The History Girls

This last fortnight I’ve been indulging in comfort reading and comfort cooking. I need a couple of hours safety in my day in order to cope with our current interesting times. My reading time has been spent about equally in fantasy worlds and in the world of Georgette Heyer. All of this convinces me that it’s time to talk about food again.

Medlars, picture by Gillian Polack

One of the ways in which I judge the success of the invention in a novel (any novel) is how well the writer handles food. Georgette Heyer is comfort reading partly because she understands that food and the social habits that surround food are essential to her stories. She skips over many things, but seldom food.

She doesn’t describe it rapturously or gluttonously: she uses it as an essential part of the lives of the characters. Her female characters can go whole days without ever needing to use a toilet, but when Elinor Rochdale rocks up to a strange house in The Reluctant Widow and no-one is prepared for her coming, there are only cold meats and maybe bread and butter on offer. In a well-run household there would be more choices, but the house Elinor discovers is not well run in any way. People must eat, even in poorly-run households, but people may not eat safely or may not have much in the way of choices but starvation is just that and only applies to those living in appalling circumstances. Heyer’s Regency is imaginary and so a lot of the ugly side of society is missing: no-one starves, although people may skip meals or have sadly restricted choices. Food is at the service of story.

Food in a good novel is always at the service of the novel. Even if the author doesn’t mean it to say something, it is part of the story. When an author doesn’t consider food properly and just shoves it in willy-nilly, it’s the reader who pays.

Dried barberries, picture by Trudi Canavan

Until Diana Wynne Jones mocked the ever-present stew in adventure fantasy travel in her The Tough Guide to Fantasyland travellers eating stew appeared far too often in a certain kind of fantasy novel. It was important to feed people felling tyrants or achieving noble quests, and ‘stew’ was a simple concept that worked for those who had never made a decent stew from scratch. By ‘from scratch’ I mean ‘first trap your hare and wild-harvest your carrots’. Decent stew is not a recipe suitable for exhausted people who need nourishment instantly and who are on the run or on a quest.

The writers who used stew in this way had a particular need in their writing. It wasn’t just to feed travellers. Others have used random nuts discovered (in or out of season) or stale bread to serve the same function in the story. They might be depicting a sense of camaraderie around a campfire, a feeling of solidarity or a moment of hope. A hot meal in the midst of panic gives that moment of comfort and equates in reading terms to my choice of novels right now.

Food isn’t just for keeping people alive. Not in fiction and not anywhere. It tells us what level of luxury we live in, what friends we have, how far we’re social beings and far solitary, how much we as individuals luxuriate in or ignore our senses. So if stew can’t be used in quite the way it has been in fantasy novels, what can?

Dried white mulberries, picture by Trudi Canavan

There are many choices, and they all relate to the function the food serves at that precise moment and also to the culture drawn on for the novel. When I was a child, damper was our stew-equivalent for a moment of camaraderie around a fire. Or, if we had a pan, johnny cakes. Johnny cakes are ‘journey cakes’, I suspect (though have never actually demonstrated).

I and my friends took our sense of mood form the folklore and folksongs we were taught. This is how that bonding can be developed, even if there’s no time or capacity to cook a stew. The song that pushed me to think about journey food was called “Four little Johnny cakes” and a version of it can be found here. http://folkstream.com/042.htmlIt’s all about comfort. All about a pause in travel for refreshment, physical and emotional. The food can be cooked quite quickly, on a single pan, or has been pre-cooked. It has associations with wandering the roads and carrying a swag: the food of swaggies or stockmen.

I’m using Australian terms quite intentionally here, for another thing that writers do when they haven’t thought through things properly is to use the language of their youth or of the fiction they write. How many US readers however, know what a squatter is or care about swaggies? The rules were different. The history is different. The words we write with are not culturally neutral.

Picture by Gillian Polack

It’s easier to remember that these terms are not culturally neutral if I use less-familiar ones. Saying “johnny cake” in my fiction would have to be backed by some suggestion as to what a johnny cake is, for my readers might not have grown up with (probably didn’t grow up with) that song. I could use the song, or I could joke about the griddle cake Alfred burned (if it was historical fiction) or I could describe the delectable aroma, or... there are many techniques open to writers. The trick is to remember to use them. A good historical fiction novel will use a dozen in a chapter, for they are what bring the detail to life for the reader when one is talking about a distant time.

Flour and water and a bit of salt and a bit of raising agent and maybe a few currants and you have a johnny cake. It takes a very few minutes over a hot pan. If you don’t have a hot pan then you find a stick and make damper. A somewhat wetter dough, wound around the stick and then cooked over a hot fire. These are the travel foods of my childhood. We drizzled honey over our lightly burned damper and made a wonderfully sticky mess. Damper can be savoury and it can be cooked in a dying fire or a dutch oven.

Flour and water are the traditional cooking ingredients of many travellers, because flour could be carried in a small flour bag and water is a survival necessity. Much more real than stew, in that way.

Alas, for flour and water, the writer has to work that much harder to get the sense of camaraderie around a campfire, or eating a hot meal together I a time of difficulty. Not all foodstuffs serve the same narrative goals with the same ease.

Stew is not impossible while travelling. Soup is even more possible. But they need planning, time and cooking equipment. This is where it’s really handy to look at what travellers actually ate at various times in various places in history. How far from village to village, farm to farm was it? Was it customary for stray travellers to be fed if they arrived when a meal was being served or (for whatever reason) were travellers left unwelcomed? Did voyagers steal chickens from farmers or buy them or forgo fresh meat? Did they walk into a shop and buy equipment and did that equipment include special bags to carry flour and salt and ground coffee and travel soup? Did they travel with a cart, a mule, a horse, a boat? The reader doesn’t have to know all this – if a writer develops the right model for their tale, it will make the story a lot more evocative and mean that food can be used in all the various ways: it’s not just a matter of making sure that characters don’t starve.

Research doesn’t have to be theoretical. Right now, I know a bit more about portable soup than I ought. This is because I’ve been making it. A lot. I know that chicken doesn’t work so well (the bones are too brittle) but that duck is splendid and beef bones with a little meat on are best of all. Of all the beef I tried, Belted Galloway farmed in an old-fashioned way made the best portable soup. I know the exact mount to cook it down to in order to make ‘soup glue’ which has so little moisture that it can be packed in paper and taken on board ship. One smallish cube of my portable soup makes 2-3 mugs of real soup. And I can make quite tasty soup this way. In fact, I have duck soup in my freezer right now and am using it instead of stock cubes in my stews. It makes the best stews ever. My version, however, takes three to five days to make, over low heat. There’s no way of speeding it up and still having a safe and tasty end-product. I’ve tried. It’s wonderful travel food, but it takes planning or resources.

I cook things like this on writing days. This is the wonder of the modern kitchen. I have to keep an eye on my big saucepan, but I don’t have to tend a fire. Before iron stoves were invented quite recently, it wasn’t so easy to make.

This explains the bread and the mutton and the johnny cakes and the fish. It also makes a kind of travel stew possible if you have a pan and a fire and some meat and some vegies. If travellers carry enough baggage and have a good cook in the company, it’s possible to have the comfort food.

It takes a lot of set-up, however. A slice off a piece of mutton bought from a farmer and a piece of bread or damper to eat it with, or a johnny cake (or four) – these are more likely for that Western European based fantasy world than a travel stew. Georgette Heyer, of course, simply finds an inn for her travellers and, if they arrive at an odd hour, someone has to argue with the innkeeper until food is produced. Food is at the service of story in a good novel, always.

Last month I wrote about the discovery in my neighbourhood of extensive food storage pits of late 18th century origin that had once belonged to the large pā, or fortified village, above the shore of Ōtūmoetai peninsula in New Zealand’s Bay of Plenty. The find was an exciting one since there are relatively few material traces of Māori life before European settlement. The dimensions of the storage pits suggested that at least two thousand people were living in and around Ōtūmoetai Pā at the time of James Cook’s first expedition to New Zealand in 1769. In this month’s post, I would like to write a little more about this particular local pā, which was home to the Ngai Tamarawaho hapū (clan) of the Ngāi Te Rangi tribe.

An impression of the pā at Ōtūmoetai in the Bay of Plenty, New Zealand. Philip Perry.

Ōtūmoetai Pā covered an area of about four acres, centred on an escarpment that looked over Tauranga Harbour and out towards the South Pacific Ocean. The pā was a complex construction encompassing outer barriers of ditches, banks, palisaded ramparts and fighting stages on multiple terraces. These earthworks were arranged around inner fenced compounds where kin-groups lived in groups of timber-framed dwellings with reed walls and thatched roofs. The naturalist Joseph Banks, who had been on board Cook’s first expedition to New Zealand, described Māori dwellings (whare) as ‘mean and low', but conceded that 'they most perfectly resist all inclemencies of the weather.’ The interior of the whare (house) was spare. A fire burned in the centre of the single room upon the floor and the entrance served for a chimney. Tools and weaponry were stored in the house and high-born families kept intricately carved boxes containing feathers and other valuable items for personal adornment, but there was no furniture except for a square of boards joined together for a bed, with a mattress made of a thick layer of grass and dried ferns. Latrines and rubbish heaps for food scraps and waste served each cluster of houses. A typical pā of this time can be seen in the lithograph made by artist John Webber, who accompanied Captain Cook on his third Pacific expedition.

John Webber. The inside of a hippah in New Zealand, 1784. The lithograph shows a pā (or ‘hippah’) with houses constructed of reeds in the Marlborough Sounds.

The dwellings are similar in a sketch of a pā in Wellington made some sixty years later by Captain William Mein Smith, a surveyor-general engaged by the New Zealand Company in 1839, and in photographs taken by Herbert Deveril later in the 19th century.

Captain W. Mein Smith. Pipitea marae, Wellington, c.1840.

Herbert Deveril. Te Rangi Tahau on the porch of his whare, c.1875.

The site of Ōtūmoetai Pā was, and is still, an advantageous one. A tidal estuary, the waters of the large bay, and the ocean beyond provided an abundance of food. Women gathered shellfish and men went out fishing with bone hooks and flax nets weighted with stone sinkers. These accomplished offshore sailors paddled their canoes to outer islands to collect obsidian and immature petrels (muttonbirds) for food, and red ochre for body painting. Mauao, the volcano at the harbour’s entrance, was a useful place marker. A favoured hapuku (groper) fishing spot could be found by lining up Mauao’s western slope with a tall tītoki tree that grew at the rear of the pā. This venerable tree, still extant, is now more than three hundred years old.

Joseph Jenner Merrett. A Meeting of Visitors, c.1843. View of a pōwhiri (welcome)
between two Māori groups outside Ōtūmoetai Pā with the outline of
Mauao (Mt Maunganui) in the background. Tauranga Libraries.

To the west of the pā, rainforested hills provided berries and bird life, and timber, and eeling places in the rivers that flowed into the sea. In a pattern that continued well into the twentieth century, Tauranga Māori made use of these rich resources by migrating between inland areas and the coast to gather food and tend crops. Excess was preserved – fish were wrapped in fern leaf, shellfish threaded on blades of rushes, birds stored in fat in gourds – and kept in raised storehouses together with large calabashes of water.

Flax and kūmara (sweet potato) were the principal crops and they were treated with reverence. Each flax plant was regarded as a family, the central shoot being the child and the leaves surrounding it the parents. In order to maintain the plant’s vitality, only the outermost leaves – the grandparents – were harvested. Women softened the blades of flax by beating them with stone pounders. They wove the flax into hoop nets and cordage, plaited it into mats and baskets and worked it into a silky fibre for clothing, which was similar in weight and drape to sweat-shirt fabric.

Gottfried Lindauer. Women Weaving Flax Baskets, 1903. Auckland Art Gallery.

Māori wore a diversity of garments – cloaks, aprons or kilts or a ‘girdle of many platted strings made of leaves’, and various closely woven mats worn next to the skin. Both men and women bored holes in their ears, which were kept extended by plugs of feathers, bones or wood. Sometimes women wore bracelets or anklets made of shells or small bones, while the men hung greenstone tiki around their necks or the tooth of a shark or a whale. Women sometimes wore their hair short, cut with sharpened shells, or tied it behind the head, or wore it at shoulder length. On occasion, women cropped their hair as a mourning gesture.

A woman photographed by the Foy Brothers, late 19th century,
with cropped hair decorated with huia feathers.
British Museum.

Sydney Parkinson, the botanical artist on the Endeavour in 1769, recorded that men on the east coast of the North Island '... had their hair most curiously brought up to their crowns, rolled round, and knotted.' Parkinson’s portrait of a chief shows an example of the style. Long hair was oiled and bound it in various ways with flax and adorned with combs, carved from wood or whale, bird and human bone, and feathers.

