The Children of Henry Vlll Q and A with John Guy

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 Our July guest is another History Boy, John Guy, whose latest book is The Children of Henry Vlll.

John Guy is an award-winning historian, accomplished broadcaster and Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. His previous books include the highly acclaimed Thomas Becket: Warrior, Priest, Rebel, Victim, A Daughter’s Love: Thomas and Margaret More and My Heart is My Own: the Life of Mary Queen of Scots, which won the Whitbread Biography Award, the Marsh Biography Award and was a Finalist for the National Book Critics’ Circle (USA) Biography/Autobiography of the Year Award. He is the author of the bestselling textbooks, The Tudors: A Very Short Introduction and Tudor England. He has presented and contributed to numerous documentaries for BBC2 and Channel 4, including Timewatch, as well as appearing frequently on BBC Radio’s flagship culture programmes. He also writes and reviews for national newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Times, The Literary Review and History Today.

Welcome, John, and thank you for agreeing to answer my questions.

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MH: Given that what most people know about Henry was his obsession with fathering a legitimate male heir and that it led to his multiple marriages and the split with Rome, it’s rather remarkable that no-one seems to have written a book on quite this subject before. Were you surprised to find this gap?



JG: Yes and no. You probably don’t see the gap until you realize it’s there. I’d written a double biography of Thomas More and his eldest daughter Margaret some years ago and quite a bit of that is about Margaret’s education and the uses to which she put it. BBC 4 televised this material in 2011 for the documentary ‘A Renaissance Education: the Schooling of Margaret More’ which got good viewing ratings, so I knew that people were interested in this sort of topic. And when I’m in Cambridge, I share an office with Elizabeth Foyster, who writes on the history of childhood from the 17th to the 19th centuries. This prompted me to think that looking at the upbringing and early experiences of Henry VIII’s children might be interesting. I knew from writing biographies of Thomas Becket and Mary, Queen of Scots, how important the early lives of people are in shaping who they later become. And I knew from the outset that Henry Fitzroy, the King’s illegitimate son, should be part of the story. He’s usually sidelined, but for a while it was entirely possible that – in the absence of a legitimate male heir – he could have been designated by Henry VIII as his successor. So when Oxford University Press came to me and asked me if I’d write something on Tudor history for a wide readership and from an unconventional angle, I knew at once what the topic would be.


MH: What new information about Henry’s children have you found for the book?

JG: Quite a lot of the incidental detail on purchases and staffing for the children’s households and who was where and when is new, because over the years I’d stumbled into what remains of their original household lists and accounts of expenditure in the National Archives. For example, I’d transcribed most of the unpublished costume accounts for Henry’s elder daughter, Mary, very carefully some years ago, so I knew a lot about her tastes in dress. The information (actually it’s heavily condensed in this book) on the gifts Mary gave to Margaret Douglas, Henry VIII’s niece, is new. I discovered that Elizabeth had a mysterious tutor called John Picton, probably secured on the quiet by Kat Ashley some years before William Grindal was appointed by the King to be her first official schoolmaster. I was also lucky enough to be allowed to make reference to some of the newly-discovered letters of the young Elizabeth that Alan Bryson has found and is currently editing for publication: two of them put her religion as a 15-year-old into a much sharper focus than anything I’ve seen before. But such details apart, what I think is new and exciting about the book is that it’s about the inter-relationships between all four of the children, rather than just a set of snapshots of their individual early lives – and it’s that approach which is the book’s raison d’être.

MH: One doesn’t see much written about Henry Fitzroy, the King’s illegitimate son with Elizabeth Blount, so it was fascinating to discover a bit more about him. Was this new material or has it just been overlooked by previous historians?

JG: Actually there’s a very good recent life of Henry Fitzroy called Bastard Prince: Henry VIII’s Lost Son by Beverley Murphy, and you’ll see it cited quite a bit in my notes and references. Murphy drew my attention in particular to the various reports from Fitzroy’s disillusioned schoolmasters, which I was able to follow up either in the National Archives or in the Letters and Papers of Henry VIII and they turned out to be crammed with marvellous material. The account of Fitzroy’s funeral from the Duke of Norfolk’s letter to Thomas Cromwell I’d already fished out of the State Papers, and then went to view Fitzroy’s remarkable tomb, which was originally at Thetford Priory, but is now at St Michael’s Church at Framlingham in Suffolk. I gather that staff from the University of Leicester in conjunction with the Space Research Centre and colleagues from Oxford and Yale are currently making high-powered infra-red images of the tomb and its contents, so maybe more information will become available shortly.

MH: I must look out for that! You can’t really write about the children without getting into a lot of other areas. You have packed a tremendous amount into a short book; how did you decide what to leave out?

JG: Yes, Oxford University Press wanted a short book, so I faced lots of tough choices about what to put and what to leave out. In fact, my method here was very simple. I put in anything I thought central to the story, and left out those details or episodes that I thought might be fascinating in their own right, but would hold the story up. I wanted the book to flow and draw readers in, so I was naturally delighted when a well-known literary critic emailed me to say that “the book flows beautifully while immediately grasping my attention: which is quite an achievement when dealing with the most over-exposed family in the British mass media after the Archers!”

