Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

Don’t work for royalty

May 31, 2006 – 9:14 am

Margaret Gwynnethe, the wife of Stephen Vaughan and mother of the Protestant author and John Knox-champion Anne Lock, was a silkwoman at the court of Henry VIII, serving particularly his two most “Protestant” queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr.

After her death on 16 September 1544, her husband wrote to a court official asking for the £360 that Catherine Parr owed for her materials and labour. In January he still hadn’t been paid and wrote again. (There doesn’t seem to be a final conclusion to this; perhaps he was never paid?)

In 1544 £360 was an enormous sum – for comparison Lady Grace Mildmay was a few years later maintaining a family on £130 a year.

From Felch, S.M. The Collected Works of Anne Vaughan Lock, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999.)

(Quite a number of Margaret’s letters are in the State Papers of Henry VIII.)

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Thailand – Getting Worse

May 31, 2006 – 8:28 am

Thailand is supposedly one of the great economic and social success stories of 20th-century development. But as poor old East Timor (the region’s newest state) struggles to restore stability, the state of the Thai nation isn’t looking so great either.

After months of foot-dragging, officials have ordered a government forensics team to exhume 300 unmarked graves in Pattani province. Human-rights activists suspect that these unknown corpses might include suspected Muslim insurgents who were abducted and executed by government death squads. Nearly 1,300 people have died in the 30 months since violence re-erupted in Thailand’s impoverished deep south, home to some three million Muslims.

The area was not much more than a century ago an independent sultanate, Pattani, something that the Thai state has since tried to suppress. I didn’t adequately realise at the time, but when the Bangkok Post ran, about a decade ago, a feature on the archaeology of the area and the sultanate, it was displaying some political courage.

The Thai “national story” runs that very nearly everyone is “Thai” – some 95 per cent – a figure that makes no sense at all as you get to know the country, for not only are there the Muslims in the South, but a great many Khmer and Laos in Isaan (the northeast) and what are known as the “hilltribes” in the North.

In the “nationbuilding” of the past 150 years all of those realities have been suppressed. But I fear that has stored up future trouble. Were you to be a young journalist looking to set up a base as a stringer, to be in the right place at the right time, Thailand might not, sadly, be a bad choice.

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The maturing Net

May 31, 2006 – 8:07 am

The cash spent on internet advertising in the UK will outstrip that outlayed in national newspapers by the end of this year, a major buyer has predicted.

The related factors of growth in broadband usage and declining newspaper circulation appear to have justified the hype. “Reach is what advertisers want most,” says the report. “National newspapers still have lots of it, but less reach means less ad money.”

And it must be some further sort of coming of age when MySpace has its first UK “pop star” creation story, quickly followed by its first not-really-MySpace scandal.

I Wish I Was a Punk Rocker (With Flowers in My Hair), [Sandi] Thom’s quirky single, is tipped to become next week’s No 1. Her rise is already the stuff of music industry myth.
Thom, 24, from Macduff, Banffshire, was awarded a million-pound deal with RCA/SonyBMG after broadcasting internet concerts from her flat in London. Audiences rose from 70 to an estimated 70,000 people during the 21 Nights From Tooting tour and included a top executive from RCA/SonyBMG, who signed Thom for a five-album deal.

Since I first heard this on Radio Four last night, and read it in The Times this morning, I suspect this will be a case of any publicity is good publicity. And good on her – I’m no music buff, but she sounds like a pretty pure singer/songwriter with a guitar, decent lyrics and a catchy beat.

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The change from medieval to early modern manners

May 30, 2006 – 1:33 pm

From “Orders for Household Servantes; first devised by John Haryngton, in the Yeare 1566, and reneued by John Haryngton, Sonne of the saide John, in the Yeare 1592”

VI. Item, That no man make water within either of the courts, uppon paine of, every tyme it shal be proved, 1d.

VII. Item, That no man teach any of the children any unhonest speeche, or baudie word, or othe, on paine of 4d.

VIII. Item, That no man waite at the table without a trencher in his hand, except it be uppon some good cause, on paine of 1d.

You can just imagine the servingmen grumbling about all these new-fangled rules and controls…

From: Hughey, R. John Harington of Stepney: Tudor Gentleman. His Life and Works, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1971.

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A day of history

May 30, 2006 – 9:13 am

“British Day” to commemorate the Magna Carta? Not surprising to find the Telegraph is the paper most prominently reporting a History Today finding that June 15 is the preferred date for a new national day. How prescient of the barons to pick mid-summer.

*****

More seriously, a letter has been uncovered that appears to prove that in 1950 the US approved the killing of Korean refugees from the North, for fear that they might be a vehicle for communist agents to enter the South.

The letter, dated the day of the army’s mass killing of South Korean refugees at No Gun Ri in 1950, is the strongest indication yet that such a policy existed for all US forces in Korea, and the first evidence that that policy was known to upper ranks of the US government.

“If refugees do appear from north of US lines they will receive warning shots, and if they then persist in advancing they will be shot,” wrote the ambassador, John J Muccio, in his message to the Assistant Secretary of State, Dean Rusk.

The letter reported on decisions made at a high-level meeting in South Korea on 25 July 1950, the night before the 7th US Cavalry Regiment shot the refugees at No Gun Ri.

Estimates vary on the number of dead at No Gun Ri. American soldiers’ estimates ranged from under 100 to “hundreds” dead; Korean survivors say about 400, mostly women and children, were killed at the village 100 miles (160km) south-east of Seoul, the South Korean capital. Hundreds more refugees were killed in later, similar episodes, survivors say.

The report provokes the question as to why it is that, among the broadly “democratic” nations, the US military’s seems to be the worst on human rights. (Of course it is still nothing like as bad as non-democratic state – no argument there.) Is it some problem with the US system that reduces civilian oversight and control, or is it something about lack of education and knowledge of the rest of the world that produces, as in this case, a panicky, hysterical, reaction to the challenge of “the Other”?

*****

In the “you couldn’t make it up” class, a perfectly cast “mild-mannered American accountant” is the first man outside Asia to trace his ancestry directly to Genghis Khan. In a neat piece of proof that race has absolutely no biological meaning at all (as opposed to cultural meaning, of which it has all too much), the accountant can trace his ancestry by documents to the Windermere area of northern Britain – so of course he’s “white”, in so far as that means anything at all…
*****

A Turkish museum director has been arrested after it was found that some of the “Lydian” artefacts on display in his museum were fakes. The report says they “belonged to Creosus” … hmmm. But still, you have to wonder how often this goes on. Suspect this can’t be the only case ever.

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An astonishing receipt (recipe)

May 29, 2006 – 2:06 pm

I’ve been reading With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman Lady Grace Mildmay 1552-1620. She was a highly religious woman, with plenty of things in her life – a thoroughly unpleasant husband, a father who left her almost penniless at the behest of her mother and sister – to encourage her to trust in God, for want of other alternatives.

But it seems the real passion of her life was medicine, and she must have spent a huge percentage of her meagre income on the medications to treat her neighbours and callers, and read everything she could get her hands on medical matters.

One of her favourite treatments was a balm that she made herself containing “24 types of roots, 68 kinds of herbs, 14 types of seeds, 12 sorts of flowers, 10 kinds of spices, 20 types of gum, 6 different purgatives, 5 different cordials”. That’s what you call a recipe.

I’ve pasted it below the fold – read it and think of the labour involved…
(I think the “standing in horse dung” was probably a method of heating – the temperature in a good-size compost heap, such as her household would surely have boasted, was probably pretty constant.)
read more »

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