Murder on the dance floor (Or, how to get away with murder if you're young and pretty and have a cunning barrister)

January 10, 2018, 4:00 pm

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The ballroom tragedy . . .

A pretty art student

A vile seducer

In 1925 Australia was gripped by a tragic story that had all of the elements of a sensational mystery thriller or a lurid Hollywood movie. 

Cyril Gidley was shot dead by his former fiancee, Audrey Jacob in front of hundreds of revellers at a charity ball in the early hours of Thursday 27 August 1925. When Audrey was arrested she was standing over the body and still held the smoking gun. 

It should have been (to use Australian gambling slang for a predicted easy victory) a "lay down misere" for the prosecution. 

But Audrey had had the good sense to engage Arthur Haynes, Perth's most cunning defence lawyer, and nothing went as the Crown Prosecutor had planned  . . .

Government House ballroom

The Crime

The Government House ballroom in Perth, Western Australia, was brilliant with light and gaiety as a ball in aid of St. John of God Hospital was drawing to a close. A couple of hundred dancers gaily tripped the fox-trot to the cheery tune of "Follow Yvette," the thirteenth dance of the evening. 

Few noticed the tall, slim girl with shingled dark hair, dressed in a radium blue evening frock, who threaded her way through the dancers. She moved as if in a dream towards a pleasant-featured, dark-haired young Englishman in evening dress.

Twenty-five year old Cyril Gidley was  enjoying his third dance with Miss Maude Mitchell when he felt a touch on his shoulder. 

Turning, he saw Audrey Jacob, his former fiancee.  Gidley looked at her coolly and said, "Excuse me, but I am dancing." 

In reply, Audrey produced an automatic pistol and fired point blank into Gidley's chest. He placed his hand over his eyes as though suddenly feeling faint, then toppled to the floor. The bullet had severed his aorta and he died a couple of minutes later. 

Audrey’s hand still held the smoking pistol. It dropped to her side as she remained motionless, staring at Gidley with a faint smile on her face.  

At first, no one dared approach her, but after several minutes a constable removed the weapon and escorted her to an alcove where she remained, eerily composed, until taken to the police lock-up. 

Gentlemen of the Press 

 

From the beginning, the press interest in the "ballroom horror" was frenzied. The circumstances of the crime, the inquest and the trial were reported in enormous detail, locally and across Australia. There was also international excitement, as Reuters sent detailed cables to America and Europe throughout the proceedings.

Almost from the moment of the shooting, the press coverage was in Audrey's favour and the local girl was given sympathy rather than censure. 

Audrey was 20 years of age, the second child and eldest daughter in a family of eight children. Her father was the Clerk of Court at Fremantle (the port city near Perth) and her family circumstances were respectable but not affluent. 

Like all good heroines of romance, she was convent-educated (somewhat surprisingly, given her parents were Presbyterian). At the remote Roman Catholic Convent she had attended to age 16, Audrey had learned to paint. She kept up the practice afterwards and would sell her works privately. At the time of the murder she was living away from home and attending art classes in Perth. 

In the period up to the inquest and trial she was reported to be a model prisoner, who spent most of her time reading, especially "books of A DEEPER KIND" and she had "asked for a Bible to be given to her." 

Photographs of Audrey in the newspapers emphasised her youthful prettiness and public opinion appears to have been firmly on her side from the beginning. For instance, her barrister's professional fees were paid for in part by a collection taken up for Audrey at the local Tattersalls club.

Her murdered lover, 25 year old Cyril Gidley, was an altogether different proposition. There was little public or press sympathy for the suave Englishman who had arrived in Western Australia two years before and was, at the time of his death, the Fourth Engineer on the State motor ship Kangaroo. 

According to the press,  Gidley had "a compelling personality". He had led people to believe that his family were wealthy and rather high in the social scale. He was "a man who fascinated girls". 

As the Truth thundered: "Little wonder then that he fascinated Audrey Jacob, who was nothing if not ROMANTIC AND ARTISTIC in temperament."  

A common trope in Australia is that of the "remittance man", an Englishman sent out to the colonies by his family to avoid trouble at home. Australians didn't much like remittance men, who they saw as England's rejects. And so, it was another black mark against Gidley that he had made it widely known that he had been sent out to Australia by his family, and given five years to "make good'' before his parents would take him back home to share in the family fortune. 

Much worse, however, were the dark rumours that Gidley was the sort of man who deceived girls into thinking they were engaged to him and then dropped them. Gidley's engagement to Audrey had been formally announced in the newspapers in 1924, but some time before his death, the engagement had been called off. 

It was soon common knowledge that, just before he became engaged to Audrey, Gidley had tricked a girl in a country town in Western Australia into thinking she was engaged to him by giving her an engagement ring. After he met Audrey, he had recovered the ring through a ruse,  leaving the girl distraught. And when his mother was interviewed by Reuters in England, Mrs Gidley said that her son was engaged a girl residing at Cleethorpes in Lincolnshire, and the girl had expected to go out shortly to marry him. Such stories cemented Gidley's reputation as the sort of man who would deceive women when he could.

At the inquest and later at the trial, this negative picture of Gidley became fixed. He was generally accepted to have been a cad, a bully and "a bit of a swank".

 The Coronial Inquest

[Audrey's outfit: "a pretty navy blue silk dress with Oriental trimming, over which she kept a heavy henna-coloured overcoat with fur cuffs." Her cloche hat was of the same colour with floral decorations.]

The inquest before the Coroner, held on 15  and September 1925, should have been merely to establish the cause of death, but both Audrey's counsel, Mr Haynes, and the Crown Prosecutor saw it as a dress-rehearsal for the criminal trial.  The strict rules of evidence do not apply at a coronial inquest, and both lawyers tried to turn this to their advantage. 

And as soon as the inquest began, it was apparent that Mr Haynes, was going to  attempt to blacken Gidley's character in a way that would not be allowed at Audrey's criminal trial. 

(I suspect that he was hoping that the lavish press coverage of the inquest would mean that anyone chosen for the jury at trial would remember the evidence given at the inquest, and this would favourably dispose them towards Audrey.) 

The evidence of Audrey's mother at the inquest was sensational. She said that Gidley had made threats against Audrey's father (Mr Jacob). Gidley had tried to poison her mind against her husband, who was opposed to the marriage. As a result of Gidley's machinations, Mr Jacob had left the family home to live in  a boarding house. Not long afterwards Gidley arranged to stay at the same boarding house, using the false name of Cyril Douglas, in order to spy on Mr Jacob. 

In vain the Crown Prosecutor tried to adduce evidence to show that Mr Jacob  had left the family home in 1921, well before Gidley arrived on the scene, and the Jacobs' marriage was troubled for entirely different reasons. 

Another sensational allegation put by Mrs Jacob was that Gidley was heavily involved in smuggling. As soon as her husband had left the family home, Gidley offered to pay to add two rooms to the Jacobs' house, which could be used to store goods Gidley smuggled from Singapore.  Mrs Jacob said she was horrified at the suggestion and told her husband. Together they had gone to the police, who searched Gidley's rooms for contraband.

In vain the Crown Prosecutor tried to emphasise that nothing had ever been proved against Gidley in this respect, and that the search carried out on Gidley's rooms on information laid by the Jacobs had revealed nothing nefarious.

Mrs Jacob also said that Gidley was domineering, cruel and harsh to Audrey. She graphically described an occasion where he "put his hand on her throat and pushed her head back until her hair fell down, and said that was what would happen if she ever threw him over". Mrs Jacob wept to reveal her strong suspicion that Gidley had "seduced" Audrey (as one commentator put it, "anticipated the wedding night").

The Crown Prosecutor did his best to paint Gidley in a better light, but with little success. This evidence was from the owner of the boarding house where Gidley had stayed:

Crown Prosecutor: "There are three girls at the place and your wife says he (Gidley) never made any advances towards them." 

Witness - How does she know? 

Crown Prosecutor: "Did you ever see him do so?" 

Witness - No

Crown Prosecutor: "You have never heard your wife or daughter complain of his conduct?

Witness - He was a bit of a swank, if that is any trouble.

However, the Crown Prosecutor did manage to put into evidence a very damaging letter that was allegedly found among Gidley's possessions. It read:

M.S. Kangaroo, Fremantle, 16/8/25. I, Cyril Gidley, do hereby state that Audrey Jacob visited me on the above ship without my permission. While on board she tried to make herself a nuisance and rejecting her advances, threatened me with my life if I didn't make her my friend again. The reason I refused was she turned me down, using her own words, "I have got plenty of good friends on the other ships"; this was just seven months ago, so I let her go to her good friends. (Sgd.) CYRIL GIDLEY. 16/8/25. P.S.—This note is in case she does keep her vow. 

Haynes did his best to downplay the letter, insinuating that it was a forgery.

Although Haynes valiantly attempted to persuade the Coroner not to make a finding of guilt, but to leave that for the criminal trial, the Coroner concluded:

"I find that Cyril Gidley died at Perth on August 27th, 1925, from haemorrhage, following a gun shot wound in the chest, the result of a shot from an automatic pistol fired at him by Audrey Jacob, of Perth, and that the said Audrey Jacob willfully murdered Cyril Gidley."

The Trial 

[Audrey's outfit: "a cinnamon costume with white lace insertion and a broad silk sash of darker colour. Her hat was also cinnamon coloured, with floral trimmings.]

The trial of Audrey Jacob for the murder of Cyril Gidley took place in the Perth Supreme Court on 8 and 9 October 1926. 

Her defence was simple: accidental shooting. 

Audrey's story was that she had arrived at the Government Ballroom on the night in question dressed as Pierrot with her friend Annie, who was dressed as Pierette. To her dismay she saw Gidley, whom she had thought was away at sea. He danced past her and snubbed her several times during the evening. 

At midnight, agitated and distraught, she left the ball and returned to her flat where she lay down. After about a half an hour she rose, changed into her blue silk evening frock and took out the gun that had been given to her by a former boyfriend. This she wrapped in her handkerchief. 

Audrey said she left the flat determined to commit suicide and began walking to the river, but on an impulse, she turned and walked instead to the nearby Catholic Cathedral. Sinking to the ground by the wall of the cathedral, she recited the rosary. After a short period of contemplation and prayer, she felt more peaceful and decided not to kill herself after all. 

In trance-like state she walked back to her flat. The route took her past Government House where the ball was still in full swing, and she decided to go in to speak to Gidley. She asked her friend, Annie, to bring Gidley to meet her, but he refused to do so. 

After this new rejection, Audrey saw  Gidley on the dance floor. In a trance-like state, she moved through the dancers towards him, determined to speak to him. She tapped him on shoulder. He turned, saw  her, and coldly replied, "Pardon me, I’m dancing". 

Audrey felt dazed. She threw her hands up to her forehead, forgetting that she held the gun wrapped in her handkerchief. A shot rang out and Gidley fell to the ground. 

She knew nothing more until she came to her senses in the lockup.

The Verdict

The all-male jury accepted Audrey's story and the verdict was an unequivocal, "Not Guilty". 

Even today, apparently, students visiting the Supreme Court Building who are given a precis of the facts of the case for a re-enactment tend to find Audrey "Not Guilty". [“Somewhere between fiction and non-fiction: New approaches to writing crime histories”, Anna Haebich, Curtin University. http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue28/Haebich.pdf]

 

 

Was Gidley's death an accidental shooting? Or did Audrey cold-bloodedly murder her lover,  as Gidley had reported that she had threatened to do a mere two weeks before?

In the February blog I will discuss the evidence adduced at Audrey's trial and you can decide for yourself whether Audrey Jacob really did get away with murder...

Audrey Jacob

 

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BLUE vs GREEN. Passion and politics in the Roman circus.....

January 11, 2018, 10:00 pm

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What did Nero and Caligula have in common, besides being murderous megalomaniacs? Both were ardent Greens. In Constantinople some 500 years later, Justinian and his wife Theodora were passionate Blues.

The Blues and Greens were two of the factions in chariot racing, who were supported by the populace in huge numbers. Along with their less celebrated rivals, the Reds and Whites, they provoked violent passions and the occasional riot in a tradition stretching from the late republic until the Twelfth Century AD. This is an extraordinary tale of sporting rivalry.

I first became aware of the Blues and Greens when researching my first, dead-in-a-drawer novel set in 6th century Constantinople. In this era, the violence from the racing factions spilled onto the streets: there were riots and massacres that make our football hooligans seem like benevolent pixies.
Now I am back again, but five centuries earlier. How important were the Blues and Greens in the early Empire - how prevalent, and how destructive?

