A SURFEIT OF LAMPREYS AND OTHER MISFORTUNES: The Death of Henry I

King Henry I is not that often touched upon in fiction and one of the lesser studied kings of England in schools today. He has also been the subject of a couple of excellent academic biographies by the late Warren Hollister and historian Judith Green. Occasionally he turns up a secondary source character in novels, mine among them. I enjoyed his portrayal in Valerie Anand's novel King of the Wood which was about his brother William Rufus. Juliet Dymoke used him as her protagonist in her excellent novel Henry of the High Rock, but he still receives rather limited exposure.

 What many people of a certain age know of Henry I from their school days is that this youngest son of William the Conqueror, died of 'a surfeit of lampreys' - I suspect that this was a phrase known, but not understood by many students.  Actually, even when it is understood, there is more to this than meets the eye.

Henry I was born either in 1068 or 1069 and died in December 1135, which puts him at about 66  at his demise - a good age for the 12th century and not bad at all for a king with all the stresses and strains that being an active and domineering head of state entailed. His father was 59; his celebrated grandson Henry II only made it to 56.  Of his great grandsons by Henry who became kings, Henry the Young king died of dysentry at 28, Richard the Lionheart from gangrene at 38, and King John from (depending who you listen to) 'a surfeit of peaches and cider' a couple of months shy of his 50th birthday.

Henry I, described by contemporary chronicler  Henry of Huntingdon as 'great in wisdom, profound in counsel, famous for his far-sightedness, outstanding in arms, distinguished for his deeds, remarkable for his wealth', was still to all intents and purposes hale and hearty when he arrived at the forest of Lyons in Normandy in late November to undertake a spot of hunting with the court. He had been hoping to cross to England, but political difficulties on the Norman side of the border meant that he was staying longer than intended.  During the course of his hunting sojourn, one of the courses on which he dined at table were the dreaded lampreys.

Lampreys are an eel-like fish lacking a jaw. There are about thirty species in the world, some parasitic, some not.  The mouth has a circular suction pad with teeth in the adults. As a food in the medieval period they were seen as edible - but dangerous and this is where we come to more than meets the eye.  The Medieval way of thinking about diet was to afford each item a humour and a temperature and people were advised to eat foods that balanced their own humours. The four humours were sanguine, which was warm and moist, yellow bile - warm and dry,  phlegm - cold and moist, and melancholic - cold and dry.

If everything was in balance, you should have an equal mix of all these and your diet should reflect this.  All foods had their own  value in the humour table too.  Elderly people were seen as having cold humours and as such needed to eat foods with warming properties.  Red wine was a good one since it was warm and dry (I know wine is wet, but trust me on this one!). Lampreys, on a scale of 1-10 scored a 10 for being cold and moist and one of the most chilling foodstuffs in existence, guaranteed to put out anyone's fire.  To an elderly person, already cold to begin with, they could be deadly.  The best way to render them less of a threat was to kill them in red wine and then cook them in the same liquor in the hopes that it would neutralise their properties.  Everyone knew this.  A chronicler wouldn't have had to spell out the details.
Once you know this, reading Henry I's death scene from the chronicler Roger of Wendover takes on a whole new light.

Henry...stopped at St. Denys in the wood of Lions to eat some lampreys, a fish he was very fond of, though they always disagreed with him, and the physicians had often cautioned him against eating them, (presumably because the state of his own dominant humour and that of the lamprey would tilt the balance dangerously) but he would not listen to their advice.  This food mortally chilled the old man's blood and caused a sudden and violent illness against which nature struggled and brought on an acute fever (trying to warm the body up)  in an effort to resist the worst effects of the disease.'  

So, did he really die of a surfeit of lampreys, or did the fish get the blame because it was off the scale on the  table of humours and viewed as unsuitable for the elderly to consume?  Who knows?  Of course it might just be a case of bad fish causing food poisoning, but the first port of call in the eyes of medieval physicians would be to look at its properties and what it might to an elderly man.
Peaches and cider were also viewed as dodgy items to eat in terms of the humours. King John was dicing with death the moment he sat down to dinner. One has to wonder where the peaches came from in October though...

