Thou Who Made this Richard Fort, Be Bold, be Bold, but Not Too Bold... Katherine Langrish

August 3, 2017, 10:30 pm

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People often assume there aren’t very many English fairy tales.  There are, of course, but they were eclipsed in popularity by the much better-known German and French tales of the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. During the 19^th century the English were, on the whole, keener on translating other peoples’ fairy tales than collecting their own: possibly (as I say in another place) because the Europe-wide fashion for collecting traditional tales was driven by nationalism, and Victorian Englishmen didn’t feel they had anything much to prove. So generations of English children grew up knowing about Rumpelstiltskin and Cinderella, and nothing about Tom Tit Tot and Ashie-Coat.

  

It took an Australian Jew, Joseph Jacobs, to notice this and do something about it. ‘Who says that English folk have no fairy-tales of their own?’ he asks in the introduction to his 'English Fairy Tales’, 1898. ‘The present volume contains only a selection out of some 140, of which I have found traces in this country. It is probable that many more exist.’

 

One of those tales is an all-time favourite of mine, ‘Mr Fox’.  It’s the oldest known version of the ‘Bluebeard’ story, and I wrote about it in my recent book ‘Seven Miles of Steel Thistles’, where I explain why I think it’s about a million times better than ‘Bluebeard’. It’s about a girl called Lady Mary who becomes curious – maybe even suspicious – when her fiancé, the suave Mr Fox, is unwilling to let her visit his castle. So when he announces he has to go away for a day just prior to their wedding, she sets off deep into the woods to find the place for herself.

And there it is, a beautiful castle: but above the gateway a strange motto is carved into the stone: ‘Be bold, be bold’. Lady Mary passes under the gateway and into the courtyard. The place is quite empty, not a soul anywhere about. Crossing the yard to the the doorway of the keep, she finds the same motto again, this time longer: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’.  On she goes:

Still she went on till she came into the hall, and went up the broad stairs till she came to a door in the gallery, over which was written:

Be bold, be bold, but not too bold

Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.

But Lady Mary was a brave one, she was, and she opened the door, and what do you think she saw? Why bodies and skeletons of beautiful young ladies all stained with blood. So Lady Mary thought it was high time to get out of that horrid place…

As she hurries down the stairs she sees Mr Fox himself coming into the hall, dragging a beautiful young woman behind him who seems to have fainted. Lady Mary hides behind a cask, and witnesses Mr Fox cutting off the young woman’s hand:

Just as he got near Lady Mary, Mr Fox saw a diamond ring glittering on the finger of the young lady he was dragging, and he tried to pull it off. But it was tightly fixed … so Mr Fox cursed and swore, and drew his sword, raised it, and brought it down upon the hand of the poor lady. The sword cut off the hand, which jumped into the air, and fell of all places into Lady Mary’s lap. Mr Fox looked about a bit but did not think of looking behind the cask, so at last he went on dragging the young lady up the stairs into the Bloody Chamber.

Lady Mary runs home, but that’s not the end. Next day this self-possessed and steely heroine meets Mr Fox at a splendid family breakfast where the contract of their marriage is to be signed. ‘How pale you are this morning, my dear,’ exclaims Mr Fox.

‘Yes,’ said she, ‘I had a bad night’s rest last night. I had horrible dreams.’

‘Dreams go by contraries,’ said Mr Fox; ‘but tell us your dream, and your sweet voice will make the time pass till the happy hour comes.’

‘I dreamed,’ said Lady Mary, ‘that I went yestermorn to your castle, and I found it in the woods, with high walls and a deep moat, and over the gateway was written:

               Be bold, be bold.’

‘But it is not so, nor it was not so,’ said Mr Fox.

As Lady Mary continues and the mottoes intensify their warnings, so Mr Fox’s denials become stronger: ‘It is not so and it was not so. And God forbid it should be so’ – till finally Lady Mary springs to her feet.

‘It is so and it was so. Here’s hand and ring I have to show,’ and pulled out the lady’s hand from her dress and pointed it straight at Mr Fox.

At once her brothers and her friends drew their swords and cut Mr Fox into a thousand pieces.

This is a great story with a brave, intelligent heroine, and it’s beautifully structured. I’ve told it aloud many times to children and they always love it. But where did Joseph Jacobs find it?  Well, he found it as an addendum to Edmond Malone’s 1790 edition of the complete works of Shakespeare ( ‘Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare’).

This of course isn't the original 1790 edition, which I couldn't find, but from 1821.

There’s a bit in ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ Act I, Sc 1, where Benedick says to Claudio: ‘Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor ‘twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.’  A certain Mr Blakeway contributed a note to explain this reference:

I believe none of the commentators have understood this; it is an allusion, as the speaker says, to an old tale, which may perhaps still be extant in some collections of such things, or which Shakspeare may have heard, as I have, related by a great aunt, in his childhood.

Mr Blakeway then recounts the whole tale, though with less artistry than Joseph Jacobs: he’s supplying a note, after all, not writing a story:

Over the portal of the hall was written: ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold:’ she advanced: over the stair-case, the same inscription: she went up: over the entrance of a gallery, the same: she proceeded: over the door of a chamber, – ‘Be bold, be bold,but not too bold, lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.’ She opened it; it was full of skeletons, tubs of blood, &c. She retreated in haste…

Blakeway concludes,

Such is the old tale to which Shakspeare evidently alludes, and which has often ‘froze my young blood’ when I was a child. I will not apologize for repeating it, since it is manifest that such old wives’ tales often prove the best elucidation of this writer’s meaning.

John Brickdale Blakeway was born in Shrewsbury in 1765, the eldest son of Joshua Blakeway and Elizabeth Brickdale. He studied law, was ordained in 1793, became a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1807 and died in 1826. His great-aunt probably told young John this tale when he was about ten, and she must have heard it in her own childhood some time between say 1710 and 1725.  This is still over a century since Shakespeare’s death, but the story happens to be one which is very easy to remember, full of repetition – the tale is actually told twice – and memorable phrases. (I’ve known children who could tell it well having heard it only once.) In 1598 Shakespeare’s Benedick quotes one of these phrases:‘It is not so and it was not so and God forbid it should be so’, and calls it an ‘old tale’.

Edmund Spenser’s immensely long narrative poem ‘The Faerie Queene’, references the other quotable quote from 'Mr Fox' in Book 3, Canto XI, verses 50 to 54: when the gallant ‘warlike Maid’ Britomart (allegorically Chastity) is exploring the House of Busirane (the House of Violence and Lust) to find and rescue the enchanter Busirane’s tortured victim Amoret. As Britomart makes her way through room after room decorated with pictures and tapestries of ravished women (and one boy), she notices something else:

Over the door thus written she did spy

Be bold: she oft and oft it over-read…

Just like Lady Mary, Britomart is not dismayed - ‘But forward with bold steps into the next room went’. And just as in ‘Mr Fox’, the castle is silent and empty - ‘Strange thing it seemed’!  Eventually,

…as she looked about, she did behold

How over that same door was likewise writ

Be bold, be bold, and everywhere Be bold,

That much she mazed, and could not construe it

By any riddling skill or common wit.

At last she spied at that room’s upper end,

Another iron door, on which was writ,

Be not too bold…

The first three books of ‘The Faerie Queene’ were published in 1596. This therefore appears to be the earliest reference to the ‘old tale’ of ‘Mr Fox’.  It must once have been very well known.  But if John Blakemore hadn’t written it down, it would have disappeared. His account is the only complete source for this English fairy tale.

I was talking about all this with a good friend, the author John Dickinson: in fact it was he who pointed me in the direction of ‘The Faerie Queene’. He then electrified me by telling me that in his local church of St Mary in Painswick, Gloucestershire, the words ‘Be bold, be bold’ are actually cut into one of the pillars. Local tradition has it that the words were carved by one of a group of Parliamentarian soldiers besieged in the church during the English Civil War, and that they are a quotation from ‘The Faerie Queene’. I was so excited about this that John invited me to come over and see the inscription.  And here it is.

TH.

WHO. MAD

THIS. RICH

ARD FORT

BE BOLD BE BOLD

BUT NOT TO

BOLD AND WHE

                                             RB          

Let’s take the first bit first.  In modern spelling: ‘THOU WHO MADE THIS RICHARD FORT BE BOLD BE BOLD BUT NOT TOO BOLD’. Some man named Richard Fort is addressing God (who ‘made’ him) and adding an – appeal? a prayer? a command? a warning? – perhaps to God, perhaps to himself, to ‘be bold, be bold, but not too bold.’

Painswick Church was indeed besieged in the year 1644. There’s an account in ‘A Cotteswold Manor; being the history of Painswick’ written by the wonderfully named Welbore St Clair Baddeley and published in 1907. In 1644 the countryside around the city of Gloucester (which had survived a siege by Royalist forces the previous autumn) was in turmoil, with Royalists and Parliamentarians exchanging raids and committing atrocities on both sides. Enter the fearsome Colonel Mynne, leading a regiment of Royalist Catholic infantry raised in Ireland. Arriving in Bristol, Mynne and his men stormed their way across Gloucestershire and in February 1644 arrived at Painswick. The Parliamentarian Attorney General, Backhouse, quartered in Gloucester, writes:

‘We heard … that Colonel Mynne and St Leger with the Irish forces march’t to Painswicke for subsistence,  but indeed to plunder the country, to prevent which, our Governor (Massey) drew out a party of Horse and Foot, where there was a skirmish and some losse on both sides.’

Whether this skirmish was successful or not, some time later Mynne’s Royalist forces withdrew and a garrison of Massey’s Parliamentarian troops moved into Painswick. In the back-and-forth of that wretched time, they were not to remain there long. The King’s man Sir William Vavasour marched on Painswick with ‘a strong brigade’ and two ‘culverins’ or light cannons. The Parliament soldiers, who had taken up a defensive position in a house near the church, were not strong enough to hold off anything much bigger than a plundering party, and had been told to make good their retreat down the steep hill towards Brookthorp if the Royalist force was substantial. But the lieutenant commanding them, ‘… not understanding the strength of the (opponents) army’ and encouraged by ‘many willing people of the neighbourhood in that weak hold’, instead of withdrawing, remainedto fight. Finding himself overwhelmed ‘upon the first onset’, he deserted the house and took his men into the church. It was a move from the frying pan into the fire: the Royalists burned down the door and threw ‘hand-granadoes’ into the church where ‘some few were slain in defending the place, and the rest taken prisoners.’  [This contemporary account is quoted in the ‘History of the Church of St Mary at Painswick’ by Welbore St Clair Baddeley, 1902]

Here, then, is the likely scenario for the cutting of those words ‘Be bold, be bold, but not too bold’ on the church pillar at Painswick. Richard Fort – whether he was one of the ‘willing’ neighbours or a Parliamentarian soldier – was holed up inside St Mary’s with the other men who were the victims of their lieutenant’s mistake. They’d barred the doors, they couldn’t get out, and they were listening to the yells and jeers of the Royalist force outside in the churchyard – and wondering what would be the next move.

How long did they have?  Was it really long enough for Richard Fort to carve all those words?And why did they spring to his mind in the first place? Had the lieutenant urged his men to ‘be bold’?  (See what had come of that!) Parliamentarians called Royalists ‘malignants’:Painswick people had already had a taste of the ravening Colonel Mynne. Perhaps two things came together in Richard Fort's head – the adjuration to ‘be bold’, and the enclosed stone trap of the church, with the enemy about to burst in.  Perhaps Richard was an educated man who had read ‘The Faerie Queene’ and remembered the armed figure of Chastity, Britomart, waiting for her enemy, afraid to lay her weapons aside:

Thus there she waited until eventide,

Yet living creature none she saw appear:

And now sad shadows ‘gan the world to hide,

From mortall view, and wrap in darkness drear.

Yet n’ould she doff her weary arms, for fear

Of secret danger, nor let sleep oppress

Her heavy eyes with nature’s burden dear,

But drew herself aside in sikernesse [assuredness]

And her wellpointed weapons did about her dress.

Or it may be Richard simply remembered the story of ‘Mr Fox’ told to him in childhood by his mother or aunt or sister, and saw its relevance, and began cutting those words to distract himself.  Did he even feel his God had let him down? ‘Thou who made this Richard Fort be bold be bold but not too bold…’ I think he did carve the words while he waited, especially as you can see at the end of the inscription on the pillar the shallow-cut beginning of two more words: ‘AND WHE…’

What was he going to say? We’ll never know. He didn’t have time to finish, so perhaps he was interrupted: perhaps, before he could grind those letters any deeper, the church door began smoking; perhaps it burst into flame. Perhaps these unfinished letters resemble those found in another stone trap, the fictional Chamber of Mazarbul in Tolkien’s ‘The Fellowship of the Ring’: 

‘The last thing written is a trailing scrawl of elf letters: they are coming.’

