'Standing up for Beards' by A L Berridge

You can’t do history without doing beards. Only a few have obviously starring roles, such as the one grown by Philip II of Spain to be ‘singed’ by Francis Drake, but even the most ordinary set of whiskers can insinuate its way into the history books – like the one Thomas More laid carefully away from the executioner’s block on the grounds that it ‘had not committed treason’.

                     A flammable beard                                            An innocent beard                              

It doesn’t even have to work that hard at it. Beards make a difference simply by being there, and through the centuries their presence (or absence) has been used to distinguish married men from bachelors, warriors from novices, clergy from laymen, Protestant from Catholic, Royalist from Parliamentarian, Jew from Gentile, Orthodox from Dissenter, and master from slave. In different times and places beards have been taxed, forbidden, and compulsory, and even in the 19th century a mistake could be costly. In 1830 a certain Joseph Palmer offended the people of Massachusetts by sporting a full beard, and his attempts to defend himself from forcible shaving landed him in prison.

A beard in the wrong place

However we look at it, beards matter, and their presence is the very texture of the past. This next battered print is one of my very favourite historical photographs, depicting the Master of Peterhouse greeting the Master of Trinity outside the Senate House in about 1906 – and I defy you not to see what I love about it…

Two Learned Beards

What would this picture be without the beards? These are beards of gravitas, as important as the ‘philosopher’s beard’ of Sophocles, and they define these two gentlemen even more than the gowns of their official status.

It has always been so. The mere style of a beard could advertise one’s status and pedigree – as in Ancient Egypt, where even a woman might wear a false beard if she was of royal birth. Their very fashion is history, and the greatest legacy of some historical figures can be traced in the styling of a ‘Franz Josef’ or a ‘Vandyke’ or the ‘Imperial’ of Napoleon III. Whole studies have been devoted to the significance and variety of historical forms, from John Adey Repton’s 1835 magnum opus ‘Some Account of the Beard and the Moustachio’ to Edwardian Upton Uxbridge Underwood’s ambitious little booklet on ‘Poets Ranked by Beard Weight’. Beards are truly the stuff of history, and we ignore them at our peril.

The Stuff of History

So why do we? When we look at historical fiction on the bookshop shelves, how come so few of the covers depict men with beards? Is there a conspiracy on the part of publishers and cover artists to whitewash the whiskers out of history, and present only images of men that appeal to popular taste?

It certainly looks like it – especially when the potential readership is predominantly female. I googled ‘Mills & Boon Historical Romances’ and was instantly dazzled by the gallery of gleaming manly jaws. Period and subject matter made no difference. Even when it came to Vikings and barbarians, there was never a beard in sight.

Invisible beards

Perhaps it’s defensible in this particular genre. The primary function of these heroes is to be sexually attractive, and history must bow to the apparently common modern view that facial hair is acceptable only on bikers, real-ale drinkers, and sandal-wearing ‘beardy-weirdies’. Beards may have been a fact of historical life, but so were bad teeth and personal hygiene, and you won’t find many of those in a historical romance.

The action-adventure and military genres are obviously a different matter. Beards have always held special significance for soldiers and warriors, and nobody would expect writers to steer clear of them in their novels. Indeed in some areas - such as Vikings, pirates or some periods of Crusaders – the beard is all but compulsory.

Author Robert Low being told he can't have beards on his Vikings

But there are other ways, and even if the writer says ‘beard’, cover-artists still display considerable ingenuity in their determination not to show them. Whiskers are hidden behind helmets, lost in the distance, and done away with altogether by the use of symbolic artefacts. Every effort is made to ensure no-one could possibly look at the book and think ‘ugh – a beard’. 

That’s not to say we’re not allowed them at all. Beards are perfectly acceptable in supporting roles like ‘hero’s friend’, while in villains or wise old men they’re actually desirable. Comedy can take the curse off even the beard of a leading man, as we see with George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman, who regards his manly whiskers as part of his allure. In other words, we can have beards on any character we like – except someone we might aspire to imitate or go to bed with.

It seems to have always been that way. We’re brought up to expect clean-shaven heroes, and I remember being shocked to discover that the Lt Chard who commanded at Rorke’s Drift actually looked very different from the Stanley Baker who tightened his jaw through ‘Zulu’ like an advert for Gillette. 