Chariot racing, according to Roman legend, was introduced by Romulus. According to archaeology, it was most likely borrowed Etruria - and the Etruscans borrowed from the Greeks. In the Greek tradition, wealthy men effectively sponsored chariots in the Games, accruing great honour. In Rome, it was fashionable int he early Republic for aristocrats to race their own teams. Historian Elizabeth Rawson argues that at some point after the fifth century BC, the state began to pay horse-breeders to raise horses for the races.

Rawson argues that is it possible that it was about this time that the four factions emerged; effectively four different stables which paid for the chariots, horses and charioteers, perhaps from the ever increasing prize-money.

Charior racing was hugely popular. Ovid, in his Weinstein-ish poetry about how to pick up women, makes it clear that men and women sat together - close packed in narrow rows. The Circus Maximus could hold - it is argued - a staggering 150,000 race fans. Imagine the noise as the Blues passed the meta (the turning post) in the final round, beating the Greens back to a sullen second.  I am reminded of attending a baseball game in America. The distances involved meant there were no rival fans. For someone used to British football and rugby grounds the atmosphere was weirdly leaden. Supporting any sport becomes more interesting when you are vested - somehow, anyhow - in the competitors.

Augustus - who cannily never let his preferences be known  - understood the power of the Circus. He renovated and expanded the Circus, and sat his family on a large collective bench so that they could be seen to be first among equal citizens. As Andrew Feldherr points out, he chose the cliffs overhanging the circus to build his palace; the architectural symbol of the new order.

There is some doubt as to whether all four factions had a long history before Augustus began to incorporate the myths and iconography of the Circus into the elaborate mythical buttressing of his
regime.

Tertullian, writing in the third century AD, says that there were originally only two factions - red and white. This is disputed by modern historians.

Alan Cameron, in his seminal book on this topic, Circus Factions, argues that Tertullian's version is just one tradition, and that all the later versions are ripe with mythology and wish-fulfillment. Cameron argues that the origins of the Blues and Greens go far back in to the Republic - exactly when, we do not know.

Blues and Green became the major colours quickly, dominating the sources. Cameron argues that the precise relationship between the Blues and Greens on the one hand, and Red and White on the other, remains a puzzle. One version of the significance of the colours holds that they represent the four seasons - but as Cameron points out, this notion is part of later mythologising by Roman antiquarians.

There have been various theories propounded as to whether the support for different factions was related to anything specific - class or religion, in particular. In late antiquity it has been surmised that one faction denoted one specific view of the nature of Christ.

Cameron argues that there is very little evidence of these distinctions. "The truth is that Blues hated Greens, not because they were lower class or heretics, but simply because they were Greens."

I can understand the temptation to ascribe social or religious leanings to one side or another; it seems absurd to hate for no more reason than the colour of a charioteer's tunic. But I have been to football derby matches - a number of them. I have seen little to match the vitriol and hatred between fans of Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United. Unlike the other great football rivalries there is little to divide the fans - Liverpool, Glasgow and Manchester have their religious splits; Barcelona its political ones.

But in Sheffield, an owl hates a blade just because he's a blade. Just as a Blue hates a Green just because.

Circus Maximus

Even as Rome descended into its late Antiquity malaise, chariot racing remained central to the City. In Decline and Fall, Gibbon says of 5th Century Romans that they "still considered the circus as their home, their temple and the seat of the republic."

In Constantinople, meanwhile, the factions became central to the Empire's politics. Who you supported came to matter politically; and the violent uprisings of the factions became a live political issue. Cameron makes strong arguments for the reasons why the rivalry between factions spiralled through the centuries to erupt in riots and murders in the 6th century: He points to the factionalisation of other areas of public spectacle, like the theatre.

But with a novelists head, and not a historian, it strikes me that there is another factor at play - all that history! Imagine the weight of it, stretching over an unimaginable 1500 years or so. And this the type of history that clings so tightly to myth that the two are indistinguishable. The generations of forefathers who were Blue or Green. Who took their Blueness or Greenness from Rome and into the provinces. From Rome to that spit of land at the edge of Asia. Being Blue or Green stops needing a meaning when the weight of history and myth and family presses its colour violently upon your soul.

Antonia Senior

Trade in the 17th Century - The Tallow Chandler

January 12, 2018, 4:30 pm

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by Deborah Swift

Matthias Storm c.1640 Old Woman with a Candle

I was at a great loss for candles; so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o'clock, I was obliged to go to bed ……… The only remedy I had was, that when I had killed a goat, I saved the tallow, and with a little dish of clay, which I baked in the sun, to which I added a wick of some oakum, I made me a lamp; and this gave me light, though not a clear steady light like a candle."

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Light has always been a symbol for move out of ignorance and into the light of knowledge. As long as we can manufacture and control light, then we are no longer bound by the seasons, or forced to work from sunrise to sunset. Light gives us extra time for work and play, and the time to create during the hours free from chores or work.

The candle was one of the earliest forms of artificial light, and in the period in which I write, most candles were tallow. I need to continually think of this whenever I write a night-time scene, or a winter scene. We take the availability of good light so much for granted.

The Stink of Tallow 
Tallow was cheap animal fat, usually the waste material from meat - hence often sheep or bullock fat.

The tallow was prepared by first chopping the fat into small pieces and then boiling it up in a large copper to detach the muscle or membrane from the fat. The resultant mush was pressed to extract the 'juice', or tallow, and the remains or 'greaves' fed to the dogs or pigs, and even to the geese that were being fattened up for market.To produce a pure light, the chandler must wrestle with dead animal carcasses, and the associated smell and mess. For this reason, chandlery was perceived as a very low class trade, and the chandlers premises were often located near the tanneries and slaughterhouses, and close to a river with access to water. The process reminds me that for every 'light' there is the often invisible 'dark'.

'A woman reading by Candle-light' by Frans van Mieris the elder, c.1665; black chalk on vellum.

Fir candles, made of a long thin splinter of fir, were commonly used in Scotland, and a fir candle holder was known as a "puirman"(poorman). But tallow candles were the common household candle in early England, and by the 13th century, candle-making had become a guild craft in England and France, controlled by ancient City Livery Companies. The Tallow Chandlers Company, one of the London Guilds, sill exists. It was formed in about 1300 to regulate and manage candle-making. Over the next 150 years they expanded in membership and influence, until King Edward IV granted them a coat of arms in 1456.

In rural areas, where no Livery Company existed, chandlers would sometimes go from house to house with their moulds, making candles from the kitchen fats saved for that purpose, or in smaller towns they made and sold their own candles from a shop. Candle-making was usually done in winter by a householder, as livestock was generally slaughtered around Martinmas (November 11th) to save the expense of over-wintering them. Tallow candles could be made for you in your own home with your own saved drippings by an itinerant tallow chandler (tallow chandlers and wax chandlers had separate guilds, and jealously guarded their products).

Candles, especially tallow ones, were kept in a wooden or metal box hung on the wall in order to protect them from vermin, as being animal fat, mice regarded them as food. Being away from the fire also prevented the candles wilting and bending in heat.

A candle box of 1680

Holy Beeswax
Unlike animal-based tallow, beeswax burned pure and cleanly, without producing a smoky flame. It also had a pleasant sweet smell rather than the foul, acrid odor of tallow. However,  it took an entire honeycomb's worth of beeswax to make one 4" candle, so it was very expensive. Beeswax candles were widely used for church ceremonies. The beeswax itself had a religious significance in 17th Century England. One story is that bees were absent from the Garden of Eden and so escaped Eve's sin. Another is that medieval monks thought that bees reproduced by immaculate conception, like the Virgin Mary, and so the beeswax of a church candle came to signify purity.

The Revolutionary Art of Plaiting a Wick
The absorbency and efficiency of a wick depended on the number of individual strands. Adding or subtracting a few extra strands of animal hair or hemp fibre made the difference between a candle that burned well, or one that guttered or dripped. The wicks were made from twisted threads of flax, cotton, or hemp, and trimming the wick to get rid of candle "snuffs" was essential to keeping your candle burning well, or it would flare and smoke. I often imagine my characters having to trim the wick in the middle of conversations, or tackling writing a letter.

The best wicks were invented later in the 19th century, and revolutionised the candle. They were plaited so they curled as they burned to ensure that the tip burnt off during use so they didn't have to be continually trimmed, thus ensuring you could carry out your task uninterrupted. To achieve this curl, the plait or braid of a wick was woven asymmetrically, with a few extra strands in one of the threads. After being cut to length, the wicks were dipped in molten wax so that one end was stiff enough to poke through the hole at the bottom of the mould, and then the moulds were filled.

Wooden & Pewter Candle Mould

The Fall of Tallow

The tallow chandler's fortunes declined at the end of the 17th century. New materials, such as spermacetti (from whale blubber) and paraffin wax, replaced tallow. Then in the late 19th Century gas lighting arrived, twelve times as bright as a candle, only to be replaced by electricity twenty years later. These eras are comparatively short, when you think that we had many hundreds of years where most of our light was by the dim smoky haze of tallow candles.

More about lighting? Lucy Worsley has a post about domestic lighting here.

Sources:

Images from Wikicommons

The Social History of Lighting - William O'Dea

Restoration London - Liza Pickard

At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime - Roger Ekirch

http://clanntartan.sitesneakpeek.com/manual/lighting.html
https://www.tallowchandlers.org

https://www.periodoakantiques.co.uk

Not the End of the World - by Lesley Downer

January 13, 2018, 4:30 pm

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‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings …’

In 1931 a young American botanist called Cyrus Longworth Lundell was trekking through the Mexican jungle in search of chicle gum for the Wrigley chewing gum company. He travelled sometimes on foot, sometimes on horseback, depending on the denseness of the trees, led by local guides and followed by a long procession of bearers carrying his luggage and equipment.

Calakmul: 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and Despair!'

Deep in the jungle he arrived at his destination, a site which he had seen first from the air - monumental edifices of stone as high as and steeper than the pyramids of Giza, with stelae placed in front and high up on the walls covered in intricately carved images and symbols. He named it Calakmul which, according to Lundell, means ‘two adjacent mounds’ in the Mayan language..

He reported on it to the archaeologist Sylvanus G. Morley of the Carnegie Institute who set to work clearing and excavating. But from 1938, for unknown reasons, the site was abandoned. 

Stela at Calakmuk

The stelae that had been cleared of jungle were left exposed to the elements. Robbers scaled the crumbling monuments and sliced off whole carved facades, sometimes cutting them into pieces, and somehow manhandled the enormously heavy rocks down the precipitous steps to be sold. Other stelae that had been in excellent condition, protected by their covering of foliage, became weathered and worn down, the original sharp images virtually indecipherable. It was only in 1982 that preservation and restoration began again.

The monuments are a good hour and a half’s drive through dense jungle, followed by fifteen minutes’ walk through the trees. It must have taken days to get here in the 1930s.

Calakmul was one of the largest and most powerful of all the Mayan city states and there are almost 7000 ancient structures. There’s a grand central plaza around which successive rulers built these pyramid-like monuments, ever taller and taller, building around or on top of their predecessors’ monuments, taking them as a foundation. Unlike our castles, these are unfortified. The Mayan rulers built their monuments not to protect themselves but to display their power and splendour.

The tallest is a skyscraper, 45 metres high. Inside, archaeologists found an ornate frieze and the skeleton of a ruler, wearing a jade mask and jewellery, wrapped in textiles and partly preserved jaguar pelts and surrounded by treasures. In others they found beautifully painted murals depicting scenes of everyday life.

Jade mask found at Calakmul

In the Mexican heat the jungle grows incredibly fast. In Calakmul it engulfs the ruins. Trees grow out of the stones, roots twine around the rocks and lianas dangle from the branches. Howler monkey crouch overhead, barking ferociously, and sometimes a jaguar emerges from the jungle. It’s all very Ozymandian. ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and Despair.’ 

The Mayan script which covers some of the stelae is made up of ‘glyphs’ - picture writing, more rounded than Egyptian hieroglyphs, almost like little cartoons. Some of the glyphs carry meaning, others sounds, or sometimes both, with one sound represented by different glyphs, a bit like Japanese. It has now nearly all been deciphered and the battles which city states fought with city states and the exploits and histories of the rulers can all be read. 

Mayan script

The magnificent civilisation of the Maya began around 2000 BC and was at its pinnacle between 250 and 900 AD. At the time of the Greeks and Romans and throughout our so-called Dark Ages, the Maya were living in city states, building vast monuments and temples, carving intricate friezes, playing ball games and anointing the earth with their own blood. The rulers embodied the gods. They flattened their heads from birth and wore the plumed feathers of the quetzal bird to represent ears of corn - maize, the all-important crop.