Picture credits

Mr Fox, illustration by John Batten from Joseph Jacobs''English Fairy Tales' 

Britomart in the house of Busyrane, by Walter Crane

'Be bold', inscription on pillar, St Mary's Painswick, photo by Katherine Langrish

Siege artillery of the mid 17th century, Battle of Edgehill, http://www.brit

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Dance Around in Your Bones by Joan Lennon

August 4, 2017, 4:30 pm

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I live in Scotland, so I am rarely troubled by being too hot.  But the summers were scorchers where I grew up and I now have a son living in Indonesia - and when I visit oh how I wish I could follow the delectable Lee Morse's advice!  Which advice is that, I hear you ask?  Listen up -

I've combined the various versions of the lyrics that the internet has to offer for you.

Dancing may do this and that

And help you take off lots of fat

But I'm no friend of dancing when it's hot

So if you are a dancing fool

Who loves to dance, but can't keep cool

Bear in mind the ideas that I've got

When it gets too hot for comfort

And you can't get ice cream cones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When the lazy syncopation

Of the music softly moans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

The polar bears aren't green up in Greenland

They've got the right idea

They think it's great to refrigerate

While we all cremate down here

Just be like those bamboo babies

In the SouthSea tropic zones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When you're calling up your sweetie

In those hothouse telephones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

When you're on a crowded dance floor

Near those red hot saxophones

Ah, t'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Take a look at the girls when they're dancing

Notice the way they're dressed

They wear silken clothes without any hose

And nobody knows the rest

No more singing in the bathtub

With those television phones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Now, we are gathered by the river

Listen to your Deacon Jones

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

You must all go in that water

Let me hear your sinful groans

T'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones

Do what I say right away, wicked sinners

For this is your judgement day

Come andele in the river with me

Wash your sins away

Throw away your gin and razors

Throw away your gambling bones

For t'ain't no sin to take off your skin

And dance around in your bones


There are definitely bits I had to look up.  Andele, for example, is, according to Wiktionary, American slang for hurry up; come on; get a move on!  Gin and razors could refer to a cocktail of gin and cayenne pepper, which seems to me a ghastly thing to do to gin, so definitely worth throwing away.  But who is Deacon Jones?  Other than a preacher who conveniently rhymes with bones?  And why were telephone boxes so hot?  Let me know if you've got any ideas.  And what about that reference to television phones way back in 1929?  Wow!

One last tidbit - in the comments of the instrumental version of 'Taint No Sin by Fred "Sugar" Hall and His Sugar Babies here, I learned that this was Ray Bradbury's favourite song as a boy.  ("Zen in the Art of Writing")  

Lee Morse, American jazz and blues singer and songwriter (1897 - 1854)

Joan Lennon's website.
Joan Lennon's blog.
Walking Mountain.

The Duffs of Beechfield Street -- a poem by Sheena Wilkinson

August 5, 2017, 8:00 pm

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Like many History Girls I love watching Who Do You Think You Are? and am always struck by how little I know about my own antecedents. This poem pieces together snippets from things my gran told me about growing up in Belfast. She was born in 1908 and must have had memories of the Great War, the Great Flu, the Home Rule Crisis, Civil War, and the Belfast Blitz, but she always spoke about the domestic: home and church, work and leisure. 

There was nothing remarkable about her family. Except of course to her. 

The Duffs of Beechfield Street

The Duffs built the Titanic.

In 1913 James Duff moved his family

two streets further up the Newtownards Road

To save on the tram fare to the Yard.

The Duffs all worked at the Yard

The Duffs  were stalwarts of the Christian Endeavour

At Albertbridge Congregational Church.

They won prizes for Attendance and Bible Knowledge.

If you didn’t eat your dinner, James would say,

Put it in the oven, she’ll eat it when she’s hungry.

A Belfast street

 

The Duffs loved animals, Annie a smuggler of kittens

Upstairs, hidden in her pinny, Frances never tiring

of the story of the wee Pomereen pup

found sleeping in her daddy’s boot.

The Duffs did as things did with them.

When James died Fanny took in sewing

And made sure the children had good clothes for Sundays.

The girls left school at thirteen, sewed shirts,

and hoped to marry. Sadie died at sixteen.

Annie, the kitten smuggler, Sadie who died, Frances, my gran

Alexander loved dancing. He always got Sandy.

Frances married Charles from a semi-detached

With a garden up the Castlereagh Road.

Jim went to Australia.

Annie dreamed of Australia

But when her mother died in 1936 she stayed

In Beechfield Street with her brother John,

And a cat called Dinky who was allowed upstairs.

Fanny Duff's death notice in The Belfast News Letter, 1936

A Workshop at The Museum of Cambridge by Adèle Geras

August 6, 2017, 5:30 pm

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On a Wednesday in late July, I went to a talk by Carolyn Ferguson at the Museum of Cambridge. It was part of a series of workshops and talks which looked at the various aspects of textile arts: patchwork and embroidery and so on. We were promised a look at some of the quilts owned by the museum and also at some from Carolyn's own private collection. As soon as I heard about it, I knew I wanted to attend. There were two main reasons for this. First, I'm obsessed with patchwork. One of my very first books for children was called Apricots at Midnight.  In this book, an old lady called Aunt Pinny told stories to a child at bedtime. Each tale sprang from one of the patches on the quilt covering the child's bed, and was about something from Aunt Pinny's life. I've always thought that that image: the patches of material mirroring episodes in your life, was a very powerful one. Patchwork has been with us for hundreds of years and its different manifestations and the different circumstances in which it's been made fascinate me.

The second reason I wanted to go to Carolyn's talk was more personal. She was at school with me, at Roedean, and in those days  she was a good friend of mine called Carolyn Ballantyne. When we moved to Cambridge in 2010, finding that Carolyn lived there too was a wonderful surprise. We hadn't seen one another for decades, but when we met again, it seemed to me that she'd changed very little. Her hair is a different colour now, but otherwise she's just the same. Nevertheless, when I learned that she was both a quilter herself and also a member of the British Quilts Study group; that she'd written papers on the history of the colour, Turkey Red, and on the Rajah Quilt; that she had a deep and scholarly interest in  textiles  and that she was also involved with the Museum of Cambridge, I was very pleasantly surprised. I've sent Carolyn a few questions which she's kindly agreed to answer. I'm going to intersperse her answers with some thoughts about the talk she gave. 

The Museum of Cambridge, of which Carolyn is a Trustee, dates from the 17th century and  used to be a coaching inn. It stands at a crossroads, very near Kettle's Yard. It's full of fascinating things, mostly local, and the rooms are small and different from one another and seem to have been stuck together haphazardly. The stairs are wooden. It's delightfully  unslick in any way and a visit there is a real pleasure. 

AG: I have no memory of you sewing, or embroidering at school. Am I blotting this out because I was so useless at such things? When did you start being interested in patchwork and quilting?

CF: My mother and her mother, my English Granny, were both very keen sewers and my Scots Granny was a tailor so I was probably bound to have some stitching in my life. My first patchwork was a teacosy made with my English Granny around the age of 8 from a set of Liberty linen samples. My mother used it for many years until it fell apart. I made various clothes at school, a petticoat and a felt skirt are things that I remember best. I still have the sampler that I started (but never finished) for O Level art too. In the 1970s I bought some Laura Ashley squares and did some basic patchwork but it was when we lived in Hong Kong and I went to a class run by an American lady that I really learnt to quilt and to do patchwork by machine which was a real revelation!

Carolyn's talk took the form of a slide show of various coverlets, quilts, bedcovers, some actually quilted and some not, starting with one from about 1400. The Tristram Quilt, made in Sicily, is the earliest example we have (it's in the V&A) and when a replica was made of this, it took modern quilters days and days of work. Below are two photos of one of the quilts from Carolyn's own collection. There were ten of us, and we all put on white gloves to look at it more carefully.

AG: You've written monographs and papers about historical textiles. Can you say something about whether the interest in the history springs from the making, or is it the other way round? I suppose I'm asking: how do the writing and the making relate to one another?

CF:I was always interested in History at school and also in historic artefacts. Do you remember the ‘Taste and Judgement’ displays? [these were objects exhibited from time to time at school, about which we had to comment and which we had to judge for their beauty, usefulness etc.] They kindled an interest in antiques - again something that my Granny was keen on. She was an avid buyer and loved auctions too. I suppose that textile research just puts together my scientific research brain with a love of textile.

Carolyn took us through the way the art developed as the techniques of printing and manufactured advanced. It was quite fascinating to see how every change in the fashion of the day was reflected in the way coverlets and quilts came to be made. 

The red quilt below was made in the 1840s in Stratford - upon - Avon by many hands. In the centre is the church where Shakespeare is buried, Holy Trinity. Many people were given a square to embroider in their own way, often using printed patterns that could be ironed on to the cloth. There's a similar patchwork made by Cambridge Ladies, led by the wives of the Masters of various colleges, and   Carolyn has a great interest in this quilt about which she's written and spoken extensively.  

AG: Knitting is the only craft I'm any good at, and I always have some knitting on the go. Are you always making something with your hands, whatever else is happening?

CF: I am not sure whether you mean research or stitch? I am still trying to write up my 5 years of research for the Masters’ Wives quilt and my sewing projects seem to take a back seat. I have numerous things on the go including a memory piece and a small quilt for my nephew’s next baby but I’m not always making things these days.  I find that there are lots of other things to be done. I seem to wear quite a few ‘hats’!

Below is the 'jockey cap' style of patchwork. The quilt is in the Museum and I'm grateful to have been allowed to photograph it.  There are many different styles. You can make patchwork out of large squares, strips, hexagons, or combinations of shapes.  Crazy Quilting combines many different kinds of fabric, in irregular shapes. American Quilts are different from British quilts. With the exception of communal patchworks, like the Stratford quilt, the Rajah Quilt and the Masters' Wives Quilt, these are often the work of single person, who has used the material available to her (or him...there were male quilters too, often in the Army or the Navy) and for reasons of their own. For example the Brereton patchwork, hangings for a four-poster bed, were made by Anna Maria Brereton mourning the death of the five children she lost: four in in infancy and one later on.

AG: How did you become involved with the Museum of Cambridge?

CF: I suppose that it was about 10 years ago that I first became involved when the Museum did a small exhibition about patchwork and I wrote all the information boards and helped set up the display. My most recent involvement started in 2012, first with the Masters’ Wives quilt then organising and making the community quilt, helping document the textiles and clothing and from the start of this year as a Trustee with special interest in the Collection. I have also given talks at the various History Festivals organised by the Museum.

Below is a photo of Carolyn's pamphlet about Turkey Red. This was the name of the red dye in the late 1700s which enabled red to be printed on cotton in a colour - fast way for the first time. Turkey Red revolutionised fabric production for one thing and for another, it's a wonderful colour.

The ladies who came to this talk were all quilters, apart from me. One of them had made a patchwork by sewing together stamps from her husband's collection, each one meticulously bound in paper and sewn together with stitches so tiny that you could hardly see them. The ways that some of these old quilts, both Carolyn's own and the ones belonging to the Museum, were found were also interesting: in a cupboard, in a chest somewhere. Look at your old boxes if you have an attic. You don't know what you might find there. But if you do own precious heirlooms, do not store them in plastic bags...there was a terrifying tale of someone whose cleaner threw a bin bag containing a very beautiful and valuable quilt out with the rubbish. Beware...

And thanks to Carolyn and the Museum for a really wonderful morning.
I'm ending this post with a photo of a pin wheel quilt made by Carolyn herself.

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Carolyn Ferguson: A biographical note


Carolyn Ferguson is a textile historian and independent scholar whose main interests are looking at nineteenth-century quilts and coverlets from a social history perspective.


Carolyn is currently researching the Cambridge Mastera' Wives coverlet and has collaborated with Dr Ann Kennedy Smith on research into Cambridge University wives 1882–1914, in particular the twelve influential women who became the Ladies Dining Society. In 2015 they presented a paper entitled ‘The Cambridge Wives Lives: Rewriting the Victorian Marriage’ for the Writing Lives Together conference. In May 2017 she presented ‘The Detective Story of the Masters’ Wives Coverlet: A Study in the Iconography of Embroidered Signature coverlets’ at the Textile Society Research Symposium.

'Cooking on a Prayer' by Karen Maitland

August 7, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Reconstruction of 19th Century Kitchen Museum of Transport and Technology, Auckland Photo: Jorge Royan

This morning I spent ages hunting through my bookshelves in search of a particular book that I was sure had a white cover, and which eventually proved to be red. But in the process, I rediscovered several books that I had forgotten I owned, including a cloth-bound volume entitled ‘Recipe Book, Swinton Parish Church Bazaar, St Stephen’s Stall, 1911’. The recipes were contributed by members of the parish and the book was printed to raise money for charity, though how it came to be in my possession, I have no idea.

