Master Kelley's Big Joke? by Laurie Graham

If you love books and you enjoy a mystery the Voynich manuscript is right up your street. It’s a delicious little book, part herbal, part guide to the cosmos, and lavishly illustrated. The only problem is that no-one can identify any of the plants featured in the drawings and no-one can read a word of the text. 

Wilfred Voynich was a Polish bookseller who claimed to have picked up the mysterious volume at a book sale in Italy in 1912.  As attempt after attempt at deciphering it failed he was accused of fakery but science has eventually exonerated Mr Voynich. The vellum on which the book is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15^th century, the gall ink and pigments are also from the 15th or 16th century. So although it does appear to be an elaborate hoax, it predates Voynich by at least 400 years.

The history of ownership of book is patchy. It seems to have gathered dust on the shelves of a Jesuit college for at least two hundred years, but the trail leads back to Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia during the 16th century. Rudolf was a dabbler and a collector. He was interested in astronomy and alchemy, he collected plants and animals and well, any oddities that took his fancy. The Voynich manuscript seems like just the kind of thing that would have appealed to him. But how did he come by it?

There have been as many suggestions about the authorship of the book as there have attempts at deciphering it  -  it defeated even the Bletchley Park code crackers  -  but in my opinion there’s quite a compelling case for bringing in Messrs Dee and Kelley for questioning.



Dr Dee

Dr John Dee is famous as Elizabeth I’s astrologer and scientific advisor. Less well-known is Edward Kelley who became Dee’s collaborator in the 1580s. Kelley was a crystal-gazer or scryer, and as John Dee’s stock as a scientist fell he turned more and more to investigating the supernatural. Kelley claimed to be able to commune with angels and to understand their Celestial or Enochian language which he translated for Dr Dee. They made quite a team.


 In the 1580s Dee and Kelley left England to try to make some money  -  there was no job security in Queen Elizabeth’s court. Their travels took them across central Europe and they are known to have visited Emperor Rudolf in Prague.  It isn’t a long stretch to imagine how they might have cooked up a scheme to sell the Emperor something for his cabinet of curiosities: a book in an unknown language.  

Edward Kelley

Kelley had a prior conviction for coining so confecting a language wouldn’t have been a big career move. He was also, by the way, the step-father of Elizabeth Weston. Weston was that rare creature, a published 17^thcentury female poet and she apparently owed her education to her enlightened step-father.

But to return to the Voynich manuscript, it is a singular thing. The script runs from left to right with no obvious punctuation and the language has about 25 characters. The illustrations, sometimes fantastical, sometimes very close to but not faithful images of known plants, are liberally decorated with stars and strange nymph-like figures. There are similarities with the images Hildegard of Bingen drew when she was seeing visions, or suffering from migraines, whichever you prefer.

Emperor Rudolf is reckoned to have paid 600 ducats for the book, which would have been about 2 kilograms worth of gold. Could it be the handiwork of Kelley and Dee? They would certainly have been glad of the money. But the case remains open and I suppose always will. This little book of mysteries now resides at Yale, in the Beinecke Rare Book Library. A cynical, money-making fake or a glorious 16th century joke? I leave you to decide.

Going the Distance, by Laurie Graham

Anyone over the age of sixty will remember the school exercise books of the 1950s that had, on the back cover, multiplication tables and a list of arcane weights and measures: bushels and pecks, rods, poles and perches, chains and furlongs.  Even if our maths lessons never ventured much beyond feet and inches, how lucky we were at least to see those other words, so rich in history. Sometimes you only appreciate things after they’ve disappeared.

Furlongs (there are 8 of them to a mile), have survived in the world of British horse-racing.  The Epsom Derby, for instance, is run over a mile and a half but this is customarily expressed as 1 mile 4 furlongs. It only recently occurred to me that the word ‘furlong’ might be related to ‘furrow’. And so it is. It dates from a time when ploughing was a critical time in the farming year.

Turning an ox and plough at the end of a furrow was a difficult manoeuvre, particularly on heavy soil, so farmers preferred each furrow to be as long as possible. A furlong, so they say, was the distance an ox could plough before needing a rest. Furthermore, an acre was the estimated area one ox could plough in one day. A rough and ready calculation to be sure (I guess it depended on your ox's attitude to life), but it was a measure that would have been commonly understood and agreed.