The Maya traded widely across Mexico and Central and South America. Christopher Columbus met Mayan merchants and used their excellent navigational maps. All this grew up without any influence from Europe, the Middle East or Asia until the Spanish arrived in 1492.

At Uxmal, 150 kilometres north of Calakmul and the capital of another city state, the buildings are covered in spectacularly beautiful carvings like geometrical patterns. When you look carefully they shape themselves into stylised eyes, noses and mouths. It’s the face of Chaac, the all-important rain god with his hook-like nose, repeated over and over again.

Face in stones at Uxmal. The door is a mouth with teeth and two eyes above

At Uxmal the many different building complexes are clear to see. There’s a great pyramid glorifying the ruler with a door leading to an inner chamber. There are also temples and palaces and a vast administrative court walled by four temples covered in lavish decoration.

On a long low building now called the Governor’s Palace there’s a small platform with a stone throne with two jaguar heads which functioned as an astronomical observatory. From another pyramid 5 kilometres away, in precise alignment with it, Mayan astronomers could observe Venus setting over the north side of the Palace once every 8 years. 

Then there’s the ball court, a staple of all these complexes, where players tried to shoot a rubber ball through a hoop high on the wall using only their hip, shoulder or head - hands and feet were not allowed. Depending on the rules of a particular game, the leader of the winning side might have his heart ripped out while the losers became slaves.

These vast stone plazas and edifices were where the rich and powerful lived, played their games and performed their ceremonies. Ordinary folk lived in thatched-roof houses such as one sees all around Mexico to this day, which quickly disappeared.

The apogee was the great monument (‘El Castillo’) at Chichen Itsa. It has exactly 91 steps on each of the four sides, adding up to 364, with the topmost platform making 365. The whole building is one vast stone calendar. During the spring and autumn equinoxes, the shadows form the image of a giant serpent undulating along the side of the north staircase with its head sculpted in stone at the foot.

Chichen Itsa at the equinox. (Image from Wiki Commons)

All these cities and complexes were laid out with mathematical precision, with the buildings aligned such that from certain viewpoints the morning star, for example, could be seen on a certain day of the year. The Maya had three calendars, based on the sun, the moon and the phases of Venus, which intersected like a complex set of cogs at varying intervals, providing very precise information about the movement of the heavens, eclipses, harvests and when to plant. The whole cycle repeated every 5200 years - which is why 2012 was not the end of the world by the Mayan calendar (as was widely touted), but simply the end of a 5200 year cycle and the start of another.

It was also not the end of the world for the Mayas when the Spanish came. Their civilisation had already peaked and faded and they’d already left all their grand monuments. They also didn’t have gold which was the only thing the Spanish were interested in. So they were left in peace for a while though eventually they were enslaved and their entire literature denounced as writings of the devil and - except for three priceless codices - burnt by the Jesuits.

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. All photographs apart from Chichen Itsa are by me.

Shoelaces

January 14, 2018, 5:00 pm

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by Marie-Louise Jensen

One of the things that always struck me as especially unfamiliar in historical fiction, that is to say Georgian and Regency historical fiction, was reading of a gentleman's 'freshly ironed shoelaces'. It also struck me as rather odd. In modern days, I've never seen a shoelace that would benefit from ironing.
I've always assumed that the laces must have been wider than now, and must therefore have become creased. I still haven't found a definitive answer to this and have no mental image. But the topic occurred me again when I was watching episode two of The Crown a couple of days ago. (Yes, I realise that I am late to this - no doubt all you history buffs saw it ages ago!)  There is a scene where the young, newly-bereaved Queen Elizabeth is dressed in mourning on the plane and just for a moment, the camera pans down to her shoes, which are laced with black ribbons.

Well, ribbons make sense. They would probably need ironing to stay looking nice. And in fact, a quick google shows that ribbons are still occasionally used for lacing shoes today. Something I (as someone entirely lacking in fashion sense) had no idea of.

However the shoelaces were made, it would have been the valet's job, poor soul, to iron them, along with his master's neckcloths and shirts. I seem to remember it was the dandies who required their shoelaces to be ironed in Georgian times, but I may be wrong.

Another fascinating fact that came up when I started to search ironing shoelaces on the internet is that apparently Prince Charles still requires his shoelaces to be ironed every time he has worn them. Very strange indeed, as I doubt he wears ribbon-laces. As he is probably one of the last men in England to have a valet (he has three) he can still demand such customs are observed. For those of us who have to do our own laundry and ironing, this is probably not something anyone today choses to spend their own time on. Hands up, anyone?

One final fun fact on the topic of ironing shoelaces - apparently in the 1920s, it was a euphemism for going to the bathroom in American English. A bit like going to see a man about a dog in the UK.

Follow me on Twitter: jensen_ml

A do-it-yourself wassailing kit - by Sue Purkiss

January 16, 2018, 1:10 am

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It's that time of year again, and people are wassailing right, left and centre down here in the west country. So if you want a reminder of how to do it, here's my post from last year. Never mind the wind and the rain - you owe it to your apple trees!

I wasn't particularly aware of the ancient custom of wassailing until recently. Okay, about this time of year you tend to see pictures in the local paper of people with green faces cavorting among apple trees - but hey, I live a mere stone's throw from Glastonbury, where the streets are paved with crystals and littered with spell books, and where every year they have a Goddess Conference at which the place is FILLED with people with green faces - not to mention magical wells, a conflux of ley lines and a 2000 year-old thorn tree. (Well, that was actually vandalised a few years ago, but I hear there are a few cuttings in the care of the fairy kingdom under Wearyall Hill - or possibly at Worthy Farm under the care of Michael Eavis.) So green faces don't raise an eyebrow in these parts.

Goddesses at Chalice Well in Glastonbury.

But, as I've mentioned before in this place, I fairly recently joined a choir. We sing a lot of folk songs, and at this time of year, when Christmas has come and gone, we sing a Wassail Song. I don't know the words off by heart - our leader, Issy, sings it first and we follow her - but they are very similar to these, which I found on the web.

'Old apple tree, we wassail thee and hope that thou shalt bear,
For the Lord doth know where we shall be come apples another year.
For to bloom well and to bear well, so merry let us be,
Let every man take off his hat and shout out to the old apple tree.
   Three cheers for the apple tree: hip hip...'

Well, it's a very jolly tune and we like singing it, so we make quite a racket, and I only hope it's loud enough for the apple trees of Cheddar to hear and be enthused. Because the purpose of wassailing is to encourage them, as the song says, 'to bloom well and to bear well'. It's entirely logical. I often talk to plants. I had quite a chat with a Christmas rose the other day, congratulating it on flowering so beautifully when all its predecessors have singularly failed to thrive; and I always apologise to shrubs before I give them a severe pruning, and explain to them that it's for their own good. I find these little courtesies make all the difference, and I'm sure they do to the apple trees as well.

There used to be lots of apple orchards in Cheddar when we first moved here thirty or so years ago. But over the years, most of them have been grubbed up in favour of more houses, and in Somerset generally, the orchards for many years seemed to be dwindling. But since the growth in popularity of cider over the last few years (Thatchers is just down the road), orchards are back in favour, and so is wassailing.

So I thought I'd look into the history of it.

Wassailing in the olden days.

Apparently 'wassail' comes from 'Waes hael!', the Anglo-Saxon greeting and toast which means 'Good Health!' Its purpose is to wake the trees up and scare away any evil spirits, thus ensuring a good harvest of fruit in the autumn. This happens on Twelfth Night - but usually, it being such an old and historical custom, it takes place not on the 6th January, but on the 17th, because this would have been Twelfth Night (or Old Twelvey, as we country folk apparently call it) before the introduction of the new-fangled and totally unnecessary Gregorian calendar in 1582.

The correct procedure is to choose a Wassail King and Queen, who lead a procession of interested parties round the local orchards. At each one, the Queen is lifted up into one of the trees, and she presents it with a piece of toast soaked in the wassail drink, which seems to be a kind of cider punch. This is a gift to the tree spirits. (Here's a recipe - I can't vouch for its authenticity, but it sounds rather nice.)

Then everybody sings the song, after which they shout and bang pots and pans and drums and generally make as much noise as they can to drive the evil spirits out. (Presumably the good spirits put their hands over their ears after eating up their toast.) Then I think they probably finish off the cider punch, and dance round the fire a bit.

Below is a video from YouTube of a wassail in Gloucestershire. I'd personally like to see a bit more attention to wearing appropriate clothing (see picture above, of a wassail at Brent Knoll, just down the A38 from here) and I'm really not happy about the plastic bags, but it's a good and lusty rendition of the song.

So there you are. I've given you a day's notice, and with a bit of practice you'll soon master the song - so if you have apple trees, prepare to wassail them. Unfortunately, they really don't grow well in our garden...

ELEANOR MARX by RACHEL HOLMES: Reflections by Penny Dolan

January 16, 2018, 5:34 pm

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January arrived, bringing time to edge myself back to mid-Victorian London, the time and setting for my long-neglected novel. Looking along the shelves for the right book to nudge my mind along, I spotted one inviting title. The book was ELEANOR MARX, written by RACHEL HOLMES, her biography of Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. Another point in its favour was that I had seen YOUNG MARX at THE BRIDGE theatre, and the play set questions murmuring in my head about the man and his family.

The biography certainly covered the time-span of my “work-in-progress”. Eleanor Marx was born in 1855, but earlier in the 19^th Century was there on the pages, looking back at the young lives of both her parents. The book seemed a good “starter” to glance though, so I began on the first chapters . . . and then I kept reading, way past the point of any practical research. 

 Eleanor Marx, as revealed by Rachel Holmes, is a wonderfully compelling character and, furthermore, the sweep of her life reads like the plot of a classic novel. 

Eleanor - or Tussy to rhyme with Pussy - was the daughter who took on Marx’s great legacy and who most inherited his cause and philosophy. Her German parents, Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, had come to London as poor refugees. Marx was in trouble with the authorities in Germany and in France and under suspicion here in England. Times were hard: Marx earned little or nothing from his writing and his family relied on subs from friends, loans from distant relatives and the local pawn-broker to survive life in the London slums. Penniless and hungry, the family flitted between rented rooms, always accompanied by Helen Demuth, their live-in maid-servant. Illness was always a worry and only three of Jenny’s babies survived to full adulthood.

One constant in the household was Marx’s closest friend, Friedrich Engels, the son of an industrialist, whose money kept the small family afloat. Closer than many brothers, these two men - Marx and Engels – debated and created the whole anti-capitalist philosophy and movement. The girl Eleanor must have been there by the fireside, listening and witnessing many of these discussions, having her life shaped by their words.

Eleanor never went to school - unlike her two older sisters who benefited from a burst of prosperity- but she was too curious about everything to stay uneducated. She learned to read and write early, and was an eager student of subjects she valued, taught by various friends and by her father. Surrounded by books, if not much else, Eleanor loved reading Grimm’s folk tales and reciting Shakespeare’s plays and was a keen little letter-writer herself. She grew up speaking German, French and English and, as an adult enjoyed learning languages. As Eleanor moved into her teens, she began helping her adored father with his work, notes, translations and correspondence. By the time she was sixteen, her own life was becoming absorbed in social struggle, and in the dilemma of balance relationships between man and woman equally.  

Yet this is only the start of Holmes sweeping biography. Through the pages, we see Eleanor living so closely with all the social struggles of the nineteenth century that she almost seemed a kind of Mother Courage to me. What was particularly valuable about this biography is the very width of its context. 

Eleanor was involved with so many of the significant events and movements of the age: the Paris Commune of 1984; the rise of Irish Home Rule & the Fenians; protests and demonstrations against industrialisation, suffrage, the fight for an eight hour day and equal wages, child labour, and education for all.ot limited by "Victorian England": as a refugee and an immigrant, with sisters and relatives living across Europe, she never loses an international perspective, and nor does this book.

Although Eleanor trained as an actor, she had little success but nevertheless those same skills, and the warmth of her personality, made her into a great public communicator. She travelled constantly as a speaker, even to America to speak to the worker’s unions, and was acknowledged almost everywhere for her knowledge and understanding of her father’s arguments, beliefs and philosophy.

 

Holmes looks into this revolutionary age, revealing some uncomfortable truths such as the lack of empathy between “society suffragettes” and working-class women; the active animosity between the various anarchist and parliamentarian Socialist parties; the English workers general rejection of European Socialist perspective and solidarity, the rise of antisemitism and more. Despite some progress, this was not a trouble-free time, nor was her own personal life free of conflict and deep tragedy.

However, as I read about the different issues she faced, it was impossible not to feel that Eleanor Marx’s life echoed then with many questions and problems that exist - maybe in growing intensity - in our 21^st century society, which adds a darker note the journey.