Sydney Parkinson. Portrait of a New Zeland Man, from a sketch made in 1769.
Many men and some women wore facial moko (tattooes) to varying degrees.

Kūmara tubers were planted in spring with some ceremony in scattered communal gardens. Everybody worked in the gardens, including rangatira (chiefs) – but they were exempt from carrying the small gravel, obtained from the bottom of streams, which was brought in baskets during the winter by women to prepare the planting ground.

Kūmara tubers. Before the planting began, prayers were offered to Rongomātāne,
the god of kūmara, and other cultivated plants, to secure goodwill with regard
to the harvest.

The tubers were planted in mounds in soil that has been amended with wood ash and were considered tapu until they were ready for harvest. Low fences served as breaks against the prevailing westerly wind at Ōtūmoetai, which can be gusty in early summer with a tendency to dry out the soil.

Te Parapara Māori Garden, Hamilton Gardens. Photograph by Michal Klajban.
A storehouse overlooking a mounded kūmara garden. Māori used a cord
to plant the rows of kūmara in a straight line. The seed tuber was set
with its sprouting end towards the warmth of the north.

The mauri (life force) of the kūmara, and hence the fertility of the crop,
were protected by carved, wooden atua kiato (god sticks)
fixed around the perimeter of the gardens.

After harvesting in autumn, the kūmara was steamed and dried before being stacked on the sand-strewn floors of underground pits over winter. The pits at Ōtūmoetai had the capacity to hold up to a tonne of tubers.

Once the kūmara had been harvested and placed in storage, the people could lead a more itinerant lifestyle, trading, or gathering other foodstuffs needed for winter. They might wander the beach or the banks of streams looking for good water-smoothed cobbles that could be used to crush the red ochre brought back from Motiti Island, or for heating the earth ovens in which food was cooked. Joseph Banks described the ovens as ‘holes in the ground filled with provision and hot stones and covered over with leaves and earth’. Small fish and birds were generally roasted over an open fire on a skewer. Kūmara, taro, large fish and dogs were cooked in the ovens.

Cook and Banks marvelled at the vitality of the Māori they encountered. That is hardly surprising given a diet that was simple and moderate, plenty of fresh air and exercise, and an absence of sugar and alcohol. They tended to be taller and more robust than Europeans, Banks noted. He was particularly struck by the number of healthy old people in the population. Some even appeared to be in their eighties, ‘and of these, few or none were decrepid, indeed the greater seemd in vivacity and chearfullness to equal the young, indeed to be inferior to them in nothing but the want of equal strength and agility.’ Aged men and women in Māori communities were held in esteem for their experience and wisdom.

William Hodges. Sketch of a Māori woman carrying a child, 1773.
Children were treated with indulgence, Joseph Banks observed.

For forty or fifty years after the first contact with Europeans, Māori at Ōtūmoetai continued to flourish. The lack of accessible timber at Tauranga – the result of previous land clearance by Māori for pā and for crop cultivation – meant that the area held little interest for early Europeans looking for opportunities to exploit New Zealand's hardwood forests – and shore whaling efforts and sealing were centred elsewhere in the country. The large Māori population at the Bay of Plenty eventually attracted missionaries and traders, but this occurred later than in some other coastal areas of New Zealand. Flax was a resource where the Bay of Plenty had an advantage, and this eventually featured in later Māori and European industry.

Ōtūmoetai Pā had the distinction of never being conquered by enemies, but the eventual military defeat of Tauranga Māori in the New Zealand Wars of the mid-19th century led to the confiscation of their land by the Crown. The people at Ōtūmoetai were forced to leave their ancestral home and the land was allocated to soldier settlers.

Tori Tupaea, the last great Ngaio Te Rangi chief of Ōtūmoetai Pā.
Image Mike Dottridge.

By the time this post goes up, I will have seen this little gem in the flesh. But if I hadn't watched that BBC 4 documentary on Still Life back last year (I posted a HG blog about it here) and got all excited about, among other things, 17th century Dutch painting, I would most likely not have bothered. Or even noticed.

It's The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius (1622-1654) and it is on loan for just 6 weeks from the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis in The Hague to the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh. You'll need to get a shift on if you want to visit it there, as it leaves again after 18th December.

The visiting Goldfinch, in situ at the National Gallery of Scotland.

As you can see, Housekeeping is taking this special visitor in its stride.

If, however, Edinburgh isn't within visiting distance for you, here is a short video of the rather sweet Senior Curator Tico Seifert, speaking about the painting's importance and Fabritius' place in art history - a student of Rembrandt and an inspiration to Vermeer. (Don't be cross that he doesn't actually show you the painting - I suspect moving the camera was going to be a step too far. I liked the helpful human podium for his notes which gradually drifts into frame ...)

The Goldfinch. Tiny. Beautiful. The sort of image the word exquisite was invented for.

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

I love old school magazines. In 2004, when I was a teacher, I based an exhibition about the school’s experiences in World War One largely around a stack of 1914-1919 school magazines. In 2014, I revisited these magazines as stimulus for my story ‘Each Slow Dusk’ in Walker’s The Great War. I’ve also plundered them for convincing Christian names for my 1918-set teen WIP, and I'm always moved by the juxtaposition of hockey matches and deaths on the Western Front.

As I’ve confessed here before, I was always a History Girl. ‘Tell me about the olden days,’ I would beg my gran, born in 1908, and she obliged with stories of the shirt factory and Sunday school and naughty Aunt Annie smuggling a kitten up to bed in her pinny. I was enchanted by the kitten but even more by the pinny. The pinny was proof that Aunt Annie came from the realolden days.

The pupils from the magazines – all those Ediths and Kathleens and Gilberts -- didn’t go to school with Gran and Aunt Annie – they were just that bit older and further up the social scale – but they might have sat beside them on the tram.

Mummy, born in 1947, came from the olden days too: not quite soolden but still firmly black and white, gym frocks and Elvis.

Then the world shifted to boring colour when I was born in 1968.

Because I didn’t come from the olden days. Obviously. And because I don’t have children, nobody has ever asked me, ‘Tell me about when you were a wee girl in the olden days.’ So, though I know rationally, that I lived through history – rather a lot of history, given that I grew up in seventies Belfast, I rarely, in my imagination, think of it that way. History was big, and happening somewhere else.

And then, last week, I saw this tweeted picture from my old school library.

I was charmed. Elizabeth and I are still best friends, and I’m still trying to encourage younger people to read. I’d forgotten about the Junior Library Club. But there it was, a tiny bit of the history of my own old school, and of my own olden days. 1987, it would have been. Not long enough to be proper olden days, of course. And then I thought again. When I was ten, my mum was thirty. The olden days she described were less than two decades ago. 1987 is nearly thirty years ago.

I do come from the proper olden days. I have only just realised it, thanks to Twitter and an old school magazine.

I am posting the link below to Lantana Publishing's page about the book which has just been published. It's called A WISP OF WISDOM, and brings together many writers and a wonderful illustrator in a volume which was created to raise money for the Cameroon region but which we all hope will be enjoyed by readers in the UK as much as by their African counterparts.

This will tell you about the origins of the books and let you know which writers are involved. The illustrator is Emmie van Biervliet

https://www.lantanapublishing.com/shop/special-project/cameroon-stories/

Here are the illustrations for my story.

But what I want to do here, briefly, is talk a bit about my experience of Africa. I've never visited the Cameroons, but have lived at different times in Nigeria, The Gambia and Tanzania. Also, although I can't remember it, I spent some months in Egypt as a young baby...my mother used to tell stories of how she carried me in her arms up and down and up and down to stop me crying and waking the neighbour in the next door room (we were in a hotel) only to discover the next day that he was completely deaf.

When my father was posted to Nigeria in 1950, I was 6. My mother looked up Nigeria in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and was horrified. She said to my dad. "But Laurie, there are two pages of diseases you can get!"Nevertheless, to Nigeria we went. I remember nothing but good things. I went to a wonderful school attached to the University in Ibadan. That was where my teacher and my class gave me the book, OUR ISLAND STORY, about which I've written a blog post on the History Girls. We then moved to Lagos and I can remember tradesmen coming to the door of our house with the most wonderful crocodile and snakeskin shoes and bags. Then we went to Onitcha, where there were fields of lilies outside our house and where the bats came out at twilight in such numbers that we had to retire to the safety of my parents' double bed under the mosquito net to avoid them. I am terrified by the very thought of bats to this very day. Then in Kaduna, near Kano, I did get one of those diseases that my mother dreaded: jaundice. I wasn't terribly ill but I remember going to the doctor and giving some blood from the inside of my elbow. I've not been keen on intravenous stuff ever since...he had some difficulty finding a vein.

Below is a photo of me and my dad taken around that time.

My parents then went to the Gambia. My father was Assistant Attorney General in what was then a British colony. Here I had a really wonderful time, whenever I visited. By this time, about 1956, I was at boarding school and used to go out every summer for the long school holidays. I usually flew on BOAC, on a plane exactly like the one seen recently on THE CROWN on Netflix, taking the young Princess Elizabeth to Kenya before she came to the throne. In those days, pilots used to invite children to visit the cockpit to have a go at flying the plane! The exclamation mark is intended to express my wonder, both at those innocent times and at my own daring. I am now flying phobic and haven't been up in the air for 20 years.

There was the sea. My father was permanently dark brown and loved lying in the sun, on the sand, stretched out with no Factor anything on his skin. I've always been very unkeen on the sun and have worn a hat and cover ups on the beach even when I was extremely young.

The Bishop of the Gambia was a friend of my parents and one day, he took me to visit the sick. We went to a part of what was then called Bathurst where Africans lived. It wasn't a shanty town but it was different from the houses where the Government officials and Colonial staff lived. I was struck by the contrast in the way our lives were organised. This was the first time I'd ever thought: how come we live like this when they live like that? How come they are servants in our houses? Because you couldn't escape that this relationship was what was common and the injustice of it was clear. I was present at a moment just before Independence from Colonial Rule was happening all over the Continent.

I wasn't thinking about such matters. I was busy falling in love. Dakar, the French colony, was next door to Gambia and somehow young men who were much more glamorous than what I'd been used to in England appeared at parties in the Club: French men! Young cadet soldiers, mostly. They were older than me by some years. I was fourteen and fifteen when I started going to dances at the Club, and the first person I fell in love with was eighteen. These dances were innocent affairs by today's standards. My father would drive me there and wait till the fun was over, often very late into the night. He read back numbers of Punch and the Illustrated London News in a quiet room and then drove me back to town when the dancing was done. He had no objection to my flirting with these men, but had no intention of letting me drive home with anyone who'd been drinking.

When I returned to school, I always took with me a huge biscuit tin full of peanuts, roasted at home. Gambia was famous for its groundnuts, as they were called, and I loved them. I still do. They didn't last long when they were shared out among my friends back in England.

When my father was in Gambia he invented a method of voting that cut out corruption. I'm not at all sure how it worked but it involved different coloured marbles being dropped into an oil drum. Here's a picture.

His idea was hailed as a real break through at the time and I wish I'd paid more attention to how it operated. I imagine each candidate had his colour...and it was 'his' in those days...and you put an appropriately- coloured one into the drum to indicate your preference. This method or a variant of it is still being used. It's just ousted Gambia's ruler after years and years in favour of a young man who used to work at Argos in Kilburn, I think. Good luck to him and I hope Gambia thrives under his rule.

From Gambia we went to Tanzania. Then, in 1960 or so, it was still Tanganyika and it was the most wonderful place. I loved it. Here's a picture of me on our verandah.

That's the sea behind me and Zanzibar is so close that I could smell the cloves and cinnamon from where I was sitting when the wind direction was right. Julius Nyerere was our next door neighbour. My father was by then Chief Justice and oversaw the handing over of power at Independence. FREEDOM was the slogan of the day: UHURU!We used to sing a song to a calypso kind of tune:

"Uhuru, uhuru, this is what we're going to do:

No more work and no more tax,

We'll sit in the sun and just relax!"

I did a few Saturday jobs while I was there on my summer holidays. I led guided tours in French to the jute factory and other local sights for tourists on the cruises stopping in Dar-es-salaam, and was a bit offended to be told I had a Belgian accent. I also read some poetry on the radio to help students up country who were studying for British Ordinary Level School Certificate. One of the poems was Balder Dead by Matthew Arnold.

I've not been back to Africa since 1962. It's changed enormously since then, of course, but these are some of my own memories. I hope very much that everyone who buys A WISP OF WISDOM will enjoy the stories written by me and my co-contributors.

St Anne, with her daughter the Virgin Mary

and grandson, Jesus.

There’s been much discussion recently about whether certain expensive treatments sold by some private fertility treatment centres actually work. For centuries, women desperate to conceive have tried many different methods of getting pregnant, particularly on this day of the year – 8th December– because this was considered by the Medieval Church to be the day when a woman who wanted a baby was most likely to conceive.