How extraordinary it seems to 21st century urbanites who hardly know a sheep dip from a five-bar gate, that there was once a whole lexicon of ploughing. An oxgang was the area an ox was able to plough in one season. It was about 15 acres, which tells us, give or take and allowing for wet weather and sacrosanct Sundays, how long the ploughing season lasted. A virgate was the area two oxen could cover in a season. And if you had a team of 8 oxen  - you should be so lucky -  you could expect them to plough a carucate of land.  Carucate: a wonderful word now lost to everyone but compilers of crosswords.

Then there were poppy seeds and barleycorns, perhaps the most picturesquely named measurements of all. Three barleycorns, dry and round and placed end to end, were the original standard for the British inch. This was officially the case up to 1824 when the Weights and Measures Act was passed by Parliament. We adopted the word ‘inch’ from the Romans, by the way. Their uncia, or pollicus, the breadth of the base of a man’s thumb, was one-twelfth of a Roman foot. And speaking of feet, barleycorns are still used in shoe-sizing: the difference between, say, a size 10 and a size 9 being one-third of an inch, or 1 barleycorn. A poppy seed was reckoned to be a quarter the length of a barleycorn. So if the shoe pinches you might need an extra 4 poppy seeds of toe room.

One more measurement for your entertainment. You will know the expression, ‘give him an inch and he’ll soon take a mile’. An earlier version was, ‘he’ll soon take an ell.’

So what, pray, was an ell? It was the distance from a man’s elbow to the tip of his middle finger, about half a yard. A double ell, a yard, was the commonly used measurement for cloth and in any tailor’s workshop you would have found a wooden measure called an ell-stick or ell-wand.  

Today we have centimetres and metres. How excruciatingly dull.

A Medieval Frame of Mind, by Laurie Graham

Three weeks ago I was in Leicester for the re-interment of King Richard III. Amidst the modest but beautiful ceremonies and the sincerity of the thousands who lined the streets and queued for hours to pay their respects at his coffin, there was something else: the television imperative to keep talking in excited voices even when there was nothing new to say.



Richard III, by Graham Turner

‘Why?’ asked presenter Jon Snow, so forcefully I thought he might levitate clean out of his chair, ‘Why on earth would a King risk his own neck by going into battle?’ 

Granted, the Royal Health & Safety Directorate would advise against it these days, but seriously, it was a question that encapsulates our difficulty of getting into a medieval frame of mind. It’s too easy for us to think of the 15^th century as being like the 21^stcentury but without indoor plumbing.

Why would a King risk his life leading a cavalry charge? Because he was a warrior, that's why, trained from childhood in military skills, and because in the 15^th century might was right. There was no arbitration. Battlefields were where crowns were won or lost.  

Did Richard fear for his life that August morning at Bosworth Field? Like every other soldier mustered there he knew how flimsy the veil is that separates life from death. Death was a fact of daily life. Richard’s wife, whom he apparently loved, had died, but he was already thinking of the Plantagenet succession and shopping for another bride.  His only child had died too. There was nothing remarkable about that either.

Richard’s personal Book of Hours shows us that like all his contemporaries he lived in the fear of God and the hope of salvation, and if Jon Snow had been around on the eve of the battle to ask him why he insisted on riding forth the next morning, you can be sure that King Richard would have been baffled by the question. His world view was not the same as ours.

It’s a problem every historical novelist faces, to get beneath the sallet and the wimple and into the minds of people who saw the world very differently than we see it today. Tudor historian David Starkey misses no opportunity to sneer at historical novelists but here’s the thing: ‘Serious’ historians aren’t so very different from us.  There are facts and figures, verifiable to a certain extent. Interpretation of them is a matter of joining the dots.  A novelist aims to join the dots in an engaging and entertaining way. When they succeed they may whet a reader’s appetite to know more and to read to read more widely and even more deeply. Nothing wrong with that, Dr Starkey.   

The Pretenders

Yesterday I printed off my boarding card in preparation for travelling to Leicester for the re-interment of Richard III  -  that I lived to see the day!  -  which reminded me it might be a good time to revisit the topic of Lambert Simnel and other  Yorkist claimants to the English throne after Richard’s defeat at Bosworth Field.  For anyone interested in the tangled dynastic allegiances of 15^th century England I can’t do better than recommend John Ashdown-Hill’s recently published The Dublin King. Dr Ashdown-Hill brooks no lazy assumptions or uncritical recycling of old legends. He goes to original sources and when he can’t he admits as much.

