Can’t imagine why I haven’t found this before: a site listing early modern history email lists. There are also list for modern history, and a periodicals listing, and divisions by century.
Of course why I think it a good idea to add to the several hundred emails I get in a day is a question – haven’t had any tea yet this morning…
As promised, only an hour or so late, I’ve just posted the second half of Miss Frances William Wynn’s account of The Old Woman of Delamere Forest.
In it, she shows herself once again to be an acute observer of human nature. She lacks our vocabulary to talk about mental illness, but she’s very aware of some of the dividing lines:
In the strange tale of the old woman, I cannot help believing there was much of self-delusion, and that, when that was removed, she had recourse to falsehood to bolster up her fallen credit: but it seems to me quite impossible to say exactly where delusion ended and deception began. I see that my sister and I should not fix the boundary at the same place: she has more faith in the old liar than I can have.
Miss Williams Wynn certainly paints a strong picture of the women’s character, which reminds me, rather too closely really, of someone I know.
Deep in early modern ballads today, I came across an account of a beauty of a morality tale. It is the story of a rich woman who mocked her poor sister who had just given birth to twins. (There was a belief around at the time that twins had to have been begotten by different fathers.)
But the rich woman got her comuppance. Immediately. She gave birth, all in one go, to 365 children – one, of course, for each day of the year.
It is called The Lamenting Lady, a broadside (the “newspapers” of the day) printed for Henry Gosson about 1620.
Of course it raises the question of how gullible people were then? Did they read it in the way we read stories about Elvis being alive? Or did they read this as “fact”? Probably a bit of both really – just like today. Ihear these faint sounds of “Blue suede shoes…”
UPDATE: (Really shouldn’t do “half-asleep blogging”) Sorry, forgot the reference: This is from Shaaber, M.A. Some Forerunners of the Newspaper in England 1476-1622, Frank Cass and Co., London, 1966, p. 150, which surprisingly enough is the best source I’ve found on the subject, even if hardly a recent one.
I listened to Gordon Brown’s Budget speech yesterday, and David Cameron’s response (whatever happened to the end of yahoo-boo politics? – he might have done himself good with his party members, but I doubt the country was impressed.) I was luxuriating in the thought that I wasn’t that evening at a newspaper, and wouldn’t be running around trying to match up case studies with their pictures, or trying to make sense of two sets of contradictory figures on tax on some form of investment trust I’d never heard of. Budget day is usually the worst day on a newspaper, and somehow I doubt the vast bulk of readers appreciate their 24-page lift-outs with lots of stuff that will probably have been proved wrong within a week, when everyone has read the fine print.
But I will comment on one, much-telegraphed, figure – the miserable, almost useless, rise of £45 in road tax for the worst-polluting vehicles. That is for most of them less than the equivalent of a tank of fuel, as a deterrent roughly the equivalent to being whipped with a wet feather. If you multiplied that rise by 10 it might start to have an effect, and I’ld judge, would be broadly popular. Even other drivers don’t enjoy being bullied by drivers of near-tanks like the enormous Range Rovers.
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Elsewhere, I’m sure I glimpsed a flash of pink and a whiggly tail flying past my window: The Times has a post-particularly nasty murder comment piece that doesn’t say “lock ’em up and throw away the key”. Camilla Cavendish writes that jails need to be turned into proper schools, quoting some interesting if unsurprising stats:
More than half of offenders are at or below the expected reading level of an 11-year-old. Nearly half were excluded from school. More than half do not have the skills required for 96 per cent of jobs, according to the Prison Reform Trust, and only one in five is able to complete a job application form.
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Then, possibly the most important news of the day, although only the Independent has it on its front (web) page, there’s been a breakthrough in research into rice blast fungus, which “destroys enough food to feed 60 million people”.
Miss Frances Williams Wynn, my 19th-century blogger, is getting back into the Gothic tale again. At least the the old woman of Delamere forest heads in that direction. It starts as the tale of an educated, independent woman who decides to make an independent life on waste land for herself and her daughter, whom she is “homeschooling”.
It is quite a tale – and I promise to post the denouncement later today….
I can almost never remember my dreams, which I consider to be a very good thing, but for some reason I woke up remembering a stupid, annoying one this morning – “got out of the wrong side of the bed” is the traditional phrase – so if I’m a bit grumpy today, forgive me.
But my day wasn’t improved by reading about the latest shooting atrocity in America: a 15-year-old boy gunned down with a shotgun – shot by his neighbour then “finished off” at close range. His crime? Running on the lawn. The context?
A child is killed by a gun every three hours in America. According to the latest statistics, nearly 1,000 children under 19 are shot dead every year. Another 800 use guns to commit suicide, and more than 160 die in firearm accidents.
Forty per cent of American households own guns, but those guns are 22 times more likely to be involved in an accidental shooting, or 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide, than in self-defence. On average, more than 80 Americans are killed by gunfire every day.
But, as the story makes clear, gun control has entirely disappeared from the American agenda – indeed controls are being relaxed. So this killer, who his neighbours knew to be unbalanced, was allowed to have a lethal weapon that could be casually unleashed on a child.
Then in Britain, the number of 16-year-olds not in any form of training has risen, from 9.4 to 12.6 per cent. This is the “underclass”, and they’ll stay that way unless they can somehow be lured back into education.
The figures come in the wake of a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which showed that the UK was 27th out of 29 industrialised nations in terms of the percentage of youngsters staying on after 16. Those figures were described as a “scandal” by David Miliband, who was Schools minister at the time – but today’s report shows the percentage who go straight from school either on to the streets or unskilled employment is growing.
Now just about everyone I know is saying, “next weekend, next weekend” life will feel better. It is almost a mantra. That’s because we’ll suddenly get another hour of daylight when the clocks go forward. Why we are deprived of it all winter in Britain is one of those great little mysteries. But there is a Bill (albeit a private members’ bill with almost no hope of passing) now in the Lords to give us that extra daylight.
Either way, I promise to get some more cheerful stories soon….
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