Mary Beard is pretty well public intellectual of the year, after her spirited performance on Question Time, and strong-minded reaction to the flood of misogynist vitriol she received as a result. I was really looking forward to her new Confronting the Classics, but I was a little disappointed on opening it to find a little-edited collection of book reviews.

As I got into the book, however, on a long train journey from Madrid to London – appropriately a swoop through a large expanse of the Roman Empire – my disappointment vanished. Sure the loose thesis that ties it all together – really we can know little of the actual lives of the Ancients, and often what we say has more to do with our “life and times” than their’s – is hardly earth-shattering.

But the ascetic wit and brutal honesty we expect from Beard shines through (she’s an entirely fair reviewer, but doesn’t pull punches or suffer foolish theses gladly) – commenting on Vanessa Collingridge’s Boudica, she notes that the fiction writer of a series about the leader, Manda Scott “comes over as something of a nutter: ‘she now practices and teaches shamanic dreaming and spirituality’ and ‘she firmly believes her subject was given to her by the spirits’ … After this warning… The third volume of her series, comes as a relief (or at least the spirits we sensible enough to finger someone who could write”. (P. 156)

And Beard provide some fascinating details that we do know of ancient lives, and some great anecdotes that we don’t but are worth reading anyway,some supplied by the reviewees, some by Beard herself.

A small sample – in reviewing Giulla Sissa’s Greek Virginity, Beard notes that for the Ancient Greeks virginity was regarded as an open state – they paid no regard to the hymen. The moment of closure came when it sealed around a growing foetus during pregnancy. So the Pythia, the oracle priestess at Delphi, was a virgin,ensuring her openness to the god Apollo. “Christian writers poured scorn on the way she sat (as they claimed) astride a tripod, legs apart,taking up the vapours of prophetic spirit into her vagina.” (P. 31) And that August’s wife Livia put her long life down to drinking wine from Friuli, which is still used in the region’s advertising, whilst we also have recipes for her own treatments for sore throat and nervous exhaustion – both entirely without sinister ingredients, despite her reputation. (P. 129)

And she draws on the analysis of Aloys Winterling’s Caligula: A Biography to convincingly answer the question as to why we have vitriolic portraits of so many senior Roman figures, particularly emperors: the survivors after a regime fell were very keen to lineup with the new forces in power – and slandering the old was a way of buttering up the new. “In the nicest example, Pliny old of a select dinner party with the emperor Nerva in the90s AD , when the conversation turned to Catallus Messalinus, a notorious hatchet man under the previous emperor Domitian (who had recently been assassinated after what was said to be a reign of terror). ‘I wonder what he would have been doing now, if he were alive today? Nerva mused naively. ‘He would have been eating here with us,’ piped up a brave and honest soul.” (P. 143)

Over to archaeology – lovely to learn that at the site of the battle Perugia between Octavian and Anthony’s brother Lucius in 41BC, more than 89 lead slingshots for both sides,with rough inscriptions scratched on them. Beard suggests these were “intended not so much, I imagine, for the enemy to read, but to convey something of the spirit in which they had been dispatched. The are mostly obscene “I am after Fulvia’s clitoris” and “I am after Octavian’s ass’ being typical examples. One, ‘Lucius is bald’ is regarded as Everitt as ‘rather more feeble’. Given the obvious tone of the others, I rather suspect that it is a nice indicator that baldness was seen as a gather physical imperfection in the Roman world than it is today.” (P. 109)

On the “nice story” side, there’s the water dining rooms at Hadrian’s Villa in Rome the guests reclined around a pool of water and one reconstruction steered delicacies to each other on a fleet of boat-plates. “(Slaves would of course be on hand to rescue the beached pickles.)” (p. 169)

Modern classic references are also charted, such as reuses of Cicero’s denunciation of Catiline with “Quousque tandem abuterre, patience?” (Whither at length wilt thou abuse our patience?” in Ben Jonson’s version) as diverse as by Hungarian demonstrators against the ruling Fidesz party in 2012, Congolese protests in 2001 against Kabila, an editorial in El Pais in 1999 on Aznar’s refusal to bring Pinochet to trial, and strikers in Brazilian state universities. (P 85).

Also, sometimes she presents the fascinating questions that the authors she is reviewing failed to ask, such as how did female Greek poets, particularly Sappho, radically subvert the male literary tradition, and explores the reasons an ancient joke book, the Philogelos, still get laughs today. Her answer is that laughing at jokes is a learned trait, with a direct line from the ancients through the Renaissance to us.

So overall this is still a collection of rather mixed essays, not in the class of Beard’s magisterial Pompei, but worth catching up with.

I was following a 1998 guide to walks around London, but luckily the paths were still there and open – and surprisingly accurate.

Eynsford has a well-known ford beside its little humpbacked bridge at the start of the walk; packed on this sunny day with paddling children. Around the bend there were still the Highland cattle billed as on show in 1998, together with some Indian runner ducks in the river.

Then you come to this simple, elegant railway bridge …

Then it was a cool detour into the magnificent Lullingstone Roman villa site – its rich 4th-century dining room mosaic a reminder of the wealth of even the late empire.

But sometimes it’s the humble things that are really interesting – like a simple, effective design that hasn’t changed in centuries…

And the preserved shape of a sandal or shoe – a walker who came this way millennia ago…

The walk continued on past lavender fields, new I think since I was last here a decade or so ago, and the hop fields are still going.

Along the way I was working, without a lot of success, on my tree ID skills. Can anyone identify this one?

Thanks!