Lambert Simnel, crowned Edward VI (and not, nota bene, Edward V) in Dublin’s Christ Church Cathedral in 1487 and carried on the shoulders of his courtiers down the hill to Dublin Castle, is the most interesting of the pretenders to the throne. We can trace a very plausible trail to his true identity and we have a colourful story about his eventual fate, sentenced to work as a spit-boy in the Royal kitchens and eventually promoted to the falconry mews. Maybe.  Or did Lambert/Edward flee from his army’s rout at the Battle of Stoke and escape into exile? This period of history is littered with possible imposters and changelings.  Who, apart from his Irish supporters, knew for certain what the boy king looked like? No selfies in those days, no passport photos.

Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be one of the so-called Princes in the Tower, didn’t fare as well as the alleged Dublin King. Henry VII toyed with him for a while and kept him where he could see him under a kind of hospitable house arrest, but Perkin’s eventual destiny, in 1499, was at the end of a rope at Tyburn. 

Then there was Ralph Wilford or Wulford who, had he truly been the Earl of Warwick, as he said, would have had a strong claim to the throne. Perhaps Ralph was a pretender too many for Henry VII. To understand why, it helps to know what else was going on in Henry’s life at the time. Henry VII was conducting delicate negotiations for a marriage between his son, Arthur, and the Infanta Catherine of Aragon. But Catherine’s parents, the King and Queen of Castile and Aragon were aware of Henry’s precarious hold on the English throne and were wary of marrying their daughter to an heir like Arthur who might be ousted by the Yorkists and never become King. The desire to clear the board of all other claimants and make his son’s succession appear more secure may very well have been behind Henry’s decision to have both Wilford and Warbeck executed.  Pour encourager les autres.

Well as we all know, Catherine did marry Arthur but Arthur died and Catherine, as was the way with valuable royal brides, got passed along to his brother Henry. But that’s another story entirely.

For my money Lambert Simnel is undoubtedly the most convincing of the Yorkist Pretenders but unless it becomes possible to compare the DNA of a known scion of the House of York with that of a Simnel descendant we may never get any closer to the truth.  It’s quite an unusual surname so, if you know of anyone called Simnel, do pass the word along to John Ashdown-Hill who would be very interested to hear from them.

Laurie Graham reviews One Night in Winter, a novel

Simon Sebag Montefiore ‘s most recent novel, One Night in Winter, poses this chilling question:  if your children were arrested and tortured, what might they tell about you?

The story takes place principally in Moscow during the summer of 1945.  As Russia celebrates victory over the Nazis, on a day of parades and rejoicing in the streets, shots ring out and two teenagers lie dead on the Kamenny Bridge. They are both pupils from School 801, a kind of Bolshevik Eton for the progeny of Stalin’s nervous, sweating, ever-shifting inner circle.

Sebag Montefiore, author of Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, is of course an accomplished guide into the mad, bad world of Stalin’s Russia. It’s a place where secrets  can be a matter of life and death. The school children have their Fatal Romantics’ Club. Their high-flying parents have their histories, their weaknesses and most dangerous of all, their privately held opinions of The Master, Josef Stalin.

Everything is coded: the Organs, the Little Corner, the Game, Up the Hill (to the Lubianka).  Children will play. But can children ever really be children in a state where a ten year old may be sent to Siberia and a twelve year old is eligible for the Highest Measure of Punishment, otherwise known as a bullet in the back of the neck?

Piece by piece the story demolishes our assumptions. Parents will go to any lengths to protect their young? The young will honour their parents without question? Two and two make four? Interrogation scenes swing with nauseating speed between different characters. Within the walls of the Lubianka you feel their confident sense of entitlement melting away.

Russian stories seem fated to have a cast of thousands. One Night in Winter is prefaced with a welcome and useful list of characters, fictional and real. This is a thriller so I will reveal nothing of their particular roles in the story except to paraphrase a quote and say that, like a party of roped mountaineers, if one falls they are liable to take the others with them.

I have just one slightly baffled complaint. The book’s title doesn’t make any obvious sense.  There are admittedly a couple of snowy moments but they’re relatively minor scenes. I can only conclude that ‘winter’ refers to the long, dark night of Stalin’s reign. Perhaps someone will put me straight.    

Whatever, it’s a gripper.


One Night in Winter, published 27th February 2014 by Arrow, price £7.99

 

 

There is Nothing Like a Dame, says Laurie Graham

By the time this post appears I’ll be in Italy preparing to direct Jack & the Beanstalk for the biennial Venice pantomime, so it seems an appropriate time to write about the man who shaped the pantomime dame as we know her today: the great Dan Leno.  