8th December was the Feast Day on which the Church celebrated St Anne’s conception of her daughter, the Virgin Mary. Therefore, a woman praying at one of the important shrines to Mary, such as Rayne, near Braintree in Essex, stood a good chance of becoming pregnant.

But the 8th December was also the feast day of a 6th Century saint, St Budoc and his conception proved not quite as happy for his mother, Azenor. According to legend when she revealed that she was pregnant her husband accused her of adultery, stuffed her in barrel and threw it into the English Channel. Azenor gave birth to Budoc whilst floating in the sea, and the barrel containing mother and babe was eventually washed ashore in Ireland where Azenor provided for her son, the future saint, by becoming laundress at Beau Port monastery, near Waterford.

In the Medieval and Tudor period the inability of a noble woman to give her husband an heir could, as we know, result in him divorcing her, incarcerating her in a nunnery or even finding a way of killing her, so women of all classes often resorted to drastic methods to conceive.

In fishing communities, women were advised by their mothers to make love when the tide was coming in as that would wash a baby into the womb.

The powerful mandrake with the mad and dying dog

which had been used to pull it from the earth.

It was also a long-held belief that if a woman was having trouble conceiving, a friend should give her parsley seeds to plant. As the parsley grew, a child would grow inside her. Since parsley is very slow to germinate – ‘the seeds go down to the devil seven times before green rises above the earth’ – this may have been simply a way of helping the woman to ‘relax and give it time.’ However, on no account was the woman to eat the parsley as they also believed if it was eaten three times a day it would produce an abortion. Another widely used herb, for those who could afford it, was the very costly mandrake root which is mentioned as an aid to fertility as far back as the Book of Genesis.

Since ancient times

fish have been associated with fertility. The salmon was a symbol of a woman's sexual organs. One medieval recipe for getting pregnant was to take a fish that had been found inside another fish and fry it with a hare’s liver until both were dried. Grind to powder with flour and drink in water. The hare was linked to the ancient goddesses of fertility, so many fertility remedies involved consuming parts of a hare, including drinking powders made from its dried skin or stomach. If the woman wanted to conceive a boy she should drink a powder made from “hare’s eggs” – the testicles of a male hare – before making love.

Some fertility aids sound decidedly unhygienic today. One calls for a woman to insert the brains of a male and female bird into her ‘womb’ before sleeping with her husband. Another to smear the fat and brains of a dove on her ‘privy parts’ for three days, or the brains and blood of a bat. One ‘cure’ was for a woman to sit or lie above a pot in which the lungs and liver of sheep were boiling in wine, so that the fumes entered her womb. Only when this had thoroughly ‘warmed her’, should her husband lie with her, and then only in a warm and draught-free room.

Women could buy amulets of herbs or charms from cunning women or they could make one themselves from a hen’s egg containing a live chick. The whole thing was burned and the ashes tied in bag bound with green and white thread and hung round the neck.

A number of communities also had stone-keepers. There were many sites which, from ancient times, had been places where women would make offerings to the old gods or spirits to help them conceive, these included figures of men and animals carved into the hillside, certain standing stones, some rocking stones and springs such as The Well of Fertility (Tobat an Torraidh) on the Isle of Sky, to which cattle were driven to drink to help them conceive and which women used for the same purpose. Many of these ancient pagan sites were destroyed or taken over by the Church during the medieval period, but small stones were carried away from these places and handed down through the generations to the stone-keepers.

Photographer: Lisa Jarvis. 'The Maiden Stone, Traprain Law.'

Legend has it that if a woman walks naked through

the gap she will conceive.

If a woman wanted to conceive she went to the stone-keeper who allowed her to hold the stone and the spirit of the place from which the stone had been taken was believed to call a child into her womb. Even today, there is a male stone-keeper in Lincolnshire who has a stone which has been used for generations and is said to have originally come from Cahir, County Limerick, Ireland. Money never changed hand for this service, but the woman was usually required to leave some kind of offering which was personal to her such as a rag from a favourite dress.

Up until 1920’s the pillars of Saint Paul’s Cathedral, London were believed to have been hewn from stone taken from an ancient fertility site and were regularly embraced by women who wanted to conceive, as was a granite block on a hill in Glenavon, Grampian.

Milking a reindeer.

Drinking milk of various animals or drying it and using it a pessary was also recommended by many medieval physicians because of the obvious link between lactation and pregnancy. Donkey milk, horse, deer and bear milk were among those thought be most effective in aiding conception. I wonder who volunteered to milk the bears!

But Christmas will soon be upon us with its bunches of mistletoe which have long been associated with fertility. A medieval woman who wanted to conceive would tie a sprig close to her belly or around her arm, so be very careful where you put your mistletoe this festive season!

Irving sighed and glanced at the glowing red numbers of the atomic clock as he poured himself another cup of coffee. It was only 2 am, he had another three hours of monitor duty. As he tasted the coffee, he grimaced and forced himself to swallow, despite the involuntary contraction of his throat. It was the only way he could get his eyes to stay open at this hour.

The door slid open and Steve entered, looking as if he hadn't slept for a week.

'Check the monitor, Irv,' he sighed. 'The satellite might be transmitting early.'

'Fat chance,' growled Irving, but he moved over to the screen and, collapsing into the yellow chair, reached forward and pressed a red bar on the right of the screen.

The grey of the screen melted into blobs of twitching colour and Irving was suddenly sitting upright and wide awake.

'Hey, we're getting something. The satellite was early!' He turned a black dial and the picture jumped into focus.

Five minutes later, when Steve found his voice, he gasped. 'It's unbelievable! A planet thirty-two light years away having technology so similar to ours!'

'We're only seeing their roads, Steve. The similarity may end there.'

'But look! That car looks almost exactly like antiques I've seen in films. If the trees weren't that weird colour I'd think the satellite had landed outside.'

'I wish one of them would get out of his car. I want to see if they look like us.' Irving leaned forward.

'Can you pull it in any closer?' Steve asked.

'I think so.' Irving adjusted some dials and the picture moved in.

'Look, that car is stopping!' shouted Steve.

'I see it! I see it!' Irving twisted a dial and the picture shifted to the motionless car.

The occupant emerged. Irving and Steve stared hypnotised for a few seconds and then Steven gasped, 'Oh, my God!' and averted his eyes.

Even Irving, with a scientist's cold detachment and intense curiosity could not help but be slightly sickened by the organism which was examining the engine of its car.

'I never thought anything could be so horrible,' whispered Steve hoarsely as he closed his eyes to blot out the memory of the thing.

'Get hold of yourself! Go get the others,' Irving said, calling upon all his will power to keep his eyes fixed on the screen.

'Right away,' gasped Steve, thankful for the chance to escape.

As Steve slithered out of the room, Irving reached out a slimy, clear yellow tentacle and raised his coffee to his beak. Thank God, he thought, I'll never get the chance to go to Earth.

How does this short story qualify for The History Girls blog? It's an historic document, written when I was 16 years old... over forty years ago! I found it while going through some papers last week. To me, the most surprising thing is how little my style has changed. I have always likes Sci-Fi and when I wrote this I was heavily influenced by Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Mr Glendening, my inspirational English teacher at Gunn High in Palo Alto, gave me a generous A- and astutely commented 'The idea is not original, but it is well done.'

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL HISTORY GIRLS, BOYS & ALIENS!

This post is a companion piece to mine of November 10th, about the grand ceremony of confecting Venetian Treacle.

This post looks at what went inside this Venetian drug that captivated the imaginations of sick people from the old world to the new.

The name teriaca derives from the Greek therion, used to describe vipers or poisonous animals in general. It was celebrated in a poem by Nicander of Colophon in the second century BC. Originally it was used to treat bites from venomous animals but later it came to be used as antidote to all kinds of poisoning.

Of the antidotes used in antiquity the most noted was a theriaca variant - mithridatum, which was composed by the doctor of Mithridates VI, king of Pontus, who, constantly in fear of being poisoned, used it every day in small immunizing doses, after testing it on prisoners.

t was said that the recipe was uncovered in Pompeii in a box belonging to the king and from that we get the old name of the electuary of mithridatum.

The Testa d'Oro, or Golden Head apothecary in Venice. Faintly,
in the painting under the window,
are the old names for teriaca

It was Andromachus the Elder, the doctor of Nero, who perfected the recipe, adding the flesh of vipers to improve its efficacy. By this time the number of ingredients was up to 60.

And so was born teriaca magna or teriaca di Andromaco, as it would be known in Venice.

The recipe was further refined by Crito, the doctor of Trajan.

Galen wrote a treatise about it.

With the crusades came more trade with the Orient, and Venetian merchants introduced numerous medical preparations into Italy, among them teriaca.

It arrived in London in mediaeval times of Mediterranean galleys imported first under the supervision of the Worshipful Society of Grocers who named it “Venetian Treacle.” This, I suggest, is because it had undergone the “Venice effect” of adapting and sexing up with theatre and appeal to the imagination plus exquisite packaging.

The Venetians prepared it as an electuary, a thick syrupy liquid medicine, usually licked from a spoon.

Teriaca was the sovereign remedy for an infinite number of illnesses, from abdominal colic to malign fevers, from migraine to insomnia, from angina to the bites of vipers and dogs, from hearing loss to coughs. It was also used to cure madness, to reawaken sexual appetite, to bring vigour back to a body that was weak, and to protect people from leprosy and plague.

Teriaca was administered in various ways and quantities depending on the illness.

For fevers, it was used with wine mixed with honey; distilled water was the vehicle when it was used as a stimulant.

For teriaca to have the maximum efficacy the whole body had to be completely purged before it was taken.

Such was the Venetian faith in the efficacy of teriaca that every family, even the poorest, kept some, almost as a talisman, to safeguard themselves from all the ills that beset mankind.

In fact, those that kept old teriaca boasted that it was the strongest and best, because it was supposed to be left to ferment for a while. It was thought that teriaca wasn’t usable until six months – some even said six years – after it was made.

The composition of teriaca/mithridatum could vary from 54 to 70 ingredients, here in Italian and

here in English.

ingredients for teriaca in their 8 classes

Roots: Iris, Balsamorhiza deltoidea, Potentilla reptans (creeping cinquefoil), Rheum rhabarbarum (garden rhubarb), Zingiber officinale, Angustifolia odorata, Gentiana, Meum athamanticum (spignel), Valeriana, Corydalis cava (hollowroot), glycyrrhiza

Stems and barks: Cinnamomum zeylanicum (cinnamon), Cinnamomum aromaticum (cassia)

Leaves: Teucrium scordium (water germander), Fraxinus excelsior, Clinopodium calamintha (lesser calamint), Marrubium vulgare (white or common horehound), Cymbopogon citratus (West-Indian lemongrass), Teucrium chamaedrys (wall germander), Cupressasae, Laurus nobilis (bay laurel), Polium montanum, Cytinus hypocistis

Flowers: Rosa, Crocus sativus, Lavandula stoechas (French lavender), Lavandula angustifolia (common or English lavender), Centaurea minoris

Fruits and seeds: Brassica napus (rapeseed), Petroselinum (parsley), Nigella sativa, Pimpinella anisum (anise), Elettaria cardamomum, Foeniculum vulgare (fennel), Hypericum perforatum (St. John's wort), seseli, thlaspi, Daucus carota (carrot), Piper nigrum (black pepper), Piper longum (long pepper), Juniperus (juniper), Syzygium aromaticum (clove), Canary Island wine, Agaricus

Gums, oils and resins: Acaciae (acacia), Styrax benzoin, Gummi arabicum, Sagapeni (wax of an unknown tree, possibly some kind of Ferula), Gummi Opopanax chironium, Gummi Ferula foetida, Commiphora (a tree from which myrrh is derived), incense, Turpentine from Cyprus, oil from Myristica fragans (nutmeg), Papaver somniverum (opium poppy)

Animal parts and products: Castoreum, Trochisci Viperarum, Narbonne white honey

Mineral substances: Boli armen . verae, Chalciditis (copper-containing substance), Dead sea bitumen

The ingredient that was always included was the flesh of vipers, and this too had its special methods of preparation.

They could only use non-pregnant females, which had to be caught in the Euganean hills in the spring some weeks after coming out of hibernation – not in the summer, otherwise they wouldn’t hold the antidote and would provoke excessive thirsts. Vipers caught before hibernation were too fatty.Once caught, they had to be dried and fermented to a precise point.The vipers were gutted; the heads and tails removed. Then the flesh was boiled in spring water salted & perfumed with dill, then worked into a paste with dry bread and then finally cut up and shaped by hand into little balls that were left to dry in the shade.

As a consequence of the great production of teriaca in Venice
the vipers of the Euganean hills became extinct, so the Venetian apothecaries were forced to buy them from the hills of Vicenza, Verona and later from Friuli. Finally the spezieri had to take to breeding them in tanks.

