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The World’s First Novel by Lesley Downer

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One day, a little over a thousand years ago, a Japanese court lady picked up her writing brush. In those days Japanese noblewomen lived in seclusion. The only men they could expect to see throughout their entire lives were their fathers, brothers, sons and, if they had one, their husband. The woman - no one knows her name but she has gone down in history as Murasaki Shikibu - was a lady-in-waiting at the imperial court.
Lady Murasaki at her desk
by Utagawa Kunisada (1786 - 1865) 1858

Some time around 1006 - sixty years before the Battle of Hastings, a couple of hundred years after Beowulf and a couple of hundred years before Chaucer - she started writing a story to entertain her mistress, the empress. Like the sultan listening to The Thousand and One Nights or the readers of the instalments of Dickens’s novels, the court ladies clamoured for more.

Murasaki Shikibu was unlikely ever to have a love story of her own so - perhaps a bit like Jane Austen - she dreamt up the ultimate man and fleshed him out. Prince Genji, the result of her imaginings, was handsome and charming, but also kind-hearted. He was human and flawed. As she told his story he developed and changed and grew older. He suffered terrible losses and tragedies. What Murasaki wrote was amazingly modern, all about relationships and character and feelings. It is moving and gripping and spellbinding and reads like the freshest of page turners. It was the world’s first novel.

In The Tale of Genji Murasaki recounts Genji’s adventures, travels, love affairs and tragedies. A breaker of hearts and fatally prone to falling in love, he’s an adept in the arts of perfume mixing, poetry writing and calligraphy. In his society court ladies keep themselves hidden inside their palaces. He exchanges poems with women he’s never seen and decides if they’re worth meeting on the basis of their handwriting and the quality of their poems. It’s a world quite Proustian in its delicacy and beauty and eternal leisure.
Ox carts - The Tale of Genji
by Tosa Mitsuoki (1617 - 1891) 

This was a society with a very different ethos from our own. Women were never openly seen by men. Noblewomen lived in vermilion-painted palaces (the aristocracy were the only people who counted, as far as Murasaki was concerned) and when visitors called, they received them hidden behind screens. When the women went out they trundled around the tree-lined boulevards of the capital, Heian-kyo, in magnificent ox-drawn carriages, hidden from view, though they made sure there was an exquisite silk sleeve dangling gracefully out of the window so the passing crowd could imagine just how beautiful and cultured the hidden lady was. There was much standing on tiptoe and peeping through lattice fences, not just by the men, trying to catch a glimpse of these elusive creatures, but also by women, when someone like Prince Genji passed by.

In The Tale of Genji men regularly enter ladies’ palaces at night, make love to them in the pitch dark without ever having seen their face and leave at daybreak. The servants, being well trained, studiously ignore the intruders though they are well aware of who they are, as each man wears a distinctive perfume which he has mixed himself.
Lady seated behind screens
Tale of Genji by Kano Hidenobu (late 17th/early 18th century)

Some of the most memorable episodes in The Tale of Genji are humorous. At one point, Genji hears about a princess who lives all alone (apart, of course, from her maids, who don’t count). One day he happens to hear her playing her zither with such skill he assumes she must be very beautiful. He sends her poems, but she is so shy she doesn’t answer, which only piques his interest further. Finally he sneaks in. There is a delicious scent of sandalwood emanating from her clothes, surely evidence of extraordinary beauty. But when he wakes up the next morning and finally sees her he discovers that, far from being beautiful, she has a huge red nose and, worse still, wears very old-fashioned clothes. He’s so horrified he doesn’t even send the customary morning-after poem until evening. But in the end his tender heart is touched and he takes her too under his wing.
Heian Shrine, Kyoto - identical to
Heian Palace (794 - 1227) which Lady Murasaki knew

The early part of the tale is full of stories like these, poignant, sometimes humorous, sometimes tragic, detailing Genii’s youthful indiscretions and misadventures, at the end of which he has gathered a brood of women who each live in an apartment in his palace. But as Genji gets older, the story gets darker; in all it is some 54 chapters and 1000 pages long. He suffers, he has terrible failures and disasters and in the end loses the person dearest to his heart - Murasaki, after whom the author is named.

By the time I sat down and read the whole novel I’d been living in Japan for several years. I knew Heian-kyo, Genji’s and also Murasaki’s city, very well. It exists like a ghostly presence underlying the streets of Kyoto, its modern name. The vermilion buildings and green-tiled roofs of Heian Shrine are an exact replica, scaled down a little, of the imperial palace that Murasaki knew, which stood until 1227. In spring the gardens, lake and delicate pavilions are swathed in clouds of cherry blossom. And you can still imagine the ox carts with their huge wooden wheels rumbling up and down the long straight streets of the City of Purple Hills and Crystal Streams, as the poets called it.

The Tale of Genji suffuses Japanese culture and Japanese society. It features in everything from art to the incense guessing game, and episodes from it form the plots of many Noh plays. It enormously coloured the way Japan looked to me. Japanese, I should add, are usually amazed to hear that I’ve read and love The Tale of Genji. For them it’s like Beowulf, so difficult that they too can’t read it in the original and rely on modern Japanese translations.
Lady Murasaki might have glimpsed
yamabushi mountain priests like these from
 the window of her oxcart as she passed
Yasaka Shrine, Kyoto (first built 656 AD) 

As a postscript, if you’re inspired to read The Tale of Genji, you should borrow, buy or steal the Arthur Waley translation. Scholars will tell you it’s not impeccably accurate. Waley took liberties, he changed details. If what you want is a precise, perfectly accurate translation, you could try Edward Seidensticker’s version or Royall Tyler’s magnificent two volume set with copious footnotes and a very interesting introduction. But if you read either of those you won’t be swept off your feet and fall madly in love with Genji and be transported away and unable to stop reading. For that you’ll have to go to Arthur Waley.

Lesley Downer’s latest novel,The Shogun’s Queen, an epic tale set in nineteenth century Japan, is out now in paperback. For more see www.lesleydowner.com.



Suicide in Rome - by Antonia Senior

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This week, I have been thinking about suicide.



Not, I promise, my own. I have been thinking about Roman suicide. There was a surge in suicides among Roman aristocrats under the Julio-Claudian Emperors. Suicide was a political act; and in imperial Rome, all politics must be understood in relation to the Emperor. Historian Paul Plass argues that this was game theory suicide, in which execution masqueraded as suicide. The victim could undermine the potency of the Emperor’s intent by claiming libertas – freedom - in the act of self-killing. It was a complicated dance, understood by all, in which the “first and central axiom in the political logic of suicide is the Emperor’s power”.

For the self-killing to fit into this exchange of power and agency, it was necessary to stage a "good” death. The contrast between a noble death and a deluded death is a pre-occupation of Seneca’s, and is visible in a constant theme in his drama and his philosophy.

This impression of an age with a morbid flavour is compounded by the sources. Our primary sources for the suicides in the reigns of the early emperors are Tacitus, Suetonius and Cassius Dio; all of them writing significantly later than the events they describe. Tacitus, in particular, is pre-occupied with political suicide.

It is clear, however, that for both early imperial writers and the later chroniclers, there were some familiar tropes that distinguish a good death. The first is the notion that death reveals the man. It is not enough to die, one must die well.


Bravery is crucial. Tacitus labours the duration of certain suicides, including that of Seneca, who takes an age to saw sufficient wounds in his wrists. He reveals a begrudging admiration for Petronius, whose subversive, drawn out death is a riot of feasting and excess.


Seneca: took his time


For Seneca, emulating Cato who himself emulates Socrates, it is important to die a thinking, philosophical death. Suicide is a reasonable response for a stoic who wishes to lay claim to freedom. “Do you ask where the path to freedom lies? It flows through every vein in your body,” says Seneca in his work On Anger. Historian Miriam Griffin argues that philosophy provided the etiquette and style for suicide, as well as a justification.

But how do you tell the difference between a virtuous free death and a deluded death. A “protocol of death” should be followed, to reinforce the notion that the self-killer is reclaiming freedom and virtue, rather than succumbing to morbidity. A good dinner, calm words with chosen friends, calmness in the act; all are ingredients. But there must be an audience. How else can witness be borne that reason triumphed despair? There is a theatricality necessary, then, to the political suicide.

To kill yourself in Imperial Rome meant comparing yourself to those who had gone before. For Seneca, a habitual user of exempla to define and encourage moral behaviour, it was not sufficient to emulate Cato and Socrates, he had to outdo them and become himself an exemplum.

The ultimate witness for the act of self-killing is the Emperor. Suicide was an important pre-emptive strike to avoid the Emperor’s humiliating offer of clemency. Clemency, as understood in its imperial context, was to be avoided – it is a pointed expression of the Emperor’s power and the powerlessness of the pardoned. To deprive the Emperor of a chance to offer or withhold clemency, is to assert freedom in the face of power.



This attempt to carve a vestige of virtue and freedom out of an imperial system which denies their possibility is the key to understanding stoic suicide. Stoics faced a fundamental tension between their commitment to nature and wisdom, and their necessary involvement in the public life of the state. A rational death allows this tension to be resolved. The details matter. Form matters; in part to resolve the central paradox of Roman political suicide. If suicide is the free choice of a free man, then what is suicide if the Emperor orders it?




Nero’s suicide escapes this central paradox –,at the moment of his death, he was still, theoretically, the Emperor. No-one ordered his death, although events suggested it as a rational course of action. The sources are hostile to Nero, and it is no coincidence that he bungles his suicide. No calm dinner for him, no noble witness. A ditch, a freedman, a failure of nerves. Nero begs his freedman to do the job for him, and thus shouts to posterity that he is less than a man. 

Nero: botched job







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THE STUARTS ARE STILL THE NEW TUDORS – Elizabeth Fremantle

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For some time now I've been hailing the Stuarts as the new Tudors. Last year saw a number of publications set in the seventeenth century, among others we had Linda Porter's excellent Royal Renegades on the children of Charles I, Andrew Taylor's hugely successful The Ashes of London, a thriller set during the Great Fire and my own The Girl in the Glass Tower, about Arbella Stuart who might have been England's first Stuart queen.

The trend shows no signs of abating with the publication of several more intriguing works of both fiction and non-fiction including the winner of the 2017 HWA Debut Crown, Beth Underdown's brilliant debut novel The Witchfinder's Sister, a beautifully written and chilling story woven around the Manningtree witch hunts.

Another dark offering comes in the shape of Katherine Clement's The Coffin Path, an eerie and compelling gothic ghost story set in the wilds of the Yorkshire moors. Other seventeenth century set fiction includes Jemahl Evans's This Deceitful Light, which continues his English Civil War series with great aplomb and Deborah Swift's Pleasing Mr Pepys, which shows explores the drama and intrigue of Pepys's world through the eyes of his wife.

In non-fiction Benjamin Woolley's fascinating portrait of the Duke of Buckingham, The King's Assassin: The Fatal Affair of George Villiers and James I, not only charts the rise of James I's most successful favourite but also explores the accusation made by a doctor at the King's deathbed that Buckingham had a hand in his benefactor's demise – all very juicy stuff indeed. Looking forward the immensely talented Leanda de Lisle has a new biography coming in January: The White King: Charles I, Traitor, Murderer, Martyr, which is every bit as thrilling as its title suggests. 

