I learned yesterday that if you want to thank, or blame, anyone for the “1066 and all that”, perhaps it should be a nine-year-old girl called Cecilia.

She was the daughter of William the (to be) Conqueror and his queen Matilda, and she was given to a monastery in France before the invasion set out to help to ensure God’s blessing on the expedition. She became a great abbess at Caen. There’s a geneological summary here.

This was at a Historical Association talk at the Swedenborgh Society in Bloomsbury; a lovely hall very evocative of 19th-century “self-improvement”.

The Historical Association local branch programme can be found here.

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abigails, originally uploaded by natalieben.

Only two this week, possibly because the post is getting even slower than usual.

One is the curiously titled The English Abigail, by Dorothy Margaret Stuart, London, Macmillan & Co, 1946, from which the above illustration is taken. “Abigail” is apparently a term for servant, although I’ve never heard it before.

It traces from Norman times into Victorian, although its definition of “servant” is rather broad, seemingly from the lowest scullion to the Queen Elizabeth’s Chief Gentlewoman, Blanch(e) Parry.

The above illustrations are apparently from the Luttrell Psalter; “We see her kneeling beside a young lady and holding up a round hand-mirror so that the effect of the elaborate head-dress may be seen; we see her helping to make a bed, and stretching out streets which fall into symmetrical, angular convolutions…” (p. 4)

One theme that carries through the book is how the “great and good” are always complaining about the servahts climbing above their station, from the 14th-century poet John Gower to a correspondent to The Lady’s Monthly Museum or Polite Repository of 1823:
“I found nothing but young ladies, delicately arrayed in white, with their heads a la Brutus, who declared they were all anxious for places, and wished to go out to service.”

The second purchase was Letters from Dorothy Osborne to Sir William Temple (1652-54) edited by Edward Abbott Parry. It is available online, as I mentioned here, but for £1 on ebay how could I resist?

I’m limiting posts on current politics as too depressing, but I have to point to a site (thanks to Personal Political) with a speech by Bill Moyers when he accepted Harvard Medical School’s Global Environment Citizen Award. It makes depressing reading:

“One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress.

…millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed – even hastened – as a sign of the coming apocalypse … Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election – 231 legislators in total – more since the election – are backed by the religious right. Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups.

… One of their texts is a high school history book, America’s Providential History. You’ll find there these words: “the secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie…that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.’ however, “[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth……while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”

This reminds me of a site someone on Feminist Blogs pointed to (sorry, forgotten who), the Rapture Index. I thought at first this HAS to be a spoof, but gradually it becomes clear that they are deadly serious.

The idea is this is an index, just like any financial measure, judging how close is Judgement Day, when they confidently predict the predictions of Revelation, as written around two millennia ago, will come true to the letter.

And they get terribly upset when news is good, e.g.”Financial unrest: The lack of any major news has downgraded this category.”

Such a pity the church father didn’t chuck that chapter out of the Bible when they were finalising it, as they very nearly did. It might have saved an awful lot of trouble. But so reassuring that financial indexes always seem to get their predictions wrong ….

Finally, on a more cheerful note, I just found the Freethought of the day website. It commemorates the birthday (in 1849), of the Swedish author and social critic Ellen Karolina Sofia Key. She wrote: “the most demoralising factor in education is Christian religious instruction. . . . even a more living, a more actual instruction in Christianity injures the child”.

That reminds me of some children I used to babysit – and this was only 20 years ago. One of the five-year-old’s paintings was on the fridge. It was on the subject he had been assigned by his apparently normal suburban Catholic school: Hell, and all its fire and brimstone. Frightening a five-year-old with Hell; if that’s not child abuse I don’t know what is.

Thanks to a tip from a member of my online reading group, I found out about an unexpected side to Norman churches, Sheela na gigs, carvings of an old woman squatting and pulling apart her vulva.

One suggestion is that this is a survival of pagan imagery, particularly perhaps in Ireland where a Celtic goddess was shown in a similar way. Another theory is that they were medieval morality figures, another that they represent the passageway to and from the afterlife. There’s a sensible summary of the theories here.