Here is a teriaca jar – a lead sample jar -
The lid is inscribed ‘TERIACA FINA ALLA TESTA DORO IN VENET’,

which translates as ‘At the sign of the Golden Head in Venice’ –

The big question - Was teriaca any use? I suggest that it was an excellent stimulant and a great boon to any suggestable patient who wanted to believe in it.

Meanwhile, it conforms in every other way to the perfect definition of a quack product – a cure all of exotic provenance, and very expensive.

This weekend I’m making mincemeat. As I scoured the Internet for a suitably simple recipe, I wondered about the history of mince pies and just how far back their association with Christmas goes.

I’m fascinated by receipt books of the 17th century. These were essentially compilations of home remedies, housekeeping and cookery tips, recorded by women (and sometimes men) as 'how to' guides, intended to be passed down through the generations. Some were published. They're a treasure trove of information about domestic life. I suspected they might have a thing or two to say about mince pies. As usual, I ended up down a research rabbit hole.

But before we get to the 17th century, let’s rewind.

The Forme of Cury © University of Manchester Image Library

One of the oldest cookbooks in the world is the Forme of Cury– a late 14th century manuscript detailing recipes from ‘the master cooks of King Richard II’ (and written about by fellow HG, Catherine Hokin here). In it there is a recipe for Tart of Flesh, which contains minced pork, lard and cheese, sweetened with figs, raisins, wine, honey, pine kernels and spices. This is the earliest reference I can find to a pie made with meat and sweetened with dried fruit and spices – an extravagant dish, surely meant to be eaten at times of celebration. It seems that didn’t change much over the ensuing centuries.

It's often said that mince pies were originally made in an oval or square shape, to represent Christ's crib, but food historian, Ivan Day, says there is no evidence to back this up. Instead, pies were often made and presented in intricate shapes and patterns. Several documents give instructions and template designs. The association with Christmas may well have arisen simply because they were a luxury item - a symbol of wealth and prosperity, associated with the feasting and revels of the festive season, particularly Twelfth Night.

17th century mince pie designs. Image © The Welcome Library

In Elinor Fettiplace’s Receipt Book, compiled in the early 17th century, she details a mincemeat recipe including “equal parts of minced cooked mutton, beef suet, currants and raisins with ginger, mace, nutmeg, cinnamon, orange rind, salt and a tiny quantity of sugar.” Gervase Markham, famous for his book, The English Huswife, first published in 1615, saw fit to include a very similar recipe:

'Take a Legge of Mutton, and cut the best of the flesh from the bone, and parboyl it well then put to it three pound of the best Mutton suet & shred it very small; then spread it abroad, and fashion it with Salt Cloves and Mace: then put in good store of Currants, great Raisins and Prunes clean washed and picked a few Dates sliced, and some Orenge-pils sliced; then being all well mixt together, put it into a coffin, or into divers coffins, and so bake them and when they are served up, open the lids and strow store of Sugar on the top of the meat and upon the lid. And in this sort you may also bake Beef or Veal, onely the Beef would not be parboyld, and the Veal will ask a double quantity of Suet.'

By the way, whilst it’s true that mince pies were associated with Christmas feasting, it’s a myth that Oliver Cromwell made them illegal. There is no mention of mince pies in the various acts and ordinances concerning the celebration of Christmas that were passed during the years of the Commonwealth and Protectorate (see my article about Cromwell and Christmas over on H for History for more info on that). Particularly zealous Puritans might have troubled themselves over the consumption of foods traditionally linked with Christmas – a celebration that had the whiff of Popery about it. This was made much of in the satirical literature of the time, such as in this piece by Royalist poet, John Taylor.

There were lately some over-curious, hot zealous Brethren, who with a superbian predominance did doe what they could to keep Christmas day out of England; they did in divers places Preach Me for dead in Funerall Sermons, and labour’d tooth and nail to bury me alive in the grave of oblivion; they were of opinions, that from the 24. of December at night, till the 7. of January following, that Plumb-Pottage was meer Popery, that a Coller of Brawn was an obhomination, that Roast Beef was Antichristian, that Mince-Pies were Reliques of the Whore of Babylon, and a Goose, aTurkey, or a Capon, were marks of the Beast.
Christmas In and Out (1652)

Mince pies were eaten at other times of year too. Samuel Pepys ate them to celebrate a friend’s wedding in January 1662 (perhaps they were leftovers?) and there are plentiful mentions of them in contemporary literature without any reference to Christmas at all.

Throughout the 18th century, mince pies started to get sweeter, due to the import of cheap sugar from the plantations of the burgeoning British Empire. Recipes in Edward Kidder's Pastry and Cookery (1720) and Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery (1747), both require 1lb sugar – a lot more than Elinor Fettiplace’s ‘tiny quantity’. And by this time, pies had changed shape. The intricate constructions that were a hangover from the Tudor table were abandoned for the circular form we’d recognise today.

Edward Kidder's Minc'd Pyes.

By the 19th century it was still usual for mince pies to include meat. Roast beef was apparently the choice of Queen Victoria’s famous cook Charles Francatelli. His Mincemeat à la Royale also included a liberal dousing of festive booze:

To equal proportions of roast-beef:, raisins, currants, suet, candied citron, orange, lemon, spices and sugar, add a proportionate weight of stewed pears and preserved ginger, the grated rind of three dozen oranges and lemons, and also their juice, one bottle of old rum, one bottle of brandy, and two of old port.

There are clues that the amount of meat was being reduced by this time. Another celebrity chef, Mrs Beeton, included two recipes for mincemeat in the first edition of Mrs Beeton’s Household Management (1861). The first, for "excellent mincemeat" is meat-free, while a second includes 1lb of beef – that might sound a lot to our ears but it was proportionately less than we see in most 17th century versions.

So when did we lose the meat?

It’s hard to say but it’s likely that as the 19th century progressed and sugar became cheaper and widely available, tastes changed. By the 20th century, the only trace left was the suet still used today.

So, if you fancy impressing your nearest and dearest with something historical this Christmas, you could have a go at the BBC’s Victorian Mincemeat recipe and sample mince pies just as Queen Victoria herself would have done. Personally, I’d take a leaf out of Francatelli’s book, and go heavy on the port.

image @Mermaid Photography, Wikicommons

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In the midst of all the Halloween madness around crazed-clown sightings (surely a PR stunt for the forthcoming Stephen King movie) and poor-taste celebrity costumes, my eye was caught this year by a request from Historic England for help with searching out some rather specialist graffiti. The patterns they are looking for date from between the the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, can be found on both homes and churches and may be marks made by the builders or occupants to deter witches.

The Norfolk and Suffolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

We are a superstitious lot when it comes to guarding home and hearth.These marks (known as apotropaic from the Greek word for turning evil spirits away) are part of a long tradition of charms and curses stretching across cultures and centuries designed to keep homes and places of religious significance safe. The Japanese ofuda, charms written on paper and blessed at a Shinto shrine, date back to at least the seventeenth century Edo period. A nazar, a blue and white teardrop-shaped amulet, is a common sight outside homes across Turkey and Greece and is a legacy of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Chinese door gods, or menshen, have been displayed on the entrances to temples and homes since the pre-AD Han Dynasty and any self-respecting house in Ancient Egypt would be guarded by the goddess Bast, depicted as a black cat.

Daisy Wheels in Stratford, Nicholas Molyneau

Apotropaic witch marks seems to be an English phenomenon and Historic England's treasure hunt request is directed particularly at secular buildings: although witch marks have been discovered on homes, these have, to date, been far less catalogued than those discovered at churches. So where do you look and what are you looking for if you decide to try and wean the teenagers of hunting for Pokemon? Witch marks of the type Historic England are hoping to catalogue are usually concentrated around entrance points such as doors, fireplaces and windows which are deemed as vulnerable to malevolent incursions. Marks can be in the shape of pentacles (sometimes lying on top of demons), inter-twined Vs and Ms for the Virgin Mary or, most commonly, compass-drawn hexfoils or 'daisy-wheels'. Whatever the shape, they do appear to share the characteristic of being formed from endless lines: apparently demons follow the lines and then get trapped, a plot device which a lot of films seem to have over-looked. Sites where marks have been found include Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford, in roof beams at the Tower of London and carved into the timbers of a room prepared for a visit by King James I (a man obsessed with witches to an unhealthy degree) at Knole House in Kent.

The scratchings are certainly intriguing although their association with deliberate attempts to ward off evil spirits is not a given: they could simply be marks made by masons to show how and where stones or timbers should be fitted or the product of apprentices learning the geometry needed for their craft. Perhaps, as with many superstitions, they started as one thing and became another. Whatever the truth of these marks, a belief has grown up around them that they exist as a protective measure, a belief it is not hard to understand in the context of communities living in genuine fear of witchcraft and in homes far darker than anything we can imagine in these days of instant light.

The urge to guard against danger or ill-luck is part of the fabric of our buildings and some superstitions of the past still linger. Few of us, for example, would raise an eyebrow at a horseshoe nailed above a door, even if we no longer believe iron has the power to repel witches. Niels Bohr, the Danish scientist who basically sorted out quantum physics for the rest of us, had one on his house and, when asked if he believed it brought luck allegedly replied: of course not but I have been reliably informed it will bring me luck whether I believe it or not. It's a line of thinking many are probably still happy to follow, although I imagine most would draw the line at a horseshoe rather than employing the full range of charms available to our ancestors.

Witch Bottle, Portable Antiquities Scheme

A fear of magic implies a belief in its power. While witch marks and horseshoes are visible signs that a house is protected, some of the other methods used were far more secretive, perhaps because they had 'magic' in their creation. Repelling a witch is one thing, to be accused of being one yourself in the doing would be rather unfortunate. The stoppered vessels known as witch bottles for example, which have been discovered bricked inside walls particularly in houses in East Anglia, could be classed as a form of magic fly trap. The bottles were intended to trap the witch who threatened the home-owner and contained mixtures of pins (to catch the evil), red wine (to drown it) and rosemary (to cleanse it away). If the identity of the witch was known, adding a personal touch, such as their urine or finger parings, made the magic doubly strong. Other, perhaps less dangerous, charms included fashioning the lintels over windows and doors from rowan wood and concealing shoes in the rafters and the hearth - this latter superstition apparently stemmed from the story of a priest in the thirteenth century who once trapped the devil in a boot. For the finishing touch, a mummified cat could be placed in the chimney breast - possibly an inversion of witchcraft as it uses the traditional witch's familiar to repel the danger.

Inverted name - Norfolk Medieval Graffiti Survey

Protection is one thing but sometimes a stronger response to danger was required and charms gave way to curses. Examples of curses, essentially an inversion of magic/evil, have also been found in and around both church and domestic buildings. Curses which may be intended to direct the evil back at its perpetrator rather than merely block it do not need to be complex: witch marks have been discovered which are, apparently deliberately, incomplete, for example with a missing petal. Some curses, however, are very specifically directed: Roman-style curses in which the targeted person's name and the details of the damage to be inflicted have been found on church walls, including at Norwich Cathedral. The writing is corrupted, being inverted with the letters jumbled, hence the assumption that these are curses.

Many of us feel like we are currently living in dark days. Whatever the truth of these marks, and no matter how difficult it is to really 'read' their intentions, they offer a fascinating insight into a world where fear of external dangers was just as real and the need to guard against them perhaps no different to our gated communities and lives lived under the shadow of CCTV. If this has wetted your appetite, Matthew Champion's wonderful book Medieval Graffiti: The Lost Voices of England's Churches is a really good read.

Happy hunting...

'Some years ago the late Miss Stewart Mackenzie of Brahan,
'The Drover's Dogs' by Susan Price. Artwork by D Simpson
Ross-shire, informed a friend that in the course of journeys by coach in the late autumn from Brahan to the South during her childhood about the year 1840 she used frequently to see collie dogs making their way north unaccompanied. On inquiring of her parents why these dogs were alone, [she] was informed that these were dogs belonging to drovers who had taken cattle to England and that when the droving was finished the drovers returned by boat to Scotland. To save the trouble and expense of their transport, the dogs were turned loose to find their own way north. It was explained that the dogs followed the route taken on the southward journey being fed at Inns or farms where the drove had ‘stanced’ and that in the following year when the drovers were again on the way south, they paid for the food given to the dogs...’

It was this quote from A. R. B. Haldane’s ‘The Drove Roads Of Scotland,’ which gave me the idea for ‘The Drover’s Dogs.’ I first read Haldane something like ten years before I started writing it. Those dogs spent all those years prowling around my head, trying to sniff out a story.