Some of the dishes are wonderfully evocative of the period: how to make potted sardines; lobster cutlets; stuffed cod with brown gravy; and oxtail soup. (I can’t remember when I last saw an oxtail in a supermarket.) But it was the ‘useful household tips’ at the end that really distracted me from what I was supposed to be doing. One, contributed by the Rev. B.O.F. Heywood, said the way to cook the perfect boiled egg (presumably on his housekeeper’s day off) was to place it carefully in boiling water and time the cooking by reciting the famous poem by Felicia Hemans, ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning deck.’

Using words to time recipes is something that has gone on for centuries. In the Middle Ages, prayers or psalms were used to time cooking and brewing. Medieval cookery books frequently state that a sauce should be simmered for the time it takes to recite two Ave’s or a fish should be boiled for three pater nosters. This method would have been highly effective in the crowded kitchens of manor houses or monasteries where many dishes were being prepared at the same time, and several scullions or young servants might be working under the direction of a cook.

Abbot's Kitchen, Glastonbury with ruined wall of the abbot's dining hall. Credit: Rodw

In the 14th century abbot’s kitchen in Glastonbury, which has been wonderfully restored, there were four fireplaces that could be used to cook everything from spit roasted meats to sauces and in the Middle Ages a narrow gantry ran across the kitchen above the servants’ heads so that the master of the kitchen could climb up and observe all the activity below, pacing back and forth to yell down instructions to those peeling, chopping, basting, and pounding. In all the noise, heat and bustle any inexperienced servants must have been grateful for the simple instructions of reciting something so familiar as a prayer they knew by rote.

Part of the Interior of the Abbot's Kitchen, Glastonbury Credit: NotFromUtrecht

Using prayers or psalms also had a protective element and they became viewed as a charm that would ward off food poisoning and accidents. This would be especially important when in an abbot's or nobleman’s kitchen where valuable spices, saffron and even gold leaf were part of the recipe, and servants ruining a dish might fear being beaten or dismissed. Demons were thought to lurk between the leaves of worts such as lettuce and cabbage which could make you ill if you swallowed them, likewise in rising bread. Crosses were cut into stalks and dough to drive them out, but you certainly didn’t want them diving into something else, so the prayers helped to banish evil from the hearth.

One of the unforeseen consequences of the Reformation must have been the number of dishes that were spoiled by cooks who suddenly found they could no longer time their cooking by reciting Ave’s without arousing suspicions that they were still practising ‘popery’. There must have been much secret muttering and mumbling going on in some kitchens.

It is hardly surprising then, that in the witchcraft trials of later centuries those unfortunate enough to be interrogated were often accused of timing the brewing of their spells or even their suppers by reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards or muttering the cursing Psalm 109.

In the 19th and first part of the 20th century, instead reciting poems or prayers to time cooking, rhyming poetry was being used to memorize the recipe itself, often because those employed as domestic staff did not read well, or simply because it wasn’t practical to constantly consult a recipe as you cooked in a busy kitchen where a valuable book was likely to be ruined by steam and splashes. Many organisations such as churches and charities produced these rhyming recipe books to raise funds and even those campaigning for women’s suffrage saw the advantage in it.

In Boston, in 1886, Hattie A. Burr produced ‘The Woman’s Suffrage Cook Book’, with contributions from many of the leading women political activists of the time including Elizabeth Cady Stanton who penned a rhyming recipe for breakfast.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (seated) with Susan B. Anthony circa 1900

'Cut smoothly from a wheaten loaf
Ten slices, good and true,
And brown them nicely, o'er the coals,
As you for toast would do.

Prepare a pint of thickened milk,
Some cod-fish shredded small;
And have on hand six hard-boiled eggs,
Just right to slice withal.

Moisten two pieces of the bread,
And lay them in a dish,
Upon them slice a hard-boiled egg,
Then scatter o'er with fish …'

As for me, I’ve found a recipe in that 1911 cook book for Ballagarry Buck contributed by Mr Filliter and Mr Taylor, it sounds like a rather interesting version of Welsh Rarebit and it thankfully requires no timing at all, so I’m off to try it.

The Blue-Eyed Roman Girl from Africa

August 8, 2017, 4:39 pm

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by Caroline Lawrence

Sometimes it’s good for writers to have restrictions; it can make you more creative.

Yesterday I led a story-writing workshop in the Undercroft Gallery at the Guildhall Art Gallery, situated above London’s Roman amphitheatre. First I shared the simple seven-beat story-structure I use to map out every scene in my books and also for the overall arc of the story itself. I illustrated the seven plot beats via the first chapter of my first Roman Mystery, The Thieves of Ostia. 

Then I told the parents and children about an idea I’m working on now, the story of the 14-year-old girl who lived in Roman London in the 4th century AD. The so-called Lant Street Teenager, named after the modern part of London where her grave was found, was one of four skeletons sent to McMasters University in Canada for in-depth study of DNA, isotopes and pathogens. Rebecca Redfern of the Museum of London has written eloquently about this and the other three skeletons. 

Science has made astounding advances and we know the following things about the Lant Street Girl. 

- Her mother was from the eastern parts of the Roman Empire, perhaps Thrace or Dacia. 

- Initial tests showed the girl had blue eyes and blonde hair

- She spent the first ten years of her life in North Africa

- She came to Londinium when she was about ten

- She ate a diet of fish, grain and vegetables

- She died aged 14 of unknown causes

Pathogens in her bones tell us about her health.

- She had rickets, a childhood disease caused by lack of calcium or vitamin D in the diet.

- As a result of this disease she had bandy legs. 

- Like most Roman Londoners, she had periodontal disease and therefore probably bad breath. 

Her burial indicates that she was from a rich family. Grave goods found with the body include:

- Two glass bottles, possibly for perfume or unguent.

- A wooden box with ivory inlay including that of a goddess.

- An clasp knife with an iron blade and an ivory handle in the shape of a leopard. A small bronze key is attached to this knife by a bronze chain.  

There has been lots of talk about the ethnic diversity in Roman London and this girl is the perfect example. Her father might have been a dark-skinned African, an Egyptian, a Phoenician or even a Roman. We don’t know yet as we don’t have access to the father’s DNA. 

 

In my writing workshop yesterday we tried to come up with a story for the girl, who I’ve called Dido as she might have come from Carthage in North Africa where other ivory-handled clasp-knifes have been found. (Dido was the beautiful Queen of Carthage who fell in love with the hero Aeneas in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid.)

We brainstormed a possible story for the blue-eyed girl from Africa, based on the facts, and then used our informed imaginations to come up with possible ways she might have met her untimely end. 

Here are some ways a Roman girl could have died in Londinium:

1. Death by illness. 

2. Death by infection. 

3. Death by childbirth complications.

4. Death by fall.  

5. Death by drowning. 

6. Death by choking.

7. Death by murder, strangulation or poison for example. 

8. Death by starvation.

9. Death by runaway oxen 

10. Death by wild animal or feral dog.

11. Death by fire or smoke inhalation.

12. Death by curse or bad omen.

Over twenty children attended the workshop and I hope that some of them might write a story which they can enter in a competition like BBC’s 500 Words or Butser Ancient Farm’s Poetry competition. (Just put your story in blank verse for the Butser entry!)

I know that even if every child and adult who attended came up with a story, each would be different. That’s the joy of writing historical fiction!

I’ll be giving the talk again today (Wednesday 9 August 2017) at 2pm so if you live in London and love history, Romans or writing, come help me tell a story about the Blue-Eyed Roman Girl from Africa.

For more information about all the great events of the #Londinium Festival celebrating Roman London for three months, go HERE. 

Door furniture - Michelle Lovric

August 9, 2017, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Of Crofters, Kelp and Iodine by Susan Price

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Some years ago, I wrote, designed and produced an illustrated book called HOW TO SEDUCE, PLEASURE & TITILLATE IN CLASSICAL LATIN, working with classicist Jenny Quickfall. It was a follow-up to a surprise best-seller called HOW TO ABUSE, INSULT AND INSINUATE IN CLASSICAL LATIN, in which my collaborator with Niki Doxiadis Mardas. That book is still in print nearly twenty years later and indeed this week the publisher, Ebury, have asked for another reprint.

That request reminded me about one of the ideas explored in HOW TO SEDUCE: the paraclausithyron or “shut door poem” in Latin and ancient Greek poetry. I included some of them in HOW TO SEDUCE. In these poems, the lover describes being shut out of his mistress’s house, life, bed. Instead of lamenting the woman’s cruelty, he rails comically against the door itself. It is the door who must take the blame for everything and the brunt of the poet’s wit.

 All the materiality of the door, from lock to hinges, can serve as a metaphor or for innuendo.

 Lucretius (De Rerum Natura 4.1177-9) asserts:
at lacrimans exclusus amator limina saepe
floribus et sertis operit postisque superbos
unguit amaracino et foribus miser oscula figit
The weeping shut-out lover often buries the threshold in flowers and garlands, anoints the proud doorposts with marjoram scent and plants miserable kisses on the door.

Tibullus offers a classic example:
nam posita est nostrae custodia saeva puellae,
clauditur et dura ianua firma sera.
ianua difficilis domini, te verberet imber,
te Iovis imperio fulmina missa petant.
ianua, iam pateas uni mihi victa querellis,
neu furtim verso cardine aperta sones

A cruel watch has been put on my girl and the hard-hearted door has been firmly locked in my face. Oh door of a stubborn master, may the rain pelt you and lightning sent by Jove target you! Oh door give in to my complaints, open just to me and make no sound as you turn your stealthy hinge.
(1.2.5-10).

Propertius describes the ‘Dreadful door’ as ‘crueller by far than your mistress herself.’ He demanded, ‘Why do you stand silent, outfacing me with such hard panels? … Will I sleep ignominiously on the cold-blooded doorstep?’ He continues,
If only a word of mine could squeeze through an open crack
And seek out those lovely little ears and ring inside them!
… But you are the one, the greatest cause of my pain,
Dreadful door, never won over by my gifts
The only one entirely devoid of pity for human suffering,
You answer me mutely with the silence of your hinges.

Possibly the best-known anthropomorphized door is the one that separates Pyramus and Thisbe, first in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and later, via Chaucer and Gower, in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

One reason why these poems were fresh in my mind is because I’ve lately felt extremely drawn to an aspect of Venetian life that might seem mundane – door furniture.

On a recent walk around my neighbourhood, I photographed the following examples and recorded my feelings about them. After a little absence from Venice, now that I am back I find myself revisiting the esoteric mental scrapbook that is the by-product of so many novels, an anthology and much life lived, felt and thought in the city.

 

The first one to attract my attention is this handsome one belonging to the Dominican nuns near the church of Santa Maria degli Miracoli. The idea of nuns having doorbells seems somehow odd, thinking back on the days when they were sternly enclosed. Deliveries took place via ‘la ruota’ – a tall circular shelf that revolved inside the doorway, meaning that no one ever needed to behold a nun’s face, a sight reserved for her bridegroom, God. Food, money and unwanted babies were inserted into convents via la ruota. The nuns raised many orphans, including characters in several of my books ...

Nearer to home, by the church of the Maddalena, I loved this lion who apparently holds a writhing snake in his mouth. A winged lion is among the totems of Venice, but the snake is a novelty. Perhaps it is an eel? It was traditional to eat eel at Christmas in Venice – a fact recorded by Effie Ruskin in a letter to her mother on December 24th 1850. She described the Rialto market as ‘a perfect lake of blood,’ with the aproned fishmongers lopping off the heads of eels and throwing ‘the wretched beasts, still twitching, into the shopping bags of eager, festive customers.’

Many writers and several exhibitions have focused on Venice’s connections – mercantile, military and aesthetic – with the East. Here, on a palazzo in Cannaregio, I found a simulation of sinuous Arabic calligraphy on domestic door furniture.

 

 

This one made me sigh. How long is it since anyone in Venice received a telegram instead of an urgent email?

 

 Venice’s sense of humour is not the best known thing about her. I first discovered it in her earthy proverbs, which I began to translate as epigraphs for my first novel, Carnevale. But you see it, if you look, inscribed on her streets too. This panel of doorbells shown above is near San Lorenzo.

Next to a residential building, another kind of door furniture. I haven’t seen a rat in Venice for some time. But I still keep a children’s toy gun in my handbag late at night. The only thing it shoots is light and noise. It seems to work.


And lastly, my favourite piece of door furniture is not old at all. But I am very fond of it.



Perhaps some poet shall take against its door one day, but for the moment it offers only happy welcomes.


Michelle Lovric’s website



Of Crofters, Kelp and Iodine by Susan Price

August 10, 2017, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: The Power, by Naomi Alderman. A sort of review.

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A Highland croft - wikimedia

Crofters in the Highlands and islands of Scotland have always had a hard life. Even now, although crofting may be a more rewarding way of life, in many ways, than banking or sales, it’s by no means easy.

In a past stretching back into pre-history, crofters supplied almost all their own needs by their own labour: building and maintaining their steading, raising animals to provide meat, milk and wool, making their own clothes and making or repairing their own tools. They grew oats and vegetables but also fished and gathered wild food.

