The Magic of Flag Fen - Katherine Langrish

Around 1300 BC, a Bronze Age community living close to a rich wetland area near what is now Peterborough decided to build a massive wooden causeway leading from a point on dry land (now known as Fengate) across the marshy pools and waterways to a natural island about a kilometre out. The causeway was constructed as five long rows of tall sharpened stakes driven into the marsh, with a criss-cross of timbers and brushwood laid between them on which people could walk. It's been estimated over 60,000 individual timbers were used to build the causeway, which followed the line of an earlier, Neolithic track - but the low-lying areas around the island were gradually becoming inundated. The site, known as Flag Fen, was discovered in 1982 by the archeologist Francis Pryor (well known to fans of the popular archeology show Time Team). Archeological investigation has been going at Flag Fen ever since, and there is now a fascinating museum and visitor centre. I’ve long wanted to go there, and my wish came true one bright sunny day a few months ago.

People lived on the margins of the fen in roundhouses like this one, farming, hunting and fishing. They kept sheep, an ancient breed similar to these in the picture below, which were trotting loose about the rural site.

The day I was there, house-martins were flying like darts in and out of the roundhouse, working away to feed their young, who were peeking shyly out of the mud nests plastered to the beams. I wonder if this would have happened in 1300 BC when the fire would have been continually smoking? Perhaps the martins would have built their nests under  the shaggy eaves.

Anyway, within these snug., safe houses - Francis Pryor has described how during the great storm of 1987 he stood in the doorway of the first reconstructed roundhouse on this site, watching sheet-metal roofs tear loose and blow away from the nearby industrial site - our Bronze Age ancestors lived and worked, and, setting out along the causeway they had built, performed ceremonies and made ritual offerings to the waters.

The acid, anaerobic peaty waters don’t preserve bones very well, but they are excellent for preserving wood, leather, and metal. Many bronze swords and spearheads were given to the marsh; gold earrings, pins and brooches have also been found. To whom or what were these dedicated? Perhaps to the dead, the ancestors – there are burial mounds on the island – or perhaps to the spirits of the water and the wild. We may guess; probably we will never know.

There's even a section of excavated causeway visible in situ, albeit housed for protection inside a hut where it's kept from drying out (and therefore crumbling into dust) by a constantly dripping sprinkler system. To stand looking down on the actual timbers which prehistoric people once trod is fascinating even if not, in such a context, terribly romantic. However the photo below doesn't show that the concrete walls of the hut have been painted with trompe l'oeil murals of the prehistoric fen in spring, summer, autumn and winter, stretching away to the horizon, populated with gulls and herons and moorhens and wild ducks.

In his book Britain BC Francis Pryor writes:

The post alignment is indeed a causeway, but it’s far more than that. The main evidence for this is provided by the nearly three hundred finds of prehistoric metalwork made to date. They were found within the area of the posts, and also along their southern side, but not along the northern side which faced ‘out’ ... into the wide-open fen. It’s tempting to view this in symbolic terms: the open fen to the north was seen as being hostile or untamed. It was on this side of the posts that we found the remains of dogs, and the only complete human skeleton. They were in extremely poor condition after lying for thousands of years in the acid peat ... but I reckon the death occurred in the Iron Age – a period when Flag Fen was still in use as an important ceremonial centre. Given what we know about the so-called ‘bog bodies’ of Britain and Scandinavia in the Iron Age, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the individual [and dogs] had been killed before being thrown into the waters.

Francis Pryor, Britain BC, p 281

Here, above and below, are some of the many beautifully preserved sword blades, and wooden tools.  It’s obvious that prehistoric people used wood for many purposes – as handles and hafts for axes, picks and wooden hammers, and shafts for spears – but wood rots easily, and finds such as these are amazingly rare.

Even more exciting, the museum houses a collection of no less than eight prehistoric log boats, all more or less intact, some with carved decorations and even lifting handles, discovered at a nearby site called Must Farm. These are in the process of being preserved, like the Mary Rose.

If you're anywhere near Peterborough, do visit if you can. We went on a sunny Tuesday morning in early summer. We had the site to ourselves, to wander around and marvel. The sheep trotted past and took shelter under the trees. Fish splashed in the fen; I heard a cuckoo. It was easy almost to imagine oneself back in the past... 

  

Did Mary Shelley Keep Percy's Heart? Anna Mazzola Investigates

At the end of August, Percy Bysshe Shelley spoke to me from the grave. Via Twitter. On Mary Shelley’s birthday, I’d tweeted that she’d out-gothed us all by keeping Shelley's heart after he died.

Up pops Shelley to correct me. No, he says, the heart couldn’t have survived the heat. ‘She kept something she THOUGHT was the heart.’

So did Mary Shelley really have the heart? If not, what on earth was it?

