Richard Overton, English Civil War writer, in The Arraignment of Mr Persecution (1645), wrote that it was often the “most weak and passionate of men, the most unable to defend truth or their own opinions” who were “the most violent for persecution”. (From Edward Vallance, A Radical History of England, p. 155)
Have just been meeting “Les Physiocrats”, who believed in a “government of nature” – i.e. laissez faire, leaving everything to the market and being very hostile to any state intervention. Their leader was Francois Quesnay (1694-1774), who wrote the article on grains in The Encyclopedia.
In the reigns of both Louis XV and XVI there were regular food crisis, and the traditional method of trying to control these was by preventing the movement of grain across international frontiers, and also between provinces. In 1763/4 Louis XV authorised the transport of wheat between provinces, but fear of riots and dissent meant nothing happened until 1768.
In Burgundy, the rural parts of the province produced far more food than it needed, but it was swallowed up by the Lyon market, and in the spring of 1770 food riots and unrest started in Dijon.
In 1774, at the start of Louis XVI reign, a new controller of finances, Turgot, imbued with the ideas of the Physiocrats, had proclaimed on September 13 completely free internal trade in cereals. This gave free reign to speculators, hoarders and traders. Prices rose brutally – in spring in Dijon the price of wheat doubled, maize followed.
Thus started what was known at the time as The War of the Flours. On April 12 there was little grain in the market and prices were extremely high. No one doubted famine would follow. A grain merchant, Fauvernay, was roughed up in the market.
On the 18th a crowd of mostly women gathered, and grew through the morning. One of them donned “un bel habit rouge, une canne [walking stick] a pomme d’or a la main” in the manner of Nicolas Carre, the miller of l’Ouche, who was much detested. With the support of the provincial administration, he had adopted a technique promoted by the Physiocrats to produce white flour, which could only be afforded by the rich. The crowd chased him fown the street, but he found a house of refuge with another miller, so the crowd’s anger was redirected towards a parliamentary councillor, Jean-
Charles Filsjean de Sainte-Colombe, who was thought to speculate with Carre. He hid in the cellar as the crowd surged through his house, and – so the story goes – was dug out of his hiding place, a pile of manure. He was to survive however, until the Revolution, when he met a nasty end.
Soldiers were called in from Auxonne to restore order, and the parliament at Dijon pronounced severe penalties for the rioters. Some of the “sediteuses” were taken before the parliament on July 29,1775.
In 1776 Turgot was dismissed by the king but the principle of “liberty of grains” was not abandoned. More hunger and more unrest in Burgundy, and in 1784 the Quartermaster of Burgundy, Amelot de Chaillou, tried to set up a municipal flour shop, to ensure sufficient grain, but the notables object and the project was abandoned.
By 1789 there was trouble over grain across Burgundy – at Charolles, Tournus, Saulieu, Auxois, Autun, Beune, Sens, Dijon, Auxerre — carts were stopped, stores raided.
From “Jours sans pain, jours de colere” by Jean Bart in Pays de Bourgogne, No 222, June 2009, pp. 3-10.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland, published in 1915, created a new sub-genre, the feminist utopia. There’s something delightfully ironic about the creation, for there’s no doubt her world, an all-female one getting along very nicely thank you, would have horrified the original creator of the form, Sir Thomas More, and indeed it initially horrified her three main characters, men of her own time, who in best traditional style, set out to explore this unknown, mysterious land.
The narrator is Vandyke, clearly the most sensible and level-headed of the three; it’s a marker of the age of the text, and its liberal origins, that he’s trained in sociology. The character who is a symbol of the “typical” man of his age, and the one who fails utterly to cope with a society where women aren’t automatically his prey, is Terry, who supplies the aircraft and the funds for the expedition into this hidden land, sealed off by a volcanic eruption some two millennia previously.
The atypical man, the one who finds himself at home in Herland,
is Jeff, the expedition doctor and science lover, the sensitive, poetic type not entirely at home in his own society.
It’s a society that’s constantly striving to perfect itself: “Moadine told him. ‘We have no laws over a hundred years old, and most of them are under twenty’.” The society is a democracy, if rather too fond of the decisions of the elders for modern tastes.
It’s developed what Vandyke finds is an entirely acceptable science, from astronomy to physiology, but where it has really excelled is agriculture, turning its limited environment into a veritable Garden of Eden (no accident that surely), in which every tree produces a crop and lives in managed harmony with is environment. In terms of another modern genre, they’ve terraformed it perfectly.
There’s only one thing it relies on from the time before the women were left – by combination of conflict and natural disaster – on their own to cope: a few huge old buildings, including the now largely redundant fortress.