Almost always, a crofter had to pay rent to the owner of the land they farmed,and that rent had to be paid in hard money. Cash was often needed to supply a few needs they could not make, catch or grow for themselves: a little tobacco, perhaps or raisins and spices for Christmas.

One way to earn money was to drive their cattle to the markets where the highest prices were paid. Another, which I learned about when I researched my book The Drover’s Dogs, was to burn kelp.

Kelp, wikimedia, By Bjørn Christian Tørrissen

Kelp is a large and fast-growing seaweed which forms thick kelp forests around rocky coasts. It had been gathered for centuries. Crofters carried it from the beaches on their backs in tall baskets— a heavy load, often carried up steep, hazardous cliff paths. It was spread on fields as fertiliser.

There was also a tradition of burning the kelp to ash and mixing the ash with fat to make an ointment. Because of kelp's high concentration of iodine, it was a quite effective antiseptic.

With the rise of industry, iodine became a far more valuable commodity. It was used in glass-making and pottery as a colouring agent. The cloth trade needed it for bleaching linen. Soap makers used it to turn soap from messy goo into the hard blocks which customers favoured. Iodine was also used in the production of the cleaning agent, soda.

It was easier to import kelp from Europe than to fetch it from the far more remote Scottish Highlands and islands, but European kelp was heavily taxed. So agents made difficult journeys north, offering to buy all the iodine the crofters could produce. Kelp was harvested in Ireland too.

A crofting family would build a kiln. These varied considerably: some were built above ground, somewhat resembling an oven. Others were simple pits. Some, if the crofters could afford it, had an iron grid laid above the pit, on which the kelp was placed and burned.

Kelp was gathered throughout the year, especially in the winter after storms, which tore it from the rocks and washed it up. The seaweedwas spread to dry and then piled into stacks, in kelp-ricks which were thatched with heather to keep it dry.

Burning started in June, while the men of the crofting family might be away on a drove. The dried kelp was piled on the iron grid over the pit and set alight.

Crofters burning kelp in Stronsay - Glens of Antrim Historical Society

As the kelp burned to ash, the oil from it dripped into the pit. The smell of the burning seaweed was, it seems, exceptionally powerful and pungent and carried for miles. If you can recall the rank stink of exposed estuary mud on a hot day, imagine that burning and, it seems, you will have a faint idea of the stench.

The end result was a pit full of thick, stinking oil which cooled to a rock-hard substance of greyish, purplish blue. If allowed to go cold, it had to be chipped and chiselled out of the pit, so the burners tried to dig it out before it was completely cold, while it was still easier to work. The iodine blocks were heavy and it was hard, stinking work.

Agents bought these blocks and paid good money for them— though in some parts of Scotland, all the money from the trade went to the local laird. Who did none of the work.

But for those who did profit from this hard, dirty, stinking labour, it was another source of ready cash and for about fifty years, roughly between 1780 and 1830, business was good.

However, in the 1820s, the tax on European seaweed was reduced, and the tax on salt  abolished. This made it much cheaper to import seaweed from Europe and much cheaper to make soda from salt than from kelp. These decisions, made in a southern parliament on behalf of southern industries, destroyed the kelp industry of the Highlands and islands.

It also contributed to depopulation of the Highlands because, at the same time, the droving trade was being killed by railways and landlords were raising the rents of crofts. Caught between rising rents and falling profits, many Highlanders left for Canada and America – where, in dreams, they beheld the Hebrides.

After 1830, demand for iodine from Scotland rose again as industry began producing aniline dyes and photographic plates. The seaweed from Europe was no longer enough, and agents once more came to the Highlands. But the industry was never again as strong as it had been, since so many of the people who would once have collected and burned the kelp had left the crofting life - either by choice or eviction.

This gave me an ending to my book The Drover’s Dogs, whose narrator is a Scot telling his Canadian children how he was rescued by two herd dogs and 'brought home' to Mull.

The Drover's Dogs by Susan Price

The ending rose partly from my own research and partly from the research my Scots partner did into his own family. He had a special interest in Drover's Dogs, since he helped me follow the old drove road to Mull, told me of the 'bondage,' the young hero escapes and also painted the cover picture! (And he doesn't like what I've done with it.) Since a branch of his own family had gone to Canada and become quite wealthy farmers, he was quite keen that the family in the book did too.

So I gave him the ending he wanted, to make up for what I did to his painting

Find The Drover's Dogs on Amazon.

 

 

We thank Susan Price for this reserve post. From 11th September this slot will be filled by Deborah Burrows.

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The Power, by Naomi Alderman. A sort of review.

August 11, 2017, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: DISCOVERING NEW HISTORICAL FICTION – Elizabeth Fremantle outlines the 2017 HWA Debut Crown Shortlist

≪ Previous: Of Crofters, Kelp and Iodine by Susan Price

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I read a lot of historical fiction. In the last eight months, with my reviewing for The Times and as a judge for the HWA gold crown, I think I have read about 100 novels, ranging from pre-Roman Britain to Post War Europe.

I don't mind being stuck in one genre. I write and review historical fiction because I love it, and have loved it as long as I can remember. But sometimes, when I get a break in the reviewing, I need something else. Something non-historical. Something involving helicopters, or spaceships, or the internet, or very modern mores. Something with women who kick-ass in a non-anachronistic kind of way.

When I had a break from my reading schedule last month, I picked up Naomi Alderman's highly lauded, Bailey's Prize winning, The Power. Why, you may wonder, am I reviewing a dystopian novel set in the future for a History Girls website? The answer lies in The Power's extraordinary structure. It is written, in the future, as a purported historical novel.

It is this framing device I want to write about here. (Leaving aside the fact that, on my break from historical novels, I accidentally read a pretend historical novel)

The book opens with a letter. The letterhead gives the address The Men Writers Association, New Bevand Square. The writer is Neil, and it begins: "Dear Naomi, I have finished the bloody book."

He has enclosed the manuscript and describes it as "not quite history, not quite a novel. A sort of 'novelisation' of what archaeologists now believe is the most plausible narrative."

I will admit here, that my heart sank at this point. Too meta. Too self-aware. I was already wary of the premise of The Power. In it, women develop an electrical power that allows them to subjugate men physically. The balance of physical power shifts, rewriting the entire political structure of the globe.

I am, obviously, a feminist - but an old school feminist who finds arguments about intersectionality utterly tedious, and looks around at May, Merkel, Lagarde, Davidson, Sturgeon, Foster, O'Neill, Jones, Dick, Cotton et al and thinks we're not doing so badly. I was worried that The Power would be a misandrist fable of dreary worthiness. Add in a pastiche of my own beloved genre and I was doubling down on the suspicion.

But the book was bought. And so on I ploughed - to discover that The Power is a work of extraordinary genius, that should be lauded as highly as A Handmaid's Tale, and set as a GCSE text book immediately.

Leaving aside the subtle and fascinating exploration of the links between physical prowess and power; and the quite brilliant dissection of gender politics, part of the novel's success is its historical fiction frame.

Why do we write historical fiction? In part to resurrect ghosts, as Hilary Mantel has said. But it is impossible to write without pondering the nature of history itself: the interplay between historical themes and big characters, the biases at play, the bindweed of mythology on facts. The deeper you go the less you have: what is a fact, anyway?

The frame allows Alderman to overlay her themes of power and gender with another over-arching consideration. Who writes history? And in the writing of it, and the thinking about it, can we ever mitigate against the present being too present, with all its current, urgent preoccupations?

The frame also allows Alderman to throw in some stunning twists, that I am dying to discuss here, but obviously can not. This is why I have told all my female friends that they have six months to read this book, or I will withdraw friendship rights. This is a book you need to talk about. An unforgettable book. Please read it!

DISCOVERING NEW HISTORICAL FICTION – Elizabeth Fremantle outlines the 2017 HWA Debut Crown Shortlist

August 12, 2017, 10:00 pm

≫ Next: A kimono by any other name ... by Lesley Downer

≪ Previous: The Power, by Naomi Alderman. A sort of review.

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The HWA Debut Crown shortlist for 2017 demonstrates that there is a wealth of fresh and exciting historical fiction from new writers out there and that historical writing is very much alive and kicking. 

1645. When Alice Hopkins' husband dies in a tragic accident, she returns to the small Essex town of Manningtree, where her brother Matthew still lives.

But home is no longer a place of safety. Matthew has changed, and there are rumours spreading through the town: whispers of witchcraft, and of a great book, in which he is gathering women's names.

To what lengths will Matthew's obsession drive him?
And what choice will Alice make, when she finds herself at the very heart of his plan?

When seventeen-year-old Abigal Walker, the youngest of four sisters and desperate to escape her mother´s oppressive house and her tedious factory job in the East, responded to the ad, Man in Territory seeks correspondence with adventurous gal, she thought she had found her ticket to love and freedom. 

She falls in love with a man named Henry through the lovely letters he sends her about his home in the West and she agrees to travel there to Shakespeare to become his wife. 

But instead she finds herself lured to a rough mining town and twice-deceived. The first surprise she discovers upon arrival in Shakespeare is that she is the sole woman to have ever set foot there.

India, 1919. Desperate for a fresh start, Captain Sam Wyndham arrives to take up an important post in Calcutta's police force.

He is soon called to the scene of a horrifying murder. The victim was a senior official, and a note in his mouth warns the British to leave India – or else.

With the stability of the Empire under threat, Wyndham and Sergeant 'Surrender-not' Banerjee must solve the case quickly. But there are some who will do anything to stop them...

The writing's on the wall for Harry Kvist. Once a notorious boxer, he now spends his days drinking, and his nights as an enforcer on the streets of 1930s Stockholm a city where the rich rule and the poor freeze. But one biting winter's night he's sent to collect from a debtor named Zetterberg, and when the man is found dead shortly afterwards, all eyes are on Kvist.

Kvist's struggle to clear his name will lead him from the city's criminal underworld to its opulent elite. It will bring him face to face with bootleggers and whores, aristocrats and murderers, and force him to confront his own darkness. It will be the biggest fight of his life.

Francesco has a memory of his father from early childhood, a night when life for his family changed. From that night, he has vowed to protect his mother and to follow the words of his father: Non mollare. Never give up.

As Francesco is herded into a camp on the island of San Domino, he realises that someone must have handed a list of names to the fascist police. Locked in spartan dormitories, resentment and bitterness between the men grows each day.

Elena, an illiterate island girl, is drawn to the handsome Francesco. Sometimes, she is given a message to pass on. She's not sure who they are from; she knows simply that Francesco is hiding something. When Elena discovers the truth about the group of prisoners, the fine line between love and hate pulls her towards an act that can only have terrible consequences for all.

On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends one of the daughters of infamous painter Evan Trentham. He and his wife are trying to escape the conservatism of 1930s Australia by inviting other like-minded artists to live at their home. Lily becomes infatuated with this wild, bohemian lifestyle and longs to truly be a part of the family.

But as the years pass, Lily observes the way the lives of these artists come to reflect their art. Yet it's not Evan, but his own daughters, who pay the price for his radicalism. Almost 30 years later, Lily contemplates the ordinary path her own life took, how she has played it safe, but does freedom come at a cost?

Brought together once more, this is a story of the impact of loss, devotion and obsession, and the demise of one family.

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

A kimono by any other name ... by Lesley Downer

August 13, 2017, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Heart and Soul at Apothecaries Hall by Fay Bound Alberti

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Writing about old Japan, there are many words which are very difficult to translate. The architecture, customs, clothing, even hairstyles are so different that the words simply don’t exist in English. For the entirety of Japanese clothing, as diverse in terminology as our blouse, skirt, dress, etc, we have only ‘kimono’ and maybe ‘robe’ and ‘gown’ that come remotely close.

In Japanese ‘kimono’ just means ‘something worn’, ’clothing.’ It’s come to mean traditional Japanese clothing, usually women’s wear.

Maiko and okami-san (house-mother):  2 sorts of 'kimono'

Not surprisingly in pre-modern Japan, the period I write about in The Shogun’s Queen, the different parts and types of clothing all had different names. The basic garment which we call a kimono was a kosode. Then there was the uchikake, a rich brocade overgarment (‘brocade’ - does it really communicate the rich silk?) with a quilted hem that trails on the ground behind you. I tried calling it an ‘over kimono’ and finally settled on ‘mantle’ though ‘mantle’ evokes something quite different from an uchikake.

Young unmarried girls including maiko (teenage trainee geisha) wear furisode, kimono with long swinging sleeves, while one of the markers of the fully qualified geisha is that she wears a kimono with shorter sleeves.

As for the obi, do readers understand the Japanese word or should I translate it as ‘sash’ or cummerbund’?

And how to describe tea ceremony? Does ‘bamboo scoop’ or ‘bamboo spoon’ evoke the tiny exquisitely shaped artefact that you use to take two scoops of green tea? Does ‘bamboo whisk’ conjure up the delicate shaving brush-like implement you use to beat the tea?