“The institutionalisation, in the 14th century, of Sir Thomas Smith’s first and second ‘sorts of men’, the peers and the knights, was a factor in raising the question of what to call the rest. Knights and gentlemen sat at Westminster with the Commons, not the Lords, but were acknowledged members of the ruling. Class. … the rise of the House of Commons had, by 1376, expanded and formalised the ranks of citizens to encompass the burgesses of every English borough. Urban citizens were joined, from 1381 to 1450, by a more formal concept of the legendary yeoman. This rural equivalent of the urban citizen was not at first seen primarily in terms of his role as a freeholding voter in the shire and borough juries or parliamentary elections. Fifteenth-century writers were more likely to see him in military terms.” p. 242

“The economic basis of his status – freehold land and/or capital in the form of farming skills and equipment, was not yet prominent, as it would be in the more economically minded 16th to 18th centuries. … Conceived as a hands-on member of the second estate, shaping, ordering and organising the lower part or ’4th sort’. When 16th-century writers …observed that yeomen and citizens had betrayed their prescribed constitutional role, they meant yeomen were no longer unquestioningly loyal and deferential.” p.243

“The collective nature of the rebellion of 1381′ which involved many communities in communicayon with each other, acting under common banners and slogans, expressed in a common tongue, may be the point at which, in the common mind, commun(it as), which customarily designated a specific, local community, began to be extended, in concept and word, to the common weal, designating (if only tacitly) the entire national community under the authority of a single ruler.” p264

“The spectre of popular rebellion haunted every generation from 1381 to 1649. Like parliamentarians in 1376 and the rebels of 1381 and 1450, the leader of a rising in 1469 ‘denounced the ‘covetous rule’ of ‘sedicious persones’ and called for ‘reformacioun’. The stated object of the [1469] rebellion, writes Wood , ‘was to protect the ‘comonwele of this lond’ against the ‘singular loucour’ of its rulers. Tax, evil advisers and the duty of the ‘trewe commons’ to rise for the commonweal were, by now, familiar themes.” p278

“Between the 14th and the 16th centuries, the cloth industry gradually … Leaked away from the medieval urban centres like Salisbury, Gloucester and Bristol and reproduced itself … Around a large number of market towns in many parts of England. … They we linked, practically, by trafike, [trade] … Thus emerged England’s first national industry… By the mid-15th century it was becoming clear that whole commodity production moved around it was a permanent feature of the English landscape. .. A Trade Policy, a lybel distributed among parliamentarians in 1463, but written earlier, possibly by John Lydgate…. gives us a systematic account of the ideas that influenced that parliament when it introduced legislation regulating cloth making and introducing basic protections for wage workers … claims to be the earliest document of English economic history. It’s topic, explicitly, was ‘the welth of ynglond’.” p.316

Sir John Fortescue in 16th century saw as crucial for Egland’s well being “that the commune people of thys londde are the best fedde, and also the best cledde of any natyon chrysten or hethen.” Some had argued that the commons would be less rebellious if they be poor, he said, as they would rebel less. But in contrast to France, where the power of the nobility was not strongly balanced by a vigorous, independent commonality, the king was too frightened to tax his nobles for fear of rebellion. p. 340

It’s a highly academic collection of essays, but some of them I found fascinating even as a lay reader…
In D. Alan Orr’s chapter
p. 76 “the tumultuous events that overtook England and its neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland during the 17th century saw the first significant attempts to produce a written constitution in the English- speaking world. Unsurprisingly, the position of the Agreements of the People in the development of modern constitutionalism is problematic. Their very written-ness has suggested them as important precursors to the US constitution and the emergence of modern constitutionalism, a development that historians of political thought have traditionally situated at the close of the 18th century; however, these curious documents were the product of a different culture in which memory, custom and the spoken word were as important to the process as the printed and written word.”

There were a number of versions of the Agreements … Says “the key to the success of the Levellers’ Agreements was political accountability, and they had a much more developed sense than most of their fellow radicals that this required not merely elections and the rotation of officers, both at a national level and a local level, nor even merely political and financial accountability. It also required active popular participation.” (p61, Jason Peacey’s chapter)

One of the fascinations of history is trying to understand the mind of people who lived long ago, and how the societies they lived in were organised. That’s particularly true of prehistory, when we have no written texts to guide us – just physical objects.

In How Ancient Europeans Saw the World: Visions, Patterns and the Shaping of the Mind in Prehistoric Times, Peter S. Wells uses one of the most original approaches I have come across in trying to understand the minds of Bronze and Iron Age Europe by thinking about the shape of their world.

I came away from it thinking that an awful lot of archaeological theory ignores the fact that the world these objects were used in is very different from our own. For example, Wells stresses how different objects look by lamplight or candlelight compared to under electric light, as we usually see them in the museum. If we’re going to understand how they were used, how they were understood, the social context, you’ve pretty well got to look at them in the same way.

It’s also fascinating to think how few human-made objects Bronze Age people in particularly would generally have come across – and how they would have stood out against the natural environment. One spectacular object would probably have lingered in the mind, been talked about for decades – whereas we’re bombarded with human-made images every second. And before writing, interpretting objects – perhaps an object that arrived from abroad, with little “story” attached to it would have relied on detailed interpretation of the object itself – much as an archaeologist has to do today.