Dan started life as George Galvin, the child of two struggling music hall performers and if he wasn’t quite born in a trunk in the Princess Theatre, he was certainly soon a part of his parents’ endlessly travelling, bread-line existence. At the age of three he made his stage debut as Little George, the Infant Wonder Contortionist and Posturer.

In the 1860s childhood was a brief affair in even the most comfortable of families. In show-business it was over as soon as a child could walk onto a stage. By the age of eight Little George was earning a decent living as a clog dancer, doing the rounds of the northern music halls. Then his father died, his mother remarried, and when George began re-branding himself as a solo act he took his step-father’s surname, Leno, as part of his new stage persona. Dan Leno was born.  He married a comedienne, Lydia Reynolds, and perhaps under her influence began to develop his own repertoire of comedy songs, strung together with the rambling monologues that were to become his famous ‘patter’.

Dan Leno was the forerunner of a style of comedian that will be familiar to British readers.  He looked funny – short and skinny, with big ears and huge expressive eyes  - and had people laughing before he opened his mouth. And he was a conversationalist, not a teller of jokes, a character who chats with his audience and draws them in. Les Dawson, Max Miller, Larry Grayson, Frankie Howerd, all followed a style first developed by Dan Leno, as of course did that uber-Dame, Edna Everage, who introduced a little sharpened steel into the mix. 

 

Leno made his London debut at the Foresters’ Hall in Mile End, and then, as would have been quite typical for a support act in those days, jumped into a hackney and raced to Drury Lane to perform again at the Mogul Saloon. Neither of those venues survives today, but the New London Theatre now stands on the site of the Old Mo’.  The manager of the Surrey Theatre in Blackfriars Road saw Leno’s early London performances and recognised his potential for playing in pantomime. He cast him as Jack’s mother in the following season’s Jack & the Beanstalk. Dan Leno had found his niche. Cross-dressed, improvisational, and with an unerring gift for the absurd, Dan Leno set the pattern for all future pantomime dames.

‘Have you never been to the Tower of London? Oh if you’ve never been, do go again,’ is a typical Leno line.

Pantomime made him an overnight star and one of the highest earners on the London stage. He performed for King Edward VII and he became a merchandising phenomenon: comic books, tea sets, even a Dan Leno ink well.

There was so much money coming in that he could afford to buy a house and Lydia was able to retire, to concentrate on raising their children. But sadly the story doesn’t end well. Money may have been coming in but money was also pouring out, literally (he was drinking heavily) and figuratively. Generous to a fault, Dan Leno would help any fellow performer who had fallen on hard times. He was a founder member of the Grand Order of Water Rats, a benevolent association that recognised how financially precarious the life of a performer can be. The Water Rats are still going strong today.

As he entered his forties the physical demands of his performances took their toll. His hearing failed and his moods became erratic. He was twice admitted to the Camberwell Asylum and his attempts at a stage comeback ended in failure. Many people believed alcohol was to blame, some have suggested that he may have been suffering from an undiagnosed brain tumour. He died in October 1904 aged just 43 and his death was front page news. One of the most eloquent tributes paid to him came from the actor-manager, Max Beerbohm Tree.

So little and frail a lantern could not long harbour so big a flame.

Whether Dan Leno has quite left the building is open to discussion. His ghost is believed to walk the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, the scene of many of his pantomime triumphs. There’s only one reported sighting of him, in the 1920s by the American comedian Stanley Lupino, who saw him in his dressing room mirror, but he’s been heard, clog-dancing in an empty dressing room and the smell of his distinctive lavender cologne has often been noticed backstage.

Jack & the Beanstalk will be my sixth (and last) Venice pantomime and I’ve been fortunate enough to direct the same amateur actor as Dame in all six of them. Jonathan Fox, who will be appearing as Dame Dotty Trott, seemed an unlikely bit of casting at the outset: a retired businessman, devoted grandfather and quietly spoken pillar of society. But strap him into a bustle and a GG cup bosom and he is a man transformed and a worthy heir to the legacy of Dan Leno.

Jack & the Beanstalk will be playing January 16 -18^that the Teatro Avogaria in Dorsoduro, Venice. Reservations essential, 0039 348 515 0212. We’ll let you in for free but you’ll have to pay to get out.      

