Shot at Dawn. By Judith Allnatt

Private Henry Burden, a Northumberland Fusilier, was shot at 4 a.m. on 21st July 1915 having been found guilty of desertion. He was just seventeen years old.

Like many young men keen for adventure and caught up in the patriotic rush to war, he had lied about his age in order to join up. Once sent overseas, he lost friends at the Battle of Belwaarde Ridge, experienced nerve shattering barrages of shelling and was sent to a military hospital to recover. On the same afternoon that he was discharged, he was sent forward with his battalion to the front line. Burden left his post, he said, to visit a neighbouring battalion to see a friend who he had heard had lost a brother. Two days later he was arrested and two days after that he was tried by a court martial. He had a record of going absent without leave, which went against him and he had no one to defend him as those who could have spoken up for him had all been killed. He wasn't asked about his age and he didn't raise it. He was found guilty, not of the lesser charge of going AWOL, but of desertion, and condemned to death.

Photo credit: Harry Mitchell [CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)] 

In the British Army, discipline was harsh. The offences for which a soldier could be executed were many and various. They included: cowardice, casting away of arms, disobedience, striking an officer and desertion. Falling asleep on sentry duty could also carry the death penalty as it endangered a whole section of the line. Soldiers on duty at night stood with head and shoulders above the parapet, rather than using a periscope, so that they could get a good field of view. (There being less chance of being hit in the dark other than by a random shot). It was therefore very obvious, if a sentry slumped, that he had fallen asleep and those who did so were easily caught. Standing at their posts for hours, dealing with mind-numbing boredom and body-numbing cold, it was all to easy to be overtaken by exhaustion. Fear of the consequences resulted in the practice of using matchsticks to prop their eyes open.

Around 3,000 soldiers were executed for offences such as those listed. There is a strong sense of the authorities using the ultimate punishment to 'set an example', a stark warning to re-assert discipline. Before facing the firing squad, the soldier's General Service buttons were removed from his tunic as a mark of his shame. Blindfolded and manacled, he was led to a stake and a target such as an envelope was pinned to his chest. Often, the firing squad was chosen from the soldier's own unit, presumably to hammer home the lesson that breaches of discipline would not be tolerated. One can barely imagine the horror and mental anguish that this practice must have caused both the man and his comrades. Apparently, the traditional belief that one of the bullets used would be a blank so that each soldier was left with the moral let-out that his shot may not have been the lethal one, is actually untrue. The whole squad were, in fact, given live ammunition.

The man's disgrace often continued after death: there were relations who chose not to talk of the relative who had brought shame on the family and memorials in towns and villages that omitted their names. Not until the 21st Century, when it became clear that many of those found guilty had suffered what we now know as Post traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD) , was there any attempt to give them a memorial.

At the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire, this shift in understanding and attitude found expression. The memorial Shot at Dawn, by Andy de Comyn, consists of a larger-than-life sized statue of Henry Burden, blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. Before him, the firing squad is represented by six juniper trees and behind him are an array of wooden stakes representing 309 other victims, each one individually named. These are the men who were posthumously pardoned by the British government in 2006. The pardons were granted not to imply blame for the officers who had acted in line with army regulations and without the understanding of PTSD that we now have, but in a spirit of mercy and in recognition of the battle trauma experienced by many, often very young men, and the suffering of their families. The Director of the Arboretum said that  "over 80 years of medical, psychological and sociological advantage (was) denied those who sat on the court-martial boards that passed sentence."

So, what of Henry Burden? As always, it is the small human details that suddenly pierce the heart. I think of his body taken down from the stake to be prepared for burial and the tattoos discovered upon it of "clasped hands" and "Love Lilly".  I am glad that his statue is placed at the eastern end of the arboretum where the sun's first rays strike.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon 1914

The Plight of the Moriscos in 17th Century Spain

by Deborah Swift

Seventeenth Century Persecution in Spain

The Spanish Inquisition is associated with the persecution of the Jews but it is not common knowledge that Muslims were also tried and tortured by this institution. When researching A Divided Inheritance I took a trip to Seville and visited the remains of the San Jorge Castle, the place of imprisonment for victims of the regime. There I saw chilling evidence of this persecution, which the Inquisition applied not only to rival faiths to Catholicism but also to mystics of their own faith.

