New Year. Or is it?

Hooray! We’ve all made it (safely I hope) into another New Year. So firstly, I wish for you more of the things you enjoyed last year, and less of the things you didn’t like, in the year ahead. New Year is a time for new beginnings, for letting go past enmities and troubles and making a fresh start. Perhaps you opened your back door on the stroke of midnight to make sure the old year made a swift exit. In my family, the 1960s and 70s found my dad standing outside the front door clutching a piece of coal and a silver coin waiting to be let in as a ‘first-footer’. We needed a dark-haired man to be first over the threshold on New Year’s Day to bring luck for the following year and, fortunately, he fitted the bill perfectly. The coal represented warmth, the coin, fortune. It is an old, and predominantly northern tradition that can sometimes involve a piece of bread to represent food and some greenery to ensure long life for everyone.

New Year has not always been on January 1st, but it has always been a time for taking stock of your life and starting anew, as you mean to go on. In Ancient Babylonia the year began at the spring equinox. It was an eleven day festival that involved the king being stripped of his regalia and slapped around by a priest until he cried, just to make sure he respected the gods and didn’t get too above himself. Sadly, this ritual has now fallen from favour. It might have been fun to see Trump stripped to his underwear and slapped around Washington National Cathedral by its bishop as a sort of pre-inauguration ceremony. I have no idea weather the bishop would be up for this, wikipedia has little to say about the bishops political leanings. In fact, it has very little to say about her at all, but it’s a cheery thought to begin 2017.

Ordinary people would try to placate their gods by making promises to them, typically, to return borrowed farm equipment. We also often make promises to be better people, in the form of New Year’s Resolutions. Though, if the Ancient Babylonians were as good at sticking to their resolve as we are, there were probably plenty of farmers who never saw their ploughs again.

It was the Romans who fixed New Year’s Day as January 1st. They made it sacred to their god Janus. Perhaps the whole month of January is named after him. Janus is the god of gateways, of beginnings and of transitions. He has two faces, one looking forwards and the other backwards. He looks to the future but also the past. So he sits quite well at the threshold between one year and the next. The Romans believed that the beginning of anything held omens for the whole. So it was important to greet everyone cheerfully and to give and receive small gifts. If you want to follow their lead, you should also devote a little time to your usual work. Not too much, don’t go overboard and leave the house or anything.

In England the date on which the New Year started has been confusing. Although most people considered New Year’s day to be January 1st, Samuel Pepys certainly did, the year legally did not begin until March 25th. Between the seventh and twelfth centuries, it began on December 25th. Then, there was the liturgical year, which began on the first Sunday of Advent. Most of Europe began to accept January 1st as the beginning of the New Year in the sixteenth century. Scotland adopted it is 1600 to keep in line with other “well governit commonwealths” in Europe, which probably explains why they’re so much better at New Year than we are. They’ve had more practice. In England we stuck with March 25th until we adopted the Gregorian Calendar in 1752. It must have been difficult. In the days surrounding Christmas and New Year, it’s hard enough to know what day it is, without wondering what year it is as well.

Beggars Banquet

Yesterday, I wrote about money and how it is worth nothing until you exchange it for something else. Today, I want to look at some of the people who didn’t get round to spending what they had while they were alive. Writers have long been fascinated by misers. Aesop, writing in the seventh or sixth century BC, tells us a story of a miser who buried his gold. But he came back to look at it every day and someone saw him, dug up the gold and stole it. The miser was distraught at the loss of his wealth. His neighbour consoled him by telling him that he might just as well bury a stone instead, or even just come back each day and look at the empty hole. Because he wasn’t using his gold, it would really be exactly the same thing. Buried gold is as useless as stone or an hole in the ground.

There are loads of examples of misers in literature, in theatre and in art, but there are also plenty of real life hoarders. I’ve mentioned a couple of them over the past year, and I have found that they are not necessarily greedy people, but they are not well people and are often profoundly eccentric. A true miser will live in apparent penury, in detriment to their comfort and their health so, often, their wealth is only discovered posthumously. Some, although they inherited huge sums, were assumed by the casual observer to be beggars. But some of them actually were beggars. Certainly, their accumulated riches were not as vast as those of John Camden Neild or John Elwes but were, nonetheless, remarkable. Robert Chambers, in his entry for July 17^th, mentions Mary Wilkinson, who he describes as a ‘beggar and bone grubber’, who had £300 sewn into her ragged clothing. He also mentions Frances Beet who was found to have hidden £800 in her bed and rickety furniture and a character called ‘Poor Joe All Alone’ who had made his living selling matches and ballads and performing magic tricks yet he managed to amass a fortune of £3,000 by the time he died in 1767. Joe left the money he had saved to help support widows and orphans.

Both Robert and I have a particular reason for telling you about rich beggars today, because July 17^th is the anniversary of the death of William Stevenson, who died at Kilmarnock in 1817. I have no idea when he was born, possibly some time around 1730. Stevenson was trained as a mason, but spent the greater part of his life begging. Up until his last illness, the only thing we know about him was that he and his wife had separated. They must had hated each other a lot, because they had made an agreement that if one of them ever proposed they got back together, they would pay the other £100. As far as we know, they never saw each other again.

