After the Black Death by Carolyn Hughes

“It is June 1349. In the Hampshire village of Meonbridge, the worst plague in England’s history has wiped out half its population…”

So goes the blurb for my historical novel Fortune’s Wheel.

“Meonbridge” is broadly somewhere in the upper reaches of the valley of Hampshire’s River Meon. The Meon is not a grand river, only twenty-one miles in length, and for much of that length is a somewhat shallow chalk stream – in summer months, at any rate. The river rises in the South Downs, near the village of East Meon, and winds and meanders through the other villages of the Meon Valley, until it rushes, broader and deeper, out into the sea, the Solent, to the south of Titchfield.

Danse macabre by Michael Wolgemut, 1493

The plague referred to in the novel’s blurb is what we call the Black Death, the plague that struck England in 1348-50. At the time they referred to it as the Great Death, the mortality or the pestilence. Having spread across the world from Asia and throughout Europe, it arrived in England in June 1348, or thereabouts. Famously, it was once thought to have entered the country at Melcombe in Dorset, although some believe it might have come in closer to Southampton, or Bristol, but it’s also possible that it arrived in several places at about the same time. The disease lasted a matter of months in any one location, although overall, as it spread relentlessly across the country, it persisted for the best part of two years.

In Hampshire, it was in October 1348 that the effects of the plague began to be seen. We know that partly because William Edyngdon, the Bishop of Winchester, issued a letter to the clergy in his diocese…¹

“We report with anguish the serious news which has come to our ears: that this cruel plague has now begun a savage attack on the coastal areas of England. We are struck by terrors lest (may God avert it!) this brutal disease should rage in any part of our city or diocese.”

Sadly, the bishop’s prayers were not answered, for the diocese of Winchester suffered gravely, with 48.8% of its clergy dying, the highest proportion for any diocese in England where figures were available.²

Extract from a Map of Hampshire, by Robert Morden, 1695,
centred on the Meon Valley.
Source: Portsmouth University, http://www.geog.port.ac.uk

In southern Hampshire as a whole, including the Meon Valley, roughly half of the populations of the towns and villages lost their lives. 

Titchfield is at the sea end of the Meon Valley. There, in the year January 1349 to January 1350, 423 tenant deaths were recorded on the manor,  compared to 56 in the previous year. In all, Titchfield might have lost perhaps as much as 80% of its population. In Corhampton, closer to the part of the Meon Valley where I think that “Meonbridge” is located, 55% of people died. In Bishops Waltham, a market town some five miles south west of Corhampton, it was more like 65%. In Funtley, further down the Meon Valley towards Titchfield, the numbers were not large (21 deaths) but it represented a huge percentage of the tenant population, and in Crofton, closer still to Titchfield, there appear to have been perhaps 92.5% mortality among tenants in the 1349-50 plague year.  

But losses were not evenly distributed. Although the places I have mentioned had relatively high losses, the plague apparently skirted some places altogether, while a few communities died out completely for a while. An example of the latter is Quob, a tiny hamlet near Funtley, where a manorial court statement in the plague year indicated that no-one survived in that community. However, as Tom Beaumont James says, in The Black Death in Hampshire, whilst there is a popular belief that many communities in England died out as a result of the Black Death, this is probably not true, but rather that the high mortality caused by the plague started a decline that was completed as much as a century or two later. Quob was tiny, perhaps just a few families, so it was undoubtedly easy enough for the plague to kill them all, but the little community did recover some years later. Whether or not a community recovered was undoubtedly affected by factors other than the Black Death, including the later outbreaks of plague, and perhaps the increasing mobility of working people, driving some away from the countryside and into towns.

It’s not unreasonable to extrapolate from what is recorded for real Hampshire to what might have happened in fictional Meonbridge. There, I have the plague arriving in December and being more or less over in early summer, which accords reasonably well with the evidence. The high levels of mortality among clergy in the Winchester diocese show that the plague was at its worst there during the first half of 1349. Evidence of the devastation in this part of Hampshire comes also from the records of the Bishop of Winchester’s manors, where much higher than normal deaths among tenants meant that many holdings became vacant and large tracts of agricultural land were therefore left uncultivated.

