Ten Years of Being a History Girl by Sheena Wilkinson

I’m going on holiday very early tomorrow morning, and tonight we have sixteen people coming for supper and some music. In retrospect, this may not have been the wisest scheduling. And in the middle of cleaning the house, packing and making supper for sixteen I have just remembered that my History Girls pots is due while I’m away! I don’t want to take my laptop on holiday, I need to post NOW. And there is NOTHING in my head to write about. At least nothing to which I can do justice in a short space of time. 

But looking back for inspiration through the HG archive, I see that it is, conveniently and unbelievably, ten years since I became a History Girl, and so I am going to reprise that first post, from October 2016, with some brief updating where appropriate. I trust readers will forgive me! 

Me in August 2016

As historical novelists we have the benefit of hindsight. In 2016, I could have had no idea that I would go on to write exclusively historical fiction, or indeed that my personal life would change drastically, from being a confirmed spinster to a wife and stepmother. That I would move to a very different part of the country, and acquire both grey locks and a greyhound. 

Me last week (August 2026)

 

In 2016 I wrote:

 

I have been a History Girl in waiting all my life. I was a swot who loved school, and from the start what I loved most, apart from English (I was a writer in waiting too) was finding out about the past. Like most children at primary school in the seventies, I did a project on the Vikings, which happened to be an interest of my history-loving father too. I don’t suppose my P4 teacher relished being told by me that there was now evidence that the Vikings may have voyaged as far as America, as that wasn’t in her textbook. 

2026 note -- This year I did an eight-week residency in that same old primary school where, fifty years on, they are still doing the Vikings. 

 

The best things weren’t in the books. When I got to secondary school, encouraged by a wonderful teacher (to whom I have paid tribute in another blog post https://authorallsorts.wordpress.com/2015/08/19/a-letter-to-my-o-level-history-teacher-by-sheena-wilkinson/) I continued to love history, but not just in the classroom. That school, Victoria College, a Belfast girls’ grammar founded in 1859, had its own history that enticed me much more than the too-long-ago Vikings.

 

Many break-times found me in a certain little hideaway under the stairs, looking at an exhibition about the school’s evacuation to the north coast during the Second World War. There were photos and letters and old essays on display and for the first time I discovered the joy of the everyday artefact, and the power of old photos to evoke a vanished, but not terribly distant world. I never saw another pupil even glance at the exhibition – I think I’d have been very indignant; it had become my private place.

 

What made it all the more inspiring was that by then I’d also begun on another long-lasting love – that of old school stories, and the world conjured up by those serious bobbed, gym-frocked girls in black-and-white was closer to the world of Malory Towers and the Chalet School than anything else in my Belfast upbringing. Just belonging to a school that had such photos on the walls was a thrill to me. 

 

2026 note – if I had known, in 2016, that I would be asked to write novels in the classic girls’ school story tradition (First Term at Fernside and True Friends at Fernside) I would have been beside myself with joy. 

 

I had the best history teacher in the world, and romped through the Anglo-Saxons, the Tudors and the Plantation of Ulster. I have especially fond memories of the bubonic plague; then as now I adored anything gruesome about disease and pestilence. (As long as it was safely in a book and preferably now extinct.) I was told off for describing (and drawing) my plague victims with too much verisimilitude – but I like to think that a historical novelist was born in that first form exercise book. 

 

In 2016 I had no idea that Name upon Name would be the first in a trilogy 

2026 note – I am, in real life, the most squeamish of people, but that second historical novel, Star by Star, which has just been reissued) centres, along with the end of WW1 and the 1918 General Election, in which women voted for the first time, on the ‘Spanish’ influenza pandemic. When I wrote it – and the words above – in 2016, it was with no idea that I would shortly, like the rest of the world, experience a pandemic at first hand.) 

