Category Archives: History

Books Early modern history Women's history

Don’t believe the conduct books

November 23, 2008 – 10:37 pm

A weekend of escape to France gave me the chance to read the entertaining and informative The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in 17th-century England by Adrian Tinniswood. (Don’t worry about the title – that’s just the publisher going a bit OTT.)

To quote: “It wasn’t just Molly, the heiress who eloped and married for love, who broke with convention; or Pen Stewkeley, the spinster who slept with and then married her sister’s unsuitable boyfriend. There was Aunt Eure, the widow who scandalised the Verney’s entire social circle by marrying a Roman Catholic; Sir Ralph’s sister Susan, who started her married life in Fleet Prison; Peg Elmes, who decided to separate from her violent husband , and Pen Denton, who according to the family broke her heart for joy when hers died. Mall became pregnant by a servant and eventually married him. Betty ran away with a poor clergyman. Even Cary, the ultra-genteel Cary, contrived to flout orthodoxy in her own small way by insisting on retaining her first husband’s name when she married her second… It was only Sir Ralph’s wife and mother who didn’t rebel. And they didn’t need to; both women were in successful and intimate relationships with head of the family – and both were in positions of power as a result of those relationships.
…driven variously by love, passion, courage, stubbornness and a fear on spinsterhood, they simply refused to do what they were told but .. they demonstrate that no matter what commentators said about the submissive position of women in 17th-cenury England, the reality of individual experience was at once more complicated and more compelling. (p. 478)

And there’s also news that the US today isn’t quite so bad at murders as was the England of the period…
Historical homicide rates are notoriously unreliable, but recent estimates suggest that in Restoration England they stood at around six per 100,000 of the population – more than four times the current rate in the United Kingdom in the first years of the 21st century, and about 10 per cent higher than current rates in the United States.(p. 406)

And a Google search doesn’t throw up anything on her, but it sounds like there’s a great story behind this career woman:
There was only one place to stay in Florence if you were an Englishman in the 1650s- Signora Anna’s house, close by Brunelleschi’s Santa Spirito on the south bank of the Arno. Anna, who only took English travellers, was a Florentine institution: Dr Kirton recommended Sir Ralph go straight to the lodgings … when he arrived in the city; the author of Sir Ralph’s “Directions for travel” agreed, saying that she ‘entertains her countrymen like princes, both for chamber and diet’. (p. 264)

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Books Women's history

Women of the Revolution

November 13, 2008 – 10:09 pm

When it comes to most of the major events of history, you have to go looking for the women, have to hunt in the darker corners of the archives, seek their behind-the-scenes presence. That's not, however, the case with the French Revolution. From the legendary revolutionaries Theroigne de Mericourt and Olympe de Gouges, who had hoped that the new regime would extend some of the rights now being given to men to their wives and sisters, to the tricoteuse watching heads roll from the guillotine, women's role was very public, if very controversial, and anyone who's studied the Revolution at even the most basic level will have some sense of it.

But there's far, far more to know – and for an overview you couldn't do any better than Marilyn Yalom's Blood Sisters: Women of the French Revolution. She's collected all of the revolutionary memoirs of women known, and sorted and sifted them into one neat, accessible volume. Yalom provides a certain amount of academic framing for this, noting particularly the way in which women jump from the personal to political and back again, giving equal importance to each, while also often putting themselves into the background and their male relatives (whose defence is often the putative aim of making a record). But mostly she simply lets the women tell their stories, while providing enough context to explain and amplify them.

The aristocratic women are here. There's the Duchesse de Tourzel, the famously level-headed and sober figure from the mad court of Versailles who was on the fateful flight to Varennes that sealed the fate of the royal family. She was an acute observer; as Yalom records, she noted that as the family was returned to Paris: "Following the order of Monsieur de La Fayette, everyone had his head covered, he had also enjoined them to remain absolutely silent to show the King, he said, the feelings his trip had inspired. His orders were so strictly observed that several scullery-boys without hats covered thei heads with their dirty, filthy handkerchiefs.

And almost at the other end of the social scale, yet servant too at the very end to Marie-Antoinette was Rosalie Lamorliere, a humble servant who told her story to one of the queen's early biographers. Yalom notes that here is a simple but seemingly honet witness who "spares us nothing — neither the queen's last bowl of soup not the vaginal hemorrhaging to which she was subject".

So too are the Revolutionaries– Madame Roland, who in the five months in prison before her execution wrote, Yalom says, "the work that would become the most famous eyewitness chronicle of the Revolution", to Charlotte Robespierre, who late in life wrote a hagiographic memoir attempting to exonerate and explain her brother.

