heart's content on the laptop when the real business of writing begins.

No - I'm talking about specific objects. I won't call them "inspirational" as I loathe the very thought. They are more like focus points to stop my attention wandering off to other books I might write, other things I might do.  I can't remember when I acquired this habit - probably with the Stravaganza sequence of novels set in Italian cities in an alternative universe.

The characters were transported to Talia (my parallel world version of Italy) by the possession of talismans and hunting for the right one for each book was important each time - a marbled notebook, a flying horse, a blue perfume bottle, a leather-bound book, a bag of silver mosaic tesserae and a paperknife in the shape of a small sword.

But the talismans, although important for the narrative, were not necessarily my object. For example, I didn't acquire the model of the black winged horse until after City of Stars was published, when a fan found one and gave it to me. While I was writing the book it was this tile, bought in Siena that worked for me.

I bought a tapestry in France to commemorate the writing of The Falconer's Knot, a small wooden trebuchet in John Lewis toy department when I was writing Troubadour and a marble miniature in the Accademia shop in Florence when I was working on David. (The marble base comes from Carrara, like the block Michelangelo turned into David - though I bought it in Pisa).

My most recent historical novel, to be published next April, is The Ravenmaster's Boy and it has very satisfactory  flibbertigibbet-controllers: two plush ravens from the Tower of London. I spent some time there with the current Ravenmaster, Chris Skaife, and his birds.

Huginn and Muninn, my plush ravens

Me and my favourite Tower raven

Chris Skaife, Ravenmaster at the Tower of London

I am currently writing a short novel about the model for the Mona Lisa but have not found a focus object. So if you hear of a daring theft from the Louvre ...

What objects do writer friends like to keep about them and are they specific to the work in hand?

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Looking for Mona Lisa by Mary Hoffman

October 31, 2016, 5:01 pm

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As I wrote in my Cabinet of Curiosities post a few days ago, I have been reading all I can find about the subject of the world's most famous painting, known as Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda. Who was the sitter? A real woman or an idealised composite of all that Leonardo da Vinci found admirable in a woman?

The most common identification of her is as Lisa Gherardini, the Florentine wife of a silk merchant named Francesco del Giocondo, hence La Gioconda. Francesco got his surname from a great grandfather who was always jolly - or "jocund." The idea caught on because of Lisa's husband's surname and the implied reference to her smile.

But she is not the only candidate - other who have been put forward include Isabella d'Este, who was desperate for Leonardo to paint her portrait, Pacifica Brandino, who was the mistress of Lorenzo the Magnificent's youngest son Giuliano, Isabella Gualanda, who is the cousin of Ceclia Gallerani, better known as the Lady with an ermine in another portrait by Leonardo.

(I have incidentally always liked this painting best of all Leonardo's work and was thrilled to see it "in the flesh" at the National Gallery exhibition a few years ago.)

It was the rather unreliable Giorgo Vasari who gave the identification of the subject as Lisa del Giocondo in 1550. Lisa had died only eight years earlier and three of her children were certainly still alive then and living in Florence so he could have checked but perhaps that was not Vasari's way. He certainly didn't change his description of the portrait when he revised the book we now know as Lives of the Artists. But then he had never seen the painting and praised the depiction of the eyebrows, which we know are not present.

I thought this was the beginning and end of what we knew about Lisa Gherardini until I saw a television programme about the painting on BBC2 last December. It was mainly about a new high-tech way of scanning the painting, used by Pascal Cotte, with the permission of the Louvre, which institution - interestingly - did not put up a spokesperson to comment on his findings.

But what really caught my attention was Andrew Graham-Dixon interviewing an Italian specialist in a Florence in an area clearly recognisable as being in the Santa Croce district, where I have often stayed. This turned out to be Giuseppe Pallanti and I found he had also written a book, called in English Mona Lisa Revealed (Skira 2006).

Pallanti is the kind of meticulous researcher who spends his life looking at historic documents of the driest kind: deeds of sale of properties, the equivalent of tax returns, records of baptisms - that sort of thing. And from that he has found out plenty about Lisa Gherardini, where she was born, the houses she lived in, her marriage, her husband's life, her children and her probable burial place.

He continued his searches after publishing the book and they were passed on to an American journalist called Dianne Hales, whose own book, Mona Lisa: A Life Discovered (Simon & Schuster 2014) has publicised his further findings and added some of her own.

Mark Rylance as Leonardo in the 2003 TV mini-series

Leonardo of course looked exactly like this when he was painting his most famous portrait. If we follow Vasari, the picture was started in 1503. It certainly is the case that the young Raphael, in Florence the following year, sketched a female model in a remarkably similar pose. And in 2005, half a millennium after Leonardo was at work on the painting, a marginal note was found, dated October 1503, in a volume of Cicero, stating that Leonardo was at work on a painting of Lisa del Giocondo.

And, whether the painting was commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo or Giuliano de' Medici or someone else, they never possessed it. Leonardo took it with him when he left Italy for France in 1516, never to return.

I wrote about Leonardo's portrait of Lisa Gherardini in my novel David: the Unauthorised Autobiography. I showed Gabriele del Lauro, the fictional model for the giant statue, watching the artist at work in Francesco del Giocondo's house in the Via della Stufa:

' It was glorious. He had captured a quality in the sitter that would have been easy to overlook. Truthfully, she wasn't as lovely as Gandini the baker's wife, but she ha a restful presence - I can't explain it any other way - that had nothing to do with any of her features, nor yet her figure.

She was past her first youth and had borne several children but was not yet quite matronly. Yet she radiated tranquility.'

And now here I am writing about her again for a novel for Barrington Stoke, a short fiction for teenagers called simply, Smile.

This portrait of John the Baptist is thought to be modelled on Leonardo's apprentice and probably lover, Gian Giacomo Caprotti, known as "Salai" or "little devil." There is a marked resemblance between his features and those of Mona Lisa. Was this true in real life? I like to think so.

For all that they lived together for some thirty years, Salai was everything that Lisa Gherardini was not - gluttonous, amoral, promiscuous and not above stealing from his master and friend. Is it too fanciful to think that Leonardo saw in his Mona Lisa the model of a loyal and loving wife, who unaccountably looked like the venal young man he was so drawn to? That he saw in her an alternative life he might have lived, had he been a different man?

One of the many things we will never know and why writers are continually drawn back to the story of the painter, the mdel and the 500-year-old smile.

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How to read as a writer, by Gillian Polack

November 1, 2016, 5:45 pm

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There are so many articles these days – on the web and off- that give a guide to how life was lived or how something was experienced in times other than our own. We can fly through London in the seventeenth century, or boat down the Thames. We can hear about the theatre or read how someone cuddled up by the fire to a good book. What all these articles have in common is that they’re articles about something: they’re modern thoughts. 

For many writers, these articles are entertaining and fun, but not where we get the grit for our fiction. We delve into scholarly studies and we check primary sources. Primary sources are the best. Books, articles, pamphlets, ephemera, pictures, objets d’art, everyday items – any primary source. I use them so much that I keep forgetting to explain that the way I read them in order to write fiction isn’t at all the way I read them as a historian.

Today, then, I’m going to address two issues with the same example. I’m going to show you how I (as a writer) read a single primary source for my fiction. At the same time, I’m going to say honestly that this is not even close to the technique I use as a historian. 

History and fiction serve different functions. We research both, but the research can be quite different in style and always leads to different outcomes. This is one of the many reasons there is a difference between historically based fiction and scholarly monographs, after all. I look into this in detail in History and Fiction, but I don’t actually pull apart a primary source to use in a novel. If you want more of the theoretical stuff, and to know what other writers do, History and Fiction is the place to go. Here I’m going to take a source that I think might be of use for the novel I’m writing (slowly at the moment, for the universe keeps intervening) that’s set in the seventeenth century.

Samuel Pepys is very well known for his diary. He wrote it for himself, which makes it even more interesting, for he writes about his place and time in a very personal way. We’re often looking through his eyes when we see the Great Fire of London, for so many modern novels that tell of the Great Fire or that have it as an incident, use his accountas their basis. 

As a historian, I regard him as a tremendous primary source for his place and time. I also have to balance his very articulate views with those of others, because Pepys’ importance (both at the time and in our eyes) means that it’s all too easy to use him alone. To get an understanding of how people actually lived, therefore, Pepys only provides one small story.

Novels share that with Pepys. They, too, focus on one small story. It’s what we write. Accounts of places and of times that focus quite sharply on particular people or events. So many novels, therefore, rely heavily on Pepys. This is why he’s not one of my major sources for my novel, in fact. Pepys is the wrong gender for me, in an England where the life experiences of men and women were wildly different. I’ve read him through and taken the information I think I need from him, and then moved on to other sources that more closely meet the way my own characters would have seen their place and time.

