The London Under London by Miranda Miller

 

This is a photo of the Great Hall of the Guildhall which has been the City of London’s civic and ceremonial centre since the 12^th century.  In the Middle Ages the Lord Mayor of London was almost as influential as the monarch. The hall you see today, which dates from the early 15^thcentury, has stained glass windows, magnificent carvings and a medieval crypt.  The banners and shields of London’s 110 Livery Companies are on the walls. For six hundred years it has been the setting for state events, banquets and state trials, most famously that of Lady Jane Grey in 1553.  The 16 -year- old who was Queen of England for nine days was found guilty of high treason and sentenced to death in this hall. It survived the Great Fire of London when, as Samuel Pepys recorded, “the horrid malicious bloody flame” destroyed the roof.”  The Great Hall was also damaged in the Blitz when the ancient carvings of Gog and Magog were destroyed, but it was rebuilt yet again.  

 The Guildhall is a fascinating place to visit and, surprisingly, not too touristy. Another reason to go there is to catch a glimpse of Londinium: in 1988, after more than a hundred years of searching, London’s only Roman amphitheatre was finally rediscovered hidden beneath Guildhall Yard by Museum of London archaeologists digging in preparation for building the new Art Gallery.

 

 The curved band of dark stone on Guildhall Yard you can see in this photo marks out the perimeter of the amphitheatre beneath the piazza. The first Roman amphitheatre was built in 70CE from wood but was renovated in the early 2nd century with tiled entrances and ragstone  walls, and enlarged so that it could seat six thousand people – an astonishing number at a time when it’s estimated that the population of the city was between 45,00 and 60,000. The amphitheatre was used for public events such as gladiatorial games, entertaining soldiers and the public with fights between wild animals, public executions of criminals and also for religious ceremonies. Although these violent spectacles were sometimes criticised, particularly by the growing Christian community, they attracted huge audiences. St. Augustine, writing in the 4th century CE, describes his own reluctant excitement at these spectacles: “He opened his eyes, feeling perfectly prepared to treat whatever he might see with scorn... He saw the blood and he gulped down the savagery... He was no longer the man who had come there but was one of the crowd to which he had come.”

Here is a map of Roman London showing the amphitheatre. Londinium soon became the largest Roman settlement in Britain. There were public baths, temples, a fort, a forum, a public square surrounded by shops and an enormous hall known as a basilica. In the 2^nd century CE Tacitus describes it as “Famous for its wealth of traders and commercial traffic.” Londinium was a major centre of international trade where merchants imported luxury goods such as wine, oil, and cloth and exported raw materials and slaves. 

After the Romans left in the 4th century, the amphitheatre lay derelict for hundreds of years.  In Peter Ackroyd’s novel The Clerkenwell Tales, set in London in 1399, citizens assemble in the ruins of this building, just a few hundred yards from St Paul’s Cathedral.

 

 

 

These photos show what you actually see when you go down to the amphitheatre, with holograms designed to show you the scale and human proportions. A few months ago, I took my grandsons to see the Guildhall, which is a fascinating building in its own right. Then we took the lift down from the art gallery to the amphitheatre, a really thrilling experience. This place has been at the centre of London life for two thousand years and nobody who is interested in history could fail to be excited by this opportunity for time travel.

 

www.mirandamiller.info

My ninth novel, When I Was, about a child growing up in London in the 1950s, will be published in March by Barbican Press.

THE FAMILY DOLL by Elizabeth Chadwick

 

In the earlier days of THE HISTORY GIRLS, we used to have a 'Cabinet of Curiosities.'  I think this family heirloom I am briefly going to talk about would make an interesting addition to the said cabinet.  


 My family has a wax doll that has been handed down the generations in the female line (of my father's side)  to the youngest daughter in the family since the mid 19th century.  It's first owner was a little girl called Mary Lees, who was born on June 9th 1775, fourteen years before the French Revolution.  On her tenth birthday, her uncle presented her with a wax doll in a glass and wooden case and she kept it and passed it on to her daughter in due course.  We know this because there is a note inside the doll's case that tells us her intentions for the doll for when she had passed away. 

"This doll is the property of Mary Blunt and was presented to her by her uncle on her 10th birthday in the year 1785.  And at her death she wishes it to be for her youngest daughter Elizabeth. October 24th 1857"

 Mary Lees married a William Blunt, and the doll became the property of their youngest daughter Elizabeth, born in 1823. Elizabeth passed it to her youngest daughter, Martha, who in turn passed it on to her own youngest, Elizabeth, my great aunt, born in 1901,and now it has come to me. 
We don't know the purchase place of the doll. Oral family history says Paris, but it wasn't written down. She stands in her glass case, blue eyes, bright rosy cheeks and ash-blonde hair, surrounded by a hoop of artificial flowers, and two delightful,  smiling china poodles either side of her body -which is stuffed and encased in linen.  The face and the hands are the only parts made from wax as far as we can tell. She was never a child's toy in the way that toys are played with today, but certainly a treasured piece handed down from mother to daughter through the centuries.  Who knows what she has heard and seen! 

