You’ll find me travelling with the RSC to Basra, in the excellent Days of Significance at the Tricycle Theatre, and getting softer and gentler, meeting butterfly man extraordinaire, Clive Farrell.
Search this blog
Archive
Categories
Monthly Archives: March 2008
Miscellaneous History Travel Women's historyTravelling with the galvachers
March 16, 2008 – 1:24 pm
Notes from my trip in Anost, which I’ve only just managed to recover. (Won’t it be wonderful, when, one day, computers are truly plug and play, so when you get a new one you don’t spend weeks making it all work. And the wi-fi still isn’t…)
Well worth a visit is the Galvachers museum in Anost. If nothing else, you’ll have a sophisticated grasp of the different forms of ox-drivers in the 19th and early 20th-century.
In short:
* Les toucheurs drive cattle to abbatoirs. Often on journeys of 12 to 15 days
* Les boeutiers: young men who were effectively seasonal workers, taking cattle to work on cereal crops as far away as Picardie. The red cattle of the Morvan had a reputation for strength. The maquis de Dampierre considered best working cattle in the world.
*Les charretiers had carts suitable for lots of different jobs, including transporting wood, wine, stone, etc. Could be away from home for wide variations of time
* Les galvachers (the elite) migrated traditionally from May 1 to St Martin’s Day, specialising in moving wood, usually from the most difficult slopes.
In this poor area they were regarded as financial saviours, in memory were glorious, courageous adventurers.
That reputation helped to create the typical women’s industry, which was wetnursing “feminine des nourrices”. Since the region had a reputation for strength and good character, it was thought that the wet nurses would help their charges grow up appropriately.
The museum attendant is also the librarian and she and I had a fascinating discussion (more or less in French) about the women, looking at the wonderful pictures of them – all starched and proper overlay on faces that speak of poverty, with the belaced and pampered charges.
I also questioned (with the use of lots of sign language) why it was that every single ox yoke was for the horns, rather than across the shoulders, when you would think that the latter would be muchmore mechanically efficient and comfortable for the animals. The librarian consulted the books, but the only conclusion that we could draw was “tradition”.
Visiting Brilliant Women
March 16, 2008 – 1:12 pm
Over on My London Your London I’ve an account of my visit yesterday to the Brilliant Women Exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. There were lots of other things I should have been doing, but what the hell…
Carnival of Feminists No 55
March 16, 2008 – 11:31 am
Slightly belatedly – sorry, some time soon I’d really like a week that allows time to breath – but that means the drumroll has been mounting to really cacophanous levels, as it should be, for a spectacularly good Carnival of Feminists No 55 on Penny Red.
I couldn’t make the Million Women March, but after following all of the links there you’ll feel as though you were there, and there’s also a great link for US Women’s History Month.
But don’t waste time here – do go over there and check it out!
Give the chimps some dignity
March 15, 2008 – 10:59 am
This is a slightly confused story in its reasoning, but I can only agree with the sentiments: using chimpanzees in advertising as a figure of fun, as mock humans, is a practice that should be very firmly consigned to history.
Historical miscellany
March 15, 2008 – 10:54 am
* Archaeology sheds unexpected light on 17th-century Cornwall, with the discovery of a series of pits lined with swan pelts revealing a previously unknown folk tradition/religious practice. I’m calling it that rather than The Times’s “witchcraft”, because who knows how the practitioners saw it… One of the fascinating things about it, however, is how late this tradition survived without making any impact on the historical record.
* One of Ramses’ sons has been revealed as having what would surely have been in his terms a miserable afterlife – mistaken for a female temple dancer.
* From my inbox, an exploration of just how much use a Viking’s shield would be to him (or perhaps her) – tested out in fun, if slightly frightening, detail. What would it have been like were you fighting in a real-life epic?
About