Chasen, chashaku, chawan (bowl), natsume (caddy)

Then there’s traditional architecture. When you visit someone you slide open the door and step into an area I call the vestibule, the entry way or the entrance hall. It’s where you leave your outdoor shoes and is a good step below the level of the main floor of the house. There you’re still outside, you haven’t intruded into the house proper, so you call out. And when you’re invited in you’re actually invited to step up. But do vestibule or entry way or entrance hall sufficiently communicate all this? And does it matter?

My YA author friend Victoria James has been busy changing the language of her novel to make it comprehensible to American readers. Do Americans understand ‘nobble’? And what do they understand by ‘biscuit’?

This probably all seems very simple. Of course writers should be as understandable as possible, should do their best to make even the most foreign of cultures accessible. My editors naturally want me to make my text as comprehensible as possible.

Maiko in furisode

But what is the best way to take the reader on a journey to another place and another time? To what extent do we need to hold the reader’s hand?
Following the rule of accessibility I might write, ‘She put on her kimono and over it her mantle and went to the entrance hall and slipped her feet into her wooden geta clogs ...’ But supposing instead I wrote ‘She put on her kosode and over it her uchikake and went to the genkan and slipped her feet into her geta ...’

Supposing I used chashaku instead of bamboo spoon and chasen instead of bamboo whisk and genkan for the entrance hall of a Japanese house?

In Sea of Poppies Amitav Ghosh is completely unforgiving. He peppers his sentences with foreign words. Some you understand straight away from the context, for some you have to flip back to the last use of the word and some you never understand. You just have to glide over them. He uses no italics and there is no glossary.

For example:: ‘... this was no ordinary ship bearing down on him but an iskuner of the new kind, a ‘gosi ka jahaz’, with agil-peechil ringeen rather than square sails. Only the trikat-gavi was open to the wind and it was this distant patch of canvas that had woken him as it filled and emptied with the early morning breeze. Some half dozen lascars sat perched like birds on the crosswise purwan of the trikat-dol, while on the tootuk beneath the serang and the tindals were waving as if to catch Jodu’s attention.’

'Sash'? 'Cummerbund'? The green garment is the ends of the tayu (courtesan)'s obi, knotted at the front to indicate that if you are rich, lucky and bold enough you might be allowed to untie it.

Speaking in New York he said that growing up in India he’d read English literature voraciously. He’d read, for example, the word ‘marshmallow’ and though he didn’t know that it was soft and white he knew it was edible and that was enough. He argued that it wasn’t necessary for the reader to understand every word but that the use of authentic words of the era created white noise, a phrase which evokes rather wonderfully the creation of atmosphere in fiction - though some might argue that he does take it rather far.

To me it raises very interesting questions. How do we write about a very foreign culture? How many foreign words can we include? Do they give atmosphere or hold up the reader? Following Ghosh’s example, could I use kosode and uchikake, and if not, why not? Ghosh’s language is actually quite difficult but that doesn’t stop you reading.

To quote him: ‘Language in novel works differently from language in journalism — it establishes atmosphere and background. Each good novel has white noise — filmmakers do it through visuals. Novelists do it with words, and so one must throw as a writer everything into the mix.’

Lesley Downer's latest novel, The Shogun's Queen, is now out in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.

Heart and Soul at Apothecaries Hall by Fay Bound Alberti

August 14, 2017, 4:00 pm

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Apothecaries Hall, Blackfriars, London

On Thursday 29 June I gave a keynote lecture at the Geoffrey Flavell symposium, held at the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, in Blackfriars, London. If you haven't visited, do check out the website and learn about the activities of the Society. It is 400 years old, having been founded as a City Livery Company (incorporated by royal charter in 1617); a major centre for the manufacture and sale of drugs at the Hall (1671-1922); the founder of Chelsea Physic Garden (in 1673) and a medical examining and licensing body since 1815. The beautiful building was partly burned down in the Great Fire of London and rebuilt; as an early modernist by training, I was delighted to discover that the symposium itself was being held in the space where Oliver Cromwell's armies had once bedded down for the night. Apparently, they made quite a mess. 

To get back to the theme of the symposium, Geoffrey Flavell was a highly respected cardio-thoracic surgeon. Born in New Zealand, he completed his training at Bart’s in London. In 1939, he became the resident surgical officer at the Brompton Hospital. And he worked, during the Second World War with Sir Archibald Mcindoe, of Guinea Pig fame, in treating severely burned patients. Flavell was appointed consultant at the London Hospital in 1950, where he worked for 30 years.

In keeping with Flavell's specialism, the title of this year's Symposium was ‘The Heart, Health and Culture: An Exploration in Medicine and the Humanities’. It gave me a chance to revisit my earlier work on the history of the heart, in health and disease. My book Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine and Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2010) explored the meanings of the heart as both symbol and organ. It looked at why we have two very different ideas about the heart in our culture: the heart as a Hallmark symbol sold on millions of cards every year and the heart as a pump, responsible for the circulation of the blood.


In my book, and in my paper, my theme was this: for centuries, medical practitioners in the West held the heart to be the centre of emotion, thought and feeling. Before the rise of the brain qua mind, the heart was the most important organ of the body, which was frequently viewed in cardiocentric ways: the heart was all that mattered in the end. With the rise of scientific medicine and neuroscience, the decline of religious explanations for our existence (and the decline of the soul in the material tradition), the heart became a material object. It might beat excitedly when we see a loved one, but not because our soul was moving through the heart. It might feel like our hearts would break, but not because our hearts were overwhelmed by the melancholic humours of the ancient world. Hormones began to offer a new explanation; hormones produced by the new emotional centre of the body: the brain.

Of course, the heart still continues to thrive at the level of popular culture. The brain governs emotions in name only. Nor is the brain the only contender for the title of emotional organ par excellence, as my book This Mortal Coil: The Human Body in History and Culture (Oxford University Press, 2016) argues. Other organs – notably the gut – are coming into their own. Like the heart, they are seen as sites of hormone production (and even, more controversially as systems of cellular memory). We are listening to the body more and more, though as we do, we must acknowledge the gaps in scientific medicine; the ways in which narratives of healing are leaving holism behind.

These are the themes I talked about at the symposium, reflecting my enduring interests in the history of the body and the history of emotion. How do we explain what we feel, and how has that changed over the centuries? Why are some organs given more importance than others? Why do heartfelt emotions and gut feelings have so much sway? Or really: why shouldn’t they? We feel with our gut and our heart, after all.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the symposium for me – a day that brought together historians and theologians, surgeons, GPS and ethicists – was how emotional our attitudes towards the body are, even for surgeons. Making a choice as a transplant specialist for instance - to operate or not operate - involves all the surgeon's clinical training, of course, but it also impacts on his and her emotional experience. Patients are not just bodies, but living, breathing people with families and loved ones. We want surgeons to be coolly efficient, but we also need them to be human.

The ways we intellectualise the body in medicine, talk about it, take it apart physically and metaphorically, doesn’t take away from the fact that we exist and experience the world, for good and ill, in our bodies. We feel emotional about what happens to our bodies (and those of our loved ones) just as we did in the past, albeit for different reasons. One of the themes that crosses boundaries between scientists and non-scientists is the question of what makes us quintessentially human. We might talk about the word ‘soul’ (and most of us believe we have one), though there is no agreement on what it is, or what it does.

In the 17th-century philosopher Rene Descartes’ time (he of the 'I think therefore I am' doctrine), things were simpler: the soul lurked behind the eyebrows. It was the space where the physical body met the emotional and spiritual body. It was also why so many emotional expressions involved the raising or furrowing of the brows. Today the soul is often placed in the brain (and sometimes seen as synonymous with the mind and consciousness). Far more often it exists as a nebulous, free-floating entity that is, and yet is not, linked to our religious beliefs.

Sometimes, the soul is still placed in the heart. When I ask people to point to their minds, more often than not they point at their heads. When I ask them to point to their ‘selves’, they point to their heart. The heart remains an emotional centre, then, and not just in language. The heart remains a symbol of our inner selves, of truth, of passion. Outside the narrow confines of medical textbooks, it can’t ever be reduced to a pump.



A Victorian Valentine's card from the Wellcome Images collection

David Douglas, plant-hunter: 1799-1834 - by Sue Purkiss

August 15, 2017, 6:00 pm

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This is the latest in my series of posts about those dashing adventurers, the plant-hunters. The previous one is here, and that has links to the earlier ones.

David Douglas, a Scot born in Scone, near Perth, in 1799, seems to have been even more indefatigable than his fellow plant hunters. He needed to be, because he had more than his fair share of bad luck, dreadful weather, and very unpleasant accidents.

Unlike the character in my forthcoming children's book about plant hunting, Jack Fortune, Douglas was interested in gardening and botany from a very early age. At the age of eleven, he became an apprentice to William Beatty, head gardener to the Earl of Mansfield at Scone Palace, later moving to Sir Robert Preston's gardens at Valleyfield, near Culross in Fife, where he also immersed himself in study in Sir Robert's library. In 1820, he began a new job at the Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh, where Sir William Hooker had just become Professor of Botany. (Sir William's younger son was Joseph, who later made the journeys to the Himalayas on which my Jack's travels are based - though Jack's adventures take place much earlier than Joseph's. Sorry if this is confusing...)

The Horticultural Society of London (now the RHS) had recently been set up, and when they asked Sir William if he could recommend a suitable botanical collector to work for them, he had no hesitation in suggesting Douglas.

Douglas, delighted, hastened off to London, expecting to be sent to China. Unfortunately, political unrest brought about a change of plan, and instead he was sent to New England. Following a pattern which was sadly set to continue, he endured a dreadful crossing with bad weather and a shortage of food, only to be told on arrival by immigration officials that he was too scruffy, and wouldn't be allowed to land till he'd bought some new clothes.

Vast tracts of America were as yet unexplored by settlers, so when Douglas set off into the interior - near Lake Eyrie - he was pretty much venturing into the unknown. He was thrilled by the wilderness and plunged happily into collecting lots of seed, despite his horse bolting (it turned out it only understood French), his cart driver stealing his possessions and abandoning him, and almost sinking on his way back to Buffalo in one of the violent storms which seemed to positively pursue him.

Somehow he got safely back to London, where the Horticultural Society was delighted with the species he'd brought home, which included a wide variety of fruit trees - perfect for the walled gardens of Britain's country houses.

His next trip was to the Pacific North-west of America, which entailed travelling all the way round the tip of South America and up the other side - it took eight and a half months. Living at Fort Vancouver, the base of the Hudson bay Company, he came to know and admire the Native Americans and use them as guides. Doubtless amused by his plant-hunting activities, they called him 'Grass Man'.

Flowering currant

Here he came across the flowering currant, which graces and scents so many gardens in spring, and the majestic fir which bears his name. He travelled by canoe up the Columbia River, and explored the countryside, battling with challenging terrain, hot sun, exhaustion and hunger.

Returning to Fort Vancouver, our unfortunate hero intended to catch a boat back to England, but missed it by an hour after being delayed by an abscess in his knee joint, caused when he cut himself on a rusty nail. So he stayed, and the following spring climbed the Blue Mountains, naturally encountering terrible weather. Partly as a result of snow-blindness, and partly due to sand which got in his eyes in the desert, he began to have problems with his eyesight.

The Douglas Fir, which can live for over a 1000 years.

So it went on. He continued to collect plants and seeds, despite falling down a ravine, encountering grizzly bears, and almost getting drowned in Hudson Bay.

Not surprisingly, when he returned to London, he found it difficult to fit in. Two years later, he set off again for North America. He revisited the Columbia River and then headed south to California, popped in to Hawaii and then went back north. He wanted to visit Alaska and then head home via Siberia. (!) However, with his usual luck, he lost all his possessions, his plant collection and his journal, when his canoe ran on to rocks in the Frazier river and he was thrown into the water and caught up in a whirlpool.

Understandably disheartened and in poor health, he decided to return to Hawaii. It was to prove a disastrous decision. Whilst staying with a local man named Ned Gurney, who trapped wild cattle for a living, using covered pits to trap the animals. At some point, Douglas apparently heard the cries of a bullock which had been trapped in a pit, went to investigate, fell in, and was gored and trampled to death; only being found some hours later.

Obviously, this was a tragic end for such a courageous man. But he had achieved a great deal. Britain has only three native conifers (the yew, the Scots pine, and common juniper): a great proportion of the conifers which form part of Britain's garden landscape today were introduced by him, as were the trees which later formed the basis for forestry enterprises all over the world. If you've ever despaired of the rows of conifers marching over British hills, you might have mixed feeling about this; but I don't think we can blame Douglas for the way his introductions were used - and we can only admire his dogged courage and persistence, in the face of a barrage of bad luck and unfortunate accidents.