 Her flocked gown is in two layers and the white, semi-transparent upper fabric turns her gown a soft pink.  The under-dress is a fabulous rose-coral.  She has stood in her case down the generations of my family and with her written provenance for two hundred and fifty years. The next custodian will either be my niece or my granddaughter, but that will be decided in time.  For now she dwells with me.  It has been said that she is a bit creepy, but when I look at her smiling poodles, I am totally reassured that she is a benign heirloom.

  I wonder if my great, great, great, great grandmother's uncle ever thought when he gave his niece Mary Lees this doll for her 10th birthday in 1785, that although generations have come and gone, his gift would still be here now, seeing in 2025 with her family.  

Foundling Stories - Stacey Halls and Rose Tremain by Judith Allnatt

In 1747, in a fine room at the splendid buildings of London’s Foundling Hospital, Bess Bright holds her one-day-old baby girl. Alongside other mothers, Bess draws a ball from a bag in a lottery held to decide who will win a place for their child as a pupil. This game of chance is played out under the eyes of invited benefactors, wealthy ladies and gents, who witness the show of human drama. Thus starts ‘The Foundling’ by Stacey Halls. 

In 1850, a baby, wrapped in sacking is abandoned at the gates of a wintry park in London where she is scented by wolves from the Essex marshes. She is found by a policeman, who hears the wolves’ howling and takes her to the Foundling Hospital. Thus begins ‘Lily’ by Rose Tremain. 

A separated family is a powerful engine to drive a story and perhaps the most poignant separation of all is that of a mother and baby. Stories of ‘foundlings’, babies found abandoned by parents or handed over in desperation to foundling hospitals, start with this heart-breaking premise and immediately fire the reader with a strong desire to see parent and child reunited. For me, this desire would probably be enough on its own to keep me reading but the two books above offer so much more in their examining of the relationships of adults caught up in the drama.

Receiving day at the Foundling Hospital. Wellcome Images

https://wellcomecollection.org/works/fgqknntr

In ‘The Foundling’ poverty and the shame of illegitimacy force Bess to give up her baby, Clara. Like other brokenhearted mothers, as well as leaving the baby’s name and details at the hospital she leaves a token to identify her – half of a heart made of whalebone given to her by the baby’s father. All kinds of things were used as such tokens: slips of paper, embroidered ribbons, rings and pierced coins. Then if the mother were able to drag herself out of poverty and also save enough to pay a fee to the hospital for the child’s upkeep (a difficult feat), even when the hospital had given the child a new name they could be sure of reclaiming the right child by describing the token they left with them. 

Token on Marchmont Street, Author: Matt BrownNo changes made https://www.flickr.com/photos/londonmatt/53413014277/

                                  

The story takes a leap and the stakes are raised when Bess, after six years of scrimping, returns to claim her child only to find that a stranger has claimed her the very day after Bess had placed Clara in the hospital’s care. Avoiding spoilers - the exploration of what it is to be a mother deepens as the two women are brought up against each other. The genius of the book for me is the way in which Stacey Halls balances the representation of the needs of the two women so that despite the reader’s natural urge to see mother and daughter reunited there is also feeling for the damaged woman who has claimed Clara. This creates powerful dramatic tension and pulls the reader’s emotions in different directions, resulting in a gripping read that one can’t put down.

The Foundling Restored To Its Mother 1858 painting by Emma Brownlow
  1858. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

 

In 'Lily', subtitled ‘A Tale of Revenge’, Rose Tremain writes of poverty, cruelty and crime in Victorian London. The infant Lily is first placed in a loving foster family but is then wrenched away and returned to hardship as a pauper at the hospital. Now, as an adult, Lily has committed a murder and lives in fear of discovery. Tremain holds back the nature of the murder and the identity of the victim, masterfully managing the dramatic tension and creating a mystery that kept me turning the pages into the night.
However, the truly fascinating thing for me was the relationship between Lily and the policeman who rescued her as a baby. She feels he may hold the key to her salvation but she dare not confess to him for fear of the rope.

Tremain writes with all her usual subtlety and feeling, imbuing everyday objects with the emotional charge they hold for her characters so that they become powerful symbols of love and loss: a scarf that Lily knits for her only friend at the hospital, a deep, black well at the farm where Lily was happily fostered that comes to symbolise her worst fear of discovery and execution.

One of Tremain’s great strengths is that she looks unflinchingly at human darkness whilst still maintaining a feeling of authorial empathy and understanding. This novel moved me to tears – it is heartrending, compassionate and brilliant.

To find out more about the fascinating history of the Foundling Hospital and see examples of the tokens left by parents, do visit https://foundlingmuseum.org.uk

More Venetian than the Venetians - Michelle Lovric

There is a little corner of Venice that is forever Slav.

I’m devoting this blog to that corner, which is best known for its jewel-box of paintings by Vittore Carpaccio, the artist commissioned by the Slavs of Venice to depict their own saints in their own sacred place, the Scuola Dalmata dei Santi Giorgio e Trifone.

