Cabinet of Curiosities - A Cat's Got In! - by Charlotte Wightwick

The last few weeks for me have been all about one thing. No, not Brexit.

February and March have, for me, been the months of The Cat. Within days of my Feline Overlord arriving, I was fully under the paw, accepting as standard the fact that I will be woken up every day at 5am by a barrage of yowls, followed by a large furry creature sitting on my head, attempting to lick my face and demanding I get up to feed it. Not to mention all the 'help' I get whenever I sit down to write anything.

Stevie the Cat, helping. Source: C. Wightwick

The joys of cat ‘ownership’ have made me wonder what feline artefact should be placed in the Cabinet of Curiosities to celebrate the thousands of years that humans have been domesticated by cats.

The obvious place to start is of course ancient Egypt, where cats were famously worshipped as gods and millions of cat mummies have been found. Personally, I’ve never quite got over the horror/ fascination of seeing kitten mummies at the British Museum as a small child: somehow the idea disturbed me more than the idea of embalmed people. I’m not sure what this says about me – nothing good, I fear. 

Ancient Egyptian cat mummies

Source: Wikipedia Commons

One of my favourite ‘real life’ historical cats is Pangur Ban, the subject of a ninth-century Irish poem, who spends his time hunting mice while his master, the monk and author of the poem, styles himself as a hunter of words. As a lover of medieval history, there’s something about this poem that really appeals to me: it gives me an incredibly vivid image of a tonsured and robed monk, writing long into the night with only his white cat, chasing mice through the library, for company.

The next candidate for the Cabinet of Curiosities has to be the suit of feline armour recently doing the rounds on Twitter, reportedly made for Henry VIII’s cat Dagobert. I suspect I wasn’t alone spending a few confused minutes wondering how on earth one persuaded a cat to wear said armour (presumably a LOT of whatever the sixteenth century equivalent of Dreamies were) before finding out that Dagobert probably never existed, and the armour is modern, created by Canadian artist Jeff de Boer. A disappointment.

I saw my final option on Twitter too, but this one is attested by the good folks (and specifically Mark Forsyth, author of A Short History of Drunkenness) at History Extra. And it’s a good one: the ‘Puss and Mew Machine’: a mechanical cat-shaped gin dispenser. The machine was a way of illegal gin-sellers avoiding the swingeing taxes that the government had imposed in an effort to ban drinking among the lower classes in the eighteenth century. You can find out more at https://www.historyextra.com/period/georgian/gin-craze-panic-18th-century-london-when-came-england-alcohol-drinking-history/. I knew there was something missing from my life, and now I know what it is.

So, which feline delight shall go into the Cabinet? A mummified kitten, a ninth-century monk’s companion, some impossible feline armour or a mechanical gin-dispensing cat? Its tricky. But as a ‘word hunter’ myself, I think it will have to be the memory of a small white cat, over a thousand years old but immortalised forever:

I and Pangur Bán, my cat
'Tis a like task we are at;
Hunting mice is his delight

Hunting words I sit all night.

Written by an unknown Irish monk, 9th century. Trans Robin Flower. 

The page of the Reichenau Primer on which the Pangur Ban 

poem is preserved. Source: Wikimedia Commons

'Nuns Behaving Badly' by Karen Maitland

For centuries, many noble women in Europe were forced into nunneries by their families either to safeguard their virtue until they could be married off, or to protect family lands by preventing them from marrying and splitting estates. Some women made the best of it, wearing silk gowns under their habits, and spending their days hawking, hunting, dancing and generally enjoying themselves in convents where abbesses would turn a blind eye, and money could buy any kind of pleasure or indulgence. Others found freedom within convents to make serious studies of the arts and sciences, write books, or practise medicine, liberated from the tedious obligations of marriage. But there were some women who refused to settle down quietly behind the cloister walls.

