'Richard III and Other Dead Kings' by A L Berridge

It seems you can pick up bits of dead kings just about anywhere now. We’re all still buzzing with the discovery of Richard III under a Leicester car park, but over the last thirteen years in France they’ve managed to identify the head of Henri IV, the blood of Louis XVI, and the heart of Louis XVII, with an added bonus in the hair of Marie Antoinette. Honestly, it’s enough to make you want to search the attic.

Richard III

Yet outside the scientific and historical worlds these discoveries haven’t been greeted with the same excitement as our own ‘Richard Crookback’ - and what I want to know is why. I'm a Francophile myself, I'm interested in all those kings, but there's something special about the Richard III discovery that sets it apart.

What is it?

The heart of Louis XVII is at least as good a story, and by far the most tragic. He was the son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the little Dauphin who was imprisoned in the Temple under the name ‘Louis Capet’ and died there of tuberculosis at just ten years old. He had been kept in in a darkened cell from the age of eight, with no-one to wash or clean up after him, and was degraded by being forced to sign a document confessing to incest with his murdered mother. He probably never knew his parents had been guillotined and he was the uncrowned King of France.

The Dauphin - Louis XVII

But did he really die that lonely prison death? Was the wracked little body the doctors recorded as being covered in sores and tumours really his? Perhaps it’s because the child’s treatment was so unbearable that rumours abounded of his secret escape, and of the substitution of a dying pauper for the wretched king. Baroness Orczy even wrote the novel ‘Eldorado’, in which the Scarlet Pimpernel himself rescued the child, and part of me still wants to believe it.

Some facts supported the theory. A prison guard called ‘Simon the Shoemaker’ quit his job in 1794, and his widow later claimed he had smuggled the Dauphin to safety in a laundry basket. The story was given credence when in 1894 the coffin of the supposed Dauphin was exhumed and found to contain the body of a man aged between 18 and 20. True, the body had already been moved once when it was rescued from its mass grave, but still the questions remained.

Heart of Louis XVII - Associated Press

Not any more. One particular relic had been making the rounds for centuries, and was even offered to Louis XVIII on the restoration of the monarchy – the supposed heart of the Dauphin, which had been secretly removed during the autopsy by Dr Philippe-Jean Pelletan, who ‘wrapped it in my handkerchief and put it in my pocket without being seen’. Even the relic's story is full of incident. Pelletan kept it in alcohol in a jar on his bookcase, but as the alcohol dried out the heart grew desiccated. In 1810 it was stolen, but when the thief contracted tuberculosis himself he repented, and his widow restored it to the doctor. In 1828 Pelletan gave it to the archbishop of Paris, but the palace was vandalised in the July Revolution, the crystal container was smashed, and the heart was finally discovered buried in a pile of sand. But still it survived, and in 2000 scientists finally decided to put it to the test of DNA.

There were obviously no living descendants – but there was a dead ancestor. The hair of Marie Antoinette had also survived in the form of cuttings taken when she was a child in Austria, and when the two were compared the result was pretty conclusive. The chief scientist, Jean-Jacques Cassiman, was far too cautious to say definitely that the heart was that of Louis XVII – only that he was descended from Marie Antoinette. The child’s heart has finally been removed from public display, and been buried at the Saint-Denis basilica near the graves of his parents.

Henri IV and Louis XVI have had a sober time in comparison, but their stories too are worth considering. Henri IV fell victim to the same fate as poor Cardinal Richelieu, being dug up and decapitated during the French Revolution, and his head carried away to form part of a private collection. It was at least kept in a nice padded box, and over the years has changed hands many times, but (like Richelieu’s) it was mummified, and it is still faintly possible to see traces of a face.

Henri IV reconstructed face

In 2010 scientists set to work identifying that face. They were fortunate to have three clues to go on: a healed facial wound, a lesion near his nose – and a pierced ear. The less squeamish can see a video of all this here, but this picture gives at least a general idea.

Suggestive certainly, but nothing is definite these days without DNA. Short of digging up poor Louis XVII’s heart yet again, it was hard to see where a possible match could be found – until someone thought of this.

 It’s perhaps the oddest of all of them. This gourd has been in the possession of an Italian family for more than a century, and what they found intriguing was the inscription partially shown below, which translates as follows: ‘In the 21st of January this year Maximilien Bourdaloue soaked his handkerchief in the blood of Louis XVI after his decapitation… When it was congealed, he put it in this gourd and gave it to me for two banknotes of ten francs each.’ 