But, whatever the numbers, it is surely very hard to imagine how shattering the plague’s arrival must have been. The disease was of course quite terrible enough in itself, but it followed in the wake of two other appalling disasters: overpopulation and severe poverty in the first decade of the century, ruinous weather, disastrous harvests and devastating famines in the second.

Probably not nearly as cute as he looks!

We know now that this terrifying disease was caused by a bacterium, Yersinia pestis, carried by a flea that lives on the black rat, although exactly how it was transmitted to people remains a matter of some debate.

The particular hideousness of the disease was described by many contemporary chroniclers. One, Gabriele de’ Mussis, a lawyer from Piacenza in Italy, in his Historia de Morbo, wrote thus³:

“First, out of the blue, a kind of chilly stiffness…a tingling sensation, as if they were being pricked by the points of arrows. [Then]…a fearsome attack which took the form of an extremely hard, solid boil [typically in the armpit or groin]. As it grew more solid, its burning heat caused the patients to fall into an acute and putrid fever, with severe headaches….In some cases it gave rise to an intolerable stench. In others it brought the vomiting of blood…Some died on the very day the illness took possession of them…the majority between the third and fifth day….Those who fell into a coma, or suffered a swelling or the stink of corruption, very rarely escaped.”

It sounds decidedly grim. The “boils” of course were the black pustules that we call “buboes”, giving the term bubonic plague, though not all victims suffered from this form of the disease. Some caught the pneumonic variety, which attacked the lungs, causing pain and an inability to breathe, then coughing up of blood and sputum. Apparently this form of the disease was invariably fatal, and quickly so, whereas it wasn’t unknown for bubonic plague victims to recover.

It seems that they may have been fortunate
enough to find a priest to shrive them…
Illustration of the Black Death from the Toggenburg Bible (1411)

But whichever form of the disease friends and family members suffered, it must have been almost beyond horrifying to witness. And how fearful people must have been when they saw how randomly the plague seem to find its victims – rich and poor, old and young, reprobate and innocent, any and all were taken. Moreover, the very scale of affliction in a community often meant that there was no priest available to give the last rites to a dying victim – the priest being either simply too occupied with others, already dead himself, or perhaps he’d even abandoned his flock to try and save himself – bringing the added terror that your loved one might be about to die in sin, unconfessed, unshriven.

The particular terror of the plague undoubtedly tested relationships and familial bonds to the utmost. With a lack of understanding of how the disease was spread, and the terrifying speed with which it invariably dispatched its victims, some people did abandon loved ones in an attempt to escape their fate. Indeed, when some thought that the disease could be communicated through the gaze or breath or clothes of victims, it is perhaps unsurprising that many were left to die, not only in extreme agony and terror, but entirely alone. However, not everyone abandoned their loved ones to their fate – some stayed to care for them, and it is perhaps one of the mysteries of the disease that, given its apparent virulence, not everyone in a household was necessarily afflicted.

And how much more frightening was it to be told that this disease – like other natural (and perhaps man-made) disasters – was God’s punishment for man’s sin, for your sin? This was presumably what priests would have taught their congregations. In September 1348, at the original behest of the king, Edward III, a letter was sent from the office of the Archbishop of Canterbury to all the bishops in the southern counties, ordering them to arrange urgent prayers to be offered up against the plague. It is clear from the letter that the plague was seen as a punishment for sin.4

“Terrible is God towards the sons of men… Those whom he loves he censures and chastises;…he punishes their shameful deeds in various ways… He…allows plagues, miserable famines, conflicts, wars and other forms of suffering to arise and uses them to terrify and torment men and so drive out their sins.”

Yet people might well have wondered which of their sins could be so great that God would want to punish them so severely.