Now you see it........                      Now you don't

But maybe there’s a whiff of change in the air. When Hollywood last did Vikings we were subjected to the violently naked chin of Kirk Douglas, but the History Channel’s series ‘Vikings’ is almost as hairy as history could desire. Improbable film actors are beginning to sprout strange growths, almost as if the age of the Pretty Boy is beginning to give way to a new fashion for Manliness. If it is, I think it started with one particular man, who’s been my own saviour whenever I’ve been challenged about beards on my characters. ‘Beards?’ says my agent doubtfully. ‘Aragorn,’ I reply smugly. ‘Viggo Mortensen. Like that.’ ‘Ah,’ says my agent, visibly relieved. ‘Like that.’

Like this...

That’s good, I suppose – but I still can’t help feeling it shouldn’t matter. If the next fashion dictates that all heroes should have beards, does that mean we need to stick them on Julius Caesar and Winston Churchill? Fashion now should not dictate fashion then, and all I ask is the freedom to be true to my period.

Because it matters – and sometimes it matters a lot. It couldn’t be more important than in my present book on the Crimean War, when circumstances compelled our commanders to rescind the standing orders on shaving. By January 1855 every last root had been grubbed from the ground to feed the precious fires, men lost limbs to frostbite and froze to death in their tents – and I’m supposed to have a hero so vain he’ll use lifesaving hot water to shave?

I don't think so. And not just because it matters to history, but because it mattered to the men themselves. Those beards grew from endurance of life-shattering experience, and the men who came home went on wearing them as a badge of pride. A ‘Crimean beard’ was a proof of manhood and survival, and many men wore them right up to their deaths.

Maybe it didn’t suit everyone – and maybe that’s important too. We’re not writing fashion parades, we’re after character, and the levels of it in this single photograph are probably beyond anything I could ever hope to write.

This is Colour Sergeant Timothy Gowing of the 7th Royal Fusiliers, still showing the Crimean beard he probably ought to have removed as soon as he stepped off the ship. It’s a fine beard, but even years after the war it can’t disguise the fact that the face behind it is too young for such gravitas.

Or is it? The beard is of a mature man, the face of a young one, but behind the eyes is something sadder and older than either. This is the Gowing who wrote of the Grand Sortie ‘our bayonets were bent like reaping hooks’, and when we look behind the eyes we see an experience of hell itself.

And that’s what we write, isn’t it? What’s behind the eyes? I need the beards to capture not the look, but the experience, and there’s so much of it to be learned in Crimea. How did it feel for a lifelong clean-shaven NCO to have to allow the creeping growth of something he’s been trained to regard as filthy? How did it affect the rebellious soldier who revelled in the sudden independence of doing what he liked with his own face? Did discipline suffer? As officers and men grew physically alike, did the boundaries between them start to break – and did relationships change? These are all questions for individuals, but individuals are what I write, and if I’m to go there, be there, and feel it, then I can’t exclude so huge a part of what they experienced.

And that’s the key for me. Maybe Crimea is a special case, but whenever we write men then beards have to be part of it - if only because they have to be shaved. Ignore them, and we’re writing women in breeches. I use them constantly in the Chevalier series, and found they gave me another layer every time. I even liked the minor character of Thibault in ‘Honour and the Sword’, because I could show both his youth and his vanity in his concern for how his whiskers would turn out – then give the reader an extra stab at his death by recalling the weedy little bristles that would never now grow into anything at all. 

Tiny things sometimes. The disgusting nature of one character from the things caught in his beard, the vanity of another from the way he shaves his sideburns, the sound of a man’s hand playing with the little bristles that line his jaw. I grappled for ages with a scene where a man meets the beloved brother he thought was dead – until I remembered the physical reality of what would have happened in their year of separation and knew what he had to say. Nothing emotional, nothing embarrassing, he says ‘That’s a bloody terrible beard,’ and I’m in.

‘In’. That’s where we want to be, and why we shouldn’t be bothered by what our characters look like to outsiders. I don’t mind too much what cover artists do (and for the next book I’m steeled to expect a back view of men in the trenches) as long as I can do what I do within the pages. And sometimes, just sometimes, I'm afraid that’s going to mean beards.