Handkerchiefs are clearly less durable than the blood of kings, and there was no sign of such a thing when in 2011 the gourd was lent to the University of Bologna for testing. There was, however, a sticky residue, and when geneticists from Bologna and Barcelona examined it they found it to be blood of a male of the right age and antiquity, who was also a ‘heterozygote’ - a compatible form for a person with blue eyes. The genetic pattern itself was found to be extremely rare (scientists among us can find a more intelligent description here), and it would be hard to find anything like a match.

Enter (in its box) the head of Henri IV.

(I was going to include a picture, but it's really too gruesome for a family blog. The curious can see one here.)

Blood and head were both tested for DNA, and the results made headlines. From this BBC site: They ‘share a genetic heritage passed on through the paternal line,” forensic pathologist Philippe Charlier told AFP. “They have a direct link to one another through their fathers. One could say that there is absolutely no doubt any more.’ Voila. Two kings confirmed for the price of one.

Interesting stories? To a French fanatic like me they're utterly fascinating, but still somehow not up to the standard of Richard III. I was enthralled by the French discoveries, but when I watched the documentary about the finding of Richard III I cried.

So why? Why? What is it about the discovery at Leicester that’s so special? 

Is it age? Richard III was already history when Henri IV was on the throne, and to whippersnappers like Louis XVI and XVII he was ancient history at that. But I don’t think that’s the answer. If it’s age that excites us we can look at these 27 Anglo-Saxon skeletons discovered last year on Salisbury Plain. Heck, we can look at this one exhumed in South Africa that’s estimated at 2 million years old. It’s far, far more historically significant – but it doesn’t make me cry.

Neither do Egyptian mummies, come to that. They’re kings, they’ve been dead even longer, but maybe it’s almost too long. They lack significance dead because we have no sense of them alive. The portraits are too stylized to be meaningful, and if someone says the word ‘Tutankhamun’ I think immediately of either a gold mask or something dead in bandages. An Egyptian specialist would be horrified by that, but I suspect it’s a common layman’s view.

Then is it the mystery? As an ardent Ricardian and great fan of Josephine Tey, I’m all for anything that will smash the Shakespeare/Thomas More myth and clear Richard III’s name – but his skeleton won’t do that. We’ve learned a bit about scoliosis and the hunchback, but whether or not he killed the Princes in the Tower – not so much. There’s far more mystery solved in the case of Louis XVII than there is with poor Richard.

Is it the tragedy? The horrible details of post-mortem injuries, the reality of that lonely grave for a man who should have had a state funeral? It’s part of it, I think, and I’m warmed by the prospect of the body finally being given the respect it deserves, but even Richard wasn't in the same league as ten year old Louis. If tragedy were all, then Louis XVII would be king in this discussion even if he never was in life.

Of all the possible explanations, I think our own H.M. Castor came closest to the truth when she said in her post here:  ‘We simply do not usually have the chance to examine the remains of known individuals from history, to compare the sources with the bone-hard evidence’. I don’t know the Anglo-Saxon skeletons or Eqyptian mummies, but we all know Richard III. He’s what ‘1066 And All That’ would call a ‘Memorable King’, and he’s part of the more sensational narrative of history. The discovery of his bones makes us look at the whole story again with the sudden certain knowledge that it’s true. We may have known that with our heads, but here are the bones, here was the man, and it’s true.

Richard III Skeleton - Image credit University of Leicester

But there must be something else. Louis XVI was well known, so was the Dauphin, they have the same legendary quality of Richard, but still we’re not stirred to the same degree. Nationalism, of course, Richard was British and the two Louis are French, but to someone like me there’s no difference and it’s my own reaction I’m trying to understand.

For me personally there is that one other thing, and it’s this. Richard III was found under a car park. Not in a box or a gourd where he’d been specially preserved, but just somewhere dumped and under our feet. Millions of people have walked over his grave and never even known.

Currently doing the rounds on Twitter - credit unknown

That’s it. That’s where it is. When people say ‘the past is all around us’ I doubt they’re really referring to kings under car parks, but that’s surely part of what they mean. As Shakespeare wrote in ‘Hamlet’, ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away.’ So he might. How many people have breathed this air before us? Whose bodies have fertilized the soil from which we harvest our vegetables? Do we really think we stand upon an island certified sterile from that terrible thing we call the past?