But it is what happened after the Black Death had moved on that is the underlying premise of Fortune’s Wheel. I didn’t want to write a novel about the Black Death. Rather, I was interested in what happened after it had passed on, leaving communities with fewer neighbours, empty houses, unfarmed land. How on earth did people cope with such calamity? I suppose that medieval society was more hardened to natural and human disasters than many of us are today, and it seems that people in fact rebuilt their lives quite quickly.

Social change had already begun in rural manorial communities, with the feudal system of lords and peasants starting to break down. But the huge demographic shift that resulted from the simultaneous deaths of so many people during the plague accelerated that change. It is an interesting period of social history.

For those who survived, opportunities presented themselves for demanding higher wages and taking on untenanted land, which generally brought benefits to ordinary people and caused problems for the wealthier landowners. The old rules about tenants not being allowed to leave their manor were largely swept away, giving peasants more freedom to choose where to work and for what price. Women too had improved opportunities, which lasted for perhaps the next 150 years or so. On the whole, conditions improved for many ordinary English men and women: with higher wages, and fewer mouths to feed, they ate better, and could afford better homes.

In 1351, the government, worried that the old way of life was being overturned, brought in the Statute of Labourers, which attempted to curb the demands of peasants for higher wages, attacking both the peasants themselves and those employers (manor lords) who were willing to meet their demands. But it didn’t really work. Wages did rise, and some who’d been previously landless were able to become tenant farmers but paying money rent for their land rather than giving feudal service. Indeed, the feudal system eventually broke down completely, giving peasant populations a greater degree of freedom to manage their own lives.

Nonetheless, imagine the heartache that people must have felt, the turmoil they must have faced, in society as a whole, and also at a personal level. Those of us who, today, live in villages or small town communities may know, or at least be acquainted with, a great many of our neighbours. But we in the twenty-first century generally live quite dispersed lives, having our homes in these communities, but probably working elsewhere. But in former centuries, when communities worked together too, the death of half of your neighbours must have been unimaginably devastating.

Death surely never looked so jolly!

Women lost husbands, men lost wives, and both lost children. Young people were orphaned and had to learn to fend for themselves. Workers realised they were now a scarce resource and had some bargaining power, and said so, while their lords and masters tried hard to cling on to the status quo and keep the workers in their place. As the peasants rebelled against the old ways, priests railed against the upsetting of God’s pre-ordained social order, and preyed upon people’s fears of further divine retribution for their sinful lives.

Yet, amidst all this turmoil and undoubted continuing fear, normal life simply had to continue: fields had to be ploughed and sown, crops harvested, meals made, animals nurtured. People would still fall in and out of love. Babies would still be born and children cherished. The wheel of fortune forever turns…

1. Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, p.115 
2. I owe my information about the 1348-50 plague in Hampshire to the excellent pamphlet The Black Death in Hampshire by Tom Beaumont James (Hampshire Papers, No.18, , Hampshire County Council, 1999).
3. Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, pp.24-5.
4. Referred to in The Black Death, edited by Rosemary Horrox, Manchester University Press, 1994, p.113.

Bath's Secret Leper Hospital by Katherine Webb

I've recently been finding out as much as I can about the Holloway and Beechen Cliff areas of Southern Bath, to use as a setting in my next novel. It's a fascinating part of the city, though much altered by two catastrophes in its recent history. Firstly the Baedeker raids of the Second World War, which I wrote about in a previous blog post. Holloway and other areas in the south of Bath were badly damaged - many houses sat in ruins for decades after the war, and were never rebuilt. And then, in the mid 1960s, came the aggressive redevelopment that has become known as the 'Sack of Bath'. By this time, many of the C17th, C18th and C19th cottages in the area, which had long housed poorer members of Bath's society - small artisans and the working classes - had fallen into disrepair and been categorised as slum dwellings. They were torn down, wholesale, to make way for road improvements and a raft of 'modern' (ugly), cheaply built houses and flats.