Lambswool and Apple Trees, by Laurie Graham

It’s wassail season. And what is that exactly? ‘Exactly’ may be difficult. Wassailing is a very good example of how elusive traditions can be. Where they ended up is not necessarily an indication of where they started. These days wassail songs are often included in collections of Christmas carols and hymns, and that’s a very long way from their pre-Christian origins.

To begin at the beginning, or as close to it as I can guess. There was, long, long ago, a Celtic festival called La Mas Ubhail, the Feast of the Apple. The name became anglicised, phonetically, to Lamasool.  It was a November fertility rite, homage to the gods in the hope of a good harvest in the coming year. Wassail has a similar root, waes hael  in Old English being the imperative ‘be thou healthy’ and was addressed to the senior apple tree in the orchard.

In the apple-growing counties  -  mainly in the south west of England and East Anglia  -  Orchard Wassailing, or Apple Howling is still quite common. Every village has its own traditions, songs and incantations, but the common thread is the presentation of bread and ale or cider to the tree, to feed it and encourage it to ever greater efforts. But wassailing has another incarnation  -  the House Wassail, lumped in with Christmas carolling, New Year celebrations, Twelfth Night revelry and everything else that magazines nowadays refer to as The Festive Season.

Twelfth Night is the traditional time for a house wassail : a good-natured and more or less tuneful door-to-door party, wandering around the neighbourhood demanding refreshments and money with boozy menaces.  The Welsh had a slightly sinister version of it called the Mari Lwyd, the Grey Mare, a tradition that’s now being revived in parts of South Wales. And very effective too. If I opened my door and saw a straw-stuffed effigy topped with a horse’s skull, I reckon I’d hand over my loose change pretty quickly.

The customary drink for wassailers is hot spiced ale or cider and one of its oldest recorded versions is a drink called Lambswool. Robert Herrick names it in his poem, Twelfth Night.

Now crown a bowl full, with gentle lamb’s wool…

Sugar, spices and ale poured over roasted apples (see, we’re back to that orchard connection?). In Ireland a more sober version used to be made using milk, presumably for junior wassailers, the Irish not usually being so fastidious about alcohol. Why was it called Lambswool? Was it named for the feast of Lamasool? Or was it because of the fleece-like appearance of the frothy ale and white apple flesh? No-one seems sure.  But here is a wonderful collection of recipes for it.

Now all you need is a good song to go with it as you pass the bowl. There are many recordings around  -  Here we come a’wassailing  is one you’ll certainly have heard, very likely sung by well-scrubbed choristers with perfect enunciation, but in my opinion a wassail song should be as raw and hearty as scrumpy cider, and there’s no finer specimen than this the Cornish Malpas Wassail sung by the Watersons on their For Pence and Spicy Ale album.

And so I wish all History Girls and our lovely readers Waes Hael!

Frail Tenements of Clay, by Laurie Graham

I was present recently at the inaugural meeting of Ireland’s branch of the Richard III Society and one of the questions before us was, what are we going to do?  We need, it was agreed, a crackingly good programme for our first year  -  a couple of accredited speakers and perhaps a study event  -  to catch the eye of potential new members. What would interest people? Overwhelmingly the topics suggested dwelt on that body in the car park. The King’s now verified scoliosis, for instance; how would it have affected him as a warrior? Or how about the recently disclosed evidence of his ringworm infestation; what did it tell us about his life and times? And those battle wounds, so clearly visible on his bones after more than 500 years; which of them would have been the actual death blow? 

Now I’m not squeamish about death and disease. Medical sciences were my subject long before I was a novelist. And yet I find myself slightly uneasy about this taste for recreational autopsies. Are we maybe watching too many television forensic investigator shows?

When King Richard’s remains were found last year I felt enormous gratitude to all those from Philippa Langley onwards, who had made it happen, and also for the science that made identification a certainty. I have mixed feelings about the facial reconstruction but on balance I welcome the reminder it has given us, if nothing else, that Richard was a young man.  Thirty three. The wounds to his skull and pelvis bear witness to the violence of hand to hand combat. Do we need to analyse his death any further than that? He went to Bosworth Field understanding perfectly well that he might not survive the day, and perhaps he didn’t much care. His wife was dead, his son was dead, and the Cousins’ War was a nest of vipers.