Henry, having breathed his last and having left the inheritance situation in such a perilous state that there followed more than 15 years of civil war, had a more immediate post mortem nasty to visit on those close to him. This is interesting with reference to Medieval burial customs - something I hope to cover in another blog at some point.  In the days before refrigeration and even in winter  chronicler Roger of Wendover goes on to relate that:
'The corpse of the King lay a long time above ground at Rouen, where his entrails, brains and eyes are buried; the rest of his body cut with knives and seasoned with salt to destroy the offensive smell, which was great, and annoyed all who came near it, was wrapped in a bull's skin; and the physician who was engaged for a large sum of money to open his head with a hatchet, and extract the brain after it was already too much corrupted, notwithstanding that the head was wrapped up in several napkins, was poisoned by the noisesome smell, and thus the money which he received was fatal to him; he was the last of King Henry's victims, for he had killed many before.  The royal body was conveyed from thence to Caen, where it was placed in the church before the tomb of his father, who also reposes there.  Immediately a bloody and frightful liquor began to ooze through the bull's skin , which the attendants caught in basins, to the great horror of the beholders.  At length the king's corpse was brought to England, and buried with royal pomp on his birthday, at Reading in the church which he himself had founded.  The archbishops, bishops, and nobles  of the Kingdom were present at the ceremony.'

So eventually, following an unpleasant demise and some fraught and dangerous times for those left to prepare his mortal remains for burial, Henry I, received a fitting funeral and was laid to rest with all due ceremony.  I wonder if they served lampreys at the funeral feast!

Elizabeth Chadwick

IT WAS OFTEN QUITE DIFFICULT TO GET CREAM by Leslie Wilson

I have been reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's memoir 'Slipstream' and read about an American who told her, in 1946, that 'we had our small privations, too, you know. It was often quite difficult to get cream.'

Britain queues for food: photo, Imperial War Museum

I can imagine her returning to Britain and telling her friends about this, and their slightly indignant laughter, as they contemplated what they saw as their miserly rations.
Meanwhile my mother was living on the outskirts of Cologne on boiled turnips, bread bulked out with sawdust, and any nettles she could scavenge; once, on a railway journey to try and find out what had become of my grandfather, who had been arrested by the Allies and had disappeared without trace, she saw a really fat man and wondered how he could be so fat on the rations. She fantasized about cutting slices off him and frying them. When my father's mother, who was living in Canada, sent her and my grandmother a gift parcel, they were thrilled to have the egg-powder the British hated so much, dried milk, and flour, to make into pancakes and fry, using cod-liver-oil from the capsules Grandma-in-Canada had sent.
When I was a child, and English people complained about the privations of the war, she snorted to herself. When she came to England to marry my father, the rations that the British found so penitential were so much too rich for her that she kept being sick in shop doorways. In spite of having a naturally round face, one can see from this photograph that she was in very poor physical shape on her wedding day.

