* Marina Warner is an author for whom I have enormous respect. In this excellent piece in the TLS, she explores the meaning and significance of the fictional, quasi-fictional and non-fictional apocalypes on our screens today. Think of its as Baudrillard grounded in the flesh.

* This review of a biography of James Hogg certainly made me want to read the book, although it suggests it might not be for those of delicate sensibilities, or stomaches. It reminds me that that Australian country term for testicles is “bush oysters” – that give you a clue?

* A satirical thoughout experiment in Cro-Magnon science fiction? That’s how you might describe this Brad DeLong post. If that doesn’t seem to make much sense, try it for yourself.

* A Booklist on the subject of lesbians in Paris and London in the early 20th century. (Now that should bring some search traffic – although they’ll be horribly disappointed.)

* Stories in America is taking a roadtrip through “Red” America and asking the questions of the day of “ordinary” people. The results are interesting, and frightening. So much for the Land of the Free, at least in Texas:

“It would hurt your job search if a potential employer heard you criticize Bush?

Of for sure, it could hurt. If I were lockstep in agreement with the Bush administration, there would be no issue. You do learn to conform. It’s very common. You learn the hard way. I consider it a rabid form of Republicanism. It’s not like the east coast Republicanism of the first Bush administration. That was completely different. Those Republicans don’t recognize these Republicans, but these Republicans are the ones who are dominating.”

On 10 May 1790 Sir Benjamin Hammett brought a bill before the House of Commons “for altering the Sentence of burning Women”, which was to finally abolish the punishment of being burnt at the stake for petty treason (killing of a husband) and high treason (almost invariably “coining” – making fake or adulterated coins). The Bill became law on 5 June.

(I might note at this point that this is not a post for those prone to nightmares.)

There’s little around on the internet on the issue, beyond this draft article about the attitudes of the period that may have led to the abolition. (And an interesting case of Nimbyism, in that it suggests the moving of the site of execution from semi-rural Tyburn to heavily built-up Newgate may have played a part in the change.)

Sir Benjamin was remembered in Notes and Queries in the 19th century, but seems to have been otherwise little noted.

N&Q reports that he told parliament this was

“One of the savage remains of Norman policy, disgracing our statute book, as the practice did the common law.”

The replacement punishment still meant being hung by the neck until dead, but when you read an account of the death of Eleanor Elsom in Lincoln in 1722, that does sound like a mercy. Like most women in the 18th century (except occasionally when practical arrangements went wrong, as in the famous case of Catherine Hayes in 1726, when the executioner was said to be drunk), she was, it seems, dead before the fire reached her, but what she had endured first …

“She was clothed in a cloth ‘made like a shift’, saturated with tar, and her limbs were also smeared with the same inflammable substance, while a tarred bonnet had been placed on her head. She was brought out of the prison barefoot, and, being put on a hurdle, was drawn on a sledge to the place of execution near the gallows. Upon arrival, some time was passed in prayer, after which the executioner placed her in a tar barrel, a height of three feet against the stake. A rope ran through a pulley in the stake, and was placed around her neck, she herself fixing it with her hands. Three irons also held her body to the stake, and the rope being pulled tight, the tar barrel was taken aside and the fire lighted. The details in the ‘Lincoln Date Book’ state that she was probably quite dead before the fire reached her, as the executioner pulled upon the rope several times whilst the irons were being fixed.” (From William Andrews, Bygone Punishments, 1899 quoted in “Sentence of Death By Burning For Women” in The Journal of Legal History, Vol 5, No 1, May 1984, pp. 44-59; p. 47).

As Sir Benjamin told Parliament, this was gender inequality, for men convicted of the same offenses were no longer subject to drawing and quartering and “women should not receive a more dreadful punishment than men”. Plus “it had been proved by experience that the shocking punishment did not prevent the crime”. (p. 55)

Interestingly there seems to have been little debate, and almost unanimous support for the Bill, in, as Sir Benjamin put it, “the cause of humanity”.

There’s a very brief outline of Sir Benjamin’s background, from a Taunton perspective, here. But I thought he deserved a bit more recognition as the architect of a small step on the road to civilisation. It would take another two centuries (not, you’d have to say in the broad sweep of these things a bad rate of progress), to finally, definitely, end the barbarism of the death penalty in Britain.

