… to the inventor of them:

Before George Ravenscroft’s invention of lead glass in London in about 1677, most quality drinking glasses used in Britain were fragile luxuries imported from Venice, or made in England in the Venetian style in glasshouses often run by glassmakers from the continent. Ravenscroft’s formula using lead oxide instead of soda produced a new type of glass which was brilliantly clear and strong, and much more like rock crystal than ‘cristallo’, the Venetian soda glass.

The physical attributes of lead glass together with changes in fashion meant that glassmakers began to produce a more simple style of drinking glass, with straight-sided funnel shaped bowls, robust stems with plain baluster shapes, and large feet for stability.

(Hat-tip to Sundries.)

Heard tonight at a seminar at the Institute for Historical Research: “The problem with Shakespeare is that he didn’t get into enough difficulties.”

To expand: the speaker was referring to the way that we only know about many early theatre men through the messy court cases they got themselves tangled in – Shakespeare didn’t do that, which helps explain why he’s considered so “mysterious”.

(For the record: I definitely belong to the “Shakespeare was Shakespeare” school, although as soon as I find the time – soon I hope – I will be reviewing a book that has an intriguing alternative hypothesis.)

A passage you’ll recognise from William Tyndale’s English Bible, but it does some interesting things with gender:

“In the begynnynge was the worde, and the worde was with God: and the word was God. The same was in the begynnynge wyth God. All things were made by it and with out it was made nothinge that was made.”

By the time of King James, however, God had suddenly become male.

The disputes between Tyndale and Sir Thomas More yielded even more colourful language. Among their lost words:

“A gorbelly was a fat man, often to be found in a sottys hoffe, a drinking den, where he became sowe-drunke, and a nodypoll was a blockhead who was often apyssche, or fantastically foolish. A prym was a pretty girl, and a galyarde a high spirited young man, with an eye for caterwaywynge, lechery.”

From B. Moynahan, William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life. A Story of Martyrdom, Betrayal and the English Bible, p. 390, p. 192

I do like nodypoll – wonder if it could be resurrected?

… but also on wildlife:

The Preservation of Grain Act, passed in 1532 by Henry VIII and strengthened by Elizabeth I in 1566, made it compulsory for every man, woman and child to kill as many creatures as possible that appeared on an official list of ‘vermin’. ‘Paradoxically, many of these creatures are today highly valued and given the full protection of the law,’ said Lovegrove.
The act was drawn up to counter food shortages and spread of disease caused by a series of bad harvests and a sharp rise in population. Henry VIII put a bounty on each creature, ranging from a penny for the head of a kite or a raven to 12 pence for a badger or a fox. These were considerable sums when the average agricultural wage was around four pence a day.

… are nothing new. From Ely in the early 17th century:

A Matthew Maye was presented to the church court

suspected to lyve in fornication in the house of John Lemon with Dorothye Sutton, & he hathe a wief and children in another place, & she hathe a husband & children alsoe in another place as it is reported, & theise woulde marrye togither.

Dorothye said in her defence “yt in ded she was & is married to another husband wch said husband she saythe was married before to another woman, & yt therefore she is not bound to tarrye with him”.

R. Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England, Manchester Uni Press, 1996, p. 162-3