It’s a thousand years since Venice and the Slavs, known as the Schiavoni, were first drawn into a warm and symbiotic relationship by proximate geography and mutual interest. With the Ottomans encroaching ever further west and Mediterranean pirates increasingly audacious, Venice represented both a place and source of safety for the threatened Christian populations of the western Balkans. And Dalmatia in turn stood as Venice’s last line of defence against a Turkish domination of the Adriatic.

In 998 AD, the Dalmatian city-states appealed to Doge Pietro Orseolo for protection. The Venetian fleet swept in, hunting down and suppressing the pirates. Orseolo was welcomed as a liberator. He and his successors took the title ‘Duke of the Dalmatians’.

Domenico Tintoretto, ritratto dei dogi
Pietro Orseolo II ed Ottone Orseolo, Palazzo Ducale,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Over the next four hundred years, the whole Dalmatian coast became part of the Stato da Màr, the name given to la Serenissima’s overseas possessions. Trade relations flourished; so did the population of Schiavoni living in Venice.

 
In 1368, Perast – in modern Montenegro – was named Venice’s "FEDELISSIMA GONFALONIERA" – most faithful flagbearer. In peace-time, the Venetian war standard was held by the Captain of Perast. In times of war, that banner was hoisted on the navy’s flagship. Each year, twelve Perastini, chosen from the most valiant, swore to die rather than allow the Venetian flag to fall into enemy hands. More on this later.

image from Bozholidays website

One of Venice’s great thoroughfares took its name from the Dalmatian merchants who landed their goods there – the Riva degli Schiavoni.

Gabriele Bella, Passeggio sulla riva degli Schiavoni, Querini Stampalia,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons 

By the mid-15th century there were over 5000 Slavs resident in Venice, of a total population of 120,000. Whether German, Albanian, Greek, Armenian or Jewish, immigrants were welcomed by Venice, because there were simply not enough Venetians to do the work of the city, particularly the more menial, low-paid work. Pragmatically, Venice assimilated and socialised her immigrants – folding them into the existing system of scuole or guilds, by which the city neatly organised her social, religious, economic and civic life. It was also the scuole that commissioned some of Venice’s greatest art.

Each national scuola operated as a nucleus of resident foreigners, who were never fully integrated but defined, accepted and welcomed as insider-outsiders, licensed to provide the manpower and trades Venice needed, while self-governing within their own confraternity. The scuola was a gateway to work, patronage, housing and alms for all new immigrants. Meanwhile, the intimate geographies of Venice gradually bound together all those who lived there, whatever their origin – as did intermarriage. In the wider picture, common causes against common enemies did the same.

So in 1451, the Council of Ten said yes, when Venice’s Slavs asked to set up their own scuola, with a mission to support the Dalmatian community, especially the families of soldiers and sailors who had suffered or died while serving la Serenissima in battle.

The Schiavoni were to meet in the disused hospice of Santa Caterina, leased from the Order of St John of Jerusalem, in Calle dei Furlani in the east of the city. Two hundred confratelli were present on the day of their first meeting. Just under 50% came from the cities of Kotor and Bar in Venetian Albania. Over a third were sailors, crewing the Republic’s galleys; another third were tradesmen, many working on the construction and maintenance of the Venetian fleet.

The aims and responsibilities of each Venetian scuola were embodied in its Mariegola, a book of statutes. The Mariegola established the days of the Schiavoni’s religious services, permitted them to worship in their own language, defined their charitable works including dowries for poor girls, their financial obligations to the State, and also the roles of the different officers. This image of their precious Mariegola comes from the scuola's website.

For its coat of arms, the new scuola adapted the antique heraldry of Dalmatia … three lion heads on an azure base. Azure turned crimson, echoing Venice’s own flag. Dalmatian soldiers and sailors wore red tunics – later jackets – and spoke in their own ‘Illyrian’ dialect, a language heavily contaminated with Venetian.4

The scuola immediately began to acquire relics and sacred art relating to its patron saints, Trifone, George and Jerome.

In 1502 the Venetian patrician Paolo Valaresso presented the scuola with a relic of Saint George that had once belonged to the Patriarch of Jerusalem. The bone fragment was delivered to the scuola on St George’s Day, in a grand musical procession. The fragment joined the precious trove of saints’ remains already collected by the Scuola Dalmata, chief among which was St Trifone’s jaw.

Within five years, Vittore Carpaccio had completed his cycle of paintings there. (Image from the scuola's website).

After various disputes with the Order of St John, the Schiavoni raised their own funds to remodel their building. In 1551, a new façade emerged. The two large windows on the ground floor provided a theatrical framing for charitable acts – the confratelli would distribute food to the poor.

Slav writers, editors and publishers soon became part of the successful Venetian printing industry. Inside and beyond Venice, her Schiavoni were becoming known for their loyalty. Their scuola was recognised – with privileges and indulgences – for the enthusiasm with which they raised money for Venice to pursue war against the Ottomans. Carlo Goldoni prefaced his hit play La Dalmatina, saying that it was "about a loyal nation worthy of La Serenissima".

