Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors

by English Historical Fiction Authors

  A vizard was found during the renovation of an inner wall of a 16th-century stone building. The nose area is strengthened to stand out and form a case around the wearer’s nose. The outer fabric is black velvet, the lining of silk, and inside it is strengthened by a pressed-paper inner. A black glass bead attached by a string to the mask was used to hold the mask in place—the wearer would hold the bead tightly in her mouth. This of course made speaking impossible, so I don’t think I would have worn mine for long!

  An excerpt from Phillip Stubbes’ Anatomie of Abuses, published in 1583, says:

  When they use to ride abrod, they have invisories, or masks, visors made of velvet, wherwith they cover all their faces, having holes made in them against their eyes, whereout they look. So that if a man, that knew not their guise before, should chaunce to meet one of them, he would think hee met a monster or a devil; for face hee can see none, but two brode holes against her eyes with glasses in them.

  So now you have your dress and your vizard—what else might you need? Well, fans made from silk and decorated paper were widely used by wealthy people during the 17th century and were the most essential accessory for women during the Stuart period. And without being able to speak you would definitely need the “language of the fan”.

  But I feel we are lacking a bit of glitz and glamour, don’t you? So how about embroidered petticoats and a bit of twinkling jewellery?

  There was a passion in this period for floral fabrics and jewellery, so it was likely you would put on your earrings by looking in a mirror with an engraved or enamelled back, decorated with floral motifs. You might be tempted to have your dressmaker make a gown, or under-dress, from flower-inspired fabric made in India for export to the English market.

  Cosse-de-pois (pea pod) shapes and later flowers became very popular, and many designs in this fashion were produced. Exotic flowers were immensely popular, and botany became a study in its own right.

  In The Lady’s Slipper, my main character, Alice Ibbetson, is a botanist and artist. Like many ladies of this era, she was fascinated by new varieties of flowers.

  The intensification of the trade with the near East brought flowers and bulbs to Europe which had never been seen before, and a true craze for flowers suddenly sprang up. The Tulipomania of 1634 is a well-documented example. Flora had been fashionable in embroidery since the end of the 16th century but was now adopted by jewellery designers as well. From the 1650s on, engraving in metal was another, and later preferred, way of depicting flowers. Other popular jewellery designs were the three droplets, or “girandoles”, called this as they resembled the branches of a lit candlestick.

  If you were going to go outside, then the latest fashion was for Venetian “chopines”—a type of sandal or stilt designed to keep your shoes protected from the filth and dirt of the city streets, and for short ladies, to add a little height.

  Constructed from carved wood and silks, they must have been as uncomfortable to wear as modern platform soles, but twice as difficult to keep on. Chopines apparently caused an unstable and inelegant gait. Women wearing them were generally accompanied by a servant or attendant on whom they could balance themselves, and even to put the chopines on was a little like climbing onto stilts, so they were usually put on with the help of two servants. Some chopines could be as high as 50 cm, and their height became symbolic of the status of the wearer.

  So now, in whalebone reinforced black dress, gripping my vizard between my teeth, ears heavy with floral gems, I shall totter on my chopines to my sedan!

  17th Century Garden Design for Women

  by Deborah Swift

  William Lawson is credited with making gardening popular for women with his book A New Orchard and Garden, which was printed together with the first horticultural book written solely for women, The Country Housewife’s Garden. Beautifully illustrated with charming woodcuts, it tells the 17th century woman everything she needs to know to have a productive and visually attractive garden.

  The concept of a “pretty” garden would have been anathema to most women of the 17th century, as gardens were primarily about producing food and herbs, unless you were very wealthy, in which case the gardening was left to your servants. The 17th century author of The English Housewife, Gervase Markham, claimed the “complete woman” had:

  skill in physic, surgery, cookery, extraction of oils, banqueting stuff, ordering of great feasts, preserving of all sorts of wines…distillations, perfumes, ordering of wool, hemp and flax: making cloth and dying; the knowledge of dairies: office of malting; of oats…of brewing, baking, and all other things belonging to a household.

  Guess that did not leave much time for planting pretty flowers!

  Because kitchen gardens were about supplying the table, and as much ground as possible was covered with edible plants, every garden was different, planted according to the whims of the women of the household. William Lawson’s book for the country housewife was designed to be read in conjunction with his New Orchard and Garden, thus giving women access to the idea of garden design, in print, for the very first time.

  William Lawson lived from 1553 to 1635 and was the vicar of Ormesby, a country parish in Yorkshire. No doubt his gardening passion led him to be so long-lived in an age where most people did not reach fifty. Gardening was a national passion in the 16th and 17th centuries, as more species came from abroad, and an interest in subjects concentrating on the useful qualities and medical virtues of plants became popular.

  But the war against garden pests was just as hard then as now—Lawson calls them the “whole Army of mischiefs” and says that “Good things have most enemies”. The enemies in his Yorkshire Garden were apparently deer and moles.