MH: I was very struck by your references to Henry’s being probably positive for the Kell antigen, which would explain why he never had more than one child that survived into adulthood with any wife or mistress. It’s a very convincing theory of Catrina Banks Whitley and Kyra Kramer. Do you think they were also on to something when they considered the King had McCleod syndrome, explaining his physical and mental deterioration in later life?

JG: This article appeared in the Historical Journal in 2010 and as soon as I read it, I found their theory arresting that Henry VIII was positive for the blood group antigen known as Kell (whereas 90% of Caucasian populations are Kell negative). The evidence Whitley and Kramer provide on the number of miscarriages and stillbirths, and on their birth-order relationships to live births, are consistent with their theory. I’m far less persuaded by their hypothesis that the King suffered from the rare genetic disorder known as the McLeod syndrome. That’s mainly because Whitley and Kramer didn’t consider other medical conditions that might explain the same data (e.g. obesity-mediated type 2 diabetes). The McLeod syndrome argument is used to explain the apparent deterioration in Henry’s personality in his later years. But you find that Henry’s personality changes at a different date depending on which historian you’re reading! Robert Hutchinson opts for 1531, whereas Jack Scarisbrick went for 1529, the year he thought the King’s first divorce suit turned nasty. Other historians advanced the date to 1527 when new material on Henry’s divorce difficulties came to light. Milo Keynes, a retired senior medical consultant at Addenbrooke’s Hospital at Cambridge, plumped for 1528. Susannah Lipscombe has more recently gone for 1536. This sort of speculation is always intriguing and can be worth pursuing, but isn’t a satisfactory basis from which to construct a medical diagnosis.

MH: We can’t really say the Tudors are having a revival, because they never seem to go out of fashion. As well as your book there is a new Life of Henry Vlll out this year, two Lives of Katherine of Aragon just out, the opening of the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth, the BBC TV series of programmes on the Tudor Court (you featured yourself in at least one of them!), etc. etc. To what do you attribute this continuing fascination with the period?

JG: It’s the stories and the personalities – it’s as simple as that. They’re stranger and more compelling than fiction, and you couldn’t make them up!

MH: Do you think the extensive portraiture helps fuel our interest in the Tudors?

JG: Undoubtedly that’s also true. Putting faces to the names can make a big difference. Although we’re finding it increasingly difficult to track down new portrait discoveries, work on iconography often enables unknown sitters to be identified. And the “Making Art in Tudor Britain” project at the National Portrait Gallery, financially supported by the Mercers’ Company and other leading donors and charities, is using some of the latest scientific techniques to uncover the working practices of Tudor artists besides examining the layers beneath the paint surfaces to discover hidden images.

MH: Do you ever indulge in “What ifs”? What would have been the most intriguing alternative history – if Henry Fitzroy had lived? If Mary had had a surviving child? If Elizabeth had married?

JG: Of course – I’ve recently been using just this approach to counter some of the more vigorously concerted attempts in the USA to make gender studies exclusively the future of Tudor history. Yes, gender issues are very important and in The Children of Henry VIII I’ve aimed to tease out some of the more intriguing implications of the King’s views on female monarchy and carry them forward beyond Edward VI’s “Device for the Succession” and John Knox’s arguments that females were “unfit” to rule in The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. However, the mid-Tudor succession crisis is not explicable purely in terms of gender or Edward VI’s minority, because the ideological battles triggered by the European Reformation played an equal and often greater part in the story. Anyone worried about this should ask a basic counterfactual question. “What if” Edward VI, the Protestant boy-king, had lived and been gay, so refusing to marry? Would his Protestant privy councillors really have sat back and done nothing about excluding the claim of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, or petitioning the king to marry and settle the succession purely because Edward was male? Or would they have continued to do everything they could to make sure of a Protestant succession?

MH: Do you have a favourite child of Henry Vlll?

JG: It would have to be Elizabeth. I’m not sure whether I’d like to have her as the proverbial dinner-party guest, but I admire her for her resilience and ability to understand and manage power.

MH:  Tell us something about your new edition of The Tudors: a Very Short Introduction, which is coming out in August.

JG: The new edition has been much expanded and rewritten to match new developments in research and understanding since the first edition appeared in 1984. Whereas before, socio-economic history and political and religious events were considered in separate chapters, they are fully reintegrated in this new edition. More attention is given to the “stirs” and revolts of the 1550s and to the post-Armada years. More space is given to the problems of minority and female rule and to the wider “British” dimension of Tudor history, i.e. Scotland and Ireland. The brief reign of Jane Grey is taken seriously in this edition. Before (in line with the scholarly consensus then) it was dismissed as a failed coup d’état and an aberration and not as Edward VI’s own “succession settlement” and one with a considerable afterlife. Finally, a new chapter on “Material Culture and the Arts” in the long Tudor century is included.

MH:  We gather you are writing a big book about the last years of Elizabeth l; can you tell us when to expect that? It seems that David Starkey never wrote the second half of his history of Elizabeth, so there is a definite gap there.