Yet, reading this biography, there is no doubt that Eleanor Marx was remarkable. Through Rachel Holmes enthusiastic writing, she is shown as a truly impressive woman in her own right. And on she goes, through these great flowing pages of history, constantly organising, writing; campaigning; addressing conferences and rallies; travelling and serving her father’s cause, as she tries to face the hidden costs in her own life. One can only admire her generous heart and her bold hope for the future. A remarkable book too - and the end of her story had me in tears.

Penny Dolan

Literary Pilgrimages - Celia Rees

January 17, 2018, 4:30 pm

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I'm sure we have all been on at least one Literary Pilgrimage.  Writers are fascinated by the lives of other writers, where they lived, where they wrote, the things they used and owned. The same fascination grips readers. Famous writers' homes have become places of pilgrimage. We feel compelled to visit, whether it is Monk's House in Rodmell, Dylan Thomas' Boat House, the Wordsworth home at Dove Cottage, C.S. Lewis' The Kilns or Kipling's Bateman's.

 Most particularly, we want to see where the write plied his or her craft. 

Virginia Woolf's Writing Room, Monk's House, Rodmell

Dylan Thomas' Shed

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C.S. Lewis' Desk

We shuffle round and past, gazing through glass or from behind a rope, much as a pilgrim might when visiting a holy site. We are often enjoined not to take photographs (but we do anyway) and definitely not to touch anything (if we are allowed to get that close) even though that is exactly what we want to do. The writer's possessions, particularly those associated with the act of writing: pens, desks, letters and manuscripts have become objects of veneration, taking on the religious aura of holy relic. Just as the face of a saint is worn away by countless fingers and lips, we feel the need to touch, as if  holding Virginia Woolf's pen or operating the keys of C.S. Lewis' typewriter, will bring us closer to the hand that created the work we so admire and by some kind of sympathetic magic, bestow on us some of their power. 

C.S. Lewis' Typewriter

It is not just the instruments they used that command this fascination. The first time I saw actual written scripts in the British Library I felt a childlike awe. This was the actual writing of the actual person, the way they had written it, with blots, doodles, crossings out. I'm still fascinated by notebooks and manuscripts, especially the scorings out and changes that show the writer's mind at work. And I feel a kinship - even writers of genius collected ideas, jotted them down on whatever came to hand, had to search for words and didn't get it right first time.  

Dylan Thomas: list of words

The things that a writer owned can, through time, as his or her fame grows, take on the aura of relic, just as the writer becomes mythic, iconic, but those very possessions, those very objects, can also help to restore the writer's humanity. Few writers are as iconic as the Brontës. Even people who have never read any of their books know their myth. Their story is a marketer's gift and so it has proved. Unfortunately, each turn of the myth making mill takes the reader further from the writer and even further from their books. An unusual biography of the Brontës, Deborah Lutz'The Brontë Cabinet, Three Lives in Nine Objects seeks to reverse this process.

No writers have been more mythologised than the Brontës. From their sudden appearance on the literary scene as Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, stories have swirled about them. Their use of male pseudonyms began the mystery; their achievement, their singular, unique voices, so unlike anything before them, added to it. The early deaths of Emily and Anne so soon after their success; their brother Branwell's wreck of a life, made their story as poignant and tragic as any work of fiction. Charlotte's death following, so early in her marriage and in her pregnancy, seemed to add a further cruel coda. All of them survived by their father, Patrick. Their home, Howarth Parsonage, soon became a place of pilgrimage, as it is to this day. Among the visitors, those who would themselves become iconic. Sylvia Plath, nose pressed to the glass in the Parsonage Museum, hiking up to Top Withens with Ted Hughes. Their possessions were eagerly collected from the beginning, Patrick cutting up Charlotte's letters for fans pleading for examples of her handwriting. Now, their original manuscripts, letters and possessions are in museums and are considered priceless - relics, indeed.  In her book, Deborah Lutz seeks to return the objects to their original use and place in the lives of their owners and through that to re- discover the Brontës' humanity and put us in fresh touch with them as people.

Tiny Book written by Charlotte

Through the tiny books they wrote, they come alive as children writing the adventures of Branwell's wooden soldiers on whatever they could find, making books out of wrapping paper, sugar bags - already inventing, making up stories, honing their craft and declaring their ambition to be published writers, even if they had to produce the books themselves.

Emily's Painting Box & Charlotte's Sewing Box

Charlotte's portable desk, Emily's paint box, a sewing box, a stout walking stick, a dog collar, each of the objects describes something of the different Brontë siblings' lives, bringing them back from the realm of myth, making each one real again and human, occupied and pre-occupied by day to day concerns. 

Emily's dog, Keeper's, Collar

Many of the Brontës' belongings are on display at Brontë Parsonage museum . They re-pay more than a casual glance. These ordinary, everyday objects, often worn and well used, help us see the Brontës as real people who not only wrote but sewed and painted, went for walks, made bread and peeled potatoes. The things they used and owned help to place their writing firmly in lived experience and bring their extraordinary achievement into fresh perspective. 

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So you want to be a Roman Emperor?

January 18, 2018, 4:01 pm

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As this is my first post as a History Girl (and yes I shall be having a badge made with that title, which I shall wear at all times) I thought I’d introduce myself before launching into the subject of my post.


My name is LJ Trafford and I am obsessed with ancient Roman History.
This fixation kicked in whilst studying Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra for my English Literature A Level. Discovering that the arch villain in that play, Octavius Caesar, later became good emperor Augustus I was intrigued. Reading far and beyond my set texts I soon possessed the ability to draw a family tree from memory of the notoriously complicated and inter-marrying Julio Claudian dynasty.
It became clear that the best course for me was to spend three whole years fan-girling over Augustus with the similarly minded. Somehow, despite possessing absolutely no history qualifications, I managed to talk my way onto an Ancient History degree course.

I now write historical fiction and have just finished writing a four book series on the tumultuous Year of the Four Emperors, 69AD. I also have a day job as a Database Analyst.
I thought it might be fun for my first post to combine these two roles and crunch some stats on Roman Emperors .

*Disclaimer*  My Data set runs from Augustus who became Rome's first emperor in 27 BC to Romulus Augustulus the last Western Roman Emperor who was deposed in 476 AD.
There are some gaps in the knowledge of some of the short lived emperors and also some conflicting evidence. My figures are based on what data we do have and my own hunches on conflicting accounts.
*Second Disclaimer*  It's just for fun.


So you want to be a Roman Emperor?

First things first. Being a Roman emperor is extremely dangerous.

Yes, you have a whopping 63.95% chance of having an unnatural death.

This might rather put you off aiming for the purple. But never fear! I have some top tips that will help aid your likelihood of surviving a tumultuous life at the top.

Tips:

1) Choose the time of your accession carefully.

As you can see from the above chart, you have a better chance of a natural death if you start your reign in the 2nd Century AD.

This is the era of Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius, three of Edward Gibbon's 5 Good Emperors.

You will certainly want to avoid the 3rd Century for your Emperorship. This was a period known as the Crisis with a sudden, violent and rapid changeover of emperor. There were 28 emperors in 100 years, meaning an average length of reign of 3.6 years. The 2nd Century by comparison has an average reign of 11 years. Which is ample to make a name for yourself.

2) Are you ready to be emperor?

Though youthful exuberance and ambition has its place, it has no place in being a Roman emperor.

Of those who became emperor aged 30 or under a humongous 80% of them met an unnatural death.
Included in this total is Nero who became emperor thanks to his mother's machinations at 17 years old.
Geta, emperor at 20. Stabbed to death in his mother's arms at 22.
And Gordian III who ascended the purple at only 13 and was killed in battle, or assassinated by troops (neither of which is very nice).

Reassuringly, for those of us of a certain age, your chances of an awful death decline sharply once you pass 31. Indeed the best age to ascend to the throne and enjoy a long reign and peaceful death is between 40 and 45.

3) What to look out for.

 We've established that you want to begin your reign in the 2nd Century in comfortable middle age but what do you need to look out for to avoid that unnatural death?

Surprisingly, given the expansionist nature of Rome, those emperors killed in battles were for the most part in civil wars against fellow Romans.
Notable exceptions include Valens who was killed fighting the Goths, Valerian the only Roman emperor to be captured in battle and Julian, who like Valerian, was fighting the Persians.

By far the greatest risk factor is assassination.
A whopping 24 emperors were assassinated, giving you a 1 in 4 chance of ending your reign that way. Even extremely competent emperors such as Aurelian (who regained large tracts of territory during the Crisis era and was named 'Restorer of the World') fell to the assassin's dagger.

So who do you need to be aware of? Who are you most likely to be assassinated by?

4) The dagger wielders.

Though an army is a necessity for an emperor you might want to keep them and your own personal bodyguards, the Praetorians, in your favour. Preferably by using coinage. Emperor Galba was deposed and decapitated in the Forum after refusing to pay a bonus to the troops.
Pertinax was ousted because he only paid his Praetorian Guard half of what they were owed.

And keep looking over your shoulder at that 'friend' or relative of yours, they might just be hankering after your throne.

Other notable assassinations include Caligula whose death was organised by a Guard whose high pitched voice he'd made fun of. Caracalla who was stabbed by one of his troops whilst going to the toilet. And Commodus who was strangled in his bath by a wrestler named Narcissus after vomiting up the poison his mistress had given him.


In conclusion having faced up to what is an awfully dangerous job, it is worth remembering that there are some benefits to being a Roman Emperor.
Such as:

• Wealth beyond your wildest imaginings. A recent report put Augustus second in a list of the richest men of all time, estimating his worth to be around $4.6 trillion in today's money.
• Palaces! Who doesn't like a palace? Nobody. And certainly not Nero who used the excuse of the great fire of Rome to build his legendary Golden House. The Imperial Palace was later extended and improved upon considerably by Domitian and Septimius Severus to take up most of the Palatine Hill. So plenty of room for your ornaments and soft toy collection.
• Fame. Or infamy, Or if you're lucky a month named after you. July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Augustus. But they were not alone in having a month named after them. Nero named April after himself. Domitian went one better by calling two months Germanicus and Domitianus after himself. And apparently Commodus was set on naming all twelve months. Though obviously none of these stuck. Trafforduary anyone?

Footnotes.
Data set compiled courtesy of Timothy Vermeiren.

LJ Trafford. 

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Self-sufficiency then and now… by Carolyn Hughes

January 19, 2018, 4:30 pm

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I have been musing recently on how, for the past, say, nine centuries or so, until perhaps the early or even middle of the 20th century, the communities in the Meon Valley were mostly self-sufficient, one way or another.

Map of the Meon Valley William J Blaeu, Amsterdam, 1645

In earlier centuries, people rarely left their village, for almost everything they needed was there, produced by themselves, or local farmers or tradespeople. People’s “needs” of course were, necessarily and aspirationally, much more limited than ours, and, apart from “Shanks’s pony”, most people didn’t have the means to travel far.

There might be a market of some kind in the village, where folk would buy and sell their produce, and itinerant pedlars might bring “extras” that couldn’t be made in the village. In the days when a lot of villagers worked the land in one way or another, they took their grain to the mill to be ground into flour and either made their own bread or bought it from a baker.

  

Many grew their own vegetables and perhaps some fruit. If they were wealthy enough, they might have a cow and be able to make cheese. More likely, they might have a pig and produce their own bacon, and even more commonly, have a few hens to produce eggs and eventually a stringy carcass for the pot. If they didn’t, or couldn’t, have their own livestock, others could provide it for a price. People made their own ale or bought it from the village ale-wives. For tasks they couldn’t do themselves, there would be tradespeople who could – smiths, farriers, wheelwrights, carpenters, builders, thatchers and so on.

That said, I am not clear about the nature of the “market” in rural communities. I have always imagined that villagers would have sold their surplus to their neighbours in some sort of “farmers’ market”: more affluent housewives who produced a lot of cheese, for example, or ran a large number of hens and had eggs to spare, or had a large holding and grew more vegetables than the family could eat.

So when a community was “granted” a weekly market by the lord, perhaps this was a different sort of event, when merchants (to use the term loosely) might also come from outside to sell their goods? Maybe this was where villagers would purchase a new cooking pot, for example, or tools of various kinds?

Titchfield already had such a market in the 11th century, for the Domesday Book says its “market and toll (are worth) 40 shillings”. Titchfield’s was one of the first markets in Hampshire and, in the 12th century, it was the only place in the Meon Valley to have one. It wasn’t until 1231 that Meonstoke was granted a weekly Monday market, and in 1269 that Wickham was granted a charter to hold one every Thursday.