***

Thanks to Dr Jeff Meek for the recommendation to John Repton's book

At 7.30pm tonight A L Berridge will be at the Old Bell in Finedon with J.D. Davies - discussing warriors and possibly their beards.

Meanwhile her disappointingly hairless website is still here. 

'Making Fire' by A.L. Berridge

Historical novelists are generally a charitable bunch, but I suspect we each have our one pet subject that brings us out in historical hives when we see somebody else GET IT WRONG.
Mine, I’m afraid, is Fire.

Unfortunately it’s also the subject writers are most likely to fudge. This particular rant has been sparked by a scene in a Regency romance where the protagonists were strolling happily along a country lane – and then the hero ruined everything by lighting a cigar.

'Regency Love' by Dylan Meconis

The poor lovers hadn’t a chance after that. They could flirt as wittily as they liked, they could even thrash about madly in the bushes, but I was seeing only the glowing red tip of that cigar and thinking – HOW? How did he do that? Was he quietly rubbing two sticks together all the time they were talking? Did he whip out a monocle and catch the rays of the dying sun on his conveniently pre-charred handkerchief? Was the interesting bulge in his tight fitting breeches really a tinderbox, and when he set the heroine ‘on fire’ was he doing it literally?

I'm afraid I suspect the writer had in mind something as deceptively simple as this picture by the scarily talented illustrator Dylan Meconis. And unless the lover also had an asbestos bottle filled with sulphuric acid in his pocket, that simply could not happen.

I'm possibly going into geek-overdrive here, but it’s still a worryingly common mistake, even with writers whose research is otherwise impeccable. I’ve seen medieval heroes escape captivity with only the clothes they stood up in – and start their life on the run by making a fire in the woods. I’ve ‘critted’ a manuscript containing a brilliant description of a seventeenth century bomb – which the villain then lights by ‘striking’ a match. What is it about this one thing that shuts down our usual historical instincts and replaces them with a mindset where ‘making fire’ is an easy, even casual thing, about which nobody thinks twice?

Part of the problem may be that a ‘striking’ match is so ‘low-tech’ it’s hard to believe they weren’t invented until 1826. Another may be simply linguistic, in that not everyone will realize that the 'match' Guy Fawkes was caught carrying would have been only a length of 'matchcord' - hempen rope coated to make it ‘hold fire’ once it had been lit by something else.

17th century 'matchcord'

 Some of the problem may be visual. Sulphur sticks look like modern matches, they go back to the sixth century in China and do indeed ‘catch fire’ – but again, they need to be lit first. Like rope match, these are merely ‘fire-carriers’ rather than ‘fire-makers’, which is perhaps why even the first successful friction match was called a ‘lucifer’.

So how did people actually make fire before that? 

By a method that takes us right back to the dawn of time – the friction between flint and steel. No-one knows when the first caveman discovered sparks could be produced by rubbing flint against iron pyrites, but ‘flint and steel’ immediately replaced the method of ‘rubbing two sticks together’, and created a technique we still use to this day.

Honestly – we do. The fuel in this lighter is modern petrol, but the spark is produced by the action of a little steel wheel on a tiny fragment of flint. It’s effectively a modern tinderbox.

And the tinderbox is where it really started.

The ingredients are simple: a ‘steel’ in a bow shape to fit round the knuckles, a rugged piece of flint, some form of ‘tinder’ (amadou, dry hemp, ‘char-cloth’, or any other material that will ‘catch’ a falling spark) and either kindling or a sulphur ‘spunk’ to bring the spark to bloom.

 How it works is fairly obvious. It’s deliberately dark, but this little video starts with the striking of a spark by flint and steel, the catching of it in char-cloth, and then the transfer by sulphur stick to a beeswax candle.

If you can endure the whole 90 seconds, you’ll also see a musketeer using ‘slow match’ to ignite his charge. I’m sorry the fire-making part is speeded up, but we had to cut out the bits of my husband swearing when he gashed his knuckles on the flint. 