(I am as ever indebted for my accounts of the plant hunters to 'The Plant Hunters', by Musgrave, Gardner and Musgrave - a really fascinating book.)

"REMEMBER SCARBOROUGH!" by Penny Dolan

August 16, 2017, 10:00 pm

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The bit marked “History” in my head is a bit of a muddle. It feels full of significant images that get added to, or overridden, or shuffled about somewhat, or coloured in more clearly and accurately. Moreover, the process isn’t a tidy one: the various new phrases, images and facts don’t present themselves in correct time-order. The “new” essential fact or story arrives as a surprise, and suddenly a question I hadn’t known to ask is answered.

Please excuse the simplifications but, in my mind, WWII buzzes with images of aerial warfare, partly because of RAF links within my family.  I think of fighters and planes and bombing raids and the Blitz raining down on London, where my grandparents had lived, and across the face of Britain. 

I knowWWII is much more: the British soldiers, Dunkirk and the Allies, the Nazi atrocities, the bombing raids, conflict across Europe and the East and so on and so on, but WWII often seems a time when, through the use of aircraft, war arrived hereon British soil.

WWI, by contrast, seems as of it is our soldiers over there,  shelled and blasted while they waited in the trenches and went over the top in France and Flanders. Yes, there’s more: the industrial-level war, the generation of men that did or did not return, the changing roles of women, the economic seeds laid for further trouble, and so on. But my first image of WWI are often iconic photos, like that which inspired the final scene in Blackadder.

Then, last weekend, I heard a new story. I was visiting Scarborough Castle, a ruined keep whose dominating headland sticks out into the North Sea.  Scarborough Head has been an invaluable look-out point since the Bronze age: the observer can see out across a wide horizon, and watch over the curving beaches that stretch North and South from the foot of the cliffs. Some of the retaining walls remain but the keep itself rises like a shattered hand. 

It was there, standing by the ruined stones, that I heard the story that changed my perception about the start of WWI.

Scarborough has always been a harbour, but during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it grew into a popular spa and resort. In 1815, the railway arrived, bringing visitors to the flourishing boarding houses and small hotels. In 1867 the Grand Hotel opened; with over four-hundred bedrooms, it was the biggest hotel in Europe, attracting many distinguished guests. (The Grand Hotel can be seen in several Victorian paintings, such as this dramatic work by Ernest Roe, showing the shipwrecks after the Great Storm of 1880. The hotel is on the right.)

 

Scarborough with its aquarium, pier and many entertainments was widely considered a place of idle pleasure and recreation. Even the ruined Castle, mostly used as pastureland, was leased by the Town Council, becoming another of visitor attraction and even, in 1912, the venue for an impressive historical pageant.  

Suddenly, in 1914, Scarborough became famous for a less welcome event. In July, war had been declared. The months that followed seemed peaceful to the population at large, and attention was focused on news from across the Channel.  

However, at 8am on the morning of 14th December, two German warships, the Vann Tann and the Derfflinger, suddenly appeared out of the mist just off Scarborough Head, with guns aimed at the town. For over thirty minutes, shells hit several buildings, including the Grand Hotel and the barracks within the Castle walls. There were reports of damage, deaths and injury and, fearful of another onslaught, guests and inhabitants crowded Scarborough station, trying to escape.

 

The two warships were part of the great German fleet moving steadily up the North Sea towards Scapa Flow. Sailing northwards, the pair shelled Whitby and Hartlepool, butthe bombardment of Scarborough, a defenceless non-military seaside resort, was what caused the greatest national outcry. Suddenly, the reality of war with Germany had come much closer to home.  I can’t help feeling that the attack on Scarborough must have had a similar effect on the national consciousness as the London July bombings.

Among the newspaper reports displayed in the Art Gallery is the funeral procession of the one territorial soldier killed in the attack, shown as further evidence of a despicable attack on a civilian population. There was no garrison at the Castle, though the name may have suggested otherwise.  The mechanical might of WWI had arrived here,not “over there” and the possibility of further bombardments from the sea must have haunted all those living by the coast throughout the war, and for the following decades.

As the news spread, questions were asked in Parliament about the whereabouts of the Royal Naval fleet, which lead to a different, more complicated story and the troubles of Admiral Jellicoe.

Meanwhile, as the way is with these incidents, the army was quick to seize the German bombs to encourage more conscripts. The shock and anger felt at the time blazes out from the famous recruiting poster, with its ringing exhortation:

REMEMBER SCARBOROUGH!

Once, years before, I’d come across this phrase quoted in a book, and passed over it. However, standing on the empty grass below the ruins of Scarborough Castle, hearing this story, I suddenly understood the impact and meaning of those words: 

War on British soil, over here, as well as over there.

 Penny Dolan

Kenilworth Castle - Celia Rees

August 17, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Kenilworth Castle from the remains of Mortimer's Tower (the main medieval entrance)

Last week, an old friend from New Zealand came to visit. We were thinking of places to go and I mentioned nearby Kenilworth Castle. By coincidence, Kenilworth was the first castle she'd visited when she came to the UK as a student to study at Oxford. It was the first castle she'd ever seen and she remembered marvelling at the size, the age, the beauty of the ruins. Although I only live a few miles away, I'd rather taken it's proximity for granted and hadn't actually visited for many years.  

Kenilworth Castle is one of the great historical sites. A royal castle for most of its life, it is one of the finest surviving monuments of its kind. It's big and impressive. Built of the local red sandstone, it sits on rising ground, on the outskirts of Kenilworth town, at the meeting of two ancient trackways and the confluence of two small rivers. 

The Great Tower

The oldest part of it, the Great Tower, was built by Geoffrey de Clinton in the 1120s. It was added to significantly by King John who dammed the two streams, flooding the low lying land around, so the castle was surrounded by a wide body of water called 'the mere'. The top of the dam was widened to become a tiltyard, used for jousting and tournaments. 

John of Gaunt's Great Hall.

Leicester's Building

The castle changed hands, as castles do. It  was granted to Simon De Montfort who then lost it after his defeat at the Battle of Evesham by Henry III. Kenilworth was an exceptionally strong fortress, surrounded by water, with an Inner and Outer Court and high curtain walls. Some of De Montfort's followers withdrew to the castle and withstood the longest siege in English medieval history only to be defeated by starvation and disease.  Henry  III granted Kenilworth to his younger son, Edmund, who became the Earl of Lancaster. The Lancastrians set about making it even more impressive, John of Gaunt adding a Great Hall. 

The castle remained in Lancastrian, then Tudor hands until it was granted to John Dudley by Henry VIII in gratitude for services rendered. 

Kenilworth then came to John's son, Robert, Earl of Leicester and favourite of Elizabeth I. In a bid to impress the Queen and to improve his rather shaky social status, Robert Dudley embarked on extensive improvements to the castle, adding the tower block known as Leicester's Building specifically to provide private lodging for the Queen on her visits in 1572 and 1575. 

He had the mere re-flooded, so that she could go boating and created a Privy Garden for her private enjoyment. The garden has recently been restored by English Heritage. It was surrounded by high hawthorn hedges to protect the queen from prying eyes and furnished with a marble fountain, obelisks and an aviary. The parterre is set out with beds planted with herbs and flowers. Each bed has a central standard holly. In the language of flowers, the holly bush symbolises deep desire. A subtle, or not so subtle, message from Leicester to his queen. 

Leicester also added a new Gatehouse, the only part of the castle to survive intact the 'slighting' it got by the Parliamentarians after their victory in the English Civil War. The Gatehouse became a private dwelling, remained so until the 1960s and has only recently been opened to the public. 

Leicester's Gatehouse

After its 'slighting', the castle became a Romantic Ruin and an early tourist destination, popularised by Sir Walter Scott's Kenilworth, painted by J. M. W. Turner, visited by Charles Dickens and Queen Victoria. It was rescued from completely falling down by bouts of restoration in the 19th and 20th centuries but Romantic Ruin is how I remembered it before this recent visit. English Heritage took over the care of the castle in 1984 and the extensive work that they have undertaken has transformed it, not only preserving and restoring the fabric of  the castle but making its history come alive. 

Sword play in the remains of the Collegiate Chapel

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

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Who was Livia, first lady of Rome? By Alison Morton

August 19, 2017, 12:38 am

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At seventeen, running through a burning forest in 41 BC, nearly betrayed by the cries of her baby son, Livia Drusilla fled through Sparta with her husband, Tiberius Claudius Nero, a supporter of Mark Anthony. Pursued by Octavian’s forces during the two warlords’ bitter struggle, they barely made it to safety.

Livia carried the blood and prestige of both the Livii and the patrician Claudii, families long accustomed to power. Politics was in the very air she breathed. She’d married within her aristocratic circle to Tiberius, whom Cicero described as ‘a nobly born, talented and self-controlling young man’ and who had risen to the rank of praetor, a senior magistrate. Unfortunately, he had backed the wrong side in the wars following Julius Caesar’s death. 

Livia Drusilla, Museo della Civita Romana, author’s photo

During an amnesty between Octavian and Anthony, Livia and her husband were able to return to Rome in 39 BC, doubtless relieved after a life on the run. Stripped of three-quarters of their assets for their disloyalty, the patrician couple accepted this was the end of Tiberius’ political career. But 39 BC was the year Livia began as a political exile and ended as the consort of one of one of the most powerful men in the world at whose side she stayed for over fifty years.

Livia was introduced to Octavian in autumn 39 BC when she was six months pregnant with her second child, Nero Claudius Drusus. Legend says that Octavian fell immediately in love with her, despite the fact that he was still married. He divorced his wife, Scribonia, on the very day that the latter gave birth to his daughter, Julia. Livia’s husband, Tiberius, was ‘persuaded’ to divorce Livia who then moved into Octavian’s house. On 14 January 38 BC Livia's child was born; Octavian and Livia married on 17 January, waiving the traditional waiting period. Fantastically enough, Tiberius, her divorced husband was present at the wedding giving her in marriage ‘just as a father would’!

The importance of the patrician Claudii to Octavian's cause, and the Claudians’ own political survival provide more rational explanations. Octavian, a rising star but from a middle rank equestrian background, needed connections with aristocrats like Livia to provide an aura of Republican respectability to his growing power. As for Livia's feelings, at 20 years old she was probably content to be joined with a younger man of 25 with such overwhelming promise. The 47-year-old Tiberius, newly pardoned by Octavian, did not have a real choice, but he was aware that it did not hurt to bestow his wife on Rome's ascendant power. Everyone gained. 

By all accounts, Livia played the role of a loving, dutiful and even old-fashioned wife. When Octavian rebranded himself as Augustus, Livia cooperated with his idea that upper-class women should behave in the austere fashion of earlier times, so she and other female members of his household spun and wove (at least some of) his clothing.

Dupondius depicting Livia as Pietas By Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com, CC BY-SA 3.0

Livia's image appears in ancient visual media such as coins and evolved with different styles of portraiture that promoted imperial propaganda and the cult of Augustus. Becoming more than the "beautiful woman" described as in ancient texts, Livia served as a public image for idealised Roman feminine qualities and symbolised the renewal of the Republic with the female virtues of pietas and concordia that were supposed to set the public pattern for future imperial women.

She ignored Augustus’s notorious womanising; Tacitus called her an "easy wife". But this was not unusual. The goal of a Roman marriage was the formation of a household and the production of children not sexual gratification which could be found elsewhere. Unfortunately, Livia never bore Augustus any living children. It demonstrated the strength of their relationship that Augustus did not divorce her because she failed in that respect. The two were a partnership; with her intelligence, connections and influence, she served him as a trusted confidante and advisor, even accompanying him abroad.

The perception that Livia schemed and was ambitious for Tiberius, her son with her first husband, fed the idea of her complicity in Augustus's death in AD 14. She supposedly smeared poison on figs, then guided him to pick one of these for himself while she selected untainted ones. Although implausible, the accusation shows how strongly she came to be perceived as championing her offspring at any cost. 

Suetonius describes a loving and trusting relationship between Livia and Augustus at the end. The emperor's last words were 'Live mindful of our wedlock, Livia, and farewell’. He died as he kissed her. This detail is probably no more accurate than the poisoned figs story, but it represents Livia’s double role: dutiful wife and ambitious schemer. 

Livia remained an influential figure even after Augustus’s death. Gaius, her great-grandson who followed Tiberius in the principate as Caligula, lived with her when he was young. He called her Ulixes stolatus, (Ulysses in a matron's dress), a strong and manipulative woman. 

Livia died in AD 29 at the advanced age of 86. She received a public funeral, although a relatively modest one, and was buried in the Mausoleum of Augustus. Gaius (the future Caligula) delivered the eulogy. When he became emperor, he paid the bequests that she had provided for in her will that her own son Tiberius had ignored. Her grandson Claudius would oversee her long-deferred deification in AD 42. Women were to name Diva Augusta in their oaths; she received an elephant-drawn chariot to convey her image to the games; a statue of her was set up in the temple of Augustus; races were held in her honour. The woman who played an important role in two principates joined the imperial pantheon at last. Tacitus's obituary calls her "An imperious mother and an amiable wife, she was a match for the diplomacy of her husband and the dissimulation of her son", a concise statement of the reputation that she left behind.