What made this climate interesting for my novel was that in seventeenth century England Catholicism was repressed, whereas in Spain Catholics were the ruling majority. To understand the climate of oppression for religious minorities in Spain in 1609, one must look back a few centuries to 1248, when Seville, formerly a Moorish city, fell to Christian armies.

Moorish tiles from the Alhambra

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Symbols of Lost Culture
During the following centuries after moorish Spain was conquered, Christians were determined to expand their dominion over Spain, and in 1492 Muslim Granada fell - a momentous day for Christian Europe, a day of rejoicing, but for Muslims it became a day of eternal sorrow. Precious buildings were sacked and destroyed, atrefacts such as ceramics with islamnic designs smashed. 

Just as the day is marked by celebrations in Spain, in Morocco black flags are hung out to indicate loss and mourning. Some descendants of those expelled still retain the original 15th century keys of their Andalusian homes as a symbol of their lost culture.

After the conquest of Granada by Christians, the Jewish population was driven out, whilst tolerance was promised to its Moorish citizens. So by the seventeenth century the Moors had become indelibly Spanish. Some were genuine Christian converts, and many, like Sancho Panza’s neighbour Ricote (in Cervantes’ novel Don Quixote), and Luisa in my novel 'A Divided Inheritance', thought of themselves as ‘más cristiano que moro’ (More Christian than Moor).

The Burning of Books
A short period of relatively peaceful co-existence between the Muslims and Christians was shattered when the Archbishop of Granada, Hernando de Talavera, was replaced by the fanatic Cardinal Cisneros, and Muslim religious leaders were persuaded to hand over more than 5,000 priceless books with ornamental bindings, which were then consigned to bonfires. Only a few books on medicine were spared the flames. Unsurprisingly, this event led to an armed response from Muslims in the First Rebellion of the Alpujarras in 1499. By 1502 the monarchy had rescinded the treaty of tolerance and Muslims in Andalusia were forced to convert or leave. Those who converted were called Moriscos, which means “little Moors”. 

The Expulsion of the Moors from Denia - Painting by Viincente Mostre

A Secret Religion

Many Moriscos professed their allegiance to Christianity while practicing Islam in secret. Every aspect of the Islamic way of life, including the Arabic language, dress and social customs – was condemned as uncivilised and pagan. A person who refused to drink wine or eat pork, or who cooked meat on a Friday might be denounced as a Muslim to the Inquisition. Even practices such as buying couscous, using henna, throwing sweets at a wedding or dancing to the sound of Berber music were un-Christian activities for which a person might be reported to the Inquisition by his neighbour, and obliged to do penance.

Rebellion
Further repression of the Moriscos resulted in a second Rebellion. Fearing the rebels were conspiring with the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, the uprising was brutally suppressed by Don John of Austria. In a spate of atrocities the town of Galera, to the east of Granada, was razed to the ground and sprinkled with salt, after the slaughter of 2,500 people including 400 women and children. Some 80,000 Moriscos in Granada were forcibly dispersed to other parts of Spain, including Seville. Christians from northern Spain were settled on their empty lands. Ayamena and Nicoloao in my story were displaced from Granada before settling in Seville.

As early as the 16th century The Council of State proposed expulsion as a solution to the on-going Morisco 'problem', for which the previous expulsion of the Jews provided a legal precedent. However, the action was delayed because of Spain’s pressing political concerns abroad and because of the drawbacks of losing so many skilled Muslim labourers from the Spanish working population. Muslim labourers and artisans were responsible for much of the beautiful spanish architecture we admire so much today.

Final Expulsion of 400,000 people

Juan de Ribera, the ageing Archbishop of Valencia, who had initially been a firm believer in missionary work, and the conversion of the Moorish population to Christianity, became in his declining years the chief partisan of expulsion. In a sermon preached on September 27th, 1609, he said that Spanish land would never become fertile again until these heretics (the Moriscos) were expelled. The Duke of Lerma, the corrupt chief minister agreed with him. The new king, Felipe III, known as Phillip the Pious for his supposed religious zeal, finally acquiesced to political pressure and in the expulsions began. 

The embarkation order was read out in Seville on January 10th 1610. The entire Muslim population, along with anyone who had converted from Islam to Christianity, was ordered to leave Spain on threat of death. By 1613 it is estimated 400,000 people had been forcibly removed in this mass expulsion from Spanish territory.