But perhaps I should have left them in – because in reality fire-making is both slow and difficult.  Even experienced re-enactors can be nervous of making fire at a public demonstration because it so rarely works first go. That’s what bothers me when historical fiction gets it wrong – not the lack of technical detail, but the fact that fire-making is tricky, that tinder could be expensive and hard to find, and that whatever different technique is used it can’t ever be casual. If we miss that, we’re not slipping up on a detail, we’re mistaking an entire way of life.

Fire has always been precious, and its original importance is beautifully illustrated in William Golding’s The Inheritors, which follows a band of Neanderthals on their summer migration. The ‘old woman’ of the group carries what is only ever referred to as her ‘burden’, but is in fact a clay pot containing the fire they need to keep them alive. The impression we have is that none of them have fire-making skills, and if the fire ever went out they could never relight it.

The advent of the tinderbox changed all that, but the value of fire persisted through to the 18th century. Once lit, fires were kept burning forever. At night they would be ‘banked’ for safety, using a metal hood drilled with tiny holes which the French called a ‘couvre-feu’ – and the English corrupted to a ‘curfew’. 

The original ‘curfew call’ had nothing to do with martial law, but was simply a night-watchman reminding the citizens it was time to cover their fires for the night.

It sounds wasteful of fuel, but only one fire was needed for a household, and from that single source would come all the hundred other usages needed in the course of a day. Burning coals or timber from one fire would be carried in a bucket to light another. A taper from the fire would light a lamp or a candle, a spill from the candle would light a pipe or a cigar. That’s why we never see Mr Darcy or the Scarlet Pimpernel hacking away with their tinderboxes – the fire is already lit, and all they ever need to do is borrow a little from an existing flame. 

And how important it makes that one fire! For Golding’s Neanderthals the location of the fire defined their home, and in many ways it still does today. The Romans used the word ‘hearth’ to define a home, and it still forms the centrepiece for most houses built before 1970. Central heating has mostly removed the physical need for a fire, but nothing (for me) compensates for the spiritual loss. I can still remember when a family sitting room wasn’t arranged around the position of a television, but around something like this:

 Fire transcends its physical properties, which is why our attitudes to it remained unchanged for so long. The invention of cheap matches should have done away with most of them, but am I the only one who remembers seeing on her grandparents’ mantelpiece something that looked like this?

It’s a jar of spills. My grandmother used them to light the candles, and my grandfather to light his cigars. In Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, a key clue actually depends on the position of a jar of spills on a mantelpiece. That seems ridiculous in a novel set during the First World War, but fire was still precious, and even a match wouldn’t be wasted if there was an existing fire source to be used.

That’s the mindset we need to hold when we’re writing historical fiction. I made a whopping great mistake in an early draft of Honour and the Sword when I had a character light his pipe using a tinderbox – when there was a fire already lit in the room. After much thought I actually left it in, because it perfectly illustrated the character’s agitation at the time – but it still originated in a mistake, and one I was determined not to make again. In In the Name of the King I had an officer bring his volunteer musketeers a handful of matches already lit, because it would have made more sense to light them all from one flame than to hang about while a dozen women all got busy with tinderboxes.

That’s what I love most about writing historical fiction – getting inside the heads of long dead characters and seeing a problem as it was in their day. I’ve even learned from it, and when I ran out of matches and was reduced to that hideously messy business of lighting a cigarette from the gas cooker, I put on my ‘historical head’ and made a spill out of screwed paper instead. I used that to light a slow-burning candle, which gave me a light whenever I needed it for the rest of the night. One fire to light a dozen others.

Or a million. Few or none will remain of those fires that were once kept burning day and night, but the idea remains and its spiritual power is as strong as ever. Candles are still lit and kept burning to maintain a vigil. A torch lit from the Olympic flame is carried hand to hand to keep the same fire burning all over the world. Unlike ourselves, a fire that is fed will never die.

 Neither will its history. History for most of us is a broken chain, a series of fragments connected by gaps. Our landmarks might be those of 1066 And All That, lurching from the Roman Occupation to the Memorable King Henry VIII with only minor stops for Alfred to burn the cakes and John to lose his laundry in the Wash. The landmarks of a specialist can be even wider spread, and my dad had Victorian Church History at one end and Mediaeval Law at the other with only the vaguest blur in between.