JG: I’ll finish it around the middle of next year, and it will be published some time in 2015. You’re right, it really is on the later years, mainly after the Armada. When it opens, Elizabeth is already past the menopause. There’s no point in her privy councillors trying to marry her off any more to settle the succession, because she can’t have children. For her, it’s a moment of liberation. Now she can be her own woman as never before. And she’s determined to take more control of what’s happening around her. She’s not always successful, but she’s certainly making the effort to assert her control. The downside for her is that these are the years of the long war with Spain and she’s also forced to confront her own ageing.

Thank you, John; that was fascinating.

John Guy's Website

Naming myself, by Katharine Grant

Blog followers may notice that I've changed my name. There's good reason for this.  I don't want children picking up my first novel for adults - Sedition, to be published by Virago UK and Henry Holt USA, in 2014 - so I've chosen a different name.  I'll remain K. M. Grant for my YA and children's books, and Katharine elsewhere. As it happens, Katharine is my real name. I was christened Katharine but always called Katie except by my father when he wanted to give me a verbal clip round the ear.  'Katharine, come here!' was a summons to be dreaded.

My family went in for names, and still do. I have a sister called Cosima (as well as sisters called Alice, Charlotte, Victoria and Frances - we are numerous), an uncle and a brother called Peregrine, nieces called Matilda, Eleanor, Frideswide, Amabelle and Lully, and nephews called Rowley, Oswald, Hal and Cuthbert.  My own children are Clementine, Eliza and Cosmo.   (I wanted to call our son Valentine but my husband threatened divorce.)

Naming characters in your novel is always a key moment.   For historical writers, names help establish the time.  In my de Granville Trilogy, William, Gavin and Eleanor flag up 12th century Christendom, and Kamil 12th century Outremer.  In Hartslove, we find sisters Rose, Lily, Daisy, Clover and Columbine, with their brother Garth:  unmistakeable Victoriana.  There will have been Alices and Dans in 1746, when How the Hangman Lost His Heart is set, but actually, that's not why I chose those names.  To me, Alice is always fair and sharp, and Dan's full name is Dan Skinslicer.  Both names set the right tone.  Belle of Belle's Song is named in a loving pun by her father, a bell-founder in the time of Chaucer.

 

Foreign names can be more tricky.  I chose Yolanda and Raimon for the Perfect Fire trilogy because, unusually, the characters sprang fully named into my imagination and it never occurred to me to change them.  Changing any of my characters' names would be as troubling as changing my own.

this is the US cover

this is also a US cover

And changing my own is just what I've done!  It was strange signing myself 'Katharine' for Sedition. Even stranger suddenly realising what a difficult name it is.  I'm KathArine, like Katharine Hepburn, not KathErine like Katherine of Aragon, or Catherine like Catherine Earnshaw, or Catharine like St. Catharine's College Cambridge, or Kathryn like pianist Kathryn Stott.  Contracts have had to be amended, the name on the cover carefully checked.

Sedition is set in 1794 and I knew what type of names I wanted so I looked up family trees to make sure they were possible for the times: Alathea, Harriet, Georgiana, Marianne, Everina and Annie - Annie was usually a servant's name - my Annie is the daughter of an Italian craftsman, her name Anglicised from the Italian Anna.

I'm always curious about other novelists' naming habits.  Do you go onto internet lists?  Do you use names you've always liked but never dared call your own children?  Do you do meticulous research or none at all?  Shakespeare may have had Juliet declare 'a rose by any other name would smell as sweet', but names do matter.  After all, had Romeo and Juliet been Chilperic and Clothilde, the speech 'Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo' would be better suited to the rude mechanicals in Midsummer Night's Dream - you try it - and Juliet/Clothilde's exhortation to 'refuse thy name' would have had even more unwanted comic undertones.   And then there's David and Victoria.  Chilperic Beckham? Probably not.

Pressing things by Louisa Young

I am rather pressed. I am going away. Yippee!

As a girl, I had one of those square flower presses with twiddly screws in the corners, and passed my innocent afternoons trying to recreate the beautiful little 'memento of Jerusalem' postcards I had bought for my mother in Portobello Market, with their biblical verses, delicate grasses and tiny dry Holy Land flowers. Our garden daffodils were not so exquisite, and some flowers I swear are unpressable: roses for example. Nothing could be harder to press than a rose. Even those German Nuns who embroidered their own hair in nonenarbeiten of the highest class would have been sore put to press a rose. 

I thought nothing would be harder to press, until I went to a rather vast and Norfolky house in Norfolk, belonging I believe to a very distant cousin on the Gurney side, where on a shelf above the Wellington boots I found some very wide books. The spines were very wide I mean; six or eight inches. The books themselves merely pretty big. I can't recall how many there were. Quite a few. They were bound in some kind of dark green cloth, shiny and faded, and looked old. Nineteenth-century say. 

My dear ancient cousin (it was not her house, it was her cousin's. She had merely slipped me in the back door) took one down to show me. The cover was not very hard; not a normal binding. It seemed like cloth stretched on a thick wire frame. The pages were not many: light rough canvas, faded and foxed, stretched again on a frame of thick wire. And on each page, a bird. Not a picture of a bird. An actual bird. Pressed. 

