1588 A Calendar of Crime

by Shirley McKay

  ‘Do not indulge him,’ said Giles. ‘He is petted enough.’

  ‘By you,’ said his wife.

  But Matthew sobbed, ‘It is not there. Do you not see? I had to find the bean, so I could be the king. I have to be the king, to pardon Uncle Hew. I must be king, to put everything right.’

  The strength of the silence stoppered his tears. He took a great gulp, and stopped, scared, to gaze at the faces around him, all of them looking at Hew. Then Frances and Meg spoke at once. Frances said, ‘That was the king you promised would come? A bean king from a cake?’ while Meg said, ‘How could you let him think that, Hew? That it fell on him, to put right your mistakes?’

  ‘I didn’t know he thought it,’ answered Hew. ‘At least, when he said the king would come, I knew he meant the bean king. I did not know he thought that king could do what a real king does.’

  ‘Can he not?’ Matthew whispered.

  His mother hugged him, ‘It is play, my love.’

  Hew said, ‘I am sorry, Matthew. I never did intend to put the weight of it on you. I did not imagine you would take it on yourself.’

  Frances cried out, ‘Why should he not? Are you so blind that you cannot see? He does what you do. You play king to the world. Why shouldn’t he?’

  She ran out in tears, and Meg went out after, with Martha in her arms, and a bitter glance at Hew.

  Giles scooped Matthew up. He sat down on a chair, and settled the child in his lap. Matthew burrowed deep against his father’s heart.

  ‘Dear me,’ said Giles. ‘I fear this present tempest may rage on a while.’

  ‘I do not have a while. Andrew Wood will hang me, and my family hates me,’ Hew said peevishly.

  ‘No cries of pity, please. And no talk of the end. You have upset the boy, already, quite enough.’

  ‘Ach, I am sorry. Will you be my friend?’ Hew said to Matthew. ‘For, if you will, I can bear almost anything.’

  Matthew lifted up his head from his father’s breast. He nodded.

  ‘There, all well,’ said Giles. ‘Tis strange there was no bean. I hope he hasn’t swallowed it.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Matthew said. ‘And Martha didn’t. I didn’t let her. We didn’t eat any of the cake. It must have been in the bit that was cut out. That was not fair. The cake was for us. And Bella was to keep it safe. But someone had it first.’

  ‘A bit was cut out?’ said Giles. ‘That is very strange. I wonder who it was?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Then it is a mystery. Perhaps Hew will investigate.’

  But Hew did not have to. He already knew.

  On the seventh of January, Hew left his house and went to town with Giles, coming to the tolbooth in the market place. Sir Andrew Wood received them, in a sober mood.

  ‘You have not brought John Kintor. And, as I suppose, you are not here to accuse the doctor. Therefore, I assume that you give up yourself, for justice to be served upon you. I note, too, that you have not brought the king with you. Indeed, I assume that the visit of the king was an invention. I will not pretend to understand what madness lay behind it.’

  Hew did not answer, except to give a little half smile, which by a man who did not know him quite as well as Andrew did, might have been construed as an apology.

  Andrew said, unexpectedly, ‘This makes me sad. I did not want this, Hew.’

  Hew objected, ‘You have always wanted it.’

  ‘To hang you, perhaps. But not for another man’s crime. Will you not reconsider? Bring me the boy, and the thing is done. This is wrong-minded of you. It is not noble. It is arrogant.’

  ‘We told him that,’ said Giles.

  ‘Listen to your friends. Go home. Send the boy. And we will forget this contract. We will call it a folly of the Yule.’

  ‘That is generous. But I cannot send the boy, because he is not guilty of the crime,’ Hew said.

  Sir Andrew sighed. ‘You say that. But you cannot show me an alternative.’

  ‘On the contrary. We can.’

  Hew took from a pouch the pellet that was found in Alan Petrie’s throat, and placed it on the board in front of Andrew Wood. ‘Do you remember this?’

  ‘Indeed. It killed the man.’

  ‘It did. But it was not one of John Kintor’s pellets for his sling. It was a bean from a twelfth cake that choked him. See.’ Hew shook out the pellets from the pouch. ‘They are not the same.’