When I read Pepys, I always remember that London was different before to after the fire. I took this picture in 2014 to remind me - this is definitely an 'after the fire' view.

This makes him a very good source to use as an example, for you can see how he’s useful and how he isn’t useful for my novel. 

Let’s start with what I’m looking for. I’m depicting the world of women. I’m looking, therefore, for experiences they might have had, for places they might have seen, for anything that’s shared between men and women, for hints of how my characters might see the streets of London when they visit. Unlike Pepys, they were not Londoners, so what he sees as an insider, my women would see as outsiders.

Let me use an online edition (although I used a print edition for the most part). I’ll paste it here and annotate it, with notes on how I would use it to help shape my novel. You might want to check the annotations of others, as well. They help show how modern readers look at Pepys and what they think need explaining for the wider public. You can find the diary entry and its reader-annotations here

 

Again, London in 2014. Even if the buildings change, the streets may be the same. Pepys may well have walked this.

Up, and to White Hall to the Committee of Tangier (1), but it did not meet. But here I do hear first that my Lady Paulina Montagu did die yesterday; at which I went to my Lord’s lodgings (2), but he is shut up with sorrow, and so not to be spoken with: and therefore I returned, and to Westminster Hall, where I have not been, I think, in some months. And here the Hall was very full, the King having, by Commission to some Lords this day, prorogued the Parliament till the 19th of October next (3): at which I am glad, hoping to have time to go over to France this year. But I was most of all surprised this morning by my Lord Bellassis, who, by appointment, met me at Auditor Wood’s, at the Temple, and tells me of a duell designed between the Duke of Buckingham and my Lord Halifax, or Sir W. Coventry; the challenge being carried by Harry Saville, but prevented by my Lord Arlington, and the King told of it; and this was all the discourse at Court this day (4). But I, meeting Sir W. Coventry in the Duke of York’s chamber, he would not own it to me, but told me that he was a man of too much peace to meddle with fighting, and so it rested: but the talk is full in the town of the business. Thence, having walked some turns with my cozen Pepys, and most people, by their discourse, believing that this Parliament will never sit more, I away to several places to look after things against to-morrow’s feast (5), and so home to dinner; and thence, after noon, my wife and I out by hackneycoach 6), and spent the afternoon in several places, doing several things at the ‘Change and elsewhere against to-morrow; and, among others, I did also bring home a piece of my face cast in plaister, for to make a vizard upon, for my eyes (7). And so home, where W. Batelier come, and sat with us; and there, after many doubts, did resolve to go on with our feast and dancing to- morrow; and so, after supper, left the maids to make clean the house, and to lay the cloth, and other things against to-morrow, and we to bed (8).

1. Places are handy. I can locate them on a map and decide if my characters need to pass them or visit them.

2. Individuals are less handy. Unless they’re likely to appear in the novel, their main use for me is to decide if my characters belong to their class or circle and how any reference will be made to them. In this case, I can’t see any reason for mentioning the death of Paulina Montagu, so I just keep on reading.

3. Pepys was a public servant and his life was ruled by Parliamentary sittings. My characters are anything but. I need to know when Parliament is sitting, however, for it will influence the visit to London. Also, it would be a great matter of interest to my characters. Politics in the late seventeenth century were an obsession and a matter of great import and terribly emotional. I will need a timeline of all the Great Events (including who betrayed whom and when) and I will need to know my characters’ views on these things. This mention by Pepys helps remind me that I need to do this. The wonderful thing about doing this as a novelist is that I’m allowed to be far more partisan than I can be as a historian. My characters will have Opinions. This means I develop quite a different timeline and overview to the one that I would develop as a historian, where I’d look more into causes and outcomes of events than into the feelings of women from a given region. To simplify, I can decide who someone would like to throw mud at and why.

4. Duels are terrific fodder. If there’s a duel in London when my characters visit and if there’s a reasonable likelihood that they’d hear about it, then it will be of interest. No more than that for me for this novel, however, for it’s not the stuff of my women’s lives. Pepys is much closer to the aristocracy and the doings of government than my women are. 

Place in society matters at least as much as place in time. The story Pepys tells would be a good one. A duel! How it happened! was stopped! But it can’t happen in that way in a novel with women from a country town as the main characters. The most they could do is gossip about it, or maybe know someone who knows someone. 

The drama has to come from something other than duelling, then, which is a shame, given how much we associate the seventeenth century with duels. I could force a duel in (as many authors do) but forcing the historically unlikely is not my style. In my notes I’ll probably write that I have to find something of equal interest, but that I can’t use a duel. It’s OK, though, for there’s at least one duel in a novel of mine that will be out next year – it’s entirely appropriate in that novel.

5. Food! I know what Pepys was likely to have eaten. Better, I know what my characters would enjoy. I’ve still got to test a bunch of recipes, but I have the tastes of the time and place all sorted. This means that Pepys isn’t giving me anything new, but he does remind me I still have to test recipes. This is one of the reasons the novel’s been put off for a bit – the one I’m writing currently has no recipes to test, so I can do it immediately.

6. Another thing I can check off. I have my transport to London sorted and my transport within London. I know how long it takes to get to a place and even how long it takes to get letters to and fro, in order to plan a trip. These were easy to research as there are books of timetables in the later seventeenth century. Some eras are much easier to research than others!

7. I do not want to know this. I really, really hate the thought of having a plaster cast of my face. It’s a suffocating scary squicky thought. I do know how it was done, however, should I ever need to write about it. 

Oddly, I was interested in this when I was a child and collected gypsum to make plaster of Paris. My mother forbade me to use the oven and my plaster of Paris remained unmade. This is the sort of information that helps with fiction. It’s much easier to check up the specifics of a technique than it is to find out about something of which one has no knowledge at all. I think this is why so many fiction writers are magpies in the way we collect an understanding of this or of that. Which reminds me that I’d make a note at this point about the ‘Change. This is something that will have to appear in my novel, in one way or another.

8. This sentence is the most important in the whole extract for my novel. It tells the normal order of life. This is something that men and women shared. It tells me the role of a maid (and that it’s a single maid and not three maids and a footman) and how she fits in with the house as a whole. I’ve done my homework on this – I know the shape of London households of this level of prosperity. This means I can safely use this sentence to help bring a household to life.

Article 1

November 2, 2016, 9:59 pm

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The day the Endeavour sailed close to home by Debra Daley

November 2, 2016, 9:59 pm

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It’s the morning of the second day of November and I’ve sat down at the kitchen table to finish writing this post. Every so often, as always, my gaze strays to the big view framed in the window. The shellfish season is passing and the garden is throwing out new spring shoots and blossoms. The pōhutukawa in the gully below is already coming into crimson bloom. Tui are feasting on the flax flowers and I can hear blackbirds and thrushes too and a rasping call as a pair of rainbow lorikeets pass by, Australian invaders that have turned up looking ridiculously overwrought, among our more restrained native birds, in their green and scarlet and blue feathers.

Flax blooming in my garden, 2 November 2016

In the distance Mauao, an extinct volcano, rises up on the southern tip of the entrance to Tauranga Harbour, where I live on the Ōtūmoetai peninsula in the Bay of Plenty – a wide scoop of sandy beaches that stretches for 250 kilometres on the northeastern coast of New Zealand’s North Island. Over Mauao’s shoulder lies the purple-grey outline of Mayor Island, once a source of valuable obsidian, which the local tangata whenua (people of the land) obtained for use as cutting and scraping tools in centuries past.

View of Mauao from Ōtūmoetai, 2 November 2016.  Ōtūmoetai means ‘the tide standing still as if asleep’. View of Mt Maunganui (Mauao) from Ōtūmoetai. Undated sketch by S.L. Clarke, possibly 1880s. Tauranga Library.

On the morning of 2 November, two hundred and forty seven years ago, HMS Endeavour, the Royal Navy research vessel commanded by Lieutenant James Cook on his first voyage of discovery to Australia and New Zealand, was passing Maketu just south of Tauranga. (Later, one of my ancestors, Elizabeth Kelly, would run the one-room school at Maketu and her brother Richard would leave the family farm in 1916 to fight in the First World War. He was killed in France.) As the Endeavour approached the sweeping bay known as Te Moana-a-Toi (the sea of Toi), the master's mate, Richard Pickersgill, drew Cook’s attention to the large pallisaded settlements on the hilltops and the hundreds of canoes drawn up on the beaches. It was the most densely populated stretch of coast that the Endeavour had yet encountered in New Zealand – and it occurred to Cook to name the great curving coastline the Bay of Plenty.

