P 50 According to the historian Barbara Hanawalt, who focused on a sample of 575 homocides in Northamptonshire occurring in 70 years of relatively complete records,between 1300 and 1472, murder remained not only sn almost ubiquitous activity but an overwhelmingly male one; 99% of the accused and 94% of the victims were men. (interestingly though in London during the same period, Hanawalt established that women appeared more frequently as perpetrators (7%) and as victims (10%).  The Northamptonshire killers tended to come from the middle ranks of society and contained a high number of what might be called ‘ middling peasants’, along with tradesmen (tailors, brewers, porters) a fair number of clergy, and more than a sprinkling of servants. .. dominated by killings outside the family, a quarter of which were committed during thefts or burglaries.”

p. 51 One well-documented (and not untypical) case from 14^th-century London, Walter de Benington and 17 companions came to the brewhouse of Gilbert de Mordone, refused to leabe when asked to do so having consumed four gallons of beer, made it clear that they intended to carry on drinking, molested a young girl and then assaulted Gilbert de Mordone and his brewer. The brewer took up a staff and killed Walter. The inquest jury returned a verdict of self-defence.”

p. 127 From around 1725, men from more humble stations in society no longer carried the formidable staffs, sometimes iron-tipped, that had been regarded as essential implements of self-defence in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. True, gun ownership had become more widespread, but guns were rarely employed in the kinds of quarrels that had once claimed lives. And while a large number of men continued to carry knives (which, one should remember, were essential work tools for many) they were less inclined to draw them in anger than their ancestors had been. Now it was far more likely that a quarrel would end in a fist fight rather than a stabbing,

p. 183 a couple of married in middle age. Catherine was 40, a spinster and a woman of property when in 1792 she married Robert, a widower in his 50s. First all went well , but … Robert was suffering from ‘family concerns’, presumably financial, and it seems likely that Catherine had granted him property to help him out. Thereaftter, so far as we can tell, Robert became fixated on acquiring as much of his wife’s property as possible… he had her locked up in an attic, though he did at least instruct the servants to pass food to her. In desperation, she knocked a hole through the wall of the attic into an adjoining house, and managed to make contact with a servant there. The servant go a message to her friends and they rescued her … our sources dry up at the cliff-hanging moment.”

p. 185 In 1670, Lady Grace Chatsworth complained that when she had been lying in bed, heaviuly pregnant, ill and suffering from a fever, her husband had deliberately brought “a company of musicians” into the chamber nest to hers and “caused them to strike and play very loudly to the danger of her health”. She had asked her husband to send them away, she said, but he had refused to do so, and they say “drinking & making a grievous noyse and caused the music to play until 12 o’clock at night.”

p. 4 Given the importance that Caesar attributed to the Bruids, and their apparently centrality in Gaullish society, one would expect them to feature prominently in his long and detailed description of his conquest of the region; but they are completely invisible in it. Nor do they appear at all in his account of his two expeditions to Britain. They are only mentioned , in fact, in that self-contained survey section on native customs, which does not seem to have any relevance to his practical experiences in Gaul. That this is not simply an authorial policy on Caesar’s own part is strongly suggested by the fact that his history of the Gallic war was continued after his feath by another Roman politician, Aulus Hirtus, who also made no mention of Druids in his depiction of the action,

p. 5 Cicero “ commented that he had met a Gallic Druid, Divitiacus of the Aedui tribe. This man had claimed to Cicero to be learned in the ways of the natural world, and he made predictions, sometimes observing the flight of the birds and sometimes spontaneously,,, Caesar wrote quite a lot about him, because he was the most steadfast native ally of Rome. He never, however, called him a Druid; Diviacus is represented rather, as a leading Gallic politicians and spokesman for his tribe in an assembly of chiefs…. Sean Dunham has made this one prop of his argument that Caesar’s account of Druids as a special caste is misleading and that druides was in fact simply a Latinisation of the native term for the religious functions of chiefs and leading aristocrats of Gaul. Roman senators, after all, doubled as priests just as Diviciacus seems to have done.”

p. 9 “It was once suggested that Strabo was adding a little extra information to a medly of Caesar and Diodorus, and that Pomponius was just a rehasj of Caesar with a few imaginative flourishes. The last of these arguments may still stand, although it is also possible that Pomponius was quoting another authority or authorities, now completely lost. In the case of Diodorus and Strabo the situation has been made to seem simpler. Since the 1950s there’s been a widespread consensus that behind the description of Gaul given in both lies a single lost source: the work of a Greek philosopher from Syria, Posidonus, who visitred southeastern Gaul in the early first century BCE> It has also been proposed that Posidonius represents the earlier authority who Caesar might have been quoting for his set portrait of Gallic society. If this is the case, then pretty well all that is recorded of Druids before the Roman conquest disrupted their society and authority rests on the indirect testimony of one traveller.