If you're looking for Christmas presents for friends and family who have read everything there is to read about the Tudors, then look no further.

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

Of Ships and Churches

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

Churches can be a fascinating reflection of their local community and history. I have grown up visiting churches in the North of Jutland (Denmark) and taking for granted that in each church, there will be at least one model ship suspended from the ceiling.

Lønstrup
In a community where almost every family made their living from the sea, mainly from fishing, the sea and its dangers were part of life. In Skagen, fishing was done from the beach until the harbour was built in 1904. On the west coast, fishing from the beach continued for much longer and there are still small communities like Lønstrup, where fishing boats are still winched on and off the beach today.



Lønstrup Boathouse
The North Sea is big and dangerous and without modern navigation tools, engines or weather forecasting, many persished at sea. This was the same for fishing communities the world over, of course. But here it has been integrated into the churches. The ships are there as a reminder that every family has lost members to the sea, that many may have loved ones at sea even as some sit in church. Perhaps they are also a form of thanksgiving - a reminder that the sea provides food and - for some - prosperity.
This is Skagen's Kirke:




 As one might expect of such a grand church (by local standards) it has a sophisticated interior. And some smart ships. Here is one of them:

Råbjerg kirke
But the ships are in all the coastal churches (and right up in the north, almost everywhere is on the coast). This church is in the middle of a dune, grass and farmland landscape, not far from the west coast. It has an interesting history of its own; it stands alone because the village around it had to be abandoned during a bad spell of shifting sand. But the church endures, solitary and charming. It underwent major restoration in 1931 and is now on a busy summer route to the beach so, for a few weeks a year, it has plenty of visitors:

The interior is low ceilinged and beamed and painted the traditional white. And of course, there are beautiful model ships suspended down the middle of the church:





It is impossible not to know you are in a coastal community when you sit in the churches here and look around. (For copyright : all photos are my own, taken summer 2017)





Follow me on Twitter at @jensen_ml




Guy Fawkes - and an awful lot of light bulbs... By Sue Purkiss

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We've just had some friends staying, and as we drove one day from Cheddar to Wells, Rosie noticed a sign warning that roads would be closed in a week's time because of the carnival.

"What an odd time of year for a carnival!" she said. "What kind of carnival is it?"

"Oh," we said, with a touch of understatement. "The carnival's quite a big thing in Somerset..."

Here, to explain, is a post I wrote a few years ago. For some reason, the carnivals are a week later than usual - so if you want to catch one, you still can.)

You've probably all heard of the Carnival of Venice. But down in Somerset, we have a carnival of our own, and this is its season. It starts in Bridgwater, close to the 5th November, and then it travels in succession to Weston Super Mare, North Petherton, Burnham on Sea, Shepton Mallet, Wells and Glastonbury. For the evening of carnival, the town centre is closed, and no matter what the weather, the route is lined with crowds of people, watching as upwards of fifty brilliantly lit carts (called 'floats' in other places) roll through the streets, drawn by tractors. Each cart has a theme, which is illustrated by performers - some have a tableau, but most have dancers, all gorgeously costumed and made-up (Strictly, eat your heart out!). The music's loud and the lights are dazzling - a cart may have 22,000 light bulbs.

Perhaps it all sounds a touch excessive - but this is a tradition which began over 500 years ago, deeply rooted and much treasured. It began when James 1 ordered his subjects to celebrate the discovery and punishment of Guy Fawkes and his fellow conspirators by lighting bonfires all over the land. The towns of the south west, staunchly protestant, set to with alacrity. In Bridgwater, they built a huge bonfire right in the centre of town. To start off with it was built out of an old wooden ship (Bridgwater is a port), with 100 tar barrels to get the flames leaping. (Eventually they ran out of ships and had to collect wood, like everyone else.) There were special fireworks called squibs, attached to long sticks, and a hundred 'squibbers' stood in line in the High Street and let their squibs off as a triumphant finale.

The townspeople streamed through the town to the bonfire, many of them dressed in masks and costumes. Effigies of Guy Fawkes, the Pope, and anyone who'd managed to get on the wrong side of the Bridgie populace were slung onto the fire, and there was merry-making till the early hours. Eventually, in 1880, the merriment tipped over into a riot. The town dignitaries cogitated. There was no question of banning the carnival: instead, they formed a committee (what else?), which decided that henceforth there had better be a procession, which would wind through the town so that everyone would be able to see it, and the high jinks would not be concentrated in one small area.


And so began the formation of the carnival clubs, rejoicing in names such as the Masqueraders and the Gremlins. Each cart costs thousands of pounds, much of which is raised from sponsorship. The clubs spend the whole year raising money and building the cart; to do this they need costume makers, make-up artists, electricians, mechanics, tractor drivers, artists, painters, carpenters, sound engineers and more besides. Friendships are formed, marriages are made (and possibly broken); whole lives are lived within the ambit of the club. Thousands and thousands of pounds are raised for charity. After the carnival, the floats are dismantled and it all begins again - as you travel through Somerset, you may see the remnants: a giraffe grazes in a field near Glastonbury, a camel and a dinosaur gaze at each other from opposite sides of the M5.

In 1685, the Bridgie people were still staunchly protestant, as were many others in the south west. But now, unfortunately, the king, James 11, was not. The people of Bridgwater, along with many others from the south west, took part in the Monmouth Rebellion - also known as the Pitchfork Rebellion - and they paid a severe price for it at the Battle of Sedgemoor and in its aftermath. Presumably during the three short years of James' reign, the great bonfire was not lit on the Cornhill: and presumably when James was deposed and William and Mary came to the throne, the merrymaking was even more heartfelt and more riotous than before.

But perhaps Bridgwater's finest hour came in 1938, after Britain and France had shamefully let down Czechoslovakia by signing an agreement at Munich which allowed Hitler to invade unopposed and take the Sudetenland. Shortly afterwards, there was a by-election in the town, and it was won by an independent candidate, a journalist named Vernon Bartlett (left) who fought the election on a single platform: opposing the Munich Agreement, standing up to Fascism and defending Czechoslovakia. His victory sent a clear message to the coalition government; once again, Bridgwater had stood up for what it believed in. During the war, the carnival did not take place, but one William Henry Edwin Lockyer walked the route each year. The tradition was kept alive, and it continues.




JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY reviewed by Penny Dolan

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How does one start to hunt for plants? My own love of plants began with Cecily Mary Barker’s picture-and-verse Flower Fairy books, Yet the works are not pure fantasy: Barker’s charming fairies, first appearing in 1923, were based on drawings of real children in her sister’s kindergarten, while the detailed flowers and settings are painted with meticulous, botanically-accurate skill. The Flower Fairies taught me- and no doubt many others – to find and identify common plants, even though some of those flowers are rarer than they used to be.

However, Barker’s pretty fairies - still hovering around today – can surely only charm a very particular young audience. There’s space for bolder books about the history of the plants and stories for older boys and girls who would welcome tales of adventure.

I was very pleased to come across JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY, a novel for 8-12 year olds, written by fellow History Girl Sue Purkiss.

Inspired by the lives of 18th century plant-hunters, Sue has written a fast-moving historical adventure story.  Jack Fortune, the young hero, is energetic and most interestingly naughty. Bored, and not allowed to attend school, he can’t resist devising tricks that shame his stern widowed Aunt Constance and horrify her genteel guests.

As a character, Jack is immediately likeable - and trouble! When he accidentally damages a priceless object, Constance summons her  brother, Uncle Edmund, insisting that he take responsibility for his young nephew.

Uncle Edmund refuses; not only is the scholarly bachelor unused to children but he is about to depart on his first plant-hunting trip to India. Jack, hearing this exciting news, wants to accompany the expedition so Uncle Edmund reluctantly agrees, while Aunt Constance, unable to face any more disobedience, agrees despite the dangers.

From this point on Jack and his uncle  and the reader– experience a new life full of challenge and interesting people and places. They sail to Calcutta, cross the Great Plain and travel through the jungle before reaching a high mountain kingdom with a hidden valley. All the way, Jack and his uncle face setbacks and dangers: vagabonds, wild animals, “mountain sickness” and, at last, reports of a huge, legendary being who brings death to any intruders in the Hidden Valley. Moreover, Jack soon realises that an unknown traitor is spoiling the expedition’s food supplies and stirring up problems with local villagers.  Who wishes them ill? Is it Sonam, their guide or Thondup, the heir to the throne who accompanies the party, and whom Jack has begun to admire?  

Sue Purkiss’s plot moves along with plenty of pace and action and just enough description to fix the story in its historical time and place without overloading her young reader’s enjoyment. She also touches lightly and skillfully on darker issues such as servants and colonisation, but lets the bold adventure end as happily as it should.

However, I felt the book was about more than the plant-hunting quest: Jack and Uncle Edmund make a wonderfully odd and warm partnership, and the hardships met on the expedition teach them more about the other.

Bookish Uncle Edmund slowly reveals his bravely determined nature and his passion for plant-hunting. Gradually, Jack sees the burning passion that lies behind Uncle Edmund’s search, and his desperate hope that the plant will bring him fame, fortune and the approval of the influential Sir Joseph Banks when - and if -  they ever return to London.

Meanwhile, faced with real demands and responsibilities rather than endless tea-parties and polite manners, Jack becomes the boy-hero he was meant to be and is even able to accept his own inherited artistic gifts and inheritance.

One of the particular reasons I enjoyed JACK FORTUNE AND THE SEARCH FOR THE HIDDEN VALLEY was that, despite the difficulties Jack and his Uncle face, the adventure is a positive and hopeful experience and one that might encourage children to look beyond everyday life and issues in school and out into a much wider world with all its interweaving histories.

Penny Dolan
ps. Years after the Flower Fairies, my gardening interests led to a set of children’s stories based on the history of British gardening, written for re-telling at RHS Harlow Carr gardens.

NB. Alma Books have also created some downloadable activities to support of this title:  http://almabooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Jack-Fortune-Activity-Book.pdf  as well as an interview with the author Sue Purkiss: http://almabooks.com/interview-sue-purkiss-author-jack-fortune/                                                                  



The Lost Words - Celia Rees

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‘Once upon a time, words began to vanish. They disappeared so quietly that almost no-one noticed. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conkers – gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter raven, willow, wren… all of them gone! The words are becoming lost: no longer vivid in children’s voices, no longer alive in their stories.’


It is this perceived loss that is so eloquently addressed in the current exhibition at Compton Verney by writer, Robert Macfarlane, and artist, Jackie Morris. In this magnificent exhibition and in the wonderful book that they have produced, they draw attention to the danger that these words might be lost to children forever and they endeavour to make good the damage, conjuring back these lost words by the magic of their painting and poetry.