Model of a Māori pā (fortified village) on a headland. Auckland War Memorial Museum. WikiMedia Commons.

By the late afternoon of 2 November, the Endeavour had reached Mayor Island with Mauao in sight. Twenty-six-year-old Joseph Banks, botanist and patron of natural sciences, was among the 90 men and boys on board. Banks, who had supplied £10,000 of his own money to equip the expedition, was accompanied byLinnaeus’s protegé, the Swedish botanist Dr Daniel Solander, a former watchmaker turned naturalist named Herman Spöring and the botanical draughtsman Sydney Parkinson. Samuel Johnson might have been aboard as well, remarkably enough, had Banks succeeded in persuading him to join the Endeavour’s expedition, but Dr Johnson had declared himself no enthusiast for ‘savage life’ and held fast to his spot in the snug at Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese off Fleet Street. 

Sydney Parkinson. Engraving of pōhutukawa blossom (Metrosideros Excelsa) 1788, after a 1769 drawing.

I am beguiled by the thought of those Georgian urbanites lingering in proximity to my distant home in the South Pacific. How extraordinary that Banks, of whom I have read so much, was ever here. I can imagine him stooping his six-feet-five-inch frame in his ‘hutch’ – as he referred to his accommodation – to try on, for effect, the cloak he had obtained a week or two earlier from a Māori chief – he later commissioned a portrait of himself wearing it. Banks was impressed by the textile uses of harakeke (New Zealand flax). ‘Of the leaves of these plants,’ he wrote, ‘with very little preparation all [Māori] common wearing apparel are made, and all strings, lines and cordage for every purpose, and of a strength so much superior to hemp as scarce bear a comparison with it. The Finest cloaths are made with the extracted fibres, snow white and shining almost as silk and likewise surprisingly strong.’

Benjamin West. Joseph Banks, 1773. Usher Art Gallery, Lincoln. Sir Joseph Banks in a Māori cloak with Pacific trophies.

Thomas Pringle.A woman weaving a flax cloak, photographed probably in the Rotorua district, 1905.

Cook was always on the lookout for a useful anchorage as a base for finding supplies of fresh food and water, but he was denied the opportunity to discoverthe excellent harbour at Tauranga and the large pā that overlooked its calm inner waters. While the Endeavour was sheltering at Mayor Island on the evening of 2 November, two large canoes packed with warriors sailed out to challenge the alien entity in their waters. The Endeavour’s men had experienced a number of similar encounters as they had made their way along the east coast of the North Island, mapmaking and gathering botanical specimens. Only that morning at Maketu, warriors had harassed the ship. The local people were in no mood to be welcoming. During the mid-18th century, most of the Bay of Plenty was engaged in tribal skirmishes between war parties or plunderers demanding satisfaction for various offences.The approach of warm weather in November traditionally marked the start of the fighting season and strangers, let alone an apparition of pale ‘goblins’, were regarded with suspicion. In a repeat of the repulse at Maketu, the Tauranga warriors performed a haka in their canoes, hurled stones and spears and chased the Endeavour away.

A sketch by Herman Spöring of the Endeavourchased off the Bay of Plenty coast, 2 November 1769. The Māori crew performed a haka and pelted the ship with stones.

It’s no great effort, I think, for enthusiasts of the 18th century to come into contact with its manifestations in other parts of the world, but here in New Zealand material evidence of that age is much more fugitive. You have to find it in covert human-made contours of the land or in terribly fragile remnants of organic materials or in the threads of memorised genealogies passed down through the generations. I am always looking for traces of that pre-European history though. I want to know what it was like to live here then.

A few months ago, a roadworks crew arrived one morning near my house and embarked on excavations to widen the street. Not long afterwards, the work came to a halt, and un-roadworks types turned up with cameras and clipboards. Archaeologists! The digging had exposed the remains of at least twenty five pre-European food storage structures - a find that confirmed existing evidence that a large Māori population had been living at Ōtūmoetai during the late 18th century. There were three pā on the peninsula at that time, the largest being its namesake. From the size and number of the storage pits, archaeologists estimated that the gardens belonging to this settlement could have fed as many as two thousand people. I was already greatly interested in Ōtūmoetai pā. Its footprint is preserved in a local historic reserve, which I sometimes pass through when I walk down to the waterfront.

Ōtūmoetai pā. Image by Philip Perry.

The body of the pā was situated on an escarpment with panoramic views of the harbour and of Mauao, before dropping some twenty metres in a series of steep, terraced embankments to a sandy foreshore that offered a safe refuge for canoes. Its location could hardly be more beneficial. A frost-free climate eased the cultivation of crops and there was an abundance of fish and seafood. When I first began digging terraces on our steep garden, I kept unearthing scatterings of seashells and learned that there are many middens in this area, produced when those long-ago inhabitants scooped out the contents of shellfish to dry in the sun. I often thought of those gardeners past, workingloamy soil that offered every advantage to the staple root crop of kūmara as well as yams, taro and gourds.

Gottfried Lindauer. Digging with the Kō, 1907. Auckland Art Gallery. The kō was a long-handled digging tool.

The Cornish printer and missionary William Colenso, who arrived in New Zealand in 1834, remarked of Māori cultivation practices, ‘… all worked alike: the chief, the lady and the slave; and all were under a rigid law of minute ceremonial restrictions, or tapu, which were invariably observed…. It was a pretty sight to see a chief and his followers at work in preparing the ground … They worked together, naked, save a small mat or fragment of one about their loins, in a regular line or band, each armed with a long handled narrow wooden spade (ko), and like ourselves in performing spade labour, worked backwards, keeping rank and time in all their movements, often enlivening their labour with a suitable chant, or song, in the chorus of which all joined.’

A Māori communal garden in the Auckland region before the arrival of Europeans. The two large plots contain kūmara (sweet potatoes) and uwhi (yams), with taro in the lower right and hue (bottle gourds) in the small plots in front. Image: Nancy Tichborne in Helen Leach, 1,000 years of gardening in New Zealand. Reed, 1984

Ever since the kūmara storage pits were unearthed near my house, I have been ferreting around in the New Zealand Room at the Tauranga Library trying to discover more about everyday life in the Ōtūmoetai pā – and I have found a surprising amount. Too much to add here, but I will use my December post to describe as well as I can what I have learned of my neighbourhood in the late 18th century.

    

Tudor Coney-Catchers and Modern Scammers - by Katherine Langrish

November 3, 2016, 11:30 pm

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A few years ago on holiday in Paris, my daughter and I were walking along the Seine from the Musée D’Orsay (we’d hoped to get in, but the staff were on strike), heading for the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Seine to the Jardins des Tuileries, when a woman walking a few paces ahead of us suddenly exclaimed, bent down and stood up with a gold ring in her hand.  Eyes wide with amazement she turned to us, and asked us (in French) if we thought it was real gold?  

She passed it to me. My daughter and I examined it. It looked real. There was a hallmark on it. It seemed to be a man’s wedding ring. I passed it back. ‘Whatever shall I do with it?’ the woman asked. ‘Take it to the police?’I suggested. It seemed a long shot that anyone would claim it... ‘No I don’t have time’ the woman declared. She hesitated, seemed to make up her mind. She pressed it into my hand.  ‘Take it! I don’t want it! You keep it!’

‘Oh we couldn’t,’ I said, but she smiled brilliantly: ‘No no – it’s a bit of good luck!  Do what you like with it!  Bonne chance! Bonne journée!’ She started to walk away. My daughter and I glanced at each other in consternation. A gold ring? What were we to do with it?  We didn’t even know where to find a police station! Then the woman turned back. ‘But – if you have any spare change – some money for a meal...?’

Light dawned. I said to my daughter in English, ‘It’s a scam.’ But it had been so clever, so well-acted, I had to grin. The woman saw; she grinned too, but her hand was out and her eyes were fixed on my face.  I opened my purse and gave her a couple of Euros – enough for a coffee – which she took without fuss. We kept the ring as a cheap souvenir and crossed the bridge.  A hundred metres along the other bank, another woman waved at us. ‘Regardez ce que j’ai trouvee! - Look what I’ve found! A ring!  Is it real, do you think?’ We laughed at her and passed on. 

Paris that day was bursting with women doing the ring trick and clearly the way it was supposed to work – and must actually have worked a significant proportion of the time – was by a form of emotional blackmail. The victims examine the ring, find the hallmark and pronounce it real. A ‘valuable’ ring is then ‘gifted’ to them, plunging them into confusion. The request for money, an apparent after-thought, takes them by surprise and is hard to refuse. Some people may well have paid the scammer a fair percentage of what they felt the ring was ‘worth’... Last time I went to Paris, the scam of the moment seemed to be card tricks – men doing ‘Find the Lady’ on the Rive Gauche and under the Eiffel Tower, surrounded by small crowds of the fascinated and unwise, who may later have discovered their pockets had been picked.  