This little-known part of seventeenth century forms one of the threads of the narrative in my novel,' A Divided Inheritance'. Read more in this excellent article by Roger Boase in History Today

The Books We Read, by Gillian Polack

This weekend reminded me that big events, especially tragic ones, can touch our lives and change our lives. When they appear in fiction, we have feelings about them. The reason I don’t read a lot of fiction set in Europe during World War II is because when I was six, I realised that a pile of corpses in a picture were not only human beings, but could well have included cousins. I had to ask my parents about the pictures, even though I knew full well they’d not sugarcoat it and they said “Yes, that’s right,” and sat me down and talked me through the Holocaust and some of the things it meant for me. When I read Anne Frank’s diary as an early teen, I was ready.

Why did I ask my parents and not my parents’ friends, some of whom were far more up on history and would have been able to explain things more gently? Melbourne at that time had one of the highest number of Holocaust refugees in the world. I was taught not to ask any of my parents’ friends about their childhoods or about modern history. 

This is one of the historical events that changed my life, even though it happened before I was born. I knew from when I was a child that people would hate me because I was Jewish and that I had to be patient with them, because it was something they’d inherited without question and I was able to question. That it was my responsibility to handle the impossible. I don’t always handle it well, but that’s a different matter.

Today I found out how many parents of Jewish children are having to explain to their children this week, “It’s not safe.” This is what I was told and it hurts to hear any child having to endure it. I’ve heard it said to children whose parents endured the Vietnam War, the Cambodian… this is an aspect of most wars and of far too much bigotry. There are groups who are not respected and who are more likely to be targeted or to be casualties. There are some books, then, we can’t read because of how the shape of history affects us. Fiction is not neutral in our lives.

The hurt can help us find out what kind of approach the fiction writer takes to their work and help us work out of this is a book we should read or not. It can also tell us a lot about the writer and what sort of cultural baggage they carry. 

My research project includes many components and one is to find out how Jews are depicted in historical fantasy. I started the Jewish element two years ago because I could see the rise in hate and I wanted to understand how our fiction could be part of a culture that supports hate. It was research I would have been doing in any case, but it’s slow because I keep taking a break from it. My research is emotionally tough. It tells me over and over, “Your parents were right – you’re not safe.” Not because the writers themselves are going to hurt me. I know many writers and they are good human beings. The problem is that one doesn't have to be a bad human being to unintentionally support the cultural narrative of those who do the hurting.

How does this work?

Let me say up front, that historical fiction is quite different in this to historical fantasy, but there’s overlap. Also, that there are different patterns entirely when the work is by a Jewish writer. Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, for instance, breaks the rules in a glorious way.

The first thing I discovered was that, for most historical fantasy, Jews are seldom allowed to be core characters. When there are central Jewish characters (CJ Sansom’s world, for instance) they do a certain amount of duty or suffer a certain amount before they’re allowed to come forward or they fit a set of stereotypes. Jews can be moneylenders or criminals or spies, for instance (Eric Flint’s work makes one of the great Jewish families subversive in this way). Secret power is given to Jews in fiction (unintentionally supporting the Jewish conspiracy fiction), but actual power is not.

What did this mean to me when the news about Squirrel Hill broke on Saturday? What does it mean to the parents of the children who are scared? It means that the vast majority of strong models (strong characters appearing across fiction ie not secondary characters only, not contained to a tony field) are within noels written by Jewish writers. Jewish readers do not see acceptance of who we actually are in historical fantasy. We see stereotypes. Sometimes they’re fascinating attempts to break stereotypes: Naomi Novik’s new novel about a moneylending family is this. But it fails on the safety test, because her idea of moneylending is so far removed from what I know about real lives in small towns. 

One of the powers of historical fiction (fantastical, realistic , somewhere in between or something else entirely) is that emotional link between events we know or that touch us and the reading we do. When bias emerges within story, however unintentionally, we, as writers, are reinforcing the situation that has parents telling their children, “Don’t tell anyone you’re Jewish – it’s not safe.”

This applies to all the core characters in fiction. Are there other minority groups who would have been there in that place at that time (England after the Crusades was not as white as most fiction depicts it)? Are there women? Are there people with disabilities? 