I don't know how you press a bird. Presumably you pull out the skeleton. I think it must be like preparing the skin for taxidermy, which you do by slitting it down the middle, and then sort of peeling it off and turning it inside out. (I know this because I stuffed two white mice at a taxidermy class recently. I won't be doing it again. They had tiny paws, and tiny little tongues.)

But then instead of stuffing this empty bird, you mount it in a book. Why? Because every surface of your vast and Norfolky house - horizontal or vertical - is already laden with stuffed creatures of all kinds: hogsheads and antlers on the walls, seascapes of terms and pintails in dusty cabinets with ancient bits of coral, dogs, squirrels in waistcoats, the odd tyrannosaur and dodo.  

One of these birds was labelled: 'The last bittern to be shot on (I can't recall the place name - Something Broad), 1843'. I found this one of the saddest things I had ever seen. And I suppose it explains why 80 years later my grandfather, bird-spotting in the same neighbourhood, could send his wife-to-be a postcard saying, 'I will spot a Bittern, or catch cold in the attempt'. 

But why would anyone press a shark? 

Dig a shallow hole in gravelly sand. Gut and behead a Greenland or basking shark and place it in the hole, with its belly-cavity supported by a slight mound. Cover the shark with sand, gravel and stones. The shark's fluids (including its poisons) are thus pressed out of the body. Leave it for six to twelve weeks (depending on the season) to ferment. 

Remove your shark from its hole. Cut it into strips and hang it up for several months, until it is dry. A brown crust will appear: remove this before cutting the shark into small pieces and serving.

It's called Hakari, and comes from Iceland (or probably stays there, let's be honest). It is taken with hard liquor, and associated with being a hard man, and Anthony Bourdain called it the single worst most disgusting terrible-tasting thing he had ever eaten. Here it is, hanging up.

The modern method is just to press the shark's meat in a large plastic container. Great. 

Pressed duck, potted shrimps, jugged rabbit, kimchi, Gravlax, yes. Gravelled shark, no.  

A DIP IN THE SEA – Dianne Hofmeyr

Muizenburg Beach, South Africa 1950

My father was a lifesaver, a surfer and an amateur early photographer. In an old shoebox I discovered heaps of negatives and sepia photographs some still in their buff Kodak envelope sleeves from the 20’s and 30’s. His surfboard was the thin wooden type with an upturned nose, sometimes called a belly-board – the kind where the surfer lies down as he catches a breaker. I found this wonderful photograph of him from the late 30’s with a girlfriend. The board is clearly visible leaning up against the back of the car. 

Photographs of his friends at a place called The Strand show a gang of them making pyramids and fooling around like teenagers. They weren’t teenagers but rather youths and young women. The term ‘teenager’ hadn’t yet been invented. There was nothing as indulgent as being a teenager. Boys and girls were expected to grow up and behave like grown ups. That’s why it was particularly special to find these photographs of people his age really having fun. He’s the one second from the front in glasses. (look at those cars and de rigueur sprigged beach dresses and sunshades)

When I started researching the history of surfing and swimsuits, I came across this photograph of George Bernard Shaw holidaying in South Africa in 1931. At Muizenburg, which is the next beach up from The Strand, at age 75, he had his first go at board surfing (see below). And apparently enjoyed the waters of South Africa so much that he extended his holiday by more than two months and went up the coast to Knysna to swim as well. I also discovered that Samuel Langhome Clemens (aka Mark Twain) as well as Jack London were all keen surfers.

For further photographs and a report of George Bernard Shaw in the South African Travel News, click here.

I went looking for more authors in swimsuits – didn’t find any History Girls – but I found this beautiful photograph of Sylvia Plath in a white two piece. 

For more writers in swimsuits click here.

Neither my father nor Bernard Shaw were the first to trying surfing at the Cape. In 1919 two United States Marines returning to the US after the war, arrived with their Hawaiian style longboards and Cape Town witnessed the first ‘stand up’ surfing ever done on its shores. They befriended a lady, Heather Price, (seen here in the photograph wearing a spotted cloth scarf... also de rigeuer beach headgear of the time with one of the marines ) She attempted to surf on the Hawaiian longboards. Surely South Africa's first woman surfer? But the marines took their boards back home with them when their ship sailed. 

An earlier picture of Cape Town with Lion’s Head and Signal Hill in the background shows bathing ‘machines’ drawn onto the beaches by horses so ladies could swim. These were replaced by the palisades of colourful bathing boxes that still stand at Muizenburg and St James and throughout England. By the 20’s women were beginning to show their bodies and fashions changed rapidly from the black stretchy knitted unisex suits to more glamorous swimsuits of printed cotton and even bikinis. I found this photograph of my mother (the ever present cigarette in her hand) in a skirted polka dot bikini, from the early 40’s, while my sister stands behind her in one of those stretchy bubbly swimsuits.

Again my mum in same swimsuit her surfboard and rubber bathing cap

From the 50’s there’s this one of my very curvy 15 year old sister. But those were the days of Marilyn Monroe, so curves were okay. 

A further search of the 50’s took me to three girls on leaning up against longboards on Bondi Beach, Australia and a stylish woman in black and white two piece swimsuit (look at the wonderful straw hats). 