Further reading: 

The First Ladies of Rome: The women behind the Caesars, Annelise Freisenbruch

  

Were there once ships on the River Meon?

August 19, 2017, 4:30 pm

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Titchfield, in Hampshire, was once one of the most significant towns on the River Meon, enjoying considerable prosperity and status during the mediaeval period, at least partly because of its port. But, over time, as with many places whose fortunes rose and fell, Titchfield declined in importance, largely for social and economic reasons, but also partly perhaps because of its geography.

Titchfield lies at the seaward end of the River Meon, and up until the mid-17th century, the town supported a small port. The woollen industry was important in the area around Titchfield, and mills along the river banks powered the production of iron, tanned goods, salt and cloth. The port enabled the goods produced to be distributed to larger centres such as Southampton, and also allowed the local gentry to move around by boat instead of travelling by road.

Titchfield, South Street, looking towards the square. Public domain

But, in 1611, the life of Titchfield as a port began its decline when the estate owner, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley, blocked off the estuary of the River Meon and built a canal directly from the sea to the town. These actions were intended, presumably, to maintain the port, in the face of the silting up of the river mouth, but it is generally considered that, in practice, what he did rather hastened the decline of the town’s prosperity.

Speed’s 1611 map (http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/hantsmap/hantsmap accessed 07/08/2017). The River Meon estuary is still shown open, despite it being the year that the river was blocked off and the canal built.

The River Meon had been important for millennia to the groups of people who lived in its vicinity, as a source of water, undoubtedly, and food, perhaps, and also as a route through the woodland of Neolithic Britain (c.4000-2000BCE), and a means of transporting goods upriver from the sea. In due course, the river’s tidal estuary also made it suitable for water-powered industries to grow up along its banks.

In the 10th century, Titchfield was referred to in documents and maps as Ticcefelda, in the 11th century, Ticefelle, in the 13th and 14th centuries, Tichefelde, and by the 16th century, the town was documented as Tytchfelde.

The Domesday book entry for Titchfield states:

The King holds TICEFELLE. It is a berewick, and belongs to MENESTOCHES. King Edward held it. There are 2 hides; but they have not paid geld. (There) is land for 15 ploughs. In (the) demesne (there are) but 2 oxen (animalia), and (there are) 16 villeins and 13 borders with 9 ploughs. There are 4 serfs, and a mill worth 20 shillings. The market and toll (are worth) 40 shillings.[http://www.titchfieldhistory.org]

“Menestoches”, by the way, is Meonstoke, 12 miles or so further up the Meon valley (and more or less where my fictional “Meonbridge” lies).

A port of some kind seems to have existed at Titchfield, with the River Meon possibly serving as an industrial and commercial waterway, since the turn of the first millennium CE, when the river was still easily accessible from the sea. Such a port may not have been all that sophisticated. It is likely that large ships would have just anchored up outside the mouth of the river to unload their goods into little boats, which would then have ferried them to the bank and, perhaps, a little further upriver.

It is thought that, prior to the 10th century, the River Meon was negotiable by small boats along most of its length, making it a viable alternative to road travel through the area. But the late 10th/early 11th century was the start of the construction of many water mills all along the river, mills that were used mainly for grinding corn but also in other industries, such as wool and cloth, iron, tanning, and salt. The mill at Titchfield, mentioned in the Domesday Book, was worth 20 shillings, but there were as many as thirty mills along the river’s length, and they underpinned the area’s economy for the next thousand years. However, it seems that, over time, the very development of the mills, and the associated bridges, weirs and other engineering works, especially those further towards its source, meant that river travel beyond Titchfield became difficult and eventually impossible.

Sometime also in the 10th/11th centuries, Jean de Gisor, a rich Norman merchant, and a vassal of the kings of England, first Henry II and then Richard I, seems to have established a base at his property in Titchfield, in order to facilitate his cross-channel trade, implying the existence of a port that de Gisor hoped to exploit. Titchfield’s location would also have provided a good stopping off point for officials travelling between England and France, and a family like the de Gisors would certainly have attracted a wide array of important visitors, wishing to make use of cross-channel travel facilities. However, by 1180, the de Gisors had already moved on, to found the city of Portsmouth, and, presumably, develop its much bigger and more viable port. One can only speculate, but perhaps de Gisor found that the silty mouth of the River Meon was not as suitable as it might be for the establishment of a really successful port.

However, a century and half later, in 1232, the Bishop of Winchester, Peter des Roches, established a Premonstratensian abbey at Titchfield, which, perhaps because of its high social and political standing, in itself resulted in significant economic development both in the town and the surrounding rural landscape.

Titchfield Market Hall, built by the 3rd Earl of Southampton in the 1620s, dismantled and re-erected in 1970 at the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum, West Sussex. MilborneOne [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], via Wikimedia Commons

Titchfield already had a valuable market in 1086, as shown in the Domesday Book. When a town was granted a market or fair, it was a signifier of its importance. In fact Titchfield’s markets was one of the first in Hampshire and, by the 12th century, it was the only place in the Meon valley to have one. In the late 13th century, presumably after the establishment of such an important abbey, which was almost certainly visited often by officials and even royalty, King Edward I granted the town permission to hold an annual five day fair, which was of enormous economic significance.

By the 1330’s, Titchfield was one of Hampshire’s richest towns, despite still being relatively small and, in 1333, it was also one of Hampshire’s most heavily taxed towns, implying that it was both thriving and important. 

However, the town suffered excessively in the Black Death of 1349‐50. The population was substantially reduced, perhaps by as much as 80%, and during the plague’s recurrences in subsequent decades, the tenant population of Titchfield was depleted still further. This dramatic demographic shift must have had a significant economic impact on the town. Before the Black Death, prices were high and labour abundant, and landowners grew rich. But the huge loss of life severely affected the production of key exports such as wool, and the reduction in labour, demands for higher wages and the excess untenanted land unbalanced the economy, at least for a while, with estate owners finding their incomes falling and trade presumably not so buoyant. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) presumably also had an adverse impact, with the inevitable restriction of trade between England and Europe, and the burden of taxation imposed by the government to fund the king’s armies.

So were economic difficulties caused by the plague and the war the start of Titchfield’s gradual decline in significance? Possibly they played a part, but not quite yet…

The abbey was abandoned by the Premonstratensian order following Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1537, but the estate and the monastic buildings were quickly taken over by Thomas Wriothesley, who was granted the abbey and estate for his services to the Crown during the dissolution. Thomas was a member of the royal secretariat, and helped secure the king’s divorce from Katherine of Aragon. He was knighted in 1540, and became 1st Baron Wriothesley in 1544, when he also become Lord Chancellor. He was created 1st Earl of Southampton in 1547.

In 1542, Thomas had the abbey buildings converted into a home, known as Place House, some parts of which can still be seen (managed by English Heritage, http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/titchfield-abbey/).

Although this site is widely known as Titchfield Abbey, the remains are largely of the old gate house from Place House, which was owned by the Wriothesley family. Photo © Rosalind Hughes

Titchfield continued to be prosperous for some further decades but, as already mentioned, the mouth of the River Meon had always been “silty” and, in 1611, the situation became so bad that the 3rd Earl, Henry Wriothesley, Thomas’s grandson, took action.

As a momentary diversion, Henry was an intriguing character, if only because of his connection with William Shakespeare, who, in 1593, dedicated his narrative poem Venus and Adonisto him. The following year, he did the same with The Rape of Lucrece, and the words of the latter dedication were really rather over the top:

"The love I dedicate to your lordship is without end ... What I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours; being part in all I have, devoted yours"

The dedication page in The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare,  to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton and Baron of Titchfield.  Image in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, in the Tower of London  in 1603, attributed to John de Critz. Image in the Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Henry was Shakespeare’s patron and it seems that Henry may indeed have been the “Fair Youth” of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, though he is not the only candidate! However, he appears also to have been a rather disreputable fellow, despite his high status, getting into scrapes of various sorts, one of which so upset Queen Elizabeth that she refused to receive him at court for a while, though his banishment did not last, so perhaps he was silver-tongued as well as handsome?

Anyway, in 1611, Henry took the decision to block off the estuary of the River Meon from the sea, and build a canal adjacent to the river, one of the very first canals to be built in England. A sea lock was built across the estuary, thus removing the port. The sealock would control the passage of ships to and from Titchfield, but would also control the freshwater levels in the area, for a further objective of the scheme was apparently to reclaim the large stretch of sea-marsh lying between the town and the blocked-off estuary (now, the haven) for, one supposes, arable farming and sheep rearing to supply the woollen industry, which was perhaps seen as of greater value to the local economy than the river itself.

The canal was built, presumably, as an alternative to the river, providing a direct link from the town to the sea, and to replace the functions that the River Meon had supported. It was evidently, however, not very successful in the long term and a hundred years later it was no longer in use.

Interestingly, before he blocked off the estuary, the Earl established an iron mill, powered by the River Meon, which surely suggests that he expected his actions over the port to support, and even boost, Titchfield’s prosperity? And, over time, that mill did produce a huge quantity of iron. Wool, cloth, salt, and leather also still kept the town a viable trading community, but perhaps, ultimately, Titchfield could not keep up with the productivity and connections of the larger urban centres to the east and west – Southampton, Fareham and Portsmouth. So, although industry in Titchfield didn’t just fall away immediately following the closure of the river port, at length the importance it had once held did decline.

Taylor’s 1759 map showing the river Meon estuary blocked off from the sea and the adjacent canal running up to Titchfield Abbey/"Place House". A road runs along the sea wall and over the sea lock bridge, suggesting that the canal no longer flows into the sea. (http://www.geog.port.ac.uk/webmap/hantsmap/hantsmap accessed 07/08/2017)

It is probably unjust to lay responsibility for the downfall of Titchfield’s economic health at the door of the 3rd Earl – though some do – when it seems that he hoped his engineering works would be the town’s salvation. But perhaps factors simply conspired, over time, to bring about the decline in the town’s importance. The silty nature of the lower River Meon, the industrial development along its banks, and then the Earl’s attempts to overcome its natural limitations, togetherwith the lingering social, political and economic effects of plague and war, eventually reduce the town’s ability to sustain a port and, finally, its trading prosperity. 

Note:

Some of the discussion as to the background to Titchfield’s decline I shared during the writing of a Masters dissertation, The Economic Significance of the old port at Titchfield Hampshire, by Rosalind Hughes, which was submitted for a Masters degree in Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton in 2011 (unpublished).

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Buckingham Palace Summer Opening - Royal Gifts by Imogen Robertson

August 20, 2017, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: A Sweet Kind of Adultery by Catherine Hokin

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Royal Gifts
22 July - 1 October 2017
The State Rooms, Buckingham Palace

Cover of Royal Gifts Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017

So picture this: I’m broke, standing in the Buckingham Palace gift pavilion and looking for a present for my husband. I’m broke because I’m a novelist, at the Palace because I’ve just had a curator tour of the Royal Gifts Exhibition in the State Rooms, and looking for a present for Ned out of guilt, because while he’s slaving away at his desk, the Queen just gave me a cake. Ok, what I mean by that is one of the nice PR people from the palace gave me a café voucher for a pastry, but it was a very fine millefeuille which is Ned’s favourite and had a crown on it, so it counts. The Queen gave me a cake.

Not a Royal Gift

I don’t think I’m going to top it today, but the best present I’ve ever given my husband is a black glazed terracotta dipping cup, made in Apulia around 300 BCE. We fill it with terrifying spirits and pass it round the table at the end of dinner parties. It’s beautiful, but very simple, valuable, but no so valuable we have to lock it away. What makes it special is its age. It was there being a cup doing cuppy things when Christ was born, when the Vikings sacked Lindisfarne, when Caxton set up the first printing press in London and when the internet blinked into life. To Ned and me it symbolises hospitality, simplicity, change and continuity. It’s a sign of shared values. It says I know you, and you and I think the same things are important. Sometimes a cup is not just a cup.

We all assign value to objects through an uneasy and shifting dialogue between prevalent cultural values and our individual and shared histories. As a result gifts are never just themselves, they are a bundle of associations, allusions and suggestions. They say this is what I think about you, and often, this is what I want you to think about me. A gift is a message. Which is probably why I normally exchange strong drink with most of my writer friends and my mother often gives me cleaning products. 

With this is mind, looking at the gifts given to the Queen over the course of her long reign and from all over the world provides a fascinating series of snapshots of the relationships between nations and peoples and I found a huge amount to enjoy in the eclectic mix of items on display. They are grouped geographically by the giver, and there’s also a section devoted to gifts from the UK. A lot of the gifts are exemplars of local arts and crafts, such as the magnificent beaded throne given by Nigeria and made by the Yoruba people. The throne was one of my favourite pieces in the exhibition. It's strangely lovely, such skilled work and full of its own particular symbolism. 