I’ve often been struck by how dogs distinguish between human adults and children, even though the child may be much bigger than the dog. I once knew a large Staffordshire bull-terrier who very clearly understood that I was a junior member of the family and took up a very protective attitude towards me. I’ve been told of collies who appoint themselves protectors of children at family gatherings, rounding them up and herding them together. They don’t attempt to herd the adults: only the children.

So I began thinking of a child in trouble, who runs away and is adopted and protected by the drover’s dogs. At first, I planned on the boy being an escaped factory ‘apprentice.’ These were child-slaves in all but name, who were bought from workhouses on the pretence that the money paid was to indenture them to a trade. This was a corruption of the long and honourable tradition of apprenticeships. The factory ‘apprentices’ were taught no skill except how to operate unguarded machinery, were badly-fed and clothed and, at night, were locked into the factory sheds where they slept on the floor.

There were various reasons why this didn't work for the book I wanted to write. The dates didn't fit. Before the factory system was well underway, the droving trade was dying. Also, I wanted my drove-roads to be in Scotland and most of the factories which used children as slave-labour were a long way from Scotland. My runaway boy would have had to run a hundred and fifty miles or more before he met my drove dogs.

Then my Scots partner, told me about the ‘bondagers.’ These were farm-labourers who were ‘bonded’ to a farmer and in Scotland, this system survived into the early years of the 20th Century. They often wore a distinctive costume — especially the women — which distinguished them. It seems, like many other professional costumes in the UK, to date from the 17th Century.

For many centuries, in all parts of the UK, farm-labourers went to Hiring Fairs, and stood in a line, offering themselves for hire to farmers, who chose a likely looking man, or girl, and came to a deal with them about board and wages. The term of hire usually lasted for a year, from May to May, and the labourer might be provided with lodgings and food. Even clothing, or cloth to make it, might be included.

Bondagers by John Dougall

In the North of England, and in Scotland, this system took on its own nature. A farmer would often hire a ‘hind’ or ploughman with the expectation that the hind’s family would supply additional labour at no extra cost to the farmer. (In the same way, fishermen’s wives and daughters were expected to work day after day at the stinking, dirty job of cleaning fish without being paid themselves.) If a hind’s children were too young to work and his wife unwilling or unable, then a hind would often hire people from outside his family, to fulfil his obligations to the farmer he worked for.

In theory, an unhappy farm-worker could leave his or her place and find other work. But in practice, it wasn’t so simple. There was no union, and pay was often desperately low. If you left one place, you couldn’t be sure of finding a better one — and risked earning a reputation for being unreliable, so no one else would hire you.

Also, under the system in the North of Britain, if a whole family was hired as a unit, then your sense of loyalty to your family was brought into play. If a teenage son or daughter left, this might result in their parents and younger siblings being turned out of work — perhaps even out of their tied cottage. Younger children had little choice if their parents set them to work.

My partner told me of an account he’d read, by an elderly man recounting his childhood. He’d been ‘bonded’ to a farmer who mistreated him, fed him badly and worked him beyond his strength. At night he had to sleep in a cold, damp shed, on a damp mattress through which thistles grew.

He'd escaped this by joining the army when World War I broke out. All his fellow recruits complained bitterly about the terrible army food, the stark barracks, the uncomfortable beds and coarse uniforms — but the bondager-boy couldn’t remember ever being so well housed, clothed and fed. He thought all his birthdays had come at once.

It was this boy I bore in mind when I invented Sandy Longmuir, the hero of The Drover’s Dogs who, at ten years of age, is bonded to a farmer until he’s twenty-one. “I remember the day my mother sold me very well,” Sandy says. He doesn’t appreciate his mother’s desperation and is heart-broken when he runs back home to her, and she makes him return to the farm. “Thomson paid us good money, and that money is spent. You’ll go back.”

When Sandy cries out that, if she makes him go back, he will never love her or speak to her again, she replies, “I will bear that burden along with all the others.”

So Sandy returns to the farm and is beaten for running away. After that, he decides that he cannot bear this life for another eleven years and, despite believing that he will be hung for stealing himself if he’s caught, he waits for a dark night and runs away.

Fearing pursuit, he walks himself into exhaustion and finally lies down and sleeps beside the road.

I lay on the grassy bank beside the drove road, locked up tight in sleep. I was jerked awake to darkness and cold, my ears filled with a wet snorting and snuffling.

Above me, outlined against the night sky, were two pointed ears. Something panted, and dripped water on me.

My head filled with monsters – things from the bottom of lochs, dragging themselves ashore, stinking of mud, to sink their fangs into me…A wet nose shoved under my chin, and whiskers prickled me. A hot tongue slathered across my cheek. I was about to be eaten! Then the monster said, “Rrroof!” And I laughed. I forgot all about monsters. I forgot about being cold, damp and by myself in the dark at the side of a road. Or, at least, I minded those things less – because I knew I had been woken by a dog, and a friendly dog at that.

Sandy realises that he has fallen in with drovers’ dogs on their way home, and decides that he will follow them to wherever they’re going, since he has nowhere in particular to go. He fancies himself a man in charge of two dogs — but soon discovers that it’s the dogs who are in charge.

I don’t think those dogs ever mistook me for their master. They were good herd-dogs and I think they knew exactly what I was — a little calf, lost from the herd. A lost little pup wandering loose. They knew that what they had to do was take me in charge, and herd me along, and watch over me, until they had brought me somewhere safe.

So I’d engineered the meeting of boy and dogs — now all I had to do was discover where they were going, and get them there ‘over Scotland’s lochs and mountains.’

I hope to tell of that, and more of the droving trade, in another blog.

Susan Price is the Carnegie Medal winning author of The Ghost Drum, and the Guardian Prize winning author of The Sterkarm Handshake.

The Drover's Dogs is the first of her books to be a self-published original.

The long-awaited third book in her Sterkarm

trilogy, Sterkarm Tryst,is now available for pre-order at Amazon.

Thanks to Susan Price for stepping in with a reserve post as Antonia Senior is dealing with illness in the family.

It's that time of year again, so I'm going to take the stress out of your Christmas shopping chaos and suggest you find everything at your local bookshop. After all the pleasure of a book lasts a lifetime, unlike that of a comedy apron or a scented candle. Here are my recommendations for the stockings of all kinds of book lovers:

FOR LITERARY ECO-WARRIERS

For those undaunted by doorstep sized novels, then Annie Proulx's BARKSKINS is the choice. Spanning more than three hundred years and depicting numerous generations of characters it tells the story of the sacrifice of the world's forests in the name of progress.

FOR POLITICOS

For clever friends who prefer political non-fiction then you can't go wrong with BLOOD AND SAND, the latest book from historian, Alex Von Tunzelman, depicting the sixteen days in 1956 that pushed the world to the brink of a nuclear conflict with crises in Hungary and Suez.

FOR CRIME ADDICTS

For lovers of crime fiction series there's Antonia Hodgson's DEATH AT FOUNTAIN'S ABBEY, set in 1728, it follows Jack Hawkins to Yorkshire on a mission to uncover a murder; or MJ Carter's THE DEVIL'S FEAST, set in 1842, in which Captain William Avery must uncover a horrible death at The Reform Club. Both are the third books in their series, so if you were feeling generous you might want to offer all three.

FOR SPIES AND STRONG WOMEN

For those who like novels about strong women there's Katherine Webb's 1950s set, THE ENGLISH GIRL, about a woman who longs to escape the rigid boundaries of her life and marriage but finds more than she'd bargained for on a desert adventure. Or for a less exotic setting but equally strong women is Elizabeth Buchan's THE NEW MRS CLIFTON, set in London in the wake of WW2, when a brother, to his sisters' dismay, returns from the war with a German bride.

FOR WW2 BUFFS

These two gripping novels tell of soldiers devastated by their experiences war. Jason Hewitt's DEVASTATION ROAD follows a broken English soldier trying to find his way home in the dying days of the war. William Ryan's THE CONSTANT SOLDIER offers another perspective depicting a German soldier, badly injured who returns home to find his eyes are opened about the Nazis who have taken over his village.

FOR SECRET GOTHICS

For those with a yearning for dark victoriana Anna Mazzola's debut THE UNSEEING tells of a woman who is about to hang for a gruesome murder but there's more to her story than meets the eye. Your could offer it alongside Waterstone's pick, Sarah Perry's acclaimed victorian gothic novel THE ESSEX SERPENT.

FOR PEPYS PEOPLE

The Stuart period is having a moment. This year marked the 350th year since London's great fire and how about Rebecca Rideal's excellent non-fiction, 1666: PLAGUE, WAR AND HELLFIRE, which gives an overview of the world-shaking events of that year. You could give it together with Andrew Taylor's novel about murder at the time of the fire THE ASHES OF LONDON

FOR FAMOUS FEMALES

Themes of fame and the female run through Katherine Clement's and Essie Fox's latest novels. Still with the Stuarts THE SILVERED HEART, tells of a notorious highway-woman during the chaos of the English Civil War. THE LAST DAYS OF LEDA GREY slips between the heatwave of 1976 and the Edwardian era to reveal the secrets of a silent movie star.

FOR TUDOR FANS

For those who have read everything there is to read about the Tudors, Sarah Gristwoods far-reaching non-fiction work, GAME OF QUEENS, contextualises the lives of the Tudors by exploring the network of powerful women throughout sixteenth century Europe. Another little-known Elizabethan and Stuart woman is the subject to (ahem – cheekiness alert) my own novel. THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER is Arbella Stuart, raised to be heir to Elizabeth I and the novel tells of her attempts to escape the life fate and politics has prescribed.

FOR WITCHES

Witchcraft or accusations of it in the Medieval period tie these novels together. Maitland's west country setting is the scene for dark happenings in THE PLAGUE CHARMER and Manda Scott's, INTO THE FIRE explodes myths about Joan of Arc in a thrilling tale of a political cover up that spans hundreds of years.

Elizabeth Fremantle's latest novel THE GIRL IN THE GLASS TOWER is published by Penguin.

This month I'm happy to introduce a guest writer who isn't a girl, but don't worry, his new book features a particularly interesting woman from history, Edgeworth Bess, harlot and consort of gaol breaker extraordinaire, Jack Sheppard. Jake Arnott is a smart and incisive writer whose previous novels include The Long Firm, He Kills Coppers and True Crime.

His new book, The Fatal Tree, covers a period particularly close to my heart and is set in a London, as usual, riven by inequality and crime. The novel is a beautiful read, rich with criminal slang, or cant, and those of us with a penchant for the 18th century will, I am sure, love it too.

So when I had the opportunity to ask Jake Arnott about his rather special new novel The Fatal Tree, I thought I would share his reply.

I found myself in the 18^th century quite by chance. I’d been asked to do a video commentary on Jack Sheppard for an exhibition on Georgian culture at the British Library. I knew something about this housebreaker and escape artist who’d become famous for breaking out of the condemned cell at Newgate, and his wicked nemesis the thief-taker Jonathan Wild. The story has been told many times, famously by John Gay in The Beggars’ Opera and I knew it via Bertolt Brecht who transforms it into The Threepenny Opera, which was a big influence on my first novel The Long Firm.

So I felt a meandering connection to the 1720s but as I did a little more research on Sheppard as ‘celebrity villain’ I was shocked by how immediate this period seemed to me. The South Sea Bubble had just burst, marking the first collapse of global capitalism and yet the gap between rich and poor just got more and more extreme. London was expanding rapidly and there was an explosion of new media. Criminal narratives were all the fashion providing much work for the Grub Street ‘hackney-scribblers’. Then there were the pamphlet ‘paper-wars’ that provided the buzz of gossip for the coffee-houses –those ‘penny-universities’ where for the price of a cup you could get access to
all the journals of the day (which seemed to me much like internet access).

Then I found Elizabeth Lyon, the notorious Edgworth Bess who, it was said, lead Jack Sheppard astray and then betrayed him to the evil thief-taker Wild. Jack’s wonderfully barbed comment that ‘a more wicked, deceitful and lascivious wretch there is not known in England’ hooked me in but as I did some research I found Bess was more than a mere Georgian femme fatale. Here was a tough woman that needed to use her wits to survive. And she helped Jack to escape from Newgate after her supposed betrayal. It seemed that it was Sheppard that forsook her in the end and I wanted to find a reason for that. So now I had a love story and a dangerous one at that. And pondering on dangerous love I re-read Rictor Norton’s excellent Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in History 1700-1830. ‘Molly-houses’ were essentially gay pubs of the time and the raid on the infamous Mother Clap’s came just after the fall of the thief-take system in 1726. The original thief-taker was himself a molly. Had he been protecting the molly-houses up until that time? I had another world to explore which again seemed modern and familiar to me.

I found a dictionary of criminal slang known as ‘flash’ that I could use to pepper the text with authentic 18th century street language. I could also draw on the bitter sharp satire and irony of the great wits of the period. High and low in that society share a marvellous gallows humour. Of course the fatal tree of the title is thieves cant for that levelling device.