Stevenson fell ill at the age of eighty-five and was confined to bed. His chief concern was that what little money he had scraped together would not last. But it did. When he knew he was close to death, he began to make arrangements for a grand send off. He sent for a baker and ordered twelve dozen funeral cakes and a great quantity of sugar biscuits. He ordered wine and liquor in correspondingly large amounts and said that more of both should be purchased if that proved to be insufficient. Next, he sent for a joiner and ordered himself an expensive coffin. Then the gravedigger, and asked for a roomy grave in a dry and comfortable corner. He told an old lady who had been looking after him where she might find £9 hidden in his home to pay for all the expenses, and assured her that she had been remembered in his will. He died shortly afterwards and, when his room was searched they found a bag of silver pieces, more coins hidden in a heap of old rags and £300 hidden in a trunk. They also found bonds and securities. His fortune amounted to around £900. To the old lady, he left £20, which may not sound like much but, in today’s money, that’s close to £1,800.

William Stevenson lay in state for four days while his distant relatives were gathered to attend his funeral. But it was not a sombre affair. It was a party. Whole families were invited. He was visited by the young and the old, by beggars and poor tradesmen. The older attendees found they had each been left sixpence, the younger ones, threepence. After the burial, everyone repaired to a barn, where most of them got so drunk that they had to be helped home. Some did not make it home at all, but fell asleep on a pile of corn sacks. The only account I could find of William’s funeral was by someone who clearly didn’t approve of it. It uses words like ‘wicked’, ‘careless’ and ‘waste’. It also goes on to say that those who missed the celebrations threatened to dig up his body so that they could give him another send off. They left him where he was, but apparently, the party continued for several weeks. That doesn’t sound like a waste to me. I think when a funeral is such fun that you want to do it all over again – that’s a pretty good funeral.

Science and Magic

Over the last year, I’ve mentioned so many people who occupy a rather grey area between belief in magic and the beginnings of modern science, that I cannot let today go by without telling you that it is John Dee’s birthday. Dee was born in 1527, in the Tower Ward of the City of London. Both his parents were Welsh and his surname derives from the Welsh word for black, ‘du’. John Dee is black by name and black by reputation. For hundreds of years, he has been mainly remembered as a magician in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Shakespeare probably modelled his character of Prospero on John Dee. While it’s true that he did spend a lot of the last thirty years of his life trying to speak with angels, this opinion is rather unfair. Dee was an incredibly clever man.

John Dee went to study at Cambridge at fifteen, passed his bachelor degree at eighteen and was made an original fellow of Trinity College when it was founded by Henry VIII in 1546. Whilst he was at Cambridge, we know that he was stage manager for a production of Aristophanes’ play ‘Peace’. We know this because he built a huge mechanical flying beetle for the play, which caused quite a sensation. This was probably the beginning of his reputation as a magician.

In the late 1540s and early 1550s, Dee travelled Europe. He studied at Louvain, where he became friends with the mapmaker Gerardus Mercator and he went to Paris where he lectured on Euclid. Back in London, in 1552, he met an Italian called Gerolamo Cardano, and together they investigated the plausibility a perpetual motion machine and also a gem that was reputed to have magical properties. I couldn’t find out what conclusions they drew, but I know Cardano decided it was impossible except when it came to celestial bodies.

Dee was an extremely skilled mathematician and learned a lot about navigation whilst he was abroad. He brought back with him, several navigational instrument including a couple of globes built by Mercator. But alongside this, he also studied astrology and the occult. This was not unusual. In the sixteenth century, the mysteries of the occult were every bit as real and useful as the secrets of geometry. But one had to be careful not to be seen to be straying into the realms of Black Magic. When Mary was made Queen, after the death of her brother, Edward VI, Dee cast her horoscope. He did the same for the future Queen Elizabeth I. Mary and Elizabeth, as you might know, did not have an easy relationship. Dee was accused, by a man called George Ferrers of plotting the death of Mary and also of bewitching his children, blinding one and killing another. Dee’s lodgings were searched and sealed up and he was arrested, but he was cleared of all charges. Following his exoneration, he proposed to Queen Mary, the foundation of a national library and requested funds. He was turned down, but began to build his own personal library of rare books and manuscripts, using his own money. His library eventually comprised around three thousand books and a thousand manuscripts. When James Burbage built the first theatre in London, he turned to Dee and his library for advice about what an ancient Greek theatre might have been like.

When Elizabeth was eventually made Queen in 1558, Dee became her personal advisor on matters astrological and scientific. He chose the date of her coronation. Skilled in the art of navigation as a result of his studies with Mercator, he was advisor to many of the English voyages of discovery, including that of Martin Frobisher. He also advocated the country expanding its territories into the New World. He supported this idea with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s assertion that King Arthur had once conquered Ireland and that it was a Welshman called Madoc who had first sailed to North America in the twelfth century. England had a noble history of expansion and a prior claim to the new lands that had been discovered to the west. In 1583, he was asked to advise the Queen on the new Gregorian Calendar that had been introduced by Pope Gregory XIII. Dee thought it was a great idea, and also proposed that the we should adopt January 1^st as New Years Day in both the civil and liturgical year. Both were sensible ideas, both were rejected on the grounds that they were a little bit too Catholic for a Protestant country. When the Spanish Armada attacked in 1588, Dee predicted a storm. It was partly down to extremely poor weather conditions that the Armada was destroyed and some credited Dee with conjuring up the storm rather than just forecasting it.