 

But it was modern history, which we studied for O Level, which captivated me most. This was history I could almost touch, history my granny could remember: suffragettes and the Great War and the partition of Ireland, and then another war.  This was a world I knew from those old school stories, and from the war poets I’d fallen in love with in English Lit. This was a world that seeped through the Victorian and Edwardian streets of my home city, and those black and white photos in the school corridors. A world evoked by the neatly-wound balls of nylon string, made from old clothes, in my waste-not-want-not granny’s Utility sideboard, and by the snaps of her and her friends on Sunday School outings in the twenties, looking exactly like Angela Brazil heroines.

 

2026 note – my 2020 novel, Hope against Hope, is set in Belfast 1921, in the very streets where my gran and her sisters lived and played. I always liked to imagine that they could have made friends with my heroines. 

Aunt Annie, Aunt Sadie (who died at 16) and Gran, in about 1917

 

When I started to write historical fiction – short stories at first and then, last year, a novel set in Belfast 1916 – it was this period to which I kept returning. As I write my second historical novel, due next year and set in November 1918, I’m looking forward to sharing some of those enthusiasms here with the History Girls.

 

And I promise not to make my plague victims too gruesome. 

 

2026 – I have indeed shared all sorts of enthusiasms, from houses visited, to old books read or rediscovered, to family history, all with a focus on the early twentieth century, and a leaning towards the experience of women. Since 2016, all my output -- seven novels -- has been historical, including my first two for adults. 

My most recent adult novel, set in 1936

I wonder what I shall write, in and out of the History Girls, in the next ten years? 

Revolution! non-fiction for 8-12 year-olds by Joan Lennon

Like many of us, I grew up in a time of protest. In Canada, we marched against the war in Vietnam (I carried a placard with the catchy slogan END CANADA’S COMPLICITY!), for women’s lib, against racism, and for CND. My parents were part of the underground railway, getting kids out of the States to defy the draft. We lived just across the river from Detroit, and in the long hot summers you could see the smoke rising from the downtown race riots. Meanwhile, in primary school, we were taught Duck and Cover. The people who influenced me the most were busy saying No to different injustices and stupidities.

I think it was inevitable I would want to write a book about revolutions, though it’s taken a while!

Different kinds of revolutions. Different stories about change.

A bit of a blurb:

What does it take to change the world?

Sometimes it’s toppling systems and finding new ways to govern that give people a better chance.

Sometimes it’s challenging long-held beliefs and finding the courage to think differently.

Sometimes it’s coming up with ingenious inventions that transform our everyday lives.

The world we know today has been shaped by exceptional events, ideas and inventions. Revolution! tells the stories of ordinary people who made the extraordinary happen.

The constraints in writing history for this age group are … interesting. (If by interesting you mean frustrating and a right royal pain.) There wasn’t a chapter where I didn’t think, ‘What I really want to do here is write a book.’ A whole book – not just four pages which also had to accommodate a paltry maximum word count, illustrations, and enough space for some of the lengthier languages we hope it’ll be translated into. But always I needed to remember that this was a book to pique the reader’s interest, not to tell all. Teo’s illustrations helped with this so much.

One of the parts I particularly enjoyed writing were the slightly sideways questions at the end of each chapter. Questions like:

What use is music in a revolution?

Why is this revolution not talked about more? [Haiti]

Might India, Pakistan and Bangladesh reunite some day?

What makes something truly green?

I tried to answer in a way that might lead the reader to think again, and to ask MORE questions.

Which was always the take home message.

Revolution! written by Joan Lennon, illustrated by Teo Georgiev, published by Templar Books, due out 27 August 2026.

Other non-fiction books for 8-12 year-olds published by Templar Books:

Great Minds: 2500 Years of Thinkers and Philosophy written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Talking History: 150 Years of Speakers and Speeches written by Joan Haig and Joan Lennon, illustrated by Andre Ducci

Joan Lennon website

Joan Lennon Instagram

The Myths and Deities of Ancient Egypt by Rachel Louise Driscoll

The Ancient Egyptians worshipped a pantheon of well over 1,400 gods and goddesses – possibly as many as 2,000.  Each deity was believed to have its area of power in life or in death, and would often be in human-form, or a therianthrope (a human with an animal head).  Sometimes, these mythical figures were supposed to be able to change between the form of a human and that of an animal, which is seen in the case of Isis and Nephthys morphing into kites.  Occasionally, there might be no human features at all, such as the dead-devouring deity Ammit, who was said to claim the head of a crocodile, the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, and the forequarters of a lion. 