The odd local insurrection still occurred in Dalmatia and Albania – for we Slavs are a fiery nation! – but many of the Schiavoni resident in the city prided themselves on being almost more Venetian than the Venetians. The Schiavoni were among the few to protest when Venice ceded to Napoleon in May 1797. While the city’s patricians withdrew to their palaces for passive lament, the Schiavoni mobbed the streets, crying "Viva San Marco!" Lower right in the rather fanciful image below – we see the Schiavoni vainly waving their yellow and red Venetian flags against French horses and canon.

Jean Naudet le Beau, Prise de Venise par Napoléon en mai 1797,
Musée de la Révolution française - Vizille,
Wikimedia Commons

Even after Venice fell, her flag still flew in Dalmatia. Perast was the very last Venetian town to cede to Napoleon. Only on August 23, 1797 did the Perastini gather to bury the Republic’s flag under their cathedral’s altar, to prevent it falling into enemy hands. This painting by Giuseppe Lallich (from the Museum of Perast) shows them kissing the flag farewell.

Giuseppe Lallich, Il Bacio di Perasto al Gonfalone di San Marco
painted in 1930. Associazione nazionale dalmata. © Cace 2006

Unknown artist, portrait of
Giuseppe Viscovich, 
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Their commander, Count Giuseppe Viscovich (left), delivered an emotional speech about the Gonfalon, or flag: "Our sons will know of us, and the story of this day will be known in all of Europe – that Perast has worthily sustained the pride of the Venetian Gonfalon to the last, honouring it with this solemn act, and setting it down wet with our bitterest universal tears.

"Let us rage, citizens, let us rage, and in these, our last sentiments with which we seal our glorious career under the Most Serene Venetian Republic, we turn towards the flag that represents us, and, upon it, we vent all our sorrow.

"For three hundred and seventy-seven years our being, our blood, our lives were always for you, O San Marco; and, always your most faithful, we have  known You to be with Us, Us to be with You; and on the sea we were always with You, illustrious and victorious. No one ever saw us in retreat, defeated or afraid!

"But what else is left to do for you? May our hearts be your most honoured tomb, and your purest and greatest praise be our tears!"

Giuseppe Praga, in his Storia di Dalmazia, says – and I agree with him – that these are "words that could be found only to frame a last farewell to a parent, from whom you have received your soul and your life."

Unlike the grander guilds of Venice, the tiny Scuola Dalmata would survive the fall of the Venetian Republic. Of more than three hundred Venetian scuole, only the Scuole Dalmata and di San Rocco saved their confraternities and their art treasures from Napoleon’s closures and larceny.

The Schiavoni’s cry of "Viva San Marco!" was heard once more in 1848, when the scuola’s members took part in the revolt against the Austrians. Among the leaders was the linguist Niccolò Tommaseo, originally from Sibenik. Tommaseo is commemorated in a statue in Santo Stefano. It was a Schiavoni commander, Antonio Billanovich, who began the bombardment of the Austrian’s new railway bridge into Venice.

When bombs fell on Venice in World War I, the Carpaccio paintings were removed from the scuola’s walls and packed in sealed cases. This proved prudent, as the scuola was damaged when nearby buildings suffered direct hits. In 1940, the paintings were again taken to a place of safety. After the war, they were extensively though imperfectly restored, arriving home only in 1947.

Save Venice restored the scuola’s façade 2001 – and will soon also complete the restoration of the paintings, a work dedicated to art historian Patricia Fortini Brown, author of the key work, Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio.

Venice has never stopped attracting the Schiavoni, generation after generation. Following World War II, many – including my own father, uncle and grandfather – found the Tito regime repressive and left Yugoslavia. My people went to Australia, but many Slavs ended up in Venice, reuniting with old branches of their families who’d emigrated in the time of la Serenissima. I’m always looking for the Lovric name on Venetian doorbells – especially after I discovered a certain Giovanni or Ivan Lovrich, - a writer born in Croatia but living and publishing in Venice in 1776. I never did find the Lovric name on a Venetian doorbell. So in the end, I put one there myself.

The confratelli of the Scuola Dalmata have remained loving custodians of their own Venetian history, setting up a library and archive in the 1980s. They publish books and a magazine. In 1997, the Schiavoni were honoured with this plaque on the Riva named after them. It celebrates the bonds of fidelity that unite Dalmatia with Venice via their five-hundred-year-old scuola. 

plaque image by Didier Descouens,
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

It’s no coincidence that Ruskin, in setting up the Guild of St George (the organisation of which I am so proud to be a Companion) chose ‘Guild’ for its title. The word is probably the best translation of ‘scuola’. Both words give the sense of a lay confraternity, a meeting place, a site of good thinking, a state of mind looking to give, rather than take.

And what place needs that more than Venice?  