  Lawson’s garden plan included long walkways, a maze, and even a bowling alley. Its rectangular shape is split into six sections over three terraces, with flights of stairs and paths to go from one to the other. Its design demonstrates the vogue in the 16th and 17th century for symmetry and patterns. In the top left square he planned to have topiary, signified by a man with the sword and a horse. A river runs at the top and bottom of the garden where he says “you might sit in your mount and angle a peckled trout, sleighty eel or some other daintie fish”.

  In my novel, The Lady’s Slipper, Alice Ibbetson is an obsessive gardener—a pioneer, if you like, testing out the knowledge handed down from her father who was a plantsman much like William Lawson. She finds relaxation in communing with nature. Her maid Ella, featured in The Gilded Lily, would try to avoid garden work if at all possible. Her sights are set on becoming a fine lady, just like Alice Ibbetson, and leaving manual labour behind for good.

  Source

  Lawson, William. A new orchard and garden: or, The best way for planting, grafting, and to make any ground good, for a rich orchard: particularly in the North and generally for the whole kingdom of England. London: J. H. for F. Williams, 1626. http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/16493#/summary.

  Gossip in Early Modern England

  by Sam Thomas

  In today’s world, whether it is used as a noun or a verb, the term “gossip” has universally negative connotations. Gossips spread rumors of dubious veracity and are often considered the very opposite of what a friend should be.

  But such was not always the case, for in early modern England “gossip” had additional and sometimes contradictory meanings.

  According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word “gossip” comes from 1014, but its meaning would have no resonance today, for “gossip” referred to a child’s godmother or godfather. The spiritual kinship between the child and the godparent extended to the child’s birth parents as well, making them “siblings in god.”

  And here is where things get really cool: “gossip” is short for “god-sib” which is itself an abbreviated form of “god sibling.” Thus your gossips we
re the women and men you chose as godparents for your child—gossips were your closest friends.

  According to the English, the Irish chose wolves as their gossips. As one historian noted, this idea is as interesting if it is false as if it is true. Intriguingly enough, this meaning of the word—including its inclusion of men as gossips—endured into the late 19th century.

  In the seventeenth century, “gossip” began to refer to the women who attended a woman during labor and delivery of a child, or at her recovery (or lying-in) afterwards, and here we can begin to see the word taking on its negative connotations. Prior to the eighteenth century, childbirth was women’s business and a central occasion for women’s sociability. A woman gave birth not in the presence of doctors and nurses (whom she knew not at all), but her friends and neighbors.

  Such gatherings of women made some men very nervous, and they spilt a great deal of ink voicing their anxiety. In ‘Tis Merry When Gossips Meet (1602) and its sequel A Crew of Kind Gossips (1609), Samuel Rowlands describes the meeting between a widow, wife, and spinster in which the three women exchange complaints about their husbands and the widow offers the other women advice on how to manipulate their spouses.

  While there is no denying Rowlands’ misogyny, his description may not have been entirely off the mark. Writing later in the century, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, describes just such a gathering in terms Rowlands would recognize:

  ...as is Usual at such Gossiping Meetings, their Discourse was most of Labours and Child-beds, Children and Nurses, and Household Servants...at last they fell into a Discourse of Husbands, Complaining of Ill Husbands, and so from Husbands in General, to their own Particular Husbands.

  When Cavendish—ever the defender of patriarchy—reprimanded the women for their disrespectful carriage, they turned their guns on her:

  ...the ladies being before Heated with Wine, and then at my Words, with Anger fell into such a Fury with me, as they fell upon me, not with Blows, but with Words, and their Tongues as their Swords, did endeavour to Wound me...it hath so Frighted me, as I shall not hastily go to a Gossiping-meeting again, like as those that become Cowards at the Roaring Noise of Cannons, so I, at the Scolding Voices of Women.

  This episode also makes clear we should not imagine these gatherings as occasions for sisterly resistance against patriarchal oppression. Rather, they were the scene of as much infighting and competition as characterized society in general.

  In the early modern period then, the term “gossip” could refer to any number of things, ranging from a child’s godfather, to a woman’s closest female friends, to a woman who spread scurrilous rumors about her neighbors. While some might find such imprecision frustrating, to my mind it simply speaks to the richness of early modern English and the ability of the common folk to define words in terms that were useful to them.

  What Was Old in the Olden Days?

  by Sam Thomas

  If people know one thing about the early modern period, whether it is Tudor England or Puritan New England, it is that people died young. At some point they saw a statistic saying that the average lifespan was forty years and they leave it at that.

  While technically true, this view of early modern life misses quite a bit about the past, not least because talk of an “average” hides the fact that high infant mortality rates skew things considerably. If a pair of twins is born in 1600, and one dies at birth while the other lives eighty years, their average life-span is forty years—but neither twin came remotely close to that number!