There’s not much on record about Edgworth Bess -some disparaging comments from other players in the tale and her own brief testimony at her trial –but I felt her version of events was calling out to be set down. An untold story is always a gift to a novelist as was the tension of the fatal tree itself. She has lived her life in its shadow, will she escape it in the end?

The Fatal Tree is out on February 23rd next year and I would hurry along and pre order if I were you.

And that's your lot from me. I've been a History Girl for over five years and it's been a real privilege. Thanks to Mary Hoffman and all the HGs past and present for having me. And thanks to all the lovely readers who've read my ramblings and (I hope) my books.

I wish all of us a better new year than the last and plenty of good reading and writing.
Much love

Catherine

If you fancy a late Christmas present my Blade and Bone sequel to Sawbones is out now. And if you fancy a novel set in the early 18th century demi mondaine but suitable for 10+ my novel A Nest of Vipers is still available.

by Marie-Louise Jensen

I always find it fascinating to see how the movement of people around the world transports and alters dishes and customs. I'm not completely sure where the English tradition of Christmas cake comes from, though I've read various theories, including from Ancient Egypt. It's been around for a good four hundred years or more as a tradition in England. I've also read that it was banned, along with mince pies, during Cromwell's time as Lord Protector, for being too rich and indulgent.

Not being entirely English, I was never that big a fan of Christmas cake. But then 26 years ago a friend and colleague gave me a recipe when I was living in Germany and I became converted. The reason this recipe was something different, is it was an Indian recipe. Taken to India by the British during the Raj and spiced up by their Indian cooks perhaps? And from there brought back to Europe? I don't honestly know what steps led to the amalgamation of a British cake with Indian spices, but I approve! It's the spices, especially the cardamon, which makes this Anglo-Indian recipe so special. And it almost certainly has an illustrious history and thus deserves a place on this blog.

In any case, this cake, so influenced by our shared history with India, has been such a joy to me over the years that I feel it would be a crime not to share it at this season. Even though, ideally, it should have been baked three or four weeks ago. I've not had time yet this year either and have earmarked this weekend for cake baking.

Ingredients:

350g raisins
350g sultanas
350g currants
60g cut mixed peel
50g glace cherries (I always swap these out for extra nuts or raisins)
60-80g almonds, chopped
225g butter
200g sugar
250g flour
1/4 tsp salt
2 tsp ground mixed spice
4 eggs (separated)
1 1/2 tsp syrup or honey
4 dessert spoons cognac (you may want more)
grated rind of one lemon
1 tsp ground cardamon
1 tsp grated nutmeg
3/4 tsp ground cloves
1 dessert spoon vanilla essence
1 dessert spoon of almond essence
1 tsp rose water

covering: 3 tablespoons of apricot jam
marzipan

Method:

Chop the nuts and mix with fruit, drizzle with the brandy, leaving them to soak overnight, covered.
Beat together butter and sugar and then add egg yolks one at a time. Add lemon rind, spices, essences and honey. Stir in flour. Work in fruit and nuts. Beat the egg whites until stiff and then blend with the dough.
Line and grease a cake tin and place mixture into it. Bake at 130 degrees c for anything from 2.5 to 5 hours, depending on the tin and your preference for a moist or drier cake. Cover with baking parchment or foil after the first hour.
Cool completely on a baking tray and remove paper. Drizzle with more brandy and store in an airtight tin - will keep for up to a year...but probably won't get the chance.

Good thing Cromwell never heard about this one.

A couple of weeks ago, while the weather was still sharp and bright and frosty (as opposed to dim and damp and dismal, as it is now), we went down to Nether Stowey, which nestles at the foot of the Quantocks, not far from the West Somerset coastline. It's a beautiful spot. Close by is the house where William Wordsworth came to stay in 1797, Alfoxden. He came there in part to recover his equilibrium after a turbulent few years in which he first became inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution (and fell in love with a French girl, Annette Vallon, who had his child), only later to be horrified by its excesses.

A particular reason for choosing this area was that his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was living in a cottage in Nether Stowey with his wife Sara and their baby, Hartley. They were very close at this time, and were collaborating on a book of poems which they were to call Lyrical Ballads - which was to create a colossal shift in the language of poetry, and in the kinds of subjects which inspired it. The two poets wanted to move away from the elegant, mannered artificiality of the Georgian Age, in favour of something they saw as much closer to life and to nature and to a deeper reality, something fresh and new and exciting.

Alfoxden is the white house near the centre of the picture.

Alfoxden is a large white house which looks out towards the sea; Wordsworth was able to afford it because he'd recently been left a generous legacy by a friend. Coleridge's cottage, which has just been restored by the National Trust, is small and must have been very cramped for a family. After its recent refurbishment, it looks charming. But when the Coleridges first rented it, the house was suffering from damp and neglect. Samuel and Sara worked hard to make it more habitable; Sara sewed curtains and I expect they white-washed the walls; regular fires dried it out - and friends, particularly Wordsworth, dropped in regularly. The conversation must have effervesced - it was such an exciting time, with new developments in astronomy, ballooning, exploring and science: a time when there wasn't the division between art and science that there is now, a time when anything seemed possible. These men were close to the centre of it all. So was Dorothy, Wordsworth's sister. But Sara? Well, probably not so much. Sara did not,have an easy time of it. There was a story we were told at the cottage: that one morning, Sara was warming milk for the baby on the fire. She accidentally spilled some of it on Samuel's foot, scalding it so that he was unable to go on the walk he was planning with a couple of friends.

He was disappointed and cross and very sorry for himself, and he limped off outside to sit under a lime tree and gaze out in the direction his friends had gone. And according to the story, this was the starting place for his poem, The Lime-Tree Bower. It's an eloquent, passionate poem, full of awareness of loss, the passing of time and separation from friends.

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Beauties and feelings, such as would have been
Most sweet to my remembrance even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hill-top edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told
But I have to say - I feel sorry for Sara. It was hardly the end of the world. She didn't mean to spill the milk. And if he'd been helping her, instead of sitting around planning his walk with his pals, perhaps she wouldn't have been in such a fluster and it would never have happened. But that was the way it was with them: the marriage wasn't to last.

The Trust has done a brilliant job with the cottage. At the moment, it has been decorated as it might have been in Georgian times; there is a Christmas tree, but it's decorated with dried slices of orange and (perhaps?) little bunches of cinnamon sticks. (I had always thought Christmas trees were a Victorian invention, but apparently this is not so: Queen Charlotte is thought to have introduced them, in the 1780s.) There's a scent of cloves and other spices, and woodsmoke from the fire. The volunteers are dressed in clothes of the time, and they're knowledgeable and very welcoming; you're encouraged to touch things and try clothes on, to sit down at a desk and write a message with a quill pen dipped in ink - not easy! - to read from the extensive collection of books that line the walls of the reading room.

And that morning, someone sat by the fire in the tiny parlour and read some of the poems that were well-known at the time - including The Night Before Christmas, which was popular then in America. But most memorably, he read an excerpt from Coleridge's own Frost at Midnight. At his feet was a wooden cradle, and he rocked it gently with his foot. The firelight flickered on the walls, and when he began - very beautifully - to read, it was as if we were actually there, with Coleridge himself, in the middle of the night, with nothing stirring except a candle flame and the occasional mouse.

The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.

The parlour. It's much smaller than it looks in this picture.

I did English at Durham, and I remember a good many lectures on the Romantic poets and the significance of Lyrical Ballads. But I think I learned more about Coleridge and Wordsworth and what they were trying to do in one hour in Nether Stowey than I did in many hours in lecture rooms and libraries. A sense of place - such a powerful force, and here so skilfully mediated.

Afterwards, we went down to the coast at East Quantoxhead. The rock formations there are quite extraordinary: I wonder what those late 18th century visitors to Coleridge, intensely curious and observant, made of them?

Last week, meeting friends in York for lunch, I heard the clock chimes ring out from the Minster, reminding me that York, like many old cities, once resounded with the ringing of bells, which grew from the simple marking of the liturgical day to the complex change-ringing that became a popular practice after the Reformation.

Only half-heard in our noisy world, church bells can still punctuate our lives and calendars. From my Harrogate garden, I hear a variety of bells: a single bell calling out a service, joyful wedding peals or a solemn official ringing for whom or why I may never know. Soon, when the last day of December comes, I will stand on my doorstep, breathe in the cold night air and hear the church bells ringing in the New Year, a proud chorus still audible among the brisker tattoo of exploding fireworks.

How the New Year celebrations will sound in York is uncertain. A disagreement between the Minster and the Minster Society of Change-Ringers – a tale that almost has echoes of Trollope or Hardy – has resulted in this news that no bells will ring out at this ancient Minster for Christmas, or to ring the New Year in.

Bells are a beautiful sound in the imagination, but people don’t always welcome the sound of bells chiming constantly. Often there are records of newcomers and visitors protesting about historic bells ringing outside their home or hotel , even though inhabitants have lived with the sound for years and hardly notice it, though it will have seeped into their souls.

In response to an incomer’s legal complaint about the quarter-chimes at Old Saints Church, Wrington, A.N.Wilson once wrote:

“For more than 100 years, the bells have marked the quarter hours. The people of the village have absorbed the striking of the church clock into the inner music of their hearts. Anyone who has lived within the sound of such chimes knows how this happens.

On the rare occasions when I spend a night in Oxford, the keeping of the hours by the clock towers in New College, and Merton, and the great booming of Tom tolling 101(sic) times at 9pm at Christ Church are inextricably interwoven with memories and regrets and lost joys. The sound almost sends me mad, so intense are the feelings it evokes. . . .

We are a people "summoned by bells", to quote the title of John Betjeman's autobiography, and both the chiming of the hours and the complex art of bellringing are the inner music of our lives in towns and villages all over the land.”

The sound of bells rings out in several stories and poems, singing out their hidden messages. In Dorothy L Sayers “The Nine Tailors”,Lord Peter Wimsey’s knowledge of campanology solves the mystery of the jewel theft and murder. Change ringing came in after the Reformation, when the simple bell, spindle and rope of earlier centuries was gradually replaced by the new technology where the new bells were mounted on whole wheels in the bell tower, and rung with ropes from below. You can find out more about the history of bells here.

Bells, in literature, carry poignant messages. Thomas Gray’s famous elegy in an English country churchyard opens as “the curfew tolls the knell of parting day”. That curfew bell was an age-old law-and- order signal for people to return home: only an outlaw or thief would be out wandering at night. Moreover, that hour, that day, and that time itself had passed and gone.

Bells are there to warn travellers of alarms and dangers, especially at sea.

In Robert Southey’s poem (1820) Ralph the Rover, having cut free the bishop’s bell, meets his own well-deserved doom when his ship wrecks on the Inchcape Rock.

Sir Ralph the Rover tore his hair,
He curst himself in his despair;
The waves rush in on every side,
The ship is sinking beneath the tide.

But even in his dying fear,
One dreadful sound could the Rover hear;
A sound as if with the Inchcape Bell,
The Devil below was ringing his knell.

The Victorian poet Jean Ingelow, writing “High Tide off the Coast of Lincolnshire 1571,” created a fictional name for the ring change that alerted the inhabitants of on-coming danger. Although ”set” in 1571, Ingelow drew on her own knowledge of the 1815 floods at Fosdyke, Lincolnshire, where a servant girl drowned while out looking after cows.

The old mayor climb'd the belfry tower,
The ringers ran by two, by three;

"Pull, if ye never pull'd before;
Good ringers, pull your best," quoth he.
”Play uppe, play uppe, O Boston bells!
Ply all your changes, all your swells,
Play uppe, 'The Brides of Enderby.'"
  Men say it was a stolen tyde--
  The Lord that sent it, He knows all;
  But in myne ears doth still abide
  The message that the bells let fall.

Over the centuries, bells were a one sure way of sending reliable news to a great many people and, during WWII, all church bells were silenced, their chimes reserved as a warning of sea-born invasion.

When peace came, the bells rang out but often over different landscapes. Betjeman, writing his Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Station, a station bombed in 1941, described London’s “steepled forest of churches” ringing again on a Sunday:

Sunday Silence! with every street a dead street,

Alley and courtyard empty and cobbled mews,

Till “ tingle tang “ the bell of St. Mildred's Bread Street

Summoned the sermon taster to high box pews,

And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing

With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls

Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing

On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul's.

Yet, despite the bells, the poem ends with Betjeman grieving at the sight of the new brash city architecture arising out of the ashes.

It was from London, too, that the sad news came that inspired my thoughts for this post today. That most admirable blog, Spitalfields Life, (which arrives by email daily once you have signed up) had a post at the start of December about the closure of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was started in 1570. Do take time to read the post, and the interview, which you'll find here, as well as several excellent photographs of bells.