  Sir Andrew shook his head. ‘So it is a bean. What does that signify? The boy could have shot the bean with his sling. Where was the cake, if he choked on it? We saw none by the corpse.’

  ‘The mill is plagued with crows. That is what the sling is for. Tis likely that the crumbs were eaten by the birds.’

  ‘In any case,’ said Giles, ‘you have the corpus still, in the dead house. There is likely to be cake inside the stomach.’

  ‘You expect me to allow you to anatomize?’ The crownar hesitated.

  ‘You said he had no family.’

  ‘Aye, but still.’

  Giles appealed to one with interests near his own, and as far as possible from Hew’s. ‘Come now, you can watch.’

  In the event, there was no need to cut the corpse. Giles found crumbs of pastry still inside the throat, and cake crumbs, oddly, in the dead man’s hose. ‘He must have pushed it down, when Bella Frew appeared. Then settled to his breakfast by the burn. The poor man must have bolted it,’ he said. ‘I wonder why he chose a piece of twelfth cake, of all the other things he could have had.’

  ‘It was Bella’s system,’ answered Hew. ‘It had placed the twelfth cake closest to the door.’

  ‘Really, it was Meg that killed him,’ Hew remarked, on their way back home. ‘For she baked the cake.’

  ‘If I were you,’ said Giles, ‘I would not mention that. The smoothing of the waters will be hard enough. The last days have been trying ones. And though I hesitate to bow down to your kirk, they may have sounder instincts when it comes to Yule. There is far too much to eat, of rich unwholesome foods, and far too much of sloth, and weariness and indolence, and nothing else to do, but fall out with family. And the whole event goes on for far too long. Still, my heart is full, and I would suffer all of it, over and again, for this happy outcome, that you are not hanged. I was sure you would be, Hew. I saw it in your horoscope.’

  ‘What?’ Hew stopped short to stare at him. ‘You did not say so, then.’

  ‘I thought it was polite to leave the worst part out. There was a chance, besides, it would not come about. The science of prediction never was exact.’

  we commonly say in the Prouerbe, that a man thinketh he hath founde the Beane in the Cake, when ther is some subtile mening in a thing, and he windeth himself into some companie to put forth his opinion and deuice, bearing himselfe in hande, that he hath an inuincible reson althogh it be but fond & trifling

  JOHN CALVIN, SERMON ON THE BOOK OF JOB,

  trans. Arthur Golding, 1574

  1588: FOREVER AND A DAY

  This book is an almanac of sorts, following the pattern of the early ones in which the months ahead were predicted in the stars. It begins with Candlemas, which in the Scottish calendar comes first or last among the quarter days depending on the count: officially, in 1588, the year began on March 25. Not until December 1599 did the Privy Council order that the Scottish year should conform to other countries and be reckoned to begin, ‘in all tyme cuming’ from 1600, on January the first. (So 1599 was almost three months short.) Properly, our Candlemas – February 2 1588 – falls in 1587, or as it is sometimes styled 1587/88. But in popular belief, reflected in the almanacs, New Year’s Day had always fallen on the first of January. And since this is a book about popular beliefs, our year begins there too.

  This kind of dual accounting ought not to confuse us, since we have our tax years and our school years, and in places like St Andrews academic ones. But in 1588, we have another kind of reckoning to contend with. Historians tend to date the events of the Spanish Armada acco
rding to the Gregorian calendar (adopted in Spain in 1582), then ten days in advance of the Julian one, which Scotland (and England) retained until 1752. The dates in these stories, and the weekdays they fall on, are those of the Julian calendar. Hew, though not Giles, would be appalled at anything else. And the times of the tides, the length of the days and the phases of the moon are roughly accounted to follow that calendar, which is different from the one we have today. They cannot be exact. They may, in some places, be wildly out. They do not account for differences in latitude, British Summer Time, or hours of indeterminate or of varying length. The noon or one or four o’clock is theirs; I cannot promise it’s the same as ours.