Priests would serve at temple sites to perform rituals which they believed appeased these gods and goddesses, and certain areas in Egypt often formed particular cult followings of favourite deities.  Interestingly, these deities also had connections with those of Ancient Greece, something which is known as syncretism.  In his work Moralia, instead of using the Egyptian name Set or Seth, Plutarch speaks of the goddess Nephthys marrying ‘Typhon’ – who, according to the Hesiod, was the son of Gaia and Tartarus – and he also claims that Nephthys was also known as Aphrodite.  This was common as the Greek Empire expanded, religions blending and borrowing from each other.

Over time, different myths have evolved regarding these figures.  Some are less known, others more common, and many have multiple versions.  Perhaps the most famous myth is that of Osiris, the god who was murdered, but it begins before the infamous events of his death, and these stories are perhaps lesser known.

It was supposed that Nut, goddess of the sky, was in love with Seb or Geb, god of the earth.  She conceived quadruplets by him, but Ra, the falcon-headed god of the sun, knew that one of the deities in her womb would surpass even his powers, and he forbade her to give birth on any day of the 360-day year.  Thoth, the ibis-headed god of wisdom who also loved Nut, gambled with Khonsu, the moon god who was often depicted as a youth with a sidelock of hair.  Thoth won the game of Senet – an ancient board game said to be similar to backgammon – and with his winnings of some of the moon’s light, he fashioned 5 extra days, which both extended the calendar year and also enabled Nut to give birth.  First came green-skinned Osiris.  Then Set was said to pierce her side when he came out, choosing not to be born the usual way but proving his violent tendencies already in those first moments.  He had the head of an animal which is still unidentified.  Next came Isis and then, finally, Nephthys.

The siblings grew and Isis and Osiris formed a natural pair, as they had in the womb, and thus were married.  Nephthys married Set, but had no children by him.  One day, Osiris and Nephthys slept together.  The circumstances are hazy, some claiming that Nephthys seduced him, others than Osiris mistook her for Isis as the sisters looked so alike, but she conceived and gave birth to Anubis, the jackal-headed god, whom she hid in a cave.  After this, Set sought a way to kill Osiris, perhaps because he had heard of the affair, or because he was jealous of his brother’s power.

Set constructed a box and said that the god who could fit inside could have it.  Osiris fell for his trick, and was nailed within where he suffocated.  Isis went in search of his body and eventually found it, but Set realised this and cut his brother into fourteen pieces which he scattered across Egypt.

Isis and Nephthys worked together to reclaim those pieces.  One was swallowed by a fish, but Isis formed a replacement with clay, and the sisters joined their brother’s body back together so that he would be whole to enter the afterlife.  At this stage, Isis conceived a son by Osiris posthumously, and he would go on to be the falcon-headed god, Horus.  Meanwhile, Anubis mummified Osiris, and this was supposed to be the first case of mummification, setting a precedent for the dead in Ancient Egypt.

Nephthys went with Osiris to the afterlife where he now became the ruler, and here she found her place as a guide through the underworld.  Because of this and the part the sisters played in Osiris’ restoration, she and Isis are linked with funerary rites, and women would often dress as the sister goddesses at funerals, quoting The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys.

For more on the myths and deities of Egypt, I would highly recommend checking out translations of Ancient Egyptian texts, and Plutarch’s Moralia.  There are so many books on Egyptian mythology, and the Egypt Exploration Society also provides information and courses which explore these subjects more.

In the well-known myth of Osiris, Nephthys is probably the least remembered character, despite playing such a pivotal role.  Because of this, I wanted to explore her more in my debut novel which is entitled Nephthys in the UK, The House of Two Sisters in the US, Les Sœurs Du Nil in France, and La Custode Delle Anime in Italy.  My novel tells the myth of Nephthys alongside a 19^th century Gothic tale of Egyptomania and archaeology.  You can find it here. 