Or think about landscape. Wells says Bronze Age people (probably 98 per cent plus of them) were involved in ploughing, digging, cultivating, harvesting, threshing, making fences, and constructing buildings… They perceived a physical world with a directness and an intensity that most of us can only try to imagine. .. he or she would have seen the features of the landscape – the fields, trees, fixes, and hedges – as a product of intensive labour, direct bodily engagement, and also as a potential source of the raw materials for sustenance and trade.” (p. 38)

He uses the concept of “ecological psychology” – the idea that an individual’s perception is directly dependent upon the environment in which the perception occurs. “We see things by interacting with them – touching them, handling them, carrying them, using them. The same principle that applies to our perception of landscapes … Somethings to act in – to walk-through, to collect wood in, to harvest cereals in.” (p. 23)

I doubt that all of Wells’ conclusions are right, it would be astonishing if they were, but they’re certainly thought-provoking. So he notes that storage jars, one of the main categories of pottery vessels in use in the Bronze Age, at the only one that have a purposefully roughened surface, and the only one where every vessel has a different pattern of ornament. Wells suggests that this reflected household ownership, and possibly even reflected the field from which each part of the harvest came.

Yet this differentiation gradually diminishes during the Early Iron Age, which Wells suggests reflects reduced anxiety about productivity, and an increasing tendency to regard grain and other produce is just a commodity. By contrast cups, one of the other main categories of pottery, started with limited decorative range in the Early Bronze Age, and were generally quite large, but they gradually got smaller and decoration became much more varied, suggesting individual rather than group use. So Wells suggests, a focus on the landscape was gradually shifting to a greater focus on the social.

And he attributes to Joanna Bruck the fascinating idea that “the notion that prehistoric people distinguished between ritual and secular activities in the way that we do is probably wrong…. Deposits such as those with early Bronze Age pottery in pigs in the ground may well have been made in the context of activities that the participants felt would affect the desired outcome – a bitter harvest, a healthy community, protections from raids by neighbours – but they most likely did not conduct the “ceremony” (if we may call it that) in a way that we would consider “ritual”. It was simply the way things were done.” (p. 86)

He also looks at burials, not with the eyes of the archaeologist, but the eyes of the participant in the ceremony that created the display that the archaeologist finds. It is obvious when you think about it, the ancient people weren’t thinking of what we find when we uncovered the graves that they created when they were taking part in a solemn ritual – often involving feasting. Maybe they were thinking about the final image they would leave with, but that would be in the frame of all of the ceremonies that came before.

One of Wells’ particular concerns is explaining the much-debated transition from the Hallstatt Celtic culture to La Tene. He suggests that this came not from simple exposure to the culture of the Greeks and the Mediterranean, but a much broader interaction with ideas and objects, from as far afield as Central Asia and China, that led to “the emergence of a whole new mode of visualisation” (p. 202).

Traditionally this has been regarded as a trend only seen in elite culture, but Wells says that archaeology has found many objects in non-elite settlements and burials, ” and there is a trend today to see burials as community representations rather than the statements about the deceased”. (p. 206)

This isn’t a terribly accessible book; it’s an academic text, written as such and making few concessions to the general reader, but it’s worth hanging in there for the fascinating ideas that you will encounter.

Even if you have never studied history, you probably have some vague awareness of the Matchgirls’ Strike of 1888 in London – and think of poor waifs, frail girls and young women, victims of vile Victorian exploitation. If you have studied history, you were probably taught that the strike was led by middle-class Fabian, Annie Besant, who provided the leadership that the uneducated East End women simply could not have found from their own ranks.

In either case, what you should do is read Louise Raw’s Striking A Light: The Bryant and May Matchwomen and their Place in History , a spectacular but very readable account of epic original research that has uncovered a very different story from the traditional tale.

It is astonishing that so long after this iconic event no one before Raw had seriously tried to research it, and very sad that no one recorded the participants’ own views before it was too late – as Raw found had been for the Melbourne tailoresses’ strike of 1882-3 (which has considerable parallels with the later strike).

In fact to find out very much at all, Raw had to engage in some serious detective work, and find creative ways to recover knowledge apparently lost in the mists of time. A lot of her information came from the grandchildren of three of the matchwomen – two of the probably strike leaders, Mary Driscoll and Eliza Martin, and Martha Robertson. Raw combines this with census data and a close examination of contemporary accounts of the strike, to paint a picture of a spontaneous, but well-planned and executed, walkout by the women – their own choice, their own action.

Besant played a role, before the action, in attacking the management, which led them to try to force the women to sign letters attesting good treatment – which when the women resisted led to the sacking that precipitated the strike, and afterwards, in helping to collect strike pay (although the workers also found some of their own from their own community), but she was in no way a leader of the strike, and in fact, Raw shows convincingly, was actually opposed to the whole idea of a strike.

There’s much more to this book too than rewriting a colourful fragment of history – Raw says that New Unionism, a major part of British political history, should be dated back to the matchwomen, rather than the dockers’ strike the following year, as is traditional. The two were closely linked by more than geography – Raw makes a detailed case for the ties of marriage and community (both groups having large Irish continents) between matchwomen and dockers. And Raw quotes from a contemporary account of the dockers strike which has John Burns telling a mass meeting: “The matchgirls had formed a union and had got what they wanted, and so had the gas stokers at Beckton, and surely the Dock Labourers could do the same” to cries of “hear hear”. (p. 166)

One lovely aspect of the story is that through their families, Raw is able to trace the subsequent lives of some of the strikers. Mary Driscoll is particularly lovely – she married a dockworkers in 1894, and had 11 children, five of whom survived. He was a violent man, but the story ends well – for as a widow Mary ended up owning and running two shops, a pillar of her community, and she would leave £13 in her will “a reasonable sum for someone born in poverty” (p. 208).