There is nothing new under the sun. I feel sure the ring trick was probably being played in Babylon and Ninevah. Certainly in Tudor England, the honest countryman coming into London on business was in grave danger of being fooled and robbed. The journalist Robert Greene wrote an exposé of them in his 1591 pamphlet  ‘A Notable Discoverie of Cozenage’. ‘Cozenage’ means ‘trickery’, and the scams were known as ‘Cony-catching’.  The conies, or rabbits, were the simple victims. The coney-catchers were the gangs of scamsters.  Here’s some of what Greene had to tell of their methods and how they struck up an acquaintance with their victims!

The cony-catchers, apparelled like honest civil gentlemen or good fellows, with a smooth face, as if butter would not melt in their mouths, after dinner when the clients are come from Westminster Hall and are at leisure to walk up and down Paul’s, Fleet Street, Holborn, the Strand... these cozening companions attend only to spy out a prey; who, as soon as they see a plain country fellow, well and cleanly apparelled, either in a coat of homespun russet or of frieze ... and a side-pouch at his side – ‘There is a cony,’ saith one. At that word out flies the setter [‘the party that takes up the cony’, who ‘sets him up’]. And overtaking the man, begins to salute him thus: 

‘Sir, God save you, you are welcome in London! How doth all our good friends in the country? I hope they be all in health?’ The countryman, seeing a man so courteous he knows not, half in a brown study at this strange salutation, perhaps makes him this answer: ‘Sir, all our friends in the country are well, I thank God; but truly I know you not. You must pardon me.’

‘Why sir,’ saith the setter, guessing by his tongue [accent] what countryman he is, ‘are you not such a countryman?’ If he say ‘Yes’ then he creeps upon him closely. If he say ‘Nay’, then straight the setter comes over him thus: ‘In good sooth sir, I know you by your face... I pray you, if without offence, let me crave your name and the place of your abode.’  The simple man straight tells him where he dwells, his name and who be his next neighbours, and what gentlemen dwell about him. 

In these days of internet fraud, you may well wince. It was no different then, for Greene goes on to tell how the setter, having learned all he can, cunningly apologises: 

‘...Hold me excused, I took you for a friend of mine, but since by mistaking I have made you slack your business, we’ll drink a quart of wine or a pot of ale together’. If the fool be so ready as to go, then the cony is caught; but ... if he smell a rat by his clawing, and will not drink with him, then away goes the setter and discourseth to the verser [‘he that playeth the game’] the name of the man, the parish he dwells  in, and what gentlemen are his near neighbours. With that, away goes [the verser], and, crossing the man at some turning, meets him full in the face and accosts him thus: 

‘What, Goodman Barton, how fare all our friends about you? Why, I am such a man’s kinsman, your neighbour not far off. How doth this or that good gentleman, my friend? Good Lord, that I should be out of your remembrance.  I have been at your house divers times.’

On this, the countryman, too embarrassed to admit he has forgotten this ‘neighbour’, is persuaded to go for a drink in an ale-house, where ‘ere they part, they make him a cony and so ferret-claw him at cards, that they leave him as bare of money as an ape of a tail.’ 

Greene’s pamphlet, which goes into much detail on this and many other scams, was immensely popular, though it got him into some danger: in his follow-up pamphlet ‘The Second Part of Cony-Catching’, 1592, he claims that:

These cony-catchers, these vultures, these fatal harpies that putrefy with their infections the flourishing estate of England ... stand upon their bravadoes ... swearing by no less that their enemies’ blood, even by God Himself, that they will make a massacre of his bones, and cut off my right hand, for penning down their abominable practices.  But alas for them, poor snakes! ... every thunder-clap hath not a bolt, nor every cony-catcher’s oath an execution. I live still, and I live to display their villanies, which, Gentlemen, you shall see set down in most ample manner in this small treatise. 

'Robert Greene in Death's Livery' from John Dickenson's 'Greene in conceipt' (1598)

Be that as it may, Greene died the same year on 3 September 1592, aged only 34. He died not from violence (we’d probably have known about that) but, according to scholar and rival pamphleteer Gabriel Harvey, from ‘a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine’.  The rather spiteful Harvey also claimed in his ‘Four Letters and Certain Sonnets’, December 1592, that Greene kept a mistress, "a sorry ragged quean” and  the sister of a criminal known as "Cutting Ball" hanged at Tyburn.  If true, then the ‘Cony-Catching’ pamphlets were truly drawn from the low-lifes with whom Greene and many another minor Elizabethan writer knocked about. They are vivid and amusing pictures of the rough streets, ale-houses and back-alleys of Tudor London.  

Trying to Like the Fifth of November by Joan Lennon

November 4, 2016, 6:30 pm

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I came to the whole 5th of November thing late, as an adult, and let's face it, I'm just not a fan.  It's just too gory and violent and religiously intolerant and, well, pants.  But, 5th of the month's my History Girl slot, so I thought I should try.  Try to find something to say about Guy Fawkes/Gunpowder Plot/Bonfire Night that was a bit more positive.  Off I wandered, from images ...

(Wikipedia)

... to poetry ...   

The Fifth of November

    Remember, remember!
    The fifth of November,
    The Gunpowder treason and plot;
    I know of no reason
    Why the Gunpowder treason
    Should ever be forgot!
    Guy Fawkes and his companions
    Did the scheme contrive,
    To blow the King and Parliament
    All up alive.
    Threescore barrels, laid below,
    To prove old England's overthrow.
    But, by God's providence, him they catch,
    With a dark lantern, lighting a match!
    A stick and a stake
    For King James's sake!
    If you won't give me one,
    I'll take two,
    The better for me,
    And the worse for you.
    A rope, a rope, to hang the Pope,
    A penn'orth of cheese to choke him,
    A pint of beer to wash it down,
    And a jolly good fire to burn him.
    Holloa, boys! holloa, boys! make the bells ring!
    Holloa, boys! holloa boys! God save the King!
    Hip, hip, hooor-r-r-ray!

English Folk Verse (c.1870) from Poem of the Week.  


... to North American history ...

In 1775, when the Continental Army was trying to form an alliance with Catholic French Canadians to help throw out the British, George Washington found out how his troops were planning to celebrate "Pope Night".  You can hear his exasperation in the orders that ensue:

“As the Commander in Chief has been apprized of a design form’d for the observance of that ridiculous and childish custom of burning the Effigy of the pope—He cannot help expressing his surprise that there should be Officers and Soldiers in this army so void of common sense, as not to see the impropriety of such a step at this Juncture; at a Time when we are solliciting, and have really obtain’d, the friendship and alliance of the people of Canada, whom we ought to consider as Brethren embarked in the same Cause. The defence of the general Liberty of America:

“At such a juncture, and in such Circumstances, to be insulting their Religion, is so monstrous, as not to be suffered or excused; indeed instead of offering the most remote insult, it is our duty to address public thanks to these our Brethren, as to them we are so much indebted for every late happy Success over the common Enemy in Canada.”

(Quotation source: General orders for 5 Nov 1775, George Washington Papers, American Memory Project of the Library of Congress.

Image source: Washington portrait from the collections of The Bostonian Society/Old State Museum.)


... to cartoons ...

Punch magazine, November 1850 

a commentary on the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England

(Wikipedia)

It wasn't going well.  And then I read this, from Mary Poppins' author P. L. Travers, writing in 1943 about the ban on Guy Fawkes Day celebrations because of the blackout.

"Since 1939, however, there have been no bonfires on the village greens. No fireworks gleam in the blackened parks and the streets are dark and silent. But this darkness will not last forever. There will some day come a Fifth of November — or another date, it doesn't matter — when fires will burn in a chain of brightness from Land's End to John O' Groats. The children will dance and leap about them as they did in the times before. They will take each other by the hand and watch the rockets breaking, and afterwards they will go home singing to the houses full of light...."

Bonfire Night linked to thoughts of hope and freedom from war - at last, something I could like!  And then I realised that I had never, in fact, read a Mary Poppins book.  So I got hold of Mary Poppins Opens the Door (Chapter One:  The Fifth of November) and I read it.  And now I have a new pet hate.  That woman!  The way she mistreats those children - introducing them to wonders and then trying to make them think they hadn't seen what they'd just seen - psychological damage much?  But that's a dislike for another day.

Other History Girls musings on this particular day can be found from Gillian Polack here, Celia Rees here, and Sue Purkiss here - they do a much better job of making it interesting, but that's me done with it, till 5th November next year ...