This blog is adapted from a talk about Ruskin and the Scuola Dalmata that I presented in February 2022 for the Guild of St George, the organisation devoted to Ruskin’s ideas, with Joseph Mydell playing the part of the Master.

Scuola Dalmata website 

The Guild of St George website 

Michelle Lovric’s website

Cornelia Africana - What a woman! by Elisabeth Storrs

My previous posts about Roman women have centered on victims (Lucretia and Virginia) and villains (Tarpeia and Tullia Minor) whose virtues and vices served as exemplars both good and bad. Today I write about another celebrated woman who was seen as the architype of a Roman Matron. Her name is Cornelia Africana. 

Unlike the other women who were legendary figures, Cornelia’s existence is verifiable through the writing of the Greek historian, Plutarch, who refers to Cornelia in his histories about her two famous sons, the Gracchi Brothers.

Born around 190 BCE, Cornelia Minor was the daughter of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus, the famed Roman general and hero of the Second Punic War, and Aemilia Paulla. Her name, ‘Africana’, derives from the cognomen ‘Africanus’ granted to her father after his conquest of the Carthaginians in North Africa. Like Lucretia, Cornelia is seen as an embodiment of civic virtue but she is a far more complex character given her interest in literature and ‘behind the scenes’ influence on politics.

Cornelia and her jewels by Angelica Kauffman, 1785

Cornelia grew up in luxury within an aristocratic household where her father encouraged appreciation of Greek culture and art. She was also schooled in Stoicism, a philosophy which espouses facing the vicissitudes of life with equal fortitude.

At seventeen she was married to the middle-aged Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in what appears to have been a happy marriage. There is an apocryphal story her husband discovered two snakes in his bed chamber, a male and a female. He consulted a seer who told him that he must kill one and let the other go. If he killed the male, he himself would die, and if he killed the female, Cornelia would perish. Such was his love for his young wife, Tiberius opted to kill the male snake, and he passed away not long afterward.

During their marriage, Cornelia bore twelve children of whom only three survived to adulthood –a daughter, Sempronia (later married to her notorious cousin Scipio Aemilianus to maintain the Scipio dynasty), and two sons, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (born nine years apart). She proudly claimed her children as ‘her jewels’.

When her husband died, Cornelia refused the hand of Ptolemy VIII Euergetes of Egypt and chose not to remarry, thereby fulfilling the role of the dutiful ‘univera’ ie a ‘one man woman’ loyal to her husband in life and death. Yet such a choice may well have been a shrewd way to ensure her own independence as well as control over her children’s lives. She already held an esteemed reputation due to her bloodline, and therefore could make choices for herself, a rarity in the ancient world. She thereafter devoted herself to her children’s education. Emulating her famous father’s Graecophilia, she hired the Greek philosopher, Blossius of Cumae, and the rhetorician, Diophanes of Mitylene, as tutors.

The Gracchi Brothers would go on to leave significant marks on Roman history as reformists who proposed the Roman State and wealthy landowners give land to poorer citizens. As a result, Tiberius and Gaius died, a decade apart, in bloody fashion. And this is where the story of Cornelia becomes particularly interesting. Fragments of letters reputedly written to her son, Gaius, were included in the manuscripts of Cornelius Nepos, one of the earliest known Latin biographers. In these fragments, Cornelia is seen as harshly admonishing Gaius for his rebellious actions which had caused unrest in Rome. For he advocated extending citizenship to Latin speaking allies and giving greater freedoms to the plebeians thereby undermining the power of aristocracy.

“No enemy has caused me so much annoyance and trouble as you have because of these events – you who ought, as the only survivor of all the children that I have had in the past, to have taken their place and to have seen to it that I had the least possible anxiety in my old age; you who ought to have wished that all your actions should above all be agreeable to me, and should consider it impious to do anything of great importance contrary to my advice, especially when I have so brief a portion of my life left.” (Nepos, Fragments 1.2)

Cornelia’s voice is forceful and there is an assumption she gives her advice freely and expects it to be heeded. It seems this could be true. In another letter, she advised Gaius not to punish a politician who had been an enemy of his brother which he duly obeyed.

Cornelia, Mother of the Gracchi, by Jules Cavelier

This correspondence was studied decades later by Roman scholars such as Cicero who attributed both Gracchi Brothers’ notable eloquence to their mother’s influence. He also praised the beauty of her writing style. Yet there is supposition the fragmentary letters are not genuine but rather propaganda circulated by an elite faction opposed to the agrarian reforms. Yet, if the letter chastising him is valid, I can understand the passion in her voice. This is allegedly a private epistle to her only living child. By this stage she had buried eleven children. Is it any wonder she would agonise over his politics knowing he might be violently assassinated in a riot as had Tiberius? Sadly, Gaius’ fate was to suicide amid a massacre on the Aventine Hill.

After Gaius’ violent death, Cornelia retired to a villa in Misenum where she received learned men from all over the Roman world to discuss literature and freely share ideas. Plutarch’s description of her here is not of a mother disenchanted with her sons but instead proud of them while displaying the stoicism that enabled her to endure the unbearable loss of all her children and her husband.