It’s a macabre thought, and may give an unwelcome significance to the phrase ‘Caesar Salad’, but there’s a truth in it way beyond the physical. We’re not alone. We didn’t spring up by magic. Millions of people have been here before us, and what they said and did has defined who we are now. 

That’s history. And as the body of Richard III has reminded us – it’s true.

***

A L Berridge's website

16th Century Medical Student Blog – Beloved son, Felix: Theresa Breslin

 

In 1552 a fifteen year old boy, Felix Platter, left his home in Basle to go and study medicine in the south of France. He wrote an account of his journey to Montpelier, kept a diary during his five years of study there, and also an account of his travels as he returned home via Paris. His journal was published in various forms but my copy was translated from the original German by Séan Jennett and published in English in 1961. It is one of the most fascinating books in my library.

Felix was a student at a time of huge social change. As in The Nostradamus Prophecy medicine was still practised using charms and spells. Creams and salves were prepared and applied according to ritual, with astrological interpretation used as a key component to judge whether the movement of the planets would ensure greater potency. Barbers performed surgery and tooth extraction, and in the absence of effective anaesthetic patients were frequently strapped to the operating table. Surgery was brutal. Life was hard and sometimes painfully short.  Herb gardens supplied natural remedies with some success, but the main enemy for effective cure for ailments was infection. People lived in close proximity to raw sewage with effluence of all types just piled at the side of the road to make a passage for horses and carts as opposed to proper disposal.

The system of student exchange operating at the time meant that the son of one family could swap places with the son of another in order to attend a particular course at a certain university. It meant that the expenses for each family were kept down as, by negotiation, no payment need be made by either party for food and lodging.  Felix begins his journal by taking us with him as he sets out for Montpelier. And right away we are engaged. For in addition to being crammed with historical detail his writing in intensely personal and utterly engaging.   

Away from home for the first time Felix stops over at an inn and becomes separated from his companions. Low in spirits he’s concerned that he might be robbed and murdered and goes to the stables where he leans on his horse’s neck and bursts into tears. He reaches his destination and has all the usual anxieties of a modern day student: the newness of the place, the strange food and customs, his relationship with his landlord, fellow students, and professors. 

His description of his lectures and practical work is absorbing. We watch the gruesome spectacle of dissections taking place and wonder a t the fact that people other than students could attend, including ladies, even thought the corpse might be male.  Then… moments of anxiety as he joins up with a grave-robbing group of students, and I’m as worried for him as I might be for one of my own children away at University. Whew! He scrapes through that episode unscathed.

I laugh out loud at his antics to impress girls when he buys himself new red breeches, slashed, and lined with taffeta and:  ‘…so tight that I could scarcely bend.’ And then later, when he is wearing spurs and tries to dance with a young lady but only succeeds in tripping and tearing her dress.

I shudder at the public executions he witnesses, including the gruesome description of the burning of a man found guilty of heresy.  Then I smile as Felix is caught out eating eggs cooked in butter during Lent - despite trying to hide the eggshells in his room.

This is such a readable book. You are drawn into his life and are able to see how and why his opinions are formed.  I felt I’d sharing Felix’s life and his youth and his rite of passage to adulthood as he slowly matures during the time of his university course.  

Felix survived his studies and his various escapades to make the long return journey where with enormous joy he meets up with and marries Magdalena, the girl who’d waited for him at home.

I’m glad to know that he went on to become a respected physician, greatly honoured by his own students and peers. His letters and his herbal are kept in the University of Basle.

 http://www.theresabreslin.co.uk/   http://www.facebook.com/Theresabreslinauthor

Twitter: @theresabreslin1 

Spy for the Queen of Scots is nominated for the Carnegie Medal and an Illustrated Treasury of Scottish Folk and Fairy Tales  illustrated by Kate Leiper is nominated for the Greenaway Medal.

The Divided City music theatre show will be performed the Millennium Theatre as part of the Derry-Londonderry City of Culture 2013.    

Shadows in the Cave - Celia Rees

Not everyone's cup of tea, but I couldn't wait to see it. I have visited caves in the Dordogne and in the Pyrenees and seen the astounding paintings but I have rarely seen the equally impressive carvings and objects which are on view here.

These objects are of enormous antiquity. 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, the years clock up like the whirling figure on a time machine, going back and still further back to a time we cannot imagine. They are strange to us, profoundly enigmatic, and have been subject to endless interpretation since they were first discovered. At first, because of their size and origin, they were often dismissed as toys. Toys? Really? Does the above look like a toy to you?