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

Sat Nav -- 1908-style

November 5, 2016, 9:00 pm

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My iPhone map app updated today and now contains singularly useless – to me – information about transport in Japan.  I find no charm in this unasked for, space-hogging data.  

But I find a great deal of charm in this little book.

I found it, appropriately enough, in a National Trust bookshop – Contour Road Book of Ireland 1908. The Edwardian equivalent of a sat-nav, I suppose. Pocket-sized, designed primarily for the cyclist though inevitably of interest to the early motorist, its 250 pages contain lists of routes with details of each road’s gradients, surface and notes on anything of interest along the way.

It’s cute, with its gilt-edged tissue-thin India paper and cross-sections of 2,000 hills, but it’s also fascinating and revelatory, about much more than the state of the roads.   The Preface explains why this volume took ‘eight years to prepare’: ‘Great difficulties have been encountered … as the Maps of Ireland, when the work was started, were hopelessly misleading.’ (Interested readers might seek out Brian Friel’s play Translations for more on that subject.)

Some of the entries read like found poems:

LONDONDERRY TO LETTERKENNY

Description: Class II.

The road has excellent surface,

though with a tendency to be bumpy

for the first 3m;

after that it is better.

The road commands some fine views

of the Donegal mountains.

Irish milestones.

Irish milestones? Ah yes, ‘Some of these are Irish Miles and some English, but these are nearly all noted in the book. The tourist will find that Counties Dublin, Waterford, Cork, Antrim and Armagh use English; the other counties either have both, or only one or two roads have Irish M.S.’ One Irish mile was one-and-a-half English miles. It’s not thatdifferent from today, I suppose, when I drive across the border and exchange the Northern Irish signs in miles for the Republic’s signs in kilometres.

And let’s not forget that in 1908, ‘Irish time is 25 minutes later than Greenwich time, but in cross-channel telegrams the latter is used.’

What about the people? ‘No Englishman or Scotsman can ever understand the feelings that sway an Irishman.’ Ireland in 1908, after all, with Home Rule gathering momentum, was a no less complex than Northern Ireland today: ‘a nation fighting out its own destiny in its own way, handicapped by the very powers that make it loveable.’

The characters in my work-in progress, set in1918, will be travelling some of these roads, climbing some of these hills and wrestling with some of these issues of national destiny. I’m often asked how I do research – I’m sure all History Girls are; and the answer is, in many different ways. But this, the stumbling across little gems which tell us so much more than they meant to, is one of my favourites. There are Contour Road Books of England and Scotland too – I may have to start collecting them.

APPLE DAY AT COPPED HALL by Adèle Geras

November 6, 2016, 5:00 pm

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Once upon a time, O Best Beloved, there was no email. People sent one another postcards. The photograph below shows a caryatid at Copped Hall. One of the first cards sent to me by Linda Newbery, who's been a friend since the mid-1980s, carried a similar image.  This is my photograph but the one Linda sent had been taken by her mother, Iris Newbery, a wonderful photographer and one of the volunteers who, over the last nearly 20 years,  has been responsible for the resurrection of Copped Hall from the ruin it was until quite recently.  Iris often takes the photographs for the Friends of Copped Hall's calendar and Linda has sent me each one as it appeared. 

 The caryatids greet you as you drive up to the house. Opposite them are their male equivalents, the Telemons, see below. On October 9th, Linda took me and Jon Appleton and  Christian Keys       to Apple Day at the house, and for me it was like fiction coming to life, a sort of dream come true.

Linda's novel, THE SHELL HOUSE, (pub 2002)  features Copped Hall, though in a state far removed from its present condition. Linda changed things, as novelists often do and has added a grotto and a lake to the landscape,  but this was the place that inspired her.  I  love the book and I've wanted to visit Copped Hall for a long time.

Below is the view that greets you when you come up the  long drive. Copped Hall has been a place of habitation for several centuries.   From 1150, there have been families here, farming the land, building, and right up until the fire of 1917, it has been a home.  The Cornfields, the `Conyers and most recently the Wythes added to the original structure, made gardens, erected statues and created a house that could be seen from the surrounding countryside. Copped Hall overlooks three valleys and is a perfect example of a dwelling in a landscape - something that appeals deeply to the British. 

 Below is the present day façade of the house. After the fire in May, 1917, the Wythes did not restore the mansion. The gardens and grounds were maintained till the Second World War, but in 1952, the estate was sold and things from the mansion (staircases,  leadwork, gates, railings etc) were dispersed to dealers and others. One of the most touching things about the resurrection of Copped Hall is the effort being made to retrieve these items from the places they went to and a great many of them have been returned and put back where they used to be. After 1952, the gardens went to rack and ruin and there were also problems with vandalism.

It was clear to us, walking round the gardens, that archaeological work is still being done. Here is a photo of the excavation which hopes to uncover some of the Elizabethan remains discovered  on the estate.

In  1986, local conservation groups and others got together to fight a proposal to put up offices on the land.  They won and the scheme was rejected.  The conservation groups formed themselves into the Friends of Copped Hall with the aim of buying the property and restoring it to its former glory. They gained support both locally and nationally for their principles.

Below is a picture of the Walled Garden, a place of supreme order and beauty. In the last fifteen years, it has changed from the tangled, messy jungle the original volunteers found when they took it over.  Iris Newbery has been a volunteer for many years and remembers these days very well. She is now nearly 91, but still volunteering. On the day we visited, she was in the office, in a gallery above the shop,  fretting over a printer which wasn't behaving properly. The laminator was also, she felt, on the brink of causing trouble.  She and others have each had a task that they've undertaken enthusiastically day after day, week after week, in all weathers. They have made an orderly paradise out of what was once a ruin and seeing it on a beautiful October day you realise how much work was involved. 

Here is one of the glasshouses. They were nothing but metal skeletons when the volunteers arrived to start the work.

And below is a heap of collected  bits of the decorative border to one of the paths which will be put back together again one day. Nothing that's rescued is thrown away. Everything that is found or bought from other owners is used imaginatively and intelligently.

And here is the gate of the Walled Garden. 

While the garden was being restored, work on the house was also continuing. The rooms of the mansion are still not exactly as they were. You can see bare walls, and roof beams and exposed areas which will one day be covered, but the soul of each room is there already. Here's the kitchen.

Here is what will one day be a most beautiful staircase. The Friends of Copped Hall are seeking money to restore it, bit by bit. Every little helps, as they say, and on Apple Day they displayed a number which people could text to donate even small sums and earmark them for this staircase. That's what I'm going to do with my donation because my photograph doesn't fully convey how wonderful it looks.

Here in one of the bedrooms is a dress displayed in a creative way which enables you to imagine previous owners, standing at the window. I'm a sucker for dressmakers' dummies and this is a particularly lovely outfit in front of a very nice view.

And this is a model of the house which is also a money box. You can put your notes and coins into a hole in the roof!

And here is another part of the garden.

Finally, what made Copped Hall extra enchanted for me was this discovery: it was where A Midsummer Night's Dream was performed for the very first time. You would have to go far to find a more perfect venue for such an occasion.

There's a website. It's at www.coppedhalltrust.org.uk 

The Hall hosts a great many cultural and educational events, though it's not open very often. It's best to look on the website if you want to visit, but I can promise you will love it. The volunteering continues into the catering too. I saw, (though I didn't eat) ranks of delicious - looking home- made cakes but I can vouch for a terrific veg and nut roast and salad.  50 p bought me Margaret Gervis's recipes for Mincemeat Cake and Tea Loaf on both sides of one piece of A5, beautifully laminated by Iris Newbery's laminator when it was in tip top condition...

---

'Playing The Fool' by Karen Maitland

November 7, 2016, 4:30 pm

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Ask most people to imagine a medieval feast and they will usually picture a jester or ‘fool’ prancing around the tables clad in bells and pointed hats, but how accurate is that image? In the 11th and 12th centuries the title minstrel, meaning little servant, was the name given to a wide range of entertainers, including musicians, tumblers and magicians as well as joculators or jesters. Both men and women were employed as minstrels and there is a record of joculatrix called Adeline, owning land in Hampshire in 1086.

In the 12th century the title of follus or fool began to be mentioned in documents, often when these jesters had been rewarded with land as payment for loyal service. A fool named Roland le Pettour was given 30 acres of land by King Henry II, probably when he retired, on condition that Roland returned to the royal court every year on Christmas Day to ‘leap, whistle and fart.’

But noblemen and even kings did not throw daily banquets and, besides, listening to same fool or joculator every night of the year would have become tedious, so medieval jesters only performed occasionally. The rest of the year they were expected to carry out other duties in the household, such as being keeper of the hounds, or travelling to markets to buy provisions for the household.