History, a Technorati tag

There’s nothing new about “idiots’ guides” or shortcuts for those who want to write that exam essay without reading the text on which it is supposed to be based. I’ve just been reading a fascinating essay on Elizabethan and Jacobean examples.

The merchant William Fulwood in 1568 produced The Enime of Idlenesse: Teaching the manner and stile how to endite, compose, and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters: as well by answer, as otherwise, Devided into foure Bokes, no lesse pleasaunt than profitable.

He tells his “reasonable Reader” that this is not for the “cunning clearke” but the “unskilful scholar that wanteth instructions”. It wasn’t just for business, also including “what sorte thou mayest (I say at such vacant times) take thy penne in hande and gratifie thy friend with some prettie or pleasant conceit”.

It went through eight editions up until 1621. By that time, women were also seen as a market. The Academy of Complements. Wherein Ladyes, Gentlemwomen, Schollers, and Strangers may accomplish their Courtly Practice with most Curious Ceremonies, Complements, Amorous, High Expressions and formes of speaking, or writing … with Additions of witty Amorous Poems. And a Table expounding the hard English Words. This was published, perhaps unsurprisingly, pseudonomously. by one “Philomosus”.

Travel guidebooks and phrasebooks start about the same time. One of the first in English was probably Andrew Borde’s The fyrst boke of the Introduction of knowledge, which contained all of the information we’d recognise: descriptions of countries, their monetary systems, and useful foreign phrases. It was published in 1542, less than 70 years after printing had been introduced into England – it is amazing how fast printers learnt to seek out new markets.

There was even marriage guidance, if only as an aside from business advice. In An Essay of Drapery, Or the Compleate Citizen. Trading Justly, Pleasingly, Profitably (1635) William Scott wrote that a certain amount of dissemination was allowed, as “with one who hath married a wife, whome hee must use well, pretending affection to her, though hee cannot love her”.

From “Handbook Learning of the Renaissance Middle Class”, Louis B. Wright, in Studies in Philology, Vol 28, 1931, pp. 58-86.

I’ve been finding lately odd bits of fascinating scholarship in social history published in the Thirties. It seems that this trend was disrupted by the war, and a lot of the work has disappeared from view – the Fifties perhaps not being very “socially” inclined. I’ve found some of these Thirties journals very good hunting grounds for little-referenced material.

It is a frequently angry, everlasting debate among cyclists: helmets or no helmets?

I’m in one of the extreme groups: I won’t go out without one.

Partly that’s a function of coming from Australia, where they are compulsory, and partly it is because I think for the small amount of inconvenience involved you could save your brains. (And I don’t go for the argument that it makes either you or motorists more careless – I know I’m still extremely vulnerable, and I doubt most drivers are paying enough attention to notice.)

This scary tale posted by a doctor backs me up, and shows that it is not just the motorists you have to worry about.

Have you noticed how “e-mail” has now almost universally become “email”?

It’s nice to know the more the English language changes, the more it stays the same.

I was reading in Liza Picard’s Elizabethan London that a “cupboard” was once a “cup board”, i.e. a shelf or a shelves on the wall on which you placed your cups – or rather your silver (or pewter) plate, sometimes with closed doors around them for security.

“The cupboard took a prominent position in any room – so much so that when a member of Gray’s Inn misbehaved himself, he was summoned to ‘come and appear at the cupboard in the hall’ to hear what punishment the Benchers had inflicted on him. The hall was where the Inn’s impressive collection of silver symbolised its power over its members.” (p.60)

A buffet then also had a different meaning:

“The drinking habits of the time involved the guest calling for a drink every time he felt dry. He was brought wine or beer in a clean – at least rinsed – glass or drinking vessel, from this buffet. When he had swallowed his drink the glass went back to the buffet.”

I’m slightly surprised by this; have certainly never read anything like it, in fiction or non-fiction. Aside from anything else, given the quality of the water supplies, this was surely a bad idea on health grounds. Any thoughts?

History, a Technorati tag

A piece of email spam that took my fancy …

“Hello,
Do accept my sincere apologies if my mail does not meet your personal ethics …”

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All readers complaining about being distracted from marking et al by the History Carnival should stop now: I just found an online Tetris game. (It was the one computer game that I really wasted some time over in my youth – it is most curiously addictive – I only played one game this time, really.)

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But if you really need a one-minute chill, click through this lovely sequence of two hummingbirds’ first 21 days.