I grew up in the 1950s  and  was lucky enough to be one of the last generation to enjoy a ‘wild childhood’, free to roam woods and parks looking for conkers, pick blackberries in the hedgerows, wade in brooks and ponds looking for newts. I was intensely aware of the passing seasons and what they would bring: the conkers and turning leaves of autumn, bryony beading the hedgerow; the prospect of snow in winter, watching robins and bluetits feed in the garden; snowdrops, celandine and coltsfoot promising spring and the summer to come. We were free to be out all day, only returning when hunger called us home. We were in tune with the world around us: the plants, trees, birds, animals. We took it for granted. I saw ‘the elm tree bole in tiny leaf’ and knew what the poet meant, but that life has gone with the elm trees themselves.

Today’s children rarely go out unsupervised, some rarely go out at all. This exhibition is a response to the shocking research findings that British children are more familiar with Pokemon characters than British wildlife and, as 

 

Robert Macfarlane points out in his article: Guardian - Badger or Bulbasaur - have children lost touch with nature?, all the centuries long associations that native flora and fauna have acquired through legend, myth, folklore and story are lost, too.  

Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris explore The Lost Words from Acorn to Wren. Each bird, plant or animal is shown in the same way. No matter how humble or ordinary, each is reverenced in  an icon: a numinous depiction in gold leaf and exquisite jewellike water colour. It is then  shown within the wider context of its natural world and then, finally, by its absence. This last is particularly powerful and poignant. Starlings are shown by an empty wire,  raven and heron by a fallen feather, the magnificent otter by a line of paw prints. An achingly eloquent expression of loss and impoverishment, both to the world: if this creature had never been, or if we were to lose it, how much poorer would we be? And to the individual: if you don’t know something is there, then it does not exist for you and your world is somehow diminished. 















Jackie Morris’ pictures are accompanied by Robert Macfarlane’s acrostic poems or ‘spells’.











My companion at the exhibition, friend and fellow writer, Linda Newbery , observed that:

'Robert Macfarlane's 'spells' are clever, striking and energetic - not a lazy phrase to be found. As well as being acrostics they also use a formal patterning of repetitions and echoes which makes me think of the Welsh 'cynghanedd' found in Gerard Manley Hopkins. It's especially lovely to hear Robert Macfarlane reading them aloud - they are meant to be spoken, after all.'

Should green-as-moss be mixed with
blue-of-steel be mixed with gleam-of-gold
you'd still fall short by far of the -
Tar-bright oil-slick sheen and
gloss of starling wing.



The two artists make a powerful conjuring.  Not least, because they invite the viewer, child or adult, to go out and do something. To look. To learn.To draw, paint, write what you see. Jackie Morris’ sketch book, watercolours, gold leaf and burnisher are there. As are Robert Macfarlane's pens, pencils, notes and notebooks.

There are drawing and writing materials, paper, crayons and pencils, so young visitors can take inspiration and make their own books. Robert Macfarlane's desk is in the last but one room. When I went in, a child was sitting on a little chair, leaning on this desk, hard at work with crayon and pencil. I'm sure that both the artist and writer would smile to see her there, and consider part of their work done, for the exhibition is an inspiration, an invitation, not just to admire their work, but to go outside and pay attention. 


The Words are not lost, they've gone into  hiding and are still there, waiting to be re-discovered. This exhibition invites us to do just that. Like all great ideas, it is simple.  It contains its own solution. It is no mystery. All you have to do is go out and see what’s there in front of you and around you. To look. Not just down at the ground but up at the sky; not just in the countryside but in every park, garden, on every road, alley, avenue, canal, stream, river and urban wild space. It’s all there. We just have to notice and teach our children to notice. Take a photo. Look it up. There’s bound to be an app...

If you can't get to the exhibition, you can buy the book: The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris, published by Hamish Hamilton. It is beautiful and would make a handsome Christmas present for anyone. 
Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com




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Roman sea-borne trading and the port of Ostia by Alison Morton

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The Romans were organised, truly organised in complex ways not seen again until at least the 18th and 19th centuries. Trade was vital to Ancient Rome. The empire cost a vast sum of money to run and trade brought in much of that money. The population of the city of Rome grew to over one million and demand for more and different goods and services to build and maintain a high status lifestyle fuelled trade from further and further afield.

Roman trade routes map (ORBIS, Stanford Uni)

In addition to the 80,000 kilometres of first class roads (as at c. AD 200) built primarily for the movement of military forces, used by the imperial courier service, for government administration and lastly for trade, sea routes crossed the Empire through the Mediterranean from Spain, France and North Africa to Syria, north to Britannia and east to the Black Sea.  They supported trade between a network of coastal cities - Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage. These cities were serviced by a road network permitting trade within their respective hinterlands. River transport was not so widespread as the major pan-European rivers, the Rhine and the Danube, were military frontiers, not the core of the Empire.

The Romans built lighthouses, harbour complexes, docks and warehouses to further sea trade and make it secure. The Roman navy (classis) tried with varying success to keep the Mediterranean Sea safe from pirates. Although the navy was instrumental in the Roman conquest of the Mediterranean basin, it never enjoyed the prestige of the Roman legions. Romans were a primarily land-based people, and relied partially on other nationalities such as Greeks, Phoenicians and the Egyptians, to build and man their ships. Partly because of this, the navy was never wholly embraced by the Roman state, and deemed somewhat "un-Roman". Unlike modern naval forces, the Roman navy even at its height never existed as an autonomous service, but operated as an adjunct to the Roman army.

Trade was facilitated by a single official currency and no complicating customs dues. Trade developed in complexity and reach  as peace became more established and with more trade, prosperity increased. When the Empire disintegrated in the late AD 400s, overseas markets disappeared, supply and distribution routes became unsafe and trade collapsed. The Mediterranean Sea became a dangerous place for merchants as there were no powers to control the activities of pirates who marauded as far north as the English Channel.

What was acquired from where?
The Romans imported a whole variety of materials: beef, corn, glassware, iron, lead, leather, marble, olive oil, perfumes, purple dye, silk, silver, spices, timber, tin and wine. The main trading partners were in Spain, France, the Middle East and North Africa. Britain exported lead, woollen products and tin. In return, it imported from Rome wine, olive oil, pottery and papyrus.

Bireme (Creative Commons)

Ostia, Rome's port
The most important sea port was Ostia situated at the mouth of the River Tiber and only 15 miles from Rome. According to an inscription, the original castrum (military camp) of Ostia was established in the 7th century BC. However, the oldest archaeological remains so far discovered date back to only the 4th century BC when Rome fought several naval actions. The traditional birth date of the Roman navy is set at ca. 311 BC, when, after the conquest of Campania, two new officials, the duumviri navales classis ornandae reficiendaeque causa, were tasked with the maintenance of a fleet. The most ancient buildings currently visible in Ostia are from the 3rd century BC, notably the castrum. From this point on, Ostia starts to play an important role as a military harbour. When Rome installed a new naval magistracy in 267 BC, one of the officials was permanently based in Ostia. Traders and artisans settled in Ostia to make a living in and around the harbour.

Goods could be quickly moved to Rome in barges up the River Tiber after slaves had unloaded and transferred cargo from merchant ships. The Romans built the world's first dual carriageway, via Portuensis, between Rome and Ostia. In 68 BC, the town was sacked by pirates. During the sack, the port was set on fire, the consular war fleet was destroyed, and two prominent senators kidnapped. This attack caused such panic in Rome that Pompey the Great arranged for the tribune Aulus Gabinius to propose a law, the Lex Gabinia, to allow Pompey to raise an army and destroy the pirates. Within a year, the pirates had been defeated.

Development
Ostia was further developed during the first century AD under the influence of Tiberius, who ordered the building of the town's first forum. Temples, bathhouses, a theatre, shops, warehouses, construction yards, workshops, guilds became an integral part of the town.

Ostia Antica forum (author photo)

With the expansion of the physical city and the demands of the population of Rome, traffic on the river became ever more congested. Manoeuvring became impossible on the 100 metre wide river and silting exacerbated the problem. To guarantee a consistent supply of corn for Rome, the emperor Claudius started to build a new harbour (portus) in 42 AD two miles north of Ostia on the northern mouths of the Tiber.

(ostia-antica.org)

Two curving moles were built out into the sea. Between the moles, on an island formed by sinking a large merchantman, a four-storied lighthouse was built. This harbour became silted up and around about 110 AD the emperor Trajan enlarged the new harbour with a huge land-locked inner hexagonal basin still visible today. Its form was hexagonal in order to reduce the erosive forces of the waves. The harbours were connected with the Tiber by canals.

Hexagonal basin (Uni Southampton)

The new Trajanic harbour was described as 'Portus Ostiensis' and the council and magistrates of Ostia also controlled the daily life of Portus. The harbours of Ostia continued their function as a major port as can be seen by traces of the many corn warehouses. This development took business away from Ostia itself which acted principally at that time as a river port only and began its commercial decline. One can only imagine the wrangling between the established guilds, merchants and city councillors in old Ostia and the up and coming traders of the modern, specifically designed new Portus.

Ostia and Portus grew to 50,000 inhabitants in the 2nd century, reaching a peak of some 100,000 inhabitants in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Portus was critically important for supplying the ever-growing city of imperial Rome with foodstuffs and materials from across the Mediterranean.  It also acted as both a point of export for supplies and products from the Tiber Valley to the north of Rome, and a major hub for the redistribution of goods from ports across the Mediterranean. It must also have acted as a major conduit for people visiting Rome from around the Mediterranean.

Roman port litho, Seewesen by Walter Muller, 1893

Ostia was to play a major part in the downfall of Rome when Alaric the Goth captured it in AD 409 knowing that this would starve Rome of much needed food. The port began to enter a period of slow decline from the late 5th century AD onwards, although it was the scene of a major struggle between Byzantine and Ostrogothic troops during the Gothic wars (AD 535-553).

Ostia Antica chandler’s floor (author photo)

Today Ostia Antica in an outstanding site for tourists and students alike and noted for the excellent preservation of its ancient buildings, magnificent frescoes and impressive mosaics (http://www.ostia-antica.org).

Portus is the centre of an exciting project led by the University of Southampton (http://www.portusproject.org/). In 2014, a new canal and town wall at Ostia was discovered. In 2016, the Portus Project launched a series of online ‘tours’ https://tour.portusproject.org/en/about  (Click the menu bars at the top right to start).

I shall be following the project with great interest…

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Alison Morton is the author of the Roma Nova thriller series.
More at alison-morton.com





The Domesday Village – East Meon

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In my series of posts on some of the communities of the valley of the River Meon, I have arrived close to the source of the river, at East Meon (Mene or Menes 11th c; Meonis 12th c; East Menes 13th c; Estmune, Estmunes, Moene and Estmeone 14th c; Estmene 15th c; and Estmeane 16th c).