  The strange thing is that the people of early modern England knew perfectly well that people—lots of people—grew old. In the late seventeenth century, a government commissioner named Gregory King (1648-1712) wrote a report called Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, in which he estimated the population of England and broke down these numbers based on age as well as social and marital status. According to King, 10% of the population was over sixty.

  Remarkably, modern demographers found that King was off by only a single percentage point: at the end of the 17th century, 9% of the population was over the age of sixty.

  Put another way, if a girl made it past her fifth birthday—by which time childhood diseases had done their worst—it was not unreasonable to expect that she would live to a relatively old age, even by modern standards.

  The question that this raises, however, is what being old meant in the past.

  In the modern world we mark age in ways that are peculiar to our time and place: we get a driver’s license when we turn sixteen, vote at eighteen, drink at twenty-one, receive full retirement benefits at sixty-seven, etc. But obviously none of these markers would have made sense to people living any time before the 20th century. So what mattered to them?

  As King’s estimate indicates, turning sixty was a big deal—in the minds of many people, that was when you became old. A Presbyterian minister named Oliver Heywood (1630-1704) made a habit of writing annual reflections on his birthday. When he turned fifty-nine, he noted: “I bless the Lord, I am as fit for studying and preaching this day as ever I was in all my life.”

  The next year—despite continuing good-health!—he adopted a rather more dramatic tone:

  Oh my dear Lord, I am now arrived at the 60th year of my age, and not one amongst a thousand live to this age, and I have passed many changes and revolutions in the course of my pilgrimage.... how soon are these 60 years of my life past, like a tale that’s told, a dream when one awakes, its but t’ other day that I was an infant, a child, a school boy, and now I am grown of the older sort, and anon I shall not be here my place will know me no more.

  “Why sixty?” you ask. In addition to being a comfortingly round number, it had religious significance, for it was when the great Apostle Paul died. Heywood wrote of, “having passed to the sixtieth year of my Life, [the date of the life of Paul the Aged] within a few days; and my Lord only knows how soon my sun may set.”

  Intriguingly enough, early modern men and women considered sixty-three to be another year-of note. When Thomas Jolly noted the death of a fellow minister, he added the note, “he dyed in the close of his great climactericall year [63], which is accounted most dangerous.”

  This is all well and good, and thank God for demographers who crunch the numbers so we don’t have to, but the other half of this question remains unanswered. How did growing old feel in the world before modern medicine and the social safety net?

  Perhaps the most interesting thing about old age in the early modern period is that one could “grow old” several times. The first phase of old age was known to contemporaries as “green old age.” This was a time, usually, when a person was in his fifties or sixties. While the body might have begun to decay, it was a time of generally good health and continuing activity.

  In his sixty-first year, the aforementioned Presbyterian minister, Oliver Heywood, traveled over 1,000 miles on horseback over extremely difficult terrain, delivered 135 weekday sermons, and attended forty religious fasts. When he was sixty-eight, he logged 700 miles, eighty-two sermons, and another forty fasts. Other men and women had a similarly pleasant experience of old age, as their children married and started lives of their own, or they found spiritual peace that had eluded them in their youth.

  It is here worth noting that an individual’s experience of old age is closely tied to wealth and gender. A man who spent his entire life working in the fields would grow old much sooner (and more painfully) than a gentleman or aristocrat. Part of what allowed Heywood to enjoy his green old age was that (by lucky accident) he’d inherited an estate in Lancashire, so he did not have to worry about money.

  Thanks to their role bearing children, many women also aged earlier than men, regardless of their social status. In contrast to the popular image of labor being fraught with peril, a woman had only a 6-7% chance of
dying in childbirth (over her lifetime, not per birth). But the fact is that in the pre-modern era, a woman might become pregnant a half-dozen times and this could take a terrible toll on her body.

  Whatever a person’s social status, green old age faded to brown and the elderly grew weaker, sicker, and less likely to recover from illness. In extreme old age, physical decay became a central fact in a person’s life, as it became more difficult to see, hear, breathe, and walk. Along with these physical challenges, many elderly people suffered from memory loss and melancholy. In 1699, at age sixty-nine, Heywood described his condition in touching detail:

  My wind grows exceeding short, any little motion puts me out of order—my chapel is near me, but when I walk to it (as yesterday) my wind so fails me that I am forced to stand and get new breath, before I go into my pulpit. When I go up to my chamber, my breath cuts, that I am forced to sit a season in my chair to breath me. When I lay down in my bed I pant a considerable time and cough and oftimes my waters come from me with motion.

  An individual’s ability to cope with the challenges of extreme old age varied with social status. The wealthy obviously lived in greater comfort than the poor. A few years after this, Heywood found himself unable to walk the few steps to his chapel, so he paid two men to carry him in a specially-built chair. Obviously, this was a luxury which most of his neighbors could not have afforded.

  But old age was not just a physical event. For some in early modern England (particularly the Puritans), it could be seen as an event of cosmic significance.

  Early Georgian Era (1715-1800)