The demolition of Victorian artisan housing at the foot of Beechen Cliff in 1966

The redevelopment was so brutal - and deemed by many as so unnecessary - that it actually led to new, tighter development laws. There are a great many photographs of what was lost, and what was built in its place, available to view (but sadly not to reproduce here) on the bathintime.co.uk website - just search for Holloway. So, not much remains of the district as it would have looked at the time I am setting my book - in 1919, and in 1942 in the aftermath of the bombing raids. But there are still little bits of architectural magic here and there, and one that has particularly caught my eye is Number 90, Holloway; aka Magdalen Cottage; aka the old leper hospital.

S & N Buck's 1734 drawing looking west over Bath. Beechen Cliff is the high wooded hill on the left; Holloway the steeply descending housing going towards the bridge

Holloway, as it turns out, is a truly ancient bit of road. It was originally built by the Romans as part of the Fosse Way that linked Lincoln to Exeter via Bath, but it's likely that they built along an existing, far older trackway. There's some dispute as to whether the name 'Holloway', which is found all over the UK, means 'holy way', ie leading to a holy site of some kind; or merely 'hollow way' as in a sunken road. Both definitions fit for Bath's Holloway, since not only did it lead to the Roman shrine to the goddess Sulis, and later to a Christian abbey and city associated with St Dunstan, popular with medieval pilgrims, but it is also cut into the steep slope of the hill.

An early C19th map of Bath, showing Holloway curving around Beechen Cliff towards the city

At the bottom end of Holloway, about five hundred metres beyond the remnants of the medieval city walls, sits Magdalen Chapel; and a few metres further down the hill sits No. 90 Holloway: a small, plain Georgian cottage bearing a tantalising stone stating: 'This hospital was rebuilt in 1761 AD.' The cottage's origins, however, like the chapel's, are medieval. Sitting a safe distance outside the city walls, this was Bath's first leper hospital. Mercifully, given that it was in a poor state of repair by the 1960s, it was saved from demolition by belonging (and still belonging) to the St John's Hospital Foundation, who still do excellent work in Bath providing housing and resources for vulnerable people.

The east end of Magdalen Chapel on the left; the small, detached cottage further down the hill is No. 90

In the 1170s, a monk suffering from leprosy travelled from Reading to Bath in search of a cure - Bath's thermal spring waters had been reputed to have healing powers since Roman times. It is likely that this monk, thought to have been named Elias, would have stayed at Magdalen Cottage. The chapel and cottage had been gifted to Bishop John of Tours by one Walter Hussey, upon the foundation of Bishop John's cathedral priory in Bath in 1100. Bishop John was also a physician, and it seems likely that it was he who first decided to use the cottage as a hospital for lepers. Beechen Cliff has many natural springs, so the cottage would have had its own supply of clean drinking water.

The name 'hospital' here is possibly misleading. There was no cure for leprosy. Upon admission to a Lazar House, as they were known, sufferers had to make a will and cut all ties with the world. It was a form of living death, so 'hospital' is meant more in the sense of 'hospitality' -  a place to stay - than as we now interpret the word, as a place of treatment and healing. St Mary Magdalen Hospital gets a mention in the 1212 will of the Bishop of Lincoln, and the 'Master and Brethren' were then granted royal protection in 1256. As you can see in the photograph below, the cottage is tiny. Behind it there is a small yard, and then the land drops away steeply again, towards the river. It is unlikely that, when rebuilt in the C15th and then again in 1761, it was built any smaller than the original footprint. So, even sleeping several to a room, it could not have housed many unfortunate residents at a time, and in very cramped conditions. And, of course, no amount of bathing in Bath's waters would have effected a cure for the disease.

The old leper hospital. I'm no architectural historian, but it looks to me as though parts of the older structure are visible at the feet of the rebuilt C18th walls

By the late medieval period, leprosy had become a far rarer condition in England. However, such was the reputation of Bath's waters, there are records of lepers still visiting to bathe far later than this - into the C16th. The fortunes of the hospital rose and fell over the years. By 1486 it had fallen into a desperate state, and housed only two or three impoverished people. It was restored by Prior John Cantlow in 1491, after being described by Pope Innocent VIII as 'a ruinous hospital'; declined again and was restored, again, thanks to a bequest, in 1560. However, soon after this, in the 1570s, a new hospital for lepers was built inside the city walls, near the baths, with its own separate bathing pool, and it is likely that Magdalen Hospital began another period of decline. By the time it was rebuilt in 1761, it was being used as a refuge for the mentally handicapped; which is a very sad thought.