There’s a feminist, Mary Daly-style, article about them here. It says: “The reason for the adoption of Sheelas on secular buildings has been attributed to the Irish seeing them as a protective force, as noted by nineteenth-century researchers who “were told by local Irish people that Sheelas were intended to ward off evil.” This is reported along with a fascinating claim from a traveler in Ireland in the 1840s that, in order to lift a curse of bad luck, the afflicted should “persuade a loose woman to expose herself to him”.

Curious that such a widespread image (the first website has a long list and is collecting more) should be so little known and its history so unclear – but then perhaps not. Can’t imagine Victorian historians talking about them, at least not without lapsing into Latin.

You can even buy a modern pendant reproduction here. It would certainly be a talking point.

I’ve always been suspicious of a Western tendency to worship at the feet of the Dalai Lama, condemn China for its invasion and subsequent treatment of Tibetan culture, and call (no doubt hopelessly) for the restoration of the hereditary theocracy. The current Dalai Lama may be a very nice bloke, but when he dies a group of religious courtiers would get to rule for the next couple of decades, and then who’s to say what the next one would be like?

It is difficult, however, to get a decent handle on pre-Chinese Tibet, since the whole topic is so tied up with active politics.

So I’ve found my reading group’s current text, Alexandra David-Neel’s My Journey to Lhasa, very interesting.

She was apparently the first foreign woman to reach Lhasa, officially closed to women, which she achieved by disguising herself as a poor pilgrim. Now she is very much an imperious, sometimes arrogant, woman of her own Western culture, but I found the following account particularly interesting….

“The poor peasants, to whom my apparent poverty and my beggarly attire gave confidence, described their distress in that country where the soil does not produce every year enough grain to pay the pax in kind.
To leave the country, to look for better land or less exacting lords, is not permitted. A few ventured the flight and established themselves in neighbouring provinces. Having been discovered, they were taken away from the new home they had created and led back to Tashi Tse, where they were beaten and heavily fined.
Now many who had thought to imitate them, too frightened by the fate of their friends, remain, resigned, all energy destroyed, growing poorer each year, expecting no deliverance in this life. Others looked towards China. ‘We were not ill-treated in this way when the Chinese were the masters,’ they said. ‘Will they come back? Maybe … but when … We may dies before.'”
(p. 119)

Food for thought.
(Reference from a 1940 Penguin, first published 1927. No translator’s name given.)

Here’s her “official website” (a lot of it in French) and a short bibliography.

There is a general idea that in the past people were forced to work vast numbers of hours a week, either in paid employment or in subsistence agriculture, but like many bits of “common knowledge” it seems to be largely a myth.

In subsistence and near subsistence farming cultures today seasonal unemployment is the norm – which makes sense when you think that while in low-tech agriculture a lot of labour is needed for field preparation, (often) planting, and harvest, not a lot usually needs to be done in between times.

But even wage employment was not so full on as we tend to think. eg. tin miners took an afternoon nap during their shift, while a treatise of 1778 noted that: “When a pair of men went underground formerly, they made it a rule to sleep out a candle, before they set about their work …. then rise up and work briskly; after that, have a touch pipe, that is rest themselves half an hour to smoke a pipe of tobacco, and so play and sleep away half their time…

Similar practices were described in many other trades and occupations. Most symbolical of customary irregular working was the observance of ‘Saint Monday’ – that is, keeping Monday as a holiday and hardly beginning the week’s work until Tuesday. …. It has been suggested that among urban workers, Saint Monday was so generally observed by the later 18th century that a regular ‘week’ of which Tuesday was the first full working day was already in existence.”

(J. Rule, “Against Innovation? Custom and Resistance in the Workplace 1700-1850”, in T. Harris (ed) Popular Culture in England 1500-1850, Macmillan, 1995, pp. 180-181.)

I wonder if in the high working hours cultures of the UK and US, people are not working more on a regular basis than ever before.