Fire is different, the universal element that has been with us all the way. We can follow it through our steel-and-flint lighters to our grandfather’s spills, through the lucifers of ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’ to the matchlock musket, through the sulphur matches and tinderboxes all the way back to a caveman rubbing two sticks together and making a spark that would change the world.

And when we can stand on the edge of that world and see right back in time to its beginning, then that, for me, is when history itself catches fire.

***

A. L. Berridge's website

Website for Honour and the Sword and In the Name of the King

To Catch the Moon with your Teeth: The Great Condé by A L Berridge

It’s always a mistake to fall in love with the dead. It’s even sillier when the object of your affection lived in the 17th century and would undoubtedly have been both dentally challenged and smelly. But there are a handful of historical figures whose greatness owes as much to personality as actual achievements, and when a writer seeks to understand them it’s all too easy to become sucked in.

Ladies, gentlemen, and fellow History Girls, I’m ashamed to present my first historical crush: Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, known to history simply as ‘The Great Condé’.

Undoubtedly smelly

His story is simply told. As son and heir to Condé, First Prince of the Blood, the young Duc d’Enghien was forced to abandon the woman he loved and marry a thirteen year old niece of Cardinal Richelieu.  Deeply embittered, he ignored and abused his wife, and took every opportunity to flee to the army and the one life he felt at home. 

But it paid off. In 1643 and at the age of just 21, he won a spectacular victory over Spain at the crucial Battle of Rocroi, and overnight became a popular hero. The victories of Freiburg and Nordlingen followed, and later the vital Battle of Lens which effectively ended the Thirty Years War.  

His downfall came with the two civil wars known as the Frondes. In the first he loyally fought to repress the rebellion, but he soon succumbed to hubris and began to issue demands against the Queen and her hated First Minister Mazarin. His imprisonment sparked the second Fronde, and when a frightened Mazarin was compelled to release him the new Prince of Condé led an army against Paris itself. When peace was finally negotiated, an isolated Condé defected to Spain and led its armies against his own country. Finally defeated at the Battle of the Dunes, he was pardoned on account of previous good service, and lived out the rest of his life in loyal retirement.

And there you have him. He was an arrogant, treacherous adulterer who meddled in politics and was forgiven everything because he happened to be a great soldier. He would seem, as Emily Bronte once memorably described a pile of dead rabbits, a ‘strange choice of favourites’.

But we’re writers here, and our loves are not the same as those of saner people.  It’s the flawed characters who get to us and break our hearts – and they didn’t come much more flawed than Condé. In my opinion he's possibly the greatest tragic figure Shakespeare never wrote.

He certainly has the stature, and France is full of paintings and sculptures to commemorate his deeds. There’s even a jewel named after him, the pink 9 carat Condé diamond presented to him by the young Louis XIV.

His name also carries the supernatural aura of legend, as when the dying Louis XIII told the elder Condé that he dreamed his son had won a great victory – just three days before the totally unexpected Battle of Rocroi. In some districts he might almost have been canonised, as in the église Notre-Dame de Saulges, where Christ is at the top, Saint Paul on the left – and on the right is Louis II de Bourbon, Prince de Condé.

He was certainly no saint, and his behaviour with the ladies made him what we’d call a ‘bad boy’ today, but that somehow doesn’t detract from his status. Everything about him was larger than life, right down to his savagely beaked nose – and well, we know what they say about men with big noses...  

And on the battlefield he was a giant. Napoleon considered him an inferior strategist to his contemporary rival Turenne, but few have equalled him in his inspirational ability to lead men.  Rocroi was his first battle as commander, but he disdained the traditional helmet in favour of a simple hat with a white plume – and it was that hat that turned the tide.  Here and everywhere, always where the danger was thickest, that plume was the one constant symbol in the whole seething chaos of a losing battle, and the broken French rallied to it, followed it to victory. I remember crying when I first read the eyewitness accounts of it, and again when I wrote the scene for ‘In the Name of the King'.