Some people have said in my hearing that the Germans deserved to starve, given what they had inflicted on so many other people. However, for one thing, those who committed the crimes were not always those who suffered for them (like the children who died like flies) and for another, this was the state of not just Germans, but people all over Europe in the aftermath of the war. To be fair, many people in Britain were well aware of their state of relative privilege.
I cannot help echoing my mother's snort when I read of British people 'suffering' from lack of sugar and sweets in and after wartime (for I really think it is obscene to call that suffering when people in concentration camps were being killed by starvation). However,I am not writing this in order to lambast British complaints of hardship - though reading yesterday's post on this blog, they seem to have become so inventive and resourceful, they should have been grateful, maybe? What I'm interested in here is the uneven texture of hardship during the war, even within nations.
For example, I have written, in my novels for teenagers, about the meagre rations of the German population at the end of the war, basing it on historical evidence and first-person accounts. However, it was well known that if you were a 'hohes Tier' (high-up, literally, 'higher animal', you could get anything you wanted, right up to the end, and these things were available on the black market. The train stuffed full of goodies in Last Train from Kummersdorf is similarly based on actual historical fact, and anyone who reads an account of the last days of the shower of criminals in the Berlin bunker can see that they were fed fat.
My mother told me that right up to the end of the war, they didn't go short in Austria, and even afterwards they still had enough to eat, though my father helped, by not only sharing his Army rations with them, but also by deploying his country skills, snaring rabbits and hares and fishing the streams around Graz.
It wasn't until she and my grandmother were deported back to Germany that they really began to starve. I haven't done any research into Austria during and immediately after the war, so was it that my grandmother was quite good at the black market, or that Austria managed to get a better food supply than other nations, or just that the starvation of the time in Germany was so dreadful that relative scarcity, looking back, came to look like a good supply of food? I don't think so, because this photograph, taken by my father in Graz in 1945, shows my mother looking very well fed - I think, however, the double chin is only due to her leaning her head back when the photo was taken, because she was always slim.

Farmers, of course, did OK, and another story my mother told me was about the farmers boasting that they would soon be able to lay down Persian carpets in the cowsheds, as starving town-dwellers bartered their valuables for milk, and so on.
But farmers generally do OK. My father-in-law, apparently, who was an agricultural engineer, used to be part-paid by the farmers for his work with butter, eggs, and so on, and thus never had much difficulty with rations. It helped that he married a farmer's daughter in 1945.
My great-aunt Mia and her husband August, had a textile factory (she ran it and he did as she told him, though it was technically his) and so my mother never went short of nice clothes, at a time when a German creative writing student of mine had to wear dresses made from flour sacks and tie her hair up with string. When my father, by contrast, made a blunder the first time he asked my mother out, by inviting her to the opera, and it turned out to be the ballet, she was shamed by being drastically over-dressed, in a silk dress with her hair tied up with a broad velvet ribbon. Anyone who's read Saving Rafael will recognise the source of Uncle Hartmut's textile factory, and his wife's supply of luxury fabrics. Connections were what mattered - it is always a mistake to assume that what one set of people experienced was typical of the entire population in wartime.
(Aspiring historical novelists, please take note! And do re-read Eleanor Updale's excellent post on this blog about the hazards of assuming that any given period would only have the clothes and furniture produced in that period!)
Unfortunately, I haven't got a photo of my mother's opera-going costume, but it's a pretty nice dress my mother is wearing in these pictures, again taken when my parents were courting in Austria. (The first one is my favourite photograph of them together, by the way) The quality of the print speaks for itself, and it looks like silk. I'm sure it came from Aunt Mia, who once gave my mother a finely-pleated silk skirt that you could crumple up as much as you liked, but it would still come out nice. And see the lovely muff and the velvet-collared coat in the previous photograph.

I did read a novel for teenagers recently that suggested that there was quite severe rationing in the States during the war, something similar to what Britain had, and I found it very hard to believe. I had read so many accounts, in fact and fiction written at the time, of American food parcels, or people travelling to the States during the war, and being staggered at the food.

But since we do have followers for this blog in the States, I wonder if any of them can shed some light on this? Or has the author of the teen novel (maybe it's as well that I can't remember the title) just got it wrong about the rationing? I would love to know.

The Thames Valley History Festival by Kate Lord Brown

They say absence makes the heart grow fonder, and it's certainly true that the heart of this expat quickens the moment the plane banks over the coast of Britain. I'm just back from a flying visit to the UK for the Thames Valley History Festival, and it was so good to be home. After months of hazy desert light and dust filled skies, the sheer beauty of England had a hyper-real quality, (the golden autumn light, turning leaves, green fields). Even 4am jetlag on the morning of my event had its rewards - the sunrise over Windsor Castle was breathtaking. 