From Bermuda comes a oil painting by Graham Foster of the wreck of the Sea Venture in 1609. Everyone survived the wreck, so it's not commemorating a tragedy, but evoking a shared maritime history. The Mexican tree of life is the product of different cultural cross-currents and also an affectionate portrait of the Queen herself, who features in a natty yellow ensemble in the centre of it. Some gifts are startling in their simplicity, such as the prayer shawl blessed by the Dali Lama from Tibet, others seem rather driven by affection such as the map of New Zealand presented by their girl guides, with an accompanying book signed by every girl guide in the country. There are also some unconventional treasures on show whose values are rather like that of the relics exchanged between medieval monarchs. A bone is just a bone, but when its the thigh bone of a saint it’s a worthy gift. A scrap of cloth is not valuable in itself, but when it is the Union Flag badge worn in space by Major Tim Peake it becomes something fitting to give to a monarch whose reign began before we’d climbed Everest. 

Of course, I am, as all the visitors are, also bringing my own ideas of meaning to these gifts, but that is the pleasure of these objects, they are extra chips of glass in the historical kaleidoscope and seeing them together is a fascinating way to shake up and reexamine what we are trying to say to each other.

The exhibition is perhaps overshadowed by the State Rooms themselves, but then I doubt many people would pay £23 entry fee just to see the gifts. I've never been to this part of the Palace before, so was distracted by the Vermeer and Van Dykes, the chandeliers and thrones, not to mention the 1980s gas fires in the ornate marble fireplaces. The gifts do make for a very interesting addition to the tour though, and the setting only emphasises the variety and varied aesthetic pleasures of the gifts displayed. 

So what did I get Ned? Well it had to be relatively cheap, and fun, but I didn’t think he’d really appreciate a stuffed Corgi. I wanted something Royal, but something about us too, so I got him this. He says he likes it.

www.imogenrobertson.com

A Sweet Kind of Adultery by Catherine Hokin

August 22, 2017, 1:00 am

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I'm currently having a bit of an Annie Grey fan moment having just read The Greedy Queen (a fabulous account of Queen Victoria and food) and watched her recent BBC series The Sweet Makers which plunged four chefs back into the world of British confectionery production from the Tudors to the 1930s.

Tudor Room set for a sugar banquet © Minneapolis Institute of the Arts

There were all kinds of wonderful nuggets in the series. I loved the concept of a Tudor sugar banquet - basically the dream 'pudding dinner' my kids always longed for - and the weird Georgian jellies but what intrigued me most was the Victorian muddling of sweets and poison. We bandy the word poison about a lot when it comes to food and, ironically, it's currently sugar that is only permitted a place at the Devil's table. This is neither the time nor the place to rant about clean-eating (although the news that coconut oil is basically lard had me in fits of joy for a week) and nuts and additives are a minefield for those with allergies, but at least they're not arsenic.

Yes arsenic, just one of the jolly compounds accidentally or intentionally used in food manufacturing in nineteenth century Britain. Fancy some more? What about copper sulphate used in bottled fruits and pickles or red lead for colouring Gloucester cheese or perhaps a tasty drop of strychnine in your rum or beer? If you're not in the mood for those, how about setting the breakfast table with a jug of chalk-filled milk, a nice loaf of bread with added plaster of Paris and a pat of butter brightened up with copper. Pop Tarts suddenly don't sound quite so bad after all.

Adulteration in food is nothing new. In the middle ages, costly spices were often bulked out with ground nutshells or pits or even stones and dust and bread flour was regularly mixed with sand and sawdust. Laws to try and regulate price, weight and quality of foodstuffs such as bread and beer began in 1266 and were heavily enforced by trade guilds. These laws, however, were to protect the market not the consumer and were patchy in their application outside towns and cities. Fast forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the mass move towards urbanisation, and adulteration becomes the rule rather than the exception across pretty much all food and drink sectors and one of the worst offending culprits was the confectionery trade.

Pharmacy Jars with sweetie ingredients

Access to sugar democratised in the mid nineteenth century as prices fell sufficiently for sweets and associated items (such as cakes and biscuits) to come within working class budgets. A cottage industry grew up to feed the nation's new sweet tooth, particularly round the production of boiled sweets. However, this was also a period of intense competition as technological innovations in processes and packaging (and the growth of the advertising industry) opened the market to entrepreneurs such as Fry, Rowntree and Cadbury whose interest was not tiny kitchens but large scale manufacturing. Profit became king and corners were not so much cut by the smaller producers as rampaged round. Potentially lethal chemicals were used for colouring, especially to make the sweets attractive to children, eg: mercury sulphide (red), lead chromate (yellow), copper sulphate and good old arsenic (blue) and copper arsenite (green). Sugar was bulked out with plaster of Paris and limestone. Very often the hapless consumer could not tell the difference - as the sweet makers demonstrate in the programme when they compare adulterated and non-adulterated toffee.

Caricature by John Leech, Punch 1858

Oh the poor consumer: as is too often the case, it took a rather nasty accident to wake everyone up to what they were really brightening their diets with. Analytical chemistry was on the rise in the nineteenth century, particularly with the development of the microscope, and a few brave souls had tried to turn whistle-blower on some of the more dubious practices. In 1820, a chemist by the name of Frederick Accum published The Treatise on Adulterations of Food and Culinary Poisons which contained detailed methods for detecting adulterants within foods and drink. He then followed this up by publishing a list of all those convicted of selling adulterated products and, not surprisingly, found himself up in court on charges of stealing and then damaging some of his source books. Reputation in tatters, poor old Accum fled home to Germany and the malpractices continued, with unfortunate results for the people of Bradford. 

The Greenmarket in Bradford was home to a sweet stall owned by William Hardaker, who was known to locals as "Humbug Billy". He bought his humbugs from sweet maker Joseph Neal, who should have been making his lozenges from peppermint oil, sugar and gum. Neal, however, preferred the profit margin obtained by replacing part of the sugar with gypsum, a kind of plaster known in the trade as "daff". So far so every day but, in what must have been the one of the worst examples of  "you really can't get the staff," Neal sent his assistant to the pharmacy for his dodgy supplies where that assistant was served by another assistant and the resulting purchase was not 12 pounds of daff but 12 pounds of arsenic. The sweets were made - apparently they looked a bit odd and the sweet maker (James Appleton) came down with vomiting and pains in his hands during the process but that didn't stop Neal selling 40 pounds of the luscious lozenges to Hardaker. Within 24 hours of the first batch being sold, 200 people had arsenic poisoning and 21 died. 

Bradford was lucky: the resulting trial (at which all were acquitted) estimated each humbug contained 9 grams of arsenic, twice the lethal dose, and enough had been distributed to kill 2000 people. And this was not an isolated case. The following year, 6 pupils at a school in Bristol plus a publican and his brother became violently ill after eating Bath buns purchased from a local bakers. When the buns were analysed, each was found to contain 7 grains of the paint pigment lead chromate which the baker had used rather than eggs to colour the buns bright yellow. Apparently he did it all the time but had somehow used too heavy a dose on this occasion. As with Bradford, no one was prosecuted because no laws had actually been broken. There was an outcry and laws were finally introduced (The Pharmacy Act, 1868 and the Adulteration of Food and Drugs Act 1872) which led to an ongoing recognition of food-borne illnesses and a programme of regulations to combat malpractices. 

The chilling bit, of course, is the detection. In the middle ages, awareness of adulteration came through noticing changes to weight and smell and taste. As technology progressed, it became easier to detect the undetectable but that doesn't mean the threat went away - the adulterers just got cleverer and technology and malpractice always seem to have a lag, especially when profits are involved. A study produced in 2013 listed 10 common products still regularly picked up in tests as being adulterated, including maple syrup, wine and coffee and milk in China where it has been contaminated with melamine to make it appear more rich in protein. Kale anyone?

Making History by Susan Price

August 22, 2017, 4:01 pm

≫ Next: WHEN CLARET WAS PINK: Wine production in the Middle Ages.

≪ Previous: A Sweet Kind of Adultery by Catherine Hokin

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I'm reading a book on my kindle and enjoying it.

     No surprises there. A complaint I've heard all my life and still hear often (especially from my partner) is that I'm 'always reading,' always 'got my nose in a book.'

     It's hard to put your nose in a kindle, though, and  I've found that when you read in bed and doze, the falling Kindle strikes your nose a far more destructive blow than a paper book. This hasn't stopped me. The book I'm reading and thoroughly enjoying at the moment (despite the risk to my nose) is The Town House by Norah Lofts. I've just finished her similar Bless This House.

Bless This House was first published in 1954, before I was born. The Town House, first published in 1959, is the start of a trilogy, being followed by The House at Old Vine (1961) and The House at Sunset (1962).

Bless This House by Norah Lofts

     Bless This House is almost like a test-run for the trilogy, though it is a very good read in its own right (write?) It tells of the building of a house during Elizabeth I's reign and then, in a series of linked short stories, follows the people who owned it through the centuries for four hundred years.

     The reader has an understanding that the characters lack. For instance, a girl living in the house in the 19th Century finds that she experiences debilitating despair whenever she goes near a window-seat in the Great Hall during daylight and an overwhelming terror if she enters the room at night. She doesn't understand it, but the reader knows who it was in an earlier century who first experienced that despair and left its mark on the house.

      The Town House and its sequels take the same idea, of a house and the passing centuries, and extend it. The first book begins in 1391 and follows the building of 'the house at Old Vine' and then the people who lived in it and the times they lived in. The final book tells of the house, still standing, in the 1950s which was, when Norah Lofts wrote it, close to her present.

Born in 1904, in Norfolk, Norah Lofts came from a farming family - she said that all of her male relatives, for living memory, had been farmers and an understanding of farming and the seasons is a strong element in her writing. Her other great strength is a tolerant understanding of people. Not all her characters are likeable but their motivations are readily recognisable. She takes the opportunity to show us her people from different viewpoints. We will be with one character in their youth or middle-age, as they tell us their own story - and then, in the next story, we will see that character from the view-point of someone from another generation. We see how time has changed them and how they are judged by those around them. We, the readers, who know far more about them, may consider that judgement too harsh or too kind.

      Norah Lofts also understood that no matter how hard some people work, no matter how much they hope or love or pray, the indifferent world goes on turning, the seasons go on changing and are not influenced by hard work, hope, prayer or love. What happens, happens - and if things turn out well for us, we think that it's our optimism or prayer or effort that made things fall that way. But it was simply luck; and for many other people, no better or worse than us, things went badly.

The Town House by Norah Lofts

I first read these books when I was a teenager and loved them. As always, when you return to books you enjoyed when so much younger, I feared that I would be disappointed. Instead, I've been impressed all over again.

But here I was, reading them on a nose-bruising kindle. When I first read them, let alone when Norah Lofts wrote them, I don't think anything like an e-reader was being dreamed of even in Science Fiction. It was a time when people who actually worked in the computer industry predicted that there might be a world market for about twenty computers. This, of course, was when even the most excitingly modern computers were the size of a room. My partner, in the 60s, when he was just starting out as a local government accountant, was introduced to one such. Local big-wigs, he says, came to visit it and it used to sing songs for them. They were thrilled. His boss wanted him to become a servant of the computer since he was young and bright. (It probably terrified the boss, looming there in its room with its valves and wires.) But Davy couldn't see the point of the thing and ran away to sea instead. Now he mildly regrets this. But not a lot.

Today, I carry my little hand-held computer about with me from room to room, as I always used to carry a book - except that the kindle holds a library. Reading on it has become as ordinary to me as switching on the light or filling my kettle at the tap - ordinary things which are also quite astonishing and trail a long history behind them.

I also self-publish on the kindle and that has become an ordinary part of my life even though I only began five years ago. How quickly miraculous things become mundane. When I began self-publishing, I was working in a university as a Royal Literary Fund Fellow. I remember students becoming excited when they spotted my kindle. "Is that one of those electric reading thingies?"

I remember reading my kindle in a pub as I waited for my agent. It was a rather posh pub on the outskirts of Oxford and a retired general type stage-whispered to his wife: "That lady has one of those e-book gadgets." And when I read it in a cafe, the waitress quizzed me about it: Was it easy to get books for it? Was it easy to download them? She wanted to encourage her sons to read and she thought they would read an ebook more readily than a paper one.

These days, who would notice an ebook - except perhaps to sneer at it for not being the latest smart phone?

My point? Only this - time is always moving on through the centuries and we, my computer-savvy, self-publishing, blogging, vlogging friends, just by reading our favourite books on our favourite gadget, by self-publishing, by writing for this blog, we are making history.

We thank Susan Price for this guest post. Leslie Wilson will return in September.

 Susan Price's historical trilogy The Sterkarm Handshake, A Sterkarm Kiss and Sterkarm Tryst, can be found here.