‘She had many friends and kept a good table so that she might show hospitality, for she always had Greeks and other literary men about her, and all the reigning kings interchanged gifts with her. She was indeed very agreeable to her visitors and associates when she discoursed with them about the life and habits of her father Africanus, but most admirable when she spoke of her sons without grief or tears, and narrated their achievements and their fate to all enquirers as if she were speaking of men of the early days of Rome.’ (Plutarch’s Life of Tiberius Gracchus 19.2)

After Cornelia died at an advanced age, Rome revered her for embodying Roman virtues and voted for an expensive bronze statue to be erected in her honour. Yet the inscription on the base limits her identity to the men in her life ie her father and sons. (Interestingly, there is no mention of her being the ‘wife of’ Sempronius Gracchus even though he’d been a consul and a triumphing general.) The base still survives and can be seen in the Capitoline Museums in Rome. The inscription reads:

Cornelia Africani f(ilia) | Gracchorum (Daughter of Africanus | Mother of the Gracchi)

The Cornelia Pedestal, Capitoline Museums, Rome

The simplification of Cornelia’s character as an ideal mother and daughter sadly erodes her extraordinary erudition and unusual independence. Thank goodness for Plutarch! Although he writes about Cornelia through the lens of her son’s lives, at least he has given greater context to her than a worn inscription etched in weathered bronze.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Elisabeth Storrs is the author of the Tale of Ancient Rome trilogy and is the founder of the Historical Novel Society Australasia. Learn more at www.elisabethstorrs.com 

"Goings-on" in medieval nunneries by Carolyn Hughes

I have just finished writing the next book in my Meonbridge Chronicles series, set in medieval England. This story centres, not on Meonbridge, as the other novels do for the most part, but on a priory, to which one of the characters in the first Chronicle, Fortune’s Wheel, departed under something of a cloud. I always wanted to follow up what happened to her, but wasn’t sure that setting a novel almost entirely in a nunnery would make for an engaging story. So, I wrote other novels, about other characters, as the idea for this latest one gradually developed in my mind.

Then I discovered – or, actually, I think, re-discovered – Medieval English Nunneries, c. 1275 to 1535, a vast tome written in the 1920s by the well-known medieval historian, Eileen Power.

To digress briefly, I’ve often wondered who Eileen Power presumed her readership was… I have two others of her books, Medieval People and Medieval Women, and both include a few snatches of medieval texts, but I think I’m right in saying the quotes are translated into modern English. So perhaps those books were intended for a more-or-less inexpert readership. But Medieval English Nunneries is not only vast, with great quantities of notes, but is also littered with Middle English, Medieval French, and Latin, some of which is translated but a lot of which is not. Which overall makes it a challenging read for one who is not a trained, academic historian!

Nonetheless, I have read Medieval English Nunneries from cover to cover, and what I learned from it really opened my eyes, and soon enough I understood that writing a story about a medieval nunnery could indeed be engaging, not to say surprising and even exhilarating.

For what I read was that some medieval nunneries weren’t at all the havens of peace and prayer I might have expected them to be.…

Hildegard von Bingen and her nuns 13th century. Public domain.

There were apparently around 140 nunneries (priories and a few abbeys) in England in the later Middle Ages. Most were very poor, despite being largely inhabited by the aristocracy and gentry and, later, some women from upper-middle-class mercantile families. Many nunneries were small, very few with more than thirty nuns, a little over a quarter with between 10 and 20, well over half fewer than 10. As economic units, some of them must have struggled.

From what I gather, nunneries were not necessarily poor from lack of good management, but simply because their income was low. They would have relied on donations from benefactors, either permanent or long-term endowments, or shorter term or even one-off gifts from friends, relatives or people who wanted the nuns to pray for their or their loved-ones’ souls. The nunnery would also have the income from its estate, such as rents from tenants and money from the sale of crops. But their expenses were many: the costs of day-to-day living, food, clothing, candles, firewood; wages for servants (of which there could be several, even in relatively poor establishments); the costs of maintaining the buildings, which clearly could be huge; alms-giving to the poor, something nuns were supposed to do, albeit they were poor themselves! A few houses were wealthy, and presumably didn’t really struggle, but in many, if not most, the expenses often outstripped the income. Even in well-managed houses, the battle to keep their heads above the choppy waters of destitution must have been a real challenge.

That this was a problem can be construed from the measures put in place by bishops to safeguard nunneries’ financial health. The prioress was not supposed to make decisions by herself, but together with all the nuns – this communality of decision-making was a requirement of the Benedictine rule, and likely that of other orders too. Accounts were to be presented regularly to the bishop’s representatives, and it might seem obvious that a nunnery should have someone with specific responsibility for its finances (i.e. a treasuress), rather than letting the prioress have sole oversight. 