Eliza’s story is much darker – also the victim of domestic violence, family accounts suggest she committed suicide, and Martha’s is one of great fortitude – her husband was gravely wounded in World War I, and she nursed him for many years, but her grandson recallled that “a number of Bryant and May matchwomen were his grandmother’s friends to the end of her life. They used to take trips to the seaside together, what they called their ‘beanos’, which often involved fair amounts of drinking.” (p. 219)

You might have noticed that Raw chooses to speak of “matchwomen” rather than “matchgirls”. It is unarguable that many, probably most, of the ringleaders, and the strikers, were under 18, but Raw makes a strong case that in the terms of the East End, they took on adult-level responsibilities, and that the use of the term girl was used by opponents to denigrate them as mere “factory girls” (a very negative stereotype of the time), and even by supporters to attempt to paint them as vulnerable, weak victims.

Her claim for this as an important foundation of New Unionism is strong also, so this really is a must-read book if you’re interested in British political history. And you should read it soon, because coming up later this year is the 125th anniversary of the strike – and there’s going to be one big beano for it.

Other thoughts from Times Higher Education.

This is a fascinating read, as ever, from this Birkbeck historian, but I’ve no time for a full review so here’s just some interesting points…

“The great expansion in meat-eating in Britain and America only occurred after the 1860s… According to one estimate, meat consumption in Britain almost doubled between the 1860s and the 1890s, and had increased still further by 1914. .. in 1909, Americans consumed on average 51 kg of boneless trimmed meat each year…. by the late 1960s the average person was eating more than 70 kg of such meat a year — or the equivalent in animal flesh of his or her own body weight… Today, the average American consumes a staggering 125 kg of meat a year.” (p 278)

Historically of course what most people ate as meat varied widely. Bourke comes up with a fascinating list from early West Coast America: ” Teal, summer and mallard duck, plover, lark, robin, prairie grouse, quail, snipe, wild geese, swan, wild pigeon, while turkey, grey and white cranes, white and black tailed deer, antelope, beaver, black bear, hare, raccoon, opossum, grey black and fox squirrels and bison. If especially hungry, they might also tuck into the flesh of blackbirds, bluebirds, buzzards, crows, doves, dippers, Eagles, owls, hawks, mockingbirds, ravens, mice, gophers, prairie dogs, panthers, skunks, foxes, wildcats, coyotes, wolves or mustangs.” (p. 277)

Now of course, we’re down to cows, pigs and poultry – with a heavy stress on the last.

“At the turn-of-the-century, only around 10% of the world grain was fed to animals… In America today, around 60% of the grain is fed to animals. This shift is even more remarkable when it is noted that the animals being fed grain in 1900 were primarily those working in the field … As opposed to animals raised dissatisfied people’s carnivorous appetites.” (p278)

And in echoes of today … “A highly publicised incident of alleged cannibalism took place in Hampshire. at the Andover workhouse male paupers had been put to work crushing bones use as fertiliser. In 1845 a local farmer and member of the board of guardians discovered that the paupers was so hungry that they were fighting over the bones in order to eat them. To great consternation, it was revealed that some of the bones came from the local cemetery. The gruesome story caused uproar, forcing the government to institute a Parliamentary enquiry into what happened. The scandal was a godsend for people protesting against the stringent new Poor Law… The master … was accused of introducing increasingly harsh measures to prevent the workhouse from becoming overcrowded by the growing numbers of unemployed men and women. The English gentleman said every person in Britain was ” entitled to food – it is his inherent right, as much as the air he breathes but he is bound to burn it honestly. If we cannot employ him – if we cannot accept his Labour – or if he is incapable of work – still he is one of us, and must not be shut up to gnaw the bones of dead men. policy and Christianity teach us otherwise”. ” (p319)

Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the fall of Rome and the making of Christianity in the West, 350-550AD has been hovering around the middle of my to-read pile for some time. Fascinating topic, fascinating period, but 530 pages of text, 758 pages with all of the accoutrements, made it just a bit daunting. Perfect for the holidays though, and so gripping that I ripped through it in three rainy days.

This is a period of the history of the West of Rome that we’ve tended to regard as dark and mysterious, but Peter Brown reveals that there’s a huge amount known. By starting with a theological debate, which has ripples and echoes throughout Christian history, he’s create a frame that doesn’t particularly grab me personally, but it creates a logic for exploring all over the western empire, primarily through the lives of prominent Christian figures, but in the process shedding lot of lots of obscure but fascinating corners that usually barely get a mention.

One key theme running through it is the persistence of what the Romans called Amor civicus, as embodied in the endowment of improvements: “At Calama for instance (modern Guelma in Algeria, which stood at the head of the Seybouse valley on the edge of the plateau of Roman Numidia, Annia Aelia Restituta received no less than five statues, and one of her father, so as to render thanks for her exceptional liberality to her fellow citizens in adding stateliness to her home town.” (p64) This continues, Brown attests, with bounteous evidence, well into the fourth and fifth centuries, and was a cause of considerable angst to Christian leaders, who thought the money should have been going into the church. Even in 421 the nobles of a blackened Trier sought from the newly created emperor Constanitius II funds to celebrate his accession through circus games – this was what was though to hold the city together in tough times, not the prayers of saints. (p. 452)

Another concept that proved both persistent but also malleable was otium. “It had unmistakable aristocratic overtones. Symmachus [one of Brown's key characters] and his friends enjoyed long periods of otium in the countryside outside Rome or in Campaniea. ‘Tired of the affairs of the city’, they liked to ‘tame their great minds in solitude’ on their estates. ‘Turning over the learned writings of the men of old’ in the well-watered gardens of their villas, they renewed their allegiance to the culture that was supposed to make them truly noble.” When Augustine was seeking to encourage his followers, he put forward a programme for such a period – of Christina writings and reflection, aiming to show it was “possible to enjoy, through contemplation, the supreme happiness of a life lived in the presence of God”. (p. 164)