Finding the Past, by Gillian Polack

 

I’m thinking about historical sources. Not just any historical sources, but ones that give us access to everyday lives. There are sources everywhere, but some sources are special. Let me start with the Middle Ages, and then end up in this precise moment in time. Before I can time-travel, however, I need to explain why the sets of sources I will introduce are so very special and why they’re amazingly useful to writers of historical fiction.

Writing is filtered. Every single type of writing we use to find out about the past has particular limits. Customs records tell us what was imported into, say, an English port in 1150, but not who sold it after that, what their lives were like, or what happened to the final imported good. It helps when we combine sources.

Let me begin with cinnamon, imported into that English port in 1150. It began its life in what is now Indonesia. It travelled as far as Egypt, where a Jewish merchant sold it to an English customer. The Egyptian woman who sold it had no idea that the customer was English. She called him a ‘Frankish knight’ (who I will henceforth refer to as ‘Frank’) and was really annoyed that he didn’t know old spice* from new. He overpaid and she didn’t respect him and life was normal. These things are recorded (though not the date, nor that the customer was English) in material from the Cairo Genizah.

A genizah is a safe storage place for documents that should not be destroyed, mostly religious, and mostly using Hebrew script. The Cairo Genizah is one of the most famous surviving, The holdings of the Cairo Genizah are amazing and strange and you can read about them in the famous many-volume study by S.D. Goitein (the easiest place for historical fiction writers to begin) or online (the best place for a quick overview). The 400,000 pages, with dates ranging over 1300 years are a marvellous selection of random documents. From them we know more about how the cinnamon was handled in Fustat (including that the sellers there had no respect for Europeans, who they called ‘Franks’) than we know about any other stage of its journey.

Customs and tariffs are another handy set of sources. They are consistent about imported spices that attract tariffs, but don’t tell us how fresh they are, nor what herbs and spices are grown locally. They contain much useful material, but it’s quite specific in nature.

Recipes tell us a little about what happened to that cinnamon, since it was bought by a knight and he would have lived among more literate people than, say, a peasant. Frank may have donated it to the Church, in which case we know how incense was used, through Church records and other sources. It may have been for gifts or for his own household. 1150 is at least within a generation of the first written cookbooks in Old French. We can see some of the uses of that cinnamon in cooking from the earliest twelfth century cookbooks. We’re reliant on random mentions in sermon literature and related materials for anything else.

Add all these sources together and we can trace that cinnamon.

Not everything is equally traceable. Cinnamon was a luxury spice, so it attracts more records than many other things. Wine also attracts records (including a poem in Old French), as does wool.

If we want detail and exciting information about the past, however, some sources are better than others. One of my favourite sources for England last century is that from the Mass Observation project. But that’s a story for another day. Let’s return to the Middle Ages.

One set of sources (also begun in the Middle Ages but not yet closed) has more information about the everyday than the Cairo Genizah: the records of the Inquisition.

The Inquisition’s archives start with the Albigensian Crusade, and their consistent use by historians begins with the French Annales school of history in the twentieth century. The work I always recommend to introduce the extent of material the Inquisition archive holds is E Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou. Le Roy Ladurie used the work of the Inquisition to find out how people lived. That’s the good part. The bad part is that the reason we have such detailed information about lives is because the Church was trying to stamp out heresy: they’re archives resulting from persecution.

In the thirteenth century the heresy was that of the Cathars. After 1492, it was “New Christians:” converts who were still too Jewish. If someone was proven to be a heretic and unable to return to a fold or found to be ‘Judaicised’ beyond redemption, they were burned alive. The price paid for these records is awful. Two scholars re-created the food history of the once-Jews in Spain, and also told us the fate of the person whose food was documented by the Inquisition. Th Inquisition records are a major historical source, and also a terrible one. They record peoples’ lives, and also peoples’ deaths.

I promised we’d end in contemporary Australia, and there is a reason for this. Right now, Australia is creating an archive similar in levels of detail to that of the Inquisition (though covering a very short time) through its Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion.