The question is not whether every single novel we read has characters that come from a range of backgrounds. The novel has to work as a novel and it ought to reflect the historical background.

I said this to a group of writers last year and one said, “I’m writing about Richard I – I can keep it white and male and able-bodied because that was who he was and who he mixed with.” A novel about the private life of Richard I may have Jewish characters and someone he knew may well have been murdered at his coronation – that’s within the boundaries of likelihood. A friend of his might have damaged themselves due to archery (for archery is hard on the body and too much archery can hurt. There would certainly be women in his life, too. Just because Richard and his bet friends wee white and male and able-bodied doesn't mean that every single person he mixed with was the same.

Leaving out all these people is a choice the author makes. 

Did Richard ever meet anyone with dark skin? How could he not, when he went to the Middle East on crusade? He was in a place where there was big international trade: not everyone was White European and not everyone was Christian. 

Authors choose what we want in our fiction and those choices reflect who we are. Because of that picture when I was six, I try to include major characters who are Jewish in over half my novels. I want people reading my fiction to know that those people who have told me (as some have), “The only good Jew is a dead Jew” are creating their own fiction, and that there are other stories one can tell.

That’s the thing. It’s not the choices made for a specific book that create our culture. It’s how all the books in a culture fit together. It’s not having everyone from a single background in one or two novels, it’s applying those restrictions to all novels. It's how all the books we read create material which we use to interpret our own lives.

There’s a link between the narrowness of the depiction of characters from a minority background and how that minority is treated in real life. Fagin was based on a real person. Ikey Solomon was depicted as a quite different person in fiction to what he was in real life. Dickens used stereotypes to create Fagin and every time “Oliver!” is shown around me, I can hear the questions and the tensions ramp up a notch.

Writer choices are critical components in how we experience culture and how we interpret our worlds and live our lives.

I didn’t intend to write a polemic. I feel as if I ought to apologise. Maybe I should do something one step better than an apology, though.

If you have favourite historical fantasy that has key characters who aren’t villains from any of those backgrounds (minority religion, minority race, women, has disabilities or mental health problems) please write a comment here telling us about them or send me a note through twitter of Facebook. If the list becomes long enough (I can dream!) I’ll chase down more detail and share it with you all. Let me start the ball rolling with one of my favourite fiction characters: Benjamin January, in a series about him by Barbara Hambly.

Note: I'm adding a note because Google gets into a loop and won't let me answer questions or reply to comments directly.

First, Jewish characters don't have to be 'of faith'. Judaism doen't generally explain religion in the way Christianity does, for one thing. They can be secular, for another or they can be somewhere in between: I have a friend who lives on Squirrel Hill and, fortunately for me, only goes to synagogue on the big days). They can be many and varied in nature and character and language. This kind of research is basic for any novel for any character. When I teach noel-writing, part of it is teaching research and characterisation. The question of how well it's done reflects on the writer, therefore, and affects the quality of the novel.

If writers consistently choose negative stereotypes for a specific culture/religion/race/gender then that's a very particular type of homework to not do because it means the writer is taking a position that sharing the negative stereotypes is less of a problem than doing enough research to create more interesting and diverse characters. When negative stereotypes lead readers in the same direction in novel after novel they can hurt the real-world people being written about. I am told so often that a person knows about Australian Jews because of Fagin. I was even called Fagin in primary school in the same year I was personally accused of killing Christ. Fiction when all gathered together creates cultural frameworks. One book doesn't cause a framework, but when most books in a genre fit into a pattern, then it presents us with cultural bias and has the potential to hurt people. Or not. Research makes a difference and the choices a writer takes can make a difference.

Mrs Maisel sounds delightful. When I have time (not for a while, alas) I'll check her out.

The Best Historical Fiction Set on Islands - By Anna Mazzola

Islands, with their closed communities, their remoteness, their uniqueness, have a special place in an author’s heart. Sometimes they become not just settings, but characters in themselves. I chose Skye for my second novel, partly because I wanted somewhere cut off (as it once was), and somewhere with its own folklore, its own beliefs. Others have gone a step further and created fictional islands: Atlantis, Azkaban, Atuan, Fraxos, Hedeby, Svalvard.