After Symmachus, Ausonius is one of the next key characters in Through the Eye of the Needle. “His family nursed a claim to ancient nobility that had been lost a century before in the civil wars of Gaul of the 260s. Ausonius’s grandfather had come to Aquitaine as a refugee from Autun … In reality, he and his family were little more than local landowners and town councillors who had risen by their talents. … One suspects that Valentinian I looked on favor on Ausonius in part so as to establish a comfortable relationship with Bordeaux and with Ausonius’s pupils, the landowners of Aquitaine. [How the empire had come down in the world.] In 379 he even became consul for the year. The old professor (now in his mid-sixties) was put on display. He was dressed in the same set of heavy, gold-stitched consular robes that had once been worn by none other than the emperor Constantius II.” (p. 188)

Otium gives him the chance to explore in a poem his “little family estate” – one of the most precise pictures we have from antiquity of what wealth was. Sounds pretty pleasant really – about 650 acres, of which 430 were woodland, a source of timber plus pitch for ships and wine amphorae, 124 for the plough, 100 for vineyards and 50 for meadows. Its warehouses could hold two years’ store of food. It was an account of what he saw as modestly appropriate wealth – which would have brough in around 1,000 solidi a year. (p. 191)

As both those sets of details of show, this is no dry theological tome; Brown is seeking to present a complete, detailed picture of his characters’ lives and those of their contemporaries. Not a time machine, but almost as close as we are likely to get.

Brown also drops in an occasional fascinating comparison with Confucian China coming to terms with the arrival of Buddhism. He compares the 4th-century empire, with Christian taking hold, to “that of the Chinese mandarins …. An official of the Ming empire reported that the Buddhists in his province had shown great zeal for building bridges. This was a public venture of which any traditional Chinese gentleman was bound to approve. But the official learned that the Buddhists were building bridges for entirely the wrong reasons. They were acting on the belief that they would gain personal karmic merit in another existence by contributing to the building of such a bridge…. The mandarin was shocked…. ‘This is all contrary to the spirit of good works!’” (p. 90) And this dry note: “it is an observed fact that other-worldly religions … often manage to become very rich very soon. As Chinese observers noted … there was a lot of wealth to be gotten from fo-shih – “Buddha business”. (p. 523)

He’s also exploring big themes, such as the rise of the villa in Roman life. He doesn’t deny that these often show, and were designed to flaunt, great wealth, but he denies the certainty of this wealth and that there was a “lost middle” between their inhabitants and the poor. Country wealth was never independent of the cities and the government, he says. “Aquitaine was a rich agrarian region, which furnished supplies to the Rhine frontier … even if not all of its members had made their way to Trier to become courtiers as Ausonius had done. (p. 196)” Rich villas only appear, Brown adds, “in regions that served as corridors of empire”. This was the last flowering of a belle epoque he says – “the moment that the Roman state and its fiscal energy began to wobble, as a result of civil wars and barbarian invasions … many villas survived as economic centres. They served as places for storage and processing wine and oil. But they became faceless. Their owners left no strong impression on them. For they no longer served as the blazons of new wealth.” (p. 197) (McMansions anyone?)

As things fall apart, the need to hold on to a labour force happy to run when it gets a chance is another persistent theme. “The bishops who gathered at the council of Macon in 585 declared that slaves who had been manumitted on the estates of the church … could not be reenslaved…But … old Roman law had insisted that freed slaves should continue to render obsequiuum – personal service to their masters. This law was maintained with particular vigor in the church.” (p. 499)

Brown’s also big on trying to get into the heads of the ancient world, rather than accepting later, sometimes lazy, understandings. So, he says, the frequent complaints about religious ascetics, such as Priscillian, (an interesting character who welcomed women followers as the equal of men – bound to get him into trouble) were not for the same reasons that shocks us – not the self-mortification, the denial or marriage or the abandonment of social duties, but the fact that such ascetics built close links with wealthy donors. He quotes the pagan emperor Julian “They are men … who by making small sacrifices … gain much … from all sources … levying tribute on specious pretenses which they call ‘alms’.” (p. 214)

And he says the idea that wealth came from the Christian God was late in arriving. Around 400AD Paulinus of Nola was still trying to assert this, clearly against the view that wealth came through family, wealth came from nature, or the bounty of the emperor. But it could remain theirs so long as they followed the will of God. (p. 238)

Brown explores both the continuity of the period, and its shocks. So he finds that while Ausonius’s contemporary and friend Paulinus had renounced his wealth in the 390s, as late as the late 6th century a descendant of his brother, Leontius, the last of the line and bishop of Bordeaux, had refurbished his ancestor’s villa at Preignac, and lying back on the traditional Roman stibadium couch, was still referring back to Ausonius’s poetry. (p. 218)

He also looks at the various ways in which individuals came to terms with the collapsing of the empire. Prosper went for the irrelevance of the state: “his Augustinianism convinced him that nothing in the past contributed to what happened in the present, just as nothing – no social advantage, no cultural gift, no ascetic labour – could precede the workings of grace in the individual heart.” (p. 430) More practically, the super-rich noble families, with estates spread across the empire, could no longer control them, they had to settle down to one local region, one area where they could exert personal control – and so it was that the church, which hadn’t really got that rich in form terms, came to be one of the richest forces going. And families husbanded their recourses by dedicating girls to the church as forced nuns, to save on dowries, and boys pushed into the clergy, renouncing their family wealth, which didn’t please the church, which hoped they’d bring it with them. (p. 439)

