Saturnalia Chickens by Caroline Lawrence

Saturnalia chickens by Dr Helen Forte

My first post for this blog was back in July 2011, over five years ago. It was called History Chickens because one of my obsessions is trying to visualise the ancient world and not leave out any detail. I maintain there would have been far more chickens in Ancient Rome than historians usually allow for. 

Although I have never kept chickens, I will always remember something the late A.A. Gill once wrote: ‘It is virtually impossible to hold a hen and not smile.’ 

A white 'Silkie' hen via Wikimedia Commons

Recently at the Roman Society’s conference celebrating 50 years of the journal Britannia, I heard a couple of scholarly talks including one by Dr Naomi Sykes, claiming that in Roman Britain, chickens were so rare that they were cherished as pets rather than used as food (although the eggs were eaten). I didn't understand all the technical stuff, but it seemed plausible. That’s why we find some early and exotic chicken remains at Fishbourne Roman palace near Chichester, the opulent Roman villa that first brought fallow deer to Britain.  

Westbourne House School, Chichester

Yesterday I came out of ‘wribernation’ to speak to children in years 3 & 4 at Westbourne House School in Chichester, near where the first chickens landed, as it were. Year 3 are reading my book The Sewer Demon, for their Romans topic. Year 4 studied Romans last year.

Sewer Demon display at Westbourne House School

The Sewer Demon is the first of my four Roman Mysteries spinoffs, The Roman Mystery Scrolls.  This short series features a beggar boy by the name of Threptus who lives in the Roman port of Ostia. I told the children how I came up with the characters and their world. I explained how, after writing The Roman Mysteries, I thought it would be fun to write a spin off series with ‘less blood and more poo’ for younger kids. Artefacts like my famous sponge-on-a-stick would feature heavily. And of course the famous multi-seater toilets at Ostia. 

Roman tombstone of 13-year-old Threptus

The hero would be a beggar boy with a heart of honey. I got the idea for his name from a Roman tombstone at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. The tombstone was erected for a boy named Tiberius Claudius Threptus who sadly lived only 13 years, 6 months and 22 days. 

I was also inspired by a fan of Italian ancestry with a sweet face named Marco. 

Mark Benton as Floridius in The Roman Mysteries

The beggar boy’s mentor and sidekick would be the soothsayer, created for the Roman Mysteries TV series by screenwriter Dom Shaw and actor Mark Benton. Floridius is a character I never even thought of, but immediately loved. Because Floridius has a fondness for spiced wine and gambling on the chariot races he is not a particularly good mentor. Luckily, Threptus will help Floridius as much as Floridius helps Threptus. 

One of the best things about Floridius is that he keeps sacred chickens, which gave me an excuse to put lots of history chickens in these books. 

Not knowing the least thing about domestic fowl, I read some books, watched some YouTube clips and called on the services of one of my former pupils, a boy named Ben Udy who kept exotic hens. Working with Ben, we came up with a lexicon of chicken-speak. It would make them fun for parents, kids and teachers to read aloud.

1. BROODY PURRING/VERY CONTENT
a) Brk-brk, brrrrk (very soft)
b) Wrr, wrrk, brrr (very soft)
c) Wrrroooww (very soft)

2. CONTENT/FEEDING/EXPLORING
a) Buuuuurk! (frog-like croak)
b) Buuurk, buurk-buurk (whiny)

Body language: loosely feathered, ambling inquisitively but not purposefully, stop to preen, cluck gently. 

3. INQUISITIVE
a) Brp, brp! (when not moving)
b) Bweerp, bweerp, bweerp (when moving)
c) Beweerp!

4. MEDIUM/COMMON ALARM
Bk-bk-bk... (varying repetitions)

5. HIGH STRESS, POST-DANGER
a) Bk-bk-bk, B’KAK!  
b) Bk-bk-bk, b’kak!  
c) Bk-bk-bk, bkaaaah! [sometimes forget final K]
d) Bock-bock-bock-bock-bock, begowwwwk! [big ]

6. HIGH STRESS, ‘DANGER’ STILL PRESENT
a) Bk-bk-bk, B’KAK!
nb) BK-BK-BK, B’KAK! [small hens]
c) BOCK-BOCK-BOCK, BEGOWWWK! [big hens]

Ben also told me about Silkie chickens, which have feathers that are as silky as hair. Thus was Aphrodite born, the hen who is like a pet for Threptus along with Felix the kitten. 