Dee often corresponded with the Queen on secret matters. He spent several years abroad during Elizabeth’s reign, between 1583 and 1589, and it is entirely possible that he was spying for her. You might like to know that he signed his letters to her ‘007’. The two zeros indicated that they were for the Queen’s eyes only and the seven was a number of magical significance. And, yes, this is where Ian Fleming got it from.

Dee’s political opinions were not as influential as he would have liked and, in the 1580s, he began to turn his attentions more towards the occult. That was when he began to try to converse with angels. This is a subject that I covered when I mentioned his rather questionable assistant Edward Kelley. But I feel I ought to mention that what Dee was seeking to learn was the original language of mankind. The language that Adam used when speaking to God. He felt that these experiments were every bit as important as his mathematical work in understanding the divine forms that he believed to underlie the visible world. He thought if he could understand that, he could heal the divisions between the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches and generally unify mankind. Dee knew he wasn’t able to speak directly to the angels himself. He needed a scryer. Someone who could tell him what the angels said while he wrote in all down. This was how he came to meet Kelley. So it was with Kelly that he went abroad with in 1583. If you need any encouragement to read about Edward Kelly, I’ll tell you that they parted company after the angels apparently suggested that Dee and Kelley should share their wives.

John Dee returned to England to find that his home had been vandalised and many of his scientific instruments and the books from his splendid library stolen. The rest of his life is rather sad. He had hoped, when he returned to England, to help the country’s prosperity through the use of alchemy. Instead, in 1595, he was appointed Warden of Christ’s College in Manchester. He didn’t have much control over the Fellows there. They despised and cheated him. Also, his wife died there, of plague, in 1604. In 1605, he returned to London, but Queen Elizabeth was dead and the new ruler, James I, had little time for magic. He spent the last years of his life living in obscurity with his daughter Katherine in Mortlake, which is at Richmond upon Thames. He was forced to sell off his possessions and make his living as a simple fortune teller. We don’t even know for certain when he died. Either in 1608 or 1609 at the age of 82. Even his grave is lost. It was a sorry end for a once great man.

A Scientist Adventurer

Today is the birthday of Sir Kenelm Digby, who was born in 1603 at Gayhurst in Buckinghamshire. Digby was from a wealthy family, but he had a poor start in life. His father was one of the men executed for the Gunpowder Plot. I’ve not mentioned him before, but I’ve come across Digby often in my research. He turns up in all sorts of odd places, I’ve found him fighting duels, practising sympathetic magic, being a founder member of the Royal Society, authoring a cookery book and tragically mourning the death of his wife in quite weird way. So I thought we could have a proper look at him today.

In his early teens, Digby was tutored by a preacher called Robert Napier, who taught him about medicine, astronomy and alchemy. Robert had been a student of Simon Forman, who I mentioned back in December. He later studied at Oxford under the tutelage of a mathematician and astrologer called Thomas Allen.

Kenelm Digby was also in love, with a woman called Venetia Stanley, but his mother didn’t want them to marry. In fact, she sent him to Europe in 1620 so they couldn’t see each other. He spent some time in France, at the court of the mother of the King Louis XIII, Marie de Medici. According to his own account, she was deeply attracted to him, but he had to turn her down because of his love for Venetia. But she was so insistent that he could only get away from her by pretending that he had been killed. After that, he went to Florence where he wrote to Venetia to tell her he was well. But his mother intercepted his letter and it never reached her. Meanwhile, Venetia had heard and believed the rumours of his death and almost married someone else.

Digby also visited Madrid in 1623 at a time when the Prince of Wales, the future Charles I, was visiting the city in secret. Whilst there, Digby became involved in a huge street fight. It all started with a woman singing on a balcony. One of his friends was in love with the woman and stopped to listen. But he had a rival for her affections who had set a trap for him. They were suddenly attacked by a group of strangers. Again, we only have Digby’s, probably inflated, account to go on. But they were set upon by about fifteen men, it was dark, the men were wearing lanterns on their heads, which stopped him from being able to see them well. Everyone’s swords broke but Kenelm’s. They ran away and left him to fight. But he got away and killed two of them.

Digby returned to England later that year, and married Venetia in 1625. In 1627, he became a privateer, which means he had permission from the king to sail around the Mediterranean capturing Spanish and French vessels. So he was basically a legal pirate. Quite early on, his crew fell sick and he had to find a port. He chose Algiers, which was rather a daring choice. Most English captains tried to avoid Algiers, because it was full of pirates. He had a great time there. He made friends with the Algerian pirates and feasted with them. He bought Arabic manuscripts, he visited the steam baths. He met and talked with Muslim women, which was highly unusual, if not unique, for the time. He also managed to persuade the governors of the city to release fifty English slaves. After that he went on to defeat a very large fleet of Venetian ships and then went to Greece and plundered quite a lot of classical statues, which he thought would make impressive gifts when he returned home.

photo credit: stephencdickson licensed under creative commons

Sadly, Venetia died in her sleep in 1633. Digby was distraught. He took plaster casts of her hands, feet and face. He asked his friend, Anthony van Dyke, to paint a picture of her on her deathbed. He commissioned poets to compose verses in her praise. He summoned the poet Ben Johnson to come and look at her body, so that he might be inspired by the sight. He insisted on attending the dissection of her body, which was carried out to try to find the cause of her death. The only conclusion was that she “had very little brain”. He built a huge black mausoleum for her body with a gold bust of her on the top. He never married again.

