by Tessa Harris
bulse: A purse or bag of diamonds.
old rulers’ tombs: The enormous domes of the tombs of the seven Qutub Shahi rulers are found close to the famous Golconda Fort, just outside Hyderabad.
vakil: An attorney.
Lord Indra: The most important god in the Vedic religion, he is also a major figure in Hinduism and Buddhism and is often associated with storms and rain.
naukar: An Indian male domestic servant.
second: A gentleman chosen by the principal participants whose job it was to ensure that the duel was carried out according to the rules.
duel: By about 1770, English duelists had adopted the pistol instead of the sword. The first rule of dueling was that a challenge to duel between two gentlemen could not generally be refused without the loss of face and honor. If a gentleman invited a man to duel and he refused, the challenger might place a notice in the paper denouncing the man as a poltroon for refusing to give satisfaction in the dispute.
cuirass: A piece of armor that covers the wearer’s front.
commoners: In this case the term refers to people who share rights over an area of common land in a particular locality.
Chapter 2
Woodstock: A market town eight miles northwest of Oxford.
tansies: Plants belonging to the daisy family. They were used for medical purposes.
laudanum: In 1753 the Scottish surgeon and physician George Young published his Treatise on Opium, which exalted the virtues of laudanum.
aloe balm: Although aloe was used to enhance women’s skin and in the embalming process in Egyptian times, it was not until the eighteenth century that Europeans discovered the plant’s additional healing properties for conditions such as skin irritations, burns, and wounds.
bury man: The archaic name for a grave digger.
Chapter 3
allotment: When commoners lost their land as a result of enclosure, many were awarded an allotment of land as compensation.
Chapter 4
Bedlam: Bethlem Royal Hospital, to give it its full name, was originally founded in 1247 but did not begin to treat the insane until the fourteenth century. In 1676, the hospital moved from the site of what is now Liverpool Street station, London, to a magnificent baroque building, designed by Robert Hooke, at Moorfields. The hospital moved to its third site in 1815 and now forms part of the Imperial War Museum.
Chapter 5
thieftaker: Prior to the establishment of a police force, individuals were often hired to capture criminals.
Chapter 6
microscope: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) became the first man to make and use a real microscope in the late seventeenth century.
Chapter 7
Great North Road: This was a coaching route used by mail coaches between London, York, and Edinburgh. The modern A1 mainly follows the Great North Road. The inns on the road, many of which survive, were staging posts on the coach routes.
Biggleswade: A market town and important staging post for traffic on the Great North Road, with many inns providing accommodation, stabling for the horses, and replacement mounts.
Clerkenwell: By the eighteenth century the area was home to many small workshops that housed watchmakers and bookbinders.
Fleet: Now a subterranean river following Farringdon Street.
East India Company: The company ruled India after the Battle of Plassey in 1757 until 1858.
Blackfriars: The outfall of the Fleet can still be seen beneath Blackfriars Bridge.
lascars: Indian seamen working for British ships. One hundred and thirty-eight lascars were reported arriving in British ports in 1760, rising to 1,403 in 1810.
Cockpit Tavern: Although the current pub dates back only to the 1840s, a tavern has stood on this site, the junction of Ireland Yard and St. Andrew’s Hill, since the sixteenth century.
without a nose: In the Mysore region, an Italian traveler reported that the inhabitants often cut off the noses of Mughal enemy riders. In the eighteenth century, the practice continued as soldiers were rewarded according to the number of noses and upper lips of their enemies they took to their leader. The Sikhs of Punjab also followed this custom.
The Atlas reached St. Helena six weeks ago with the Besborough: The Atlas, carrying Marian Hastings, sailed from Bengal and was accompanied by the East Indiaman ship the Besborough.
Marian Hastings: Anna Maria, to give her her full name, was first married to Baron Carl von Imhoff, but following a scandalous relationship with Warren Hastings, she married the latter in 1777. She attracted much speculation and gossip and amassed a large personal fortune. One satirical poem at the time ran thus: “Your gaudy charms to public view,/Admiring swains with rapture eye.”
Warren Hastings: Joining the British East India Company in 1750 as a clerk, he rose to become the first governor-general of Bengal, from 1773 to 1785.