Magdalen Chapel, with the hospital visible just down the hill, in a drawing from 1829

By the time the cottage was listed Grade II in 1950, the interior was described as being in a very poor state, with no original features remaining. In 1954 a timber lean-to kitchen was added to the rear of the property, and it may have been at this time that the cottage was used as a private dwelling for the first time. It was extended and updated in the 1960s, again in 1997, and most recently in 2011-12. It is now let out to private tenants by the St John's Foundation. It is, not unexpectedly, reputed to be haunted, with a variety of ghost stories relating to its history - a reputation I plan to make the most of in my novel! It's a fascinating little building, in an interesting part of the city, and its history gives an intriguing snapshot of the history of Bath before and after its famous Georgian period.

Book of the Book - Celia Rees

Every time I plan a new book, one of the first things I do, once the idea has gelled, once I know it will be a book, is to buy the Book of the Book. The one above is the Book of the book I'm writing now.

Book of Sovay

Book of The Fool's Girl

These are two I made earlier...

I have a weakness for notebooks, as many writers do. This is the perfect excuse to indulge my vice. The Book of the Book is special, to me anyway, so it deserves to be handsome and expensive. Once I have the book, the right book (selection is important, too) them I'm ready. 

The Book begins with the starting point, first ideas. Something I saw, remembered, a place I visited, even an object which ignited an idea that I knew would be a book. I collect things, postcards, flyers, programmes, photographs, it's part of what I do, so usually, I have some record of that first spark.  

First page for Sovay

First page for The Fool's Girl (originally titled Illyria)

From here, the ideas begin to accrue. Not all of them will be used. Some will be discarded but all signify something. To embark on a large project, I need to be excited. Collecting, visiting places, taking photographs, going to museums and art galleries, finding pictures of people who could be reference to characters, images of objects from the period, helps me to tap into the initial rush that having the idea gave me in the first place. It fuels the spark.     

Initial ideas for Sovay

Fool's Girl - walk along the South Bank

I may, or may not, have started writing at this point. Maybe I'm working on something else, maybe I just don't feel ready, but once I begin to write, the Book tracks the book's growth and progress. The Book is a record, not just of what the book is about, you can read it for that, but of the writing of the book, with all the wrong directions taken, dead ends and frustrations encountered, as well as the pure joy of making new discoveries, finding the thing that will fire that initial excitement again,  help me find the right path. 

The Book follows the patterns and rhythms of my writing. Each entry is dated (mostly) so it gives a rough history. It is also a record of the places that I visited, the research I undertook as I went along, so a page might have a coaster from a coffee shop, a restaurant card, a café bill, an entry ticket. 

Not everything finds its way onto the page and, if it does, it might just be a line or two. Sometimes, I can't even remember why I found this, or that so fascinating, but the pages work as snapshots of what was going through my mind at the time I was writing; they also work like time capsules, taking me back to a particular stage of the writing. The pages show how I constructed a scene, a setting, a character, out of all sorts of bits and pieces, not just what I needed to know but what I found interesting, the detail needed to breathe life and veracity into a particular passage. 

The Book tracks the life of the book from first beginnings to the end of the writing. On the last page is the date the book was finished and sent off and the cover. I could not have imagined either thing  when I had that first idea.

www.celiarees.com

Parks and Gardens by Penny Dolan

In my junior historical novel, set in Victorian times, the young hero arrives alone in Victorian London. Needing a safe space for the night, he considers climbing over the railings into one of the garden squares. Those green spaces were private gardens for the key-holders, the residents of the big houses nearby, and acted as distinct social spaces where children could play, infants be “aired” in perambulators and a variety of respectable adults could greet each other while strolling about.