There are instances in history where there might be some justification for breaching the privacy of the doctor’s consulting room. Did Henry VIII have syphilis, or diabetes, or McLeod Syndrome? Would one or any of those diagnoses explain his destructive nature and his frequent recourse to the axe? Would it make him a more forgivable figure?
 

Haemophilia in Queen Victoria’s numerous descendants certainly had profound consequences for the Romanov dynasty. If the Tsesarevich Alexis hadn’t been haemophiliac the Tsarina wouldn’t have fallen under the thrall of Rasputin and Russia might have learned to love its German Empress. Perhaps, perhaps.   

And if we know why haemophilia has apparently disappeared from the remnants of Europe’s royal houses  -  monarchs now know better than to marry off their daughters to first cousins  -  it would still be interesting to know where the gene sprang from.  Could Victoria’s mother have been a carrier? Or was Queen Victoria the unfortunate source of a spontaneous mutation? Such things do happen.  

George III’s porphyria, a diagnosis that is still debated, led to the Regency, but the life of the nation wasn’t greatly affected. Life went on. Revolution didn’t come to our shores and eventually political reform did.  Yes, it would be interesting to have a firm diagnosis, but it would hardly change our view of George’s reign.  A more interesting point would be whether his porphyria (or whatever else it was) has now been bred out of the Royal Family? But actually it’s none of our business.

As for King Richard, my thoughts are that he should be laid quickly and finally to rest. A Catholic funeral mass and a tomb worthy of an anointed King.  No more picking over his bones, no judicial reviews, no soi disant descendants bickering about his resting place. And no more forensics. He died a violent and horrible death along with many others, on Bosworth Field. Time to close the autopsy file.

October in the Cabinet of Curiosities, by Laurie Graham

No, not a gravy boat, though it would make a very pretty one.

This is a bourdaloue, once the salvation of many a lady caught with a full bladder in a public place. The only problem was, having used it she needed someone to empty it for her. If she didn’t have a maid I suppose she could have slipped it under a chair and nonchalantly kicked it over with the toe of her dainty slipper. 

I find it interesting to see things that were once a part of my daily life becoming collectable antiques. I was born too late for a bourdaloue but not for a chamber pot. Growing up in a house with no indoor plumbing it was an essential item under every bed.  Mine was pink. My parents had one in blue and white willow pattern. The unenviable job of emptying them each morning fell to the females of the house. When you were deemed old enough to empty your own gesunder you knew you’d really grown up.

Gesunder was one of its several affectionate names. As in ‘gesunder the bed’.  ‘Jerry’ had a similar etymology, during and after World War Two.  Po (from pot-de-chambre) was the favourite in our neighbourhood, which caused a lot of stifled mirth when we did the rivers of Italy in school.

The chamber pot wasn’t a very hygienic thing but by the 20^thcentury it was at least  used in the privacy of the bedroom. Up to the 19^th century gentlemen, full of claret and ready to progress to the port, depended on finding a po in the dining room sideboard, though of course they’d only use it after the ladies had withdrawn. Why, you may ask yourself, didn’t they go to another room relieve themselves? What, and risk missing a bit of gossip or a good joke?

Writers of historical fiction sometimes get berated either for bringing 21^st century sensibilities to their creations, or for not doing so. Personally I’m in the ‘tell it how it really was’ camp. And the bourdaloue is a good reminder that spending a penny hasn’t always been a private affair. I wonder, by the way, how long the expression ‘spending a penny’ will remain in circulation. On Horsefair Street in Leicester sixty years ago a penny used to buy you a very comfortable call in a spotlessly clean cubicle. Nice warm wooden seats too.  Those were the days. As for bourdaloues  -  named by the way, after a French priest famous for his bladder-testingly long sermons - they are now collectors' items. And chamber pots look very nice planted with geraniums.

Knitting for Victory, by Laurie Graham

I’ve been wandering around the Crimean steppe these past few weeks, not literally but in my research library. The Crimean War has been described variously as ‘the real First World War’ and ‘a pointless, minor conflict in a far off place no one ever heard of over a cause no-one can remember.’ Whatever position you take the human cost was very great.

I started off investigating Soyer’s field kitchen, which was a very clever portable stove. Alexis Soyer was the Frenchman who transformed catering on the battlefield from a wasteful abomination into simple nourishing sustenance. Of course if Joe Soap of Peckham had offered to go to Crimea and improve the soldiers’ food he’d have been sent away with a flea in his ear, but Soyer was very well, even Royally connected. He’d cooked for Dolly, Duke of Cambridge and many of the army’s senior officers knew him from the Reform Club. But anyway, as always happens with research, way led on to way.