The River Meon rises just south of the village and at first flows north, winding through the village itself before heading off into the countryside towards West Meon, where it turns and flows south, making its short, twenty-one miles, journey through the Meon Valley, to Titchfield and the sea.
For 1,000 years, East Meon was a hundred, a parish and a manor. It was the largest of the estates of the bishops of Winchester, with the magnificent All Saints Church and the bishops’ Court House to reflect its importance. For centuries it knew only one industry, farming, and only one owner, the Diocese of Winchester.
It seems that, initially, no distinction was drawn between East Meon and West Meon (about 4 miles north-west as the crow flies and following the course of the River Meon). East Meon is first mentioned specifically in the mid 11th century, when the then bishop of Winchester, Alwin, granted both Meons to the monks of Winchester, retaining, however, the management of the lands. When Alwin died, in 1047, the manor was held by the new bishop, Stigand, and he continued to hold it after he also became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1052. He was apparently excommunicated for holding both Winchester and Canterbury, though that doesn’t seem to have affected his continuing to be bishop and archbishop. Stigand attended the deathbed of King Edward and the coronation of Harold Godwinson as king of England in 1066, but after Harold’s death, Stigand submitted to William the Conqueror. However, when William was crowned King on Christmas Day 1066, it was the Archbishop of York who carried out the coronation because Stigand’s excommunication meant that he could only assist!
HIC RESIDET HAROLD REX ANGLORUM. STIGANT ARCHIEP(I)S(COPUS).
“Here sits Harold King of the English. Archbishop Stigand”.
Scene immediately after crowning of King Harold.
By Norman or English embroiderers
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Stigand was eventually deposed in 1070, but held East Meon until his death probably two years later. At this point, it was seized by William I, and it was he who was holding East Meon in 1086, although, as Domesday tells us, Walkelin (Walchelin), the first Norman (as opposed to Saxon) bishop of Winchester, appointed in 1070, was also holding considerable property in East Meon (6 hides and 1 virgate, with a church). It was Walkelin who, in 1079, began work on a new cathedral church in Winchester, the current Winchester Cathedral, though little other than his transepts and crypt are still extant.

In the Domesday Book the hundred is represented by a single entry under Mene:

The entry shows that, in 1086, the “Mene” Hundred had 138 households, which was a large community of perhaps 500, and six mills, which also seems a lot, but perhaps their number reflects the extent of the Hundred’s lands.
In 1986, to celebrate the 9th centenary of the Domesday Book, the Hampshire Museums Service and the Sunday Times selected East Meon as the “Domesday Village”. In an exhibition at the Great Hall in Winchester, a model of the village was displayed, depicting it as it might have been in 1086. The simulation was created by Edward Roberts, then lecturer in Mediaeval Architecture at King Alfred’s College, Winchester, and Liz Lewis, curator at the Hampshire Museums Service. The model was later transported to Bayeux, where it is on display in La Musée de La Tapisserie, under the same roof as the Bayeux Tapestry. 
This part of the model shows the church and the Court house.Image courtesy of La Musée de la Tapisserie
East Meon continued to be crown property until some time between 1154 and 1161, when Henry II granted it, along with all churches belonging to it, to the diocese of Winchester. From this date, apart from a short period during the Commonwealth, when it was sold with his other lands in 1648 and 1649 as a result of the Root and Branch Bill, East Meon remained with the bishops of Winchester right up to the mid-19th century.

I imagine that it was not untypical that relations between tenants and their lords in English manors were not of the most cordial and, indeed, it is recorded that, in the reign of Edward III, there was a dispute between the then bishop, Adam Orlton, and his East Meon tenants. It seems that, in 1342 and 1343, the tenants wanted “clarification” of entries in the Domesday Book relating to “Menes” (one assumes they felt they were being short-changed in some regard). A century later, in August 1461, when Edward IV went on progress to Hampshire, the tenants of East Meon and elsewhere “in grete multitude and nombre” petitioned the king for relief from certain services, customs, and dues which the bishop, William Waynflete, and his agents were attempting to exact (presumably unjustly). According to one account the tenants seized the bishop, but the king rescued him from his murderous tenants and then arrested and tried the ringleaders, giving judgement in favour of his noble bishop.
East Meon is full of old buildings, including some delightful thatched cottages, strung out along the narrow streets, many of which follow the line of the River. But two of the buildings are of particular note. One is the church, All Saints, described by Nicholas Pevsner as “one of the most thrilling village churches in Hampshire” (The Buildings of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight). The other is the old Court House, the manor house of East Meon, built at the end of the 14th century, which stands opposite the church and is the best preserved of the residences of the bishops of Winchester.

All Saints church
Pevsner doesn’t explain exactly wherein lies the “thrill” of All Saints, but it is certainly a wonderful church. It was built in stages between the 11th and the 14th centuries, the original Norman church with its tower being completed in about 1150. The size and beauty of the church probably reflected East Meon’s importance in mediaeval times, both as a very large manor and as a centre for the bishops of Winchester.


The original church was cruciform in shape, consisting of nave, chancel, and transepts, and the original work is clearly identifiable in the round-topped arches typical of Norman or Romanesque style, and in the West and South doorways. The only major addition to the church was made in about 1230, when the South Aisle and Lady Chapel were added, in the new Early English style, with its pointed arches and larger windows. The spire was probably added at this time too.
All Saints’ greatest treasure is the Tournai font, one of only seven such fonts in the country (another, of the same period, is in Winchester Cathedral). The font was carved in the 12th century by the sculptors of Tournai from the hard blue-black limestone from the banks of the river Scheldt in what is present-day Belgium. The carvings on the four sides are illustrations from the opening chapters of Genesis, together with birds and animals, in a Romanesque style. It arrived in East Meon in around 1150, just as the original church was being completed, and was probably a gift from the then bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois, who was a grandson of William the Conqueror. Henry was King Stephen’s brother, the Chancellor of England and the richest and most powerful man in the country after the king.


I will talk a little more about this font in a future post on some of Hampshire churches’ finest treasures.

The Court House
East Meon was the largest of the bishops of Winchester’s manors in Hampshire, and this manor house reflects that. It perhaps acted as the diocese’s administrative centre as well as being home to a number of monks who played host to the bishop whenever he visited East Meon.
About 20 years ago, an architectural historian called Edward Roberts identified pipe rolls for Court House (those for 1395-6 and 1396-7), which recorded the building of the house. It is thought that the works were carried out almost wholly in 1396, at a total cost of £109 15s 11d, at a time when a labourer’s daily wage was 4d.

The building, consisting of a great hall and a two-storey wing, was a replacement for a similar building, almost certainly Norman, which had stood on the same site. It was commissioned by someone I have mentioned before in previous posts, William of Wykeham, the then bishop of Winchester. His master mason for this building project was William Wynford. It is thought that Wynford might have first met Wykeham when the latter was a provost of Wells Cathedral, where Wynford had gone as master mason. He was made master of works at Windsor Castle in 1364, also under Wykeham. During the 1370s, Wynford worked at Abingdon Abbey, Corfe Castle and Southampton Castle.
When Wykeham founded New College, Oxford (1379) and then Winchester College (1382), it was to Wynford he turned for their design. There is a portrait of William Wynford in the stained glass in the east window of Winchester College. This shows an old man with thinning hair, with the words “Willms Wynfort lathomus” below. His last major work, in the 1390s, was the remodelling of the Norman nave of Winchester Cathedral in the latest Perpendicular Gothic style.
But it was also to Wynford that Wykeham turned for the design of his new manor house in East Meon. The Court House is apparently Wynford’s only surviving domestic (as opposed to royal or ecclesiastical) building.
Broadly, the structure of the original house was of a vast hall at the south end, built onto a wing of the earlier Norman building that contained the chapel and, upstairs, the bishop’s chamber. The hall itself is 48 feet long and 26 feet wide and is over 40 feet up to the peak of the roof. There would have been an open fire in the middle of the floor. The walls are 4 feet thick and 20 feet high and are constructed mainly of white malmstone (greensand) from Langrish (2.5 miles to the north-east) and flints from the downs above the village. The roof was constructed during the same months as the great roof of Westminster Hall. There are corbels set into the eaves of the roof that were carved in Winchester and represent heads of bishops and kings. It is thought that the one of a bishop might be William of Wykeham himself, by then in his seventies.
At the north end of the hall there is a service wing with a chamber above. Two doors lead from the hall into the buttery (where drink was stored and prepared for serving) and the pantry (where food was stored). The kitchen itself, as usual in these times when it would represent a considerable fire hazard, would have been a freestanding building to the east.
Above the buttery and pantry is the great chamber, 30 feet by 15, with a timber roof and a large fireplace. It is accessed by an external staircase. Off the great chamber was the garderobe with a drop down to a latrine below.
The new building survived virtually unaltered through six centuries. Under Wykeham’s successor, Cardinal Beaufort, the earlier wing to the south of the Great Hall, containing the bishop’s chamber and chapel, was rebuilt, but later demolished, probably in the early 17th century, when the timber framed farmhouse wing on the east of the hall was built. The farmhouse, for the 750 acre Court Farm, survives today. 


We must be very grateful to the mediaeval bishops of Winchester for what they brought to East Meon: a glorious manor house, much of which survives unaltered, a “thrilling” church which certainly survives, and of course that magnificent Tournai font. 
And isn’t it extraordinary to ponder upon how very many babies (and adults too) must have been baptised in that font, standing there in All Saints church for over 850 years – not much less than half a century since the writing of the Domesday Book!






When to buy a Leonardo Da Vinci at Christie's (try 1776) by Imogen Robertson

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Christie's Auction Room (From the original drawing by Rowlandson)

On 15th November 2017 Salvator Mundi, (very probably) by Leonardo Da Vinci sold at auction at Christie’s New York for $450.3 million. You may have read one of the reports about its rediscovery, restoration and controversial sale and resales - if not take a look at this article in the Guardian, it includes a nifty slider so you can see the effects of that restoration - you may also have picked up on the fact it was bought from an estate sale (pre-restoration) in 2005 for ten thousand dollars, and felt a deep twinge of sympathy for whoever sold it then.


Salvator Mundi - Leonardo Da Vinci (1500)


If that bothers you, my story today might break your heart. Robert Foulis (b.1707) and his brother Andrew were printers to the University of Glasgow and earned a reputation for the accuracy of their printing of Greek texts, and showed considerable critical and commercial sense in their choice of modern authors. In the 1750s they set up an Academy of Fine Art in Glasgow, and made their art collection available to the students who studied there, a collection enhanced with further large purchases of art in 1772. The Academy however seemed to be a terrible financial strain and closed its doors after Andrew died in 1775. 

Early the following year Robert went to London, apparently to sell the pictures. He was advised against doing so by none other than Mr James Christie who apparently told him that the market was glutted with similar paintings. According to the snappily entitled Robert & Andrew Foulis and the Glasgow Press : with some account of the Glasgow Academy of the Fine Artsby David Murray, after expenses Foulis returned to Glasgow with just fifteen shillings of profit and died very shortly afterwards (2 June 1776). 

James Christie
From a print by R. Dighton
(in  Memorials of CHRISTIE’S: 
A Record of Art Sales from 1766 to 1896


Now if Foulis had been trying to sell just one Da Vinci, that would put the pain of the person who sold Salvator Mundi in 2005 into some sort of perspective, but Foulis wasn’t just selling one painting, oh no. The collection he took to London included (according to his three volume catalogue)  SIX works by Leonardo Da Vinci works, as well as numbers of works by Raphael, Titian and Rubens. 