Most of London’s squares and gardens are open to the public by day, and locked every evening to deter vagrants, although not always successfully. Returning to my hotel in Mecklenburgh Square around 11pm recently, I saw a young man hoist himself up over a set of spiked railings, drop down on the other side and disappear into an overgrown corner of the Coram Fields grounds for the night, just as I had imagined my own Victorian runaway doing in a fictional garden setting.

As cities grew larger and more congested, the private parklands surrounding an industrialist’s mansion or a wealthy landowner’s now-unwanted residence might be converted into a public space, such as the small park created around Bruce Grove Castle, although surely altruism was only one strand in the creation of such places.

These green parkland spaces were seen as a way of refreshing the polluted, miasmic city air and also as a way of improving the health, education and social mores of the urban population. Titus Salt, the Yorkshire textile manufacturer and temperance enthusiast, made sure his model village at Saltaire provided a park for his mill-hands, although he provided them with rules about how to behave within his park too.

Gradually, as the middle-classes increased and workers were granted half-days and holidays, parks became even more a social venue. The expected expanse of trees and lawns might include impressive botanical gardens, floral displays, bandstands and room for sporting activities as well as the obligatory swings, slides and see-saws of children’s playground area.  

In Harrogate, the old Bogs Field where spa visitors had once walked off the effects of the Spa purges, changed character during Victorian times. As part of town improvements, the area became the genteel Valley Gardens, intended to attract high-class visitors to the town, which it still does. 

The open grass acres of The Stray, where horse-races were once held, is still used by many groups and individuals during the week and weekends. They, and others, recently signed a forceful petition against some councillors wish to “improve” The Stray further by increasing the number of paying events planned for the much-valued open spaces. The local newspaper claimed the people's petition had won. It has, so far.

The city of Leeds has generous parklands too and one - Roundhay Park - offers another reason for the tone of my post here today. A private leisure company, providing healthy outdoor activities for children, had been in negotiations with the city council about taking over an area of park and woodland for their own exciting proposal. Local residents pointedly pointed out that at £25.00 per family visit, the new facility would not available to the families who currently use the park daily and weekly. Furthermore, the plans would cause significant damage to a much-loved natural habitat. Fortunately, the council took note and Roundhay Park still remains a public space. Yet the pattern of commercial encroachment seems worrying right now.

Moreover - and less noisily – many parks are facing deeper threats. Intense cuts in public funding mean that trained gardeners are often the staff of the past. The gardens in parks are now a facility that can be maintained, like libraries, by groups of keen volunteers. Alongside this pattern comes the additional matter of developers spying out prime land for housing and new planning regulations and I find myself worrying about the role of parks in the future.

Why were the parks created? Surely the increasing density of the urban populations will need open spaces just as much as the urban workforce of the past? Or will public parks, in this continuing age of austerity, be necessarily absorbed into the ticketed-leisure industry and recreated for a different ideology? In fact, will the provision and upkeep of public parks in Britain become, to all intents and purposes, history?

ps. I hope, by my next post, to have my eyes and words more firmly on the past. 

 

Penny Dolan

.

Norah Lindsay, society gardener: by Sue Purkiss

The National Trust is wonderful on many counts. It's saved hundreds of stately homes, little homes, pieces of countryside, stretches of coastline and more for the nation (that means for us, all of us); it constantly strives to manage its estates in a way that is careful of the environment (take a lesson from that, Mr Trump); it's a source of delectable cakes; it commissions books and sells nice things in its shops; and it educates - you learn while you look.

I recently visited North Norfolk, staying in a cottage on the Blickling Hall estate. Blickling is a Jacobean house, made of mellow russet brick and creamy gold limestone. It has curly gables and towers with turrets, decorative chimneys and leaded windows. It was built on the site of an older house, which belonged to the Boleyn family. It's uncertain whether the unfortunate Ann was actually born here. She's said to appear - headless - in a coach driven by a headless coachman and four headless horses, on the anniversary of her execution, but I prefer to think of her as a child, running along its corridors and playing hide-and-seek in the garden, utterly unaware of the dramas in front of her. There is a wooden relief portrait of her in the hallway, which proudly proclaims that she was indeed Hic Nata - born here; it looks a little odd, because it was done in the 18th century, and the line of her clothes reflects that rea rather than the Tudor one.