The Crimean War and its participants have given us a number of words. Lord Cardigan didn’t invent the garment that bears his name but he allowed his men to wear a collarless knitted vest under their battledress and probably wore one himself. The Crimean winters were bitterly cold. Lord Raglan, who had lost his right arm at Waterloo, gave us a style of sleeve, designed for his greater comfort by his tailor and later taken up by the world of fashion. And then there was the Balaklava helmet.

The balaklava, a staple of every pre-1960 schoolboy’s winter wardrobe, didn’t get its name until some years after the war. In the Crimea it seems to have been called a Templar hood or simply a helmet-liner. It was warm, versatile, eminently transportable, and an easy item for the ladies back home to knit. Knitting for the men at the front became the thing to do because the Queen was doing it. Queen Victoria was an avid knitter and in that respect quite a ground breaker because knitting had always been a traditionally male skill. She knitted mittens and socks for the troops and, who knows, maybe even balaklavas. In later years she made special scarves for soldiers who had been decorated for gallantry. Not woolly mufflers, but rather fine knitted lace emblems, for Boer War heroes. And with the Boer War I’ve almost reached today’s destination. Lord Kitchener.

Kitchener stitch is an indicator of a knitter’s expertise, a sort of knitting Matterhorn that must be conquered. It involves grafting together two pieces of knitting using a threaded tapestry bodkin as a third knitting needle. The result is a seamless join perfect, say, for the toe of a sock. Whether Kitchener actually devised the technique we do not know, but he was certainly the man who identified the need for it. Soldiers cannot march on lumpy socks. And given a few things we do know about Kitchener  - knitting would still have been a respectable male activity for a man of his generation and he is reckoned to have been an accomplished homemaker  - I think we can give him some credit. By World War I every sock knitter was using Kitchener stitch. And Monsieur Soyer’s field kitchen was still going strong.

It’s been a bit of a wander, from the Crimea to sock seams, but such is often the nature of research.

A final note. In August when I wrote about Richard III’s unknown grave I had no idea what thrilling news was about to break. By the time my November slot comes up I hope there’ll be even more to say.   

Down Memory Lane, by Laurie Graham

Sometimes a writer’s research crosses the path of their personal history and for me this happened recently in a quite literal sense. Researching the coaching inns of the Great North Road I wandered off-topic a little and discovered, to my joy, that a track I remember walking nearly sixty years ago is a remnant of an ancient drove road.

As a child I was often sent to stay with relatives on the Rutland-Lincolnshire borders. The reasoning was that country air must be good for an asthma sufferer. And apart from the pollen, it was. My grandfather took me mushrooming and pigeon-shooting and walked me miles every day. It didn’t cure my asthma but it made a walker of me. One of our favourite routes was from the village of Sproxton towards Skillington and then along a gentle track to Buckminster and back to Sproxton. That track was the Sewstern Drift, one of England’s oldest drove roads. In its day it would have been an alternative to the costly Grantham turnpike, with the bonus of providing good grazing for animals on the move.

Britain has a wealth of old pathways: packhorse bridges, salters’ tracks, drove roads. The Sewstern Drift, like most drove roads, was wide and grassy. It had to accommodate large herds. I also remember it as being filled with wild flowers  -  the source of my award for Second Year Infants Best Pressed Flower Collection. But I digress…

The drove roads declined in the 19^th century, when the railways began to provide a quicker way of getting fatstock to market, but in their heyday the animals were driven mainly from the west and the north towards London and to the victualling yards of the Navy towns. Sheep from Yorkshire, black cattle from Wales. Indeed I now have a clue as to why my Welsh ancestor ended up in Rutland. I suppose he lodged a night at a Drover’s Inn and some buxom wench caught his eye.

The Sewstern track is likely to have carried traffic in the opposite direction too: East Anglian geese and turkeys going to the Michaelmas Goose Fair in Nottingham. Like me you may have heard of geese wearing little boots to spare their feet on the long march and wondered, if you have any personal experience of geese, how such a thing could ever have been accomplished. In fact it seems this story got a bit garbled. Geese were actually driven through puddles of warm pitch and then through oyster shell sand, to give their feet a tough protective surface. It was pigs who wore the boots. They had leather soles and knitted tops, rather like those cardigan boots that are fashionable today.  Cattle were shod by blacksmiths at points along the route, two half-moon iron plates per hoof. They were called called cues. And you don't put cues on a bullock the way you shoe an obliging horse. Each animal had to be wrassled to the ground. You begin to see that droving was no quiet, bucolic stroll.