Or this?

It has been calculated that the Lion Man took 400 hours to make. Would that amount of effort be expended on a toy? It is clearly of far greater significance and this exhibition goes a long way to underline the importance of an object like this. It is a creature that could not exist. In that, it shows the workings of the imagination: a bonding of observation, interpretation and creativity that has informed art ever since. And perhaps it does more than this. I was reminded of the great cave painting in the Trois Frères Cave in Ariège, France, half man, half stag. Does it show a god, or a shaman? We can't know, it was painted 16,000 years ago, but there is a continuity of belief in the stag headed one from  this figure to Herne the Hunter and on to the Abbots Bromley Horn Dance which is still performed today. 

The female figurines hold the same power and the same continuity of depiction. A tour of some of the other galleries in the British Museum will show similar abstract female figures but of a much more recent date. The earliest discoveries shown here, however, were often interpreted as mere erotic objects. Erotic object? Some kind of stone age sex aid? The mind boggles.

These little figurines have real power and a beauty that can only really be seen in three dimensions.

This figure, much admired by Picasso, has just the sketch of a face, a few lines, delicately etched. The effect is transformational. No wonder these figures inspired artists like Picasso, Matisse and Henry Moore, they sensed the specialness that emanates from these objects and obviously felt a kinship with their makers, an affinity that early archaeologists  appear to have largely lacked.

The animal carvings, etched on bone and mammoth tusk, show precise, exact observation of every hair,  muscle and whisker.

As in the cave paintings, there is an effort to record animals moving, a horse galloping, something not achieved until photography and moving pictures, but the desire to capture movement is the same.

The artists' vision, skill and complexity of execution, sense of purpose, focus, talent all telescope the time between us and them but when we look for meaning, purpose, the gap yawns wide open. 

'... we seem no closer to knowing why the people of that period penetrated the deep limestone caves of France and Spain to make images in total darkness ... and on pieces of portable stone, bone, ivory and antler. We do not know what the images meant to those who made them or to those who viewed them.'

The Mind in the Cave - Consciousness and the Origins of Art, David Lewis - Williams

This is the deep and abiding mystery which makes this art and these objects so fascinating. The gap created forces us to use our own imaginations just as they once did. I recently read Alan Garner's novel Boneland where he explores just this mystery. The book is set both in the present and in the very deep past.

'He cut the veil from the rock, the hooves clattered the bellowing waters below him in the dark. The lamp brough the moon from the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.

He took life in his mouth, spat red over his hand on the cave wall. The bull roared. Around, above him, the trample of the beasts answered, the stags, the hinds, the horses, the bulls, and the trace of old dreams.'

Boneland, Alan Garner

I like the idea of 'cutting the veil', of capturing the essence of something, it's inner core and meaning, and thus penetrating the separation of the spirit realm from the real world.

For me, the most enigmatic, mysterious, awesome object of all was probably owned by a shaman. It was found buried with him along with other objects which suggested his role and status. It is an articulated male figure, a puppet made from mammoth ivory, 27,000 years old. Once one realises that it would probably have been used to create a shadow play on the walls of a cave, one begins to sense something of its true meaning and power.

I was reminded of the allegory of  Plato's Cave.

 Perhaps these ancient peoples had more humility in the face of the mysteries and meaning of life than we have today. 

The idea of continuity and kinship, rather than separation and difference are key to understanding this art, its meaning and purpose. Here are the thoughts and reflections of the first people to enter the Chauvet Cave in the Ardeche, France. 

'Alone in that vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we were seized by a strange feeling. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. ... Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we were not alone; the artists souls and spirits surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.'

The Mind in the Cave - Consciousness and the Origins of Art, David Lewis - Williams

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Independent State of Hastings by Penny Dolan

Last week I was wandering around Hastings with my brother, idly sight-seeing.  

Among the tall black-painted net huts below RockaNore Cliff was the Fisherman’s Museum, empty enough on that cold weekday to examine all the exhibits in enjoyable detail, even the huge model of the Great Harry.

I clambered on to the deck of the old fishing boat in the centre. The walls - although I’m sure that’s not the right word - barely reached the height of my knees. I felt slightly dizzy, even without the swell of the sea. 

I bought a copy of "Voices from the Stade" The man at the desk was very pleased as he'd been one of the people involved in the collecting the old fisherman's tales and was keen to share his experiences.