This was the case with two of the nuns of the Sainte-Croix (Holy Cross) in Poitiers in 6th century. The Frankish Princess Clotild, was the child of King Charibert of the Merovingian dynasty and his concubine, a wool-carder’s daughter. Clotild’s cousin, Princess Basina, daughter of King Chilperic, had also been sent to the nunnery, arriving at the tender age of seven, after an assassination attempt on her family. But by then Basina had already been raped by soldiers and had lost her lands too, so she had plenty of cause for anger.

King Chilperic and his queen

The princesses’ resentment of their lot came to a head early in 589 when they declared that they would no longer put up with the treatment they were receiving from their Abbess, Leubovera, who wasn’t showing them the royal respect they were due. They persuaded 40 fellow nuns to join in them in their rebellion and marched out of the convent, refusing to return until the abbess was expelled. Several bishops to whom they appealed refused to do anything, but finally a female relative of King Guntrum, Clotild’s uncle, promised to ensure a commission would be sent to Poitiers to look into the matter.

But the commissioners showed no sign of hurrying, so the nuns, now back at Poitiers, sought sanctuary at the church of St Hilary from where they recruited a small army of cutthroats and outlaws to defend them, including a notorious murderer Childeric, the Saxon. By the time the commission consisting of four bishops, deacons and clerics arrived, the Church of St Hilary had become a fortress for the nuns and their outlaw gang who were using it as a base to attack the abbess. When the outraged bishops came to the church to excommunicate the rebellious nuns, their whole party was attacked and the clerics, including the bishops, staggered from the church covered in blood and bruises.

Far from being repentant, Clotild urged her gang of mercenaries to seize all the convent’s lands and beat up any who tried to resist. She was only prevented from attacking the main building of the convent by the terrible winter weather which drove many of the nuns to seek shelter in other convents or homes. Clotild and Basina took no notice of the censure of their royal uncles and by Easter 590 were ready to attack the convent itself with the intention of dragging the abbess out, even threatening to throw her from the roof.

Abbess Leubovera, crippled by gout, took shelter in the oratory along with a precious relic of the Holy Cross, but the outlaws broke in during the night and she was only saved from being hacked to death with a sword, by another outlaw who presumably had some qualms about murdering an abbess in front of the relic of the true cross. In the dark and confusion, the Provost Justina, niece of Bishop Gregory, was seized in mistake for the abbess and carried off, but as soon as they realised their error, she was returned to the convent and Leubovera was captured and held prisoner in Basina’s chamber near St Hilary while the convent was looted.

Bishop Maroveus of Poitiers ordered the townspeople to break into the house and release the abbess, but Clotild coolly handpicked a group of men giving them orders to kill the abbess at once should there be any attempt at rescue. In spite of this, a royal envoy managed to snatch the abbess back, but that only led to more violence in which men were slaughtered in the holiest places in the abbey including the shrine of the Holy Cross.

Basina quarrelled with her cousin and made her own peace with the abbess, but this sparked further hostilities between Basina’s supporters and Clotild’s. According to the chronicler of the time, not a week went by without a new murder. Finally, it took the king’s men led by Count Macco to put down the rebellion, slaughtering many of the mercenaries hired by the nuns, while the rest fled back into the forest.

A rather romantic image of the excommunication of a later
Frankish king, Robert II (972-1031), known Robert the Pious,
who invoked the Pope's wrath by marrying his 1st cousin.

The punishment for the royal princesses was excommunication, which was considered a terrible sentence by the Church, since they would be excluded from most normal aspects of life and if they died in that state, would go straight to the eternal fires of hell. But since the pair had been excommunicated several times throughout the rebellion without it curbing their behaviour in the least, we can probably conclude that it didn’t worry them too much. Clotild’s own father, King Charibert, had himself been excommunicated in his lifetime because of his violent behaviour.

In any case, thanks to intervention of King Childebert II, the Church Council was persuaded to restore them to grace a few months later. Perhaps the King intervened because he knew if the sweet little princesses were not readmitted to the Church he’d have no chance of banishing them safely to a convent again and he didn’t want to risk those two running around his kingdom uncloistered.