Titchfield Market Hall, built in 1620s, now at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum, West Sussex. (MilborneOne at the English language Wikipedia [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons)]

To buy something more exotic, folk might make the effort to travel a few miles to the nearest annual fair. Fairs were more than just over-sized markets. They were, as Ian Mortimer says, “the great gatherings of mediaeval England.” They were usually three-day events, held in honour of a specific saint, on the saint’s day and the day before and after it. Merchants would come from further afield with more exotic goods, spices perhaps, fine quality cloth, more sophisticated household and personal items than could be had in the markets. They were also places of entertainment as well as shopping.

In the Meon Valley, there were several fairs, though only one or two would be within walking distance of a particular village. At the sea end of the valley, in the 13th century, Titchfield was granted permission by King Edward I to hold an annual five-day fair, which was of enormous economic significance, and perhaps reflected the importance of the town after the establishment of its Premonstratensian abbey, which was almost certainly visited often by officials and even royalty. Further upstream, Wickham, at the same time as being granted its market, also received permission for an annual three-day fair on the anniversary of the Translation Of St. Nicholas (in May). The Wickham Fair attracted buyers and sellers from a wide area, dealing in goods of all kinds. The fair has continued more or less without a break, and is still held every 20th May, now more of an entertainment than a grand shopping experience. In the upper reaches of the valley, Meonstoke was also granted an annual three-day fair, in 1231, to be held on the “vigil, feast, and morrow” of St. Margaret. East Meon, too, held an annual fair on Lady Day (March), which continued until the 19th century, but has recently been revived as a May Country Fair.

Knowing how very rural and tranquil the communities of the Meon Valley are now, it is interesting to picture them hundreds of years ago as – once a year at least – the busy, bustling centres of trade they once were.

Interesting too, to note how relatively large some of these, now quite little, villages once were. The Domesday Book of 1086 has the details... East Meon for example was very large in relation to the norms of the day, with 138 households (perhaps 700 people), although the area covered was probably more than just the existing village. Only a short distance away was West Meon, also quite large, with 50 households (250 individuals). A few miles further to the south is Exton, still quite big at 46 households, as was Soberton with 35. By contrast, and rather intriguingly, three of the communities that were granted annual fairs – which one interprets as an indication of their power or importance – were not among the largest: Titchfield had only 33 households, Wickham had 26 and Meonstoke had 28. How curious! Mind you, the fairs and markets were granted to these places nearly two hundred years later than Domesday, so perhaps they had by then become more important places.

Obviously, the size of all communities has gone up and down over the ensuing centuries, but it’s quite interesting to see how the relative balance has changed since Domesday. In the most recent census (2011), East Meon and West Meon now have about 2000 individuals between them; Exton and Meonstoke, together with Corhampton (three villages that sit very close together) have 1600, with Corhampton now the largest of the three (having had only 60 or so individuals in 1086) and Exton the smallest. Soberton, too, has 1600. Wickham and Titchfield, however, have grown really quite large, at 4300 and 7200 respectively. As I have shown in a previous History Girls post, Wickham has been a thriving “townlet” for several centuries, and perhaps its location on a main route from the south coast at Portsmouth is a reason. In Titchfield’s case (see this History Girls post), it, too, was an important town for centuries, but eventually lost its status partly as the surrounding conurbation of Southampton/Fareham/Portsmouth grew and overwhelmed it.

Returning to the matter of the communities’ relative self-sufficiency, that way of life must have continued, more or less unchanged, for centuries, certainly into the 19th and in some places into the 20th. I am not clear to what extent the markets or the fairs continued, but change of a sort did take place during the 19th and early 20th centuries, when shops came to the villages. In the Meon Valley, two communities, East Meon and Soberton, offer good, if different, pictures of just how self-contained a village could still be, even up to a time that is well within living memory.

East Meon © Author

For example, East Meon was still virtually self-sustaining in the early 20th century, for then it had over 20 shops and tradesmen’s workshops. The East Meon History group (http://www.eastmeonhistory.org.uk) has a wonderful website with all sorts of fascinating information about the village’s history. The website includes a map, drawn from memory by a resident, which shows all the stores and workshops serving the village in the 1920s, and where they were located (all now, of course, private and highly desirable homes). Inter alia, there were four bakers, a dairy, three grocers, three butchers, two mills, a saddler and cobbler, a wheelwright, farriers, a post office, a herbalist, and a wide range of craftsmen and building trades. One of the grocers, alongside food, also offered haberdashery as well as household goods, fabrics, boots and shoes, and apparently all the grocers sold paraffin, vital for cottagers without electricity. 

In Soberton, in the 1830s, it is thought that there was just a single shop in the High Street, a grocery, but, before long, more shops appeared: a butcher, a bakery, which was apparently also later the post office and sold beer and insurance too, and also a bicycle shop, a boot repairer, a blacksmith, and building craftsmen (carpenters, joiners, masons etc). In Soberton Heath, in the middle of the parish, there were a couple of grocery shops, and, in Newtown, at the southern end of the parish, a shop was opened in the 19th century, which, in the end, was the only shop in the parish and didn’t close until the 2000s. As late as, perhaps, the early 1980s most things could be bought in the village.

Wickham's market square © Author

Wickham and Titchfield, now with very much larger populations than any of the Meon Valley villages, are unsurprisingly rather better served in terms of shops and businesses. In 1939, Titchfield had about 40 shops and workshops, and Wickham’s great square was lined on every side with businesses of different kinds. Now, each little town has a small chain supermarket and a second “open-all-hours” store, as well as a butcher, a post office, a chemist, hairdressers, several pubs, restaurants and tea/coffee houses. Wickham also has two hardware stores, several antiques centres and gift shops, and a chocolate shop…

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

However, there is no shop now in Soberton, and once bustling East Meon has just one shop, which is a general store and part-time post office. But there are also village shops in each of West Meon (which also has a butchers’ shop), Meonstoke and Droxford, all of which offer at least part-time post office services, and are village hubs, offering access to all sorts of local services and tradesmen as well as selling food and household goods.

In truth, it is perfectly possible to live quite well in either Wickham or Titchfield without having to travel further afield too often, provided one is prepared to accept a relatively modest lifestyle in the context of 21st century consumerism.

Yet, some of those village shops are also really striving to recover at least a degree of self-sustainment for the communities they serve. The post office and village store in Meonstoke (which also serves Exton and Corhampton) is a good example. It offers nearly everything you could need for day-to-day living: bread, meat, vegetables and fruit; ale and wine; logs and coal; as well as culinary treats, and access to many trades and services. Moreover, a good deal of what the shop provides is locally produced, much as it was in the Middle Ages. Its website (http://www.meonstokepostofficeandvillagestores.co.uk/) sums up its credo: “Local produce, for us, is key for many reasons – to make sure you receive them when they are most fresh, to support local businesses and to promote a reduced carbon footprint.”.

There seems to be a growing desire (in truth, a need) for “local produce”, for reducing “food miles”, for greater “sustainment”. And some small communities are clearly beginning to return to at least a modicum of the self-sufficiency they had for so many centuries. What is happening here in the Meon Valley is undoubtedly happening in rural communities throughout the country. One wonders if the tide is beginning to turn.

Historical Research - Pelicans and Donald Rumsfeld by Imogen Robertson

January 20, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Ned signing his contract

It’s been an exciting couple of months at our house. My husband Ned Palmer who crops up in my History Girls posts from time to time, has got a book deal. God help us, we are now a two author household. He’s a cheesemonger, and for the last few years has run a company providing cheese and cheese talks to all sorts of people from lawyers and lobbying firms to family groups and incidental gatherings of historians. 

His book is provisionally titled A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles. From Roman cheese moulds to factory cheddar of the 20th century; from 18th century squires promoting Stilton, to monasteries coming up with meaty tasting washed rind cheeses; from scientific farming to witchcraft and charms in the dairy, Ned examines history through a cheesy lens. The book is due out from Profile at the end of 2019.

Other than sharing my pride in the other half though, I wanted to talk about how watching him plunging into the research has reminded me of my old friend Donald Rumsfeld. His most famous quote (see above) has echoed in my mind since I started writing historical novels for a living and it's not just me see Antonia Senior's great piece about how the hunt for unknown unknowns can inspire a writer. 

But unknown unknowns can be a pain, and I fear by best beloved is feeling that pain. At the moment Ned feels his has to know everything about everything which has happened in the last 2,500 years with the depth and detail of a specialist scholar. This makes me afraid that A Cheesemonger's History will in fact become the Key to All Mythologies with cheese. 

Patrick Malahide as Casaubon in BBC's adaptation of Middlemarch

I’m in a better position to help than Dorothea Casaubon was though. I know for a fact that if I had a private income, I’d still be researching my second book. Now an extra eight years of research might have made for a slightly better book, but would probably made for a much worse one. We have to decide what is important to our characters, to our story and follow those threads. Of course we need to reserve some time for free and easy wandering through the archives, letting our curiosity lead us into dark corners where inspiring forgotten stories might lurk, but we mustn't become paralysed by a fear we'll be caught out as if preparing for some terrifying exam. 

I saw a great ‘Meet the Author’ interview with Conn Iggulden some years ago, and at one point, talking about research Conn confessed he’s always afraid that in his research he’s missed some key fact ‘like everyone in the 15th century had a pet pelican’. (I can’t find the interview online, so forgive the from memory paraphrasing). Anyway, I remember snorting into my coffee as I heard him say that, because it’s such a familiar feeling. You know that you have done your research and it’s unlikely that you’ve missed anything fundamental which your critics will gleefully point out to you, waving their pelican banners over bonfires of your book, but at the same time it’s incredibly difficult not to think that perhaps in the next book, the next scholarly article, the next newspaper or PhD thesis you are going to find something which fundamentally alters your understanding of a period. Learning to write historical fiction is learning to manage that anxiety, work out what is important to your story, and what is important to you as a writer. 

Detail of a "disgorging" medieval misericord in Ludlow parish church via wikipedia

I care about getting the history right in my books, and hate it when I get things wrong. I noticed a reference to the Green Man in one of my books the other day - the shame now I know that phrase was only introduced as a descriptive of the foliate heads in churches by Lady Raglan in 1939 . I have to make sure as I disappear into the weeds of my research though that I remember what I’m actually doing for a living. Telling a story. Creating characters. Delivering a satisfying sense of their world. Sometimes I teach classes about writing historical fiction, and the most common question - most often from people who have the hollow eyed look of someone who has spent six months checking for pelicans - is how to manage your research. My answer is always go back to the story. Go back to the motivations and world which your character inhabits, concentrate your research on the world which is closest to them, which matters most to them, on their story. 

That said, sometimes I just need to know things. Even if they don’t end up in the novel I need to understand them so I feel I have the authority to describe a place or time in the book. For Paris Winter I had a chart of sunrise and sunset times and daily weather reports. A fellow writer and I were talking about the tide tables she wanted to study for her book. 

We all have our things, and often looking for them leads to some nugget of detail, some serendipitous discovery which can expand and enhance your story. We have to make sure there is time in our research to stumble upon things, but we also have to admit upfront what our goals are. For me, that’s tell a satisfying and absorbing story.

So to Ned I’m saying, your readers aren’t coming for a page summarising the current academic debate of invasion v. settlement in the Anglo-Saxon period, they are here to hear you talk about how a cheeseboard can be a lesson in history and culture, rich in anecdote and insight as well as delicious. Stop scanning for pelicans, search out the nugget. And so to lunch. 

www.imogenrobertson.com

Diamond Annie and the Fearless Forty Elephants by Catherine Hokin

January 21, 2018, 10:00 pm

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Jewellery Displays at the Ritz Paris

In among all the Brexit misery and non-shuffling cabinet
re-shuffles that have dominated the press so far this year, there has been one story which has had more elements of farce than even the Prime Minister can conjure up: the recent jewellery heist at the Ritz Hotel in Paris. For those of you who missed it, a group of thieves (one dressed as a builder) armed with small axes smashed through a window and assorted display cases and stole items with a value of several million euros.

Not surprisingly their actions triggered the alarms: the hapless thieves (who were all known to police), ran, scattering their loot like confetti, and were pretty much immediately caught by security. More Wallace and Gromit than the Pink Panther. Perhaps they should have spent a bit more time studying history than the hotel layout and acquainted themselves with the shop-looting tactics of the Forty Elephants, a female-run gang which dominated parts of the London crime scene for almost two hundred years.

The gang worked out of the Elephant and Castle district and, although they are primarily documented between the 1870s to the 1950s, appear to have grown out of the Elephant gang of highwaymen operating around the area's Elephant Coaching Inn in the eighteenth century.