Specialists of the period have therefore come to speak of a Posidonian tradition of Greek and Roman writing about the ancient Druids … were at once quite sophisticated thinks and scientists, with a firm belief in the immortality of the soul, and practitioners of large-scale human sacrifice by a variety of cruel means … suggested that Posidonius exaggerated the sophistication … by imposing Greek concepts of philosophy on it… accused him of acting as a propogandist by tainting the Gallic tribes with barbarism. Piggott noticed that the description of human sacrifice by shooting to death with arrows is off, because archery is not mentioned in any accounts of the warfare of the Gauls or related peoples.

p. 21 Suetonius and Loiny both stated that the Druids had been suppressed by imperial decree, but Pliny then proceeded to write as if they still existed, raining the possibility that only their political power and religious role had been destroyed. If that was the case, it would explain the remaining references to them in ancient texts, three of which appear in the series of potted biographies of Roman emperors known collectively as the Agustan History. In each of these a Gallic dryas or drydis, or a group of druidae, makes a prophecy to an emperor or future emperor that turns out to be perfectly accurate… the prophets concerned are clearly female. In one case she is the landlady from whom the emperor-to-be is rending a billet during his service in Gaul. These are the first and only appearances of female Druids, by name, in the whole of ancient literature. It is possible that they had always been present in Gallic society. It is possible that, with the annihilation of their religious and political role, the Druids as a whole were reduced to local healers, soothsayers and folk magicians, and came to include women as part of this loosening of their society identity. It is also possible that terms related to Druid were being applied by Roman authors who knew little of Gaul and the Gallic language, to kinds of magical practitioner very different from the original Druids.”

p. 48 “This is how an Iron Age Druid is fashioned: from selected parts of Greek, Roman, Irish or Welsh texts usually mixed with archaeological data. The process made to compose the result is more or less an arbitrary one, determined by the instincts, attitudes, context and loyalties of the person engaged in it. Virtually none of the ingredients employed have the status of solid material… The manner in which these ancient and medieval images of them have been put to use is therefore a perfect case study of the way in which the modern British have liked to think and feel: about humanity, nationhood, religion, morality and the cosmos.”

p. 37 “the embassy undertaken by Sir Amias Paulet as resident ambassador to France from 1576-9.

“The ambassador’s wife, Margaret, and their six children were part of the embassy, and accordingly were expected to take leave from the Queen in person. Though most ambassadors travelled without their wives, the practice was increasing: Gemma Allen puts the percentage of 16^th century ambassadorial wives on embassy at 25%, rising in the 17^th century. Hilliard [miniaturist who could sketch Elizabeth’s potential suitor Francois, Duke of Alencon] was recently married and so his wife Alice accompanied him in the embassy train, and the household’s chaplain, Arthur Wake, brought his wife and departed with her when she became pregnant. .. It is telling of the general perception of the wife of the political man that one place she does appear is in a fondly recalled domestic vignette, written by Francis Bacon, years later, where she cures a wart on his finger. The meeting of female domestic responsibility and political activity in the embassy in glimpsed in Hotman’s single reference to the role of the wife in The Ambassador. After warning that care is to be taken concerning who is accepted into the household, since there are ‘so many spies”, he syayes: “It shalbe the best way, if he can, to bring his wife with him, whose eie will stoppe infinite abuses amongst gis people, and disorders in his house, unlesse hee can trust there with some one of his owne followers, that may carry an eye and charge over the rest.”… she is in charge of internal security and supervision of all who come into the household; this is a key role, particularly for a large embassy, and one that places her firmly in the diplomatic world of information gathering and political communication.

p. 38 There is a brief mention of Lady Paulete in her husband’s correspondence that hints at an even weightetier, though subtle, role in diplomatic activity. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth on 22 June 1577, Paulet describes his recent audience with the French King and Wueen Mother, stating “and thus I was dismissed from the K and the Q mother, after that I had thanked Q mother for the good intertaynement which she had given my wife on Sondaye last, as indeed bothe shee and the Frenche King’s wife did use her with great favor and familiatitie, and amongst theire other talke made great protestacions of theire sincere affection towards your Majesteie”… it is a political statement to entertain the wife of the English ambassador… both a ceremonial activity and one that contains the opportunity to negotiate on an ostensibly informal level ,,, women in court could find it easier than men to conduct diplomacy with other women in power during leisure time; it is thus even more relevant to search for women in diplomacy in embassies to France around this time, considering the powerful political presence of the French Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici.”… one of Paulet’s daughters and his eldest son Hugh died during his appointment.”

P. 54 The female poets who did compose skaldic verse were perfectly at ease with the conventions, proving that they could take on the outrageously arrogant persona of a skald, one poet – if the verse really was composed by a woman – pitting her patron god Thor against the feeble Christ with all the swagger of a contemporary rapper. One court poet we know by name is Jorunn, nicknamed skaldmoer (poetgirl), who was active in the early 10th century. Her poem Sendibitr (Biting Message) is an elegant political comment on the disagreement and reconciliation of King Harald Fairhair Halfdanarson and his son Halfdan the Black.. The component maer (maiden) rather than jona (woman) in her nickname may indicate she was, like more of her male counterparts, young and unmarried. Since no other poems have been preserved, perhaps she moved on to other pursuits after a stint at court… We know the name of at least one other woman who was a Viking court poet, Viborg, who was active in Norway in the late 11th century… more female sada characters who are the creations of an author are said to have uttered original verses, which the authors could not have got away with unless their audiences knew that women poets existed.”

P. 64 What then of the famous shield-maidens we know from sagas and popular culture. They’re in Norse texts that could be characterised as a medieval version of the modern historical fantasy genre. Icelandic sagas set in the legendary Scandinavian past and the mythical-heroic portion of Saxo’s History of the Danes recount stories about women warriors who receive training in battle skills and make a career of being Vikings and pirates… These characters are successful for a time, exerting military power that proves more than their opponents can handle, and both the narrators and the other characters seem just as in awe of them as modern audiences. This period of their lives is usually followed by marriage and the remouncing of weapons… … There is nothing strange about retiring from Viking life: most men are not Viking warriors forever either, and unless they die in battle, they use it as a springboard to power and status, becoming kings or rulers… the story of Hervor has a serious subtext about what happens if a man has no sons to inherit him. Hervor’s father is at first reluctant to acknowledge his daughter as a valid heir, but when she’s proven she can hold her own against him, he yields and recognises her right to inherit his sword and status.”