There’s lots of fascinating women in this period – Brown explores in some detail the great widow Melaniia the elder, who supported the Nicene cause. “She arrived in Alexandria with a shop loaded with gold and silver to help the monks of the Nile Delta, whose lay support had been cut off by the repressive measures of the pro-Arian emperor Valens. Going on to Palestine, she helped feed 3,000 Egyptian monks in exile.” (p. 261) And many more…

Since Laura Gowing’s Domestic Dangers, there’s been something of a surge of books exploring women’s “ordinary” life in early modern England through court records, of which City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in early Modern London by Eleanor Hubbard is one of the latest.

That’s a demonstration of just how a rich a source these records are; the material can be approached from many different directions – whether to study the (alleged) deviance for which the court hearing took place, or to understand the assumptions about “proper” or “ordinary” behaviour that lay behind them. The latter approach is that taken by Hubbard on the London consistory (religious) court records between 1570 and 1640, with due notice of the fact that the ordinary life, of a maidservant, wife, widow or daughter of course would never appear before the courts.

The date limits are set by the records – when they become fairly regular, to when they fall apart before the Civil War. Hubbard also adds in other records and recent research to provide as complete as possible a picture of the life-cycle of a London woman – arriving around age 12-14 from the countryside, going into service, getting married around 24-26, then quite likely widowed and running a household after around 15 years, possibly for many years, or, more likely, remarrying.

The cases fall into two main groups – defamation charges relating to claims falling under ecclesiastical sway – mostly sexual, and those affirming and dissolving marriages (not divorce as we understand it, but “separation from bed and board”, the right to live apart). Usually men claimed adultery, women cruelty.

Hubbard tells us that the defamation cases mainly come from the poorer end of the “middling sort” – “they were not too dignified to wash their dirty laundry in public, but could afford to at least pay the fees to begin a case”. Those involved in marriage cases were richer individuals – the cases were expensive to prosecute and at stake were often portions or alimony of some size.

This is very much an academic monograph, but for its breed a very readable, jargon-light one – entirely of interest to the general reader who wants to get under the skin of early modern London. It would make a great source for anyone wanting to collect real life detail or minor characters for historical fiction.

So we learn that the wages for maidservants were usually around 30 shillings a year – but the quality of food and lodgings, and the wealth of the family, might matter more – with gifts and tips from visitors, the possibility of a little casual theft, and the chance of gifts or legacies. So around the middle there’s Elizabeth Chatfield, the wife of a tailor, who in 1613 reported that she paid her servant Anne Clare 40 shillings a year “beside her vails which are ordinarily worth 20 shillings per annum”. (p. 35)

Hubbard notes, interestingly, that maids would typically have moved quite a lot around London – so by the time they married they’d probably have a pretty good “map” of the city in their head. Partly, Hubbard says, this was because poaching a neighbour’s maid was bad form, partly because they were always on the trawl for marriage opportunities. She notes that in 1572 Elizabeth Doughty, 30, broke her contract with her existing family to move to the household of William Brown, a middle-aged tailor with neither wife nor children. After a few months she married him. (p. 36)

When the maid stepped up to be a wife, Hubbard explains, she was taking on risks certainly, of what we’d now call domestic violence, or abandonment or financial disaster, but there was also the expectation that within her own sphere of her household, she was expected to be sovereign. But there was no sense of being captive within the home – socialising with the neighbours in local alehouses and standing chatting in the street were normal behaviour (although maids visiting alehouses was less reputable. So when Katherine Ward and her husband on midsummer Sunday were in an alehouse, they witnessed two female neighbours who had been at odds being brought together for a reconciliation, the husband of one saying “Come on, Nell, what shall we have Goodwife Bird and you fall out for a few babbling words? I will make you friends if all the ale in this house will make you friends.” He then called for drink, and everyone did – an important part of the ceremony being that everyone drank to the bottom of their glass – symbolising the end of the ill will.

So what were the insults that led to defamation cases? Hubbard quotes a great example that ranges across many of them:
“Wealth, maternity and sexual honesty all come into play in one 1611 quarrel. In Chancery Lane, Elizabeth Chare and Elizabeth Jacob fell out ‘about some building which the said Elizabeth Chare her husband had erected near to her the said Elizabeth Jacob’s house and had thereby hindered her light of her house”. Mistress Jacob threatened Mistress Chare wiith the law, claiming that she had £20 to spend in the suit. Mistress Chare immediately changed the topic to a different kind of wealth, telling her opponent that ‘she was as good a woman as she was though she had not £20 to spend’ and perhaps even ‘something better’. ‘Wtherein art thou so good as I?’ inquired Mistress Jacob, Mistress Chare declared: ‘I have 10 children and thou hast never a one. ‘Ay,’ her childless rival said, ‘you have 10 children indeed but who got them? Your husband … got not of them, but alas, poor ninnyhammer, he … is fain to father them.’ A snide remark about one of Mistress Chare’s daughters then prompted the outraged mother to storm inside, retorting that ‘Elizabeth Jacob never had such a jewel.’” (p. 175)