My own photographs from the 60’s (not in the same shoebox) show me wearing a bikini on the famous 2nd Beach at Clifton where I had a white cat who used to join me on sand that was whiter than any beach I’ve ever been on.

Hope you all have a great summer holiday… beach or not!
www.diannehofmeyr.com

 THE MAGIC BOJABI TREE

'immensely satisfying' 
from Children's Summer Reading in THE INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY last week – 21 July 2013

DEATH ON A PLATE and other stories from 1960, by Eleanor Updale

There's a well-recognised phenomenon, written about by Simon Jenkins, that everyone looks back to a golden age, and that for most people that age is about fifty before the time they are in.  I've just discovered an antidote, in the unlikely form of an old cookbook.
When my Scottish mother-in-law died, twenty years ago,  I inherited the contents of her kitchen bookshelf.  Mrs Beeton's Cookery and Household Management has found its way out of the box.  It's not the original, but the 1960 edition, and has some quaint vignettes of domestic life at that time.  If nothing else, some of the livid pictures of the food are enough to put anyone off:

There are some faint rumblings of feminism (sections on women's property rights, exhortations for the housewife to find time for herself, etc) but 1960 is still a world of considerable domestic drudgery.  There's even a warning to beware of unexpected tasks generated by 'labour-saving' devices.  Washing machines make more ironing, and as for freezers:

While making it possible to conserve large quantities of produce, ready for quick serving when required, a quick-freeze cabinet does mean the housewife must cope with preparation of food to go into the deep freeze; and this must be done when the fruit is ripe or the chickens ready for killing; which often means a busy season for the housewife.

If you were going on holiday, you were advised to scatter the miracle chemical paradichlorobenzene around the edges of all your carpets, so the moths wouldn't start munching while you were away.
How times change.  This is the latest on paradichlorobenzene, from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency:

Exposure over long periods of time can affect the central nervous system with symptoms including speech impairment (dysathia), a lack of muscle coordination and weakness in the limbs. Exposure can also result in liver and kidney damage. Ingestion of para-dichlorobenzene may cause gastrointestinal irritation, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea. Exposure may also cause liver and kidney damage. Dermal contact with para-dichlorobenzene can cause skin irritation. Eye contact can cause irritation. The International Agency for Research on Cancer has designated para-dichlorobenzene as a possible carcinogen.

Oh dear.  It's a miracle so many of us survived growing up then.  Its reminds me of an early 20th century medical book, also passed on by Granny, which recommends cigarettes to alleviate symptoms of bronchitis. 
But I bet a lot of things we are urged to do today will be exposed as laughable years to come.

The best thing about the Mrs Beeton volume is not what's on its pages, but what lies between them.  There are all sorts of recipes and press clippings stuffed in for safe keeping.




One cutting, sadly undated, is from the Aberdeen Press and Journal.  A reader has written in asking for a recipe for 'Buttery Rowies'.  If you've never been to The far North East, you may not have come across this breakfast delicacy, which is the source of immense local pride.  A 'buttery' is not delicate, and it is not good for you.  If you want to know why Scotland has the worst heart health in Europe, you need look no further.  Somewhat inappropriately, this one, auctioned on Ebay in 2006, raised £620 for the Royal Aberdeen Children's Hospital.

Here's the recipe.  Give it a try if you're feeling suicidal. 

BUTTERY ROWIES

INGREDIENTS:
1lb flour
3/4 lb lard and margarine, mixed
1 tablespoon salt
1 tablespoon sugar
1oz yeast
1/4 pint tepid water

Sieve flour; mix yeast, sale and sugar.  Add to flour along with tepid water.
Set in a warm place to rise to twice its bulk.
Divide fats into three parts.  Roll out dough on a floured board,  Dot first part of fat over it in small parts.  Fold in three and roll out as for flaky pastry.  Repeat twice until fat is used up.
Divide into "Buttery" shapes* put on greased and floured tray, and prove for further 30 minutes, then bake in a fairly hot oven for 20 to 25 minutes.

NOTE: when working with yeast, all utensils must be warm.
*[ie rough lumps about the size of a man's palm]

Butteries do actually taste good, as long as the cook has used plenty of salt, and you eat them straight from the oven, before they turn to stone.  But the health news gets worse.  They are usually served slathered with butter and jam.
Good luck.

A postcard slipped into the book - not in my mother-in-law's handwriting, and possibly very old - has what looks like a pretty straightforward  recipe for Tasty Ginger Cake.  It sounds more appealing than the (perhaps fortunately) partly illegible Hawaiian Delight, a mixture of pineapple, walnuts, cake and double cream.

TASTY GINGER CAKE
Cut 6oz of preserved or candied ginger into rather large dice.  Pass through a sieve 12oz of flour and a half teaspoonful each of baking-powder and ground ginger.
Stir together until smooth 1/2 lb each of butter and castor sugar, then beat in 4 eggs adding with each one a little of flour mixture.  Stir in the dice of ginger and remainder of flour.  A little milk may be necessary, or one or two tablespoonfuls of syrup from preserved ginger may be used.  Bake gently in a butter-lined tin, usually for about two hours.
There's no indication of oven temperature.  I'd guess Gas Mark 5 or 375/190.