In the Middle Ages there were three types of fool. The professional fool employed by a nobleman was usually very astute, educated and generally wore normal clothes, like their masters, rather than the classic fool’s costume. But wealthy families also adopted boys and men who had mental illnesses or physical deformities, keeping them almost as pets for their amusement or as an act ‘Christian charity’. These too were given the title of ‘the Queen’s fool’ or ‘Lord X’s fool’, but they were not paid, just fed and clothed. If their masters decided these poor fools no longer amused them they were sometimes provided with a pension in the form of regular alms, but sadly many ended their days as beggars.

1400. The author of the manuscript (centre) is shown writing for all ranks of society, from the highest, the pope and the king on either side of him to the lowest - the jester with monkey on the far left and the beggar on the far right.

The third class of fool was the Fool Societies, particularly popular in France. These were groups of amateurs who performed at Christmas, or at fairs or festivals. They were generally the ones to don the classic jester’s costume of a hood with ears, multi-coloured tunics and tie bells to their shoes or clothes. They would dance and prance through the streets, some even carrying their infants on their backs.

1614. Tom Durie, beloved jester to Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI. He holds the cup of hospitality offered to guests.

Both King Edward II and Edward III had a succession of professional fools and called them all ‘Robert’ regardless of their real names. But by the 13th century some talented jesters were beginning to achieve superstar status. Those who were lucky enough to be employed by royalty were provided with their own horse and servants. Tom le Fol – Tom the Fool – performed at the marriage feast of Edward I’s daughter Elizabeth and was given a fee of 50 shillings which was a fortune, since a skilled thatcher could expect to earn only 2½ pence a day and you could buy a goose for 1½ pennies.

Of course, most fools weren’t lucky enough to come to the attention of the king. One traveller complained that no one gave him rabbit-trimmed robes or costly gifts, because he couldn’t play instruments, tell jokes and stories, juggle, dance, and fart a tune.

The Battle of Morgarten, 15th Nov 1315 showing the court jester, Kuony von Stocken, in red standing next to his master's horse.

When I was researching the life of a medieval jester, who is one of the characters in my novel, 'The Plague Charmer', I discovered that dwarf jesters were also expected to carry clandestine kisses and illicit fondlings between men and women in the noble houses who were flirting or having affairs.

That task could be hazardous, but jesters or professional fools could be required to carry out duties that were even more dangerous. On the battlefield one of their roles was to carry messages between the leaders of warring armies and sometimes the enemy did 'kill the messenger' and often in particularly nasty ways.

Fools certainly earned their wages. It was serious game they had to play.

Time Travel in Rome's Piazza Navona

November 8, 2016, 7:00 pm

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On the day this blog is due I will be in Rome, being a writer-in-residence to kids at St Stephen's High School. So I thought I’d dig up a suitable post from my Roman Mysteries Travel Guide. When in Rome, try a little Time Travel. Here’s how to do it in Rome’s Piazza Navona! Caroline Lawrence

A Top Fan took my advice... and loved it!

Sit in at an outdoor table of the Tre Scanlini in Piazza Navona as the afternoon is cooling into evening. Order a tartuffo. Tartufo is Italian for ‘truffle’. But this is no fungus; it’s a triple chocolate ice-cream treat. It will be expensive. That doesn’t matter. You will never forget this experience. 

As you wait for your tartuffo to arrive, look at the shape of the

Piazza Navona. Does it remind you of anything? It used to be a race-course for chariots, like the Circus Maximus, only smaller. It was built by the Emperor Domitian, Titus’s younger brother. Where the people are walking (and where you are sitting!) used to be the race course, with chariots driving at breakneck speed. Imagine four-house chariots driving there now – from your left to your right, and trampling all the unsuspecting tourists! 

The central part of the Piazza Navona – with its obelisk and fountains – would have been much thinner in the first century AD, about the width of the base of the obelisk. That was the central barrier of the racecourse, called the ‘spina’ or the ‘euripus’. The fountains are too wide and wouldn’t have been there in Roman times, but parts of the euripus would have been filled with water for the sparsores, the boys who sprinkled the track with water to keep the dust down. Instead of the big fountains at either end, imagine bronze cones, each about as tall as a cypress tree. Those cones were called metae, and they were the turning posts. This is where all the worst crashes occurred, as charioteers made a 180 turn at great speed. 

The chariots weren’t wooden chariots like the ones in Ben-Hur. Those were ceremonial chariots, used for solemn processions. Racing chariots were probably not much more than a wicker basket on wheels, designed to be as light and fast as possible. Imagine driving a basket on wheels behind four powerful stallions going at breakneck speed.

You have the reins wrapped around your waist, to keep your hands free to use the whip or tweak a particular rein. But if you are thrown out of your chariot you will be pulled along the sandy racetrack. Charioteers were given a knife in their belt to cut themselves free of the reins if they were thrown out of the chariot. Imagine trying to cut through eight thick leather straps as you are dragged along the sandy track with horses thundering past on your right and left, their hooves only inches away! Whew!

Your tartuffo should have arrived by now. You deserve it. As you savour the triple chocolate, remind yourself that chocolate was unknown to the Romans. Poor Romans. But wait, they had chariot races and we don’t. Which would you rather have: chocolate or chariot races? 

Now look at some of the Roman men and women walking in the Piazza. Imagine them dressed in tunics and sandals. Imagine the women in stolas and pallas. You can easily see which Roman men would have been patricians or senators. And you can easily spot the rustic farmers and peasants. That beautiful female street-sweeper must be a slave from Germania. And that big muscular youth, showing off to his friends, is probably a gladiator. That man with the thinning hair and the wire-rimmed glasses is the spitting image of Cicero. 

One mystery I have never been able to solve is this: What did Italian men do with their hands before cigarettes and mobile phones were invented? 

Author of the million-selling Roman Mysteries, Caroline Lawrence is now writing the Roman Quests, a series set in Rome and Roman Britain in the final years of the volatile Emperor Domitian, who had a caffé named after him.

The Great Venice Boil-Off - Michelle Lovric

November 9, 2016, 4:30 pm

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This post is about Venetian Treacle, the crème de la crème of all quack preparations. Like all such, Venetian Treacle was said to cure everything from ingrown toenail to plague. It probably cured nothing.

 Known as ‘teriaca’ locally, its ingredients (69 including viper flesh) deserve a post of their own. This one’s about the ceremony of making the stuff.
Ceremony was very important. Teriaca was among Venice’s premier exports and extremely expensive. It had a cult status in every Venetian family's medicine cabinet too. So, in order to make sure that no one was quacking about it with the recipe, it had to be made in public with proper regulation, proper costumes, proper songs, proper bribes, proper nibbles and a great many feathers.
The ingredients were displayed in public, then mashed in public and finally boiled in public until the teriaca emerged as a dark stick liquid known as an electuary.

 Only a few Venetian apothecaries were allowed the honour of making teriaca. They were called triacanti. Most of them had their premises around Rialto, where the foreign merchants flocked and usually stayed. Those who made teriaca would print handbills about it in many languages for their international customers. This one's from lo Struzzo, the Ostrich:

 

Earlier this year I had the honour of escorting members of London’s Worshipful Society of Apothecaries on medical tour of Venice. I took them to see most of the triacanti around Rialto –

 Lo Struzzo, (the Ostrich), Ponte dei Baretti

La Testa d’Oro (the Golden Head), at the foot of the Rialto Bridge

L’ Aquila Nera (the Black Eagle) at Rialto

La Madonna at Rialto

 Il Pomo d’Argento (the Silver Apple) at Rialto

 Il Pellegrin (the Pilgrim) at San Lio

 L’Umiltà Coronata (Crowned Humility) at San Severo

 Il Doge on the Riva degli Schiavoni (where he had to contend with competition from the ciarlatani, or quacks)

 Il Redentore (the Redeemer) at San Marco

 I Due Mori (the Two Moors) at San Salvador

 Il Paradiso at the Riva di Vin


For the London Apothecaries, I translated the following document that shows how much bribery and nibbles had to be provided by the apothecary (‘speziale’) who wanted to get his Teriaca properly supervised.

 This is a supplication from the speziale at the Sign of the Doge on the Riva degli Schiavoni - an invitation sent to the chancellor of the of the Magistrato alla Sanità (the health department) on 4th September, 1787.