Once I’d started thinking about books set on islands, and asking others to give me their recommendations, I realised that there are in fact hundreds of excellent books set on islands. These include plenty of classics (Swallows and Amazons, Gulliver’s Travels, Treasure Island, To the Lighthouse, The Old Man and The Sea) and so many crime novels that I’m beginning to think going to small islands is a serious health risk.

There’s also a glut of brilliant historical novels set on islands. Here is a list of my top ten favourites, in which both ‘historical fiction’ and ‘island’ are given a broad interpretation. There will be many I’ve missed, so do comment below.

1. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, 1966

The novel in which Rhys gives voice to the ‘mad woman in the attic’. Antoinette Cosway is a Creole heiress and the wife of a man who, though he is never named, we understand to be Jane Eyre’s Mr Rochester. He renames her ‘Bertha’, declares her mad, and relocates her from the West Indies to England. Written in the 1960s but set in the early 1800s, this is a key postcolonial work, which deals with ethnic and gender inequality, displacement and injustice.

2. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, David Mitchell, 2010 

Mitchell transports us 1799 and to Dejima, a tiny artificial island in the bay of Nagasaki where the Dutch East India Company established a trading post. Mitchell had been backpacking through the west of Japan looking for lunch when he stumbled upon the Dejima museum. ‘I never did get the lunch that day,’ Mitchell said. ‘But I filled a notebook with information about this place I'd never heard of and resolved one day to write about it.’

In the novel, a young Dutch clerk arrives to make his name but falls in love with a midwife, who is spirited away to a sinister mountain temple cult. It’s a fascinating work of ideas, longing, power and corruption.

3. Secrets of the Sea House, Elisabeth Gifford, 2010

Having fallen in love with the Hebridean island of Harris and its legends, Gifford came across an 1809 letter to The Times about a Scottish schoolmaster who claimed to have seen a mermaid. From this sprang her brilliant debut, a dual-timeline novel that tells the tale of a newly-ordained priest, Reverend Alexander Ferguson in 1860, assigned to a parish on a remote part of the island. Over a century later, Ruth, raised in children's homes after losing her mother as a young child, discovers the tiny bones of baby buried beneath their new house, the legs fused together like that of a mermaid. A beautiful story of love, hope, healing and stories.

4. The Light Between Oceans, ML Stedman, 2012 

Tom Sherbourne returns home from the Western Front trenches of World War I. He and his wife, Izzy, move to an isolated lighthouse on Janus Rock off the coast of South West Australia. One day in 1926 a boat washes ashore, containing a dead man, and a crying baby. What happens next leads to a gripping exploration of grief, temptation and love.

ML Stedman said: ‘The island of Janus Rock is entirely fictitious (although I have a placeholder for it on Google maps). But the region where the Great Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean meet is real, and the climate, weather and the landscape are more or less as I’ve described them. I wrote some of the book there: It’s a very beautiful, if sometimes fierce, part of the world.’ And that is very much reflected in the novel.

5. The Book of Night Women, Marlon James, 2013 

Marlon James’ searing second novel, The Book of Night Women, is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation in the late 18th century.  It tells the story of green-eyed Lilith, born into slavery and orphaned at birth by her 13-year-old mother, one of the many slave girls raped by their white masters. Forced to grow up fast, Lilith begins to push at the edges of what is imaginable for the life of a slave woman. By no means an easy read, but an essential one, it’s a story that culminates in slave revolt, blood and atonement.

‘I don’t consider myself a historical novelist,’ James has said. ‘But I am obsessed with the past. And I am obsessed with stories that weren’t told, or that weren’t told in a good way.’ As the African proverb goes: ‘Until the lion’s story is told, the story will always belong to the hunter.’

6. The Lie Tree, Frances Hardinge, 2015

 

The Lie Tree, Hardinge’s seventh novel, opens with 14-year-old Faith Sunderly and her family leaving their home in Kent for the isolated (and fictional) island of Vale. Faith, forever spying, discovers they have fled to escape the growing scandal around her father’s recently published scientific findings. When her father is found dead, Faith sets out to find out what has really happened and discover the nature of her father’s investigations. This leads her to a tree that feeds off lies.
Supposedly YA, but really for all ages, this is one of my favourite Victorian-era novels, and definitely my favourite one about lying plants.