Chapter 8
coppicers: The men who made their living by managing woodland trees.
sawyers: In order to cut tree trunks lengthwise, they were placed over pits known as sawpits. Balanced on smaller logs, the trunks were attached to them with iron hooks called dogs. Cutting was done with a two-man saw. The sawyer on top was known as the “top dog,” while the “under dog” stood in the pit and would be covered, unfortunately, with all the falling sawdust.
enclosure: Between the fifteenth and early twentieth centuries, landowners began fencing off common land previously available for common use.
Chapter 9
Aston Abbotts: A village five miles northeast of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire.
ague: A fever or shivering fit.
Oxford Castle: Most of the castle was destroyed in the English Civil War of the 1640s. By the eighteenth century, the remaining buildings had become Oxford’s local prison.
its forbidding prison: In the 1770s the prison reformer John Howard visited the castle jail several times and criticized its size and quality, including the extent to which vermin infested the prison. Its keeper was the incredibly named Solomon Wisdom. Work began on a new prison on the site in 1785.
Chapter 10
gibbet: During the eighteenth century there were fifty-six public executions at Oxford Castle, for crimes ranging from sheep stealing to arson and spying.
Chapter 11
schnapps: A type of distilled spirit made from fermented fruit, this remains a popular drink in Germany.
hemp or wool: Most rope was woven from hemp or wool at the time.
coir: Not until 1840 was a factory making coir products established in London.
Chapter 12
Great Fogg: A persistent dry haze hung over Europe during the second half of 1783, thought to be caused by an eruption of the Laki fissure in Iceland. (See The Devil’s Breath.)
charcoal burners: Men who lived in the woods and operated large kilns that burned wood to produce charcoal.
glean for corn: A privilege granted to poor parishioners, who could gather the stalks and ears of grain left behind by reapers.
pannage: In autumn domestic pigs were allowed to forage on fallen acorns, beech mast, or other nuts. It was a right granted to local people on common land or in royal forests and still exists in some woodlands today.
coupes: Areas of woodland that are cut on a rotation. Many other terms are used, such as burrow, hagg, fell, cant, panel, or burrow, depending on the locality.
sack-’em-up men: The London anatomist Joshua Brookes refused to pay a retainer to a gang of resurrectionists and found a rotting corpse on his doorstep. His neighbors were so scandalized that they almost beat him to death.
fulling stocks: Large wooden hammers used for part of the process of fulling (or thickening) and cleaning woven cloth by matting the surface texture.
Chapter 13
Chiltern Hills: A chalk escarpment that stretches from the River Thames in Oxfordshire to Hitchin in Hertfordshire.
Chapter 14
Dick Whittington’s day: The children’s rags-to-riches story is based on the
life of Richard Whittington (c. 1354–1423), a wealthy merchant and later Lord Mayor of London.
New Bond Street: In 1720s London, the original Bond Street was extended to the north, running from Burlington Gardens to Oxford Street. It was then called New Bond Street.
William Gray: A 1784 trade directory lists Robert & William Gray, jewellers, 13 New Bond Street.
Chapter 16
Great Tom: Housed in Tom Tower at Christ Church, the bell is the loudest in Oxford.
runners: Founded by the magistrate Henry Fielding in 1749, the small band of constables operated from his Bow Street home, hence their full name, the Bow Street Runners.
Chapter 17
Oriental scholar: Several English scholars studied Indian texts during the eighteenth century, but the most famous was Sir William Jones, who arrived in Calcutta in the early 1780s. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal with the enthusiastic support of Warren Hastings, who was also a keen Oriental scholar.
Sanskrit: The classical language of India. Many ancient Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain texts are also written in it.
Chapter 19
in the presence of the nizam: No English language newspapers existed until 1784 in India. This is a fictitious report, although a firsthand account of one such torture and execution at Baroda in 1814 has been preserved in The Percy Anecdotes. It makes for very distressing reading.
Chapter 20
pakar tree: Akin to a fig tree, it is commonly known as the Portia Tree.
Chapter 21
banyan: A gentleman’s banyan was a loose, informal robe that was influenced by Oriental fashion. The robes were also called Indian gowns.
the Great Snake: In an account of a journey to Orissa in 1766, Thomas Motte wrote that he visited Naik Buns, “the Great Snake worshipped by the mountain rajahs, which they say is coeval with the world, which at his decease will be at an end.” Goats and fowl were carried once a week to the cave entrance where the snake lived to satiate it.
“You have examined the wound?”: According to legend, a miner escaped from the Golconda mines with a huge diamond hidden in a leg wound.