As the author surely had no choice – and really as in science fiction today the science isn’t really the point – she skips over the essential development of virgin birth. It happens, and the women, understandably enough, come to revere it, putting motherhood at the centre of their society (although later, when they understand the limits of population growth controlling it by social pressure). But there’s little focus on heredity, and no desire for personal glory in it.
If there’s one main criticism of the nature of Herland today it is that as a society it is rather too perfect, impossibly so (even the men are forced to admire the practicality and suitability of the dress – although Perkins Gilmann’s concern with this, at the start of the 20th century, is understandable enough).
The 21st-century world is rather less sanguine about the perfectibility of human nature and indeed the possibility of perfection at all – Ursula Le Guin’s utopia/dystopia The Dispossessed in being a case in point.
Yet Perkins Gilmann can be excused in this: she wrote in a more innocent age – before the horrors of two world wars – and more importantly, she wrote at a time when women were barely allowed, and by most, thought possible of much practical constructive effort at all (although then as now, women on average worked harder and longer than their menfolk with the double burden of home and employment).
She was facing a huge mountain of public disbelief, and any flaw in the world of Herland would have been a fissure of opportunity for the enemies of feminism.
Although long neglected, Herland is indeed one of the founding texts of feminism, and anyone who’s interested in being a feminist should read it – but don’t worry, it is mercifully short and to the point, not at all flowerily “literary”. Its author is non-nonsense, getting on with the job, writing for purpose, not ego, just as her characters, and so often women generally, do.
Fame, particularly for women, is a strange and unpredictable thing. For centuries, most of the great things done by women, their outstanding talents and amazing discoveries, have been forgotten and later reinvented by men, or claimed from the start by men – and often there’s little chance of this being corrected. Yet sometimes, a story is so outstanding, so surprising, so amazing, that it’s survived to be revived and propagated in an age that seeks out these women’s deeds.
Who would have predicted that Mary Anning, a working-class woman, who spent much of her life only a few pounds from the workhouse, in an obscure little English coastal town, would today be one of the most famous women of the 19th century?
An actress portraying her regularly parades around the Natural History Museum, many of her great fossil discoveries are properly labelled with her details, and now, Tracy Chevalier, well known for her Girl with a Pearl Earring (although personally I prefer The Lady and the Unicorn) has made her the subject of her latest book, Remarkable Creatures.
Like those books, this isn’t great literature, but very good reading – built around finely woven characterisation and dialogue that superbly exercises that cardinal novelist’s rule: show don’t tell.
As in all of her other books, Chevalier has clearly done her research on Anning, and her other central character, Elizabeth Philpott, a middle-class if impoverished spinster who helped Anning, while doing her own fine and important work on fossil fishes. She’s also clearly absorbed the social mores of this stiff, superstitious, class-obsessed age, and the way it was deeply disturbed by the unmistakable message that emerged as the fossil record in the cliff of the coast around Lyme Regis started to be unearthed.
(N.B. This book has not yet been released in the US, but is available in the UK.)
If the structure of their relationship – its great split engendered by what seems like an unlikely obsession with a clearly unsuitable, unlikely man – seems a little forced and artificial, well that’s the price one pays for popularising Anning’s story. (And it has to be said that for all her virtues, Chevaliers always have the whiff of the writing class about them.)
Nevertheless, if you know Anning, you should read this book – it might not teach you anything new, but it will enjoyably put flesh on the bones of her story. If you don’t know Anning, read it for the entertainment value, but also because you’ll then know about a great woman of history, and have acquired the knowledge in an entirely pleasurable manner.
It’s the centrepiece of many a Regency romance, the attractive wooded park beside the soaring mansion, in which the heroine can flounce as the hero gallops up on a high-mettled steed, fresh from chasing down some innocent deer. Yet there’s much more, in complexity and ihistory, to the park than that, as S.A. Mileson explains in Parks in Medieval England. No dashing knights here, however, this is a monograph based on a PhD thesis and it does rather show – dashing it isn’t, but there is an interesting story to tell here, and some fine anecdotes.
Milseon follows parks back to the Norman era – and suggests that they may well have had Anglo-Saxon predecessors, and is firm that their primary purpose was always hunting – specifically of deer. He spends quite a bit of this short monograph defending the claim that hunting was central to aristocratic life in the Middle Ages, saying that there is a revisionist strand of history claiming that it wasn’t, although this always feels like a bit of a straw man.
Although that does allow for the telling of many compelling stories. I’ll never look at Westminster quite the same way again after learning that:
During the celebrations for the coronation of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon at Westminster in 1509, eight bramble-clad knights presided over a group of men dressed as foresters or park-keepers, all in green clothes and complete with horns, who arranged a ‘pageante like a park’, with artificial trees, undergrowth and fallow deer. The unfortunate deer were released from the enclosure and chased down by greyhounds in the palace grounds, their bodies presented to the queen and ladies.’