Threptus first meets Floridius and his  sacred chickens in the final story in my volume of Mini-Mysteries, The Legionary from Londinium. 

The sacred chickens go on to feature in all four Threptus books, which we’ve called The Roman Mystery Scrolls, but they really come into their own in the third book of the series, The Thunder Omen, set during Saturnalia. It starts out like this: 

It was early morning on the first day of the Saturnalia, the Roman mid-winter festival of gift-giving, feasting and dancing. It was a topsy-turvy holiday when anything could happen. In the port of Ostia, in a one-room shack behind a temple, eight sacred chickens were dancing on a table. 

Threptus has made each chicken a small conical hat called a pileus. Minimus illustrator and Latin teacher Dr Helen Forte made me a special colour plate showing seven of the sacred chickens plus Felix the kitten. They are all wearing the pileus, the freedman’s cap, to show that normal rules don’t apply.

Dancing sacred chickens by Dr Helen Forte

Long live the sacred chickens... 

... and Yo, Saturnalia! 

My Summer of Trees

I am calling this summer My Summer of Trees

As a writer of historical fiction, I want to be specific and precise about the world my characters inhabit. At the moment I am working on a book set in Iron Age Britain, fifty years after the Romans arrived. As this book will partly take place in woods and forests, I need to know my trees. 

I love trees, but I'm not particularly good at identifying them. 

I can spot the exotic or exceptional ones – like palms, yuccas, weeping willows and the bright red-blossomed bottle-brush plant that used to grow in the garden of my childhood house in Bakersfield, California. 

When my family moved from Bakersfield to the Stanford campus I first encountered great groves of eucalyptus trees. Originally from the Australia, these were imported to suck up moisture from swampy ground. They are beautiful and distinctive, with their silver-green blade like leaves and their peeling bark scrolling away to show the smooth white flesh underneath. 

I learned to recognise magnolia trees with their fragrant waxy flowers. 

From the window of my parents' car I could easily spot oak trees, especially the evergreen California oaks that often stand sentinel on a golden hill. 

Laburnum, with its clusters of bright yellow flowers, I met when I first went up to Cambridge and stayed in Whitstead, the graduate house belonging to Newnham College, where Sylvia Plath once lived. 

And I will never forget the first time I came across wisteria. It was during my first trip to Athens, one May. I walked under an arbour in the National Gardens. It was like bathing in perfume. 

I can point to plane trees, those great urban survivors planted along the banks of the Seine, Tiber and Thames. Their giraffe-neck trunk splotches and spiky spherical seed-cases give them away. 

Silver birch I know, too: gentle and graceful trees with white trunks and trembling, heart-shaped leaves. There used to be one on the corner of busy York Road and Mendip Road in Wandsworth, not far from where I now live. It was a reminder of nature in an urban landscape. Sometimes I used to reach out my hand and touch it as I passed to give it a kind of affirmation. It was like a friend and it always cheered me up. 

A sliver birch blocked this building's sign

Then, one terrible day I walked by and they were cutting it down, because it partly blocked the sign of a storage warehouse. I grieved for that birch and still think of it every time I pass the corner where it used to stand. Sometimes I want to cry, a think I have not done for some people I have lost. So yes, I always recognise silver birches. 

But I have trouble identifying some of Britain’s oldest and most common species: lime, hazel, beech, field maple and sycamore. 

So now that I’m writing books set in Roman Britain, I have decided to learn the names of the trees that would have been here in the late first century. 

I've got my Tree Identifier app and my guide book. I have The Ancient Tree Hunt challenge and Kew Gardens. 

Sweet Chestnut planted in the early 1700s

Today at Kew I saw one of the oldest trees in the park, a Sweet Chestnut. Apparently the Romans introduced this species to Britain. 

Tomorrow I'm going to find Barney, the giant plane tree in Barnes.

Helen Forte's "Minimus" in a yew tree (taxus)

I've even got a small Latin-speaking mouse named Minimus to help me identify trees on a Pinterest board!

By the end of the summer I hope to be able to identify the native species in London's parks and garden squares, and at the very least the trees right outside my front door. 

Caroline Lawrence is working on The Archers of Isca, partly set in a Gloucestershire glade. @CarolineLawrenc