  Nothing of this matters to the people in the stories, whose lives are shaped by seasons – by seedtime and the harvest, by fish days and flesh days and days when rents are due – rather than by dates. And yet the almanacs are full of dates, each with an aspect and a name (February opens with St Bridget’s day; Valentine is drowned in a sea of saints). They count the years since the world began (ominously, 5550, in 1588 – the world was supposed to end in the sixth millennium) and give ‘everlasting tables’ ‘at no time to be altered’ to calculate ‘for ever’ which sign the moon is in, on which day Sunday falls, when it is a leap year, the age of the moon ‘at all tymes’, the ebbing and flowing of the tides, the length of the day and the night, the dates of the moveable feasts. These ‘everlasting’ tables were discarded with the day, thrown away each year and like the days they represented, came round again. Of the very many thousands printed and reprinted, no more than a handful have survived. One of those is Walter Gray’s for 1588, An almanacke and prognostication, made for the yeere of our Lord M.D.LXXXVIII, a single copy of which is in the Bodleian Library, The Vicar’s Library, St Mary’s Church, Marlborough. This almanac is ‘rectified’ for Dorchester, though it’s not clear how this impacts on predictions such as: ‘Februarie, the first day, darke and colde’.

  The earliest existing Scottish almanac that I have come across was printed in Edinburgh in 1619, though much earlier calendars for calculating dates of religious feasts are found in psalm and ballad books. Of A generall prognostication for ever. Fruitfullie augmented with manie plaine, briefe, chosen rules, concerning all purposes, and verie expedient for all maner of persons whatsoeuer. ‘Imprinted at Edinburgh by Andro Hart: 1619.’ – ‘for ever’ once again – two copies have survived, one of which is in the Bodleian, and the other in the National Library of Scotland. Hart’s almanac is based on earlier prognostications issued by the English astrologer Leonard Digges in various editions, dating to the 1550s. The earliest surviving one is dated 1555. Hart’s 1619 version has been adapted for the market to include the Scottish fair dates, the tide times for Leith, Aberdeen, St Andrews and Dundee, and the ‘readie high wayes’, with the names of the towns and distances between, of which ‘the whole summe is, two hundreth, and foure score of miles betwixt Edinburgh and London’. (John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’, who walked from London to Edinburgh in 1618, observed that ‘the Scots doe allow almost as large measure of their miles, as they doe of their drink’, The Pennyles Pilgrimage).

  The almanacs together form a kind of composite of familiar themes, like the days themselves recurring year on year, with very little change. But 1588 was no ordinary year. This was the year in which the same printer who printed Walter Gray’s almanac published John Harvey’s A DISCOVERSIVE PROBLEME concerning Prophesies, How far they are to be valued, or credited, according to the surest rules, and directions in Diuinitie, Philosophie, Astrologie, and other learning: Deuised especially in abatement of the terrible threatenings, and menaces, peremptorily denounced against the kingdoms, and states of the world, this present famous yeere, 1588, supposed the Great woonderfull, and Fatall yeere of our Age, and in which James VI wrote a meditation on the Day of Judgement, in response to the threat from the Spanish fleet. This was a year in which the world was meant to end, in which ‘for ever’ seemed to loom perilously close. Its calendar and almanacs, and enduring histories, have shaped the stories here, which follow through the year its high days and holidays, fair days and foul, from Candlemas to Yule, where the changing of the seasons marks time to the march of human life itself, and the only constant is that every date brings death.

  A LIFE SHAPED BY SEASONS:

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  CANDLEMAS

  Candilmes, February 2 1588

  A term day in Scotland

  Candlemas was once a festival of light, a beacon in the midst of the dark days of winter. In the early Christian Church, Candlemas was the feast of the purification of the Virgin Mary, the day on which the infant Christ was presented in the temple, and his mother cleansed of childbirth, forty days after the nativity. The story is told in the Gospel of Luke 2 22:40. The infant Jesus Christ is recognised by Simeon as the anointed one, the bringer of the ‘light’, which is symbolised in candles at the feast of Candlemas. It is said to have its root in the ancient Roman festival where tapers were lit to honour Februa, a double affront to the Protestant Church, compounding Roman Catholic faults with Roman pagan ones.

  In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the craftsmen of Aberdeen performed, among their several pageants and processions, Candlemas ‘plays’, and the corporations were required to provide wax candles for the Mass. There were penalties for those who failed to take part ‘in their best array’. In 1523 one John Pill was tried and convicted for not joining in the Candlemas procession, with ‘his token and sign of his craft’. Compounding his offence by rudeness to the Bailies, John Pill was sentenced to appear barefoot and bareheaded at the Kirk with a candle of wax in his hand.