An Australian Royal Commission is the highest level of inquiry, and it, like the Inquisition, asks many questions to find out what is happening in an area of immense importance and urgency. The trigger for this Royal Commission was the shootings at Bondi, although much of the work of the Royal Commission is on events and issues in the lead-up and after the shooting. Because of the broad focus and detailed question, the Royal Commission is developing deep documentation of the lives of Jewish Australia and their haters and the workings of government at all levels. It is unintentionally creating an immense archive of how Australians see themselves and others and what their lives are like.

Normally I see these things hundreds of years later, but in this case, I’m in the middle of it. I submitted material and every week of the hearings I learn about my own life. It’s quite intense.

This Royal Commission demonstrates just how much work and how many people it takes to create the Cairo Genizah, the Inquisition trial records, or Mass Observation. Even in the age of computers, 20,000 public submissions and week-long testimony into a given subject (all transcribed) is an immense amount of information that has the potential to create some amazing historical fiction… when it is in our own past. Right now, its creation allows us to peek into this kind of vast and detailed records, and helps us interpret them.

Let me give an example. I interpret police records quite differently to even two weeks ago. Before this week, I had to trust narratives about police work, often fictional. This week’s testimony by very senior officers (which is not fully webbed yet, so the link I gave you last paragraph leads you to another week, dealing with universities) showed me how they operate and what frustrates them and how they work alongside other public bodies. My greatest moment of insight was when they tried to explain that they wanted to deal with antisemitism. Their frustration was so clear.

My biggest reminder from these last few weeks, as an historian, is that the past always contains human beings. If we don’t see those humans and can’t hear at least a little of what they’re saying, we need to look further or more deeply.

*This is not a pun, but ought to be.

A Cursed House? by Maggie Brookes

Could a house be unlucky? 

I'm not sure I believe in such things, but something prickled the back of my neck when I was researching the history of Forty Hall in Enfield, and I began to wonder...  

Things seemed to go badly wrong for just about every owner. There were so many deaths, plus gambling debts, childlessness, and connections to enslavement and the enclosure of common land, which caused misery to others.

Back in 1629, King Charles 1st was on the throne, and the bricklayers had just laid the foundation stone for a new country house for the wealthy merchant Nicholas Raynton (or Rainton.) He was the third son of a Lincolnshire farmer, who made his money importing silk and taffeta from Florence and velvet from Genoa. I picture him standing outside the building site, watching the sweating labourers bringing brick and tiles from the kilns on nearby Clay Hill, filled with glee at how far he had risen.

Nicholas and his family moved in to Forty Hall around 1632, which was also when he was elected Lord Mayor of London, and subsequently knighted. So it was a pretty good year for him! He must have felt invincible as he set off from his new home every day in his liveried coach, with coachmen and outriders, clattering through Enfield to the city of London.  As well as building the house, he began the gardens, possibly planting two Cedar of Lebanon trees and orange, lemon and myrtle trees in the green house. There are references to an orchard, and a garden of 2 acres enclosed by a brick wall. 

But as we know, wealth and fame don't always guarantee happiness. Sir Nicholas had no children, (which must have been a sorrow) but took care of his brother's son and five living grandchildren after his brother's death. So the house must have rung with children's voices, though by the time Sir Nicholas died in 1646, his wife, nephew, nephew's wife and many of their children had died. 

I hope that the gardens gave Sir Nicholas some comfort in all his losses. 

Forty Hall was inherited by the great-nephew he'd 'adopted', also called Nicholas Rainton. At this time  it was fashionable to enclose common land, creating elegant landscapes around country houses. This met with furious local opposition. In 1672 two local men drove a large flock of sheep onto Nicholas's newly sown crops on stolen common land, destroying 20 acres of produce. But of course they were seen as the criminals. 

Nicholas was also responsible for demolishing the remains of the great Tudor palace of Elsyng, said to rival Hampton Court, to create the great park of Forty Hall. 

But the second Nicholas also died without a son to leave the house to,  and it went to his grandson Nicholas Wolstenholme. 