We ambled on, past “Winkle island” with its shiny new sculpture, eyed the windows of the arty, gift and goth shops, and chatted over lazy tea and cake. 

Then I saw it. An image painted across a pub wall: The America Ground.

It was one of those moments to do with writing when something remarkable happens. 

Oddments of information loosely connected to a certain topic suddenly start appearing everywhere, even when you aren’t searching or researching for them.

Is it that you just didn’t notice such things before? 

Or does some animus start flinging fascinating details at you, intent on luring you away for weeks or months or years?

My current writing project is partly involved with the passion for independence that grew among the people of Europe and America in the late eighteenth century and beyond: a deep longing for rights, equality and liberty, combined with that questioning of the crown, clergy and gentry that led to rebellion and revolution.

There, in Hastings, was the story of a small revolution, a time when the local people rebelled and seized their land for themselves. The “land” wasn’t new. It belonged to nobody. Officially, it wasn't there. 

Back in the thirteenth century, great storms had reshaped the South Coast. The old cinque ports of Rye and Winchelsea were locked inland and the natural harbour behind Lydd island transformed into the Romney salt-marshes. 

Even the harbour at Hastings was altered. A long shingle bank was thrown up by the waves, blocking the harbour and making land where there was sea before. This new ground lay outside the bounds of the Borough of Hastings so anyone who settled there need pay no rent or taxes to the town.

Over time, this No Man’s Land of shacks and upturned boats grew until it held more than a thousand inhabitants. 

While the great landowners - Lord Cornwallis, the Earl of Chichester, Battle Abbey Estates and the Hastings Corporation – fought each other through the courts for ownership, the place thrived in its own happy rate-free state.

Originally a haven to fishermen and boat repairers, by now it had tradesmen, lodging houses, livestock keepers, a rope walk, a bakery and a brewery. More enterprises followed: limekilns, stonemasons, a tallow factory, a sawing house, a gin palace and even a small school.

In 1822, inspired by the American Revolution, the people proclaimed their own independence. They raised the Stars and Stripes and named the strip of shingle shore “The America Ground.”

However, with seaside resorts becoming fashionable, the Hastings councillors decided that this undesirable collection of shacks and huts must be removed. A Crown Commission offered seven-year leases to the inhabitants, after which the land would belong to the Crown. Most refused, taking their shacks and moving further along the coast to St Leonards.

So, by 1834, just twelve years later, the America Ground was empty.

The Councillors got their way and development followed. 

Now all that is left to commemorate that small stand for independence is the painting on the outside wall of a pub near Robert Street and the raising of the Stars and Stripes nearby every Fourth of July.

Meanwhile, up here in Yorkshire, there’s another area of land that’s nominally part of England but covered by the Stars and Stripes. 

Menwith Hill. 

A different kind of independence.

Penny Dolan 
www.pennydolan.com

'Besely seking with a continuell chaunge...' by Sue Purkiss

(Warning: there's not an awful lot of history in this...)

I've been musing recently about the relationship between thinking and walking. Like many people, I find that walking helps my thinking. I was going to say that it helps me to think, but it's not quite as clear-cut as that: sometimes when I'm walking I'm not consciously thinking at all. I notice things - like this morning, when I saw a rabbit sitting very still in the distance and realised - with some pleasure - that its outline was exactly the same as a relief carving I did of a rabbit years ago. Or yesterday, when I saw white blossoms trodden into the mud on the ground and looked up in surprise; what could be flowering so early? But mostly, my mind is at rest, not 'besely seking with a continuell chaunge' (to borrow Thomas Wyatt's words). Something is happening though, below the surface, because often by the end of the walk a knot is untied - whether it be a knot in a plot, or a knot of some other kind.

Anyway, there's that - but also, I recently read a novel called The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry, by Rachel Joyce. I was gripped by this book. It tells the story of a man in his sixties: very conventional, rather dull - who one day walks out of his house in Salcombe, Devon, to post a letter, and decides on impulse that he will carry on walking all the way to Berwick-on-Tweed, where the intended recipient of the letter lives. The walk changes him, and it changes others, too.