  The Candlemas pageants, like the May folk games and Robin Hood plays, were driven out at the Reformation, when the tables turned. Sanctions were imposed on those who took part, as opposed to on those who shunned the celebrations. But the Kirk had a battle to dispel the old beliefs. In our present month of February, 1588, the General Assembly made report of Fife: ‘No resorting to the Kirk in many places. The kirks ruinous and destitute of Pastours and provision. There is superstitious keiping of the Yule, Pasche, &c’. In 1591 the Kirk was still denouncing plays of Robin Hood and asking that the acts of Parliament against them be put into effect, while in Aberdeen the candlelit processions celebrating Candlemas were taken up by schoolchildren and were carried on through the eighteenth century.

  The Kirk appears to have distanced itself, too, from the second part to Candlemas (if the first is the presentation in the temple of the Christ child, the bringer of the light), that is, the feast of the purification. The commentators to the Geneva Bible were careful to explain the meaning of the verse: ‘And when the days of her purification, after the Law of Moses, were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord’ with the note ‘This is meant, for the fulfilling of the Law: for otherwise the virgin was not defiled, nor unclean, by the birth of this child’. The book of Common Order – the liturgy that John Knox introduced to Scotland in 1564 – contains no service for the thanksgiving of women after childbirth, unlike the English Book of Common Prayer which it replaced. Presbyteries should be ‘careful to remove superstition . . . in kirking of women after childbirth’ notes the Synod of Moray in 1656. Despite this, the ‘kirking’ of women after childbed (and also after marriage) appears to have continued into the late nineteenth century, long after the practice in England had died out. Deep-set superstitions can be hard to shift, even for a zealous and persistent church.

  CANDLEMAS LORE OF THE LAND

  ‘As lang’s the liverock sings afore can’lemas, it greets aifter’t’

  The liverock (skylark from Old Scots laverok/lawrok) should be careful not to sing too soon. Candlemas day was the point in the year at which the winter would either let go of its grip, or redouble in strength. A dark sky boded well, and a clear one ill, for:

  If Can’lemas is fair and clear

  There’ll be twa winters in the year

  This piece
of ancient lore recurs in various forms throughout the northern hemisphere. It appears as a foolproof way to forecast the weather for the year to come, in Digges’ Scottish almanac:

  If the day of Candlemas be cleare,

  The Winter shal be greater and worse that yere

  According to Thomas Hill’s Gardener’s Labyrinth of 1577, ‘The yearely Almanackes doe maruellouslie helpe the Gardners in the election of tymes, or sowing, planting, and grafting, but especially in obseruing the Moone, about the bestowing of plantes’.

  In Meg’s garden in this month, the primroses are peeping through. They will be eaten as a pot herb or boiled in white wine as a remedy ‘for one that cannot make water’. A little later in the year they may be made into a ‘spring tart’ like this seventeenth-century recipe from The Compleat Cook: or, the Whole Art of Cookery (London, 1694):

  Gather what buds are not bitter, also the leaves of Primroses, Violets and Strawberries, with young Spinage, and boil them, and put them into a Cullender, then chop your Herbs very small, and boil them over again in Cream, add thereunto so many yolks with the whites, as will sufficiently thicken your Cream, to which you must add some grated Naples bisket, colour all green with the juyce of Spinage, and season it with Sugar, Cinamon, Nutmeg, and a little Salt, you may bake it in Puff-paste or otherways.

  Also flowering now is the lesser celandine, a member of the buttercup family that takes its name from the Greek word for swallow: ‘the small Celandyne was so called, bycause that it beginneth to spring & to floure, at the comming of the Swallowes, and withereth at their returne’.

  Celandines are said to be good for the eyes: ‘I sau celidone, that is gude to help the sycht of the ene’.

  Considered ‘hot and dry in the third degree’, celandine is also prescribed for toothache, haemorrhoids, jaundice, ‘naughtie fleume’ and ‘evil humours’, while the juice of the roots ‘mingled with honie, and snifte or drawen vp into the nose, purgeth the brayne from superfluous moystures, and openeth the stoppings of the nose’.