Radegund who founded Saint-Croix abbey

Basina did return to the life of a nun in Saint-Croix in Poitiers and, so the chroniclers say, lived there ‘in obedience’ for the rest of her life. But Clotild had no intention of meekly returning to a nunnery. Despite being illegitimate, she persuaded the king's mother, the infamous Queen Brunhilda, to grant her lands which she ruled until her death.

Incidentally, the abbey of Saint-Croix had been founded by an earlier Frankish Princess, Radegund, around 560, when she fled her murderous husband. The rule she established meant that the nuns were very strictly enclosed, but allowed many hours to read and write. Radegund herself wrote Latin poems which she gave to the poet Venantius Fortunatus and to the bishop and historian, Gregory of Tours, who both became great friends. So she was one noblewoman who was grateful for the peace of her seclusion.

A BLOW-OUT IN A BREWERY by Penny Dolan

I enjoy map-reading but I remember my way by the visual geography. I watch for the line of the road, the building on a turn, the look of the street, a shop front or a tree.

More than a year ago, I went down to London, got off a bus near an ex-publishers ex-office and turned in what was the right direction. Suddenly I couldn’t recognise the place. Where had the landmarks gone?

That whole familiar corner of Tottenham Court  Road was a vast building site. 

I couldn’t spot Centrepoint’s fountain pool or turn left for Foyles. Behind the large PR-pasted hoardings, the legendary Astoria lay demolished. 

Only the Dominion Theatre, with its gigantic “We Will Rock You” statue, offered a fixed point in that altered place. 

Yet cities do change. What was there before the Dominion? As a writer, I like to search out the history of places and this is what I found. 

Back in 1814, this area was part of the Parish of St Giles, known for its dreadful poverty, squalor and deprivation as the Rookeries. At the corner of Tottenham Court Road stood the Horse Shoe Brewery, part of the brewing empire of Sir Henry Meaux. With the poor quality of London water, this must have been a busy and welcome industry. 

Inside the brewery was a vast vat: a wooden construction twenty-two feet high bound together by twenty-nine metal hoops. Constructed in 1785, at a cost £10,000, the vat was designed to hold 20,000 barrels of porter, a beer that needs months to mature.

Almost thirty years later, in 1814, the gigantic vat was full of fermenting porter and the evening must have seemed an ordinary one. 

However, at  6pm, one of the metal hoops snapped and the huge vat exploded, bringing down the others around it. The sound was so loud it was heard five miles away. 

Within moments, more than twelve hundred thousand litres of beer smashed through the brick wall of the brewery.

The beer swept in a flood through the surrounding slum of Saint Giles in a violent wave. It damaged buildings, totally demolished two houses and a pub in Great Russell Street, The dreadful torrent caused injury and death, especially to young children and destroyed both homes and livelihoods. Of course, as this liquid was beer, some of the injuries were caused by people rushing out with pans, pots and kettles to gather up beer for themselves and being caught up in the flood.

The disaster immediately attracted huge interest. Some of the locals exhibited the bodies of the drowned, charging for a viewing. The crowd inside one house was so big that it broke the floorboards and dropped the sightseers down into the still-flooded cellar. Before long, the police stepped in and closed all the gruesome exhibits. The funerals were paid for by coins placed on coffins by parishioners. 

The stench of the beer filled the district for many months. Eventually but not unsurprisingly, the Meaux Brewery Company was taken to court and the incident was judged an “Act of God”. The brewery gradually recovered and continued on the same site until its demolition in October 1922. 

Did those who knew the Horse Shoe brewery grumble about their old missing landmark when the Dominion appeared? 

As for the date of the famous 1814 London Beer Flood? 

It was 17^th October. 

Cheers! 

Penny Dolan 

A Boy Called M.O.U.S.E (Bloomsbury)