Hubbard moves on through widowhood and remarriage with a great wealth of similarly detailed material – we worry today about privacy, well for widows and widowers there was none such. In 1625 Joan Neville, a widow, kept a cook shop at Pye Corner, with two rival suitors for her attraction. James Edwards, a clothworker, the wealthier won out, as his rival understood when he saw them both at a victualling house in Windmill Court nearby, “sitting close together”, clearly with “love and goodwill betwixt”. The shoemaker whose wife ran the alehouse held their hands together, saying “God give you joy, and God bless you together.” An oysterwoman offered to be a bridesmaid, and onlookers escorted the couple to Joan’s house, where more beer was consumed by all, and Edwards announced they’d consummate the union that evening. A friend visited the next morning and found that certainly so, with Joan sitting on Edward’s knee. (p. 246)

City Women provides a reminder of the long-term nature of the capital – I’m not a fan of psychogeography, but there’s a sense in which places have a natural demographic and cultural shape that very much applies to London – 77% of the women in Hubbard’s cases were immigrants to London, and Hubbard notes that many of the defamation cases in particular arose from a fluid society in which jostling for status was a perpetual state. Not so different, then, to today.

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867″ (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male’”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”

p. 173 In the pages of the Englishwoman’s Review and elsewhere, suffragists never ceased to assault the conditions of English marriage as outmoded and ‘barbaric’ inheritances of a past world. Speaking of and denying differences in male and female intellect to the Manchester Ladies Literary Society in March 1868, Lydia Becker spoke of ‘the long dark of our race’ and ‘the dawn of a brighter day’. In private she wrote that the paper ‘made quite a commotion’ in the Manchester Anthropological Society.”

p. 177 “Developments in the 1870s were to be less favourable, even as the relationship between advanced liberalism, radicalism and the leadership of the working class movement drew closer. The increasing place of trade union concerns within that leadership did not encourage claims for women’s suffrage. Nor did Gladstone’s ministry encourage the cause… And the retreat of Lancashire Liberalism and the discarding of older political machines dating from the Anti-Corn Law League movement may also have affected this heartland of the women’s suffrage movement.”

p. 60 In the 19th century Britain maintained free entry to all foreigners and prided itself on its rights of asylum, one of the famed ‘English’ liberties…. In the 13th century Jews and Flemings were deported, amongst others, in the 16th and 17th centuries, religious recusants of varying persuasions. From 1823, however, to the end of the century, no refugee was expelled from Britain or prevented from coming…. IN 1848 an act was put on the statute books for two years, but was never implemented…. As Lord Malmesbury put it in 1852 in a moment of English complacency: ‘I can well conceive the pleasure and happiness of a refugee, hunted from his native land, on approaching the shores of England, and the joy with which he first catches sight f them; but they are not greater than the pleasure and happiness every Englishman feels in knowing that his country affords the refugee a home and safety”.

From Hall’s chapter “The nation within and without”, pp. 179-233
p. 180 “There was no legal category ‘citizen’ until 1981 when the British Nationality Act created a number of different forms of British citizenship. From 1986 citizenship would only be accord to UK-born or naturalised people and their UK-born or naturalised children, and three categories of citizenship were established: British citizenship, British Dependent Territories citizenship and British oversees citizenship. Prior to the legislation of the late 20th century, all peoples of the British Empire enjoyed the status of subject, subject to the laws and rules of the state, sharing the so-callled ancient liberties of the protection of the crown.” (p. 180)

p. 182 “It was not until the reaction against east European Jewish immigration in the late 19th century that migration into Britain was first regulated with the Aliens Act of 1905…. The beginnings of decolonisation in the post-war era inspired the 1948 Nationality Act, which reaffirmed the rights of subjecthood to all members of the British Empire. This was an act designed … to maintain Britain’s unique position as the ‘metropolitan motherland’ and demonstrate to the world that the UK was still the centre of a great commonwealth of nations. … This definition opened the way to the arrival of large numbers of West Indian, South Asian and Irish migrants in the 1950s and 60s, which led in turn to the Immigration Act of 1962 that differentiated on racial grounds who had the right to enter Britain.”

Now that’s what you call an insult…
Thomas Carlyle thought democracy brought “blockheadedism, gullibility, bribeability, amenability to beer and balderdash”. (p. 185)

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

p. 52 “Co-operative society membership gave an entitlement to the dividend – a cash return from the members’ local society at the end of every quarter or half-year. For Beatrice Potter, one of the main motives ‘that impels the rank and file of members … is the ‘divi’…. her criticism of these ‘dividend hunters’ who failed to engage with the ideology of the movement has contributed to the establishment of a ‘dominant narrative within labour history of the limited appeal of consumer co-operation’.”

p. 136 A pamphlet for the Co-operative Women’s Guild “attempted to ‘bring home to every woman the power and danger of the Capitalist Combines’ and to inform its members how ‘sometimes the separate capitalist firms in an industry join together in one great firm, as in the Soap Trade. When a Combine is supreme, it constantly restricts production in order to keep up prices’.(Indeed a 1921 survey found Co-op soap was consistently cheaper than that of the Soap Manufacturers’ Association members, even though its production was lower.

p. 154 “The movement was founded in the 19th century on a commitment to sell pure and unadulterated food at fair prices, and this remained of central importance to its work in the arena of consumer protection during the 20th century. The co-operative movement was involved with … food safety and testing, the problems caused by profiteering, and ensuring an equitable supply of food during periods of work … During the Second World War … it provided advice to civilians on a range of consumer issues. In the 1950′s, the cooperative movement actively supported the BSI’s Kite-Mark scheme, and in 1960 it was responsible for sponsoring and publishing the first book that explained to consumers their legal rights.