The festival was a huge success selling over 1,000 tickets across 23 events with 33 authors/historians in 14 venues of historic interest in 17 days. Many HWA authors took part, and the subjects ranged from 'The English and the Exotic' to the War of the Roses and the story of Christian the Lion, and ten of the events were sell-outs. I'm still 'new' this year to events and festivals, and it was great to see the enthusiasm of the TVHF team, and to meet so many readers (including friends known only through Facebook who came along to support the event). If you have the chance to go or take part next year, it's a wonderful festival, beautifully organised and with a great energy to it.

Tim Lynch and KLB

Credit: Becky Young

The historian Tim Lynch and I were discussing 'WW2: Home Front to War'. Tim talked engagingly about the brave young lads of the labour divisions, who were, as he described chillingly, 'speed bumps' to the invading German forces in Europe. Untrained, and woefully under-armed, they were lambs to the slaughter. It's not often I've been at gunpoint in Eton, but Tim really brought home their bravery when he slotted a bayonet onto his WW2 rifle and described how the boys fired the last of their ammo then staged a final charge against the heavily armoured German troops. (In a wonderful bit of serendipity, I flicked on the TV on the flight home, to watch 'Who Do You Think You Are' with Patrick Stewart. It looked into the history of his soldier father, and guess who the expert was - Tim. If you're interested in learning more about this fascinating bit of forgotten history, I recommend searching for the programme on iplayer).

Some of Tim's display.

Credit: Becky Young

The lovely TVHF team got into the swing of the vintage 

coffee morning that accompanied the talk

Credit: Becky Young

Credit: Becky Young 

One of the things we talked about during the section on the Home Front was the wartime initiative for recycling which seems incredibly modern. During WW2 saucepans were sacrificed for Spitfires, and everything from waste paper to bones were saved. 

Self-sufficiency was encouraged - people 'dug for victory', and farmed on a small scale. (It might have been more accurate if the poster below said 'two rabbits' ...).

One of the best things about events is how people share their remarkable stories with you. A lady came up and told me she remembered this image from the War, and that someone had once posted her family a rabbit (dead), unwrapped, but with a luggage tag addressed to them around it's neck.

There's a line in Mrs Miniver: 'This is not only a war of soldiers in uniform. It is a war of the people'. The war on the Home Front wasn't all bombs and battles, but a day by day quest to survive, to resourcefully hold together the home, and step into the roles of absent men. The Mass Observation diaries of women like Nella Last, and the wonderfully detailed diary of Betty Armitage are priceless glimpses into how people coped. 

These were all initiatives that my grandmothers took. They planted veg and fruit, kept animals including a succession of pigs - Esmeralda I, II, III and IV (my mother remembers weeping for all of them, except Esmeralda III who was a biter that nobody liked). They bottled and preserved, made do and mended. And these initiatives worked - by 1944 households were using three quarters of the fuel they had used in 1938. Britain has never been greener.

Perhaps there's a natural instinct, or wish, to believe that everything improves over time, that the trajectory of history is always upwards. One of my art history professors believed it was more like a pendulum, that eras and civilisations reach a peak, before falling back. Santayana's famous quote: 'those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it' comes to mind. With Remembrance Day just passed, it was heartening to see so many children in the audience in Eton - I think the ages ranged from 8 to 80. Remembering both how people fought on the Front and coped day to day on the Home Front is vital. With all our economic problems, (let alone political unrest and calls for revolution), we could learn a lot about self-sufficiency and managing our own home fronts by looking at how our grandmothers and mothers coped during WW2. 

So what have you learnt about your historical era that we have forgotten as a society? Have you come across any surprising ways of living that we could do with remembering now?

The Ghost Hunting Mobs of Victorian London by Imogen Robertson

Judging by the numerous sirens that go by my house every day, Bermondsey still keeps the Metropolitan Police pretty busy, but I doubt they spend as much time as they once did dealing with ghosts or with the crowds that went looking for them. Learning of the ghost hunting flash-mobs has been one of the many joys of The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts by Owen Davies. It’s a scholarly work, brilliantly researched and thoroughly footnoted but it also has a lively style, an original take on the subject matter and a real sense of compassion and understanding of how we see and understand ghosts. It’s great and covers belief systems from medieval to modern times and across the country. 