 You will note he is writing in September – but his ceremony would not take place until May because that was when most of the ingredients, especially the viper flesh, were said to be in the best condition; also because the movement of the stars in that month specially favoured remedies. Weather was probably a factor too. You didn’t want rain or snow falling on your teriaca parade, either, because all the various substances had to be displayed in public for three days to assure everybody of the genuineness and quality. Then the ceremony itself took place outdoors, so that everyone could observe and enjoy the lusty singing of the facchini mixing and breaking up the ingredients to the rhythm of a song.

So … here are the inducements offered by the speziale in the hope of being allowed to make a bit of teriaca:

 Invited: one notary from the Magistrato alla Sanità,
one financial officer from the same magistracy,
one protomedico (one prior and two councillors from the medici fisici)
and the prior and two councillors from the Collegio degli Speziali.

 For the tips that will be given out in great quantity,
I’ll limit myself to indicating that for the weighing part of the ceremony,
to the leader, the second in command and the facchini (the lowliest and busiest workers in the apothecary business), I will give a beret of black silk.
That of the leader will have three feathers, two red and one black;
the second in command, two feathers, one red and one black;
the ordinary facchini will have one red feather each.
The facchini who grind the mortars will get a beret of yellow wool
with a pink tassel and a red feather.

 Before starting the weighing, the chancellor will be given a silver tray
and a bunch of beautiful flowers costing at least 10 lire,
and the others who are supervising will receive a bouquet worth at least 3 lire.

Once the drugs are weighed, they will be displayed, carried around
first in front of the noblemen, who will stand centrally,
then to the doctors and noble ministers, who will stand on the right of the chancellor,
and then to the speziale, who will be on the left.

Once the cinnamon has been weighed, we will offer some of the best,
wrapped up in paper, to all these officers, who will number ten.
When just over half of the drugs have been weighed,
we will hand out lemon water, hot chocolate, pastries and coffee.

The magistrates will at this point leave, with the weight registered,
and the second councillor of the spezierie,
the one who was supervising the weight of the drugs,
will then be given his flowers and his cinnamon.

 When the facchini begin to break up the ingredients,
they get a snack too, which will consist of
a slice of salami, a slice of cheese, some bread and a glass of wine.
After this food, they will begin their work and
they’ll be given two more drink breaks.
That’s how it is on the first day.

 On the following days, everyone will be given a bottle of rosolio and
a half-bottle of acquavita.
In the course of the morning, they will twice be given a glass of wine
and after lunch another glass of wine and so on until their work is finished.

On the day of mixing, the weighing won’t be done
unless three officers are present to examine it.
When it is half finished,
they get some lemonade, hot chocolate, pastry and some coffee.
And after the weighing, more coffee.

 Payments to the facchini: all the facchini get 7.1 lire per day.
Only in the first half-day
in which they are weighing the ingredients
they get an extra 4 lire.

 All those who do the grinding get a little bottle of Teriaca.
All the facchini who work in the honey get 7.10 lire
and those who work in the paste get the same.
The leader gets a tip of 40 lire and a little bottle of Teriaca,
and the second in command, 24 lire and a bottle of Teriaca.

 The presents that are given after the compost:
to the chancellor, six loaves of fine sugar and Teriaca,
to the notary of the Sanità, sugar as above, Teriaca and in money, 16 lire.
To the financial officer of the Sanità, sugar and Teriaca.
To the protomedico of the Sanità, four loaves of sugar and Teriaca.
To the two officers of the Sanità, 80 lire and 5.10 lire for lunch.
All these presents will be delivered to an officer of the Magistrato,
and the money will be given to the officers directly.

 To the prior and the two councillors of the medici
will be given four loaves of sugar and Teriaca
and to the officers of the speziali, six loaves of sugar, Teriaca, 22 lire in cash, nutmeg oil, goma storace calamita and castoreo.

The proprietor of the Teriaca pays as a tax to the Collegio dei Medici of 5 ducats for every 1000 parts of the drug.

the Magistrato alla Sanita near San Marco

 After two months, the officers from the Collegio degli Speziali are requested to come as well as the officers of the Sanità, to open the big terracotta urn.

 Once it’s opened the usual tests are carried out, and as recompense, those who attend get 8 lire. Two bottles of Teriaca are sealed and delivered to the prior of the speziale, who has to deliver them to the Magistrato della Sanità.


                                                                                 *



In 1441 it was ordered that any fake teriaca and mithridatum (a cheaper, simpler version) would be burned in the middle of the Rialto Bridge

In theriaca’s countries of origin (the middle east), makers of bad teriaca would be beaten by physicians … but in Venice the faker would be ordered to pay 1 ducat for every pound of his fake product. The fine would be divided between the denouncer, the magistrato and the collegio.

The trade in teriaca, and especially all the pomp and solemnity that went into the public making of it, really became important from about 1500. Teriaca production continued until the mid-nineteeth century ... in the early 1900s the only pharmacy still making it was the Testa d’Oro, but they were doing so only within the walls of their laboratory, not in the street, because from 1842, all the solemn ceremonies and the supervision of the state were abandoned.

Without the ceremony, the drug simply lost its allure.
Teriaca was effectively replaced by a liquor known as Fernet Branca.

I suggest you try some ...

Michelle Lovric


Translation © Michelle Lovric 2016

Victorian Tattooed Ladies: Circus freaks or pioneering feminists? by Katherine Clements

November 10, 2016, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: The Consolation of Seneca, by Antonia Senior

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The history of tattooing goes back to prehistory but the English word, in this context, is first attested in the writings of Captain Cook. An entry in Cook’s ship’s log of 1769 refers to male and female ‘tattooed savages’ in Polynesia, proudly displaying their tribal marks: 

"Both sexes paint their Bodys, Tattow, as it is called in their Language. This is done by inlaying the Colour of Black under their skins, in such a manner as to be indelible."

Many of Cook’s men returned to England with tattoos they’d received on their voyages and the practice quickly became a tradition, hence the enduring association with sailors and men of the sea. It might have been common to see crudely inked bodies in the eighteenth century docks and taverns of London and Liverpool, but otherwise tattoos were stigmatised, associated with criminals and prostitution. No respectable woman would have displayed one.

This began to change in the latter half of the nineteenth century when tattoos became fashionable among the upper classes. Notable society figures, including European royals, acquired tattoos, creating something of a fad that wasn’t confined to men.

One magazine of 1898 estimated that a fifth of British landed gentry had tattoos, while the New York Times claimed that many society women had designs in ‘inaccessible places’. Famous beauty, Lady Randolph Churchill (Winston’s mother) was said to sport a serpent wrist tattoo that she covered with bracelets, and some have even suggested that Queen Victoria herself succumbed to the craze.

This cover of the Police Gazette from 1870 shows a well-heeled woman receiving a tattoo in her boudoir – more than a hint of titillation about it. A tattoo might have been a provocative fashion statement for some women, but mostly they were not to be shown in public; they were private and rarely visible.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, a few women found fame and fortune exhibiting their ink in the circuses and freak shows of America.

Tattooed native women had been displayed as circus freaks in America for years, but the earliest known tattooed white woman was Olive Oatman. Her story is a sad one. In the 1850s, during an ill-fated journey to California, Yavapai Indians attacked her family. Only Olive and her sister survived. The girls were rescued and adopted by Mohave Indians, who gave Olive a traditional facial tattoo. Her sister died but Olive lived with the Mohave until she was ransomed some years later. 

Olive Oatman

She soon became a celebrity, touring the country giving lectures about her experiences. People flocked to see the facial markings that, according to Olive, were inflicted without her consent. More recent research suggests her stories may not have been entirely truthful and the tattoo was a sign of willing acceptance among her new Native American family. Later she married, turning her back on her extraordinary past, abandoning the lecture circuit and using veils and make-up to cover the evidence of her time with the Mohave.

Others played on Oatman’s story, and many of the ‘tattooed ladies’ who began performing as circus attractions in the latter half of the nineteenth century claimed to have been captured and forcibly tattooed by native tribes.

One of the best known is Nora Hildebrandt, America’s first professional tattooed lady, who toured with Barnum and Bailey’s circus throughout the 1890’s. Nora claimed to have been held captive for a full year, tortured daily with hours under the needle. She even suggested that the famous chief, Sitting Bull, had been involved. 

Nora Hildebrandt

It soon became evident that this fabricated history, while entertaining, was hardly true: Nora is commonly said to have been the daughter, or wife, of Martin Hildebrandt, an artist who opened the first tattoo parlour in New York City (possibly as early as the 1850s) and was heavily in demand among American Civil War soldiers. But this too is doubtful. Nora was actually born in England and there’s no proof she was either married to or related to Martin. (He’s recorded as married to a woman called Mary, with one son – Frank). Perhaps she took his name in acknowledgement of the art with which he covered her body, but the reasons are lost in almost as much myth and hearsay as Nora’s own stories. 