The drovers generally rode on horseback, though some walked, and all had dogs to help them keep the herd together. A good droving dog knew the route so well it could find its own way home. Every animal has its travelling speed. Cattle could cover fifteen miles in a day, with pigs you were lucky to manage six. Geese moved faster than turkeys, because they have the ability to eat on the move. I can vouch for this. When we had a house in the Dolomites we used to invite our neighbour’s birds down to clear our land of slugs and snakes. The geese treated it like an Arby's Drive-Thru. Gulp, gone. But the turkeys lingered, chatted, digested. The Slow Food movement made flesh. 

I'm so delighted to have found out about the Sewstern Drift. I wonder now if I liked it because it was so worn and trodden and loved, if it somehow spoke to me through the soles of my little five-year old feet. A fanciful idea, probably. But returning to the subject of soles, I would give quite a lot to see some 18^th century pig boots. Find me a pair. I’ll pay.      

Laurie Graham's latest book is A Humble Companion. Read a review HERE and find out more about her at her at lauriegraham.com

Mislaid: One King, by Laurie Graham

On Sunday week, August 19^th, the customary commemoration of the Battle of Bosworth will take place in Leicestershire. It’s one of those very English events: a military re-enactment and an (approximately) medieval-themed market  -  this would be a good place to upgrade your chainmail or stock up on axe heads  -  preceded by a service in Sutton Cheney church, where King Richard prayed before the battle. Some people attend every year, a pilgrimage that perplexes those who confuse Richard III with Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of him. Why commemorate evil incarnate, they wonder? And after 527 years, who cares?

I have several reasons for promoting the cause of King Richard. First there’s an element of vicarious atonement for the harm a writer can do. Our negative image of Richard was shaped largely by Shakespeare. Well, he had his reasons. He knew what would play well with the audience. Then there’s the fact that Richard’s death on Bosworth Field was a key moment in English history. It marked the end of the Cousins’ War, as the War of the Roses was then known, and heralded the rise of the Tudors including, eventually, regrettably, Henry VIII. That moment, in a muddy Leicestershire field, changed everything. 

Principally though, I feel a local loyalty to Richard. I grew up in Leicester, a city that has, or at least had, many Ricardian connections. Richard slept in Leicester the night before the battle. One legend says the quick-thinking innkeeper of the Blue Boar changed its name to the White Boar on hearing the Yorkists were looking for a billet. According to another, more credible version, the inn was originally the White Boar, niftily repainted blue when news of Richard’s defeat reached Leicester. I certainly remember a Blue Boar Inn on Southgate Street in the 1950s. It was a Victorian building but built close to the site of the original. Don’t look for it today. It was demolished to make way for the Southgates underpass.

That Richard’s body, stripped, trussed and thrown over a horse, was brought back to Leicester after the battle is well-established. It’s also fairly certain his body was displayed in the now long-gone Church of the Annunciation in the Newarke, close to Leicester Castle, and then taken away by the Grey Friars to be buried ‘without ceremony’ in their priory chapel. The Grey Friars were doomed of course, when Henry VIII went into the roof lead recycling business. Their monastery was destroyed and its land built on. In the early 17^th century Robert Herrick’s uncle had a house there, with a stone in his garden that marked where King Richard lay, but house, garden and stone have disappeared, and the whereabouts of the tomb has been lost to posterity. There is a story that the grave was opened and the King’s bones thrown into the River Soar, but I have never been convinced by it. Richard was an anointed king and Leicester had no reason to treat his remains so spitefully.

So most likely his dust still lies in Leicester city centre, somewhere beneath the disappeared footprint of the Greyfriars’ Priory. On the rare occasions I return to my home town I always walk the neighbourhood where King Richard was buried: Southgate Street, Peacock Lane, Greyfriars, Friar Lane. I feel sure he’s in there somewhere, perhaps beneath a car park.

Richard was the last English king to die in battle, his reputation was worked over to great theatrical effect, and yet he is one of our very few monarchs to have no known grave. I commend to you the work of the Richard III Society which does so much to deal fairly with his reputation and to keep his memory alive. 

Laurie Graham's latest book is A Humble Companion. Read a review HERE and find out more about her at her at lauriegraham.com