7. The Winter Isles, Antonia Senior, 2016 

Antonia Senior plunges us in to the raw and often vicious world of 12th century Scotland where Somerled, son of an ageing chieftain, must prove his own worth as a warrior. It’s a compelling story of action, warfare, love and sacrifice and one which is clearly rooted in Senior’s love of the West Coast of Scotland.

‘All my favourite places are islands,’ she says, ‘From Corsica to Mull, Iona to Ponza. As a visitor they offer a manageable, enclosed world to explore. As a writer there is something magical about islands: a world within a world. There is often surface beauty, and a sinister underbelly. They are enclosed spaces, in which people are too close to each other - that strange interplay between isolation and oppressive familiarity.’

8. Mussolini’s Island, Sarah Day, 2017 

In 1939 a series of Sicilian men were taken from their homes and imprisoned on the island of San Domino in the Adriatic Sea. Their crime? They were gay. Out of this little-known slice of history, Sarah Day has created a fascinating novel.

Francesco, a young gay man from Catania who grew up without a father, is one of those arrested and herded into a camp on the island. Meanwhile, a girl called Elena dreams of escape from her island home, imagining Francesco will save her.

‘It’s such a beautiful, peaceful place,’ Day says of San Domino, ‘and yet was used for such a dark purpose. As a visitor, arriving by boat, the island seems so idyllic, but as soon as you put yourself in the mind of a prisoner being brought there against your will, you realise how terrifying it must have been to arrive somewhere so isolated and stark. That context was really important to me when writing the book-an island can be a paradise or a prison, depending on who you are and the time in which you live.’

9. Sugar Money, Jane Harris, 2017 

Martinique, 1765. The charismatic but damaged Lucien and his more cautious older brother Emile are tasked by their French master with returning to Fort Royal in Grenada to bring back the slaves stolen by the English. Emile knows this to be a reckless mission, but, as with most things in their lives, it is something in which they have no choice. What follows is part adventure, part tragedy, and entirely compelling.

Harris has created a setting we believe in and characters we desperately want to survive. There is nothing sweet about Sugar Money, nor should there be.

10. Mr Peacock's Possessions, Lydia Syson, 2018 

It is 1879 and Mr Peacock and his family are struggling to scratch a life for themselves on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of New Zealand. At last, a ship appears, bringing six Pacific Islanders who have travelled across the ocean in search of work. All seems well until Mr Peacock’s son, Albert, goes missing.

This is a gripping mystery is woven from strands of real history. As Lydia Syson explained in her interview with History Girl Adèle Geras, the story came from her husband’s ancestors, Tom and Federica Bell, who in 1878 decided to take their six children to make their home on an uninhabited Pacific Island called Sunday Island. ‘The captain who brought them sailed away, promising to return in three months. They found their provisions were rotten and they never saw that ship again.’

Again, the island setting is crucial to the story, as Syson herself makes clear. ‘The island – so beautiful, so fertile and yet so treacherous - was a gift in terms of setting, plot and metaphor.’

__________________________________________________________

Anna Mazzola is a writer of historical crime fiction. Her second novel, The Story Keeper, set on the Isle of Skye, will be published in July 2018.

https://annamazzola.com 
https://twitter.com/Anna_Mazz

Trade in the 17th Century - The Tallow Chandler

by Deborah Swift

Matthias Storm c.1640 Old Woman with a Candle

I was at a great loss for candles; so that as soon as ever it was dark, which was generally by seven o'clock, I was obliged to go to bed ……… The only remedy I had was, that when I had killed a goat, I saved the tallow, and with a little dish of clay, which I baked in the sun, to which I added a wick of some oakum, I made me a lamp; and this gave me light, though not a clear steady light like a candle."

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Light has always been a symbol for move out of ignorance and into the light of knowledge. As long as we can manufacture and control light, then we are no longer bound by the seasons, or forced to work from sunrise to sunset. Light gives us extra time for work and play, and the time to create during the hours free from chores or work.

The candle was one of the earliest forms of artificial light, and in the period in which I write, most candles were tallow. I need to continually think of this whenever I write a night-time scene, or a winter scene. We take the availability of good light so much for granted.

The Stink of Tallow 
Tallow was cheap animal fat, usually the waste material from meat - hence often sheep or bullock fat.