There used to be far more walkers in the British countryside: tramps, they were called. You don't see them so often now. My father used to tell me a story about one: an ex-soldier, one of the many who couldn't find a job or a place after the First World War - you can read a version of it here. Last week, a sprightly 90 year-old in one of my writing classes told us about another one, who often passed through the town where she lived with her young family in Kent in the 1950s. He was called Smokey Joe. No-one knew anything about him. He had his belongings packed onto his bike, which he never rode, only pushed along the roads. In the piece she wrote about him, Phyllis imagined that he had come back from the war and been unable to face life inside a house, with his family: so one day, he just walked out of the door: he needed the sound of his feet pounding the tarmac, the rhythm of his walking, to deaden the sounds in his head, to stop the procession of images, he couldn't bear to see.

And in the small town where I live, there is another walker. He's not a tramp -  he lives in the town. But every day, all day long, he walks. He usually has earplugs in, or he stares intently at a mobile phone screen as he walks along. He never, ever makes eye contact, and has only been known to speak to someone - angrily - if they try to push it, to make him talk. Does he walk to think, or does he walk to deaden thinking? I think the latter is more likely. Or perhaps it is that he walks to calm the thinking down, to reduce the noise it makes inside his head? I always think of him as the Walker, partly for the obvious reason, but partly also because he makes me think of the Walker in Susan Cooper's fantasy novel for children, The Dark Is Rising. That one walks because it's his destiny to do so, not just for years, but for centuries; he too carries inside him a burden of  unhappiness which is presumably only bearable if he keeps on moving.

And finally, I've just started a book called The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane, who lectures in English at Cambridge but has also walked for thousands of miles and written most beautifully about his journeys. He relates a fascinating piece of etymology which shows that the link between thinking and walking has long been seen to exist - and here it is:

"The trail begins with our verb to learn, meaning 'to acquire knowledge' Moving backwards in language time, we reach the Old English leornian, 'to get knowledge, to be cultivated'. From leornian, the path leads further back, into the fricative thickets of Proto-Germanic, and to the word liznojan, which has a base sense of 'to follow or to find a track' (from the Proto-Indo-European prefix leis- meaning 'track'). 'To learn' therefore means at root - at route - 'to follow a track'."

And so the journey goes on.

January Competition Winners

And the winners of Deborah White's book, Deceit, are:

Ruan Peat
Sarah (Walker)
Marjorie
Young Historian

Please contact Liz Scott at: liz@lizscottpr.co.uk to receive your prizes

Congratulations!

Let's Talk About Love (and Brazen Bulls) Catherine Johnson

 I know, I know, it's that day isn't it. And I had intended to write a piece about St Dwynwen, Wales's very own Saint of Love who ended up living as a hermit on her own island just west of Anglesey. Her feast day isn't Valentine's but Candlemas, two weeks or so ago. I was going to write about her  life as put upon virgin who is unlucky in love and grows up to be nun (romantic? nuh-uh), but that led me to one of my all time favourite books - The Penguin Dictionary of Saints.

This book is a cracker, even though I'm not a Catholic. I think my copy was bought by my brother in a jumble sale in the mid seventies and I stole it off him. I have been entranced by St Agatha with her breasts on a dish (patron saint of bell founders - they're the same shape) or Saint Bathild, carried off by pirates as a child and sold into the household of Clovis II, who married her. Saint Budoc - the book lists him as a 'fantastic composition' whose mother, Azenor, was thrown into the sea off Brest in a cask where she gave birth to little Budoc.  Five months later, still in this cask, the pair wash up on the coast of Ireland alive and well. Or Saint Pelagia of Tarsus, roasted to death inside a brazen bull,  which as  I'm sure you're all aware was a bronze bull shaped torture and execution device which transformed the screams of the torturee into the 'sounds of a bellowing, infuriated bull. Apart from poor St Pelagia, Saint, Eustace and Saint Antipas (pictured) suffered the same fate.

pic via wikpedia commons

 also suffered the same fate. There are more. Who knew how many ways there were to live and die and get canonised? The book is full of lovely snippets of the fantastical alongside the rather dull and well worth a look. It's worth it just for the names.

Anyway, like I said I wasn't going to write about saints. But Dwynwen and Valentine did get me thinking about love, and not just the romantic kind.

One of my theories is that's what we all write about when we make up stories.  Having just finished edits on two very different books, one an 18th century romp with danger and death and dis-interring, the other a 19th century story of self deception and despair and romantic love, they are both about relationships. About need, truth, dependance, desire, the million and one ways people fit together, manipulate and deceive, get hurt or get bored.Some things remain the same whatever century we're writing in.

Catherine.