Nora’s debut was quickly followed by that of Irene Woodward – or La Belle Irene – who billed herself at ‘The Original Tattooed Lady’. She and others often used salacious stories like Hildebrandt’s, to attract and entertain audiences. These women were mostly viewed as risqué circus attractions, little better than those working in peepshows or burlesque follies. Margot Mifflin, author of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and Tattoo says:

“The women afforded a peepshow, along with a freak show, because at that time women just didn’t show that much skin publicly, The tattoos gave them a reason to strip down and show their bodies. Certainly a number of people who came to see them were interested in the flesh as much as the art.”

Even so, some of these women became stars. Artoria Gibbons was the highest paid tattooed lady of the 1920s, with a legion of fans, and others, such as Betty Broadbent, went on working as pin-ups and performers right up until the 1960s. It certainly offered a level of fame and financial independence, more so once women became more than just a canvass.

Artoria Gibbons

One of the most enduring, evocative images of early tattooed women is that of Maud Wagner (née Stevens); widely regarded as the first American female tattoo artist.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Maud was a circus performer, making a living as an acrobat and contortionist – hardly a conventional career choice to begin with. While entertaining visitors at the St Louis World Fair she met Gus Wagner, a renowned tattoo artist (and the last to work with old-fashioned needle and ink, rather than a machine). Legend has it that Maud agreed to go on a date with Gus only if he gave her lessons. She learned the art from him, going on to become a circus attraction and respected tattoo artist in her own right. They ran a successful business together and their daughter, Lovetta, continued the tradition, becoming a well-known artist, working up until the 1980s, despite apparently never getting inked herself. I’d love to know how many of Maud’s clients were women.

Maud Wagner in 1911

Margot Mifflin’s book, mentioned above, is one of several that chart the history of tattooing in relation to the female body, the changes in gender prejudices and stigma over the years and the reasons for them. It’s a complicated history that’s synonymous with women’s rights, feminism and the changing representation of women’s bodies. 

Mifflin writes in her introduction to the most recent edition: “Tattoos appeal to contemporary women both as emblems of empowerment in an era of feminist gains and as badges of self-determination at a time when controversies about abortion rights, date rape, and sexual harassment have made them think hard about who controls their bodies—and why.”

I wonder what these tattooed ladies of a century ago would have made of the proliferation of body art that adorns all kinds of women – and men – today. Would they see themselves as pioneers? Even if some of them were motivated by money, renown or simply a passion for the art, they certainly broke the rules, and in doing so, made a statement which was far more subversive – and gutsy – than it is today.

www.katherineclements.co.uk

www.facebook.com/KatherineClementsBooks

@KL_Clements

The Consolation of Seneca, by Antonia Senior

November 11, 2016, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: SEEKING THE TRUTH IN A 'BOGUS' HISTORY – Elizabeth Fremantle

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Seneca is having a moment. There are two excellent new biographies out about him: Dying every Day: Seneca at the Court of Nero, by James Romm and Seneca, a Life, by Emily Wilson. The Senecans, by Peter Stothard, my old boss at The Times[1], weaves the tale of a sort of high-brow Senecan fan-club with the politics of Thatcher.

In Glasgow at half-term. I was buying a copy of Seneca’s letters. I already own them, but this was a new edition with such a beautiful binding, I could not resist. The lovely Waterstones bookseller there said: “Seneca’s really big at the moment. He keeps cropping up. I should read him.”

“You should!” I cried in a slightly excessive squeal.

SENECA

We all should. Seneca is the antidote to our liberal malaise. He gives a hope for living intelligently in a surreal world. His is the intellectual rigour that could give bulk to all the mindfulness crap that is ubiquitous and yet hollow. I started reading him for research; I now read him for consolation, for joy and for pity.

I first came across him a few years ago, when I was doing a MA in Ancient History at Birkbeck under the wonderful Catherine Edwards. I’d been rather turned off the Stoics by the experience of translating Cicero’s advocacy for A-level. Dear Lord.

But Seneca and I got on, pretty quickly. (I also fell in love with his nephew Lucan; but his violent bitterness is a story for another blog.)

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was an equestrian of Spanish heritage. He was born around the same time as Christ – or a little earlier. His father was a rhetorician, and Seneca and his three brothers were immersed early in the Rome of letters and politics.

Seneca’s health was dreadful throughout his life – and he spent some time convalescing in Egypt as a young man. He returned to Rome and began to make connections in the court, becoming friends particularly with the Emperor Caligula’s sisters Agrippina and Julia Livilla. On the accession of Claudius, Seneca was charged with and adulterous affair with Julia and exiled to Corsica.

He was recalled by Agrippina on her marriage to Claudius and installed as the tutor to her son, Nero in AD 49. Claudius’ death in AD meant that Seneca’s charge became the most important man in the Western World. Yes, the source of all political power was a fat megalomaniac with bad hair and an attraction to showbiz that terrified the political elite: imagine that if you can people.

NERO: even scarier than The Donald

Seneca essentially believed that the purpose of life is to become a sapiens, or a wise man. The ideal wise Stoic is free, tranquil and happy at all times. This is clearly hard to achieve – and Cicero particularly disagreed with the notion that it is possible to divorce yourself from passions. Emily Wilson argues that Seneca’s insistence that a wise life is possible marks the changing times: “It was more important than ever to hang on to an ideal of tranquillity in a world where it is so difficult to achieve.”

Perhaps this accounts for the surge in Seneca’s popularity. In this post-truth politics world of Brexit and Trump, is it time to look for new mentors? Seneca is a very human sage. He was criticised for hypocrisy in his own life-time; partly for his immense wealth and his stated indifference to it. But Seneca’s central dilemma was also a very modern one. How does a virtuous soul approach the exigencies of politics?

Epicureans, who were the alternative school to the Stoics in Rome, believed that the philosopher is obliged to withdraw from public life. That the compromises demanded by politics are anathema to the philosophical soul. Their beliefs demand silence; at most the benign chatter of one’s like-minded friends.

But not the Stoics. Their creed demanded that they were bound to serve the common good. They were duty-bound to engage with power; unless their lives were endangered by their service. But what if the retreat from that power was where the danger lies? What if confronting tyranny, and fleeing tyranny were both suicidal?

The way Tacitus tells the story, the early part of Nero’s reign was a golden age – because Seneca was effectively running the show. But the 17 year old Emperor grew up, began asserting himself, and side-lined his erstwhile mentor. As Nero grew more difficult, Seneca sought to withdraw from political life. He offered his entire fortune to Nero in return for a retirement. But Nero knew that Seneca was the virtuous figleaf that his reign demanded – and refused the request.

Their relationship became poisonous, until at last Seneca became tainted by a conspiracy against the Emperor. He killed himself. Suicide was the great refuge of the sapiens – it guaranteed freedom in the face of tyranny.

I have paraphrased his life. I haven’t even touched on his remarkable tragedies, which explore the darkness of human passions unleashed. Nor his letters, with their sharp insights into daily life. We have a dozen essays, more than 100 letters, nine tragedies and a satirical piece. A treasure trove which keeps on giving. How to give a flavour in this very short blog? Here are just a few of my favourite quotes from a writer famous for his pithiness and paradoxes.

“You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire” 
― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

Summer has gone, but another year will bring it again; winter lies low, but will be restored by its own proper months; night has overwhelmed the sun, but day will soon rout the night again. The wandering stars retrace their former courses; a part of the sky is rising unceasingly, and a part is sinking. 

Letter 36

What then is good? The knowledge of things. What is evil? The lack of knowledge of things. Your wise man, who is also a craftsman, will reject or choose in each case as it suits the occasion; but he does not fear that which he rejects, nor does he admire that which he chooses, if only he has a stout and unconquerable soul. 

Letter 31

Kindly remember that he whom you call your slave sprang from the same stock, is smiled upon by the same skies, and on equal terms with yourself breathes, lives, and dies. It is just as possible for you to see in him a free-born man as for him to see in you a slave…..

…“He is a slave.” His soul, however, may be that of a freeman. “He is a slave.” But shall that stand in his way? Show me a man who is not a slave; one is a slave to lust, another to greed, another to ambition, and all men are slaves to fear. I will name you an ex-consul who is slave to an old hag, a millionaire who is slave to a serving-maid; I will show you youths of the noblest birth in serfdom to pantomime players! No servitude is more disgraceful than that which is self-imposed.

Letter 47

@tonisenior

www.facebook.com/antoniaseniorbooks 

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[1] He does not know he was my boss. I was a junior reporter writing about pensions. He was editor. He was the Sun King; I was an ant. Everything I know about the strange and wonderful world of Court politics comes from working in a newspaper.