But what if a prioress had neither the ability nor the motivation to grapple with the mammoth task of managing the priory? Some prioresses were clearly terrible at their job. Yet perhaps it’s not surprising that some were unable to manage their priories properly, for, after all, they had no training. Maybe it is more surprising that so many were reasonably well-managed even if they did remain relatively poor?

However, in some cases, incompetence was not the (only) problem. For imagine a prioress who is discontented with the ascetic life and wants a bit of luxury, or who has a yen to assert herself above her sisters and do things “her way”, instead of by the Rules of her order, Benedictine or otherwise.

For a start, she might try to force her own election by whatever devices necessary. Eileen Power describes various examples of electoral subterfuge, where the community splits into rival factions, and the prospective prioress uses bribery or slander or some other devious, un-nun-like means to win the day.

Once in place, the prioress might then succumb to whatever “temptations” can help her assert her authority or implement her desires. Power mentions three such temptations:

• The desire to live a separate, superior sort of life, wearing luxurious clothes, not engaging with the life of the convent, sleeping and eating alone, travelling unnecessary, visiting friends, having friends to stay, even meeting men in private
• The urge to rule like a tyrant, instead of consulting the other nuns, as the Rule demanded
• The inclination to favour individual sisters, causing rifts, resentment, and even outrage…

These matters too were ones that bishops tried to tackle, but where their efforts were often in vain. Nunneries were typically visited and examined – by means of the bishop’s visitation, which was how all religious institutions, including religious houses and churches, were monitored and managed – only every three years or so. Therefore, the nuns were essentially left to their own devices for years at a time, during which all sorts of mayhem might be perpetrated.

It is through the records of the bishops’ visitations that Power is able to tell us so much about the difficulties of medieval nunneries and the measures the bishops tried to put in place to help them but also to curb their failings.

Apart from the financial problems, there were a number of other issues that might cause life in a nunnery to be less than contented.

For example, the very reason why the nuns were there. Had they entered the nunnery by choice, to pursue a religious life that they believed was their vocation? Or had they been sent there, possibly against their will, possibly even as a child?

Power makes it clear that at least some of the professed nuns in medieval nunneries were not there because they chose the life. Some were sent as children, others as young women. Power by no means claims that all of them were forced. She suggests that some – perhaps many, or even most? – professed happily enough, and might even have developed a vocation for the religious life. But it certainly was not always the case. For those, in particular, who entered the nunnery unwillingly, or at the very least, without their active consent, one can imagine the life might have seemed like a form of imprisonment.

To send your child to a nunnery was, I suppose, not necessarily done in order to “get rid of” them. For some, the religious life might have been seen as a sanctuary, an honour, or an insurance for the family. But at least some of these youthful internees might have met their fate when devious relatives did want to be rid of them, in order to access their inheritance, for a nun had no claim on her father’s estate.

In other cases, a man with a lot of children – sons and daughters – would give his sons priority, and might send “superfluous” daughters to a nunnery for a lower dowry than he might need to find her a husband. (In fact, canon law forbade the giving of dowries to nunneries as “simony”, but they happened anyway, and indeed were commonplace.) For some, a career as a nun might have seemed a natural “alternative” to marriage. Power suggests that the majority of young medieval women who entered a nunnery as a career did not have any particular religious inclination, but simply had nothing else to do, assuming I suppose, that they were unable, for whatever reason, to find a husband.

It is undoubtedly true that a girl might choose to take the veil willingly, not to say eagerly. She might see it as an honourable life for a girl who was unwilling or unable to marry, or indeed she might have a real calling to the life. But, for others, the nunnery might prove a prison, into which they were forced, unwilling but unable to resist, perhaps out of fear or simply sheer lack of agency.

It is of course impossible to know how many were willing and how many not.

But it seems that the majority of nunneries were apparently not full of desperately unhappy, antagonistic women, but were reasonably calm and contented places so, perhaps, regardless of the way they had entered their life, most nuns did learn to accept their fate and make the best of it. We shall never know.

So, why the nuns were there was one of the potential issues that might make, for some, their life a less than happy one. Another was the day-to-day life itself.

In the early days of nunneries, a nun’s day (aside from eating and sleeping) was marked by prescribed periods of prayer, some hours of work, and time allowed for reading and study. But Power tells us, that by the fourteenth century, reading was no longer widespread, and even work occupied less, if any, time than it once had, as servants tended to do it. As a result, says Power, “all nuns had was prayer”.

Nuns dining in silence while listening to a Bible reading.  

Pietro Lorenzetti, 1341. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons  

Obviously, those for whom the life was a vocation, where prayer was one of its most important, indeed joyous, aspects, would undoubtedly have relished spending most of their time in chapel. Moreover, even if reading and study had declined overall, one can imagine that nuns with a vocation would read and study anyway, so much of their time would be usefully, and happily, occupied. 

But for others, especially those who had no vocation, the lack of occupation could have rendered their lives as tedium without relief. Some reacted negatively. For example, some neglected the services – the holy offices – either by not attending them at all or by disrupting them in some way, such as racing through the psalms, to render them cacophonous and meaningless. 