Now it’s true he wasn’t the only one with a stack of Old Masters on hand in 1776. James Christie had in one sale sold pictures by all those artists the previous April, and did so again in March of 1776. In the same issue of the Public Advertiser in which Christie advertised the 1776 sale, Messers Langford in Covent Garden are alerting readers to their own auction which includes Rubens, Rembrandt, Carracci and Titian and Mr Walsh has a selection of Poussin and Corregio up for auction if you aren’t Old Mastered out.

Daily Advertiser (London, England), Monday, March 20, 1775 

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

Public Advertiser (London, England), Friday, March 1, 1776

But… As we all know only too well the closer you look into history the murkier it all gets. I’m pretty sure Foulis didn’t sell his pictures at all. 

Now, it may be that he intended to do so, and heeded Christie’s advice to wait, or it may be his original intention was to make money out of his collection in another way. Here is the advertisement Foulis ran (with minor variations) from 31 January to 26 May 1776. 

Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (London, England), Wednesday, January 31, 1776


There is no mention of any sale here. Instead he is quite explicitly exhibiting his pictures and charging a shilling a time, and also trying to sell his three volume catalogue of the collection. 

It’s true that auctioneers often exhibited works for a few days before a sale, but I can’t see any example where they did so for weeks. Langford charged people a shilling to come and see what he was selling from 1 March 1776, but he probably wouldn’t have had room to do so before then, giving he had two other old master sales in February. 

For anyone who has tried to tempt Londoners to an event, that fifteen shillings profit looks pretty reasonable now. There is no doubt that Foulis was devastated by the failure of his exhibition. His printer gives a rather harrowing description of him returning home to Glasgow, exhausted and deeply disappointed. 

But his paintings were sold in 1776, only it was in December almost six months after Robert died and by… yes, James Christie himself. Here is the notice:

Public Advertiser (London, England), Monday, December 2, 1776


So why were they sold at this point? The new season has begun, but it's only a couple of weeks old, so it's still early for the eighteenth century oligarchs to have gathered, I’d have thought. Possibly Robert’s death had made his family’s severe financial problems acute and they had to sell as quickly as they could. 

The sale realised £381 8s 6d. It’s tempting to insert a snarky remark about Christies having got a lot better at selling Da Vinci’s since then, but something else must have been going on too as Christie’s sale of M. Le Brun’s pictures in 1775 netted £2,142 and Sir George Colebroke’s collection sold for £4,385 17 shillings. 

Perhaps Christie knew the market was glutted, because he’d glutted it himself.

It is also possible that Foulis’ paintings were being looked at with a sceptical eye. Given that there are under twenty paintings universally accepted as by Leonardo known today, it does seem a little dubious that so many drifted through the London art market at this time. If anyone wants to take advantage of this link to the Foulis catalogue, and match his descriptions to a particular painting, I’d be fascinated to find learn more. I'd also love to know what happened to the pictures after the sale.

Looking at various calculators of relative value, that £381 from the sale could be worth anything between forty thousand pounds and four million today. Even if we take the latter figure, that’s still a hundredth of what someone just paid for one rather beaten up Da Vinci.

So next time you timeslip into the 18th century you know where to go for a bargain.


From the Communist Party to Peaky Blinders: The Real Jessie Eden by Catherine Hokin

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For those of us who like their televised historical fiction with a slag-heap of grit and a soundtrack that favours Nick Cave over luscious strings, this month's return of Peaky Blinders has been like Christmas come early. This recreation of 1920s Birmingham and the truly terrifying gangsters stalking its grimy streets blends fact with fiction: the Peaky Blinders gang existed but wasn't run by the Shelby brothers; Small Heath and the Garrison pub had strong associations with gangs and betting rings between the wars although the satanic-mill factories that form the backdrop were not in such consolidated ownership. Real characters are mixed in with the series' fictionalised family, including appearances by Winston Churchill and Billy Kimber, leader of the Birmingham Gang and vicious enough in real life to make Tommy Shelby seem almost a softy by comparison.

 The Peaky Blinders Women off to listen to Jessie Eden
Part of the series' appeal for me has always been its core of feisty female characters, centred on Helen McRory's Aunt Polly who ran the illicit gambling rings when the men were away being damaged by war. In series four, a new women has been added to the mix: Jessie Eden, a shop steward in one of Shelby's factories who we first encounter putting on her lipstick in the gents' toilet and responding to demands she go somewhere more suitable with the rather cracking: 'You don't have a woman's lavatory on the second floor because no women get this far up."

Publicity round the series suggests Eden has been brought in as a possible love interest for Cillian Murphy's character Tommy. Given the show's track record with its female characters, I think we can hope for something closer to the actual Jessie Eden, who is something of a Brummie, and certainly a trade union, hero. She was born in 1902 and, when we meet her challenging Tommie about female pay in 1925, was actually working at the Joseph Lucas Motor Components Factory where she was a shop-steward for the Transport and General Workers' Union. At the time of the General Strike in 1926, the percentage of unionised women at the factory was tiny and completely over-shadowed by the 10,000 non-unionised women, nevertheless Eden marched the women in her section out to join the strike.

Tanks in the General Strike - Daily Mirror
When she was interviewed by the Birmingham Post on the 50th anniversary of the Strike in 1976, Eden recalled the privations of the period: "We used to take our turns picketing or join the big meetings in the old Bull Ring, which was much larger then. Sacrifices had to be made. We had practically no meat during the strike. We lived on bread, jam and marge.” She also recalled her own brush with the law on the evening of the May Day march which saw a procession of 25,000 people, witnessed by another 100,000. "One policeman put his hands on my arm. They were telling me to go home, but the crowd howled, ‘Hey, leave her alone’ and then some men came and pushed the policemen away. They didn’t do anything after that. I think they could see that there would have been a riot. I was never frightened of the police or the troops because I had the people with me, you see. I don’t know what I’d have felt like on my own."


 The young Jessie Eden
Five years later, Eden really came into her own when she led 10,000 women out of the Lucas factory on a week long strike over new working practices which were driving female workers to the point of collapse. The irony of the story was that the new working speeds intended as a result of the American-designed systems were to be based on Jessie's work-rate as she was judged as an exemplar of efficiency. A further irony was that Eden, now a member of the Communist Party, was one of those who lost her job when a furious management imposed cutbacks. The 1931 strike is credited with starting mass unionisation among women workers but its aftermath was tough on Eden who apparently struggled to find work. She seems to then disappear for a period of two years but was actually in Moscow, rallying Soviet women construction workers employed building the city's metro. No mean feat for a working-class, apparently tiny, woman from Birmingham.

Jessie Eden was a champion of social justice her whole life. She was a key figure in the 1939 Birmingham Rent Strike which brought 49,000 tenants out on strike, successfully winning them rent control in the council and private sector. She stood for the Communist Party in the 1945 General Election and led a march against the Vietnam War in Birmingham in 1969. Graham Stephenson, whose website is a fantastic resource for anyone interested in Eden and union/Communist politics, knew Eden in later life and described her in a recent Guardian interview: "People say that in her prime she was an electrifying speaker, who poured out words from the heart without notes and whose confidence in victory was contagious."That's a tribute I'm sure most of us would love to have and hopefully Peaky Blinders is set to give us a deeper flavour of this woman whose actions made such a difference to the women around her, women who she fought to see treated with dignity, equality and respect. Somehow the time for remembering her seems right.



Two reflections on Dickens's Little Dorrit, by Leslie Wilson

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I'm listening to Little Dorrit as an audiobook at the moment, which will see me through quite a lot of cooking and baking. This is not a comprehensive set of remarks about the book, but two thoughts which I decided were suitable for this blog.
Mr Meagles tells Tattycoram to count five and twenty


One is: Tattycoram!
Tattycoram is actually called Harriet, but her employers have decided to give her the less attractive name (not uncommon in the nineteenth century, when servants could be renamed just because there was already a Mary, or a Janet, or whatever, in the establishment.) The 'practical' Meagles couple took her from an orphanage (presumably the Coram orphanage, though this isn't stated), telling themselves that 'if we should find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account... no parents, no child-brother or sister, no individuality of home..' They called her Tatty instead of Harriet, because 'we thought even a playful name might be a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of effect.' To which conviction they stick, even when she runs away and tells them that she hates the name. They are right, and what she wants doesn't matter. Instead, when she gets upset or 'passionate', Mr Meagles tells her to count to five and twenty. When she runs away, and the woman to whom she runs points out to Meagles that she hates the name, Meagles only says, in his blundering, insensitive way: 'I'll call you by that name still, my good girl, conscious that I meant nothing but kindness when I gave it to you, and conscious that you know it -'

'I don't!' said she. Whereupon he once again tells her to count to five and twenty.

Of course, in our age, we would think Tattycoram deserved some consideration and care, instead of being expected to be grateful for being taken on as a kind of semi-slave, a maid to a child older than herself, and, as she not unreasonably points out, a child she sees being indulged and adored while she is expected to fetch and carry. If this is supposed to compensate her for a life without a loving family, it's not very helpful. It does, incidentally, cast a slightly less benign light on the Coram orphanage than visitors to Coram Fields might be inclined to see it in.
Little Dorrit leaving the Marshalsea


In Dickens's world view, it is, of course quite different. In the novel, Tattycoram sits diagonally across the narrative from good Little Dorrit, the Angel in the House, who lets her father, sister and brother treat her like a doormat, and who never complains. Compare Little Dorrit to Jane Eyre (whose outburst to Mrs Reed puts her more in the Tattycoram category, telling that heartless woman what she deserves, and hasn't got, as later she will tell Rochester). Dickens's women are, of course, notorious. However, Jane Eyre springs from the gentry; whether Bronte might have thought a working class woman was entitled to state her wrongs so vehemently is an interesting question.

In the nineteenth century, Tattycoram had to be grateful, to accept whatever weird name was dropped onto her by her gracious employers, to keep her place in society. I haven't listened to the book through yet, and it's ages since I read it, but I do feel that Dickens, while endorsing Meagles's charitable brutality, does give us enough material to realise that she is wronged, that she deserves better. Dickens did care about children, after all. It doesn't stop me wanting to slap Meagles every time he bleats: 'Count to five and twenty!'

The second reflection is the dreary aptness and relevance of this passage, 160 years after the book was written. However much Dickens's caricatures of women annoy me, as well as being a magnificent writer and a great story-teller, he was often pretty perceptive about people.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/22/Charles_Dickens_-_Project_Gutenberg_eText_13103.jpg
Charles Dickens
'It was uphill work for a foreigner.. to make his way with the Bleeding Hearts' (working and lower-middle class English people). 'In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country. They never thought of enquiring how many of their own countrymen would be returned upon their hands from divers parts of the world, if the pricniple were generally recognised: they considered it particularly and peculiarly British. In the third place, they had a notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities happened to his country because it did things that England did not, and did not do things that England did...
They believed that foreigners were always badly off; and though they were as ill off themselves as they could desire to be, that did not diminish the force of the objection. They believed that foreigners were dragooned and bayonetted; and though they certainly got their own skulls promptly fractured if they showed any ill humour, still it was with a blunt instrument, and that didn't count. They believed that foreigners were always immoral; and though they had an occasional assize at home, and now and then a divorce case or so, that had nothing to do with it. They believed that foreigners had no independent spirit, as never being escorted to the poll in droves by Lord Decimus Tite Barnacle, with colours flying and the tune of Rule Britannia playing..'





