Strange news from Shadwell
Being a True & Just Relation of
the Death of Alice Fowler, who had
for many years been accounted a Witch

“In King St near Whapping, lived a widow woman named Alice Fowler, about the age of four score years, and had always been a malicious ill-natured woman and for many years had been accounted a witch; she was always observed to be muttering and grumbling to herself, and was continually holding a Discourse as it were with herself … she was always poor, as it is observable that those kind of people are.”

[Her son Waler, had been transported to Barbados; “nine years since he was hung for murdering his wife & breaking open a house.”]

The poor neighbour who was nursing her went out, locking her in & taking the key. When she came back “local account had her lying dead on the floor with her 2 big toes tied together, naked, with a blanket lying over her” … neighbours examined the body and “found 5 Teats, all as black as Coal”.

She was buried at St Paul’s, Shadwell. No one attended the funeral.

Printed by E. Mallet, London, 1685.
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I just cycled home through Shadwell; it hasn’t changed much.

I learnt today from a talk at the British Museum that you’ve got it all wrong. Mummies were not white, or even off-white; most of the ones you see in museums are just like that because they’ve been exposed to light for some time and the dye has faded.

The outer wrapping was usually a deep pinkish red (there are a couple of examples in gallery 64 for anyone interested), sometimes with strips of contrasting colour patterned across it.

The mummy masks have blue hair because the hair of the gods was thought to be made of lapis lazuli, and and faces were made of gold, or gold-painted cloth because that was what the gods’ faces were made of.

If the owner, or the rellies, could afford it, the body was coated with resin after the drying process, a resin made especially from the pistacia tree. The ancient Egytian word was sineture (sp?) – “that which makes divine”. It again helped up the mummy on the level of the gods.

You could buy happiness in the afterlife, it seems, or at least the status of a god.

More here.

From yesterday’s research: John Wilkins, distinguished Royal Society member, was, I learnt, keen on developing a new “universal” language. (A sign of how even in the 17th-century at least some people saw that Latin was on the way out.) His “Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical Language” was read to the Royal Society on May 14, 1668.

His language is explored in an essay here, appropriately enough “translated from the Spanish”.

I went to an interesting talk today (well yes it is 2am, but it’s today in my terms) on Mahdism in Africa at the Britism Museum. (I love learning about things I know nothing about.)

The object highlighted that I found most interesting was a huge cylindrical slit drum, maybe 2m long and a good metre in circumference, carved, it seemed, out of a single tree trunk, that was taken from the forces of the Khalida Obdullahi (the Mahdi’s successor) after the battle of Omdurman (Sudan) in 1898. This is a form normally used many hundreds of miles to the south-west in Central Africa, but was probably made by the black slave troops who eventually formed Mahdism’s crack troops. (This was after the Mahdi had got over his aversion to firearms, which did not square with his “knightly” form of Islam.)

What is particularly interesting is that it is carved with Arabic script, “Islamising” it, and taking it from its pagan roots. There are also some “throwing knives” displayed beside it that have been through the same process.

Unfortunately the drum is not on the BM’s website, but there are some fairly similar ones here.

There are quote marks around “throwing knives” because actually these were seldom if ever used for that purpose, or even as weapons, although they look like pretty effective ones, being instead symbols of rank and status. (Some early Europeans even called them boomerangs, but as you can tell from the pictures here, you really wouldn’t want them whizzing back at you.)

A note in the gallery says: “Mahdism remains a vital political force in contemporary Sudan”; history isn’t just for fun.)

Lovely biography in my inbox this morning from DNB on Jill Tweedie, written in a beautifully dry style: ” … one of her uncles, by then resident in Vancouver, to spend time with his family in Canada. She stayed there for six months, fell unsuitably in love again-this time with a cousin-and was dispatched home; however, she cashed in her air ticket and stopped off in Montreal instead. There she got work, initially as a reindeer in a Christmas display ….”

I knew her Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist, my battered copy of which I have just dug out. I realise from the pencil pound sign inside I must have acquired when I first came to Europe in 1990. (So it has since been to Australia, Thailand and back to England.)

I hadn’t known how dramatic her life had been, however, or that there was a sequel, More From Martha; off to abebooks ….

But I’m left pondering how DNB are going to keep up the current email rate. They’re sending male and female biogs on alternating days, but since I heard somewhere it is still only about 15% female, aren’t they going to run out?

To complete a mixed day of work and indulgence I’ve devoted this evening to reading the much-praised Havoc In Its Third Year, by Ronan Bennett.

It has some interesting colourful set pieces, lots of period detail and so far as I can tell is very true to history, but overall I found it a disappointment. All but the main character, John Brigge, coroner, are only sketched as stereotypical stick figures: the stern Puritan hypocrite, the half-mad female vagrant prophet, the martyrdom-seeking Catholic priest, and even Brigge himself is a somehow bloodless, emotionless; his faith has no explanation and his resignation to fate seems unreal. (This may indeed be true to period, but doesn’t engage this modern reader.)

I think the Booker judges got it right in leaving it off the shortlist, but here’s a different view.

It did, however, send me back to what I consider a wonderful book, Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague, about the “plague village” of Eyam, which, in the fiction as the history, locked itself off from neighbouring settlements to avoid spreading the contagion, and suffered horribly. The ending is perhaps a little Hollywoodish, and the main character overly “modern” in her thought, but it is a wonderfully uplifting tale.