Perhaps it's the ghosts of Elsyng or the beleaguered commoners who haunt Forty Hall?

The location of Elsyng Palace.

Nicholas Wolstenhome and his wife Grace decided to remodel the house, replacing the Tudor windows with fashionable Georgian sashes and adding an extension. Some of these works may have been carried out following a fire. These alterations were expensive, and the couple was also embroiled in a cripplingly expensive legal battle, so by 1707 they were heavily in debt. Nicholas was imprisoned in the Fleet prison, where he died four years later. Sometimes the history of Forty Hall seems like Hogarth's prints of The Rake's Progress.

A Rake's Progress - debtor's prison.

Mostly the women who lived and worked in great houses are invisible to history, but women had a big part to play in the history of Forty Hall in the 18th century. When Nicholas Wolstenholme died, his widow Grace remarried Lord Hundson, which hopefully solved her financial problems. Again there were no children to inherit, and when Grace died, the Hall passed to his nieces Elizabeth and Mary. Elizabeth married Eliab Breton, though her sister Mary continued to live at Forty Hall with them.

But Elizabeth too had a tough life. Three of her children died in infancy, which must have been a terrible grief, though two boys grew to manhood. Her husband died in 1785, and 2 years later Elizabeth was forced to sell Forty Hall owing to the 'misconduct of her offspring'. We don't know what that misconduct was, but possibly gambling debts or unwise investments? All we know is that she didn't leave them anything in her will!

In 1787 the house was sold for £8,800 to the self-styled 'Captain' Edmund Armstrong, who doesn't appear to have had any genuine rank, but appointed himself to the gentry. Armstrong had a wife and daughter who died – another sorrow for the house – but he remarried and produced two sons. At last, you'd think, some sons to inherit...

It wasn't to be. As we know, there are dark sides to the rise of these great country houses, and the worst of these was enslavement. 'Captain' Armstrong was in charge of charging a plantation tax on goods imported from Barbados plantations: the cotton, sugar and tobacco grown by enslaved people. remarried Perhaps in karma, or as payback for his own hubris, Armstong died with massive debts and his son was forced to sell the house.

As we've seen, as well as the evil of enslavement, the owners of England's great houses were guilty of enclosing common land and calling it their own. At Forty Hall this included the first two Nicholases, Lord Hunsdon who married Grace and is noted as having 'improved the estate,' and in 1800 Forty Hall was bought by James Meyer, who 'added land to the estate.' Enclosure of common land was fought in the courts and in pitched battles in the fields themselves, but of course the rich landowners won. Here the hardship was not in the house itself but in the cottages of neighbouring labourers who depended on the common land for grazing.

During the 19th Century Forty Hall continued to change hands. It was owned by a brother and then a nephew and another son of the Meyer family. Geoffrey Gillam's history of the house says that one of them married 4 times and 'produced' nine children. I fear that means four women had babies in the house, and three of the women died, possibly in childbirth. Is this the curse of the house striking again or just a sign of the times?  I wonder how many babies were conceived, born, and how many people died in this room?

At the end of the 19th century the house was bought for Henry Ferryman Bowles, who immediately began to carry out improvements. Water closets made it no longer necessary for the servants to scurry up and down stairs to empty chamber pots into cesspits. Running water was installed, so the poor housemaids no longer had to carry it from the wells. Candle light was replaced with electricity. 

Henry Bowles was a man of parts: a barrister, an MP, High Sheriff of Middlesex, and he became the County Commandant during WWW1.

Henry had no sons, but it is very likely that he encouraged boys and men from the house and estate to go and fight in the trenches. There are 40 names on the war memorial at Jesus Church, over the road from Forty Hall. This is an extraordinary number of deaths from a small rural parish without even a village. I am still investigating whether they were in a 'pals' regiment and all died together. We can only begin to imagine the grief of their mothers, wives, sweethearts in the house itself and all around the estate of Forty Hall.

 

Henry of-course survived. 