The tallow was prepared by first chopping the fat into small pieces and then boiling it up in a large copper to detach the muscle or membrane from the fat. The resultant mush was pressed to extract the 'juice', or tallow, and the remains or 'greaves' fed to the dogs or pigs, and even to the geese that were being fattened up for market.To produce a pure light, the chandler must wrestle with dead animal carcasses, and the associated smell and mess. For this reason, chandlery was perceived as a very low class trade, and the chandlers premises were often located near the tanneries and slaughterhouses, and close to a river with access to water. The process reminds me that for every 'light' there is the often invisible 'dark'.

'A woman reading by Candle-light' by Frans van Mieris the elder,
c.1665; black chalk on vellum.

Fir candles, made of a long thin splinter of fir, were commonly used in Scotland, and a fir candle holder was known as a "puirman"(poorman). But tallow candles were the common household candle in early England, and by the 13th century, candle-making had become a guild craft in England and France, controlled by ancient City Livery Companies. The Tallow Chandlers Company, one of the London Guilds, sill exists. It was formed in about 1300 to regulate and manage candle-making. Over the next 150 years they expanded in membership and influence, until King Edward IV granted them a coat of arms in 1456.

In rural areas, where no Livery Company existed, chandlers would sometimes go from house to house with their moulds, making candles from the kitchen fats saved for that purpose, or in smaller towns they made and sold their own candles from a shop. Candle-making was usually done in winter by a householder, as livestock was generally slaughtered around Martinmas (November 11th) to save the expense of over-wintering them. Tallow candles could be made for you in your own home with your own saved drippings by an itinerant tallow chandler (tallow chandlers and wax chandlers had separate guilds, and jealously guarded their products).

Candles, especially tallow ones, were kept in a wooden or metal box hung on the wall in order to protect them from vermin, as being animal fat, mice regarded them as food. Being away from the fire also prevented the candles wilting and bending in heat.

A candle box of 1680

Holy Beeswax
Unlike animal-based tallow, beeswax burned pure and cleanly, without producing a smoky flame. It also had a pleasant sweet smell rather than the foul, acrid odor of tallow. However,  it took an entire honeycomb's worth of beeswax to make one 4" candle, so it was very expensive. Beeswax candles were widely used for church ceremonies. The beeswax itself had a religious significance in 17th Century England. One story is that bees were absent from the Garden of Eden and so escaped Eve's sin. Another is that medieval monks thought that bees reproduced by immaculate conception, like the Virgin Mary, and so the beeswax of a church candle came to signify purity.

The Revolutionary Art of Plaiting a Wick
The absorbency and efficiency of a wick depended on the number of individual strands. Adding or subtracting a few extra strands of animal hair or hemp fibre made the difference between a candle that burned well, or one that guttered or dripped. The wicks were made from twisted threads of flax, cotton, or hemp, and trimming the wick to get rid of candle "snuffs" was essential to keeping your candle burning well, or it would flare and smoke. I often imagine my characters having to trim the wick in the middle of conversations, or tackling writing a letter.

The best wicks were invented later in the 19th century, and revolutionised the candle. They were plaited so they curled as they burned to ensure that the tip burnt off during use so they didn't have to be continually trimmed, thus ensuring you could carry out your task uninterrupted. To achieve this curl, the plait or braid of a wick was woven asymmetrically, with a few extra strands in one of the threads. After being cut to length, the wicks were dipped in molten wax so that one end was stiff enough to poke through the hole at the bottom of the mould, and then the moulds were filled.

Wooden & Pewter Candle Mould

The Fall of Tallow

The tallow chandler's fortunes declined at the end of the 17th century. New materials, such as spermacetti (from whale blubber) and paraffin wax, replaced tallow. Then in the late 19th Century gas lighting arrived, twelve times as bright as a candle, only to be replaced by electricity twenty years later. These eras are comparatively short, when you think that we had many hundreds of years where most of our light was by the dim smoky haze of tallow candles.

More about lighting? Lucy Worsley has a post about domestic lighting here.

Thank you for reading. Find my latest book, Pleasing Mr Pepys, here.

Sources:

Images from Wikicommons

The Social History of Lighting - William O'Dea

Restoration London - Liza Pickard

At Day's Close: A History of Nighttime - Roger Ekirch

http://clanntartan.sitesneakpeek.com/manual/lighting.html
https://www.tallowchandlers.org

https://www.periodoakantiques.co.uk