All illustrations, public domain 

STEPPING FROM THE SHADOWS: Robert FitzHarding: minor character, major player by Elizabeth Chadwick.

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19th century window depicting
Robert FitzHarding. Bristol
Cathedral
Writing works of fiction set in the medieval period across a broad canvas, I often have to research characters who might only have a few lines in my novel, but whose influence and impact on their world while they were alive, was considerably greater.  They might dwell in the shadows now, but they were big players on the stage of their own lives.

One such person is Robert FitzHarding of Bristol, a twelfth century merchant, landholder, broker and baron, who appears in my current work in progress The  Irish Princess, as the man responsible for introducing interested parties and assisting them in their negotiations to obtain the right deal and support for their enterprises.  

When the Irish king of Leinster, Diarmait Macmurchada was exiled from his land, it was to Robert FitzHarding in Bristol that he brought his plight.  The latter advised him to seek the aid of King Henry II and gave him letters of introduction. On Diarmait's return from Henry's court in Aquitaine, Robert housed him in comfort in Bristol at Henry's request  and  brokered an introduction to Richard de Clare, lord of Chepstow who would provide the military might that would eventually restore Diarmait to his position in Leinster and swept the Cambro-Normans into Ireland with history-changing consequences.

Born around 1095, Robert FitzHarding's family background was aristocratic, but of the Anglo Saxon persuasion rather than Norman, although intermarriage had occurred in the years since 1066. English high status survivors are a rare breed, but Fitzharding was one of their number.  He was the son of a royal official, Harding of Baldwin Street and his grandfather was an English thegn from Somerset called Eadnoth the Staller.  The family, following the Norman Conquest held their land of the Earl of Gloucester for a single knight's fee (the amount of land thought to be sufficient to sustain a knight and his military requirements).  Robert's brother Nicholas was the holder of this knight's fee.  Robert himself was a tenant of housing and lands in Bristol, probably a family inheritance, but held, like the Somerset lands, of various top ranking lords of the land.  Robert held land on the High Street in Bristol, in Broad Street, Wine Street, St Nicholas Street, by the river Frome, and between Small and Broad Street.  Added to this were two suburban estates held directly of the Earl of Gloucester. 

Throughout the mid 12th century, Robert FitzHarding continued to acquire land and knights' fees from various barons until he had his own lordship of scattered estates surrounding Bristol. Indeed, Richard de Clare, needing funds for his Irish expedition, sold FitzHarding one of his manors at Tickenham in Somerset. During the years of the Anarchy as King Stephen and the Empress Matilda fought for the throne, he supported the latter's cause - Bristol being the caput of Robert of Gloucester, half-brother to the Empress and her chief supporter.  FitzHarding with his trading contacts and wealth was in a position to loan money, provide ships and wheel and deal to help further the Angevin cause. 

Berkeley Castle today (Wikipedia)
Certainly Henry II was so grateful to FitzHarding that when he came to the throne in 1154, he granted him the lands and estate of one Roger of Berkeley who was less wedded to the Angevin cause and had refused to pay dues from his lands. FitzHarding was given permission to build a castle on the land.  The only stipulation was that his eldest son Maurice was to marry Roger of Berkeley's daughter and Roger of Berkeley's son also called Roger, was to marry Robert's daughter Helena. 

So, from wealthy burgess, Robert FitzHarding was now true landed gentry with a castle and dignity of his own.  He had also founded the abbey of St Augustine's in Bristol between 1140 and 1148 (now Bristol Cathedral)  and retired there shortly before his death in 1170. The family, while never rising to the highest ranks of baronial power, were nevertheless important at a regional level and formed the vertebrae in the backbone on which both the higher and lower echelons of society depended. 


Descendents of Robert FitzHarding still occupy Berkeley Castle today in unbroken tenure stretching for 900 years.

A fascinating personality and I enjoyed discovering a little more about him, even if he only has a handful of pages in my novel. 

Perugia, Italy by Miranda Miller

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   Last month I revisited Perugia, where I studied Italian in my teens. At lunchtime, when I finished my classes at the University for Foreigners, I used to make my way up the steep medieval streets to a mysterious place called the Rocca Paolina. This was an enigmatic, subterranean cavelike labyrinth on the edge of the city and I was usually alone there. It appealed to my adolescent love of solitude and the story attached to it fascinated me.

   In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a family of condottieri called the Baglioni dominated Perugia. They built palaces and towers, slaughtered the rival Oddi family and eventually turned on one another. Their crimes make the mafia look quite benign. In 1500, for example, there was a family celebration from hell known as the Red Wedding:

   “Poorer or bastard members of the Baglioni (led by Grifonetto and Filippo di Braccio, bastard) turned on the leading clique, killing some of them including Guido and Astorre,(the bridegroom) whose heart was cut out and symbolically bitten by Filippo. In all, about 200 died...”
(From Early Modern Italy - A Social History by Christopher Black).

   As always in Renaissance history, brutal crimes, religious sentiment and sensitivity to art co-existed, often in the same person; Perugia’s most famous artist, Pietro Vannucci (Perugino), taught Raphael. In memory of the tragic death of her son Grifonetto, Atalanta Baglioni commissioned Raphael to paint a Deposition where the characters of that terrible event were to be depicted. In his 1507 Entombment, now in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, Atalanta is portrayed as the heartbroken Madonna, Grifonetto is the one bearing the dead Christ and Zenobia, Grifonetto’s wife, is represented as Mary Magdalen.



   Gianpaolo Baglioni escaped the slaughter and ruled over Perugia for many years. In an age when Popes were formidable and violent politicians, Perugia’s arrogance and independence was considered intolerable. Gianpaolo was as ferocious as the rest of his family and the Popes were afraid of his ambition. So Leo X lured him to Rome, promising him safety; Gianpolo came, and was tortured and beheaded.

   His sons and nephews continued to fight and murder one another and the Farnese Pope, Paul III, visited Perugia. All the nuns in the city had to queue up and kiss his feet. In 1538, when the Pope raised salt tax, Perugians revolted against this and were excommunicated. Paul III then sent an enormous army of mercenaries and Spaniards and handed over the city to the Preservers of Ecclesiastical Obedience.

   Paul 111 decided to humiliate and control the proud city of Perugia by building a massive fortress, the Rocca Paolina, as a symbol of his power. Over a hundred houses, as well as all the palaces and towers of the Baglioni, churches and monasteries were partially demolished and used as building materials for his fortress. Instead of destroying the houses entirely, the Pope’s architect, Sangallo, left the lower part of the houses and the streets to create the phantom underground galleries that are still so intriguing.



    In this nineteenth century painting of Perugia by Giuseppe Rossi you can see that the massive fortress loomed over the entire city. In 1859, during the Risorgimento, Perugia again rebelled against Pope Pius IX, who sent 2000 Swiss Guards ( wearing those cute uniforms you see in the Vatican). They looted the city and butchered people in the street. With the unification of Italy the following year the new king of Italy, Victor Emanuel 11, finally liberated the city from the Popes. The fortress was torn down by the citizens of Perugia, using dynamite and their bare hands. Anthony Trollope, watching the demolition of the Rocca Paolina, wrote that ‘few buildings have been laden with a heavier amount of long-accumulated hatred’.

   The Prefecture Palace and the pleasant Carducci Gardens were built on top of of the Rocca Paolina, like a lid on Perugia’s gory and turbulent history. On a clear day in October we looked out over the balustrade at the end of the gardens to see the stunning golden landscape of Umbria, as far as Assisi.

   I knew that the ruins where I used to wander long ago had been cleaned up and that escalators had been installed to help people in this steepest of hill cities to reach different levels. Italian engineering never ceases to amaze me and in Perugia modern technology bridges different periods of history, as well as being extremely practical. I was afraid the Rocca Paolina would have lost its unique and melancholy atmosphere and was delighted to find an imaginative video installation down there. Without words, it uses Bach’s music and expresses time as waves, floating clouds and kaleidoscopic mosaics; a griffin, Perugia’s symbol, flies through the film, swooping through shattered buildings and brutal wars to some kind of triumph. Viewed in the underworld, projected onto an ancient wall through a medieval archway, it’s impressive.













griffin unknown 1 jpeg

Giving thanks for Olives, by Carol Drinkwater

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                                                            Olive in full blossom (April)

I am trying to keep away from the computer at present to avoid this most obnoxious, recent invasion to Europe, "Black Friday".  Instead, I have been out on the land, working in the sunshine harvesting our olives.  I know that I have written at length in my series of Olive Farm books, particularly the two travel books THE OLIVE ROUTE and THE OLIVE TREE about olive farming, its culture and its history. Still, every year when I return to the land to pick the fruits - a backbreaking task but one that I enjoy enormously - I am yet again enthused by the subject. I am reminded of how rewarding and historically rich this activity is and it fills me with a real sense of humility and I am grateful to Mother Nature for her gifts.


                                             Baby olives growing from the flower (May)

The shedding of the blossoms (May)

We pick by hand, using no machines. We don't even beat the fruits to the netted earth because the sticks bruise the fruit's skin, causing it to split, the oil to weep and thus the fruit begins to oxidise. Oxidation augments the level of acid in the pressed olive oil. Olive oil that has an oleic acid level of higher than 0.8% cannot be sold as Extra Virgin. (Some territories allow the acid level to reach 1% before the oil loses it Extra Virgin label. In Europe, the regulations are more stringent). Once the oil has lost its Extra Virgin quality, it loses many of its natural vitamins and minerals and, most importantly, it lacks the antioxidants that make extra-virgin olive oil such a gift to our kitchens and our good health. These include protection again heart disease, lowering of cholesterol levels, protection against type II diabetes as well as several cancers.

Recently-pressed unrefined olive oil has a greener or golden hue whereas refined olive oil will be lighter in colour and lack any residue of the flesh of pressed fruits. Because olive oil, unlike wine, does not have a long shelf life, it is important to consume it young.  


Our newly-pressed oil (October - November 2017)

I think it is because we have stayed faithful to the time-honoured methods of farming that I find the harvesting and visits to the mill so rewarding and rejuvenating. I know that I am contributing to a ritual that is almost as ancient as farming itself. Of course, we press our olives at a modern mill. Today, it is very rare to find mills that press using the hemp mats (known as les scortins in French) stacked high and squeezed in a screw press. This process has been overtaken by more efficient and more hygienic systems.
These photos show the old-fashioned screw press system at work. This method was, until the last century, used everywhere around the Mediterranean. 


Packing the hemp mat with olive paste. The paste is the result of crushing the the fruits including its stone with a gigantic revolving stone.

Stacking the scortins into the screw press


As the screw presses its weight down onto the mats, the oil is squeezed out and runs into a steel plate. At this stage, as you can see, it is oil mixed with water. The liquids are then separated so what you are left with is pure olive oil.
By the way, this ancient mill is still operating not far from where we live in the south of France. 

Here is a photograph of some of our olives being unloaded at the more modern mill we use, which is in Speracedes in the hills behind Cannes.