Female Shoplifter

Their activities included blackmail and house-breaking but they were most notorious for ransacking department stores, including Selfridges and Whiteleys. Police reports describe thousands of pounds of clothing and jewellery being seized in a single swoop, to be stored away in deep pockets, muffs and the voluminous bloomers and crinolines of the period. Perhaps because of all the stowed loot, one report (in the 1925 San Jose Chronicle) reports many of the gang women as big handsome women about six feet tall. They are also described as fashionably dressed although the mention of razors in their corsages does cast a darker side on some of the rather glamourised reporting which focused on their good looks and excessive, partying lifestyle particularly in the 'decadent' 1920s. These girls were territorial and ruled their patch as much by violence as any of their male counterparts.

Lilllian Rose Kendall, the Bobbed Haired Bandit

The gang seems to have been at its strongest in the 1920s and 1930s when they took full advantage of the newly available motor car to extend their operations beyond London and acquire get-a-way vehicles far faster than anything the police could manage. One police report describes how they would descend in taxis and limousines like a gang of locusts, stripping out a store within an hour. Others describe the arrest of one gang member at Whiteleys who had a bag hidden inside her clothes which hung from her waist to her knees and contained over 40 stolen items and one who used a false arm in her blouse. Techniques included the 'crush' where women crowded at a counter and then handed round or dropped items for others to hide. And fighting back, hard. During this period, the gang had its most famous queen: Alice Diamond or Diamond Annie as the police dubbed her after her jewel-encrusted rings which gave her a punch to beware of. Alice was born in Lambeth workhouse, came from a crime family and was a notorious shoplifter by her teens. She took over the gang in 1916 when she was 20, continuing to rule the mob even after she was imprisoned in 1925 after the 'Battle of Lambeth' when a dispute led to Alice leading an army of women armed with lumps of concrete and broken bottles into a brutal attack. The role of Queen passed next onto Lillian Kendall and the gang continued its operations into the 1950s.

Many of the women involved in the gang have colourful reputations but also stories of lives begun in terrible poverty. Alice was one of eight children born in the dreadful conditions of a workhouse and her father was a violent and illiterate petty criminal. Life had few choices for women in her position so perhaps the path the glamour-loving Alice chose is not so hard to understand. Last year it was announced that Marnie Dickens is developing a series for the BBC about the gang and its members - with so much 'glamour' involved it's easy to see why this could be a female Peaky Blinders but let's hope it tells a rounded tale. For anyone interested in finding out more, there are a number of books about the gang, including one by Brian McDonald whose uncles led the male Elephant and Castle gang who the Forty Elephants were linked to. It's quite a story.

History restored: the Red Kite, by Leslie Wilson

January 22, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Photo: Mike Prince from Bangalore, India

'The kites are gathering.' I don't know how many historical novels I have read those words in, and I can't find a reference now, which is annoying. But as a child, I knew that kites came to battlefields, and internalised those words. Perhaps the birds recognised the signs of incipient battle, which would mean food for them.

Nowadays, if I want to see a kite, all I have to do is go outside. There was one this morning, when we walked the dog; riding the wind, adjusting its wings with admirable skill. Riding on the rein of a wimpling wind, as Manley Hopkins wrote about the kestrel. It's been called the British vulture, though no vulture is as beautiful and elegant as the red kite. It's an enormous bird; when you see the odd kite that has landed and is sitting on the grass, you can see what large birds they are. Their wingspan can reach up to 195 centimetres, almost two metres.

You'd never think they were so big when you see them hanging in the sky. I love their display call, a confident, almost insolent whistle; Whee, whee-whee-whee! They look less confident, though, when they're being harried by a mob of crows. Crows seem to hate them, and probably they do raid crows' nests,but the crows raid theirs.

Robert Southey talks about kites squealing in the skies over the Lake District, where you won't hear them nowadays. Shakespeare says: 'When the kite builds, look to your lesser linen.' Kites haven't changed, then; they are fond of taking small cuddly toys and underwear to put in their nests. They were even known as the 'hat bird' because they were supposed to have removed hats from people's heads. Luckily, I don't wear a hat much in bird-nesting season.

They were apparently protected in England and Wales in medieval times, because they were useful scavengers; like vultures, they cleared up carrion and thrown-out meat that would otherwise rot or attract rats. Killing them even attracted the death penalty, according to a blogger. I'm sure I've seen references to kites hanging round the rubbish dumps on the outskirts of British cities. In Britain it was known in the past by a number of local names the most widespread being 'Glead' or 'Gleade' - a name derived from its gliding flight and 'Puttock'.

However, by the eighteenth century the kite was seen as a danger to game and even crops; it was relentlessly hunted, and it became vanishingly rare. Egg collectors were a further threat to the few remaining pairs, as they wanted to get the last eggs for their collections, which, frankly, makes me want to spit. 'On the authority of two good ornithologists' says my early 20th century The Birds of the British Isles and Their Eggs, 'we know that a pair nested in Devonshire in 1913, though unfortunately the eggs were taken.' Only a few birds managed to survive in Wales.

red kite (not captive) by Jason Thompson

It sounds hopeless; and yet very recent history tells a very different story, as inhabitants of the Home Counties and the south Midlands know. In the late 1980s, the red kite was considered to be one of the most threatened birds in Europe - and then the Chilterns reintroduction was launched by the RSPB and the Nature Conservancy Council. It began in 1989, shortly after we came to live on the lowest slopes of the Chilterns, and began to walk regularly at Christmas Common and Watlington Hill, where a wooden board went up; Red Kites in the Chilterns. You can still see it in the Watlington Hill car park, faded now, and rather superfluous. The few chicks who were brought from healthy populations of Spanish kites were kept in wooden pens in the Oxfordshire/Buckinghamshire beechwoods, and then released into the wild. The first pair bred successfully in 1991. In the early '90s, we still thought ourselves lucky if we saw a red kite at Watlington Hill. How different things are now! You can see them over urban Reading.

Can anyone tell me more about red kites in literature and history?

To see a map of current distribution of red kites in the British Isles, go to the RSPB, where you can also see a video of a kite flying, though unfortunately you don't hear the display whistle. What you can hear is all the little birds crying out in alarm when the kite stoops; it does have a bird of prey profile, after all, and they do take nestlings.

DESTRIER - A Recent Hunt in Progress by Elizabeth Chadwick

January 23, 2018, 4:30 pm

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late 13th century apocalypse British Library

Social media has its problems, but I love it for the exchange of ideas and information which just wouldn't have been possible before the days of the Internet, or certainly not possible within the time frames to which we have now become accustomed.

About a fortnight ago, I got talking on a Facebook friend's page with him and other interested people about the word 'destrier' as a term for a medieval warhorse.   A debate began about when the word first came into use.  1400 was mentioned as a date for the word to enter the vernacular, and that the Normans would not  have used such a term for their own warhorses.

My area of expertise is from circa 1066 up to around 1230, and I had always used the word 'destrier' in my novels as a term for a knight's warhorse, so I was surprised to read that the name came in so late. It was pointed out to me that the 13th century History of William Marshal, which has a great deal of engagement with warhorses, doesn't once mention the word destrier.  Warhorses are always just known as 'chival' and indeed, that's where the word 'chivalry' comes from.  It's made clear that a knight's riding horse was a 'palfrey' his pack horse a 'sumpter' and his warhorse was a 'chival.' Ordinary riding horses are called 'roncins'.

Sumpter horses - Hortus Delicarum

Made curious, and not convinced, I went digging.
I headed first to the Anglo Norman Dictionary.  It's a wonderful online resource of primary source evidence for Anglo Norman words.
website here for the Anglo Norman Dictionary  Looking up 'Destrier' I immediately got the word back to 1230 together with references to palfreys (high ranking riding horses) and coursers (fast horses for hunting).  So clearly 1400 as an assumption was wrong.   Looking up the word again in the same source for this blog, I glanced at the entry below 'destrier' - 'destries' (various spelt, sometimes without the 's' which means 'behind' but discovered when checking the source for an example citation that 'destrier' by chance, happened to be part of the sentence. - 'il est detries lui sur le destrier asis.'    The source was given as The Romance of Horn and dates to circa 1170.  Now I had the source back to the latter 12th century and a full two hundred and thirty years before 1400. 

I then turned to the Pipe Rolls to check if the word was being used in Latin in the twelfth century. The Pipe Rolls are basically the King's annual accounts for England.  Sadly not all of these account rolls have survived the vagaries of time and the early part of the 12th century and the reign of Henry I is barely covered. However, enough remain to reveal that 'destriers' glossed in Latin as 'dextrarii'  single 'dextrarius'  are constantly mentioned. In 1197, Joscelin de Amundeville gave a destrier and a hawk in homage to his overlord.  One Nicholas de Chavencurt gives 10 marks and a destrier he had promised to Count John (future King John).
The same thing happened throughout the pipe rolls of Henry II, and often as high status gifts and pledges, sometimes given with a hawk, which is strongly indicative of a gift denoting that the giver renders service and allegiance to his overlord. In other words it's always in a high status context.  When the Count of Toulouse was making an agreement with King Henry II in 1173, one of the terms was a payment of 100 silver marks or alternatively ten 'dextarii' worth ten marks each.  Around this time, a common soldier's riding horse - aforementioned roncin or rouncy - would fetch around one and a half marks. A surviving pipe roll from the last years of Henry I 3 times references the term 'dextarii'in the context of high status payments. 

Checking further primary sources I had on my shelves,  there was again a reference to 'dextarii' in William FitzStephen's Description of London, dating to around 1174, where he describes the horse sales held every Friday at Smithfield in London where earls, barons and knights, as well as ordinary citizens came to view the beasts on offer.  The destriers (dextarii) are described as 'beautiful in shape, noble in stature, with ears and necks erect and plump buttocks.'

I was also alerted to the fact that the Song of Roland, written circa 1129, contains the term 'destrer' for Count Ganelon's warhorse  named Tachebrun.  So now we're 170 years adrift of 1400 and clearly all the evidence points to the term referring to a high status war horse.  Destrier in Old French.  Dextarius in Latin.

As another note, there is a Welsh word meaning 'well fed horse' that is very similar to 'destrier' - 'edystir' and this will bear further investigation. It occurs in the laws of Welsh Prince Hywel Dda which are 10th century in origin, but surviving manuscripts in Welsh and Latin date to the mid 13th century.

The hunt continues, as does the question as to why the horses were actually known as 'destriers'.  There are two theories for which I am currently searching for proof.  I also acknowledge that the theories may blend and both may be right - or neither.  Without primary source evidence, it can only remain best guess.  I can find several secondary sources, but as yet none from the horse's mouth (pun intended!).

Tournament Guiron le Courtois Naples 1352 British Library

One notion goes that the horses were always led on the right hand side by the squires and grooms who tended to these expensive, magnificent beasts and would have to lead them in their lord's pack train.  Destriers were not used as ordinary riding horses, but generally led to the place of tourney or battle and then mounted at need.  For example in the Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal,  Patrick of Salisbury, William's uncle was killed while trying to get from his palfrey to his warhorse when his party was ambushed on the road.  Earlier in the Histoire, William's father John ambushed Patrick when Patrick was unarmed and riding casually, but heading to make war. (clearly Patrick didn't learn from experience!).
 
The other notion is that destriers were so called because they led on the right leg when commencing a gallop to the joust. But this doesn't fully explain the early 12th century use of the term with regards to jousting.  One on one jousts did exist as we hit the 1130's, but there were no barriers and they were always a preliminary to the main event which was a free for all with everyone piling in to fight over a wide area.   Having said that, warhorses were highly trained animals and the lead on the right leg could have been part of general fighting tactics. 

It will be interesting to find out if the word 'destrier' occurrs around the same time as the joust and organised combat sport meetings begin to take off in the early 12th century, or whether it goes back earlier.  I am still digging away at sources and pondering ideas and theories.  I have not carved anything in stone beyond the fact that the word had entered parlance long, long before 1400.

As always, my curiosity and my research continue, being refined as I go.  I started that particular day a fortnight ago, never knowing that such a fascinating research tunnel was waiting to open up in front of me!  If anyone has any primary source reference to the world going back before 1129, then do leave a comment - I'd love to know!

My thanks to Brendan Cronin, Nigel Amos and Joseph Pickett for conversations.

References - in very short.
The Anglo Norman Dictionary Online (linked in the text).
The Annals of Roger of Hovedon volume 1
William FitzStephen - Description of London
The Song of Roland
Various Pipe Rolls of the reigns of Henry I, Henry II, Richard I, King John
The Laws of Hywel Dda.
Histoire de Guillaume le Mareschal

Elizabeth Chadwick is a best selling author of more than 20 novels set in the Medieval period.  Her latest novel, Templar Silks, covering what William Marshal might have done during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land will be published in the UK in hardcover on March 1st.