But the woman who caught my interest came much later and was far less well known. She was called Norah Lindsay (1873-1948, and she was a gardener. Here she is.

She doesn't look as if she'd be one to get her hands dirty, does she? She was born into an upper-class Anglo-Irish family, and married Sir Harry Lindsay at the age of 22. She went to live at Sutton Courtenay Manor in Oxfordshire, where she became interested in gardening - and this was what saved her when, in 1924, her marriage had collapsed, her divorce went through, and she was facing financial ruin. Her friends rallied round, and commissions to design gardens both at home and abroad soon came pouring in.

So far, so Wikipedia. But I learnt a good deal more from a talk and tour at Blickling, by a volunteer who was such a fan of Norah that she dressed in character, in bright colours and with a scarf would round her head like a turban. (Clearly, her taste in clothes had changed considerably since the time of the portrait.)

In some ways, it must have been a very pleasant way of life. When she came to Blickling to redesign the parterre (the formal garden in front of the house), she lived as a guest. But that wasn't quite what she was, and the servants knew it. Our guide hinted that she was difficult - did she trail in mud from the garden, perhaps? Or was it simply that they knew that she was in that uncomfortable, indeterminate territory somewhere between the servants and their masters? She always had a lady's maid, but she didn't seem to have much money; she travelled on public transport between her prestigious commissions, and she didn't earn enough to maintain her beloved Sutton Courtenay.

But the gardeners thought she was wonderful. She wasn't just a designer, like her predecessors in other parts of Norfolk, Humphrey Repton and Capability Brown; she really knew plants, and she was quite happy to wade in with a trowel herself.

The parterre had last been re-done in 1872, when an elaborate sunken garden was created with a complex arrangement of over 80 flowerbeds radiating out from a central fountain. Now, in 1930, tastes had changed. It all seemed rather fussy. And anyway, it was too expensive to employ the vast numbers of workers who would have been needed to keep it all in order. Norah designed a simpler, more elegant arrangement, with four large, rectangular beds full of herbaceous plants with topiary yew trees at each corner to provide structure, and narrow borders filled with roses.

When we were there, there wasn't much to see in the parterre. Everything was still brown in the main beds, though tulips were in bud. I would love to see those beds later in the season; in pictures, they look glorious - full of colour and texture. There was a consolation prize, though - these primroses, further on in the garden.

In another part of the grounds, the walled garden is being brought back to life. Two years ago, this was all grass. Now it's ready once again to produce the vast quantities of fruit and vegetables which once fed the whole estate; the excess was sent to London to be sold. But again, it was the guide who brought it home to us that in the past, there were no supermarkets to nip out to when you ran out of something: everything had to be produced on the estate.

Hyacinths, with walled garden in the background.

The Trust enables you to see history, almost in action; sometimes to touch it, even to smell it. And then there's the cakes... and at Blickling, a wonderful second-hand bookshop. It's a gift that just keeps on giving.

Facing the Future as Someone Else: A History of Face Transplants by Fay Bound Alberti

Faces matter. They tell the world who we are and where we come from. They reveal our individuality, our genetics, emotions and ethnicity. But faces are also 'matter,' a composite of tissues, muscles and nerves that can be changed by cosmetics, art and surgery.  Face transplants are no longer science fiction, which they were in 1997 when Face/Off hit the cinemas, starring John Travolta and Nicholas Cage and directed by John Woo. Since 2005, it has been possible to perform face transplants, in which the face of a dead donor is overlaid on the body of a recipient. That recipient will more than likely have undergone some traumatic event or accident, and multiple reconstructive surgeries before receiving a new face. What must it be like to wake up as someone else? To have to learn to speak, eat, smile and inhabit a totally different visage? What would it be like for your family? Or for the family of the donor, constantly looking for and hoping to find (or not to find) an essence of their loved one. 