He became less of a gregarious adventurer and more of a solitary scientist. I first came across him in connection with the ‘weapon salve‘, an ointment which could cure a wound by applying it, not to the body, but to the weapon that caused it. Digby claimed to have the secret of the ‘powder of sympathy’ which he used to cure the wound of a friend named James Howell. His hand had been cut when he tried to intervene in a duel and was in danger of developing gangrene. Digby asked for something with his blood on it and was given a garter. Then, he took a bowl of water, put a handful of powder in it and dipped the garter in the bowl. Howell, though he was unaware of what was happening, immediately felt relief. When later, Digby put the garter to dry before a fire, Howell sent word that his wound was burning worse than ever. When Digby put it back in the water, his wound was cooled again.

Kenelm Digby left England during the Commonwealth period and returned at the same time as Charles II. He was one of the founding members of the Royal Society. In fact, one of his papers, ‘Discourse Concerning the Vegetation of Plants’ was the first to be published by the society. In it, he claimed that it was possible to burn the bodies of crayfish and resurrect them from their ashes, which, in 2016, seems a bit of a wild claim. But his paper was the first to suggest that plants might draw some of their sustenance from the air.

But Digby had another surprise. After his death, his lab assistant published a book of his recipes. Kenelm Digby was a cook. During his travels, he had collected all sorts of recipes. He has an oriental recipe for ‘tea with eggs’, which is the first Chinese recipe ever published in English. Some of his recipes are European, but many of them are English. It’s a great source of information for what people were eating in the seventeenth century. Admittedly, some of them don’t sound that great. ‘Hart’s horn jelly’ and ‘barley pap’ both sound pretty awful, but his book also contains his recipe for the powder of sympathy, which I’m sure you could seek out if you were interested.

Kenelm Digby died in 1665, and was buried alongside Venetia. Sadly their tomb was lost in the Great Fire of London the following year. The gold bust was looted. Someone once caught sight of it on a market stall but, when he went back for it, it had gone. Digby’s reputation was also largely forgotten. He struggled hard against the legacy of his father’s treachery. He became a learned man, he freed slaves, he brought home plundered wealth. He was an important figure at the courts of both Charles I and Charles II. Yet he was mostly remembered as a bit of a quack, who thought you could get rid of warts by washing your hands in a bowl of moonshine. He did think that, but he also invented the wine bottle.

Kindred Spirit

Today, I am celebrating the birthday of Robert Chambers who was born in Peebles in the Scottish Borders in 1802. He and his brother William founded W & R Chambers Publishing, who eventually produced Chambers Dictionary. That’s my favourite dictionary, but that’s not why I wanted to tell you about him. I discovered Robert a year ago when I was writing on Tumblr and he has been with me almost every day since. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Both Robert and his brother were born with six fingers and six toes. Both had undergone surgery to remove the extra digits but one of Robert’s operations had left him lame. So he was not an active child, but became instead a great devourer of knowledge. When he found a complete set of Encyclopaedia Britannica in his father’s attic, it kept him entertained for years. His brother later said of him: “the acquisition of knowledge was with him the highest of earthly enjoyments.” I have learned so many interesting things whilst researching this blog that I’m inclined to agree.

The family moved to Edinburgh in 1813 and when Robert was sixteen he began to run a second hand book stall on Leith Walk. When his brother William bought a printing press, they began to publish magazines together, with Robert providing the content. In 1832 they began to produce a weekly magazine called ‘The Edinburgh Journal’. It cost one penny and included articles about history, religion, language, and science.

In 1844 he produced a book called ‘Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation’. It began by explaining the formation of the solar system, continued with the geology of the earth and followed the pattern of increasingly complex lifeforms right the way up to humans. He talked about how one species of creature may have arisen from another. He would have referred to it as the transmutation of species, we would now call it evolution. This was all very controversial and ungodly at the time and Robert went to great lengths to conceal his authorship. He dictated it to his wife, so the manuscript would be in her handwriting and then sent it to a different publisher. It brings together a lot of ideas that were around at the time regarding how our world came to be as it is. Some of the experiments he cites are questionable, such as one which suggests insects can be made to arise spontaneously from electricity. But his examination of fossil records, which points out that fossils of simpler organisms are found in older rocks, is good.

Vestiges quickly became a bestseller. The first edition sold out in only a few days. Over ten years, it sold over 20,000 copies. Prince Albert read it aloud to Queen Victoria and Abraham Lincoln was also impressed by it. Others were not so keen. Such a theory rather cut God out of the equation, which was a pretty shocking claim. Roberts book received a lot of scathing reviews. At least one of his critics thought it was such awful nonsense that it must have been written by a woman. Some of the theories in the book were similar to those being pursued by Charles Darwin. Darwin found some of his explanations a little clunky. He didn’t feel that the, then anonymous, author of Vestiges had really described the environments that caused animals such as a woodpecker to develop in the way it had. But for many years, Vestiges was the only book available in English the explained the theory of evolution. Its reception by its critics may also have been what put Darwin off publishing his ‘Origin of Species’, which appeared fifteen years later. Robert’s authorship of Vestiges was not revealed until 1884, thirteen years after his death.