One of my favourites amongst the scraps of is POTATOES FOR ALL OCCASIONS, a leaflet from the Potato Marketing Board.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about that organisation is where it was housed -- in a grand building almost directly opposite Harrods in London. The nanny state in its heyday. At last, I understand where Mrs Thatcher got her passion for abolishing quangos. I wonder whether she turned her hand to any of the strange mix of the blindingly obvious and the downright weird on these four small pages (Taffy's Pie, perhaps, or Hopel Popel).  The stains on the paper suggest that Granny was a fan.

I might give some of the recipes a try, just for fun, but overall, I have to admit that I'm rather glad things have moved on.

  www.eleanorupdale.com

Sweet as Candy: A few notes on sugar in the Middle Ages

A few months ago a reader wrote to me to say that I mentioned sugar in one of my novels and she wondered how they had extracted sugar from sugar beet in the 12th century.  I wrote back explaining that sugar at the time came from sugar cane, not beet, which wasn't processed as a source of sugar until the late 18th century.  Just recently I read a novel set in the 14th century which explained how much of a treat sugar was back then, and I decided that perhaps a few notes on the Medieval sugar industry and how medieval people treated the commodity might prove interesting to readers.


 Unlike honey, the powerful sweetness of sugar from sugar cane was not available to everyone.  It began as a product grown and produced in India and gradually spread to the Middle East and the Mediterranean. By the 10th century, Egypt was a major producer and exporter of sugar and by the 12th it was grown wherever practical  in all Muslim lands bordering the Mediterranean.  More distant areas such as Morocco and Andalusia were under cultivation too.  There is also strong archaeological evidence for Christian sugar production in the Jordan Valley in the crusader period. Cyprus too became a major producer, and Crete, dominated by the Venetians and Genoans.  It was in Cyprus that the water driven sugar crushing mill was invented, thus making sugar a more readily available commodity on the European market.  The Venetian Cornaro family owned extensive sugar plantations on the south of the Island around Espiscopi and a sugar processing complex. Sugar syrup was obtained from crushed cane, clarified, solidified into conical loaf shapes and sold throughout Europe.

modern sugar loaf

In the 14th century Italian Merchant Franceso Pegolotti listed fourteen different types of sugar readily available to the consumer.  These included rock candy, sugar scented with roses or violets, sugar from Damascus, Bablyon and the Genoese port of Caffa in the Crimea.  Pegolotti lists sugar with descriptions of spices, and indeed it was classified as a spice in the medieval period.

There was a large European market keen to buy sugar for artistic and medicinal purposes.  It was ideal for creating confectionery sculptures as statements pieces at grand banquets and was being used on a large scale in France by the reign of Philip IV (1285-1314).  Even earlier in England in the 12th century, it is listed on the Pipe roll accounts for the reign of Henry II. 
However, even as time and technology progressed and the Cypriot crushing mills brought down the price of sugar, it was still a luxury item.In the 15th century, honey imported into England cost £2.10 shillings per ton.  The same weight of sugar cost £40.00 per ton.  At this sort of price, a single bag in the consumer's hands was worth a skilled man's wage for a day.

French medieval merchant selling sugar loaf (far right)

As mentioned above, sugar was viewed in the Medieval period as a  medicinal item.   That it tasted good and could be turned into various forms such as syrups and pills was a great advantage and it also helped to counteract the bitterness of some of the medicines in which it was an ingredient. It wasn't until the 18th century that sugar ceased to be considered as a drug and a spice and became a basic staple of daily life.

An important medicinal use of sugar was to balance the humours.  The medieval mindset on bodily health was based on humoural theory - the belief that all existing things were composed of a combination of two pairs of elements - warm and cold on the one hand and dry and wet on the other. These elements were then acted upon by the temperamental agents of blood, choler, phlegm and melancholy.   The sanguine temperament (blood) combined warmth and moistness.  The choleric temperament was warm and dry, the phlegmatic cold and moist, and the melancholic was cold and dry.  Foodstuffs too had their element, and the way they should be prepared had specific and logical rules.  So, fish that were cold and moist, were generally fried at least as a first step in their preparation, because frying was hot and dry.  Wine was seen as a hot, dry substance in terms of its humour, so was an ideal medium in which cold, moist pears might be cooked.  Again, the same with fish.  Lampreys, seen as being particularly cold and moist were often killed in red wine and then cooked in it. Henry I dying of a surfeit of lampreys has more going on in that statement than first appears.  Any medieval person would immediately recognise the danger signs.  You took your life in your hands when you ate lampreys unless they were correctly balanced by other products and suited one's humour!

On the humour table, sugar was warm in the first degree and moist in the second and seen as being one of the best foodstuffs for the human condition. It gave sugar a starring role on the pharmacist's shelf and by the 14th century was so prevalent in dishes for the unwell or the recuperating as opposed to those who were healthy, that historians can immediately tell the intention of the dish when studying recipes of the period.