I have been thinking a lot about these kinds of questions. I'm writing a history of face transplants from the 1950s to the present, focusing especially on post 2005, when the 38-year old French woman Isabelle Dinoire became the first face transplant recipient. Hers was a partial transplant; her nose, chin and lips had been lost when she was savaged by her pet dog. Isabelle was unconscious at the time, having argued with her daughter and taken an overdose of sleeping tablets. Whether or not it was a deliberate overdose has proved contentious: could she have given true, informed consent for a face transplant when she was depressed enough to commit suicide? When she couldn't possibly have known what the world had in store for her? 

As it turned out, the world was very interested. The hospital that treated her released pre- and post- operative photos. The media immediately picked up the story: they wanted details from her neighbours, her friends. They wanted to know what it was like to have someone else's face; what it was like for her family and the family of the donor. They discussed whether she would be able to kiss, to have a new relationship, to return to her old existence. Life was never the same again for Isabelle. She remained dependent on her doctors and did not return to full time work. She constantly watched her skin for signs of tissue rejection. She lived with a face that she described as half her own and half somebody else's. When Isabelle died of cancer in 2016, her doctors denied it was in any way connected to the cocktail of immunosuppressant drugs she had been taking - though those drugs are known to increase the risk of cancer. I have written in detail about Dinoire elsewhere. Her case is important - not just because of her own experiences as a female patient undertaking a cutting-edge technique, but also because it draws attention to the limits and obligations of what has been called 'Frankenstein science'. Where do we draw the line in medical experimentation? What can and can't be transplanted? Who decides?

I have not included images of Isabelle Dinoire in this blog post, since some readers might find them upsetting. But they are widely available online. So, too, are images of her surgeons, Bernard Devauchelle and Jean-Michel Dubernard, who also performed the first hand transplant. The hand transplant was not ultimately a success, because Clint Hallam, the recipient, could not bear living with it or dealing with the possibility of tissue rejection that occurred. For transplants to hold, massive amounts of immunosuppressants must be taken. Doctors are experimenting with alternative methods, but to date these have been unsuccessful. 

The history of face transplants is a history of experimentation, of trying to master the complexities of the different tissues making up the face. People with transplanted faces do not gain full facial mobility, so in addition to belonging to the realms of both the living and the dead, they are both healed and not healed. Isabelle Dinoire said that she felt like a 'monster' before her operation, when her wounds were visible and like a 'circus freak' afterwards, when everybody knew that she was the first face transplant recipient. Other people's responses to disfigurement and transplantation are hugely important. Face transplant surgery can be traced back to World War I and to the development of plastic and reconstructive techniques as a consequence of soldiers being wounded in ways and numbers never before seen. 

Another History Girl, Louisa Young, has written beautifully on questions of facial reconstructive surgery and social rehabilitation in My dear I wanted to tell you and the follow-up novels, The Heroes' Welcome and Devotion. I first met Louisa in 2006, when we were both contributing to the Wellcome Trust's first public exhibition, which was on hearts. Louisa had written her glorious Book of the Heart and I was working on a history monograph, Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, Emotion. Eleven years later, by a wonderful serendipity, I find myself working on the history of face transplants soon after the publication of My Dear, I have something to tell you.  

Maybe that isn't such a coincidence as it might appear. After all, hearts and faces have a lot in common. I became interested in the history of transplants because of what they tell us about our bodies - and how we feel about them. Heart transplant patients often claim they have received more than a stranger's heart; stories abound of people's personality or even their cravings and abilities changing as a result. Transplants are gifts, from one person to another (at least in the UK where donors are not paid). They provoke a range of emotional responses: fear of having a new organ, disgust that organ is assimilated into their own bodies, gratitude to the donor, guilt that s/he has died while the recipient lives on, and so on. Isabelle expressed both revulsion that her tongue touched the dead lips of her donor as well as gratitude for her new face. There is an added poignancy to the fact that Dinoire's donor was a young woman who committed suicide. In life as in death, the two were linked together forever.