Robert Chambers’ last work was ‘Chambers Book of Days’ published in 1864. It was subtitled: ‘A Miscellany of Popular Antiquities in Connection with the Calendar, Including Anecdote, Biography, & History, Curiosities of Literature and Oddities of Human Life and Character’. It’s a massive work that runs to two volumes each with more than 840 pages. It contains, for each day of the year, a list of the births and deaths of notable people and a list of the saints associated with that day. Then underneath are a number of short essays about the some of the people, or the events that happened on that date. When I discovered Robert, I was happy to have found a kindred spirit. His undertaking was much larger than my meagre effort. He wrote around two thousand essays for his ‘Book of Days’ and he didn’t even have the internet to help him. It seems his family all thought the huge amount of work he put into his book contributed to his early death in 1871. Despite this warning from history, I have pressed on with my project and now have only twelve days to go.

Robert has helped me out of many a hole in this last year. When Wikipedia failed me, I turned to him. Sometimes, I’ve felt he was up against the same problems as me when seeking something interesting to say about a particular date. But he has also introduced me to some wonderful characters. Without him, I would not know so much about mountebanks, eighteenth century bets and weird burials. You can find Chambers Book of Days, in a searchable format here. If you want to know what he has to say about today, I recommend you scroll to the bottom and read ‘Child Suckled by Goat.’

The Terror, the Horror

Yesterday’s post was a big one, so I’m going to try to keep it short today. Today is the birthday of not one, but two Gothic novelists. Ann Radcliffe, who was born in 1764 and Matthew Gregory Lewis, who was born in 1775. Both, as far as I can tell, in London.

Details about the life of Ann Radcliffe are pretty few and far between. Christina Rosetti once began to write her biography, but had to abandon it for lack of information. Ann was married to a journalist and they had no children. Ann filled in the long hours whilst her husband was at work by writing stories and poetry. She published six novels and probably the most famous now is ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho’. This is because it features heavily in another novel, ‘Northanger Abbey’ by Jane Austin. It features many of the characteristics we associate with the Gothic. An orphaned young woman, held captive in a remote castle by an aunt and her cruel husband. She has an unwanted suitor and a true love. The discomfort of her situation is compounded by the creepy castle. There are doors which close on their own, apparitions, sounds in the night. What people loved about her work were the vivid descriptions of the landscape and settings. She includes many long descriptions of landscapes, describing places she’d never visited herself, but drew her inspiration from paintings. Though the money she earned from her writing did eventually allow her to travel. Radcliffe’s heroine highlights how much a young woman was at the mercy of the men in her life. She can be taken away by a virtual stranger and forced to marry someone she doesn’t like. Eventually though, she gets away, inherits property and marries her true love.

The seemingly supernatural elements in Radcliffe’s novels are only there to illustrate the mood of the characters. In the end it turns out that there is a perfectly natural explanation. In the case of Udolpho, there are pirates in the castle. The writers of Scooby Doo must have been fans of Radcliffe and her oeuvre. Ann Radcliffe felt the power to scare lay very much in what she called the difference between ‘terror’ and ‘horror’. Between what is imagined and what is laid out in front of you in startling and gory detail. She says: “Terror and horror are so far opposite, that the first expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life, and the other contracts, freezes and nearly annihilates them.” Her point was that something which is partly seen stimulates the imagination to fill in the rest of the details.

Matthew Gregory Lewis, on the other hand, enjoyed laying out all of the horror for us to see. He was a well-travelled and gregarious person, destined for a diplomatic career. You might like to know that he was briefly an MP and succeeded William Beckford, the author of Vathek, in his constituency. He made several attempts to write plays, in which he was only moderately successful. In 1803, his play ‘The Captive’ was staged at the Haymarket. It was about a woman imprisoned by her husband. Devoid of human contact, she realises she is on the brink of madness. It was performed only once. The audience hadn’t taken it well:

“…when it was almost half over a man fell into convulsions in the boxes; presently after a woman fainted away in the pit; and when the curtain dropped, two or three more of the spectators went into hysterics, and there was such a screaming and squalling, that really you could hardly hear the hissing…”

It seems even the theatre staff were horrified by it. Part of what was so frightening about his play was that in real life, no woman was safe from this fate. It was all to easy to claim that a woman was mad and have her locked up, no matter what her social standing. But Lewis was clearly pretty good at showing people something that scared them. His most famous work though, is a novel called ‘The Monk’. It is, of course, about a monk. He thinks of himself as a very pious man and is very proud of it and, as you might guess, this is a set up for a spectacular fall from grace. A nun, who disguises herself as a monk just to be near his ‘holiness’, eventually tempts him into a sexual relationship. There is rape, murder, imprisonment, incest, the spectre of a bleeding nun and a pact with the Devil, all luridly described. The Monk is the first novel to feature a holy man as the villain.

Ann Radcliffe did not care too much for The Monk, she felt it was all a bit graphic and it was probably what prompted her to write her essay about terror and horror. I have to admit, I haven’t read either of these novels. I’m writing about a new and unfamiliar subject every day, and there just isn’t time. Of the two though, The Monk sounds more readable for a modern audience. But I have to agree with Ann that, in fiction at least, a horrible thing which is presented to us in graphic detail is not as powerful as anything our imaginations can supply.