Ever since I first heard of that Whitechapel Foundry, it has formed part of that vague and oddly-made creation: my personal mind-map of London, an imagined collage of all the good and interesting things about that huge city that was once my home. Furthermore, the Whitechapel bell foundry is closing because, apparently, there is not enough commercial demand for bells in the modern world for the Foundry to stay where it has been all these years. How very sad. How very silent.

Meanwhile, back to York Minster to end with some joyous sounds:

I’d like to close my last post of 2016 by sending good wishes to all the History Girls, past and present, whose varied posts inform, amaze and inspire me every day - and to wish all History Girl readers a happy holiday. Ring out, wild bells - and good wishes for a better New Year.

Penny Dolan

It's that time of the year as Elizabeth Fremantle pointed out earlier this month. The book pages of the weekend papers are full of round ups as reviewers and writers select and present their choices from their reading over the last twelve months. We look among these mini reviews for ideas for presents or pointers to titles we might have missed. Here's some of my reading from 2016. For me, it was a year of reading seriously. A lot of non fiction, much of it historical. I often read non fiction when I'm writing - I don't want too many other voices in my head. Some of my reading comes under the (sometimes very) loose cover of 'research'- it feels like working - other books just caught my interest from those very newspaper pages, or hearing about them from the radio, or browsing the bookshop shelves.

No Woman's World was first published in 1946. Iris Carpenter was one of a band of courageous female war correspondents who covered the latter stages of the war in Europe. Carpenter arrived four days after the D-Day landings, traveled across France, was at the Huertgen Forest and the Battle of the Bulge. She went on to cover the meeting of U.S. and Russian forces and the final fall of Berlin. I've been reading quite a lot about the women reporters and photographers who reported on the Second World War. Martha Gellhorn and Lee Miller are perhaps the most famous, but there were others, like Iris Carpenter, who made a major contribution to the journalism of the Second World War.

Edmond Taylor's The Fall of Dynasties begins with Gavrilo Princip's fateful shots in Sarajevo which left Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife bleeding to death in the back of their open top car. The Archduke was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne and with his death, a dynasty, a whole way of life, began to topple. In this thoughtful and thought provoking book, Taylor covers the period from 1905 to 1922 and the collapse of four dynasties: the Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Ottoman and Romanov. Their astonishingly swift downfall was precipitated by the shots in Sarajevo and the consequent World War but the reverberations from this calamitous collapse continued to be felt throughout the Twentieth Century and on to the present day. Edmund Taylor's offers a different slant and new insights into the vexed and contentious issues surrounding the causes of the First World War and the consequent effects that the conflagration had on the world.

In The White Island Stephen Armstrong gives us a beguiling and eclectic guide to Ibiza. Part history, part guide book, it covers everything from the Carthaginians to 20th Century clubbing culture, by way of pre-war hedonists, 1950s bohemians and 1960s hippies. The island was a magnet to artists, musicians like Joni Mitchell and Pink Floyd and writers and Janet Frame. I read this book on the plane to Ibiza. It proved the perfect holiday read, not too taxing but full of fascinating snippets of information, not only telling you where to go but why you should go there. Even if you aren't planning a visit, once you've read it you'll want to go there and if you've already been, you'll want to go back!

In my local park, there is a monument to Jozef Gabčík, Jan Kubiš and the other Czech agents who undertook the suicidal mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague. It is there because during the Second World War, the Free Czech Army was billeted in my home town of Leamington Spa. The recent film, Operation Anthropoid, tells their story. Callum Macdonald's The Assassination of Reinhard Heydrich is considerably more detailed than the film but no less nailbitingly exciting.

Czech Fountain. Jepson Gardens.

A ruthless and fanatical Nazi, Heydrich was among Hitler's most trusted lieutenants. He was one of the architects of the Final Solution, chair of the Wannsee Conference. The Czech agents succeeded in carrying out the only successful assassination of a senior Nazi officer during the War but it was a suicidal mission. They were betrayed, hunted down and killed. Their action exacted terrible reprisals, including the annihilation of the village of Lidice and the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of thousands of Czech citizens. Heydrich was deeply mourned by Hitler and given a huge state funeral in Berlin. Following his death, the policies formalised at the Wannsee Conference were accelerated. The mass killings that followed came under the title: Operation Reinhard.

In his Baillie Gifford Prize winning work East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity, Human Rights lawyer Philippe Sands offers a very particular, highly unusual and deeply personal view of the Holocaust centred round the city of Lviv, now in Western Ukraine. Even the changing name of the place betrays its uncertain history, moving from German Lemberg, to Polish Lwów, Russian Lvov, to Ukrainian Lviv. Sands traces the story of his maternal grandfather's escape from a city that would see the annihilation the family left behind. He also follows the lives of two Nuremberg prosecutors, Hersch Lauterpacht and Rafael Lemkin, who were also Jewish and lost their families in Nazi held Lviv. It was through their efforts that the terms 'crimes against humanity' and 'genocide' were included in the Nuremburg judgement and came into our parlance and consciousness. Across the court from them sat the defendant, Hans Frank, Hitler's personal lawyer and Governor-General of Nazi-occupied Poland, he set up his headquarters in the castle that overlooked the city that connects them all. This clever book is utterly absorbing, part personal history, and part legal examination of the concept of International Law, the nature of genocide and crimes against humanity. By focussing on individuals and their different family histories, Sands reveals the enormity of a crime that is almost beyond comprehension. His book is both profound and profoundly moving, beginning in the court room in Nuremberg and ending in a quiet woodland glade where the remains of three thousand five hundred Jewish men, women and children still lie, some of them relatives of Sands, Lauterpacht and Lemkin, all of them victims of Frank who would hang for his crimes.

Forgotten Land, Max Egremont's fascinating history of East Prussia visits a land that is no longer on any map, although it was once powerful and thriving with an ancient and proud history, dating back to the Teutonic Knights. A deeply forested, fertile land with a long and proud military tradition, the birthplace of Immanuel Kant. Divided after the First World War, it paid the price again for Germany's defeat in the Second and the crimes committed in its name, like those exposed in East West Street. Subject to Stalin's 'terrible revenge', carved up between Poland and the USSR, its people forced into exile, it ceased to exist. Max Egremont takes a remarkable journey through landscape and memory, weaving the stories of ghosts and survivors to create a memorable and sobering meditation on the transitory nature of national and cultural identity.

Looking back over my selection, I realise that they don't comprise the cheeriest of reads. Maybe my New Year's Reading Resolution should be to lighten up in 2017!

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

This close to Christmas, and newly returned from a short break to Prague for Christmas markets and beer, I had, of course, intended to write a post about King Vaclav the Good, aka Good King Wenceslaus, the real life figure and later saint who inspired the famous Christmas carol. Vaclav was a C10th century duke of Bohemia, the area now encompassed by the Czech Republic; whose remains are interred in Prague's St Vitus's Cathedral.

Vaclav was born in 907AD, and came to power as young man of only around 20 years old. A devout Catholic, Vaclav's pagan mother and Christian grandmother fought it out behind the scenes, embodying the struggle for the hearts and minds of the Bohemian people that was raging at the time. Known during his lifetime as a fair and charitable ruler, who founded many churches and monasteries, kept Bohemia free from foreign powers and did a great deal to firmly establish the Christian faith in Bohemia, Vaclav the Good was murdered in 935 by his brother Boleslav the Bad, who then seized power. So, it goes: philanthropy, Good; fratricide, Bad. Clear?

An interesting figure, and just as interesting is the way his legend spread, his sainthood was bestowed and he was posthumously re-titled as a king. A Czech legend that a sleeping army lies beneath Mount Blanik and will awake, to be led by Vaclav, to defend Bohemia in its hour of direst need, bears obvious strong similarities to the English legend of King Arthur.

A gratuitous shot of the huge Christmas Tree in Prague's Old Town Square. A few times a day they make the lights 'dance' to Rossini's William Tell Overture - bonkers.

But whilst I was there, I found out about something even more interesting than Saint Vaclav: Prague's Old-New Synagogue; one of the oldest surviving synagogues in Europe. What a fascinating, atmospheric building. Originally called the New Shul (synagogue), it became known as the 'old-new' when others were founded in the city. It was built in the latter years of the C13th, around 1270, and remains the most important synagogue for Prague's Jewish community today.

The Old-New Synagogue

The synagogue survived various pogroms and fires throughout Prague's history. Its walls are thick; and, sadly, many of its legends reflect a history of persecution. For example, the attic is said the house the remains of a golem (an animated clay man) created and brought to life in the C16th by the famous Rabbi Loew (Judah ben Bezalel, to give him his full name), to protect the Jewish people. Another legend has it that the synagogue was protected from the several fires that swept through the ghetto by the wings of angels, manifested as doves.

The serene, atmospheric interior of the synagogue

The curtained holy arc, containing the Torah scrolls, with the 'eternal light' (ner tamid) suspended to the front

Close to the Old-New Synagogue is Prague's Jewish cemetery, another deeply affecting place. The Jewish community was granted so little space within the city that burials had to take place on top of burials, in a crowded jumble. The level of the ground was eventually built up, so that, in some places, people could be interred ten storeys deep. This must have been so hard to cope with for a community for whom the dignity and purity of the burial ritual is so important.

Graves, some dating back to Medieval times, packed cheek by jowl, with the old Jewish Ceremonial Hall in the background

The stump of an old tree, which had grown through some ancient graves, pushing the stones out of place

You can see here, quite clearly, how the ground level was raised to try to create space for people

The history of Prague's Jewish community, like that of so many in other areas, takes a deeply tragic turn in the C20th. Transported to an internment camp outside of Prague, at Terezín, many tens of thousands of Czechoslovakian Jews died during the Nazi occupation in World War II; either by being executed or from the hardships they endured. Over 150,000 other people were held at Terezín for years before being transported to death camps in occupied Poland.

Prague's second-oldest surviving synagogue, the C16th Pinkas Synagogue, now houses a museum. The names of around 78,000 Jews killed by the Nazis are inscribed inside the walls in commemoration, and there is also a deeply moving collection of drawings made by Jewish children being held at Terezín. Most of the children's names are followed by three dates: Date of birth, date of internment, date of death.

The Pinkas Synagogue in 1909, before the restoration of the Jewish Town in Prague

Though I was only in Prague for two days, and the primary purpose of the visit was to explore the Christmas markets, eat the street food (I am now worryingly addicted to sausages and pickled cabbage) and drink the mulled cider, it is a place of such visible and fascinating history, it can't fail to make an impression. And it certainly does Christmas in style!

I wish all the History Girls, and our readers a peaceful, very happy Christmas, and a wonderful 2017.

It must have seemed the perfect solution. Marry Edward, the boy heir to the throne of England to Mary, the child queen of the Scots, and you would have peace and prosperity between the two countries. It would not be the first marriage between the two royal families.

Margaret Tudor

Most recently Margaret Tudor, daughter of King Henry VII of England and sister of King Henry VIII, had married King James IV of Scotlandin 1503. This meant that Margaret Tudor was the grandmother of Mary Queen of Scots and aunt of Prince Edward, making Mary and Edward first cousins once removed, a relationship too close for marriage in the eyes of the Church. However, the Church could grant a dispensation, and there would be no trouble in gaining one from the EnglishChurch. No need to bother with the Pope, not since King Henry had severed all links with Rome.

Marie of Guise

There was just one fly in the ointment. Marie of Guise, mother of Scotland’s child queen. Marie was determinedly French, fanatically Catholic, and vituperatively anti-English. Part of the powerful French family of Guise, she was loyal not to Scotland, nor to England, but to France. She already had four French sons by a previous marriage, little Mary’s half-brothers. The Guises had their eyes fixed on a further rise to power, and Mary would be a useful pawn in the long game they were playing. She would be shipped away to France, brought up French speaking and Catholic, and married to the heir to the French – not the English – throne. In the meantime, her mother would rule Scotland and see to it that it remained Catholic and an ally of Franceagainst

England

Two mutually antagonistic plans, bound on a collision course.

Let us backtrack briefly.

James V of Scotland

The child queen Mary was born on 8 December 1542. Six days later, her father, King James V of Scotland, died of a fever, about three weeks after the Battle of Solway Moss, in which the Scots suffered a terrible defeat by the English army, a disaster which probably hastened his death. James was only 30, and his sole legitimate child was Mary. The Stuart kings had a distressing habit of dying young, leaving very young heirs. James himself had become king at under two. It made for trouble, as those around the infant monarch struggled for power.

Earl of Arran

If the infant Mary did not survive, the next heir to the Scottish throne (though somewhat distant) was the Earl of Arran, who became Regent (or Governor). At this point Arran was a Protestant and favoured an alliance with England. In the early part of 1543, he was involved in negotiations with England for this marriage of the two children, although Henry VIII did not altogether trust him and wanted him replaced. Even so, the Treaty of Greenwich, made on 1 July 1543, agreed that Mary would be married to Edward when she was ten.