San Clemente, Rome by Miranda Miller

January 24, 2018, 5:00 pm

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   As a sixteen-year-old I fell in love with Rome on a day trip. Six years later I went to live there and now I can see that my fascination with the city - and with history itself - was triggered by my excitement that Rome is a palimpsest; our moment in time balances precariously on top of other centuries which are actually visible. Nowhere is this more true than in San Clemente, a 12th-century church built on top of a 4th-century church built on top a late 2nd century pagan temple. The wonderful thing is that you can explore all these different levels.

   The church is on a shabby street that winds between the Colosseum and the church of S. Giovanni in Laterano, which is the real cathedral in Rome (not St Peter’s in the Vatican) and was the first church to be built there, by Constantine the Great. By then, of course, Rome was already an ancient city. Saint Clement, who was supposedly the third pope or successor to St Peter, was martyred under the emperor Trajan. He was exiled to Crimea and forced to work the mines,but since he persisted in his missionary activity Roman soldiers bound him to an anchor and threw him into the Black Sea. His body was recovered at the bottom of the sea when the waters miraculously receded. Later, his remains were later brought to Rome and buried under the main altar of this church.

   You enter the upper church, or second basilica, of San Clemente from the world of cars and cappuccinos, through a small cloister and immediately feel a dizzying mix of timelessness and historical curiosity. After the pomposity of Baroque architecture this church is moving in its simplicity. There is a swirling marble pavement,

an ornate marble choir and frescoes of the Life of St. Catherine by Masolino and his young disciple, Masaccio. A 12th-century mosaic fills the apse with a Triumph of the Cross, showing a crucified Christ with the Tree of Life growing in twisting vine tendrils all around.

   Then a lift takes you down to ancient Rome. You are in another, lower church that is known to have existed in 392, when St. Jerome wrote about it. There are early Medieval wall paintings and frescoes of the Life of St. Clement and the Story of St. Alexis.

   This 6th century fresco in the Lower Church shows either a Madonna and Child or the Empress Theodora. It’s very dark and if, like me, your night vision is weak this adds to the mystery of the experience.

   Then you descend another flight of stairs to, roughly, ancient Roman street level and find yourself in a Mithraic temple.The altars of both later churches are placed directly above the altar to Mithras. When you peer through the grating and you' can see a relief carving of the god sacrificing a bull.

As part of their rituals, Mithraic priests used to sacrifice bulls until the blood flowed into troughs, which followers would then scoop out with their arms to bathe in.

   The first building on this site was probably destroyed in the great fire of 64 AD. Titus Flavius Clemens, a wealthy consul and an early Christian, allowed other Christians to worship secretly at his house when their religion was still illegal in Rome, and the basement was used as a temple to Mithras.

This is a Roman wall painting. As you wander through the dark, brick vaulted rooms of Flavius Clemens' grand palazzo, you can hear the sound of rushing water from ancient pipes and aqueducts behind the walls.

   These lower levels were flooded for many centuries and this unique building is, amongst other things, an example of co-operation between the nations of Europe: Irish Dominican monks have been the caretakers of San Clemente since 1667, when England outlawed the Irish Catholic Church and expelled the entire clergy. Pope Urban VIII gave them refuge at San Clemente, where they have been ever since, running a residence for priests studying and teaching in Rome. In 1857 Fr Joseph Mullooly began excavations The Irish Dominicans have collaboratied with Italian archeologists. In one of the chapels there is the tomb of Saint Cyril, who translated the Bible into Slavic language and Christianised the Slavs.


   I’ve visited San Clemente many times and it never disappoints me; whether one believes in miracles or not the survival of such a rich and complex building is itself miraculous. On a wall in the atrium is a plaque affixed by Pope Clement XII in 1715: "This ancient church has withstood the ravages of the centuries.” In Rome three more centuries don’t really seem to make a lot of difference.

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Picasso's Plates, by Carol Drinkwater

January 25, 2018, 4:01 pm

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                                                               La Guerre 1952  Pablo Picasso

                                                             Picasso Musée National, Vallauris

Forgive the brevity of this post. I am up against several deadlines at present and I am very short of time. Again!

In these wintery days, there is little that can be more heartening than admiring some of the art that came out of this corner of the Côte d'Azur throughout the twentieth century. Warm vibrant colours and exceptional landscapes. This post is really an excuse to share with you some of my favourites and some that are new to me. A breath of beauty to brighten up these days.

Picasso War and Peace 1952

There are many fine galleries down here along French Riviera celebrating the work of so many great artists who made this part of their world their home. Bonnard spent his life in the village of Le Cannet where I buy my morning baguettes, just a half a kilometre from our farm. A new Bonnard museum has recently been opened there and, although small, is well worth a visit. There are several exhibitions offered every year. It also offers fabulous views down across the red-tiled rooftops to the sea. Picasso lived with his last wife, Jacqueline, less than a kilometre to the rear of us. Occasionally, I turn a corner and there I am in front of the inspiration for someone's masterpiece. 

Renoir, for example, and his olive trees in Cagnes-sur-Mer. His home has also been transformed into a fascinating museum dedicated to his life and work.

Picasso in his studio in Vallauris

I was reminded of all of this by chance this week when I was contacted by a television company who are making a mini-series about Pablo Picasso. The episode they wanted to discuss with me concentrates on Pablo's ceramic work in Vallauris. 

In 1946, Picasso went to Vallauris to visit the annual pottery exhibition. This small hillside town has been known for its pottery since ancient times. Back in the day it produced wonderful examples of amphorae used to transport wine and olive oil, but it really came into its own as a pottery centre during the 19th century. A century later, Picasso's arrival on the scene brought another injection of life and a new direction for this local industry.

Glazed vase. Art Nouveau period. Potter: Delphin Massier. One of three brothers all working in their father's family pottery business in Vallauris. This example was fifty years before the arrival of Picasso.

During his 1946 visit, Picasso met Suzanne and Georges Ramie who owned the Madoura workshop and were to change his life. He was keen to try new forms of art. The couple offered him space in their studio. He returned the following year to their workshop and began to experiment with ceramics for the first time.

The rest is history. The town was revitalised. Artists came from all over to experiment with paint on cooked clay and give new forms to pots and cooking utensils.  So taken was Picasso with this work that he bought himself a property in Vallauris, Les Fournas, an ancient perfumery. This he converted to create for himself a large studio. 

His Vallauris period was between 1948 to 1955 even though he continued to experiment with ceramic and linocuts for the next twenty years and returned to the town regularly. He even married his last wife, Jacqueline, in secret in the town hall there. I believe Jacqueline was a young cousin of Suzanne Ramie.

Picasso working with linocuts in his Vallauris studio.

Here are a few examples of the groundbreaking pottery work Picasso produced over a period of forty years. I hope they will bring joy and sunshine to your day.

Next month I will be again talking about The LOST GIRL as the paperwork is to be published on 8th March.

This is a series of eight plates, La Corrida

www.caroldrinkwater.com

Mary Beard's "Women & Power: A Manifesto" by Janie Hampton

January 26, 2018, 4:30 pm

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Professor Mary Beard, © Caterina Turroni

Professor Mary Beard is Britain’s most famous classicist and The History Girl’s History Girl. Her book Women and Power: A Manifesto is a reminder of  the progress, or lack of, that women have achieved in the last hundred years.
This highly readable book of 100 short pages is based on two lectures Mary Beard gave for the London Review of Books at the British Museum in 2007 and 2014. She uses classical examples to remind us of the deep strata of ugly gender prejudice that underlie what women are still up against. “This is not,” Beard insists, “the peculiar ideology of some distant culture, however distant in time it may be.”

Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to keep on weaving, Athenian pot, 500 BC

She takes the story right back to the first known account of misogyny: Homer’s Odyssey, composed almost 3000 years ago. Telemachus, the teenage son of Odysseus, ordered his middle-aged mother Penelope to be quiet and go back upstairs to her weaving, and leave the men to get on with the important job of talking to each other. Haven't we all been there? I am old enough to have been to dinner parties where after the cheese course, the women withdrew to the drawing room to chat about childcare and recipes, leaving the men to drink port, smoke cigars and discuss world affairs (or so we assumed). My innocent husband once tried to join us women, but was physically barred from leaving the dining room by our host! Telemachus was learning the art of being a real man, which included telling women to be quiet. How many women readers of The History Girls have sat on committees, and either not been allowed to speak or had their bright idea taken up by, and credited to, a man?
Beard explores with wry wit and accessible language, the early history of misogyny and how it has been reinforced ever since Western “civilization” began. She gives the stories of three women who spoke up in the Roman forum. Unfortunately, according to the male Roman writing about her, Maesia "really had a man’s nature"; and as for Afrania, her speech was “yapping and barking”. Her demise in 48 BC was recorded, only because "with unnatural freaks like this" it was more important to record her death than her birth. The third woman, Hortensia, was only permitted to speak for other women, and not on behalf of men too. There are echoes here of modern governments that have Ministries of Women. “Look,” say the ruling men. “We have a Ministry for Women. We can’t possibly be misogynists." Like the dinner parties, the women are encouraged to knit and cook, leaving the men to govern the important things like the economy and war.
Demeaning language about ‘yapping’ women also continues today. In 2017, a Times headline screamed “Women prepared for Power Grab of London in Church, Police and BBC.” While men are awarded positions of power and authority, women have to grab them, pushing aside those unfortunate, less qualified men who previously gained the work or positions.
Little has changed in two thousand years. The image of Donald Trump as the Greek god Perseus holding aloft the decapitated head of Hillary Clinton as Medusa, was an unpleasant and graphic warning during the 2016 U.S. election campaign of how Trump would rule as president.

Donald Trump as Perseus with the head of Medusa depicted as Hillary Clinton, 2016.

Beard’s saddest observation is that women are their own worst enemies. Women often condone and reinforce misogyny, and behave and present themselves as "almost men." In 1588, Queen Elizabeth I is reputed to have encouraged her troops who were about to face the Spanish Armada, with the words, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king.” In other words, “Forget I’m a woman, I’m as good as a man.” She knew that only by ignoring her sex could she hang onto her power: with marriage and babies she would lose it. 

Elizabeth I rousing her troops at Tilbury, 1588. She seems to be giving  'two fingers' to the Spanish.

Margaret Thatcher and Theresa May both reached their positions of high power by emulating men’s deep voices and long strides. Neither woman has behaved, at least in public, in a feminist or friendly way to other women, although they have both cleverly made use of a symbol of womanhood to reinforce their positions: Thatcher’s hand-bag became a weapon and May’s uses her kitten-heeled shoes to mollify. Hillary Clinton and Angela Merkel both wear trouser suits, presumably to ‘blend in’ with the men. “Having women pretend to be men may be a quick fix, but it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem,” writes Beard.
Even though Mary Beard has broken through many of the barriers preventing women from achieving their potential, she still suffers abuse just for being herself. Without appealing for sympathy, she reflects on how she has been treated in both print and social media. She has not been judged on her skills or intelligence, but on what she looks like. The late food critic A.A. Gill commented not on the content of her television programmes but on her teeth, hair and clothes; and judged her to be "too ugly for television". Although undoubtedly hurt, (even tough, hard-working women have feelings) she fought back against "the blokeish culture that loves to decry clever women" and hoped to show young women that there was more than one way of being a woman, and of growing older.
Despite gratuitously rude men like Gill, Beard is both respected by her academic peers and admired by television viewers for her authenticity. In 2013, I saw her presented with “The Oldie Pin-up of the Year Award” at the smart London restaurant “Simpson's in the Strand”. In a forthright and witty speech to the male-dominated audience, she made no concessions. She was probably the only woman present not wearing lipstick, and certainly the only one in a comfortable grey cardigan.
Beard considers how the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded, and how the views of male ancient Greeks are still repeated, in order to make gender violence seem normal. As Jacqueline Rose wrote in The Guardian, Beard describes “the poison of patriarchy as it drips into the body politic of what parades under the banner of civilisation.”
All round the world there are women who dare not speak at all, even when raped. Let’s hope that the news of sexual harassment from Hollywood and Westminster will not become tomorrow’s chip-wrappers. Those who support the ‘witch-hunt’ hypothesis certainly hope so. Beard notes that sexual predation is about power, and it is the men who usually have that; if they happen to be film producers or politicians, even more so.
Beard makes a plea that women should be allowed to make mistakes, and then pick themselves up without being pilloried. “If I was starting this book again from scratch,” she writes, “I would find more space to defend women’s right to be wrong.”
The conclusion that Beard comes to is a surprise. Women must stop trying to gain equal power because power itself is designed by men, and not what we really want or need. Society will only improve when power is redefined. "We don’t have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like,” she writes. “We only have templates that make them men." This brilliant and readable book will hopefully make us all wonder how can we help men to achieve equality for women. And ask, what would a world with articulate women allowed to speak look like? Would there be less violence? No rape, no guns? More equality?
Women & Power: A Manifesto by Mary Beard published by Profile (£7.99).
PS I have noted the irony that I have used Mary Beard’s father’s name – the patrilineal. Even journalists and academics model themselves against men!