But as so often it is the humbler stories that are really gripping. I found most powerful, and astonishing here that of Renee Bordereau, whose life was preserved in a "47-page poorly printed pamphlet" (which might so easily have been entirely lost). As Yalom says, in translation, where the French genderised language is lost, you might think this was a male tale:

Arriving near the Loire, I destroyed five of my enemies, and finishing off the day, I broke my sword on the head of the last one… Seeing only one horseman near me, I doubled back to our army. I alone, killed twenty-one that day. I'm not the one who counted them, but those who followed me, and if they hadn't said so, I wouldn't have spoken about it myself.

It sounds like grandiose boasting, yet Yalom reports there are multiple corroborations of the tale, including in two of the other accounts that she records of the extremely vicious "Vendee Insurrection" (which occurred when this isolated, traditional region refused to accept Revolutionary rule).

And this was not some hardened to insensitivity soldier: Bordereau reports the killing of four republicans one day after seeing "one of them had a child of about six months stick on his bayonet with two chickens." An image that she later repeats as obviously haunting her. She survived the war, Yalom tells us, was imprisoned by Napoleon for six years, and did not gain her liberty until the return of Louis XVIII in 1814, when she was also granted money.

It's a story that begs for a grander telling, a complete book, for Yalom has space for little more than a taster. But for an overview for women in the Revolution, this is a great start – a guide to further reading. And if you want to feel like you've got a decent historic grasp of the Revolution, you certainly can't leave out women's place in it.

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History Travel

The usual York scenes

November 13, 2008 – 12:27 am

I spent a day in the city, since I was nearbyish (Huddersfield), and trying to avoid a horror (three trains and a bus) journey back to London on Saturday night. So instead I got the horror Sunday night train trip of (two trainloads crammed into one) journey instead – cattle truck hardly did it justice.

Still I got to see Clifford’s Tower, with its sad history…

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York Minster…
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And was reminded that this was where Constantine was crowned emperor…
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Possibly under this very column…
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I found it a curious city – one of those where the modern and the ancient are mixed in sometimes frustrating ways – here’s the wonderful ancient Shambles, there’s M&S; here’s a wonderful medieval hall, there’s a shabby bus stop.

Which kind of made Jorvik Viking site somehow right – they’ve obviously done an enormously good job on the archaeology, and really ineteresting reconstruction, but then they’ve kind of turned it into a half-hearted theme park, so you ride around the reconstruction and don’t get the chance to stop and look at things nearly as closely as I’d have liked.

Possibly the best bit in the entrance, where you walk down (more than two normal flights) through the layers…
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And I wouldn’t recommend arriving on a Saturday night and wandering around town, as I did – it is hen and stag night city, which isn’t an attractive scene…

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History Travel

York Castle Museum – social history par excellence

November 13, 2008 – 12:14 am

Notes from Sunday’s trip around the museum – which really is a very fine show, with a focus very much on local, social history

Cleaning
The claim is that there was not much cleaning to be done before Victorian revolution of “stuff”. Sand was used on floors as it soaked up grease and dirt, mixed with ground oyster shell to clean food utensils. In the country bran was used for “washing up”; the husks soaked with fat and food remnants fed to pigs.

Early mechanical cleaners blew the dust upwards, supposedly allowing it to be swept up more easily. Hubert Cecil Booth recognised that this was the wrong way around and in 1901 patented the vacuum cleaner. The first was mounted on a horse drawn cart and pipes fed through windows.

In 1908 James Murray Spangler invented the first lightweight domestic vacuum; William H Hoover bought the rights.

An 18th-century tax on soap put it out of reach of very poor. Only repealed in 1853.

Moules’ earth closet was patented by the Reverend in 1860. The tank held dry earth, which was flushed into bucket after use.

The first toilet paper appeared in 1857, billed as medicated paper and sold as sheets in flat packet. To avoid embarrassment chemists sold it from under the counter. First roll in 1928, soft paper in 1932 and first coloured paper in 1957.

Urine was added to water to help clean clothes and bleached them because contained ammonia. In Yorkshire it was called wetin or old wash. Lye was also used, made by passing water through clean wood ashes and known as buck wash.

In a comment on today’s obsession with cleanliness, the quote was of an old saying “Every man must eat a peck of dirt in his life (about 6 litres).”

Babies
One remarkable exhibit is of a caul worked into parchment that became record of birth for mountain family from 1830 to 1860.