Between the wars, with Henry and his family in residence, it was still a grand house, with a butler, two footmen, a lady's maid, 3 housemaids, a cook, a housekeeper, a kitchen maid and a scullery maid. Outside the house there was a chauffeur, a handyman, two carpenters, a painter, head gardener, several assistant gardeners, a cowman, several farmhands and a gamekeeper. They had a dairy herd, a few sheep, some pigs and chickens.

 

In 1943 Henry Bowles – by then a Baronet – died, and the house was inherited by his grandson. But this is the final chapter in the bad luck of those who owned this house, because his grandson was 'not well enough' to live there. I'm guessing that's an early 20th century euphemism for having poor mental health, or perhaps a condition like epilepsy. 

In 1951 the Bowles family sold it to Enfield Urban District Council for £43,000. Thankfully, it is now thriving, and was beautifully restored with a Heritage Lottery Fund in 2012. 

 

It's fanciful perhaps (I am a novelist and poet!) but seems as though the house, gardens and land are happy to be back in public ownership. The gardens and woods are now open to everyone and the long gallery is alive with music and words to be enjoyed by all. The commons are finally restored to the people.

 

  

Maggie Brookes, author of The Prisoner's Wife and Acts of Love and War and Wishes, new and selected poems.

Refs:

Gillam, Geoffrey (1997). Forty Hall, Enfield, 1629–1997: house, courtyards, walled kitchen garden, pleasure grounds, park & home farm. Enfield: Enfield Archaeological Society. ISBN 0950187720

Forty Hall Estate 2018

Minoan Textiles by Kathryn Gauci

 

 Minoan Textiles

 

For millennia, women in particular sat together, spinning, weaving and sewing, but because textiles are perishable, early textiles are not easy to find. Even when we look back at Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece, very few ancient literary records are devoted to women, so we have few sources to consult. The Minoans are an exception. 

The Minoans flourished during the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BC) and belong to the group of civilisations archaeologists sometimes refer to as “island cultures”, in that they were protected by sea, or, in the case of Egypt, a desert. Malta and Easter Island also belong to these categories.

Secure in their environment, they were able to develop and prosper. By 2300 BC, the people of Crete had developed textiles into a major art form. Before this, flax had been in use since Paleolithic times, whereas wool as we know it today – woolly sheep as opposed to hairy or kempy ones – was only introduced around 3500 BC. The people of Crete turned the herding of these new woolly sheep into a major part of their economy, and from this, a flourishing textile trade grew.

The first evidence of weaving manufacture in Crete comes from the archaeological site of Myrtos in the South. Clay spindle whorls were found in many rooms as though women were spinning everywhere, just as they have done in rural Greece for centuries.

For most people, spindle whorls don’t look like much at all, but as far as archeologists are concerned, they are a spectacular find. In one room, archeologists also found evidence of shallow clay dishes specifically designed for wetting linen thread as it is being worked. The ancient Egyptians used such bowls as do the Japanese today. They also unearthed clay loom weights, and significantly, these were not scattered throughout the dwellings as were the spindle whorls. For whatever reason, Myrtos burnt down, and charred oak beams were unearthed at the site. Because of the way some were found, it is believed that looms with oak beams were set up on the flat rooftops. The looms were the upright ones with clay weights, as the weaving loom with heddles that most people associate with cloth-weaving would not be in wide use until much later. Having said that, the Egyptians did sometimes use them alongside the upright loom.

They exported their woollen textile goods to the Middle East and other Mediterranean islands, in particular, Egypt. We can see just how much the Minoans developed their textile skills from the tablets unearthed around the palace of Knossos. Almost 2000 of these mentioned textile production. The D-series at Knossos, which documents shepherds and their flocks, contains 984 fragments of tablets and 231 record cloth manufacture, 171 record textile workers and 84 record wool. At Pylos, cloth via taxation is also documented along with flax production. Through this Linear B documentation, we can follow textile crops, the birth of lambs, targets for wool yields per animal, collectors’ work, the assignment of wool to workers, the receipt of finished fabrics, distribution of cloth and the storage in palatial magazines. The records are so detailed, we can deduce how many km a year could be spun, given that a spinner worked 10 hours a day for 300 days a year - 14,025 km yarn/year spun on an 18g spindle whorl. Quite mind-boggling! Minoan Crete was quite literally a super powerhouse when it came to textiles, particularly of wool.    