Whoopsie

On this day in 1919, the R34 airship touched down in Mineola, Long Island and became the first airship to cross the Atlantic Ocean and the first aircraft to cross it from west to east. The R34 was ninety-two feet high and the length of two football fields. Her crew nicknamed her ‘Tiny’.

The airship had left East Fortune, just east of Edinburgh, four days earlier and almost didn’t make it. They had carefully limited the amount of crew and equipment that they would need to carry in order to make the journey, as landing or refuelling would have been difficult. Twelve hours into the flight, they found they had two stowaways on board. The first was man named William Ballantyne, who had been ordered to stay behind, but two hours before the launch, he had hidden himself in the hull of the ship amongst the gas balloons. He had also brought with him a second stowaway, a kitten named Whoopsie. Ballantyne was forced to reveal himself when he began to feel ill due to the gas leaking from the balloons but, by then, it was really too late to do anything about it. As they were now flying over the ocean, it was decided that they would both just have to stay. Had they been over land, he would have been given a parachute and expected to jump.

They travelled via a northern route, so that they might be closer to land if anything went awry. During their voyage they slept in hammocks and prepared hot food over a metal plate welded to an engine exhaust pipe. They kept themselves entertained by playing jazz records on a gramophone and, of course, by a small cat. Strong winds and bad weather meant that they almost ran out of fuel before they arrived, they would land with only another forty minutes worth of petrol in their tanks. As they approached the landing site, their commander, Mayor E M Pritchard, put on his parachute and jumped from the craft in order to assist with the landing. He thus became the first person to arrive on American soil from the air. The crew received an enthusiastic welcome and were treated like royalty during their three day stay in the US. Ballantyne, the stowaway, was sent home by ship. Whoopsie, as far as I can tell, became the airship’s mascot.

Everyone was pretty excited by the possibilities of transatlantic airship travel. They thought that airships, perhaps five times the size of the R34, would soon be crossing the Atlantic with passengers and cargo. It seemed as though the airship would be, compared to an aeroplane, what an ocean liner was compared to a cross channel ferry.

The R34 was not the only airship to attempt to cross the Atlantic with a cat on board. In 1910 an airship called ‘America’ set off from Atlantic City. Just as they were taking off, someone, rather unhelpfully, threw a cat on board. The cat hated flying. Pretty much everyone else on the America hated flying with a cat who hated flying. The America was the first aircraft to be fitted with radio. The first historic in-flight radio message was “Roy, come and get this goddam cat!”. They did try quite hard to get rid of the cat, whose name was ‘Kiddo’. They put him in a canvas bag and tried to lower him onto a boat, but couldn’t quite manage it and had to pull him up again. Oddly, after being dangled over the sea in a bag, the cat calmed down a bit. One of the crew, Murray Simon, noticed Kiddo was particularly good at predicting bad weather. In fact, he thought no airship should ever cross the Atlantic without a cat. Unfortunately, even the cat couldn’t help them when, after flying a thousand miles, they ran into problems and had to abandon the flight. They were forced to ditch into the sea in their onboard lifeboat. All were saved, including Kiddo, but the airship flew on without her crew and was never seen again.

Shiny Bright

photo credit: David Rowan licensed under creative commons

On 5^th July 2009, a man named Terry Herbert was in a field in Staffordshire which had been recently ploughed. This would not be brilliant, or even newsworthy had he not had his metal detector with him. The farm had been searched previously by metal detectorists, but they hadn’t turned up anything special. But Terry began to find objects made from gold. Over the next five days he had found enough to fill 244 bags and called in the relevant authorities. A proper archaeological excavation was organised and over the summer of 2009 over 3,500 pieces were recovered. It is the largest hoard of Anglo Saxon gold and silver that has ever been found.

Unlike the previous largest discovery at Sutton Hoo, the horde is not part of a burial. All the objects have a military association, there is nothing domestic at all. There are many sword hilts and pommels but no sign of the actual blades. This suggests that the decorative parts of the weapons had been deliberately removed. We know that the Anglo Saxons sometimes did this, because it happens in Beowulf. It’s hard to imagine how such a large amount of beautiful and precious objects ever came to be lost at all. Perhaps they were buried by their owners for safe keeping, maybe they were spoils of war. Or they may just have been stolen. But something must have happened to prevent whoever buried them from returning to recover their treasure.

It was most likely buried somewhere between 650 and 700 AD but many of the pieces are probably heirloom items which are much older. In the seventh century, the site of the find was in the kingdom of Mercia. It is a period of history we don’t know a great deal about. Most people lived in wooden houses and left little evidence of their lives. The best records we have from the time are the ‘Ecclesiastical History of the English People’, written by Bede, in Northumbria and the ‘Anglo Saxon Chronicles’, which was composed in Wessex for Alfred the Great. Northumbria and Wessex were both enemies of Mercia, so neither have much useful to say. Only that they were awful and violent, but enemies would say that. We don’t even know that the horde definitely came from Mercia, as it was found right by an major Roman road known as Watling Street, so it could have come from anywhere.

Amongst the horde were three gold crosses, so at least some of the objects must have belonged to Christians. The crosses had been folded up though. Perhaps as they bent when they were torn from their mountings in some sort of looting incident, maybe were just folded so they would take up less space in a bag or box. This might imply that they were taken by an opposing army who were pagans, but it could be that they just weren’t that fussy about religious objects. There is also a strip of gold with this inscription:

SURGE DNE DISEPENTUR INIMICI TUI ET FUGENT QUI ODERUNT TE A FACIE TUA.