In the very poor area of Walmgate York in 1898 one in four babies died. The 1902 midwives’ act made for big drop.

Really telling local stories, here are the baby goods of Mrs Hull, whose son Stephen was born in 1956 after she’d had five miscarriages and an ectopic pregnancy. She wasn’t allowed even to carry handbag during the pregnancy. She was in labour from 1am saturday until 7pm sunday. The baby was allergic to milk and had to be fed with marie biscuits soaked in very weak tea on a spoon.

Farming

In east Yorkshire there was a unique way of life: the horsemen were young and unmarried and remained on annual contracts long after rest of country stopped the practice. Usually when they got married, however, they became skilled farm labourers who had little to do with horses. (Seems like an awful waste.)

This is a bee skep, which was used to keep bees before wooden hives invented. On moors left on a flat stone, ideally in a sheltered, sunny position.

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A common tool was a turnip chopper. This was an important part of 18th and 19th crop rotations, but awkward for animals to eat.

Comb-making
Oxhorns were steeped in water for months to soften, solid tips cut off for buttons. Then a tradesman called a horn presser cut the hollow horn along length, soaked it again and careful held over fire, moving constantly. Scorched horn lost malleability, when soft enougj opened with pincers and heated bw two iron plates, plates were then turned over to craftsmen to be carved or turned. A horn comb factory was established in York in 1794 by Joseph Rougier and became largest in Britain; closed 1931 due to competition with plastics

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The museum also boasts a fine little collection of medieval porcelain (unfortunately unlabelled)…
read more »

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History

Medieval boom and bust in England

November 6, 2008 – 11:55 pm

At the Doomesday survey in 1086, only about 5.9m acres was under arable cultivation, less than a quarter of the possible total. Some areas were as closely settled as practical – Flegg district in east Norfolk had the same population as it would in 1801. But there was plenty of space for the 12th and 13th century expansions, as the population (to 1315) doubled at least, while the craft and urban sectors also increased demand. The arable area had reached from 10m acres (it was 10.5m in 1800) and some of the areas under the plough then — parts of Dartmoor, the sandy East Anglian Breckland, and the heaviest midland clays – would not be ploughed again.

The number of draught horses was perhaps 400,000, and 800,000 owen (162,000 and 650,000 in 1086 respectively). This meant the rinderpest epidemic of 1319 was particularly destructive.

But only about a half to two-thirds was actually ploughed each year – the rest was fallow to allow recovery of the nitrogen balance.

As a counterweight to the theory of the “tragedy of the commons” theory, actually these were run by rules developed in the common interest, and were stable over centuries. “This, after all, was the social world from which sprang the team sport of football.”

Woodland was subject to intensive management – coppiced in the areas of most demand. “This was especially the case in the counties of the south-east, where a strong local demand for wood was reinforced by the more powerful regional demand of London, and, in the case of Kent and Sussex, by demand from the thricing coastal towns and cities of northern France and Flanders.”

“Little of the land of England served no agricultural purpose whatever. Wastes, moors and heaths supplied feed to sheep and free-ranging cattle, and during the 13th-century the development of commercial rabbit warrens turned the most barren sands into gold.”

But in 1315 came the bust – the start of the Great European Famine of 1315-1321. And starvation patterns were as ever uneven – London with its wealth kept drawing in grain. “Agenoese speculator responded to the exceptional prices previaling… by shipping 1,000 quarters of wheat to London and selling it to an agent of the king.” Areas near London, whose produce was shipped in, however, did badly.

“Probably between a quarter of a million and half a million people perished of starvation and starvation diseases in England’s worst recorded subsistence crisis.”

An interesting portrait of rural England, drawn from B.M.S. Campbell, “The land”, in R. Horrock and W.M. Ormrod, A Social History of England, 1200-1500, 2006 (which is I’d imagine intended as an undergraduate text – the intro has what I thought was a very good survey of the main theoretical arguments about the Middle Ages.)

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History Politics

Powerful words

October 26, 2008 – 11:58 pm

Spent part of this evening watching “War & Exile”, a joint performance by a number of local arts groups in St Pancras Old Church, with donations going to the Stop The War campaign.

Some powerful words I wrote down:
* “Unspeakable grief is only a politician away.”
* “Karl Marx puked in his grave” (an interesting variation on the old spinning)
* “taught to die with their black caps askew”
* ” he has to run without his shirt”, from a translation of a Somali poem by Abdullahi Botan, who I gather lives locally.

And much enjoyed a reading from Deborah Moggach, about a housemaid watching the village horses being taken off to war (must look up some of hers).

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