As you can see we try to pick the fruits when they are green rather than dark purple or black. It gives a more peppery taste to the oil. Also, because we are organic, the sooner the fruits are off the trees the less chance the fly has to attack the drupes during her autumn breeding session.


                     See how green and viscosy our oil is. Its extra virgin rating is between 0.5% and 0.6%.

I spent seventeen months travelling solo around the Mediterranean in search of the history, secrets and cultures of the olive tree and its cultivation. I wanted to know where it all began. No one knows precisely who first picked a drupe from off an olive tree or wild bush, perhaps, back then, and decided to experiment with its oil. I found no definitive answers but I did manage to trace olive routes, olive developments from the fourth to fifth millennium BC forwards. I discovered two groves of 6,000 year old olive trees - each grove, boasting about a dozen remaining trees, still delivering their annual fruits and still being pressed into fine extra-virgin olive oil.

Mesopotamia and the regions known today as Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Isra
el, Iraq were, as far as I have discovered, at the heart of the earliest olive farming operations. It's a tragedy that so many of the clues I found that date olive cultivation back to at least 5,000 BC have been destroyed in the recent wars. 

Here are one or two of my memories. Thankfully, saved.


                                                        An ancient olive tree in Greece

                              Libya. It's the women who harvest and prune the trees in north Africa.
                Leptis Magna, Libya. Libya was hugely important olive production region for the Romans.

In our Olive Route films, we visit Testaccio in Rome which is a hill created from pottery shards, the broken remains of the amphorae used by the Romans to transport their oil and wine.


Lebanon

These two photos were taken in Becheleah in Lebanon. These trees have been radiocarbon dated at over 6,000 years old. In the second photograph, I am standing with an Iranian friend, Soheila, in an olive tree where, over millennia, its centre has died off and hollowed out. It survives and thrives by producing new exterior shoots from its roots. These are the trunks that are encircling us.




These two travel books were based on my experiences of those seventeen months travelling round the Mediterranean. The books, in turn, became the inspiration for a five-film, high-definition documentary television series narrated and written by me.
The films were shot round the Mediterranean although, due to the Arab Spring uprisings and the Syrian war we were not able to shoot everywhere I travelled when I was alone researching for the books.
If you are interested in buying the films, please contact me at olivefarmbooks@gmail.com










Tamara Karsavina & Henry Bruce, Part 2, by Janie Hampton

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Tamara Karsavina in Le Spectre de la Rose
choerographed by Fokine, costume by Bakst, in Paris 1913.

Continuing the story of the British diplomat Henry James Bruce and Russian prima ballerina Tamara Karsavina, who fell in love in St Petersburg in 1913. Eight months after they had witnessed the October Revolution in 1917, Lenin declared Britain an enemy of the Bolshevik government. Henry’s British Embassy colleagues fled from Moscow to Britain via the Crimea. But Henry went in the opposite direction, north to Petrograd, to rescue his lover and their 19 month old son, Nikita.
Read Part One of their adventure  here. 
Petrograd had been Tamara’s home all her life, but now she agreed with Henry that it was time they left. Although she had no political objections to the new order, communal life was stressful. The apartment in Millionaya Street, where she lived with Nikita and their cook, nanny and maid, was now shared with five families. Life was chaotic, with children playing in the shared passage, its ceiling criss-crossed with washing lines. Tamara’s cook Liza had been elected onto the house soviet committee but nobody knew who owned the house or to whom they should pay rent? 

Henry James Bruce at Eton in1899
Tamara had been with handsome, clever Henry for five years but now that Lenin had made peace with Germany, her dull husband, Vasilii Moukine, might return from fighting. He had agreed to divorce Tamara but the Bolsheviks had abolished both marriage and divorce. 
Postcard sent from Berlin in 1912 to Tamara,
written in French, the address translated into Russian
The chaos extended far beyond Millionaya Street. When Moscow became the capital in March 1918, Petrograd, formerly St Petersburg, was of little national or international importance and was now bankrupt. The canals, once busy with barges bringing food and fuel, were collapsing and choked with rubbish and sewage. Cholera and typhus had already killed several thousand people that winter. Although the population had halved, there was not nearly enough food. Most of the cab-horses had starved to death, and the electric trams no longer ran. Henry was compelled to walk to the former British Embassy where he found Captain Cromie, the Naval Attaché, the only British diplomat left. Cromie showed him coded telegrams which revealed that all routes south to the Crimea, east to Japan and west to Finland and the Baltic Sea were closed. Their only way out of Petrograd was north via Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, where British troops were stationed to reinforce the White Army. 

Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky in Jeux, by Debussy, in Sir Thomas Beecham's
Grand Season of Russian Ballet at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, June 1912.
However, they couldn’t tell where the front line of the civil war between the White and Red armies was located, only that it was getting closer every day. As a foreigner, Henry needed a permit from the Foreign Ministry in Moscow to travel; and even Tamara needed permission from the workers’ soviet that now controlled the Marinsky Ballet. Another problem was that Tamara’s face was even better known than the Czarina’s or Lenin’s. For 15 years she had appeared to two thousand people at each performance in the Marinsky Theatre and she had toured all over Russia and Western Europe with Diaghlev's Ballet Russe. Postcards were sold of her posing as Giselle and Salome; and with Nikita on her lap. His thick curly hair and his mother's large dark eyes were unmistakable. If a reward was posted for their capture, they might easily be denounced to the authorities in exchange for a meal or a few logs of firewood. 
Famous all over Russia and Europe, Tamara Karsaviina
as  Zobeide on Sheherazade  by John Sargent, 1913.
After a tense week of enquiries, an unidentified woman telephoned the apartment. She had passes for a steam-ship departing the following morning. It would take them along the River Neva and through Lakes Ladoga and Onega north to Petrozavodsk, which was beyond the front line on the railway to Murmansk. Tamara packed two trunks, which was the most they risked taking without arousing suspicion. She found it a nightmare choosing what to include and after a desperate search failed to find the key to her bureau containing her personal letters and photos. They waited until three in the morning when it was dark enough not to be seen. Liza the cook and Katiousha her maid put aside their new revolutionary status and marked an ancient custom. They all sat in a circle in silence, then crossed themselves and quietly said goodbye. Tamara’s neighbour Prince Dolgorukov accompanied them to the pier on the Neva embankment. Henry spoke fluent Russian, French and German, and both he and Tamara had travelled all over Europe. But neither of them had travelled incognito, with a child, through enemy country before. 
Portrait of Tamara Karsavina by Henry J. Bruce, 1918.
The steamship was crowded with families anxious to return to their homes around the inland lakes before they were cut off by civil war. There were also young men eager to join the fighting – wherever the front line was now. A young Count told them that he planned to join the White Army, though it already had a surplus of officers and not enough soldiers. The Red Army had the opposite problem – too many private soldiers, who decided military strategy by vote. 
After five days the boat arrived in Petrodovask on the west coast of Lake Onega, where they planned to catch the steam-train north. Henry and the Count disembarked cautiously. The road leading up from the empty harbour to the railway station was shrouded in drifts of willow seed, stained with blood. A French officer told them that the streets were overlooked by snipers and the trains were full of Red Army soldiers, whose few officers could not control them. He advised them to return to Petrograd, even though the situation there had deteriorated even further. Count Mirbach, the German ambassador, had been assassinated in Moscow and Lenin had laid the blame on Britain. As a result, Captain Cromie had been killed defending the former British Embassy in Petrograd. They decided to remain on the boat which was heading to the north of the lake. The young Count went to search for food but was shot by a sniper within sight of the steamer. He managed to crawl back to the boat, his plans to join the White Army in ruins. 
Map of the route from Petrograd by steamer and cart to Lake Sumo, July 1918
Five days later their boat arrived in Povenetz, a village at the far north end of Lake Onega. There they were told of a disused post-road leading north-east for about 200 miles to the White Sea, and they hired a horse and cart. Tamara was forced to reduce their luggage to a few pictures, some blankets and a teaspoon which had belonged to the dancer Taglioni. She gave away most of Nikita’s clothes, and asked the captain to return their trunks to Petrograd. From Povenetz, they travelled slowly through the forest, crossing marshes and rounding lakes. Mosquitoes rose in huge clouds and swarmed around their heads. For several days they saw only the occasional peasant, shrouded in muslin, working in an isolated clearing. At night, they shared the floor of rough window-less huts, lit by rushes. They drank weak tea, and ate hard sausage. The local people were friendly, but knew nothing of politics or the movements of the Red Army. Twenty years of dieting and dancing with bleeding feet, had taught Tamara to ignore both hunger and pain, while Henry had been toughened up by British boarding school. Nikita, a pampered city child, clung to his mother and screamed. 
After six days and nights in the forest, they arrived at a slightly more prosperous village on the edge of Lake Sumo. They had just let the horses go for the night when they learned that the village had a soviet committee. Without realising it, they had crossed the line into Red Army territory. Worse still, a consignment of vodka had just arrived. In an effort to improve productivity in both factories and farms, the Tsar had passed a law, which the Bolsheviks had upheld, against distilling vodka. But with the increasing anarchy, it had been impossible to enforce. After a short, fitful sleep in a hut, the leader of the soviet, Commissar Solkov woke them and announced that rather than let them continue round Lake Sumo by cart, his men, who were all drunk, would row them across. He obviously didn’t trust this well-dressed man with a strange accent, his beautiful wife with soft hands, and their child who wore shoes. If they did not agree, then he would lock them up in a barn. Henry remained outwardly calm, guessing that the commissar would almost certainly set the barn on fire.

Postcards of Tamara Karsavina were on sale in Russia.
Here she is with Louloushka, her King Charles Spaniel.
Tamara pointed out that a storm was brewing, the lake was already rough and Nikita could not swim, whereupon he said, “It matters not if the little cur drowns.” At this Tamara was enraged and flew at him, screaming. She could cope with the new social order, but not with insults to her son. Henry thought it was all over. Despite their luck and fortitude so far, their escape seemed to be ending in disaster.
Will they get away? Find out next month.
Part Three, December 27.

A Local Gem by Lynne Benton

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Lacock is a small village in Wiltshire, which many people will recognise, even if they’ve not been there, as a favourite place for filming, especially by the BBC.  The village, with its timber-framed houses, has proved an ideal backdrop for scenes in “Cranford”, “Pride and Prejudice”, “Wolf Hall” and “Downton Abbey”, and for the film “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince”. 


In 1232 Lacock Abbey was built, initially as a nunnery, but it subsequently became a comfortable family home, and the village grew up beside it.  One of the Abbey’s most famous residents was William Henry Fox Talbot, who created the first ever photograph negative there in the nineteenth century and established Lacock as the birthplace of photography.  The Fox Talbot Museum contains changing exhibitions of the history of photography. 


Because Lacock is so frequently used for filming of historical series, there are no double yellow lines in the village (though there are plenty of notices warning you not to park on the street!) and television aerials are kept to a minimum, even though nowadays they can be photoshopped out.  The whole village belongs to the National Trust, so that it retains its special character.



It is a wonderful place to visit, and I feel very lucky to live nearby.  Just walking round the village gives the feeling of having stepped back in time.