Chapter 22
the commissioner of the dockyard at Portsmouth: John Woodman, described as a “cautious lawyer,” was Warren Hastings’s brother-in-law. He gave a detailed account of Marian Hastings’s landing on July 27, 1784. He and his wife were waiting to welcome her at Portsmouth.
William Markham: Little is known about this person apart from the fact that he was a resident of Benares and a close ally of Warren Hastings.
Benares: Now called Varanasi, Benares is regarded as sacred by Hindus, Buddhists, and Jains.
Sir Percivall Pott: Perhaps the most esteemed surgeon of the day, Pott found an association between exposure to soot and a high incidence of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps in 1775. This was the first occupational link ever made to cancer.
Chapter 23
Mr. Pitt’s India bill: The forerunner of the India Act of 1784, introduced by Parliament to bring the administration of the East India Company under the control of the British government.
South Street, close to Hyde Park: John Woodman wrote to Warren Hastings that the house he had found for Marian was “scarcely to be equalled for situation, as well.... It is airy, with an uninterrupted view to Banstead Downs.”
Chapter 24
the headquarters of the East India Company: The original East India House was demolished and completely rebuilt in 1726–9. Further remodeling took place after 1796, but that building, too, was demolished in 1861.
the coat of arms of Warren Hastings: Coats of arms and crests are awarded not to a family or a name but to an individual.
Chapter 25
Indian philosophies: In the eighteenth century onward, a number of Buddhist texts were brought to Europe by people who had visited the colonies in the East. These texts aroused the interest of some European scholars who then began to study them.
championing a new movement: Sir William Jones, with his Grammar of the Persian Language (1771), was an authority in the field for a long time. His Moallakât (1782), a translation of seven famous pre-Islamic Arabic odes, introduced the poems to the British public. Along with Henry Thomas Colebrooke and Nathaniel Halhed, he founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal.
Mr. Hastings has a great affection for India: Unlike many of his successors, Hastings respected and admired Indian culture. He once wrote: “The writers of the Indian philosophies will survive, when the British dominion in India shall long have ceased to exist, and when the sources which it yielded of wealth and power are lost to rememberances.”
like jackdaws: These birds are notorious for picking up shiny objects such as jewelry to hoard in nests. John Gay, in his 1728 Beggar’s Opera, wrote: “A covetous fellow, like a jackdaw, steals what he was never made to enjoy, for the sake of hiding it.”
an executioner dropping hot balls: In Buddhist texts like the Milinda Panha, belonging to the second century AD, mention is made of some strange tortures, including the kettle of gruel, where the skull is cut open and an iron ball is thrown onto the brain, which boils and “runs over.”
surrounded by their own amputated noses and ears: In the Mysore region, the inhabitants attacked their enemies with an instrument that resembled “a sort of half-moon of iron.”
Chapter 26
agents for none other than Prince George: George III’s son was a notorious debtor and owed money in many quarters.
Bond Street roll: In the eighteenth century Bond Street was filled with the “Bond Street Loungers,” who cultivated a special walk called the Bond Street roll.
Chapter 28
Kew: By this time the gardens at Kew Palace, just outside London, were already known for their rare and exotic collections.
sepoy: A term used in the East India Company for an infantry private or servant.
Major Scott: John Scott was a close friend of Warren Hastings and in 1780 was appointed to command a battalion of sepoys, or Indian soldiers. He was political agent to Warren Hastings and arrived in London in 1781.
Mr. Hales: Stephen Hales, (1677–1761), was an English clergyman and the first person to measure blood pressure.
Mr. Fox and his “ghastly” Whigs: Charles James Fox and his Whig party were fierce opponents of William Pitt the Younger.
“In my opinion”: In a letter, Percivall Pott promised that Marian Hastings would be in perfect health before the winter and made light of any complaint.
Chapter 29
Indians in his homeland: Native American Indian tribes, including the Apache and Comanche, are known to have tortured and killed victims by securing them over anthills.
Kooma: This small caste was apparently performing reconstructive rhinoplasty as long ago as 3000 BC using a skin graft taken from the forehead.
skin from the forehead: In a well-documented case, a Hindu bricklayer performed surgery on a Parsi whose nose had been cut off. The operation was witnessed by Thomas Cruso and James Findlay, senior British surgeons in the Bombay Presidency. Their account was published in the Madras Gazette and later reproduced in the October 1794 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine of London.