But back to the mobs. Grange Road in Bermondsey is not my first choice place to hang out of an evening, but in July 1830 people walked miles to spend the whole night just standing outside a house there. A rumour had spread that the ghost of a reclusive clergyman who had recently died had been spotted in his old house, still wearing his night-cap and smoking his pipe, as he had in life. Pretty soon the road was blocked with crowds of people willing to wait all night to get a glimpse. It was also said that one person who had dared enter the house had seen him vanish up the chimney. A whole police division were summoned to deal with a crowd of two thousand people, completely blocking the road and disturbing the sleep of the residents in a way that the ghost himself never had. An inspector made a search and found no ghosts, nor any sign of anyone pretending to be one. A guard was mounted to keep the crowd from gathering in future. (The Times July 8 1830)

In 1865 the trouble was outside St George’s church in Borough, with hundreds of people staying out from nine in the evening until three or four the following morning. A Sergeant Chenery arrested a costermonger called Henry Stanley for causing a disturbance. He’d been held for shouting ‘Here’s the ghost’, and refusing to stop doing so when asked. He claimed he was just one of the curious and was set free. I can’t help sympathising with the Sergeant. The crowds were so great they again had to draft in extra officers to keep the road clear. What the story of the ghost was, or even if there was one at all, we do not know. (The Times May 27 1865)

Then in 1868 hundreds gathered outside Bermondsey church yard to see a ghost that had been reported there. Inspector Mawson thought the cause of the trouble was that a drowning victim had been brought to the dead-house next to the church until an inquest could be held. For some of the local boys this was enough to start a story of a ghost and then the crowds gathered. A policeman got his helmet knocked off by an enthusiastic sensation seeker who was fined 2s.  (The Times August 1 1868) Now, of course, all we sensation seekers can stay in the warm and watch re-runs of Most Haunted. 

I understand the curiosity of the crowds and I love reading ghost stories, but I have never gone on any kind of ghost hunting expedition myself. It’s not because I think the whole thing ‘ridiculous’ as the Southwark magistrate who imposed that fine did though. I am sure that in the shared excitement of the crowd, looking for something above and beyond the day to day, a lot of those people did see ghosts. I am also fairly sure if I went on a ghost hunt I’d see one too. 

Let me be clear. I don’t believe in ghosts or magic or the supernatural in any form. It’s all just natural - though, now you mention it, while I was looking up these stories a Jehovah’s Witness turned up and handed me a leaflet called ‘do the dead return?’ which was a bit creepy - but anyway, just because I don’t believe in ghosts doesn’t mean they don’t scare the hell out of me. I’m professionally imaginative and rather good at thinking myself into all sort of odd states, including hearing voices which seem to come from somewhere other than myself. And I don’t want to see a ghost. I don’t think it would be any less terrifying just because I didn’t believe in it. My irrational mind would have put together the shadows and night noises, dragged in every ghost story I’ve ever heard and confronted me with something hellish and heart attack worthy while my rational mind was still going ‘Huh…?’ Our minds can be frightening places and I think it best I only encourage mine under controlled circumstances. Dark churchyards, ruins, cross-roads in the countryside and deserted manor houses are not controlled circumstances.

Though the imaginations of ghost mobs sometimes got a little help. In 1874 in Westminster crowds were also blocking the road outside a churchyard to see a ghost. A police constable hid in the churchyard and before long he had arrested the culprit - a labourer called Frederick Grimmond whom the constable saw climb over the fence and put a sheet over his head. It didn’t sound like it was a tough arrest. Grimmond made a dramatic dash across the church yard but fell over a grave and was taken before he could get up again. (The Times July 6 1874)

www.imogenrobertson.com

'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.