Mary and the influence of Isabella of Castle by Melita Thomas

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Photo by AW Images


Our November guest is Melita Thomas


Melita Thomas is the co-founder and editor of Tudor Times, a repository of information about Tudors and Stewarts in the period 1485-1625.

Melita has loved history since being mesmerised by the BBC productions of ‘The Six Wives of Henry VIII’ and ‘Elizabeth R’, when she was a little girl. After that, she read everything she could get her hands on about this most fascinating of dynasties. Captivated by the story of the Lady Mary galloping to Framlingham to set up her standard and fight for her rights, Melita began her first book about the queen when she was 9. The manuscript is probably still in the attic!

Whilst still pursuing a career in business, Melita took a course on writing biography, which led her and her business partner, Deborah Roil, to the idea for Tudor Times, and gave her the inspiration to begin writing about Mary again. The King’s Pearl: Henry VIII and his daughter Mary is her first book.

In her spare time, Melita enjoys long distance walking. She is attempting to walk around the whole coast of Britain, and you can follow her progress here.

Welcome Melita! Your book is a great read.

Mary and the influence of Isabella of Castile.

It is a truism that women could not (or should not) rule in Europe during the middle-ages and Renaissance period, but the theory and the lived reality were two very different things. The second half of the fifteenth century, and the sixteenth century was an age of female rulers.

Generally, female rule was not absolute – they were regents, governors, dowagers and queens-mother, whose effective dominance was hidden behind the cloak of acting on behalf of fathers, brothers or under-age sons – but one woman, Isabella, sovereign Queen of Castile, probably wielded more power and influence across Europe than any woman until the empresses of the eighteenth century.

As a young woman of seventeen, Isabella was willing to wage war against her half-brother to have her claim to succeed him recognised, and on his death, when she was twenty-three, she raised troops and led an armed force to seize the throne, not waiting for her husband to take the initiative on her behalf. Isabella’s driving personality, and the mutually beneficial partnership that she and her husband, Ferdinand, King of Aragon, established, led to the emergence of Spain as one of the great powers of Europe, and the dominant force in the European colonisation of the New World. Isabella’s vision of herself was as a Crusader. Whilst crusading in the Holy Land was something that most European rulers talked about, but failed to do, Ferdinand and Isabella saw themselves on the front line – their duty was to reclaim Christian Spain from the remaining Moorish kingdoms, and to ensure purity of religion at home by rooting out heresy, and Judaism.

Isabella had four daughters, two became queens-consort of Portugal, one succeeded her (much less successfully) as Queen of Castile, and the youngest, Katharine, became queen-consort of England. Katharine left her homeland at the age of fifteen, but records of her childhood, and her surviving correspondence, suggest that she was emotionally close to her mother. Isabella, in an early example of a woman holding down a high-powered and demanding job, whilst maintaining her maternal role, took her children with her everywhere, even close to the front-line of battle, and was closely concerned in their education. It is no stretch of imagination to suppose that her youngest daughter imbibed from her mother the knowledge that a woman could be a powerful and effective monarch, even if she were married, and that her supreme duty was to God.

This belief in a woman’s duty to be a crusader, to protect her faith, and to fight for her rights were amply illustrated by Katharine’s refusal to accept her husband, Henry VIII’s plan to set her aside, because they had only one daughter, and no male heir. That Katharine was seen as a fearsome opponent is illustrated by Henry’s concern that Katharine would raise an army against him and ‘wage war as fiercely as ever her mother had done’, and by her nephew, the Emperor Charles V, telling the English ambassador, only partly in jest, that his sole fear was that ‘(Katharine) would ally with French and defeat him’.

This was the heritage of Katharine’s daughter, Mary. It was not the custom in the sixteenth century for royal children to live with their parents full time – Isabella had been exceptional in that regard - so Mary was housed separately, but she visited her parents for weeks and even months at a time and all the available evidence indicates that both of Mary’s parents were devoted to her. Naturally, of course, she would have been included in the daily activities of her mother, rather than her father and, whilst there is no evidence about what Katharine told Mary about her grandmother, it is not unreasonable to believe Mary heard the story of Isabella’s victories and the final surrender of the Kingdom of Granada to her, an event Katharine herself had witnessed in 1492.

In 1525, Henry, despairing of a male heir, began to consider the possibility that Mary might succeed him. He sent her to the Marches of Wales to preside over the Council. Although not formally created Princess of Wales, she was called by the title, and very quickly accustomed herself to being treated as such, with the implication that the position held of being the king’s heir.

The single extant letter from Katharine to Mary dating from this period, refers only to their mutual health, and the queen’s hopes that Mary will improve her Latin, and occasionally send copies of her Latin exercises for the queen to see. It says nothing about Mary’s role, or what the future might hold for her, but surely Katharine had told her about Isabella’s success, not just on the battle-field, but also in reinforcing crown authority, increasing trade and improving access to justice - thus creating a role-model for Mary.

Eight years later, in 1533, Mary was informed that she was no longer to be termed Princess of Wales, nor to consider herself Henry’s heir. She was seventeen, the very age at which Isabella had insisted on her right to the Castilian throne, in preference to her half-brother’s daughter, whom most people thought was not his own child. The similarity of cases – the ‘true-born’ heir as Mary saw herself, versus the illegitimate (again in Mary’s view) Elizabeth, corresponds with that of Isabella and her supposed niece, Juana ‘La Beltraneja’, and it is impossible that Mary was unaware of the parallel.

Isabella was not physically within the control of her half-brother, enabling her to take up arms to drive out La Beltraneja on her half-brother’s death, whilst Mary was isolated and powerless, stripped of even her household servants, but she continued to vehemently defend her position. Like Isabella, Mary had many supporters, and had Henry died without a legitimate son, Mary would undoubtedly have fought for the throne against any attempt to proclaim Elizabeth. As it was, Henry lived until 1547, and was succeeded by Mary’s half-brother. But on his death, in 1553, when an attempt was made to ignore her claim to the throne, Mary showed herself the true descendant of a warrior queen.

Without hesitation, she called on her supporters and raised an army, preparing to fight to for her rights and her religion – just as Isabella had done. Late in her own reign, when there was war with France, Mary even talked of taking the field herself - surely, her courage, determination and martial spirit must have owed something to the example of Isabella.




















November competition

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To win a copy of The King's Pearl by Melita Thomas, just answer the question below in the comments section. Then copy your answer in an email to maryhoffman@maryhoffman.co.uk



"Her father Henry wanted Mary to swear an oath recognising him as Head of the Church in England and admitting that his marriage to Mary's mother, Katharine, had been invalid. What would you have advised her to do?"

Closing date 7th December

We are sorry our competitions are open to UK Followers only

Good luck!

Medieval Heroines by Mary Hoffman (review)

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First, the kitchen items pictured in my post on 1st November, some of which did look a bit medieval!

The first was a duck press (poor duck), the second an egg separator and the third was a fish knife and fork. The reason that special cutlery for fish was a class marker (a negative one), as alluded to in John Betjeman's poem, was that they needed to be silver, or at least silver-plated. If you had to have a set of them, the inference was that your normal cutlery was NOT silver.

How snobbish was that? It reminds me of Alan Clark's jibe about Michael Heseltine having "to buy his own furniture."

Eleanor's tomb in Fontevrault Abbey (g0ng00zlr)

Now, how many medieval women can you name? Eleanor of Aquitaine? Joan of Arc? Julian of Norwich? They are all here in Sharon Bennett Connolly's Heroines of the Medieval World (Amberley) but you have to find them in the index. The contents page is organised not by female subjects but more general categories like "Scandalous Heroines,""Warrior Heroines,""The Medieval Mistress" etc.

This does make navigating the book a bit difficult but that's my only slight criticism. What is fabulous about it is that it doesn't just treat the well known women listed above but some really recherché names. Bennett Connolly's blog is called History - the Interesting Bits. That gives you a clue to how enjoyable this book is.

Joan of Arc by Arnoud Schaepkens (Rijksmuseum)
The heroines are mainly royal, or at least aristocratic, because there aren't many women of humbler birth whose lives have been chronicled. The Maid or Orléans in an exception to the rule. Women such as Matilda of Flanders, the wife of William the Conqueror and Isabel de Warenne represented a kind of ideal of womanhood.

And perhaps the acme of that ideal was personified in Blanche of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. It is almost certain that Blanche was the woman about whom Chaucer wrote his Book of the Duchess.

Chaucer was married to Philippa de Roet, whose sister, Katherine Swynford, later became John of Gaunt's third wife. Small world for nobles in the Middle Ages! But Katherine Swynford is another very well-known name, for her perseverance and devotion to her royal lover, bearing him four children, before he eventually married her. She features, naturally, in the chapter on "Medieval Mistresses," along with Alice Perrers, who was the lover of Edward the Third, John's father.

They might both have been placed in the next chapter, "Scandalous Heroines," since they certainly stepped outside the role society expected of them in their time. In fact the scandalous ones are Joanna, the illegitimate daughter of King John, Marguerite and Blanche, the daughters of Philip lV of France, Joan (the Fair Miad of Kent), who married Edward the Black Prince, Constance of York, the daughter of the first Duke of York and Eleanor Cobham (famous as Duchess of Gloucester in Shakespeare's Henry Vl, part two).

Another chapter, "The Pawns," reminds us just how much the fate of noblewomen - especially princesses - in the Middle Ages depended on their use as pieces on the gameboard of dynastic matrimony. Unfortunately, it was common for proposed matches, often contracted when the royal females were still in single figures, fell through. (Just read Melita Thomas's book about Mary Tudor featured in our guest post of 29th November, to see how many grooms were proposed for her, all without success).

In "Warrior Heroines," as well as Joan of Arc, you can read about the splendid Aethelfled, daughter of Alfred the Great (written about by our own Sue Purkiss in the History Girls anthology Daughters of Time, Templar). And Nicholaa [sic] de la Haye, who defied King Richard the First but defended Lincoln Castle against an Anglo-French force and helped save the throne of the underage Henry lll.

We are becoming more used  to stories of women who ruled, in their own right or as Regents, from accounts like Helen Castor's She-Wolves (Faber & Faber) and Sarah Gristwood's Game of Queens (Oneworld) but there is a good chapter here on Women who Ruled, like Anne of Kiev and Catherine, Regent of Castile (a daughter of John of Gaunt).
By Romeyn de Hooghe (Rijksmuseum)
"Literary Heroines" gives us Hildegard of Bingen and Héloise, the lover of Abelard, Marie de France and Christine de Pisan. None of these is obscure, perhaps by definition, since they left writings that have survived. But what a group read about together like this!

The final chapter deals with "The Survivors," which begins appropriately enough with Eleanor of Aquitaine (written about by Adèle Geras in Daughters of Time). But also lesser known women, like Joan of Bar and Anne of Woodstock and her contemporary Maud Clifford.

Sharon Bennett Connolly shows us women who have defied fathers and husbands, have ruled on behalf of their children, gone to war, defended castles, had love affairs with men of their choice and written works that have survived for centuries. All in all, this is the perfect book for anyone interested in history and specifically the history of women.

So a good Christmas present for any History Girl of your acquaintance.
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