The dearth of meaningful activity also encouraged some to try and brighten their lives a little, with more colourful clothes, pet dogs and forms of entertainment. The evidence that bishops attempted to curb these “brighteners” does suggest it was a problem, though how widespread it was it is impossible to know. I have already mentioned unscrupulous prioresses who sought a more luxurious and entertaining life, and perhaps finding it at the expense of the nunnery’s financial health. But from the bishops’ viewpoint, this was also about the failure of the nuns to observe the life of simplicity and abstinence which a nunnery was supposed to have.

Worse was when nuns broke the bounds of morality.

In principle, the life of a nun was “cloistered”: she kept to the confines of the nunnery, and did not leave it for any reason. Yet, it seems that nuns made all sorts of excuses for escape, and again, the evidence that bishops tried to curtail it indicates that such getaways were commonplace enough. Excuses might include visits to friends and family, weddings, funerals or christenings, pilgrimages, walks (for exercise) and even field work on the nunnery’s home farm. Clearly some of these excuses were probably perfectly legitimate, but it’s equally clear that sometimes nuns took advantage, especially perhaps of weak-willed or incompetent prioress, and ended up visiting improper places, like monasteries, or men’s private houses, or taverns. The latter seems somewhat unlikely but perhaps it has some truth! Anyway, as Power says, for hundreds of years, the bishops were mostly unsuccessful in forcing nuns to stay “cloistered”, and in the end, of course, the nunneries (like the monasteries) were dissolved, with the excessive freedom to “get away” cited as one of the principal reasons.

One of the reasons for insisting upon enclosure was of course the desire by the authorities to keep nuns away from men, and the temptation they posed. Chastity was one of a nun’s vows, and the only way of preventing nature taking its natural course was to keep her locked up and prevent her from meeting men. Although, she might come across men anyway inside the nunnery. The priest-in-charge or chaplain might even live within the nunnery’s walls, and illicit liaisons with priests were certainly recorded in the visitation reports. Moreover, some of the in-house servants might be men, and if a nun did engage in any outdoor work, she might have occasional contact with farm workers. So opportunities were probably always there for those who wished to find them… Power concludes that the majority of nunneries were almost certainly perfectly moral, and didn’t have their nuns gallivanting around the countryside or getting themselves into inappropriate liaisons with men. Nonetheless, the records of the bishops’ visitations reveal that immoral, even outrageous, behaviour, did occur, some of which led to the inevitable unwanted consequences.

Sometimes it was the prioress herself who set a bad example. There appear to be examples – if few – of prioresses or even abbesses who bore several children and even brought them up in the nunnery, which sounds extraordinary. Sometimes it was a nun who got into trouble, and occasionally she left the nunnery – apostatised – perhaps to set up home with her child’s father. But it wouldn’t have been a happy answer to her problem, for she risked being excommunicated. Often it seems, the apostate returned to the nunnery and had to undergo arduous penances in order to recover her position. 

My novel, obviously, focuses on the sort of mischief that did go on in some – but probably very few – medieval nunneries. I liked the idea of political manoeuvring – electoral subterfuge – for the potential for duplicity and conflict that would arise between factions. Also the concept of a prioress imposing her own inappropriate or even immoral desires on a place where her word was “law”, given that nuns owed her complete obedience, regardless of the worth or rationality of her decisions. And finally, the notion that the dissipation she might create would engender such grief amongst those nuns for whom such dissipation was anathema that they might be willing to cast obedience aside and rise up against her. I thought it might all make for a stimulating if surprising story.

However, as I shall write in my Author’s Note, this picture of a medieval nunnery should not be taken as the norm! Most of the 140 or so nunneries in Medieval England (and indeed also the monasteries) were probably reasonably pious and tranquil, working hard to make ends meet as best they could, although the very few wealthy institutions presumably didn’t have to work so hard. But, as Eileen Power writes, the evidence – from the bishops’ visitations – shows clearly that there were a few that were badly managed, had prioresses who were hopeless managers and/or incorrigibly self-seeking, where discipline was lax, piety at a minimum, and the inmates possibly feeling like prisoners.

Power’s book has been criticised for overstating the case for mismanagement and especially depravity in medieval nunneries, but I don’t feel she does especially overegg the situation. She draws on reports from the bishops’ visitations, which describe the “goings-on” in a few nunneries, sometimes in considerable detail. They certainly make intriguing reading, but there is no need to extrapolate from the few extraordinary examples to deduce that such behaviour was commonplace.

In truth, I feel that it is perhaps surprising that more nuns did not succumb to misbehaviour, given the circumstances in which some of them had entered their cloistered life, and the constraints with which they were required to live.

Anyway, I’ve drawn on Power’s descriptions of a few particular cases of prioresses or abbesses who brought either financial failure or shame, or both, to their houses, and overlaid them with my imagination to create a story that I hope gives a flavour of what life might have been like in those few houses that had the misfortune to be headed by a woman who was more interested in her own comfort, advancement and control than the well-being of her sisters. I hope it will be published early in 2025.