Strange mementoes 

Firstly, it’s worth saying that keeping a physical memento of a loved one was considered pretty unremarkable in the 19^th century. People frequently had locks of their dearly departed's hair (and sometimes even their teeth) made into rings, brooches and bracelets. Napolean left his heart to his wife (allegedly his physician made off with his penis). Paul Verlaine's mother kept her two miscarried foetuses preserved in jars in their home. When Dickens’ cat, Bob, died, he had his paw made into a letter opener. Nor was it uncommon for a person’s heart to be buried separately to the rest of the body. Chopin’s heart was preserved in a crystal jar (which the Nazis later stole). Thomas Hardy’s heart was cut out to be buried in his hometown of Stinsford, Dorset, but was then part-eaten by a cat.

 Victorian braided hair and milk teeth gold mourning ring.

Mary keeping her husband’s heart wouldn’t therefore have been considered quite as bizarre as it would today.

Snatched from the flames

What’s more odd is the way in which the heart was obtained. In July 1822, aged only 29, Percy drowned after his boat, Don Juan, was caught in a storm. His body and those of his two sailing companions were found 10 days later.

For complex reasons to do with burial regulations, Percy’s body had to be burnt on the beach in Viareggio where he’d been temporarily buried. His friends, Byron, the poet Leigh Hunt and Captain Edward John Trelawny, had a portable crematorium built. Percy then had to be disinterred (not a pretty job) and cremated. According to one of Trelawny’s several contradictory accounts: ‘The fire was so fierce as to produce a white heat on the iron, and to reduce its contents to grey ashes. The only portions that were not consumed were some fragments of bones, the jaw, and the skull, but what surprised us all was that the heart remained entire. In snatching this relic from the fiery furnace my hand was severely burnt.’

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889)

There was then a battle as to who should have all the bits. Trelawny gave the heart to Leigh Hunt, after he supposedly ‘begged’ for it. When Mary wrote to Hunt to ask him for it, he refused, telling her that his love for his friend negated ‘the claims of any other love’. Byron weighed in and eventually Hunt gave Mary the heart.

Most of Shelley’s remains were interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where Keats was buried. The heart, however, remained with Mary.

A thousand theories

But could it really have been his heart? How could it have survived the heat of the fire? Some argue that his heart had calcified due to earlier tuberculosis. An 1885 New York Times article theorised that it might, in fact, have been his liver: ‘Shelley’s liver was saturated with sea water, and was on that account more than normally incombustible’.

The truth, Twitter Shelley says, is that it was probably just a bit of ‘calcified something’. Really, it could have been anything.

But I suppose the important thing is that Mary thought it was his heart, and she kept it with her throughout her life. In 1852, a year after she died, Mary’s son, Percy Florence Shelley, and his wife, Jane, opened Mary’s box-desk. Inside, they found one of Shelley’s last poems, Adonais, An Elegy on the Death of John Keats. When they unwrapped the paper, they found that it contained the remains of Percy’s heart. Or rather, what Mary thought was the remains of his heart.

In 1889, Percy Florence himself died. When he was buried, in the family vault at St Peter’s Church, Boscombe, the remains of Percy’s heart were buried too. 

Not all of him is beneath ground, however. The British Library has a thick, red leather-bound volume containing Mary Shelley’s letter to Maria Gisbourne about Shelley’s death. Inlaid in the back cover are the ashes that Trelawny collected together with what are said to be fragments of Shelley’s skull. Or are they?

The ashes of Percy Bysshe Shelley inside British Library manuscript (Ashley MS 5022)

A conference! Australia and historical fiction, by Gillian Polack

My special event for September was the Historical Novel Society of Australasia’s conference. Every two years it happens and every two years it’s very special. I had to skip the evening events, because my life is just a bit fast-paced right now. Over coffee the following mornings I found out how splendid they were. The round table was particularly good, I heard, with people talking about diaspora and change. This set much of the conference up for how fiction and how history fed into the society we know. They’re not independent from our lives. 

Opening ceremony, HNSA, Photo courtesy HNSA

During my first masterclass, this approach came up a lot. We talked about silencing and about what responsibilities writers had and how to be ethical and still write the amazing fiction one dreams of. I seem to be teaching this a lot recently, which is good. 

I love it that so many writers care about living in a better world and don’t just say “This is my dream novel – I’m not interested in finding out how it affects others.” These days more and more writers are asking “How can I know what goes into my fiction. How do I understand what baggage I’m carrying and how do I make active choices to write responsibly?”

It wasn’t just my masterclasses. It was most of the panels I attended, and it was one of the academic sessions, and it was one of the subjects that many people chatted about during breaks and over drinks in the evening. Being a fiction writer has cultural consequences and so many writers are saying “I can write my best work and still be aware of those consequences.” This is one of the reasons I respect writers so very much. Not all writers. Some are still shuttered in a closed world. But so many of the ones I’m working with admit that fiction is an active part of creating culture and that we all have a part to play in the way the world works.