Mileson identifies the great age of park-making as the 12th and 13th centuries, a period when the population of England “more than doubled and perhaps trebled”, which put strain on hunting lands and particularly on deer populations. The native red and roe deer declined and large numbers of fallow deer were brought from the Continent.
When we think of hunting today we think of a long horseback chase, something that even the largest park would struggle to cope with, but as Mileson explains, it often took forms other than the par force chase., most of which you couldn’t exactly call sporting. Often a group of beaters drove deer towards a trap or waiting archers. This seems to have been, Mileson notes, the primary method of hunting in pre-Conquest Britain, when hedges or “hays” were often used as traps. Deer could also be stalked on foot, something Henry V is supposed to have particularly enjoyed.
Yet parks weren’t only practical. Mileson shows how having a park could be an important part of creating and maintaining status, particularly for families coming up in the world. He quotes a later source, the late 17th-century agriculturalist, John Houghton, who disliked their uneconomic status, but noted that for their owners “they make or preserve a grandeur, and cause them to be respected by their poorer neighbours”.
Perhaps the most interesting, and no doubt difficult to chart, aspect of parks, was undoubtedly their impact on their communities. On an always crowded island, carving out hundreds of acres of land – often including, Mileson shows, valuable farm and pasture land – was bound to have significant impact. Theoretically at least, it was possible to challenge an emparkment:
“Free men could, of course, take their grievances to the king, and from the later 12th century there were standardized legal actions available which could be used to claim access to land, but for many people legal action would have been too risky and expensive…around half of the population was legally unfree and had no right to use any court other than their lord’s own manor court, which was hardly a sympathetic venue.”
The loss was not only of productive land – the physical obstacle to trade and development could be significant. Mileston quotes Devizes in Wiltshire and Sheffield in Yorkshire as two towns that developed in odd shapes due to parks; sometimes even settlements were completely destroyed. Trade also suffered: compensation was given to Ludgershall in Wiltshire in 1348 because a new royal park meant “the paths and ways leading to the town through the field from the both are now closed, whereby men and merchants no longer come to the town to do business there.”
There was always resistance – much poaching and “breaking” of park walls was certainly at least inchoately political – an expression of what were felt to be proper rights. The peasant rebels of 1381 demanded that “all game, whether in warrens or in parks and woods should become common to all”.
So while this is a story of a specific aspect of the medieval landscape, it does shed light on the development of medieval society and the tensions within it. It’s a survey of what the author says is a relatively undeveloped field, so often unsatisfying in its unanswered questions and lack of depth. But worth sticking with for a different angle of a strange and distant world.
I don’t know if this genre has an “official” name, but when I describe it you’ll know instantly what I mean: the grand sweep of history novel. Edward Rutherford covered 2,000 years of the British capital in London: The Novel. James A. Michener covered Israel’s even longer history in The Source.
But no one, really, can get a grander sweep than Stephen Baxter does in Evolution, a Novel. For he starts in the age of dinosaurs, with a little rat-like primate ancestor of ours called Purga, who witnesses the collapse of that great ecosystem to a near planet-destroying comet, 65 million years ago, watches as the human race evolves, then imagines our decline, finishing 500 million years into the future when we’re symbiotically dependent on a tree that directs our existence, the last tree it turns out, on a dying earth.
The key trick with this genre is to quickly create characters with whom the reader identifies, since we won’t have a lot of time to get to know them, and this is something at which Baxter excels. Even his more primitive creatures, anthropomorphised of course, quickly grab your sympathy.
And his imagining of the life of Homo erectus, the later hominids, and modern humans – represented by the difficult, troubled and imaginative brain of a woman 60,000 years ago in the Sahara, ancestral Australian Aborigines 52,000 years ago; the last Neanderthals 32,00 years ago in western France; the world’s first city, Catal Huyuk 9,600 years ago; the dying age of Ancient Rome; and the last humans like us, some time tens of thousands of years into the future – deep frozen survivors waking into a different world.
There’s much imagination here – there’s a sense that this is a science fiction novel (which is how Amazon classes it), and the whip-cracking intelligent dinosaurs is, to this reader, one step too far.
But it is also clearly based on a stupendous amount of research into paleontology, archaeology and anthropology, and intelligent thought about how the world might have worked in different eras. There’s also a delightful sly wit; Republican Rome is the pinnacle of our species, which is not how most people today would put it.
Generally, however, this learning is worn pretty lightly (if showing signs of the dinosaur obsessed youngster I bet Baxter once was). For this is an easy-reading, intoxicating novel – the whole history of evolution, and the theories behind it, accessible to any reader at all. You could call it an ideal intelligent airport novel.
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