Condé at Rocroi

He led from the front, the middle, the flanks, anywhere he was needed, and he did it with a heroic passion that was the stuff of legend. At the battle of Freiburg he was apparently so incensed at his troops’ reluctance to advance that he threw his own marshal’s baton into the Bavarian lines – at which, of course, his whole army rushed to reclaim it. His speeches were full of honour and victory, but it was the simplest one his men remembered best: ‘Qui m’aime me suive’ – which translates roughly as ‘If you love me, follow me.’ They did both.

He was, in fact, a good old-fashioned hero, and one who could give Indiana Jones a run for his money. He had horses shot from under him and musket balls whizzing through his clothing, but always he turned up again, ragged and filthy but eager for more. During the Second Fronde he was known for certain to be a fugitive a hundred and twenty leagues away, but when a previously moribund army suddenly launched a daring attack at Bleaneau, Turenne exclaimed at once ‘Ah! The Prince of Condé must be come!’
He was a master of the impossible, and the poet Voiture was only half-joking when he wrote ‘I think if you had undertaken it, you would catch the moon with your teeth.’

Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine outside Paris

It's an appropriate image for this man. We’re rarely aware of the bodies of historical figures but Condé's physical presence dominates everything he does. The hand with which he made a ‘threatening gesture’ at the Councillor Quatre-Sous in the Parlement, the foot which Mazarin embraced in his desperate attempt to ingratiate himself, the arm that was drenched in blood up to the elbow after a day at the Siege of Mardyck. This is a man who breathed and bled and sweated – so much so that at the Battle of the Faubourg St-Antoine he stripped off his armour and rolled naked in the grass to cool himself down. 

Grande in every sense

 Women certainly felt it, among them the Grande Mademoiselle herself. She was the only daughter of the King’s brother, but there was something about Condé that reduced her to a schoolgirlish flutter. Her account of their meeting during the Battle of Faubourg St-Antoine dwells with loving detail on the dust and sweat on his face, the blood on his collar, the dishevelled state of his hair. When he burst into tears to lament the death of his friends on the field, it was that manly heaving bosom that inspired her to the act that ensured her own place in the history books – ordering the guns of the Bastille to turn inward on the city in order to allow Condé’s army to enter.

 So what went wrong?

Much the same thing that went wrong with Coriolanus and indeed Othello. Condé was a great soldier, but he was a rotten politician. Arrogantly assured of his own importance, he never suspected the intrigues that might be conducted against him, and the scene in which the wily Cardinal Mazarin induced him unwittingly to compose and sign the order for his own arrest is one Shakespeare would love to have written.

It wasn’t that he was stupid – he was fluent in both Latin and Greek – but that was part of his tragedy. He knew he was being manipulated, and he knew how it would end. When his sister and brother finally persuaded him to take up arms against his King, the Duchesse de Nemours recalled his words: ‘You have engaged me in a strange plot, but I foretell that you will weary of it sooner than I, and that in the end you will forsake me.’ He was right. Being once persuaded that the honourable path was to fight Mazarin, he refused to change sides simply because it had become politically expedient to do so.

He was in the wrong world. The enduring image I have of him is almost of a child, a grubby boy-soldier who never quite grew up. While other aristocrats vyed to be seen in the latest fashions, he was careless with his clothes and usually filthy from his latest scrap. He laughed like a child and enjoyed life like a child, even (or perhaps especially) when it was most dangerous. When he was on the run from the King’s forces he disguised himself as a humble courier, but to the despair of his companions he insisted on trying to cook his own omelette at an inn, just for the fun of it. The inevitable disaster with the hot pan and consequent loud swearing let the cat well and truly out of the bag, but as his desperate attendants dragged him back out and into the road ‘Monsieur le Prince was laughing.’

To me he's a tragic hero, and to research his story is to wish it ended differently. Maybe it could have done, and I remember falling prey to that peculiarly female weakness of believing ‘I would have understood him, I would have helped’. I couldn’t, of course, and a snob like Condé would have had nothing to say to me anyway. It’s always a mistake to give your heart to an unreliable, arrogant, womanizing aristocrat.

Especially when they’ve been dead for more than three hundred years...

***

Condé appears in A.L. Berridge's novel, 'In the Name of the King'.

More about his world can be found at the Chevalier Series website.

Rude messages can be left for A.L. Berridge at her own website here.