The Key to Learning by Lynne Benton

January 27, 2018, 6:30 pm

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When I was at school I hated History.  For four long years in my teens I had an extremely boring History teacher, who made everything seem really dull.  My main memory of her lessons is of her writing on the blackboard lists of dates and Acts of Parliament and telling us to copy them and learn them.  I don’t remember her telling us anything interesting: about the people, how they lived, how they thought, or why the Acts of Parliament were important. And in those days there was no internet, and we had no television either, so although I enjoyed visiting castles and museums, these seemed to bear no relation to what I was supposed to be learning at school. I wasn't inspired.  I’m sure I wasn’t the best pupil, but Miss P. wasn’t the best teacher either.

Fast forward 25 years, when my daughter was the same age as I’d been then.  At the time there was a series on television called “Robin of Sherwood”, on which she and her friends were all hooked – especially the hero, Robin Hood, played by Michael Praed.  (Seen here with Judi Trott, who played Maid Marian)

 They all had posters of him on their bedroom walls and never missed an episode.  That term at school (an all-girls school) they had a new History teacher, Mr. Pritchard, and he began their first lesson by saying, “Right, girls, Robin of Sherwood!”  Instantly he had the entire class in the palm of his hand, and they lapped up everything he could teach them about life in mediaeval times.  This has sparked a lifelong interest in mediaeval history in my daughter at least, and maybe in others too.  History teaching had certainly improved since my day, so well done Mr Pritchard!

In fact I did come to love history later, after I’d given it up at school, when a friend recommended historical novels by the likes of Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton etc. 

     

     
I was soon hooked, and read all the ones I could find.  It was fascinating to learn about life in different periods in history, and importantly how the behaviour and beliefs of those who ruled the country affected ordinary people.  I was inspired to find out more about the eras I was reading about, and realised what I’d missed through such uninspired teaching.

This is why I love writing for children, especially writing historical novels.  I hope to make history exciting for children, so they will enjoy it more than I did.  Now I don’t have to learn lists of dates I love doing all the research required, to make sure I’ve got the facts right.  And when my first book was published ("Raiders!", about the Viking invasion of Britain) it filled me with great satisfaction to imagine how Miss P. would have scoffed at the idea of me writing a historical novel!

January Guest: Rise Up, Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes by Diane Atkinson

January 28, 2018, 4:30 pm

≫ Next: Cabinet of Curiosities - Harry Potter: A History of Magic at the British Library by Charlotte Wightwick

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Diane Atkinson, author of Rise Up Women!

This month, our guest blogger is Diane Atkinson, author of Rise Up Women! The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes. Marking the centenary of female suffrage, this definitive history charts women's fight for the vote through the lives of those who took part, in a timely celebration of an extraordinary struggle. It is published in the UK by Bloomsbury on 8th February.

Here, Diane commemorates some of the women who attempted to infiltrate government to get women's voices heard, and who paid the price of imprisonment for doing so:

SUFFRAGETTES’ DESPERATE RAID ON A CABINET MEETING…  A FIGHT WITH THE POLICE

A hundred and ten years ago, on the morning of 17 January 1908, Edith New, a schoolteacher, and Olivia Smith, a nurse, members of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), arrived in Downing Street. Under their coats there were steel chains round their waists. They padlocked themselves to the railings outside Number Ten Downing Street, shouting ‘Votes for Women!’ loud enough for the Cabinet Ministers indoors to hear. Sylvia Pankhurst said: ‘Chains symbolically express the political bondage of womanhood, and the practical reason is that this device would prevent the women being dragged away’. Policemen tried to smash the padlock. ‘Considerable force was used before the chains could be broken.’ When Herbert Asquith, chancellor of the exchequer arrived, other suffragettes tried to surround him but he was protected by a circle of policemen. 

Flora Drummond

 Two taxi cabs pulled up, one was carrying two more suffragettes, Flora Drummond and Elizabeth McArthur, and during the chaos Flora and Elizabeth got into No 10. Mrs Drummond knew ‘the secret of the little knob’ in the door, and pushed it. Miss Mary Garth, ‘a frail, pale- complexioned girl,’ followed them. The three women nearly got to the Cabinet Room where they wanted to ask the Prime Minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman and the Cabinet if women’s suffrage was to be included in the King’s Speech at the opening of Parliament on the 29th January.

But Drummond, McArthur and Garth were grabbed by the porter and policemen and chucked out of the building. One supporter outside was knocked down in the melee. The Daily Mirror reported that Flora Drummond was ‘very violent’ and ‘tripped up a gentleman and he would have fallen had he not seized the rails.’ The suffragettes refused to leave Downing Street, five were arrested and taken to Cannon Row Police Station. In the afternoon their cases were heard by the chief magistrate, Sir Albert de Rutzen. Flora Drummond, Elizabeth McArthur, Edith New, Olivia Smith and Frances Thompson were sentenced to three weeks in Holloway Gaol in the second division as ‘common criminals’ and not political prisoners, which meant they could not wear their own clothes, and had to do menial work.

Edith New, right, on her release from Holloway in August 1908, after serving two months for smashing windows at 10 Downing Street with her comrade Mary Leigh, left.

The next day a photograph of Flora Drummond, dwarfed by five burly policemen, appeared on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Olivia Smith told the court she had refused to unchain herself from the railings because ‘I do not see why I should not chain myself up on a man’s fence if I like. I did not hurt the fence, I did not hurt anybody … it is my right to exert my individuality and accept my three weeks’ imprisonment.’ Edith New had already served two weeks in Holloway for her part in the protest at the House of Commons on the 8th of March 1907. Edith, a member of the WSPU since 1906, was a paid organiser, born in Swindon in 1877. Before her suffragette days Miss New was a schoolteacher in Greenwich.

SUFFRAGETTES’ PADLOCK AND CHAIN RAID 

Alice Hawkins, a mother of six children, who had been arrested in skirmishes with the police in Westminster in February 1907, and spent two weeks in Holloway Gaol, had opened a branch of the WSPU in her home town of Leicester. Alice, who worked in the boot and shoe industry before and after her marriage to Alfred Hawkins, was born in Stafford in 1863. In 1886 Alice went to work at Equity Shoes, a cooperative, where workers were encouraged to participate in political organisations.

Alice and Alfred, a shoe clicker – he cut the uppers from the leather – were long-standing political activists: they joined the Independent Labour Party in 1892, and met the Pankhurst family in the mid 1890s. In 1896 Alice joined Equity Shoes’ branch of the Women’s Cooperative Guild, and was active in the Boot and Shoe Trade Union. In 1906, because of its failure to promote women’s suffrage, Alice fell out with the I.L.P.

Alfred Hawkins took care of the children when Alice went to London to attend the suffragettes’ Women’s Parliament on 14th February 1907.

One day in the exercise yard at Holloway Alice saw women with babies: ‘The thought that a young life born into the world should have to spend its first months of life in prison. It was one more injustice to add to our cry for the right to stop some of these horrible things being allowed.’ She invited Mrs Pankhurst’s daughter Sylvia Pankhurst to Leicester and introduced her to the workers at Equity Shoes. Sylvia spent the summer of 1907 with the Hawkins family, drawing and painting and writing about the women in the boot and shoe trade as they worked.

In the January issue of the suffragette newspaper, Votes for Women, Frederick and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, who were the financial backers of the WSPU and editors of paper, launched the 1908 campaign. They presented readers with stark choices: 

"Are you going to play the woman or are you going to play the coward? Are you going to stand by and let others bear the brunt of battle? Are you going to say to yourself, “I will be sympathetic; I will occasionally talk about it to my friends, perhaps I will give a little money, but I do not mean to risk my reputation or friendships or personal esteem by too prominently identifying myself with the cause of my sex” … or are you made of sterner stuff than this? Are you going to come forward and say, I will be a battle comrade in the great fight; I will share the difficulties and the hardships; I will make the sacrifices that are required of me."

Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence

Frederick Pethick-Lawrence

Fred and Emmeline urged: ‘stand with us so that this year shall see the fulfilment of the promise for which women have worked so long.’

During the first six weeks of 1908 the WSPU’s headquarters in Clement’s Inn – which now employed twenty workers and had dozens of volunteers - made preparations for the three-day Women’s Parliament at Caxton Hall, February 11th –13th. The WSPU’s plan was to present a petition to the House of Commons on the first day by smuggling themselves into the building in two pantechnicons.

The Trojan Horse raid was the brainchild of Mrs Pankhurst’s son, nineteen-year-old Harry, and twenty-one women almost succeeded in their invasion.

Rise Up Women! by Diane Atkinson Front cover, published 8th Feb 2018 by Bloomsbury

Cabinet of Curiosities - Harry Potter: A History of Magic at the British Library by Charlotte Wightwick

January 28, 2018, 4:30 pm

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So I’m cheating a bit this month. The Cabinet of Curiosities is supposed to be one object which I’d love to have for myself. However I couldn’t resist talking about the current exhibition at the British Library on Harry Potter; A History of Magic, which is itself a compendium of incredible objects.

It’s a fantastic exhibition, making brilliant use of archive material, historical artefacts and modern technology to create an experience unlike any I’ve been to before. It combines original Harry Potter archive material and memorabilia with historical manuscripts and objects, setting J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world into the context of real historical beliefs about magic, with technology providing an interactive experience for those who want to try their own hands at ‘magic’.

So, for instance, the exhibition includes hand- and type-written excerpts from J.K Rowling’s original manuscripts (complete with editorial suggestions and some entirely unknown scenes which were cut from the final books), novel plans and some of her own early drawings of characters and locations – an absolute treasure trove for fans and fellow writers. There are also a large number of original drawings and paintings from the illustrated versions of the books by Jim Kay, with sound effects and objects from the films too.

The exhibition is organised into a number of different rooms, each of which is dedicated to an individual Hogwarts’ ‘lessons’ – Potions, Charms, Defence Against the Dark Arts, etc. In each case, Rowling’s archive material is cleverly interspersed with manuscripts and objects which explore ‘real life’ historical beliefs surrounding magic.

For example, the Herbology room includes Jim Kay’s illustrations of the greenhouses as Hogwarts; J.K. Rowling’s own drawing of Professor Sprout and some stunningly beautiful Herbals from the British Library’s Collection. The Care of Magical Creatures room is another highlight for anyone who loves medieval bestiaries and illuminated manuscripts.

The Astrology room contains stunning early globes, astrolables and orreries, as well as medieval manuscripts with illustrations of centaurs and other mythological creatures relating to the constellations. One of my favourite items in the exhibition was the sixteenth century ‘volvelle’ – a beautiful rotating paper model – of an astrological chart with a dragon at its centre, from Petrus Apianus’ Astronomicum Caesareum. The dragon could be spun in order to determine the latitude of the moon, or to cast horoscopes.

Similarly, the Divination room contains a whole raft of artefacts and manuscripts showing how different practices to determine the future have been used through centuries and across continents (another great feature of the exhibition is that it doesn’t restrict itself to European traditions of magic, but looks across continents and civilisations) – and makes use of modern technology to allow younger visitors the chance to look into their own futures.

So, which would be my one object to take home for my Cabinet of Curiosities, if I was allowed? Its tricky. The spinning astrological dragon would have to be up there. But then I’m also enough of a Potter fan to covet one of J.K. Rowling’s own drawings. The beautifully intricate gold filigree case containing a bezoar stone was also stunning.

But the thing I did actually take away with me, apart from a head full of wonder? The exhibition book. As well as beautiful colour photos of many of the exhibits, it also contains some fascinating essays by authors as diverse as astronaut Tim Peake, TV wildlife expert Steve Backshall, and author Anna Pavord. The exhibition’s curator, Julian Harrison, provides the overall foreword. He also tweets regularly, including about his favourite objects from the exhibition, and is well worth a follow @julianpharrison. 

My object for my Cabinet of Curiosities! The exhibition book, published by Bloomsbury

To find out more about the exhibition (including whether there are any tickets left! It closes at the end of February) the website is:

https://www.bl.uk/events/harry-potter-a-history-of-magic

If you do get the opportunity, I really would encourage you to go. It’s a wonderful example of how stories, even those set in with a supposedly fantastical backdrop, can stimulate our imaginations about the truth of history and of the world around us.