There’s nothing new about “idiots’ guides” or shortcuts for those who want to write that exam essay without reading the text on which it is supposed to be based. I’ve just been reading a fascinating essay on Elizabethan and Jacobean examples.

The merchant William Fulwood in 1568 produced The Enime of Idlenesse: Teaching the manner and stile how to endite, compose, and write all sorts of Epistles and Letters: as well by answer, as otherwise, Devided into foure Bokes, no lesse pleasaunt than profitable.

He tells his “reasonable Reader” that this is not for the “cunning clearke” but the “unskilful scholar that wanteth instructions”. It wasn’t just for business, also including “what sorte thou mayest (I say at such vacant times) take thy penne in hande and gratifie thy friend with some prettie or pleasant conceit”.

It went through eight editions up until 1621. By that time, women were also seen as a market. The Academy of Complements. Wherein Ladyes, Gentlemwomen, Schollers, and Strangers may accomplish their Courtly Practice with most Curious Ceremonies, Complements, Amorous, High Expressions and formes of speaking, or writing … with Additions of witty Amorous Poems. And a Table expounding the hard English Words. This was published, perhaps unsurprisingly, pseudonomously. by one “Philomosus”.

Travel guidebooks and phrasebooks start about the same time. One of the first in English was probably Andrew Borde’s The fyrst boke of the Introduction of knowledge, which contained all of the information we’d recognise: descriptions of countries, their monetary systems, and useful foreign phrases. It was published in 1542, less than 70 years after printing had been introduced into England – it is amazing how fast printers learnt to seek out new markets.

There was even marriage guidance, if only as an aside from business advice. In An Essay of Drapery, Or the Compleate Citizen. Trading Justly, Pleasingly, Profitably (1635) William Scott wrote that a certain amount of dissemination was allowed, as “with one who hath married a wife, whome hee must use well, pretending affection to her, though hee cannot love her”.

From “Handbook Learning of the Renaissance Middle Class”, Louis B. Wright, in Studies in Philology, Vol 28, 1931, pp. 58-86.

I’ve been finding lately odd bits of fascinating scholarship in social history published in the Thirties. It seems that this trend was disrupted by the war, and a lot of the work has disappeared from view – the Fifties perhaps not being very “socially” inclined. I’ve found some of these Thirties journals very good hunting grounds for little-referenced material.

It is a frequently angry, everlasting debate among cyclists: helmets or no helmets?

I’m in one of the extreme groups: I won’t go out without one.

Partly that’s a function of coming from Australia, where they are compulsory, and partly it is because I think for the small amount of inconvenience involved you could save your brains. (And I don’t go for the argument that it makes either you or motorists more careless – I know I’m still extremely vulnerable, and I doubt most drivers are paying enough attention to notice.)

This scary tale posted by a doctor backs me up, and shows that it is not just the motorists you have to worry about.

Have you noticed how “e-mail” has now almost universally become “email”?

It’s nice to know the more the English language changes, the more it stays the same.

I was reading in Liza Picard’s Elizabethan London that a “cupboard” was once a “cup board”, i.e. a shelf or a shelves on the wall on which you placed your cups – or rather your silver (or pewter) plate, sometimes with closed doors around them for security.

“The cupboard took a prominent position in any room – so much so that when a member of Gray’s Inn misbehaved himself, he was summoned to ‘come and appear at the cupboard in the hall’ to hear what punishment the Benchers had inflicted on him. The hall was where the Inn’s impressive collection of silver symbolised its power over its members.” (p.60)

A buffet then also had a different meaning:

“The drinking habits of the time involved the guest calling for a drink every time he felt dry. He was brought wine or beer in a clean – at least rinsed – glass or drinking vessel, from this buffet. When he had swallowed his drink the glass went back to the buffet.”

I’m slightly surprised by this; have certainly never read anything like it, in fiction or non-fiction. Aside from anything else, given the quality of the water supplies, this was surely a bad idea on health grounds. Any thoughts?

History, a Technorati tag

A piece of email spam that took my fancy …

“Hello,
Do accept my sincere apologies if my mail does not meet your personal ethics …”

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All readers complaining about being distracted from marking et al by the History Carnival should stop now: I just found an online Tetris game. (It was the one computer game that I really wasted some time over in my youth – it is most curiously addictive – I only played one game this time, really.)

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But if you really need a one-minute chill, click through this lovely sequence of two hummingbirds’ first 21 days.

The promised second half of my notes from last week’s British Museum gallery talk: as you can see from below, I’ve been a little busy with the History Carnival.

So, the British population: the first Homo sapiens sapiens arrive between 40,000 and 30,000 years ago. Before that the Britons were Homo erectus (for which the oldest evidence is about 700,000 years ago) and Neanderthals. But until about 7,500BC there was a land bridge between Britain and continental Europe, so populations presumably interchanged.

From 7,500BC to about 4,000BC the “Britons” were entirely cut off, but from around that date Neolithic farmers started to arrive in timber-framed leather boats – not dinghies but serious vessels that brought even livestock. (What a journey that must have been.)

They brought what is known as the Beaker Culture. But there were never – as taught in traditional history books – waves of Celtic invaders. There was a lot of interchange of culture and isolated mixing of populations – usually in pockets: the cart burials in Yorkshire indicate close ties with the Parisi (around modern-day Paris) – perhaps the result of a marriage alliance?, and the archer at Stonehenge who was shown to be from near the European Alps, but no big invasion.

So the first large influx of foreign people is Claudius’s army, about 50,000 men, most of whom are of course from varying provinces of the empire. There were probably never more than a few hundred “ethnic Romans” in Britain. With an initial population estimated at between 2 and 6 million, this was a serious influence.

We looked at the lovely collection of tombstones grouped in Gallery 49. (Do check out the gallery if you haven’t been for a while – it has now been totally re-arranged and refurbished and has an enormous amount of new information and material.)

There are legionaries and auxiliaries from the Adriatic, from Spain, from the Belgic tribes, from across Gaul, and a surprisingly large number of Palmyrians. Although one of the “Palmyrian” women, her name shows, had been a British slave girl from the St Albans area, who presumably “married up”. Her tombstone shows her dressed as a perfect Palmyrian lady, but the Latin on it is a mess. The Palmyrian script (a form of Aramaeic) below, however, is perfect, suggesting a serious-sized community as it could support a stone mason.

So if you were in the town of Corbridge, Northumbria, today as “Little England” as you could imagine, in say 200AD, our guide Sam Moorhead suggested, you could have expected to hear half a dozen languages, and seen people from all parts of the Roman world, from “Ethiopians” (the Roman word for dark-skinned Africans), to Syrians, to people from what is now Russia. But virtually all of them would have thought of themselves as, or have been striving to have themselves thought of, as Romans.

So for about 2,500 years – until about 4,000BC – Britons were an ethnically isolated population. The mixing started with those Neolithic farmers and has been going on ever since … so much for those who like to suggest there’s anything solid or meaningful about the concept of race.

* While researching this I found a blog of the Boxgrove site, which dates back about half a million years, detailing recent work there.