As Minoan trade flourished, the people developed their dyeing skills. The main colours used were red, blue, yellow and white. Natural plant dyes such as madder will give an orange-red, whereas the red from the Kermes beetle gives an intense crimson. The excavations at Myrtos show that oak was used for timber, strongly suggesting the presence of the Kermes beetle. Yellow was obtained from the saffron lily, which was found on many Aegean islands, particularly the island of Thera (present-day Santorini).

Vat dyes are more complicated to produce than natural dyes. Indigo Blue is one such colour, and it wasn’t widely known for centuries, so it’s likely that the Minoans used woad. Woad was already known to the ancient Egyptians, who used it to dye the cloth wrappings for the mummies, and for years it was assumed to be Indian Indigo. Woad is a flowering plant, and the blue dye is produced from the leaves. Although it is native to the steppe and desert zones of the Caucasus and Central Asia, woad has been cultivated throughout Europe, especially in Western and Southern Europe, since ancient times,

There is also Royal purple obtained from several varieties of seashells such as murex. Excavations on Crete have unearthed many shell heaps. Each little mollusk produces only a single drop of this beautiful dye, so we can only imagine how many were needed to dye a single piece of cloth. Some earthen floors have been found to contain crushed murex shells as aggregate—an example of recycling from about 1500 BC.

The Egyptians mostly wore clothing made of flax, which is harder to dye than wool, so naturally, this was a boom market for the Minoans. We can see from paintings in Egyptian tombs from 2000 BC onwards that the most popular patterns were blue heart-spirals with a red diamond between each pair of double hearts on a white ground. Diagonal spirals with red and blue rosettes were also popular. They must have been beautiful, as these patterns existed long after the decline of the Minoans.

When it comes to dress, we get a glimpse of just how beautiful and decorative Minoan costumes were from ceramics, figurines, the paintings in Egyptian tombs, and the wall paintings of Akrotiri on Thera. These paintings show just how advanced the Minoan civilisation had become. The Palace of Knossos also shows the sophistication of the time, but it is from Akrotiri that we see the finer details.

The predominance of female figures in authoritative and ritualistic roles over male ones seems to indicate that Minoan society was, in all likelihood, matriarchal. Certainly, the fact that the men were often away trading meant that women took care of the home and did agricultural work at the same time, which gave them tremendous power. For centuries, Cretan men wore simple loincloths, sometimes with fancy borders and always fastened with cinch belts, and it was the women who shone as far as costumes went. In fact, they were extremely fashionable and would have been the Parisiennes of their day. From early figurines of women, we see the bell-shaped dress and open-top bodice, also with a cinch belt, but it is generally thought that this is a representation. Two famous Minoan snake goddess figurines from Knossos show bodices that circle their breasts. These striking figures are probably goddesses, priestesses, or devotees, as they are dressed differently from the way normal Cretan women dressed.

From pieces like the Agia Triada Sarcophagus at Knossos, we see that Minoan women normally covered their breasts and priestesses in religious contexts were probably the exception. The fact that women wore such elaborate costumes shows us that women played a very important role in textiles and society in general. While they wove and created them, the men traded them, especially to Egypt. This trade brought back not only physical wealth but ideas, most notably in the way the Minoans started to richly decorate their palaces and villas. These wall paintings show that even the plainest of dresses were striped, while the finest display a mind-boggling array of all-over patterns, including interlocking grids of motifs, fringing, tassels and embroidery, which were obviously advanced. Thick sashes, colourful hair-bands, sculpted aprons, hats, and jewellery add to this astonishing array of beauty.

With the decline of the Minoans, textiles and costume changed, reflecting yet another era in civilisation.  During the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age, women lost their social status, and by the dawn of the Classical Age, were almost second-class citizens. They rarely went out of the house except for religious festivals, and a maidservant did the shopping. With women sequestered, the development of textiles, from a commercial point of view, was taken up by men.