If it were spelled properly, this would read: ‘Surge Domine et dissipentur inimici tui et fugiant qui oderunt te a facie tua’ which means ‘Rise up, Lord; may Your enemies be scattered and those who hate You be driven from Your face.’ It is a quote from the Bible which appears in the story of Saint Guthlac, who I mentioned back in April, when he predicted that a man named Æthelbald would become king of Mercia. He predicted that Æthelbald’s enemies would ‘flee from his face’. Æthelbald did become king, in 716. But it would appear that God, on this occasion, did not oblige.

As well as giving us thousands of truly beautifully crafted pieces of Anglo Saxon metalwork, the hoard has also revealed another secret. Anglo Saxon goldsmiths knew how to cheat. They could make twelve to eighteen carat gold look like much purer gold, between twenty-one and twenty-three carats. Tests have shown that it is only the gold on the surface of the object that is pure. They had must have found a way of removing the impurities from the surface. In order to do this, they would have needed to know how to make ferric chloride. Probably they heated water, salt and iron rich clay. When painted onto the gold it would have removed the silver content from the surface and made it look much more shiny. So, even though we don’t know much about what happened in our country in the few hundred years after the Romans left, we should stop calling them the Dark Ages, because those people were pretty bright.

Theatreland

Today, I want to tell you about the Globe Theatre, in Southwark. The theatre where William Shakespeare worked and where his plays were performed. It opened in 1599, I don’t know the exact date, but I do know when it burned down and it was on this day in 1613.

The Globe was built to house an acting company called the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It was owned, for the most part, by the company’s lead actor, Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert. But Shakespeare owned a one eighth share in the project. The actors’ previous home in Shoreditch, north of the City, had been one of the first, and certainly the most successful permanent theatres to be built in England since Roman times. I can tell you where it was: between Alice Daridge’s garden and the Earl of Rutland’s oat barn. Just near the Great Horse Pond, next to the common sewer and a slaughterhouse. Not that this really tells you much about it’s geographical location, but it does give you some idea of what it might have been like. It opened in 1576 and was called, simply, ‘The Theatre’. But they had run into problems. The Theatre had been built by Richard and Cuthbert’s father James Burbage and a man named Mr Brayne who was his brother-in-law. After both men died, there was a huge falling-out over who owned what. Added to this, the Theatre was built on land that was leased from a man called Giles Allen. Allen was a staunch Puritan who wasn’t keen on theatre and, when the lease ran out in 1596, he refused to renew it. What’s more, he claimed that the building now belonged to him too.

The Burbages side-stepped the whole problem on the night of December 28^th 1598. Giles Allen was away celebrating Christmas at his country residence and the Burbages, along with a carpenter called Peter Street and a few others, probably including Shakespeare, simply stole the building. They assured onlookers that they were renovating it, but in fact, they carted away all the massive oak beams and stored them in the carpenter’s warehouse over the winter. When the weather improved, they used the beams to build themselves a new theatre across the river at Southwark.

The site of the Globe theatre wasn’t great either. It was prone to flooding, especially at high tide and they had to build a sort of raised bank to protect it. Also, one of the other attractions on offer nearby was bear-baiting. We have an account from a Swiss tourist called Thomas Platter, who visited in 1599. He said that he saw twelve bears and a hundred and twenty mastiffs and it absolutely stank because of all the offal that was fed to the dogs. He also went to see a play. It was Julius Caesar and it may have been the first play performed at the Globe. Thomas tells us that the audience could stand and watch from the courtyard for one penny. For two, you could get a seat in the galleries and for three, you could get a cushion as well and a seat where everyone could see you. He describes the actors as lavishly dressed and explains why this was. Lords and knights, he says, tended to bequeath their best clothes to their servants. But they were much too fancy for a servant to wear, so they sold them and actors bought them.

The theatre, as I said, caught fire in 1613. It was during a performance of Henry VIII. It broke out after the firing of a theatrical cannon. Some of the material fired from the cannon reached the thatched roof of the building where it smouldered unheeded for a while. The fire spread inside the thatch and soon the whole roof was on fire. The entire building was burned to the ground in less two hours. It seems no one was hurt though, which was lucky as the theatre could host up to three thousand spectators and there were only two small doors for everyone to get out. According to an eyewitness the only casualty was a man whose breeches caught fire, but it was quickly put out by someone pouring a bottle of ale over them.

The theatre was quickly rebuilt on the same foundations, but this time, they sensibly built it with a tiled roof. The Globe Theatre was in use, apart from periods of closure due to outbreaks of bubonic plague, until all the theatres were closed by down the Puritans in 1642. It was demolished two or three years later. We have a pretty good idea of what the theatre looked like because we have a beautiful reconstruction of it, only 750 ft from where the original stood. It is the first thatched building to have been allowed in London since the Great Fire of 1666.

Here Comes Summer

Today, I am in a bit of a quandary. The thing that I was going to tell you about did, I’ve since discovered, not happen on this day at all, but on the 25th. Never mind, it’s sometimes easy mistake a 5 for an 8 and if you wanted to know about the Newbury Coat, which was a bet about being able to shear a sheep, spin and weave its wool and make a coat out of it in a single day, you’ll find it here.