Of course, if it was good for the sick, then it was probably beneficial to the healthy too, and following on from this, everyone else who could afford it embraced sugar into the diet. What was not to like?  The Tacuina sanitatis, an 11th century  medical treatise has this to say on sugar.

'Ask the grocer for refined sugar which is hard, white as salt, and brittle.  It has a cleansing effect on the body and benefits the chest, kidneys and bladder...It is good for the blood and therefore suitable for every temperament, age, season and place.'

Since Medieval food was all about balance and harmony, sugar was often combined with vinegar, the properties of which on the humour table made it the perfect partner for sugar and a distinct 'sweet and sharp' cuisine became very popular.  Fish, chicken, rabbit, all received this treatment, sometimes with the sweetness coming from dried fruit. All very delicious, (I've tried rabbit and salmon versions and they are wonderful)  and all very good for you by the lights of humoural theory.

Sugar and spices were blended together as an end of meal digestif, aiding the closing of the stomach after it had been opened with an 'aperitif' to light up the furnace of the stomach and get it working. The main courses would then be consumed by the fire in the stomach cauldron, and the digestif would settle everything afterwards and close it all down safely.   Cinnamon or rose water were blended with melted sugar to make sweets and partaken of at the end of a meal.  Candied ginger too and cardamom. We still have the tradition when we we eat After Eight mints, truffles, petits fours, and the like following formal meals, but mostly without remembering the original reason.

In the large Italian cities such as Milan, the equivalent of sweet shops existed by the end of the 14th century and 'Candi' (from Arabic 'Kand') could be bought by weight in small amounts, made from imported cane sugar melted and crystalised and sold in paper cones - see the illustration opposite (that brings back memories of my own childhood and the way sweets were bought in the local shop!). 

These days our love for sugar has run wild and some would say out of control.  In the Middle Ages, sugar was a drug, and I guess we're all addicts!

ELIZABETH CHADWICK
Elizabeth Chadwick's latest novel The Summer Queen came out in June 2013.

Great-grandparents, by Leslie Wilson

Eight people who I never knew, but they are crucial to me, and part of me; I carry bits of their bodies around with me. And there are other things I wouldn't know about; mannerisms, foibles - all part of the genetic heritage that was passed on to me through my ancestors.

I think ancestors must begin with great-grandparents, though perhaps not if you knew them. But all of these people died well before I was born; indeed, two of my great-grandmothers, I know, died before my mother was born.

The Bakers, my father's grandparents, are the ones I know least about, because my father never knew them. Great-Grandad Baker, I know from my aunt Mollie, was a coastguard at Gosport. The story she told me was that one day he came into the coastguard station and found his colleague hanging there, having committed suicide. The man had been an alcoholic, and my great-grandfather forthwith foreswore all alcohol. Whether he subsequently became a Methodist (my granddad Baker was) or whether he already was, or whether it was his son who joined that church, I do not know. Of Great-Grandma Baker, I know nothing at all.

My other paternal great-grandparents were Henry and Ellen Jacques. Here they are.


Ellen and Henry Jacques, date unknown

Henry Jacques was born in Liss, in Hampshire, in 1833.  Family tradition has it that he was of Huguenot descent. He began his working life as a porter, then became a maltster, which means that he treated barley with malt to brew beer. Later he became a signalman at Midhurst, Sussex, but three railway lines went through Midhurst, and I don't know which one he worked for. My father remembered him as a quiet, retiring man, and he died when Dad was still young, of dropsy - maybe heart failure? But his smile, and his stance on this photograph make me think of my father.

Ellen was twenty-five years younger, born as Ellen Norgate in the pretty village of East Meon in Hampshire in 1858.

street in East Meon

We visited East Meon the day after our daughter's wedding: curiously she chose to be married in Midhurst, in the Walled Garden, Cowdray, without any idea of the family connection with the place. When Ellen Jacques lived at 6 Station Road, Midhurst, Lady Cowdray used to graciously call on her - so maybe she was a tenant of the Cowdray Estate. Anyway, Ellen's mother, Ann Norgate, had a whole string of children, with nary a father listed for any of them. Whether this meant that the father had disappeared, or that they all had different fathers, or that they just didn't want to give the money to the parson, I have no idea. When my father was told this (as a result of my brother's family history research) he sat there gobsmacked, saying: 'But Grandma Jacques was always so respectable.) When she came to visit her daughter's family, she used to ask my father how much money he had in his money-box, and then double it, which was an incentive for him to save. Much later, when he was a young man and his father died (which he did when Dad was 17) my father cycled over to Midhurst from Bristol and stayed with his grandmother in her cottage. Ellen has passed on to me and to my brother her cheekbones, and also I think my eyebrows and eyes are like hers. There is also a look about her face that makes me think of my daughter Kathy, the one who was married in Midhurst. There she stands in her pre-World War One costume, decent black, with the little brooch at her neck. She lived to see that war, but not the Second World War, and was an old woman in the between-the-wars era we love so much to read about nowadays.

East Meon church

font, East Meon church

She and her husband were married in the impressive church at East Meon, and there, I guess, she was also baptised, in the wonderful font which was brought to England from Tournai, which is now in Belgium, in about 1130-40.