p. 179 “Co-operators were continually reminded that an alliance with the Labour Party was necessary, as independent representation on local councils and in general elections would involve ‘tak[ing] on all comers, including the Labour candidates … That would be political folly.’ However, this in no way meant that relations were always amicable. Sidney Pollard argues that, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, the ‘natural groundswell which drove the Co-operative movement into the arms of the Labour Party seemed to be irresistible’. However, an exploration of relations between the two parties at a grassroots level during the period 1914-60 challenges any assumptions of this being a wholly ‘natural’ or ‘irresistible’ alliance.”

p. 216 “Peter Gurney in his study of the movement from 1870 to 1930, argued that ‘just as there were historical alternatives to mass production, so too were there alternatives to mass consumption’ and the co-operative movement was one of these…. He argues however that whatever revolutionary potential the cooperative movement did posses, was lost by 1930, and during the interwar period the fact that the movement could not complete with the shopping experience offered by stores like Marks and Spencer and Lewis’s (‘the stress on utility meant that cooperative stores did not usually stock the latest fashionable designs’) is evident.

At the core of her theory is a belief that at some time in human evolution, possibly as long as 2 million years ago, going back to Homo habilis or erectus, with what distinguished us from other similar species was that the young started to be too expensive for an individual mother to care for, so she had to rely on others – usually female relatives (“allomothers”), to provide extensive care and provisioning for the child, and the child had a better chance of survival if it was good at encouraging that care by its behaviour. This can also be used to explain human menopause.

I don’t by any means agree with all of it – there’s a few parts of rather crude socio-biology type analysis about modern societies – but an interesting read.

I found academic backing for that instinct in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, in which she concludes (talking here about the awful One Hyde Park in London where apparently the penthouses have bulletproof glass, iris scanners, purified air and panic rooms) “no matter how much military hardware is installed, the aim of creating a maximum security environment to make people feel safer is doomed to failure because … security is as much an emotional as a physical state”. (p. 66) (Even the attempt by owners to secure themselves against stamp duty has apparently failed.)

There’s evidence, as Minton wrote recently in the Guardian, that CCTV makes people feel less secure. I’d very much like to get rid of the one in our garden – and not just because of its recent controversy. Minto: “One of the most important studies is by criminologist Jason Ditton, who carried out a study for the Scottish Office of CCTV in Glasgow, which found that recorded crime actually increased after CCTV had been installed …. the majority of people supported its introduction and believed that it would make them feel safer, but the findings after CCTV was put in showed that there was no improvement in feelings of safety.” (p. 169)

She reports on the case of a Dutch architect brought to Liverpool astonished by public housing estates surrounded by walls and CCTV. Hans Van der Heijiden, she reports, worked for six years with local people in Fazakerley, consulting on a proposed scheme, more continental in design and relying on the presence of people for security, but the “Secured by Design” certificate was unlikely to be granted on this basis, so the scheme fell through, the architect was sacked, and a new one built a “traditional”, prison-like structure. His words on consultation are telling: “The consultation process was a big book with procedures we had to follow with boxes to tick. An enormous amount of money was spent on it – venues were rented and bus services were provided.” But their support for his scheme was ignored.

Minton looks at people living in gated communities, who when they go out into the “normal world” feel suddenly far more insecure and even actively frightened. “When she visits her son in his terraced house, she is aware that the people walking past outside are ‘just inches away’ from his front room…. ‘Would I worry if I didn’t live her? Possibly not,’ she said.” (p. 80) For all of us, Minton notes, unexpected events, like the doorbell ringing, have become much rarer – even friends who are in the neighbourhood are likely, with mobiles, to phone first – and the phone will tell us who’s calling. “There is a flip side to the certainty and predictability which has come with the explosion of new technology, which is that tolerance and appreciation of the unexpected recedes, while reliance on that sense of certainty and feeling of control over the environment grows.” (p. 81)

Minton’s written previously on the privatisation of so many of our public spaces – the way security guards chase off young people, the homeless and (I declare an interest here) political campaigners and leafletters. Ground Control looks at those commercial districts that have undergone redevelopment and “regeneration”, from Liverpool One to Canary Wharf, and quotes Henri Lefebvre, who almost 40 years ago said that that the consequence of treating places simply as a product to sell to consumers could create units of near identical places, to the same tick box recipe. (p. 54) Malls are the perfect example, but so sad that so many city centres are going the same way. (I fear for the so-called “Midtown” in London.)

She also writes on the comprehensive debunking of the “Broken Windows” theory of crime prevention – on which so much of the last Labour government’s policies were based, with its focus on tackling anti-social behaviour, despite the fact that only 16% of people told a recent British crime survey that it was a big or fairly big problem in their area. And of the way that generalist authority figures, such as park wardens, who did a range of jobs, have been replaced by people whose only role is to enforce penalties, to crack down, producing a very different relationship to those with whom they come in contact.

Minton’s also critical of many approaches to “social capital”, saying this agenda, relying on political scientist Barbara Arneil “overlooks the fact that lack of cohesion is driven not so much by a decline in civis participation as by the enormous gap in levels of trust between privileged and deprived groups, and within deprived groups, which is why fear of crime is so much higher in the poorest parts of the country, where living conditions are hardest…. It is far more likely that networks of social capital will only benefit those who know each other, which means that segregation will persist. … it is this question of trust between strangers that Jane Jacobs was so concerned with.” (p. 172.) While I can see Minton’s point here, I do think she may be being unduly pessimistic – based on my own local experiences.

But I’ll finish with a lovely quote she unearthed – I suspect I’ll use it again…. “The morals of our children are ten times worse than formerly.” Lord Ashley, 1823. About time we started to get over such panics…