Then I wasn’t sure what subject to choose. I could tell you that it is the anniversary of Queen Victoria’s coronation. But the ceremony excluded, for the first time, the bit where the new monarch’s Champion rides into Westminster Hall in full armour during the coronation banquet, which is a pity. I could tell you that it is the birthday of Henry VIII. But that was a shame for quite a lot of people, especially his future wives. Anyway, I’m not generally big on royalty unless they’ve done something spectacularly eccentric. So, here instead is an extract from another ‘on this day’ publication for June 28^th. It is “The Everyday Book” published in 1826.

Before you read it, you might like to know that ‘lawn of Cos’ means a very light linen fabric that would be lovely to wear on a hot day, that a water-cart would have sprinkled water in the streets to keep the dust down and that the word ‘tittle-bat’ probably means ‘stickleback’, a sort of fish. Also, you may like to know that ‘Tartarus’ refers to a region of the underworld, far below Hell, where all the really bad people went. Sadly, I can’t help you with the phrase ‘suckers of leather’, it might mean some sort of pump, but they are clearly three words that have changed their meaning significantly over the last two hundred years, and I wouldn’t google them.

So here is part of an essay by the poet Leigh Hunt called ‘a “Now”: Descriptive of a Hot Day’. Even though it describes a world long gone, I think it would remind me of what summer is like, even in the depths of winter.

“Now grasshoppers “fry”, as Dryden says. Now cattle stand in water, and ducks are envied. Now boots and shoes and trees by the road side, are thick with dust; and dogs rolling in it, after issuing out of the water, into which they have been thrown to fetch sticks, come scattering horror among the legs of the spectators. Now a fellow who finds he has three miles further to go in a tight pair of shoes, is in a pretty situation. Now rooms with sun upon them become intolerable; and the apothecary’s apprentice, with a bitterness beyond aloes, thinks of the pond he used to bathe in at school. Now men with powdered heads (especially if thick) envy those that are unpowdered, and stop to wipe them uphill, with countenances that seem to expostulate with destiny. Now boys assemble around the village pump with a ladle to it, and delight to make a forbidden splash and get wet through the shoes. Now also they make suckers of leather, and bathe all day long in rivers and ponds, and follow the fish to their cool corners, and say millions of “my eyes” at “tittle-bats”. Now the bee, as he hums along, seems to be talking heavily of the heat. Now doors and brick walls are burning to the hand; and a walled lane, with dust and broken bottles in it, near a brick-field, is a thing not to be thought of. Now a green lane, on the contrary, thick-set with hedge-row elms, and having the noise of a brook “rumbling in pebble-stone,” is one of the pleasantest things in the world. Now youths and damsels walk through hay-fields by chance; “ha’ done then William;” and the overseer in the next field calls out “let thic thear hay thear bide;” and the girls persist, merely to plague “such a frumpish old fellow.”

Now, in town, gossips talk more than ever to one another, in rooms, in doorways and out of windows, always beginning the conversation with saying that the heat is overpowering. Now blinds are let down and doors thrown open, and flannel waistcoats left off, and cold meat preferred to hot, and wonder expressed why tea continues so refreshing, and people delight to silver lettuces in bowls, and apprentices in doorways with tin canisters that lay several atoms of dust. Now the water-cart, jumbling along the middle of the streets, and jolting the showers out of it’s box of water, really does something. Now boys delight to have a water pipe let out, and set it bubbling away in a tall and frothy volume. Now fruiterers’ shops and dairies look pleasant, and ices are the only things to those who can get them. Now ladies loiter in baths; and people make presents of flowers; and wine is put on ice; and the after-dinner lounger recreates his head with applications of perfumed water out of long-necked bottles. Now, the lounger who cannot resist riding his new horse, feels his boots burn him. Now buckskins are not the lawn of Cos. Now jockeys, walking in greatcoats to lose flesh, curse inwardly. Now five fat people in a stage coach, hate the sixth fat person who is coming in and think he has no right to be so large. Now clerks in offices do nothing but drink soda water and spruce-beer, and read the newspaper. Now the old-clothesman drops his solitary cry more deeply into the areas on the hot and forsaken side of the street; and bakers look vicious; and cooks are aggravated: and the steam of the tavern kitchen catches hold of one like the breath of Tartarus. Now delicate skins are beset with gnats; and boys make their sleeping companion start up, with playing a burning glass on his hand; and blacksmiths are super-carbonated; and cobblers in their stalls almost feel a wish to be transplanted; and butter is too easy to spread; and the dragoons wonder whether the Romans liked their helmets; and old ladies, with their lappets unpinned, walk around in a state of dilapidation; and servant maids are afraid they look vulgarly hot; and the author, who has a plate of strawberries brought him, finds he has come to the end of his writing.”

Incidentally, Leigh Hunt was not big on Royalty either. He was once arrested and tried for saying something extremely uncomplimentary, but also true, about the Prince Regent. He was promised that he would be let off, if he promised not to say anything else rude about the future George IV. He politely declined and spent two years in prison. He bore it well. He had his room papered with rose trellises and the ceiling painted like the sky. He had his books, he had a piano and he had lots of visitors. His friend Charles Lamb said there was: “no other such room, except in a fairy tale.”

I hope it’s sunny where you are. If it isn’t, and you’re still not feeling summery, you could give this a try. I’m off to unpin my lappets and buy some strawberries.