Here is the census entry for the family in Midhurst, in 1911. My great-aunt Nellie was then a 'Malta Lace Assistant' - she must have sold Maltese lace (fascinating that the shop sold enough for her to specialise); she later married a soldier, my father's Uncle Sam, who she reclaimed from 'a life of vice' though what that vice consisted of my father never managed to find out.

Helene, Maria, Erich, Gustav, Martin and Bernhard Roesel, Giersdorf im Riesengebirge, perhaps 1905?

So here are my Roesel great-grandparents. Gustav (who my mother said was a postman, but who appears on a census as a mason - but people in mountain areas often do several jobs) was born in 1866, eight years after Ellen Norgate, in Loewenberg in Silesia (now Lwówek Śląski, Poland). My mother remembers him as a forthright, rather crusty old man, who didn't like the Nazis. Maria Roesel was born in 1870, but where I do not know. I only know her birthdate because she appears on an application for a visa to transit Belgium on the way back from England to Germany, which my grandmother had to fill out in 1951. My mother kept it, probably because of the family data, and now I have it, though it is gradually separating into two halves. My great-grandfather moved at some stage to Giersdorf/Podgorzyn, where my grandfather was born. Maria died when my grandfather was quite young, of TB, but my mother was thought to resemble her. Luckily she didn't inherit the protruberant ears, which she passed on, as the photo shows, to Martin and my grandfather Bernhard. I do remember Opa's sticky-out ears. My mother didn't have the beetling brows either, but Maria may have looked a lot prettier when she wasn't having to sit still for ages for a photographer, with a wriggling baby on her lap. If my mother got her straight nose from Maria, that is where mine comes from, too. When we went to Podgorzyn (once Giersdorf) in 2010, I left some sweet rocket flowers for her in the flattened graveyard of the one-time Protestant church, where, presumably, her bones are laid. We also ate in the inn in Podgorzyn (sorry, there should be an accent on the second o, and I can't put it in here) beneath the nest of a stork whose ancestors may well have nested there when my great-grandparents were alive.

The land they lived in is now Poland, rather than Germany, and the people who came there were expelled from their own homes in the Polish Ukraine. Maria never experienced that upheaval, but Gustav was deported from Giersdorf after the Second World War, and my grandfather tried hard to persuade him to come to the Rhineland to join him. But he refused to come, because he didn't want to believe he wouldn't ever see his beloved mountains again, and he died in a displaced persons' camp in the Russian Zone. Just one of many such stories, as whole peoples were moved about after the war. It does make me sad.

landscape in Riesengebirge/Karkonosce

His life, however, was like something from Heidi. He was a mountain man; he bred Saint Bernard dogs, one of which was my mother's especial friend when she was small. It was quite normal in winter for the snow to engulf the ground floor of his house; my mother remembered going to visit him and exiting her bedroom window on skis. He kept goats (I have a photograph of my mother in a basket with a kid) and milked them - or maybe Maria did that. He'd have chopped huge woodpiles for the winter, as you can still see in Alpine villages, and she - or his second wife - would have put up fruit and vegetables in jars. When the Poles arrived after their horrific journey from the Ukraine, they were delighted to find all the preserves, and the houses so tidy and well-appointed. Though I gather, from what I was told when we went to Silesia, that it was hard for them to settle down; they always thought the Germans would come back, just like my great-grandfather. I think now their descendants feel more at home, and that is a good thing.

Here, from that same transit visa application, are the names and birthdates of the Kolodzej great-grandparents. Kolodzej is a common Polish name, incidentally, and means Wheelwright. Franziska, I see, was older than my great-grandfather Simon, and both were older than my mother's paternal grandparents. Franziska also died of TB, as did two of her daughters, my great-aunts.My grandmother was seven when she lost her mother. Simon and Franziska were both born in Cosel, now Koźle, near Opole in Upper Silesia and they were Catholics. I know nothing of Franziska beyond the fact of her death, but my mother remembered Simon as a gloomily religious man, pro-Nazi, antisemitic, and scary. He went to live in Zabrze, where my mother was born, and where he managed an iron-works. I think he had money, which he put into property because he was convinced that was safer than investing on the stock market. He was wrong, though his descendants put in an application, post-war, for restitution of at least one of the dwelling-houses he rented out. I guess they got it. I have the form, again, which has more family information on it. I don't know when Simon Kolodzej died, but I think it was before the end of the war. He remarried, after Franziska's death. His second wife had been sent as his housekeeper from a convent; she was no aristocrat, however, as in The Sound of Music, but a foundling who had been abandoned in a basket at birth, and it was considered a scandal that such a well-off man should marry someone with such a shady past. I have never found any record of her children, though, nor did my mother talk about them, so I guess the marriage was childless.

They lived in a world quite different from the one that we live in, and I sometimes wonder what any of them would have thought, if they had known how their genetic material would travel and mix up; it is a long way from Hampshire to Silesia. And in the next generation there came in Northern Irish protestant stock, from my husband David, and now my three grandsons descend on their father's side from Scots and East End Jews. One of my nieces has a British husband of Asian ethnicity. But that - as I said two months ago on this blog - is what being British is all about!

All colour photos by David Wilson.