Over the weekend there was a lot of attention paid to developing good writing. Some people donned mail and helmets. Some checked out costume (and Rachel Nightingale wore one of the costumes, for she was the one doing the teaching). There were craft workshops and subject-matter workshops, and manuscript assessments. I brought in some of my teaching objects and we used them in my masterclasses and even in one panel. 

I delivered a paper, photo courtesy HNSA

Linking up the physical world with story is a complex business and it was fascinating to see how different writers reacted to different objects. A group of audience members for that panel were romance writers. When we sat round after the conference had finished and they said “We would’ve reacted differently.” I brought the items out again, and we explored them from a new angle and it was fascinating to see how each writer had perfectly useful approaches to transmuting an object into a part of a story: all of them were valid. For one writer a potsherd wasn’t useful at all, and for another it became a whole story.

What was really interesting was the number of non-writers attending panels that I’d mentally assumed were mainly for writers. Someone asked a question of my panel from the audience and prefaced it with “As a reader…” Australian readers love finding out how writers think and what techniques writers can use.

Discovering history over food, photo courtesy HNSA

We’re living in a difficult historical moment. This kind of thought and questioning give me hope. This conference was very good for my sense of what the future might be if everyone keeps the levels of inquiry and questioning this high. What’s particularly important to me is that novelists and their readers (both!) are taking on this understanding that history is not static. That we interpret the past all the time. That not all interpretations are equally safe for all of us. The interpretation we each choose matters.

This is where organisations like the HNSA make a difference. 

They’re publishing most of the academic papers in November or December, by the way, so you’ll be able to explore some of the topics for yourselves. All the best of the discussion was ad hoc, so my recommendation is that you have a dinner party. I would say that, for I’m back into historical food. Pity my friends…

St Michael and his Mounts

Last month I was in Cornwall, in the romantically-named Marazion, right opposite St. Michael's Mount. We visited it twice (not for the first time), once by walking the causeway and once by boat.

And a few years ago I spent a long weekend on Mont Saint-Michel in Normandy, researching for an adult novel. The French island is much bigger than its Cornish counterpart but I started wondered why there were two such similar geographical entities so relatively close together, each topped with a castle or abbey and each dedicated to the Archangel Michael.

We know him as a protector and defender, the one whose role during the "war in Heaven" was to defeat the apostate angel who became Satan. But he was also the stern preventer of any return to Eden by the exiled Adam and Eve, barring their way back with a fiery sword.

As early as the 5th century there was a legend that St. Michael had appeared to fishermen on the mount that now bears his name.

But it is the French tidal island that is the senior mount. Until 708 when St Michael appeared in a vision to the Bishop of Avranches, Mont Saint-Michel was called Mont Tombe. The vision was to urge the Bishop to build an oratory on the top of the islet, which he duly did, perhaps encouraged by the saint laying his finger on his head so firmly that after death the Bishop's skull shows the indentation. Over the next few hundred years the building was extended and became a monastery dedicated to St. Michael.

The Abbey at Mont Saint-Michel, as the monastery is known, became a place of pilgrimage but as it grew in wealth, so it became a less holy and more venal place. Richard, Duke of Normandy decided to cleanse the Augean stables and institute the Order of Saint Benedict at the Abbey and return it to a more devout life.

The Benedictine monastery gave its support to William the Conqueror's claim to the English throne and is even depicted, rather quaintly, in the Bayeux "tapestry."

These panels show Harold Goodwinson rescuing two Norman knights from the quicksand in front of the island. William was so grateful for the monastery's support that he gave property on the other side of the channel to Mont Saint-Michel, including the rocky little island off the Cornish coast near Penzance.

A monastery was built on the Cornish island too, in the 12th century, but it could not be on the scale of its Norman counterpart. Both religious houses were dedicated to Michael the Archangel.

But the association of the two islands and their monasteries came to an end in 1424, as a result of Henry V's wars in France and there is now no connection except a strong family resemblance.

Mont Saint-Michel has today a range of shops and restaurants and even this hotel, where I stayed:

The Mère Poulard was famous for its omelettes and day and night I could hear the eggs being whisked in a copper bowl. But the shops are full of touristy tat and the restaurants incapable of understanding vegetarians, or at least they were a few years ago.

You can probably tell that I prefer the smaller Cornish poor relation with its two cafés and two shops.

Mont Saint-Michel is reached by a causeway wide enough to take a coach. In contrast, you reach Saint Michael's Mount by a narrower man-made causeway which appears at low tide.

Once across the causeway, you can climb up the the castle on the top. At least, if it's not battered by high winds, as it was on our first attempt last month. The original church was destroyed by an earthquake in the 13th century and re-built a hundred years later. It is still used as the castle's chapel.

Now it's a castle with a stately home attached, the home of the Lords St Levan, whose family name is St. Aubyn.

Have any of you ever visited either of St. Michael's mounts? And can anyone think of two other places with the same name and appearance but in two different countries?