Prince Edward at the time of the Rough Wooing

As early as March that year, George Douglas, brother of the Earl of Angus, warned Ralph Sadler, the English ambassador: 'if there be any motion now to take the Governor from his state, and to bring the government of this realm to the king of England, I assure you it is impossible to be done at this time. For, there is not so little a boy but that he will hurl stones against it, and the women will handle their distaffs, and the commons universally will rather die in it, yea, and many noblemen and all the clergy be fully against it.'

(If you have read Wolf Hall you will have met the young Ralph Sadler.)

Henry’s suspicions proved to be well founded. One of the most powerful men in Scotlandat the time was Cardinal Beaton, more politician than man of God (who was later, May 1546, to meet an unpleasant end at the hands of Scottish Protestants in St Andrews). In September 1543, the Earl of Arran left pro-English Edinburghsecretly, in order to meet Cardinal Beaton, whereupon he converted to Catholicism, to the pro-French party, and to support for the marriage of Mary to the Dauphin of France. Oh, and incidentally, in pure gratitude for this change of heart the French bestowed upon him the dukedom of Châtelherault.

Now the Queen Mother, the Cardinal, and the Regent were in alliance, and opposed to the strong Protestant, pro-English party, mostly based in the east of Scotland. On 20 December 1543, war was declared between Englandand Scotland, a war which was to last for seven years and came to be known as the ‘Rough Wooing’. Everything hinged on whether a marriage alliance would be made between the child Mary and one young boy (Edward of England) or the other (Francis of France).

Mary Queen of Scots age c.16

In April 1544, King Henry, outraged at the Scottish alliance with France, ordered Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford, (brother of Jane Seymour, and so the prince’s uncle) to attack and ravage Scotland. Seymourcarried out his instructions with savage enthusiasm, a measure not likely to endear the pro-French party to England.

Prince Edward c.1546

King Henry VIII died on 28 January, 1547, and his son Edward became king at the age of nine. Englandwas ruled by a body of Councillors, amongst them Seymour, who continued to wage war against Scotland. After the murder of Cardinal Beaton in 1546, the Protestant faction in the east of Scotland hoped for alliance with England, but were attacked by a French naval force, in alliance with the Earl of Arran and Marie of Guise.

The ins and outs of the struggle are too complex to detail here, but the English won a decisive victory at Pinkie Cleugh on 10 September 1547, causing panic amongst the pro-French party. And during all this fighting the child Mary was moved from one place of safety to another.

The area where I live became involved after the victory at Pinkie, when the English fleet sailed into the Tayestuary. The mouth of the Tay was guarded (and is still guarded) by BroughtyCastle. The garrison there, being Protestant and pro-English, handed over the castle without a shot being fired.

Broughty Castle

The English forces also built a fort on the hill overlooking the harbour at Broughty, yards from where I live. It must have been a fairly temporary structure, as nothing now remains of it, except the name Fort Hill. The city of Dundee, also primarily Protestant, agreed to resist Governor Arran and ally itself with England.

The man established as governor of Broughty Castle, Sir Andrew Dudley, sent word to the English government that what he needed was not more troops, but good Bibles (Tyndale’s Bible), with which to convert any remaining Catholics to the Protestant faith. What he got instead was military reinforcements, who sailed up the Tay to Perth, burning Balmerino Abbey on the southern (Fife) shore, on Christmas Day 1547. On 29 December, they seized and burned the nunnery at Elcho, taking prisoner the nuns and the girls at school there, and holding them to ransom. As both nuns and schoolgirls came from good families, this would have proved quite profitable. (The nuns later returned and rebuilt their priory.)

Inchmahome Priory

Alarmed by the English successes in the east of Scotland, the pro-French party moved four-year-old Mary west to safety at Inchmahome Priory on an island in the Lake of Mentieth, where she remained for a few months. On 7 August 1548, Mary was smuggled away from DumbartonCastle on a French ship and taken away to be reared in the French court. In 1554, Marie of Guise became Regent of Scotland in succession to the Earl of Arran, four years after the ‘Rough Wooing’ was abandoned, as now pointless.

King Edward VI c.1550

By then young King Edward was dead, on 6 July 1553, at the age of fifteen.

Francis, Dauphin of France

The French marriage went ahead, but only after Mary had secretly signed an agreement on 4 April 1558, bequeathing Scotland and her claim to the crown of England to the crown of France, should she die childless. On 24 April, she was married to Francis, Dauphin of France, at Notre Dame de Paris. She was 15, he was 14, and through this marriage became king consort of Scotland.

Henry II of France

Just over a year later, on 10 July 1559, King Henry II of France died after a jousting accident and the young couple became the rulers of both Franceand Scotland. The Guises were now in control of France, although Marie of Guise could only maintain her position in Scotlandagainst the rise of the Protestant lords by the use of French troops.

Francis (15) & Mary (16) - King & Queen of Scotland & France

The reign of the young couple in France was not to last long. Francis died on 5 December 1560 at the age of sixteen. He was succeeded by his ten-year-old brother, and Mary was now surplus to requirements. She returned to

Scotland

So what did the Rough Wooing accomplish? As for its professed aims – nothing. What it did do was help to harden the lines between Catholic and Protestant Scots. It turned the young queen pro-French and anti-English, which would have a long term effect on her life and her relationship with her cousin Elizabeth I of England.

None of those manipulating Mary’s marriage chose well, both boys dying in their mid teens. It is interesting to speculate, however. What if Mary had married Edward? By all accounts he was a highly gifted and intelligent boy. If he had lived long enough and managed to father a child before his death, how different the rest of the sixteenth century in Englandand

Scotland

would have been!

Ann Swinfen

http://www.annswinfen.com

Leo Tolstoy in 1908
Photograph by Sergey Mikhaylovich Prokudin-Gorsky

Memory is a slippery thing. At the end of my first year studying Russian at University I went on a month long trip to St Petersburg which included a trip to Moscow and a tour of some of the ancient churches that surround the city, and it was there that I first heard a women’s choir singing in an orthodox church. My memories are fractured - being ushered under low ceilings, between thick walls and seeing over the shoulders of my friends, a neon blue rucksack, a fleece with the insignia of a university rowing team on it, a room of smoke-stained icons - gold, red and brown and hearing the high, unearthly, sharpened voices of the women singing. Parishioners leant forward to kiss an icon, the air was heavy with incense, and I had for the first time a feeling of voyeuristic shame, observing a deep devotion I did not share. I can’t put those images together into a coherent narrative, but I’m sure that was the day I began to understand something about Russia.

This was in 1992, so Russia was in a state of confusion and transition. It was a time of great want and great hope, and my fellow students and I staggered around in the middle of it suffering a continual whiplash of culture shock, trying to cope with the waves of frustration and fascination with which Russia often douses naive Western visitors. We weren’t as insulated from the realities of ordinary Russian life as the newly arrived Western businessmen, bankers and lawyers but of course we were still cushioned by each other, the dollars in our pocket and the sure and certain knowledge than unless we got caught doing something really stupid, we were only a few hours away from our comfortable, stable and familiar lives in Britain.

When you start to study Russian literature, teachers tend to usher you first towards Tolstoy and for anyone who knows 19th century British and French literature, this feels like familiar ground even if the settings are different and it takes a bit of time to work out the names. Tolstoy tells you stories from above, he comments on the actions of his characters, watches them being pushed about by circumstance, history or their own nature and draws his moral lessons. You can sense Tolstoy, a great bearded sage in his peasant smock (on his country estate) handing down his moral and political wisdom - not God perhaps, but an un-jolly Santa who knows your secrets and will pass out punishments and rewards accordingly.

Fyodor Dostoevsky in 1872
by Vasily Perov

Then you encounter Dostoevsky and Dostoevsky is something rather different. The colours are over-saturated, the emotional volume turned so high it’s a scream of feedback. It’s messy and hard and it digs its claws into you. It’s like being chained to a madman on a bar crawl through the seediest parts of town, then through the drawing rooms of high society and back, once the crockery has been smashed, out into the gutter. He hauls you from one humiliation to another, one revelation to another, Mephistopheles to your Faust, and your safe word, the only safe word he allows is ‘God’. To an atheist like myself, that feels like an easy option, a throwing in of the towel, but I never doubt the sincerity of his conclusions.

When I first read him, safe in my university room, I sort of got it. I was having a fairly messy time, missing more lectures than I attended, drinking too much, the usual story, but even though I didn’t acknowledge it then, there was still a structure there. The lectures happened, dinner was served everyday, I was never hungry and I was never physically afraid, so even in that period when the colours of my own life seemed rather too bright to contemplate, I still didn’t get Dostoevsky in my gut. It took going to Russia in a time of continuing crisis for that to happen, and in particular being ushered into that church near Moscow, seeing those worshippers offering their devotions and resignation to God.

I started Russian from scratch at University, so I spent all of my year abroad there in a town about 300 miles south of Moscow. I got hungry, I got drunk, I made some close friends and sang folk songs round the dining table, exchanged toasts and listened to stories of lives lived under circumstances that seemed unendurable but which were endured. I began to get an idea of a culture which flowered in dark places, and grew strong and uncompromising in the soil of deep learning, black humour and cold winters. Some Russians talked, some prayed, and both methods seemed like valid techniques to deal with impossible times.

I haven’t been back since and when people ask me why, I often fall back on the excuse I’ve never had the time or the money to do so, but that’s not really it. I’m sure you have in your past a particular passionate all ravaging relationship that, though it caused you a great deal of pain at the time, you also recognise as being the making of you in some way. You probably still think of that person, but you don’t want to go and grab a quick coffee with them. Too complicated, too much history. For me, Russia is that lover. Popping over to Moscow for a week would be somehow a betrayal of the significance of the time I spent there. Does that sound melodramatic? Self-aggrandising? Fair enough, it’s probably both, but that’s what Russia does to you.

Philosophers, 1917 (Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov)
by Mikhail Nesterov

I found this painting on wiki art. The artist is Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov, who was born in 1862 and survived the revolution to be an honoured artist of the Soviet Union. Not that medals were a guarantee of a comfortable life in that period. He was very poor when he died of a stroke in 1942.

The two men in the painting are Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky and Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov. Both spent their philosophical energies grappling with the ideas of faith and science, Russian destiny, her intelligentsia and her people and the relationship between them. Both found some accommodation with the Bolshevik regime for a time. Florensky, on the left, was a remarkable scholar, mathematician and philosopher who ended up working on the electrification of the Russian countryside after the Bolsheviks closed the church where he was a priest, working alongside government officials while still wearing his priest’s cassock. He refused to go in exile and was arrested in 1928, and shot near St Petersburg in 1934. Bulgakov was expelled from Russia in 1922 on board the Philosopher’s Ship and died in Paris in 1944. The worldview, the opinions and policies of both men could not be further from my own, but there is something about this portrait of 1917 that transcends those differences. It it the attitude of engagement, of dedication and concentration, the nerve shredding attempt to understand rather than accept which punches through this image. It seems to me an portrait of struggle, how struggle is undertaken or understood. Nesterov apparently painted it ‘at one stroke’, without sketches or drafts. For me it is as powerful and as enlightening an image of the Russian revolution as any of the stills from Battleship Potemkin.

I also recently read a novel dealing with individuals facing revolutionary change in Russia - The Last Summer by Ricarda Huch, translated by Jamie Bulloch and published by Peirene Press. I blurbed it, in fact. Huch was a remarkable German writer and historian who was born two years after Nesterov and died five years after him in 1947.

The Last Summer was published in 1910 and like the painting, it is a small but telling study of Russia and revolution. Perhaps another reason I link them in my mind is that the novel is epistolary, consisting of the letters of a privileged Russian family from their summer estate (I imagine it looking like the landscape in the painting) caught up in the intimacies and betrayals of their own home, and in the larger violences of the time. In both works of art a character study sheds light on wider conflicts while remaining personal and particular. The novel is mix of very different voices, a clamour of them in fact, and deals with those ideas of what we accept, what we try to change, what we resist and what we sacrifice for peace or a higher cause.

This year has left me concerned that we are now caught up in the bow wave of revolutionary times, so I find myself looking at European and Russian history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in a very different light, and discovering in the art and novels models of resistance and engagement which have become relevant and immediate once more. Prayer? Struggle? Accommodation? Resistance? Perhaps all and none of the above, but in the meantime I’m listening to history, trying to catch its repeating rhythms and learn from them.

www.imogenrobertson.com

Slate will be discussing Dostoevsky's The Brother's Karamazov early in 2017, and for Slate subscribers there's an excellent discussion available of Tolstoy v. Dostoevsky.

And is you subscribe to anything this year, I do recommend Peirene Press

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